Every Day I'm Hustling Read online

  Instead, I hugged him and we kissed. I decided that if I just did as little as possible to set him off, he would stay the Curtis I knew.

  We had one more night in Monte Carlo. A bunch of us went out to a restaurant, and Curtis was actually fun again. I thought, We’re back on track. Later that night we were in bed and I kissed him. He pulled back and kind of put his lips in the little-boy pout position that always signaled trouble.

  “You’ll never love me like I love you,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I like you more than you like me.”

  He left the next morning, and I didn’t know he was keeping a secret from me. I later found out that he had planned to propose on that trip to Monaco.

  Curtis changed his mind after I took the hosting gig. His plan was to rent out a theater in Monte Carlo and show a print he had obtained of Kill Bill. We were going to watch it and at the end, he was going to ask me to marry him. He had a twelve-carat diamond engagement ring.

  I didn’t know any of this until about a year later. Instead of giving me the ring, he had the diamond broken in two. He wore them as earrings.

  He had the ring.

  When I found that out, it broke my heart all over again.

  *   *   *

  When we left Monaco, I had no idea what might have been. I came back to America and I started work on The Salon in Baltimore. I thought everything was fine, or at least as “fine” as I was now used to.

  Then that issue of Today’s Black Woman came out with the huge photo of us on the cover. I had been promised the images of Curtis and me would just be inside and not on the cover. The story was all about me, with him looking like a plus-one. I knew he wouldn’t be happy. I called him right away and left a message saying I didn’t know this was going to happen.

  The next thing I know, my stylist friend Darryl Brown called.

  “Yo, your boy’s on the radio blasting you.”

  “Who?”

  “50.”

  He was going on a rant. That was it. It was the beginning of him telling the world I was a fucking bitch. “She used me,” he said. He was repeating the words of his boys, who had always been trying to convince him that he was whipped: “She used you for fame. You’re on the cover of a girls’ magazine. You’re a pussy. You’re a wimp.” It was their way of getting me back for every time a reporter whooshed by them at an event to ask 50, “What’s it like to date a movie star?” And for the Rolex I got that they thought they deserved. Instead of Curtis coming to me and us attacking this together as a couple, I became the enemy of 50 Cent.

  He got such a reaction out of the first radio interview that it was like he was on the Stomp Vivica tour. He was on the radio daily, assassinating my character. The awful thing was that I was a feel-bad girl working on a feel-good dramedy. The Salon is about a smart hairdresser who owns her own place, but a big corporate company wants to buy up the neighborhood. I’d taken it because I wanted to be in a black ensemble film with a strong female lead who can take care of business and herself. And every day I was crying. All the damn time. I’d start crying in the makeup chair, and they would have to start doing my makeup again. I lost ten pounds because I was too sad to even eat. I look at that movie and see I was gaunt.

  Kym Whitley was on the movie, and every day she would knock on my trailer door and check on me. She is so funny and so kind. She told me to stay strong. “He’s just mad because he’s in love with you.”

  Really? Because this just seemed like some Dr. Jekyll two-faced garbage. He started to up the ante changing his tune, saying I was stalking him. I was in Baltimore making a movie. I wasn’t in his freaking bushes.

  And then something in me said, Push through. Push through.

  He stayed away and gradually stopped talking about me. Then I was in Vancouver working on a guest thing for a show. They put me up in a hotel, and while I was there, I decided to get a facial at the hotel’s spa. The facialist worked my pores and even did the cucumber-slice thing on the eyes. I was so relaxed.

  She left for a moment and then came back in.

  “Uh, Miss Fox, you have a visitor.”

  “Who?” I asked. Who would even know I was here?

  “50 Cent is here.”

  I took off one cucumber slice to look at her and see if this was some kind of joke.

  “He came in here asking for you.”

  “You’re really not kidding,” I said.

  “Would you like him to leave?”

  I paused. “No,” I said. “It’s time for us to talk.”

