The Money Honey Allure - September 2001 Issue

She's got a new movie, a new record, and a new contract estimated at $100 million. But unfortunately for Mariah Carey it's her personal anguish, not her professional triumphs, that's been making all the news.
By Vanessa Grigoriadis

Teenyboppers want to be her. Rappers like Eminem, her newest pal, are psyched to hang out with her. President Bush thinks--what does President Bush think? "Hmmm..." vamps Mariah Carey, batting her eyelashes just a bit. "Do you think he would like me too?"

How could he not? Carey is immensely likable. Fun, open, and honest, but not saccharine, she's the girl in high school who had so much of her own stuff going on that she didn't need to play the popularity game. This makes her recent travails--a skittish and strange appearance on MTV's TRL, (unsubstantiated) rumors of suicide, and her subsequent hospitalization for an emotional and physical breakdown--even more heartbreaking. In 20/20 hindsight, the four or five times Carey rescheduled this interview and the two-hour-long delay on the appointed evening could have been signs that the Grammy-winning diva was not on the top of her game. Even so, meeting with her was worth the wait. With her hair now nearly as platinum as her multitude of albums, Carey, 31, lounging in a New York hotel penthouse and sipping a glass of white wine, is the world's best-selling female singer and wants to be one of its biggest movie stars, too. Leaving Janet Jackson in the dust as the highest-paid female artist (Carey's reported $100 million deal is for four albums; Jackson's reported $80 million is for five), Carey is also producing and writing the soundtrack to--and starring in--Glitter, the story of a young girl making it as a singer in the 1980s (sound familiar?). It's a classic triple play a la Madonna, and, significantly, on the promotional material for Glitter, the name is no longer even Mariah Carey. It's simply...Mariah.

Carey--oops, Mariah--says that "acting has helped me grow as a writer and a singer," and she's already moving on to her next project, Wise Girls, a Mafia movie with Mira Sorvino. She loves to channel her character, Rachel, who has a Brooklyn accent and "really long nails she's always teasing her hair with." She lets out a deep laugh. "The more I go into Rachel, the more I really like her. Because this girl is very, 'We're doing this, this, and this!' whereas I'm always like, 'Let me explain myself, because I don't want to hurt your feelings.' But now this freaking girl! Very helping me express my anger!"

It's not clear that Mariah needs help expressing herself, as she always seems to say what she feels. Would she like to star in a Broadway musical? "Nah," she says at first. "But maybe if I wrote it myself." Does she wish she went to college? "What?" she shrieks. "I went to the school of life. Can you really see me in some room listening to some professor?" Then there's her description of high -school math. "I was the kid who was like, 'Um, how exactly is this going to help us in life?' I knew I was going to have [an accountant]." She laughs and cocks her head in mock ghetto fabulousness. "I just didn't know they were going to rob me!"

Then Mariah expresses that she's more than a little annoyed because of a conference call she had an hour ago--she doesn't say why, but it's clear that it has something to do with Sony, her old label, which also happens to be run by her ex-husband, Tommy Mottola. Their unhappy marriage ended three years ago, but the gossip columns still report conflicts. Since then, Mariah has dated Derek Jeter and is now with Latin pop superstar Luis Miguel, who recently gave her the $1 million diamond bracelet that Julia wore to the Oscars. "Yeah," Mariah says dreamily, "that was nice."

But the dreaminess is dispelled when I bring up Jennifer Lopez, that other pop-singing, movie-starring diva, who's been called the "Latin Mariah," and who, in an earlier interview for this magazine, told me she was a big believer in at least eight hours of beauty sleep. "Oooh, that just pisses me off," Mariah says. "Right now, I've just signed this big deal that everybody's watching. I don't have time to relax. I don't have at least eight hours--eight hours, I that's like a joke! I wish I could, for my voice. Not for my pores!" She fumes so much that she sits upright in her chair. Then she claps a hand over her mouth. "Oh, no!" she says. "I don't mean to be mean. I just can't help it!"

Blame it on that Rachel character.

HOME SWEET HOME
"I've got a new house now, my first. I guess I had one before [when married], 'cause I paid for half of it. Even though everyone wants to think that I was a princess who was kept in a nice cage and who didn't pay for anything, the truth of the matter is that those people almost made me go bankrupt. In my new place, I did a big renovation, and the parts for me are now [including an in-house salon designed to the specifications of Carey's hairstylist and makeup artist], but not the rest of the pad, the parts for the fun folk. It's in downtown Manhattan, because I got turned down from every co-op board uptown. There would be these people on the board who were, like, 60 years old, and they'd all ask, 'What time do you get home at night? What are your hours?' And it's like, when I'm doing a record, especially with other artists, it's a really collaborative process, and I'll be walking in at 3 A.M. with a bunch of people who've come back to my house to do...whatever, you know? I'm not going to change that."

A STAR IS BORN
"I did this TV special two years ago at my junior high, walked in all, 'Guess who's back?' I had little ensembles of gym shorts and the school jacket in the colors of the school, and little platform stilettos made out of the Adidas king of shoes. The kids were kind of, 'What is this?' But it was cool, because that was where most of my insecure memories were. I was relatively happy in high school, but I was really working on music most of the time and not taking [school] that seriously at all."

MARIAH SLEPT HERE
"When I was in high school, my brother was living in Manhattan--I was forever Morgan's little sister. He was a bartender at all the big clubs when I was in, like, seventh grade. He paid for my first demo. Then, after I graduated, he was modelling in Italy, so I stayed in his apartment. And then I met a girl who let me sleep in her house, on top of her kitchen--literally, you would step on a counter to get up to it. All I had was my Marilyn Monroe posters up there. But I didn't mind. I was happy to know I was on my way."

EXECUTIVE DECISION
"I decided to sign with Virgin mostly because of Lenny Kravitz, who is an old friend. He's really happy there, and even re-signed after ten years, so I figured that was pretty good. They [Sony] still have a big stake in this album, and they're very proud of that. I'm not, but whatever. After all the years I've put up with certain things, I think I should be released now. It shouldn't be about finding the new way to mess with me. Like, OK, you've surely done your share of damage. Couldn't we stop now? Couldn't we call it a day?"

ENGAGED IN DISCUSSION
"Right now I'm in a zone where it's like, I'm with myself. They say don't make any life decisions at certain points in your life, and at this time it's about movies, videos, songs, albums, interviews, work, focus. I couldn't even exist within a relationship. [Luis Miguel, her boyfriend] doesn't talk about his personal life, so I don't feel like it's fair for me to sit here talking about stuff. Anyway, a relationship requires giving of yourself to be in something. And I don't have it. I mean, I'm not even very fair to myself."

UP IN ARMS
"My muscles are really big--if I were to work out for two days, I would look like I'd worked out for two weeks. So I never work out my upper body, and my legs I don't have to worry about, but my brother used to be a trainer, so if I have a video or something coming up, I check in with him and work out for just two days. It's better than another trainer who doesn't know our genetics, 'cause between African-American, Venezuelan, and Irish, we've got a lot things going on there. So he knows, like, 'Do these exercises, do some abs, don't overwork her arms'--because I'll come out looking like The Incredible Hulk. I was the arm-wrestling queen of my school."

DAIRY QUEEN
"I eat cheese and bread a lot, and I love pizza. Really! I'm bad. The best thing I have is this drink, it's 100 percent egg protein but it's really hard to find. It's good, even though it sounds gross. It helps your hair and stuff, and there's no carbs--it's just protein. You mix it with ice and it becomes, like, a glossy shake. I get it in Spain. We fly somebody there."

LIGHTENING STRIKES
"I would never let anyone cut my hair, because it grows really slowly. I worked the curly hair thing for many, many years, maybe too many years. Now, because my hair is lighter--due to the sun [laughs]--I get it straightened all the time, because my hair looks frizzier when it's lighter. These highlights are for Wise Girls. It's lighter than it's ever been."

SEAWORTHY
"I have supersensitive skin; my doctor told me I have an allergy to the sun. It's funny, I think of the bottom part of me--my legs--as my dad's side, so I get tan there, and the top half as my mom's, so I always cover it up. It's bad though, because I love the ocean. That's what revitalizes me--not a pool, but an ocean."

NEVER SAY NEVER
"My feeling about plastic surgery is, whatever's going to make the person feel better about themselves. Some things I feel are excessive, and I don't think they'd be right for me. But I don't judge people for anything, on any level--sexual orientation, race, creed, color--it's just not about what I'm going to impose on somebody else. But I'm hoping that when I'm older, there will be a new method."

ON THE ROCKS
"My favorite spa thing is the hot-rock treatment. I never sleep--literally, I sleep like three hours a night--and everyone thinks I'm Supergirl because I just keep going, but the truth of the matter is I do require food and sleep. It's like, 'Hello, I am not a cartoon character!' But this rock thing completely puts me to sleep."

WET DREAMS
"I live for baths, I'm a total bath queen, but I can't put in oils or things like that because my skin is so sensitive. If I could, I would live in the bathtub. It's the only place where I relax. I stay in there for an hour and talk on the phone. Trust me, I've got to take every minute I can for myself. I just have no time."

Against All Odds Cosmopolitan (UK Import Edition) - September 2001 Issue

Heartbreak, family tragedy, insomnia...meet Mariah Carey, the singer who's overcome it all to be pop's most successful woman
Interview by Bill Burrows. Photographs by Carlo Dalla Chiesa

Click, click, click. Mariah Carey is click click clicking her long, trampy false fingernails, talking in a loud, broad New York accent and standing like a waitress who had just been under-tipped. Mariah has her hair scraped back and is wearing a white vest and a very short denim skirt.

Surely this can't be the woman with the most lucrative recording contract in history (a rumoured $25 million per album) and more number ones in the US than anyone apart from Elvis and The Beatles? Surely this can't be the woman who won't accept any brand of mineral water other than Evian and demands a bottle of Cristal champagne, two bottles of white wine, a six-pack of Snapple iced tea, 12 bottles of apple juice and er...a box of bendy straws backstage at every gig. But it is.

She is, it transpires, still in character. "I only just got back from Nova Scotia," she explains. "I've been up there working on a film called Wisegirls and it takes a while for me to get back to how I usually am." And, as if to prove a point, she clicks her nails again and drops back into the brusque nasal delivery of the New York street for a couple of seconds before sitting down in her luxurious hotel suite and crossing her elegant legs.

