Mariah has a brother and a sister, but both are almost 10 years older,
and she was, in effect, an only child. (Her sister, who was pregnant and
married by 16, and, according to press reports, subsequently a drug
addict and prostitute, may have presented a more immediate example of
the path not to take, as well as a living cautionary tale on the virtues
of caution itself.) Whatever the particulars, her childhood while not
miserable, was not easy. The dream of a singing career along with the
support and love of her mother, are, she says, what pulled her through.
"If there were difficult times when I was growing up, I got through them
by being an optimist, praying and hoping, at the risk of sounding
clichéd and corny, that through music I would rise above the whole thing
and I wasn’t going to be liked people I saw."
Mariah has always known she could sing. She is no longer much in touch
with her father, but one of her earliest memories, from before her
parents divorced and her brother and sister left home, involves singing
and its relation of self-assertion. "My father was very strict, one of
the strictest disciplinarians, and there was this whole dinner-table
etiquette; everybody spoke only when spoken to, and so on. And I was a
more free spirit; my mom kind of shielded me from that. And I loved
singing; I was singing since I started talking. I can’t help it, I have
music going on in my mind all the time. So I was singing at the table,
and my brother and sister were just, like"- she pantomimes horrified
astonishment-"and my father said: ‘There will be no singing at the
table!’ So I got up from the table, and I went into the living room, and
I got up on the coffee table and continued singing at the top of my
lungs. I guess that was an early indication of who I was going to be."
I guess that could mean she was going to be a singer; or it could mean
that she was going to be a singer in rebellion against a controlling
male authority figure; or it could mean that she was going to be a
singer who stood on coffee tables, though if that is the case, she has
successfully concealed it from press scrutiny. She is, of course, a big,
big, big, big star, possessed of the kind of the fame that even people
who don’t know who she is know who she is. But Mariah has, for a couple
of reasons, been very guarded about her personal life from the very
start of her career; she had the kind of childhood that leaves you
naturally guarded, and her success was so huge and immediate that being
guarded (literally as well as figuratively) was a condition of survival.
Not coincidentally, from the very start of her career, Mariah has been
dogged by rumor: first, that she was having an affair with Mottola, who
is 20 years her senior and was married when the couple met (true, as it
turned out); then, that her marriage to Mottola was oppressive and
confining (more on this later); and, currently, that she is out swinging
from rafters of every nightclub in town, partying down with rap artists
and dating Donald Trump (as are we all).
Also, while publicizing the private lives of big, big, big, big stars is
hardly ever bad for business, publicizing the private lives of the chief
operating officers of big, big, big, big multinational corporations like
Sony is hardly ever good for it. In Mariah’s case, owing to her
marriage, these things were one and the same.
"It’s unnatural to curb what you say; it’s f-----g hard," says Mariah,
miserably, of the limitations on what it’s OK to reveal. "I mean for me
to get to this point… it took an enormous amount of strength for me to
get out from where I was," We are at a lunch at a Japanese restaurant,
and Mariah, I would be derelict if I did not inform you, is wearing a
honey-colored spaghetti-strap suede minidress with matching ribbed wool
tights and high-heeled boots. She has a honey-colored cardigan tied
around her waist and a pair of Sendi sunglasses pushed back in her
honey-colored hair. "Can’t we go shop for kittens or something?" she
asks wistfully when the subject of her marriage comes up.
Mariah says that she cares about Mottola and doesn’t want to hurt his
feelings. People close to Mariah say that while it was not like he
handcuffed her, beat her and forced her to admire the foliage in
Bedford, where the two had built a $10 million mansion, the rumors of
manipulation and control are not entirely without basis. Everyone agrees
that there was genuine affection on both sides; still, the atmosphere
was often, according to one witness, one of psychological warfare.
Mottola reportedly wanted to control every aspect of his wife’s career,
image and social life, down to the last detail: The couple fought about
where she went, what she did, whom she saw, which photographers she
wanted to work with, which directors should do her videos. According to
friends, Mariah was followed by a Sony employee on at least one occasion
when she went out and was closely observed when she at home; Mottola
opposed his wife’s interest in acting, and things deteriorated to the
point that she and her friends conducted phone conversations in code (a
Sony employee who seemed to be miraculously turning up wherever Mariah
did was code-named 007, for example).
