A cover story on Beyonce written for Rolling Stone in early 2004.

From the moment Beyonce lands in London she’s treated like a princess.  A British Airways agent meets her at the lip of the plane and whisks her and her four person crew down an almost hidden set of stairs and into a waiting British Airways car.  The rest of the passengers making connections are shuffling through the long corridors of Heathrow in order to trudge between terminals on a bus, but the 22 year-old from Houston, who says she’s really a New Yorker now, is zipping through Heathrow’s back streets, trying to figure out whether her final destination—Cannes, France—is pronounced can or kahn.  She wears no necklaces and no rings, but she’s still dressed very girly in big chunky earrings, a pink off the shoulder cashmere sweater with a sort of bow in the front, a brown fur-lined wrap, fuzzy pink boots, jeans, and a hot pink baseball hat with embroidered sparklys on the front adding up to a primitive cat and on the back more sparklys spelling out Beyonce.  It’s something a teenage girl probably made.  Her shoulders and neck flow gracefully out from under her sweater, recalling old french sculptures that romanticized the curves of the female form.  She has golden skin, three small birthmarks on her face, perfect teeth, and a dancer’s posture which makes her seem much taller than 5’7”.  And her tight jeans reveal her to be a healthy girl, someone the brothers would call thick, with a booming system in the back. 

The last six months have seen a sort of Beyonce explosion where she went from the most popular singer in a hot group, Destiny’s Child, to a ubiquitous solo megastar whose Dangerously In Love has sold more than two million copies, earned her five Grammy nominations, and spawned two of the biggest and most infectious songs of the year, “Crazy In Love” and “Baby Boy.”  Beyonce has become a crossover sex symbol like Halle Berry, a black girl who’s not so overwhelmingly nubian that white people don’t appreciate her beauty.  She’s the new Janet Jackson, the tastefully sexy black sex symbol who’s giving you R&B-flavored pop hits and signature dances as well as well-concepted videos, tours, and some movies, too.  2004 will see still more Beyonce ubiquity as she gives us a tour with Alicia Keys and Missy, a new Destiny’s Child album, and a tour with Destiny’s Child.  But offstage, the girl is careful to maintain a distance between the person who’s famous and the person shaped long before fame.  “I don’t want to get addicted to fame,” she says.  “Then when I’m no longer famous I don’t know what to do and I just seem desperate and lose my mind.  I refuse to get addicted to fame and I know now the importance of going on vacation and having another life because one day everything comes to an end.”  Beyonce comes from money and has that finishing school polish, but she’s the beautiful girl in school who’s disarmingly down to earth.

When she lands in Nice, France, she’s met by an agent who takes her through a special, empty line at Passport Control.  But nowadays even princesses sometimes hit potholes.  While she’s standing at the baggage carousel, tired, hungry, and clearly running on empty after a long pair of flights from New Jersey, someone from British Airways runs up and says there’s two bags missing.  Beyonce mumbles that the missing bags are surely hers.  She’s annoyed.  Anyone would be.  She could throw a tantrum or even just make one little nasty comment and no one would blame her.  But Beyonce’s not that kinda girl.  “You wanna think she’s a bitch because she’s so fine,” says her choreographer Frank Gatson.  “But I’ve never seen someone so sweet.  It trips me out.  Knowing she wants to go off on somebody because somebody’s pissed her off, she catches herself because she knows that humility is important.  I think it’s her upbringing in church.”  She just rolls her eyes and grins.  It’s a fake smile, but it’s polite, even professional.  She lives like a princess, but doesn’t have airs.

Every princess must have a prince and for now Beyonce’s is the recently retired MC Jay-Z, who’s more than a decade older than her.  “I know dude a long time,” an insider said of Jay-Z.  “I’ve never seen him sprung like this.  He cares about her, gives her great advice, he wants his woman to look right.  They adore each other.”  Jay and Beyonce both refuse to discuss the relationship.  “I don’t say I’m single,” she says.  “I don’t deny anyone.  I just don’t talk about it.  People are like why does she say that they’re just friends?  I don’t say that.  I just don’t talk about it.  I see a lot of the actresses that have had successful relationships and I see that a lot of people don’t talk about it.  I just wanna protect my private life.”

