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Information Page
Chapter 1 Growing Pains
Chapter 2 Delusions of ‘Glam’deur
Chapter 3 Back in the Land of the All-Day Sun
Chapter 4 Dancing in the Rain
Chapter 5 Every Rose Has Its Thorn
Chapter 6 Soldier of Love
Chapter 7 Battlefield Chic
Chapter 8 The Scent of a Rebel
Forget sugarcane – Rihanna is Barbados’ biggest export, with sales of over 15 million albums worldwide. Officially the highest charting and most successful Bajan – that is, Barbadian – artist of all time, the small-town girl with obscenely big dreams broke out of her island idyll to become a global superstar. But where did it all begin for the girl who, since childhood, had found herself blessed with the nickname Rebel Flower?
Rihanna grew up on what to many seems the ultimate paradise island, where turquoise blue waves lapped at infinite sandy beaches, where postcard-perfect coastline stretched as far as the eye could see, where the sun was always shining, and where – even at night – temperatures barely dipped below 25°C.
But the sun was rarely shining in Rihanna’s heart. Beneath the paradise mirage was a life of dark secrets, harsh betrayal, drug abuse, brutal violence and never-ending heartache.
She had been brought into the world by Monica and Ronald Fenty, both immigrants to Barbados. Ronald’s ancestors had been Irish settlers on the losing side of the vicious English Civil War of the 1600s and, consequently, had been exiled to the island to become indentured servants.
In an act of defiance, some immigrants allegedly married their own brothers and sisters in a bid to keep their bloodlines pure. They resented their new lives of servitude at the mercy of wealthy plantation owners and exploitative employers. They might have stood out as being pale-skinned newcomers to the island, when back in Ireland barely a lick of sunshine had touched their faces, but there was one thing they had in common with the locals – a hatred of powerful companies and the pitifully low wages they provided.
Even worse, throughout the 1900s many people were escaping the country due to high rates of unemployment and poverty. Refusing to be beaten, Ronald’s ancestors did the opposite and stayed put.
Their saving grace turned out to be tourism. Being surrounded by wealthy holidaymakers who had come with only fun in mind – a hedonistic weekend of sun, sea and sand – might have made the local Bajan workers resentful; but it was the exotic appeal of Barbadian shores that had saved the island’s flagging economy. Hospitality quickly surpassed sugarcane to become the top source of income in the country, and, eventually, one in every five Bajan residents would be employed in the tourist trade, some of Ronald’s relatives included.
Rihanna’s mother was also an immigrant, hailing from the little-known British colony of Guyana – a beautiful land of reefs and rainforests nestled just north of Brazil and a little east of Venezuela. She had shared her South American heritage with an African-American mother who had moved to Barbados soon after she was born.
Finding herself on Barbados, Monica met Ronald when the two were high-school students. There was an instant attraction, but it wasn’t plain sailing. By the age of 14, Ronald had already discovered the temptations of marijuana and crack cocaine. However, Monica was undeterred. The two became firm friends and, later, lovers.
They married in 1985, by which time the two were both in their thirties, but their marriage was ill-fated from the start. Back then, less than two percent of marriages had been ‘mulatto’ – mixed race – and such relationships were often taboo for social and political reasons. Behind the scenes many mixed-race couples were secretly sharing homes, but Rihanna’s parents were among the few to come out of the closet and publicly declare their love for one another through marriage. Not everyone approved, and the two had to endure the occasional stare, taunt or catty remark as commonplace – but that was the least of their worries.
By now, Ronald had developed a severe drug addiction. If Monica had hoped she could change his ways, she had been sorely mistaken. As much as he wanted to quit, substance abuse had now taken over his life. The newly-weds lived together in Bridgetown, which, despite being the island’s capital, was a small, tight-knit community and Ronald soon built up a reputation as a parrow – Barbadian slang for a ‘scrounging junkie’.
In fact, rumours were even rife that his drug abuse had left him infertile, accounting for the couple’s initially childless marriage. The gossipmongers were proved wrong on February 20, 1988 when the couple’s first daughter was born – Robyn Rihanna Fenty.
