Quincy Jones, his daughter and the Tupac they loved
TWENTY years ago on Tuesday, Tupac Shakur’s mother told doctors it was time. Her son, who had been shot in the hand, pelvis and chest in Las Vegas, was taken off life support. He was 25.
Among those who last spoke to Tupac were his fiancée, Kidada Jones, according to a Vanity Fair account of his final days. “Do you know I love you?” she told Shakur as he lay in a hospital bed. “Do you know we all love you?”
He nodded. As she turned to the door, Tupac convulsed and slipped into a coma.
His romance with Kidada, daughter of Quincy Jones, is an aspect of Tupac’s biography that is often overlooked.
“Tupac was the love of my life,” Kidada wrote in a first-person account published in her father’s autobiography. “He and I lived together for four months and then he was murdered in Las Vegas in 1996.”
Their relationship had had a rocky start. Tupac had said some nasty things about her dad in a 1993 Source magazine interview, such as that he had sex only with white women, producing messed-up kids.
This angered Quincy as well as Rashida and Kidada, the daughters he had with Peggy Lipton. Rashida responded to Tupac with a harsh letter which the Source published.
“Where the hell would you be if black people like (my father) hadn’t paved the way for you to even have the opportunity to ex- press yourself ?” she wrote. “I don’t see you fighting for your race.”
Kidada wrote that when she met Tupac in a club, he apologised to her, and they began dating.
“I wasn’t happy at first,” Quincy Jones told The New York Times in 2012. Then, one night, the couple were at Jerry’s Deli in Los Angeles when “these two hands slammed down on Tupac’s shoulders from behind”, Kidada wrote. “We jumped up, and there was Dad.”
Quincy told the Times he had been dropping Rashida off when he spotted the couple. “Like an idiot, I went over, put two arms on his shoulders and said, ‘Pac, we gotta sit down and talk, man. If he’d had a gun, I would’ve been done.”
The two went to a table and spoke for a long time, Kidada wrote. She saw them hug.
According to Quincy, Tupac apologised for what he had said. “We became close,” Quincy said.
Rashida also became friends with Tupac. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she wrote a paper about him and he spoke to her about it.
Interviewed by The Guardian in 2014 about her sister’s engagement to Tupac, she said: “That was a nice full circle. It was a good lesson for me… I’d never forgive anyone for talking like that about my family, and I was wrong.”
Then came that fateful night in Las Vegas. Kidada was in the couple’s hotel suite when she received the call that Tupac had been shot.
At the hospital, she was handed his bloody clothes and told Tupac had no blood pressure when he came in. She later walked around the parking lot for nine hours, telling herself he couldn’t die.
“I knew we should never have gone to Vegas. I had a horrible feeling… We weren’t supposed to be there… I don’t know who shot him.”
Years later, Quince wrote in a foreword to a book about Tupac: “His untimely passing is representative of too many young black men in this country.
“If we had lost Oprah Winfrey at 25, we would have lost a relatively unknown, local market TV anchorwoman. If we had lost Malcolm X at 25, we would have lost a hustler nicknamed Detroit Red.
“And if I had left the world at 25, we would have lost a big-band trumpet player and aspiring composer.” – The Washington Post