From rap stardom to movie stardom, “Will” traces its hero’s quest out of West Philadelphia.
Fourth of July weekend,1996. America has gasped en masse watching aliens detonate the White House in the movie “Independence Day” and, at 3 a.m. in Los Angeles, the telephone of its young star, Will Smith, jangles him awake. It’s his domineering father, calling from Philadelphia to crow about the boffo box office receipts. “Remember I told you! There’s no such thing as luck,” this man he calls Daddio reminds him several times. Smith is baffled. Then Daddio, piling on affectionate profanity, concedes he was wrong about being the creator of your own destiny, about success being the result of preparation meeting opportunity and all that. His son, a rapper-turned-sitcom actor and now overnight matinee idol, is just the luckiest man he has ever met. Titled simply “Will,” with all of that word’s felicitous double entendres of iron and resolve, Smith’s autobiography is indeed a fairy tale of dazzling good fortune — albeit one told by a narrator who admits by the second chapter that he is unreliable, a lifelong embellisher for whom “the border between fantasy and reality has always been thin and transparent.” The book is also intermittently a call to self-actualization: Written with Mark Manson, a mega-selling personal-growth author himself prone to profanity, it’s sprinkled with homilies like “Living is the journey from not knowing to knowing. From not understanding to understanding. From confusion to clarity.” A Fresh Prince of all media, Smith has so many “angels” to thank along this “journey,” he directs readers to his Instagram account rather than kill more trees with lengthy acknowledgments. It’s more like a wild ride than a journey, however, one whose most valuable insights are to be gleaned not on Instagram but in a pre-web world of suburban basements, cassette decks, network TV shows, fax machines, party lines and playing outside. During Smith’s childhood in the Wynnefield neighborhood of West Philadelphia, Daddio was a hard-drinking self-employed refrigeration engineer of militaristic discipline but erratic temper.
