by Hasted, Nick
You digest the inadvertent gossip, that Yezvack was probably seeing Eminem at the same time as his fractious, notorious relationship with Kim, his now ex-wife, mother of his child, and brutalised subject of his songs. And a moment later, you’re brought one last step towards your quarry.
“Who was here,” Yezvack politely asks, “so I can tell him?”
You tell her your name, knowing this is the closest your life will brush his. You ask if you could speak to him like she does, anyway.
“No,” she smiles, “he doesn’t even like it when I talk this much.”
So you say goodbye, and you leave Detroit, and you go back home, and start to think about the things you’ve seen and heard. You can see what Eminem loves about his fallen, forgotten city. It’s a place that educates you in how race and money work in America, every day you walk its streets. It’s a place so hard, it leaves no room for the illusions peddled on his country’s coasts. It’s one reason he makes the music he does. Of course, Eminem is not just the city he’s from. He’s the things he’s done, too, and the people he was with. So you go back again, to the day he was born.
2
MOTHER’S BOY
Everything about Eminem’s early life is unstable. Details of homes, relations, schools, jobs, all shimmer and fluctuate from one reminiscence to the next, as if nothing stayed still long enough to be sure of, and no one cared enough to take notes. Even his date of birth was a matter of conjecture till recently, the rapper seemingly pushing it forward two years in interviews, apparently wanting to be even more of a prodigy than he was. After the date was challenged by his mother last year, new publicity quietly started to admit he was born on October 17, 1972. Immediately, all the other “facts” and dates assumed about him pre-fame lock into a different, more believable shape. But still, many things have stayed in flux, maybe for good. You can even take your pick of names. But in the years before the world got to know him, he was always Marshall Mathers.
His mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, was the one constant factor in all that time, the itch he would scratch with escalating, obsessive violence on his subsequent records. She was just Debbie Briggs, a 15-year-old girl, when she met the 21-year-old Marshall Bruce Mathers, Jnr. in 1970. Her family was of Scandinavian origin, and scattered across Missouri and Michigan, his father’s family was from Wales, and he was from Dakota. They played together for a while in a band called Daddy Warbucks, touring Ramada Inns along the Dakota-Montana border. “My mother used to listen to Jimi Hendrix and shit like that,” their son would recall to FHM. “She was like a little flower child growing up in the Sixties. A little hippie.” His tone had a rare touch of affection, in an interview characteristically hostile to her, as he recognised her own rebellious streak. His grandmother, Betty Kresin, remembered the wilful and passionate way her daughter forced the under-age marriage with Marshall Jnr. into being. When Kresin first refused to give special permission, she told The Source, “She threatened me about six months later. ‘Okay, if you won’t let me get married and go to school, I’ll get pregnant and get married.’” It was a typically teenage impulsive ultimatum, in the heat of first love, and at a time when teenage Americans were resisting parents and following sexual desires as never before. Kresin backed down, and in 1972, Debbie and Marshall, Jnr. were married. They lived for a year in his parents’ basement in North Dakota. And before that year’s end, in Kansas City, Missouri, Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born.
The earliest picture to be made public gives little hint of the conflicts that were to follow. Debbie, now 17 and renamed Mathers-Briggs, is a skinny-armed, T-shirted girl with long, dark, centre-parted hair, her legs folded in a near-lotus position, her mouth in a happy, hopeful grin for the camera. She is holding up baby Marshall, in red, knee-length dungarees. He is looking distractedly at something away from the camera, with big-eyed seriousness. “He always seemed like he was hungry. And always happy,” Kresin told The Source. “And you know most babies are screaming; he wasn’t. He was looking around at the world and very happy, it looked like, to be here. I mean, those big blue eyes. He was such a beautiful grandson from the beginning.” The charismatic blue eyes would stay. And the essentially accepting, contemplative mood Kresin noticed would remain his natural state, whenever stress or public attention were removed. It was the things that happened to him over the next 25 years that mixed that docile intelligence with the violent, vengeful rage which turned Marshall into Eminem.
The first blow came as a consequence of his parents’ immature love. “We married so young, it was ridiculous,” Marshall Jnr. admitted to the News Of The World in a self-serving interview years later, “but I was delighted when your mum became pregnant.” Still, passion was quickly spent, and, moving to their own apartment, the young parents soon tired of each other. Mathers-Briggs claimed – though it has never been proven – that her husband was drunk and used drugs, and was even with her best friend as she gave birth to Marshall. Marshall Jnr. said these were all lies. Even the manner of their inevitable split is disputed. Mathers-Briggs said he walked out, one more in a generation of absconding fathers. Marshall Jnr. painted a tragic picture of coming back to their apartment one day to find it emptied like the Marie Celeste, of driving round town for weeks, on the apparently impossible task of finding his family. He claimed the eventual divorce was done through lawyers, that he had no way of tracking down the son he loved. So in 1975, he remarried, and moved on.
