A Love Story: Voice Actor Joan Baker and Producer and Director Rudy Gaskins on ‘How to Succeed in Business and Marriage By Really Trying’
by Christy DeBoe Hicks
This is a love story in two parts. It is a story about a California girl who goes to the Big Apple to advance her show business career. She discovers her talent for voice acting, which leads her to meet and fall in love with a guy from Chocolate City, who hired her for a job. They make a connection and a commitment to each other and to support other voice actors while increasing the public recognition and appreciation of their beloved industry that brought them together.
Rudy Gaskins, an Emmy Award-winning producer and director, and Joan Baker, an award-winning voice actor, producer, and top-selling author, have been partners in life and work for 26 years. They are co-founders of the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences (SOVAS), where Gaskins is president and CEO and Baker is the vice president.
Part I is the story of how Gaskins and Baker had a chance encounter — that came within minutes of not happening — which led to a lifetime of loving, living, working, and creating together. Part II will explore the incredible work they are doing through SOVAS to uplift the voice arts industry and to encourage and support more diversity and equity in the field. To learn about how they had to face down racism on their way to each other and to the top of their fields, read both parts.
Kismet, noun — fate; destiny
Rudy Gaskins and Joan Baker took different routes to the helm of the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences, a burgeoning nonprofit organization that provides education, training, job opportunities, and award acknowledgment to support working voice actors and those trying to establish careers in the field through its signature programs That’s Voiceover! Career Expo and the Voice Arts Awards. SOVAS is also a leader in the promotion of equity and diversity in the voiceover industry.
Rudy Gaskins
Rudy Gaskins’ journey began in Washington, D.C., where he was born and raised. He was influenced by racial and economic divides, the death of a civil rights hero and its aftermath, a failed presidency, an exceptional opportunity for arts education, and four extraordinary women.
The only boy in the family, Gaskins grew up with three sisters — Deadra, LaRita, and Kim — and what he describes as a “very strong-willed” single mother, Eva Dove, who was a nurse. He says his upbringing shaped both how he views women and how he related to them.
“I developed a sensibility about women — young women and older women — that created in me an affinity for what women deal with in the world, and a concern for supporting them,” he says. Those early lessons continue to influence his life and work today.
Gaskins grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and remembers D.C. as a hotspot for racism and politics. Although the city was about 70 percent Black, earning it the nickname “Chocolate City,” there were notable racial and economic divides.
“There were metaphorical railroad tracks,” Gaskins says. “I was on the poor folk side, not dirt poor, but definitely working class.” As a member of the track team at Roosevelt High School, he got to see the sometimes-stark differences in neighborhoods as they traveled to various schools for track meets. There were neighborhoods much poorer than his, neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park, where few African Americans lived, and there was a neighborhood just east of that park where well-off African Americans lived. That neighborhood bore the nickname “The Gold Coast.”
“I enjoyed driving down The Gold Coast and thinking about the lives of those folks and appreciating that those folks were living the good life,” he recalls, “But I was dealing with racism regularly. It was a standard experience once you stepped outside of your community.”
Growing up in the Nation’s Capital, Gaskins was interested in politics, but two incidents in his young life turned him away from that path. One was the riots that tore the city apart after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, when Gaskins was eight years old. “I was a kid walking through the streets, smelling the tear gas after the riots, and seeing all the buildings that had been burned out, and trying to make sense of what was happening in the world,” he recalls. In 1974, when Gaskins was a teenager, Richard Nixon resigned his presidency after being impeached by the House of Representatives for crimes related to the “Watergate Scandal.”
“That shifted my point of view of politics,” he recalls. “Up until that point, I had considered a career in politics because it was so prevalent in D.C. After that happened, it seemed like a negative way to go. The president was a crook. Politics fell off my radar.”
Gaskins turned his attention to more creative pursuits. His sister, LaRita Gaskins, also pursued the arts. She is a singer who has worked in-studio sessions or live performances with top artists, including Aretha Franklin, Ben E. King, Jimmy Cliff, Debbie Harry, Jocelyn Brown, Debbie Gibson, Oleta Adams, Bob Baldwin, and more. Rudy Gaskins attended the Workshops for Careers for the Arts, a professional training program designed for artistically talented teenagers, which was a collaborative effort housed on the campus at George Washington University. These free afterschool and summer workshops were designed as a pilot program that helped lead to the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a public performing arts high school in Washington, D.C. “That’s where I was introduced to the arts through filmmaking,” he says. “I started making short films there, and that led to me to the Tisch School.”
