My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem (16 page)

Claiming relatives were suing him or fighting over him, he makes reference to his half-brother and sister, who’d never tried to contact him until they saw him on television. But he reserved his worst words for me. Now I was an effing-bitch mother who was suing him for every one of the pills he said he’d stolen from me. He claimed he’d picked up his habit from me, finding my medication under my mattress.

If ever I had to take prescribed medication, I sure didn’t hide the fact, nor ever take anything illegal. With all that I’d been through in my life, of course I ended up in doctors’ offices a few times, and was prescribed something for my nerves. I would’ve cracked if I hadn’t have had something.

I was approached to put out my own CD with a hip-hop group called Identity Unknown, or ID-X for short. If I couldn’t defend myself in public over the lawsuit, I could do so via music. We met at a studio in Georgia and I was literally given five minutes to write an open letter to Marshall. It was originally called “Set the Record Straight,” but by the time it had been remixed three times, it was called “Dear Marshall.”

I started the poem by saying I still loved him but we had a problem, something had gone wrong between us.

“I was so excited by your success, yet so let down by your betrayal,” I wrote, explaining how I’d tried to be mom and dad to him, giving him everything he ever wanted because he was perfect in my eyes.

“My unconditional love created a spoiled young man, an angry one too,” I wrote. I finished it with a plea that he’d stop his attacks, rewriting his lyrics, “Will the real Marshall Mathers please stand up? And take responsibility for his actions.”

We flew to Nashville and then drove to Georgia to complete the final remix. The CD was released to silence from the music press. It was available only on the Internet, and to this day I have no idea how many copies it sold.

Nathan played it to Marshall. He thought one of the lines said, “Poke your eyes out.” Nathan replayed it to him a couple of times to point out the proper lyrics.

The Marshall Mathers LP
sold 1.7 million copies in its first week, knocking Britney Spears’s
Oops!... I Did It Again
off the top of the charts. The first single, “The Real Slim Shady,” had upset, among others, Christina Aguilera. She’d annoyed Marshall by letting slip on MTV that he was married. He responded by mocking her in his lyrics, claiming she had given him a sexually transmitted disease and had given oral sex to Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit and MTV’s Carson Daly.

I felt sorry for Christina. She was only nineteen and had been vilified just like I had. But, when asked on MTV if she was going to sue, she said, “Suing for slander requires that somebody takes him seriously. It’s obvious in the song that he’s making this stuff up about a lot of people.”

The album also mocked
Baywatch
babe Pamela Anderson, her husband, Tommy Lee, actor Will Smith, Britney Spears, ’N Sync, the New Kids on the Block, Vanilla Ice, and even Dr Dre. I was physically sick when I heard his reference to raping me on “Kill You.”

His follow-up to
The Slim Shady LP
’s “’97 Bonnie and Clyde”—where he’d sampled Hailie’s voice—was “Kim.” He said it was a love song, describing his feelings when he discovered she was cheating. It ends with his choking her.

Needless to say, Marshall and Kim were having problems again. On June 3 he’d tailed Kim to a carstereo shop, where he got into an argument with Douglas Dail, a road manager for his rap rivals Insane Clown Posse. Unbeknownst to me, Marshall had started to carry a gun for protection. Dail claimed he waved it at him.

In the early hours of the next morning, Marshall caught Kim kissing former bodyguard John Guerra in the parking lot of Warren’s Hot Rocks Café. Again, Marshall brandished his gun. It wasn’t loaded, but in the confrontation that followed Guerra claimed Marshall hit him at least twice with the pistol and threatened to kill him. The police took both Marshall and Kim into custody. Marshall claimed he never pulled the gun on him; it fell out of his jogging pants.

Marshall told me later that the police officers asked for his autograph while they were fingerprinting him.

Kim was accused of breaching the peace. Marshall was bailed the following morning on assault and weapons-possession charges. But as he left the police station, another officer called his cell phone. Dail had pressed charges over the previous day’s incident.

I asked Marshall why he was carrying a gun. He claimed he needed it because he was always getting hassled.

“Son, where are your bodyguards?” I wanted to know.