Finding it difficult to deal with the upheaval of the new arrival, Ronald would flee the family home for days at a time on cocaine binges, leaving his wife to take care of the newborn. While her father was scoring crack and her mother was working all the hours that God sent to keep the family finances in check, Rihanna was distracting herself in a very different way – by singing. At age three, she would stand in front of her bedroom mirror, an imaginary microphone or her mother’s hairbrush clasped in her hands, singing the words to Whitney Houston’s ‘Saving All My Love For You’. What was more, as soon as she was able to walk, she also mastered the dance routines.
Singing and performing were essential diversions for Rihanna as she dodged her parents’ increasingly ferocious battles. “Even as a child, I would learn that my mom and dad would argue when there was foil paper in the ashtray,” she later told The Mirror.
There was also prolific violence – on one occasion, Ronald even broke his wife’s nose in front of her. Rihanna would cling onto his legs and smash glasses in a desperate attempt to save her mother and distract her father from the beatings. “I was out of control,” Ronald acknowledged to The Sun. “I would let my wife and children down time and time again. I was not a good dad or husband.”
Rihanna agreed, telling The Observer, “A child shouldn’t have to go through that. Being in the whirlwind, it frustrates you, it angers you, because you’re being tortured and you don’t know why.”
Over the years, suffering from an abusive father, she continued to find refuge in song. She was inspired by the tunes that blared out from the reggae nightclub her mother ran at the time, and became a huge fan of artists such as Bob Marley. Uplifting songs such as ‘No Woman, No Cry’, which made the best out of a bad situation, lifted her out of her depression.
It was almost compulsory for a young Bajan girl to listen to copious amounts of reggae; but, going against the grain, the young Rihanna – still known to everyone by her first name, Robyn – also sought out a more balanced musical diet as she grew up. This included Shaggy, Diana Ross and Mariah Carey.
“Reggae wasn’t enough for Robyn anymore,” a childhood friend told the author. “She was frustrated by how local sega or reggae artists weren’t getting much success outside of Bridgetown. She started to look up to the American artists more because they were given more recognition and they’d made their dreams come true. They were pulling audiences from all around the world. Actually, the girls at school dissed her for turning her back on our local culture, thinking she was better than the rest.”
And music wasn’t the only reason she was singled out for abuse at school. Rihanna had always stood out as different, due to her unusually light skin and green eyes, and at primary school, she was bullied relentlessly and told that she was “an ugly pig”.
But music dominated Rihanna’s life: whether it was Bob Marley, Destiny’s Child or an obscure sega group from back home adorning her playlist, Rihanna would sing along – and loud. She would sing in the school cafeteria, on the beach, on balconies or even at home in the shower. The latter caused her some trouble at times. Her neighbours might have been embarrassed to mention the near daily arguments, physical fights and piercing screams they heard echoing through the perilously thin walls of her home – domestic violence was another taboo – but they were less restrained when it came to criticising Rihanna’s singing.
“We used to call her Robyn Red Breast,” joked her long-time neighbour Dawn Johnson to The Sun. “She was always singing like a bird. We are so close we could hear her singing from the bathroom.”
Although Dawn had remembered her voice with affection, others hadn’t been nearly as kind. Rihanna’s childhood friend continued: “People would actually taunt her, she would get told to shut up, and they barely stopped short of complaining to her folks. I don’t know if she’d like me telling you this, but she was in tears over it more than once. Singing should be natural, but she was made to feel uncomfortable and forced to cover it up – like she had to hold herself in. It wasn’t just her father who clipped her wings.”
Her father might have been unpredictable, suffering from drug-related mood swings, but – in a twist of fate – music turned out to be the one thing they could bond over. Aged seven, Rihanna’s voice came to his attention, burning through his consciousness, as she belted out ‘A Whole New World’, a song from the Aladdin soundtrack. “I was in the lounge and heard this angelic singing from the balcony,” he told The Sun. “I looked out and it was Rihanna. My heart jumped. I knew then she was special.”
