Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir (18 page)

As if my stress level wasn’t already off the charts, another problem cropped up during this time. I began to suspect that my father was having an affair. He’d often ask me to get free tickets for some of the people at his job at Baltimore Gas and Electric Company (he’d left E. J. Korvette once it closed down back in 1980). I happily arranged tickets for his colleagues. One time, he got tickets for his coworker to attend a concert. Mommy went to the concert as well, but her seat was all the way on the other side of the arena. After the show, a woman who was one of my assistants at the time told me, “Toni, your father’s got a girlfriend! I saw him kissing on some lady”—but I wasn’t quite sure whether to believe her. Another time when my sisters were on a tour with Luther Vandross, Daddy flew out to meet them in Vegas. He brought one of his coworkers with him—you guessed it, this same woman—and her mother. They all stayed in a large suite. And in Severn, this woman would often call my parents’ house and say, “Is Reverend Braxton there?” Sometimes, my father would suddenly have to go after one of those calls. Once when I was home visiting, Daddy even went out in the middle of a snowstorm after this woman rang; he claimed he had to “work” and that he needed to stay overnight. To this day, Mommy says that she never saw the signs—but they were abundantly clear to me.

I MET KEYBOARDIST
Keri Lewis on the Kenny G tour. Keri was a member of Mint Condition, the band I’d hired to open for me. After our show, I’d often hang out with the whole band—when you’re on the road with people for weeks and months, a bond naturally develops.
These guys are a lot cuter in person than people even know
, I thought. I especially thought Keri was handsome—and helpful. One afternoon as we prepared for a show, my programmer somehow messed up some of the drumbeats. “I’ll reprogram it for you,” Keri told me. “Don’t worry about it.”

Keri grew up in Minnesota. So when our tour arrived in Minneapolis, he and Stokley Williams (Mint Condition’s lead singer) showed me around their hometown. Later, when the tour stopped close to Maryland, we drove down to visit my family. “Keri likes you!” my cousin Jackie told me once she’d met him. “No, he doesn’t!” I said insistently. “It’s not even like that. We’re just friends.” After all, I was still with Curtis. But when Keri eventually mentioned he had a girlfriend in Minnesota, I have to admit that I was a little annoyed—and I even surprised myself with that reaction because I was still very much in love with and committed to Curtis. One weekend when I offered to hang out with Keri, he said he wanted to spend time with his girlfriend instead. “Why are you so upset?” my cousin said when I told her about it later. “I think it’s because you like him!” she declared. I denied that, of course—but at that point, I did admit to myself that our friendship seemed to be getting tighter and tighter. Even still, I put my connection with Keri at the back of my head—because front and center was my romance with Curtis.

DURING THE WEEK
the tour stopped in Brussels, Bert Padell, then my business manager, called me from New York with some bad news. “Muscles, you’re running out of money.” Bert always called me “Muscles” because he said I seemed pretty fearless for a new artist. “We’re already in the red. We’ve got less than fifty thousand dollars left.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “Don’t I have a royalty check coming?”

“You do,” he explained. “‘Un-Break My Heart’ is selling a bazillion copies, so that money is coming. But until then, you still need to take a personal loan to cover some of the show’s expenses.”

I did that—and I prayed that the coming royalty check would be enough to bail me out. After that big contract renegotiation, the $1.6 million of additional royalties I’d received had put me in the black. But when the following royalty statement showed up, I saw a figure that still shocks me—it was less than $2,000. That’s because once the record company had recouped their money for the expenses related to my album and tour, less than two grand is what was left for me. “We’ll ask the record company to loan you more money,” my manager told me. But the Arista execs wouldn’t budge. Since they didn’t seem to want to work out a deal, I called L.A. directly. He didn’t return my calls—and I had no idea what the record company might’ve been telling him about my situation, since we’d both had so many people speaking on our behalf.

That’s when I began reckoning with a devastating reality: I might never get out of my predicament. The accolades may have been rolling in—I’d won five Grammys, five American Music Awards, and three MTV Video Music Awards by the end of 1997—yet I came back from Europe with little to show for my stardom. My debts totaled nearly $4 million.

