Newlywed Mariah Carey lives the dream of stardom that sustained her in poverty
Sometimes, even in fairy tales, it rains--but never a depressing cold
drizzle like this. All
morning the picturesque farmhouse in Upstate New York has been suffused
in gloom.
Inside the lavishly renovated white colonial, however, a crackling fire
fends off the chill
as Mariah Carey, 24, talks about her quick ascent to pop music majesty.
“When I look
back and think about it, it’s so unbeleive-able!” she says. “I
mean, it really is
like Cinderella.”
Indeed it is, right down to Carey’s storybook June wedding to mentor and
Sony Music
mogul Tommy Mottola, 43. Ever since her bearded Prince Charming slipped
that shining
Gibraltar of a wedding diamond onto her hand, Carey has been cursing in
happily-ever-after mode. “Tommy is so romantic,” she gushes. “I was in
London for a
week, and every morning he had two dozen pink roses sent to my room, By
the end of
the rip, It was filled with roses.”
This day Mottola is tending to thornier business in Manhattan, 90 miles
away, leaving
Carey the run of their baronial Hudson River Valley estate. Its
sprawling main house and
adjacent guest lodge sit on a hill surrounded by acres of woodlands and
mowed pastures
near a barn where the couple’s four horses are stabled. Of course, no
fairy tale is
trouble-free, and lurking under Carey’s bridge of happiness is a pack of
trollish critics
who slammed her fourth album, Music Box. Even so, the album
ascended
quickly into the top 10, while its first single, the trilling ballad
“Dreamlover,” spent two
months at No. 1.
Carey has been hearing sour sounds from critics ever since she first
cams octave-surfing
onto the scene three years ago with a voice that could swoop from
operatic hight to
warm, moaning lows. Her 1990 debut, Mariah Carey, sold 6 million
copies and
won two Grammys. Two follow-ups also moved like Big Macs:
Emotions (3
million sold since 1991) and Unplugged (2 million since ’92).
While one critic
called hers a transcendent talent, others find her vocal showy. Another
likened her lyrics
to “hackneyed high school poetry” set to music.
Then there has been the issue of Carey’s mentor, Sony Music president
Mottola, who
plucked her out of anonymity when she was 18 and spent almost two
years--and lavish
sums--nurturing her talent. Industry insiders say he treated her like a
hothouse flower,
sequestering her in recording studios and limiting her public
appearances and press
exposure. “All the special treatment really upset me,” says a former
Sony employee.
“They spend $200,000 on a video and Mariah doesn’t like it? No big
deal. Just junk it
and make another. Other artist as talented, as deserving , never get
the shot. They didn’t
marry the chairman of the board.”
A Bronx-born former pop singer, Mottola was a successful artists’
manager (Hall &
Oates, John Mellencamp, Carly Simon) before joining CBS Records as head
of U.S.
operations in 1988, shortly after Sony’s takeover of the company.
Hoping that he had
discovered the next Whitney Houston, he signed Carey to a contract that
year. Since
then, Mottola has described a career arc as fast-rising as Carey’s.
Sony Music’s U.S.
revenues increased 50 percent under his stewardship--helped in part by
Carey’s
success--and corporate bean counters hardly faulted Mottola for his
pro-Carey bias. To
the contrary, two months ago he was put in charge of Sony’s $2 billion
worldwide music
interests.
For her part, Carey says her only regret is that her sudden success
caught her unprepared
for performing in public. “I didn’t come up doing clubs like most
people, so I wasn’t
ready,” she says. “Now I am.”
Out to prove it, Carey launched her maiden tour in Miami Nov. 3 (A
warm-up
performance in Schenectady, N.Y., filmed in July, will air Thanksgiving
night on NBC.)
Her Florida debut left some listeners underwhelmed, though by the time
Carey got to
Boston last week she had recovered from her jitters enough to get a rave
from a skeptical
Boston Globe reviewer for “a spectacular performance...[which]
bowled over the
crowd with a confidence that grew before their before their very eyes.”
Carey admits
she’s happiest in the studio: “I love to go in and sing all the
background parts and then
hear like 20 tracks of my own voice coming back out of the speaker.”
But she hoped that
the tour would give her a chance “to give something back” to fans and
talk back to the
critics.
“Someone said I never paid any dues,” she says, with a rare flash of
anger. “I feel my
whole life was struggling, because we were poor. We were alone, we had
nothing--no
security. I feel I have paid my dues. I’ve been paying my dues all my
life.”
Carey was just 3 when her father, Alfred, a black aeronautical engineer
from Venezuela,
separated from her Irish-American mother, Patricia, an aspiring opera
star from Indiana.
As a mixed-race couple that moved from one all-white Long Island suburb
to another,
“they went through some very hard times before I was born,” says Mariah.
“They had
their dogs poisoned, their cars set on fire and blown up. It put a
strain on their
relationship that never quit. There was always this tension. They just
fought all the
time.”
The Carey family disintegrated when Alfred and Patricia divorced in
1972. Mariah’s
elder sister, Allison (now 32 and a New York housewife), lived with her
father, who
eventually settled in Washington, and her elder brother, Morgan (now 33
and a fitness
instructor in L.A.), moved out on his own. “My father and I had a good
relationship for a
minute there, right after the divorce,” says Mariah, whose weekly visits
with Alfred
gradually dwindled down to amicable but infrequent meetings. “Everybody
wishes they
had the Brady Bunch family, but it’s not reality.”
