a “whirlwind,” recalling the day when
her daughter received an advance for
“Tidal”—a check for a hundred thou-
sand dollars. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, this
is unbelievable!’” McAfee told me. They
were in their dining room, and Apple
was “backing away, not excited.” Because
Apple was not yet eighteen, her mother
had to co-sign her record contract.
The musician Aimee Mann and her
partner, the musician Michael Penn,
who was also signed with Slater at the
time, remember seeing Apple perform
at the Troubadour, in West Hollywood,
at a private showcase for “Tidal,” in
- Mann glimpsed in the teen-ager
the kind of brazen, complex female mu-
sicianship that she’d been longing for—a
tonic in an era dominated by indie-male
swagger. Onstage, Apple was funny and
chatty, calling the audience “grownups.”
After the show, she did cartwheels in
the alley outside. Mann recalled Apple
introducing the song “Carrion” with a
story about how sometimes there’s a
person you go back to, again and again,
who never gives you what you need,
“and the lesson is you don’t need them. ”
As Apple’s career accelerated, Mann
read a Rolling Stone profile in which
Apple spoke about having been raped,
at twelve, by a stranger, who attacked
her in a stairwell as her dog barked in-
side her family’s apartment. Mann said
that it was unheard of, and inspiring,
for a female artist to speak so frankly
about sexual violence, without shame
or apology. But Apple’s candor made
her worry. Mann had experienced her
own share of trauma; she’d also col-
lapsed from exhaustion while on tour.
“I was afraid of what would happen to
her on the road,” she said. “It’s an un-
natural way to live.”
In fact, the turn of the millennium
became an electric, unstable period for
Apple, who was adored by her fans but
also mocked, and leered at, by the
male-dominated rock press, who often
treated her as a tabloid curiosity—a
bruised prodigy to be both ogled and
pitied. Much of the press’s response was
connected to the 1997 video for “Crim-
inal,” whose director, Mark Romanek,
has described it as a “tribute” to Nan
Goldin’s photographs of her junkie
demimonde—although the stronger
link is to Larry Clark’s 1995 movie,
“Kids,” and to the quickly banned Cal-
vin Klein ads depicting teens being co-
erced into making porn. When Apple’s
oldest friend, Manuela Paz, saw “Crim-
inal,” she was unnerved, not just by the
sight of her friend in a lace teddy, gy-
rating among passed-out models, but
also by a sense that the video, for all its
male-gaze titillation, had uncannily ab-
sorbed the darker aspects of her and
Apple’s own milieu—one of teens run-
ning around upper Manhattan with lit-
tle oversight. “How did they know?” Paz
asked herself.
Apple’s unscripted acceptance speech
at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards,
in which she announced, “This world
is bullshit,” further stoked media hos-
tility. The speech, which included her
earnestly quoting Maya Angelou and
encouraging fans not to model them-
selves on “what you think that we think
is cool,” seems, in retrospect, most shock-
ing for how on target it is (something
true of so many “crazy lady” scandals of
that period, like Sinéad O’Connor on
“Saturday Night Live,” protesting sex-
ual abuse in the Catholic Church). But,
by 2000, when Apple had an onstage
meltdown at the Manhattan venue Rose-
land, instability had become her “brand.”
She was haunted by her early interviews,
like one in Spin, illustrated with lasciv-
ious photographs by Terry Richardson,
that quoted her saying, “I’m going todie young. I’m going to cut another
album, and I’m going to do good things,
help people, and then I’m going to die.”
Apple’s love life was heavily covered,
too: she dated the magician David Blaine
(who was then a member of Leonardo
DiCaprio’s “Pussy Posse”) and the film
director Paul Thomas Anderson, with
whom she lived for several years. While
Anderson and Apple were together, he
released “Magnolia” and she released
“When the Pawn ... ,” her flinty sec-
ond album, whose full, eighty-nine-word
title—a pugilistic verse written in re-
sponse to the Spin profile—attracted its
own stream of jokes.
During this period, Mark (Flanny)
Flanagan, the owner of Largo, a brainy
enclave of musicians and comedians
within show-biz L.A., became Apple’s
friend and patron. (In an e-mail to me,
he called her “our little champ.”) One
day, Apple visited his office, wondering
what would happen if she cut off her
fingertip—then would her management
let her stop touring? Flanagan, dis-
turbed, told her that she could get a
note from a shrink instead, and urged
her to refuse to do anything she didn’t
want to do.
As the decades passed, Apple’s rep-
utation as a “difficult woman” receded.
After she left Anderson, in 2002, she
holed up in Venice Beach, emerging