Believing she had inherited her singing talent from his parents, Ronald began to pay more attention to her and the two grew closer. “I still vividly remember all the good things, like playing with him on the beach and catching crabs,” Rihanna told The Mirror of that time. Her father’s drug use also seemed to have subsided. But underneath these brief moments of happiness, a storm was brewing. She had his love and approval for now – but for how much longer?
Before long, the wheel of fortune dipped down again in her life. Even discovering who was responsible for Rihanna’s talent became a bone of contention. “Her mum says Robyn takes after her, but I know the singing is definitely from me,” Ronald told The Mirror in defiance. Both of his parents had been keen singers, sometimes performing professionally.
By now, Ronald had left his job as a warehouse supervisor and had taken on the role of a full-time house husband as Monica struggled to support the family on her own meagre wages. Rihanna began to see more of him – and she realised she didn’t always much like what she saw.
“I had seen the marijuana around him, but I didn’t know what it was,” she recalled to The Daily Mail. “I just know that my mum didn’t like it and they were always fighting about it. My mother was a very strong woman and tried to shelter us from it as much as she could. But she was working and he was at home, so there was only so much she could hide from us.”
As the fighting escalated yet again, Rihanna would sit on the stairs, her eyes closed and her fists clenched, muttering, “I’ll never date someone like my dad – never!” over and over as tears streamed silently down her face. When her father was coming down from a hit, he could become enraged even by the sound of someone crying – so she had learnt to keep her grief under cover. Living in constant fear of more attacks, the last thing she wanted to do was trigger her father’s violence.
What was more, in Barbadian culture, airing one’s dirty laundry in public was frowned upon – and something as controversial as violence had to be kept a closely guarded secret. “In Barbados we don’t [talk about abuse]. We keep it in our family and figure it out and move on,” Rihanna revealed matter-of-factly to The Observer. She added, “Domestic violence is a big secret. No kid goes around and lets people know that their parents fight.”
But it was becoming harder and harder to keep her feelings in check. Her betrayed mother would even make snide remarks as they passed homeless men in the street. “We were walking down the street with the kids and there was a guy sleeping on the sidewalk,” Ronald recalled to The Sun. “Her mother said to Robyn, ‘Your dad is going to end up like that.’ I did not want my children to see me sleeping on the sidewalk, so I started making the changes.” However, his addiction was ruling his life and it was too little, too late.
At the age of nine, Rihanna unwittingly triggered her parents’ separation, when she caught her father in the act. It wasn’t simply telltale foil wrappers in the ashtray that caught her eye this time, but her father with a crack pipe locked to his lips. He had promised his wife that he would quit drugs but – even as an innocent child – Rihanna knew better. Fearfully spying on her father through a crack in the kitchen door, she decided she had to do something. It was a tough call for Rihanna but – knowing how it upset her mother – she knew she had to be honest and confide in her about what she had seen. Within days, Ronald had left the family home.
“I just know that my mom and dad would always fight if there was a foil paper in the ashtray,” Rihanna recalled to Giant of that time. “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 he did it again and I told her. I said, ‘Mom, he did that ashtray thing again…’”
The guilt of being found out by his daughter brought Ronald back down to earth with a crash. He told The Sun, “I turned and looked Rihanna in the eye and instantly came back down from the high I was on. I saw her run for her mother, ask her something and then they both started to cry. I had no idea she had been watching. It was the lowest point – life just stopped and I realised what a fool I had been.”
Monica was furious that her daughter’s innocence had been shattered at such a young age – and she resolved to kick him out of the house once and for all. There were no more second chances, no more waiting for him to kick his habit.
“It really broke her mum’s heart,” an close friend told the author. “She hated the thought that Robyn might come to see that as normal and one day start doing it herself.”
She’d always tried to protect her from that kind of thing. She was a regular in church so I guess what he was doing went against her beliefs. But I remember Robyn feeling so guilty – she felt as if, because it was her who’d found him, that it was her fault he’d left – that if she’d just kept quiet, he would still have been at home. To her, she’d lost her father and it was all her fault. She couldn’t stand it.”
As she struggled to shoulder the guilt, her feelings gradually turned to anger. “I hated him,” Rihanna told The Guardian. “Then one of my school friends who I was very close to, she knew, and she always used to say, ‘You can’t hate your father,’ that you have to love him at the end of the day because he’s your father. So I listened, as much as it took it out of me.”
