Beyoncé: The Ice Princess
Beyoncé Knowles is tired, hungry and sick of acting crazy. For seven hours inside a cavernous hangar on the Brooklyn waterfront she’s been lip-synching histrionically, hurling into walls and generally behaving like a diva one Klonopin away from a breakdown.But she does look good. Her hair is tousled in an elegant pile, and she’s dressed like Sharon Stone in the notorious interrogation scene of Basic Instinct — white sleeveless turtleneck, white skirt slit up the sides. As her riotous new single “Ring the Alarm” blares, she pantomimes hysteria. Every twitch, snap of the neck and jerk of the hips dramatizes the theme of manic jealousy. Not that she’s enjoying temporary insanity. “I’m tired of acting so nutty — it’s hard,” she says between takes. Hanging her head, she seems to have shrunk by half since the cameras began to roll at 7:30 A.M..
A small village of bodyguards, production assistants, extras, ass wipers and her mom populate the set. When the director calls for another take, Beyoncé dutifully slams into the interrogation chair. She raises her head, rolls back her shoulders and rapidly crosses and uncrosses her legs — as Stone did while exposing her crotch to Michael Douglas in the most rewound moment in cinematic history. The song hits a climax and Beyoncé’s legs swing open, revealing to Blender a view of … skin-tone bicycle shorts.
Beyoncé Knowles can grow tired. She can act crazy. And she can be one hell of a tease. But she is not the type to slip up.
“I don’t like being interviewed.” It’s not much of a conversation starter, but at least she says it with a disarming smile.
Three days after the video shoot, Beyoncé is back in the Manhattan studio where she made B’Day, her dance-floor-targeting second solo album. Her long blond hair is swept back with a gold hair band, and her feet are strapped into gold sandals. Her voice is warm and deep, curling into sentences like a cat nestling into a blanket.
Beyoncé Giselle Knowles is both a thoroughly modern star and an anachronism. She has a clothing line, a movie career and major endorsement contracts. She’s partial to space-age R&B beats and big-budget videos. So far, so twenty-first century.
But female pop stars of her magnitude typically detonate in a fireball of Cheetos, nipple brooches and front-page divorces. They let camera crews trail them for “intimate” TV shows. From officially sanctioned Brangelina baby photos to VH1 celebreality to MySpace, this is a time of unprecedented pop-star exposure — and Beyoncé isn’t interested in exposing herself.
It’s a neat trick: She’s become one of the world’s most visible women while building walls around herself. For the past four years, she’s dated kingpin rapper and Def Jam Recordings president and CEO Jay-Z, jetting from NBA games to the tropics with him (and her Shih Tzu, Munchy, who travels in a $1,500 Louis Vuitton doggie carrier). But Beyoncé has never even publicly acknowledged their relationship, which seems both coy and silly after the constant paparazzi photos of the couple sunbathing together on yachts.
Are you and Jay-Z dating?
“What do you think?”
Do you plan to have kids together?
“I mean, we’re not married, we’re not engaged. If that happens, then I want to have kids.”
Do you live together?
“I have my own place.”
Does he stay at your place more or do you stay at his place more?
“Ha ha ha! I don’t want to talk about it.”
Beyoncé’s been fortifying herself for stardom since she was 9. As she puts it, “I went to Knowles Boot Camp.” When Beyoncé and her childhood friends Kelly Rowland, LaTavia Roberson and LeToya Luckett weren’t singing En Vogue harmonies during early morning jogs, they were rehearsing on a stage Beyoncé’s father and manager, Mathew Knowles, had constructed behind the family’s suburban-Houston home. “We were sleeping in the same bed, waking up every morning, singing all day and loving every minute of it.”
Her parents were tough, in different ways. “My mother was strict about when we went to sleep, or whether we could go to a party. My dad would say, ‘Ask your mom,’ and then he would tell her, ‘You better not let ’em do it!’”
Beyoncé never had a rebellious phase. A God-fearing, dutiful daughter, she was the consummate good girl: “I was very quiet and behaved,” she recalls. “And really shy around other kids.” Shy, that is, until she sang John Lennon’s “Imagine” at age 7 during a school talent show. “When I had an audience, it was different. The shyness was gone completely.”
In the tradition of pop schizos from David Bowie to Eminem to Mariah Carey, Beyoncé has an alter ego. She calls this person — the one who roars across stages in a storm of pipes and booty — Sasha. “When I feel uncomfortable about something, I tell myself, ‘I’m Sasha, I’m a diva, I’m fierce, I can do it.’ And then I can.”
At 17, when Beyoncé was writing Destiny’s Child’s second album, The Writing’s on the Wall, Sasha helped the good girl channel her inner sass bomb. Private-schooled until eighth grade and with exactly one boyfriend under her belt — whom she met at church at age 13 and dated for five years — Beyoncé hadn’t seen much of life’s ups and downs. So she posted herself near the hair dryers at Headliners, the salon her mom, Tina, ran and still owns. For a young songwriter hungry for secrets of adult femininity, it was a place rich with tales of romantic deceit, dreamy Mr. Rights and no-good scrubs, an E. Lynn Harris novel come to life. “I eavesdropped,” Beyoncé says. “You listen to those women in there, it’s more than getting your hair done.”
