The brand, which wasn’t really even a brand at that point, remained dormant while Cattier focused on its existing brands like Antique Gold. According to Bienvenu, the house started to think about making Mrs. Cattier’s idea a reality during the early 1990s, but nothing was officially done until fifteen years later. Shortly after Armand de Brignac’s debut, Bienvenu claims, Jay-Z came across it purely by chance. “When we started to ship product to the U.S. and especially to New York, Jay discovered our champagne in a wine shop and bought a few bottles,” he says. “There has never been any partnership, any financial involvement, or something like this between Jay and us . . . It’s fantastic to have such an endorsement.”
As I press Bienvenu for more details, the cracks in the story begin to show.
“How,” I ask, “did the champagne find its way into Jay-Z’s ‘Show Me What You Got’ video?”
“He discovered our champagne by pure coincidence in a wine shop and a few months after came to Monaco to shoot a video,” Bienvenu replies. “On that occasion, he ordered a few cases that we shipped to his hotel there. We couldn’t imagine when we shipped those cases that the purpose of this was to include our champagne in the video. We just thought that he wanted to enjoy our champagne during his stay in France.”
I nod politely. But when I ask Bienvenu for the name of the New York wine shop in which Jay-Z allegedly found his first bottle of Armand de Brignac, the affable Frenchman quickly becomes defensive.
“I don’t know which wine shop,” he says. “I can’t tell you any more details because I don’t know.”
All of this makes for a great story: a family-owned champagne brand dreamed up by a little old French lady in the 1950s, dormant until resurrected half a century later, promptly discovered by the world’s most famous rapper, by sheer coincidence. Even more fantastic is the notion that Jay-Z—a man who’d launched his own Scottish vodka brand four years earlier, just so that he could rap about it—would decide, out of the kindness of his heart, to include the mom-and-pop champagne in the music video for the biggest single on his comeback album. It’s about as believable as the notion that Jay-Z did his 2006 Budweiser commercial, carved from that same Monaco shoot, for free (in fact, a source tells me Anheuser-Busch financed the whole shoot and paid him $1 million on top of that for his efforts).
The first bottles of Armand de Brignac weren’t shipped until October 2006—months after Jay-Z’s video was filmed. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office confirms that the Armand de Brignac trademark was first used for commerce in November 2006.28 Bienvenu himself admitted that the bottles were first shipped and released in the fall of 2006.29 Obviously, it would have been impossible for Jay-Z to stumble upon a bottle of champagne in a New York wine shop during the preceding summer.
When I later confronted one of Cattier’s publicists about this inconsistency, she backtracked. “There’s a misunderstanding regarding how Jay saw the bottle. It was in New York . . . but not in a store,” she explained in an e-mail. “Prior to the launch of Armand de Brignac, our U.S. importer was showing the brand to selected ‘tastemakers’ to generate excitement and spread word-of-mouth in key circles. . . . Through some of these connections, word reached someone in Jay’s team of the brand and that’s how his interest was sparked. Like any new brand coming to market, a number of key people would have seen it, tasted it, and learnt about it before it was released.” Pressed on the nature of Jay-Z’s connection to the importer, Sovereign Brands, she responded: “I know there have been some discussions between the two sides about potentially forming a relationship.”30
In the weeks following my return from France, I realized that the answers to Jay-Z’s champagne mystery were here in the U.S. all along. I spoke with a number of sources close to the matter—including a prominent executive at a major record label, a wine distributor with ties to the entertainment industry, and the chief executive of a notable liquor company, to name a few—and none of them would let me quote them by name for fear of damaging business relationships. But when I related everything I’d learned, all of these sources confirmed that Jay-Z receives millions of dollars per year for his association with Armand de Brignac. As I suspected, the connection wasn’t through the Cattier family, but through Sovereign Brands.
Jay-Z and those around him publicly deny any connection to Armand de Brignac because he wants to be seen as a champagne connoisseur, a trendsetter with the sophistication to anoint a successor to Cristal as hip-hop’s choice bubbly—not something as gauche as a paid promoter. Or, as Bienvenu offhandedly explained to me: “He doesn’t want to be considered a brand ambassador or something like this.” More important, Jay-Z realizes that the revelation of a financial connection could endanger the authenticity of his endorsement—and by extension jeopardize a very lucrative arrangement. Most of the people buying bottles of Armand de Brignac are doing so because they think Jay-Z prefers it to other fine wines simply because of its quality, much as he prefers Maybachs to Toyota Camrys. If they discovered that they were actually paying $300 for a gussied-up bottle of $60 Antique Gold, they might reconsider.
