Eye to Eye with Mr. T

I'm not just rappin' off at the mouth, I know what I'm talkin' about, I can quote Dante, John Donne, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes, I'm not just one of those brothers that only know about boxin' and football, I know what's happenin' in the Middle East, I know all about Omar Qaddafi, I know all about the AWACs missiles and all that, I know about the nuclear bombs and all this protestin', I know about the I.O.U.s, money runnin' out and stocks and bonds, most fellows are one-dimensional, me I am not a conversation dropout."--MR. T

At Dingbat's on Ontario Street in Chicago, they like to remember hard about Mr. T. Ron Briskman, the white and Jewish owner of this get-on-down, all-acrylic black disco, hired T as a bouncer somewhere around 1977. Well, he didn't have much choice; it was either that or be eaten, steak by steak, out of his funked-up son et lumière. Calvin Hollins and John Bitoy were closer to T than Patti and Maxene were to LaVerne. Right now--as Smoke, a dancer in an all-male striptease act, presents us with the dark open sandwich of his body--Calvin will begin reminiscing about T again.

"John and T and me, we didn't go out to murder anybody, but God forbid if any guy touched one of us. This hand's been broken three times for T." The forefinger knuckle is grotesque, almost flat, like a stepped-on melon ball. "John's expert in karate. One night outside Dingbat's, a guy attacked him. John handled him good, but one of the guy's partners came behind and stabbed John in the side. Well. Oh, man. I can't begin to tell you what T did to that guy. He picked him up and bounced him on a fire hydrant about nine times. Up and down on the fire hydrant. Oh, God."

("Oh, God" is right, brother. Take time out here: Just think what it'd be like, getting dropped on a fire hydrant. Over and over again. You know those pointy orange-juice squeezers? The guy must've been nothing more than a wet rind when T got through with him.)

"John bled pretty bad. So T went out to flag a cab down. Well, no cab would stop, the man looked so terrifying. T was there in the middle of the street and cabs were goin' all around him. Finally, T steps in front of one, stops it, grabs the driver, yanks him out, throws John in the back seat and drives the cab to a hospital. Police came, they looked at the guy who did the stabbing and they said, 'We don't know who we should arrest; he's in so much worse shape than you are.'"

T first went to Dingbat's as a well-dressed, 300-pound freeloader. John: "Calvin and I were gonna throw him out one night--he 'hadn't paid to get in--then we looked at each other and said, 'Now, how we gonna do that?' So after a while, he got to helping us and we didn't pay him any fee, but we promised to feed him."

"Amazing man," says Briskman. "He'd dress up and come down here looking like the cat's meow. And he'd have on spats and he'd have a cane. And if somebody gave him a hard time at the door, he'd take the cane and shove it onto the guy's toe and he'd press hard and say, 'I'd like you to know that my temper is as short as my hair.' He was completely bald back then."

"But it got to a point," Calvin recalls, "when Ron looked at my food vouchers and said, 'What is this? What? You've been signing out eight or nine steaks a day.'"

"Yeah." Briskman has to laugh. "I put T on salary then. I decided I'd rather pay the guy than feed him."

•

Poor NBC has to do both. Give T a year, there'll be nothing but peacock bones left. Out in Hidden Valley, California, where The A-Team, his perplexingly successful TV series, is on location today, he has just bankrupted the network lunch wagon. Fish du jour double helping, quart of orange juice, victory-garden-size salad--in one hand. In the other, a steak sandwich. For T, a steak sandwich is two large steaks with one slice of bread between.

"This ain't all for me," he protests. "Got two brothers in my van, they too shy t' come out. Where's my pie?" Whaddya think the T-bone steak was named for?

T is--if Valley-girl hyperbole hasn't made English into a vapid-fog sponge by now--awesome. Even massive. His forearms are certainly tubular. And right now, this 232-pound fallen-rock zone is mad at magazine people. Mad, therefore, at me. Frankly, I'd rather be hated by, oh, Newark or Bulgaria. But you gotta understand T: The man is both generous and mistrustful. One week before, see, he agreed to do a fashion layout for some other magazine, at no fee. T, the mistrustful half of him, doesn't have an agent. "I know I'm just meat out here, man, I don't need someone takin' ten percent of my meat." Yet, after a while, he thinks he should be paid for the spread. Soon he is downright huffy about getting ripped off. Sooner yet, a contact at his production company says, he wants a limousine to pick him up. The poor editor will cave in on that, as you'd cave in if a Scenicruiser asked you for pocket money. But then T orders the limo to follow his car so that he can walk out on the whole damn photo shoot, goombye.

