She is one of the biggest superstars on the planet: a £500 million pop powerhouse who is known around the world by just her Christian name, counts Barack and Michelle Obama as friends and was personally chosen by the President to perform at his inauguration.
At 34, Beyoncé is at the top of her game. Meticulously packaged, groomed and marketed, she slavishly controls her public image – so it was a rare glimpse of the real woman behind the impenetrable mask when last week she snapped ‘Stop it’ at an assistant fussing in an attempt to stop her falling out of her pink couture outfit at a glittering charity event in New York.
But for one man, the outburst came as no surprise. Her first love, Lyndall Locke, who dated the singer for a decade from when she was a 12-year-old wannabe until they split when she toured the world with Destiny’s Child, said she had always been fixated on the pursuit of fame – and the ‘simple girl from Houston’ rapidly became a ‘control freak’.
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Lyndall Locke and Beyoncé at his school prom in 1997. He dated the singer for a decade and said the ‘simple girl from Houston’ rapidly became a ‘control freak’
‘She was focused and knew what she wanted,’ he says. ‘She’d started singing when she was five and her parents supported her. There was a Beyoncé train on the fast track to fame and you were either on it or off it. Some people fell off the train and others jumped.’
Although her marriage to fellow music star Jay Z has made her part of the most influential couples in the world, Beyoncé still describes herself as ‘just a simple girl from Houston’. However, according to Lyndall, now a chef who runs his own catering business, the truth is rather more complex. In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, he reveals the true scope of the machine that has propelled her to stardom – a campaign orchestrated by her father, Mathew Knowles, who gave up his job and invested his life savings to making her a success, driving them to bankruptcy in the process.
Mathew ‘Big Mac’ Knowles was the mastermind of ‘Project Beyoncé’, as it was known in the family. ‘Let me tell you, there was no messing with Big Mac. He gave me the third degree about who I was and what my intentions were,’ says Lyndall. ‘He gave me the talk about “not messing anything up.” ’ Lyndall says he understood this to mean not to get Beyoncé pregnant. ‘We shared our first kiss at a Brian McKnight concert when Bey was 13. She was a little southern belle. She was an awesome kisser. We would hang out and do normal boyfriend-girlfriend things, although I was never allowed to stay over.’
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ShareLyndall recalls cycling up alongside his teenage girlfriend as she pounded the pavement and asking why she was belting out songs as she ran. Her answer was telling. ‘Because Daddy told me it would increase my breath control and lung capacity,’ she replied. ‘I need to be able to perform onstage for hours when I become a star.’
Rare in the world of dumped celebrity exes, Lyndall, 36, is not bitter and pragmatically accepts that Beyoncé outgrew him. ‘We were together for ten years. I saw the changes in her. She needed someone like Jay Z to take her to the next level. There’s no hard feelings,’ he says with a shrug.
But he says Beyoncé was already ‘fixated’ on fame when he first met her at a Houston church in 1993 after being introduced by her best friend Kelly Rowland, later a member of Destiny’s Child. Lyndall, the product of a broken home, says he was delighted to be welcomed into Beyoncé’s much more middle-class life. Her father was a middle manager at Xerox and her mother Tina ran a successful hair salon, where Beyoncé would hone her performances in front of ‘tough black ladies sitting under hair dryers’.
In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, Lyndall, pictured with the singer at his 19th birthday party, reveals the true scope of the machine that has propelled her to stardom – a campaign orchestrated by her father, Mathew Knowles
Lyndall describes the family as ‘very close, very loving’. ‘We hung out and did the normal things kids do: we watched videos, went to the movies, went out for chicken. We were two kids in love for the first time.’
But Lyndall quickly realised that Beyoncé, then 12, was ‘no ordinary kid’. ‘She lived and breathed her career.’
Beyoncé’s parents invested every penny in hiring the top vocal coaches, dance tutors and managers. The budding star was pulled out of school and home-tutored to give her more time to rehearse – to the exclusion of almost everything else. ‘Beyoncé came to my high-school prom with me. It was a great evening. She laughed and danced and told me, “Lyndall, it’s so great to be normal, to be a kid.” ’
His story is included in an explosive new book, Becoming Beyoncé, by bestselling celebrity biographer J Randy Taraborrelli, but he chose to speak because ‘it would be best for me to tell my own story rather than let anyone else tell it for me’.
While Mathew was protective of Beyoncé, his own private life was a mess. He has famously admitted being a ‘sex addict’ who entered rehab in a failed attempt to save his marriage, which later imploded when one of his lovers became pregnant. The new book outlines the affairs which rocked Beyoncé’s homelife. ‘She loved her daddy,’ one friend explains, ‘but she wasn’t blind to the pain he caused her mother. That’s why Beyoncé has had so few sexual partners. She grew up learning not to trust men.’
An assistant helps the star with her revealing dress at the TIDAL X event in New York last week
The family struggled once Mathew gave up his Xerox job. At one point they were declared bankrupt.
‘Every penny went into Beyoncé’s career,’ Lyndall explained. Undeterred, Beyoncé was able to ‘compartmentalise’ her life. ‘She kept her personal life separate from her career. We talked on the phone for hours, but I was never part of her music. I was an upbeat, positive kid. I made Beyoncé laugh. When she was with me it was downtime.’
Lyndall admits cheating on ‘good girl’ Beyoncé when he was 15 and she was 13. ‘I’ve never been a liar. I told her the truth which is that I lost my virginity to a girl from church. She cried and hung up on me.’ The pair split but reconciled. Lyndall believes it was because the Knowles family knew ‘I wasn’t after anything from them’.
