Debbie Allen on power, pain, passion and prime time

Ebony, March, 1991 by Laura B. Randolph

DEBBIE ALLEN On Power, Pain, Passion And Prime Time

ONE morning last spring Debbie Allen phoned a fashionable New York boutique in search of an outfit to wear for an upcoming magazine photo shoot. After describing exactly what she wanted, the woman who, more than any other TV director, has become a star in her own right - a celebrity as big as any of her famous cast - got the shock of her life. Yes, she was told, the store had what she wanted. But no, they didn't want it worn in a Black magazine.

"I went off," says Debbie, nestling in the soft leather of her limo's backseat and staring out at the palm tree-lined streets of Beverly Hills. Actually she didn't just go off. She went to the store. "I walked in that store and said, `I know Bill Cosby, Donald Trump and Jesse Jackson, and I will call the world and no one will ever buy your clothes.' When they tried to calm me by saying the clerk had made a mistake, I said, `Really?' Then I want her fired. No, I demand she be fired.'"

As the top Black woman director in Hollywood, and as an internationally acclaimed star of Broadway and television, Allen is used to having her demands met. She made a lot of them in fact when, three years ago, she took over as producer-director of NBC's hit comedy, A Different World.

Though the series has always been highly rated, before Bill Cosby asked Debbie to take charge of the weekly sitcom about life at a Southern Black college, it was pretty much a disaster. The debut season had ended with a seriously unhappy cast, staff and crew, and the resignation of former producer Anne Beatts. "There was a deep morale problem," concedes Debbie.

The first thing she did was watch every episode of the critically panned first season. By the time she clicked off the VCR, she had her finger on the pulse of the major problem: the story lines. They were, she says bluntly, juvenile and trite. "I'm a graduate of a Black college so I have lived what Hillman is all about and it's not about that high school stuff they were dealing with," says the Houston-born cumlaude graduate of Howard University. "College life is about young adults coming of age; about their intellectual, political and sexual maturity, and none of that was being dealt with."

What's more, says Allen with her trademark shoot-from-the-lip candor, the show was too White. "I said `Come on, honey. This is a college where you go to the cafeteria and they have fried apples and grits for breakfast.'"

Vowing to add soul and substance, Allen invited the cast to contribute ideas ("I couldn't believe no one had ever bothered to ask them what they were feeling"), then gathered the writers and insisted on doing the difficult, meaningful material she knew was at the heart of the Black campus experience. In fact, though it isn't public knowledge, many of the most penetrating episodes aren't fiction. They're made-for-TV versions of Debbie's real life.

This season when Jasmine Guy, who plays spoiled Southern debutante Whitley Gilbert, visited a pricey boutique and was snubbed by a White clerk, it was a fictionalized account of what happened to Debbie while shopping for a gift for her husband, former pro basketball star Norman Nixon. "The clerk assumed because I was Black I couldn't afford anything in the store," she recalls of the incident in a Beverly Hills jewelry store.

In a flash of brilliance, the 5-foot-2 star, whose income reportedly tips into seven digits, let the clerk know just how wrong she was. First, she asked to see the most expensive watch in the store, then she drove in the point of the stiletto - and the lesson. "I said `Ring it up. That's the one I want,'" says Allen, who is known to walk it like she talks it.

Similarly when Charnele Brown, who plays premed student Kimberly Reese, found her character dealing with the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy, the subject was very much on the mind of Allen, who'd lived through the experience as a freshman. When a girlfriend confided she was too terrified to see a doctor alone, Debbie agreed to take the test with her. Afterward, the doctor informed Debbie she was pregnant. "I said `Oh no, baby. I haven't done it yet'," she says now, laughing at the memory. (A recheck of the tests revealed they were accidentally switched.)

Since those unforgettable days at Howard, the celebrated dancer/actress/director/producer/choreographer has moved from success to success. She's won acclaim on Broadway (she received two Tony nominations for her performances in West Side Story and Sweet Charity), television (she has two Emmys and a Golden Globe Award for her unforgettable portrayal of dance teacher Lydia Grant on six seasons of Fame), and now that she's behind the camera, she's one of the most sought-after TV directors in Hollywood. (In addition to Different World, she's directed episodes of Family Ties, Quantum Leap, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.)

Privately, however, the journey hasn't been as smooth. In her early 30s after six years of marriage to independent record producer Win Wilford, Debbie realized she wasn't happy. But admitting she wanted a divorce, she says, was the most painful decision of her life. "It was difficult because he was a very nice man," she says of her ex-husband. "But sometimes people just grow away from each other and that's a very painful thing to realize and then decide to do something about.... A lot of people can just stay in a bad relationship and just falter for years and make each other miserable. I decided...that wasn't what I wanted to do."