Apparently, Chris Brown isn’t the only star in this domestic violence drama who has a troubled past. In a June/July 2007 coverstory, Rihanna talked about how her father’s drug abuse and parents’ marital woes effected her:
Her father, Ronald, who is of both black and white heritage, works as a warehouse supervisor for a garment factory and was addicted to many drugs, including crack and weed, Rihanna told GIANT. “I just knew that my mom and dad would always argue when there was a foil paper with an ashtray,” says Rihanna. “He would just go to the bathroom all the time. I didn’t know what it was. I really did not know. I just thought it was normal. Then one day, I heard them arguing about it. Then he did it again. And I told her. I said, ‘Mom, he did that ashtray thing again.’”
Then, as a young girl, Rihanna began having terrible headaches. Her mother, an accountant of Guyanese descent, dreaded the possibility that her daughter might have a brain tumor. But actually, Rihanna was keeping such a stiff upper lip about her parents’ marital problems, her massive stress was making her head hurt.
“I was just taking on too much. I wouldn’t cry or act, so it really affected me in here,” she told GIANT, pointing to her head. “I would go to school like a normal kid. No one would know that I had a problem. I always had a smile on my face. But that’s when it started to mess with me.”
Click here to read “Is Chris Brown Violent?”
To check out Chris and Rihanna in happier times, check out our exclusive gallery here!
And for more exclusive Rihanna photos, click here! And here!
For the full story read below:
The day before yesterday Rihanna was getting her makeup done in a trailer in Los Angeles. The makeup artist was laying on the bronzer when suddenly Rihanna started clawing at her face and screaming. “It’s burning! It’s burning!” Rihanna shrieked at the top of her lungs. The makeup artist panicked; security rushed over. That’s when Rihanna gave it up.
“I’m just kidding!” she blurted, laughing her head off.
“It was so cute,” she says later, retelling the story at a secluded garden table at the Le Montrose Hotel restaurant in West Hollywood. “The whole trailer went from this [tenses her face] to this [loosens her shoulders]. They were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe you were kidding! Get out of here!’ I just do that all the time. They never know whether to believe me.”
Her face has a look of sheer mischief. Rihanna is a coltish beauty pageant queen with slender shoulders, long legs and striking light-green eyes that look like the sea from a Bajan beach. Today, she’s rocking a summery look-a red and cream knit tank with skintight indigo jeans and sky-high, heeled Gucci wedges-for a sunny and crisp afternoon. She talks with a faint, lilting Caribbean accent that becomes stronger when she’s discussing music she loves such as the catchy “Pop, Lock & Drop It” by Huey, which plays whenever her cell phone rings.
“I love that song! I don’t know why,” she says emphatically. “It makes me bounce,” she adds with a shimmy.
Rihanna’s exuberance suits her job well. Tova Dann, her assistant, says she can be “goofy and silly.” Evan Rogers, her producer, says she has “a wicked sense of humor.” She can charm music journalists, sit patiently through endless fittings and photo shoots, and she can rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Even when it’s the last thing on earth she feels like doing.
Click here for breaking news about Chris Brown’s assault charges here!
Click here to watch celebrities speak out about Chris Brown/Rihanna drama!
Of all the Baby Beyoncés that emerged in the mid-2000s-Amerie, Brooke Valentine, and Teairra Marí-Rihanna is the only one who has prevailed. They were all beautiful. They all worked hard. They all had a modicum of talent. But Rihanna was best positioned for global stardom thanks, in part, to her Caribbean heritage, the perfect background to have when artists such as Gwen Stefani and Sean Paul are making reggae-tinged beats mainstream.
“The Caribbean thing is so hip and cool,” says Max Glazer, the DJ who toured with Rihanna nonstop for the past year and a half. “She’s that by default. That’s just a huge plus, and it’s something she has naturally.”
She’s taken that Caribbean flavor all the way to the top of the showbiz heap by representing Barbados at high-profile events such as the Teen Choice Awards and the Billboard Awards. “This young lady is the biggest star that Barbados has ever had,” says Ricky Jordan, news editor of the Daily Nation, the largest newspaper in Barbados. “Young people here look up to Rihanna, especially those involved with entertainment and the arts. They have dreams of making it big like she has. They see some hope and say, ‘This is what I can probably become.’”
