Hidden trauma, addiction, and childhood abuse are uncovered in a new Prince documentary that may remain unseen. Photo / Michael Ochs Archives, Getty Images
A revelatory new nine-hour documentary about the late superstar may be too controversial ever to see the light of day
A dressing table scattered with half-empty pill bottles. Piles of food left to rot. Pills strewn on bedspreads. When we think of Prince we think of genre-defining hits such as When Doves Cry, Kiss and Raspberry Beret. We think of good times and of an enigmatic, eccentric, immaculately dressed and wildly prolific musical prodigy who melded funk, rock and soul to become one of music’s biggest-ever stars. We don’t think of squalor. And we certainly don’t think of a makeshift bed on the floor of a small bedroom close to the elevator where he died alone in April 2016 aged 57, shocking the world and sending millions of fans into mourning.
But these details and many more are included in a tell-all nine-hour documentary about Prince that, if reports are correct, may just be too controversial to ever see the light of day. Forget Prince and the Revolution. This is Prince and the revelations.
The documentary shows stark images taken by investigators after Prince’s death in his Paisley Park studio complex in Minneapolis, according to a new 9000-word investigation into the project by The New York Times Magazine. The film reveals how, in the last decades of his life, Prince was in constant pain due to years of strenuous physical performances and had become dependent on pain medication. The documentary lays bare his unhappiness and his messy death from a fentanyl overdose.
Disturbingly, the picture of the makeshift bed in the small bedroom holds up a grizzly mirror to one of the film’s other key revelations: that a young Prince was locked in his bedroom for up to six weeks by an abusive stepfather. This image of the bed “bore disturbing echoes of the abuse he suffered as a youngster”, writes New York Times journalist Sasha Weiss, one of the small number of people to have seen the Prince film.
This new information completely redraws our sense of Prince. Yes, he’s still the man who sold more than 100 million records and he’s still the man who can make the hairs stand up on our arms when we hear Purple Rain. He’s also still the man who we all knew was a bit strange: the obsession with wearing purple (he apparently smelt of lavender) or his decision to change his name into a squiggle in 1993, to name but two examples. But we never knew quite how deeply this went, how damaged and sad he apparently was. And we didn’t know how much it affected his relationships with other people.
Prince’s dizzying success masked severe childhood trauma, the documentary reportedly reveals. Born in Minneapolis in 1958 to musicians Mattie Shaw and John Nelson, he had a hard upbringing. His parents had a violent relationship and separated when he was 6 or 7. Shaw remarried a man called Hayward Baker. Two people in the film, which is based on more than 70 interviews and access to Prince’s vast personal archive vault, claim Prince told them that Baker locked him in his bedroom as a youngster. He’d be passed food through the door. The abuse made him introverted. When his mother kicked him out of the house aged 12, Prince went to live with his father, a jazz musician.
Prince was “genuinely inspired by memories of his father’s piano-playing”, writes his biographer Matt Thorne. But his dad kicked him out too after repeatedly catching him with a girl in his room. The ejection led to years of staying on a mattress in his best friend’s basement – “it broke his heart”, according to Prince’s sister Tyka – and characterised the rocky and inconsistent relationship he had with his father in the decades that followed. It also engendered attachment issues. “He was ultimately, terribly alone,” Weiss writes.
Prince’s personal relationships with women could involve a mixture of the seemingly-opposing impulses of support and domination, according to Weiss. Some girlfriends were “spellbound” by their time with him, she writes. But former lover Susannah Melvoin, twin sister of the guitarist in his band the Revolution and herself a musician, tells a different story. In the film, Melvoin relays to its maker, Ezra Edelman, how Prince would monitor her phone calls and discourage her from leaving the house after they moved in together. He also tried to prevent her from seeing her twin Wendy, according to Weiss. But there was understanding there too. “He was so marginalised as a kid,” Susannah tells the film. “He was always trying to find his worth. Where do I belong? Who’s going to accept me? Who’s going to take me as I am?”
Some extraordinary stories (not, to my knowledge, in the documentary) also abound about Prince’s actions around women who he wasn’t dating. Late singer Sinead O’Connor told a strange anecdote in her autobiography Rememberings about visiting Prince in a dark Gothic-like hilltop house near Los Angeles after she’d had a hit with his song Nothing Compares 2 U. Prince – or “Ol’ Fluffy Cuffs” as O’Connor referred to him – kept her waiting in a small kitchen before appearing, “stalking” her around the room, arguing about soup, challenging her to a pillow fight (she claims he concealed a hard object in his pillow), and then chasing her around his garden and then down a highway.
Then there’s Prince’s relationship with his wife, Mayte Garcia. We knew already that their son was born, in 1996, with a disease called Pfeiffer syndrome Type 2 which meant he was unable to breathe on his own. The couple made the decision to take him off a respirator. The grief and trauma must have been unimaginable, yet Prince invited Oprah Winfrey to conduct a TV interview with Mayte and him at his Paisley Park compound just days after the loss. The film shows a desperately difficult scene shortly before the filming where Prince is shockingly cold and demanding of Garcia. Here is someone who had completely buried his grief.
We also meet Prince, the fiercely competitive. He famously (look it up on YouTube) performed a blistering, intricate solo on The Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps at his 2004 induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Playing with rock dinosaurs such as Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, he outclassed them all. But the documentary reveals how Prince had been devastated to have been left out of a Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time the year before – this was most likely his revenge solo. He apparently watched repeats of it incessantly.
Despite its insights and multiple interviewees, it looks as though the film, commissioned by Netflix and directed by the Oscar-winning Edelman, may never see the light of day. A new group of executors of Prince’s estate have reportedly objected to the project, arguing it misrepresents the singer. “As of today, there is no indication that the film will ever come out,” writes Weiss.
Michael Pagnotta was Prince’s publicist from 1990 to 1996. “In the end what Prince was all about – for me – was one thing: control,” he tells me. “And this control had to do with his own life, the people around him and the world that he created. Paisley Park was a kingdom that he controlled,” says Pagnotta. Prince exercised this control as a way of “protecting his true self”, he suggests. “In Prince’s case, obviously there was a lot of pain, a lot of childhood trauma and a tremendous amount of vulnerability.” Pagnotta says he can understand why Prince’s estate are reluctant to let these details emerge in a documentary. “It’s not in the estate’s interest to put something out there that is going to harden into ‘This is the truth about Prince’,” says Pagnotta. “And, no documentary is the truth. They are versions of events… Plus, the reason the [archive] vault exists is because he didn’t want that s*** out there.”
Plus ca change, says Pagnotta. “All great artists have a story. They just don’t want you to know it.”
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