Marshall’s memories, though, leave no doubt that his father was at least partly lying, or of the wound his absence inflicted. Marshall was about six months old when, for whatever reason, his father moved to California. He was too young to remember having a father at all. But Kresin recalls his childish efforts to communicate with him, anyway. “Marshall used to colour pretty little pictures and give them to me,” she told The Source. “He’d say, ‘Grandmom, can you give these to my Daddy?’” She passed them on to a relative she was sure had stayed in touch with Marshall Jnr. In his early teens, Marshall would send letters, too. All came back marked “Return to Sender”. The most painful proof that his father had simply chosen to ignore him came when he would visit Marshall Jnr.’s aunt’s house as a child. The adult Marshall recalled the scene to The Source with crystal exactness, and emotions that were still raw and live. “I was always over there, and he would call there. I would be on the floor colouring. I remember!” he exclaimed, as if still childishly desperate for someone to believe him. “I would be there just listening. He would call there and talk to them, and never ask to talk to me.”
“I think a lot of anger came because he was raised by his mother – no father image or figure was there,” Kresin considered recently, to the Tonight TV programme. “I once asked him why he was so angry with me,” Mathers-Briggs told the Mail On Sunday. “He said it was because he didn’t have a dad. I tried to explain to him that I left his father because he was abusive” – partially clearing one mystery. “When you see my Dad, tell him I slit his throat in this dream I had,” Marshall declared himself in ‘My Name Is’, the single that announced him as Eminem to the world. But his father was never seriously mentioned again in his work. And in that Source interview, his memories of hurt had to be squeezed from him. All he wanted to say, and kept saying, was “Fuck him!” It was his father who had done him the simplest, most damaging wrong, by removing himself from his life. The cost of such abandonment to many children is helplessness and compensatory aggressive anger, a sense of loss and lack of self-esteem. Marshall would exhibit all these traits as he grew up, a typical child, in this way, of his times. Most of all, though, what his father left behind was a hole in his head, which could not be filled. So, in interviews and art, he sealed that wound over, ignored it as best he could, and moved on. His mother was a very different matter.
“Me and my mother have never gotten along from the cradle,” he told NME in 1999. That mother was a 17-year-old girl when she was left with him. The consequence-blind teenage gamble she had taken with her life
, by marrying his father and having him, had already failed. And in the end, all the evidence suggests she did not raise him well. But they were stuck with each other. More than anything, that explains why the dammed fury he kept for his father was not as strong as the hot, active hate he would come to have for his mother; why, by the time he was making records as Eminem, childish love had collapsed into a vindictive state of war.
Everything his parents said after he was famous is tainted by a tone of self-justification, after he attacked them in lyrics and print. But even his father admitted that, in the time he knew Mathers-Briggs, “She was great with you – you were always clean and well-fed and well-dressed, and I couldn’t fault her for that.” “I am gullible and loving,” Mathers-Briggs said of herself, in the Mail On Sunday. “As a child Marshall was never spanked, and I never raised my voice to him. The real problem is not that he had a hard time, but that he resents I sheltered him so much from the real world. I love him so much that if he asked me to jump in front of a train for him, I would. I was an over-protective mother who gave him everything he wanted and more.” The strained exasperation she felt having to raise this insecure child on her own, barely an adult herself was, though, more realistically described on the Tonight programme. “I did the best I could – it was just him and me,” she sighed. “Anything Marshall wanted, I would try and get for him. I got kicked out of stores because he’d be like the spoiled brat, lying in the aisle, arms and legs spread open.”
Marshall’s neediness only grew, though, as a direct result of his mother’s actions. In one of his most touching early interviews, quoted in his mother’s eventual, infamous suit against him for defamation, he described the difficulty of his childhood, with none of the bravado of later accounts.
“Was your home life ever stable?” the interviewer asked.
“Not really,” he replied. “I was an only child for 12 years. When I was little, my mother never had a job, so we used to always stay with my family. We would stay until we got kicked out. Some of the relatives stayed in Kansas City, some in Detroit, so we just kept going back and forth. I guess we were freeloaders, so to speak. Whenever we would come back to Detroit, we would stay with my grandmother. Finally, my mother ended up meeting some dude and shit, so we got a house on the east side of Detroit when I was 12 years old.” A little later, he expressed how that made him feel, in a tone of forlorn sadness for himself. “If you’re going somewhere constantly and the scenery is changing around,” he said, “it makes you feel real nervous and shit, especially being so little. I mean, fuck it, now it’s done and over with …”
In another early interview, to Spin, he gave more concrete details, this time with a dutiful attempt to understand his mother. “I was born in Kansas City, then when I was five we moved to a real bad part of Detroit. I was getting beat up a lot, so we moved back to K.C., then back to Detroit again when I was 11. My mother couldn’t afford to raise me, but then she had my little brother” – his half-brother, Nathan – “so when we moved back to Michigan, we were just staying wherever we could, with my grandmother or whatever family would put us up. I know my mother tried to do the best she could, but I was bounced around so much – it seemed like we moved every two or three months, I’d go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.”
