The Times Magazine 35iles could make me laugh so
hard I’d nearly choke to death.
Every time we’d sit down for
dinner, he’d start up with his
crazy stories. A few made me
cringe (like the one about a
friend he called Third Storey
Joe, so named for his skill in
scaling buildings to rob them), while others
made me curious (during Miles’s childhood,
his mother, when hosting ladies’ lunches,
counted out her guests’ peas before serving
them). Every one of his accounts, by the
end, had me doubled over.
And style. Miles, like my father, was a
Dapper Dan, a certified stepper. He had
an Italian tailor, Mario, who dressed him
to the hilt. In the Sixties, men’s fashion
was exactly as I prefer it: slim-fitting suits
complemented with thin ties, thin lapels,
thin collars. Wherever the two of us turned
up, boy, we turned some heads. I beamed
at his side, glamorous in my couture.
I felt proud to stand alongside Miles, loved
folding my silk-gloved hands into his. Miles
and I were among a handful of black power
couples of the Sixties, an artistic duo that
drew stares. Once when he and I were out
at a dinner concert, a well-known singer
I won’t name glided over to our table.
“You’ve got the prize, Ms Cicely,” she told
me. I smiled and pulled my sequin wrap
more snuggly around my shoulders.
One of my most cherished fashion
staples was a gift from Miles. He once called
up a renowned designer and said to him, “I
want you to make Cicely a fur coat.” “I don’t
make fur coats,” the man told him. Miles
repeated his statement, the second time
adding “and I want it here on December 24”.
Sure enough, by Christmas Eve, an
enormous brown paper bag sat on Miles’s
living room floor. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Well, open it and see,” he said, a glint of
mischief in his eyes. I lifted out the floor-
length stunner and gasped. In the following
years, I wore that mink out, do you hear
me? I basked in the glory and the gaze.
Hair was central to the fashion show.
I learnt to style my ’fro in every manner
known to black womankind: shortly
cropped, twisted out, pulled into a poof,
cornrowed. For versatility, I reached for
beehive wigs, clip-on chignons and goddess
braids created using extensions.
That was the Sixties, a peculiar
combination of fashion and frivolity,
protest and profound social turmoil. That
April, Miles and I were on a tour stop in
Seattle. Any time Miles was on the road,he never wanted to go out for lunch or dinner,
preferring to preserve his energy for his
performances. So in the kitchen of the
apartment we stayed in, I fixed us something
to eat while he sat in the living room, talking
on the phone with his attorney, Harold. When
their conversation ended, he laid down the
phone and looked over at me. “Harold said
they shot King...” he said. I continued stirring
my pot of broth, feeling sure that, as usual,
Miles was joking. I was just about to blurt out,
“Now that’s not funny!” when he delivered the
remainder of his sentence: “... and he’s dead.”
I folded like an accordion, my body turning
in on itself as I faltered to my knees. The
words stabbed me in my solar plexus. “What?”
I asked. “What did you say?” “King has been
assassinated,” Miles told me. “He’s gone.”
I was on set filming The Heart Is a
Lonely Hunter when the country suffered
yet another body blow. A lone gunman shot
Robert F Kennedy, then running for president.
Most black folks in the country saw RFK
as the remaining hope: a candidate intent on
extending King’s quest for civil rights. Here
was a man who promised to end a deeply
controversial war overseas in Vietnam and
who promoted equality for Black Americans.
In July 1968, right after that one-two
punch, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter premiered
in New York. Miles and I showed up on the
red carpet together. An image of us, yellowed
by time but forever stashed in my box of
memories, brings to mind the feeling of that
era. Miles’s arms are folded across his body,
his eyes covered with sunglasses. I, wearing
a simple sleeveless dress, stand near him,
with one hand clutching my purse, the other
resting on his hand. A pair of silver chandelier
earrings swirl from my lobes toward my
shoulders, like two large teardrops. We both
peer blankly into the camera lens, our bodies
present in the room, our spirits far away.
When I look at that photo now, it remindsme of the stillness of those months following
Dr King and RFK’s murders, of the quiet
and the questioning that befall you once
a casket has been lowered into the ground.
We were there to celebrate the opening of
a film, and still, we were inwardly weeping.
A few weeks after the premiere, Miles
gave me yet another reason to grieve. One
afternoon I was relaxing in his living room
on the ground floor while he was upstairs
in the bedroom. The doorbell rang. When I
opened the door, there stood a light-skinned
young black woman, with straight hair
cascading down her back. Before I could
speak, Miles, who’d heard the bell, pushed
past me, ushered the woman away from the
entrance and shut the door behind him.
I stood there for only a moment. Miles
and this woman were hardly down the block
by the time I stormed from his place and
back to my own a few streets away. Once
home, I pulled out a large suitcase, lifted
it onto my bed and opened it. I packed up
everything Miles had ever given me: the
dresses, the shoes, the jewellery, the mink
coat, the items reeking of the guilt that
had prompted their purchase. An hour
later, I hailed a taxi and loaded the suitcase
in the trunk. “Please take me around the
corner to 312 West 77th,” I told the driver.
I hauled that suitcase to Miles’s door
and rang the bell. He opened the door.
I pushed past him and hurled the suitcase
into the air. It landed, with a thud, a few
feet from Betty [Mabry], who looked
dumbfounded, like she’d just witnessed the
Second Coming. Before either of them could
speak, I bolted off.
Miles had been strutting all over town
with this woman, obviously with no care
about mortifying me, and plainly with no
fear of reprisal. As much as I cared for
Miles, I would not allow him to blatantly
disrespect me. If he wanted this woman,
then he could have her. But he could not
have us both at once. And clearly he did
want her. Because soon after our debacle,
he married Betty in the autumn of 1968.
That fall, with my emotions still
raw, I landed a small recurring role in a
Canadian television series. I don’t recall the
show’s name, only that it became a lifeline
for me. I packed my sorrows alongside my
toiletries and flew to Toronto. Away from
Miles, whom I did not speak to after I flung
that suitcase into his world. Years later we’d
again cross paths for Act Two of our story. nExtracted from Cicely Tyson’s Just as I Am,
published on February 4 (£20, HarperCollins)M
‘I beamed at Miles’s side, glamorous in my couture’
EXTRACT
Tyson and Davis when married, at the 1986 Grammys