Authors: Rosie Perez
Lyor came into rehearsals one day, told me he needed to speak with me alone. I found Russell and LL Cool J waiting outside. LL Cool J! Next to RUN DMC, he was the biggest thing in rap, especially on tour. Lyor and Russell knew of the problems with Rick and the dancers. They told me that Todd (meaning LL) liked my style and work ethic and wanted me to do his show instead. In fact, they wanted me to leave at that very moment and start working with LL at his rehearsal space.
“Um, now? Like now now? What about Ricky?”
“Don’t worry ’bout Ricky,” said Lyor. “We’ll handle that. And give you a raise of an extra five hundred a week. Cool?”
I hesitated. Regardless of the money, it was crazy and wrong to just up and leave. Right?
“Rosie, they hate you. Ricky’s mother told me the dancers can’t wait to jump your ass after every rehearsal,” Russell added.
“Can you make that an even thousand?”
Working with LL was on a whole other level. First thing, he ensured his crew and staff were in sync with him by having us all move into his Queens apartment for a month’s preparation. (Although he had female dancers, I, again, was the only female on staff, and we all got along.) He demanded a relaxed yet professional work environment and expected everyone to work as hard as he did. He woke up early, worked out every morning, ate healthy—most of the time, when he didn’t have a yearning for White Castle—and was on time every single day. He was involved in the tiniest of details but still listened to your ideas, challenged them, pushing you
to do better. I loved it! He even made the dancers, three girls and one guy, step up their look. They were representing him, and he wasn’t having anyone looking busted, especially the chicks.
“Rosie. We gotta get these girls to the OTB salon.”
“Off-track betting?”
“No, off-track bitches. Girls need some hair on their heads, and some makeup tips too.”
“I can’t tell them that!”
“Yes, you can. And you will. You’re in charge, right? Trust me, they’ll scream their heads off for some hair.”
And they did. I was shocked at the time that anyone would be so excited about getting a weave! Now? Well, I’m not mad at a few snap-ons.
Only two out of the four dancers I got along with, but at this point I paid it no mind. This was my job, and my job was to do it well, not get all caught up. One thing for sure, these dancers worked hard—very hard. Pettiness aside, we got down to business. The numbers were really good, and the dancers did their
thang
!
Busy Bee joined the show as LL’s hype man and brought the fun! Sometimes we had more fun on the bus with his constant joking than we did onstage. That’s saying a lot, because LL was great fun and amazing onstage, always in the moment, always in command. It was a great gig. Well, except dealing with LL’s father. He was rude, mean, was always hitting on all of us girls. I never brought it up to Todd because that’s how it was—you just dealt with it. The tour did okay. Todd was trying new things, but his audience wanted “Rock the Bells.” Still, our show was amazing—and the tour, shit was crazy.
On the first show date, I ran into none other than Slick Rick—I froze up like a deer in headlights. “Yo, Rosie. How you gonna play me like that?” Then he pulled out his gun! Yes, folks! Everyone started pushing and shoving. I ran like a bitch into a corner, sunk down, covering my head, hoping I wouldn’t get shot. Thankfully,
the bodyguards rushed in quick. Ricky calmly put his gun away and acted like everyone was making a big deal out of nothing. He asked to speak with me. One of the bodyguards picked me up and brought me over. Rick smiled bashfully.
“Sorry. We cool. Right?”
“Yeah, Rick. We cool. Sorry ’bout that too.”
He gave me a pound like I was one of his boys, and that was that—crazy world of hip-hop.
While on tour, I was notified that
Do the Right Thing
was finally premiering. And the timing worked out, we had dates in New York. I got excited and in a split-second panicked. All I kept thinking was that all these rappers, everyone, was going to see those damn ice cubes on my big-ass breasts. I told Todd about the premiere during dinner at this Creole restaurant in New Orleans. (He would take all of us out to dinner from time to time to really nice restaurants.) I also told him about the nude scene. He just started laughing.
“Oh shit. Your man knows about them ice cubes?”
“Oh my goodness, I never told Ramier!”
“He’s gonna know now! Hey, I’m just playing with you. That’s a good look. I’m happy for you.”
• • •
When I got back to New York for the premiere, I was shocked to find out that Ramier had gotten locked up for selling narcotics. Say what? I had no idea that he was involved in drug dealing, honestly. I was devastated. Puffy heard the news.
