The real-life Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: television and recording tycoon Benny Medina proves that Hollywood life can be stranger than Hollywood fiction

Ebony, April, 1991 by Laura B. Randolph

The Real - Life Fresh Prince of Bel - Air

IT'S DINNER hour at Spago on a star-filled Hollywood night, and as the maitre d' escorts a young Black man to the restaurant's most coveted table, eyebrows raise, heads turn, and who-is-this-guy whispers are exchanged. This is, after all, L.A. and, as everyone here knows, no seating at Spago, where the A-list stars routinely dine, is ever an accident. Not at dinner time--power hour--when mega deals are served for dessert. And never at the window table overlooking Sunset. This is the spot to see and be seen, and the good-looking Black man in blue jeans and day-old designer stubble fills it with the inner knowledge that he earned it.

Benny Medina, the real-life Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, has arrived at the top of the heap in the real-life world of Hollywood. Even the NBC execs seated at a nearby table come to Medina to pay him his due. The only person not going slack-jawed at Spago tonight is the object of all the commotion--Medina himself, the bachelor TV tycoon and music magnate. "I guess I have come a little distance," says Medina, the 32-year-old vice president/general manager of Black music at Warner Bros., the co-producer of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the hit NBC show that is based on his life story.

"A little" distance? Hardly. Medina has gone the distance, from the East Los Angeles ghetto where he was born to the Hollywood Hills neighborhood where he's now livin' large. In a way it's that journey that keeps him grounded. For although he was a millionaire before he turned 30, Medina knows that, as a kid, he couldn't have even gotten a job busing tables at Spago.

So how did all this--the Mercedes Coupe (convertible, two phones), the house in the hills (backyard pool, drop-dead view), the Lakers tickets (season, courtside)--happen? That's easy. He dreamed it. Then he made it happen.

Benny Medina has spent his whole life dreaming dreams and refusing to succumb to cruel twists of fate that would have sucked the soul out of most men. Twenty-four years ago, his childhood was shattered when his mother died and his father abandoned him. "My earliest childhood memory," he says, "is a green room. That was the color of the walls in the home I was put into after my mom died of cancer."

Growing up with four brothers and sisters in Watts, Medina was used to being poor, but he was at least loved. But after he lost his mother and his father disappeared, he was dumped into a series of foster homes where he was never really wanted. "They were more interested in the checks than me," he says. So he ran away from home after home, returning each time to the state institution.

To quell the loneliness, he'd sit for hours staring at the green walls, dreaming that he was a dashing young Hollywood tycoon, living on a mountaintop, driving a Mercedes and dining at chic restaurants like Spago.

A year after his mother's death, an act of love opened a new and painful chapter in his life. To keep the family together, his aunt took Medina and his brothers and sisters out of various foster homes into her own home.

"The seven of us," Medina remembers, "lived in a three-room house. I slept in ... the living room, and I still have this thing about falling asleep on couches. "But it wasn't the family's lack of money that distressed him--it was the beatings regularly administered, he says, by his aunt's new husband. "He had a very short fuse," Medina says, "and it would lead to him grabbing the nearest thing he could, and it usually turned out to be an iron cord or an extension cord."

His uncle, Rozzell Sykes, remembers it differently. Yes, he says, he whipped Medina with a broom and an iron cord, but it was discipline, not abuse. "I had to shock him," Sykes explains.

Whatever it was, Medina was desperate to get away from it. Hanging out on the streets, he hooked up with a bad crowd. "It was me and these six cats," he says. "We were selling joints and Red Devils [amphetamine pills]. We had a little house that we rented out and, at 12 years old, we were throwing rum punch parties..."

Tragically, he was the only one of the group to make it off the streets. Ironically, it was Sykes who indirectly provided the ticket. A talented artist, Sykes had founded a community arts center which attracted wealthy visitors. One of the visitors was 9-year-old Allen Elliott, a rich White kid from Beverly Hills who like Medina, Medina sensed, "needed a friend." Although Allen was five years younger, the two forged a lasting friendship ("We became brothers"), and Medina saw his way out. He begged Allen's father, Jack Elliott, a prominent TV and film composer, to let him move in. Elliott turned him down, but his wife Bobbi interceded. "i had an unhappy childhood," she says today, "so maybe that's why we reached out to one another."

Living in the refurbished garage behind the Elliott house, Medina entered Beverly Hills High School--and a new world. "The gym," he recalls, "had a swimming pool, the football team had uniforms and the photography class had Nikon cameras." Medina seized the hour and the opportunities and became class president, a starting fullback and drama club star.