She looks at her hands. "I'm sorry about my nails," she apologises sweetly. "It's just that my character is very violent...and there's this one scene where I get blood under my nails - that was the last scene before I came here."

At 31, Carey is a bona fide diva (according to the dictionary definition of a 'highly distinguished female singer' and/or a 'prima donna'). And, as such, she has a reputation for the kind of tantrum-throwing, queue-jumping, 'pain-in-the-ass' behaviour that seems typical of all contemporary, major-league, female singing stars. Not least, of course, her main rival at the platinum record-collecting diva top table, Jennifer Lopez - a woman who recently turned up at Top of the Pops with an entourage of 60, including three chefs.

Mariah has an entourage of just four today. Very casual. In fact, she's just as 'normal' as I had been led to believe by actor Max Beesley, who has just played her love interest in her cinematic debut Glitter (more of which later). "She's just the best," he told me. "I'd heard all that stuff [about her being difficult] but I never had a moment's trouble - she's a great actress and at no point started stamping her feet or complainng." And<>Wisegirls, before spending what's left of her day off at a screening of Glitter.

But that's the other thing you always hear about Mariah Carey - that she is the hardest-working woman in music. "I don't know how to stop," she explains, "but the way I think of it is, you get success and then, because you come from a place where it is not standard to have money, you don't ever let up." And she pulls her legs up onto the sofa and takes a sip of mineral water (Evian, naturally).

RACE AND RELATIONS
A lot has been made of Mariah Carey being of mixed race. She is the daughter of a half-Venezuelan, half-African/American father and a second-generation Irish mother and, although her parents split up when she was three, her family had already suffered at the hands of racist bigots - subtle little displays of hatred such as burning crosses, having their dogs poisoned and their cars destroyed...And this was in New York, not the deep south. "Everywhere has its own undercurrent of racism," she says.

The family never stayed in one place for long. "I moved 13 times as a kid. When you move around you have to make it back into the groove and sometimes you never make it, depending on where you live or whatever. Having said that, I wouldn't say I was bullied at school, in fact I was more of a bully...but it was out of insecurities that I became like that, and then I made friends with everybody."

Moving around so often did not lend itself to long-lasting friendships but she recently went back to Long Island, where she was born, and visited her junior high school for a TV programme called Homecoming. "It was like Missy [Elliott] on the remix of Heartbreaker - 'Guess who's back in the motherfuckin...?'." and, suddenly reverting to demure, her voice trails off. "I had my own little reunion and it was cool. There was a guy there who used to go to school with me and he's now the janitor there and he's like, 'do you remember Chuck?' and he was on my table at the prom and so we had this whole discussion about how I didn't get to be the prom queen." She says this so fast, as if it still rankles, that there's no room for enquiry. "Well we didn't even have prom queen at our school - my friend and I just invented it so we could er... have a project." And she grins.

From make-believe prom queen to queen of pop and a fairytale ending. The reason Carey symbolises the All-American dream is probably down to the way she came to fame. She's suffered her fair share of setbacks, and a dysfunctional family background - which she says she cannot discuss for legal reasons - was destined to create an artist, heroin addict or prostitute - or indeed all three. Her older sister, Alison, used to be a drug addict and a prostitute. She is now HIV-positive.

Mariah, on the other hand, was already an accomplished singer at an early age (her mother Patricia was an opera singer and a voice coach), Mariah spent years after high school, in true Hollywood tradition, employed as a coat checker, a beauty salon assistant and, naturally, a waitress. She reckons she was fired from about 20 restaurants. "It was horrible," she says. "All the other waitresses would hate me because I couldn't work the till.

"I could write you a song right here and now but I can barely add two and two, which is kind of bizarre because my father's an aeronautical engineer. I couldn't deal with that aspect but...the nails start clicking, a hand goes on a hip and the accent comes back, as she drops into her waitress character from Wisegirls, 'but you know, it's a mob joint so you gotta be on your toes, you can't be slacking - know what I mean?'." The laugh that follows is absolutely sinful. "I gotta get these nails off," she shudders.

THE 'OLD' LIFE
Does Mariah Carey have bad hair days? "Look at me now," she says. "I have chopsticks sticking out of the back of my head. I usually come all glammed up but I've just come from home. I've just bought a new apartment [in New York] and it is my space finally. Even though I owned that big mansion which burned to the ground," she says, referring to her former marital home, but not expanding upon the cause of the fire, "it wasn't my own because I didn't feel at ease there."

Of that period of her life - when Mariah was married to Tommy Mottola, 20 years her senior and, as Head of Sony Music Entertainment, one of the most influential men in the record business - she says, "It's surreal...it brings up weird feelings. If I sit here and pick it apart I think the relationship was on its way to ending before the wedding, which I thought would somehow save me...but it didn't." Would she marry him if she had her time over again? "No." And she means it. She has recently said of the split, "sometimes the person you think is your biggest protector is actually your biggest enemy, because they're stifling the real you."

However, despite his controlling nature, Mottola was, in many ways, the making of Mariah Carey. From the time she managed to give him her demo tape at a record label party in Manhattan in 1988 (he was so impressed after hearing the tape on his car stereo that he went back to the party to find her. Unfortunately she had already left but, subsequently, he managed to track her down) until the wedding in 1993, everything seemed to be fine.

They had a huge $10 million mansion (the 'fricking house up yonder') built on a secluded suburban estate in Bedford, New York, complete with an indoor pool, ballroom and recording studio but, as she has said before, "I wasn't in control. I felt as though I was being watched, everything I did was looked at and over-analysed. I wanted out." She also started hanging out with a much older set of people. When I ask her if that was difficult, she just nods and looks sad. It was not an amicable separation. Rumour has it Mottola has since dated Jennifer Lopez and she now refers to the relationship as, 'the old thing that we won't discuss'...

She has called her post-divorce period a second childhood and certainly seems as though she is making the most of it. "I went out to a bikini bar with MTV the other week, because David LaChapelle [photographer to the stars] though it would make a good picture. We went to this place called Schnuckies in the middle of the desert outside LA. When we arrived...it was full of exotic dancers - I didn't realise. I can still be a little naive. They didn't know I was coming and when I walked in there's a girl dancing to my song on the stage. She sees me and starts crying and then goes off to get a picture of her kid. It turns out that the kid's five, and she's like, 'This is Mariah,' and she's crying and when someone cries I cry, so we're both crying and I'm going, 'no filming'! Then a guy on the other side of the bar says, 'I just had a baby and her name is Mariah, too' and I'm like 'Yeah, right'. In Schnuckies there are two people who've named their kids after me! And he goes, 'I've got a tattoo.' And he lifts up his shirt and he has 'Mariah' written on his chest."

Just when I think she's about to stop and well-up, she carries on. "I tried to give the girl my new song, Loverboy, to sing and get her some time on MTV because she wanted to be a singer but the bar didn't have the equipment. In the end, she did a little dance to Heartbreaker, really respectful wearing a little top. But I'm not goping to go and put some notes in a girl's G-string so I got my security to give her some money."

CAREY ON FILM
So what about the movies? "My new motto," she says breezily, "is: 'hey, I sing and write the songs and occasionally act in the movies.'" Her first outing is, as mentioned previously, in the semi-autobiographical Glitter, with Max Beesley. Glitter is the perfect project for me," she says, correctly, of the story of a talented young singer trying to make it big, "Fame was my favourite movie for ages. That Irene Cara scene when she has to take off her shirt [for some topless photographs] scarred me forever," she says, before pausing and then laughing again like a naughty schoolgirl, "Obviously it didn't scar me that badly...but that kind of thing hasn't been done in a while."

Her pager goes off. She looks at who it is, smiles and then turns it off. I reckon it's her new squeeze, Mexican heartthrob Luis Miguel. She just smiles. The Mexican crooner wooed her in the skiing resort of Aspen. He is said to have ordered several bottles of $1000 wine and bought her a diamond and platinum necklace. Mariah, if the gossip-mongers are to be believed, sent him a steamy home video. He is the same age as her and at the sharp end of the business. Six months ago he bought her a £1 million speedboat to say well done for her work on Glitter.

"When I'm relaxing I talk to my friends. I page people incessantly, if I'm depressed, I just put on a song that makes me happy. Or sometimes, if I'm sad, I'll just sit in the room with my cat and dog and cry for five minutes and then think...'hey, c'mon, I could be scrubbing floors for a living.'" Sleep, however, doesn't feature in Mariah's relaxation routine. An insomniac since childhood, the multi-millionaire spends the middle of the night thinking abouy "all those loose ends, the things I have to do." She says she suffers from "flashes of nerves" and generally survives on just three hours sleep a night."

I reach for a glass of water. "I'd get that for you," she offers, "but it's my skirt, sorry." She's right. Her skirt's so short, it would be impossible for her to pass me the bottle without losing an appreciable chunk of her dignity.

"Have you ever thought of calling yourself Ma Ca?" I ask, by way of a naughty reference to the re-branding of the artist formerly known as Jennifer Lopez to J.Lo. Mariah splutters and then smiles in the way women do when the last thing they want to do is smile. "Not really, people call me 'MC' and always have done," she states.

I allude to the rivalry between the two divas: "As a singer?" she asks, genuinely amazed I could have posed the question. "Like...singing?" she shrugs, too clever to commit to tape but raising her eyes to the sky and going into Wisegirls waitress mode. "Hmm, mmm...love to everyone."

But perhaps not J.Lo, who is reported to have said, "I'm sexier than Mariah...she's been sitting on her throne for so long, all that success has made her plump." Yeah right. If there's a spare ounce of fat on this woman then God only knows where she's hiding it. Pushed on the matter of Ms Lopez, Mariah yields, "Certain people might do things to hurt you, but they are just helping you in the end." This is followed by a look nobody would want to be on the receiving end of. There is no need to click the fingernails here. The point is made.

Mariah Carey's film Glitter is out on general release in November; the Glitter soundtrack is released by Virgin on 20 August.

Life according to Mariah Carey...
What is your philosophy on life?
"I'm the queen of 'let's all have a good time forever.' Life should be fun. I might have 20 zillion things to do, but I'm going to try and laugh as much as I can in-between."

What's the last item you bought?
"An army jacket for my brother."

When was the last time you shouted at the TV?
"I really don't watch it, but last night my mum was in the studio watching some trash show and I was shouting at her, 'what are you watching that for?'."

Are you careful about your diet?
"I don't eat and I barely sleep so lately everyone has been saying I look really thin. I was on a protein shake diet for , like, a minute but I think I over-dosed on them."

