Every Little Step: My Story (7 page)

The Bad Boy Is Born

There was an undeniable sexual energy I brought to the stage, even as a teenager. It became clear to me very early on that whatever I was doing had a serious effect on the ladies. Everywhere I went, I was swimming in a sea of beautiful faces. They couldn’t get enough of me—and the feeling was very mutual.

Hollywood stars, starlets, singers, dancers, groupies, regular girls, church girls—I screwed them all. I was with some of the most beautiful women in the world. Just imagine: The year I had the number one album in the country, 1989, I was only twenty—a twenty-year-old who suddenly had millions in the bank and women climbing all over him. A twenty-year-old who just a few years earlier had thought he was too dark and ugly.

To put it mildly, I went buck fuckin’ wild. My thinking was, get as much as you can while you can.

I remember one particular week when I happened to be in LA and one of my friends was dating a woman who danced with Madonna. Madonna told her friend to have me come to the studio, where she was working on an album. In 1989 she was at the height of her powers—and her sexiness.
Like a Prayer
had just been released and it seemed like everybody was talking about her and her knack for pushing the sexual envelope.

As soon as I got to the studio, we were introduced. Be
fore I knew it we were in the bathroom. We got together a few more times, but I wasn’t interested in dating her—she was just too wild, even for me.

A FEW WORDS FROM MARVIN “MARVELOUS” M
C
INTYRE

Growing up in Roxbury, I was a good friend of Tommy Brown, Bobby’s older brother. Bobby was just a nappy-headed little five-year-old when I met him for the first time. As he got older, Bobby used to tell me, “Marvelous”—which is my nickname—“when I get on, you need to roll with me. You’re the smartest kid I know from the hood, so I want you around me.”

I wasn’t sure if I should feel complimented—after all, I wanted to be the smartest kid he knew, period. Not the smartest from the hood. But I always remembered what he told me. So in 1988, I was working in corporate America in Atlanta when Bobby called me. I was twenty-six and had graduated from college in New Hampshire. He was about to go on the
Heart Break
tour with New Edition and Al B. Sure and he said, “Marvin, I want you to come with me.” He had recorded the
Don’t Be Cruel
album and they had just released the singles “Don’t Be Cruel” and “My Prerogative,” which were starting to blow up.

I told him, “If I’m going to do this with you, I’m not doing it for the money—I’m doing it for the challenge and the experience.” So that was my introduction to the music business. Almost thirty years later, I’ve never looked back.

When we went out on the
Don’t Be Cruel
tour, I was the tour manager. Between 1988 and 1992, Bobby Brown was arguably the biggest artist on the planet minus Michael Jackson. It was amazing to watch. It was also hard to comprehend because I was seeing it and living it at the same time. Everywhere he went, he was a one-man PR firm, a one-man show. People of all nationalities around the world knew who Bobby was. It was truly an exceptional thing.

When we went to Japan, there was an enormous audience of Japanese people who didn’t speak a word of English, but they all were reciting every word to “My Prerogative” and “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Every Little Step.” When we were down in Columbus, Georgia, they had this lewd-act law on the books, saying you couldn’t gyrate on the stage. So being the bad boy that Bobby Brown is at the time, he’s going to do what he wants to do. So he went out on the stage and did what he does best. He got arrested. They took him to a holding cell and locked him up. But as he was leaving—and I will never forget this—the sheriff and the officers who had locked him up bring this kid down to the jail cell. When Bobby walked out they wanted him to take pictures with the kid. That’s when I knew this stuff ain’t fair—I mean, you’re going to lock this guy up for doing something, but then you want to do a photo op with him? Of course Bobby graciously obliged.

As tour manager my responsibilities were everything from advancing the next city, advancing the next show, to making sure folks got paid and doing all the administrative and logistical things pertaining to Bobby’s moving around. It was excit
ing; it was challenging. I’ve always embraced the art of being behind the scenes and structuring and development.