  “He made us promise not to tell you,” she said with the tiniest bit of fear in her voice. “Can you please act surprised when you walk out?”

  Even she thought this was crazy. Well, I never got dressed so slowly. I wanted to make him wait, and maybe a small part of me hoped he’d give up and leave.

  Finally, I went in the waiting room and there he sat, leaning forward in his chair. I stared at him for a long time, a whole range of emotions going over me. Love, hatred, that feeling of betrayal, but mainly love. Dammit, I thought, you still love him.

  Meanwhile, he began to stand, and his face slowly changed to “Oh, damn, what is she going to do?”

  I walked right over and hugged him.

  “Why did you leave?” I asked quietly. “Why did you leave? Oh my God, why?”

  “Let’s just go somewhere private,” he said. He was Curtis again. That voice I’d missed. “What room are you in?”

  I took him upstairs and we hung out. I ordered room service and I got him his favorite: cheeseburger and fries. We turned on the TV and watched football. Like nothing had ever happened. And as Curtis stared at the screen, he was able to open up without looking at me. He told me how much pressure he was under, and how hard it was to date someone famous. He said his guys said dating me made him look soft. And image was everything in the rap game. He was sorry.

  And I accepted it. I thought that was being a strong woman: You talked all that shit about me and now you’re sorry? Look how strong I am. Look how loyal I am. Look what I am capable of being for you.

  I know now that people do this all the time. You get with someone so toxic that loving them is a test of your strength and you will not allow yourself to fail. You think it’s strong to hang in, but that’s just what you tell yourself so you don’t lose the person you love.

  I say I know this now because I sure as heck didn’t know it then. I just thought, I’ll follow his lead.

  So he started his reappearing act. There were more moments like the Vancouver spa. He showed up at my house, waiting for me to come home. I walked in to find him in my living room, playing with my cat Snookie. Finally, I just asked him: “What’s going on?”

  “I’ve just got to figure out how to handle this,” he said. “I want to be with you.”

  But he didn’t. If he meant it, he would have stood up to his silly friends with their “No Girls Allowed” rules. I never told anybody this, about all the times that he would show up. I never betrayed that confidence because I was still in love with him.

  In 2009, he asked me to be in his video for “Do You Think About Me?” He told me he wanted to shock the world again, like we did at the MTV Awards. He wanted it to be majorly cinematic, with a whole story line. There were two female roles in the video. One was the new girl, and the other was a caricature of the “psycho ex,” slashing tires, going crazy in front of the mirror. He thought it would be funny if I played the new girl. And fool me said, “I’ll do this for you because I care about you, and I know it will get more attention for you if I play the crazy chick.”

  He paid me $25,000 to do the video, flew me to New York, and gave me a huge trailer. He greeted me in my trailer and thanked me. “You know you’re my first wife,” he said. “We just never actually got married.”

  My friend Tamala Jones from Two Can Play That Game played his new love interest, and she told me that Curtis spent the whole time saying he had don
e me wrong and he loved me. She told this to me like it was a revelation, but it was just more mind games. I noticed he had a lot of young guys around him, buzzing about. A new generation of boys telling him how to act.

  Curtis went on another radio show, playing 50 Cent and talking about all the women who were supposedly after him just because he worked with them. “Wait till you see my next video,” he said on the show. “What are they gonna say when they see Vivica Fox?” The DJs didn’t believe him and asked why in the world I would do that since he had been so cruel to me. They even asked if we were having sex again, and he chose to play coy. “No, we weren’t sexually active,” he said, then paused. “At the video.” He got the laughs he wanted.

  He called me on New Year’s 2010, but I didn’t pick up. I was with someone else and had already decided I needed to move on. That chapter of your life is over, I told myself. I’d had a great love, and Curtis shrunk from that greatness. I was proud that I tried and that I believed in love. I didn’t feel weak.

  *   *   *

  He had one more trick up his sleeve in his reappearing act. It was the May 2013 premiere of Will’s movie with his son Jaden, After Earth. It was a family kind of night, and I was sitting in the theater feeling very happy to be part of the Smith extended family.