What's your favourite season?
"I don't even acknowledge the seasons until it's Christmas, and then, I have to be in the snow. I have to go to Aspen, or wherever - there just has to be snow."

Do you ever get really drunk and lose control?
"I don't know that I lose control completely but, yeah, I hang out and have fun. And if I'm with friends who are going to take care of me and do whatever... I'd probably fall asleep."

Which other divas do you rate?
"I love Aretha Franklin, she is a classic...she's just amazing to me. She's also really funny and cool and we share the same star sign. She said to me, 'I like your sense of humour - typical Aries,' and I was like, 'how does she even know I'm Aries?'. I spent time [during the filming of the first VH1 Diva Show] in her trailer because there was an issue with the air-conditioning. You know, divas don't like to sing when there's air-conditioning on - it's not good for the throat - and so we were both in her trailer. She has really helped me in a lot of ways and I feel very privileged to be even able to say that I know her. The same goes for Diana Ross."

Would you ever consider having plastic surgery?
"I'm hoping (by the time I need it) they'll have something else. Maybe a pill - who the hell knows. They're coming up with everything else!"

What is your most personal song to date?
"The real fans know which are the ones, but there are songs like Petals from the album Rainbow." ['And I missed a lot of life, but I'll recover, though I know you really like to see me suffer. Still I wish that you and I'd forgive each other, cause I miss you, Valentine, and really loved you.']





Many thanks to Kerry from Mariah Carey Collection for the scans.

Cash & Carey, Mariah Takes It To The Big Screen Movieline - August 2001 Issue

Cash & Carey, Mariah Takes It To The Big Screen
Movieline - August 2001 Issue

But can she carey a movie? by Martha Frankel

For several years Mariah Carey has wanted to make movies. Now the princess of pop is getting her chance with Glitter, a rags-to-riches story she claims in not her life story.

I am expecting the worst. I've read about Mariah Carey for years. Ever since she released her first album in 1990 she's been labeled a diva, a title she loathes but seems to have done one or two things to earn. Her diva-like behavior has been reported on extensively - she's been accused of always being late, of throwing tantrums, of being a social climber who has completely forgotten her humble roots and of making outlandish demands of her employees and hosts. Her life story is a setup for all the presumptions of divadom. Here's the Reader's Digest condensed version. Young biracial girl moves to Manhatten, does a variety of menial jobs while dreaming of being a singer. One night she meets a man who volunteers to listen to her demo tape in his limo. After hearing it, he tells the girl he can make her a star. He's Tommy Mottola, head of Sony Music. Despite their 20-year age difference, the mogul and his prodigy fall in love and marry. She becomes a star and turns out more number-one hits than any solo female performer ever. They move into an enormous upstate New York mansion. Rumors abound that he's a Svengali with a temper who keeps his star-wife isolated from her friends and family. Eventually they divorce, prompting speculation she will fade away without the mighty mastermind. But fans keep buying her records. Virgin Records makes her the highest-paid performer in history by agreeing to pay her more then $20 million per album.

I'm meeting Carey on the 21st floor of The Pierre hotel in New York City to talk to her about her new movie, Glitter. She has long wanted to branch out into acting. Several years ago she signed on to Double-O-Soul, a James Bond spoof with comedian Chris Tucker, but the project fizzled. In 1999 she appeared on-screen for mere minutes as an opera singer opposite Chris O'Donnell in The Bachelor. Critics didn't take to the pop diva trying to play a real diva and they slammed her even though she was actually one of the few points of an otherwise dreary, unsuccessful movie. Now Carey is taking center stage in a thinly veiled version of her life story - poor girl hits big city in hopes of making hit records, which she does after she falls for a Svengali. She has spent more than three years trying to get Glitter, for which she wrote the treatment, off the ground. She's being paid little to star in it, but, with a minimal budget of $20 million, if the film is even a modest hit, it could mean a big payday - she's a coproducer and there's a soundtrack with new songs on it.

When I arrive at the upper reaches of The Pierre, Carey is ensconced in a two-bedroom suite with a view that makes Manhattan look like a child's dream city, complete with tiny people scurrying on the pavement and pretend cars. Carey's people explain that I might have to wait for a while because she's finishing up a photo shoot, but it's only a few minutes before Carey comes rushing out of the bedroom to apologize and ask if I'd like anything to eat or drink. She's in full makeup and wearing a dress that barely covers her remarkable body. She personally brings me the Diet Coke I've asked for and invites me to watch the shoot. "If you need anything else," she says in her incredibly raspy voice, "just call me."

For the next hour, the photographer and his assistants, the hair and makeup people, the stylist and a dozen others push and prod her. Through it all, Carey is like a cheerleader, urging them all to have a good time. When the last shot of the day is taken just after 10 p.m., she claps. "You all did a fantastic job," she says in her thick Long Island accent. "You should be very happy." As everyone walks out the door, I set up my tape recorder in the living room, which is as big as my yard, and wait for Carey, who's changing clothes in the other room. A minute later, she sweeps in, wearing orange sweatpants, a white tank top, a gigantic diamond bracelet, and a smile. "Do you mind if we do this in the other room?" she asks, grabbing all my stuff and heading off.

The room Carey brings me to is a small (I mean small) space off the bathroom. There are two chairs crammed in with a Lilliputian-sized table. A huge humidifier is humming. "I apologize," she says. "Those other rooms are just too big. My vocal cords are weird and I need a lot of humidity. I have a different set of cords than most people, and my doctor says that he always gives talks about them because the're so unusual."

"Do you find appropriately miniature rooms wherever you go?" I ask.

Carey responds earnestly, "I rented this house out in Aspen last Christmas for my family. I love the snow and I thought it would be so great. I was recording some of the music for Glitter, and I had a big truck outside the house that was like a studio. I had this gorgeous bedroom, but I could feel my vocal cords getting tight. So I moved, like six humidifiers into the closet and dragged my mattress in there and slept there for a week." Forget that the closet was big enough for all the humidifiers and the mattress - wouldn't a bona fide diva make the owners of any house she rented install a humidifying system that could deal with those delicate cords? But enough about the vocal cords.

"Tell me about that diamond bracelet you're wearing," I say.

Carey flashes one of those smiles that could melt ice caps. "Luis bought it for me as a present." Luis is Luis Miguel, the Latin superstar singer, whom Mariah met in Aspen a couple of years ago (did he sleep with her in that closet last Christmas?) and has been linked with since.

"All I want to say about Luis is that he's a great guy. He's a very generous and gentle person. We've been in 33 cities together since we met. He understands my life because his is very similar, so we don't have a lot of issues. There are places we go where he's the center of attention and that is so cool with me. Other places I'm more well known, and he's good with that."

Although she says she doesn't know for sure, the bracelet is rumored to be the very one that Julia Roberts wore to the Oscars, and cost close to $1.5 million. It's a knockout.

"I can't get a fix on where you live. L.A., New York?"

"I just got my first apartment in New York City," she says excitedly. "We spent last night in it for the first time. It's so cool - a cross between a grown-up place and a fantasy. The first thing I bought was Marilyn Monroe's white piano. I've been a fan of hers since I was a little girl because my mom loved her. Certain people thought it was quite inappropriate that my mom would buy me Marilyn Monroe books. When I was six years old, I'd be singing 'I Wanna Be Loved By You,' waltzing around the house. So now I have her piano. And I have this room off my bedroom that's totally tiled - floor, walls, ceiling. And it's full of humidifiers. So if I get hoarse I can go sleep in there. I am so frigging tired of living in hotels, but I never had enough time to get an apartment fixed up."

"I think you must be the wealthiest star I've ever met. I hear your new record deal could earn you $100 million in a couple of years."

"Prince called me up the other night and said, 'You think you got a good deal, right?' And then he starts to say how they sell the record for $18.99 and most artists make less than a dollar on each CD. So he says, 'C'mon, do the math with me.' I said, 'Prince, I failed math before Purple Rain came out.' So he said, 'OK, if you sell 10 million records that's $100 million for them, and if every album, you've ever done has sold eight million, what do you think you made for these people anyway?' I said, well, this is such a great company. And he says, 'That's like the old slave mentality, saying my new master is better than my old master.' Talk about taking the wind out of my sails. But I need to keep my eye on things, because I've been frigging taken advantage of like you wouldn't believe. They could do a whole miniseries of my life and my music, but they'd never run it. My life has been too sick and twisted."

Now I'm leaning forward in my chair. I've heard stories about Carey's family - a troubled older brother, a troubled sister with kids who Mariah supports. But Carey says, "I apologize. This is something that it's better for me not to talk about."

It's been speculated that the most sick and twisted things that have happened in Carey's life took place during the time she was married to Tommy Mottola, who has been described as a control freak. Are the two still on good terms even though she's left the music label he oversees, Columbia Records? "I'm just trying to make peace and let him live his life and let me live mine, I hope." She leans over, knocks twice on the table and proceeds to change the subject.

"Shouldn't I tell you about Glitter she asks, doing her job and mine, "I wrote the treatment. It's a story I've wanted to tell for a long time. We start with my character, Billie Frank, as a nine-year-old girl. She's at a club watching her mother sing. Billie is light skinned, and her mother is black. And her mother is clearly out of it, high or drunk, we don't really know. At a certain point the mother loses it in the middle of a song, she forgets her lines and she calls Billie to come up and sing. And the little girl saves her mother and the crowd goes crazy, because she's got this huge voice and she shouldn't be in a club anyway at two or three in the morning, Wait, am I giving away too much?"

I laugh. "I don't think so," I say. We've seen this movie before anyway, right?

"So Billie is sent to live at an orphanage because her mother is unstable. Billie grows up confused, becomes a backup singer for a girl who really can't sing, and she's pissed off because she knows she's so much better. She signs a bad deal, then meets a DJ who falls for her and makes her a star. But he has a very dark side..."

"Wait. This is getting good. Tell me more about this part."

Carey giggles. "Can I just say right now that this story is not autobiographical?"

"You can say whatever you want," I tell her, "but people are going to read into it. Because you do come from a biracial family, and you into a star, and he did have a bad side."

"But my mother is white, and she was never unstable. She's an opera singer. And the DJ that Billie meets isn't like any man I've ever been with."

I say, "Uh-huh."

Carey slaps my hand. "Trust me, Billie has totally different issues than I do. Not that I don't have my own."

"For instance?"

