A lot of people think Macy Gray is a fruitcake. The squeaky voice and kinky Afro, the eccentric clothes and zany manner. At a time when it seems as if there’s an R&B diva on every street corner, Macy Gray is one of a kind. ‘Oh yeah, she’s live!’ jives Starling, our wannabe Samuel L Jackson limousine driver, as we drive down La Cienega on our way to meet Macy at her favourite Hollywood diner. ‘She’s phat, she’s tight, she’s outta control!’ Or, as we say over here, she’s bonkers.
Next thing you know we’re at Swingers diner and there really is an R&B diva on the street corner. Macy lurches out of her Mercedes 4×4, all gangly arms and legs, in a big, baggy T-shirt, big, baggy jeans and a big, baggy apple hat – an ungainly 6ft figure lolloping down the sunny street to meet us. She’s just 10 minutes late which, in Macyworld, where time is a flexible concept, is apparently something of a record. She extends a hand, looks shyly away and squeaks a barely audible greeting in her Minnie Mouse-meets-Marge-Simpson speaking voice, which is transformed into a smoky, husky instrument of pleasure onstage and on record.
She folds her lanky frame awkwardly into a booth and orders her usual – ‘a big glass of ice’ – which she proceeds to spoon into her mouth over the next hour. She’s a Freudian text book of mannerisms, as you might expect from a woman who has borrowed from the father of psychoanalysis for the title of her new album, The Id . Incapable of eye contact, at least on first meeting, she hides behind the brim of her hat, her glass, her spoon, her hand – anything to create distance – and fidgets constantly, rubbing her hands up and down her thighs, playing with her cutlery and twisting her body this way and that. Clearly, this is not a person who feels comfortable in the company of strangers.
Refreshingly immune to the low-cal obsessions of LA, Macy orders a huge milkshake topped with whipped cream, and a hearty bowl of chicken soup. She answers questions by looking away and mumbling through a mouthful of broken ice, but it seems more like diffidence than discourtesy (or a rumoured, and strenuously denied, heroin habit). Self-examination, it swiftly transpires, is not her strongpoint. ‘She simply can’t talk about herself,’ says Ted Cockle, her product manager at Sony’s UK headquarters in London. ‘She can’t even look you in the eye when she meets you. And she’s bonkers, so she can be very unpredictable. But she comes alive when you put her on a stage.’
In common with many performers sharing that constant need for approval, Macy always felt she didn’t fit in. First, as a child, because of her squeaky voice, enormous feet and big head – fellow pupils cruelly nicknamed her Waterhead at school – and later as one of only 12 black girls at boarding school. She has not overcome the feeling. ‘I still feel like I don’t fit in,’ she says. ‘That’s an all-round thing with me. Becoming famous and selling a lot of records doesn’t change a thing.’
Her music doesn’t really fit in, either; not with that of her Nu-Soul contemporaries Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, Angie Stone, Jill Scott, Lina and Sunshine Anderson. In a beat-driven genre, Macy surrounds herself with a big band of real musicians. If her records bring a contemporary hip-hop sensibility to old-school soul, the live Macy Gray experience recalls an updated Stax revue from the 60s, complete with a horn section of men in sharp suits and outbursts of squealy rock guitar.
Her dad liked Elvis Presley as well as Al Green and Marvin Gaye, James Brown and Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone and Aretha Franklin. Then, at boarding school, she was exposed to white rock music before developing a taste for hip-hop. You can hear all that in her music, which is why it’s been such a huge crossover success, with her debut album, Macy Gray On How Life Is , selling more than 7m copies.
Natalie McIntyre was born in September 1969 in Canton, Ohio, a city famous for its (American) Football Hall of Fame, and home to two other big names in music, The O’Jays and Brian Warner – aka Marilyn Manson – who was brought up a couple of blocks away.
