The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  Eminem meanwhile recognised that, now he was rich, he would have to stay that way. To be desperately poor now he’d tasted the security of wealth, to be dragged back through the looking glass and dumped on the sidewalk, would destroy him. “I don’t think I’d be able to go back to a regular lifestyle,” he admitted to Melody Maker. “I think I’d do something really fucking crazy if I did. It worries me. To be honest, I think about it a lot, and I’m being really, really careful with my money. I think about the future more than anything.” So, counter to the rash Slim Shady myth the public was swallowing by the million, he spent with the prudence of a suburban civil servant; or, more relevantly, a responsible family man. He bought and refitted a big new house for his wife and daughter, “way out in the suburbs, away from everything”, trailer parks just a bad dream. “I’m putting some money aside so my daughter gets an education, and grows up in a decent area,” he added. He had bought stocks and bonds, too, and just two cars. And Interscope had donated his own label, Shady Records (his first signing, he indicated, would be an MC Proof).

  But the single real thrill he seemed to get from his instant millions was much more personal. “When my daughter was born,” he told NME, “I was so scared I wouldn’t be able to raise her and support her as a father should. Her first two Christmases, we had nothing, but this last Christmas, when she turned three she had so many fucking presents under the tree. She kept opening them saying, ‘This one’s for me, too?’ My daughter wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth. But she’s got one now. I can’t stop myself from spoiling her.”

  The intense Interscope schedule that helped pay for Hailie’s presents, though, also made such moments depressingly rare. The company put Eminem on a tour so intensive, he couldn’t even talk to his daughter when she called. The non-stop dates started in January and peaked in June, when he’d play an afternoon slot on rock’s high-profile Warped tour (alongside the likes of Blink 182), drive hours to perform nights in hip-hop clubs, then drive on to catch up with the Warped roadshow. He still professed to love the shows, for reasons rooted in class. “I like to go out and earn crowds,” he told icast.com, “because it makes me feel like I’m working for my money. I want to be in touch with the crowds and talk to people, keep eye contact, and try to see what they’re feeling. These are the people that’s buying my records, they’re paying my way.”

  NME saw 15,000 greet him ecstatically on Warped’s second date, in Dallas, where his first hero Ice-T watched approvingly from the wings. When he was photographed in front of a chain-link fence that afternoon, the young white fans’ faces pressed behind him looked proud and happy, a fresh army awaiting his lead. On a flying visit to London in April, a one-off gig at the tiny Subterranea, reported at 20 minutes, left many booing and feeling cheated, but a five-page PR itinerary meant every second on British soil helped sales anyway. Journalists who met him then found him generally affable, and eager for stimulation. He was amused and un-bothered by the stiff formality of his Kensington hotel, for instance, on his first trip outside America. He seemed obsessed with sex on this endless time away from Kim, and bragged he was getting plenty; but still muttered about them both being loyal, claiming: “I believe in sticking with the girl who’s been with me from day one, before all this fame.”

  To keep up with the tour treadmill’s grinding pace needed more than sex, though, and it was the drink and drugs interviewers observed him guzzling that should have triggered alarm in his aides. Bacardi was downed with abandon, and his limo slowed to take wraps of Es through its window, Rolling Stone seeing three downed in a night. On May 9, at San Francisco’s Fillmore, the wheels inevitably started to whirr from his control. He was reported to have dived off the stage towards a heckler, fists flying, with his bodyguard and security in pursuit, before the heckler was ejected, and order restored. To FHM, Eminem gave a rougher account, claiming he’d stopped his show when he saw kids at the front fighting, jumping on them when they ignored him. “I got pulled down in the middle of it and these kids were stomping on me, and then my boys came running, beating the shit out of everybody. I thought I was gonna get arrested that night.” The same day, he reportedly punched out a man who challenged him in Haight-Ashbury, and incensed local DJ Sista Tamu so much with a freestyle about slapping a pregnant “bitch” that she snapped his CD on air.

