What Makes Puffy Run
It was half past noon on Monday, and Puff Daddy was asleep on the second floor of a Park Avenue town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where the sidewalks are decorated with women in wide-brimmed hats and polka-dotted taffeta dresses holding pedigree poodles.
On the first floor, it was quiet. The maid was softly doing dishes, running water from the gold-plated faucet. The sweet and friendly Honey Combs, a young, golden-beige Shar Pei with a curlicue tail and a Gucci collar, greeted strangers without barking. The off-white walls held framed photos by one of the century’s greatest photographers, Gordon Parks, which completed the place’s crisp, classic look. And in every room there were toys belonging to five-year-old Justin and one-year-old Christian — a giant, fuzzy, rocking elephant, all sorts of Tonka trucks, a white highchair plusher than any you’ve ever seen. The boys live with their mothers, but, judging by the number and placement of the toys, they visit often.
Puff woke up just enough to drag his body down the stairs, across the sidewalk and onto the tour bus parked in front of his door, where he could get one more hour of sleep. It was the day before the release of his second solo album, Forever, so he’d already appeared on Good Morning America and done a handful of telephone interviews, but the man who insists on doing three or four things at once (and can still be heard to complain, “I don’t think I’m doing all I can do”) was working at a pace no faster than usual and no slower than that of, perhaps, the 100 fastest-working men on Earth. (Heads of state and top CEOs, though, are far less prey to the whims of public opinion than a pop-music star, and no amount of work can make up for that. Despite a whirlwind day-before- and day-of-release schedule in which Puff sells himself with the same relentless vigor as a presidential candidate, Forever will have a disappointing first week, moving a mere 207,000 copies — less than half of what his first album, No Way Out, sold in its debut week. In testament to how quickly tastes change, and in what way they’ve changed, Forever will enter the charts at Number Two, behind the debut album from teen pop sensation Christina Aguilera, who is, like Britney Spears, a graduate of the Disney Channel’s All New Mickey Mouse Club.)
After two hours, the bus reached Smith Point in the Hamptons, and Puff jolted from his sleeping quarters in the back. The bus’s front section was crowded with three assistants, a photographer and two impossibly gorgeous women (one of them the cutie dancing with Q-Tip and flirting with the camera in the video for “Vivrant Thing”). Puff sat down in the center of them wearing nothing but black Calvin Klein drawers, white socks and a white towel around his neck, boxer-style. “Now I’ma show you overdrive,” he said. “Super-quadruple overdrive.”
As a hair stylist delicately poured water on his head and brushed his short-cut, finger-waved hair, Puff swallowed a slew of vitamins and herbs, sipped a Red Bull Energy Drink, picked at a turkey burger and fries, and ran through a ton of phone interviews. Each of the interviews began the same way: First, an assistant dialed a radio station on one of Puff’s tiny v-series Motorola cell phones (folded up, it looks like a medium-size beetle). The moment Puff completed one call, he was handed another phone, and, after the journalist’s name was whispered to him, Puff greeted the journalist by name. There was a long silence as the journalist asked his first question. Then, invariably, Puff said something like, “The whole thing was oversensationalized. It was an altercation you’d get into with a friend,” or, “It was a huge mistake. I just lost my cool.”
He was speaking, of course, about the incident with Nas manager/Interscope exec Steve Stoute in which Puff was accused of assaulting Stoute after MTV aired a video for Nas’ single “Hate Me Now” featuring a scene of Puff being crucified — a scene that Puff had asked be excised. The two have since made peace, and Puff was sentenced to a one-day anger-management course — far less than the seven years he originally faced on the assault charge. Puff was tired of talking about the whole thing and wished it would go away, but he would not duck questions about it.
The next day, his manager, Steve Lucas, a thin man so cool and unflappable he may have the lowest blood pressure of any successful record-business man, said through clenched teeth, “If we’re asked that question one more time…” What will you do? He thought a moment and then, with a resigned air that said, “My hands are tied,” replied, “We’ll answer in the way we have.” That is, for Puff to blame himself, make no excuses and hope the conversation moves along. Still, Puff’s frustration with the way the media have handled the situation is evident. Earlier that morning at Good Morning America, a producer promised Puff and his assistants that the issue would not be brought up. Once they were live on the air, it was the interviewer’s third question. “I hate when mafuckers be lyin’,” Puff said later, his anger barely concealed. “That’s what got me in trouble in the first place: mafuckers
Puff finished the last phoner and put his Motorola down. It was a quarter past three, and he needed to get dressed. He was in Smith Point to shoot a video with R. Kelly for the second single from Forever, called “Satisfy You,” and time was growing short. An assistant handed him his jewelry, and he strapped on a platinum-and-diamond bracelet, watch, ring and two giant neck crosses. The glittering ice, so crucial to his image, stood out against his smooth, dark skin and seemed to transform him from mild-mannered Sean Combs into pop superstar Puff Daddy.
