My Dinners With Andre K. Braugher

Not diminished at all by either the passage of time, or the death of the man, himself.

In Emperor Jones, Braugher as Jones and me as the ghost of Lem.

On December 11, 2023 my phone kept buzzing. Text after text in what could only be some sort of jamboree of misery, this was familiar to me and I knew, and was fairly certain, this was no kind of good news. And since preparing for bad news is the better part of dealing with bad news, I made believe the phone didn’t exist until I was ready, only to learn what you can never be ready for: the passing of a peer. Or more than a peer, an actual friend.

See, to call Andre K. Braugher — he had always told me that the K stood for Kathleen and not Keith as reported by the papers — a peer implies some sort of peerage, something increasingly hard to do with someone without peer and much less descriptive than friend. And friend works better anyway.

In 1980, Stanford University in some sort of visionary thinking must have figured that all of the Black guys in our freshman dorm would feel better actually living directly across the hall from each other. Even if we couldn’t have been more different.

Braugher had come to Stanford on a scholarship underwritten by a company that had fully expected at the end of four years he’d be some version of a chemical engineer. I’d come to Stanford on a Times Mirror Scholarship underwritten by a company that had fully expected I’d become a newspaper man. But Braugher had read the small print and had a sense that other options, pretty much any other option, would be more interesting than a future as chemical engineer. And they had to pay no matter what he wanted to study.

“I want you to play Lem as a bush!”

“Does a bush have lines?”

“Unless you’re Moses, I think I’m going to have to say that bushes don’t actually talk.”

So why not take some acting classes, and do some plays, which aligned well with my interests as well? While I was too punk rock to be bothered by the theater kids in high school, at Stanford it seemed a good place to find folks interested in the arts. Versus pre-med. Or pre-law. And the first offering that caught our eye was The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, a play by David Rabe.

Before we were getting PTSD from overdosing on Vietnam War movies, this still held some cachet and the director had imported Joe Treen, a journalist and former military guy, to help with not only the language but military accuracy. Andre had pulled the roll of Ardell, Pavlo’s bad-ass alter-ego. I had pulled Sgt. Tower, the sadistic drill sergeant. Big roles. But Steve Vineberg, the Canadian director, had envisioned that Tower would be a Southerner.

Fresh off the boat, so to speak, I was so much from New York that it was Tony Curtis comical — Bronx-native Curtis as some figure of classical antiquity in some play famously rendered this line “Yonder lies da castle of my faddah” — and after two weeks of rehearsing, my attempts to sound southern were shitcanned. Letting me proceed apace as the sergeant sadist.

But Braugher hit it from the outset, having spent the summers in Mississippi with family, and beyond that showed me a level of dedication and focus for a role that very much carried the whole play. While professional performances of the play had made Rabe a star, it also did the same for Andre and the reviews reflected this.

It also marked a curious decision at an inflection point I’d later recall at a crucial time: “I’m done doing roles that require me to use the accent.” He was speaking, specifically, of that Black southern accent and some incident with Black theater folks at Stanford where they had given him the high hand, had cemented this.

He went on to theater study classes, and voice for theater actors while I drifted into music which I, fundamentally, found more honest. I’d never had someone come backstage to tell me that I had sucked after a play. I had had plenty of audiences, unburdened by a need to be nice, tell me I sucked when playing music though. And were it to have been so, I definitely welcomed hearing it. It also never dawned on me that it wasn’t so, but music makes the “so what? of this stick. Acting? Well, leaving it in the hands of the critics never made sense to me.

But we met up again, outside of every day and every meal, and every bullshit session, during a production of Emperor Jones where he and I would compete for the first time, head to head, for the role of Jones. Andre was a lock. But the role of Lem, a man he kills in a dice game, was juicy and I’m totally cool with second banana status.

[A] future of bush playing in the wake of Andre’s immense talents seemed…pointless.

“I’ve got a great idea!” The director Rush Rehm, an actor, director, and professor of Theater and Performance Studies and Classics at Stanford was one of those great idea guys. “I want you to play Lem as a bush!”

“Does a bush have lines?”

“Unless you’re Moses, I think I’m going to have to say that bushes don’t actually talk.”

So I spent the run of the play acting like a bush. A scary haunted bush (see photo above). And doing movement drills where I could explore the bushier aspect of my personality and my performance ethos. Because there are no small roles, just small actors.

Yeah: fuck that.

