Slap! I’ve just read Will Smith’s autobiography

Will Smith with Mark Manson, Will, Penguin Press, 2021.

If it hadn’t been for The Slap I wouldn’t have read it at all. Even then I didn’t seek it out. Rather, a neighbor asked me if I wanted to read it. “Sure,” I said (why not?). So he loaned it to me.

From the book’s website:

This memoir is the product of a profound journey of self-knowledge, a reckoning with all that your will can get you and all that it can leave behind. Written with the help of Mark Manson, author of the multi-million-copy bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Will is the story of how one person mastered his own emotions, written in a way that can help everyone else do the same.

You see a problem, don’t you? Having read the book in the penumbra of the slap, I have to wonder about just how profound this journey has been since he seems not to have mastered his emotions yet.

But that’s advertising copy. Will Smith has led his adult life on stage in front of millions and millions of fans. That’s a very strange way to lead a life. One thing that Will makes abundantly clear is that his adult life has been built on an all-but-insatiable need to please and to bask in the approval of others. He had the ability and the drive to harness that need to a spectacular career, but it left him with a problem: What’s his and what’s theirs? Does he have a life at all or is it all performance?

The end, jumping off

The book ends strangely. Will has 21 numbered chapters. The last is entitled "Love" and is about the death of his father, “Daddio” he calls him. But it ends with this wife (p. 494): “Jada and I agreed that we would ride together for this lifetime, no matter what.” But that’s not the last word.

There’s an unnumbered postscript, “The Jump” (495):

We’re about to witness something has never been done before. You’ve read about it, you’ve tweeted about it, and it’s finally here. I’m Alfonso Ribero, and this is ‘Will Smith: The Jump,’ coming to you from the Grand Canyon.

Today, on his 50th birthday, he will face his fears and heli bungee jump over this jaw dropping gorge...This is crazy.”

Yes, it is. It’s not something I’d do. But people do things like that. Former President George H. W. Walker Bush sky-dived to celebrate his 75th, 80th, 90th, and 95th birthdays. The last time was a tandem jump with Bush in a wheelchair. But I don’t think he did it with cameras rolling like Will Smith did. That’s fan service!

What do you make of that? A couple of years of therapy, a bunch of ayahuasca trips, and he’s still playing to the fans. Smith’s book ends with a photograph of him falling out of the helicopter tethered to a bungee cord.

And now he slaps Chris Rock in front of an audience of millions. Why? Because Rock ad-libbed a joke about his wife’s baldness. The joke was not particularly good nor was it particularly nasty. But it was insulting. Still, physical violence, slapping Chris Rock across the face at the Oscar’s ceremony?

It’s beyond me.

From fear to fame

Smith opens by telling us how, when he was eleven, Daddio had him and his younger brother, Harry, construct a brick wall, twelve feet high and twenty long, themselves, brick by brick, day after day, for almost a year (p. vii): “If we can keep it real, this is chain-gang kinda labor.” When it’s all done, Daddio delivers the moral of the story: “Now, don’t y’all ever tell me there’s something you can’t do.”

That was prefatory. The first chapter, “Fear,” begins (p. 1):

I’ve always thought of myself as a coward. Most of my memories of my childhood involve me being afraid in some way–afraid of other kids, afraid of being hurt or embarrassed, afraid of being seen as weak.

But mostly, I was afraid of my father.

When I was nine years old, I watched my father punch my mother in the side of her head so hard that she collapsed. I saw her spit blood. That moment in that bedroom, probably more than any other moment in my life, has defined who I am today.

You connect the dots.

Smith was driven, a pleaser. When he was twenty-one he, along with his DJ partner, Jazzy Jeff, received a Grammy for Best Rap Performance. Starting in 1990 he starred in a sitcom, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, that became a hit. His 1996 role in Independence Day made him a mega-star.

Somewhere during the run of Fresh Prince Smith’s friend and advisor, JL (James Lassiter), had asked (p. 212):

“What are we doin’, man?” [...]
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, everything. There are too many people, there are too many things happening–I can’t function like this. If you want me to help you, I need to know what I’m helping you to do.”
“Shit is goin’ good, J. I think you just not seein’ it.”

JL didn’t buy it, but finally managed to get Smith to cough it up: “I want to be the biggest movie star in the world.” And it was made so.