The New York University Tisch School of the Arts is one of the country’s most revered centers for the study of performing, cinematic, and emerging media arts. Gaskins made it through the school’s highly selective admissions process and was admitted to the Film and Television program. One of the highlights of his time at Tisch was that he met and worked on student projects with award-winning film director Spike Lee, who was attending the graduate film program at Tisch while Gaskins was an undergraduate there. Gaskins would later work with Spike Lee as an editor on Do the Right Thing and School Daze. In addition to his film work, in his sophomore year, Gaskins created Brownstone magazine, NYU’s only school-sponsored publication targeting the university’s African American community. Brownstone magazine was published for fifteen years. In 2018, a student-led magazine of the same name began operating on campus.
While in college, Gaskins wrote, directed, and produced several short films, including I Wanna Play, a twenty-minute short film about a woman whose marriage was falling apart because she was obsessed with playing chess. The film won “Best Comedy” at the NYU Film Festival. After he graduated, he got an opportunity to work as an apprentice film editor on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club. He went on to work with some of the most influential filmmakers of our time, including Jonathan Demme (Something Wild), Brian DePalma (The Untouchables), Miloš Forman (Valmont), Alan Pakula (Dream Lover), and Spike Lee (School Daze, Do the Right Thing).
“Having the opportunity to work on the editing side of feature films, which is where I was working as a sound editor, music editor, and a picture editor, was an extraordinary experience because when you’re doing that post-production work, what you are learning to do as a filmmaker is how to finish,” he says. “Many people start films, and they finish them five to ten years later. You have to learn to finish, especially if you’re working at that level with people like I was.”
Gaskins started in the film business as an apprentice and worked his way up to a full editor. “The joy of that work was the professionalism, working at that level with other professionals,” he explains. “When you talk about these directors, you’re also talking about top actors who you are working with daily,” he says.
His biggest takeaway from working on major studio feature films is this: “The devil is in the details. Learn to enjoy that little devil because it will make all the difference in the end product. There’s too much at stake to let the little things go by. When you’re working on feature films, you’re dealing with multimillion-dollar projects that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. So, you can’t leave anything to chance. So, you’re checking and you’re double-checking, and you are bearing down all the time to uncover what can be made better.” He says paying attention to details, making sure nothing slips by and continuously striving to make things better is a skillset and mindset that made him a successful film editor and influenced all his work.
Gaskins traded the big screen for the small one because he wanted to work as a director. He started working on freelance documentary projects for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), first as an associate producer then as a union director. Working for PBS, he traveled to 35 of the 50 states in the U.S. and internationally to Israel, Italy, The Netherlands (Amsterdam), Australia, Guatemala, Mexico, Columbia, Ecuador, Ghana, and South Africa, where he interviewed Nelson Mandela, and produced stories that ranged from science to social issues. During his tenure there, he produced or directed nearly twelve hours of documentary programming. “I was completely swept off my feet by the world of PBS,” says Gaskins. “It was a life-changing experience to work with people who wake up wanting to change the human condition for the better — scouring the world and the universe for a deeper understanding of how to live up to the best we can be.”
Gaskins’ next challenge was as a writer/producer with ABC News advertising and promotion. Here, he oversaw the writing and production of advertising messages for World News Tonight featuring the legendary Peter Jennings, 20/20 with Barbara Walters, and Primetime Live with Diane Sawyer. Gaskins also produced and directed behind-the-scenes news packages for ABC affiliates. While working for ABC, Gaskins crossed paths with Joan Baker, a meeting that would change his life — and hers.
Joan Baker
Joan Baker’s early years were, in many ways, the mirror image of Gaskins’. Born in San Francisco, she moved with her family to Marin County, in Northern California, when she was three years old. Her father, James Baker, was a longshoreman, and her mother, Mae Jones, took care of the home and the family.
Like Gaskins, she had three siblings, but they were all Baker boys: Kevin, Michael, and Stanley. She was the oldest and the only girl and she always felt that she was in charge. “The difference between my experience and Rudy’s is that I ruled the roost until the day I left home, and Rudy did a lot of observing women in a compassionate, loving way.”
