"Star's New Sparkle"

Headed Down Under, super songstress Mariah Carey tells
Bronwen Gora how she's taken control of her own life.


Eighty million records sold - and counting.  Mariah Carey's star is shining so
brightly she admits it almost blinds her.

From her newly bought apartment in Manhattan's fashionable Upper East Side, the
gorgeous 27-year-old singer grapples with how it feels to be a phenomenon. 
"It's incredible," Carey acknowledges.  "I don't really think about it because
the enormity of what that means is something other than the reality of who I
am." [huhh??]

"It doesn't feel like that."  Carey is indisputably the biggest selling female
artist of the decade - and more.

Her albums shoot to number one and turn platinum at lightning speed.  She is
the only female artist to have had three albums sell more than eight million
copies each.  She has had more charts toppers than any other solo female
artist in the rock era.

Carey also married one of the most powerful men in the music industry, Sony
president Tommy Mottola.

But if the last decade has seen Carey arrive, this year she's well and truly
grown up.

Early this year she formed her own record label, Crave, in a joint venture
with Sony.

The in June she split from Tommy.

On her latest album, Butterfly, she's teamed up with rappers with names like
Bones Thugs and Harmony.  Any on her sassy videos, she is showing a lot more of
her shapely body.

"Well that's who I've always been," Carey says, speaking like a woman suddenly
set free.  

"It's just that (before) everybody felt that was a little bit threatening for
me - and for the public.

"Everybody's just always had me covered up."

For "Everybody", read the record industry which has cossetted her ever since Mottola
discovered her as a teenager.

How the tables have turned.  Nowadays, Carey calls the shots in a game that she
says has been controlled by others for too long.  She talks of "my decisions",
"my music", "my image".

"I used to feel a little bit insecure and cautious," Carey says. "I'd edit
myself and really listen to what other people said - and they said: 'If you
wear this you may not succeed; if you do this stye of music it might not
work' - even though my gut would always be to go with what I liked.

"Now I'm doing what I want musically and image-wise and I'm responsible."
Carey even talks about "trying to fit in some fun," perhaps a holiday
sailing with friends, as though it is a long-forgotten feeling.

She is careful not to name her estranged husband as one of those who have
cramped her style. the much older Mottola was said to be so obsessed about
losing his young wife that he had her tailed earlier this year.

"I care about Tommy as a person and I always will," Carey says. "He
represents a large portion of my life. I've really known him since I was
really a kid, a teenage girl, and we've been through a lot together."

Any men in her life post-Mottola? "No, unfortunately," she laments,
explaining she is lying in bed with a cold after a hectic day rehearsing in
wintry New York.

"I'm just sitting here alone about to take a bath and waiting for my dogs
(terriers Jack, a Jack Russell, and Ginger, a Yorkshire) to get home from
doggy day care."

For all her success and it's lavish accompaniments - including her $500,000
wedding four years ago attended by such heavy weights as Barbara Streisand
and Bruce Springsteen - Carey attests she remains unchanged by fame.

"I still feel like the same person from before this all started," she says.

"Because of the way I grew up I felt the rug could be pulled from me at any
time. I'm never really at ease with the fact that everything is going to be
OK."

Carey's parents - her father, Alfred, a black aeronautical engineer and her
Irish-American mother, Patricia, a vocal coach and opera singer - divorced
when she was three.

She has an older sister who became involved in prostitution and drugs and
is HIV positive, and a brother with cerebral palsy.

Carey says she was saved from falling by the wayside because of her
mother's constant reassurances. Patricia spotted Carey's talent and
five-octave voice when her daughter was barely out of nappies.

"I always had this great hope for success," says Carey. "My mom always told
me to believe in myself and to visualise myself doing what I wanted to be
doing and that it could happen if I did that. I prayed and hoped and I
focused from a very, very early age."

At 17 Carey headed for New York to seek the fame she craved. With one set
of clothes and her mother's borrowed shoes, Carey lived in a tiny loft in a
friend's apartment, waitressing and hawking demo tapes to the recording
industry.

"I would walk to my little job and my feet would be in the ice and snow
because of the holes in my shoes," Carey says.

"But I knew that this was going to happen for me. I knew that was part of
what I had to go through. I didn't feel sorry for myself."

Her life changed forever when she met Mottola at a New York party and gave
him a demo tape. He listened to it in his car on the way home and spent a
week tracking her down.

Ever since, Carey has endured taunts that her success is due to her
relationship with Mottola.

She points out she almost skipped that fateful music industry party
because, days earlier, Warner Bros had drawn up a contact for her - she
just hadn't signed it.

All the Sony meeting did was give her more leverage when she eventually did
sign with them.

Australians can thank Carey's new-found boldness for her tour here early
next year.

She says she desperately wanted to head Down Under after her last Japan
tour but "nobody booked it".

"Now the decisions I'm making are up to me and I really wanted to come
here," she says defiantly.