He then told a stylist to bring him sweaters. The stylist, a bald young man with a concave chest and the too-hip posture that sets fashion-industry people apart, returned a few moments later with a stack of white sweaters. Puff looked through them with disgust. “These look corny,” he said. “Bring me some turtle-necks.” The stylist brought a stack of white mock-neck sweaters. “Why he bring me all these mock-necks?” Puff wondered aloud, his patience thinning. “This is hip-hop. I can’t look like a dickhead!” He demanded to see white jackets, and the stylist scurried off. Before he could return, Puff stormed out of his bus, toward the wardrobe bus. Time, his most precious commodity, was being wasted.
On a long, thin road between the buses, Puff caught up with the stylist, who was bringing him a stack of white shirts. Puff looked at the shirts. In a fury, he snatched the stack with both hands and flung them overhand, sending them flying a good fifteen yards. “I don’t want none of this shit!” he yelled. The humiliated stylist scooped the shirts off the ground and hurried away. “I was just very mad,” Puff said later. “I wanted to burn the whole fuckin’ bus. I get to the snapping point sometimes.”
For a long moment everyone stood still, embarrassed by what they’d seen. Then Puff moved toward the wardrobe bus. Now twelve men were following him — managers, bodyguards, photographers, videographers, assistants — and as he struggled to deal with his rage, they played an absurd game of follow the leader. He jogged toward the wardrobe bus, and they jogged. He stopped suddenly; they all did. He turned and leapt over a short fence and twelve men did the same. There was no illusion that they were walking to the same place. For Puff, there was a destination. For them, he was the destination.
After a few minutes in the wardrobe bus, Puff emerged in all white — pants, turtleneck and long, thin jacket — and charged off toward the video set. He passed R. Kelly’s bus and the food-service bus and came into the shooting area. A handful of black men milled around the camera, including director Hype Williams and Puff’s first employer and the current president of Bad Boy, Andre Harrell, talking about
how the video should go. A crew of white men handled the blue-collar work involved in filming, like lugging the camera into position.
And overlooking it all with a palpable excitement, standing behind yellow police tape, screaming at the sight of Puff, were a few hundred locals, white boys and girls spanning the ages of six to eighteen, wearing Tommy bathing suits or Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts. The kids, mesmerized by the sight of him, in love with him “’cause he sings good,” stuck around for hours: They followed him around the video set just to see where he went, watched the filming and applauded every take, and continued to watch even as the night grew cold. But when asked to name their favorite of his songs, most were unable to come up with a single title.
This is evidence that Puff has transcended the level of house-hold name and gone on to the Zsa Zsa Gabor level of fame — that is, the sort of star who is famous less for what they have done than for who they are. Even after the audience can no longer remember exactly why it loves these stars, it still worships them. “I could be in motherfuckin’ Thailand, in a fuckin’ rice paddy,” Puff said, “and a motherfucker be like, ‘Puff Da-dee!'”
At 11:20, as the shoot came to an end, 300 kids were still watching. Puff grabbed an assistant and said, “Yo, those are loyal fans. We gotta sell some albums. Tell ’em Puff says his album is coming out tomorrow and go pick it up.” The man ran off with a bullhorn.
Upon hearing the announcement, the crowd cheered and waved to him. He jumped up from his chair. “I want you guys to come home with me!” he yelled, only half kidding. “White people, I love you!” Everyone around him laughed. “Nothin’ like 1,000 white people to make you feel great.”
What will happen to America when the hip-hop generation grows up and these white kids who grew up idolizing Puff (and Jay-Z, and Jordan, and Shaq) start to assume positions in this country’s power structure? “I think it’s gonna have a drastic change on the way things are set up, totally,” Puff said. “You’ll have a lot of white kids with a lot of rhythm. I think it’s gonna make the world a better place.”
After almost ten slow, draining hours, the shoot ended. Puff jumped into a silver, chauffeur-driven Lincoln Navigator; it flew down the Long Island Expressway and through Manhattan traffic, running a handful of red lights, and by a quarter past one, Puff and his six-deep entourage were at a party called Purr in a nightclub called Cheetah, ensconced in a booth, sipping Cristal mixed with orange or cranberry juice.
If this were a typical night in ’96 or ’97, the next ten songs would be from artists on Puff’s label, Bad Boy, or records produced by Puff. Back then you would dance half the night to Puff’s music, jump in the cab
where a Puff record was on the radio, and bounce into another club where a Puff record was playing as you walked in. But in ’99 he’s not quite ubiquitous.
After half an hour in the club, we’ve heard two songs from Biggie protégé Lil’ Kim, one from Puff’s first big success, Mary J. Bilge, one song by Bad Boy in-house producer Deric “D-Dot” Angeletti (done in his alter ego, the Madd Rapper) and Puff’s own new single, “What You Want.” Out of fourteen songs, five are directly related to him, and though you could still play three degrees of Puffy with nearly every record in the modern black-music biz, his power has dissipated.