But even though she won’t talk about the relatonship she’s open to discussing what sort of girlfriend she is.  “In relationships I think a lot like a guy,” she says.  “If I do something wrong I don’t get emotional.  I think about it and I change it and I fix it.  And I’ve always been very logical, maybe because I’m a virgo, I don’t know.”  Still, she can find herself overcome by emotion sometimes.  “When I do anything I do it,” she says.  “If I fall in love I’m there.”

And even though she absolutely won’t talk about the relationship, she will talk about him.  She’s very free with saying “we,” the way people in couples replace the singular “I” in their vocabulary with the plural “we.”  Asked where she was during the New York City Blackout of 2003, she replies, “We were at the 40/40 Club.”  There was a generator at the club, so the party never stopped.  “At 4am we took a plane to Italy,” she says.  “We got to Rome and they had a blackout there.  The first one in years.”  She still had a good time.  “I went to the Vatican and I almost cried.  I was just in awe.” 

She said that “Crazy In Love” was rhymeless until the night before she had to turn the album in.  “I asked Jay would he rap on the song,” she says, “and he came to the studio at 2am and in like, what, ten minutes, he listened to the track, came up with a rap and didn’t write it down.  It’s miraculous to watch [his creative process], it really is.”  Jay was there for her through much of the recording of Dangerously In Love.  “He helped a lot with a lot of the songs,” she says.  The night she recorded “Baby Boy,” she had the chorus but just didn’t like the verses until Jay stepped up and told her exactly how to rewrite them.  “I’m amazed how much he knows about how much,” she says.  “He can write a song for a woman, he can write a song for anybody, and he has all of these details that he knows about and it’s like, how did you know that?  How did you think of that?  It’s amazing to me.”

She says she’d like to have children one day.  “If it was a perfect world I would have two boys and a girl,” she says.  “I love little boys and girls are so much drama.”  But how could she maintain superstar ubiquity and be a mom?  “One day I wanna have a family and be a mother and occasionally put out albums or do like Anita Baker and perform occasionally.  I love that.  That’s so hot to me.  Sade’s career?  [Releasing one album every four years.]  That’s ridiculously hot to me.”

Now, you needn’t be friends with Jay and Beyonce to know where they are on a daily basis (and, soon, whether or not they’re pregnant) because the gossip press all but stalks them, constantly snapping photos that Beyonce is often unaware are being taken.  “It’s very strange,” she says of having the papparazzi constantly following her.  “I can spot a camera.  I see the little glare from miles away.  So then, I’ll be like okay, it’s no one around.  But they’re everywhere.  I think paparazzi takes regular cameras so you think they’re fans.  It doesn’t bother me but I don’t like it.  It’s just they always catch you at the craziest point.  The whole trip they get me jumping off of a boat.”

She was referring to a recent picture which, once again, she didn’t know was being taken, which showed Beyonce leaping into the ocean from the second story of a boat as Jay and friends watched.  The boat was very high.  “Yeah, it was,” she says.  “It was.  I don’t know what’s wrong with me.  And I looked at the picture and said, that’s really dumb.  I do it every year.  I think that’s my let go, start over, this is a vacation and I’ma be free.  That’s my jump.  It’s a ritual.  I have to jump off of something so I can let go of everything that happened before the last vacation and start over.  It’s like bein baptized.”

Before Beyonce was baptized her father Matthew Knowles was an executive at Xerox in medical sales, selling multi-million dollar pieces of equipment and making six figures.  “I was blessed to be the number one sales rep in the medical division of Xerox for years,” he says.  Matthew is Beyonce’s manager, the one who negotiated everything from her initial record deals with Elektra and Columbia to her recent endorsement deals with L’Oreal and Tommy Hilfiger, and executive produced all of her albums.  He’s pleasant though self-serious, but with an easy laugh.  There’s nothing like massive public success to make a man feel good about himself.  You talk about laughing all the way to the bank, Mr. Knowles laughs like a man who just got back from the bank.

