Strength of a Woman

The Phyllis Hyman Story

Jason Michael

• Verlag: JAM Books
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780979489020
• Thema: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Thema: Biografie in ambito musicale

The story of singer Phyllis Hyman is brought to light in the powerful new biography Strength Of A Woman: The Phyllis Hyman Story by Jason A. Michael. Hyman's 20-year career, which included the release of eight albums as well as a Tony nomination and Theater World Award for her Broadway turn in Sophisticated Ladies, was brought to a tragic end by her suicide June 30, 1995, just hours before she was due to take the stage at the legendary Apollo Theatre. In the spotlight, Hyman's breathtaking voice and stunning beauty shone brightly. But off stage, after the applause and the laughter produced by her bawdy humor had faded, Hyman spent her days and nights engaged in an exhausting battle against bipolar disorder. Complicating its crippling effects was Hyman's addiction to drugs and alcohol, which she tried repeatedly to kick, and the demands and constraints of being a female African-American entrepreneur in an industry controlled by white men. But though she ultimately chose to extricate herself from the pain, she did so not before leaving a legacy of beautiful music that will last and live on forever as a true testament to the 'strength of a woman.'

Chapter 1

I never experienced being a girl.

I was always a woman.

Ismael X paid thirty-five dollars to Solomon Hyman for the right to use his name to buy land in his native North Carolina. The son of slaves, Ismael, a humble farmer, worked hard to build a better life than the one he had known for his children. Ishmael’s grandchildren were the first generation to head north in search of that better life. Samuel, Edward and Philip all settled in Philadelphia.

Philip served in the Army during World War II and was stationed in North Africa. After returning to Philly, he began working in his brother Samuel’s barbershop at Haverford Avenue and 52nd Street. He met Louise Lively, a waitress, at a local nightclub. Their courtship was short. Philip proposed when Louise announced she was pregnant. Louise was 26 when she gave birth to a daughter, Phyllis Linda, on July 6, 1949. Philip just days shy of 29. Soon he had abandoned the barbershop for a job on the railroad; and the couple moved with their infant to Pittsburgh, where they settled into the public housing of the St. Clair Village area of town. A second daughter, Ann, was born 21 months after the first, and a third, Jeannie, was born 13 months after that.

By this time, Louise was suffering from chronic depression, and she found herself unable to cope. Jeannie was sent to live with family friends, Bill and Esther Quales. When Jeannie finally returned to the fold, at about age six, she was keenly aware that something was amiss in the Hyman household. There was a new sister in the house, Kym, and yet another child, a boy, had been stillborn. “I was a little kid and I remember thinking, ‘What’s she still doing having babies?’” recalled Jeannie. “Now back then, kids

didn’t know stuff like they do now. But I remember thinking, ‘If she couldn’t take care of me, why is she still having children?’

“When you have a severely impaired primary caregiver, lots of little things just don’t get taken care of,” Jeannie continued. “When I came back into the household, to me, it was utter chaos. It was nasty. It was dirty. The kids were unkempt. There was no order. I couldn’t believe people lived like this.”

Quarters were cramped in the Hyman household. Philip and Louise lived with their four children in a three-bedroom row house. As Louise spun further and further into the depths of her depression, Philip did little around the house to bring order to the chaos. Working on the railroad, he was often gone a lot when Phyllis was young. Later, back problems caused him to retire on a medical disability and he did barbering part-time. “He had health problems and then he had his drinking problem,” said Jeannie. “And often, the two were intermixed.”

Two years after Kym came along, Louise gave Philip his first son, Mark. And a year after that, she delivered twins, Michael and Anita, bringing the total to seven. Finally, they moved up the street to a four-bedroom unit, but seven kids sharing three bedrooms was still a pretty tight fit.

“There’s a difference between a parent who’s just lazy and does not want to do anything and a parent who cannot,” said Jeannie. “If my mother had been in a wheelchair and had been paralyzed, everybody would have understood. But because they didn’t, I always perceived us as being seen as those dirty little yellow kids in the neighborhood. Plus, not knowing that my mother was mentally ill, not knowing what the issues were, I just saw my parents as trifling, an opinion that I think Phyllis shared.

“When my kids and I were poor, I could take my pennies and put them in layaway for things that I wanted them to have,” Jeannie continued. “Or I could go to the secondhand store and get some good buys. My mother didn’t have the capacity to do that. We didn’t get our hair combed unless I did it. We didn’t get baths regularly. It just was a nasty mess.”

With Louise overwhelmed and at times out of commission, and Philip incapacitated in his own right, Jeannie stepped up and became a surrogate caregiver for her siblings. Phyllis, meanwhile, had free reign to lord a certain power over her brothers and sisters.

