The Dark Story of Eminem (42 page)

The problems that would cripple Eminem’s life for the next three years had begun when Proof was still alive. They would make the most famous rapper in history vanish and become a creature of rumour: hip-hop’s Howard Hughes.

The first warning sign flashed on August 17, 2005. Eminem had just finished a 23-date US tour in Detroit. But he would not be leaving home for the Anger Management 3 tour’s European leg, which was due to climax on September 17 with a prestigious gig for 80,000 fans at Ireland’s Slaine Castle. “Eminem is currently being treated for exhaustion, complicated by other medical issues,” Interscope announced.

Two days later, truer news seeped out. Eminem was “in the hospital [in Brighton, Michigan] under doctors’ care” for addiction to sleeping pills. He would spend six weeks in rehab, officially attempting to kick the sedative Ambien. But it would transpire he had other problems. The rehab failed. “I wasn’t ready to go,” he would reflect to the
Guardian
later. “So when I came out I relapsed right away, within a week.” That July, he had denied Proof’s comment to a Detroit newspaper that he would retire after the Slaine Castle gig. But such thoughts were swirling round his mind. “I was sitting in rehab reflecting for the first time in a while,” he told the
Guardian
. “I felt like I needed to pull back from the spotlight, because it was getting out of control.”

The December 5 release of a greatest hits collection put a full stop to his major label story to date. Its title,
Curtain Call: The Hits
, completed the conceit of
The Eminem Show
and
Encore
. All he could do now was leave the theatre. Hearing his biggest singles in one place made Eminem the subject of nostalgia for the first time, mixed with amazement at the scope and sustained potency of his six years’ work. The youthful cheek of the unprecedented Slim Shady’s introduction on ‘My Name Is’; the comic unifying of a generation of burger-flippers in ‘The Real Slim Shady’; the slashing barbs at the Columbine killings and class as ‘The Way I Am’ rounded on his tormentors; the motivational anthem ‘Lose Yourself’; his prayerful responsibility for hip-hop’s fans in ‘Sing For The Moment’ and its practitioners in ‘Like Toy Soldiers’; and richly emotional conversations with his own family in ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ and ‘Mockingbird’: this was chart pop at its most resourcefully ambitious, by a pop star reckoning with every problem and pleasure that was put in his way. On top of these, ‘Stan’ sounded like a miracle. How on earth had such a perfectly twisted piece of fiction ever been a hit? Who else could have written it, or made us listen?

Not Eminem in 2005, or ever again, you were tempted to think, listening to the new tracks scattered through
Curtain Call
. ‘Fack’ was sex-crazed doggerel inspired by a
South Park
episode: Slim Shady regressing to his sick childhood. ‘Shake That’ was a dumb party tune about sex. The scattershot humour of
Encore
songs such as ‘Ass Like That’ plunged lower in throw-away efforts which seemed designed to piss on the legacy surrounding them. This was the first clear sign that whatever was wrong with Eminem was infecting his music.

Curtain Call
‘s last new track, ‘When I’m Gone’, redeemed the record. It was Eminem’s final single of 2005, and in most countries would not be followed up for four years. In the mode of ‘Mockingbird’, it was heavy on syrupy strings from Luis Resto’s keyboards, and addressed Hailie with near-mawkish sentiment. But the anger that made it bite came from Hailie, here confronting her dad in a series of dreams that he crashes through like a hall of mirrors. He was here and Mom would be back, he had sung at the conclusion of ‘Mockingbird’. Now he was the one abandoning Hailie to write another song and start another tour, even physically attacking the mother who looked so much like her. Real events blurred, as they do in bad dreams, and Eminem found himself taking the stage in Sweden while Hailie wailed for help with Kim back home, perhaps after her suicide attempt in 2000. But then, there was Hailie accusing him from the crowd, and the stage curtains folded around him, trapping him in the dark. His daughter’s words came in Shady’s angry growl, and confronted him with current sins: a man whose debased authenticity now amounted to guiltily gulping pills, just as he’d rapped about.

The song became a death-dream, sharing the wish for posthumous comfort to loved ones of Proof’s ‘Kurt Kobain’. But the only corpse left behind in ‘When I’m Gone’ is that of Slim Shady, who has a bullet put in him. “Slim Shady eventually became a metaphor for the trappings of fame for me,” his creator explained in
The Way I Am
. “I was basically saying, I don’t want this life any more … he’d become so famous he had damn near destroyed my family.”

