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When I was growing up in Terrell, Texas,” Jamie Foxx, 37, says, “I felt this was not where I was supposed to be. I knew I was meant for a different destination.”
Jamie Foxx is referring to the southern town where he lived with endemic racism, poverty and the corrosive knowledge of having been abandoned shortly after birth.
Last year, in Hollywood, he received Academy Award nominations for his performances as the singer Ray Charles in Ray and his supporting role opposite Tom Cruise in Collateral. Thus he became the second man in history, after Al Pacino, to earn Oscar nominations for roles in two pictures in the same year, winning best actor for Ray. He has just finished his 17th movie, Jarhead, Sam Mendes’ adventure drama about the first Gulf War.
Despite his success, little in Foxx’s journey to stardom was easy. For starters, when he was seven months old, his birth mother handed him to her adoptive parents, Estelle and Mark Talley, then walked away. The Talleys took him in and raised him as their own son, although they were already in their 60s.
“For whatever reason, my biological parents didn’t want to make the effort,” Foxx says. “Legally, my mother is my sister, because the lady who adopted her in turn adopted me.”
Unsurprisingly, Foxx, born Eric Bishop, has little contact with his birth mother, Louise Annette Bishop, 62, or his biological father, Darell Bishop (aka Shahid Abdula), 63, reportedly a sometime stockbroker and convert to Islam.
Foxx believes his father will only talk to him if he converts to Islam, something he is not going to do.
“Although it’s too late now, I still ask myself why they didn’t want me,” Foxx says. “Maybe they weren’t ready to raise a child. Was it too inconvenient? I lived just up the street from them. I’ll never understand it, because I know how great it feels to have a child love you back.”
Foxx has an 11-year-old daughter, Corrine to whom he is devoted.
“I realise the effort you have to make. Raising a child ain’t going to be easy, but if I was to lose the relationship with my daughter, it would be really destructive for me,” he says.
Foxx grew up in the Talleys’ small yellow house in the black quarter of Terrell, a racially segregated community with a population of 13,000, 30 miles east of Dallas. Like the rest of Texas, Terell continued to subject blacks to unequal treatment.
While Foxx remembers the racism, he also claims memories of his grandparents’ home as a safe place where hard work, self-discipline and learning were valued and he was surrounded with books and music.
“My grandmother was my protector,” he says. “She did battle for me. She said, ‘This boy’s special. He’s got something.” There was no question that I was their son. I always felt loved there.”
The Talleys worked as gardener and housemaid for white families. “My grandmother had to take a lot of disrespect,” he recalls.
“They’d call her at all hours and say, ‘Get over here!’ It used to burn me up. They’d call my grandfather, when he was 79, at five in the morning and say, ‘We need you here!’ I hated that. I decided that won’t be me.”
At the age of five, Foxx began taking weekly piano lessons from the Dallas music teacher Lanita C. Hodge and practising piano for 30 minutes a day on his grandmother’s orders.
“Grandmother was tough,” he says. She was determined. She was a devout Christian, but she’d cuss like a sailor. Granny said, ‘I paid good money for that piano — and you are going to play it!’ And I did. She told me music would take me where I needed to go.”
“Sometimes, when the weekends came and everybody was going to an amusement park or outside playing,” he continues, “I didn’t want to go in the house and practise or take my piano lesson. My grandmother could be mean. It was fisticuffs. And then she’d call in the enforcer, my grandfather, Mark. He’d come in and say, ‘What‘s the problem?’ I’d say, ‘Problem? There ain’t no problem! What was I thinking?’ And I’d go take my lesson.
“Granny said music disciplines. She said, ‘Can you handle 30 minutes’ practise every day? Music gives structure. It helps your reading and memory.’ It did all that for me. My memory is impeccable, almost photogenic. Music was the means to everything.”
Among the earliest benefits music brought him was money. As a young teen, Foxx worked as a part-time pianist and choir leader at Terrell’s New Hope Baptist church for $75 a week. His grandmother saved his wages. Being on the church staff brought him under the special scrutiny of the elders.
“It was different from kids growing up today. There was a lot of stuff we weren’t meant to do. I got caught dancing when I was 13. I was on the corner with some friends and I did the moonwalk for them. My third-grade teacher, Miss Thomas, saw me dancing and told the preacher. He said to me, ‘I understand there was some dancing going on, mister.’ I said, ‘I just learnt how to do he moonwalk. At church on the white side of town they are having sock hops (teenage dance nights held in school gyms or churches).’ ‘Well, we don’t do what they do on the white side of town,’ he said. ‘All that dancing is devilment and it’s evil!’”
