Bernie Mac keeps it real
TV’s latest star lives in the south suburbs, still hangs with guys from the old neighborhood and is a family man. Hollywood will have to wait.
Would you say you’re spoiled?” Bernie Mac asks his daughter Je’Niece, affectionately referring to her by her childhood nickname, “Boots.”
“You’ve given me a lot, but you also made me work for it,” she replies. “So I don’t know if you can say that’s spoiled.”
As Mac and his daughter converse in the family room of his south suburban home, he appears to be a gentler parent than the one he portrays in his self-titled Fox situation comedy, one of the surprise hits of this TV season.
But Mac still wants his 24-year-old daughter’s perspective on his parental skills. “I can’t grade myself,” he says.
“We’ve had this kind of conversation before, so don’t try to act like I try to make you out to be a monster,” says Je’Niece McCullough. “I’m grateful for [his stern hand]. I turned out OK.”
Life is more than OK for the 44-year-old Mac. He will celebrate 25 years of marriage to wife Rhonda in September, and will walk his daughter down the aisle to marry Tre’ Childress, a 25-year-old teacher, in a few months. A loyal friend, Mac still hangs out with guys he grew up with on Chicago’s South Side.
Those things mean more to Mac than fame and having a hit TV show. Indeed, Mac may work in Hollywood, but he returns to Chicago when he breaks from filming “The Bernie Mac Show” (8 p.m. Wednesdays, WFLD-Ch. 32).
Life hasn’t always been great for Bernard and Rhonda McCullough. For years, Mac found work here and there but had no steady job. He started performing stand-up comedy in 1977 in Chicago, but those early gigs sometimes netted $15 to $25 a night, not nearly enough to support a wife and child.
Making ends meet was a constant battle, but instead of crippling the couple, the struggle has made them strong and appreciative of what they have now.
“All of that was humble beginnings,” he says. “And I say that with motivation because I remember them without any shame, without any sorrow, without any pity. That’s what made me.”
“I never forget where we came from and how we arrived to this point, because I believe that it has given us the strength to go on and get to this point,” says Rhonda, 43.
Mac doesn’t live the high life because he remembers how “I’ve had so many low points,” he says days later in the South Loop offices of MacMan Enterprises, his production company.
One low point: Je’Niece being teased on the first day of 3rd grade when classmates noticed she wore the same clothes from the previous school year.
“I look at the little girl who said it. I wanted to kick her ass,” Mac says of that day, slipping into the tough-love persona of his TV character. But he admits “a tear came down my eye” after hearing the taunts.
Another low point came one Christmas. When Rhonda’s family asked her what her husband had given her, she lied and said it was a new coat with a fur collar that was still on layaway. Mac could only afford a Christmas card.
Faith in himself
Mac says he went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and said, “You watch.” It wasn’t going to be like that forever, he vowed.
“All those things made me who I am,” Mac says. “And I’m not saying that for sympathy . . . it strengthened me.”
Also building Mac up was his mother, Mary, and grandmother, Lorraine, the major influences in his life. They lived in an apartment in a tough neighborhood around 69th and South Morgan Streets. But they gave Mac, his sister and his two (now deceased) brothers a grounded sensibility.
“When I lost those two,” Mac says, “I felt empty.” His mother died when he was in his teens; his grandmother passed away when Mac was in his 20s.
Married at 19, Bernard and Rhonda, whom he met at Chicago Vocational High School, bounced from one relative to another on the South Side. At various times they lived with his wife’s mother, and in his grandmother’s home on public assistance. But he would keep his family together no matter what.
“I made an oath to myself that I would never be like my father,” Mac says in explaining the devotion he had to his daughter. His own father made infrequent visits when Mac was a boy.
Says Rhonda: “All the struggle, because of all the not-having and the living with people . . . now we can appreciate it and do right by it.”
Rhonda was trained as a nurse and still maintains her license because, she laughs, “you never know what might happen.”
Although the family can now afford to do what they please, “life is still basically the same for us,” she says. “We still laugh, we still have fun, I still cook, I still wash. I still do all the things I used to do. The only thing that I don’t have to do is go outside of the house and work.”