The Writing’s on the Wall (the group’s “best record,” she declares) sold more than 6 million copies and turned Beyoncé into pop’s ur-sista, hurling grenades at bugaboos and triflin’ brothers in a take-no-prisoners war of the sexes.
Soon Beyoncé experienced her own turmoil. When Roberson and Luckett turned 18, they tried to fire Mathew Knowles as their manager. In response, he ejected them from the group. They struck back, alleging that Mathew Knowles had stolen money and, later, suing Beyoncé for defamation. “At the time, it was really hurtful,” Beyoncé says. “And I was hurt for my father, because we’d been a family. He loved all of us.”
Except family can’t be replaced: Roberson and Luckett were speedily succeeded by Michelle Williams and Farrah Franklin (the latter soon left the group in a storm of counter-accusations). Adding to her pain, Beyoncé was slammed on Internet sites. DC fans, incensed by what they perceived as a ruthless backstab, smeared message boards with anti-Beyoncé bile.
“All of a sudden, she’d been picked out as the bad guy,” says Teresa LaBarbera Whites, the A&R rep who discovered Destiny’s Child at a Jewish-community-center performance in 1990. “It was devastating for her; she locked herself up and cried for days.”
Something dark had crashed in on Beyoncé’s adolescent idyll. “It taught me that people can be really vicious,” she reflects. “I was really depressed and I wouldn’t speak to anybody. I decided to protect myself a lot more.” (Beyoncé herself was not always kind: After the split, she was quoted as saying, “LeToya was tone-deaf.”)
At concerts immediately following, pockets of the crowd booed her. This is how the good girl responded: Beyoncé led the audience in a prayer.
Sasha, meanwhile, responded with a snarl: She spun the conflict into a thundering tale of victimization and defiance, sang it in the first person, named it “Survivor” and sold 4.3 million copies of an album with the same name. The group released six albums with three different lineups before declaring an indefinite hiatus last year.
Through pain, disappointment, tears and a lawsuit or two, the good girl had grown a lot savvier. Sasha, who had first proved useful helping Beyoncé cure her shyness, had become an indispensable shield. “Sometimes when Beyoncé slips through, I’m like, ‘Hold up, come back!’” she says, laughing. “Sasha protects me. It’s a good way to keep sane.”
Beyoncé has sold over 19 million CDs in the U.S. Double that and you’ve got the worldwide numbers. Her clothing line, House of Deréon, is carried at Macy’s and Dillard’s and is expected to generate between $30 million and $50 million in sales its first year. She is notoriously no-nonsense in the studio: Producer Swizz Beatz, who worked with her on B’Day, says, “I never saw her playing around, drinking, smoking — none of that. I’ve seen 150 million percent music focus.” And she just turned 25.
Her age is easy to forget. Mike Myers, her costar in 2002’s Austin Powers: Goldmember, recalls this rare reminder of her youth. “I mentioned that it would be good to mash together ‘Baby Boy’ and ‘The Ocean,’ by Led Zeppelin. Beyoncé said, ‘Who’s Led Zeppelin?’”
Her gaps in classic-rock knowledge notwithstanding, Beyoncé is one of pop’s most adventurous stars — she can flaunt her considerable voice but prefers singing fleetly over bumpy, hammering beats and packing verses with tricky mini-hooks that are easier to love than sing along with. In R&B, she’s the girl to be: Even Mariah Carey — no stranger to imitators — has scrapped melismatic balladeering for Beyoncé’s up-tempo, more rapperly style.
She’s one of the few singers who doesn’t wilt when matched with a rapper, including Jay-Z. “I think he’s one of the best rappers; he thinks I’m one of the best singers,” she explains immodestly. “If you’ve got Jay-Z’s phone number, why would you get anyone else? He’s the best.” The relationship has even redirected her music. “My ear for beats has changed. I used to pick beats for big pop records, but that’s not what I want now. My taste is more interesting since Jay. Like ‘Ring the Alarm’ — before I would never have picked that beat.”
She’ll talk all day about how much she loves Jay, as long as the context is musical. Her refusal to give one inch in the privacy war is a good way to stay sane; it’s also good business. Beyoncé teasingly cultivates the immense interest in her personal life, putting Jay-Z on her singles, tugging his belt suggestively in videos, grinding against him during performances — all to direct attention (and cash) back to her music. If you want to know about Beyoncé, says Pharrell Williams, who produced two songs on B’Day, “you pick up her CD. You pick up the thing she can control.”
Jay-Z, a former drug dealer who grew up in a housing project, hardly shares Beyoncé’s sunny suburban past. But this isn’t merely a case of the good girl in love with the bad boy: Beyoncé has a gangsta side, too.Beyoncé the gangsta has a poker face and unflappable nerves. If you want to see her in action, Google her name and “PETA.” Earlier this year, two anti-fur activists bought a charity lunch with the singer in New York. Armed with a hidden camera, they posed as fans before launching a rather polite attack on House of Deréon’s use of fur: “You’re so gorgeous,” one says, “you don’t need to kill animals.” Beyoncé nods, smiles, smiles some more and remains silent. The women keep talking. She keeps smiling. After a minute, a bodyguard emerges to whisk the interlopers away.