I was playing a bush and the chasm widened. Braugher had a lot to love though and when the play was going to go to Berkeley Rep after its Stanford run everyone was excited. Just not me. So I begged off of Berkeley Rep. I had Whipping Boy shows planned and a date with a mohawk haircut. I said I wouldn’t be doing it and showing up to the cast party with the haircut solidified it.

The play went to Berkeley Rep. I did not. And only years later did I realize that Andre had stopped talking to me because of this. For a year at least. Which, in the face of art antagonism, what maybe I was in this instance, was the right response. But acting never filled that art itch for me. With music I could write the words I’d be performing, perform them and get an honest rendering of whether we sucked or not, nightly. It was emotionally satisfying for me in a way that acting wasn’t. Also a future of bush playing in the wake of Andre’s immense talents seemed…pointless.

Our friendship survived, ultimately, I mean I’d seen all the rest of his plays, and after graduation and his move to New York to do Juilliard, we decided to drive to New York together. Me to do some music and family stuff, him to start his professional life. We made it in two days and eighteen hours. That’s even stopping at his family’s house where his mother when asked if we looked alike, something that had always irked me when people confused us and which I chalked up to Anglo myopia, she confirmed, “oh, yes. You two DO look alike.” Irking me no less.

He went on to the Royal Shakespeare Academy after Juilliard and was off to the races. Years later while on the set of the execrable Leonard Part 6 with accused rapist Bill Cosby, I had discovered that Andre was on the set of Glory. So I set about, before cellphones, calling him. From my set to his set, it seemed a cool bookend with both us Stanford actors ending up doing our first movies at the same time.

They called him to the phone and he picked up to me laughing. Since it made sense to me, I assumed it would make sense to everyone but Andre was method through and through and the conversation with me played like it would have with his character in Glory. And that’s where the chasm widened. His character actually had a name and mine, Guard #3, did not. We were not the same.

Moreover, it dawned on me that I was an ass for playing that we were. He was a No-Plan B guy, and I had heard the whispers as our Resident Fellow bemoaned “the chance” he felt Andre had squandered by wandering off of the reservation to pursue a field littered with failure. I had heard the critiques and I felt protective about his choices since I was a Plan B guy and had to beg my Silicon Valley bosses for time off to do the movie, and so I knew Plan B’s suck.

But though Andre had driven a cab to make ends meet, when and where he had started smoking I believe, there was never any flinch or give: he would be what he felt he truly was. An actor. And I’ve always favored the bold and daring and this was nothing if not that.

And that was TV shows, films, awards, celebrity and great work besides. From comedy to drama, Andre did it all, and killed it all. Up to and including getting called out in 1997 by People magazine as one of the world's 50 most beautiful people. A turn of events that I found as amusing as when I told the Beastie Boys that they were NEVER going to make it right after they had told me that they were going to start doing hip hop.

We lost touch and I had not had the occasion to call forth him or his memory until I was on set with Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson, insulted by me in the first 30 seconds we met, apparently, was stonewalling me during our subsequent interview for a cover story for a new fashion magazine. A set of circumstances that caused me to have to go to the nuclear question. This question, usually asked at the end, is designed to be the edgiest question, asked at the end so as not to imperil a mostly completed interview, and Jackson made me Hail Mary it since he was giving me nothing.

“The actor Andre K. Braugher told me that he would never do another role where he was called upon to use what would be considered the stereotypical ‘black’ accent,” I started. “How does that hit you?”

Some journalist had once dismissively critiqued Robert DeNiro as a “professional Italian American” and this was a swing at Mr. Motherfucker This and Mr. Motherfucker That. How did it feel to be a “professional African American”?

This stopped Jackson in his tracks, and he puzzled over it for the entirety of the remainder of the interview, giving me one of the better interviews I’ve ever read with him. So, thank you Andre.

And when I finally looked at the texts and the news carrying to me his passing from this planet, after he had succumbed to lung cancer, I was stricken. Then pleased. Pleased in the way I am each and every time I hear that potboiler “My Way”, and that’s that Andre had not, as far as I know, ever and never, crawled, and certainly not away from the one and only “option” for him.

So he leaves behind his mom, and a wife and sons, but more so than this the face of total commitment to a course of action deemed unwise by many but totally necessary by a few. That is, to thine ownself be true. You’re g-ddamned right.

Rock on brother. Rock on.

A pic we took to convince his parents he was “working hard”.

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