It's a Family Affair
In the past year Beyoncé has gone from being a well-known recording artist to quite possibly the biggest star on the planet. Which is exactly how her mother and father planned it.
Lillene Christy Ebanks says: Boyonce added to any lesson helped children pay attention and remember, so No Child was ever Left Behind and we had a 100 percent pass rate. Go Texan! (July 2nd, 2010 at 6:24pm)
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Headliners, which until 1995 was on Montrose Boulevard, was the girls’ unofficial stage, where they learned to be entertainers. Every week they would work out their routines to an audience of captive women under hair dryers. While Tina cut hair, Mathew would direct the girls, and afterward he’d ask the ladies for criticisms and comments. Then the girls would do the routine again. “The customers sometimes didn’t want to listen,” remembered Tina. “They’d be singing and dancing, and Mathew would tell them to make eye contact with the customers. The girls would call out, ‘Put your hands together!’ Customers would be rolling their eyes. That was a tough audience.” Solange cut her entertainer’s teeth here too, dancing solo for customers when she was only four.
It’s been a while since Tina cut hair at Headliners. She still goes there to get hers done, but she spends most of her time at her Music World office. While Mathew is intense, Tina is calm and earthy. She likes to wear jeans when working; for our interview at her office she was also wearing a black sweater and tan suede boots.
She was born Celestine Beyoncé in Galveston in 1954. Her father was a longshoreman and her mother a seamstress who tailored clothes for others and also made them for her family. Tina loved Motown and even had a singing group in high school called the Veltones, which was modeled on the Supremes. She designed their outfits and her mother made them. She loved Motown’s music, but she also loved the style, the berets on the Jackson 5 and the gowns on the Supremes. “I couldn’t wait to see what the Supremes had on,” she told me, “how they had their hair. All those groups were talented, but they had the whole imaging thing too. They looked like stars.”
After her girls were born, she would often go to thrift stores and buy clothes, then customize them for her kids. It wasn’t as though she needed to; Mathew made good money. She just liked to do it. She worked as a beautician and makeup rep, and in 1990 opened Headliners, which, at the time, was one of the biggest salons in Houston, with two dozen chairs. Tina started grooming Destiny’s Child, and later she began designing outfits for them too. Hip-hop culture was all baggy pants and backward baseball caps, and Tina wanted Destiny’s Child to be different. “I always wanted the girls to be glamorous,” she told me. “But for the longest time, nobody at Columbia got us. They’d say, ‘Tina, these girls, they’re so Texas. Can you lay off the makeup and the big hair and high heels?’ But I love big hair and makeup. We here are different than anywhere else in the world. Women here are so well put together.” She worked as hard as Mathew did at getting the girls’ look established, sometimes laying their costumes out on the floor of the salon and working into the night. She has dressed them like Boy Scouts and cowgirls, making them look sexy but glamorous—but never, as the rappers might put it, “stank.” “You can dress sexy without going too far,” Tina said. “I grew up in the seventies. I don’t see anything sexual about a nice flat stomach.” Tina’s design for Beyoncé’s Super Bowl outfit was a tasteful white forties-style skirt and suit jacket; her design for her Grammy appearance one week later was a gold, old-Hollywood-style gown.
“She’s a style icon,” Donatella Versace recently said of Beyoncé. “Her sense of style is perfect for today.” Of course, Versace was complimenting Tina too. Mother and daughter are partnering for an upcoming clothing line, Touchacouture, which Tina says will be out later this year. She will be doing less designing and more culling from other designers for Destiny’s Child, but she’ll still accompany them on tour. Though even there she’s never far from her more traditional family role. In January, while she was on tour with Beyoncé in Europe, a friend of Solange’s was killed, and Tina flew home. “When my seventeen-year-old calls me and says, ‘Mom, I’m sad,’ I have to get on a plane and go.”
She doesn’t have to do that too often. While Beyoncé has been the family project since she was a little girl, Solange is the more independent daughter, the oddball kid sister who seems to enjoy doing things on her own. (In March she surprised many people by jetting to the Bahamas and marrying her boyfriend.) At the Music World studio, I watched her record vocals for her next album (her first, Solo Star, came out last year on her father’s label) and then sit and work on the lyrics. She was like any other high school senior absorbed in writing poetry, only hers was, literally, to her own soundtrack. Solange is waifish and thin, with long hair almost to her waist. At seventeen she is cute on the verge of beautiful. She doesn’t have Beyoncé’s curves, but she says she doesn’t compare herself with her sister anyway. “My family always called me the rebel,” she told me. “I’d always dress differently. I never defined myself by my sister. Beyoncé went along with Mom’s styling because she was so beautiful. I have my own musical ideas, and marketing ideas, and imaging ideas.” Her self-produced second album, she said, has an Alicia Keys-Norah Jones soul-jazz feel. If Solange succeeds, it will be by following young, independent women like them. “I have arguments with my dad about the meaning of success,” she said about the man who built her the grandest of sandboxes. “His meaning: at the end of the day, having something to show for how hard you worked—a wonderful house and wonderful family. My meaning: At the end of the day, I want to feel good about what I’m doing. No regrets. I want to love what I do.”
You can gauge Beyoncé’s progress as a showbiz kid by looking at the covers of her albums. On the front of the group’s 1998 debut, Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé, on the far right, looks the least assured, wearing a meek, doe-eyed look, while the other three face the camera with confident smiles. A year later, on the cover of The Writing’s on the Wall, Beyoncé is out front, a steely look on her face. She was also writing more songs, with credits on almost every track. Those songs were heavy on empowerment themes, urging women to stick up for themselves. “Hey, ladies,” she asks in one, “why is it that men can go do us wrong?”
But the group’s increasing fame—the first album sold more than 500,000, the second more than 10 million—had led to a growing divide between the two women who lived with the Knowleses and the two who didn’t. In fact, two years before, LeToya had sued Mathew to keep him from throwing her out of the group. LeToya’s mother, Pamela, an accountant, claimed in court documents that she had asked Mathew many times for accountings of the group’s earnings; they had never come, she said, and it was because of these requests that he kept trying to boot out her daughter. In December 1999 LeToya and LaTavia, who had each just turned eighteen, sent letters to Mathew to disaffirm their management contracts with him, something that every artist has a right to do once she becomes an adult. Perhaps LeToya and LaTavia were trying to empower themselves, but just as Berry Gordy threw founder Florence Ballard out of the Supremes in 1967, Mathew kicked the two out of Destiny’s Child. A year later he said, “I didn’t fire either of them. They asked to leave … asking to leave [the manager] was asking to leave Destiny’s Child.” But in their letters both girls had insisted they weren’t leaving the group; they just wanted their own managers. Mathew now says, “I had to make a business change. I have four girl groups. In two I’ve had to make changes. That’s the history of female groups, the dynamic of female groups.”
The group got two replacements, Michelle Williams and Farrah Franklin, though Farrah lasted only four months before she too was booted. In 2000 LeToya and LaTavia sued Mathew, Beyoncé, and Columbia and later settled with Beyoncé for $850,000; each side also agreed not to disparage the other (they settled with Mathew in July 2003).
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