Life Beyond Measure (12 page)

Then, during a period when I went to work pushing and loading dress racks in the garment industry, I met Frances, a statuesque knockout with a spellbinding smile, skin color that matched my own, and an earthiness that made me comfortable. At last, I was able to make some headway and the two of us clicked, long enough for us to become a steady couple.

When she found out that I was trying to be an actor, Frances wasn’t thrilled. “What a waste” was all she said, but the next time I went to call on her at her Harlem residence she seemed to have lost interest. In fact, as she opened the door and asked me to step into the railroad apartment, instead of taking me into the kitchen near the front door where five or six people had congregated and were in a party mood, she led me down the hall all the way to the living room at the far end of the apartment.

“Make yourself comfortable,” Frances said and then returned to her friends in the kitchen—leaving me by myself for the better part of an hour. Again, given my lack of experience, I didn’t understand that instead of just breaking up with me, she was sending me the message indirectly. In any case, I eventually gathered the cool to
walk down the hall and past the kitchen, where I excused myself and left. The bruise to my ego took me a week to shake off. But once I let it go, I was better prepared for the slings and arrows of love that followed.

Decades later I met someone who happened to be related to Frances, and I took Frances’s phone number. When I called, we had a warm conversation, during which she touched me deeply by saying, those many years later, how much she regretted that last encounter. Even though it was unnecessary for her to say so, as it was very much water under the bridge, I so appreciated how it underscored that for most human beings, even when we briefly touch up against other lives, we leave our marks on each other.

So, after Frances, I kept working at being an actor and was starting to make some significant progress, and then I met Jackie, a beautiful girl, very smart, at a dance, and we saw each other a few times after that. Then she went to Long Island for a summer and I went to visit her there. When she came back, she invited me to meet her folks. After I learned they were West Indian, probably from Jamaica—and I knew that Jamaicans were a very fastidious people, hardworking and interested in education—I figured they wanted to look me over, so I accepted her invitation. Not only did they live in Striker’s Row, an upscale Harlem neighborhood, but her father was a highly esteemed, prominent lawyer. Afterward, Jackie was as sweet as ever, but she implied that her family was old-fashioned in the West Indian way, and they were not particularly happy with anybody she met. Clearly, she was dropping me, though as nicely as she could.

For years after, I wondered what it was that got me so dismissed. Then I began to realize that besides the fact that I had no table manners whatsoever, I had tried to sell myself as something that I wasn’t, pretending to be knowledgeable about topics of acceptable
conversation when I didn’t know beans about anything. Whenever they asked about my education, for example, I told the truth, but nevertheless tried to infer that my education was more in-depth or significant than it really was. Eventually, I could almost hear what they were thinking—
Oh, this poor thing. He really doesn’t know much, does he?

Not long after that, just before I left to go to Africa to make my second picture,
Cry, the Beloved Country,
I fell madly in love with a woman in New York. We had decided that upon my return, once she spoke to her folks about it, we were going to get married. While I was away, we were talking twice a week by long-distance telephone calls, and about the fifth time I called, she dropped it on me: her folks were up in arms. They didn’t want her to marry me, and they wanted her to finish school, where she was studying to be a psychiatric social worker.

“But what do you want?” I asked

“Well, my parents…” she began. And each time I asked what she felt, she picked up the same refrain: “My parents…”

And there I was in South Africa.

I came back and saw her, and realized there was no chance at reconciliation. After we parted ways, she followed the path that her parents had wanted for her. And they were right to feel that I didn’t have the experience that qualified me to be the husband of a daughter they were sending to Barnard. They were thinking of what was best for her. After we broke things off, they sent her to Jamaica with friends and relatives to look for a husband, and she soon found one. That marriage, however, lasted less than a year. Later, she married a friend of mine, with whom she had children, but the marriage was short-lived as well. And then she married a guy who was several years her senior. She is now eighty-one and in a convalescent home,
where I went to visit her not so long ago—and found the same person, very bright and still very attractive for her age.

Though I wasn’t always happy when girlfriends’ parents disapproved of my background or my choice of career, I tried not to take it personally. Instead, I focused all the more on improving my standing with the work that I’d chosen. In much later years, from time to time I would run into an old flame or two, or their parents, like an ex-girlfriend’s mom who regretted that her daughter hadn’t married me. “Oh,” she said, “if only I knew that you were going to turn out to be Sidney Poitier!”

Back during the ups and downs of becoming secure and successful in that pursuit, I received a memorable phone call from a friend, William Garfield Greaves, a gifted filmmaker of documentaries on African American culture. He said, “I have somebody I think you ought to meet.” He knew how many times I had been dumped, and he was a good friend looking out for me. He went on, “I’ve met this girl. Her name is Juanita Hardy. She’s a model and a dancer, and an absolute show-stopper.”

After he showed me photos, I was intrigued, and then I went to see her dance. He was right: she was quite attractive, and she was a show-stopper.

After such an inviting introduction, Juanita and I began dating. Given my lack of experience, I figured that I was ready for a serious relationship, and she seemed to be similarly disposed. After dating for quite a while, we began talking about marriage. Then came the daunting prospect of meeting her family—who turned out to be quite gracious. They asked me a few questions and came to the conclusion that I wasn’t a bad guy.

We were married not too long after that, amid much celebration. Neither of us, however, was prepared for marriage, and neither of us
had a way of knowing that. One may have seen successful marriages among family and friends, but there are so many independent energies intertwined in marital success that luck of the draw has to be a part of the whole equation. And we weren’t lucky.