The video for ‘When I’m Gone’ showed where the song began, and where Eminem wanted it to end. It starts in a shadowy AA-style meeting. “Hi, my name is Marshall Mathers,” the newest recruit says, replacing the jittery fun of “My name is … Slim Shady” with sober confession. When the song’s nightmares are reversed and erased – the plane which would have flown him to Sweden turning to ash without him on it – Eminem finds himself miraculously back with Hailie and Kim (played by actresses, as always). They embrace under the blue skies of a home he’ll never leave. “I don’t ever want to become soft. I don’t want to compromise my music for my life at home,” he had told
Vanity Fair
only a year before. But he had already known then that if he could have only one, the music would stop.

‘When I’m Gone’ entered the Top 10 on either side of the Atlantic, while
Curtain Call
topped Christmas charts and sold 2.5 million in the US. That was the only predictable thing to hang onto as Eminem entered a period of buffeting change. His new video was, it turned out, more than wishful thinking. His relationship with Kim, “neutral at best” and the subject of ‘Puke’ at worst, when she became a coke-snorting fugitive from justice in 2004, had evolved again: she was now his fiancée for the second time. The first most people had seen of her in years was on the cover of
Hello!
magazine on February 1, 2006, which announced: “A New-Look Eminem Remarries His Childhood Sweetheart”. As in previous photos, she seemed to dwarf her lover, in a tuxedo for the occasion as he squinted at the camera.

The invitations were touchingly hopeful: “This day I will marry my best friend, the one I laugh with, live for, love. Kimberley Anne Mathers and Marshall Bruce Mathers III. On January 14 at 5 pm they hope you will join them as they exchange vows and the celebration of their new life together.” They repeated the vows from their first marriage at Michigan’s Meadow Brook Hall mansion, walking down the aisle as Luis Resto tinkled ‘Mockingbird’ on the piano. Proof, Eminem’s best man, was at his side. Hailie (then 10), Alaina (12), and the newest adopted member of what sometimes seemed to be the groom’s family of saved refugees, Whitney, Kim’s three-year-old by another man, formed the bridal party. Debbie Mathers-Briggs, reportedly very ill now, was not invited. He “should get a prenup this time”, grandmother Betty Kresin advised, unimpressed. They did, the week before. It was still a romantic, sweet-natured day. On April 5, 82 days later, Eminem filed for divorce.

“We decided [to get married] on January 14,” Kim soon explained to
People
magazine. “Marshall wanted to do it because it was our fifteenth year together from our original day we started going out. And even on that day I said, ‘Let’s just go through the ceremony and not sign the marriage license.’ Because I was just afraid of what would happen if we had to go through a divorce, our kids. And then 41 days later, February 25, Marshall left.”

The day after papers were filed, Kim was explicit about the reasons when she rang a Detroit radio show. “He’s having problems with, you know, his problem that he had,” she said, referring to his pill addiction. “Right after he came home from his rehab we started having a few problems, and I thought it was going to be in our best interest to delay the wedding. But he really pushed it and I really thought it was going to be something that worked this time. I don’t really necessarily want to get divorced. I was hoping he was going to come home and say, ‘I got us a counsellor, let’s go.’ But you know, it didn’t work out that way. I got an attorney at the door instead.”

Eminem put his side across in a statement that afternoon. “The details surrounding my marriage and subsequent filing for divorce are private, and I had hoped to keep them that way for the sake of my family. However, a few of Kim’s statements … this morning need to be addressed. First, her allegations regarding my status post-rehab are both untrue and unfortunate. Second, she was aware that I was filing for divorce. We both tried to give our marriage another chance, and quickly realised that a wedding doesn’t fix the underlying problems.”

That spat aside, Kim needn’t have worried about the split, which was conducted in the mood of ‘Mockingbird’, not ‘Puke’. On December 19, divorce was amicably finalised between a couple who “conducted themselves with dignity and respect”, presiding judge Antonio P. Viviano observed (years before, he had spared Eminem jail for pistol-whipping John Guerra). Custody of the children would be shared. Kim and Eminem remained entwined.

But by now Eminem’s world was narrowing and darkening almost daily. Only six days after he filed for divorce Proof was shot dead. As Eminem went into shock, he wondered if he had left his best friend at risk in some karmic balance. He had cast his friend in the character of the rapper’s posse-member who is shot dead for his boss’s beef in the video for ‘Like Toy Soldiers’. There, Proof’s body jerked and flapped on the operating table, smeared with blood that also covered the shirt and hands of Eminem, who clutched his wide-eyed head in horror, too late.