"Well, my father is African-American and Venezuelan, and my mother is Irish-American. When they married, my mother's family disowned her. My parents faced incredible discrimination. Someone poisoned their dog, someone torched their house. They split because they couldn't take the pressure. And I never felt like I fit in. I was too white for the black kids, too ethnic for the whites. It shaped who I am. Why am I telling you this?" she says with a laugh.

Carey has talked extensively about her past in previous interviews so you'd think by now she'd know why she goes into it, but all I say is, "I don't know."

"I saw this movie recently, I can't remember what it was, but it showed an interracial love story. And I swear, you could feel people in the audience squirming. I don't think very much has changed in 30 years. I think it's still the one thing that people don't feel comfortable with."

"That, and two women kissing," I tell her.

"What do you mean?" Carey looks absolutely shocked. "I thought men loved to watch two women kiss."

"Men like to watch two women if they think the women are only doing it for the man's benefit. They do not want to think that two women could have a good time by themselves."

Carey thinks this over for a minute. "You're right. Remember the whole frigging mess over Basic Instinct? People didn't care if she was a killer, but they went ballistic when she kissed another woman and seemed to be enjoying herself. It's that kind of ignorance that makes me furious. When I was a little girl I remember hearing the most insensitive things. People would say things about me as if I was deaf or stupid. And believe me, it would cut me to the bone. But please let me stop whining... I hate that woe-is-me crap."

"Have you ever studied acting?"

"Yes," she says. "I have a great acting coach who I really trust. I've been acting my whole life. I did plays when I was young, and it was just a natural part of singing. I love Woody Allen, Mike Myers, Chris Tucker. I would love to do a comedy. I'm embarrassed to say which actors I'd like to work with because I'm afraid that they'll say, 'Ugh, I don't like her at all' and I'll look like an idiot."

"How bad a self-image does the most successful woman in music have?"

"Better than it used to be. When I first started recording, someone told me that I should never be photographed from this one particular side because it made me look ugly. I believed that totally and I would always make sure that the photographer was on the other side of me, and that in my shows I was mostly showing one side. I mean, I was 18 years old and they're telling me this crap. They were successful and older and of course I believed them. And it's only since I started studying acting that I got over it. When we first started shooting Glitter, I was convinced that the director of photography was shooting me on my 'bad' side on purpose. When I talked to him, he thought I was out of my mind. I guess nobody sees this 'bad' side but me. So you know what? I've given it up. People will have to accept me with both my 'good' side and my 'bad' side."

"Glitter takes places in the '80s, which is not your era. What is it about that decade that drew you in?"

"Are you kidding? Can you think of a time where the music was funkier and the clothes were worse? I had Rick James write one of the songs for the movie, and it sounds just like one his hits from that time. And I love those '80s videos -- they were so cheesy. But it was also a time in music when a DJ could play your record in a club one night and the next day, radio stations got hundreds of calls for that song. It was a magical time in music in some ways, and I wanted to pay homage to that."

"Since you admit that it's not such a stretch for you to play a singer, is Glitter going to be both your first and your last film?"

"No way. I've just signed to do Wisegirls with Mira Sorvino. This is very different from Glitter. Mira and I play waitresses in a restaurant that's owned by mobsters and we get involved with them. I was one of the producers on Glitter, and I did the music, and it was a story that I had thought up. I was involved in every part of it. In this one I'm just a hired hand. I'm going to concentrate on my part, and I'm not going to have to make sure that every little thing is going smoothly."

"I get the feeling that you're a control freak anyway."

"A little," she says. "But I can give that control up if the people around me are doing their jobs well."

"Don't you wish you had a cool name like J. Lo?"

Carey laughs. "Next question."

"Did you feel bad when you made the worst-dressed list after wearing a white dress to the '99 Oscars?"

"They made me wear white -- they insisted that I wear a white dress. Believe me, not too many people look good in white, and I'm no exception."

I decide not to ask who "they" were.

"I didn't feel too bad," Carey continues. "I tend not to care about that stuff. As long as my records are selling, I can't worry that some photographer snapped me on the way to the deli and that picture gets scrutinized by people whose opinions I don't care about."

"You seem really sweet to me," I tell Carey. "Why do you have such a bad reputation?"

"Jesus, Martha, did you save all the hard questions for the end? Do I have a bad reputation?

I just nod.

"Well, I don't know. I know exactly who I am -- I'm a girl from Long Island who grew up with nothing. My mother and I moved 13 times because we had trouble paying the rent. And I don't want to forget that. I treat everyone around me with respect. I do not throw fits when things don't go my way. I'm good to people and I'm a great tipper. What more do you want?"

The New M.C. ELLE - July 2001 Issue

The New M.C.
ELLE - July 2001 Issue

Her life may be a fabulous hurricane -- a new album, a new movie, and a new love -- but Mariah Carey has everything under total control. Almost. The five-octave, high-octane, nonstop pop diva slows down just long enough to talk with Thomas Beller.

1. TIME AND MONEY A few minutes before midnight, Mariah Carey steps out of her black stretch limo. She moves briskly into the dark lobby of Manhattan's Tribeca Grand Hotel, a bodyguard in front, an assistant behind. She is carrying a bushel of roses. She moves across the lobby like a fighter place: sleek, quick, shiny, expensive. Her platinum-streaked hair is in a tight ponytail. She's wearing a stiff denim jacket and tight Sergio Valente jeans. Her shoes are open-toed and high-heeled, but they're not slowing her down. The words time and money come to mind. Her manager (also carrying roses) points me out and Mariah waves, makes a "just one minute" gesture, and disappears into the elevator. The whole episode is like the glint of a diamond bracelet.

"Let me give you a little warning," Carey says when I walk into her hotel room in a few minutes later. Her voice is low and throaty, almost whispery. The room is filled with a quantity of roses not usually seen outside wholesale flower markets. "I'm tired," she says, though she doesn't look it. "And I want you to say when I should be concise, because the fact I'm exhausted doesn't help in my ramblings."

"Have you eaten dinner?" I ask.
"No. And I haven't eaten breakfast or lunch..." She half sings the "or." stretches in way out; it's a gigantic, hands-on-hips, wide-eyed, room-filling "or." But I do have the remainder of a protein bar," she sighs. "Isn't this glamorous of me?"

"How's you day been?" I ask.
"My day?" she says. "My day has been going on for, like, three days!" She flops on the couch. Her face is made up, eyebrows plucked. There is glitter on her chest. Her shirt is black and sheer--Givenchy--she's got a black halter underneath. She has just returned from a meeting with executives from her new record label, Virgin, where she played them her new album, Glitter, for the first time. Like many music fans, Virgin purchased Carey's record without knowing what was on it. Unlike many music fans, they're said to have laid out an estimated $23 million--the most ever paid for a single album--for the privilege. "I made this deal without anybody hearing one note of music," she says.

"Were they worried?" I ask.
"Probably," she says, one eyebrow up, as if to say, Wouldn't you be? Carey does not look worried. At thirty-one, over a decade after her debut at age nineteen, she is the godmother of the G-string divas, the Britneys and Christinas and Dentiny's Childs for whom self-empowerment and self-exposure are completely entwined and sugar-glossed with a multi-octave range. Mariah's voice, however, is a Howitzer compared to most other singers' water pistols, her not-at-all-secret weapon.

Virgin is taking a gamble, but it's not irrational: Carey has sold more than 140 million recordings since 1990's Mariah Carey. She has had fifteen number-one singles, placing her third behind the Beatles (20) and Elvis Presley (seventeen or eighteen, depending on whether you count "Don't Be Cruel" b/w "Hound Dog" as one or two records). Her hits have spent more weeks (sixty) at the top than those of anyone else, including the Beatles (fifty-nine). She had a number-one song every year of the '90s, the only recording artist to do so.

The new record is the soundtrack to next month's All That Glitters, in which she stars. It's the story of a mixed-race girl who has been abandoned by her white father, taken from her black mom, and raised by foster parents. As a teenager she hangs out in Manhattan clubs, circa 1982, gets discovered by a DJ, falls in love, and becomes an overnight sensation. The affair ends badly; she looks for her lost mother. Which is to say it's about someone with a more than passing resemblance to Carey. Besides doing the soundtrack and co-producing the film, M.C. worked with scriptwriter Kate Lanier, who wrote What's Love Got To Do with It."

"I had this idea four years ago," Carey says. "And people said, ''80s? Nobody's ready for '80s.' I said, 'I really feel strongly about the '80s, 'cause it's nostalgic.' Some of the executives were concerned that it was too soon, and people weren't ready to go there. And I said, "Trust me, they are." According to director Vondie Curtis Hall, "It's a classic Cinderella paradigm, like Funny Girl." M.C., the hip-hop Barbra Streisand.

"Most megastars don't have the time or patience to get involved in developing a script," Lanier says. "But Mariah was hanging out in my hotel room, reading pages and giving me input. It blew me away." Lanier says M.C. wasn't at all the person she was expecting. "I was thinking pop. But she wanted to do something dark and edgy. I didn't think she would be that sophisticated or that smart, but she really is."

All of which suggests that maybe Mariah isn't the bubblegum pop star with the diva voice, controlled by a behind-the-scenes mastermind, which, to be honest, is how I'd vaguely thought of her. Today's pop culture is so heavily marketed, it's hard to imagine someone like M.C. without a Svengali pulling strings. And though she was launched by Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola, whom she famously married in 1993 and famously divorced in '97, she now seems to be the puppeteer of her own act, writing and producing records, starring in a movie that borrows from her life story. Her euphemism for the marriage is "the situation," and what that apparently entailed, besides a Cinderella story, was Rapunzel story: M.C. trapped in her Bedford, New York, castle, longing to get out and take control of her life.

Well, she got out. Sitting on the couch with a glass of white wine in hand, feet up, she has the issue of food. Twenty-three million dollars will buy you whatever dinner you desire. What M.C. desires this evening is macaroni and cheese. "It's not what I should be eating," she says, stabbing it with a fork. "But hey--I did have the protein bar." As she tells me about her endless day, her face takes on a bashful pride, as though I have walked into her house in the middle of renovations, but she'll show me around anyway, proud of the changes under way. It's all a work in progress.

Right away, I notice the eyebrows and the eyes. They have this quality--hopeful, expectant, amazed, as though she still cannot believe her life. Everything else about her appearance gives off a vibe of being smart, tough, of knowing what's going on. The meetings, agents, deals, the two shiny electronic devices--pager and cell phone--that sit on the couch. Her hair, her body, her manicure, it all says celebrity, businesswoman, diva. But her eyes, particularly her eyebrows, say Holy shit! Can you believe this?