“When you runnin’ a marathon,” Puff explained, “sometimes you take the lead, sometimes you stay back in the pack and you observe what’s goin’ on. If you always try to run in front the whole time, you gonna lose the marathon. I’m in it for the long run. I don’t have a problem with runnin’ with the pack. You ain’t gotta shine all the time. You shine all the time, you overshine.”
At 2:30, Puff slid back into the Navigator, headed for Park Avenue and bed. But he never got to sleep. “I went home and got into an argument with my girl for three hours,” he said at a few minutes past seven on Tuesday morning in an elevator going up to Hot 97, New York’s dominant hip-hop radio station. “I got no sleep, dawg.”
Forty-five minutes later, sitting in the Hot 97 booth, Puff noticed a silver box that had been sent to the on-air personalities. A card taped on top said “BAD BOY” above a handwritten note, but beneath the card was a Reebok DMX insignia, and inside the box was a DMX T-shirt. Puff decided to play a joke on Bad Boy promotions vice president James Cruz, who had left the room. Cruz is a tall, street-smart Latino man who seems so dedicated that he would kill if Puff asked.
When Cruz walked in, Puff, holding the box, began to light into him. “What the fuck is this? This shirt don’t say Puff Daddy! Don’t none of this shit here say anything about Puff Daddy or Forever!” Cruz stood there, silently taking Puff’s abuse. “Why the fuck is our card on a box that say DMX… ?” For half a minute Puff went on, railing at Cruz, embarrassing him in front of the influential Hot 97 crew. Suddenly Puff stopped and smiled, letting Cruz in on the joke. As everyone else laughed, Cruz smiled with relief and breathed hard, long breaths, as though he’d dodged a bullet aimed at his head. His face said that Puff’s joke public attack could easily have been serious, because Puff is hard on his staff and, at times, verbally abusive, making them scamper around him on egg shells, trying to avoid his wrath.
At twenty past ten, after Puff had spent an hour on the radio, a small crowd had formed outside Hot 97, most of them wanting a glimpse of Puff, a few looking for jobs. As he strolled through the Hot 97 lobby, a grungy-looking young man named Metropolis said, “Yo, Puff, can I spit sixteen in your ear?” Puff listened while he rhymed sixteen bars, then encouraged the grungy young man to call the office next week. He took ten steps and another man asked for two minutes to rhyme for him.
After a few seconds, Puff lost interest. “It only take me five seconds [to know],” Puff said later. “I’m listenin’ for voice, flow and lyrics. But I can teach you lyrics. I can’t teach you rhythm. I can’t give you a voice.” The man continued rhyming, and in the middle of his verse, a girl on an expensive-looking mountain bike just riding by dropped her bike and began rhyming over him. Each MC was worse than the one before, but Puff listened to all of them. “Seventy percent of my artists I found from just spittin’ at me a cappella in the streets. No doubt. I listen.” But how many of those who walk up to him and rhyme become artists? “One percent… or less.”
At forty-six past ten, Puff arrived at Daddy’s House, his midtown recording studio, and stepped into his office, a giant room he calls the “Frank Sinatra Room.” It’s a giant brown-and-beige, postmodern fantasy with a pool table, a fully stocked bar, five TV screens (two of them tuned to security cameras, others beaming in BET, SportsCenter and MTV) and all kinds of funky little chairs, couches, banquettes and love seats in a rainbow of browns, textures and animal-print fabrics. On the walls are classic black-and-white photos of Miles, Bird, Dizzy, Cab Calloway, Satchmo and Monk. In one corner, bottles of Rémy Martin sit next to a copy of Cigar Aficionado. On a table, a glass Gucci box holds seven exquisitely sculpted pieces of chocolate. Near the door is a basket filled with large, fuzzy off-white slippers which guests are supposed to wear. It’s like a mini Playboy mansion without the girls, or maybe like ultimate bachelor pad.
Puff plopped down on the couch next the giant-screen television and began five long hours of phoners with radio stations around the country. Over and over he said things like, “That was just one five-second period of emotional distress”; “You can have all the hits, you still a human being”; “I fell off the path of total self-control”; “I ain’t goin’ to jail; I’m free and clear”; “The press over-sensationalized but I gave them the chance”; “I’m a man. I stand up for what I believe in, but I could’ve handled it in another way, and to me that’s a real man”; “I’m supposed to turn the other cheek no matter what”; “I gotta make sure my karma is right”; “He’s never let me down. I gotta make sure I never let Him down.”