But it took a lot of work. Smith had a dozen or so close associates on his team. They worked with military discipline and precision. From 2002 to 2008 Smith was in eight movies that opened at the top of the box office (316). “I was running my life like a fight camp.”

That’s one hell of a way to live. Two wives, three children. Something’s got to give.

Bright moments!

As long-time readers of New Savanna know, I’m a musician. And I collect anecdotes about performance. For his third film, Six Degrees of Separation, he OD’d on the Method, that is, method acting, and became completely absorbed in his character (p. 226), “four or five days at a stretch without breaking character.” Then he had to get back to Fresh Prince, but he couldn’t get back to the character. For ten episodes he’d (p. 227) “lost my sense of humor, my timing, my swag, my charisma, and my ability to improvise and ad-lib.”

Think about that for a minute. It’s as though every synapse in his brain got rotated 3.7 degrees. How did Smith rotate those synapses back?

I immediately hired five or six of my friends from Philly to work on the writing staff, on the crew, and to surround me on set while I relearned to play the character of ‘Will.’

It worked. [pp. 227-228]

And then there’s going to church with his grandmother, Gigi, when he was a child. He was nine years old. The Reverent Ronald West would take the pulpit every third Sunday (p. 35):

Reverend West led the choir. He always started off seated, playing the piano with this left hand, directing the choir with his right, calmly leaning into some slow, Mahalia Jackson–style ballad to warm up the elders.

This was just the calm before the storm.

Slowly, he would transform, allowing the music to carry him into a trance. Tears would fill his eyes, sweat building on his brow, as he rummaged for his hanky to clear the fog from his glasses. The drums, the bass, the voices, all rising at his command, as if imploring the Holy Spirit to show itself. And then, like clockwork, an ecstatic crescendo, and...BOOM! The Holy Ghost fills the room. Reverend West explodes from his seat, kicking over the stool, both hands possessed, banging in praise on the piano. Then, with a guttural roar, he blazes across the stage to the three-tiered electric organ, demanding that it do what God intended it to do, swirling massive orchestral Baptist chords, all the while sweat flying; the congregation erupting, singing, dancing; old women passing out in the aisles, weeping; Reverend West pointing, directing, never once losing control of the choir and the band...until his body would collapse in surrender and gratitude for the merciful bliss of God’s love.

As the music settled, Gigi returned to her seat, dabbling tears from her eyes, and my little heart pounding–not even totally what that sweet vibration was inside my body–and all I could think was I wanna do THAT. I want to make people feel like THAT.

He learned how to do it. He performed for Gigi; she loved him, and loved him for it.

In the mid to late 80s, when Smith was in his late teens, he met Jeffrey Allen Townes, who’d spent days in the family basement listing to 10,000 jazz, funk, and blues records his father and brothers had amassed. Jeffrey absorbed it all, becoming Jazzy Jeff, the best DJ in Philly.

One night Smith was booked to do battle at a friend’s party. But his DJ didn’t show. Jazzy Jeff was the other DJ, but his MC didn’t show. They decided they’d hit together (82-83):

There are rare moments as an artist that you cannot quantify or measure. As much as you try, you can barely reproduce them and it’s near impossible to describe them. But every artist knows what I’m talking about–those moments of divine inspiration where creativity flows out of you so brilliantly and effortlessly that somehow you are than you have ever been before.

That night with Jeff was the first time I ever tasted it, the place that athletes call “the zone.” It felt like we already existed as a group and we just had to catch up to ourselves–natural, comfortable, home.

Jeff could sense my rhyme style. He always knew when my jokes were coming, when to drop the track out so people could clearly hear the punch line, and I could tell by which hand he was using what type of scratch was coming. He preferred different scratches with his left hand than with his right. Sensing this, I could draw the audience’s attention to which scratch was coming by which hand he was transitioning to. He was choosing the tracks and adjusting the tempos based on what he felt best accentuated the narrative structure and the flow of my rhymes. And just as the music crescendoed, I’d throw down a dagger of a line and Jeff would drop the beat into the funkiest, hottest, party-rocking shit these Philly kids had ever seen in their lives.

Smith doesn’t talk about any more magic moments – they’re rare – but he and Jazzy Jeff became a team: DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince. They went on win a Grammy.

And so it goes. 

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Here's a video Will Smith put together about his book. When it had been drafted he gathered friends and family together and they discussed the manuscript with him.