  Someone tapped my shoulder and I turned.

  It was Curtis. “What’s up?”

  I stood up and we hugged. Every headline about him had been drama lately, and he was staring at me so intensely. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m all right,” he said in a little-boy voice. “I’ll call and I’ll talk to you soon.”

  There was something concerning about it. “I’m serious,” I said. “Let me know if you want to talk.”

  “I will,” he said. “I’ll find you.”

  Instead, he kept talking about me. Which was fine—I convinced myself I could take it. But then he went after my Empire family. I was cast in the second season of Empire, getting to work with my friends Taraji P. Henson, Terrence Howard, and Jussie Smollett. Being with them is like a family reunion. And they were also in Curtis’s sights.

  By then, Curtis had moved from radio dissing to using Instagram as his weapon of choice. I guess he felt Empire was eclipsing his Starz show, Power, and so he hit out against them a few times. On October 15, he reposted an Instagram saying Empire’s ratings had declined because of all “the gay stuff.” (He later deleted it and sent his rep out to say he hadn’t read the whole thing and missed the homophobia.) I was so sad because I suspected “the gay stuff” was code for Jussie Smollett, who came out in March 2015. I have known Jussie since he was seven years old, working with his five amazingly talented siblings. We used to hang out and eat french fries, talking about movies. The kids called themselves the von Trapps, but I remember them most as the first vegetarian family I knew. I love Jussie with all my heart. The antigay remarks really bothered me because here is someone working his ass off and it’s dismissed out of sheer pettiness.

  So in November 2015, Andy Cohen had me on Watch What Happens Live. We talked about me being on Empire for the second season, and he asked me what I thought about 50 Cent’s comments about gay themes ruining the show. I went on autopilot and I let my anger do the talking. “First of all, you know, ‘the pot called the kettle black’ is all I’m saying,” I said. “He’s not,” I continued. “I mean, we had a great time. He just seems like he’s got something that’s not quite clear.” It was an incredibly clumsy way of saying it.

  Well, that did it. I didn’t hear from him directly, but he slammed me on his Instagram. “Oh No!!!, Now she thinks I’m gay because I let her lick my Ass. LMAO. Wait, I didn’t want her to, she forced me, my hands were tied. 50 shades of grey.”

  Listen, I’m a grown-ass woman. If that was my kink and what I was into, then I would do it. Our lovemaking was so cherished and special to me that it hurt to see him make up stories. But he did get a reaction out of it. So of course he didn’t stop.

  Once my episodes aired, he went after my Empire family big-time. He posted a side-by-side of me and some poor woman with a misshapen face. “I don’t know why people would want to cross me,” he wrote. “I would stay out of my way, if I wasn’t me because I’m gonna keep winning.”

  Taraji—an Oscar and Emmy nominee and Golden Globe winner, mind you—came to my defense with a comment on his post. “I prob should leave this alone but I despise bullies,” she began, before suggesting that perhaps 50 should just be happy for others.

  When he responded to Taraji, he told her he hoped she could eat her trophies. Jussie came right to the defense of Taraji and me, his on-screen mom and auntie, saying 50 should hold up women, not tear them down. “You’re in your 40s brother. It’s time to leave all childish, pettiness behind.”

  I had brought this to them. He was aiming for me, and he took on my Empire family to hurt me. Jussie, my french-fry-eating boy turned gorgeous leading man; Taraji, who I watched work for fifteen years to win success without sacrificing her principles; Terrence Howard, who I knew when we were starting out, talking about how we were going to make it. People who work so hard, freezing their asses off filming in Chicago to put out a hit show. People who defy all odds to be a black ensemble show that everyone wants to watch.

  He could say what he wants about me, but not my family. I decided I would no longer protect him. When he went on Watch What Happens Live in December 2016 to spout more lies about me, I let him have it on my Instagram. The devil can only tempt me so much.