Overnight Bobby Brown became a name. When you said “Bobby,” you meant Brown. Bobby was so hot that a promoter in London wanted him so bad that he flew him back to America on British Airways’ Concorde so that he could meet a show obligation. At the time the Concorde was the fastest passenger jet in the world. I’m from Roxbury, Massachusetts, and here I am flying on the Concorde. I have so many amazing stories, amazing memories.

What made Bobby so successful was that New Edition was straitlaced: dress right, choreography, image, trim haircuts. Then this offspring of New Edition comes out with saggy baggy pants, the Gumby haircut, cussing, gyrating, doing all the things that don’t represent the New Edition brand. The young girls of America looked at that and said,
Ooooh, he’s giving me this? I want more more more.
Bobby Brown ignited the birth of the Ushers, the Chris Browns, the Trey Songz, the Ne-Yos.

What I always used to love about Bobby was his work ethic. He was such a hard worker that it was clear why he was so good onstage. This is something people might not expect to hear because of his reputation. But you don’t get to be that good by accident, without putting some work in. I would tell him, “Robert”—I never call him Bobby—“you make it look so easy, make it look so unrehearsed.” That’s a true test of a star: if you can make stuff look so easy, like you don’t have to rehearse it.

I met Malika Williams through her sister, Mona, who had been dating Ralph Tresvant. Mona and Malika were from Los Angeles; Ralph and I started hanging out with them during one of New Edition’s trips to the West Coast. Malika was a beautiful, sweet girl. I was seventeen and she was about the same age. She didn’t even have a driver’s license yet. As a matter of fact, neither did I.

Speaking of driver’s licenses, it was an incident on the road that drew us closer. It was also the first of many unpleasant encounters I would have on the road with the police, encounters so frequent they sometimes feel like they comprise the CliffsNotes version of my entire life.

We were staying at the Franklin Plaza Suites in Hollywood, the hotel New Edition always stayed at when we were recording in LA. Her stepfather had this big-ass Lincoln that
her sister had used to drive the two of them to the hotel. Malika and I decided to go get some food for everybody, so we got into the Lincoln and took off. As I said, neither one of us had a license, but I was convinced that I was a good driver so it wouldn’t be a problem. I was wrong.

I was driving along on Sunset Boulevard when I heard sirens and saw a fire truck coming toward us on the opposite side of the street. But instead of pulling over, I kept driving. Unfortunately, there was a police car just ahead of us. As I passed them, they turned on their flashing lights. But I kept driving. Malika was beside me in the passenger seat, freaking out. I finally pulled the car over.

When the officer walked up to the car, he learned that I did not have a license, but Malika was also not sure under what name the car was registered. I’m certain that in the officer’s mind we were two teenagers out for a joyride in a stolen car, and nothing we could say would convince him otherwise. Next thing I knew, we were in the back of a squad car in handcuffs. A very promising night with a beautiful girl had quickly turned into a nightmare.

We were placed in holding cells at the police station. I was able to bail myself out, but they wouldn’t let me bail out Malika. Finally they let her go because they didn’t really have any charges against her. Eventually, she made her way back to the hotel. For some reason, the shared trauma of the experience brought us closer together. We had sex that night, without protection.

A couple months later I was on the road somewhere with New Edition and I got a phone call from Malika.

“Bobby, I’m pregnant,” she said.

I let the words sink in. Right away I knew a couple of things: 1) I had no interest in trying to get her to get rid of the child; 2) I had to grow up real fast.

When her sister called and told me Malika had gone into labor, I hopped on a plane as fast as I could. But she had delivered Landon by the time I arrived in LA. Part of the reason I moved my family to the West Coast was so that I could be with Malika and the baby. I bought a big house in Tarzana and Malika and Landon moved in.