He later cheated on her again towards the end of their relationship because she was constantly on the road and he felt ‘lonely.’ He says Beyoncé’s strong persona was inspired by her mother. ‘Tina was a glamorous lady who ran a house, worked in her hair salon and worked promoting Beyoncé as well as being a fantastic mother.’ Even when Tina’s husband cheated ‘she stayed strong and kept the family together’.
Lyndall says he experimented with marijuana and alcohol but his girlfriend was never tempted. ‘Beyoncé told me she would never smoke or drink because that would hurt her voice. She was a control freak.’
In one incident, Beyoncé fled the scene of a minor car accident because she feared it would be ‘bad’ for her image… even though she was years away from becoming famous.
She was 16 and Lyndall was driving Beyoncé and her cousin Angie to the beach in a five-car convoy of friends. ‘A car suddenly pulled in front of me, crossed to the side of the road then flipped and fell right off the highway.’
Lyndall screeched to a halt and raced down the embankment to check on the occupants of the other car (who were unharmed). When he returned, Beyoncé and Angie had driven off. ‘When I finally got a lift home I was furious. Beyoncé told me, “I can’t be around a mess like that. I have to think smart and staying there would not have been smart.” ’
The new book lists in endless detail how managers were hired and then dumped. So, too, were girls hired to sing and dance alongside Beyoncé as she worked the talent-show circuit in Houston and then nationally.
There was a failed appearance on a US talent show Star Search. But finally, in 1996, after years of only limited success, Beyoncé had her first hit, as part of the group Destiny’s Child. Killing Time was on the soundtrack of the 1997 film Men In Black. The following year, the group released their smash-hit debut album. Meanwhile, Lyndall admits he ‘drifted’. ‘I wasn’t sure where I was going. I remember Mathew asking me what my goals were. Beyoncé’s career was taking off, but I was still the small-town kid.’
His 19th birthday in December 1998 brought home the distance between them. ‘I was smoking pot and she came in and gave me a hug and said, “Dang! It’s thick in here.”
‘She was promoting Destiny Child’s second album and I was back home smoking weed. I didn’t want that to somehow reflect badly on her. She was all about image and career, while I was directionless and having fun. Once they started to hit big it was obvious she was changing,’ he explains. ‘She became aloof. I told her she was becoming a whole new kind of person and she looked at me and said, “I am.”
‘I told her, “I wish we could have a normal life” and she said, “I don’t want a normal life. I’ve been waiting for this since I was a kid.” ’
Becoming Beyoncé – The Untold Story by J Randy Taraborrelli, is published by Sidgwick & Jackson on Tuesday
There were perks of her growing fame. Beyoncé secured backstage passes to see Janet Jackson perform in LA in 2000 and took Lyndall along. ‘I jabbered on to Janet, I was nervous’, he explains. ‘Janet said, “You remind me of one of my nephews” and I said, “Well, your nephew must be pretty awesome!”
Clearly embarrassed by his gauche behaviour, ‘Beyoncé huddled with her cousin Angie, and Angie came over and escorted me out. That hurt. It cut deep. I was 20, I was excited to meet Janet Jackson, but they had an image to protect. It was business for them. I wasn’t cool.’
Lyndall’s mother Lydia recalls: ‘Beyoncé was very sweet. Whatever state she was in, she would send Lyndall a ticket. But I wanted to put an end to it. Lyndall needed to make a life for himself and not just be waiting around ready for when she snapped her fingers.’
Lyndall recalls the time he fell foul of Beyoncé’s fame ‘train’ was when he filled a cup with whisky in a limo taking Beyoncé to a Destiny’s Child concert in LA. ‘Mathew came up to me backstage and said, “That’s not cool. How do you think that makes Beyoncé look? If you don’t pull it together and get a real career she’ll be gone. Beyoncé needs to be with someone who has it going on.”’
Finally in 2002, just as Beyoncé landed her first acting role as Foxxy Cleopatra in the film Austin Powers In Goldmember, Lyndall, who still lived at home with his mother, enrolled in catering school. It was too little, too late. ‘She started mentioning this other guy Jay Z a lot, casually dropping his name,’ he recalls. ‘I felt I was being edged out of her life.’
Then the inevitable: in 2003 the ten-year relationship ended with a whimper. Feeling ‘rejected and angry’ as Beyoncé prepared to set off on a world tour, he confronted her about Jay Z. ‘She said, “He’s not even my type,” but we agreed to take a break. That was it.’
Soon Jay Z and Beyoncé were an item. They married in 2008 and had daughter Blue Ivy in 2012. But their relationship has been dogged with rumours of infidelities, including Jay Z’s supposed ‘close friendship’ with protegee Rihanna, which was later revealed to have been fabricated by Rihanna’s former publicist to promote her.
The Knowles family fractured further in 2011 when Beyoncé fired her father as her manager after discovering irregularities in her accounts. ‘Fame cost her a lot in terms of relationships,’ Lyndall says. ‘But she was prepared to pay the price.’
Lyndall is now in a long-term relationship with the mother of his two-year-old son. ‘I’ve not spoken to Beyoncé in years. I’m happy for her, but I love my job and life. I sometimes joke that my son should have a playdate with Blue Ivy, but I don’t know how to get hold of Beyoncé any more. I know I was special to her and I know she loved me. At that age, you think you will be together for ever, but then life happens.’
Is he surprised by the level of her success? ‘No. She was always going to ride that Beyoncé train to the very top. That’s who she is. She wanted it so bad. She knew her destiny.’
- Becoming Beyoncé – The Untold Story by J Randy Taraborrelli, is published by Sidgwick & Jackson on Tuesday
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