Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (19 page)

7

The Whipping Boy

THE POWER THAT CAME WITH FAME DID GO TO MY HEAD—ONCE. Opening for Barry Manilow at the Circle Star Theatre in San Francisco at the height of his popularity, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I had come a long way and so had he—I knew Barry a little when he was the substitute piano player at the Improv in New York. When I arrived at the theater for a rehearsal, I saw a huge concert grand piano taking up the whole middle of the stage. This was a theater in the round. With the piano consuming so much space, I would have to work on the edges of the stage. I told the theater workers to move the piano to the side.

“Excuse us,” one of them said, “but it’s tuned and can’t be moved. Could you work around it?”

“Absolutely not!” Then I went on a rant in front of the entire crew about how great an act I was and that I deserved my place on stage and if they didn’t move that damn piano then I was going to walk!

Barry arrived and asked what was the problem. I told him in no uncertain terms. He was understanding but pointed out that if they moved the piano they would have to move it back to center stage after my performance, which would require tuning it again. There wasn’t enough time to do that between acts. I did not care—I wanted the piano moved! Finally, the general manager of the theater came to us. I bitched to him too.

He nodded his head. “You’re right, Mr. Walker.”

I was feeling righteous indeed.

“You’re right,” he continued. “You should walk. Thank you for coming. You are released from your contract.”

“But . . . ”

He turned and left.

Everyone in the theater fell silent, including me. I slinked out feeling about six inches tall.

I won’t sugarcoat what I did: I was wrong. As my mother would say, I showed out. The worst part was that I imagined everyone there thinking to themselves, “I used to like this guy.” I wrote Barry a letter of apology, and to this day I am embarrassed about that incident. I never let anything like that ever happen again.

You are never as big a star as you think you are. Reality will knock you down a peg, sooner or later.

Sometimes when we meet, fans don’t realize that they are talking to a real human being and not a TV character. Because I was in their homes every week for years, when people see me in person, they talk to me like a family member, like I know them and they know me. But neither is true. It seems so strange to me when people get so personal when we first meet.

Years after
Good Times
I was working out at a gym and a guy who made Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Don Knotts came up and said, “Mr. Walker, you changed my life.”

I puffed up my chest a little, which took some effort.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “everybody laughed that I was as skinny and ugly as J. J. on
Good Times
.”

The air went out of me.

“I got so tired of that,” he went on, “that I started going to the gym, working out. I entered bodybuilding contests. And I won the state championship. I went back to those people and showed them my first-place trophy! After that, they never said I was as ugly as you!”

Nice to hear it. Thanks. I guess.

During the run of the series I was a recognizable figure from TV, but I was a recognizable
black
figure from TV. I was reminded of that while dating Stacey. She loved having her long, blond hair blow in the wind as we rode in my convertible Mercedes. One day driving down Sunset Boulevard a cop pulled us over. I expected him to come to the driver’s side and ask for my license. Instead, he went to the passenger side and asked Stacey, “Are you alright? We have a report of a woman being held against her will in a car on Sunset.”

Yeah, right.

Stacey said, “No, I’m fine” and made a point of adding, “This is my boyfriend, Jimmie Walker.” The cop recognized me, gave me a dirty look, and walked away without another word.

When I was invited to be a contestant on the
Tattletales
game show, I needed to have a woman with me so we could be one of its celebrity couples. I brought Stacey. The producers’ faces flushed white—and I mean that in every way possible. They took me aside and said that, though they liked Stacey, they had affiliates in the South, and having her and me together would not be a good idea for the show.

“If you can bring a black girl,” they said, “give us a call and we’ll have you back.”

I asked Jere Fields, a black actress I barely knew, to come on the show with me. We had no relationship whatsoever, but she pretended to be my wife. According to information on the Internet, I have supposedly been married to Jere ever since! This is probably news to her: I have not seen her in more than thirty years. Maybe that is the perfect marriage!

We never went as far as showing a serious interracial relationship on
Good Times
, only an innocent one with young Michael—not as threatening as an adult one. But real life was often reflected in the series. That was no accident. Lear regularly called me and other cast members into the writers’ room to meet with them and the story editors to talk about our personal experiences as black men and women. Lear, in particular, wanted to absorb everything he could. Like my white friends at Yankee Stadium when I was a kid, he really wanted to know about us.

For me, these were almost like therapy sessions. A script about how black students were often promoted to higher grades without actually receiving the education necessary? Well, I could certainly talk about that. During the first couple seasons writers such as Roger Shulman and John Baskin, and Kim Weiskopf and Michael Baser for a couple of seasons after them, wanted to know not only what happened but also how I felt about what happened. They listened to what we said and tried to incorporate our thoughts into their scripts. They really cared—and it did not matter whether they were white or black.

Of course, there was not as much merriment in any ghetto, including my Melrose projects, as there was around the Evans household on
Good Times
. We were a sitcom, not a reality show. But there sure was a whole lot more reality than seen in any other TV series of any kind. I think there was more reality than most of today’s reality shows!

Good Times
explored topics never before explored on television. Our second episode had aspiring artist J. J. paint a portrait of a black Jesus. That episode, about whether to enter the painting in an art contest, would be as controversial today as it was then. (Black artist Ernie Barnes created many of J. J.’s paintings shown during the series, which helped make him and his distinctive style famous.)

Another episode that first season touched on the touchy subject of George Washington being a slave owner. Another slipped in the fact that high blood pressure was the number-one killer of black males. And then there was the one in which J. J. was passed on to his senior year despite failing grades. In that episode the family questioned the validity of standardized testing. An exam asked students to fill in the blank for “cup and ______.” But instead of writing “cup and saucer,” the inner-city kid wrote “cup and table” because at his poor home they did not have saucers to put between a cup and the table. Other subjects included James being too old for a government job program and the evils of a corrupt evangelist. For story ideas the writers only had to read the front page of the newspaper.