Foxx, who is a practicing Christian, is critical of the black church. “I sometimes thought the veil of the holy-rolling thing hurt the African –American community,” he says. “Whenever there was a problem we’d go to church and sing. By the age of 16, 17, I was saying to myself, ‘This is not going to solve anything. We are churching ourselves to death. Church is a pacifier. Nothing‘s getting done. It was tough for me, because I’m minister of music. I can’t say those things. When I’d say those things, the preacher would act like it was the devil asking those questions. But I wondered, if God predestines, and if my whole life is separation and railroad tracks, are black people and whites going to be separate in heaven too?”
As a boy, Foxx’s only social contact with white people came when he was hired to play the piano at private wine and cheese parties at their homes on the other side of town.
“One Christmas in 1983, my friend, Chris Barron, drove me way out in the country to play for this party,” he recalls. “We were kids. This rich guy opened the door. ‘Why are there two of you here?’ he asked. I said, ‘My friend drove me here. Is there a problem?’ ‘Yeah, I can’t have two niggers in my house at the same time.’ I was so used to hearing that word. I went inside alone. The man gave me this nice jacket with leather patches to wear, and as I play I hear them telling these nigger jokes off to the side. I’ll never forget it. At the end of the night I went to give him his jacket back. He didn’t want it. ‘I can’t wear that no more,’ he said, ‘Not after you had it on.’
“Let’s call it what it was: racism,” Foxx states. “Don’t sugarcoat it! I was 15 then. When you say the word ‘nigger’, it is like somebody hit you in the head with a brick. I didn’t understand his disrespect or why he hated. I still don’t. I used to think, why does the fact of me just being born on this big earth have anything to do with you anyway? Why can’t I live my life and not have to worry about you? What has my being born black have to do with you? I don’t goddamn get what you are so mad about! Why don’t you want everybody to live prosperous lives and be grand? Why hate so much? Is it the money? The power? What the hell did I ever do to you? I’ve never done anything to you! Maybe he was taught wrong. Or it’s genetic. Or it’s the residence of slavery. Maybe hate’s just in some peole. Maybe you can’t change it. Whatever it is, we still have a problem with race in America. We are going to have to deal with it. We are getting to that point now.”
In high school, Foxx was a popular student with top grades, sang in a rock band called Leather and Lace (“We were horrible”), and was a stellar athlete in basketball, track events and football. Randy Heisig, his football coach in middle school, remembers him as an exceptional player, a straight – A student who “never got in trouble and was always smiling”.
He also recalls that Foxx’s grandmother insisted piano lessons always had to take precedence over football practice.
In Texas, where football is an obsession, Foxx was a local sports celebrity, who was featured in the Dallas newspapers.
Nevertheless, his biological dad never bothered to see him play. “He lived 28 miles away,” Foxx remarks “I never saw him. It hardens you. I don’t get emotional. When I’m struck, I don’t go, ‘Oh, I‘m angry, I’m going to get at this person.’ I’m a cactus, not a daffodil that needs to be taken care of. I just need a few drops of water. I can handle my own.”
After high school, Foxx was awarded a music scholarship to United States International (now Alliant) University in San Diego, California. His grandmother sent him off with the money she had saved from his church pay. He studied classical music and composition, while secretly hoping for a career like Lionel Richie’s, singing love songs. “I wanted to sit at a piano and sing about love 150,000 ways. I just wanted to love you to death. For me, music was my ticket out. Even now I can sit down and play classical music, modern jazz. I could do it for the rest of my life, if I had to. As long as I don’t lose my hands, I’m still making music.”
In California, Foxx discovered, for the first time, a place “where racism fell away”. “College was like a haven to me. You’d be exhausted even trying to be racist at the university because there were students from 81 different nations.”
On weekends, Foxx would drive with college friends up from San Diego to Los Angeles. “The minute I saw LA I felt free. I could breathe,” he said. “Be what I was meant to be. In California, I got my swagger.
In 1989, accepting a girlfriend’s dare, he walked up to a comedy club’s open mic and told jokes and did impressions.
“My career jumped off because of Ronald Reagan,” he says. “At the time I was the only African-American doing him. “Within a year and a half he had left college, dropped his birth name, Eric Bishop, and invented “Jamie Foxx” as his stand-up moniker. “The way that I looked at it was, if i fail as Jamie Foxx, I’ll just change my name and come back as somebody else.”
He didn’t fail. Instead he quickly began making it on the club circuit as a stand-up comic. With his first earnings, he bought a car and drove back to visit Terell.