And here I am, that one week later, nerve-wrecked in the Wilshire Manning lobby. This condo joint feels sodden with wealth, full of magenta-haired women and maintenance men who keep changing the dirt in a decorative palm-tree pot because, well, it's dirty. T set himself up at this Wilshire Boulevard address not long ago; what a joke on Whitey--combat boots, bare-arm denim. Sal Mineo would've looked more appropriate playing Jesus on Golgotha. Me, I'm not afraid: I've just got this mental catheter, and it's dripping down the side of my brain. And here he is, driving some cheap, cream-colored Iacocca. Classy and exclusive as the first seating on a coal barge.

I rise. I'm suddenly patriotic in his presence, like before a hockey game or something. T isn't overtall (5'11-1/2"), but neither is a flat-bed truck. He has the bouncy ball-of-foot stride that athletes affect: Imagine throwing your office Coke machine on a trampolin; that'll give some idea. The skull is more part than hair. That distinctive Mandingo hedgerow up its middle may remind you of a sculpted ski mountain in summer; give it some snow and you can see tiny Phil Mahres slaloming down T's neck. Deep, evil furrows whorl at forehead center, as if he'd been tummy-tucked there. T is black-hole dense: He seems to suck in surrounding light. Mine.

He has started talking in this no-period, all-comma Muhammad Ali-sound-alike flume ride of monolog. It'd be easier for me to knit a suit from mozzarella strands than to get any question past him. His nose is flaring. The wild eyeballs stone-wash my head. His mouth is snappish, like somebody biting off one cigar tip after another. We're each seated in a big armchair, and all at once I notice--my God, I notice that his chair is breathing. I mean, when he inhales, exhales, just plain hales, the entire chair goes along. By now, he has looked down at me and said, "Thing that sets me apart from everybody else is--I never had an ego problem." Hey, neither would I, bro, if I wore my furniture.

T is rapping off: about Christian commitment, about Mother, particularly about his positive effect on the ghetto youth of America. I'd get a more responsive interview from Mr. Coffee. So, just to see if my voice will still work, I say, "My two boys watch you all the time."

"Mmmm, brother?"

"And. And. They're white."

T has looked at me, Caucasian me, as if maybe I'd been smoking my toenails in Bambu that afternoon. "They are? Both of them?" Then he spazzes out in a ridiculous te-hee giggle. He has this nimble, boyish grin that could bend your spoon one half block away. Unmitigated charm: The effect, coming out of that Iron Maiden scowl, can disconcert. Rather as though you'd seen Eldridge Cleaver in a spaghetti-strap outfit. And we both have to laugh.

"T is a pussycat," says Dwight Schultz, the brilliant young comic actor who has been playing Mad Murdock on The A-Team. "He doesn't have a private thought, or so it would seem. He's completely forthright and spontaneous. Whatever he thinks comes out immediately; there isn't any seven-second delay."

But T does have one problem: The man could use another finger or two. He has ten gold rings already, including one T-shaped shiner that small craft could take off from. A quarter of a million dollars' worth of gold is looped around his neck, like rope around a bollard. Not to mention seven earrings. If T had been in town when Pizarro was collecting for the United Spanish Appeal, Atahualpa would never have died. In fact, what we've got here is the human equivalent of a vanity license plate. But T will explain.

"Two reasons why I wear gold, one, I can afford it, two, when my ancestors come from Africa, they were shackled by their necks, their wrists, their ankles, I turn those chains into gold, which symbolize the fact that Mr. T is still a slave, only my price tag is higher."

And going way up. T, with his face like a two-minute warning and his outfit on loan from the Vatican collection, has become a sort of live logo for The A-Team. "It bothers other people, maybe, that I'm doing all the promos and whatever, but I'm the one who's selling it. People don't want t' see nobody else up there, you know, I don't mean to sound conceited or cocky, but I just put it where it is."

And what do you think is behind this paroxysm of success? Fear, what else? Nielsen doesn't base his chart system on homes with little black children in them. T, from a young age, has had fun searing the cheese-it out of honkie. This is not a pleasant, chino-colored O. J. Simpson. This is the buck black black who rents space in our worst, middle-class fantasy. Lock your wife up; nothing more terrible than being raped by a stereotype. Although T's A-Team character will turn out to be thoughtful, even soft, danger is always implicit. This man, after all, can break people across a fire hydrant. And has. The sensation is both scary and titillating. T knows it.

"People come up and say, 'You're so mean, I hated you, but I love you, can I have your autograph?' I think people like being frightened." Yes, they do. And since Sonny Liston scared Floyd Patterson and America into false whiskers, no baaad black man has done it better.