In December 1997, I sued LaFace and Arista. I loved L.A. and Kenny like brothers, and I will always consider them my original music family—but in business, you sometimes have to make hard choices. The only way I could get the money I deserved was to sue. Even under the renegotiated agreement, I was receiving a much lower percentage of royalties than a bestselling artist typically earns. My records had sold an estimated $200 million worldwide—yet I was getting an average of just thirty-five cents per album.

One of my managers was hopeful that we could work out a deal with the label that would return me to solvency. “For an artist of your caliber, bankruptcy would be suicide,” he said. “If you file, it will be the beginning of your demise. The industry will never forget it.” But I had other voices in my ear that were just as persuasive. Barry Hankerson, whom I’d hired as a manager, told me, “You’re too deep in the hole to make this work.” He explained that the RIAA, a trade organization that represents recording industry distributors, was trying to change a law so that if any artist declared bankruptcy, any contract that an artist had signed with any person or company could become null and void—except for the artist’s recording contract. “You need to hire some lawyers and fight,” he said. So on January 23, 1998, I did what I thought I had to do to save my financial life: I filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

A
scarlet “B”—that’s what I felt like I had stamped on my forehead during the entire bankruptcy process. I cried a lot. And daily. I just couldn’t believe I’d allowed myself to get into this situation. When I called my mother and told her what I was feeling, she tried to comfort me. “You can always come home,” she said. “It’s all in God’s hands.” She and Dad flew to Los Angeles to visit me right away. My father, trying to support me, offered to sell the Rolex watch I’d given him as a Christmas gift. I might have my issues with my family, but one thing will always be true: We come together during a crisis.

Inspectors showed up nearly a dozen different times at my two-bedroom condo in Century City to audit my personal property—everything from my furniture and my artwork to my designer dresses and my awards. I wasn’t home, so my assistant answered the door. “Where are the Grammys?” the assessor asked my assistant immediately when he arrived. In fact, the assessors only seemed interested in the Grammys—which is why I felt like they were purposely trying to humiliate me.

On another occasion, an assessor came to take stock of some belongings I’d put in a storage facility. I chose not to be there that day—too painful. So my assistant called to give me an update. “They’ve got all your stuff out,” he said, “and it’s starting to rain.” My belongings were eventually put back in the unit, but not before a couple things were water damaged. In the end, I handed over many of my most valuable possessions—including all five of my Grammys.

Completely mortified—that’s how I felt during the entire process of the bankruptcy. It was like being Cinderella when the clock strikes midnight and you have to give back the glass slipper. When you declare bankruptcy, all of your credit is frozen—which means that none of my credit cards worked. And all of my bank accounts were seized. Thankfully, I did get to live in my condo while they were assessing it. A couple days after I filed, Curtis gave me $10,000 in cash to live on. “Don’t worry about everything,” he said. “You’re going to be okay.” But even though I was trying to act strong, I felt broken. All I could do was cry and consume sugar: I ate Twizzlers and Kit Kats like crazy. My emotional low point came one evening when I’d returned to my condo after the inspectors had been there. I pulled into the garage and just sat there in my truck: I couldn’t quite bring myself to go upstairs after knowing the inspectors had been in my house, touching all my personal items. I felt naked. Invaded. Exposed. Finally, after a few minutes of cupping my hands in my face over the steering wheel, I opened the truck door and dragged myself through the front door. I went into the kitchen. Everything seemed in place. I then walked over to a mirror in the living room and just stood there and stared at myself. I felt so ugly and ashamed. As I peered, the tears began to topple down my shirt. I made my way into the bedroom, pulled the curtains together to make the room completely dark, and I just lay there and wept. I couldn’t believe what a mess my life had become—and how it all seemed to happen so quickly.

As word of my filing reached the press, hurtful headlines like
TONI BRAXTON: UN-BREAK MY WALLET
and
BRAX DONE
abounded. The most bewildering part of the ordeal was the impression those news stories gave to the public: Over and over again, I was accused of squandering my earnings on an extremely lavish lifestyle. That was simply a lie. And hearing it was like standing naked in front of the world, with no way to cover myself. I felt completely humiliated—and I wanted to at least give my side of the story. That’s why I chose to appear on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
.

