Will Smith: A brutal childhood, and that slap
As a kid, Will Smith watched his father beat his mother. He spent the rest of his life punishing himself for not acting.
When Will Smith was nine years old he watched his father beat up his mother. He punched her so hard on the side of her head, Smith wrote in his memoir, 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.”
Everything he has done since, he continued, “has been a subtle string of apologies to my mother for my inaction that day. For failing her in that moment. For being a coward.”
On Sunday night at the Academy awards, Smith got up from his front-row seat, strode onto the stage and hit the comedian Chris Rock, hard, live on air. Rock had made a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who has been open about her struggle with alopecia and her decision to shave her head rather than cope with daily hair loss.
“Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me,” a shocked Rock told a stunned audience, who were unsure at first whether the fracas was part of the script. Smith returned to his seat, shouting, “Keep my wife’s name out your f***ing mouth.”
Twenty minutes later, Smith was back on stage to accept the award for best actor. He apologised to the academy, the audience and fellow nominees but not to Rock, with whom he has had a long-running feud since Rock made another public joke about Pinkett Smith in 2016. In a rambling and emotional acceptance speech a sobbing Smith said: “Love will make you do crazy things.”
Willard Carroll Smith II was born on September 25, 1968. “From the moment I showed up, I was a talker,” he has said, “always smiling and babbling away. Even at that age I loved having an audience.”
His father, Willard Smith, known as Daddio, was a refrigeration engineer and an alcoholic with a brutal temper.
Father ruled by fear, force
His mother, Caroline, known as Mom-Mom, was one of the first black women to attend Carnegie Mellon, a prestigious university in Pittsburgh. Smith grew up with his younger twin siblings, Harry and Ellen, and his mother’s daughter, Pam, from her first marriage.
The family lived on a tree-lined street in a middle-class area of Philadelphia. For a young black family in the 1970s it was, Smith wrote, “as American dream as you could get”.
Daddio ruled his family by fear and force. He was also, Smith has noted, a devoted father who went to every sports match and every play and, later, every recording studio and movie premiere.
“Most of the times I got hit during my childhood I didn’t think I’d earned it,” he wrote later. A careless word, or a misinterpreted look, could lead to “a belt on my arse or a fist in my mother’s face … My father tormented me. And he was also one of the greatest men I have ever known.”
‘I was the weak one’
Smith’s elder sister and younger brother reacted to their father’s violence by fighting back. Smith decided to be funny, using humour to deflect his father’s drunken rages. “In a family of fighters, I was the weak one. I was the coward.”
He grew up listening to early hip-hop and at school used rap to turn himself from a goofy kid with bizarre taste in clothes into a popular teacher’s pet. One teacher started jokingly calling him Prince Charming. One day Smith teased that actually from now on she had to call him the Fresh Prince. The whole class burst out laughing and the name stuck.
His mother hoped he would go to college, but Smith announced instead that he was going to be a rap star. In 1985 he met Jeff Townes at a house party thrown by a mutual friend, and together they became DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. They started out playing at birthday parties for local teenagers, but eventually secured a global No 1 hit with Summertime. In 1989, when Smith was 21, they became the first hip-hop act to win a Grammy. Smith himself was clean-living but, young and newly wealthy, he started hanging out with drug dealers, ran through all his money, underpaid his taxes and, in 1990, borrowed $10,000 from one of his dealer friends to move to LA and become the biggest film star in the world.
He met the super-producer Quincy Jones at a party and, only six weeks after he arrived in LA, found himself auditioning for the head of NBC at Jones’s birthday party. Six months later came the premiere of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a sitcom about a boy from Philadelphia who goes to live with his aunt and uncle in Bel-Air. It ran for six series and made Smith an international star.
Although Smith later admitted that while he was “fairly average” on talent, he believes that what gave him the edge was his work ethic and ferocious self-discipline.
It was also on the set of Fresh Prince that he met Jada Pinkett, who auditioned for the role of his character’s girlfriend. She didn’t get it, but in 1995 he and Pinkett started dating, after he split up with his wife of three years, the actress Sheree Zampino, the mother of Trey, his eldest child. Pinkett and Smith married on New Year’s Eve 1997, when she was three months pregnant with Jaden, their son, who was followed three years later by a daughter, Willow. Jaden, now 23, started acting as a teenager while Willow, 21, released a hit record when she wasn’t yet ten years old. She now models, co-hosts a Facebook talk show, Red Table Talk, with her mother and grandmother, and performs at big music festivals.
Marriage ‘can’t be a prison’
Smith and Pinkett separated in 2011 but got back together. In 2015 she said: “I’m not the kind of woman that believes that a man’s not gonna be attracted to other women … it’s just not realistic.”
In a post on Facebook she later said that there were “more important things to talk about” than whether she had an open marriage or not. Last summer, they addressed the issue on Red Table Talk in a post viewed by 15 million people in 24 hours. Smith has written that Pinkett Smith always “had questions about the viability of monogamy”. She has admitted to an “entanglement” with August Alsina, an American singer-songwriter, while she and Smith were separated. Alsina has said that Smith gave them his blessing.
“We have given each other trust and freedom,” Smith told British GQ last year, “with the belief that everybody has to find their own way. Marriage for us can’t be a prison.” Pinkett Smith recently said that they are now in a place of “unconditional love”.
While Fresh Prince was still on air, Smith had turned his ambitions to the big screen. He was told by the studios that African-American leads didn’t sell to an international audience but he won a part in a small indie film in 1993 and later an action film, Bad Boys. His breakthrough came in 1996 as part of an ensemble cast in Independence Day, which took more than $800 million worldwide, followed a year later by the first Men in Black film. He now holds the record for the most consecutive $100 million-plus hits at the US box office and has been nominated for best actor at the Oscars twice before: in 2001, for playing Muhammad Ali, and in 2007, for his role as a salesman in The Pursuit of Happyness. On Sunday night, 20 years after that first Oscar nomination, he finally won, for his role in King Richard as Richard Williams, the father of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.
‘No excuse’
Rock has told police that he does not want to press charges, but others have called for Smith to be stripped of his statuette.
“There is no excuse for what he did,” the actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner tweeted. “He’s lucky Chris is not filing assault charges. The excuses he made tonight were bullshit.”
Mark Hamill, of Star Wars fame, called it “the ugliest Oscar moment ever. Stand-up comics are very adept at handling hecklers. Violent physical assault … not so much.”
Smith’s son Jaden hit back, tweeting: “And That’s How We Do It”.
“It was kind of hard to watch,” Rebel Wilson, who was in the audience, told Radio 4’s Today program, adding that what should have been the best night of his life “might have some repercussions”.
Attempting to calm and comfort Smith alongside Bradley Cooper, Denzel Washington warned him, “At your highest moment, be careful. That’s when the devil comes for you.”
At the Vanity Fair after-party Smith appeared in good spirits, joking “you can’t invite people from Philly nowhere”. He was greeted by cheering friends and colleagues, and spent the evening dancing and rapping to his biggest hits until the early hours alongside his wife and children, and stars including the Williams sisters, Kim Kardashian, Kevin Costner and Natalie Portman. In his memoir, Smith offered an insight into the flawed man behind the feted actor.
“No matter how successful I have become, no matter how much money I’ve made or how many No 1 hits I’ve had or how many box office records I’ve broken, there is that subtle and silent feeling in the back of my mind: that I am a coward; that I have failed; that I am sorry, Mom-Mom. So sorry.”
The Times
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