His show is often fourth or fifth on the Nielsen chart. Goes to show how salable sheer down-and-out, hard-legged black bad-assness can be. The A-Team, after all, is not a paramilitary Masterpiece Theatre. In fact, you might consider it the neutron bomb reversed: It will destroy property but not people. Since the pilot film, 4,136,442 machine-gun bullets have been fired without anyone's being hit. Those men lack a killer instinct; they could also use target practice. When a jeep gets maxed, nose-diving upside down, the occupant will be seen to worm out from underneath and dust his trouser crease off. The A-Team is violent/surreal--commando soap opera, more or less.

Despite all that ho-daddy bravado (he calls himself One Take T), the man has to work like a posthole digger. T is no graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Before each scene, he will hold his script in both hands, as if to steer by it. On one occasion, the line "Oh, Hannibal, you know I can fix anything" cleft his palate. At co-star George Peppard's suggestion, it was abridged to "Oh, Hannibal."

T is aware of his dramatic shortfall. "You give me too much dialog, that kills what I'm about, people want to see me bustin' through a door, pickin' up something and throwin' it." Yet, after some makeshift rehearsal, his line interpretation improves appreciably. By the last take, he can give a competent if somewhat beaver-boardish performance. Through lunch, he will memorize some more while listening to religious tapes and praying, presumably, for his digestive tract.

Peppard has it in perspective: "To say that T is apt would be an understatement. He's quick; he's very quick. The thing that people don't remember is that he didn't spring out of the crib looking like that, talking like that, acting like that. He created a character and he plays it very well."

•

T had begun to doll up that character even in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes housing project. When you're one of 12 children, you distinguish yourself quickly or they give you a retroactive abortion. Robert Taylor is so monotone glum and depressed, people there can't even afford Central standard time. High-rise, low-rent building after high-rise, low-rent building; you want to serve a subpoena on the whole neighborhood. But young Lawrence Tero stood out.

"In high school, I used to wear white-and-black handmade wrestling boots that cost $110, I used to come in the ring with a robe on, I was special, it pays to be different, white people say all blacks look alike anyhow." Lawrence won the Chicagowide 167-pound wrestling championship twice. That was fortunate: Doesn't matter what they wear, losers have less visibility than a socked-in airport.

In 1970, at the age of 18 or 19, Lawrence Tero became Mr. T. (He had already, in the eighth grade, changed his name from Tureaud to Tero, seeking a persona slowly and diligently, as a dowser with his rod.) He had, so the legend goes, heard both his father (who left home when Lawrence was five) and his elderly uncle called "boy." Now he would be Mister T, thank you. Whatever the rationale, it was rather a precocious, if not a precious, demonstration. If my 18-year-old started signing in as Mr. M, I'd think his wet cell had run down. T, at that time, was also forward enough to father a child, Lesa, out of wedlock.

Soon after, he set out for Prairie View A & M (football scholarship) but went back after just one year. He began working with children in a program backed by Federal funds. Children seem to be his particular constituency. "Here I got an opportunity, I can mold kids' lives, they look up to me, that's what I try to tell them, the producers, in each segment to show me with a kid, that's very important to my character." But by 1975, the Federal slush had melted off. T was out of work, with, it appeared, only a talent for flagging down attention to put on his résumé.

Briskman thinks back. "He used to get dressed up--coat and glasses--and he'd hire a limousine. He didn't have a pot to piss in, and he'd go to the Crystal Ball, a predominantly Jewish affair in Chicago. Two thousand people at $200 a seat or something. He'd walk right in--you don't ask him if he has a ticket--and hobnob with the men and dance with the women. He'd tell me, 'The only way you're gonna get rich is to hang around with the rich.'"

T never had much trouble protecting himself; after all, not many would mug a solid-steel toll booth. So he thought, at that jobless moment, of protecting other people for cash. He joined a National Guard MP unit--it would "look good on paper"--and, right off, broke one fellow recruit's leg in combat practice. He then got some training at the U. S. School for Law Enforcement. In time, he opened a bodyguard-and-entourage service known as Mr. T's Enterprises. It was at that juncture that John and Calvin appeared. The three went into partnership. On and off, their firm landed local jobs escorting rock stars and actors to, then from, arenas and auditoriums. They also set up TCB ("taking care of business" in black jive) Enterprises, Inc.--a concern that would eventually comprise two restaurants, a liquor store and a car-repair shop. Meanwhile, all three continued to bounce for Briskman at Dingbat's.

"I am the best bodyguard," T says, "because I'll take a bullet, I'll take a stab wound, I'll take a hit upside the head, I'm like a kamikaze pilot, the President got shot because his men relaxed, and anyhow, they was lookin' for a black guy with an Army coat on with a natural two feet wide."

