Maybe You Never Cry Again (20 page)

After the
Kings
tour, I went home to Chicago and picked up where I left off. The tour had put us on the map, but there was no rest for the wicked. I had to keep moving.

One night, not long back, I went to do a show at the Cotton Club and saw my grinning face on the marquee. AS SEEN IN THE KINGS OF COMEDY, the sign said. They even had an excerpt from
Variety,
the show business newspaper: “The concert's true showstopper is Bernie Mac…. Appearing on screen last, he extends his motor-mouthed, bug-eyed movie persona into a dizzying string of impeccably timed comic arpeggios worthy of regal pronouncement.”

Well, thank you. I'm not going to argue with that.

I went in and walked out onstage, and the fans gave me a standing ovation. I love my fans. I love my fans in Chicago, New York, and L.A. I love my fans in Toledo, Savannah, Louisville, Detroit, and Anaheim. And I especially love my fans in all the little places in between, the ones that aren't even on the map. My fans made me, and they're making me still.

And for that, I thank every last one of you from the bottom of my heart.

 

At around this time, thanks to my team, there was serious talk about putting me on TV, but nobody could get a handle on how to do it. My comedy was too raw, they said. I was too strong. I scared people. I had too much
power.

I told them I could be family-friendly, too, but I wasn't about to let them castrate me.

I went back to L.A., racking up more frequent flier miles, and met with Jeffrey S. Dyson, Christopher A. Hall, and Takashi Buford, three guys who'd been kicking around Hollywood for a good long while. They had an idea for a show called
Deadbeat Dad Detective,
about a private eye who tracks down fathers when they stop making their child support payments. It was supposed to be
Fletch
meets
Ace Ventura.

We talked and shook hands and went off to think about it. Lot of thinking goes on in Hollywood. Endless thinking. Though of course it doesn't show.

Lot of meetings, too. Endless meetings. Lot of smiling back and forth and big promises and people all the time telling you how much they love you, but nothing happens. Still, that's the way they do business in Hollywood:
If you don't hear from us, it's not happening.

I met with Takashi Buford again. He had a movie at Fox called
Seven Spells.
It was a casino heist, with an all-black cast. It was supposed to be
Ocean's Eleven
meets
Superfly.
Everything in Hollywood is Something Meets Something Else.
Jaws
meets
The Exorcist.
Hey, that's not bad. Maybe I can sell that one.

Again, nothing much happened—just more supporting roles. I was ready for bigger things, but I didn't crank or moan. And it's not like I wasn't working: I'd been touring forty-five weeks a year for going on thirteen years now. And the movie roles—small as they were—they kept on coming.

In '98 I played a creep called Dollar Bill in
The Players Club.
I had promised myself that I wasn't going to do those kinds of roles anymore, but I'd made a commitment to the project two years earlier. It took that long to get off the ground, and now they were back, with Ice Cube himself reminding me of my commitment. So I put on my bowler hat and my electric blue coat and did my bit the way Ice Cube asked me to do it.

Next in line,
Life,
with Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, starring as a pair of convicts in a penitentiary, and my old friend Ted Demme at the helm. Ted called and told me he had a part for me, a small part, a prisoner called Jangle Leg, and he was hemming and hawing about the character. Finally he said that I had a “relationship” with one of the guys, and I almost dropped the phone.

“Are you telling me I'm gay? Is that why you're hemming and hawing, because Jangle Leg's a faggot?”

He sent me the script and I read it. I noticed I had very few lines, but there was something about the character that intrigued me. He reminded me a little of Harpo Marx—not the gay part, but the silent part. Seemed to me that every actor who plays a homosexual always plays him over the top, and I asked myself how Harpo might have done Jangle Leg. It felt like a real challenge, so I picked up the phone and called Ted.

“Teddy Bear,” I said, “I'm in.”

He was real happy. He thanked me over and over again and said he was looking forward to seeing me, then he asked me how I was going to play the character. “I don't know,” I said. “Let me think on it.”