“Yo, Money, lemme go with you. We could both dress in white and blow that red carpet up!”
“I couldn’t do that to Ramier.”
“Nah, nah, nothing like that. Ramier’s my boy. I just want to go to the premiere. It’s a good look.”
So I had four tickets, and I went to my very first premiere with
Puffy along with two of my half-sisters, Kathy and Amy—and no, I didn’t wear white.
Carmen didn’t want to go. Dad couldn’t go, and Tia was in L.A. I invited my mother. She didn’t want to go either. My brother, the one who tried to molest me, the one who stole my money and plane ticket, wanted to go. He didn’t even ask me if he could go. When I went to Lydia’s to pick up my sisters, he just jumped into the limo the day of, all dressed to the nines—can you believe it? I told him I didn’t have an extra ticket, which was true, but he and everyone else didn’t believe me, made me feel like I was fucked up when I told him he couldn’t come. Leaving my mother’s house in the limo with my two sisters, I started to get upset. I felt so bad and guilty.
Sitting in the dark theater, I was blown away by the magic of filmmaking. I knew that this was my new path, and I wanted to give it my all. I didn’t want to give up on choreographing either, I did love it, but my new focus was movies. I told Tia, who was still concerned about my schooling. My father was happy, but concerned too. Not about me wanting to become an actor—he was over the moon about that—but about my breasts being splattered on the big screen for all to see.
I had never told him. How are you going to tell your father something like that? What was worse is that he had invited the entire town of Aguadilla, all his friends and our family pastor, to the local theater to watch the film! When the ice-cube scene came on, my father gasped, jumped up, grabbed his heart, and fell out cold—no lie! He was taken away in an ambulance. I felt horrible. I flew down immediately.
God bless America three times that it really wasn’t a heart attack but a panic attack. He still milked it for days! While lying helpless on the couch, he told me, “Let’s make a deal. Next time you do something like that, do it with class and let me know by saying you’re in an … ‘artistic’ film.”
I GOT rave reviews!
Everything changed. Everything. I found myself very uncomfortable and conflicted about the attention and the fame that came with it. I love my fans, and it’s great when I hear them say that they appreciate my work, truly! I mean, without an audience loving what you do, what’s the point? But I wasn’t prepared to deal with all of the new “friends.” I wasn’t prepared for how those I knew and those I didn’t began to treat me differently too. Most important, I didn’t like being stared at, pointed out, and talked about as if I weren’t standing in front of the person or group that was doing any or all of this. It drove me crazy. I acted as if I was handling it, but inside I was a bundle of nerves.
The strangest reaction to everything was Lydia’s. Boy, did she jump on the bandwagon. When I saw her after all of the hoopla of
Do the Right Thing
, she was so kind and nice with me and I fell for it. I still kept somewhat of a distance, but when I did go over to see her, I relished in her attention. When I would slip her cash, she acted so humble about it, telling me she loved me so much and that I was a great daughter. Okay. I didn’t fall for all of that stuff, but still I liked the fact that she was liking me a whole lot more than before.
And on top of everything else, there was dealing with the press.
Oy vey!
A lot of the media jumped on the image I had portrayed in
Do the Right Thing
, labeling me as street and tough. Their racism pissed me off. Attention, all racists! Not all people who are poor are street
and tough! We are many things, just like everyone else! Not an interview was done with me that they didn’t perpetuate that persona immediately.
“How does it feel to come from the hard-core, dirty streets and now be part of Hollywood?”
“Don’t you think it’s a fluke, someone like you, to be in the movies?”
“You really went to college to study bio-chem? That’s unbelievable!”
It was so disrespectful. And when I would get upset over their lack of respect, they had a field day confirming their opinions.
This hurt me career-wise tremendously. Yes, my accent was strong, yes, I was Brooklyn, yes, I was poor, but did that mean I should be limited to only playing unintelligent, downtrodden, and humiliating stereotypes?
I wasn’t going to let them win either. I told one of my representatives at the time that we had to fight this: she needed to get me a shot at those Jessica Lange—type roles—love her! She patronizingly told me I was far from Ms. Lange—okay, probably true—and that I shouldn’t expect too much. Well, forget that. She further suggested that I try to sound less ethnic. “Yes, that, and, well, if you change your hair color, maybe a little nip.”
