The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  11

  THE WAITING ROOM

  With the very last juice squeezed from The Marshall Mathers LP, everything else that happened to Eminem in 2001 took on a sensation of drift. It was as if he had entered a sort of limbo between albums, with his celebrity sustaining enough atmospheric force to attract unrelated fragments of gossip, rumours of sex and violence. Cut loose from his teenage Detroit sweetheart, he was said to be dating other stars: first, 19-year-old R&B queen Beyonce Knowles of Destiny’s Child; then, Irish pop singer Samantha Mumba, 18, glimpsed with him in posh LA hotels; even the fading diva Mariah Carey was placed at his house. None of it seemed quite real.

  Violence, meanwhile, now happened in his name, without him lifting a finger. In August, rival Detroit rapper Esham alleged he had been attacked by D12 and dozens of their hangers-on while on tour in New Jersey, and blamed the absent Eminem, although the accusation went nowhere. Eminem told MTV Asia that, when he rejected two groupies who followed him to his hotel after a gig and left them in a room, they fell to fighting on the floor over whose fault it was, and continued their wrestling in the parking lot. “Little did they realise I didn’t like either of them,” he smirked with lordly disdain.

  In Britain, his influence was still more distant. In March, a 14-year-old Devon boy sent home from school for stabbing a girl with a pen kicked in his house’s door and stairs and scrawled on walls, after his mother criticised Eminem, whose “disturbing” lyrics were attacked by his lawyer. In August, a 24-year-old Kent man brutally thumped his girlfriend over the head with a dumbbell and shoe, and stabbed her foot with a screwdriver, after she turned off an Eminem CD because she didn’t want her four-year-old hearing his lyrics. In January, a coroner in Teignmouth had criticised those lyrics at the inquest into the suicide of 17-year-old David Hurcombe, who had printed out the words to ‘Rock Bottom’ before jumping in front of a train. In March, another inquest heard Hampshire 13-year-old Kayleigh Davies had become obsessed with Eminem before hanging herself. In July, an Oldham primary school headmaster discovered at least five of his pupils had cut their arms with pencil sharpeners, which they reportedly blamed on seeing “a fan” slash his wrists in ‘Stan’’s video (which contains no such sequence). “It has all been instigated by this idiot Eminem,” the headmaster decided. PC Graham Jones was called in to explain to pupils “that what their idols do is not gospel. It is quite worrying that parents are allowing children to watch things like this. It could lead to serious injury, even death.” The fact that those “things” did not exist to be watched in the first place showed the ill-informed, headline-led nature of the fuss. Eminem had done all he could to tell his fans not to follow his music’s example. This rash of sad deaths, stupid, thuggish violence and juvenile experiments in Britain merely showed that the lost and unpleasant young souls in his songs existed outside America. His name’s attachment to them showed it now had a life beyond his control.

  In the absence of a new record, others also began to make records about him. In September, Tori Amos released Strange Little Girls, a selection of songs written by men but reinterpreted with female characters at their cores. Among covers ranging from Tom Waits’ ‘Time’ to Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’, Eminem’s ‘’97 Bonnie & Clyde’ was the track critics zeroed in on. Leaving the lyrics as they were, Amos sang them starkly, in the previously erased voice of the wife lying in the trunk. By its existence, it dragged Eminem’s misogyny into terrain he could not have anticipated. A woman had finally returned his hate to him, in his own words.

  “I’ve always found it fascinating how men say things and women hear them,” Amos told the LA Times. “In ‘Bonnie & Clyde’, that was Eminem – or one of the many people living inside him – and he killed his wife. What intrigued me in the way he told the story was this rhythmic kind of justification. You have to have empathy for him. I did when I heard it. But she has to have a voice.” To MTV, she spoke almost mystically of her relationship to the battered Kim of the song. “‘Bonnie & Clyde’ is a song that depicts domestic violence very accurately, right on the money. But there was one person who definitely wasn’t dancing to this thing, and that’s the woman in the trunk. And she spoke to me. She grabbed me by the hand and said, ‘You need to hear this how I heard it.’”

