You Have No Idea: A Famous Daughter, Her No-Nonsense Mother, and How They Survived Pageants, Hollywood, Love, Loss (15 page)

I think my mom was scared.

HELEN ON PUBERTY

Scared?

Of course I was scared! I thought, “Oh God, here’s one more thing to think about with this kid! Let’s hope she doesn’t get pregnant.” Because I never knew what was next with her. I swear I was six feet before I had Vanessa—now I’m barely five one.

I was this force with hormones! “Sit with your knees together,” Mom would bark at me. She was always in a state of being on guard, being alert, being protective.

Mom’s exasperation is exactly what I channeled into
Ugly Betty
. Wilhelmina, my character, was always annoyed by everyone’s inadequacies. Her attitude was, “Get it together, people! UGH! Do I have to do everything?”

That’s exactly my mother.

You’re a woman now. How could you do this to me? Get it together! And don’t get pregnant!

At Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, I immersed myself in performing. I played French horn in the marching band, acted in all the theater productions, and sang in the chorus. I performed in two shows a year and choreographed pieces for the school spring finale with the theater department. Greeley was also a very progressive school and students were able to pick their courses and schedule. We were offered a lot of electives, and most of my time was spent in the performing arts building, studying band, orchestra, voice, and theater.

Like most high schools in Westchester in the late seventies and early eighties, Greeley was divided into the typical cliques. There were the stoners who wore flannel shirts and ripped jeans; the greasers who wore black leather jackets; the rich kids in their Izods who played tennis, skied, and drove BMWs; and the theater kids, who had their own style. If you were a theater kid, you could be different and be cool. I didn’t conform to the standard preppy outfit of the time. I would wear my gauchos or knickers with bright-striped socks.

Unlike other schools, the theater department at Greeley had a full-time faculty, and you could take four years’ worth of classes in scene study, improv, method acting, and so on. The theater building became my second home. Many people who were active in the theater department when I was there went on to have big Hollywood careers. My friend Adam Belanoff, a writer for
The Closer,
also co–executive produced
The Cosby Show
and
Murphy Brown
. Joe Berlinger became an award-winning documentary film director. Dan Bucatinsky is a television producer (I did the genealogy quest series
Who Do You Think You Are?
with him). Matt Arkin, the son of actor Alan Arkin, directed me in my freshman spring finale.

As a sophomore, I got my first big break when I landed the lead
in the Madwoman of Chaillot musical
Dear World
. My photo appeared in the local paper. More clippings for the scrapbook. I was becoming a hometown star. “Great job,” Mom said. And again, when my mom says something like this, I know she’s impressed!

During the summers, I performed in various productions—
Once Upon a Mattress, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Of Thee I Sing
—for the Saw Mill Summer Theatre, Chappaqua’s community theater for performers from fourteen to twenty-four. I also choreographed
The Robber Bridegroom
one year. Plus, I always had a job.

I was doing it all—marching at football games, starring in shows, traveling with our orchestra, dancing in recitals. Between school, work, theater, and dance, I didn’t have any time to get in trouble.

Well…

Unfortunately I could find the time for trouble—or it found me. It seemed with each year, I became more and more rebellious. The girl who rode her bike without considering the crash grew into the girl who tried to sneak out at night, who ignored curfews, who smoked pot. The girl still loved the thrill of adventure, except as I got older, the risks became greater—and the consequences bigger.

My mom and dad tried to keep me in check. My dad would ask me to write up contracts promising to be good, which he’d put on the refrigerator. My mom still has these promissory notes I’d written as a teenager.

“
I, Vanessa Williams, promise to abide to the rules of the Williamses’ house as long as I am residing here. I will not allow anyone in the house to use the telephone without permission. I will not do anything illegal or otherwise, and I wouldn’t do anything considered wrong, and if not sure, I would ask.
”

Let’s just say if it was wrong, I never asked. What’s the point in asking when you know the answer is NO?

