The Fame Lunches Read online

  Brown readily admits to being “ambivalent” about her subject: “She was easy to ridicule—she could be ridiculous—but she was also more important than that. And she was getting more disciplined. Her visit to Angola [where she toured minefields] is a snapshot of who she might have become.”

  We linger over the many personalities involved in the tale, the “cavalcade of bizarre, second-rate” courtiers and hangers-on. Although so much went wrong, it is curiously difficult to assign blame (which is, I suppose, why I’m tempted to believe in the conspiracy theories), or even to divide the cast of characters into Good and Bad. Diana’s mother, Frances, who was probably the most interesting of the bunch—Brown calls her “funny, tough, romantic, and selfish”—was only intermittently close to her daughter. Lady Fermoy, Diana’s maternal grandmother—whose loyalty to both her daughter (she testified against Frances in her custody trial) and granddaughter (after conspiring to marry off Diana to the highest-placed bachelor in the country, she dropped her the minute she began flailing) was nonexistent—is the closest to a malign backstage presence. Diana’s relatives on the other side, it seems, were no better. “The Spencers are a dyspeptic lot,” Brown remarks. “They’re a family always on the outs with each other.” Diana’s father, who cut a touching figure accompanying her down the aisle, turns out to have been something of a “sad sack,” an Evelyn Waugh character barking at the gamekeeper.

  Brown’s most mischievous suggestion, in the book and to me personally, is that Prince Philip might have been Diana’s savior—both romantically and sexually—if only he hadn’t been her father-in-law. “Philip,” she announces, “was the lover she needed. He was authentic. He has a kind of decency.” (It’s hard for me to see him as the “great guy” Tina makes him out to be, but then again, she herself has always had a taste for older, powerful men.)

  As our meeting comes to an end, Tina and I ponder what Diana’s psychiatric diagnosis might have been. She asks me if I think she’d be classified as a “borderline,” but then we both wander off from this line of thinking, mostly because it doesn’t seem useful in addressing the void left by Diana’s fatal trajectory. “It was such a banal way to go,” Brown says. “No one can bear the idea of something as wasteful, crass, and silly as a car crash.”

  What I am left with, after my former editor rushes into a waiting car that will take her to her weekend house in the Hamptons and I step out into the beautiful pre-summer weather, is a feeling of indescribable sadness. I’m still not persuaded that what Diana needed was, as Tina put it, “what Gwyneth Paltrow needed—a gated community with a driveway and electronic intercom which she could bark into and the gate would swing open.” She was, as Tina also conceded, someone who was “quite capable of living in a cottage. She wasn’t grandiose or pretentious. She was a girl with no background.” Although enough money might have helped in moating her, in keeping the paparazzi at bay, I can’t imagine any amount would have shielded her from what she needed shielding from most, which were her own intransigent furies. In that sense, the whole Dodi Fayed–as–Aristotle Onassis scenario, which seems to speak to Brown, doesn’t convince me. It might have been a solution if Diana had been a regal, self-sufficient Jackie O. sort; in the event, she was a mother-starved girl looking for affection anywhere she could find it.

  The truth is that The Diana Chronicles has only provoked more questions and left me searching for more answers—or, lacking them, more speculations. For a moment, as I walk along Fifty-Seventh Street, I find myself wondering how Diana’s life might have turned out if she and Charles had bonded over their shared lack of mothering, their virtual abandonment as children. Both came into the marriage with “transitional objects” from their childhood, especially beloved stuffed animals: he with his patched-up teddy bear and she with a small gang of well-worn companions. What would have happened if they had had the patience (on his side) and endurance (on hers) to address their mutual longings for love and nurturance in each other? And then it occurs to me that I am spinning fairy tales of my own, trying to shift the script away from tragedy the better to give the spellbinding narrative of the princess with the golden hair and a commoner’s touch a longer shelf life than fate would have it.

  THE PEACEFUL PUGILIST

  (MIKE TYSON)

  2011

  The gold caps on his teeth are gone, as are the frenzied trappings of celebrity: the nonstop partying filled with drugs and women, the cars, the jewelry, the pet tiger, the liters of Cristal. Mike Tyson—who was once addicted, by his own account, “to everything”—now lives in what might be described as a controlled environment of his own making, a clean, well-lit, but very clearly demarcated place.