Another difference was that while Gaskins grew up in a working-class neighborhood in an east coast urban, majority Black city, Baker grew up in a west coast county that was considered a “utopia.” The county is among the wealthiest in the country. It also had very few African American residents when she was there. “Where I was growing up, Marin County was all white,” she says. “Another Black family moved into our neighborhood when I was in eighth grade, so we were the only ones there for ten years.”
Despite the differences in where and how they grew up, they both experienced racism as children. Baker believes the racism she experienced growing up was exacerbated by the fact that she is biracial. Her mother is Black, and her father is white, and she says that it was that particular racial combination that made it possible for her family to live in the neighborhood in which she grew up. “The real estate people were not letting Blacks into the area,” she says. “There was a lot of talk that they wouldn’t even let Willie Mays move into Marin County. So, the only reason we were there was that my dad bought the house, and he was white.”
Baker recalls that when she was teased or shunned or bullied, she thought it was because there was something wrong with her, and she felt embarrassed. “I never told my parents about the horrendous racism that I faced because I was so mortally embarrassed by it, and I didn’t want my parents to see me that way,” she recalls. “I kept it all in, and I had nightmares and sleeping problems throughout my childhood.”
Long before she knew about racism, she had big dreams of being in show business. Those dreams began to come true in her childhood. Beginning at age ten, Baker participated for two years in the Marin County Shakespeare Festival, with roles in the Wizard of Oz and The Wind in the Willows. “This was probably one of the most famous theater festivals in the world, so it not only attracted actors from all over the globe as cast members, but it also attracted worldwide audiences,” she says.
She then signed with a talent agency, the Brebner Agency, in San Francisco, which was “a big one,” she declares — and they helped her get a role on a popular children’s television show, Whatchamacallit. When the show ended, Baker said she had established herself as a talent. “I studied dance and I did different dance shows. I joined the theater company at the Belrose Performing Arts Center and performed there.”
Baker started performing because it was her dream, but it soon became a coping method for her. “It ended up being a tool for me to connect with people and for them to see me differently,” she says. “I had fans. I got fan mail,” she enthused. “I loved it, and it helped me.”
She received lots of support for her showbiz dreams from her parents. She recalls that her mother would pile her and her brothers into the car and make the 20-mile trip (each way) to San Francisco three times a week for rehearsals and the taping of her television show. “They wanted me to be what I wanted to be,” she says.
Baker continued to pursue work in the performing arts field. She received a scholarship to study dance at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and, in 1980 at nineteen years old, she moved to New York City. She also had been studying acting on and off for her whole life and had professional acting experience as a child and teenager. Despite her talent, training, and experience, she couldn’t find enough work to make a living. So, she created a nightclub act.
“I knew that I wanted to get into show business and make a living at it, and certainly dance didn’t bring a living,” she says. “I created this Josephine Baker act in partnership with Jean-Claude Baker, one of Josephine Baker’s sons and the proprietor of Chez Josephine, a restaurant in New York City’s theater district.”
The act was based at Chez Josephine, but she also performed it at other venues in the city. “It ended up taking me to the hottest nightclubs in New York,” she recalls. She performed the act for four years, but she knew she didn’t want to be typecast as Josephine Baker for the rest of her career.
It was an ad in Backstage magazine that began to pique her interest in voiceover as a possible career path for her. She says she didn’t know much about voiceover, but she knew there were cartoon voices involved. She thought she would probably be good at that. She took four lessons, created a demo reel, and delivered that reel to the top talent agents in the city. Within one day, she says four agents got in a catfight to sign her. She signed with Don Buchwald and Associates. “I ended up having a great voiceover career,” she says. “I could not get anywhere in television because I was too biracial looking. I wasn’t Black enough and I certainly wasn’t white enough. No one could put me in a category. And that doesn’t work in television or film.”
Baker is now one of the top voiceover artists in the country. She has earned six Telly Awards, three for voiceover work and three for her work in short-form documentaries.
Despite her top-tier representation, Baker had never been one to leave her fate entirely in other people’s hands. One day, after three years with Don Buchwald and Associates, she was at their office and overheard an agent talking about a client who had a booking at ABC.
Baker thought, “I want to do that,” and went home and called department after department at the network until she was finally directed to the on-air promotions department. A secretary name Jane Raine invited her to send in her demo reel to her boss, but Baker walked it over instead. Three days later, when she called to follow up, Raine told her that her boss hadn’t listened to it yet. That call took place at 11 a.m. on a Friday. By 3 o’clock that afternoon, she was booked for a job at the network, but she didn’t know about it until she checked her messages nearly two hours later, while she was in a restaurant waiting for food she had ordered. She had seven or eight increasingly frantic calls from her agents. The booking was for 5 p.m.
