"Soup with Prince"

I did a lot of catching up on things I wanted to read over the holiday break, and part of that included knocking out a pile of magazines that had been accumulating at my bedside. A few back issues of The New Yorker were read, and in one I ran across a short piece by Claire Hoffman that just tickled me all over for some reason. An excerpt...

The thirty-thousand-square-foot Italianate villa, built this century by Vanna White’s ex-husband, looks like many of the other houses in Beverly Park, a gated community in L.A., except for the bright-purple carpet that spills down the front steps to announce its new tenant: Prince. One afternoon just before the election, Prince invited a visitor over. Inside, the place was done up in a generic Mediterranean style, although there were personal flourishes here and there—a Lucite grand piano with a gold-colored “Artist Formerly Known as Prince” symbol suspended over it, purple paisley pillows on a couch. Candles scented the air, and New Age music played in the living room, where a TV screen showed images of bearded men playing flutes. Prince padded into the kitchen, a small fifty-year-old man in yoga pants and a big sweater, wearing platform flip-flops over white socks, like a geisha.

“Would you like something to eat?” he asked, sidling up to the counter. Prince’s voice was surprisingly deep, like that of a much larger man. He picked up a copy of “21 Nights,” a glossy volume of photographs that he had just released. It is his first published book, a collection of highly stylized photographs of him taken during a series of gigs in London last year. “I’m really proud of this,” he said. Short original poems and a CD accompany the photographs. (Sample verse: “Who eye really am only time will tell/ 2 the almighty life 4ce that grows stronger with every chorus/ Yes give praise, lest ye b among . . . the guilty ones.”)

Limping slightly, Prince set off on a walk around his new bachelor pad. Glass doors opened onto acres of back yard, and a hot tub bubbled in the sunlight. “I have a lot of parties,” he explained. In the living room, he’d installed purple thrones on either side of a fireplace, and, nearby, along a hallway, he had hung photographs of himself, in a Moroccan villa, in various states of undress. At the end of the hall, a gauzy curtain fluttered in a doorway. “My room,” he said. “It’s private.”

Read the whole piece here...

Soup with Prince