When I grew out of my little-girl pale pink room, Dad and I turned my bedroom into an autumnal forest. We had hung up a big
mural of woods, with trees with gold, orange, and rust-colored leaves. I had gold shag carpeting and a lime green bedspread that matched my walls. The northeast light flooded my room in the morning and my windows looked out on the street, so I could see who was coming and going.

It was important for me to love my room because I spent most of my adolescent years stuck in it, stripped of privileges for more reasons than I can remember. Sometimes Chris would tell on me; he was four years younger, so he was being what younger brothers are… intrusive.

I was grounded all the time. There was always a different circumstance, a different group of kids, a different story. My mother would catch me at something and I’d be grounded again. Then I’d sneak out some more. It was this endless circle. It seemed I was always slamming my door in anger.

One day, after too many door slammings, Dad calmly came to my room with a screwdriver, took the door off its hinges, and stored it in the garage.

“If you don’t respect the rules of the house, you don’t get a door,” he said. “You don’t deserve privacy.”

The door was off my bedroom for months.

In high school, I played the mellophone, an instrument similar to the French horn but shaped like a trumpet and with a bigger bell, for the school’s marching band. There were three parts of the band—the musicians, the cheerleaders, and the silks. Sometimes after school and before practice, a bunch of us would smoke pot to make rehearsals more fun. We weren’t burnouts, we weren’t even stoners. It was just something that we’d do once in a while to get silly and laugh. It was more of a bonding thing. Of course I rarely got away with anything. When I came home after practice one day, my mom was waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

My eyes were bloodshot.
So what was my excuse? Let me think!

Mom looked at me and I could tell she knew I was high. “I must be allergic to my mascara.”

It turned out my mom and dad had found a small bag of pot in a tiny compartment in the secretary in my bedroom.

“Get in the car. We’re going to school,” they said.

I tried to explain that I wasn’t some pothead with stashes of marijuana. Did they think I was dealing drugs and smoking all the time? When we got to school, they made me take them to my locker so they could inspect it—in front of the other kids! It was so embarrassing to have my parents standing next to me as I opened my locker and pulled everything out. I think Mom expected to find it packed with pot, but there was nothing there.

“See, I told you,” I said. But they weren’t convinced that I didn’t have a problem.

Another time, during a sleepover at my house, my friend and I were watching late-night television and we smoked a bowl in the greenhouse. When we were finished I dumped the remainder in some dirt and went back into the house to watch TV.

A few months later, my mom went on a tirade.

“How dare you, Ness! How dare you!”

“What now?” I had no idea what my mother was screaming about.

“You planted pot in the greenhouse! What were you thinking?”

I looked at her like she was crazy. “Are you kidding me? I’m not growing pot in the greenhouse!”

“Are you going to deny this to my face?” Mom hissed. “Then you really are a great actress.”

“I swear I did not do this.”

Years later I realized what had happened—the seeds from the pot must have taken root and sprouted. But to this day, if I bring it up with my mother, she will say I was growing pot in our house! I’m not that stupid!

But the family meetings and disappointment continued. “There are certain things we don’t do as a family. These are the rules. We don’t come in late. We don’t treat people with disrespect,” Dad or Mom would say. When it came to marijuana, they’d say, “Do you realize what you’re doing to your body? Your brain? And what happens when you get bored of marijuana? This could lead to something else—something more powerful and more dangerous. We don’t do that in our family.”

My parents never said, “You’re bad.” There was never any name-calling. Instead, it was always very inclusive. “We are a family,” they would say. “These are the things we as a family don’t do. You’re part of the family, so we expect you to abide by our rules.”

Unlike elementary school, where I was one of the only black kids, in high school there was a group of us black girls who hung out together during free time. We even had our own cafeteria table where we’d meet at lunch, talk, and make plans for the weekend.

During my sixteenth summer, I went to a party at my friend Lori’s house in Chappaqua. While we were dancing in her garage, a car full of black guys just happened to drive by. Black guys in Chappaqua? I suppose they were equally surprised to see a bunch of black girls dancing in a garage in Chappaqua.