“I told them I was on my way, had my food bagged up, and hopped into a cab,” she recalls. “I had eight minutes to get there on time. I got to ABC, hurried through the lobby, signed in, and went up the elevator. The elevator door opened and Rudy, who would be producing the segment, was there with a clipboard in his hand. It was 5 o’clock on the nose.”
Gaskins, a producer at the network, says that they hired Baker for a campaign about women’s health issues for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. “What’s interesting is that ABC News hadn’t used a female voice for any of its recordings or on-air promotion in about eight years at that point. So, I suggested that we needed a woman’s voice for this campaign because it was about women’s issues,” he recalls. Raine overheard the conversation and suggested that they listen to Baker’s reel. They did, and they called Baker to come in to do the recording. “Once I met her, I kept her on my radar, and one day I picked up the phone and called her,” he recalls. She didn’t answer so he left her a message saying, “It’s Rudy Gaskins, and this is not a call about work.”
Joan Baker and Rudy Gaskins
In what would be a preview of the trajectory of their courtship, it took Gaskins six months to make that call. “You know what’s funny is that the day she came in and did that job, it was my birthday, and the day I picked up the phone to call Joan, it was her birthday,” he muses. At the time, neither of them had a clue about how those first interactions coincided with their birthdays.
Baker recalls, “When I first met Rudy, he had dreads, and they were halfway down his back. They were the most gorgeous dreads I’ve ever seen, and I thought that he must be extraordinarily talented to be one of the few Black people at ABC at that level and to be sporting dreads.” She says she would soon learn how right she was.
The spot he directed her on was extraordinarily successful, and she had called him to see if she could get a copy of it to put on her demo reel. “He called me on my birthday to follow up and make sure I had gotten everything,” says Baker. “My birthday is October 14. We met for coffee on October 24, 1994, and four years later, we got married on that date.”
Their love connection was almost immediate, and they knew early on that they wanted to get married, but rather than go with their emotions, they made a plan. They decided to go into couple’s therapy for a year, not because they were having problems but because they wanted their relationship to work. They wanted to investigate each other on a deeper level.
One important reason Gaskins wanted to start this relationship off right was the life lessons he had learned raising his son, Ngozi Ayo Gaskins, from his previous marriage. “Ngozi was my greatest gift, and his well-being played a big role in my choice of a lifemate who would become his stepmother,” said Gaskins. Baker was his perfect choice, and Ngozi was the ring bearer at their wedding. Ngozi Ayo Gaskins is 33 years old and currently operates his own event planning company, Studio Gallery Oakland in Northern California.
They agree that the therapy went well. “There were difficult times and enlightening moments, but it was the best thing we could’ve done because we got the chance to ask the kinds of questions that couples don’t typically dig into until they’re together and they have to deal with certain issues,” says Gaskins. “We decided we would figure out who we are as individuals and as a couple first. That made a huge difference in terms of our working together. We got to see clearly what we could take, how much we appreciated who each other was as individuals, and where our fears lay.”
Gaskins notes that the same kinds of issues that impact relationships happen in business partnerships as well. “When you’re dealing with each other as business partners on how the business will go, how the money will be shared, and how the responsibilities will be divvied up, all of these things lead back to trust and appreciation, and respect for one another. Those are the kinds of things that get solved in relationships as well. And doing that work beforehand not only strengthened us and created a platform for our relationship, but it also created a platform for us to partner and to work together toward common goals.”
Joan adds, “As Rudy said, it wasn’t necessarily easy at times. But what came out of it was a partnership and two hearts that got strengthened and bonded. There is no question, twenty-six years later, it’s made a difference. That is undeniable.”
That doesn’t mean that it was all work and no romance during their courtship — there was plenty of both. For instance, Gaskins says he used to write her a lot of love letters “because it was the best way for me to share what I was feeling on the deeper level, and so I would write her these love letters often.”
Baker says she kept every one of those letters. “These letters not only had beautiful sentiments, but they were also on beautiful cards. If there’s ever a fire, those are the things I’m going to save, and if I ever have to leave the house quickly, I will grab them.”