First day of shooting, I'm on the set, and here we go. Martin Lawrence is new to the prison, and my character sees Martin and—whoo!—he thinks the boy is hot. He's going to show Martin around the prison. Teddy asked me again how I was going to play him, and again I told him I was still thinking. Then he said something to me that was about one of the nicest things any director had ever said to me, white or black. He said, “Bernie, I'm not worried. I trust you.” And the reason it touched me is because it came from his heart. And it touches me to this day. Swear to God, just the memory is powerful enough to bring tears to my eyes. Because this was about
respect.
This was about a fellow human being who had enough faith in me to let me do my thing, my way. And that is a rare thing, that kind of respect—in Hollywood or anywhere else.

When the cameras finally rolled, I shuffled over to Martin's side and bowed my head low and mumbled away, and everyone was roaring before Ted even yelled “Cut!” Teddy was laughing, too. He was laughing so hard he couldn't catch his breath.

Ted Demme was a fine human being. If there was anyone in this town that I was on my way to making a connection with, it was Teddy. He came at me straight and clean, and there's precious little of that in this world. I miss Teddy. He collapsed on a basketball court early last year and died before he reached the hospital. He was thirty-eight years old.

 

Next up was
Ocean's Eleven,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, and what a stellar cast that was! George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia, Julia Roberts, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Don Cheadle, Carl Reiner, and that wild man Elliott Gould. It was a trip to be working with people of that caliber, and to be treated as an equal.

People always ask me about the stars I've worked with—“That Julia, man, she must be superhot?”—and I always tell them the same thing: I
work
with these people. And most of the time it's a pleasure to work with them. They are solid, professional people, doing their job, just like I'm doing mine. But I'm not going to pretend I
know
them. I do my work and go home. They do their work and go home. Maybe we'll have a meal together; maybe we'll smoke cigars and watch the sun set from the deck of our hotel. But we ain't friends. We are acquaintances. I don't know George Clooney. I don't know Eddie or Martin Lawrence, neither. They have their lives, I have mine.

Maybe if I'd been in my twenties when all of this was happening, I'd be like a lot of young actors. Partying, jumping in and out of each other's beds, getting crazy. But success came to me later in life, when I was already an adult, when I already knew myself and liked myself, when I'd already staked out my world. The people who are in my life now are the people I want in my life. It's not like I don't have room for new friendships, but friendships are hard work. And like my grandma said: If you have a handful of
good, loving people in your life, you're a lucky man. Well, I'm here to tell you: Bernie Mac is a lucky man.

 

One day, not long back in Chicago, I got a call from my manager. He said he wanted me to meet with Larry Wilmore, a longtime Hollywood writer, and he assured me that it wouldn't be a waste of time.

So I went out to Los Angeles and sat down with Mr. Wilmore. He told me he had actually started in standup comedy but soon found he was more at home in front of his computer. He'd worked on
The PJs,
an animated series about an urban housing project. It ran for two seasons on Fox and one season on the WB. Before that, he'd written for
In Living Color, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, The Jamie Foxx Show
—more shows than he could remember.

Wilmore told me that he'd seen and loved
The Original Kings of Comedy,
and he was particularly taken with one of my bits. Yeah, you guessed it: the one about inheriting those three kids.

“I think we might be able to build a show around it,” he said.

It came together quickly. We decided we were going to do a series about a successful comedian in his midforties named Bernie Mac who lives in a big house in lily-white Encino, California, with his wife, Wanda, an executive at AT&T. They are childless, a career couple, until the day Bernie inherits three high-maintenance kids from his messed-up sister.

We realized that the heart of the show would be about parenting—both of us had strong opinions on the subject—and that Bernie had to be a real tough-love daddy. And not just regular tough, but
thick
tough,
hard
tough. Lay it on strong.
I'm gonna bust your head till the white meat shows.

