As beautiful as she is outspoken, the actress--who made her mark in Jungle Fever, Boomerang and TV's "Queen"--lets fly on everything from making The Flintstones and her career advice for Spike Lee, to competing for roles with Winona, Julia and Marisa, and her marriage to Atlanta Braves ball player David Justice.
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Halle Berry crosses the dining lounge toward our table at the Bel Age Hotel one sultry afternoon and shreds my heart. Wrapped in a brief crocheted number that growls "sex kitten" and sets off her devastating air of innocence while highlighting her spectacular cafe au lait coloring, she makes heads swivel. Petite but about as fragile as a Humvee, she smiles slowly, extends her hand and quietly introduces herself.
Judging by the reactions of other diners in the room, I'm not the only one who was impressed by her turns as the crackhead in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, as the doll who wallops Eddie Murphy in Boomerang, as the doomed stripper in The Last Boy Scout, and as Alex Haley's racially mixed grandmother in the highly-rated TV miniseries "Queen". Okay, I took a pass on catching her in Strictly Business or more recent films like Father Hood and The Program, but this anyone could catch instantly: not for nothing did she win the prehistoric sexpot role originally intended for Sharon Stone in The Flintstones, the live-action movie version of the animated TV series. Not for nothing, either, does she have a deal to star in a Disney-funded movie based on Eden Close, Anita Shreve's erotic American Gothic, which, who knows, could do for her what Basic Instinct did for Stone.
Like Stone, Berry says what's on her mind. At length. In detail. About her past (rocky). About her alleged suicide attempt and nervous breakdown (what, already?). About her career ambitions (watch out Julia, Winona and Whitney). About old boyfriends (dial 911). About the so-called new black cinema (stand back). About her marriage to outspoken Atlanta Braves outfielder David Justice (very new). About working with such movie icons as Spike Lee and Eddie Murphy (duck, you suckers). About the casting couch (whew!). Just another chat over lunch with a breezeway-brained starlet? Guess again.
So, why the heart-shredding I feel at the sight of her? Because I know my Hollywood history well enough to realize that if Berry becomes the major star she shows every indication of deserving to be, it will be against killer odds. Hollywood, fascinated but never quite certain of what "to do" with talented black women--from Eartha Kitt and Dorothy Dandridge to Lonette McKee and Diana Ross-- tends to fritter them away.
Berry is obviously well aware of this because she tells me, with a knowing grin, "Directors and producers tend to see me either as the Doris Day of the '90s or else the one to get for Girlz N the Hood III, IV, V and VI. I'm totally not interested in that. I'm soft-spoken, which people in Hollywood sometimes mistake for being weak, vulnerable and fragile. People talk about Jungle Fever, where I played a crack addict and was cussing like a sailor, but they say, 'That was you?' Yeah, that was me. Being from a minority, you become used to the mind-set of having to prove yourself."
But wait a minute. Did I just hear Berry assert her identity while more or less dishing John Singleton, director of Boyz N the Hood, considered one of the beacons of the emerging cinema by and about people of color? Making it clear that she isn't singling out Singleton, she explains, "Look, we black African-Americans, or whatever term is correct, feel like we've reached equality, sometimes, in certain arenas. But filmmaking isn't one of them. 'Black films,' quote-unquote? Black exploitation films, if you ask me. It's not only no different from the Shaft era, it's even worse. The nature of these movies is that they're so violent, they deal with such negative subject matter, we're not willing to pay money to see them. Just turn on the news. Menace II Society? I don't think [moviemakers] realize sometimes the damage they're doing. I don't buy the idea that says you make these movies to show white people. Do they think white people don't know? Does Midamerica go out in droves to see 'black movies'?"
Still, she has, in Spike Lee and Eddie Murphy, worked alongside two of the highest-profile black men in the movies. Each has attracted some of the least flattering press in memory. Can Berry understand why? "I can definitely understand it in Spike Lee's case," she says. "I like him. If you don't know him personally, he can sometimes have a one-track mind, like, he's got his opinion and that's it. People get very put off by that. Once you get to know him and can break down all that stuff he puts up, he really is a nice guy underneath. He puts so many personal issues in his movies, it sometimes gets to be like, 'Oh God, another one of those?' I'm really looking forward to seeing Spike direct something he didn't write, that doesn't encompass his views."
So, knowing Lee as Berry does, what does she think we who don't know him would find surprising about him? "The kind of women he has dated," she answers. "Spike seems too pro-black to me and then he dates these light, bright, almost white-looking women. It's the opposite of what I think he stands for-- or what he says he stands for." When Berry made Jungle Fever, she was romantically unattached. Any fire? "He didn't hit on me, no," she answers, laughing. "I came to that show with the attitude, 'I'm not hittable.' I think he may have picked up on that because he didn't even try."