  These days, the forty-four-year-old ex–heavyweight champion is in bed by eight and often up as early as two in the morning, at which point he takes a solitary walk around the suburban Las Vegas neighborhood where he lives while listening to R&B on his iPod. Tyson then occupies himself with reading (he’s an avid student of history, philosophy, and psychology), watching karate movies, or taking care of his homing pigeons, who live in a coop in the garage, until six, when his wife, Lakiha (known as Kiki), gets up. The two of them go to a spa nearby where they work out and often get massages before settling into the daily routine of caring for a two-year-old daughter, Milan, and a newborn son, Morocco; they also run Tyrannic, the production company they own. It is a willfully low-key life, one in which Tyson’s wilder impulses are held in check by his inner solid citizen.

  The astonishing discipline and drive Tyson once put into “the stern business of pugilism,” to quote the boxer Jack Johnson, is now being channeled into the business of leading an ordinary, even humdrum existence. Tyson insists that quitting boxing is the best thing he’s ever done, that he doesn’t regret it, “not even a little bit. I don’t like the person it allows you to become.” Still, while it is impossible not to wonder whether this effort can be sustained indefinitely—whether, that is, you can reshape the contours of a personality by a sheer act of will—there is no doubt that Tyson has committed himself to a wholesale renovation. He spends some of his time involved in domestic activities, accompanying Kiki and Milan to classes at Gymboree and doctors’ appointments or running errands, and some of his time furthering his post-boxing career, doing autograph signings, conferring with his agent and publicist about new opportunities. Although he no longer gets lucrative endorsement deals, Tyson earns fees for personal appearances in America and “meet and greet” dinner tours in Europe. He made a brief but memorable cameo in the blockbuster film The Hangover and will play a bit part in The Hangover Part II. He’s hoping to nab more acting roles—genuine ones, in which he gets to play someone other than himself. “I want to entertain people,” he tells me, smiling broadly. “I want a Tony Award.”

  As part of his cleaning-up campaign, he has been adhering to a strict vegan diet for nearly two years, explaining that he doesn’t want anything in him “that’s going to enrage me—no processed food, no meat.” He says that he can no longer abide the smell of meat even on someone’s breath and has dropped 150 pounds since he weighed in at 330 in 2009. “I’ve learned to live a boring life and love it,” he declares, sounding more determined than certain. “I let too much in, and look what happened … I used to have a bunch of girls and some drugs on the table. A bunch of people running around doing whatever.”

  The life that he has created almost from scratch over the last two years has been defined at least as much by what Tyson wants to avoid—old haunts, old habits, old temptations, and old hangers-on—as by what he wants to embrace. One of the few links between his tumultuous past and his more tranquil present are his homing pigeons. He has been raising them since he was a picked-on fat little kid with glasses growing up in some of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods—first Bedford-Stuyvesant, then Brownsville—with an alcoholic, promiscuous mother given to violent outbursts, which included scalding a boyfriend with boiling water. (“He had a tough mother,” recalls David Malone, a childhood
friend. “We knew to stay away from her.”) Although he has turned down requests to do a reality show, Tyson agreed to participate in a six-part docudrama about his pigeons called Taking On Tyson that began airing on Animal Planet on March 6.

  The young Tyson turned to birds as both a hobby and an escape; it was in defense of his pigeons that the timid kid who was called “sissy” and “faggy boy” got into his first fistfight. When he was released from prison in 1995 after serving three years for the rape of Desiree Washington, he went immediately to visit his coops in the Catskills. “The birds were there before boxing,” says Mario Costa, who owns the Ringside Gym in Jersey City and has known Tyson since the early 1980s. “He feels peaceful around them.” Tyson keeps coops in Las Vegas, Jersey City, and Bushwick, and to this day he seeks out the birds when one of his “bad spells,” as Kiki calls them, strikes and his mood turns dark and agitated. “The first thing I ever loved in my life was a pigeon,” Tyson says. “It’s a constant with my sanity in a weird way.”