The math looks extremely favorable for Jay-Z. Like most expensive champagnes, the production cost per bottle is about $13; the wholesale price is $225.31 Armand de Brignac’s maximum output is sixty thousand bottles per year.32 If Jay-Z splits the $212-per-bottle profit evenly with Cattier and Sovereign, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests his annual take would be a little over $4 million. One of the industry sources who asked to remain anonymous confirmed that number, and added that Jay-Z may have received a Sovereign Brands equity stake worth about $50 million.33 All for dropping a few lyrical references and featuring Armand de Brignac in a couple of videos.
“If he’s not getting a cut, or if he doesn’t own a piece, then he’s not a good businessman,” adds Fass. “And we all know Jay-Z is a good businessman.”34
At least for now, Jay-Z gets to have his champagne—and drink it, too.
8
To Infinity—and Beyoncé
The rumors started swirling again on April Fools’ Day, 2008. It was a delightfully confusing twist to the six-year saga of Jay-Z and Beyoncé Knowles’s romance, which had endured dozens of erroneous reports of elopements and secret ceremonies. As the week wore on, though, it started to become clear that Jay-Z and Beyoncé were finally getting married.
Or were they? On April 1, People reported that the couple had secured a marriage license in the posh New York suburb of Scarsdale,1 but other rumormongers remained skeptical. On the morning of April 4, Gawker weighed in with a story entitled “Beyoncé and Jay-Z Definitely, Maybe Getting Married Today.” TMZ followed with another entitled “We Are Sooooo Not Buying It.” But as the afternoon of April 4 unfolded, more details surfaced. Beyoncé’s mother Tina was spotted in New York along with Beyoncé’s former Destiny’s Child group-mates Michelle Williams and Kelly Rowland. A white tent popped up on the rooftop terrace of Jay-Z’s Tribeca penthouse. Someone photographed a set of candelabras sitting on the sidewalk in front of the building after being unloaded from a truck.2
Then the deluge began. At 5:47 P.M., Tina Knowles arrived. Twenty minutes later came Beyoncé’s father, Mathew Knowles. At 6:27 P.M., Jay-Z’s Maybach was spotted en route to the building. An hour later, actress Gwyneth Paltrow and rocker Chris Martin joined the other celebrities gathering at Jay-Z’s apartment. 3 An insider let it slip that fifty thousand orchid blooms had been ordered for a “big party” at the mogul’s pad. By the end of the night, the gossip hounds were in agreement: Jay-Z and Beyoncé had finally tied the knot. “It happened earlier this evening,” a source informed People. “Jay wanted it to be a really private affair—close friends and family.”4
Jay-Z and Beyoncé stayed mum on the details even after their wedding had been widely reported. The first official confirmation of the marriage came nearly three weeks later, when a Scarsdale town clerk confirmed that the court had received the signed license, which listed the wedding date as April 4.5 It wasn�
��t until September that Beyoncé finally showed off her $5 million Lorraine Schwartz wedding ring—an 18-carat flawless diamond set in a thin platinum band—a fittingly spectacular token to commemorate an alliance of seismic proportions.6
“In terms of the entertainment industry, it’s the biggest merger you could possibly imagine,” says music historian Jeff Chang. “It’s two superpowers coming together. It’s sort of Microsoft and Apple deciding they can be literally in bed together.”7
The secrecy that preceded Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s marriage is the by-product of what started out as an extremely unlikely union. In 2002, when the pair first became involved, Jay-Z wasn’t the sophisticated mogul he is today. He possessed neither an Andy Warhol Rorschach-blot painting8 nor a swank Tribeca penthouse in which to hang it. He favored do-rags and basketball jerseys over button-downs and slacks. He palled around with Damon Dash, Foxy Brown, and Beanie Sigel—not Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin, and Oprah.