  Like my female friend with experience of misogyny and male violence Amos, a rape victim, wasn’t threatened or surprised by the song, and wanted its angry, unchecked words to be heard. “Music is always a reflection of the hearts and minds of the culture,” she told MTV. “If you’re singing songs that are about cutting women up, usually these guys are tapping into an unconscious male rage that is real – they’re just able to harness it. So to shut them up isn’t the answer. They’re a gauge; they’re showing you what’s really happening in the psyche of a lot of people.”

  It was as mature, insightful and fair a response as Eminem could have wished for; better than the man who on ‘Shit On You’ accurately rapped “over-reaction is my only reaction” managed to female and gay attacks on himself. Where she split from him was in his defence of his work’s careless extremity, repeated so often by now that he hardly seemed to hear the phrases as he mouthed them: that “I didn’t know if you’d do it or not”, that these were just words, that speech was free. “I would hear a lot of people say, ‘They’re only words, what is everyone going on about?’” Amos countered, to MTV. “I believe in freedom of speech, but you cannot separate yourself from your creation. Words are like guns. Whether you choose the graciousness of Tom Waits or the brutality of ‘Bonnie & Clyde’, they’re equally powerful.”

  In the North-east of England, meanwhile, The Pet Shop Boys were recording a similarly cogent response to Eminem’s homophobia. “Eminem’s defence of the homophobic lyrics on his albums has always been that he’s not speaking as himself, he’s speaking as a character, and he’s representing homophobia in America,” their singer-lyricist Neil Tennant noted. “I thought it would be quite interesting to take that method and just to present rap in this homosexual context. I mean, there obviously are gay rap stars.”

  ‘The Night I Fell In Love’, one of the strongest songs on The Pet Shop Boys’ March 2002 album Release, was therefore a narrative of a teenage boy’s night of lust and love with a barely disguised Eminem. To a softly swelling, romantic melody, he’s introduced to this nameless rap star backstage, and taken to his video camera-equipped room for a “private performance”, ending with the rapper joking at breakfast the next morning “about Dre and his homies and folks”. Tennant had obviously thought about his subject enough to penetrate past Eminem’s image to his private character, as the boy notes, “I was surprised he spoke so politely”, and “he couldn’t have been a nicer bloke”; the boy’s seduction is gently consensual.

  In some ways, ‘The Night I Fell In Love’ is an answer song to ‘Stan’, Tennant clearly inspired by it to write another angle on fan love, with Stan’s advances responded to more positively. Tennant’s rapper even quotes ‘Stan’’s lyrics, as if nervous he’s about to vanish into the song: “Hey, man! Your name isn’t Stan, is it? We should be together!” So Eminem’s greatest work had yet another layer added to it. Tennant’s cleverest critique, though, was simply to sing the fan’s memoir in his own fey, Northern English voice, bringing the rapper’s street Americanisms thudding down to earth. The breakfast they shared was surely an English fry-up, and Tennant saved his best deflating line for last, when the lovers part quickly: “but I thought that was cool/ ‘cos I was already late for school.”

  “I was thinking of the boy as the schoolboy in Queer As Folk, someone like that, going to see a concert at Manchester Arena or somewhere like that, and he ends up backstage because he’s cute, and he gets off with the rap star,” Tennant explained. “I think if rap’s going to be provocative that you can be provocative back about it. I like Eminem’s records. I think he’s brilliant.” “I’ve got his doll on the mantelpiece,” fellow Boy Chris Lowe added, helpfully.

  When the schoolboy “as
ked/ why have I heard so much about him being charged with homophobia and stuff/ he just shrugged”. But Tennant, as a critical gay fan of Eminem, had constructed a far more accurate, effective undermining of his homophobic leanings than any of the outraged pressure groups who had tried to shut him up, and just fuelled his fire. ‘The Night I Fell In Love’ begged for a single release, to take the argument into the charts where it belonged. Eminem offered no public response to either Tennant or Amos (a spokesperson said he was “aware” of the latter’s effort, but “hadn’t heard it”).