Her friend’s advice led Rihanna’s feelings to spiral back down into guilt. She started to question all over again whether her parents’ separation had been down to her own poor judgement – crying to her mother about the crack cocaine, when, perhaps, she should have left it alone.
She began to suffer intense migraines on a daily basis, causing her mother to panic that she might have developed a brain tumour. In reality, she was simply repressing her feelings – and buckling under the stress.
“I was just taking on too much,” she confessed to Giant magazine. “I wouldn’t cry or act, so it really affected me in [my 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.” From then on, inside, Rihanna was always crying.
What saddened her the most was that she still loved the very man who had abused her. “Some of my most memorable childhood experiences were with him,” she recalled to the Daily Mail. “He taught me how to swim, fish and ride [a bicycle]. He’s the one who made me tough and prepared me for the world.”
To an outsider, rearing such a resilient daughter might have made Ronald appear to be the perfect dad – in reality, Rihanna had needed to be tough because of the misery that his drug abuse had heaped on the family. The fact that she doted on him made it even harder to accept his faults; but, feeling from that moment that she couldn’t trust him to show her right from wrong, she decided to father herself.
“I think it made me very independent,” she told The Observer. “I’m very strong… I’d always been a daddy’s girl. I was daddy’s girl. [Then] I found out who was doing right and who was doing wrong – and I turned into a mommy’s girl.”
In fact, Rihanna took her role so seriously that she became the “second mother” in the family – a surrogate parent to her younger brothers Rorrey and Rajad, born in 1989 and 1998 respectively. Ronald had nicknamed the young Rihanna ‘Pinky’, because of her love of feminine-coloured clothes, but she soon dispensed with the pastel pinks. It was time for her to paint on her tough-girl persona, and it was most definitely not pink.
Perhaps Rihanna was afraid of being the delicate young flower, the girly girl who dressed in pale colours, because femininity was a painful reminder of her mother, and what she had been forced to endure as she soldiered through a physically abusive relationship. Rihanna didn’t want to make the same mistakes. Subconsciously, she might have wanted to shake off her archetypal female image, rejecting the pain she had seen passivity cause. Before long, her maternal grandmother was affectionately referring to her as ‘Rebel Flower’.
While she was transforming herself, Rihanna also watched her mother turn from a fearful, downtrodden single mother into a strong, independent career woman determined to succeed for her family. Monica had retrained as an accountant and worked long, arduous hours of overtime, leaving Rihanna to take care of the house and the children. Yet, if it meant her sons and daughter didn’t have to witness – or inhale – crack cocaine, then she felt it was a decision she had no other option but to make.
“My dad got put out of the house… because she was not having that around us,” Rihanna recalled to The Observer. “My mom had to be a woman and a man, working her ass off for us.”
At around this time, Rihanna’s soundtrack to escapism was Destiny’s Child, and their song ‘Independent Women’ struck a special chord with her. She had seen her mother fight to raise three children and to earn enough money to support the family, while also fending off the grief of losing her husband. She knew first-hand how difficult it could be, so strong female role models became prominent in her life – her mother most of all. “I was never aware that we were poor,” she later told Glamour. “My mom never made us feel that way. She loved me unconditionally. She made us feel anything was possible and instilled in me such confidence.”
However, her mother’s hectic routine put a great deal of pressure on Rihanna. “[My mom] worked a lot. She was really never home – I mean, she was home, but it would be after work, late at night, so I would take care of [youngest brother Rajad],” she continued. “He was my best friend. He thought I was his mom!”
Meanwhile, Rihanna’s relationship with her other brother, Rorrey, more often involved borrowing his clothes. She would put on his baggy trousers and trainers the instant she changed out of her school uniform. “I wore my brother’s clothes, dresses with sneakers, or no shoes at all,” she later confessed.
