Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [117]
Eminem’s history with Kim and his mother reads like a Sigmund Freud parable. Eminem is the son of a willful, perhaps delusional mother and he married a willful, possibly deceitful woman. He fights with both and makes his revenge a reality—in song and in fantasies. He has used these women as the inspiration for some of his canon’s most distraught and improperly funny episodes. They are, Kim particularly, the key to understanding Eminem. Like a two-sided muse, Kim brings out his extremes: loyalty and revenge, maturity and primal rage.
Marshall and Kim met when she was thirteen and he was fifteen. They were dating by the time he was sixteen and Kim lived with Marshall and his mother on and off for years, before and after Hailie was born.
“She lied to us from the beginning,” Debbie says. “She moved in with us when she was twelve and said she was fourteen. She used to sleep downstairs on a couch and told me a few years later she always snuck upstairs to Marshall’s room. She told me just to hurt me. Kim is a very jealous person. She doesn’t want him talking to anybody or to have any friends. And he has a lot of friends, just like me.”
All of the eleven years that Eminem and Kim have been together in some form or another have been tumultuous.
“We’ve just broken up and made up so many times, man,” he said in 1999, before fame made matters worse. “We’ve got issues, issues. It was fucked way before. We just don’t get along.”
“Once me and Eminem and Bizzare all went fishing,” Proof told me that same year. “Then we went to this club 1212 to perform. We come back and Kim’s thrown all of Em’s clothes out, which was about two pairs of pants and some gym shoes. He spent the night at my grandmother’s with me. This is what I love about Em. He’s like, ‘I’m leaving her, I ain’t never going back, fuck it, I’m leaving her.’ Next day, he’s right back with her. The love they got, man, it’s so genuine, it’s ridiculous. He gonna end up marrying her.”
In 1999, he did, in a private ceremony in his mother’s native St. Joseph, Missouri. In July of 2000, when the Anger Management Tour, that summer’s most lucrative outing, came to Detroit’s Auburn Hills arena, Kim was at home with her mother, Kathleen Sluck, who was watching a video with Hailie when she wandered upstairs in search of her daughter. According to an interview Sluck granted People magazine, Kim’s mother discovered her in the bathroom, ready to cut her wrists. Sluck couldn’t restrain her daughter, so she called 9–1–1. According to the article, the tape of the call captures her imploring Kim to put down the razor and Kim’s reply that she doesn’t want to be here anymore. The hospital reported five lacerations requiring stitches. Soon after, the couple began divorce proceedings.
In 2002, while Marshall was linked, both falsely and kinda not so falsely to a variety of film and music talent (Mariah Carey, Brittany Murphy, Kim Basinger, porn star Gina Lynn), Kim became pregnant by another man, Eric Harter, whom she allegedly began dating in 2001.
“She’s due any day,” Eminem told me in April of 2002. “It’s not mine. But Hailie’s going to have a baby sister. It’s going to be tough to deal with, the day she comes to me and says, ‘Why can’t my baby sister come over, Daddy?’ Those are issues I’ve tried to keep her sheltered from. Of course she’s going to find out shit about her mom and me as she goes through life, but I really don’t want her to learn all the fucked-up shit on my shift. I have no idea who the father is, what that is about or anything, I just know she’s due any day.”
A million young men who act, look, and feel like him: Eminem and his phalanx of look-alikes rehearsing