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Chris Rock Steps Up

The comedian opens up about his biological clock, his father's death, and raising daughters. If you think HBO is uncensored, read on.

“I could have really been something.” Chris Rock knows that sounds crazy—as if being a best-selling author, an Emmy- and Grammy-winning comedian, a TV executive, a talk-show host, an Oscar emcee, and a feature-film producer, writer, director, and star means less than something. “I love what’s happened to me,” he is quick to add, “but when I was a kid, I wanted to be the president of the United States. Or I think I could have been a really good civil-rights attorney and probably be living the same way I live right now. I mean, take away people screaming your name and all that stuff, and I’d still live in a nice neighborhood and have nice seats at the Knicks games.”

Rock lives in Alpine, New Jersey, a very nice neighborhood, but these days, the man whose calendar is booked well into 2008 is camped out at the Paramount studios. Most days, he’s either on the set of his CW TV show Everybody Hates Chris, an autobiographical look at his childhood and the closest to The Cosby Show as he’ll ever get, or in a nearby building editing I Think I Love My Wife, his new big-screen comedy about fidelity and temptation. It’s his second feature film as a director, following Head of State, in which he cast himself as the first black man in the White House.

Finding Rock should be fairly straightforward. You check in at the grand gates of the studio, and then park. A guard gives you a map. Rock should be right there in an unidentified building that appears on the map as a black square.

“I’m in the black building?” he howls in the high-pitched expression of disbelief that has become his trademark. “Don’t tell me that.”

In person, Chris Rock is not all that. That is to say, he is not the live wire provocateur whose one-man shows have made him the king of HBO comedy since the mid-1990s. He is sharp, sly, and funny, but equally serious, sincere, and sweet.
“I have my own demons and dark moods,” he insists, swiveling back and forth in a chair at an editing console, looking like any other Joe on a casual Friday, in a dark shirt and trousers with Adidas sneakers. “It’s weird. I kind of keep my personality in my pocket a lot. When I start to do stand-up, that’s not my true personality either. It’s the personality of a guy who hasn’t been able to say what he wanted to say.”
He came to this reticence naturally. Born in South Carolina on February 7, 1965, and raised in the rough turf of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Chris is the eldest of seven kids with two working parents. His mother, Rose, was a schoolteacher, and his father, Julius, drove a newspaper delivery truck. They raised their firstborn with love but also a set of no-nonsense ­obligations. “I had a lot of responsibility,” he recalls. “In case of a fire, I was the guy in charge. It almost feels like I was raised on a farm. I had chores. Get up, put out the bowls for the oatmeal, run the water, put the pot on the stove, pour the oatmeal for the kids. And then at night, it’s bath time. ‘Okay, Chris, you go run the water again.’ ”

Rock’s father was a model of discipline. “I got beatings,” says Rock. “It was either my dad beating me or the cops, but I wasn’t ever in that kind of trouble, because my dad whipped my ass first. He was trying to make me a man, because it’s rough out there.”

How rough was it? “Where you’re from, I guess, it’s ‘Hey, we’re going to go toilet-paper someone’s house on Halloween,’ ” Rock replies. “The guys in my neighborhood were going to rob a store. Guys I grew up with got together and bought cocaine, and they were selling it like it was Avon.”