3 Kings

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  The reception for the album, though, was by no means universally positive. The New York Times gave Diddy a backhanded compliment at best by noting that “people, even tone-deaf people, love to sing along with” his music.5 Entertainment Weekly gave “I’ll Be Missing You” a grade of D, excoriating the song as a “maudlin ‘tribute’” that “gives lie to those who claim hip-hoppers are above self-serving sentimentality.”6 Perhaps to blunt such criticism, Diddy gave his $3 million in profits from the single to Biggie’s family.7

  Knowing he’d get flak for his materialistic boasts and his reliance on other songwriters and producers throughout the LP, Diddy preemptively devoted a chunk of album time to skits by the Mad Rapper, a fast-talking fictional firebrand who first appeared on Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die. The character complained that, despite having four albums under his belt, he still lived with his mother while rappers like Diddy drove around in fancy cars and filmed $500,000 videos. On No Way Out, the Mad Rapper was joined by his brother: a new character called the Mad Producer, who criticized Diddy’s abilities behind the board (“He ain’t no real producer!”) and his songwriting talents (“A thousand niggas write for him!”). This self-deprecating counterpoint to Diddy’s grandiosity proved to be a clever move. Says Rob Stone: “You couldn’t really get mad at him, because then you were the angry rapper.”8

  Diddy knew that hip-hop was an aspirational genre; he simply took the aspirations higher, and found a huge market for his message. A series of songs that Diddy rapped on, produced, and/or released through Bad Boy held the top spot on the charts for forty-two weeks of 1997.9 His Puff Daddy and the Family tour grossed $15 million that year, perhaps not as much as it would have with Biggie on board, but still the most in rap history to that point. Diddy personally pocketed $53.5 million in 1998, thanks mostly to an outsize advance from Arista.10 Diddy plowed a chunk of his gains—about $2.5 million, according to reports—into a modernist East Hampton mansion designed by Charles Gwathmey. The brightly painted house stood on an isolated plot overlooking Gardiner’s Bay, seven miles from the more desirable (and pricier) real estate on the Atlantic coast closer to town.11

  Next, Diddy decided to flip the notion of whiteness on its head. He’d taken his Harlem swagger and Timberland boots to suburban America; now he was going to put the violence of the mid-1990s behind him by exerting his cultural clout on one of the country’s wealthiest Caucasian enclaves. He had his new home slathered in white paint and appointed its interior with fine Italian furniture. It would serve as the backdrop for an annual bash with a dress code more rigid than that of the snootiest country club: the White Party.

  “The whole concept of the White Party and it being super strict—like you couldn’t come in cream or whatever—was all him,” recalls Rosenblum, who helped Diddy plan what quickly became the hottest invitation in the Hamptons. “It had an energy and it was beautiful.”12

  Diddy threw his inaugural soiree in 1998. Thousands of white Christmas lights hung in the trees around the house; mermaid-costumed women swam in the pool and bartenders were trucked in from New York to pour Cipriani’s famed Bellinis. Hot-air balloons rose from the beach at sunset and sunrise. Guests ranged from hip-hop nobility (Russell Simmons, Jay-Z, and Andre Harrell—Diddy had recently hired the man who’d been his boss at Uptown) to mainstream stars (Martha Stewart, Howard Stern, Donna Karan, and Donald Trump). “If you couldn’t get into the White Party, your summer was ruined,” says Stone. “You’d see grown men leave the party and come back… If their shorts had blue trim, they’d go find white shorts and come back.”13

  Rosenblum remembers staying up until four or five in the morning the day before each iteration of the party, working with Diddy to perfect the setting, all the way down to moving pieces of furniture a few inches one way or another. His vision amazed her. “A lot of people—and particularly men—would not be so confident,” she says. “And particularly rappers in the nineties would not be so confident, in their thought of This furniture must be arranged this way or I don’t like the way this looks or This isn’t pretty enough.”14

  Nor would they insist on all-white flowers, or an all-white dress code. But then they wouldn’t be Diddy, who was redefining the art of celebration for a new generation. He was also upending sociocultural customs as a young black man throwing a white-clothing-only party in one of America’s most economically segregated vacation haunts, leaving revelers of all races begging to get in. As Simmons points out, Diddy never believed the color of his skin should dictate where he spent his time.