On February 27, 1998, I flew to Amarillo to tape an episode of the show—Oprah and her crew had temporarily relocated to Texas because she was in the middle of that big Texas beef trial. I admired Oprah—I was one of her biggest fans at the time. Even before she had her national show, I used to tune in to
People Are Talking
, her Baltimore show. She always seemed to be helping people, and I believed she would somehow help me. I thought that going on her show would finally give me the opportunity to set the record straight about my bankruptcy.

On the day of the taping, Oprah came to my backstage room to briefly greet me. “Hello, Toni!” she said. “See you out there!” I was so excited to meet her (and a little mad that my hair wasn’t right that day!).

As a setup to our interview, a prerecorded piece was played for the audience. “Five years after the thirty-one-year-old pop sensation made it big, she has filed now for bankruptcy,” Oprah narrated in part of the segment’s voice-over. “At her elegant Los Angeles condominium, appraisers are now taking stock of her possessions. Her baby grand piano. Her Gucci silverware. Her Porsche and Lexus. They’re even counting her shoes . . . and her Grammys.” Right after that segment finished, Oprah continued the introduction. “Toni Braxton has sold over one hundred seventy million dollars’ worth of records, yet she says she’s going to be out of a home—homeless—in sixty days. In her first television interview since filing for bankruptcy, she’s here to share her story with us. Please welcome five-time Grammy winner . . . Toni Braxton!” I walked out smiling. The audience cheered, and then Oprah and I hugged. I took my seat.

“Nobody can believe that you’re gonna be broke,” Oprah said. “Is that true?”

“Yes, it’s true,” I said.

“And how did that happen—why did you have to file?”

“Well, I had to file because, first of all, like you said, I was broke,” I said, shifting in my chair. “I had no money and I was very surprised. But let me also start by saying it wasn’t always like that. I came to my record company, and I was so happy to be there working with fabulous producers. They introduced me to everyone, and I believed and had faith in everyone, and because I allowed all my finances to become everyone else’s finances, that’s pretty much how I got here.”

“And that
is
the key,” said Oprah. “Do you take responsibility for the situation you’re in right now?”

I nodded. “One hundred percent,” I said. “It’s my fault because I trusted and I believed,” I explained. A couple minutes after that exchange, things started to go south.

“When you’ve got Gucci silverware and baby grand pianos, and you’re used to wearing five-, and six-, and seven-thousand-dollar gowns, and spending five hundred dollars on a pair of shoes, it’s a long drop,” Oprah said. “So how does that make you feel?”

“My image is much bigger than the dollars,” I said. “The expensive dresses and shoes—I was financing personally the image that everyone sees.”

“But most people are—because the old studio days are long gone with Elizabeth Taylor,” said Oprah.

“Yes, but if someone is making one hundred seventy or one hundred eighty million dollars,” I said, “and I got one-twentieth of a hundredth of that, it makes it almost virtually impossible.” My throat tightened.

“I read that you were upset about stories that your overspending caused this,” Oprah said later in the interview. “Because it would appear—and you can explain to us whatever you want to explain to us—but it would appear that, even if you don’t believe that you got the percentage you felt you should’ve got, you still knew that there was a certain amount of money coming in. And you overspent that amount of money.”

“Well I was doing math,” I said. “One plus one is two all day long, all across the world. And I was still coming up negative. So I’m thinking that I’ve sold over twenty million records, so money’s gonna come in . . . but there was no money coming in.”

“That’s the key there, Toni—are you spending money when there’s no money coming in?”

“I was spending money on touring,” I explained. “Touring is very expensive. I invested a lot of money in my career.”

After the interview, I was deflated. Given my perceived celebrity lifestyle, it was easy for the public to jump to conclusions about my money troubles. But I didn’t earn “millions”—Arista did. Yes, the record company sold nearly two hundred million dollars’ worth of albums, but I received a mere fraction of that money. And the vast majority of my expenses were marketing costs that should’ve been underwritten by my label. That would later be proven in court.