Her garb didn’t adhere to her mother’s exacting standards for a ‘young lady’ either. “I would always get in trouble with my mum,” she continued. “She would say things to scare me, like, ‘You’re going to get cut!’ But I couldn’t help it. I would climb trees, steal mangoes, catch birds – silly things that were fun to us at the time.” She was still a flower, but – like any good rose – she was also showing her thorns.
Like Katy Perry, Rihanna seemed to long to be ‘one of the boys’, but, despite her tomboyish persona, they weren’t ready to accept her into their world. “My cousin and I were the only girls in the group,” she recalled. “We would have to stand up for ourselves because the guys didn’t want us around.”
If her relationships with the boys were fraught, that was nothing compared to how the local girls saw her. The bullying campaign that had been waged against her stepped up even more as she grew older, leaving her infuriated. “[The prejudice] made me angry,” she told In Style of the taunts and catcalls she received about the colour of her skin. “It made me want to fight in my younger years. Having lighter skin wasn’t a problem in my household, but it was when I went to school, which really confused me at first. For the first six years of school, I would go home traumatised. The harassment continued to my very last day of elementary school.”
What was more, she didn’t receive much sympathy when she chose to reveal her ordeal to the press later. “Why do you always speak so badly of the Caribbean?” a girl calling herself Shanakay raged on blog site Out A Road, in response to a post about Rihanna being bullied at school for her comparatively light skin colour. “You need to be proud of your roots.” Another fan called Nelly added, “It’s like you do not have anything positive to say about your country and your family – many Caribbean children go through it because we are of mixed nationalities, whether you’re mixed with Indian, Spanish or Chinese. Stop making your life in Barbados out to be worse than it really was because we all know, Robyn – that was not the case.”
Rihanna also unwittingly found herself at the centre of a race debate, with one anonymous girl insisting, “Because you were light skinned, that’s why you’re a star. Now you think you were the only young Bajan that could sing… It’s the norm in this slavery mentality world we’re still living in, so save it, Rihanna.”
Rihanna’s friends came to her defence. “She never thought she was better than anyone else like people are saying,” one of them told the author at the time. “It’s just that some girls are very sensitive about issues of race in the Caribbean. They thought that Rihanna’s comments were sneering that she was superior, and they were trying to get across their own problems and their feeling of, ‘Well, it’s alright for you!’” Did lighter skinned girls really have an easier time of it? “Not necessarily, but that was the perception.”
Clearly, growing up in a land of sun had been far from the idyllic childhood it might have seemed. With the combination of her pent-up aggression towards the bullies and her angst about what had been going on at home, Rihanna felt that she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. Her headaches escalated, becoming so intense that by the time she was nine she had started to black out on a regular basis.
She was admitted to hospital for a series of brain scans that would go on for years. “I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t get upset. It was all just up here, in my head,” she told Contact Music. “I had to go through a lot of CAT scans. They even thought it was a tumour, because it was that intense. It’s not great memories, but it helped to build me and make me stronger.”
It wasn’t an easy time for Rihanna and it was a great relief for her when she finally graduated from primary school and enrolled at Combermere, a small, mixed secondary school consisting of just 1,000 pupils.
The atmosphere in what was Barbados’s oldest secondary school would prove to be a little calmer. “There was no bullying about her looks [at Combermere],” another close friend, Cheyne Jones, told the author. “That’s a rumour.”
Rihanna settled down and became very academic, counting maths and chemistry among her favourite subjects. She also dreamed of studying psychology at university to learn how her friends, enemies and, of course, frenemies, operated.
“I’ve always had a thing for reading people,” she told The Observer. “When I come into contact with a situation or a person, the first thing I do is, I’m just quiet for a little while. I sit, I watch you, I observe you – and being able to read people helps me to know how easy it is to be read. I know the key things that show people who you are… people are shallow, they’re dishonest. You can’t trust them. [Psychology] really helps me to understand how to play the game.”
Yet psychology was just a back-up plan – deep down, she knew she wanted to sing for a living. While she fantasised about becoming a star, she supplemented her family’s meagre income by becoming a market-stall trader, using her father’s bric-a-brac business for inspiration.
“She used to sell stuff on the side of the street like I did,” her father, Ronald, revealed to The Sun. “She’d come outside of the store, put up a rack and sell hats and scarves. She would also buy sweets, put them in packages and take them to school to sell to her friends for a profit.”