  Two months later in New England, near the end of the Warped tour, the crash he’d been hurtling towards all year arrived on cue. It was the second section of his life he termed a “crack-up”, excessive success now shattering him as failure had. Sprinting onto the stage, he skidded in a pool of liquid, and fell 10 feet to the venue floor. He cracked ribs. It could have been his head. “It was insane,” he admitted to the LA Times. “I knew I had to slow it down. The fall was like a reminder.” In 2000, he confessed to Star: “Last year, I was a little bit gone. There are quite a few things people ask me about that I don’t remember. Marshall Mathers stops when the booze kicks in. Then I become Slim Shady.”

  Critical fire also crackled around his ears during 1999, with a heat that would only get worse. Washington rock censorship pressure group PMRC (Parent’s Music Resource Center) was among his attackers. But it was a full-page crisis column by Billboard‘s then-editor Timothy White that caused the biggest stir. He accused Eminem of “making money by exploiting the world’s misery”, and tied ‘Guilty Conscience’’s imagined date-rape to real equivalents. Eminem’s defence was built in to The Slim Shady LP, on ‘Role Model’ and ‘Still Don’t Give A Fuck’, and he had already explained ‘Guilty Conscience’ even more. But to interviewers who repeated the accusation, he justified himself in fresh ways.

  “The older people are getting it confused,” he told Launch, “tending to take my shit too literal. I don’t care, it’s funny to me, because if I say my brain fell out of my skull, and they believe it, what’s wrong with them? The younger people have a sense of humour, and can determine right from wrong. I only get flack from the white-collar motherfuckers, who don’t know about hip-hop anyway.” To Consumable Online, he added: “Maybe I am the first person to say this shit to this extreme, but all I do is say what’s on my motherfucking mind, man. Hip-hop is hip-hop, and it’s always been like this.” His most impassioned response came to Select, right after that Subterranea show, as he considered the influence of earlier demonised rappers like N.W.A. on himself. “I listened to it all, but I never went out and shot nobody. I just did dumb shit like getting into fights, because the music made me feel something. If your music makes you feel something, you doin’ your job.”

  The real life melodrama he had leeched and magnified for his bestselling music meanwhile carried on its course. On June 14, back in his birthplace of St. Joseph, Missouri, he and Kim finally married. It was kept a secret till the Detroit News discovered documents later that year. “A big part of it is females buy 80 per cent of Marshall’s records,” Kim explained, in a rare interview. “Lots of girls are fans, and he’s good looking. They think they stand a chance.”

  Mathers-Briggs, now living in Missouri, attended the ceremony, of course. But this blissful interlude for Eminem’s fractured family could not last. When the truce with his mother broke, he would claim she had been exploiting his name ever since his fame started, beginning with that St. Clair trailer home.

  “When I got my record deal I took it over – just to give me somewhere to stay,” he told FHM. “Next thing, my mother’s selling the trailer on the Internet, advertising it as ‘Slim Shady’s Trailer’. And in the paper, she’s saying if you buy this trailer Slim Shady will personally come round and autograph the walls. My mother’s crazy. While I was on tour she was taking posters that I’d left, signing fake autographs on them and selling them to the kids in the neighbourhood. My mother came backstage at a show in Kansas City and she was saying to the kids, ‘If you want a picture with my son it’s $20.’ And I didn’t know anything about it until this little girl came up and said, ‘Can I have my picture taken ‘cos I’ve paid my $20?’
My mother’s a snake.”

  To Consumable Online, he detailed the numb remains of their relationship: “I talk to her every now and again, but as little as I can. She’s got my little brother, so when I do talk to her, it’s really to talk to him. I really don’t have much reason to talk to my mother. My mother’s done so much fucked up shit to me that it’s like, now that I don’t have to talk to her, I ain’t gonna.”

