“I’ve learned not to worry about age and simply think about what I want to do with my life and know that I can still do it,” Marla Gibbs writes in “It’s Never Too Late”. “No matter what age I am, if I want to accomplish something, I’m going to give it a try and since I’m thirty, I’m expecting to do it.”
Gibbs is no longer looking back in the story at 94; it is an explanation of how she continued to move forward despite an unstable childhood, a marriage that was violent and the entertainment industry that often found no place to place Black women on the stage, mold the language, or make them the owners of the work they did. So the throughline, as she narrates it, is persistence: the type that manifests itself in minor choices, in exits, in going back to work again.
Gibbs was born in 1931 and writes that she was growing up in an unstable and affectionate household that made her hungry. She gets married to her high school boyfriend, Jordan “Buddy” Gibbs and recalls years of physical and sexual abuse such as being beaten up during pregnancy and being confined after seeking to leave him. In her story, there was the time when she tried to escape and fell and miscarried and the other time she was told by a judge, You should know how not to push his buttons.
She eventually ran out of Detroit to Los Angeles with her children and concealed herself and writes that she found her daughter Angela being molested by her husband. She describes her coming back once more and then coming back again and then leaving as “unacceptable” in the retrospect before she and her children fled permanently, with police assistance. Buddy eventually died and Gibbs writes that there was no bitterness in her during his final days. She says that acting was a sort of salvation, a way of rescue, both emotional and practical.
She took courses with her daughter, couching them as a form of closeness and reestablishing control. When a person had strength, I appeared to get strength, she writes. She quotes that she grew by relating to the feelings of a character, as well as saying that she was compelled to be in the profession of acting due to a desire to escape herself and the reality she was living. When her career made a turn about with The Jeffersons, she was continuing her daytime employment at United Airlines and continued to have the job even as her character Florence started to differentiate as a guest into a top-billed star. It was a strenuous program, and it gave her a two-footed standing: a pay-check which she could regulate, and a platform on which she could stand.
The leverage was soon found in that platform. Gibbs describes it as her finding out that she was being paid less than fifty percent of what the leading actresses of the show received, and how she orchestrated the supporting actors to demand raises and increased screen time. She also remembers how she broke the typical writer-actor gap to question the dialogue that she thought was false: I interjected. Forgive me, the Blacks do not speak that way. In her account, such insistence altered process in the same way it altered scripts enabling actors to sit in on table reads and promote how their characters would talk and live.
In the song “227,” it was even more structural, the influence of Gibbs. She reports having acquired executive-producer power behind the camera scenes, with no screen credit, by resisting the stereotypical manner of representation. In one of her interviews regarding the show, she stated, I had a significant impact on the way that the show turned out and that is the way that I would prefer it to turn out, because the series featured a middle-class black family and its plotlines were designed to be relatable to the viewers.
Her off-camera life was of its turn. Gibbs reveals that she had an aneurysm in her brain in 2006, had a brain surgery twice, and sustained a stroke during the first surgery. She explains that her physicians had informed her family that she had limited time ahead of them and that she might never come back to acting or even walk again and that she did not want her medical crisis to be publicized as it might restrict the amount of work she can do in future. Recovery, she says, demanded something that was against her inclination, which is to slow down and allow other persons to assist her.
Yet the public version of Gibbs kept expanding into music, guest roles, and mentorship while her private version held to the same internal age she’s named for years. “My thing is that it’s never too late if you’re still breathing,” she has said elsewhere, a line that echoes the memoir’s central message without softening the cost of getting there.