  “He don’t mind where he hangs out,” the Def Jam cofounder explains. “He might like cultural stuff that is based in urban culture, but there’s nothing about him that’s going to stop him from going into any door or hanging out anywhere.”15

  That attitude is part of the reason many in Diddy’s orbit during the late 1990s still trace the through line of fake-it-till-you-make-it American ambition from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most celebrated character to hip-hop’s most ostentatious impresario. “There certainly was a Bad Boy dream,” says Rosenblum. “[The White Party] was this thing, it was mansions and chicks and jet-setting and the life. In a funny way, it’s The Great Gatsby for the nineties.”

  Meanwhile, in California, Dr. Dre took a literal approach to the end of the Death Row–Bad Boy conflict, founding a new label called Aftermath. With Interscope backing him once again and Suge Knight out of the picture, Dre set out to emphasize quality over quantity: his label launched just five albums in its first five years; all of them went platinum.

  The first of those was Dr. Dre Presents… the Aftermath, which featured seven Dre-produced tracks and three songs on which he rapped; there were also guest appearances by New Yorkers including Nas and KRS-One. The latter offered an incisive summary of the 1990s rap wars on the track “East Coast/West Coast Killas”: “Cacophony of small-talent rappers, claimin’ a coast over instrumentals / Ain’t got no real street credentials.”

  The presence of such lines, along with the names of Dre’s album and label, revealed his immediate goal: to move past boundaries of coast and label—as well as the accompanying violence—and get back to making money. Just as Jay-Z had done earlier that year with the founding of his own record label, Dre tried to model himself after America’s first billionaire, anointing himself a “young black Rockefeller” in “Been There, Done That.” Perhaps in an effort to further distance himself from Death Row’s misogyny, and from his own admitted history of violence toward women, Dre praised his new bride’s entrepreneurial pluck later in the song: “My woman’s independent, makin’ dough by the caseloads.”

  He also set about rehabilitating his East Coast connections, accompanying Iovine to New York during the fall of 1996, shortly after Shakur’s death. Dre was riding high from his appearance on the chart-topping R & B classic “No Diggity.” (Iovine had convinced producer Teddy Riley to record the song with Blackstreet and Dre instead of giving it to Michael Jackson, as Riley had initially planned.16) The mellow crossover hit about giving listeners “eargasms” was an excellent way to further remove himself from the Death Row era and rebrand himself for audiences on both sides of the country.

  Rob Stone, working as a consultant for Interscope at the time, took Dre to do an appearance at one of New York’s underground hip-hop radio stations, where he got a warm reception, and then to Rockefeller Center for his Saturday Night Live performance. In the greenroom, they sat with Iovine and watched a few innings of a World Series game; the New York native Iovine revealed his own standards of perfection when one of the Yankees made an error.

  “If I was Joe Torre, I’d fire him,” Stone remembers Iovine saying. “I’d run right out on the field and fire him in front of everyone. You can’t make that kind of play in the World Series.”17

  Iovine didn’t have to take any such measures when Dre went on and performed “Been There, Done That.” In the midst of the stirring rendition, a familiar figure sidled up to Stone: Diddy. Much like his erstwhile riva
l, Diddy wanted desperately to smooth things over—and that wasn’t necessarily a given with Iovine, who’d been heavily involved with Death Row’s rise and the signing of Shakur. “Yo, introduce me to Jimmy,” Diddy said to Stone. “Tell him I’m a good guy. Tell him I’m cool.”

  “Puff wanted to just make sure Jimmy knew that he was a businessman and not all this other craziness, which was very smart and probably part of the reason he was there,” Stone recalls. “Later on, they would end up doing a lot of business together. They’re best of friends now.”

  There didn’t seem to be any awkwardness that night between Diddy and Iovine, or between Diddy and Dre. “He was out,” says Stone of the latter. “He was away from Suge.”