“You mean look less ethnic too?”
She shrugged her shoulders, “Everyone does it.” Now, I have no problems with plastic surgery—it’s the new mascara—but for these reasons? Come on, people!
Turning down work was tough. But I stayed strong. The only other role I could even consider after
Do the Right Thing
was playing a crackhead ho for HBO’s Criminal
Justice
, also starring Anthony LaPaglia, Jennifer Grey, and Forest Whitaker. I agreed to it since my character was a co-lead, and more important, the story was politically and socially worthwhile.
Jennifer Grey couldn’t believe what I had to deal with. She
introduced me to her agent, Jane Berliner, at CAA, over the phone. I simply told Jane I wanted access to the same opportunities that everyone else had.
Get me a shot and I’ll do beyond my very best to get the work
. She signed me immediately, over the damn phone! Being with CAA gave me a new power and entrée into the rooms I needed to be in—the momentum was building. Yay!
Criminal Justice
debuted on HBO. I got rave reviews once again—holla! And my popularity increased. That was good and bad. The press started in again asking a million personal questions. I never lied about being poor, being on welfare, being from Brooklyn, being a love child, and not being raised by my mother but by my aunt. Yes, I did leave out any mention of the Home and the Group Home. I wasn’t ready to go there. I knew that if and when the press found out, they would descend like vultures and further perpetuate this uneducated-street-urchin image they had conjured up. But honestly, I held back because I didn’t have the emotional strength yet to lay out years of abuse for the entire world to see. Who does in their early twenties? Shit, who does even after thirty?
Since I had left the system, I had made a new start. I was having great fun and on my way to the type of life I’ve always worked for. I wasn’t the girl from the Home who was to be pitied, who was less than because her parents gave her up. I had a sense of self that wasn’t so wounded and was getting stronger. I didn’t want to lose that. It would break my spirit. Plus, it was my right to keep that information private. And don’t give me that crap about being in front of the camera—that it comes with the job. Bullshit. That’s some Jedi mind trick invented by yellow journalism.
It was an effort to fight for those good roles and to keep the press at bay by telling humorous stories and staying on topic in all the interviews about the work. And it was working. The press stopped asking about my past and I got the attention of the major studios and independent industries. They started to see more than just my ethnicity—yay!
Then I made a really bad decision. As I’ve said, Lydia came a-calling, acting like she was the best mother ever, and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. So much so that when a television show celebrating Latin celebrities wanted to do a profile on my mother and me, I jumped at the chance. I subconsciously wanted to be perceived as someone who’d always had that supportive mom like normal people did—the same bullshit I had worried about in the Home and the Group Home.
The interview was done in Carmen’s house. When the cameras began rolling, Lydia went on a tirade about herself and how her dreams of being a singer were squashed, how my father was a piece of shit to her, and blah, blah, blah. Nothing was said about her support for me—or about me at all for that matter. How could she? The interviewer, who was also the main producer, Rosanna Rosario, who is now head of
El Diario
newspaper, kept trying to guide the discussion back to me, asking Lydia if she had brought any pictures of me throughout the years. There weren’t any pictures to be shown; there weren’t any wonderful stories about our mother-daughter bond since there wasn’t any such bond whatsoever.
Making it even worse, when the interviewer tried to steer the conversation back to my budding new career, Lydia started talking incoherently to the walls. I wasn’t in the room—Carmen came running and told me what was going on. The interviewer, the whole crew, felt so embarrassed for me that they called it a wrap. Hurt? Yes. Embarrassed? Beyond. But defeated? No.
The great thing is that the producers never aired my mother’s interview—God bless America two times. They just aired the stuff they recorded with me. Rosanna Rosario told me that it wasn’t their agenda to exploit what had happened that day, it was about the bigger picture of promoting Latinos who were making it in the industry without compromise. “We have to look out for each other,” she said. The scandalous story had no place in their
news special—cool! Ooh, Lydia was steaming mad that she didn’t make the cut. That’s when the tension between her and me kicked in all over again. But, I was still happy that they didn’t abuse the situation. I
did
have some friends—people in the press, even a few paparazzi, who did have integrity and wanted to make the world better.