There’s a great moment in Jada Pinkett-Smith’s tell-all interview with Hoda Kotb in which Kotb says to the actress, “I feel like you’re a straight talker …” Pinkett-Smith smiles and nods. “I am!” she insists. But then Kotb finishes her sentence: “… Except you’re not sometimes.” To which Pinkett-Smith smiles and nods almost more enthusiastically.
The moment is a perfect summation of contemporary celebrity persona: that many of our front-facing, interview-hungry, memoir-writing famous are “brutally honest,” of course, unless they are lying, which is their “right” as people who live in the public eye. For years, Pinkett-Smith and her husband Will Smith have doubled down on not only their being married, but specifically their — as Smith once put it — “NOT GETTING A DIVORCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
“So why do that?” Kotb asks Pinkett-Smith.
The actress frames the now-viral news of her “longtime separation” from her husband as a matter of “not being ready,” that it’s taken them seven years to even say that they live separate lives, and that divorce — in a legal, permanent sense — is off the table. It is true, in a fundamental, Webster’s Dictionary sense, that the act of divorce can be complicated, even with adult children involved, and that there is more than one way to end a marriage besides legal intervention. But it is also true that Pinkett-Smith could just say whatever with the same air of quiet confidence that leads her to the Red Table again and again, where any and all press surrounding her can be spun.
In the build-up to the release of Worthy, her new memoir for people who wish we were all still talking about the Slap, she also goes so far as to recontextualize the perceived animosity between her family and comedian Chris Rock, telling a story to People about Rock calling to take her out several years back because he too thought she was divorced. “He was appalled. And he profusely apologized and that was that,” Pinkett-Smith writes. Little did Rock know that she was not divorced, and not single, but single enough to have an entanglement.
It doesn’t seem all that insane, all considered, for a newly divorced guy to call up someone he thought was also newly divorced. But like all of Pinkett-Smith’s anecdotes, the details are vague enough — “he called me and basically he was like, ‘I’d love to take you out’” — to sell a story of soured interest. It’s possible Rock just wanted to hang and talk, but in reframing part of their professional relationship as a romantic rejection, the details of the ongoing Slap drama continue to enrich and confuse. Is this because there is deep-rooted celebrity lore, or because Pinkett-Smith has controlled the narrative around this event as best she can?
In People, Pinkett-Smith also added: “[Do I have] any desire to talk to Chris? Here’s my desire: I just hope that all the misunderstanding around this can be cleared up and that there can be peace.” It is funny to say something like this before launching into an anecdote on past kerfuffles between her family and Rock, and it is hard to read the comment like anything other than a “Fuck you” toward the comedian. But it is hard to read any of her comments in any one particular way, because as Hoda Kotb says, Pinkett-Smith is a straight shooter, except when she’s not.
She’s used similarly obscure language when addressing the nature of her open-or-not-open relationship with Smith in the past. Her “cheating scandal” was framed as an “entanglement.” When she addressed the seemingly open nature of their relationship, she wrote: “Open marriage? Let me first say this, there are far more important things to talk about in regards to what is happening in the world than whether I have an open marriage or not.” A non-statement statement on par with when Jeremy Strong went on WTF with Marc Maron to promote Armageddon Time, then ended the interview reminding everyone that being an actor doesn’t matter in the face of conflict in Ukraine. Pinkett-Smith doubled down on her not-open-marriage stance with a series of rhetorical questions. “Do we believe loving someone means owning them?” she asked. “Do we believe that ownership is the reason someone should ‘behave’? Do we believe that all the expectations, conditions, and underlying threats of ‘you better act right or else’ keep one honest and true? Do we believe that we can have meaningful relationships with people who have not defined nor live by the integrity of his or her higher self?” In obfuscating her truth by reflecting their relationship outward — it’s our fault for caring, it’s our fault for having narrow visions of love, it’s our fault for not knowing what “unconditional love” is … or does … or means … By the time you finish reading the series of questions, it’s hard to know what she — or we — were talking about in the first place.
But of course, Pinkett-Smith is honest (or is she?) about her own lack of truthfulness, and perhaps we should have been more distrusting from the start. “The fact that I have, in the last four years contributed to the creation and perpetuation of falsehoods about myself, in which other untrue narratives were birthed, has surely aided in the misunderstandings that surround me,” she wrote in her announcement of the book on Instagram from June. “This fall, with deep humility and respect, I will take back my narrative.” Falsehoods, untrue narratives, misunderstandings — all at her own hand. But Pinkett-Smith isn’t claiming to come clean either. She’s just “taking back her narrative.” She’s centering herself; that doesn’t mean she’s centering the truth. It benefits her to distance herself from Will, from the Slap, from their marriage, not only because she’s been at the heart of it for so long but because the baffling nature of their separately-together relationship deluded those involved and uninvolved. A narrative isn’t, in and of itself, real; it’s PR, like everything else. How is she, as Kotb says, considered a straight shooter by any stretch of the imagination? It seems unlikely that Worthy will set the record straight, so much as it will set the record askew enough to recant in the future. But she didn’t call the book Honesty for a reason.