And there he might've stayed--human retaining wall for the famous--if Leon Spinks hadn't been so unsurpassably d-u-l-l. In 1978, T became Spinks's duenna throughout a controversial Chicago exhibition. Leon produced such miserable copy (the gap wasn't just between his front teeth) that newsmen, desperate, began concentrating on this bald, gold-plated specimen built like some floor sample from a granite quarry. Great press coverage followed, even one local TV bio. T began to charge $1000, even $5000 per diem--a tremendous rise in the cost of living. But his image wasn't quite barbered yet.

"T felt there were too many bald black men around," Calvin says. "So he decided to go with the Mohawk. He let his hair grow out a bit and we put masking tape on his head to get a straight line."

They did everything together, John, Calvin and T. They worked out and hit many handballs. They ate: Between them, an average breakfast after work could run $85. Together, they didn't drink or smoke. "If a woman lit up a cigarette, we'd all leave," John says. "None of us drink, though T's on a champagne kick right now. We agreed even on the way we liked our steaks done. We didn't agree on women, though. T likes big, ugly women. He'd say, 'Good-lookin' woman start lookin' worse when she take her clothes off, ugly woman start lookin' good when she take her stuff off.'"

In 1978, NBC decided that the ceiling at Dingbat's was too low. Ah? said Briskman. Too low for what? Well, NBC was shooting a segment of Games People Play featuring the Would's Toughest Bouncer contest, and they needed overhead reach to accommodate their crane, and did Briskman know...?

Did Briskman know? It was a serendipitous moment, like when that nifty little fungus sat itself down on Sir Alexander Fleming's Petri dish. Or when Joshua Reynolds invented the mood ring. Briskman knew this perfect club. He also happened to have the World's Toughest Bouncer working for him. NBC had no entry space left, but since Briskman had been so helpful, they let T in. That contest fit him, ummm, to a T. He threw this 120-pound stunt man 17 feet, which was farther than I would trust him. He jumped a bar and broke through four inches of door without knocking. Then, as his coup de gross, he outboxed his nearest competitor. And he did it again in 1979, when the casting director for Rocky III was watching. The rest is Hollywood.

"The reason why I won, you know, and will continue to win whatever I get into, because the cause I represent is far more greater than other guys' causes, see, when I won that contest, I gave that money both times I won to my church, to feed the less fortunate people."

John and Calvin are also devout. Although Catholic, they have often visited T at his place of worship--Cosmopolitan Community Church on south Wabash. (concluded on page 182) Eye to Eye with Mr. T (continued from page 86) Calvin: "It hasn't been, like, maybe five years T got into it. He was going to church, but he wasn't really deeply into it as he is now. We went to his baptism. It was complete immersion. The preacher goes, 'I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,' and he dunks T under. John and me tap our feet. Been down there an awful long time. And the preacher's trying to pull T back up and T is 230 pounds and he can't do it. Had to call some deacons to help bring T up. It was close."

T's devotion to his family--in particular to his mother, who somehow kept one dozen Tureaud children from chilling out on life--is almost obsessive. Mrs. T, a religious woman of simple taste, doesn't much concern herself with the entertainment world. When T appeared in his bouncer competition, he had to hump a TV set up 17 flights so Mother could watch him. He has the following agenda: (1) Buy a home for his mother. (2) Build some sort of community center to serve less fortunate people. (3) Feed 5000, as Jesus did. Right now, Hollywood must seem to him like the miraculous loaves and fishes. But no matter what he may be earning in 1983, his quick generosity could be self-destructive.

"T likes to live. He always did know how to spend money," John can remember. "We used to rent a limousine and ride up and down. T would go to his old neighborhood and just give out money. We didn't have money to give, but we'd give what we had. Show the kids there's another way out of the ghetto. Not just by pimping or dope dealing."

For T, that other way involved hard work and a hot cuspidor full of luck. "I had to beat out 1500 black guys for Rocky III. Joe Frazier, Earnie Shavers, Ken Norton, Jim Brown, all black, brown, darkskinned guys--even Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans." After his initial test, T was given a call-back. John and Calvin scuffed cash together for his plane far to L. A.

Calvin: "Later, T was working the door at Dingbat's. I went down to check on things, and he said, 'I got it. I got a telegram, I got the part.' And we both started crying like two big babies." Sly Stallone had hung his tripe on the sill for T: a brilliant risk.

What he got was this bizarre and powerful character playing this bizarre and powerful character. I mean, which sounds like the fictitious name, Clubber Lang or Mr. T?

Did it work? Does a sheep have public hair?