My Moment With Prince
One night in the late ’90s, I went to a party at a Manhattan nightclub to celebrate the release of Emancipation, a three-hour album by the artist formerly known as Prince, then known as a symbol, then as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, and finally as Prince again. There was a memorable moment as he walked across a floor crowded with fellow African-American royalty (Quincy Jones, Spike Lee, Savion Glover), a handful of random white pop stars such as Billy Corgan and Marilyn Manson, and a major contingent of bodyguards appropriate to this high density of celebrity. Prince, dressed in red, happened to be headed directly toward Lenny Kravitz, whose monumental Afro was barely contained by his enormous knit cap. The two came face-to-face in a meet-and-greet. It was, of course, an era before cell phone cameras and cell-fies of all description, and no photographers were present. They didn’t need to be. All eyes were on the pair: two men short in stature, their heads level, one delicate with carefully cropped hair, the other cartoonishly large. Blink, click. Indelible.
Three weeks earlier I had interviewed Prince on the West Coast for a cover story for the magazine I worked for then, a dream assignment that, on closer scrutiny, turned out to be not quite so dreamy. In fact, the provisos he put on the exercise were so extreme that it was decided that only a staffer—not an outside writer—could put up with them. There was no guarantee that he would either show up, stay, or talk. (Recently he had walked off another magazine’s photo shoot after only one roll of film had been taken because he didn’t like the vibe.) No particular amount of time was allotted for the interview (if it happened), and the journalist was not allowed to record the conversation. I was to address him as The Artist, and hope he liked the cut of my jib.
The team, which included a top fashion photographer, his assistants, the studio crew, fashion and makeup people, and myself, shipped ourselves to Los Angeles for a Sunday afternoon session, only to hear that Prince had rescheduled—for midnight. Fueled by caffeine and Coca-Cola, assembled at Smashbox Studios, our nerves gently fraying, we waited.
The thing about going through this kind of mind game is that, when your subject finally appears, you are disproportionately grateful. What’s more, the whirlwind of uncertainty that had been whipping up all afternoon blew in quietly and calmly, the eye of the storm. In bell-bottoms, pink Cuban-heeled boots, and a pendant bearing his symbol, Prince walked in with his then-wife Mayte (who was to pose in the pictures with him), utterly low-key and polite. He had brought his own collection of trilbies and fedoras lest our fashion choices prove alarming, and, while Mayte sat down for makeup, we talked.
There were many accretions of wariness around Prince, just emerging then from his self-described enslavement to his record company (hence Emancipation). I was under pressure during my small and precarious window of opportunity to connect with him by any means possible. I won’t permit my mind to travel to whatever contortions of ingratiation or efforts at making the moment true that I may have ventured, but I do know that I later found out that the leather coat I had worn for the occasion was an error: He was strongly opposed to the wearing of the material for humanitarian reasons.
Nevertheless, he was more or less sweet and communicative. Not charming, exactly, but with flashes of warmth and a mischievous humor. He had made the merciful concession that I could take a few notes, and we discussed what was on his mind: ownership of people, slave names, how much he liked Chris Rock, how to handle success, money and ego. “Do you have to have a big ego to be an artist?” I asked him. “If you do it right,” he said, and smiled.
He spoke with great seriousness, on the other hand, about God, and sex. Freeing himself from Warner Brothers felt, he said, “like 18 orgasms at once.” He was not joking; no flicker of a smile. At first he kept his kohl-rimmed eyes on the wall but later, in an apparent break with tradition, made contact. He talked about his marriage, which was to be sadly short-lived. He rolled his eyes good-naturedly at the clothes we had picked out for the shoot.
It was Prince who decided when the photo session was over and, without even turning around, held up his finger for his bodyguard to return his namesake pendant. Symbol, Cuban heels, wife, The Artist—soon they were all gone. In the studio we shuddered with relief. We had pictures, and an interview.
The photos became another flashpoint of control, however. Prince arranged to buy them once they had appeared in the magazine and so own the copyright. For some reason, the check he wrote came to me. A standard-issue green rectangle from a widely used financial institution, it was signed with a flourish above the no-nonsense printed name: P. R. Nelson. The man who had come so far, imposing who knows what depths of determination and self-belief on the world to give us his prodigious talent on his own terms, who had gone to such trouble to craft for himself the name he wanted, was still plain Prince Rogers Nelson to the bank.