  On September 17, his mother struck back, with the lawsuit that would finish their harsh life together. The mobile home was again at issue, the sort of financial wrangle domestic breakdowns so often fixate on. The late payments had not been fixed as she would have liked, as she alleged Eminem’s failed promise to “at a minimum, help his mother” with its mortgage and rent had led to her and Nathan’s eviction, and its repossession (which seemed to ignore her living in Kansas City when he was responsible for it). She claimed damages for “loss of her mobile home; harm to credit rating and associated detrimental consequences; humiliation, embarrassment and many sleepless nights; loss of and/or diminished self-esteem; and other damages and injuries to be determined through discovery and trial.” More notoriously, she sued for the content of his interviews with Rolling Stone, Rap Pages, The Source and the Howard Stern TV show, as well as the claim in ‘My Name Is’ that “I just found out my Mom does more drugs than I do.” Stating she had been characterised as a drug abuser, unstable and, amusingly, lawsuit-happy, her suit added she had sustained “physical and psychological injury and damages”, including “damage to Plaintiff’s reputation in the community at large and among her family, friends and peers; emotional distress and loss of or diminished self-esteem; humiliation, mortification and embarrassment; and sleeplessness and anxiety”; and that this distress had been intended by Eminem, whose conduct was “extreme, outrageous and of such character as not to be tolerated by a civilised society” (she would not be the last to make that claim), and “for an ulterior motive and purpose”.

  And the requested bill for this behaviour? $10 million.

  To the Tonight TV show’s Trevor McDonald, Mathers-Briggs would later claim to be “in shock” when her son told her the papers had been served on him. “I sat there and thought, ‘This is not happening.’ My lawyer was supposed to send a letter warning him to stop being so demeaning and say if he didn’t stop the lawyer would hit him with a lawsuit. I walked up to my lawyer and he said, ‘This is a wake-up call.’”

  Whatever the truth of that, Eminem’s initial response came in Rosenberg’s careful, legal language: “Eminem’s life is reflected in his music. Everything he said can be verified as true. The truth is an absolute defence in a case of defamation. The lawsuit does not come as a surprise to Eminem. His mother has been threatening to sue him since the success of his single ‘My Name Is’. It is merely the result of a life-long strained relationship between him and his mother. Regardless, it is still painful to be sued by your mother and therefore the lawsuit will only be responded to through legal channels.”

  Of course, Eminem couldn’t leave it at that. To the LA Times, he hedged: “I have to be careful about what I say about my mother, because I’m sure her lawyers are looking. How does it feel? It feels like shit. How would you feel? One thing I can tell you is that every single word I said about my mother and my upbringing was true.” To Muzik, he added: “She doesn’t have a leg to stand on. I would love it to go to court, I want it televised. I want people to see what type of person she is and what my life has been like.” To NME: “She’s always been out to get me, and now she knows I have money, she won’t leave me alone. I know that’s not a nice thing to say about your mother, but unfortunately it’s true.” To Q, he freestyled a rap hoping to settle things in court. Otherwise? “I’ll slit the bitch’s throat.”

  Also to Q, he described the finality of his severance from his mother, after the last straw of her suing him. “I speak the truth. I’ve got no reason to fabricate my past, no reason to lie. There will be no reconciliation. I’ve tried, I’ll say that. I can’t comment further.” All he admitted regretting losing was access to Nathan. “I raised him since he was a baby, changing his diapers and feeding him. It’s gonna be hard.”

  But he had already suffered a worse loss that year. On May 21, D12 member Bugz (aka Karnail Pitts), 21, had been expected to perform as part of Eminem’s tour, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He never arrived. That afternoon, while he was with a friend and the friend’s cousin at Detroit’s Belle Isle Park, a man shot the cousin with a high-powered water pistol, to her rage. A fierce argument ended with Bugz jumping in to help his friend in a fistfight with the man. A friend of the man then pulled a rifle from their car, and shot Bugz three times at close range, including bullets in the chest and neck. The pair then ran him over, to make sure. Snarled in Detroit traffic, an ambulance arrived too late to save him. When his fellow rappers found out the next morning, Federation Records’ Rico Shelton told Rolling Stone, “Hearts were dropping. I’ve never seen so many sad faces. Everybody knew him; he was part of Detroit.” Said Proof: “It just makes you look at life more serious.” Remembering his friend to Muzik, with the variants in detail customary in this story, Eminem spoke softly. “He got shot in the face twice, then run over by a car. It was over some stupid shit. He wetted this girl with a water gun and these dudes came over and got their revenge.” It was the sort of pointless end he could have come to himself, and as a youth, at the Bel-Air mall and other places where pistols were pointed at him, almost had. In so many ways, success had come just in time. D12, too, weren’t going to let their chance slip. Bugz was soon replaced by Swift (aka Ondre Moore, 23), and they proceeded with recordings of their own.