Murphy, with whom Berry made Boomerang, is "a nice man [but] he's bitter. He got a lot of success real early in his life and maybe he hurt some people along the way, but it was bound to happen. There were serious problems on that movie between Eddie and Paramount, but it wasn't somebody just being a power-hungry prima donna like they made out in the press. He assured me, 'It's not that I'm just being dicked and I don't want to show up. We are having problems on a higher level that you people don't know anything about.' Paramount and Eddie both needed to get their acts together."
Then, with a kittenish grin, she adds, "In Boomerang, when I got to smack him, it was like. . . well, so many women have come up to me and said they just loved that. They wanted to see Eddie smacked." She quickly amends this by saying, "Well, not necessarily Eddie, but that kind of guy. So many women have been treated like that by men that every woman rejoiced in that moment."
When I ask Berry what she considers the truest cliche about Hollywood, she answers like a shot, "The truest cliche about Hollywood is that women have boobs and everybody wants to see them!" After a beat, she adds, "When I came to Hollywood, I had an audition where the guy said, subtly, 'Sleep with me and the part's yours.' Well, only women with half a brain fall for that shit, then screw half the town and end up screwing themselves big time." Would she care to get more specific? "Well, this was another instance," she says, "but, when I finally got picked to do The Last Boy Scout there was this nudity clause attached that had never been mentioned to me. I told my manager, 'I can't be nude. I'm not signing the contract.' The producers came back and said, 'Forget the nudity, we'll get a body double.' Sometimes nudity is pushed on you because they think you're not smart enough and that you want the part so bad. Nothing doing."
This is a woman some find shy and fragile? A woman who, only eight years ago, was a beauty pageant veteran and first runner-up in the Miss USA pageant and, only four years ago, was just breaking out of modeling and into such TV sitcoms as "Living Dolls"? "When I'm pushed to the limit, in life or in a movie, I'm like a cornered cat. I'll scratch your eyes out." Not my eyes, of course, but how about those of her competition? "I really try not to compare myself with other people," she declares. "Four years ago, when I first started, I had a short-term plan and a long-term plan. Everything, in my mind, has gone according to schedule. My role in The Flintstones was written for a blue-eyed, blonde, Sharon Stone-type bombshell. Five years ago, they never would have cast a black woman in a sex-symbol role like this. That recharges me."
How does Berry react to a business that seems to make room for, say, only one Stone, Julia Roberts or Michelle Pfeiffer, not to mention one Whitney Houston or Diana Ross? "It's real hard to sleep when you know you're not getting a shot at something maybe Winona Ryder is," she admits. "I'll test or read for or with anybody, anywhere. I just want to know that I'm getting the same shots as Julia or Winona or Marisa Tomei or Whoopi Goldberg."
Berry utters all this with a fire in her eyes and a tone that suggests she has in mind some firsthand for-instances. "I was up for The Firm," she says, referring to the role of the man-trap who entices Tom Cruise on the beach. "It was just that little scene but I wanted it, because it was in a big film and in a role that didn't call for a black woman. I auditioned for Intersection. I really wanted to be seen for Indecent Proposal. The producer called my manager and said, 'Why would a black woman sell her body for a million dollars?' The fact is, why would any woman sell her body for a million dollars? If you're going to make this movie with anyone, why can't it be with a black woman? I also met the director [John Badham] for Point of No Return, who wouldn't even let me read for it. Anytime I see anybody in a great role, I think, 'God, I could have done this with that.' I saw The Silence of the Lambs, which I auditioned for, and went, 'Ohhhhhh,'" she says, letting a long sigh express her frustration.
She's the first to say she doesn't give up easily, however. "I was turned down originally for the TV miniseries 'Queen,' but when I'm passionate about something, I'll keep coming back. I mean, I'm not going to show up anywhere in costume and invade somebody's space--we all know our Sean Young stories. I do have some pride." One hears how Berry had been a front-runner for playing Tina Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It, then got passed over for Angela Bassett. "I'd be the first to admit if I tried and didn't get it," she says. "I had just finished 'Queen,' which was really emotional and painful. I met with the director of the Tina Turner movie. Later, I called my agent to say, 'I can't do this movie.' My agent said, 'They want you to screen test!' but I said, 'I'm not ready to play another abused, battered woman. I don't even know who I am right now, except 'Queen.' I'm just going to have to let them cast somebody else."
Which they did: Angela Bassett. "Who was the only one," Berry hastens to observe, "that was supposed to be Tina Turner. I made my peace with the whole situation, so let's celebrate her getting it, which is what really matters." It's tough to say whether Berry or Bassett made the wiser choice. After all, Bassett might be an Oscar nominee, but Berry, surprisingly, was not cited for an Emmy for "Queen." "If I ever felt suicidal in my life," she says, "it was 10 minutes after the Emmy nominations were announced. I was just crushed. After 'Queen' got high ratings, everybody kept saying things like, 'You're going to be nominated for an Emmy, so what are you gonna wear?' and I had started thinking, well, maybe . . . Anyway, when I wasn't nominated, I talked with the director of 'Queen.' It took me days to really understand what he meant when he said, 'Never look to awards for acceptance. Find the rewards in your work.' "
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."
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Richard Gere for the December 1993 Movieline.