HOWZAT

The only male figure in his early life was his Uncle Ronnie, who at 19 shot himself in front of his suicidal girlfriend, according to the police, though his mother Betty, Marshall’s grandmother, disputes it. “Ronnie”, nevertheless, was among the earliest of Eminem’s famous tattoos. His relationship with his mother has been flayed in the courts and on disc, where she is repeatedly referred to as a “bitch” and “pill-popper”. She has sued him for defamation claiming $10m, but earned only his further hatred and a derisory $1,600 in damages after legal costs. Later, she made a bitterly reproving rap record herself; unsurprisingly, it bombed.

His father, Marshall Mathers II, abandoned the family when his son was 14 months old and now lives near San Diego. He wrote asking for a reconciliation and insisting he did not want money. Eminem’s only response came in a line in My Name Is: “If you see my dad, tell him I slit his throat in this dream I had.”

If Marshall Sr found his son’s overnight success hard to swallow, so has Marshall Jr. At one stage he was on a bottle of Bacardi a day, topped up with painkillers and ecstasy. The low point came in mid-2000. His brother-and-sisterly relationship with Kim had mutated into a jealous love affair, marriage and birth of a daughter, Hailie Jade.

The pressures, groupies, fame and drugs proved too much. In June 2000 at the Hot Rocks Sports Bar and Music Café in south Detroit, he found Kim kissing another man. In the ensuing scuffle Eminem pulled out a gun. He was lucky to escape with a probationary sentence. He later settled a lawsuit brought by the victim for $100,000.

At a concert a week later he assaulted an effigy of Kim on stage and threw it to the audience. She later tried to cut her wrists, was convicted twice of drink-driving and that October sued for divorce. His response was a new tattoo: “Kim: Rot in Pieces”. The next year was spent in squabbles over his wealth and the settlement while she had a baby with another man.

From then on, incredibly, it has been uphill all the way. He was triumphant at the 2001 Grammy awards and astounded critics by singing a duet with gay-and-proud-of-it Elton John. His second album The Marshall Mathers LP was an exercise in public self-laceration and a huge success. It was followed by The Eminem Show — a wail about superstardom’s lack of privacy from a man who has made his private life a freak show — and now the movie.

The fact that his music crosses the racial divide in the other direction to Detroit’s old Tamla Motown stars, revealing a white underclass with a shared lack of values, is an irony he acknowledges: “Look at my sales, do the math. If I’d been black I’d have only sold half.” But his appearance dressed as Osama Bin Laden for a video looked like a desperate attempt to restore the shock factor.

Kim along with Hailie, the subject of her daddy’s favourite tattoo, and her new daughter Whitney, has moved back into Eminem’s mansion in a gated community in an exclusive suburb of Detroit. He attends community meetings and has edited out swear words from his records for his daughter despite claiming she is “me to the nth power: she runs around the house and makes up little sayings and phrases”.

Can it be? Eminem is doting. Like Mick Jagger, who has mutated from His Satanic Majesty to knight of the realm, or Ozzy Osbourne, bat-biter to reality TV star, is Eminem on the way to a new incarnation: No More Mr Nasty Guy? As Brian Grazer puts it, has he “moved over to the larger demographic”? It certainly looks it. On his latest tour he shouted: “Look at me, White America, I could be one of your kids.” In the audience were folk who no longer looked as if they’d mind too much.

His “problems with the government” hardly amount to much and his jibes at Lynne Cheney and Tipper Gore are not exactly knife blows to the jugular. Oh, and he threatened to urinate on the White House lawn. Well, naughty, naughty, as Mr Blunkett might say.