We were kids who didn’t know what to look for in each other. We saw images that were more out of our imagination. We superimposed over our togetherness a kind of potential that we didn’t have, and we didn’t have the wherewithal to analyze, pick apart, and see how much depth was really there. Once we had gained acceptance of each other, we got married. We had a strong imprint in our minds of what marriage ought to be, but we didn’t know how to bring that about. And we were coming at each other from two different sets of circumstances.

I knew that my mother and father were as they were. I experienced their love for each other every day of my life with them. And Juanita had loving parents as well, as was demonstrated to me. But she was no more versed than I was as to the manner in which two people can begin to build something, realizing that each comes with what he or she is. You have to take those two forces, if there is a mutual compatibility, and make out of it whatever you can. You have to look dead center at what the possibilities are—not the daydreams, because that is all foreplay. You have to determine what the real possibilities are of understanding each other. You need to have exchanges through which you learn each other’s positions on things—a relationship where the economics of it and the sense of responsibility for the nurturing of children can be determined.

Juanita and I came to marriage without having a sense of how the dynamics were made to work, even if they were operative in our individual families. We weren’t ready—and few people are. Almost half the marriages in America end in divorce. Among those that do
last, some do so unhappily, welded only by children or religion or economics. And where unions have lasted a lifetime, many couples look back with recognition of how little they knew in the beginning of those compatibilities that would later bond them so joyously and can only say, “How lucky we were.”

There you have a candid understanding, as great-granddaughter to Juanita and to me, of the love and the challenges that were met in our marriage—which lasted eighteen years; and, to her joy and mine, resulted in four children, four beautiful, brilliant daughters, who were—and are—really terrific people.

There may be within you, Ayele, as there was once in me, the streak of the undying romantic who sees love only in its mythic perfection, and not for its thorny though still beautiful reality. Rather than protect you from the complexities, I would rather you know about them in advance, not for you to guard yourself from love when it comes, but perhaps to see its true intentions for you.

In any event, experiencing hurt, disappointment, and even a broken heart or two can still be worth the price of taking the chance to love.

Even if you are someone used to wearing armor, guarded and afraid, I think love is such a strong force it would find a way through your protective guard. It will get to your heart, and you can’t put any fences around that. As much as you might try, you simply can’t. You’re going to have other forces that will be operative at the same time if it is right for you to fall in love with this activity or individual or cause or process.

There is no right or wrong in the general scheme of things when it comes to love, only what’s right or wrong for you. Like all of life’s great mysteries, we have to search for our own answers. What I now know, as a basic, is that love has many forms and shapes. It is
an indispensable element in the bonding of all creatures. We fall in love because we have a capacity for it. This capacity may never find the object of it, the one who will make it whole. And the capacity within us can wither and die, depending upon external factors. Many times we sense a potential, or we engage in wishful thinking, assuming that it would be wonderful if one’s capacity for love could be fulfilled by that which one believes to be in this or that personality, and something wonderful could come to fruition. And that something wonderful happens every day. There are people who can just pick it up in another’s eyes, or laughter, or the way the person walks or turns away when embarrassed. There are endless numbers of such moments that can spark an array of possibilities.

But though there is always a capacity, there is not always the destiny. Among other things, love might be damaging. Or maybe the hurt comes from the lack of love, or the absence of love, or your love being rejected—such that some people, greatly disappointed, turn bitter. Many have a great love for a very short time and never experience it again, and they live a full life in the number of years that they have left. They live with a wounded self, but they live. But the greater tragedy is that there are some who live full lives in terms of years and yet never experience the love of another human being.

You will probably discover for yourself, Ayele my darling, that love does not always last. There is a perishable quality to it, and if it is not nurtured and tended much like a garden, it may wither. But you will also discover, I pray, that though love is complicated, it nevertheless is an essential, endlessly abundant force in our lives.

What I can add to that, as well, is that sometimes, when you least expect it, when you’re not even looking to find the love of your life, every now and then love comes along and discovers you. In any case, about forty years ago, that’s exactly what happened to me.

In those days of the late 1960s, I was riding a wave of a great deal of success as an actor. Earlier in the decade there had been such well-received films as
A Raisin in the Sun
and
A Patch of Blue,
along with
Lilies of the Field
—the movie for which I won an Academy Award. In 1967, I had the good fortune to become the year’s top-grossing actor, thanks to three major hits, released that same year, that touched a deep nerve with the public:
In the Heat of the Night, To Sir with Love,
and
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Well, I mention some of those highlights to give you a sense of the atmosphere of those days, when my focus was very much on continuing to grow creatively and professionally, not on falling in love or starting a new relationship. So when I prepared to start shooting a picture called
The Lost Man,
nothing in my instincts led me to suspect that the love of my life was waiting in the wings. An extraordinarily beautiful Canadian model and actress then living in Paris, she had come to the director’s attention after appearing on the cover of French
Vogue.
When she was first approached by Universal Pictures to do a screen test for the movie, her initial question was “Who else will be starring in it?” And when she was told, “Sidney Poitier,” her response was “Who’s that?”

Yes, indeed, that was Joanna Shimkus, and though she had never heard of me, after some encouragement she did agree to do the screen test, and was cast in the role. It didn’t take us long, once we started working on the movie together, to wonder if perhaps forces greater than ourselves had brought us together. By the end of production, we knew that we would indeed be together from then on.

And that was forty years ago.

This time, I was ready to live the love story that I had seen in my parents’ marriage at the start of my life. Part of our compatibility is that we are so different. Where I’m a thinking guy, she has such
a great heart; where I’m private, she has an outgoing nature that puts everyone around her at ease. With our differences, we have so much more to discuss—our kids, our interests, friends, family, life, new ideas; nothing is off-limits. A woman of boundless generosity and energy, remarkable creativity, and a dog lover, too, Joanna stopped her acting career to raise our children, and has also become extremely close to my four daughters from my first marriage.