Stunning, dark-haired pop diva Mariah Carey spoke in a surprisingly deep voice of her “ugly duckling” phase.
“My mom was sort of a left-over hippie. She wasn't the type of mom who dressed their girl's hair in little curly bows. At one point when I was 12, I tried to lighten it and it came out orange. And I didn't know you were supposed to pluck your eyebrows, so I shaved them and they were uneven. So for a while I didn't have them.”
But the singer weathered childhood, and adolescence, just fine. In fact, Mariah Carey is the stuff of dreams.
At 23, Carey is enjoying the success of her latest album, Music Box, and its hit single, “Dreamlover.” She already has won two Grammys (best new artist and best pop vocal performance, female) for her first album, Mariah Carey, and one of its tracks, “Vision of Love.” Billboard named her top female artist for the last two years. She will be Jay Leno's guest Monday on The Tonight Show.
And on top of her soaring musical career, she married Sony Music president Tommy Mottola in a June wedding with a long list of stars in attendance.
Thursday, Carey stars in her first network special, This Is Mariah Carey (10 on NBC), taped July 15 during Carey's first live concert, at historic Proctor's Theater in Schenectady, N.Y.
In the hour-long show, Carey performs past hits such as “Love Takes Time” from the first album, and the title track from Emotions, her second album. In addition, the camera captures her at her lush country home in upstate New York, frolicking with friends and pizza dough in a kitchen food fight, plus interviews with friends and family.
A native New Yorker, Carey was taught to sing from age 4 by her mother, Patricia Carey, a former singer with the New York City Opera and a vocal coach. Mariah, blessed with a voice noted for its range, wrote songs during high school and hustled jobs waitressing and hat-checking.
But she was also pursuing a career in music. A breakthrough occurred when she landed a back-up stint for singer Brenda K. Starr, who handed Carey's demo tape to Sony's Mottola.
“Tommy played the tape in his car and got ahold of me through her management and wanted to make a deal,” said Carey. A year later the album was released that would make hers a household name.
Her advice to young people with similar dreams: “I would say the most important thing to do is to picture yourself doing it and really succeeding — to never give up, to just keep going. I know I would never give up.”
Carey's parents divorced when she was quite young, and she grew up with her mother in a middle-class neighborhood. Her two siblings are much older. But she said she always felt different from those around her, perhaps because of her mixed parentage: Her father, an aeronautical engineer, is black and Venezuelan; her mother is of Irish descent. “Also I didn't have a lot of money,” she added.
Patricia Carey, she said, is “one of those people who doesn't try to impose her ideas on others. She really let me develop my own personality, my own style, my own vocal technique.”
Carey didn't want to follow her mother into opera. “You have to train for that,” she said. “I never really gravitated toward that because you have to study and be disciplined, and I'm not that.” She said she enjoys being able to sing a song a different way night after night, if she wants to.
Carey's upcoming tour will allow her to do just that. She noted that her MTV Unplugged live performance was a good indicator of things to come. (Her songs from that show were released as an extended-play album, “Mariah Carey MTV Unplugged.”) With that preparation, she said, she's ready to see her audiences.
“I think more than anything, MTV Unplugged helped me feel mentally ready to get out there on tour,” she said. “It is tough to sing that many songs in the style of singing that I do, back to back.”
Maybe that's why she has taken some heat for giving stiff performances.
“I'm still growing,” she said. “The first Grammy [ceremony], in '90, was very difficult — the crowd is very far away from you.” Not so in her NBC special, where the audience is closer and, she said, “You really get to feel the people.”
Carey said she plans to watch the special with family and friends Thursday night after their own Thanksgiving dinner.