The Fame Lunches Read online

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  Tyson lives less than half an hour from the raucous, twenty-four-hour universe of the Las Vegas Strip, but it was preternaturally quiet in his house. The phone didn’t ring, and the silence during conversational pauses was broken only by an occasional crying bout of Morocco’s or some chatter of Milan’s that trickled down from the second floor. “It’s like a funeral home here,” Tyson said softly, as if he were thinking my thoughts aloud. It was one of the few times he alluded to what appears to be the deliberate curtailment of his life—the lengths he and Kiki have gone to in order to keep his habitat free from too much stimuli or pressure, the better to preserve his somewhat fragile equanimity. At one point, Milan came into the living room and reached for a tiny handful of pretzels from a bowl. He picked up the toddler and hugged her tightly, then put his face in her hair. When he put her down, she stood against the couch across from him, and he kept his eye on her as she ate her pretzels. “Chew,” he said gently. “Milan, you’ve got to chew.”

  Tyson has six biological children, who range in age from newborn to twenty, born of three different women. A seventh child, a daughter named Exodus, died at age four in May 2009 in a tragic accident at her mother’s home in Phoenix; she was strangled when her neck was caught in a cord hanging from a treadmill. Tyson caught a plane immediately upon receiving a call from Sol Xochitl, Exodus’s mother, but by the time he arrived at the hospital, the little girl was already brain-dead. The loss of his daughter critically altered his once-tentative grasp on his own accountability. To this day, he blames himself for not being there. “It made me feel very irresponsible,” he says simply. “I wish she were here to hang out with Milan.” The effects of the tragedy reverberated throughout Tyson’s extended family. “The kids were very close to Exodus, and when she died, we were all devastated,” says Monica Turner, his second wife. “I think that changed Mike forever.” Tyson refers to Exodus repeatedly during our conversations with evident sadness and insists on keeping her memory alive by counting her among his living children.

  Tyson has been married three times; the first marriage was to the TV actress Robin Givens when he was twenty-one, after a fevered courtship. The yearlong union proved disastrous, culminating in an infamous 1988 interview with Barbara Walters, in which Givens described the marriage as “pure hell”—while Tyson sat passively beside her, drugged on manic-depression medication. (“I’m tripolar,” he tells me, laughing, when I ask him how he’d diagnose his condition today.) He went on to have two children with Monica Turner; he also considers himself a father to Turner’s daughter Gena. Turner, who is on friendly terms with Tyson, filed for divorce in 2002, citing adultery. Along the way, Tyson, a notorious womanizer, sired two more children—eight-year-old Miguel and Exodus—with Xochitl. Tyson keeps in touch with all of his brood, speaking especially proudly of his oldest son, thirteen-year-old Amir, who is six feet tall. “He’s just nervous and afraid of life,” he says, sounding an apprehensive note. “But he’s doing so well … There are no bad influences. I have so many hopes for him.”

  Tyson knows from bad influences, if only because he has been susceptible to so many of them since the death of D’Amato and his own emergence as a sports superstar. Following a brief glory period in the late 1980s, when he was arguably the most popular athlete in the world—he was asked to do endorsements for Pepsi, Nintendo, and Kodak, and hired by the New York City Police Department to boost recruitment as well as by the FBI to do public service announcements to keep kids off drugs—Tyson began spiraling out of control. His self-destructive patterns, which had been refocused by D’Amato, came to the surface once again, aided and abetted by the boxing promoter Don King, who successfully wooed Tyson in the wake of his split from Robin Givens. (Tyson filed a lawsuit against King in 1998, claiming that the promoter stole millions from him.) Once a moneymaking machine worth $400 million at the height of his fame, Tyson was reduced to filing for personal bankruptcy in 2003; he was $27 million in debt.

  In late December 2006 he was arrested in Arizona on charges of drug possession and drunken driving, and in February 2007 he checked himself into the Wonderland Center, a rehab facility in the Hollywood Hills, for the treatment of various addictions. Carole Raymond, a warm-sounding woman with a thick Yorkshire accent who worked as a staff member at Wonderland during Tyson’s stay, remembers that he had trouble finding a facility that would take him and that he came to them a “beaten down” man. Still, she remembers him as funny, “very humble,” and eager to embrace the program’s ethos. “People who come from fame or money have a hard time grasping the idea of recovery. He wanted to be emotionally better than the Mike Tyson who was always boxing.” Tyson, in turn, credits the “life skills” he learned in rehab with coming to his rescue when a crisis hits: “You don’t know where they came from, but you’re on the top of your game. You’re suited up and ready to work.” When I asked him why he stayed at Wonderland for as long as he did—more than a year—he leaned over as if to emphasize what he was about to say. “I felt safe.”