Joe got out and introduced himself. He was twenty years old and a gorgeous bodybuilder with the whitest teeth and the biggest smile I’d ever seen. He was the oldest of nine kids who lived in Katonah, a nearby town. He had dreams of playing football but was studying to be a mortician—yes, a mortician—at Westchester Community College.

He asked for my phone number. He called the next day and asked for a date. When my mom met him, she liked him right away. I knew she thought he was very good-looking, and he actually thought my mom was hot. Yuck! You don’t want to hear that coming from your boyfriend!

Joe was one of those guys who was striking and really polite. He’d do and say all the right things—he’d shake my father’s and mother’s hand, smile at them, and promise to have me home on time—and he always did. But in between pick-up and curfew, he’d get busy with me in his station wagon. When he’d drop me off later, he’d again be the perfect gentleman in front of my parents. It was all a very well-polished act.

To Mom, Joe was this really good guy from a nice Catholic family. He was respectful. He was well-mannered. He was the perfect boyfriend.

HELEN ON JOE

Oh, please! He was the perfect boyfriend because I knew it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t going to last. But boy, was he good-looking. They made a striking couple.

And then there was Bruce.…

I met Bruce while I was at a New Year’s Eve party with Joe. We had been together a year and we were bored. Joe was gorgeous, athletic, nice as can be, but there wasn’t much of a challenge. My mother will say I get bored too easily.

So while we went to the party as a couple, I was in the living room counting down to midnight and dancing to the music, and Joe was upstairs flirting with a buxom girl with long black hair, who happened to be Pam Grier’s cousin. When midnight struck, I
embraced my friend Toni, and this handsome sandy-brown-haired guy with deep-set brown eyes came up to me.

“Happy New Year,” he said. And then he kissed me on the lips.

WHEW!

“Happy New Year to you,” I said. Then he just walked away.

Okay, who is this guy who just walks up to me and kisses me on the lips
? I was shocked by his boldness, especially since he knew that I was with my bodybuilder boyfriend who was right upstairs.

Wait, what bodybuilder boyfriend again? (Maybe Mom was right about my attention span.)

I ended it with Joe shortly thereafter and began dating Bruce. We fell in love very quickly. He was a freshman at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He was this really smart, sophisticated, and well-traveled guy, who had a lot of black friends. Bruce’s best friend, Gary, was black and dating my best friend, Toni. He was used to being around black people and he loved black music. In his free time, Bruce skied, played tennis, and rode horses. He worked at a cocktail bar in Saratoga, so he knew how to mix proper drinks. He knew how to cook. He was a really well-rounded guy. His parents—his mom was a teacher, his father owned a car dealership—had just gotten divorced, so I’m sure I was an escape from all that stress for him.

My parents couldn’t stand us together. I was impulsive and Bruce was ready for anything, which was a dangerous combination. My mom felt that I had this bright future, but I was willing to risk everything for Bruce. My mom would say, “What are we going to do with you?” They couldn’t control me. There was no punishment that mattered to me. Every time I was grounded, I’d sneak out anyway. I was ready to take the heat. I’d disobey them. But I didn’t care. Bruce always let me have my way, which infuriated my parents. They felt he didn’t respect their rules.

It was crazy young love. I’d lie about where I’d been, but Mom
always knew. I’d be out with Bruce, miss curfew, and make no apologies. My parents would be waiting up. Then I’d get the lecture.

In high school, Mom always found scholarships for me. During my senior year, she had applied for a scholarship for me through the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. As a finalist, I was invited to a weekend drama program at Princeton University, where I performed monologues from Molière’s
The Misanthrope
and Ntozake Shange’s 1975 stage play
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
.

Bruce met me there. We couldn’t stand to be apart.

Mom found out.

When I returned from Princeton, I was in my room, kneeling on the floor, unpacking my suitcase. No one else was home but Mom and me. Mom stormed in and yanked me by the hair and forced me up off the floor.