Her natural father, an insurance broker, left when she was a baby and she was brought up in a blue-collar neighbourhood by her mother Laura, a maths teacher turned school administrator, and Richard, a retired steelworker, whom Laura married when Natalie was five. She spent much of her childhood playing solitaire and writing stories, locking herself away from her step-siblings Nathon, now 26, and Nehlia, 24. She didn’t speak much, despite her mother’s prompting, because she was aware she ‘talked funny.’ She was, she says, ‘an awkward kid’, her awkwardness compounded by the importance her mother attached to behaving like a ‘lady.’
She was very withdrawn, feeling ‘goofy’ and like ‘a misfit’. She still seems like an awkward kid, is still goofy and something of a misfit. But her funny voice ended up making her fortune. As a child she showed little interest in music, but her mother made her take classical piano lessons for seven years. She did not sing in the church choir, hated going to church, ‘and anything else my mother made me do’, although she remains a committed Christian.
At high school, where she was teased and bullied – for her funny voice, for her big head, for being a bright kid – she was seduced by the three icons of the 80s: Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince. She even painted her bedroom purple in homage to his landmark album Purple Rain . Then she got hooked on hip-hop.
Academically gifted and with a talent for sport (football, swimming, karate, basketball), at 14 she won a scholarship to a mostly white boarding school where her room-mate liked Stevie Nicks and John Cougar Mellencamp. ‘So that kinda stuff grew on me. Then I discovered Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin. It was a long process,’ she says. ‘I’m very open to music. One of my favourite bands ever is Nirvana.’
Natalie didn’t fit in at boarding school either, was still bullied and got into trouble for drinking and smoking weed. After two years she was asked to leave. Not for her misdemeanours, but for reporting a teacher who was (she claims) sleeping with her 12-year-old friend and propositioning pupils, including herself. Faced with expulsion, she ran away, and was eventually found sleeping in a car at the side of the road as she made her way home.
At this time, she was so unhappy that she reportedly attempted suicide on more than one occasion. But Macy gets upset and evasive when I ask about it, saying only, ‘I think if I had been really serious about it, I probably would have done it.’ Later, she asks if I could please write about something else instead.
In 1985, she won another scholarship, this time to the US Naval Academy, but turned it down to enrol in film school at the University of Southern California. It had always been one of her ambitions to be a writer or a producer. She moved to Los Angeles and studied screenwriting, but never graduated. She preferred partying with local musicians, and began writing lyrics for a demo tape some of them were making. One day, the singer failed to turn up at the studio, and she recorded some of the songs herself. The tapes were eventually heard by a publisher, who passed them around, and the leader of a jazz band offered her a Sunday brunch gig in an LA suburb, singing Sinatra songs for $100 an hour.
After leaving college in 1989, she sang jazz standards in bars while going through various jobs and sleeping on friends’ sofas – and even, for a while, in cars. Although she failed to complete her degree, she made a living charging fellow students $500 a time to write their papers. ‘I loved it!’ she says. They were happy days. She read scripts at Universal and Paramount, worked on the crew of pop videos, including Tupac’s debut, and for MTV’s events wing. She became known for her lyric writing on the LA underground music scene and became a face in hip-hop circles as the hostess of an after-hours coffee shop called The We Ours. While working as a waitress, she would serenade celebrities as she served them free drinks.
After five years on the fringe of the music scene, her unusual voice came to the attention of an Atlantic Records executive, who signed her to a contract in 1994. She changed her name to the catchier Macy Gray after an old Canton friend of her father’s who had always told her she’d be something special one day. (She’d thought he was dead. He wasn’t – but he was flattered.) She recorded an album under the working title A Thing Of Beauty and the results, accompanied by a rock backing, were likened to Janis Joplin. But the record was never released and her contract was cancelled just as she became pregnant with her first child.
