After a very public breakup with husband and Sony Music chief Tommy Mottola, MARIAH CAREY begins a new, if uncertain, future with the release of Butterfly
Welcome to the newly
single life of Mariah
Carey. It is free and
entangled, exhilarating
and embattled. And it
never stops moving. At a Manhattan
photo studio in late August, Carey is torn
between posing for shots and dealing with
the prelaunch mania surrounding her fifth
album, Butterfly. Cell phones ring
incessantly. Carey's new manager,
Hollywood power broker Sandy Gallin,
swings by to nail down details of her
appearance at the MTV Video Music
Awards. A stylist and hair and makeup
artists commandeer the pop star' free
minutes. At one point, Carey--who, these
days, oscillates between moments of
infectious playfulness and emotional
rawness--shoves a tape into the VCR. It's
the video for a remix of Butterfly's first
single, "Honey." In it, she pinches the cheeks
of rappers Sean "Puffy" Combs and
Mase--a tender gesture, but one that also
conjures The Godfather. "That freaked
them out," she says, laughing. "They take
that [gangster] stuff seriously."
At other moments, Carey disappears to her
dressing room with a cell phone. One
wireless conversation with a Butterfly
producer erupts into a dispute. To the
chagrin of her makeup artist, tears soon
streak Carey's face. "Being able to handle
things on my own is good," she explains
later. The singer is in the midst of a
complicated breakup from husband Tommy
Mottola, the president and COO of Sony
Music Entertainment and the man who, until
this year, has overseen every aspect of her
career. And behind the scenes, the split has
sparked angry accusations of infidelity,
abusive behavior, and artistic suppression.
Carey's tears, she says, were inevitable: "It's
so easy to become overwhelmed during the
state I'm in right now, I just couldn't help it."
Around midnight, the 15-hour shoot is finally
over, but the 27-year-old Carey's not ready
to call it quits. Just before 1 a.m., she takes
off for the Palladium nightclub with an
entourage of friends. Carey throws off the
day's stress by throwing in a tape by the
Jerky Boys, whose antic juvenile humor
proves the perfect release. "I love these
guys," she says, mimicking along with the
pranksters' mischievous phone voices.
At the club, Carey and party slip through a
private entrance into near chaos. So many
people fill every corridor that bodyguards
are exercising crowd control backstage.
Carey, however, makes her way through the
multitude like an habitué. She kisses the
night's headliner, the manically dreadlocked
Busta Rhymes. Heads swivel as she sidles
on, greeting a hot record producer here, an
up-and-coming hip-hopper there, before
climbing upstairs to a private office, where a
bucket of Cristal awaits.
Carey hangs out in this cramped hideaway
for most of the night. Her two bodyguards
block the door, but a few VIP rappers, like
Combs and Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott,
cameo in to say hi. "Mariah, she listens to
rap. She's straight up just cool," says Elliott,
a friend since the two cowrote a song for
Butterfly. Contrary to tabloid innuendo, it's
hardly the wild gangsta- rap atmosphere in
which Carey has supposedly immersed
herself. In fact, the only threatening thing is
the guy blowing chunks just outside the
office door. Carey--the pop diva who, in the
past, has seemed so inaccessible--is
experiencing it all. And as 3 a.m.
approaches, it's still four hours before the
insomniac will hit the sheets. She promises
to make a 3 p.m. interview scheduled for the
next day. "That's bright and early for me,"
she warns.
IT'S ONLY A 50-MILE DRIVE FROM
THIS SCENE in downtown Manhattan to
the affluent white burg of Bedford, N.Y.,
where Carey lived for the last two years.
But the contrast between environs--from
nightclub to country club--is immense. In
1993, Carey, dressed in a $25,000 Vera
Wang gown, married Mottola in a grandioso
ceremony attended by the likes of Barbra
Streisand and Billy Joel, and reportedly
modeled after the royal nuptials of Diana
and Charles. At the time, Carey gushed to
People magazine that her life had become a
fairy tale--"Cinderella," to be exact. And the
couple built an ostentatious, $10 million
mansion in Bedford--complete with two
pools and a recording studio--that became
the talk of the music biz. The plush suburban
life, for a time, clearly had its appeal. "She
didn't get out much," says rap producer
Jermaine Dupri, who began working with
Carey two years ago on her 1995
multi-platinum album, Daydream.
Mottola and Carey had met in 1988, when
she was an 18-year-old waitress/singer from
Long Island and he was a married talent
manager - turned - rookie label head 20
years her senior and on the hunt for the next
Whitney Houston. According to industry
lore, he grabbed her demo tape away from
another exec at a party and within days
signed Carey and her octave-scaling voice.
While she was recording her 1990 debut,
Mariah Carey, a romance blossomed. The
professional and personal symbiosis turned
Carey into the best-selling female singer of
the '90s.
If the success rested on a formula--a pristine
pop persona fashioned from sugary ballads
and girl-next-door clothes--no one scoffed
at the payoff. Carey's worldwide album
sales have topped 80 million units. Her
singing reaps Sony's Columbia Records up
to $200 million in annual revenues. In
February, the company rewarded Carey
with her own label, Crave Records.