J. J. was always the good kid who should have gone bad but never did. In a two-parter the next season he was accused of holding up a liquor store on his eighteenth birthday, presumably for money to buy art supplies. The entire family held a vigil at the police station while they tried to raise the bail money. Florida was on the verge of an emotional breakdown. James was desperate. They almost turned to a loan shark. Then the real robber was caught and innocent J. J. was released. But he had already lost his job because his employer found out about the arrest.

In another two-parter the Satan’s Knights recruited a reluctant J. J. into their gang. With J. J. on his way to a gang fight, James caught up with him to stop him. As the two tried to flee the fight, J. J. was shot. James wanted to hunt down the punk who shot his son, but Florida convinced him to let the system take its course after the boy was arrested. At the shooter’s trial James showed compassion for the boy and his broken family.

Another plot that second season depicted a senior citizen with money troubles who was forced to resort to eating dog food. Other subjects: upper-class blacks (“Oreos”), teen pregnancy, and the highly charged issue of bussing.

The shows were thoughtful, which other people were in charge of, but also funny, which was in my wheelhouse. Through all of this, J. J. took the pie. He was goofy and outgoing, confident and street smart; he was never going to go to college, and he was sometimes lazy. He was like a lot of teenagers in any family, black or white. That J. J. existed did not mean that all young black men were J. J. any more than because there was an Arthur Fonzarelli on
Happy Days
that all young Italian Americans were punks in leather jackets. And not so by the way: Both of them pretended to be more “street” than they really were. At heart J. J. was genuine and well meaning.

Then, just before the premiere of the third season, all hell broke loose. Esther said of J. J. in the September 1975 issue of
Ebony
: “He’s 18 and he doesn’t work. He can’t read and write. He doesn’t think. The show didn’t start out to be that. Michael’s role of a bright, thinking child has been subtly reduced. Little by little, with the help of the artist, I suppose, because they couldn’t do that to me—they have made him more stupid and enlarged the role.” Negative images, she continued, “have been quietly slipped in on us through the character of the oldest child. I resent the imagery that says to black kids that you can make it by standing on the corner and saying ‘Dyn-o-mite!’”

Talk about black-on-black crime! The media—both black and white—jumped on the controversy. The show that the public and critics had praised for two years was now being trashed by its top-billed and highly respected star. That was news, and the press took off with it.

I tried to stay out of the firestorm. I responded in the
Ebony
article with “I don’t think any TV show can put out an image to save people. My advice is do not follow me. I don’t want to be a follower or a leader . . . just a doer.” I deflected the subject as best I could when I told
TV Guide
that “I’m no actor. I’m a comic who lucked into a good thing. What the show has done for me, with all that exposure, is get me where I’m goin’ a lot quicker.” I told anyone who would listen that kids needed parental guidance and that sitting them in front of the TV with J. J. as the babysitter did not qualify.

I never criticized Esther or John. You will not find one negative word in print from me about either of them. I never had an argument or got upset with them in person either. It was not in my personality to wallow in my hurt feelings. It still isn’t. I’m a realist. Life is what it is. I accept what happens and then, hopefully, move forward. Bern Nadette, who was so close with Esther that they were like mother and daughter, would say, à la Rodney King, “Can’t we just get along?” But I never thought, “Oh gee, I wish we could be friends and hang out.” I did not think that was that important or necessary. I just kept trying to be the funniest I could be on the show—which was my job.

Carl Rowan, a renowned black columnist for the
Washington Post
, had it right: “‘Jr.’ is a hilarious composite of all those enchanting, exasperating creatures groping along that treacherous path between adolescence and adulthood. If ‘Jr.’ is a little exaggerated for the sake of belly laughs, well, so was Jim Nabors’ portrayal of ‘Gomer Pyle.’ That’s entertainment, baby!”

I could not imagine that any comments I made to the press really mattered in the long run anyway. At the time I was quoted as saying, “I don’t think anybody 20 years from now is going to remember what I said.” I was a stand-up comic, and when this series was over, I would be on to the next case. So I stood there and took the hits. Lear would say in passing, “You’re a good guy for taking all this.”

I had no idea that the controversy would become part of television history or that decades later I would be signing memorabilia and t-shirts at
Good Times
events. I had no idea that the stigma would continue to today either. But the accusations of “cooning it up” fit the agenda of the politically correct and have been repeated over and over again. Although I sloughed it off in public, the fact is that Esther’s criticism, and also that of John and others—some of it very pointed and personal—seriously damaged my appeal in the black community. I still suffer today from the controversy that they sparked and stoked.

I was wrong about my viewpoint not mattering to posterity. Because this book is my story, it is time for me to finally speak up.

Here are a few facts: J. J. did not smoke, drink, or do drugs. The only thing he was hooked on was Kool-Aid. He was not a criminal, hustler, gangbanger, or shady character. Yes, he did not work much during those first two seasons. He was in high school! Even then, he still had a goal in life: He wanted to be a painter and he worked at his art, boasting that he was “the Van Gogh of the ghetto.” Yes, he used the word “jivin’,” but he was not illiterate or stupid. He was a nice kid who never hurt anyone and who dearly loved his family. And only one person succeeded by saying “dyn-o-mite!”—me, not J. J.

So what was the problem? Because we were a
black
family, there was enormous pressure for every Evans to be better and for every situation to be cause for progress. For some, such as Esther, that Thelma and Michael were college material was not enough; J. J. had to be too. For her, J. J. could not be “just” funny. In the inflammatory
Ebony
article, she admitted as much, saying that she was “more dedicated to doing a show of worth than to doing a funny show.”