  As befits someone who has been alternately idolized and demonized by the press, Tyson is wary of the public’s continuing interest in his saga. He says he believes that celebrity made him “delusional” and that it has taken nothing less than a “paradigm shift” for him to come down to earth: “We have to stick to what we are. I always stay in my slot. I know my place.” He asked me outright, “Why do you want to know about me as a person?” and at one point, anxious that he might be boring me, he got up to show me photographs from the glory days in which he is posing with other boxers (Ali, Rocky Graziano, Jake LaMotta) and with big names like Frank Sinatra, Tom Cruise, and Barbra Streisand. Underneath his deliberate calmness and considerable charm, there is something bewildered and lost seeming about Tyson. Indeed, he refers to himself as a “little boy” who “never had a chance to develop,” and it is in part this conception of himself as missing out on a crucial period of maturation that fuels his present focus. “This is what the deal is,” he said. “People just wait for you to grow up and do the right thing. They’re just waiting for you to participate in the improvement of your life as a human being. When are you going to do it?”

  The most important and sustaining influence in Tyson’s current incarnation as an introspective mensch rather than the Baddest Man on the Planet is the presence of his wife, Kiki, whom he has known since she was about sixteen (they met through her father, who did some boxing promotions); they exchanged their first kiss when she was nineteen and had an on-and-off romance for more than a decade. They tried living together in Kiki’s apartment in Manhattan in 2002 after Tyson’s defeat at the hands of Lennox Lewis, but it was, she says, “a disaster.” “He was used to juggling a lot of women.” They remained friends, even though the relationship didn’t work out, had another fling in 2004, lost touch again when Tyson was in rehab, and then reconnected when Tyson called her after he got out. Their daughter, Milan, was born on Christmas 2008, and they married on June 6, 2009. “We know all of each other’s secret stuff,” she says. “He told me everything, and I told him everything. We fight hard, but I’m very much in love with him.”

  Kiki, who is thirty-four, is a well-spoken, down-to-earth woman who seems pleasantly oblivious to her own exotically good looks and celebrity status by virtue of being Mike Tyson’s wife. Making a viable life with the complicated, demon-haunted man she has married requires patience. “It’s a struggle,” she says, speaking about his relapses post-rehab. “You’re always an addict and have to work at it. It’s easy for him to fall back in his own life. He surrounds himself with people who are sober and doesn’t go out to clubs. If his pattern shifts, you know something’s wrong.” Perhaps because she has known Tyson for so long, she’s clear-eyed about his failings. “He slept with every kind of woman you can think of,” she says. “Now he wants someone who knows him and can be good to him. We’re rebuilding our lives together on a positive note.” Tyson, meanwhile, seems continually struck by his good fortune in
having Kiki, whom he addresses as “my love,” by his side. “I never thought we’d be together,” he told me. “I thought we’d be sex partners. I told her not to marry me.” A few seconds later he adds: “I want to die with her.”

  Despite their cushy lifestyle, there isn’t the kind of money to throw around that there once was. But Kiki, for one, seems indifferent to the sort of lavish expenditures that Tyson’s former fortune once enabled him to make: “Mike always says he’s broke, but it’s relative. That type of stuff isn’t important to us. We want to build a nest egg for our kids’ accounts. I’m not impressed with money like that.” Meanwhile, although Tyson still owes a substantial amount—“a few million” is how Kiki puts it—in back taxes, he is adhering to a payment plan. He has a financial planner who negotiated a deal with the IRS regarding the purchase of his house, which was paid for in full. If Tyson misses his high-rolling days, he isn’t letting on. “If you make a lot of money, you end up being around people you don’t want to be around,” he says. “Guys on allowance. It takes years to gather the audacity to get rid of them.”