“She liked to bully us,” said Ann. “She had to be in charge.” Jeannie concurred. “She was a terrible bully,” she said. “We were her little peons.”

Phyllis intimidated her younger siblings into doing her bidding, unwittingly adding to the burden on the rest of the older children in the house, who scrambled to fill the gap created by their mother’s mental illness.

“Jeanie was our caretaker,” said Kym. “She was the one who combed our hair, got us ready for school, made sure we ate, even made sure we had dessert.”

It was a great deal of work, but Jeannie did it gladly. “That was my role,” she said. “I think because I didn’t live there for several years, when I came back my attitude was ‘We’ve got to get this together.’ I was really little. I was under 10 taking the three little ones to the baby clinic for their shots and stuff. But I loved that. I think because I didn’t live at home for those years, I felt like I didn’t really have a place there, that there must have been something defective with me that I was given away and no one else was. So I found a place for myself, and I liked that place. It made me feel a part of the solution.”

In later years, when she reflected on her childhood, Phyllis rarely touched on the dysfunction of the Hyman family home. She made it clear, however, that her family’s poverty was an impetus to her quest for fame. “We were a below-middle income family,” Phyllis said. “We were rich in human areas. We didn’t have material things, but then I didn’t miss them either. My parents, I felt, were not obligated to give me things. Money can’t buy a moral attitude.”

From a very young age, Phyllis was perplexed by the notion that a woman could want no more than to raise children and take care of her family. As a child, not fully comprehending the extent of her mother’s illness, Phyllis faulted her mother for not doing more, for appearing to want so little. Following her father’s lead, Phyllis even began to take her mother for granted, to verbally abuse her. “I didn’t respect my mother’s opinion. I thought, ‘What has she done? Had seven children?’ I never had to carry a key when I was growing up because she was always home. I always thought I didn’t want to be like that. That woman didn’t ask for enough. There was a whole world out there.”

Phyllis knew she wanted to explore that world. She considered her family’s poverty a curse. “When I was real little, I used to have daydreams about being very wealthy, very famous and very loved,” she said. Phyllis began taking after her father, who didn’t provide much aide with the young children in the house. Phyllis’s mother did not ask Phyllis for help, and she didn’t offer any. Philip, according to Phyllis, was a shadow around the house. The family patriarch ate and slept there, but was not, exactly, an involved parent. “He never said much,” Phyllis remembered.

The lack of visible affection between her parents left a lasting impression on Phyllis. It helped her to form a negative opinion of marriage and family that stayed with her for most of her life. “I didn’t like being part of a large family, not just because there was a lack of money, toys and things like that, but because I didn’t witness a lot of caring or passion between my mother and father. With the intense pressure of trying to feed and raise seven of us properly, I guess there just wasn’t enough energy left for that.” If Phyllis was aware that it was more than just seven children draining her mother’s energy, that it was also her intense depression, she kept that knowledge, as well as her sadness and shame surrounding it, out of interviews.

For her part, if Louise had any awareness of what was happening to her, as depression held her firmly in its clutches, she had little to hold on to in the way of faith. Raised Catholic, she no longer attended church. Philip was the son of a fundamentalist Baptist minister, but he no longer regularly attended services either. The Hyman children were, however, often invited to church by neighbors and permitted by their parents to go. “We were not encouraged or discouraged,” said Jeannie. “We were given an opportunity to go.”

When she attended services with her siblings, Phyllis had her own issues with God and religion. “Can you really imagine me as a little girl, in a ruffle dress, being quiet for any length of time? I think not.” Church was far too constraining for young Phyllis. “You had to keep your legs crossed. You couldn’t eat. I couldn’t wait till church was over so we could get in the basement and eat that good old church food. I was slightly afraid because the preacher would be shoutin’. I thought, well, who the hell is he mad

at today? He’d be screaming at you, ‘And the Lord sayeth.’ I wanted to say, ‘And I ain’t deaf. I hear real doggone good.’”

There was at least one perk, though. “You know the collection box in the church? It had change in it. So I thought it was mine. That’s what I got for an allowance. I was always trying to go for it. Of course, I got slapped on the back of the head a lot. It’s very flat back there.” Outside of church, Phyllis had few spiritual thoughts. “I can remember my mom teaching me a prayer, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord the soul to keep; If I should die before I wake; I pray the Lord my soul to take.’ Does that sound like a nightmare to you? I didn’t want to go to sleep - ever. I was petrified. God’s coming.”

Pittsburgh in the 1960s was still somewhat segregated. St. Clair Village was one of the poorest neighborhoods on the north side of the river. It was the projects, and the only projects in the area. “It was a nice neighborhood and real communal,” Phyllis said. “If I misbehaved in some way, the neighbor down the street was permitted to give me a licking. So I couldn’t get away with much. I was a pretty good kid. I played hooky just one time and, wouldn’t you know it, I got caught.”