Just before eleven, Puff’s son Justin bounced into the room in a dark navy Polo Sport tank top and matching shorts, holding hands with his little best friend, Unique. He had the exuberance of a firecracker. He ran to Puff, and they kissed on the mouth and then high-fived. Justin sat beside Puff as continued talking on the phone, opened toy briefcase, and pulled out a toy cell phone and a stack of toy money. When Puff’s call ended, he said, “You got your business and you movin’ it around like Daddy?”
“Yeah,” Justin said in a squeaky voice.
“Tell Touré what you wanna be when you grow up.” A thoughtful pause. “A rapper.”
“Jus, what time you went to bed last night?”
“Eleven a clock.”
“You wanna stay with me or go home?”
“Stay with you.”
“All right. I’ma kidnap you.”
Then Justin bounced off the couch and over to Unique. “Wanna play chess?” Unique nodded yes, and they ran off together.
Around six, Puff showered, put on a cream jogging suit and rode uptown to HMV to sign albums for fans. Three thousand people were waiting for him, and the blocks around the store overflowed with teenagers and their nervous energy. A riot seemed possible. When Puff’s silver Navigator got within a block of the store, a bodyguard jumped out and walked alongside the truck as it moved slowly down the street, like Secret Service men do. Finally, Puff leapt out and was immediately surrounded by a cell of bodyguards and assistants who kept the beehive of fans from tearing him apart. It was like a rugby scrum, with Puff as the ball.
As fans stepped up to the table for their four-second meeting with Puff, most were overwhelmed. Girls sobbed, boys’ legs buckled and nearly everyone lost their tongues. A bodyguard standing next to Puff grabbed the microphone and began giving instructions meant to keep things moving. “Please have the item you want signed out and ready as you step up to the table… Please be fair, y’all, only one signature per person… ” But as time went on, he began teasing the fans, clowning them over the loudspeaker, keeping the moment light. “Breathe!” he urged girls who stepped up crying. When people began rhyming for Puff, he said, “Rhyme while you’re steppin’ down the aisle.” When a young boy’s camera wasn’t ready, he said, “Fix your camera outside the store. Thanks for coming.” Puff’s assistants laughed. Puff remained professional, hugging those who cried.
After four hours, everyone who lined up had gotten an autograph. The crew moved through the back caverns of HMV and into the silver Navigator. An assistant phoned Mister Chow, the trendy upscale Chinese restaurant on Fifty-Seventh Street, to let them know Puff was on the way.
“I signed every autograph,” Puff said, proud of himself. He would say it two or three more times. “Is your hand tired?” someone asked. Surely it was cramping. “Not at all,” he said animatedly, snatched up his Motorola and, with his writing hand, began dialing. He seemed not the least bit tired, as though he had fed off the crowd’s energy and left HMV with his batteries charged instead of drained. “I’d like to get a shot of him relaxing,” a photographer whispered to Steve Lucas. “You’ll be waiting a long time,” Lucas said.
Puff’s crew strolled into Mister Chow and settled at a rectangular fifteen-person table. Mister Chow is the official cafeteria of the hip-hop glitterati, a place where you’ll see a tanned businessman in a pastel green suit sitting beside a man in a football jersey that says “MURDER UNIT” on the back. MCs Pras and Noreaga, longtime Def Jam executive Chris Lighty and DJ Spark Ronson were already in the house, seated at separate tables. A few moments later Kobe Bryant arrived, pushing the combined worth of the room’s black men well over $100 million.
Over shrimp egg rolls, seaweed, garlic lobster, Peking duck, chow noodles, chicken satay and a glass of water, Puff talked about Mase (“[He] really found God. He go to church and pray for me every day”), the new album (“I’m definitely better as an MC. Lyrically, I had to stop bein’ lazy, stop lettin’ n-ggas write the whole joint for me ’cause I just didn’t wanna write”) and the effect B.I.G.’s murder had on his own celebrity (“I think his passing added to the fame. I would say that at least 2 million [of the nearly 5 million copies of No Way Out sold] were due to that, straight up. And that doesn’t necessarily feel good, but that’s the reality”).
On the subject of Puff, he said, “I’m a human. I got problems. My head is fucked up. This game done fucked me up in the head. It’s made me cold. My whole life made me cold. The last year I had to work on not turnin’ cold, not turnin’ into a corpse. I worked on my karma and my energy; I’m just so unstoppable right now. I could die right now, I’d be the happiest motherfucker in the world.”
Then Noreaga, surrounded by his peoples at a nearby table, stood, champagne glass in hand, and yelled out, “All of Mister Chow’s!” The whole place hushed. “This is me and Puff’s album release,” he said with bluster, letting everyone know that his album and Puff’s album had come out that day. Then his voice got soft and almost sweet: “And we havin’ a whole lotta fun.” Puff and his table cheered and whooped. Puff said, “Mister Chow’s has been turned out!” But it wasn’t clear if Puff Daddy was having a whole lotta fun.