In a nutshell: In addition to wanting the control that every label head
probably wishes he had over his franchise artists, Mottola is said not
to have understood that it is a responsible pop diva’s duty to wear
short, tight clothing for public appearances. The pressure on Mariah is
said to have been so relentless and all-encompassing that she was
reduced to making small gestures of autonomy, like styling her own
bangs, just so she could feel like she was in control of something.
Since Mottola declined to be interviewed, I couldn’t say that his side
of this sad story is, although I’m sure he has one. However, I don’t
actually think that the things he said to have done are that unusual.
There is a time in most people’s lives when need and circumstance
collide in such a way as to put one person’s ego in the hands of
another; and no matter how responsible the other is, that’s always going
to cause constant, raging, unassuagable anxiety for as long as the
situation lasts. Who has not made a hang-up call or checked for a light
in the window? It’s just that most people do not have the power of a
big, big, big, big multinational corporation at their disposal or
probably the drive and tenacity that would put them at the head of one.
In any event, he remains her biggest fan.
From one point of view, it is hard to imagine Mariah cooperating with
conditions as suffocating as those said to have constituted the last
years of her marriage, because she is a strong, larger-than-life
personality, comfortably in control of her world in a way that suggests
control is not an issue. (People are, for some reasons, surprised to
learn that she a not-at-all-petite 5 feet 9 inches. Also, that she is
smart.) She does not like the tag businesswoman ("I guess it bothers me
because it connotes that I’m going to have a business suit and Hanes
stockings and sit behind a desk"), but she is prodigiously on top of her
own affairs. From another point of view, submission is easy to picture.
Mariah is not a patsy, but she’s something of a people-pleaser, a
rememberer of birthdays, the type of who does not like to disappoint,
the type of person who as a child was just like a little adult. She
keeps her commitments, of which marriage is one. She was also, she says,
not ready for marriage ("I hadn’t experienced enough of life itself. I
probably still haven’t") and was somewhat swept up in the excitement of
a dream come true. "I mean, obviously, it’s like a glamorous,
flattering, amazing thing when someone on that level believes in you so
much and is interested in you and is focusing on you. He presented a
form of stability I’d never had." And she was very young when the
relationship started.
"I probably looked like a vixen, but I was very innocent at the time we
met," she says. "Or, I don’t know if vixen is the right word, but I
looked like I look, I dressed like I dress, except I didn’t have as much
money to buy clothes. But my only other boyfriends were when I was in
high school, and I never took them seriously because I knew it was
something that wasn’t going to last. I hadn’t actually had intercourse
with any of them, so Tommy is the first person I was really with."
Mariah was aware that many people will not believe that Mottola was the
first (and is still the only) man she has had sex with, although she has
had other sexual experiences. But this would be an odd thing to lie
about, and it is very much in keeping with her general comportment.
Despite the short, tight clothing, she projects a cheerleader kind of an
aura, like the prettiest, most popular girl in school, who, because she
is so pretty and so popular, is very, very careful about whom she lets
get close. In some ways, Mariah seems not so much younger than 27 as
untouched by adulthood.
There are reasons for this besides the childhood that left her cautious.
However cloistered her marriage was or was not, she has made almost a
record a year since 1990, which does tend to keep you in the studio. "I
was basically ties to the board for years," she says. "Not like I was
miserable doing it, but it was like a steamroller." And owing to that
huge and immediate success we mentioned earlier, for which, I should
emphasize, she is very grateful, there are probably some aspects of life
she hasn’t had to engage with very fully since she was an adolescent-
for example, weather. Mariah is wearing a tank tops or spaghetti-strap
dresses every time I see her, though it was it is late November and cold
and rainy. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s just that a limousine
takes her everywhere (she also doesn’t know her own street address and
isn’t even positive about the street). She is, however, very considerate
about other people’s transportation needs and arranges them without
being asked. This regular-person thoughtfulness, in a world-class
superstar, is even more unusual than likable insecurity in a regular
person.
