“Are you sure you don't want a fig roll?”
Mariah is pacing her office at Sony Records in New York in flat black pumps. She is wearing tight gold trousers and a striped vest top. “My friend is having a party later,” she explains, looking every inch the glamour puss.
Stretching her legs, Mariah draws herself up to her full 5' 9" height and suddenly seems surprisingly tall and very slim. She is determined that I should try one of these biscuits and returns with two in her hand so that I can munch along with her as we talk. We've already chatted about her astounding singing success, but I want to know more about what it's really like being Mariah Carey. For instance, what's it like being married to the President of SonyRecords, Tommy Mottola?
“It only makes a difference because people focus on it,” snaps Mariah, who has spent much of the past five years defending herself from claims that it was only Tommy pulling strings that got her noticed.
“No person has that much power,” she retaliates. “You could maybe pull out one gold record from a lot of promotion, but you can't make something do that every time. I don't care if you're the king of the world. It doesn't happen that way.”
Ouch! Obviously a sore point. But I was thinking more of what you're like at home. Do you run around doing wifey things for him, like ironing his shirt and cooking?
Mariah shrieks in horror.
“Oh no, please! That's not for me! No deal! I mean, when I was growing up, it was my nightmare that I would end up having to do that with some guy. Fortunately, we have people to help us with that kind of stuff.”
Apparently Tommy is not averse to putting on an apron and making like Delia Smith in the kitchen. “He's an incredible cook!” enthuses Mariah. “He's the best chef I've ever encountered and (affecting a serious gourmet voice) I've been all over the world.”
She falls about laughing, but in case I'm in any doubt about the extent of his talents, Mariah goes off on one again. “He should actually bottle his spaghetti sauce and sell I it, because it's so good!”
By the time Mariah had sealed her success with her second album, Music Box, it became clear, even to the tonsil-wobbling songstress herself, that she was making a considerable amount of money. “When I first started out, it was like all these people, like managers, wanted to take me to dinner. I only realised later that half the time I was paying!” She grins for a moment. “No offence to my manager, because he does pay for dinner from time to time,” she continues, “but you soon figure that every time anything gets done — be it a messenger or a car or whatever — it comes out of your own pocket. Originally, I never knew that.”
Mariah soon set things in order, however. Now every expense must be signed off by her. “I'm going to look like this penny-pinching miser,” she grins, before adding, by way of an explanation, “I grew up moving from place to place, always feeling like somebody was going to pull the rug out from under me. Now I just want to make sure that my rug is straight.”
You get the impression that Mariah is a very determined young woman who has worked hard to realise her ambitions, but there have been sacrifices along the way. As she became successful, she found people she'd once been close to turning against her.
“Some friends turned out not to be real friends,” is how she puts it. “It's been really kind of sad. But I've kept a few of my good friends. Like, I had a Memorial Day (a special American Bank Holiday) party the other day with some old and new friends and it was really nice.”
Of course, some of those friends are very famous. Singers Bruce Springsteen, Gloria Estefan, Billy Joel and Michael Bolton attended her wedding, along with actors Robert De Niro and William Baldwin. Since then, she has become friends (and worked with) Boyz II Men and Luther Vandross.
“It's good to have people around who know what it's like,” she says. “I never want to complain, because I always think it sounds ungrateful, but it is kind of difficult to deal with a lot of people and things in this business. You know, it's fun to go to award shows and see stars and be glamorous and blah blah blah… but it s not reality. That's more about being with good people.”
So instead Mariah hangs out with her true friends, many of them the songwriters and musicians she's worked with on her albums, away from the public eye, going to parties and riding rollercoasters — her favourite is the Tower Of Terror at Disneyland in LA. She also spends a lot of time with her animals at home and her eyes light up with enthusiasm when she talks about them. They all live together happily at her out-of-town estate in Hudson River Valley. It's quite a menagerie, with four dogs (two Dobermans called Princess and Duke and two Yorkies called Jack and Ginger) and three cats (Thomkins, “who my brother dropped off years ago and never got back”; Clarence, “my childhood cat”; and Puffy, “a big, fat, fluffy Himalayan cat”).
Mariah clearly has her favourites. “Clarence is my lifelong friend,” she says simply. Puffy was a present from Tommy, “which was a shock because he hates cats!”
Luckily, the cats live in a different part of the house to Tommy, though Duke is hard to avoid. “Tommy wants to get rid of him,” Mariah explains, “'cause he's kind of out of control. He's huge and hates everyone except me.” She grins mischievously.
The two Yorkies are stars in their own right. Jack, who has made appearances in three of Mariah's videos, is famed for his swimming abilities — “He dives like a seal” — while Ginger made a more sedate appearance wandering around in the background of the video she recorded with Boyz II Men, One Sweet Day. “She's nice, but she's untrainable,” Mariah sighs regretfully. “She still doesn't know where to go and where not to go, you know?”
One of Mariah's other passions is Camp Mariah, the holiday camp for underprivileged inner city children that she helped create with the Fresh Air Fund. Mariah held a special one-off concert which raised a whopping $750,000 to help set up the fund. The idea was to provide a place where children could play outside the city and, at the same time, learn about future careers.
“A lot of them only have negative influences, like drug dealers on the street,” explains Mariah. “They're the only people they can look up to, with their nice cars, so at least when they come to these things, they meet people who give them a different outlook.”
Some lucky kids were even taken on day trips to Mariah's recording studios. “I recorded them singing and they talked to the engineer and learned about tracking and stuff.”
With her latest album Daydream, and her 19th single, Always Be My Baby, riding high in the charts, it seems like the Cinderella story really has come true for Mariah. But has life really been that rosy?
“Can anything be that good?” questions Mariah. “I mean, really? I'm thankful beyond belief for what I have, but I work harder than most people could understand, and it's a struggle because people have different perceptions of you. I don't come from a Brady Bunch-style family, so there are a lot of serious issues that I have no control over. And now some of those things have become public.”
Mariah is talking specifically about her sister Alison. If Mariah is the fairytale Princess, Alison could be seen as the flipside. Recently, the press in America broke the story that Alison had been diagnosed HIV positive and that Mariah was concerned about the welfare of Alison's child.
“People think they have the right to say things, and they do because it's a free country. But instead of sitting there over dinner and saying, ‘Oh, not again,’ with your family, you deal with it in a huge tabloid extravaganza. People with a pen think they're being cute and sarcastic and getting a scoop, but they don't realise that it's real people and children's lives that are being, affected. But,” she adds, “you deal with it and move on.”
And there you have the secret to Mariah Carey's success. People will continue to knock her. They will try and peel the paint away from the golden girl exterior, but Mariah will always be ready for them.
“My life is incredible,” she concludes, “but it's just like anybody else's.”
Well, no, it's not. One thing is true, however — there is more to this lady than meets the eye. Instead of the fluffy-brained singer I'd expected, I met a tough-talking and open individual who will no doubt continue to surprise the world of music for a long time to come. Total respect is due.