Now, in a shift that puts her career on the
line as never before, she is leaving the
formula and the husband behind. On May
30, Carey and Mottola, 47, announced that
they would no longer live happily ever after
together. Since Mottola remains her boss,
industry observers speculated that a nasty
breakup could rock Sony Music. But a
statement issued at the time reassured: "[The
couple] have mutually and amicably agreed
to a trial separation.... They look forward to
continued success in their professional
relationship."
Indeed, Carey appears to be taking charge
of her music and her life. Along with the
symbolic titling of Butterfly, she is stepping
out in a number of ways. Boasting a host of
R&B and rap collaborators, Butterfly reins
in the ballads, explores an edgier street
sound, and offers her most personal lyrics
yet. At the MTV Video Music Awards two
weeks ago, Carey showed up in quite a
different Vera Wang outfit than the one in
which she got married: a bandeau top with a
skirt provocatively slit, on both sides, to the
hip. Recently, she canned her manager,
Randy Hoffman, and lawyer Allen Grubman,
both of whom are long-standing intimates of
Mottola. And now--like Whitney, Janet, and
Madonna before her--Mariah hopes to go
Hollywood. Since January, she has been
studying with a drama coach. "My whole life
I've wanted to act," says Carey, who hopes
to make her movie debut sometime next
year.
So far, the metamorphosis is taking wing.
"Honey" rocketed to No. 1 on the Billboard
Hot 100 in its first week of release. That
makes Carey--with her 1995 hits "Fantasy"
and "One Sweet Day"--responsible for three
of only six singles ever to accomplish that
feat. And as befits a singer who can so
deftly tip the musical scales, she's taking the
high road in the split. "I love him. I care
about him," Carey says, recalling a quiet
dinner she recently shared with Mottola on
her chartered boat in the Hamptons. That
evening, Mottola dinghied over from his
boat and cooked pasta. "He made sauce,
which is his specialty," she says.
Talking about the split, Carey chooses her
words carefully, as she is prone to do. At
once candid and coy, she'll answer "yes,"
then hedge for five minutes. On the subject
of her marriage, the indirectness is
understandable in light of the unflattering
attention it received in a Vanity Fair profile
of Mottola last December. The article, rife
with denials from the record mogul, painted
him as a controlling, Mafia-connected
obsessive who'd turned Cinderella into
Rapunzel inside their Bedford estate. The
picture was of Carey as a prisoner in her
own home. "When you've experienced more
than someone else, it's a natural tendency to
try to protect the other person from things
that you've gone through," is all she'll say
about Mottola's purported behavior. "But
now, I have to learn things for myself. I have
to experience things for myself. I have to
make my own decisions and live by them."
Then why is a controversy of
the singer's own creation
calling into question the
sincerity of her cozy
comments? Ever since
"Honey" debuted on MTV
six weeks ago, media watchers have been
astonished by the video's seemingly
too-close-to-home scenario. On screen,
Carey, portraying a 007 type called Agent
M, is handcuffed to a chair inside a
magnificent palazzo. GoodFellas actor
Frank Sivero, as a rug-haired Italian hood,
threatens her with death. Luckily, pluckily,
Agent M escapes by Jet Ski.
The parallels between the "Honey" plot and
the Vanity Fair piece are eerie. "It's the
most incredibly coincidental thing that you
could put out," says producer Walter
Afanasieff, who's worked with Carey since
1990 but who fell out with the singer last
spring over the hip-hop flavor of Butterfly.
(As a hitmaker for Sony artists like
Streisand and Celine Dion, Afanasieff is an
employee of Mottola's.) "Everything in the
video is 'F--- you, Tommy,'" he adds.
With "Honey," is Carey presenting her true
feelings about Mottola while also
perpetuating the Mob talk? Someone who
works for Carey butrequested anonymity
insists the video is a calculated, sharp-edged
lampoon of the record exec, made to elicit
sympathy for her alleged mistreatment. "It's
like 'poor Mariah,'" the source says, adding
"She's very smart."
But should anyone care if Mottola doesn't?
In an undoubtedly difficult position as Sony
Music's top man and the ex of one of its
biggest stars, Mottola not only released the
video, but publicly supported it. Mottola
declined to be interviewed for this story, but
in a New York Post article headlined
mariah's video vengeance, a publicist
relayed the mogul's enthusiasm. "Tommy
loves the video," the flack offered, "and says
it's the best yet from Mariah."
The day after her late night on the town, the
video's auteur, dressed in a midriff-baring
top and blue shorts, is installed in the
penthouse of a downtown hotel. Since
Carey has moved out of her Bedford
mansion but not yet found her own
apartment, this is her home for the week.
Exhausted and stressed, she wants to talk
from bed. Curled up under a pink blanket,
she nestles a stuffed puppy close to her side.
"It's not intended to be a dis to Tommy," she
says of the video, in her brassy but genial
speaking voice. "All this speculation is really
kind of crazy--the media hyping it and
feeding it." According to Carey, an
afternoon of jet skiing in Puerto Rico earlier
this year inspired the "Honey" chase scene.