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  On the Saturday before the premiere of Taking On Tyson, Mike Tyson was in New York with Kiki and their two children, doing publicity for the show. I met him in Bushwick, in front of the run-down row house where he had gone to see his birds; Kiki, meanwhile, had taken Milan to the American Girl store to meet a friend. Tyson was with Farid and his friend Dave Malone, who tends to the Brooklyn coops. On the drive back to the Ritz-Carlton in Battery Park, where he was staying, I found the ex-boxer to be in a contemplative mood. Or maybe he was feeling remorseful; he had just come through one of his bad spells—what Toback alluded to as his “click-outs”—in which he feels alternately so low that he wants to jump out the window and so angry that he wants to crack someone’s head open with a pipe. “They come on you,” he told me, “out of the blue.” The birds helped him regain his footing, as they always do, but these bouts must take a toll on him (not to mention Kiki), opening up the floodgates of the past. Driving through Brooklyn, we passed a bunch of kids playing handball, and he reminisced: “When I was poor, I used to play handball. That’s how we all start.” He called Kiki to check how the playdate was going, sounding sweetly affectionate, and then on the way into the hotel posed patiently for a photographer with an excited bride and groom who spotted him coming in.

  In his hotel suite, Tyson was eager to tell me about a book he was reading—A Natural History of Human Emotions, by Stuart Walton—and asked me to read aloud a chapter on jealousy. We discussed the difference between jealousy and envy, and when I asked whether he ever envies his children getting the sort of parental love he never had, he said, “How did you know that?” I inquired whether he misses the glamour of his old life, and he answered, “That’s not who I am anymore.” Around 5:30, Kiki returned with Milan, who triumphantly marched in, carrying a new American Girl doll aloft. Tyson and his wife kissed each other, and he said, “I’m sorry if I upset you.” She answered serenely, “That’s okay, honey,” as she went to get ready for their night out.

  A cynic might wonder whether the kinder, gentler Tyson is merely another act, a construction every bit as deliberate as he claims his invincible Iron Mike persona was—“a vicious tiger,” as he describes it, “out there to kill somebody.” And there is indeed something of the actor about Tyson, warming to his new role as a humbled rogue, a gentle giant with his delicate birds. But there is also a kind of heroism in his effort to construct a more accountable self, a reaching across the decades of excess back to the more disciplined days in the Catskills with Cus D’Amato. Now, however, the focus is not on invincibility or greatness but on the perhaps more elusive goal of keeping his furies at bay and trying to master his unrulier impulses rather than letting them control him. It’s sure to be one hell of a match.

  IN WARM BLOOD

  (TRUMAN CAPOTE)

  2005

  Long before I ever read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood—with its “immaculately factual” (according to Capote) descriptions of the lead-up to and aftermath of four random murders that occurred in the very early morning of November 15, 1959, in an isolated farmhouse in the tiny hamlet (population 270) of Holcomb, Kansas—bloodied images of the Clutter family used to color my adolescent dreams. Thanks to my mother’s transfixed reading of Capote’s account as it appeared in four consecutive installments in The New Yorker in the fall of 1965, when I was eleven, I was aware of the book well before it was published, and had pestered my mother for all the ghoulish details. I would lie in bed at night, envisioning Nancy Clutter, only five years older at the time of her death than I was then—kind, journal-keeping Nancy Clutter, sixteen and rarely been kissed—lying with her hands and feet bound in her pink and white bed, listening in the dark to the ominous sound of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock coming up the stairs in their boots. Nancy was dispatched with one shotgun blast to her head, like her younger brother and her parents (Mr. Clutter’s throat had first been slit). I don’t know when it was exactly that I learned of Perry’s limp, acquired in a motorcycle wreck that was one of the innumerable mishaps that marked his own desolate growing up, but I do remember being intrigued enough by the detail to incorporate it into my re-creation of Nancy’s last minutes.