Like Beyoncé, Rihanna has successfully cast herself as a marketable brand name. Her managers, Marc Jordan and Christa Shaub, have negotiated a steady stream of endorsements for her, which are becoming increasingly mainstream and prestigious. In 2006 she was the face of Nike’s women’s line and Miss Bisou, a junior label sold at JC Penny’s. Tomorrow, she will shoot a commercial for Cover Girl, a lucrative deal that thrills Rihanna. “We shot the ad campaign, which is going to be out in June, and we’re about to shoot a commercial,” she says. “It’s all going to be tied in with the album.”
Her past two albums, Music of the Sun and A Girl Like Me, respectively sold 2 million and 3.5 million copies worldwide. “She’s reaching a big international audience,” says Rogers. “That’s the goal we have for her. Appealing to all the major territories is very unusual, and Rihanna has broken in Europe, America, Japan, Canada. It’s almost like a tug-of-war in all the different areas, like, ‘We need her here! We need her here!’”
Although she’s a sex symbol for the guys, Rihanna’s core fans are teenage girls. When Glazer started DJing with her, he was shocked at how she held sway over legions of screaming, mostly white 13- and 14-year-old girls at her appearances. “The last thing we did was toured Europe with the Pussycat Dolls,” says Glazer. “So it was more girls on top of screaming teenage girls and doing fifteen thousand-seat arenas all over the UK. You had to search and look around to see a man in the audience. Most of them were either a father or boyfriend who’s been dragged there. It was total teenage girl power.”
And for ALL THINGS Rihanna, check her out on the GIANT List here!
But behind the fresh face that showed up and did the requisite song and dance at an endless stream of radio promos and in-store appearances, a real-life 19-year-old woman was getting tired. As she sold more and more albums, Rihanna started to feel like a machine. “I felt like I wasn’t a person anymore,” she says. “You go into the mindset of an object. You go here when they say go here. You go there when they say go there. You kind of lose yourself until you just have to stop for a second, breathe and think. Because this is how people go crazy.”
Jay-Z, her label boss at Def Jam, saw the fatigue. “‘You have to stop,’ Jay-Z told me at one point. ‘You’re burnt out.’ That was just before Christmas,” she says. “So I took a week off and started recording the new album right after that. It was good to get into some new stuff. Creativity. New album. New image. New sound.”
New image?
Rihanna points to her hair. It’s dyed ebony and cut in a bold asymmetrical bob with her bangs swept severely to the side. For Rihanna it symbolizes a profound metamorphosis, like a girl who cuts off her hair to get over an ex. The old Rihanna had flowing chestnut brown tresses and frolicked poolside in bikinis.
“The new sound is not as playful,” she says about her latest album, Good Girl Gone Bad. “It’s not as elegant. It’s more edgy. It’s a little more rock star. I’m just going for it. I just thought it would be fun. I wanted to be me. I wanted to get out of my innocent, generic shell that everyone is used to molding me into. I was like, ‘To hell with that!’”
Wait just a second. Gone Bad is still pop, asserts Rogers, “but it’s lyrically edgier with more depth.” On “Breaking Dishes,” she sings about being angry that her boyfriend is out late without checking in. “She’s saying, ‘I’m sitting here looking for something else to throw. I’m breaking dishes all night. I’m not stopping until I see police lights,’” says Rogers. “It’s really stuff she would never have done on the first album.”
The Jay-Z-assisted lead single, “Umbrella,” with its resounding kick drum and climactic synthesizers, lets Rihanna sing about the power of love in her slightly nasal Caribbean style. “Now that it’s raining more than ever / Know that we’ll still have each other,” she sings for the chorus. “It speaks about the strength in a relationship, whether it’s with your boyfriend, girlfriend or a very close friend,” she says. “It just shows people that I have your back. No matter what, you can come into my arms or under my umbrella.”
On February 20, 1988, Monica and Ronald Fenty named their firstborn daughter Robyn Rihanna Fenty. All of their children have the initials R.R.F. Rihanna’s 17-year-old brother is Rorrey; her youngest brother is 11-year-old Rajad. Robyn, as her friends and family call her, grew up in a small cream and brown house in Westbury, a working-class neighborhood in developing Barbados.