His wife Tina Knowles has light skin, long wavy hair with blonde streaks, and green eyes.  Matthew says, “Beyonce’s still not as beautiful as her mama.”  Where Beyonce is underaccessorized, Tina visited Beyonce in New York wearing a giant diamond ring on each hand, a diamond tennis bracelet and diamond watch on her left wrist, and what looked like another diamond watch on her right wrist.  She owns one of the top beauty salons in Houston, called Headliners, where Beyonce says she grew up.  “She got a lot of influence from my clients,” Mrs. Knowles says.  “We catered to the professional woman so we had judges and attorneys and I really credit that to her having that drive and ambition.  She had a lot of great women around her who inspired her to work hard and do great things.”

The Knowleses made good money long before Beyonce came along and lived in a large house in Houston with all the accoutrements of the upper middle class.  “We lived in a house the same size as we do now and in a neighborhood as nice as I do now,” Beyonce says.  There is probably no black music megastar of the past 20 years who grew up as rich as Beyonce with the exception of Michael and Janet Jackson.  You can see the finishing school poise and polish on her.  Still, just because the Knowles had money didn’t mean they never had money problems.

In 1981, while Tina Knowles was pregnant with her first child, she realized that her family name was dying.  Tina is the youngest of seven, but only one of her brothers had had a son.  “I said oh God we’ll run out of Beyonces,” Mrs. Knowles said.  So she gave her daughter her maiden name.  Grandpa Beyonce, a creole who lived in New Orleans and spoke French, was unimpressed.  “My family was not happy,” Mrs. Knowles said.  “My Dad said she’s gonna be really mad at you because that’s a last name.  And I’m like it’s not a last name to anybody but you guys.”

Beyonce was a shy, quiet kid.  When she was seven and in the first grade at St. Mary’s, a catholic school in Houston, a dance teacher, Miss Darlette Johnson, pushed her to join the school talent show.  “I was terrified and I didn’t wanna do it and she’s like c’mon baby, get out there,” Beyonce says.  “I remember walking out and I was scared but when the music started I don’t know what happened.  I just… changed.”  Both of her parents were in the audience.  Tina recalls, “We both said, who is that?”

That was Sasha.  It was many years before Beyonce’s stage persona got her name, but from that first time onstage it was clear that when the shy, humble girl got onstage she became someone new.  “I don’t have a split personality,” Beyonce says, “but I’m really very country and would rather have no shoes on and have my hair in a bun and no makeup.  And when I perform  this confidence and this sexyness and this whatever it is that I’m completely not just happens.  And you feel it and you just start wildin and doin stuff that don’t even make sense, like the spirit takes over.  That magic, that’s what I love.  If you see me on TV I’m not a humble, shy person, but it’s a transformation into that.  It’s a job.  In real life I’m not like that.”

Her choreographer, Frank Gatson, said that when she gets onstage she gets the Holy Ghost.  “She’s fearless,” Gatson says.  “When I worked with Usher I wanted to think Usher was that, but Usher has fear sometimes.  Kelly and Michelle don’t have the nerve that she has.  She has no fear.  I think when you get out there you have to give it to the audience with no inhibition.  You gotta let the spirit take you.  Something powerful takes her over and in that time onstage she’s gone.  On VH-1 Divas she threw her $250,000 earrings and later she said she didn’t know why she threw them.  That’s losing yourself.  I’ve been in shows where people booed Beyonce.  And she’d be right in their face dancin, lettin em have it like it was nothing.  Most people would panic in that, you’d see them buckle down.  But Beyonce has learned to dismiss fear.”

Actually, Beyonce knew how to dismiss it when she was in the first grade.  At the end of her performance she got a standing ovation and won the show.  “I was like, oh Lord, this is amazing,” Beyonce says.  “So I knew I wanted to do that, I knew I wanted to be a singer.  I think before that I knew I wanted to be a singer, but I’d never been on a stage before that.”