Assuming she would grow up to be an entrepreneur, he was shocked to learn just how serious singing had become for her. “She liked to dance and had natural rhythm, but she wasn’t doing all the school productions and stuff so it came a bit out of the blue,” he recalled.
Although her father had his heart set on her becoming a businesswoman and hadn’t seen success coming musically, Rihanna knew exactly where she wanted to be. “I just developed a passion, singing and listening to the radio all the time. It became a dream of mine to become a singer myself,” she told The Guardian. “I aspired to be like Mariah Carey. I wanted to make music the world would love.”
However there was a setback on her journey. Her estranged father had rejoined the family, promising to kick his drug habit for good; it was too late to save the marriage, and he and Monica would finally divorce when Rihanna was 16. For the moment, however, Rihanna was delighted to have him back around the house, although she still lived in constant fear of another argument. She desperately needed a distraction, an outlet for all of the tension – so, aged 12, she decided to enrol in the summer camp run by the Barbados Cadet Corps.
It was an ideal outlet through which to channel all of her anxiety and aggression. According to popular belief, it was one of the toughest youth courses in the Caribbean, if not the world. As the founders of the camp warned, “The programme is deliberately intense, the timings will be strictly adhered to and standards will be set very high.”
The rigorous training programme included a survival camp test, where cadets were challenged to pitch their own tents in the wilderness and cook food over an open fire. Their physical fitness would be tested with regular swimming, cycling and running races. But the biggest endurance test for most cadets, however, was the orienteering challenge, which involved route planning, scrambling over rough terrain and map-reading on the move. To make matters worse, the cadets would be timed on how fast they could find their feet. A mixed group of boys and girls would also take part in shooting practice with a .177 air rifle.
However, as a friend recalls, Rihanna had no trouble at all adapting to the challenges of being a cadet. “Robyn was a really smart girl,” she told the author. “People thought her best friend Sonita would be the successful one, because she was planning to study medicine and she worked super hard at school. Not only was Robyn a bit of a party girl but she was seen by some people as just another pretty girl with no brains. People dismissed her as being empty-headed, but that wasn’t the case at all.”
She added, “She was brilliant at map reading – and imagine this gorgeous girl with model looks who would turn round and blow your mind by doing shooting practice with more precision than any guy you’d ever seen. She definitely didn’t conform to what was expected of her, even then.”
However, Rihanna struggled to accept her role in the cadet hierarchy. As a lowly junior cadet, she had to obey the orders of girls who had a more experienced ranking. She would be at their mercy the moment she put a foot wrong.
One such woman was the formidable Shontelle Layne – now a singer and songwriter better known simply as Shontelle – who was a drill sergeant for the team. “Picture me and Rihanna in combat boots and fatigues crawling through mud and things like that,” Shontelle later told BBC Entertainment. “I had to order her around. That’s what drill sergeants do. We boss cadets around, we make them do push-ups – especially when they show up on the parade square late.”
Unfortunately for Rihanna, this happened all too often. Although Shontelle insisted she “wasn’t one of the scary ones” and “didn’t abuse my authority,” there were consequences for a girl who dared to be late.
“I was drill sergeant on duty one day and they blew the horn and everyone was supposed to assemble on the parade square,” Shontelle told The Mirror. “Everyone’s there and then along comes Rihanna – Miss Robyn Fenty – straggling behind with a bunch of her buddies. The sergeant major was there watching so I knew I had to discipline them. I ordered them to drop and give me 10 press ups.”
Yet her soft spot for Rihanna, whom she secretly adored, caused her to be a little more lenient than usual. She confessed, “If it had been someone else, they’d have had to do 50.”
Shontelle believed she knew the reasons for her friend’s constant tardiness – her preoccupation with her looks. She joked to Lime magazine, “She used to be really sharp all the time, but Rihanna is a diva now, she’s always fabulous and glamorous. She was always that way, and she used to be late all the time because she was in the bathroom making sure her lip gloss was sparkly.”
