Chapter
2
Setting the Record Straight
“Where’s Melvin Childs at? Y’all bring up the house lights, where’s Melvin Childs?” bellowed the booming voice from the stage.
I was there as much out of curiosity as anything else. It was 2007 and I heard on the radio that Tyler was bringing his latest show, “Madea Goes to Jail,” to Oklahoma City. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in years so I guess a part of me just wanted to see what he was up to. Not that it was any kind of secret what the man had been doing. He was a full on celebrity by this point so a quick internet search would have told me everything I needed to know about the life of Tyler Perry, or at least that’s what he would have you believe.
In that sense, Tyler isn’t all that different from many other celebrities. One of the many perks of fame is that you get to rewrite whatever your personal story was before you became somebody. Your PR machine controls everything about your personal life once you hit it big. And the bigger you get, the larger the machine you need to put in place to justify your elevated status. It’s all about managing how you come across to people, and the story of how you made it is a big piece of that.
All celebrities protect this “back-story” because it helps them appear relatable to their audience. Being relatable is the key to being likable, and being likable is the key to making money. No star, especially one with as loyal a following as Tyler Perry, can afford to lose touch with their core audience. They need to be “one of us” if they expect us to support them and Tyler’s back-story is designed to make you feel as though through faith and hard work, you too can achieve what he has.
Unfortunately that’s not the way it works. I know how that sounds, but hold on Saints. Don’t give up on me yet. I’ll explain that one later.
So as I sat and watched Tyler doing his thing that night, I couldn’t help but think about what his back-story would be like if I had written it. Having been as close to the action as I was at one point, I always thought I had an interesting story to tell. I just never had any real motivation to tell it. What happened seemed like a lifetime ago and everyone had moved on to bigger, if not better, things.
Still, I wondered what people might say if they ever heard the real story of how Tyler made it big. To be honest, I wasn’t sure that Tyler himself could remember what happened back then. He answered that question for me by calling me out by name during the curtain call of his performance.
He knew I was there because I stopped by the theater earlier that afternoon. I wanted to see for myself how the operation had grown since the early days when it was basically just him stuffing everything he owned into the back seat of his red BMW. Since I knew the building managers, I had no problem getting back stage where I ran into Chris Locklear, the stage manager. I personally hired Chris ten years earlier and remembered him to be a good dude. We caught up for a few minutes while he showed me around. I got to look at the set and the lighting, and I have to admit, I was very impressed. Not that I was all that surprised. I didn’t have much good to say about any of the people Tyler now had running things for him, one person in particular, but I could honestly say that they knew their business.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and I had some things to do before the show, so I was about to get going when I asked Chris where Tyler was.
“Awww, you know how he is Melvin,” he said with a knowing smile. “Lemme tell him you here before I bring you back to his dressing room.”
Chris went to talk to Tyler, leaving me alone in the green room to collect my thoughts. Even though so much time had gone by, I wasn’t the least bit nervous or tense about seeing him. A lot of bad shit went down but most of it had very little to do with Tyler. Nia and I got screwed because we didn’t know enough about the business to prevent it from happening, simple as that. Now you could say Tyler was complicit in much of it by allowing it to happen but, in fairness, there is no way he was the mastermind behind anything. He knew even less about the business than we did. He damn sure didn’t know enough to develop the plan himself. That was entirely someone else’s doing.
“He’s getting his makeup on right now,” said Chris as he came back into the room. “He said he’ll get with you after the show.” I knew the routine well enough to know “after the show” meant I was to come back stage and mingle with the masses while waiting patiently for an audience with the man himself. I’m sure he knew me well enough to know that wasn’t gonna happen.
That was cool with me. After everything we’d been through, it would have been weird to not at least try to say hello, especially since we were less than fifty feet from each other at the time. The truth is I’m not all that sure we had anything to talk about. I guess he felt the same and I didn’t take it personally.
See, Tyler and I never really had any kind of major falling out. Of course there were disagreements, some of them pretty heated, but that is to be expected when you’ve got a group of twenty-somethings out there on the road trying to get something that had never been done before off the ground. And make no mistake about it, what we were producing had not been seen before in the black community. Don’t get me wrong, gospel plays had been around forever. It’s just that what we created was something beyond the typical nonsense presented on the so-called Chitlin Circuit back then. We knew we had something special, and we fought tooth and nail to get it out there.
Working with that kind of passion is bound to cause conflict and, yes, we butted heads more than a few times. Through it all though, we never lost focus on the big picture. We knew if we could find a way to get the show up and in front of the right audience, we could be successful. Was it easy? No, of course not, but we leaned on each other and that, as much as anything else, is what made it worthwhile. To me, there’s nothing more rewarding than being able to share success with the very people who were side-by-side with me during the bad times. I’ve learned that not everybody feels that way.
“Melvin Childs,” he said dramatically as I stood up from my seat in the second row. The performance was finished and, as is his custom, Tyler was on stage addressing the audience. I had no idea he would call me out by name, and I had even less idea what he was about to say. “Not many people know this, but Melvin here was my very first promoter until he decided to leave me for bigger and better things. How’s that workin’ out for ya?” he asked sarcastically as he folded his arms in front of him and flashed his most charismatic smile. He got the laugh he was going for as I sat back down. The fact that it was at my expense didn’t bother me nearly as much as the characterization of my role as merely a promoter.
The drive home was quiet. My seven year old son was with me and as I looked over at him dozing off in the passenger seat, I couldn’t help but feel like a failure. The emotion I felt in that moment was raw and the entire weight of those years came down on me all at once. It’s a significant moment in any young man’s life when he sees his father cry for the first time. I was lucky little Melvin was sleeping so that I wouldn’t have to explain my tears. Not these tears, not like this.
Seeing Tyler on that stage and having him mock me in front of my son the way he did was incredibly insulting. What would it have cost him to be gracious? What would he have sacrificed to simply say thank you for all I had done? And believe me, I did a LOT. I sacrificed more than he could possibly know to launch his career and now he was acting as if my being a part of his story would somehow diminish what he had accomplished. It would have been one thing to just ignore me and pretend I wasn’t there. I could have accepted that as just an ego driven slight. But to spit in my face like that … and laugh about it?! No, this was beyond just insulting. The anger was building but I had nowhere to vent it. All I could do was clench the steering wheel and swallow my pride as I made my way through town to my home.
It was a long ride home that night. A quiet ride. There were so many things I wanted to say. So many things I wished I had done differently but life doesn’t come with a time machine. We can’t go back, as much as we sometimes wish we could. We have to accept the past, learn from it and move forward. For the most part, I think I’ve done exactly that. I worked hard to get beyond the bitterness and anger and honestly, I thought I had; at least until that night.
That night was a turning point for me. Until that night, I had defended Tyler to anyone close enough to me to know the true story. I’m talking about the truth; not the spin he puts out on Oprah or the half-truth you can read on his website. I’m talking about the real story of how he went from being a failed playwright performing in churches for fifty people, to being Tyler Perry. I’m talking about the time in the beginning when I had lost my job and would take money from my wife and send it to Tyler to help pay his bills. I know what happened because I was there and, what’s more important, Tyler knows I was there.
His...
