On the surface, the discovery and rise to fame of Mariah Carey has all the plot elements of a showbiz fairy tale: a young and ambitious girl moves to the big city determined to make her mark. She slaves away at meaningless jobs to get by, singing whenever and wherever she can. One fateful evening, she attends a soiree, at which she passes her demo tape into the hands of a dark, handsome man, and then disappears into the night. The dark prince in this particular tale, Sony Music Entertainment President Tommy Mottola, plays the tape and has an epiphany: he can make this mystery songstress into a star. He seeks her out, and, overwhelmed by the extraordinarily Cinderella-like vibe of it all, they fall in love. . . . At any rate, that's how Mariah Carey and Tommy Mottola choose to recount their personal and professional courtship to the press. In a darker version of the story, some music-industry observers suggest that Carey is more like Rapunzel than Cinderella--sequestered in their gaudily enormous Hudson River Valley mansion and creatively stifled by Mottola's Svengali-like domination, the diva is compelled to spin sugary ballads into gold.
Carey was born to a half-Venezuelan, half-black father and an Irish mother. As you might imagine, the family faced a fair amount of prejudice due to its mixed heritage. Mother Patricia, an opera singer and vocal coach, was disowned by her family when she married Alfred Roy Carey, an aeronautical engineer. Over the years, the couple had various atrocities waged against them by bigots, including having their cars blown up and their dogs poisoned. The marriage crumbled under the strain of such malicious events, and the couple divorced when Mariah was three years old. Mariah's older sister moved in with their father, and her older brother was soon off to college, leaving just Mariah at home with a mother who struggled to make ends meet.
Patricia Carey's vocation qualified her to truly "discover" her daughter's talent. "From the time Mariah was a tiny girl," she recalled, "she sang on true pitch. She was able to hear a sound and duplicate it exactly." The proud mother nurtured her daughter's talent by coaching her at home, all the while trying not to force the issue too much. Mariah sang for friends, and performed in talent shows and at folk-music festivals; by the time she entered junior high, she had begun to write her own songs. In high school, she started commuting to Manhattan in order to study music with professionals, and upon her graduation, in 1987, she moved to the city. She paid the rent on her barren apartment by working as a waitress (she claims to have been fired from twenty restaurants because of her "attitude"), coat checker, beauty salon janitor, and part-time backup singer. It was this last gig, backing rhythm-and-blues singer Brenda K. Starr, that brought Carey close enough to Mottola to slip him her tape. After only ten months of slumming in the big city, Mariah Carey was about to become a star.
Carey's 1990 eponymous debut album created quite a stir, largely because of the incredible virtuosity of her voice, which many say is rivaled only by that of Whitney Houston. Critics babbled on and on about her remarkable octave-dancing (Carey has a vocal range of between five and seven octaves, based on varying reports), but generally agreed that there wasn't much substance to what she was saying. These days, Carey co-writes most of her songs, but her debut album was penned by professional hit-makers and it dripped with a cloying sweetness. However, nothing the critics said mattered much after the album sold over six million copies and made Mariah Carey an overnight sensation: two singles from the album shot to No. 1, and the music community awarded the newcomer with a gaggle of Grammys for her impressive debut.
Meanwhile, back at the studio, love had blossomed between Carey and Mottola. Home-wrecking advanced apace of recording, as Carey sent a boyfriend packing and Mottola did the same with his wife. Carey's Emotions album (1991) and her MTV Unplugged EP (1992) racked up sales in the millions, but her most impressive production was her marriage to Mottola. Inspired by videotapes of Charles and Diana at their royal wedding, Carey and Mottola--a kind of self-styled music royalty themselves--put a half a million dollars into their June 1993 nuptials. Fifty flower girls, an eight-piece orchestra, and a boys' choir convened with three-hundred VIPs (including Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Robert De Niro, and Ozzy Osbourne) to heap their blessings on the marriage. Carey remembers: "When I look back and think about it, it's so unbelievable! I mean, it really is like Cinderella."
Carey's post-marriage albums (1993's Music Box, 1994's Merry Christmas, and 1995's Daydream) offered more chart-dominating, syrupy pop. The generally well-regarded Daydream earned her six Grammy nominations and helped push her career sales to the eighty-million mark. Her status as the biggest-selling female recording artist of the nineties makes you wonder what heights she would be capable of scaling if her talent weren't consistently shoe-horned by producers into predictable, harmless harmony. But if she has thus far been prevented from using her music to tap into and communicate the considerable angst of her childhood, the pop princess has acknowledged it in other ways--in 1995, Carey donated $1 million to a New York camp that provides summer vacations for disadvantaged inner-city kids. The camp was subsequently renamed Camp Mariah.
Web Sites:
Mariah Carey's official web site
Mariah Carey's unofficial web site
Mariah Carey Fan Club:
The Fan Emporium
$18.00 (U.S) and $22.00 (outside the U.S.) first year. Renewal: $15.00 (U.S) and $18.00(outside the U.S.) annually. Include a self-addressed, stamped, envelope.
If you would like to support Mariah Carey's charitable endeavors, write to:
Fresh Air Fund
P.O. Box 679
Branford, CT 06405
1040 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10018
