34 The Times MagazineWilliam ransacked their two-room Harlem
apartment where his three children slept
together on a pull-out bed, grabbing a bundle
of his wife’s earnings from a drawer. Only
after he left did Cicely’s mother carefully
unpick the mattress into which she’d sewn
her savings. Her getaway money. She used
it to leave her marriage and secure another
apartment that same day.
But Cicely’s seminal memory is, aged
nine, arranging to meet her mother outside a
Bronx department store to buy new shoes for
Easter. There she found Frederica standing
among a line of black women while, from idling
cars, rich white women emerged to assess
their respectability before hiring them as
cleaners. Cicely was shocked to witness her
daily humiliation. “I never expected my mother
would be standing in line like slaves were in the
years of slavery,” she tells me. “And somebody
would come along and go, ‘I’ll take that one.’
I will never, ever forget that moment.”
Wanting her daughter to better herself
Frederica only allowed Cicely to date a
pastor’s son, Kenneth. But at the age of 16 she
fell pregnant. It was the first time she’d had
sex and she didn’t believe it counted since
they’d neither undressed nor laid down.
Frederica insisted she marry Kenneth. “We
were shopping for wedding gowns, and I said,
‘I don’t want to get married.’ And she said,
‘Well, you’re not going to have a baby out of
wedlock.’ ” Cicely conceded, but in marriage,
“A road of tedium and regret stretched before
me,” so she walked out when her daughter- whom she refers to only as “Joan” – was two.
Tyson got a job as a typist at the Red Cross,
a prestigious job for a black woman in the
Fifties. But she seized upon modelling as an
escape, despite being reserved and quietly
spoken. “The most powerful antidote to
reticence is survival,” she writes in the book.
Dispatching Joan to an upstate boarding
school, she combined modelling and typing,
until she caught the eye of a movie producer
who asked her to audition. Telling Tyson she
could pass for 20, he told her to lop a decade
off her age (which she kept up for many years).
The film was never made but, encouraged, she
took acting lessons, briefly sitting alongside
Marilyn Monroe at Lee Strasberg’s Actors
Studio, before moving to the Yale School of
Drama, which nurtured black talent such as
Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.
Her breakthrough came as a lead in the
TV series East Side/West Side in the early
Sixties, where her close-crop began a fashion
for natural hair. Tyson embodied the new
African-American woman, no longer trying
to conform to impossible white beauty ideals.It was 1965 when Tyson first met Miles
Davies through her friend, the actress
Diahann Carroll. She’d seen him play in
concert, found him intriguing, heard he was
arrogant, recovering from a recent overdose
in California and, crucially, married. Later
bumping into him on the street, she swerved
his constant offers of lunch until eventually
he wore her down. “I have never met a man
quite like him,” she says. “He was fascinating.
He would be standing in front of me talking,
and then he would say something to me, and
I thought to myself, ‘This man isn’t the same
man I was talking to five minutes ago. It’s a
different person.’ ”
Through the mid-Sixties the couple were
photographed at every fashionable party and
premiere, the black Liz Taylor and Richard
Burton, swathed in furs and jewels. But Davis
was constantly unfaithful, creeping back late
from other women’s beds, showering her withguilty gifts of rings and gowns. She endured
this for years, along with his heavy drug
use – always out of her sight – in which he
behaved “as if he didn’t care if he lived or
died”. But finally, when she discovered his affair
with the singer Betty Mabry, she crammed his
presents into a suitcase, dumped them at his
apartment and left for a role in Canada.
Miles Davis’s marriage to Mabry lasted
barely a year and Tyson kept hearing from
friends about his affairs and drug binges on
tour, plus the inevitable overdoses. He had
an uncanny habit, she says, of pitching up
whenever she enjoyed a career high. After
she received an Oscar nomination for the
1972 movie Sounder, in which she plays the
wife of jailed sharecropper, Davis tracked her
down on a publicity tour. She got a call in her
hotel room that “your husband Miles Davis is
in reception”.
“He came up,” she says, “I opened the door
and he stumbled in. He pointed out of the
window and said, ‘Everyone in those buildings
knows your name.’ Then he said, ‘Where do
you want me to take you? I’ll get cleaned up
and go anywhere you want.’ He was so sad.”
Tyson believes Davis was drawn to her
because they were opposites. He was the
wild man who drank, smoked weed and took
heroin; she was churchgoing and preferred a
clean, quiet home life. “I can’t even get Cicely
to smoke a cigarette,” he said once to a friend
who offered her cocaine. What did she think
drove him to drugs? “Insecurity,” says Tyson.
“He said to me ‘What’s all the fuss about?
I’m just playing a horn.’ I wanted him to
understand why all of these people were
raving about him and his music. I wanted
him to know that it was real. But you knowwhat I’ve learnt in life? People who are born
with genius don’t understand what it is.” She
does not recognise the Davis she knew in
the many biographies. “This bad man that
everybody talks about wasn’t him at all. He
was very vulnerable and he was trying to
protect himself. What he showed me was the
sensitivity of his being.”
After their break-up, he remained in her
thoughts. Once, having a premonition he was
in trouble, she went round to his New York
apartment to find him and a young woman
crashed out on drugs, covered in vomit. But
mainly she was based in Los Angeles, enjoying
the heyday of her career, dating other men,
although none came close to Davis.
Throughout the Sixties, although she
mixed in the same circles as Nina Simone
and James Baldwin, was good friends with
Maya Angelou, an actress before she turned
novelist, and attended Martin Luther King’sReceiving the Medal of Freedom from President Obama, 2016‘THIS BAD MAN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT WASN’T MILES AT ALL. HE WAS VULNERABLE’
Cicely Tyson Continued from page 27GETTY IMAGES