The Times Magazine 27he year Miles Davis died, Cicely
Tyson felt he was haunting her.
Each time she climbed into a
New York taxi, entered a lift
or a department store, she’d hear
a snatch of ’Round Midnight or Blue
in Green. “It was as though Miles
was following me around,” she
says. “Everywhere I went, his
music would be playing. I’d say
to him, ‘OK, OK, I know you’re with me.’ ”
At the age of 96, Tyson is publishing her
autobiography, Just As I Am, which charts
a life beginning in the slums of Twenties
Harlem and follows her seven-decade acting
career whose rewards include an honorary
Oscar, three Emmys and the Medal of
Freedom from President Obama. Oprah
Winfrey and fellow TV producer Shonda
Rhimes cite Tyson as a trailblazer and in
the foreword, Viola Davis describes how,
growing up in poverty in the only black family
in her Rhode Island town, seeing Tyson on
TV, “a dark-skinned, thick-lipped woman
who truly mirrored me” gave her “permission
to dream”.
Her book also charts a great 20th-century
love story. Miles Davis and Cicely Tyson:
the legendary jazz trumpeter and the leading
lady, a rare black Sixties power couple whose
tumultuous on-off affair was marred by
Davis’s infidelity and addiction. It is Cicely’s
noble profile, bare of make-up, on Davis’s 1967
album Sorcerer, and it was to Tyson he turned
to haul him back to health and creativity.
“Thank you for saving my life,” he said on
their wedding day.
Like an old-school star, Cicely Tyson is
fashionably late for our Zoom call. Then the
disembodied voice of her couturier, B Michael- who designs her outfits, including the much
photographed gigantic black hat she wore for
Aretha Franklin’s funeral – comes on to say
they’re just checking the lighting. And finally
Miss Tyson materialises, smiling beatifically
in a green silk chiffon scarf, exquisitely made
up. I confess I’d dreaded a transatlantic video
interview with a 96-year-old, but Tyson does
not look or speak or even hear like someone
of such great age.
Indeed, her career began because she looks
far younger than her years. Tyson was 30 and
a typist when, while browsing a department
store on Fifth Avenue in her lunch hour, a
smartly dressed black man tapped her on the
shoulder. “Are you a model?” he asked. “If you
aren’t, you should be.” She called a modelagency in Harlem and within months was on
the cover of Ebony magazine.
In Just As I Am, Cicely Tyson attributes her
success to good fortune, God’s blessing or her
own spooky sixth sense. Yet it is clearly down
to her own inner steel and fortitude, besides
the example of her own mother, Frederica,
a domestic worker, who migrated to the US
from the Caribbean in 1919. Tyson’s father,
William, was charming and doted on his
daughter, but he was unfaithful and sometimes
violent. Her parents’ marriage ended whenT
With Miles Davis, Copenhagen, 1982, and, left, in 1974, with the two Emmys she won for The Autobiography of Miss Jane PittmanFOR TOO LONG, ‘PEOPLE DIDN’T RECOGNISE TALENT IN
WOMEN, SIMPLY BECAUSE OF THE COLOUR OF OUR SKIN’
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