"You're torturing me!" cries Mariah Carey. No, the 27-year-old pop diva is not manacled to a chair as she was in the
instantly-infamous action-adventure video for her hit single "Honey"; she's not being hounded again by the tabloids about her
supposedly torrid dating life; she's not being rejected by another co-op board for consorting with rappers; she's not even
being asked to wake up at 4:30 A.M. - the time she's usually getting ready for bed - as she did earlier this week to do the
Oprah Winfrey Show.
This particular evening. Carey's tormentor is a camera crew that has chosen to film an interview with her in a cramped,
sweltering New York City recording studio on an unyielding black leather couch. Carey has spent the last half-hour contorting
herself into endless spine-wrenching positions, trying to find a pose that looks relaxed and natural.
As Carey scrutinizes her appearance in a TV monitor, every slight shift creates a new visual vexation: First, her left knee is too
shiny; next, her chocolate-colored tank top bunches unflatteringly; and then, her cascading hair falls the wrong way. Finally,
she settles back into a corner of the couch, splaying her long legs sideways, and twists her head toward the camera. She
sighs, "Its always has to be the most uncomfortable position that looks the best."
The maxim suddenly seems fitting for Mariah Carey's career: Her recent personal strife has heated up her image more than,
say, the fact that after "Honey" debuted at number one, Carey became the decade's best-selling female singer, beating out
Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Whitney Houston. Indeed, Carey's pop ballads and dance ditties have always sold exceedingly
well - 80 million - plus albums since her 1990 self-titled debut at age 20 went multiplatinum.
Single Sensation
Carey's career had always been shadowed by her relationship with Tommy Mottola (the head of her record label, Sony),
which remained an unsubstantiated rumor almost up until their wedding in 1993. Mottola, who is two decades her senior and
was married to someone else when they met, supervised Carey's intense marketing push. Despite the dicey beginnings, once
they married, she and Mottola seemed to settle quietly into the virtual palace they'd built in suburban Bedford, New York.
Then last May, following month of speculation (and an official denial just a day earlier), the couple announced their separation,
and Carey tentatively began to extricate herself from the chaste, safe image that some say Mottola had perpetuated. Her new
album, Butterfly, boasts some edgier grooves, pointedly personal lyrics, and a decidedly sexier look.
Overnight, Carey became the object of gossip-column fascination. Every man she encounters is declared her new beau. While
making the "Honey" video, she was snapped while having her hair done by stylist - and the photo wound up in an Australian
tabloid captioned "Mariah frolics on the beach with mystery man." She's been linked to Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter,
David Fumero (the chiseled model in the "Honey" video), rapper Q-Tip - basically "everybody from Puff Daddy to Donald
Trump!" she marvels. "I mean let's be real; it's ridiculous! No one saw me out for six years, so suddenly they think, She's
gone bananas!"
Despite her protests, Carey has been wearing the notoriety as comfortably as her body - hugging outfits. Unlike some other
professions, the music business, personal drama can be a commercial boon - just ask Madonna or Courtney Love. And
Carey is clearly game: The "Honey" video showcases her body as never before and portrays her as imprisoned in a mansion
and threatened by dark - suited goons. In the lust title song, "Butterfly," she asserts, "Wild horses run unbridled or their spirit
dies, Spread your wings and prepare to fly."
Butterflies Are Free
"I'm not this one - dimensional girl who sits in a field wearing a flannel shirt or stands onstage singing only ballads," Carey says,
referring to her former image. "And I feel I'm in a better position to express myself at this point.
"All the personal things I went through while making this album were very draining," she says of the more than year - long
process, "but I'm the type of person to throw myself into my work. When I was a child, music was always my saving grace,
the thing that pulled me through, made me feel special, gave me hope." Butterfly, she says, feels like her most gratifying
achievement, "because it's something that I feel fully responsible for and because I took chances." Previously, she'd been
cautious in her musical and visual presentation, she says, "because of the way I grew up, I always felt like the rug could be
pulled out from under me at any moment."
This attitude resurfaced recently when she began taking acting lessons. Her teacher asked her to remember a place where she
felt safe in her life, and Carey says, "I didn't have one. I couldn't think back to a place that didn't give me a feeling of shakiness
or some negative memory."
Carey On
Carey is referring to her tough childhood. Her parents separated when she was two and divorced when she was three. She
and her sister and brother, both nearly a decade her senior, are products of an interracial marriage. Her father, Alfred, and
aeronautical engineer, is black and Venenzuelan; her mother, Patricia, who was trained as an opera singer, is Irish. "I'm
triracial," Carey says. Living in white neighborhoods on Long Island, New York, the family experienced a lot of racial hatred -
"my family had their dogs poisoned, cars blown up, my brother was beaten up," she recalls - which no doubt hastened the
divorce. Her mother, who once had sung professionally, worked different jobs to get by.