Right afterwards, Macy married her live-in boyfriend, a mortgage collector called Tracy Hinds, in Las Vegas. Broke, she found a ‘really boring’ new job as a secretary in a finance company. That year, 1995, she gave birth to two children: a daughter, Aanisah, in January, and a son, Tahmel (known as Mel), in December. But the marriage was short-lived and violent, with the couple fighting ‘all day, all the time’. In August 1997, when she was seven months pregnant with her third child, they separated and she moved back in with her parents in Canton. ‘I was ready for death,’ she has said of this time. ‘My marriage had ended and my career hadn’t worked out, and I was feeling kinda beaten.’ As a single mother with two kids and a third on the way, she believed her chance of fame had gone for ever.
A couple of weeks later, while she was in her bedroom playing solitaire, she received ‘a phone call from heaven’. The caller was an LA music publisher called Jeff Blue, who had signed Limp Bizkit and Korn, and he had just heard her unreleased album. Blown away by her voice (but not her band), he offered her a deal on the spot. The heavily pregnant Macy said she could not meet him for six weeks because she was ‘in the middle of something’. A week after her daughter Happy was born, Macy met him and moved back to LA. She formed a band and recorded the album that would become On How Life Is , many of the songs inspired by her disastrous marriage. She recorded it under the pseudonym of Mushroom, in case of any bad connotations with the unreleased Macy Gray album, but reverted to Macy Gray when Epic Records signed her to a reported $3m deal.
Unusually for a US-signed act, she was launched first on the UK market. Following a meticulously planned marketing campaign that involved creating a word-of-mouth buzz, rather than buying her into the pop charts, Macy Gray became a star. The single, ‘I Try’, took off and never came back down to earth, selling half a million copies in the UK alone. In the US, however, she was known for singing ‘Winter Wonderland’ in a Christmas TV ad for Baby Gap. But they got there in the end. Two Grammy nominations and a memorably zany appearance at the Brit Awards in February 2000, winning two trophies and riding the insults of Ali G cemented her place as a star. And her reputation as a fruitcake.
Now Macy’s branching out. In addition to promoting her second album, The Id (sales already approaching the 2m mark), and planning next year’s tour, she can currently be seen in US cinemas making her film debut in Training Day, where she appears as ‘a ghetto hoochie mama’ alongside Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke (and rappers Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg). As we speak, she is also trying to get a TV deal for a cartoon series she has written about her childhood, called It’s A Pretty Good Life, which may exorcise some of her demons. ‘It’s based on me when I was 15 and my four best friends, coming of age, growing up together in the same school, living in the same neighbourhood, all with crazy home lives. It deals with real kid issues but it’s funny. I’m gonna do my own voice and I’m doing a soundtrack. It’s gonna be hot.’
She has successfully managed to combine parenthood with her career, although the circumstances dictated that Happy spent most of her infancy with Macy’s mother. The children go to school in LA and their grandmother looks after them when Macy’s away working. Now that they are a bit older, she is starting to take them with her during holiday time. I wonder whether it is easier for her to cope with the demands of fame, having already gone through the different demands of parenthood. ‘We work it out. It’s rough and tumble like any family with children. You’ve gotta get your priorities straight. It’s hard, but you’ve gotta have the right people around you.’ She uses one of her favourite expressions: ‘It can get a little bananas.’
She says she used to suffer from ‘a little bit of manic depression’, but she’s much better now. One therapist told her the best cure was a regular daily regimen of sleep, sex and exercise. ‘So that’s what I try to do. It’s pretty good for your head.’ She thinks there’s a real art to being a star and it’s something you have to learn. ‘It’s like any other job: there’s a method to it and it’s really important to get that down. I’m still working on it, I got a lot to learn. It’s one thing to make records but it’s a whole ‘nother capacity to be a star – whatever that is.’ She thinks the best thing about being famous is the travel: ‘Because it’s cool to see the world – everybody should do that. And it’s broadened my mind a lot.’ Travel, and the fact that fame means she can get pretty much anything she wants. ‘And that’s the downside, too, because you get spoilt.’