“I wasn’t successful but I made enough to get a small car that looked like a Ferrari,” he says. He bought a vintage Triumph TR7. “Go ahead, man. Paint over the insignias. They’ll never know. I parked it in front of my grandparents’ house, not in the driveway, right on the grass. The girls saw those blue California plates — ‘Ooh. Take me there! Get my country ass out of here! He’s a city slicker!’”
In 1991, Foxx was hired for Fox TV’s comedy-sketch series In Living Color. It made him famous. “Keenan Ivory Wayans was running the whole show,” he recalls, “and I was lucky having him as a boss. He said, ‘If you are black, you have to be the best. You can’t be mediocre.’ He was right.”
Five years later, Fox was given his own series, The Jamie Foxx show. It was a hit. In 1997, at 30, he landed his first starring film role in Booty Call. The turning point in his acting career came in 1999 when Oliver Stone cast him as a rookie quarter back in the football drama. Any Given Sunday.
It brought Foxx wide critical applause. Two years later he won serious praise for his supporting role in Ali, opposite Will Smith. This year he received two Oscar nominations (for Ray and Collateral) and a host of other acting honours.
“In some movies we show drugs and womanising, but we also show the repercussions. As a black person, if I do a role that is considered foolish or distasteful it can hurt. It has to show a redemptive quality. If you are not acting to help or influence regular folks, what are you doing it for?
“Something positive should come out of it. I want to look back and have a body of work like Denzel Washington’s.”
Foxx and Colin Farrell are now filming Miami Vice, a stylised cop movie.
“Colin has this endearing thing about him, “ he says. “Good–looking guy, charm, women go absolutely crazy. But he’s really this young, sincere kid. People don’t get a chance to see that. You hope someone’s letting him know the ins and outs and watching out for him, because he’s such an honest, pure guy.”
Foxx and Farell have reputations as party boys — fun-loving risk-taking and highly sexed — yet they are both unusually family–centred.
“Collin has his mother and sister with him all the time.“
In Miami, Foxx is accompanied by family who normally live with him in greater LA: His two half-sisters, Diedra, 37 and Diondra, 21, who has Down’s Syndrome, and their father.
His daughter Corinne, stays with her mother near him in California. She also visits him in Miami.
His Talley grandparents are deceased; his grandmother, Estelle, died last year at 95.
“Even though I’m not married, and don’t want to get married, I have a great relationship with my daughters’ mother. I’m a southern gentleman, so I keep that smooth,” he says. “I’m a huge family man, I’m not going to let the things of the past happen again, not to my child,” he says.
He has visited disaster victims in Africa, and recently got involved in fundraising and advocacy work on the American Gulf Coast.
“I’ve been able to go to New Orleans and elsewhere to see the damage from Hurricane Katrina. It was like a heart attack. There were symptoms before the damage was done. Poverty. No education. Racism. Corruption. There was a police department and poor people on two completely opposite sides. It explodes. You expect the cops to save you ? They walk away. You don’t mean anything to them.”
In Texas, Foxx visited the hurricane refugees — most of whom were black — crowding the Houston Astrodome football stadium, commandeered as a shelter, and spoke to local officers and aid workers.
“Niggerdome” is what he says some called the stadium. He came away frustrated by the Bush administration’s seeming indifference to the plight of black victims and the refusal of local officials, among them the black mayor of New Orleans, to label that indifference racist.
“I looked at all those black faces and thought you expect them to stop save you? You don’t mean anything to them. We’ve got to stop waiting. At this point we’ve got to stop saying that the white man is going to come and save us,” he says.
“I remember being in Mozambique, talking about politics, about life and I’m really enthused about this kid. He asked, ‘Mr. Foxx, how do you rule the world?’ I said, ‘That is easy. With power.’ He said, ‘No.’ I said ‘What, are you telling me no? I’m older than you, I’ve been around the world and you’ve only been here.’ He said, ‘You rule the world with with the ability to kill women and children and go to sleep. I saw men kill women and children and they slept. Mr. Foxx, they did that with slavery in your country too, and then they went to sleep.’
“Those words ring out in my mind.
People see the suffering in New Orleans, they see it in Africa, everywhere and they sleep. They don’t think it affects them.”
Given his concerns, I ask if he plans to enter politics. “That’s always in the back of my mind. I’m real person, and I’m angry. I think you are given things for a reason. You have to use your position to do a good. What are you doing it for otherwise? I’m not here to make money. I’m trying to use this celebrity thing to get people some help. AIDS, poverty, racism — I want to be one of the hands that helps stop all that. I’ll put it on my shoulders. I’ll charge it to my account, I want to do more. I want to make history.”
Published on: Sunday, 11th December, 2005
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