Raised by Patricia, who remained single until remarrying years later,
Mariah says her
mother “wasn’t one of those moms who dressed you up with little bows in
your hair.”
While Patricia scratched out a living as a singer and freelance voice
coach, “I sort of took
care of myself a lot,” says Mariah. “I always felt like the rug could be
pulled out from
under me at any time. And coming from a racially mixed background, I
always felt like I
didn’t really fit in anywhere.”
Whatever her social insecurities, Mariah always had one gift to rely on.
“From the time
Mariah was a tiny girl. she sang on true pitch; she was able to hear
sound and duplicate it
exactly.” says Patricia, who discovered Mariah’s talent in 1972 while
rehearsing at home
for her New York City Opera debut as Maddalena in Verdi’s
Rigoletto. “I
missed my cue, but Mariah didn’t. She sang it--in Italian--at exactly
the right point. She
wasn’t even yet 3.”
>From then on, Patricia encouraged--but never pushed-- Mariah, coaching
her at home and
applauding her best effort. “She was not a stage mother at all,” says
Mariah, who sang
for family friends, joined occasional folkmusic hoots and performed in
school talent
shows. While still in high school, and with Mom’s blessing, she began
commuting to
Manhattan to write songs with a musician friend of her brother’s,
sometimes staying out
until 2 a.m. on school nights. Within days of graduation from
Harborfields High in 1982,
says Mariah, “I packed up my stuffed animals and my posters and tapes,
and I moved into
the city.”
There, after just 10 months of struggling as a waitress, coat checker
and part-time backup
singer for rhythm-and-blues diva Brenda K. Starr, Carey met Mottola at a
Columbia
Records party. Anxious to sign a female singer, Mottola snatched
Carey’s demo tape as
she was about to hand it to another music scout. Driving home, he
played the demo in
his tape deck. “I didn’t have my name on it,” says Carey. “He couldn’t
match up the
voice with this Long Island kid in a football cheerleading jacket. So
he drove back to the
party to find me, and I was gone.”
And so using the plastic cassette tape as a glass slipper, Mottola
launched a search for
pop’s future princess, finally tracking Carey down a week later through
Starr. “He left a
message on my machine,” says Carey. “I called back, stuttering: ‘Can I
speak to
M-Mister M-Mottola?’ He said, ‘I think we can make a hit record.’ I was
like freaking
out!”
Five years later, Carey looks nothing like the scared kid from Long
Island Lolitaland.
Tall--5’9”--and striking with her mahogany-colored hair and ebony eyes,
she seems
unaffected by her fame. When old high school pal Jennifer Colombo, 22,
visited, the two
lapse into giggle fits. “She’s as funny as the first time we met,” says
Colombo. “I think
it was in the girls’ room at school.”
For Mottola, his marriage last June to Carey--in a splashy wedding at
Manhattan’s St.
Thomas Episcopal Church attended by family and friends including Robert
De Niro,
Barbra Streisand and Bruce Springsteen--marked the end of a secretive
courtship.
Married and the father of two preteen children when he and Carey met in
1988, Mottola
separated from Lisa Clark Mottola, his wife of 20 years, in 1990. After
a bitter legal
battle, the two divorced a year later, with Mrs. Mottola winning custody
of the children
and Mottola receiving liberal visitation rights. His relationship with
Carey had turned to
romance while the two were working on her debut album. “Here I was,
coming from an
apartment with mattresses on the floor into this whole different world,”
says Carey. “It
just sort of happened. Tommy is just the greatest person. He knows so
much; he’s
funny. I can’t imagine anybody else who would be so supportive and so
understanding
and helpful. He lifts me up.”
So far, Carey can’t find a downside to life with one of music’s top
moguls. Since
returning from their Hawaiian honeymoon, the power-pop couple has been
dividing time
between a Manhattan apartment and their farm, where Mottola keeps his
extensive
shotgun, pistol, and hunting rifle collections. Carey, a former
vegetarian who would
rather cuddle than shoot animals, believes marriage can bridge
differences, even their
almost 20-year age gap. “I don’t think of Tommy as an older person,”
she says. “I think
of him as a very special person. Everybody who knows us realizes that
we’re right for
each other.”
As for some youngsters of her own, Carey says she and Mottola are
agreed: “Eventually,
but not soon.” They do, she admits, “sometimes get in fights” over
business. “He’s
ready to say, ‘Do it this way.’ At the same time, I’m very
independent.” At home,
however, there is one realm where Mottola always rules: the kitchen.
“Tommy is a
wonderful cook,” she says. “I’m so spoiled by his cooking. I
bake when I’m
bored, but he’s the chef.”
Outside, the rain has stopped, the skies seem about to clear, and Carey
is feeling exultant.
“Every day I count my blessings,” she says, executing a spontaneous
pirouette in front of
the fireplace. “I mean, I’m this poor kid from Long Island and
now--this! I couldn’t
have made it any better if I’d created it myself.”
Well, there is one thing. “Okay,” she adds after a second’s thought,
“maybe those critics
could go.”
People Weekly cover, Nov 22/93 issue
Return to Mariah Carey articles
Looking In at Mariah
Get your own Free Home Page