  * * *

  I have never been particularly drawn to boxing, but there was something about the younger Mike Tyson—his way of seeming larger than the sport itself, of playing out impulses that seemed all the more authentic for being so unmediated, whether it was his desperate bid for Robin Givens’s heart or his desperate biting of Evander Holyfield’s ear—that caught my attention. He seemed like a man in huge conflict with himself as well as with the forces around him—the media, the celebrity machine with its perks and dangers—in a way that suggested that he was both vulnerable to manipulation and leery of being manipulated.

  In preparation for my visit to Las Vegas at the beginning of March, I communicated through e-mail with Kiki, who manages Tyson’s affairs, and the plan was kept loose: we were to meet at his house for several days of conversation, with no definite times fixed. I called the film director James Toback, who made an acclaimed 2008 documentary about Tyson and has known him since they met on the set of Toback’s Pick-Up Artist in 1986, to find out what I could about a man who came across in the film as both very present and elusive, weepy one minute and matter-of-fact the next, capable of self-insight but also hidden to himself. Toback told me that Tyson was unpredictable, given to sudden psychological disconnections that Toback referred to as “click-outs.” It was entirely possible, Toback said, that Tyson would back out of the interviews altogether. “Everything is contingent on the state of mind he’s in at the moment,” the director observed. According to Toback, he and Tyson shared experiences of temporary insanity—of “losing the I”—and “people who don’t understand madness can’t understand him. He’s quicker, smarter, sharper than almost anyone he’s talking to.”

  Toback went on to say that making the movie had been an “exhilarating” experience for both of them and that he senses that Tyson is happier now, that he doesn’t have “the same degree of doom” he had before he met Kiki. He recalled their “late-night conversations about sex, love, madness, and death,” and then, lest I think I might intuit something about the ex-fighter that had escaped others, Toback suddenly issued a pronouncement: “No one gets him. You can’t get him if you haven’t been where he’s been.”

  * * *

  The first object that caught my eye in Tyson’s double-storied, sparely furnished living room was a plush, purple Disney child’s car seat, perched on a chair near the screen doors that led out to a swimming pool. There was also a child-size table and chairs, and a cluster of Mylar balloons tied to a bar stool in celebration of the birth of the Tysons’ week-old son, Morocco, who has a touch of jaundice as well as his father’s narrow eyes. The white stucco house is in a gated community called Seven Hills, which has the hushed, slightly vacant aura of gated communities everywhere. The entranceway features a koi pond under Plexiglas, and the expansive, open interior is decorated in a style that could be described as utilitarian (the color scheme is plum, beige, and brown) with rococo touches: there is a huge contemporary chandelier as well as two gilded brass mirrors over a glassed-in fireplace that match the ironwork frieze on the front doors.

  Tyson bought the place from a friend, the NBA player Jalen Rose, in the down market of early 2007. (The property was originally valued at $3 million; Tyson paid around $1.7 million for it.) It was built, he says, as a “party house,” but he and Kiki have been pushing it in the direction of a more traditional family home, with clearly defined living areas and childproof touches, like the Plexiglas panels on the stair railing. Tyson mentioned that he bought the house because it reminded him of a New York loft, even though he also says there’s little he misses about his hometown aside from the pigeon competitions and seeing people from his old stomping grounds. “I have a big affinity with the guys in my neighborhood … the guys with the broken English and stuff … and then the pigeon world, it’s not like there’s a glass ceiling, the pigeon world keeps evolving with time. There are new diseases; there have to be serums for the new diseases,” he said, sounding momentarily like a biochemist, albeit one with an endearing lisp. “Antibodies.”

  Tyson and I sat diagonally across from each other on black leather couches; in front of us was a glass coffee table on a Persian rug. He took sips from a cup of tea with honey and snacked on a banana. Kiki and her mother, who lives down the street and does a lot of babysitting, were upstairs with the children. Tyson’s assistant, Farid (also known, inexplicably, as David), had picked me up at my hotel and driven me to the house in a maroon Cadillac Escalade; Farid is a genial former IT consultant whom Tyson met in jail, although Tyson was at pains to point out that Farid was never a criminal type, just a geek trying to make some extra money on the sly. In person, Tyson’s voice was deeper and raspier than it sounds in TV interviews, and he cut a much slighter, trimmer figure than you would expect. He wore a T-shirt that said “TYSON” on the back and very white running shoes. His head was shaved, and the left side of his face bore the dramatic tattoo of the New Zealand Maori warrior that he got in the beginning of 2003. All the same, he seemed more shy than ferocious, more of an introvert than someone out to create a stir.

