The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Why Will Smith’s Oscars slap was ‘Holy’
Jada Pinkett Smith’s memoir lifts the lid on her marriage, but drowns the juicy gossip in psychobabble
416pp, Fourth Estate, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£ 25, ebook £12.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
What was Jada Pinkett Smith’s state of mind, when her husband mounted the Oscars stage and slapped Chris Rock in March 2022? We wade through 95 per cent of her memoir, Worthy, to get to that moment, and it isn’t really worth the wait. Not when she starts calling it “the Holy Slap” – a springboard to personal growth.
At first, like many viewers, she assumed it was a skit; then she realised it wasn’t, but didn’t understand. Only when she heard the word “wife” yelled by Will did something click. “This is when sixteen-year-old Jada appeared,” she writes. “I’m back in a club back in Baltimore, a fight has broken out, and s--- could start popp’n.”
Smith grew up closely acquainted with violence and rage. Soon after she was born, “an argument got out of hand”, and her father, Robsol, punched her mother, Adrienne, in the stomach, an assault that swiftly led to them divorcing.
As a teen, she was a mid-level drug dealer on Baltimore’s streets, repeatedly mugged at gunpoint.
Such ordeals, and her more recent battles with alopecia, have given her a steely armour, a not-to-bemessed-with quality you can spot a mile off. But vulnerability has still blighted her adulthood. The book begins with her battling suicidal depression in 2011. She hatched a plan to swerve her car off a steep cliff on Mulholland Drive: “a fatal accident that wouldn’t look intentional – for the sake of my kids”.
Those children – Willow, Jaden, and Jada’s stepson Trey, from Will’s first marriage – come off the page like her guardian angels. But without the psychoactive drug ayahuasca, which she imbibed, starting in 2012, in night-long ceremonies orchestrated by an unnamed Medicine Woman, Smith is certain she wouldn’t have made it.
As this genre dictates, everything gets framed within a healing journey – admittedly, an ongoing one – towards a state of higher being, in which Smith finds a happy accord with “the Great Supreme”. But the book’s juice (and there is some), is diluted by a torrent of psychobabble.
Smith seems to have inhaled every self-help text under the sun, and before each of Worthy’s 22 chapters, she stops for a tutorial, quoting nuggets of wisdom and asking the reader direct questions (“Can you recognise patterns in your life and relationships that stem from inherited trauma cycles?”). It’s a lot.
Smith’s intense relationship with Tupac Shakur nestles deep down in all this. She and “Pac” met at 15 and became inseparable; when she visited the rapper at Rikers Island prison in 1995, following his incarceration for sexual assault, she reveals that he actually proposed to her, but they’d long ago resigned themselves, by her account, to there being “no romantic chemistry between us … at all”.
She ducked the question, and was, of course, devastated by Tupac’s murder in 1996, turning her back forever on her “love for hiphop or the streets. It was all dead to me.” By then, her courtship with Will – just graduating from squeaky-clean Fresh Prince to Hollywood megastar – was well under way. Glimpses of this famously fraught marriage tantalise by making a show of pulling back the curtain. We get deep and meaningful conversations, hints of great sex, and fuming rows every chapter or two. “Living on edges of our own making and driving each other absolutely crazy. Sometimes joyfully and other times with great … dislike.”
She confirms rumours that the couple have been separated since 2016 – but not divorced, still diligently co-parenting, and on supposedly good terms, though in 2020, she admitted to one particular “entanglement”, an affair with then-23-year-old R&B singer August Alsina.
She stomps on hearsay that hers and Will’s relationship has ever been a lavender marriage.
Her acting career is underrated, not least by her – any fulfilment she may have derived from it gets oddly short shrift. We hear that she turned down Halle Berry’s role in Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998) because it was “culturally inauthentic”, but much of her own best work is left out.
Scientology, with which she briefly dabbled, gets one tiny nod. We’re led down so many routes to locate “the treasure chest of ourselves” in this book, it collapses into therapeutic spaghetti. “Our inner banshee wants us to give her some space to breathe,” Smith insists. You could fit a whole coven up in here.