"My brother was supposed to watch me when she went off to work," Carey says. "I was, like, 6 and he was probably 16,
and he would leave and go out with his friends; he was wild. So I got very used to being on my own and feeling very
vulnerable and scared. I saw a lot of craziness in my house." She won't get too specific, but drugs and other seedy elements
were around. "I could've ended up psycho drug - addict nutcase." she says, "but I made the right decisions by looking at
people who made the wrong decisions and saying, I'm not going to be like them."
Her family moved "at least 10 times" and was sometimes forced to stay at friends' homes. They were so poor that at one
point, her family couldn't afford to buy her a new pair of shoes. By high school, Carey had convinced herself she was going to
escape by becoming a successful singer. She was often absent from class, leading to her nickname Mirage, because she and
then - writing partner Ben Margulies were spending late nights in New York City, workin on a demo tape.
For the proverbial "something to fall back on," Carey took 500 hours of beauty school. She learned "pin curls, roller sets,
finger waves, manicures, pedicures," she recites. "Our style was tacky, but hey babe, it was the '80s." She took a job
sweeping hair in a pretentious salon and quit after one day, when the owner demanded she change her name to Echo. "I was
like, 'Bing bong, these are not the slave days, good - bye."
She briefly waitressed and checked coats, then got a gig doing backup vocals for R&B singer Brenda K. Starr. In November
1988, Starr dragged Carey to a record - industry party where Carey tried to hand her demo tape to another Sony executive,
but Mottola grabbed it. Then she began living out her dream.
Happily Ever After?
Fear of becoming tabloid fodder has made Carey understandably reticent when it comes to talking about specifics of the
separation. Even Oprah couldn't get her to illuminate the particulars, except that she's now on a path to "personal growth."
Tonight, she leaves the recording studio via five flights of stairs, despite her three-inch wedgies, declaring, "the elevator here
takes forever." Then she takes a waiting limo back to her temporary quarters in a hotel on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Before she addresses the big "Why?" Carey pours herself a glass of red wine, kicks off her 9 1/2 shoes, stretches her
suprisinlgy tall 5 - foot - 8 1/2 inch frame on a couch, and pulls up a blanket. She's nursing a sore throat (nothing serious:
allergies and smoky clubs) and proudly pulls out a sonogram of her improving vocal cords like a mother might of an infant in
the womb, adding, "All I need is two days of good sleep and I bounce back. But I haven't had that."
Accustomed to working all night and sleeping till noon, she's been taking melatonin to help her slumbers, "but," she says, "it
gives you weird dreams." She incorporated one into the video for "Butterfly" - she chases something but it leaps over a
barbed wired fence, and she tries to follow, she can't and cuts her finger. "I didn't put blood in the video," she says. "Too
gory."
Is the split with Mottola gory to explain? "It's hard - I don't want to look like I'm dissing him or trying to garner sympathy for
myself," Carey finally says. Her most revealing statement is her description of her life when she first started seeing Mottola: "I
had my own apartment. I was independent. I was still connected to my past. I had more of my friends from when I was
growing up around me." Though she had always claimed Tommy was her best friend, clearly, as they spent more time
together, she felt isolated, dependent, and depressed. She never enjoyed the self-discovery allowed most people in their 20s.
Bye Bye Bedford
She and Mottola built their $10 million mansion together - "financially down the middle, because I didn't want to be in a
position where someone could ever say, 'Get out of my house." But, she says, "I prefer not be there right now," despite the
home's private recording studio, indoor pool, rifle range, and other luxuries. The house has yet to be put on the market, but
Carey is looking to buy a place in Manhattan.
Her advice to women going through separation is "Don't look to someone else, don't do the rebound thing, just try to
understand how you can grow from the experience." She's unsure what her own romantic life will bring. "I have a lot of time.
If I'm with somebody,it's going to be because I really love him, not because I feel the need to go wild."
If she does ever settle again, she says, it will be to have kids,"and I'm not emotionally prepared to do that yet. To have
children and not be 100 percent focused on them would be really negligent. I would never want someone else raising my
child. I would have a nanny, because we all need a little help, but I would have to be the dominant force in my child's life and
have a positive role - model father on the scene."
Careys fingers the chain she wears around her neck; on it hangs cross, a heart, and two rings. One ring is from a high - school
boyfriend, the other from her sister. They're nothing fancy - once's cubic zirconium, the other a "cheesy flea - market ring."
But she's always worn them, even after they were "busted, bent, and the zirconium had fallen out."
And when she signed her first record deal, after buying an apartment, her first present to herself was getting the rings melted
down and restored. Today, she never takes the chain off. "It's a part of me, from then to now. It's like holding on to myself."
Carey falls silent. Those rings are still with her; the six - carat, pear - shaped diamond wedding ring is not. A few nights
earlier, at her record release party, she'd been all smiles as she was interviewed by CNN, Access Hollywood, Vibe, and
others. And every now and then, her right hand would toy with the ring finger on her left hand, now bare. Old habits die hard.
Cosmopolitan, Dec/97
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