"I was in Spain doing the vocals for the soundtrack," she explains. "I go out of the country because this pager and this phone"--she points to them as if they were demanding pets--"will continue to go off. And so I'm out of range here."

In Malaga, she worked at a live-in studio, leaving only when her boyfriend, Luis Miguel, came to visit. He is a “huge Latin superstar," she puts it. "We got mobbed because they all love him. Of course," she adds demurely, "I have a few fans in Spain, as well."

I ask if they discuss their pasts. "A lot men don't like to tell their stories," she says. "Maybe it's a power thing? Usually, I'm the one who's open. I mean, I've had intense stuff happen to me, but I haven't been through the wringer with lots of men. I could count on less than one hand the men I've been with in my life. I really hate the thought of being intimate with somebody, and then it's over." She snaps her fingers. So was she a prude in high school?

"Well, no. As a kid, I would walk around with the tight ensembles on, and the makeup... But it wasn't like I had boyfriends that were serious or that I was having, like, intercourse with. I knew I wasn't going to get married..." She rolls her eyes, give a loopy grin. "Well, I did get married, but I knew I wasn't going to be doing the housewife thing."

2. THE SAFE PLACE M.C.'s father left when she was a toddler. She moved thirteen times while growing up on Long Island with an older brother and sister and her mom, Patricia, a Midwestern Irish American whose family never quite forgave her for marrying a man who was half black, half Venezuelan. When her parents met, Alfred Roy Carey was "a swinging aeronautical engineer," as M.C. says; she explains that now he is in no way swinging, with-it, or hip.

"He thinks I've had one album," she says as if this were the funniest thing. "Honestly, he doesn't know any of my songs!"

"I bet he's a connoisseur of your accomplishments," I say. "Connoisseur?" she says. "He doesn't know any..."

A few minutes later, M.C. is on the floor giggling, and her mother, a former opera singer--now ensconced in an upstate New York house that M.C. bought for her--is on speakerphone, confirming that yes, "he thinks she only made one album."

"And what do we call it?" asks M.C. They say together: "The Album." M.C. is in hysterics. "We can't diss him," she gasps. "He's just not into music." Considering she hardly knows him, she's talking with real warmth, as though he were an eccentric neighbor.

The subject of M.C.'s father makes Glitters seem all the more personal: a Poor Girl Making It story entwined with a Love story and a Lost Parent story, and, finally, a Mixed Race story. "There are a lot of mixed-race girls and young women who hold Mariah up as a hero," says Lanier. "She's proud of that. For a long time she was encouraged to play up her white side. Since she's been allowed creative freedom, she has related more to black culture."

When I tell M.C. that her mixed-race background seems, visually, pretty subtle, her face softens. "Well, that's part of it," she says. "A lot of people say things that they wouldn't say if they thought somebody, you know, black was in the room. Or vice versa. Or somebody Latin. I'm a mixture of a lot of things. Because of that, I didn't really like I had one person that I identified with."

It was around the time her marriage to Mottola dissolved that M.C. began working with acting coach Sheila Gray. She's acted as a kid, but in her "other situation," she was encouraged to focus on her music. "Sheila was one of the catalysts for helping me move out of that situation," she says. "I was so blocked, emotionally. I sat on her floor and did relaxation exercises, and immediately started crying, 'cause she said to me, 'Name a place where you feel safe.' And I was, like, 'I don't have one,' I own, contrary to popular belief, half of everything in that mansion"--that she shared with Mottola--"and paid for half of everything, down to the electric bills. So I didn't have one space to think of. And she said, "Well, use something from your childhood.'" The once scaldingly awful thing I know about M.C.'s childhood, which I don't bring up on this otherwise festive occasion with white wine and macaroni and cheese, is that, in a newspaper article, her sister talked about having been a prostitute and drug addict.

"So," she continues, "it was this burst of emotion, and I was just, like, Whoa! It helped me realize that, like this is not right. [Sheila] used to always say, 'Relax your shoulders,' because I walked around like I had to fight, constantly. I grew up with such free rein. And suddenly, it was this enclosed situation. I wouldn't be the person that I am if I hadn't gone back into that and gotten in touch with myself. Not to sound New Agey or corny..."

A lot of these themes play out in All That Glitters. "I think people will be blown away by her acting," Lanier says. "She is able to carry off a lot of pain and show a lot of soul." Soul, however, does not interfere with business.

"I personally met with everybody," M.C. says of her label negotiations. "I grew up with some of the smartest and most shrewd businessmen." Before she signed with Virgin, Carey got advice from Lenny Kravitz, who knew her when she was seventeen, sleeping on friends' couches waiting for a break, and from Prince, of whom she is a huge fan. "I learned a lot. It's not like somebody can lie to me and say, 'We're gonna do this and this,' and have me not go, 'Wait, who's your distributor in Taiwan?'"

3. A FISTFUL OF DIAMONDS "I don't give a f--k!" The $23 million voice booms from the ELLE studio dressing room. The controlled frenzy of the photo shoot has been compounded by news that M.C. had to fly to L.A. tonight to score her movie. Cell phones chirp, assistants swarm, and a guy in a suit stands near a briefcase guarding diamonds from Harry Winston.

"She's pulling it together," says Carey's publicist. "There's the record, the single, the radio promos, the videos, the movie, the next movie..." The trades have announced that M.C. will star with Mira Sorvino in Wise Girls, basically Wise Guys for women. The logistics of it all are an enormously complex algebra equation, a hurricane.

Then the eye of the store emerges, in pigtails, loose Levi's, a green cardigan with buttons straining across her chest. She teetering on pink marabou slippers, a glass of champagne in one hand; in her other, the diamonds, dripping and dazzling. Last night was business. This is M.C. unbound, feeling it. She offers a big "Hi!" followed by "I'm having the biggest fucking spiral day of my life!"

She has a cell against her head, and she's talking about Busta Rhymes; from the sound of it, he may be in her next video. She notices me scribbling and laughing, says, "You are seeing me at my most..." Eyes bulging, she trails off. Most what? Most perfectionist? Most confident? Most psyched? Most pissed off? All of the above? She's got a million words at her disposal; they come bubbling out like a fountain. She asks if I'd like a glass of champagne, sees hers, most empty, and belts, "Will someone get me a glass of champagne!" Then, in a whisper, "They're probably trying to keep it away from me, thinking I'm going to get drunk."

The shoot commences, and I ask an assistant, Jill, if Carey's world is usually this intense. "This is the most intense day in a long time," Jill says. "M.C. is the hardest-working girl in show business. She has a hand in everything." Right now, she has a hand between her breasts. She's mugging for the camera, rapping along to the boom box, using the fluted glass as an improvised mike: "Hate to sound sleazy, but tease me."

During the next break, she pulls me aside. "Listen, that stuff I was saying about my father. I don't want it to sound--I just really want to build a relationship with him." I assure her that it was cool, warm even. Her eyes get all soft. What an operator! I think. Not that she's insincere. She just moves fast, shifts gears, and moves on. She turns, and her fistful of diamonds sparkles.

"I need to talk to Busta!" she says to no one in particular, but everyone hears her, because everyone is listening.

Over The Rainbow Cosmopolitan Australia - July 2000 Issue

Over The Rainbow
Cosmopolitan Australia - July 2000 Issue

Fed up with all the rumors, Mariah Carey says she's ready to set the record straight about her love life, fluctuating weight and diva reputation. Here, she talks past and present with Judith Newman

Mariah Carey is sitting cross-legged on the bed in Bungalow 5a of The Beverly Hills Hotel - once the love nest of Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand, and the site of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's violent, vodka-fuelled arguments. But right now, Mariah, who in the 1992 hit Emotions sang about "the way you make me lose control," is oblivious to the room's lustful history. "Watch this," she advises, while very gently scratching down her forearm with an unvarnished fingernail. In less than a minute, the invisible line, extending from her wrist to her elbow, has turned into an angry red welt.

"It's call dermographia," she says with satisfaction. "Any little mark on my skin becomes red and raised." It is a condition related to stress, she explains. "It's pretty good today, actually. It was really bad a few years ago." That was around the time that her marriage to Sony Music Entertainment president and CEO, Tommy Mottola, first began to show signs of unravelling.

Emotion written on skin. You could hardly dream up a more appropriate condition for a singer whose ballads, full of passion and pain, have sent tingles down millions of spines. Indeed, despite the huge success of her 1998 album #1's (a collection of her first 13 number-one hits) and the release of her ninth album Rainbow last November, the last few years of Mariah's life would have given hives to far less sensitive souls. There was her divorce from Mottola, a man who apparently loved too much, her hasty rebound into the arms of baseball player Derek Jeter, which prompted accusations of earlier infidelity; the tabloid speculation about relationships with men ranging from Donald Trump to Leonardo DiCaprio to Sean "Puffy" Combs; the collapse of Crave, her own private label at Sony; the $1.5 million lawsuit filed by a limousine driver who alleged she had $40,000 in unpaid bills; and endless reports of prima donna behaviour, including the insistence that she only be photographed on her right, or "good" side. "A friend once told me that the definition of being a diva is 'goddess/prima donna'," she grins. "So I guess that being called a diva could be an extreme compliment or a 'dis'."

To her hard-core fans (and they're a devoted group - a fact confirmed by dozens of Internet sites), the details of her childhood are familiar. She's the daughter of an Irish-American mother and an African-American/Venezuelan father, whose marriage, fraught with noisy conflict, was over by the time the songstress was three. Her mother, an opera singer, struggled to support Mariah, her older brother and sister by juggling different jobs, including managing a pet store and working as a vocal coach.

Another well-known chapter of the Mariah saga is her discovery by Sony executive Tommy Mottola, in 1988. At 18, while working as a back-up singer, she attended an industry party where she handed Mottola a demo tape. He climbed into his limo, played the tape, then drove back to find her.

Mariah signed with Columbia Records in 1989 and from there, the '90s became a blur of platinum albums, provocative music videos and awards. While some may view her music as the equivalent of muzak, no one - not even Mariah's own musical heroes, who include Aretha Franklin, Diano Ross and Chaka Khan - has topped her sales, which currently exceed 115 million records worldwide.