Matthew began taking her to local talent shows where she won 35 times in a row.  Soon a group was formed, which made it all the more fun.  “I was nine the first time we performed,” Beyonce says.  “It was at a day care.  We didn’t even know the name of the group cuz I remember we were backstage, well, not backstage but in this little room on the side,” she laughs, “and we were tryin to write down names and logos.  There were kids out there cryin while we performed, but I realized how much I loved bein in a group.  Because I was always so nervous and to have those girls with me before the stage, during the stage, and after the stage and we could talk about it, it was even more exciting for me.”  The groups became the entirety of her social life.  “All her friends basically her entire life have been her group members, whoever they were at the time,” says Angela Beyonce.

When Beyonce was ten the group, now called GirlzTime, earned a place on Star Search.  It would be a turning point, but not one they were expecting.  They lost.  As his daughter sobbed backstage Matthew vowed to leave his job and manage them full-time.  “Him leaving his corporate job was very scary for me,” Tina said.  “I don’t know many people who would give up a job makin the kinda money he made.  I thought he had gone a little nuts.  I was like what are we gonna do?  I had a large salon and it was generating good money, but we were accustomed to two incomes.  All of a sudden we have to totally alter our lifestyle.  But he’s just like that about whatever he does.  He’s just really passionate.”

Matthew took a class at Houston Community College on the business of music, but found his corporate background gave him most of the training he needed.  “Quite frankly, when I came into this I was more qualified than 75% of the managers out there, who have no business background and don’t know how to move inside of a corporation.  Coming from corporate America, I understand how to navigate through those political issues at the record label that have nothing to do with music.”  He agreed that selling is pretty much the same no matter the product, that the mechanics of selling high-level medical supplies is ultimately the same as selling Beyonce to America.  “When you’re a good salesperson then you’re a good salesperson,” he says.  He’s been called a stage Dad many times and bristles at that because he says he simply used his expertise to help his child achieve her dream , just as any parent would.  “It never mattered to me if my kids did music,” he said.  “If Beyonce came to me and said dad, I wanna be a doctor, just my personality, I would find a way of buying a hospital.”

Matthew created his own artist development program which Beyonce suspects was modeled after the Motown system.  “I’m sure he got it out of reading Berry Gordy,” she says.  In the summers Matthew led a sort of R&B boot camp where Beyonce and whoever else was in the group at that point would start their mornings by jogging while singing to build up the ability to sing and dance at the same time.  They had team-building exercises, choreography lessons, vocal coaching, media training, and walking lessons from a model.  And they watched lots of video of the great performers—Michael, Janet, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Madonna.  “We’d study those tapes like football teams study their competitors tapes,” Matthew says.  Tina was pressed into styling and then designing their clothes.

When Beyonce was 13 the group, now called Destiny’s Child, signed a deal with Elektra Records, achieving their dream.  But it was the beginning of a streak of bad luck that tested the Knowles family more than anything they’ve ever had to deal with.  Things quickly went sour at Elektra and the group got dropped.  “Then we got hit with some tax problems and everything kinda came crashing down,” Mrs. Knowles says.  “We had to sell our house for way less than we could’ve gotten if we’d had time to sell it right.  It was very emotional because my kids grew up in that house and they were not happy at all.  They didn’t know it was because Matthew gave up his job for them.  You really don’t explain it.  You just say, listen, we gotta scale down.”  They bought another house but after the sale when Matthew went in he found the previous tenant dead in the bathroom, a suicide.  Then Matthew and Tina’s relationship began to fall apart.  “At that point we were just not getting along good at all,” Mrs. Knowles says.  “I felt like Matthew was obsessed and should go get a job.  So we separated for maybe about six months.  The lowest point was when I moved out.  I moved into an apartment which my kids had never lived in in their lives.  That was really difficult for them.  We were just miserable without each other because we’d been together forever.”  They’d married in 1980.  “He was always like, I’m gonna make this happen,” she says.  “I just thought that something had to wake him up.”