Je’Niece, who is working toward her master’s degree in psychology, agrees there is a “bigger house” and “nicer cars,” but “everything else is the same.”
“And it’s funny to me,” she adds.
“People’s perception is, `Oh, well, that’s where you all live. That’s it? I thought you all had a mansion. Oh, that’s all you drive? I thought you had a Bentley or something.’ It’s weird because, like, why? Why do you need all those things?”
No going overboard
Indeed, the trappings of show business are not in evidence in the McCullough home. There aren’t several cars choking the driveway, people crowding the home with music blaring and the sound level bouncing the house from its foundation, and an endless supply of food and drink for revelers.
“This is it. This is every day,” Mac says. He’s sitting in the family room in front of a big-screen television, watching one of the numerous syndicated court-based television shows and dressed in pajama bottoms, T-shirt, slippers and stocking cap.
“This is my life and this is how I live it,” he continues. “I wasn’t born like this. I’m a comedian. I’m not running for office. I don’t need no bodyguard. I don’t live my life like that.”
That unfettered lifestyle extends to Mac’s small circle of friends, some whom he has known since childhood.
They sometimes get together at Mac’s home to watch sports on TV, or they get together for meals, like Mac and four of his closest friends did recently at a River North steakhouse.
“You know what your problem is?” Mac laughs at close friend Morris Frazier. “You want to be me!”
Frazier, Mac’s friend of 30 years — whom Mac affectionately calls the “Big Fella” — shoots back: “He’s been mad at me since 1973 when he got cut off the frosh-soph [basketball team] and I made the team.”
“We are who we are. He can be who he is,” says Frazier, 44, a postal police officer who lives in Matteson. “In settings like this . . . we sit around and [razz each other] all day.”
What one doesn’t see are stars. Just as Mac keeps his home life quiet, he keeps his friendships to a minimum, “people who keep it real and people who are very well grounded,” says Roger Smith, a 52-year-old pharmaceuticals salesman from Bolingbrook.
“I’m not quick to call someone my friend,” Mac explains. “Because these guys know me, they know my work ethic, they know my style, they know my style of play. . . . I love them, and they love me for me.”
Now America loves Mac. His series, which averages about 10 million viewers a week, has been hailed by critics and embraced by TV watchers for hilarious, but true, musings on parenting by a man who believes in the old-school approach to kids — they should behave like children, and not little adults.
“It’s just a very honest point of view, and I think that people really are responding to that,” says Fox entertainment president Gail Berman. “He gets to say things that most parents think and don’t say. And I think all parents watch that and go, `Right on, I get it.'”
A slow rise
Mac’s climb to his own comedy show was a slow one. After toiling in clubs around Chicago and across the country, he built a strong following for a stage show that included music from a live band and some singing in addition to the comedy.
The 1990s proved to be Mac’s breakout decade. In the early and mid-’90s, his profile grew thanks to appearances on HBO’s “Def Comedy Jam,” which led to his own short-lived HBO comedy variety show “Midnight Mac.”
In the late ’90s there was “The Kings of Comedy,” a touring comedy show starring Mac, D.L. Hughley, Steve Harvey and Cedric “The Entertainer,” which became the highest-grossing stand-up tour in history; Spike Lee turned it into a moderately successful documentary/concert film.
From the heart
“I’m so personal with my comedy,” Mac says, “even when they said that my comedy wasn’t working. Even when they said I was a little too hard. Even when they said that I was a little bit unorthodox. . . . The humor that I try to bring touches home.”
One bit that resonated with fans was about three unruly kids he took in because his sister was on drugs — in real life, it was a combination of his taking in his “gangbanging” niece and her daughter, and a friend who had cared for her drug-taking sister’s three out-of-control children.
That chunk of material spoke to producer Larry Wilmore, who worked with Mac to fashion a sitcom out of it, knowing how the relationships that parents have with their kids is a universal one.
“I think Bernie represents the values that most of us grew up with,” Wilmore says.
For Mac, the central value has always been family, not success.
“It’s just my life, man,” Mac says.
“And I do it without even thinking about it. I don’t need that, I don’t want that. I think the day that comes, the day you see me [like that], that’s going to be the end of my career.”