Exactly when Mariah became involved with the then-married Mottola, 20 years her senior, is a matter of speculation; but they wed in June '93 and were separated by May '97. It doesn't take a $200-an-hour shrink to work out that, for a child who grew up without a father around, there might be something fairly comforting and secure about an older, controlling husband. Mariah hints at similarities between them, and her stories of separating from Mottola are oddly interwoven with memories of her father, who lives in Washington, D.C. and with whom she has only limited contact. Mariah says she'd like her father to be a bigger part of her life.

But whatever Mottola's control, Mariah finds it "sexist" when people assume, "because I was married to someone much older, who happened to be involved in my career, I was a kept woman." In fact, she always kept her finances separate from his. "I felt that splitting the house, the bills, everything, would make me more in charge of my life. As it turns out, I was--ahem--a little off in assessing that." Still, Mariah's bothered that "people thought I was this little girl who was taken care of - the canary in the cage." While acknowledging that "in a way, it's true," she does point out that "the case was actually half paid for by me."

These days, Mariah has made another life for herself. Since releasing Rainbow (the catchy hit single Heartbreaker was her 14th US number one), she's been taking acting classes. Earlier this year, she made her movie debut as an opera singer in the romantic comedy, The Bachelor, playing alongside Chris O'Donnell.

Mariah's new-found independence has also seen her purchase a Manhattan loft-style apartment for a reported $US9 million, which she is renovating. And Mariah has also enlisted a team of financial managers to look after her affairs. But it's extremely difficult, she says, to find advisers who are trustworthy. "It always ends in disappointment," she observes, "and that's a sad thing." (Among the lawsuits brought by people she thought she could trust was one brought by her ex-stepfather for reneging on an alleged agreement to license a line of "Mariah dolls." The suit was eventually dismissed.)

The way in which Mariah deals with loss - by trying to recognise the absurdity of a particular situation - is something new, too. "I think that I internalise a lot of my sadness, but I try to laugh through the difficult times. Even when I'm in a moment of intense despair, I'll think of some joke, and if I'm crying hysterically, I'll just laugh," she explains. "I'll say, 'I don't have the right to be this upset'." Mariah believes humour helped her to maintain a sense of reality while trying to live up to Mottola's image of what she should be, and who she really was. With Mottola, she says, "I wasn't even allowed to be myself."

The ability to be herself, and to trust, are hard-won struggles - which may also explain Mariah's close relationship with her mother, Patricia. In the middle of the interview, Mariah reaches for the phone to call her to check the accuracy of some of her childhood memories. "I'm so proud of her - she's lost 17 kilograms," says Mariah as she dials. "I got her this swimming pool, and -- hi, mom!"

The very moment she hears her mother's voice, Mariah visibly relaxes. Even during the most difficult times in her life, Mariah says, her mother has always been there for her. "But it certainly wasn't a traditional relationship. Sometimes she was the mother, sometimes I was. We traded off." With her huge success, Mariah loves being able to provide Patricia with all the things the family couldn't afford when she was growing up. Mariah has bought her mother not only a swimming pool, but also a house in upstate New York. "She's always rented houses, and never had one of her own. I understand the importance of having something that's all yours. I knew she'd want that," she says quietly.

Mariah is sitting, racking her brain, trying to remember a weird dream she had the other night. "Wait, wait, I'm sure it'll come to me if we talk about something else, she says. So we do.

Mariah's always more than happy to mention her favourite causes, most of which involve children. In 1998, she was named celebrity spokesperson for New York City's Children's Adoptive Services department. Since 1994, she's played a similar role for The Fresh Air Fund, which named a facility in upstate New York "Camp Mariah," to acknowledge her efforts on behalf of the fund.

A less pleasant topic for Mariah is the relentless speculation about her post-Mottola love life. "Lies! I was never seeing Leonardo DiCaprio or Q-Tip (rapper from A Tribe Called Quest), and there was never anything with Puff Daddy (Sean Combs, the rapper and her sometime producer)." So all the wild party-girl stuff was the fevered imagination of gossip columnists? All of it?

"When you finally get to this level (of fame)," Mariah says, "it's really hard to be with anybody without hearing rumours. You hear rumours about them, they they hear rumours about you." The whole gossip-column reading world seems to hear them. Take, for example, what happened when Mariah met current beau Luis Miguel at celebrity ski resort Aspen, in December 1998. For months after, both Mariah and Luis, the 30-year-old Latin singer known as "the Elvis of Mexico," denied they were spotted kissing in public. Outed around the world, they were forced to admit that they were involved. Eighteen months later, Mariah's only comment on their relationship is, "Right now, I feel good. I'm in a relationship where I feel supported and I don't feel too stifled."

Suddenly, Mariah remembers her dream and launches right into a detailed description. "I was getting a massage, -sometimes it helps with my insomnia. While I was being massaged, in this dark room, I fell asleep. In my dream, I told the masseuse that I had to go to the bathroom and I'd be right back. She asked me, 'Do you want me to leave the light on for you?' And I said, 'No, you can leave the lights off because being in the dark equalises us all'. What does that mean? I'm not sure."

I'm not sure what Mariah's dream means, either. But if I had to guess, I'd say that sometimes, no matter how much you love being a diva, it's nice to be able to turn the spotlight off - to just be yourself. And, as I'm leaving, I notice that the whole time we've been talking, she's kept the lights dimmed low.

On The Cover Pop princess Mariah Carey is rumoured to be diva-like demanding. But, then again, who can blame her? After all, she's the biggest-selling female artist of all time and has just completed her movie debut in The Bachelor, alongside Chris O'Donnell. Mariah confesses...

Q&A with Mariah Carey

How does it feel to be a diva?
I'm just a nice, down-to-earth person - not a prima donna. Believe me, if I did want to be a diva, you'd know about it.

What are you fanatical about?
I have an awful lot of clothes. I don't want to sound like Imelda Marcos, but I do collect shoes. You'll rarely see me in a pair of sneakers. And I'm a bath queen - a fanatic. Oh, and I love little perfume bottles, brushes and all those doodads.

Are you obsessed with exercise?
I don't do aerobics when I'm singing because it depletes my energy and takes the edge off my voice. Instead, I do sit-ups, leg raises and push-ups.

Every woman's demanding when it comes to the men in their life. What does your Mr. Right have to have?
My dream man, because I'm a stickler for good grammar, is one who can put a sentence together. I don't like the "dees, does and dems" guys.

Looking The Part "I did 500 hours of beauty school - so I'd have a career to fall back on," Mariah laughs. The 175cm-tall diva, who fluctuates between a size 6 and 10, still practises some tricks of the trade.

Food "I can't stand dieting," says Mariah, admitting she craves McDonald's Cheeseburgers and French Fries when she's working hard. The secret, she says, is to eat in moderation. "I'm not inherently skinny, but I'm naturally pretty muscular. If I ate a lot, I'd get fat like anybody else." Favourite foods include Quaker Fat-Free Apple Cinnamon Rice Cakes and Guiltless Gourmet Baked Not Fried Tortilla Chips.

Exercise Mariah occasionally swims or uses a treadmill. "And I jusr bought a stationary bike. I'm not coordinated enough to bike around the streets of New York,"

Never with Cigarettes. "I used to smoke in school, but these days my voice can't take it."

Never without MAC Spice lip pencil, lipgloss and antiseptic wipes. "I can't afford to get sick, so I use them to wipe off germs."

Most hated beauty treatment "Electrolysis. I have this special chair in my house for facials and electrolysis treatments. It's not a whole lot of fun, but it works."


Many thanks to Kerry from MariahCareyCollection for the scans.

Simplemente Mariah [Simply Mariah] Vogue (Spain) - March 2000 Issue

Simplemente Mariah [Simply Mariah]
Vogue (Spain) - March 2000 Issue

Mariah Carey, one of the most successful singers of the world, makes us see that glory is a colorful subject and happiness is not on millions of records sold. With no need to hide her human fragility, the diva makes an honest revelation.

Mariah Carey is unhappy. She says so between her teeth, trying to keep the tears that involuntarily well up her black eyes. Eventhough the rest of humankind would pay to have just a tiny part of her fame or money, she doesn't enjoy those things. "Being famous is something strange, complicated. I feel the need to be thankful everyday for all I got, but I am still a vulnerable person, I've suffered a lot, I've worked a lot to be where I am, but..."

She didn't finish the sentence. She almost never does so. She looks to another side and tries to smile. She looks fragile. Maybe it's the flu she has since she started promoting her eighth album, Rainbow, one week ago. But something is for sure: being the female singer that sold most albums and singles during the 90's (120 million records in the whole world) "is not the secret to happiness."

She is sitting inside a restaurant in New York, waiting for her limousine to take her to the airport to travel to Europe. The happy face that shines in all the promotions of her album and these days cover all her home town have nothing to do with the young girl squatted and exhausted that speaks confusedly to Vogue about the meaning of life. "I am learning to know myself, to accept myself, to be myself. I think that is the key." During this interview, Mariah Carey, 29 years old, repeats constantly three things: "I've been misunderstood, I am a fighter that received nothing easily and that wants to be fre." To understand her words, you need to dive deep into her past. She was raised in New York as part of a poor and problematic family, divorced parents and conflicted brothers. Since three years old she started living with her mother, an opera singer who used to do from Aretha Franklin songs to famous arias. She became independent at fifteen, starting her work as a waitress while writing and recording her own songs. She wanted to be successful with music and one day the miracle came true: in 1988 she met Tommy Mottola, an executive of the recording company Sony who she married in 1993. After listening to a tape recorded by Mariah, Mottola decided to record an album. "That was my biggest desire, get out of poorness and… be a famous singer!", exclaims while looking at a glass of white wine.

With her first album, entitled Mariah Carey, she received two Grammy awards and sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. Nonetheless, eventhough the critics recognized the power of her voice (which covers six octaves), they attacked her because of the simplicity of the lyrics (classic stories of falling in and out of love) and the excessively sentimental side of the songs. But her ballads, which created hordes of fans around the world, were slowly giving place to other types of music, and Rainbow is the most evident proof. "I've grown in the streets of New York, hip-hop is part of my culture, so nobody should be surprised that I began to introduce it to my albums," she affirms. The first step was done with Butterfly, her sixth album, with the collaboration of famous rappers like Puff Daddy and Krazy Bone. It wasn't a coincidence that such work was her first after separating from Tommy Mottola in 1997. "He didn't let me do what I really wanted. Because of that, once I was free, I could express musically who I am," she underlines.