It turned out his trusted security officer, Byron Williams, had been keeping a journal and planned to write a book about Marshall. My son was devastated. He thought Williams was a friend. He was so hurt, he’d dispensed with his bodyguards.

I couldn’t believe he was roaming Detroit without protection and I was horrified that he was carrying a gun, regardless of whether it was loaded. He knew I hated firearms of any kind. My sister Tanya’s husband, Lynard, had taught Marshall how to shoot a couple of years earlier. He’d become infatuated with guns.

Marshall was also worried about security at his house in Sterling Heights, across from the trailer park. It was on the main road, with just one small fence at the back that everyone climbed over. He often found fans in his swimming pool. Someone had set fire to his mailbox. He worried about going outside even to collect his newspaper.

The house had a long driveway, but there was only one entrance. Fans blocked it with cars. When I dropped off Nathan, they tried to persuade me to take them inside. There were so many of them outside, it scared me.

Marshall covered his face when he went out, hoping he wouldn’t be recognized.

A week after his arrest, Marshall was on stage in Portland, Oregon, when he announced that reports of his marriage problems weren’t true, that Kim was in the wings. Then he pulled out an inflatable sex doll, committed a lurid act with it, threw it into the audience, and encouraged everyone to beat up the “Kim” doll.

On July 7, while Hailie was watching TV downstairs with her cousin Lainie, Nathan, and Kim’s mother, Kathy, Kim smashed up her wedding picture and ornaments and tried to slash her wrists in the bathroom. She cut the wrong way, and her wrists ended up in bandages.

Kathy called the police. Kim apparently told them, “There has got to be a better place than this.”

All of this was colorfully covered by the world’s media. Kim never gave interviews, but she had written a letter to the
Detroit Free Press
after their June arrests saying, “I don’t think anybody in their right mind would cheat on a millionaire husband—especially with a nobody at a neighborhood bar.”

No one who knows Kim took her suicide attempt seriously. She’d been creating dramas for years. She was forever locking herself in the bathroom, smashing mirrors, and breaking everything else in her wake. Everyone usually ignored her.

Marshall decided it was time to send her a wakeup call. In August, two months after their first wedding anniversary, he filed for divorce, hoping it would shock her into calming down. That worked for a matter of days. She agreed to reconcile. Then
she
filed for divorce—and made it clear she was serious. Marshall was devastated.

Marshall says his life started to unravel in 2000. He’d been betrayed by his bodyguard, faced five or more years in jail, was being sued by me along with John Guerra, he was battling Kim for custody of Hailie, and he hated the fame he’d spent years seeking.

I agreed: 2000 was shaping up to be worse than 1999.

Nan, who was eighty-eight, had been in ailing health for some years. She weighed just fifty-five pounds, and I knew we were losing her. She’d been the one constant in my life, the only real mother to me. As Nan’s health worsened, she and I had a talk about going to heaven. I assured her that if anyone deserved to go there, it was surely her. Nan had devoted her whole life to helping out us kids and anyone else who came to her. She looked after me, Steve, Todd—all of us. I told her we didn’t have to worry about that, as she was going to be here for a long time yet. Sadly, I was wrong. Nan lived only three short months after that. I only wish I could have been there when she passed away. I was in Missouri when I got the call. It was one of the saddest days of my life.

Her death hit me so hard. She’d been born on June 6, 1912—she hated all those sixes; even the year she was born divided into sixes—and had lived a long, hearty life. But it didn’t make it any easier, losing her. She had lots more life to live—her last ten years had been very hard.

She’d been such a character. As a Native American, she’d believed in natural medicine. I was stunned when she showed me a beautiful plant in her backyard. She said it was pot. Then she chopped it down and hung it up to dry. I worried she’d be arrested, but she just laughed, saying, “The police aren’t going to go after an old woman like me.”

Nan, who’d grown up chewing tobacco, said she loved the smell of pot. She smoked it occasionally.

When she died, her daughter Joyce took her ashes back to her native Alabama. Joyce wanted me to ask Marshall to contribute toward building a memorial for Nan. Nan had always said she wanted to be buried at the foot of her brother in Michigan.