  For this was the thing about In Cold Blood—and about Capote’s trumpeting of his “nonfiction novel” as an innovative narrative form that drew on both the persuasiveness of fact and the poetic altitude of fiction: it decisively upped the literary ante. Every detail about the Clutter case, from the idyllic-seeming family with conservative heartland values who were the victims, to the two punks who had little in common but a sense of derring-do, a collection of tattoos, and a chewing-gum habit, seemed thrilling and potentially life transforming. It was as though the more details you had firmly in hand—the killers’ final pathetic haul of forty-three dollars, a pair of binoculars, and a transistor radio (a far cry from the ten thousand dollars they’d been told by a former cell mate of Hickock’s that they’d find in Herb Clutter’s safe); the lingering postpartum depressions of Mrs. Clutter; Perry Smith’s love of esoteric, triple-inning words—the closer you might come to comprehending not only the age-old question of good versus evil but the haphazard workings of fate itself. It was as if the details could explain why one moment the small-town assumption that it is safe to sleep with unlocked doors still holds up, and the next moment the worst has happened and your neighbors suddenly strike you as potentially homicidal.

  In Cold Blood made the largely passive acts of observing and writing seem freshly potent, as though the movies hadn’t yet gobbled up all the cultural oxygen. The book made Capote, as he put it, “the most famous author in America”; George Plimpton described the newly lionized writer as becoming “so extraordinarily famous that he was recognized by the average person in the street.” Whatever you chose to make of Capote’s puffy claims about himself or the artistic ground he insisted he was breaking (he was at pains to separate himself from the pack of New Journalists, like Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin, whom he considered to lack “the proper fictional equipment”), there is no doubt that he helped create a more intimate and artfully crafted kind of journalism. His anthropological method lent the aimless, misspent lives of Hickock and Smith a reality every bit as textured as the God-fearing, cherry-pie-baking lives of their victims. With only the sustained quality of his attention and his prodigious memory to call on, Capote succeeded in making the eventual collision of these two worlds a paradigmatic (and, as it turned out, psychologically plausible) tragedy that reverberated long after it actually occurred. In doing so, he brought to the literary landscape an energy and allure—a sense of high-stakes drama—that it hadn’t seen since the days when Victorian readers awaited the death of Dickens’s Little Nell.

  Capote, the film, which opened last week, has been justly praised on many fronts, from its subtle, literate script (based on Gerald Clarke’s biography, Capote) and quietly memorable cinematography (Adam Kimmel), to
the unobtrusively effective score and the remarkable work of its cast. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the movie is how assured it is for a novice effort. It is the first feature for both the director, Bennett Miller (his previous credits include more than two hundred commercials and a one-man digital documentary, The Cruise), and the screenwriter, Dan Futterman (this is his first produced screenplay), and it is noticeably lacking, with one or two exceptions (such as the oddly mistuned, avuncular portrait of William Shawn), in wrong turns or amateurish moves. Almost from the moment the camera pans across the flat wheat fields and wide swath of Midwestern sky, the film establishes a sense of parallel universes, deftly cutting from a scene “out there” in unpopulous Kansas in which Nancy Clutter’s best friend knocks at the door of the silent farmhouse where her friend lies dead, to a throbbing, smoke-filled Manhattan gathering where Capote, a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, holds an audience of literati spellbound with his glittering, frequently heartless anecdotes. The versatile Philip Seymour Hoffman inhabits Capote as though they were brothers under the skin, with a degree of empathy that circumvents caricature (unlike Robert Morse’s portrayal of Capote in Broadway’s Tru) and adds a note of poignancy to even his character’s less endearing traits.

  Most of us know Truman Capote only by way of the sensationalistic images he cultivated on his way up (The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill once described the young Capote as a “gorgeous apparition, fluttering, flitting up and down the corridors”) or the scandalous gossip that circulated around the five-foot-three-inch “Tiny Terror,” as he was dubbed, on his way down, after his muse had largely abandoned him. In those latter years, the perennially baby-faced creature, whose gargantuan charm and savage opinions wore less and less well, wobbled on and off talk shows in an alcohol- and drug-induced haze, still childlike of mien and sibilantly nasal of tone (Capote’s voice was once compared to that of a baby seal), before he died at the age of fifty-nine. But right from the beginning, even before he moved into the social epicenter on the arms of the rich and beautiful women he called his “swans,” there was something both ephemeral and larger than life about him. You can see it in the early, faun-like jacket photograph on the back of Other Voices, Other Rooms, where the twenty-three-year-old writer is posed lolling on a sofa for maximal winsome effect, like a beautiful boy who got lost on the way to reform school.