Even after his wife and children moved out and his family was collapsing Matthew kept working his contacts at Columbia, trying to get a deal there, still chasing the dream.  “Well,” he recalls, “I had this vision and when it doesn’t happen right away and your friends are saying what is wrong with this guy and that’s bringing on some personal issues, that’s pretty difficult.  Your husband is focused on music rather than his job and the bills are there.  We had a lot of success so we had a pretty hefty lifestyle.  There was a point when Tina thought I maybe should reconsider this dream and I didn’t wanna give up on it.”

Beyonce, about 14 then, didn’t really understand what was going on until several years later, but she said the group had become the center of the family and it wasn’t succeeding and she could feel pressure building on her.  “The group is where we get everything,” she says, “so if the group doesn’t happen then my life is over and I felt like it was my fault.  Until I realized that my mother owns a hair salon, one of the best ones in Houston and my father made great money and still has many degrees and is gonna go out and do many things.  They didn’t give up everything because that was our only hope to get us out of the ghetto.  So I realized I don’t have to have that pressure because they’re going to be successful regardless of what they do.”

When Beyonce was 15 Columbia offered Destiny’s Child a record contract and, almost concurrently, Matthew and Tina reconciled.  Both say that one had nothing to do with the other.  “It was an exciting time,” Mrs. Knowles says.  “It wasn’t about the money, it was just that they finally got to do what they wanted to do and they were on their way.”

It’s Saturday night in Cannes and backstage in a small, bright room at the NRJ Music Awards, Beyonce is waiting to go on.  She says matter of factly that her wisdom teeth are bothering her, that they’ve been bothering her for a while now, and she wants to get them pulled, but can’t afford two weeks with her face blown up.  And her nose is stuffed and it won’t unclog.  And her back is killing her, so as showtime approaches she runs through a series of back, calf and ankle stretches, like an athlete warming up while wearing a tight peach and gray Armani short-skirted dress, beaded Giuseppe Zanotti three-inch heels dripping with bangles, and chandelier earrings.

She takes a moment to brainstorm with her crew about her upcoming Grammy performance.  “I’d love to win,” she says of the Grammys, “but it’s more important for me to have a good performance, an incredible performance, than to win.  Because people remember the performance.”  They go through reference photos that she’s pulled from various magazines to explain the direction she’s considering.  She seems to be constantly brainstorming some aspect of her career, either with an expert or alone.  She says she’s already thinking of video treatments for Destiny’s Child.  It’s frustrating to her that she doesn’t seem to get credit for not being a puppet.  “I work really hard,” she says, “I’m a perfectionist.  I’ll go into a studio and figure it out.  If my video is wrong I’ma fix it.”  She says it was her idea to re-edit the “Me, Myself and I” video and have it play out backwards.  “This is not something anybody planned for me,” she says.  “I had the help of my family, I don’t do it all by myself, but I write my songs, I write my treatments, I help with my clothes and anybody who, every time they’re seen they’re right, it’s not other people.  You can’t be that consistent without the artist being involved.”

As showtime nears her intensity grows.  She stares at herself in the mirror, eyes burning.  She becomes restless, her foot shaking with nervous energy.  She bounces around a bit to see if she’ll leap out of the dress when Sasha! arrives.  Her back still doesn’t feel right.

At the edge of the stage, just before she goes out, she stands alone, eyes closed, head down as if in prayer.  She’s introduced in French, the music leaps from the speakers, and Sasha! explodes.  If Beyonce was sick and ailing, Sasha! is a tiger who attacks the crowd.  They stand and applaud from their first glimpse to their last.  “They were excited and that got me excited,” she says afterward.  She runs through half of “Baby Boy,” then half of “Crazy In Love,” singing and dancing full out, then struts off-stage with a smile.  The dancers look dour, upset that they missed a few moves, but Beyonce is beaming and invigorated.  Now that she’s performed there’s a new spirit inside of her.  “It’s funny,” she says. “Whatever hurts, when you get onstage it don’t hurt no more.”