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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 lyin'."
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 turtlenecks." 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.
[Excerpt From Issue 822 — October 14, 1999]