  Interscope meanwhile continued to push The Slim Shady LP, as 1999 ran down. In August, ‘Guilty Conscience’ was released as a single, making number five in the UK, and 25 in the States (his biggest home hit yet). The very popular video, dramatising the song’s three controversial scenarios, used stop-motion special effects to help create a new side to Shady’s visual persona. While Dre lumbered around the song’s tempted characters with the sluggishness of his raps, Eminem blinked and buzzed with manic energy, a super-speed blond irritant barely in control of a body being jerked by unseen hands. Dre shook him like a rag doll when he mentioned Dee Barnes, but just made him flap faster, till the Doctor threw in the towel. A fourth video, for ‘Role Model’, would chuck bustling, ‘My Name Is’-style business at a track finally too draggily downbeat to come out as a single. Only daring digs at the Catholic church (Father Eminem not only hearing a sultry teenage girl’s confession, but beckoning a young boy to his bed), and another fresh batch of acting styles from the rapper (from subtly intense sociopath to wide-eyed stooge) were worth watching.

  September saw him win the first of what would become incessant music industry awards, at the Video Music bash by his friends at MTV, where ‘My Name Is’ (Best Male Video and Best Direction) and ‘Guilty Conscience’ (Breakthrough Video, whatever that meant) came first. It was appropriate his painstaking videos should be gaining as much attention as his music (which would win two Grammys in February 2000, for Rap Solo Performance [‘My Name Is’] and Rap Album). But fresh tracks, and the product-placement of old ones, also kept his momentum up as 1999 turned into 2000. Dre and Eminem duetted again on the Wild Wild West soundtrack’s ‘Bad Guys Always Die’, while the Schwarzenegger dud End Of Days and MTV’s Celebrity Death Match were seeded with Slim Shady LP cuts; Eminem meanwhile guest-rapped on indie 12-inches (some recorded before his success), and major releases from Missy Elliott’s Da Real World to the late Notorious B.I.G.’s Born Again. Quality stayed conspicuously high, as if he couldn’t let a single listener start to doubt he was here to stay.

  His most high-profile new work, though, again emphasised his bond with Dre to the public. 2001, released in November 1999, was the Doctor’s first LP since the string of flops that had preceded him meeting Shady. Now, his reputation was restored. It reached number four in the UK and two in the US. If anyone doub
ted Eminem’s part in this renaissance, they only had to listen to the album. It had more of the room-filling pop boom of Slim Shady than The Chronic‘s squealing funk, and Dre’s raps, poised between realism at his millionaire, near middle-aged family life and gun-wielding threats to pretenders to his throne, were unusually sharp. But there was also a languor to the record, and dull thuggishness to its many guest raps – until Shady walked in the door and, for a precious few minutes, electroshocked it to life.

  ‘What’s The Difference’ was his first intervention. “Stop the beat!” he woozily lurches. “Dre, I wanna tell you this shit right now, while this fuckin’ weed is in me – I love you, dog!” Everyone heard before, including Snoop Dogg, suddenly sounded anonymous, drowned out by this helium-voiced fool. And Eminem didn’t just praise the boss. He made the track another part of his expanding world, a footnote to ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ – observing, when he and Dre sentimentally swap offers to off each other’s enemies that, if he really wanted to kill Kim, afterwards he’d stick her body not in the boot, but the front seat, then add shades and wave her dead arm as he drove her rotting corpse from Detroit to California, where he’d dump her in front of a police station, and pull away with a screech. Like a novelist’s famous characters appearing in other books’ backgrounds, it was a satisfying, controlled cameo.

  ‘Forgot About Dre’ was still more impressive, with Eminem again injecting the addictive element. His rap was an unbroken but perfectly articulated stream of words with a racing, staccato beat, effortlessly increasing in speed as his anger increased, till he sounded like a tape flapping free of its machine. The virtuoso technique was a shocking advance on his own LP. And again, he added to his ongoing tale as much as Dre’s, telling Hailie she would now have to live with the Doc, as Dad was “crazy”.