Rihanna was showing exactly why her grandmother had given her the pet name of Rebel Flower – she was tough, edgy and rebellious, but she was determined to make sure she looked good in the process.
“She’s so funny,” Shontelle continued. “She’d be like, ‘I don’t care if I’m in fatigues – I want to be the fliest person in here!’ But since she was late, I was like ‘Rihanna, do 10 push ups now!’ I couldn’t let it slide.”
However, Rihanna’s vanity came in useful for one thing – cadets were awarded extra brownie points for looking immaculate in the drill competition, which saw a third of the total points awarded for successful ‘inspection of cadets and uniforms’. According to Shontelle, this was one area where Rihanna definitely made the grade. “In cadet camp, your appearance is important,” she told Hollywood Life. “You have to have your shoes perfectly shined. Buttons, belt buckles, everything aligned. She totally was that. She was a really good cadet.”
Unbeknown to each other, both budding army princesses had a passion for performance and were practising their vocals behind closed doors in their spare time. Plus, when drills were over, Rihanna’s friends insisted that the roles reversed and Rihanna became the dominant one in their social circle.
“She really stood out,” a friend recalls. “She was very cool and calm. I think Shontelle was actually in awe of her behind the scenes. She’d also try to be different. In cadets, everyone has to look identical, but Robyn would always find a way to stand out from the crowd, whether it was a crazy-coloured lip gloss or just her demeanour. She definitely wasn’t ever going to blend in.”
Indeed, Shontelle confessed to The Mirror, “I knew she was going to be famous, but I always thought Robyn was going to be a model or something. She’s gorgeous.” Rihanna had already been typecast as a typical tall, leggy catwalk model, but in spite of that she had also made a name for herself as a force to be reckoned with. Her background in cadets had certainly toughened her up. “People say, ‘Oh, Rihanna… she’s a Barbie,’” Shontelle continued. “No, she’s not. She’s the real deal.”
She had proved herself by completing the strenuous summer camp, excelling at shooting practice, military precision and even three-mile runs. Yet there were also some less difficult areas to tackle. Debate was encouraged through a public-speaking contest, where cadets addressed topics such as, “Discuss the pros and cons of cultural penetration in your country,” and “Discuss the impact of lifestyle diseases on youth in your country.” The first question proved embarrassing for Rihanna due to her mixed-race background, with Irish ancestors in Sligo. Meanwhile, contrary to strict military training expectations, Rihanna was involved in what some conservative Barbadians might regard as a ‘lifestyle disease’ already. She had begun to party relentlessly from the tender age of 14.
“At 14 I’d go out and get drunk, but that’s what teenage girls do in Barbados,” she explained to the Daily Mail. “The country’s pretty laid back about the legal age for drinking. But I never went over the top. I wasn’t exactly in Amy Wine house mode. I’d seen what alcohol and drugs had done to my dad, and I wasn’t going to follow in his footsteps. I knew my limits when I was a kid.”
She added, “If I go to a club, I go for the sounds. I go out to have fun, to dance and laugh at people fighting or dressed like whores. I might have a few drinks, but I don’t get tipsy too easily. I don’t ever get to the point where I want to throw up, can’t stand straight or say things I’m likely to regret in the morning.”
While drinking at 14 might have been tolerated on the island, some frowned upon her new lifestyle. Rihanna had regularly attended church as a child and lived among some very religious families, for whom even listening to calypso music was forbidden, but there she was drinking rum while dirty dancing to those very same beats. If it caused a stir, she was having too much fun to notice.
Her favourite club was The Boatyard, a 24-hour hotspot for both tourists and locals that was open 365 days a year. During the day, she would sample seafood lunches and go snorkelling with her friends, or sunbathe around the beachfront property. At night, however, things would hot up, with cheap cocktails and a fusion of pounding reggae, hip-hop and R&B beats. But there was a price to pay for her liberated lifestyle.
According to an acquaintance of Rihanna’s, she quickly built up a reputation for promiscuity. “She was in the club underage trying to get with older guys,” the source told Media Takeout, “but it hardly ever worked because she had horrible skin.”