By the time he talked to NME a little later, he had told the story enough times to start to resent what it meant, and be certain who was to blame. “My mother never had a job,” he re-emphasised, “so … in Kansas City when I was a kid we stayed with my aunts, my uncles, and when they got fed up with us – not really with me, but my mother, she can’t get along with no one – they would kick us out. That’s how we ended up in Detroit.”
His mother’s response came in the Mail On Sunday. “Obviously, I became over-protective,” she said. “I was single, he was my only son. Years later, he abused me because he changed school so many times. Yet the truth is whenever he had a problem at school, he came home and demanded to move. And I gave in to him.”
Such private, partially remembered conversations between relatives now in bitter dispute can’t be checked for accuracy now. But Mathers-Briggs’ reason for their moves at least tallies with Marshall’s memory of fleeing Detroit’s bullies as a child for Kansas City. Records entered into court during the libel trial about her raising of him – taken with his albums, the most public inquiry into a mother’s duties in American history – meanwhile confirmed that Marshall attended five elementary schools in four cities as a child. While not quite as erratic an education as he remembered, it was obviously deeply destabilising, for a boy already feeling abandoned by one parent. As he said, the scenery kept changing. It must have been hard to feel trust in the world.
Instead, it was in these first nomad years that he was forced to turn inwards, and start to nurture an artist’s mind. He became absorbed in TV, and comic-books. The latter was a traditional source of inspiration for poor black rappers, especially the superhero genre, with its garish, primal fantasies of impotent, misunderstood striplings with enormous, secret strengths – his D12 bandmate Kuniva would note that “being a rapper in high school was like being one of the X-Men, like being a mutant with hidden powers.” Marshall gained so much from comics that drawing them was his first artistic ambition, a daring one for someone from a background with such limited horizons. He would later turn up in superhero costume in videos, and joined the superhero (and rap) tradition of “secret identity” aliases. He gained his first aged five – Eminem, from his initials, and the M’n’M sweets he loved. But puny Marshall Mathers remained his real self.
The wounded, self-protectively sealed nature of that boy was agreed on by him and his mother. “He was a really talented boy,” she told the Mail On Sunday. “He was very artistic but he was a very shy child. He was too shy. He was a loner and he never wanted to pal up with people.” In that sad, court-quoted interview, he gave more reasons why. “It was real difficult making friends when I was growing up, because we used to bounce from house to house and move so much. It wasn’t until I was 12 years old that we finally stayed in one spot. In school, when I was little, I was one of them shy kids, and it was hard for me to make friends. Just as soon as I would start getting close to friends, we would have to leave.”
“I was the distant kid,” he added to a website. “You know, real distant. The friends I did have knew me well, but I didn’t have a lot of friends.” “Drugs is what they used to say I was on/ They say I never knew which way I was goin’,” he rapped bitterly of how others saw him then, on ‘Brain Damage’. “Wore spectacles with taped frames and a freckled nose/ A corny-lookin’ white boy, scrawny …” The enduring nature of this hurt was confirmed when Brian Grazer, the producer of his movie 8 Mile, met him last year. “He was very humble,” Grazer said, surprised. “He talked about his roots in a way that made me feel … damage.”
Mathers-Briggs’ own state of mind in these first years of Marshall’s life, as she moved through her twenties, can only be inferred. Relying on the regularly removed charity of relatives, unable or unwilling to work, it must have been a harried, directionless existence. The freedom and wilful-ness of the “hippie chick” days in which Marshall was conceived are rarely to be found in accounts of her raising him. Her own descriptions of her motherly technique in interviews are meanwhile unmistakably idealised, self-justifying in the most transparent way. But when she relates actual altercations with her child – in a flailing tantrum on a supermarket floor, shouting at her for his father’s absence, asking to leave schools where he was constantly bullied, failing to make friends – they sound pulled from still strong, specific memories. And they suggest a mother who found her son hard to understand, and found bringing him up too much to handle, more than once.
The only way in which she did continue down the old wild path on which she conceived her son was sexually. “My daughter had a lot of boyfriends,” Kresin told the Sydney Sun-Herald. “Debbie is not the best m
other.” There’s nothing to criticise in such a young girl staying sexually active and searching for a partner. But Marshall’s memories suggest she hardly screened him from the changing cast of men with which his father was replaced.
“The worst place was an apartment in a big house in Detroit that had five families living in different rooms,” he said in Bliss. “My Mom’s boyfriend’s friends would all come over and go crazy. It was horrible.”