Having Landon come into my life changed me in profound ways. With the knowledge that I had a son, I felt stronger, more invincible, like his presence in the world turned me into a superhero. I felt everything through him; he became my strength, my motivating force. It’s hard to explain but I felt the
King of Stage
album through him; I felt the
Don’t Be Cruel
album through him. He gave me the strength to walk away from New Edition and do my own thing. He was my strength to get away from the projects and not take the little crumbs New Edition was willing to accept. He was my strength to move out of Boston to California.

As I look back now on my relationship with Malika, my overriding thought is that I was way too young to become a father. I was hardly ever there for them because I was doing
so much touring. I was still messing around with girls in every tour stop. I never slowed down for a minute, not even with a girlfriend and a baby back home. I’m a bit ashamed now by how I acted, how I treated her. She was extremely understanding, and I was an asshole. But at the same time, I never hid from her what was going on. I never pretended we were now in an exclusive, monogamous relationship just because we had a child.

She and Landon stayed in the house with my family for a bit, but soon it was time to move out. I got them an apartment that I called our new home, where we could try to be a little family unit, but I still wasn’t ready. I was still cheating, leaving for long periods on the road. Understandably, Malika eventually couldn’t take it anymore. She needed to be free, to stop pretending we were in a serious relationship.

Next thing I knew, she was dating a friend of mine, the actor Carl Payne. They eventually got married and had four kids together. They’ve now been married more than twenty years. At first I was upset that a friend of mine would move in on my woman, even if I wasn’t being faithful. What made it worse was that he lived in the same building where her apartment was located, so I figured that he had been eyeing her while we were still together. This was after his appearances on
The Cosby Show
but before he became a star on
Martin
. Eventually, I got over it, though, and was happy for my girl. When things ended with Malika, I went back to Kim in Boston, my first love. Over the next few years we wound up hav
ing two children, LaPrincia and Bobby Jr. Of course, I love them both dearly.

Through it all, I tried to make sure I took care of Landon. I would frequently take him on tour with me for extended periods of time, even when he was very little. I’m sure it was a pretty crazy life for him, to go from the normal day-to-day with his mom to becoming part of my entourage traveling around the world. He was growing up to be a very good-looking young man—and I could tell because one day when he was still in junior high school, I noticed some of the women on the tour looking at him extra hard. I couldn’t believe it. I told them, “Girl, I’ll fuckin’ kill you if you go near my boy!”

But I knew that stuff was right around the corner. I couldn’t believe how fast the time flew, how quickly Landon became a man. Now he’s damn near thirty years old—a grown-ass man with a wife and an adorable little girl who is only a few months younger than my son Cassius. Yeah, Bobby Brown the grandfather. Has a nice ring to it.

A FEW WORDS FROM MALIKA (WILLIAMS) PAYNE

When I suspected I was pregnant, I called Bobby and told him. He didn’t lose it or anything. We had become really good friends, aside from being intimate.

“What are we going to do?” he asked me.

“That’s what we need to talk about.”

So after some discussion, we decided we would have the baby. His mother was not very happy about that. That was understandable—she didn’t know me from a rock. As for my mom, she wasn’t happy about being a grandmother so young. My stepfather was disappointed, but he didn’t go crazy or anything. I think Bobby’s family was a lot more upset than mine was.

Back then you couldn’t go to a regular public school if you were pregnant, so I had to do most of eleventh grade living in a residential dorm for pregnant teenagers. I would go home on weekends and spend weekdays in the dorm while attending classes. Bobby actually came to see me while I was in the dorm. He would come and hang out with me. But I would always make sure we were away from the building because I didn’t want Bobby Brown up there around all these teenage girls. This is when he was going through all his turmoil with New Edition and parting ways with the group, so his name was in the gossip columns and teen mags all the time. It would have been ridiculous if Bobby Brown had walked into that dorm. I didn’t even tell anyone who the father of my child was. It would have been way too much drama.