Macy likes to do lots of different things at the same time, but I don’t think she’d call it multi-tasking. She is not an organised person; past interviews have tended to take place hours, if not days, later than planned. Rules are invariably for breaking. Plans, as I will soon learn, are liable to constant modification and scheduled to have unexpected outcomes. ‘I suffer from impulsiveness,’ she agrees. ‘I’m not lazy, I’m a bit disorganised and a little absent minded. And I talk a lot of shit.’ She cackles wheezily to herself. One example, I imagine, would be her suggestion that if she were not a pop star, she would like to be a criminal. But she insists she’s ‘really serious about that. Trust me. I was a movie kid, I used to watch a lot of movies and the movies I grew up on were all about crime. The best movies are all about violent crime: The Godfather, Bonnie and Clyde , Menace to Society – they’re all street stories that have violence in and mostly the main characters are thieves. And those are my heroes. They still are!’ In her spare time, she likes to fire guns at a shooting range near her home. I ask her what the attraction is and she says: ‘It’s just fun, I swear, just the whole prospect of hitting the guy in the head. It’s something I’m getting better at.’ She likes to get better at the things she does. ‘I like progress. I like learning how to do new shit. If I try something I’m obsessed with learning how to do it well.’
If Macy were a thief she would like to be a bank robber. But for now she’s content with a life of petty crime. ‘I do steal on occasion,’ she admits. The most recent documented occasion involved a rug that she took from a hotel room; and I wonder if there have been any more. ‘I stole a painting from the last hotel I was in,’ she says brightly. ‘But I’ll probably be charged for it.’ She’s unlikely to go to jail for it, but she’s been there twice before. Once, while at college, she had gone to Las Vegas with a boyfriend. They lost all their money on the blackjack tables and, after filling up their car at a Barstow gas station, drove off without paying. The cops caught them five minutes later and, although released without charge, she spent a week in jail for unpaid traffic warrants. A few years later, she did more time for drink-driving. She has spoken of this before but seems to have forgotten about that. ‘Who told you that?’ she exclaims nervously. ‘Who told you I was in jail?’ I explain that she has mentioned it in previous interviews. ‘Oh – I gotta stop doing that,’ she says, shaking her head in self-admonishment, before reflecting sagely on her time behind bars. ‘It teaches you a good lesson when you’re locked up. They literally take your freedom away. There’s nothing sexy about that. I learnt my lesson. I would never, ever, ever go back.’
These will turn out to be ominous words just 48 hours later, as our day out together ends with Macy in police custody once again. It all began with an invitation to ‘hang out’ with her for a bit longer. So, the next day, there’s a call suggesting we go jet-skiing, and I drive over to her house in the Valley with her UK publicist, Kim. A year after she moved in, Macy’s house – an imposing villa built in a blend of colonial, Tuscan and Greek styles with pillars and balconies, plus a pool and a basketball court – is still being decorated. The overall look is contemporary Graceland. Already completed are the ‘chocolate room’, filled with African artefacts, fluffy sofas and a piano all in various shades of dark brown, and a jungle-style bathroom in which everything is decorated in leopard print, right down to the tissue holder.
The living room has orange walls, orange drapes, the biggest orange sofa in the world and a cinema-sized video screen, on which she plays the promo for her new single, ‘Sexual Revolution’, featuring a cast culled from lonely-heart ads. Macy’s bedroom is every bit as spectacular as you would hope, but so, too, are the two smaller rooms that serve as wardrobes, stuffed with size 11 shoes and extravagant clothes adorned with fluffy, feathery bits in various shades of red and orange and purple. There are giant tellies all over the place. Meanwhile, down in the basement, Aanisah, Mel and Happy have the run of their own virtual play-park, complete with Japanese arcade games and graffiti-style murals of cartoon characters such as Buzz Lightyear and the Powerpuff Girls.