  *   *   *

  I thought it would just end with that note of anger, but the Lord intervened. I was in New York City to promote Vivica’s Black Magic right after the 2017 New Year. I had a night off, so I decided I would take up Madison Square Garden’s offer of courtside seats for the New York Knicks–Orlando Magic basketball game.

  Right before we left the hotel, my friend and publicist BJ Coleman got a message.

  “Okay, I gotta tell you something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “50 is going to be there tonight.”

  “Really,” I said. But then I thought about how I had been talking up this trip to New York on my social media. In his defense, he does love basketball almost as much as I do.

  I looked in the mirror. I had my hair up, and I wore black leather jeans and a gray knit sweater. I completed the look with above-the-knee Michael Kors boots and a Helen Yarmak light fur to fend off the New York chill. I was glad I listened to one of my rules: Always look good—you never know who you’ll run into.

  My friend and I got to MSG early, where we were met by a lovely woman who was panicked about the double booking of me and 50 Cent. She kept apologizing. “Um, just so you know,” she said, “you’re on one end and he is on the other. You guys aren’t by each other.”

  “Honestly,” I said, “I am okay. Listen, I don’t have a problem with him being here.”

  I went up to a small VIP area to kill time before the game and I was so excited because there was Cate Blanchett, with her handsome son. Curtis left my mind immediately. I fanned out, and decided I just had to say hi. She is so amazing, and has shown such versatility on the screen. She is a star, and that sometimes makes it hard for actresses. You run the risk of watching her work and saying, “There’s Cate Blanchett playing Queen Elizabeth” or “Oh, there’s that Cate Blanchett again, this time playing a 1950s lesbian.” But she does a disappearing act on-screen, and surrenders herself to the role.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. She turned and I stuck out my hand. “I’m Vivica—”

  “Vivica Fox!” she shouted with a smile.

  You get so excited about people that you think they don’t know you, and she did. I don’t know if her son saw Kill Bill or Independence Day because he couldn’t have been sweeter, too.

  “I just love your fashion sense,” I told her.

  “Oh, honey, talk about fashion,” she said, gesturing to me with her glass of Chardonnay. �
�Look at that coat.”

  It was such a vote of confidence. We were all brought to our seats, and my friend ordered a Maker’s Mark, neat. I thought to myself, Honey, you might need a bourbon for this.

  “Make it two,” I said. “But put a lot of ice in mine.”

  It was an A-list night. Besides Cate, there was Ron Howard, Michael J. Fox, Matt Lauer … and there he was, Curtis. He came in wearing a green bomber jacket, tan-gray acid-washed jeans, and a white baseball cap.

  Just as I practiced a face of “I see you, and I’m the coolest cucumber at the grocery,” the jumbotron played a clip of Independence Day: Resurgence. Then the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Vivica A. Fox!”

  They went to a live shot of me. I had that drink in my hand, so I toasted everybody and said, “Happy New Year, darlings!” I was the first celebrity attendee up on the screen, so people were primed to cheer. I’m an L.A. girl, so to have that huge New York crowd cheering for me felt amazing.

  At halftime we were brought up to the private lounge. The place looks like an elegant old cigar lounge, dark with gold accents. There are about ten tables with a few couches, and you sit there in an atmosphere of “good ol’ money.”

  Cate walked by. “Hey, girl,” she said.

  “Hi there,” I said.

  I sat at my table with my friend BJ. “Oscar winner Cate Blanchett just hey-girl’ed me,” I said. “Damn, hashtag life is good.”

  I spotted Curtis walking in with his little entourage. He took a table across the room, and the VIP lady came nervously over to me.

  “He wasn’t supposed to come up here,” she said.

  “Sweetheart, I am telling you, it’s okay.”

  “I just…”

  I was mortified that someone so kind and so good at her job was worried about something as trifling as adults who can’t be in the same arena together.

  “I tell you what,” I said. “I’ll prove it. I’m just going to go over and say hi.”

  Her eyes widened. Like she could hear the ding-ding at the start of a boxing match. This was MSG after all.