Mariah’s limousine is a very pleasant place to be, and you can meet
interesting people there. Theoretically, Mariah lives in the nicely
furnished, rented town house on, I don’t know, some street. She does
have her family pictures there a few other possessions, but most of her
stuff is in storage. So Mariah’s limousine is the true center of her
life, the place she is in most regularly, her hang, a mobile home for
the soul of the party, always on the go, from morning till… well,
morning, from dream to dream in every sense.
Mariah is not involved with any of the men with whom she has been
linked. She characterizes these stories as "99.9 percent true." If I had
to guess the .01 percent was, I’d pick Derek Jeter. But she does go to a
nightclub now and then, and is, as she says, sun-loving girl- after a
certain hour, where there is Mariah, there is also Cristal, as a general
rule. ("Have some champagne," she instructs Katie or Stephanie via cell
phone from the limo as we wing from the studio to the offices of Crave.
"No, no, I know it makes you sleepy. I’m saying have some there for
me.") She and her close girlfriends talk in a close-girlfriend talk that
is based entirely on the work of the Jerky Boys, whom Mariah loves.
("One of the perks of fame is you get to meet the Jerky Boys." Composed
of words and phrases also found in plain English, this is not an argot
that can be understood through logical explanation, but here’s an
example: "A-a-a-nd begin." This doesn’t really mean anything but it gets
laughs. What can I tell you? It’s an attitude. You sense it.
Mariah’s own attitude is positive, a lifelong attribute. (Asked if she
was a happy child, she says, "I wanted to be."). Butterfly is her
favorite record ("by far"; she is pursuing acting projects; and she is
free to proceed her own pace, which is both rapid and cautious. If she
did spend most of the last several years ion the suburbs when she would
have preferred to be in the city, she’s not bitter or vengeful about it.
Nobody held a gun to her head; that’s just the turn her life took. "Even
if I’m angry about certain things, they have to remain personal and
private," she says. "Regardless of what happened, I care about Tommy and
still love him as a person. Tommy represents a huge portion of my life,
and he’s helped shape the person that I am. Although he obviously was at
a very bug level when our relationship started, I think we both shaped
each other’s careers. And that way, when you look at how many records
I’ve sold for the company, I didn’t get most of those profits, you know
what I mean? That goes to the company. I think everybody’s done
enormously well by this."
Some final, unrelated facts about Mariah Carey: She has a little
talisman of two rings melted together (one a gift from her sister, the
other one from a high-school boyfriend), which she always wears, along
with a heart-shaped charm from Mottola and a cross, either on a chain
around her neck or her waist of her ankle or, if all those places need
to be bare, in her bra. She doesn’t like her forehead, and it is only
recently that she is allowed it to be seen. She has really high iodine
levels and seafood makes her break out. Walking around her large, clean
kitchen in her bare feet, she walks tiptoe, as she says she has done
when walking barefoot since she was 4 years old; She doesn’t know why.
Asked to think about it for a moment, she says, "Because I’ve had to
tiptoe around things my whole life."
Mariah was a big fan of the last Hole record, Live Through This, and
used to play it a lot up at the Bedford house. She especially likes
"Violet" and "Asking for It." I find this enchanting and keep brining it
up. I picture her in some room involving chintz and pictures of dogs and
horses and geese, wearing headphones and screaming along with Courtney
Love’s angry, dense lyrics, although she says she didn’t scream. "I have
to be more protective of my voice than that," she says. "But I felt it
when I listened to it." She sings a little of "Asking For It"- "every
time that I stare into the su-u-u-un"- her beautiful voice reproducing
the ragged little variations of the original vocal. What Courtney
certainly arrived at through lack of control, Mariah achieves with
complete technical command. And it is funny and moving to hear, because
irrespective of the means of production, the source is probably much the same.
Rolling Stone, Feb 5/98 issue, BY MIM UDOVITCH
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