“It was a year before I could really do anything normally again,” he wrote in
The Way I Am
. Sometimes, he stayed in bed. Sometimes, he couldn’t walk, paralysed by grief. Brain “scattered”, “I wasn’t making sense when I spoke, so everyone was trying to keep me off TV and away from the press.” Slim Shady was dead, Eminem was shutting down, and Marshall Mathers was falling apart.

The death of Proof, on top of his divorce, accelerated a deeper, more secret malaise. A cancelled tour and a quick rehab spell for sleeping pills didn’t sound serious. But between
The Eminem Show
and
Encore
, recreational gulping of the sedatives Ambien, Vicodin and Valium became an addiction. The latter album would become an unlistenable repository of bad memories for him. “I remember going to LA recording [
Encore
] with Dre and being in the studio high, taking too many pills, getting in this slap-happy mood and making songs like ‘Big Weenie’ and ‘Rain Man’ and ‘Ass Like That’,” he told
Vibe
in 2010, when the truth was out. “Dre would just laugh. He didn’t understand what was going on. Nobody understood what was going on with me or why I was acting so fucking goofy.”

Proof’s death “gave me a real legitimate excuse, in my own head at least, to take more drugs,” he told the
Guardian
. “I didn’t care if my drug problem got worse at that point so I took more pills. And the more I said fuck it and took more pills, the higher my tolerance got.” He was taking “10 to 20 Vicodin” a day and countless Ambien and Valium, just to sleep, he told
Spin
. Proof’s death had also made him fearful. “He started to worry that he might be next,” an associate told the
Independent
. “It also made him realise his responsibilities. He didn’t need any more money, and he hated being away from his daughter, so he decided that he wouldn’t leave her alone to go touring any more.”

But this wasn’t the happy, family-friendly ending of ‘When I’m Gone’. It seemed more like an excuse to lock the world out, and entomb himself. He divided his time between his two gated houses on Detroit’s wooded outskirts – a six-bedroom, nine-and-a-half-bathroom behemoth with swimming pools and helipad in Rochester Hills, and a smaller, more discrete mansion in Clinton Township. When I wandered Detroit in 2002, Eminem was still a regular weekend visitor to his old haunts. When Guy Adams went on his trail for the
Independent
in February 2009, he seemed more like a ghost. “No one had seen him at all,” he says. “Everyone knew someone who’d seen him – ‘a friend of a friend saw him three weeks ago in a bar …’”

Every rapper in Detroit knew Eminem was still working. “He’s never stopped recording. Ever,” Terry Simaan, owner of local hip-hop label Oh Trey 9 told Adams. “I hear they’ve got over 300 songs in the can.” No one Adams spoke to even considered their local hero had lost it. “Everyone kept the faith. They all think he’s a genius.”

Perhaps only Eminem knew that the pills had given him crippling writer’s block. “I never stopped working, but I had a problem I was hiding,” he told the
Guardian
. “A combination of writer’s block and being lazy … I couldn’t write a line to save my life.” The man whose dense, cryptic notebooks were part of his myth now freestyled in the studio, rather than focus on words. The mush of barely there, mumbled lyrics which made
Encore
‘s comic songs sound so daring in isolation now seemed the product of a dissolving, stoned mind. “I had this slurry tone,” he told
Spin
of the failed recordings he made next. “It sounded like I was talking-rapping. I’d become so fucking lazy. Songs where I would talk about eating so much and getting fat and saying, ‘Fuck it, I don’t care.’” The rumours of 300 recordings were true. Only one would be salvaged. The writer’s block lasted four years, and Eminem never stopped recording hazy, despairing shit.

Songs on his 2009 album
Relapse
retrospectively sketched the sloth and furtiveness of a functioning addict. He spent the morning slumped nude on his sofa in ‘3 a.m.’, idly musing if it was too early for naked breasts on TV. ‘Déjà Vu’ plotted his addiction’s course, as rap’s most gifted and wealthy man decides to get wasted until the kids walk in from school, and stashes pills in his porn video boxes, so his beloved, worried children won’t find them. He feels alone and shivers as his home’s gates close behind him, but doesn’t really struggle. “My Dad’s gone crazy,” this song’s Hailie clearly thinks, no longer joking.