Since the beginning, Mariah talked constantly about before and after Tommy Mottola. Even though she always wrote her songs, "before" he/they (the recording company) were deciding what she could do or not, and "now" she makes her own decisions. "I don't blame them. I was young and inexperienced but I've learned." She even changed the way to talk about herself. Nobody can say she is "just" a singer because then she becomes mad. "I am a writer, a producer, a musician," she says in a cutting way.

The genesis of Rainbow coincides with her new romantic relationship: the Mexican singer Luis Miguel. "He is a secure man, accepts me as I am and doesn't interferes in my work." They even recorded a song together for the album but scrapped it because they didn't like the final result. "Our relationship doesn't need to be commercially explored," she clarifies rapidly.

Co-produced with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (famous producers), Rainbow features important rappers as Jay-Z, Da Brat, Missy Elliot and Snopp Dogg. And even tough it is undeniable that they contributed to the evolution of her music, she continued with the same formula for the lyrics and the excessively sentimental ballads that enrapture some and... keep annoying others? We dared to ask. "No! Rainbow is a fan with many musical influences. My music is changing because I am changing!" clearly offended by the insinuation.

Well, calm down. Let's change the subject. Her new passion: the movies. She just did a cameo in the movie Gary Sinyor's The Bachelor, and in spring she will start to film All That Glitters, a musical written by Kate Lanier. It's the story of a singer who achieved stardom during the 80's and that, by the way, is protagonized by Mariah. She is the producer of the movie and the writer of the soundtrack too. "I always wanted to act. I took almost two years of acting classes and now all my energy is concentrated on that. Being an actress is very important to me because it's teaching me how to show my emotions, to not feel ashamed of what I feel, it's... (silence and then smiles).

The absolute idol of Mariah Carey is Marilyn Monroe. Her admiration for the actress made her invest 106 million of pesetas to buy her grand piano in an auction. "I don't even know if I am going to keep it. I would like to donate it to a museum." But there isn't a museum dedicated to Marilyn, I tell her. "But we need to create one. She deserves it. Everything that was auctioned there should go to a museum. Marilyn's piano is a piece of American history. I wanted to save it from the plunder. It represents her childhood, her mother, all the problems she had as a little girl and that made her who she was. I grew up admirating her. She suffered a lot, was not comprehended, always playing the fool, but...was an intellectual of our century! Does Mariah identifies herself with Marilyn? "I feel a connection with her because I was a sad girl too that suffered a lot and started to desire to feel well, to do things that made her feel well, it was hard." Mariah's eyes are full of tears again. But there is her manager, ready to save her and take her to the airport. "You can finish the interview in the car," exclaims the singer-writer-producer-actress. While in the streets of New York, I want to know what Mariah thinks about politcs. "I am an artist, I don't have opinions about those things" (Dry). Before she gets bored again, it's better to change the subject. "Does Mariah sleep in airplanes?" "I've had insomnia for years. I spend many nights talking on the phone, listening to music, watching movies, writing songs…" And what do you read? "Guides" But no writer? "Stevie Wonder. He is the best. An inspiration in my life." No writer of books? "Ah!" exclaims, thinks about it and then shoots "Jimmy Angelo."

"Time is over. We are about to get there," warns her manager. And then, with the advice, it's time for the last question. What is Mariah Carey's goal? "Be a happy person and (doubts)... learn to act, do a good movie and that people remember me as a person who fought to achieve her dreams."



Many thanks to Kerry from MariahCareyCollection for the scans and Joao for translating the article.

The Whirling Diva Rolling Stone - February 17, 2000 Issue

The Whirling Diva
Rolling Stone - February 17, 2000 Issue

Recipe for Mariah's life: mix one part screwball comedy, one part global capitalism, add hip-hop beats, shake well in a private jet and serve over ice.
by Mim Udovitch

Mariah Carey is in the characteristic double-helix whirl of activity that occupies what seems like 105 percent of her time. She is, to use her word, in a spiral. It is one o'clock in the morning, which is about the middle of the day in Mariah's universe, and is wearing a gray hooded swear shirt and customized Mariah jeans - with the cuffs and waistband cut off - a look she developed while shooting the cover for the "Heartbreaker" single. "My stylist, Tonjua Twist, was rolling down the top of my jeans, because when you wear jeans that are up to here, they can give you a roll of fat," she explains. "But I liked the way they fit on the butt. And she kept having to step in and step in, so finally I was like, 'Rip it, cut it,' and then that night, when I wore them out, everybody was like, 'Wow, where'd you get those jeans?' So then we started doing it to all of them."

For Mariah, the spiral wears many guises: There is the travel spiral, the mood spiral and, as is the case at this moment, the work spiral. Mariah is in Miami, although she started the day in Argentina, and she is just settling in for an edit session on a television special for which she went back and performed at her junior high school, on Long Island, where she grew up with her mother - her parents divorced when she was three. "It started out with wanting to do something after the things that happened in Columbine, and I still have dreams about junior high and high school days," she says. "So I thought it would be something positive to do." After she's finished with that, she will be going to Venezuela to spend a few days with her boyfriend, Latin American pop superstar Luis Miguel, 29, and then to Los Angeles for a photo shoot, Las Vegas to accept the Billboard Music Award for Artist of the Decade, and Mexico to promote her record. With no makeup, her hair pulled back and her feet - clad in Prada mules with gray mesh tops and really, really high red heels - up on the desk in front of her, she looks a little bit like a third-grader who got into mother's closet and then unexpectedly inherited a multinational corporation.

Although not actually the inheritor of a multinational corporation - Mariah grew up without much money, and her mother, an opera singer and voice teacher, sometimes worked as many as three jobs at a time to keep the family afloat - she is, at twenty-nine, a majot asset to one: Sony, the parent company of her record label, Columbia. Since last summer, Mariah has written and recorded an album (Rainbow), see its first single ("Heartbreaker") go to Number One, made three videos and shot a television special. She is the only artist to have had Number One hit in every year of the past decade, a feat last achieved in the Twenties. She has had more Number One hits than any female artist, any active artist of either gender and, for that matter, any artist of any kind except for Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Globally, she has sold a staggering 105 million records since her debut, in 1990. She is currently in preproduction on a film she's been developing about a pop singer in the Eighties, called All That Glitters. She has done numerous in-store appearances and interviews. And she has done all this while wearing really, really high heels.

In fact, sometimes she has done all this while wearing really, really high heels twice - her evil alter ego, Bianca, with whom she grapples in the "Heartbreaker" video, is also not an aficionado of sensible footwear. Actually, given the grand arc of the spiral that is Mariah's life, two personae hardly seem like enough to handle the cell-phone traffic, let alone that work commitments. "I think her friends get more excited by her success than she does," says singer Trey Lorenz, who met Mariah when she was recording her first album. "I'll be like, 'You just broke the Supremes' record for Number One singles!' But maybe that's because she's always working."

Mariah recorded most of Rainbow in Capri, Italy, which was, because it's a hilly island and you have to walk everywhere, something of a footwear challenge. "I had to hike up a hill to the studio every day, so I just ended up sleeping there - it was a room that was not stellar," she says, making quotation marks with her fingers around the word stellar, which she pronounces, as she does certain words and phrases, a la Dr. Evil; Mariah is a big "Austin Powers fan. "It wasn't like a grand suite of any kind," she continues, preparing to launch into one of the most characteristic spirals in the spiral repertoire, the conversational spiral, "but I really don't care about having a huge room. I like to be in a more intimate setting. But this was taking it to the next level, because there were constant mosquitoes and it wasn't very clean and it was really small, so I would just go up and sing, and then I would sleep for as long as I could, and then, so I would at least feel like I had a little bit of a summer, I would take these little boats - there were no big boats available, because it was the height of the tourist season - to the Blue Grotto. One day I woke up right in front of the siren rock. The sirens would sit there and lure in the men. They gave them this rock because women were considered less important than men, and that's their revenge: They sexually entice men with their voices to come to this rock. And I happened to wake up in front of the siren rock, and I just fell in love with that."

To say that Mariah is a hands-on artist is to vastly understate the case. She is dizzy dame (all those spirals), but her dizziness in no way indicates a lack of purpose or intelligence; if anything, it indicates an excess of those qualities. She is happy, she is in charge, and she is happy to be in charge. Her 1997 divorce from Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola, who signed her to her original deal after hearing the demo tape she handed him at a party as a teenager, has had a liberating effect. The marriage was not a peaceful one, and though both parties say that their current relationship is amicable, a burden has obviously been lifted - friends of Mariah's used to jokingly call the house in Bedford Hills, New York, that she shared with Mottola "Sing Sing," because the perceived demand for new records ("Sing! Sing!") was so unrelenting. (Incidentally, the house, which was sold in 1998, burned to the ground in December. Neither former spouse was seen running through the neighborhood with a torch.) As the fair-minded and astute reader will perceive, as a simple explanation, this characterization of the marriage founders a little on the fact that she's at liberty to do anything, it makes her want to sing! sing! sing!

Either way, the point is that Mariah a busy diva. "If I didn't see and experience all the things she does in a day, I wouldn't believe it, either," says her mother, Patricia Carey. "She's always been like that: never stopping, always writing, always doing something." "She's a trouper, to say the least," agrees director Brett Ratner, who did the "Heartbreaker" video. "But se's like a kid, too. 'That's what's so crazy, because when you're with Mariah, it's, like Mariah's reality. It's like, 'Jump on and go for the ride,' And, look, she's really, really smart. She does everything: She writes, she produces. People think she's writing these songs just to sell records, but these songs come right from her heart."

In the meantime, Mariah's hectic pace is so well know that even her fan mail frequently abjures her to take some time off. She doesn't sleep, for one thing, and when she travels on business, she has to take along two people from her management company, so they can work in shifts. ("I just think I sleep better with anything that moves," she says. "Like on the plane, I know I have no choice except to stay put. When I was little, I used to sleep in cars.") Whether from anxiety or positive energy or a combination of the two, she is constitutionally incapable of doing just one thing - for example, in addition to traveling to Venezuela to see Luis, she is going to try to research the Venezuelan side of her half-African-Venezuelan side of her father's family tree. (Mariah, whose mother is Irish-American, titled Rainbow partly in reference to her multiracial origins.) With Rainbow, as with Butterfly, she has been even more involved than on her previous albums; since her divorce, her sound has increasingly reflected her taste for hip-hop, and Rainbow features guest appearances by Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Da Brat and Missy Elliott, and samples from songs like "Aint' No Fun If the Homies Can't Have None," as well as the purer pop of the inspirational ballads with which she is most associated. (In addition to having two personae, Mariah has three physiologically distinct singing voices: what's called a whisper voice, which is the uppermost part of her range; the high voice, breathy voice that falls in the middle; and the belting range. "They stick a thing down your throat - I have pictures of it, she says. "When my doctor lectures, he uses me as an example. A freak example.")