I was furious. Her wishes had been betrayed, and now everyone expected Marshall to pay for everything. Nan would not have approved, either. She never took from anyone: she spent her life looking after others and she was always good at giving sage advice. I did wonder what she’d think of her foul-mouthed great-grandson and his fans, who’d taken to calling me a pig and spitting at me.

I’d got used to being recognized. With my mane of platinum-blonde hair I wasn’t hard to spot. But until then the fans had been polite, merely asking for autographs and snippets of gossip about my son.

Missouri is part of what is known as the American Bible Belt. Most people attend church, yet the abuse I suffered was shockingly un-Christian. One day at the East Mills shopping mall in Saint Joe, two kids ran up to me, pulled the back of my hair, then spat at me. Nathan and I went to a movie theater. The kids behind us put chewing gum on the back of my seat and hair. Wherever I went, I was accosted by teenagers yelling abuse.

I stopped watching TV programs about my son. It was too upsetting. I was officially the most hated mother in America.

Kim and Marshall briefly reconciled before once again formally separating. As if to copy me, she announced she was going to sue him for ten million dollars, claiming she’d been defamed by the lyrics on “Kim.” They had no prenup, and Kim made it clear she was not only seeking custody of Hailie, but she was also going to take Marshall to the cleaners.

“I’m leaving your son. He won’t pick up after himself. I am not his mother,” Kim said in a rare phone call to me.

I explained I’d always tidied up after him. She butted in and started screaming over and over, “I am not his mother!”

Then she said she was moving into an apartment with Hailie, and no one would ever know where they were.

She was on a spend-spend-spend spree. She thought nothing of dropping six thousand dollars in fancy department stores such as Dillard’s and Marshall Field’s. She bought only expensive clothes.

Marshall had more clothes than he knew what to do with. He was flooded with free gear from companies keen for him to wear their brands. He gave bags of them to the Salvation Army.

Music pundits estimated that Marshall was worth more than thirty million dollars. I doubted that. But apparently he thought nothing of dropping hundred-dollar tips on drinks.

Before his split with Kim, he’d lavished presents on her mother and stepfather. He bought them cars, furs, leather coats, jewelry—the lot. He was still trying to please them.

The press reported that we weren’t talking, but we were. Our conversations were sometimes strained—I was still trying to drop my legal action against him—but, as always, he ended our calls by telling me he loved me. One Mother’s Day, flowers arrived signed, “Love, Marsh, your number one son.” He didn’t spend money on me, but I didn’t care. The little things counted. Among my most treasured possessions was one of his posters that he’d signed for me just before he married Kim. He’d written on it, “I love you even though you do more dope than I do. Ha, ha.”

He wasn’t laughing over his split from Kim. On the phone, his voice was flatter and flatter. He always sounded so miserable.

“I love her,” he told me.

“I think she’s a habit,” I said. “And bad habits are hard to break. If you have any sense, you should run, not walk, away from her.”

He could have any girl in the world, but the only one he wanted didn’t want him. It broke my heart to hear him sound so miserable. I tried to explain that there were many more women out there who would love him. But all he thought about was Kim’s rejection. He’d known her since he was fifteen; that was almost half of his entire life. He was used to having her around.

Then there was Hailie and also Lainie, Kim’s niece, whom he’d formally adopted. He feared losing both of them. I offered to care for them both, but my half-sister Betti Renee and her husband, Jack, had become his live-in housekeepers. They watched over the girls when Marshall wasn’t around.

They certainly weren’t my idea of caretakers. I was furious that Betti Renee was even in the house.

Marshall said it was Kim’s doing. She and Betti Renee loved to party. It didn’t matter that Kim and Marshall had split—she still had a hold over everything he did.

Nathan wanted to spend Christmas with Marshall. He was really worried about his big brother. Marshall had given interviews saying he’d tried to overdose on painkillers shortly after Hailie was born but had thrown up. If this happened, he never told me about it. However, Nathan was now extremely worried about Marshall.

I spoke to Marshall on the phone, and he sounded very depressed. Kim had played him for what he felt was the last time, and all the world had seen it. I told him we would drive from Missouri to his home in Michigan to see him. I quickly packed the car with clothes and Nathan and I set off.