In fact, Rihanna already had two boyfriends. While things never became physical with either, the adrenaline rush of infidelity distracted her from her tough home life – until she eventually became too guilty to continue, and confessed.
The fling with her more serious boyfriend quickly ended, but she never stopped touring the clubs. During her tomboy phase, her friendships were almost exclusively with boys and this, combined with her constant partying, fuelled the rumours that she was sleeping around. Even Rihanna’s mother became distrustful of her multiple friendships with the opposite sex. “I didn’t get along with people very well,” Rihanna explained to Interview magazine. “I got along with guys, but I hated the girls and the teachers. [That’s where I got] my swag… all my friends, even if they weren’t in my school, were always guys. My mother didn’t understand that for a long time. There were all these different guys calling the house, and she probably had a totally different idea of what was happening.”
She wasn’t the only one. Rihanna found herself the victim of rumours from local girls, claiming that she was a slut who had slept with all the boys she could find. Rihanna, however, insisted that she was still a virgin. Her protective mother even banned her from leaving the house, hoping to prevent the chances of a teenage pregnancy. Rihanna’s luck only changed when she befriended an older girl in school, Melissa Forde, who her mother liked and trusted.
“When Melissa arrived at school, she really stood out,” Rihanna enthused to You magazine. “She was a black girl with blonde hair who wore make-up. She was the only girl in school who wore make-up, because we weren’t allowed.”
She added to Seventeen, “We just clicked. That was a time when I had no girlfriends at all, and neither did she. She was my first real girlfriend… I feel so comfortable when she’s around. I feel like she’s like my guardian angel.”
Not only did her unconventional look match the mixed-race Rihanna’s, but she had also introduced her to femininity. Although Rihanna’s mother had once worked as a make-up artist, expertly transforming the faces of local women for a fee, she had forbidden her young daughter from experimenting with the products she loved.
To make matters worse, Rihanna had an older half-sister, Samantha, who was an aspiring model – one of three children by three different mothers from her father’s troubled past – and Rihanna’s mother would apply make-up to her for modelling shows. Rihanna, meanwhile, could only watch.
“I’ve loved make-up and dreamed of being a cover girl since I was a little girl,” Rihanna later enthused. “I was fascinated watching my mother apply lip colour, blush and mascara.”
The desire had been buried during her tomboy phase – not least because her mother had refused to allow Rihanna to test her collection – but Melissa was helping to reawaken it. “She would come over to my house with her older sister’s magazines, and we would go through them and say, ‘Hey, we could do something like that!’ That’s when I started to get into fashion and make-up,” she remembered.
Her friendship with Melissa feminised her so much that she even dropped out of the cadets. “I was like, ‘This is terrible! They are just screaming at me, I don’t like this!’” she laughed, shuddering at the memory. Her parting shot was to get involved in the International Cadet Concert, where song and dance presentations were awarded with points. According to the rules, judging would be focused on “professionalism, talent, presentation and personal confidence”. It was a brief appearance, but it reminded Rihanna of how much she loved to sing.
She started a group with her two music-loving friends, Kelenna Browne and Jose Blackman, called Contrast. The name was chosen because the girls had different racial backgrounds, and it was intended to symbolise the diversity of the island. The trio practised Destiny’s Child and Mariah Carey songs religiously every weekend and wistfully dreamed of faraway fame and fortune.
Rihanna was becoming increasingly frustrated, however, with the lack of opportunities her country provided for becoming a singer. She loved being there, telling Interview magazine that her childhood “was perfect… we basically spent the entire day on the beach with summer all year around.” However, she also felt that there was more to life. As much as she lived and breathed music and both looked and sounded the part, her chances of success living in small-town Barbados were a million to one. The reggae and sega scene back home was dominated by men and, in any case, Rihanna didn’t want to be a success on home turf alone – she wanted global fame.
Yet the number of Bajan artists who had broken through internationally was almost zero, because most of the big-name producers lived in America. It would take more than a few rehearsals and shout-outs to local concert venues. Yet she was determined. “Seeing artists like B2K and JoJo come out at a young age really inspired me,” she told The Honolulu Advertiser. “If all of these young teenagers could do it, I thought I could too.”