If you were to walk down 125th Street on a steamy summer day in 2002, you’d likely hear Jay-Z’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” emanating from at least a few rolled-down car windows. You’d hear about all the women he was seeing, as well as the culinary perks of their ethnicities (“Spanish chick, French chick, Indian, and black / That’s fried chicken, curry chicken, damn, I’m gettin’ fat”) and the raunchy ramifications of their professions (“I get frequent flyer mileage from my stewardess chick, she look right in that tight blue dress, she’s thick / She gives me extra pillows and seat-back love, so I had to introduce her to the Mile High Club”).9
Along with the abundance of Jay-Z’s self-proclaimed dalliances, there were plenty of other obstacles to a union with Beyoncé. Jay-Z got his first introduction to the business world by peddling crack on the streets. He narrowly avoided jail time for allegedly stabbing record producer Lance Rivera for bootlegging his songs; when Jay-Z met Beyoncé, he was still on probation. These aren’t the sort of traits most young women look for, nor are they the type of qualities that tend to sit well with parents of twenty-year-olds—especially ones like Beyoncé’s.
The superstar diva was raised as a devout Methodist by parents Mathew and Tina Knowles. (Tina’s maiden name was Beyoncé, and she passed it along to her daughter so that it would continue on in another generation.10) Along with her younger sister, Solange, Beyoncé grew up in a four-bedroom mock-Tudor house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Houston, Texas. Her mother owned a hair salon; her father was a successful salesman at Xerox.11 “I didn’t grow up poor,” Beyoncé explained to Vanity Fair in 2005. “I went to private school; we had a very nice house, cars, a housekeeper. I wasn’t [singing] because I didn’t have a choice, or to support the family, or because I had to get out of a bad situation. I just was determined; this is what I wanted to do so bad.”12
Beyoncé got her start in entertainment as a first-grader, thanks to the keen eye of a dance teacher who noticed her and convinced her to enter the school’s talent show. The spirited performer who emerged from the otherwise shy Beyoncé surprised even her parents. “The first time I saw her onstage at a school talent show, she was seven and just a different person,” Mathew Knowles said in 2003. “Tina and I just looked at each other and said: ‘Wow! Where did that come from?’ ”13
In 1990, at age nine, Beyoncé joined an R&B group called Girl’s Tyme, which earned an appearance on the television show Star Search the following year. Despite a heart-breaking defeat on the American Idol–style program, Beyoncé was hooked on music, and so was her family. Her father left his job to manage his daughter’s group and rechristened it Destiny’s Child. At first, gigs were limited to practice at Tina’s salon, where audiences were actually captive—women in curlers, immobilized by bonnet dryers.14 During the summers, Mathew put together a sort of entertainment boot camp for the girls, complete with dance practice, vocal lessons, and a strict exercise regimen.15
In 1996, Destiny’s Child scored a deal with Columbia records; the group’s self-titled debut hit stores in 1998. Shortly after the release of a second album the following year, two of four members left the group and filed a lawsuit claiming that Mathew Knowles favored his daughter (the case was eventually settled). Beyoncé was crushed, admitting that she fell into a deep depression after the split. But the group quickly gained a new member and released the aptly named Survivor in 2001. The reincarnated Destiny’s Child went on indefinite hiatus in 2002 before splitting amicably in 2004, giving Beyoncé the freedom to pursue a solo career.16
Throughout the many incarnations of Destiny’s Child, bombshell Beyoncé remained shy offstage. When it came to dating, she claimed she was something of a wallflower. “I had a boyfriend from ninth grade until twelfth grade, the same guy,” she told Vanity Fair. “I met him in church, and I went to his prom, but I preferred to be at home singing in front of a stereo—recording, making songs, listening to the music I grew up with . . . All I wanted to do was watch videos and write songs and perform.”17
In the rare moments when it seemed Beyoncé was feeling too proud of herself, her mother was quick to admonish her—particularly, Beyoncé recalled, on one occasion when she was nineteen. “We were in the record store, my mom and dad were both there, and my song was playing, and I was feeling like hot stuff . . . There were some really cute guys in the store who were noticing me, and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah! I’m hot!’ And my mom said, ‘I’m talking to you.’ And I kept singing. And so she smacked me—slapped me in my face, so hard. And my dad said, ‘What are you doing?’ Because I didn’t get spankings growing up. They didn’t believe in that. My mom said, ‘She thinks she’s hot stuff ’cos her single is out. Nobody cares about that! You are still my child. I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it! Now go sit in the car.’ But it was the best thing she could have ever done to me because for the first time I realized I was losing sight of what was important.”18
