Halle Berry: Halle-lujah!

Yet the stir Berry caused in "Queen,: in which she aged from 15 to 65, did stir up lots of interest in Berry. In particular, about her personal life. Suddenly, the press had its snout in her business, pouncing on rumors about an alleged suicide attempt. And about unflattering things blabbed in a tabloid by her father, who separated from her mother when Berry was four. She has recently owned up to how tough it was growing up as one of two daughters of a black father and a white mother in a Cleveland, Ohio suburb in the '60s. "My friends would say about my mother, 'That can't be your mother. She's white. Are you adopted?' My mother's parents disowned her and, when my father left, they took her back. My grandmother didn't really love me. Only when I started getting into beauty pageants, then did things on TV, was she the loving grandmother because, to her little friends in Ohio, I was somebody."

Even with the attention her looks and smarts got her, she says, "There were so many insecurities, fears of being left, because my father left. My father was an alcoholic who abused my mother. I feel like the problems I've had with men have been the result of not having a father all my life." Berry's father has gone public with his side of the story. "He went to the Star and told his little stories," she says. "So, he now wants a relationship? I'm really not interested in developing that relationship. If you're not there when it matters, I don't think you deserve to be a part of your child's life just because you were the biological parent."

I'd heard that Berry had, before her marriage, found herself in some hairy relationships with men, including one with a not-unknown actor. One of these guys, during a knockdown, drag-out fight, belted her in the left eardrum, causing her to lose, she tells me, 80 percent of her hearing. Although she has a hearing aid, she admits that vanity keeps her from wearing it very often. Berry refuses to name names, but recalls, "I was in several relationships that were very abusive, mentally and physically. It was one long fight in all of these relationships, but when it got physical in one of them, I fought back. Blows were thrown on both sides, and the relationship was over. I sat down and said, 'Halle, you're doing something very wrong.' I knew I had to work on myself."

Berry, who explored meditation and yoga, says that her process of self-discovery and healing will be "lifelong." It's been enriched, she tells me, by finding herself diagnosed as diabetic after she collapsed on a sound stage and went into a coma. As someone who now devotes her time to diabetes associations, Berry says, shrugging, "I can take a shot of insulin and I'm fine, you know? I'm lucky, damn lucky, that I don't have cancer or leukemia, that I have all my legs and both my arms, and that I can see."

Handling such personal stresses and working on putting childhood trauma behind her, she says, opened up the world for her. "When I let go of all that old stuff, the right man came into my life effortlessly. It was the greatest thing." She met that greatest thing, David Justice, through a journalist who knew the Atlanta Braves right fielder was a fan of Berry's. Berry autographed a picture of herself for the ball player and included her phone number on it. He called, they spoke for over three hours, and less than a year later, she asked him to marry her, had his name tattooed on her behind, and now they live in a six-bedroom house which she has just remodeled.

"Right now, after nine months, I'm still happily married," she says. "I remember that, five minutes into my first phone conversation with David, he said, 'I'm talking to you like I've known you for a long time.'" What did Justice say that so impressed her? "The first thing he said that clicked in my mind was that he had his mother's name tattooed on his arm. I thought, 'How sweet.' When a man really loves and respects his mother, I knew he would love and respect me. He had also, just about six months before, been in an eight-year relationship with one woman and that had ended for both of them on good terms."

I tell Berry that she sounds so happy with Justice, it's making it tough for me to be my usual flirtatious self with her. She loves hearing this, particularly when I tell her that my Movieline editors will be disappointed that she and I didn't do some serious sparking. She leans into my tape recorder and purrs, "Hey, editors, he's cute. He's got my libido going, you know? But I'm wearing this ring, see. And David--" she cracks up laughing "--well, David's got a bigger ring." And that, as they say, is that.

Living in Atlanta, Justice and Berry get a lot of press, not all of it flattering. I ask what was with all the speculation that she had cracked up and tried to end her life? "I had some surgery done and my husband had to leave a baseball game to be with me. The press turned that into a suicide attempt, a nervous breakdown, whatever. My husband flew home [after] one day and the next day, he was back playing baseball. If I had a nervous breakdown and tried to commit suicide, could you believe it could get settled in one night? They turned it into something major when it was a real personal situation."

Flying in the face of Hollywood stars' current obsession with raising families, Berry declares, "I'm too selfish right now with my career to have children. I want to wait, because children need parents, not a nanny raising them or someone sending them off to school." A good thing, too, what with Berry being pursued all over town for projects only slightly less ambitious than those she is pursuing on her own. With Lonesome Dove producer Suzanne de Passe, Berry is developing a feature project loosely based on the life of Elaine Brown, who began as an exotic dancer at The Pink Pussycat, became the head of the Black Panthers when Huey Newton fled to Cuba, and was forced to run for her life with her child when she was targeted for assassination. Loosely based, Berry explains, "so that we can do it more like a suspense thriller, not a really slow bio-movie like Malcolm X, where it's like 'Who wants to see that?'" She also hopes to soon be in Eden Close, a movie of Anita Shreve's suspense novel of the same name, in which she'd play the title character--a gorgeous-but-strange blind woman with a secret. The project, which had previously been considered for Demi Moore, particularly delights Berry, because, she says, "It's not something where the fact that I'm black and the man's white even has to be mentioned." As with, say, The Bodyguard? With a smile, Berry answers, "That was great, but the reason they allowed that movie to be made was because you had two superstars in it. People didn't come to see Whitney Houston act, they came to hear an international crossover artist sing that soundtrack album. It's a whole other thing to do a movie with me, at this point."

Is there a place in the Hollywood sun for a woman who combines the saucy charm of Houston with the allure of Sharon Stone and the haunting quality of Dorothy Dandridge--innate qualities of Berry's that we've only begun to see? Berry is betting on it. "Right this instant, if I'm cast for things it's going to be seen as 'creative casting.' I think I'm always gonna have to say, 'Take a chance, it might be okay, it also might be something great!' I'm always going to have to push. But you know, I've got a lot of that."

_________________

Stephen Rebello interviewed Richard Gere for the December 1993 Movieline.

Pages: 1 2 3