They have had many opportunities to road-test what they learned. Baker was doing voiceover work at Court TV, then a start-up network, and told Gaskins that there was a job opening to run the promotions department there. He had been a producer at ABC for a year. Still, this position would allow him to become the coordinating executive producer, create an on-air promotions department and hire the people he needed to help him do it. “I had an impressive resume, but ABC News was huge to them,” Gaskins said. “In fact, during the job interview, the owner asked me why I wanted to leave a big industry like ABC News to come there.”
Gaskins had the opportunity to put his stamp on the network. One of the first things he did was to assign voice actors to specific shows instead of having them all do different things. He wanted to make sure each show had a distinctive brand, feel, and sound that viewers and fans would come to depend on. That’s how Baker became the voice of The Johnnie Cochran Show, which aired on the network for three years.
After four years running the promotions department of Court TV, Gaskins faced a critical career decision. He was laid off after Court TV was sold and the network became TruTV. He had to decide if he wanted to continue down his current path and do the same job at another network or work independently. “In my heart, I felt that I wanted to deal with different kinds of brands,” he says. “That’s what encouraged me to start my own company, Push Creative Advertising.”
It was a decision that paid off big and fast, he recalls. “The first client we got was NBC. They hired us to produce vignettes and promos for the Olympic Games in 2000.” Gaskins won an Emmy as the producer of those segments and his company was launched.
Push’s client list included FOX News Channel, BET, American Express, Spike TV, ABC, Sentient Publications, MSNBC, and WABC-TV (New York City). He has amassed more than twenty Telly Awards for on-air promotions and documentary shorts produced while on staff at television networks and as the owner of Push Creative Advertising, which he closed in 2014, after starting SOVAS.
Baker and Gaskin believe that the best thing about being a couple and working together is finding more opportunities to be together. “When we are on the job, we are one hundred percent into the gig,” says Rudy. “And when there is downtime, we can share intimate moments and talk about things, and travel, and have vacations and so on. You know what the priorities are, and you find a balance without necessarily underscoring it or drafting how it should look.”
They also agree that working together has made each of them better at what they do. “One of the things that has come out the intertwining of personal and business is that I’ve learned a lot from Rudy,” says Baker. “I would never have said I’m a writer before, but I can now say that with confidence. I have won awards around producing because of what Rudy taught me.”
She continues, “I’ve taught Rudy the things that are natural for me, which are more around performance. He’s already walked in the door a great director, but now he’s more aware of things that affect performers. Because of that awareness, he can get great performances out of them instead of good ones. We have each brought things to the table that neither of us expected, and we have learned things that help us in our careers and lives.”
Gaskins says that another bonus to their work/life partnership is that they don’t have to adhere to the usual boundaries in the workplace. “When you have an intimate relationship with someone as Joan and I do, you learn things about each other that go far beyond what you learn about people on the job,” he says. “And with that information, you can help and mentor each other on a whole other level. We know things about each other, including weaknesses or deeper fears, that we can tap into and help each other elevate in various situations. There are conversations we can have that are empowering to each of us that we could never have with an employee or peer in the corporate environment.”
Baker and Gaskins continue to promote their vision for equity, excellence and transparency in the voiceover industry across several platforms. Their primary focus is the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences. In addition, Baker continues to work as a voice actor.
Gaskin and Baker also hosted a seven-part podcast series for Backstage magazine titled Get Out There, in which they interviewed successful people who can “inspire listeners to live out their most audacious dreams and create a life they love.” They also do a biweekly Zoom-cast on the voiceover business called The State of VO. It is a live show, and the episodes are not available for public viewing afterward.
The final question: If they could go back twenty-six years, would they choose to be a couple with independent work lives, or would they choose to be partners in both marriage and business, as they are now? The answer came immediately and emphatically from Baker, “Absolutely, hands down, I would choose this way. I can’t even imagine it now any other way.” Gaskins agrees.
Christy DeBoe Hicks is a communications consultant, writer, and editor with more than 30 years of experience working with policy, nonprofit, education, and community organizations, as well as in the music, theater, and publishing fields. After a hiatus, she has returned as a regular contributor to Global Communicator.
Cover Credits:
Cover Creative Director: Sandy Lawrence
Photography: Emilio Madrid
Rudy Gaskins — Grooming: Donovan Edwards, Becoming Beauty Salon; Wardrobe: Armani
Joan Baker — Hair: Michelle Dejesus; Makeup: Moet Baez; Gown: B&B Couture