Quite apart from co-writing and co-producing almost all of her work, she has, since the release of Rainbow, been on a promotional spiral that has covered four continents and the purpose of which appears to be to come as close to meeting each and every fan in person as humanly possible while getting at least four hours of sleep a night. "Sometimes I don't realize where I am anymore," she says, continuing to summarize the last five months, "because I'm in so many places - literally a city a day. But I think what happened after Capri is, I went to New York... No! First I went to Tenerife [Spain], where Luis was giving a concert, and I thought that was going to be my little vacation time, but it wasn't as stellar a place as I thought it was going to be. But, still, it was nice to be with him, so I begged and pleaded with him to go to Capri with me before I went back and started my schedule. And that's not exactly a short jaunt. So, let's see...then I went from Capri - are you cold? - from Capri to New York. Oh, and also, in the middle of this whole thing, I did the 'Heartbreaker' video in Los Angeles, and then I was completely bedridden, because I did my own stunts. I knew how to do a roundhouse kick, because my brother is a fifth-degree black belt, and they taught me the rest. But the person I had to fight against, she's a great girl, but she connected with me a few times, and I was bruised from head to toe. So I was in bed and I couldn't move. I was in misery; I had her handprints on my leg, and nobody was there helping me except for Luis. He was like, "I'll be your assistant for the day,' so he was taking care of me and getting me stuff. And he said, 'Open your eyes, open your eyes, look over there,' and I thought, 'Ooh, what did he do?' because he's a master of surprises. So I opened my eyes and Mini Me was standing there in the bathroom! I thought it was the real Mini-Me, because Mini-Me hangs out and is often spotted in clubs. So I was like, 'Don't even tell me he brought Mini-Me here when I'm in this state of misery.' And it was a cardboard cutout that he saw in a store, but since his bathroom has lots of mirrors and I only opened my eyes for a second, it looked real. Then we went to Europe and I did this whole promotional mess, and I'm not sure if I went home in between or not. Oh, yes, I came back and we released the album, and then I tool some fans who were winners of a contest to Europe with me on a plane. They called it Rainbow One, but it wasn't like it was some elaborately painted, beautiful plane. They were, like, they were going to make this rainbow plane, and I was like, 'Oh great.' And then when I got there, they had thrown this sticker on; it was not stellar at all, it was not banging. Then I went to Chicago on the Rainbow plane and did Oprah, and we brought fans with us, which I love. Anything that involves actual interaction with real fans who give me feedback and stuff like that. Then I either went back to Europe or I went back to Hong Kong. I'm not sure which happened first. Then I went through Asia and to South America, and now here."

Mariah and Luis met a year ago in Aspen, where each was spending Christmas. They were set up by the real-estate agents who rented them their respective houses - Mariah's agent told her that Luis wanted to meet her, and Luis' agent told him that Mariah wanted to meet him. Although Mariah's love life is the subject of intense speculation in the press, her relationship with Luis has been relatively quiet on a public level. It does make an occasional appearance in the gossip columns, however. Shortly after they met, an item appeared reporting that he had given her a diamond necklace. "Well, he did do that," says Mariah when this rumor is raised. "But it was not like a big, elaborate diamond necklace; it's a nice Bulgari diamond necklace, and it was Christmas Eve, so it was appropriate. We met the day before Christmas Eve." She is sitting, eating carrot and celery sticks, in the vaguely Etruscan courtyard of the Miami recording studio where the vocal tracks for the television special are being mixed. (If there is one thing Mariah, who has been dieting, would like the world to know, it is that Joan Rivers has caused her to have an eating disorder by saying she looked fat at last year's Academy Awards.)

She is wearing her Mariah jeans and a short gray tank that leaves her midriff bare, and on one wrist a bunch of bracelets made of multicolored semiprecious stones that she collects for their rainbow symbolism, along with a gold bracelet she got as a birthday gift from a friend and a very tasteful diamond bracelet she got from Luis for Valentine's Day. "In the beginning," she says of their relationship, "I didn't know where it was going, I was just in my whoo! stage of hanging out. And it was like I was on ecstasy - everything was like it was the greatest thing on earth. Because my fixation about feeling like an outsider in every situation, I used to have this whole thing from when I was a little girl that was like, 'Someday I will meet somebody mixed who will look like me, and we'll have a similar life, and we'll be happy ever after,' and the would complete me somehow. Not to be quoting Jerry Maguire, but I felt like it was going to make me whole as a person, because I felt like such a fragmented combo plate of things. But it doesn't work that way - you have to find someone who is emotionally compatible. And Luis is that way, because, first of all, the fact that we're both musicians is an interesting new dynamic, which is really great. I went to a show of his last week where women were passing out and fainting and being carried out on stretchers. It was, like, 50,000 people, and some people had signs that said, 'Luis and Mariah,' and it was really nice, it was really cute. It's not nasty or competitive or negative. Because he's like a king in those countries, but I have devoted fans down there, too. People ask me all the time if there's any competition, but it's the furthers thing from that."

As the oblique references to her brief relationship with multiracial Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter in the above quote indicate, Mariah is a little reluctant to discuss her personal life in detail. However, she is obliging to a fault, and several days later she calls from... oh, someplace, where she is getting her makeup done in a car on the way to a press conference, to deliver the following report on the Billboard Music Awards spiraling toward a Luis anecdote, which is the purpose of the call. "It was really great, and afterward we went to this restaurant. And there was this woman there, and it was her boyfriend's birthday, and she asked me if I would sing 'Happy Birthday' to him, because she had told him the night was going to be full of surprises. So my friend Trey and I did a little impromptu version of 'Happy Birthday.' But before that, she was going, 'I'll give you $100 if you sing, I'll give you $100.' And I said, 'No, it's OK, you don't have to.' And she's going into her bag and pulling out money, and I was saying, 'No, it's OK! Keep the $100, it's not a problem.' Isn't that pretty great? I think it's pretty funny, after winning Artist of the Decade, to be offered $100 to sing 'Happy Birthday.' So I had this really great night. For once, I had this really happy, triumphant feeling about the whole thing. I was really happy with the whole thing. And also, Luis sent me flowers to the suite and a congratulatory note, and it was really sweet, because he tried to send ten dozen roses but they only had seven dozen in all of Vegas. And so with the roses there was a note from the florist, apologizing and saying, 'He tried to send you ten dozen but he cleaned out all the roses in Vegas.' So how cute is that?"

Truth be told, Mariah is, in her happiness, in fact something of a screwball diva. For example, she is thinking about doing a world tour and starting it in Guam, because she has always, since she was a little girl, had a hypnotic fascination with the word, Guam, and she recently received a fan letter from Guam, saying she had lot of fans in Guam, and Dr. Evil, she believes, has his underground world headquarters in Guam, but she has heard there are a lot of snakes in Guam, which fall out of the trees of Guam, and the snake of Guam have eaten all the birds of Guam, so there are no birds in Guam. Strangely enough, one thing that has historically been used to kills the snakes of Guam are the Jack Russell terriers of Guam; even more strangely, Mariah has a number of Jack Russell terriers, one of which is named Guam. So, she reasons, she will start her tour in Guam, and she will have Sporty Thievz for her opening act, and they can sing "No Pigeons," and then, at the end of the show, she will do "Hero" and release a bunch of pigeons. Then there will be birds in Guam, and maybe she will also donate some Jack Russell terriers. When objections to this plan are raised, she says, "But I'm afraid of snakes. What else can I do? Well, if she puts it that way, nothing.

"I always said that if Mariah's personality came out as it really is, there would be no stopping her and people would really love her," says Trey Lorenz. "I think it was different even a few years ago, when she really wasn't able to express herself. Now, when people are like, 'She's so different!' I say, 'No, you're actually seeing more of Mariah, as far as the cool side and the person who's just like you, more than you ever got to see.' Because she's cool people." Agrees Mariah's mom, "She's certainly more content with herself, and there's a peace that she has now that she didn't have for a long time, that she certainly didn't have when she was married. But now she's back to being the old Mariah. The Mariah who grew up fun-loving and outgoing is back. And she wasn't here for a while."

Despite having sold 105 million records worldwide during the last ten years, Mariah, who recently bought an apartment in downtown Manhattan but who has been living in hotels and sublets since her marriage ended, owns only one piece of furniture: Marilyn Monroe's mother's old white baby grand piano, for which she paid $662,000 at auction last fall. "My accountant was dying," she says. "Actually, I also own a chair that Louise McNally, my manager, gave me because she felt bad that I didn't own any furniture. It's a gold and white chair, from probably circa 1801. It's a very nice chair; she gave it to me for Christmas last year. But I have always loved Marilyn, since I was a little girl and I saw my mother watching a documentary about her life, and for some reason I was really taken by her. And the rest of the world was, too, so it's not such a thing, but I had an increased fascination with her, and I started reading books about her. Which was maybe not really material for an eight-year-old kid to be reading, but I learned a lot of things about her life, so I know that the piano was something that belonged to Gladys, her mother. And since her mother was institutionalized and it was a big issue for her, and her father never acknowledged her, and she didn't have any children, although she tried a lot of times, and she had no family to say how she would want her things distributed... I mean, would you want someone auctioning off your things randomly who you didn't even know? I feel like she's such an icon that she deserved a Graceland, but she doesn't have one. Anyway, my point is, the piano was her mom's. She lost it along the way when her mother was institutionalized, but somehow she went through all this trouble to find this white piano again. So that was a really sentimental thing for her, and she didn't have very many things that belonged to her family, so I just wanted to make sure that someone who cared about it got it, and I'm going to keep it, but I'm going to make sure that eventually it goes to a museum. When something happens to me. Or maybe before that I'll put it in a museum, I don't know - I'll have to see what the energy and the vibe is around it, because it's a pretty intense thing. But she was taken advantage of by a lot of people, I was glad I got the piano, because that's something that I think shouldn't be exploited, when it was something she really cared about. And it's kind of coming full circle from being a little girl reading books about her to being able to actually buy something like this. I guess what it cost was kind of a joke, but I don't own anything else - this is the only thing that I own. And it meant something to me. In fact, I'm really happy about it."