  At peace with himself and those around him, Dre could focus on what he did best: produce music and discover new talent. The biggest splash for his Aftermath empire was signing a bleached-blond, blue-eyed, twenty-four-year-old rapper from Detroit. When the urgent vocalizations of Eminem first wormed their way into the ears of Dr. Dre—courtesy of Iovine, who got his demo from an Interscope intern who’d heard the neophyte on a Los Angeles radio show—the producer tracked him down within twenty-four hours. Soon they were in the studio working on his debut, The Slim Shady LP, named for the rapper’s sharp-tongued, sometimes violent, politically incorrect horrorcore alter ego—more Quentin Tarantino than Suge Knight. But in the booth, Eminem played the role of eager student. “Dre showed me how to do things with my voice that I didn’t know I could do,” Eminem told the Los Angeles Times in 2007. “I’d do something I thought was pretty good, and he’d say, ‘I think you can do it better.’”18

  Though Dre once spent seventy-nine consecutive hours in the studio, the duo completed the smash single “My Name Is” in about sixty minutes. Just as he’d done with “Who Am I?” on Snoop Dogg’s debut, Dre made sure to pound the identity of his new protégé into the heads of audiences—the name of Eminem’s alter ego, Slim Shady, is stated seventeen times.19 Dre produced three tracks on Eminem’s album, which would go on to sell 480,000 copies its opening week. Dre appeared on the album, as in life, in the role of the avuncular foil to Eminem’s erratic adolescent, showing up on one song as his “motherfucking conscience,” trying to talk the youngster out of making the sort of mistakes Dre once had. (Fascinatingly, the maturing Dre wouldn’t let his young children listen to Eminem’s music.)20

  In Eminem, Dre found someone who actually had quite a bit in common with Shakur: he had grown up essentially fatherless in a rough neighborhood, had been raised by a drug-addicted single mother, had been scrawny and gotten picked on by neighborhood bullies. As an adult, Eminem inhabited multiple personalities: that of the clever lyricist challenging the norms of society, and that of the violent (and often misogynistic) nihilist. But unlike Shakur, Eminem had to overcome early doubters who didn’t think a white guy could rap. In post–Death Row Dr. Dre he had a perfect ally, one who had grown tired of conflict and wanted to bridge divides to create provocative, meaningful art.

  “I got a couple of questions from people around me… You know, ‘He’s got blue eyes, he’s a white kid,’” Dre told Rolling Stone in 1999. “But I don’t give a fuck if you’re purple: if you can kick it, I’m working with you.”

  At the turn of the millennium, Diddy seemed to be “kicking it” in just about every sense of the phrase. Forbes writer Rob LaFranco (whose media and entertainment role I inherited years after he left the publication) learned this firsthand when he traveled to Atlanta in early 1999 to land an interview. The goal was to put Diddy on the cover of the first-ever Celebrity 100 issue, a chronicle of the top-earning names in show business. The only problem: LaFranco couldn’t get a firm answer from Diddy’s camp as to whether or not the interview would actually happen.

  LaFranco arrived in Atlanta and spent his first night unsuccessfully trying to corner Diddy at the opening of his restaurant, Justin’s (named for one of his sons). A few hours before his flight back to New York, LaFranco received detailed instructions via telephone from one of Diddy’s handlers regarding what he needed to do if he actually wanted to talk to the twenty-nine-year-old superstar: “You need to go to the Omni Hotel… Walk into the front door. You go to the left, there’s a set of curtains. Velvet curtains. You walk into those velvet curtains. There will be a guy standing at a desk. When you get to that guy at the desk, you say that you’re there to see the King.”21

  This is total bullshit, LaFranco thought. But he had to try, so he pushed back his flight. On his seventh cup of coffee and already exhausted after staying up all night, he arrived at the Omni at 11:30 a.m. on Friday morning, walked past the velvet curtains—and, sure enough, found a man standing behind a desk.

  “I’m here to see the King.”

  “Is the King expecting you?”

  “I think that he is. Yeah.”