It’s already early afternoon, but Macy, who is making pizza for six-year-old Aanisah, is determined to go jet-skiing and adamant that this can only be done to her satisfaction in San Diego, a two-hour drive down the coast. After that, we could go shopping across the border in Mexico and have a meal there. So we pile into her people carrier, collect Aanisah’s best friend Sunny, pick up Macy’s boyfriend Kiilu (the DJ in her band) and his son Tyler, and hit the road like a multi-ethnic Partridge family. Macy sings merrily along to Michael Jackson’s ‘Off The Wall’ as we belt down the freeway and Kiilu, at the wheel, does the moves to Biggie’s greatest hits.
By the time we hit San Diego, it’s cloudy, cold and almost dark and the jet-ski centre is about to close, so calls have to be made to ensure that they will stay open for an unannounced visit from Macy Gray – ‘and her family’. As we’re in California, of course they do. With dusk falling rapidly, Macy strides into the marina, wheeling a small suitcase, drops her jeans and changes unselfconsciously into a pair of shorts in full view of everyone. Grabbing her daughter by the hand and strapping on her life vest, she strides purposefully down the pier towards a jet-ski. She leaps astride it with the terrified Aanisah (‘Mommy, I’m scared!’) and waits impatiently while she is told she must return in five minutes because it is against the rules to jet-ski after dark. Seconds later, Macy and Aanisah, swiftly followed by Kiilu and Sunny, roar away at high speed, two plumes of water cascading on to the pier. A squadron of pelicans takes flight from the bait pier as they disappear rapidly into the distance. ‘Oh shit!’ says the man from the jet-ski staff. ‘I was supposed to tell them they can only go 5mph in the harbour. And the cops are right there at the end of the pier.’
Less than a minute later, a siren sounds and a police launch gives chase. It doesn’t take long. The speeding jet-skiers are ordered ashore and interrogated by special harbour police wearing shorts. Macy, of course, refuses to co-operate. She gives a false address. She gives her driver’s licence as a string of zeroes. She gives her name as Natalie Hinds, which is her real married name, but the cops don’t believe her because they’re sure she’s Macy Gray. They are not amused. When they tell Macy she’s about to go to jail if she carries on like this, Aanisah bursts into tears.
An hour later, and with some interceding from the jet-ski centre staff, Macy is freed with a $40 fine and comes galumphing back. Despite the drama, she’s in high spirits as we all head not for Mexico but for a nearby resort hotel recommended by the cops. Macy extravagantly rents a suite so the children can watch TV and order pizza from room service while we adjourn to the lakeside restaurant, where the barman asks her if anyone has ever told her she looks like Macy Gray. ‘I get that a lot,’ she nods from under today’s distressed-denim apple hat, and orders the first of several ‘hot toddies’, which, in America, seem to consist of a shot of brandy with a separate glass of hot tea, into which Macy proceeds to deposit eight lumps of sugar. She orders another with her jumbo shrimp, and opens up for the first time since we’ve met. By the end of the evening she’s gaily singing snatches of every song from her new album, repeating each time: ‘That’s a great song – who’s that by?’
Next morning, she’s on the phone again, wondering whether we’d like to go to the beach. But we’ve got a plane to catch. Macy admits she is still learning to deal with fame and celebrity, and that perhaps she does not always do it very well. ‘I think I get misinterpreted and misunderstood a lot,’ she says. I tell her everyone I know thinks she’s a fruitcake and she laughs, then says she has to go and make some phone calls. I think she must be offended, but she stays to consider her state of mind before delivering a response straight from Macyland. Here’s what she says: ‘Am I a fruitcake? I don’t know. Perception is reality, so if I sit here and say, “I’m not a fruitcake, I’m a lemon cake,” it doesn’t matter. What you see me as in your world is what I am; it doesn’t matter what I am – do you know what I mean? To me, I know what my real problems are – and they’re certainly not about cake. And that’s just the way it is.’