We felt there had to be moments in the show when it actually looked like I was going to lose control. I knew I could look
scary—people think I look scary
now
—and I sure enough had the heft for it. And another thing: I wanted to be as politically incorrect as possible. This politically correct shit was ruining the world. I wanted to get out there and be powerful. Bernie Mac don't wear no panties.

We also decided we didn't want a laugh track. We didn't need to tell the audience that the show was funny. We didn't want to cue them with fake laughs. Between the two of us, we knew the show was going to be drop-dead funny.

And we settled on doing it as a one-camera show—a single, high-definition, digital camera instead of the usual multicamera approach.

It was Larry's idea to use little pop-up notes on the screen, to drive home some of the finer points. And it was my idea to break down the fourth wall—to have me address the camera directly. We had things to say, after all. And the character of Bernie Mac was a comedian. And comedians like addressing their audiences directly.

The idea wasn't new—Tim Reid had done it in
Frank's Place,
to give you just one example—but we knew we could make it fresh. Or, as they say in Hollywood, we could take the idea and
make it our own.

Finally, I told Larry I wanted the relationship between the TV Bernie and his TV wife to be a good, solid relationship. I was sick and tired of the way marriage was portrayed on TV. I didn't see a single TV relationship that had any real love in it, and I wanted to put that kind of love on the screen. I wanted to be honest about what my marriage was like.

Sure, Rhonda and me—we had ourselves some humbugs. She'd get mad, come at me swingin' like Joe Frazier. Not a pretty sight. Sometimes she thought she was a superhero: “I'm gonna Thor your ass!”

The thing is, see, two people meet and fall in love, and they expect to hear music for the rest of their lives. But time passes,
and people change, and their needs change. And one day they turn around and that person next to them isn't the person they married. What they don't see, however, is that maybe they're an even
better
person, better in different ways, excite you in different ways, and that you gotta take the time to know them all over again.

The love I feel for Rhonda now, it wouldn't be the same if we hadn't been through what we'd been through. Neither of us is perfect, but we stood by each other when it counted. Rhonda didn't think less of me because I was a janitor. She respected me.

Even more important, she taught me to respect
her.
Rhonda understood her own value, as a woman and as a human being, as a wife and mother. She knew that if a person doesn't respect himself or herself, they ain't gonna get respect from anybody else.

Rhonda also taught me that if we stood together we could be wicked strong. I wanted that to be part of the show, too. “I want to show marriage the way it's supposed to be, the way it
can
be if you work it right,” I told Wilmore. “I'm tired of the way TV turns marriages and relationships into an ugly joke.”

Wilmore was all for it. We pitched it to the Fox network, sold it, and Larry wrote the pilot. They loved it. They put us with the casting people and we hit the ground running.

 

We found Dee Dee Davis to play five-year-old Bryanna. She was a complete newcomer. We got Jeremy Suarez for Jordan, the pre-asthmatic middle boy in glasses, age eight. (He played Cuba Gooding's son, Tyson, in
Jerry Maguire.
) We got Camille Winbush to play the stubborn, smart-mouthed, hard-to-read teenage girl Vanessa. She'd been on
7
th
Heaven
for a stretch. And then we got Kellita Smith for Wanda, my loving but career-obsessed wife. Kellita and I had met on
Moesha,
and before that she'd done
The Steve Harvey Show, In Living Color,
and—like me—more supporting roles than she cared to list.

 

That pilot episode started with me lighting a cigar, loving my cigar, then looking dead at the camera and saying, “I'm not here to talk about cigars. I'm here to tell you—I'm going to kill one of them kids.” So we got right to it. Who says they're going to kill a kid on national television? Bernie Mac, that's who.

Then I told the audience: “Yeah, my sister's on drugs. But a lot of families are messed up. I can't let the state take her three kids…” I was near tears by this time, though of course they were crocodile tears. “I'm just trying to do the right thing,” I said, and my voice broke with feelin'.