This article stirs up some controversy about Tommy and the marriage like the Vanity Fair article. Some things are obviously exaggerated for effect, by others...it's not quite clear, especially with some of the quotes (you can't fabricate quotes!).
Again and again the former waitress swore the great love by her 80 millions records - and became less happy day by day with her marriage to one of the top US music managers. Since her separation she has tried to find her own tunes. She is not simply coming through the door. Mariah Carey staggers in like a confused fairy, her hands looking for something to hold: "I am so tired", she moans. Behind her follows a man sticking to her back constantly picking her hair, by her side a woman with powder and brush. It is 7 pm, Mariah rolls her eyes and glides down on a sofa, the hair man and make-up woman follow. Everybody in the room is nervous. The manager, president-manager and vice-manager of her label SONY strafe around, and when asking for Mariah, if one is allowed to speak, a second of silence follows. "Yes, you will be able to talk to her soon," she's let's one of the girls answer. All the others wipe away the sweat from their fore-heads and do "pfft". An employee of the "Leibziger Hotel" whispers that "Miss Carey isn't in a good mood today." You can hear workers working a few rooms away, laying parquet flooring, which was ordered over night, because "Miss Carey" wanted to rehearse for the show, for which she is advertising her new CD "butterfly". Mariah Carey is 27, and you really can call her a spoiled goat. A pop star, who sold 80 millions records with voice and soft-ballads; a Cinderella with a similar history - waitress and sometimes background-singer from Long Island, discovered 1988 and raised to popularity by her prince, SONY-Music-boss Tommy Mottola. A relationship built on the typical columns of the upper-class: sex and money. Mariah, at that time 18 years old, made Tommy, at that time around 40, young again and secured his presidential seat with her chart successes. He, a multi-millionaire, stuffed dollars into her career and into her wardrobe. The marriage in June of 1993 "was more a crowning," guests were saying. Mariah studied the video of princess Diana's wedding for days, her dress was made for US$ 25000, and of course names on the guest list were Bruce Springsteen, Barbara Streisand and Robert DeNiro. With saying "Yes," Mariah started a dream that became a trauma. After the wedding to one of the most powerful men of the music business, a weapons-freak who sometimes sits in the cellar of his mansion cleaning his rifles, Tommy built up a ten-million-dollar palace with two pools, a tennis-court and a sound-studio for both of them in Bedford close to New York. But he also employed 2 body-guards who followed her even to the rest-rooms door. She believed him whenever he told her which dresses to wear - closed-to-the-throught-ladylike [??] and sex-less. She may have called it love, but she just did not realized that Tommy, from a second phone, listened to every one of her private phone calls in Bedford. Tommy controlled her mail. Tommy never allowed a acting-teacher in the house and cancelled good-looking, non-gay dancers from the casting list of her videos. Nobody told her that Thomas D. Mottola Jr. already was called "Don Tommy" in the music business: coming from an Italian background of the Bronx, he worked himself up using a lot of strange and shady methods. The master of stars like Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Gloria Estefan is so much self-assured of his power, he sometimes allegedly threatens that if the Japan motherhouse does not stops criticizing his politics, he will take SONY Music away from them. And Mariah wasn't a love for him, but a project that secured his company the top of the charts. Mariah realized that only gradually. "No," she says, "friends did not warn me. I didn't even leave the house for a few years." Only from time to time, when she locked herself in one of the rooms, listening to incredibly loud rap-music and Tommy shouting in front of the door, she thought, "He is too close to my butt." But she had no time to think it over. Records were produced like on a assemble-line, white middle-class soul with calculated emotions. Mariah became a kind of Maria Callas for hobby-markets and car-shops, where songs like "Without You" and "Anytime You Need A Friend" should raise the buyers' will to buy. Even though her voice reaches six octaves, her musical abilities stayed on base-level. The US mag "Time" certified it "nutra-sweet soul," but the marketing-concept of the blond daughter of a irish mother and a black venezuelean grew. "Every company would have loved to have her," so says music-mogul David Geffen. Mariah winds down on the sofa and pulls her black way-to-short leather-skirt. Her breast is so much pressed and pushed in her white top, pressure-strips are visible, and her thin, almost ash-blond hair won't stay in shape. Since she must not wear her dresses closed up to the throught [thigh??], she demonstratively shows more skin. Life did not leave any contours on her round face yet, even though there have been a lot of ups and downs recently. Downs like the day this May, when she left Tommy Mottola; Ups like these weeks in which her latest CD is high in the charts. "It is my most important album," she says, "because it is so personal. It is a part biography." Maybe that is why "Butterfly" is her worst [darkest??] album so far? Behind the golden bars of Bedford Mariah developed the idea to also stand musicaly on her own. She started to write songs in secret during the night, teen-lyrics on outbursts and "finding yourself." "But i always put them aside again." It was autumn 1996 when she started to write for "Butterfly" together with black musicians - the soundtrack of her emotional outburst. A childish project with childish pictures - in the video to her single "Honey" for example, the chained Carey lets herself be saved from agents in a house and then swims to freedom in a bikini. "Everything in the video shall show: Kiss my butt, Tommy", her ex-producer Walter Afanasieff says. "No," says Mariah, "it may looks like that, but that is over-interpretated." Then she blinks her eye. "That is my most important album," she repeats, "because i finally gave something away from me. I come from New York and I had a terrible childhood, my father left us when I was three. I grew up with rap-music, these are my roots." The fact that she produced "Butterfly" with rap-legends like Puffy Combs, Mase and Da Brat, initiated shocks at SONY, because they have to stick with Mariah for another four albums, the Mariah who now turned into a gangster-girl with a "fuxx you"-lyric. "They all were very nervous, because I changed the formula of success. They have asked if I am totally crazy." The excitement came down fast, because the album still follows the formula of success of the soft ballads, and only a few songs dare venture a slight step into soft rap - an undecided work and a failed try to be Janet Jackson. Nevertheless Sony's first-lady is full of self-confident: "Musically nobody can tell me anything, there I am only obeying myself. I can do it on my own." Mottola on the other hand wasn't thoughtless when he stated his parole (??) in the company saying: "Let her do anything, she knows what she does." Scenes like after the grammy-show in 1996, when Mariah wasn't able to get a award and after the show in a hotel lobby shouted into Tommy's face if he really isn't powerful enough to get her a Grammy, probably will be saved from that man. The separation, both was announced publicity in May, happened in financial agreement, the divorce is supposed to happen in the next year. "We speak very friendly to each other", Mariah says. Just recently they met on a yacht. Tommy made pasta. After one hour in Leibzig Mariah again falls back on her sofa. She moans, she is hungry. What for? "Pasta," she whispers, "but simply cooked only." Again a pile of managers come into the room, again everybody is nervous. That's because actually Mariah STILL is the wife of the boss.