The Dark Story of Eminem Read Online Free PDF Page A

desires as never before. Kresin backed down, and in 1972, Debbie and Marshall, Jnr. were married. They lived for a year in his parents’ basement in North Dakota. And before that year’s end, in Kansas City, Missouri, Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born.
     
    The earliest picture to be made public gives little hint of the conflicts that were to follow. Debbie, now 17 and renamed Mathers-Briggs, is a skinny-armed, T-shirted girl with long, dark, centre-parted hair, her legs folded in a near-lotus position, her mouth in a happy, hopeful grin for the camera. She is holding up baby Marshall, in red, knee-length dungarees. He is looking distractedly at something away from the camera, with big-eyed seriousness. “He always seemed like he was hungry. And always happy,” Kresin told
The Source
. “And you know most babies are screaming; he wasn’t. He was looking around at the world and very happy, it looked like, to be here. I mean, those big blue eyes. He was such a beautiful grandson from the beginning.” The charismatic blue eyes would stay. And the essentially accepting, contemplative mood Kresin noticed would remain his natural state, whenever stress or public attention were removed. It was the things that happened to him over the next 25 years that mixed that docile intelligence with the violent, vengeful rage which turned Marshall into Eminem.
     
    The first blow came as a consequence of his parents’ immature love. “We married so young, it was ridiculous,” Marshall Jnr. admitted to the
News Of The World
in a self-serving interview years later, “but I was delighted when your mum became pregnant.” Still, passion was quickly spent, and, moving to their own apartment, the young parents soon tired of each other. Mathers-Briggs claimed – though it has never been proven – that her husband was drunk and used drugs, and was even with her best friend as she gave birth to Marshall. Marshall Jnr. said these were all lies. Even the manner of their inevitable split is disputed. Mathers-Briggs said he walked out, one more in a generation of absconding fathers. Marshall Jnr. painted a tragic picture of coming back to their apartment one day to find it emptied like the
Marie Celeste
, of driving round town for weeks, on the apparently impossible task of finding his family. He claimed the eventual divorce was done through lawyers, that he had no way of tracking down the son he loved. So in 1975, he remarried, and moved on.
     
    Marshall’s memories, though, leave no doubt that his father was at least partly lying, or of the wound his absence inflicted. Marshall was about six months old when, for whatever reason, his father moved to California. He was too young to remember having a father at all. But Kresin recalls his childish efforts to communicate with him, anyway. “Marshall used to colour pretty little pictures and give them to me,” she told
The Source
. “He’d say, ‘Grandmom, can you give these to my Daddy?’” She passed them on to a relative she was sure had stayed in touch with Marshall Jnr. In his early teens, Marshall would send letters, too. All came back marked “Return to Sender”. The most painful proof that his father had simply chosen to ignore him came when he would visit Marshall Jnr.’s aunt’s house as a child. The adult Marshall recalled the scene to
The Source
with crystal exactness, and emotions that were still raw and live. “I was always over there, and he would call there. I would be on the floor colouring. I remember!” he exclaimed, as if still childishly desperate for someone to believe him. “I would be there just listening. He would call there and talk to them, and never ask to talk to me.”
     
    “I think a lot of anger came because he was raised by his mother – no father image or figure was there,” Kresin considered recently, to the
Tonight
TV programme. “I once asked him why he was so angry with me,” Mathers-Briggs told the
Mail On Sunday
. “He said it was