It's a Family Affair
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Beyoncé won many more contests, and soon she was asked to be the lead singer for a dancing and singing act called Girls Tyme, more than a dozen eight- and nine-year-old girls who would eventually include the other three original members of Destiny’s Child: LaTavia Roberson, Kelly Rowland, and LeToya Luckett. Girls Tyme performed elaborate routines to pop and contemporary R&B at schools and talent shows. In 1990 a woman named Andretta Tillman, a friend of one of the adult founders of the group, invested some money in the girls and eventually began managing them. When the girls weren’t rehearsing, they watched videos of the Jackson 5 and the Supremes, aping the dance steps, admiring the outfits, and dreaming. They made videos of their routines and then critiqued them. Tina, who owned a hair salon, did the girls’ hair, and they ran through their routines at her shop.
In 1992 Girls Tyme—by then with only seven members—made it all the way to the finals on Ed McMahon’s Star Search, where they lost. The defeat was devastating, and not just because the band that beat them looked like A Flock of Seagulls. They had been convinced that a Star Search win would lead to a record deal. It was at this point, Mathew says, that he decided to help his daughter achieve her dream. Without any experience, he took the leap into the music biz. “Back then I knew ninety percent of what I needed to know because of my business acumen,” he told me. “I knew from corporate America how to establish relationships and how to get to the decision maker.” Mathew uses the phrase “corporate America” often, as if to refer to a time in a previous life.
Mathew got his entreprenuerial spirit, he says from his father, a Gadsden, Alabama, truck driver who sold scrap metal on the side, and his mother, a housewife who sold quilts. Mathew sang in high school and went to college at Fisk University, in Nashville, where he graduated with degrees in business administration and economics. He and Tina met in Houston and married in 1979; they had Beyoncé in 1981 and Solange five years later. Mathew became a salesman—life insurance, telephone equipment, postage meters, copiers, and finally, high-dollar hospital equipment such as CT scanners and MRI machines. The Knowleses did quite well and lived in a six-bedroom house in Houston’s fashionable Third Ward among other upper-middle-class black families. They went to church on Sundays and sometimes gathered around the piano and sang while Dad played.
After the Star Search loss, the middle-aged corporate salesman sat down and considered something that thousands had considered before him: how to make it in music. He enrolled in a class in artist management at Houston Community College, but he found a much better blueprint in the story of Berry Gordy, the president of Motown Records, who had created one of the great music-business success stories in the sixties. Gordy had done everything in-house at his Hitsville studios and offices, which sat on one city block in Detroit—managing his acts, recording them, releasing their records, promoting them, and marketing them. Unlike most labels, Motown actually developed its artists, teaching them how to move gracefully, dress glamorously, talk to an audience, walk across a room. Gordy helped create individual styles for every artist. When they walked onto a stage, they were stars. Gordy ran Motown like a family, even employing his own siblings. Most important, he controlled everything. He was the father, and father knew best.
To say that Mathew took control of Girls Tyme would be an understatement. According to Lornonda Brown, Tillman’s brother, Mathew threatened to take away Beyoncé, the obvious star, if Tillman didn’t agree to let him co-manage. Tillman, of course, relented. “She knew she had to,” said Brown. “Mathew’s daughter was his trump card.” Tillman had been diagnosed with lupus, and as the disease slowed her down, Mathew took over more responsibilities (she died in 1997). He changed the group’s direction and image, trimming it from seven to four members—Beyoncé, Kelly (whose mother, a nanny, deposited her at the Knowleses so often that she eventually moved in and became their ward), LaTavia, and LeToya—and concentrated on making them better singers. He hired vocal coaches to help with the harmonies and melisma of modern R&B. He had a deck built in the family’s back yard for the girls to practice on. He set up what he called Boot Camp—three months of vocal and dance lessons in the summer. He hired a model to show the girls how to walk in high heels, and he made them sing while jogging through Memorial Park so they could perform without tiring. He himself taught them how to present themselves, what to say between songs, and how to do an interview. “It’s critical to nail it in the media,” he told me. Image, Mathew knew from his jobs in corporate sales, was just as important as reality (though he’d make his share of mistakes, such as changing the group’s name—first to Somethin’ Fresh and then, oddly, to Cliché).
Perhaps most crucial of all, Mathew developed a strategy. “When you sell a product,” he told me, “you first have to design and build it, but also you have to figure out the needs of the customer. When we put the group together, we had a plan. We figured out our demographic, our customers, our imaging, what type of songs we’re going to sing. It’s not by accident that we write songs like ‘Independent Women’ and ‘Survivor’—female-based empowerment songs. That’s our customer base.” It was no longer just about singing and dancing, or even entertaining. The girls had to believe in themselves and their product at all costs. They had to sell themselves.
By 1994 Mathew was mailing out dozens of packages full of tapes, bios, and photos to record labels. “My heart was not in corporate America,” he said. All of his work seemed to pay off when he got Columbia A&R rep Teresa LaBarbera Whites to fly to Houston for a special showcase. On the video from the performance, you can hear his voice stopping the girls mid-song. They had gone swimming before the meeting, and as he had warned, their noses were stopped up. “I don’t really care if Teresa is here,” he says angrily. “See the price you’re paying for going swimming the other day?” They didn’t get signed. A few months later they inked a production deal that led to a contract with Elektra Records in 1995, but that too eventually fell through.
By that time, Mathew had become obsessed with the group. He left his job selling medical equipment, absolutely certain that his gamble would pay off. Tina had to make up for the lost income by working longer hours at her hair salon, working so late she’d go to sleep on the salon couch, then get up in the morning and begin cutting hair again. The financial and emotional strain on the marriage was too much, and the couple separated. Tina took the girls and moved into an apartment. They sold their home and one of their cars. The dream seemed over.
But not in Mathew’s mind. Like any decent salesman, he remained confident, refusing to admit defeat; he believed in himself, his daughter, and his product. And so he pestered LaBarbera Whites again and got another audition, in 1997. This time the girls flew to New York City, and this time they didn’t go swimming. They got the deal.
Soon afterward, Mathew and Tina got back together. To seal their good fortune, they picked a new name for their daughter’s group, this quartet of girls that seemed, after all that hard work, chosen. Tina pulled out a Bible and found the word “destiny.” Mathew added “child.”
“Someone just called for beyoncé,” Vernell Jackson said, laughing. “This woman said, ‘I think I rang this number in error, but is Beyoncé there?’ No, Beyoncé’s not here.” She laughed again. “It happens almost every day.”
Vernell manages Headliners, Tina’s eight-seat salon on Bissonnet, near Rice University. She is also the go-between for crazed fans and Destiny’s Child. She pulled half a dozen letters and packages from behind the front desk, addressed to Beyoncé, Tina, and the group in care of the salon. Then she produced a white canvas the size of a coffee-table book with a pencil drawing of Beyoncé, though it looked more like Cher. There was a handwritten letter from the artist taped to the frame. “He loves her,” Vernell explained, “because he saw her in his dream.”