  Nor did he comment on the equally cheeky “Eminem Look-Alike 8-Page Pull-Out Special” in the April 2001 issue of gay porn magazine Euroboy. In dungarees (initially) and hockey mask, 18-year-old Matthew licked his chainsaw, and gently inserted it where even the toughest rapper might hesitate. Editor Sean Spence told NME: “The common consensus here is that Eminem is an asshole and gay men shouldn’t waste money on his records. But personally I like his music and think he’s attractive. We’re making a political statement and having a bit of a laugh. Matthew really wants to carry on as Eminem, stripping at hen parties and gay clubs.” Matthew himself added: “Even my mum thinks I look like Eminem. I love his music, his lyrics – in fact, I love everything about him. People say he’s homophobic, but I’d still like to give him one!”

  The army Eminem had imagined in ‘The Real Slim Shady’’s video had come true, doing his work for him all over the world, while he vanished from view. But recruiting had taken place without his permission. So these Slims not only trashed their rooms and screamed, “Fuck you!”, but stabbed their girlfriends, slashed their arms, hanged themselves, resurrected his wife, made him come out as gay, and saucily stripped for gay men and straight women. The value of letting him speak could not have been clearer. The unpredictability of responses to his songs of provocation, satire and rage, and the ability of the groups he targeted to enjoy and turn his words, and good looks, to their own ends, had been demonstrated all over the world.

  The real Eminem, meanwhile, continued to live his life as best he could. It was his fractious relationship with his family, still, which damaged and dominated it, the hurts of childhood ruling his heart even now, after so much success.

  In August 2001, on the eve of his Reading appearance, the News Of The World published an extensive “letter” from his long-lost father, Marshall Mathers II. The accompanying picture showed a 50-year-old, bespectacled, grey-mulleted man, gaunt in the face and heavy in the belly, in a jumper that was too big for him. The letter – actually an interview with the tabloid’s reporter – explained that this Marshall had been told of his now-famous namesake by his son Michael, 23 (one of two children by his second wife, along with Sarah, 21 – “They’re the half-brother and sister you never had,” he said, enticingly). There followed a plea of innocence for every sin Eminem had laid at his door. He hadn’t been drinking and doing drugs when his baby was born; he hadn’t been fucking Debbie’s best friend while his wife was giving birth; it wasn’t him who walked out (reading Debbie say that made him “choke with tears of rage”). When Debbie left with his darling boy, he had searched everywhere for them. “On the word of God” he knew nothing about the letters Eminem said he sent to him, and had got back, “returned to sender”. A photo of him going into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting was just “lies” – “I was going into a DONUT shop.” He had a new girlfriend now, Teresa Harbin, 40. “You’d like her. Me?” he continued, as if his son had just respectfully cut in. “I’m a construction worker … I’d get on a plane right now, this second, and go anywhere in the world if you’d meet with me. Please get in touch.” The apologia seemed credible in parts. But its tone of wounded innocence, and its disingenuous claim that, “I’m not after any handout”, made in a tabloid notorious for paying its informants handsomely, didn’t sound like a loving, pining parent.

  Eminem’s response came in 2002, in The Source: “Fuck him!” He remembered with perfect clarity his father ringing his father’s aunt’s house, while he played there as a little boy, and never speaking to him. He recalled it in a tone of still childish dismay, as if that part of his life was still frozen. He had already seen his father, such a painful absence for so long, blundering back into view with his pleas on TV, trying to reach his rich, famous son. “For 24, 25 years of my life, he never wanted anything to do with me,” Eminem coldly noted. “And him saying he couldn’t get in touch with me, it’s bullshit. It was cool to see him to know, hey, this is what I’m gonna look like when I get old, but that’s it. All I can say about him is, fuck him.”

  But it was Eminem’s relationship with his mother, so much more active, angry and intimate over so many years, which remained the worst sore in his life. It just got more poisonously bitter as each month went on, none of the good things that happened to him making him relent. In this time their bond, once one of love, took on the shape of genuine tragedy, perhaps the greatest he was a part of. Although, blinded by hate, he was of course unable to see it that way.