“It was bugged out!” she says now. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m not gonna change my composure.’”
Did anything they say concern you?
“I felt so deceived I didn’t even hear them. I was like, ‘I’m just gonna chill. They’ll leave and the shrimp is still coming.’”
The video is stunning to watch: This woman’s veins, it seems, pump Freon.
Even the songs she wrote for B’Day are “really gangsta,” she says. She mentions the “nigga, please” lyrics in “Irreplaceable,” about a guy being bluntly dismissed. “I want women to hear this and be like, ‘exactly!’”
And all this strength and sangfroid also contains some less decorous impulses.
Is there a celebrity couple you admire for the way they handle the paparazzi?
“I guess, Gwyneth and Chris Martin.”
You know he’s punched a photographer.
“Well, I can relate with that! It must be really scary to have your children in front of all these people. That’s your kids. That’s when Mama Knowles is gonna be punching some photographers!”
Her nickname around her label is B-Zilla. And if she sometimes appears invulnerable, she insists that she’s not. “I’m a human being. I have issues and struggles. The same things everyone else has in their family, I’ve been through.”
The word family is a big clue. Her father’s behavior is the sole source of scandal in the Knowles clan. There is the lawsuit by Roberson and Luckett and another lawsuit, according to Star magazine, filed in early 2002 by sons of the group’s original manager, Andretta Tillman, alleging that Mathew Knowles blew $32 million on cocaine and “sex parties.”
“I don’t talk about that,” she says. “I don’t talk about who I date, let alone talk about that.”
When she announced the release of B’Day, Beyoncé declared that she’d made the record without notifying her father. She told one interviewer, “When I turned 18, and started handling my business more, he went into shock.” It seemed the Independent Woman was declaring more independence from her dad.
But Beyoncé tells Blender that her father is just as much her manager today as he was five years ago. “He goes through millions of requests and narrows them down to the things that are right. He negotiates all of my contracts.”
So why was it important to make the record without telling him?
“It wasn’t ‘without telling him’ — it was without telling anyone. My dad and Columbia Records would have given me a deadline, and I didn’t want a deadline.”
B’Day was completed in less than a month, funded out of Beyoncé’s own pocketbook (probably a Vuitton). Later this year, she’ll star in Dreamgirls, the film adaptation of a cherished Broadway musical that loosely fictionalized the story of the Supremes. She says the film influenced B’Day, which is “not about my personal life. It’s very Deena and Curtis” — the story’s embattled lovers. Deena, she says, “can be a B-I-T-C-H.” (“I don’t swear,” Beyoncé explains sweetly, “unless I’m really mad.”)
Dreamgirls is Beyoncé’s first dramatic role, and her biggest one yet. Austin Powers and The Pink Panther were breezy walk-ons. “Music, I’m good at. Acting’s a challenge,” she says. The question of whether she can make it in Hollywood hinges largely on Deena Jones. Is this her Glitter? Or her 8 Mile? For his part, director Bill Condon says she nailed it from the screen test on. “It was the first time she’s had to dig deep,” he says. “And she just got it out there.”
The film, costarring Jamie Foxx and Eddie Murphy, deals with issues of race in romance and culture — including the compromises a black group has to make in crossing over. Beyoncé says compromise is one thing she doesn’t have in common with Deena Jones. “I make black records,” she says indignantly. “I write records like I speak, and I don’t try to change my songs so everyone else likes them.” It’s a sensitive subject. When Farrah Franklin left Destiny’s Child, she alleged that she’d been told to darken her hair so that Beyoncé would stand out more. A 2005 Vanity Fair cover on which Beyoncé looked particularly fair sparked rumors about digitally altered skin tones.
Beyoncé’s relationship to race is certainly complex. She boasts a L’Oréal contract. She is blond. There is a Beyoncé Barbie doll that is approximately the same shade of bronze as Ken. But, even before she hooked up with Jay-Z, she had a ghetto pass. “I’m able to go to Europe with a prince and have a conversation, and I’m able to go to Marcy Projects at Christmas and pass out presents,” she says. “I love Brigitte Bardot and I love Lil’ Kim.” Stephen Hill, senior VP for music programming at BET, puts it this way: “She has not gone to crossover. Crossover has come to her.”
Back on set, Beyoncé has finished take five of the interrogation scene. “That’s lunch!” someone yells, and an assistant wraps a white robe around the star’s shoulders. “We’re moving, we’re moving!” someone else barks. Shadowed by a towering bodyguard named James, she heads for the dressing room.
But the dressing room is across the street, and the summer humidity has turned into a light drizzle. “Clear the way, please,” James bellows, his voice a 45 playing at 33. He helps his boss into a black car that’s been purring on the set and climbs in next to her. A hangar door glides up. The car glides out. Faced with the same situation, some people would use an umbrella. Beyoncé — the good girl with a gangsta inside — uses an Escalade.