There was no high school in St. Clair Village. The all-black high schools were located on the south side of the Allegheny River. But Phyllis chose to attend Carrick High School, just above the all-white Mt. Oliver section of town. Though their parents might have, the other black kids in the school did not look down on their classmates from St. Clair Village. Just the opposite, they idolized and emulated them. The kids from St. Clair Village were cooler, hipper. They dressed with a certain flare and listened to the newest music. Kids from the integrated sections of town, like Beltzhoover, would sneak into St. Clair Village and hang out at the community center in search of some fun and puppy love.

Phyllis was well liked in the predominantly white high school. She was a member of the student council, the human relations club, intramurals and, of course, the chorus. At Carrick, music teacher David Tamburri took a special interest in Phyllis. A jazz pianist by trade, Tamburri had only started teaching to be able to provide a steady income for his family. When Phyllis joined the chorus at Carrick, Tamburri “recognized immediately that Phyllis

had something besides just a normal kind of voice,” recalled his widow, Trudy Tamburri.

“I always knew I could sing, but I didn’t always want to do it professionally,” Phyllis once said. “In fact, the first time I sang at a talent show, it must have been in junior high, I remember my legs shaking and my voice quaking.”

The problem for Phyllis was not the singing. That came effortlessly. She could do it with her eyes closed and probably did in those early days. Phyllis didn’t like being watched, for she couldn’t comprehend what made her watchable or why anyone would care. She was never asked to sing by her parents, or encouraged by them to perform for visiting friends, as parents are sometimes want to do. So Phyllis sang for herself, for her own enjoyment, and when others started catching on, it confused her. “As long as I thought no one was paying any attention to me, I could relax and sing,” she said. “But as soon as people stopped talking and started to listen, I froze.”

Music was not readily available in the Hyman household. “We had a little cheap radio that was played,” said Jeannie. “I don’t remember music ever being a big thing, except when Phyllis would sing. My father and mother would have parties and I remember music from that, Nat King Cole and Dinah Washington, but I don’t remember music being a big part of our home.”

Radio was Phyllis’s link to a whole new world. “We didn’t have a record player in the house, but I always managed to listen to music somewhere,” she said. “When I first heard Nancy Wilson sing, it was the greatest sound I’d ever heard. I knew from that moment on, scared or not, that’s what I had to do.”

Jeannie may have thought her oldest sister a terrible bully, but she also knew from an early age that she was a terrific talent. “Even though I didn’t like her as a child, it was so astounding to me that she sounded like an adult. We were kids. She couldn’t have been more than 10, 12 years old and she sounded like an adult singing with another adult. I knew at a very early age that she had a really special voice.”

On occasion, Phyllis would recruit Jeannie and Ann to be her backup singers. “She would bring us in if she needed us,” said Jeannie. “She would make us learn songs. We wouldn’t want to do it, but we didn’t have a choice. She made us do it anyway, and we

did it and we did it well. I mean, she would train us and whip us in shape.”

“I remember when we were little kids and Motown was what was happening...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Table of Contents
• The Phyllis Hyman Story
• New Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Author’s Note
• Prologue: Life is about choices, and I choose to go.
• Chapter 1: I never experienced being a girl.
• Chapter 2: Florida was very strange … but that’s where I learned to be an entertainer.
• Chapter 3: People tell me, ‘You’re going to be a star in two or three years.’
• Chapter 4: I don’t think anyone has captured the true essence of what I’m about in the studio yet.
• Chapter 5: What kind of woman would Billie Holiday have been if she had a couple of kids?
• Chapter 6: I wanted a break from the record industry and the whole concert business was in something of a slump anyway.
• Chapter 7: I often times don’t see myself the way other people see me.
• Chapter 8: I never sang in church, you know.
• Chapter 9: There were some nice records, but I’d say 70 percent of the time being
• Chapter 10: There’s a certain depth of understanding that comes from keeping it all the family.
• Chapter 11: The kindest thing Clive ever did was to let me go.
• Chapter 12: The way I see it, if the toilet’s going to be flushed, I might as well flush it myself.
• Chapter 13: I’m sabotaging my career with my addictions.
• Chapter 14: ‘Living In Confusion’ is a song about me. It’s about someone who’s not being honest with themselves.
• Chapter 15: What else is the point of having cake if you’re not gonna eat it?
• Chapter 16: Men are not my problem.
• Chapter 17: I don’t know if I really believe in God.
• Chapter 18: I’ve found that the only answer to life is really death.
• Epilogue
• Discography
• Notes & Sources