  As the hours passed, Tyson grew less wary and more at ease about saying what was on his mind. An autodidact, he likes to discuss characters he’s read about, ranging from Alexander the Great to Constantine to Tom Sawyer, and he harbors a special fondness for Machiavelli. He knows the history of boxing inside out, watches films of Muhammad Ali and other boxers (including himself) most every evening, returning again and again to Raging Bull. He’s also something of a homegrown philosopher, peppering our conversation with hard-knock truths. “The biggest tough guy wants to be likable,” he observed. But there are also whole areas of his life he keeps firmly cordoned off, especially the raging Kid Dynamite days: “I think I was insane for a great period of my life. I think I was really insane … It was just too quick. I didn’t understand the dynamics then. I just knew how to get on top; I didn’t know what to do once I got there.” He seemed to be edging closer to a deeper revelation, so I asked him if he had any regrets. He answered with rare snappishness: “I’m too young for regrets. I’m not in the grave yet.”

  * * *

  The first big change in Tyson’s convulsive life came when he went from being a ghetto kid whose world consisted of “a reformatory and welfare and rats and roaches” to being a rising boxing star living in a fourteen-room, antiques-filled Victorian mansion on fifteen acres in the Catskills as one of the charges of Cus D’Amato, the legendary boxing trainer cum life coach. D’Amato, who was seventy then, was known for his stern credo of excellence, his ability to mold young talent, and his eccentric, somewhat paranoid views; his protégés included Floyd Patterson and José Torres. The adolescent Tyson was introduced to “this old white guy” who didn’t know him “from a can of paint” by Bobby Stewart, a counselor at the Tryon School for Boys, the juvenile detention center where Tyson was sent after racking up a police record of street crimes. D’Amato saw Olympic potential in the surly, antisocial boy who could barely read or write. �
��He said, ‘Can you handle the job that’s at hand?’ And I say, ‘Sure I can, I can do it,’” Tyson recalled. “But I really didn’t know if I could do anything. I didn’t want to be a punk or a pussy…”

  The young Tyson began training with D’Amato and his staff at the Catskill Boxing Club on passes from Tryon; in 1980, while still a ward of the state, he moved into what was a kind of boardinghouse run by D’Amato and his companion, Camille Ewald. Camille served as materfamilias to the group of troubled boys—there were no more than four to six fighters in residence at any one time—teaching them manners and how to do laundry. (Tyson remained in touch with Ewald, helping to support her and sending her flowers on her birthday, until her death in 2001.)

  D’Amato, meanwhile, devised a master plan whereby Tyson would be reprogrammed from being a street thug to being a warrior in the ring. “Cus was an amazing influence,” says Tom Patti, another D’Amato protégé, who lived with Tyson at the boardinghouse and played the role of big brother in his life, although he was only two years older, teaching him how to drive and palling around. “He engineered his fighters and their success.” To hone Tyson’s physical skills, D’Amato taught him the two boxing techniques that he himself had developed and that were now his signatures—holding the gloves in a tight defensive position at ear level and maintaining a consistent head motion before and after punching.

  As for mental conditioning, Tyson’s ego was inflated nonstop. “They were telling me how great I am, telling me how I can do this if I really try,” Tyson explained, sounding decidedly of mixed minds when looking back on this approach. “They kept it in my head. It had me form a different psychological opinion of myself. No one could say anything negative about me. I always had to have the supreme confidence that I’m a god and superior to everybody else, which is just sick and crazy. But it had its uses.” After Tyson’s mother, Lorna, died of cancer in the fall of 1982, D’Amato became his legal guardian and continued to oversee Tyson’s training until his death in 1985. On November 22, 1986, D’Amato’s tireless mentoring paid off big-time when Mike Tyson defeated Trevor Berbick and became the new world heavyweight champion (and, at age twenty, the youngest in history), exactly as D’Amato had predicted he would.