SEAN COMBS
What really gets the hip-hop star jumping is raising his six kids.
The day after Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs became a 26-year-old father to his first son, Justin, he threw an epic New Year’s Eve bash. “I was trying to escape. I was too young to have a kid,” says Combs, now 47. Feeling lost after being fired from his job at New York’s Uptown Records, he says, “It was a time of being scared. I was like, ‘What is about to go on with me?’”
More than 20 years later, the entrepreneur— whose rise is charted in his new documentary Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story (available on Apple Music)—just topped Forbes’s list of the richest celebrities, with a net worth of $US820 million. Along the way, he has branded himself as a guy’s fantasy of an alpha male with the means to have anything he wants. But it turns out he isn’t quite that fellow anymore—as anyone who visits his $39 million Los Angeles mansion can attest. At home he’s a funny and hands-on parent to six unfailingly well-mannered kids: Quincy Brown, 26, Justin, 23, Christian, 19, and twin girls D’lila Star and Jessie James, and daughter Chance, all 10. They say
please and thank you. And when his three girls trot in for a photo shoot in glittering gowns, they are marched back upstairs and ordered into age-appropriate dresses. “They’re kind, great people, with a lot of love in their hearts,” Combs says of his brood. “I’m the luckiest man in the world.” The never-married Combs points out that his kids are a credit to their mothers—exes Misa Hylton-brim, Kimberly Porter and Sarah Chapman (see box)—who have been their primary caregivers. “My hat is off to them,” he says. “I don’t understand how they do it all.” All of the women are very much in the picture. It’s not traditional, but it is a manifestly loving and tight-knit clan. As for Combs, he’s stepped up in his own role. “I need to pick up the baton,” he says. “I’m all in.” If he
needs a role model, he need look no further than his mother, Janice Smalls, who raised him and his sister Keisha in Mount Vernon, New York, after his father, Melvin, was murdered in a drug-related shooting. Smalls supported her kids with jobs that included driving a school bus and working in a bar, and by 12, Combs was delivering papers and cleaning petrol-station bathrooms. He was quick-tempered—in his Catholic boys’ school he was nicknamed Puff because he huffed and puffed when he got angry—but no-one doubted his drive. After a stint at Howard University, he begged Andre Harrell, CEO of Uptown Records, for an internship. “Whether I was cleaning a bathroom or taking Mary J. Blige to a studio session, I was gonna handle it,” he says. “[If ] you are a black man in this world, you’re gonna have to really, really, really roll up your sleeves.”
He rose quickly but rubbed others the wrong way. Then a rap concert he promoted at City Coll ege of New York turned into a stampede that killed nine people. After tensions between Combs and Harrell escalated, the music exec fired him in 1993. “Puff wouldn’t listen to anybody but me,” Harrell later said. Combs launched Bad Boy Records shortly after. But in 1997, as rap’s feuds and violence spun out of control, Bad Boy’s big star Christopher Wallace, better known as the Notorious B.I.G., was killed. “It’s a real heavy weight,” Combs says of his friend’s murder. Still, he bounced back, rebranding himself with new handles—puff Daddy, Diddy, Puffy and P. Diddy, among others—and forming lucrative partnerships in fashion, media and the liquor trade. Wealth gave him freedom, but he owed a debt to his loved ones. “I’m just trying to catch up from all the time I was on the road,” he says. “I care about being a great dad. I don’t care about the Forbes list.”
His kids say Combs has been there for them when it mattered. “He is a tough-love parent, but he is also my best friend,” says Justin, who this year graduated from UCLA. There have been bumps—combs infamously got into a fight with Justin’s football coach—but he’s not about to give up trying. “Happiness is being present and not letting this world take your soul,” he says. “My life has had its ups and downs, but it’s a dream come true.”