The Dark Story of Eminem (28 page)

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.”

In his childhood, his own letters to his father had never been read by their target; his own grandmother had sometimes been kept from him. Now, like a petty child suddenly turned into an upside-down family’s head, he was using his unexpected powers to repeat these offences, to get back at the grown-ups who’d hurt him. The imbalance of his millionaire adult status right now, and the weakness of his mother in the face of it, wasn’t something he could see, it seemed. But his mother’s actions in the closing months of 2001 showed the damage she was starting to sustain.

According to a report on Sony’s Musiclub site in January 2002, when he would no longer take her calls, she had moved to an apartment near his Detroit mansion, to try to get close again. Betty Kresin’s comments on what happened next showed she too was still outside the mansion’s warmth: “My daughter was involved in a car crash when she first moved there. She nearly killed herself when she was driving Nate to school. She was taken to hospital in an ambulance, but Eminem wouldn’t change his behaviour or visit her. She even tore her book up in the hope her son and her would get back together. She did make some mistakes, but she just wants her son back. She’s hurting, she’s so sad. And she’s so thin, she looks like she’s just about to die. She misses her son so much. She’s living in a condominium as close as she could get to his house, but he’s as hard-hearted as ever.” Whatever wrongs his mother had done him, Eminem’s apparent inability to see her as a fellow, hurting human being, with flaws and motivations of her own, showed how much he was still a child when it came to his family. The irrepressible, disproportionate vendettas which made his records so much fun when applied to Britney Spears also tasted sour when turned on a mother withering from them. This was still the stony place in his heart, untouched by his achievements, the ground where he was worst and weakest.

In every other respect, though, the Eminem glimpsed in this time out of the spotlight seemed to have matured appreciably. However much he rapped about the probation conditions which had narrowly kept him out of jail not taming his wildness, he had in large part obeyed them. He knew very well how close his day of Slim Shady madness the previous year had come to ruining him. Keeping clear of drink, drugs, guns and “assaultive behaviour”, at least in public, and maintaining a new fitness regime, he was in better shape physically and mentally. He was also more understanding of the price of his fame, as he told
Q
, when considering the familiar complaint that he couldn’t play basketball where he used to any more, as the people he had played with now just stared, and asked for autographs. “Gotta build a fucking basketball court in the backyard,” he laughed. “That just might be the way ahead – all the shit you want to do and miss doing, you just go and do it in your own backyard. Then you shut up and respect it.”

As Jennifer Yezvack told me when she took my order at Gilbert’s Lodge when I first went to Detroit, Eminem anyway continued with the places, people and acts that were natural to him, in spite of his fame. He had not become an alienated celebrity, severed from his roots, lost and mad. Instead, in short, chaos-trailing bursts, he still hung out with the friends who had loved him when he had nothing, and went to the movies, or the clubs. “He goes to all the right places where the hip-hop fans go to,” Detroit promoter Michael Saunders confirmed to
NME
. “It’s not like he’s from Detroit but you never see him. He’s here all the time. You would not believe he’s on MTV by some of the venues he goes to.”

Though the spectre of Elvis’ Memphis Mafia of live-in home-town disciples (who had eventually asphyxiated his sense of the outside world) loomed when you looked at Eminem’s Detroit Dirty Dozen, the latter crew seemed vastly healthier. Only Eminem’s immutable diet really recalled the King. “Everyone wanna eat
filet mignon
,” Swift laughed to
Spin
. “He still hollerin’ about Taco Bell.” The material temptations of his status, out of reach so long, simply meant nothing to him. “A lot of motherfuckers are living way better than me,” he told
Spin
indifferently. “Their houses make mine look like shit.”

His peaceful, reflective state when away from his parents was summed up in
Q
: “I’ve made plenty of mistakes in the past, I’m only a human being, but I learned from my mistakes, and I’m definitely old enough to know right from wrong. I’ve got some regrets, but that shit is all besides the point as long as I know I’m raising my daughter right, and she doesn’t have to live in a ‘hood any more, and go through the things that I went through.”

While Eminem got his head together and was briefly almost forgotten, the pop world he would have to come back to was of course moving swiftly without him. In hip-hop, only Eminem’s ties to him had kept Dre’s production style (changing and improving though it was) really current. The likes of Timbaland and The Neptunes had developed techniques based on skittering, micro-sliced beats which made Dre sound slow. It was a single by Timbaland’s main accomplice (and Eminem fan and one-time collaborator) Missy Elliott, the skeletally funky ‘Get UR Freak On’, not D12, which had defined the form in 2001. That year, Timbaland also unveiled his own million-selling white rap protégé, Bubba Sparxxx. His
Dark Days, Bright Nights
LP and hit ‘Ugly’ had no similarity to Eminem (except for the unusualness of a white rap point of view). Nor was he quite good enough to challenge for his predecessor’s crown. But in interviews, he thanked Eminem for breaking the curse of Vanilla Ice, as Eminem had thanked 3rd Bass: “He gave credibility back to the institution of white people being involved in hip-hop.” The arrival of a second black rap entrepreneur with a money-making white boy in tow, so opposite to the arrangement which had previously held in American music, was perhaps still more significant.