Her father, Ronald, who is of both black and white heritage, works as a warehouse supervisor for a garment factory and was addicted to many drugs, including crack and weed, according to Rihanna. “I just knew that my mom and dad would always argue when there was a foil paper with an ashtray,” says Rihanna. “He would just go to the bathroom all the time. I didn’t know what it was. I really did not know. I just thought it was normal. Then one day, I heard them arguing about it. Then he did it again. And I told her. I said, ‘Mom, he did that ashtray thing again.’”
Then, as a young girl, Rihanna began having terrible headaches. Her mother, an accountant of Guyanese descent, dreaded the possibility that her daughter might have a brain tumor. But actually, Rihanna was keeping such a stiff upper lip about her parents’ marital problems, her massive stress was making her head hurt.
“I was just taking on too much. I wouldn’t cry or act, so it really affected me in here,” she says, pointing to her head. “I would go to school like a normal kid. No one would know that I had a problem. I always had a smile on my face. But that’s when it started to mess with me.”
The couple split several times before divorcing for good when Rihanna was 14 years old.
“At that point, it was more of a relief,” says Rihanna.
Her father has been off drugs now for a long time, she says. She doesn’t know exactly how he recovered, but she knows it was a sign of how much his children meant to him. “My dad saw that what was between him and us was the drugs,” she says. “He knew that to get closer to us, he had to cut that out. And he did.”
Not long after the divorce, Rihanna had a chance meeting with Rogers, soon to be her producer, who ultimately plucked Rihanna from a humble Caribbean childhood and thrust her headlong into a megawatt career on the road.
Rogers, the man that would change Rihanna’s life, is a short white man in his 40s. “He always has on a polo shirt, jeans, sneakers or Timberlands,” she says. Rogers was vacationing in Barbados with his wife, Jackie, when he was introduced to Rihanna, who auditioned for him as a member of a girl group. She was only 15 but sang “Emotion” by Destiny’s Child well enough that he invited her to record a demo in New York City. “She was a little rough around the edges, but her voice was unique and full of potential,” says Rogers. He sent Rihanna’s demo to a few labels, and Def Jam was the first to call back. She secured a coveted audition with Jay-Z (whom she vehemently denies rumors of being romantically involved with) and was signed to the label through Rogers’s production company, SRP.
“Uncle Evan,” as Rihanna likes to call him, had a history as a singer in the music business, too. He was a member of Rhythm Syndicate, often referred to as “Color Me Badd with instruments,” which had a hit in the early ’90s called “P.A.S.S.I.O.N.” Rogers and his bandmate Carl Sturken later started SRP. They’ve written and produced songs for the likes of Christina Aguilera, Kelly Clarkson, Rod Stewart and Ruben Studdard.
“It’s very much a family atmosphere,” says Rogers. “My wife is from Barbados, and the first thing that happened with Rihanna is that she came up here with her mother and stayed at my house. We’ve always had that kind of relationship as opposed to some slick dealmaker swooping in and controlling her. We’ve always made sure that, even as young as she is, she is completely involved in all of the business and decisions and all that.”
Rihanna lived with Rogers and his wife for two years in their upscale Stamford, Connecticut, home while she cut her teeth in the studio. “Jackie definitely took on more of a motherly role,” says Rihanna. “She took care of me when I was there. She made sure I had my laundry done. She made sure I ate on time.”
Now that Rihanna is on the cusp of her 20s, she’s ready to move out of the Rogers’ house and into her own pad in Los Angeles, and her handlers aren’t worried about her acting like some crazy 19-year-old celebrity on the loose in la-la land. “There’s no drinking, partying or going out late at night and being irresponsible,” says Tova Dann, Rihanna’s 25-year-old personal assistant, a petite redhead who is wearing a white tank top, crimson USC sweats and flip-flops with purple toenail polish. “She impresses me so much with how dedicated she is. In the three months that I’ve worked with her, I’ve never once seen her take a sip of alcohol because she’s only nineteen. She respects the law here.”
Back at Le Montrose Hotel, Rihanna is opening a minuscule glass jar of honey for her peppermint tea and pondering her survival strategies.
“Sometimes I’m tired. Sometimes I have good days and bad days,” she says. “Certain things trigger me off to be in a bad mood. I just have to work around it. I always keep my eye on the prize because I always want to win.”
- SERENA KIM
Click here to subscribe to GIANT today!