"Her idea was just to do a James Bond kind
of thing," says the video's director, Paul
Hunter. The chief villain, Carey adds, was
not conceived as a role for an Italian
American. In fact, funnymen Chris Farley
and Denis Leary were both approached to
play the part but were unavailable.
A frustrated Carey would rather talk about
Butterfly, which (as is the case with all her
albums) she cowrote and coproduced. As
an expression of her lifelong love of R&B
and rap music, it's a project that's close to
her heart. It's also one that seems
intrinsically linked to Carey's ongoing
exploration of her mixed-race identity. Her
mother, who raised Carey, is Irish; her
father is a black Venezuelan. The couple
divorced when she was three. "Growing up,
it was difficult for me to find people that I
connected with," says Carey, "because of all
my issues of feeling separate and apart."
The R&B world is where, Carey believes,
she's found her peers. "I grew up in New
York. I grew up on urban music," she says.
"It's totally a part of me." Adds Afanasieff:
"She gets in her car, puts on her radio
stations, and it's always R&B. She knows
every song, every word, every rap out
there."
Not naming Mottola specifically, Carey
maintains that her label has opposed her
interest in the genre. Two years ago, while
making Daydream, she hatched the idea of
teaming with hardcore rapper Ol' Dirty
Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan on a remix of
her song "Fantasy." How dirty is Dirty?
Expressing his unrequited feelings for Carey,
he says, "I want to tear her a-- up."
According to Carey, Columbia, worried the
pairing would damage her crossover appeal,
discouraged the experiment. "Everyone was
like, What are you, crazy?" she remembers.
"They're very nervous about breaking the
formula. It works to have me sing a ballad
on stage in a long dress with my hair up."
Columbia president Don Ienner responds: "I
was incredibly positive about ODB. There
might have been some [who fought it].... I
can only speak for myself."
The remix was ultimately made, boosting her
hip quotient. Says Carey, "They started to
realize, 'Maybe she does know what she's
doing.'" And on Butterfly, she takes her
passion further. Combs produced "Honey,"
Mase and Da Brat rap on remixes, and
members of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony
guest-star.
According to a source at Sony, Mottola,
who gave Carey complete freedom on this
project, worries that Butterfly may have
flown too far from Carey's fan base.
"Tommy's looking at it from a business
standpoint, saying 'You know what? We sell
about 3 to 13 percent of your sales to [the]
black music [market].' He's not saying
'Don't make black music.' He's saying 'Don't
go totally left of what you've already built.'"
The concern may be overwrought. For one
thing, groups such as Sony's Fugees have
proved rap's international appeal. And
Carey herself may turn out to be a powerful
popularizer.
More important, a quick listen to Butterfly
reveals that the ballads are still there--though
they don't soar as they used to. "I wanted to
do so much more, and she wanted to keep it
light and R&B," says Afanasieff. "She was
trying to prove herself to be this Mary J.
Blige kind of thing: 'Let me show my
independence and streetness. Let the
conglomerate of Tommy Mottola and Sony
Music drop off of me for a while.'"
Still, Carey's rebelliousness didn't overtake
common sense: Butterfly is in no danger of
requiring a parental advisory sticker. "We
can't be cursing and all on the record," says
Elliott. "She's still Mariah. You've got to be
careful not to change too much."
In all, it's a quiet, even melancholy album,
with lyrics that dwell on the acceptance of
love gone bad. "For the first time since the
first album," Carey says, "it feels like I'm
letting a piece of myself go."
She credits her acting lessons as an
important tool in discovering herself this
year. "People have told her to be so careful
about what she says and presents," says her
coach, Sheila Gray. "I think a lot of her real
voice got lost." Carey has even been
revisiting, through drama exercises, some of
the difficult terrain of a poor and unhappy
childhood. "It's helped me to get in touch
with my feelings," she says. (In lighter
moments, she's rehearsed Judy Holliday's
role in Born Yesterday, the story of a young
woman whose thuggish older boyfriend
wants to refine her. One day, relates Gray,
Tommy "did Born Yesterday with us." A
testament, apparently, to Mottola's highly
developed sense of irony.)
Still lying in bed at her hotel, the new Mariah
wants to make clear she's not disowning the
old one. "I realize who I am, who my
audience is," she says, her voice tiring. It's
10 p.m. Carey needs sleep. She also needs
to rehearse her dancers, with whom she'll
appear on London's Top of the Pops. And
she wants to stop by a remix session for
Butterfly with the rap group Mobb Deep.
"Lately, I find myself wanting to cram in
everything," says Carey, who stays out for a
second night in a row.
SO WHAT DID GO WRONG WITH
THE MARRIAGE? While the singer is in
London, friends and associates of both
Carey and Mottola come forward to tell
highly polarized stories. But one theme is
central: The couple was undone by a
generation gap that became a chasm. "This
was doomed from the beginning," says a
source close to both.
Friends of Carey's assert they witnessed a
pattern of controlling behavior o
BY DEGEN PENER, Entertainment Weekly, September 26/97
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