When Sean Combs, aka Diddy, realized he was direly late for the Kingdome Basketball Tournament in Harlem, where his Bad Boy Records team was playing, he went into multitasking mode. The plan was to listen to tracks from his first album in five years, Press Play, on a ride to his Midtown Manhattan apartment. There he would join his kids, his beefy entourage and a chicer pair of sunglasses, then a luxury car convoy would roll to the projects uptown. After the game, he would pay his street-marketing respects to a Harlem neighborhood where he once lived. He would finish an interview as he drove his Ferrari convertible home, then he and his family would hop on a jet to St Tropez, where he was giving one of his celebrity-studded “white parties.”
Perhaps this is an average day for the man formerly known as Puff Daddy. He never seemed stressed by the complex agenda. What did seem to make him nervous was the potential reaction to his new music. His driver cued up Diddy Rock, an inventive fusion of hardcore hip-hop and Ibiza-style dance music, which sounded great. (Then again, can a song sound bad when it is blasted in a Rolls-Royce Phantom speeding through Times Square?)
“Now don't feel like you have to say anything — just form your own opinion, and I'll leave you alone,” Combs said. Pause. He glanced sideways as if searching for signs of head nodding. “It's pretty different though, right?” Pause. “You can imagine people dancing to it at some after-hours spot in Miami, right?” Long pause. “That's Timbaland on there.”
Like a fur-clad Phoenix, Combs has reinvented himself many times through a long, tumultuous career: as a painfully young executive at Uptown Records, as a hit-making producer, as the head of Bad Boy Records, as a rapper (No Way Out, his 1997 debut album, sold 7 million copies) and as a diamond-flaunting, Jennifer Lopez-dating symbol of 1990s so-called ghetto fabulous culture. After a 1999 nightclub shooting involving a Bad Boy rapper, Shyne, Combs was charged with and acquitted of gun possession and attempted bribery, but he quickly rose again, as an award-winning fashion designer and friend of Anna Wintour. His clothing line, Sean John, generates about US$400 million a year in retail sales, and he recently released a hit men's fragrance, Unforgivable. He is a quintessential modern American celebrity: an audaciously ambitious marketing whiz with an insatiable need for attention: not an artiste but a collaborator, a tapper of trends and other people's talents. His current persona — international man of action and taste — is tailor-made for paparazzi cameras, whether he is strolling about the Riviera with an umbrella-holding manservant, jumping on a trampoline in crisp summer whites or riding a Jet Ski in a fluffy bathrobe.
But unlike many tabloid regulars, he seeks credibility in addition to fame. In 2003 he ran in the New York City Marathon, raising US$2 million for charity. In 2004 he made his Broadway debut in A Raisin in the Sun. His performance drew mixed reviews but the show did well at the box office. “I know I've been through some bad times and my share of tragedies,” said Combs, whose father was killed, as was his best friend, the Notorious B.I.G. “But it just made me feel like I got to be a better person to deserve this blessing.”
During the interview, he had the air of a workaholic overachiever who struggles with emptiness after major accomplishments. He referred repeatedly to the thrill of doing something for the first time and the yearning to recapture that feeling forever after.
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