  Debbie Mathers-Briggs’ first action after the effective failure of her lawsuit had been to follow up her single about her son by writing a book with the provisional title, My Life With Eminem. It was not the sensible course of someone seeking reconciliation, and when NME spoke to her before Reading she revealed his inevitable reaction: “He’s pissed about it. He’s like, ‘You and my dad are trying to cash in on me, now you’re writing an effing book, go ahead and try and ruin my career.’” There was hypocrisy here on his side, of course – that career had partly been based on exploiting his fiery rows with his mother and Kim, so sulking that Mathers-Briggs, having failed to silence him, should comment back was not fair. But then fairness and restraint didn’t seem on the agenda of anyone in the family by this time, and the book, bound to anger, was just another chip in a furious game which hurt its players with each new turn.

  Mathers-Briggs’ comments to NME about her son’s alleged continuing drink and drug intake (“He needs to go into rehab”) showed her uncompromising mood. She indicated, too, that money was a factor in her writing the book, allied with resentment (“He’s never done anything for me in his life, and I was behind him every step of the way”). Eminem’s attitude was revealed in what she said was their last conversation. When she called, he had told her he had a woman with him (Mariah Carey, went the rumour), but if she wanted to move back to Michigan, he would help. The next morning, she said, he called back, to spit: “I lied, I had company. The only thing I would put you in is a damn pine box.” The undeclared motive in his mother’s sometimes confused, impulsive or stupid moves in their feud, which would become clearer as the months went by, was perhaps one of self-preservation, as Eminem moved to cut her out of his family and life with all the vicious concentration of those final words.

  The first step had been taken before that August interview with NME, and explained her frustration in it. Eminem had finally moved from his exposed old house in the heart of Detroit to a large new property in a gated, secure community, a place more practical for a man of his suddenly vast fame and wealth. He had immediately moved in, not his mother (naturally), but her 25-year-old half-sister, Betti Schmitt, and her husband and children. For Mother’s Day, Eminem had given Schmitt a new car, with “not even a card” for Mathers-Briggs. He wasn’t thinking straight, she complained, he couldn’t “move them in and replace your own blood, which is me and his little brother Nathan.” But such an act could be about nothing but replacing blood – choosing who would now be his family, and who would not. Still seething about all the times he’d been cast out of his mother’s home, there was something more naked than symbolism about the way he now locked her out of his mansion.

  Mathers-Briggs and her mother were united in thinking Schmitt was a “gold-digger”, which they both also thought about the suddenly divorce-rich Kim (Eminem, the lone multi-millionaire in a poor family, must himself have been racked with suspicion about each relative’s motive in talking to him, almost as much as he was with new
“friends”). But the strain of events was now also tearing Betty Kresin from her daughter, even as that daughter lost her son. That ill-starred lawsuit was again the damning act. “I turned my back on my daughter,” Kresin told the Sydney Sun-Herald. “I said, ‘If you don’t drop that lawsuit I’m going to come to your house, run you over and go to prison myself. How can you do that to your own son?’” Of the book, she told NME: “She sued her son, and I’ll probably sue her.” As to Eminem, Kresin too was feeling the chill. In February, she admitted to Trevor McDonald on ITV: “Our relationship is not a good one. It has changed. It was good up until Christmas 1999.” She would not elaborate on what had caused her exile.

  But it was in The Source the next year that the now unshakeable, central nature of Eminem’s hate for his mother became apparent. It was here that he told the story of her wishing he had died instead of his uncle, with undimmed resentment. “I want her to apologise,” he said, in a flat tone suggesting things had gone too far for that. “But that ain’t enough because I know she ain’t gonna change. She’ll go right back to doing what she was doing. She’s not right, not now.” As to what she was doing, he wouldn’t say: “I don’t want to get sued again.” But the degree of distaste he now felt for her was shown in his decision not to let her granddaughter, now six, set eyes on her. “I don’t feel like Hailie would ever grow up to resent me for that,” he said, echoing his refusal to see how demonising her mother Kim, his other female bête noir, might harm their child. “I feel like when Hailie is old enough to know better and wants to find out about her grandmother, she can. But right now her mind is too young to be around that. I don’t trust my mother around my daughter. My mother wrote her letters, before she could even read. Real sick letters that she wanted me to read to Hailie or somethin’? I don’t know. I throw them in the trash.”