These severe reminders seem to have had a major impact on the young Beyoncé. Even as she became an international icon as the star of Destiny’s Child, she cultivated a modest image. In interviews, she opened up about insecurities that seemed more typical of a normal college-aged woman than a pop diva. “One day, I counted the blemishes on my face,” she explained in 2001. “Got up to thirty-five. It’s so irritating to read in articles people saying, ‘She thinks she’s beautiful.’ There’s a lot of days when I wake up and hate how I look. . . . When I was little, my head was smaller, and I looked like I had big Dumbo ears. I still do not wear my ears out, and that’s why I wear big earrings, because they camouflage your ears.”19
It wasn’t just Beyoncé who was dealing with a very human set of insecurities. According to Jay-Z’s longtime mentor Jonathan “Jaz-O” Burks, the rapper sometimes struggled with issues of self-image. “He felt he needed money because he didn’t feel like he was the most attractive guy to girls,” says Jaz-O. “I think he had a serious complex about his features.” 20 Regardless, Jay-Z did his best to project an air of invincibility. In his 2000 hit “Big Pimpin’,” he laid out his romantic philosophy: “Me give my heart to a woman? Not for nothin’, never happen / I’ll be forever mackin’.”21
At least that’s what he wanted his audience to think. Chenise Wilson, a friend of Jay-Z and Damon Dash who spent a lot of time with both men in the early and late 1990s, paints a slightly different picture of Jay-Z’s love life. “There were girls around, but that wasn’t his thing, being in girls’ faces,” says Wilson. “He had his share, but he wasn’t the kind of guy with a whole lot of girls. . . . I’ve heard stories that he’s always had a girl and another girl and another girl. But, you know, those are stories. Jay is a very particular guy.”22
Meanwhile, Beyoncé claimed she had trouble finding men. “I am trying to date, but there’s no one special,” she said in July 2002. “The crazy thing is that everyone tries to hook me up with somebody. I’m scared, and I didn’t want to go out with anyone for a long time. I was always worried the tabloids would get a picture. Plus, I’m not a dating-type
person.” 23 Her shy-girl image might not have been completely representative of real life. New York papers linked her to controversial rapper Eminem in 200124 and suave superproducer Pharrell Williams in 2002.25 “She ain’t been a choir church girl since she left the church,” says Wilson. “She was very skilled at keeping it quiet. I think it was a mutual thing with whoever she was involved with.”
In any event, Jay-Z and Beyoncé hit it off while collaborating on the song “ ’03 Bonnie & Clyde” in early 2002. They’d known each other through the celebrity circuit, and Jay-Z approached Beyoncé about working together ostensibly because she was the most talented performer he knew. “I wanted a singer on the song,” he said, “and I knew one who was exceptional.” The song appeared on Jay-Z’s seventh album, The Blueprint 2: The Gift & The Curse, and on international editions of Beyoncé’s solo debut, Dangerously in Love, each of which sold more than three million copies.26
In July 2002, Beyoncé gave Newsweek a nondenial when asked about photos of her embracing the rapper. “We’re good friends,” she said. “To get a boyfriend, I have to date, and it’s so hard to trust people. But I’m hopeful.”27 Jay-Z had similar concerns with trust. By his own admission, his issues were fostered by the trauma of being abandoned by his father as a preteen. “It [affected] my relationships with women,” he told Rolling Stone in a 2005 interview. “I was always guarded, always guarded. And always suspicious. I never let myself just go.”28
But after the music video for “ ’03 Bonnie and Clyde” came out in 2003, even casual observers could see that Jay-Z was beginning to let Beyoncé into his life in a meaningful way. In the video, Jay-Z and Beyoncé cruise the sepia sands of Mexico in a gunmetal gray Aston Martin. Unlike legendary outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, they aren’t robbing banks or sticking up gas stations (though the ever-present cash-filled duffel bag implies something of that ilk). Instead, they’re seen cleverly evading the authorities through a series of maneuvers that would make James Bond proud, culminating in a scene where Jay-Z tosses his Aston Martin keys to a gas station attendant who’s later stopped by the authorities as Jay-Z and Beyoncé ride off into the sunset in an old pickup truck.
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