Never Make the Same Mistake Twice: Lessons on Love and Life Learned the Hard Way - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Nene Leakes is an active member of Atlanta society. She resides in the upscale Sugarloaf area of Atlanta with her husband Gregg, a successful real estate investor and business consultant, and their two sons, 18-year-old Brice and nine-year-old Brentt. Nene donates her time to various foundations and is the founder of The Twisted Hearts Foundation, which brings awareness to domestic violence against women. Never one to sit still, the outspoken social butterfly also hopes to open a luxury boutique hotel in the near future.

Denene Millner, whose Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, cowritten with Steve Harvey, is currently #1 on the New York Times Advice Bestseller List, is an award-winning entertainment journalist and the author of The Sistahs’ Rules, and the coauthor of several novels. Her nonfiction credits include the What Brothers Think, What Sistahs Know relationship series and the humor book, The Angry Black Woman’s Guide to Life.

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Chapter 1

I AM LARGER THAN LIFE -- AND REFUSE TO MAKE APOLOGIES FOR IT

Go to Athens, Georgia, right now, and people will tell you in a heartbeat: Nene hasn't changed one bit. I've always been loud, a little brash, unapologetically truthful, and, above all else, real. I'm like Simon Cowell on American Idol: If you say something I don't like, I might as well correct your ass. It's my opinion, and there's nothing wrong with having one. I have, at least, the right to express it, don't I?

And I love expressing it on The Real Housewives of Atlanta -- in the spotlight. What, you didn't know? I was meant to be in the spotlight. I knew this from the time I was a little girl, trust. I was that girl, honey. I would be at home, at my aunt's house, playing with my Barbie in her little pool and my Candi doll, too -- you know, the one with the hair and the makeup and the rollers -- having loud conversations with the two of them about how Janet Jackson, who was then starring as Penny on Good Times, didn't have nothing on me. I'd be doing their hair and getting their makeup right and baking cakes in my Easy-Bake oven and having parties for them and me, just bragging to them and the four walls about how we were all going to go big-time and how my Easy-Bake needed 100 watts because we needed to go big with it. Be clear: My people were sharp, honey. My dolls and I would all be in there looking fierce and I'd be just going on and on about how I was going to be a star, for real. My friends and I would be over there on Dearing Street, hopscotching and playing baseball -- the tree was first base, a shoe was second, and a piece of cardboard, third -- and we'd be getting down, me talking smack the whole time. If I got my hands on a piece of chalk? Oh, it'd be over. I'd plop right there in the middle of the street and write "Nene" in big bubble letters in different colors, just like I intended to see it up in lights, punctuating each letter I drew with, "I'm going to be famous, y'all. I don't know when this shit is gonna pop off, but I'm gonna be ready when it hits!"

My aunt and everyone else thought I was just a trip. They'd bust into the bathroom and see me in the mirror, posing like that picture of Janet Jackson -- the one where she's smiling all cute with her hand behind her head -- and crack up laughing at me. They just didn't know where I got all that big personality from, where I got it in my mind that I was going to be a celebrity. But I knew all along I was destined for greatness, and that greatness wasn't about to be found in the old dirt roads of Athens. I was raised on the outskirts of Athens, a cute but small college town in north Georgia. My aunt built her a nice house there -- though it looks small today, it seemed huge when I was a kid -- but we didn't have even the simplest things everybody had in town. Like cable and paved streets. You could wash your car and spit-shine the tires and then drive down the road leading to my aunt's house and it would seem like your car hadn't seen water since it left the dealership lot. And don't even get me started on how we couldn't watch any good shows on TV. Lord, I couldn't stand being out there with no channels, moving those damn rabbit ears to try to get reception so I could watch something decent. That just wasn't any way for a future star to live.

Besides, I saw early on that Athens did something to people -- made them settle for that small-town life and a small-town way of thinking. I watched all my friends and their brothers and sisters, too, graduate from school and then start working at the plant almost the day after they crossed the stage. It didn't seem like it ever occurred to them that the world was so much bigger than our little corner of Georgia, that there were bigger, better opportunities out there. But I had big dreams, and they would reveal themselves in Technicolor and with clear Dolby sound. I was going to be a model, and act, and have money, and a man who was about something. And everything I did was geared toward making my colorful, loud dreams a reality.

I convinced my aunt to let me live with her daughter so that I could go to the school in the city of Athens and so that I could join both modeling school and an acting class downtown. I was on the basketball team and the cheerleading team, and you could usually find me holding court in the restaurants and boutiques in the cute little downtown area near the University of Georgia, the college that anchored Athens. My friends would just watch me move and goad me on. They knew I was a gogetter -- a hustler -- and that I wasn't hardly studying staying there in Athens the rest of my life. I wouldn't even date a dude from Athens. My girls would date those country guys from in town, and I would be somewhere bragging about the guy I was dating from Oglethorp or the boy who was driving in from Atlanta to visit. And while I was waiting for him to show up? I'd be talking about making it big. Oh, I was a celebrity already in my own mind -- was always like, "I don't know what's wrong with the rest of these people, but they better recognize: Nene is a star!"

Now, it didn't pop off like I planned until much later in my life. I got sidetracked with a nogood man who abused me, and then became a young single mom, and after that wound up doing some not-so-popular things to survive, things I'll talk about later in the book. But I never forgot the dream, never lost sight of my vision. I'd find my way to auditions here and there, and eventually ended up meeting the casting director Robbie Reed-Humes, who'd gotten her start casting Spike Lee's earlier films and was enjoying a smoking hot career as the person booking talent for the hottest black movies on the big screen. When I met her, I'd been looking for a speaking part in a film so that I could get my Screen Actors Guild card, and Robbie was casting The Fighting Temptations, the flick about a secular music producer who agrees to direct a church choir in order to get his inheritance. She got me in front of the director, and he liked me enough to bring me back for a second audition the next day.

Still, because I didn't have a name, I didn't get any of the big parts. Instead, they gave me a bit as a stripper auditioning for the choir. I had on a shirt and jeans, and I had to go up in front of Cuba Gooding's character and take off my top while I tried to convince him I was just perfect for his church group. My scene ended up on the cutting room floor, but I did get that SAG card, which led to me landing a guest starring role on The Parkers, and I even auditioned for a lead role in Girlfriends -- opportunities that kept opening doors for me. I also landed the lead role in A Time to Dance, a theater show in Atlanta. My agent even got me a meeting with the head of casting over at UPN. I wasn't on my game in that interview, though. I thought it was an audition and so I showed up in the standard audition outfit of jeans and flip-flops, ready to read and take a head shot and leave my callback information and be on my way. I must have looked so new to her, like I didn't know what I was doing. I'm not going to lie: I didn't. I had no clue that she wanted to talk to me about a new TV show the network was planning -- Eve -- and they were thinking about me as a sidekick. That lady saw my inexperience, but she kept talking to me, and her words inspired me. I learned the lingo from her and got some ideas, too, namely, that a reality show might be the perfect platform for Nene to go big.

I could have gone on Survivor or Big Brother or the Flavor of Love, but none of them felt right, none of them spoke to me. But when a producer came knocking on my door, talking about The Real Housewives of Atlanta?

Yeah, it was on.

...