When the baby was born, Bobby wanted me to name him Jimmy, after a best friend of his who got killed. He also offered up the name Terrad. I don’t know where he got that one from. My sister said maybe he thought it was “terribly radical.” My son hates to hear the story about where I actually got his name: There was a report on the news about a missing child.
He was a little Mexican boy who was the cutest thing I ever saw. His name was Landon.

I knew Bobby was with other women all the time. In fact, he was kind of in my face with that stuff. It was kind of like, when he’s here we’re together but when he’s not, we’re not. He was still very young and he was doing whatever he wanted to do. I’ve always been an old soul, even when I was young, and I had an understanding of how things worked. He had a lot of money, he was very famous, and women would literally be throwing their panties at him everywhere he went. And he would succumb to all of that—over and over again. At some point I got tired of that. If we weren’t going to have a real relationship, which I knew we weren’t, I didn’t want to do it anymore. At one point he even asked me to marry him. We were having dinner at a restaurant and he said, “If I asked you to marry me, would you?”

I said, “No, because you’re a whore and I don’t see you ever wanting to be with one person. I think you will always be this way.”

His mouth just fell open.

“Did you really just say that?” he asked.

“Yes I did. It is what it is.”

Eventually it was just over between us. It wasn’t a formal thing. We didn’t sit down and talk about it and mutually decide to end it. One day after he popped up again and expected us to be together, to be intimate, I just told him, “Look, you can’t keep doing what you’re doing. I’m not doing this anymore.”

After Bobby and I went our separate ways, we stayed in contact with each other over the years. We had a child and now have a grandchild together, so we were able to remain really good friends. Throughout it all, I’ve always thought Bobby was an awesome person. I love him to death and I would never want to see anything bad happen to him. Behind closed doors when there’s nobody else around, he’s a good guy. But his intentions and his actions have not always matched. I think from a young age he always had freedom to do whatever he wanted. There really had never been anyone around him who could control him. With most of us, when we were young and dumb, there was somebody around to say no.

Bobby has been a breadwinner since he was fourteen or fifteen years old. So he’s always called the shots. And from a very young age he’s been on his own, not home with his mom and dad. He was a young teenager on the road by himself, figuring out how to be an adult. Nobody gave us lessons on how to be an adult, how to behave. It was something you made up as you were going along. As a result, for many years he was wild and crazy.

But he’s a different person now. I tell him happy Father’s Day and happy birthday every year, and he always calls me to say happy Mother’s Day. I think we’ve been able to maintain a good relationship.

Around the World

In the early days of New Edition we used to have contests to see who could get the loudest screams onstage. Ralph always won—nobody could beat him. The girls were in love with that crazy motherfucker. But I tried—and I was always a strong second. Ralph had the voice, the smoothness, so I had to use my sexiness. It was always there. But when I went solo, it was like a beast was unleashed, like someone had opened a cage and just let me out. I guess in this analogy the cage is New Edition. When I went solo, I had total control—of my music, my show, my moves. I sometimes asked Brooke Payne to help me with the choreography, but most of it was me—an entire routine sprouted from my imagination.

On January 25, 1989, four days after the
Don’t Be Cruel
album hit number one on the
Billboard
chart, where it stayed for six weeks, I was arrested by a police officer in Columbus, Georgia, for violating the city’s “lewd law.” It had only been on the books since 1987, when the city council came up with the ridiculous law following a crazy Beastie Boys concert. The Columbus ordinance prohibits performers from “simulating sexual intercourse” onstage. At the time I was outraged, thinking it was extremely unfair since I hadn’t even touched the girl the police officer said I was dancing with in a lewd way. It was a regular part of my act, bringing a female fan up to dance suggestively with me onstage. I know offended authorities had threatened to arrest Elvis back in the 1950s
for the way he danced, claiming he was corrupting America’s youth, but I incorrectly figured we had made progress in the three decades since then. I got arrested in the middle of my Columbus show and dragged down to the police headquarters. After posting $652 bail, they let me go—and I went back to the arena to resume my concert an hour later. Surely that was one of the strangest intermissions in music history.