  The man vanished for a moment, and then returned and ushered LaFranco into an elevator. At the penthouse, the doors opened to reveal a raucous party. The rapper Juvenile danced with a group of revelers in front of a baby grand piano; Diddy’s mother was there, too, clad in fur. On the sofa lay a pair of matching fur coats—a big one for Diddy and a miniature one for five-year-old Justin—but Diddy himself was nowhere to be seen. LaFranco ended up sitting by the fireplace for half an hour, talking to a screenwriter working on a Sean Combs biopic that never materialized. Suddenly, LaFranco felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around. It was Diddy.

  “They tell me you want to talk to me.”

  “Puffy, we’re going to put you on the cover of the entertainment issue. You’re the top entertainer of the year.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, just stick around for a little while,” Diddy replied. “I can’t do it now, but we’ll see.”

  Then he disappeared into a bedroom with Kim Porter, his off-and-on girlfriend of many years. LaFranco had been sucked into the Diddy vortex and wouldn’t emerge until the end of a weekend during which he and the mogul had crisscrossed Atlanta in a fleet of Lincoln SUVs and Bentley sedans, going from hotels to clubs and beyond. They stopped at a gym to meet Diddy’s trainer, a former pro boxer; they tracked down famed lawyer Johnnie Cochran, with whom Diddy was thinking of starting a sports agency; they discussed his vision for Justin’s, in terms of both menu (Diddy felt strongly about hush puppies and corn fritters) and vibe (he wanted it to be the sort of place where people would stand “outside with their fur coats, smoking cigarettes in the dead of winter”). There was even discussion of a Puff Daddy packaged food line.

  But at that point in time, Diddy had homed in on music. It was a pivotal moment in his career as a recording artist, and particularly for his label. Bad Boy’s biggest artist was dead, and Mase—its most promising up-and-comer—had just left the hip-hop world to become a minister. Diddy felt enormous pressure to make his second solo album, Forever, live up to its lofty name. So he had indefinitely rented a studio owned by Thom Kidd, an engineer whose résumé included working with artists from Gladys Knight to Elton John, for the sole purpose of recording this new opus.

  LaFranco wandered around the studio, finding an entire room full of vinyl classics by everyone from Steely Dan to REO Speedwagon—and a seemingly unlimited quantity of 1970s R & B that looked particularly rifled-through. The building teemed with producers and songwriters in the vocal booth and outside it, lounging upstairs near the pool tables and big-screen TVs. In every corner, there was a ghostwriter scribbling lyrics or a producer trying to convince Diddy to use one of his beats on the album, a realization of the Mad Rapper’s and Mad Producer’s prophecies.

  “He would listen to it, he would give it a little bit of feedback—‘I kind of like that, but it’s lacking a little bit,’” LaFranco remembers Diddy saying. “These guys would just kind of cycle through… You could almost believe that you were sort of in a Berry Gordy type of situation.”

  At the same time, a coterie of attractive young women spun through Diddy’s orbit. One of them had a cold, so the rapper sent an intern out to get
her some vitamin C. There was another—a University of Georgia student of Irish and Puerto Rican descent—who caught LaFranco’s eye before he went into the studio. He went to try and find her after growing tired of waiting for Diddy to sit down for his interview. As he reached the second floor, he heard someone in Diddy’s camp urging him back down: “No, Robbie, Robbie. No, no, no, no!”

  At that moment, LaFranco looked across the upstairs room and saw the woman for whom he was searching—along with another familiar face.

  “I see Puffy’s head pop up over the couch in front of a big-screen TV,” recalls LaFranco. “He was very clearly going to town.”

  LaFranco headed back downstairs, dejected and annoyed.

  “Puffy’s the only one in this room who’s getting any action, and he’s getting all the action,” LaFranco remembers. “I’m kind of bored now. My editor’s expecting me to interview this guy. The day comes to a close, uneventful… I don’t even see Puffy.”

  The next morning, Diddy’s entourage picked up LaFranco at his hotel and took him to the studio again. At the end of the day, Diddy finally deigned to sit down and talk. “Sorry,” he said. “I had to take care of some shit.”