Mariah Carey, the biggest-selling female pop-singer of the Nineties, has a bit of trouble with the question of what she does for fun. She tried horse-riding, but gave it up. She runs, swims and water-skis for health and muscle tone. She has no known vices. She likes new clothes, but has given up shopping, for fear of being recognised in the fitting rooms; she now has stylists bring her the fashion lines, in her spanking new mansion in the New York suburbs.
Thinking it over, she taps the floor gently with an expensive, virgin shoe that has hit the pavement only between the limousine and the door.
Then she brightens, and even smiles. What she really likes to do is to go to the funfair. She ties her hair in braids, pulls on a baseball cap and heads incognito to DisneyWorld or the Six Flags amusement park of New Jersey. “You know the Tower of Terror?” she asks, suddenly chattering. “It's incredible, really cool. You drop 13 storeys, just like that!”
Carey is 26, but could easily pass for a willowy teenager. She has sold 75 million records in six years, and is already worth perhaps $300 million. She scooped her Grammy awards at the first try, with Mariah Carey, the first of four wonder-albums, and has gold and platinum discs flying in from all corners of the world.
And today, she is sitting amid the full pomp and circumstance of the pop star, enthroned on a television stage at New York's Sony Music studios, accepting the attentions of technicians, gofers and public relations personnel. When she needs to go to the bathroom, she is accompanied down the corridor, past the laden buffet table and tangles of video cables, by two massive body guards in perfect security formation. She is wearing a muted, earth-toned trouser-and-top outfit that speaks of maturity, and a couple of dazzling diamond rings that speak of fabulous wealth.
But it is the image of Carey in braids, squealing with delight as she rollercoasters through the innocent, happy-ever-after world of Walt Disney's fantasy America, that lodges in the mind.
Mariah Carey is a pop phenomenon who is either loved or loathed. In the market place, she is clearly loved. Her following divides roughly into two: sub-teenagers, and thirty-something suburban devotees of “lite” radio stations. Any class of 12-year-old girls is likely to divide roughly down the middle into Carey adorers and those who declare allegiance to the wilder rock ‘n’ roll of Courtney Love or Alanis Morissette. She sells particularly well in Japan.
Her key asset is her voice, which commands the full five-octave range, soaring and diving like her favourite rollercoaster. The result is somewhere between R‘n’B, gospel and opera, all crafted to the limit through studio synthesisers.
She writes her own songs, which gives her a pitch of teenage fantasy romance almost unknown since the squeaky-clean das of Fifties pop. “We were as one/ for a moment in time” she sings in “Always Be My Baby” on her latest album, Daydream, “and it seemed everlasting/ that you would always be mine/ now you want to be free/ so I'll let you fly”.
If you shut your eyes and listen to this, you can get the feeling of being stuck in a very slow elevator riding all the way to the top of the Empire State Building. Pop stars are held to be the Pied Pipers of the era, but the kids are safe with this one.
Carey is so successful that any criticism can seem like jealous carping, but those who loathe her say her music is a soulless, synthetic betrayal of a musical heritage. They complain that she “showboats” her voice, never singing one note when a dozen will do, and that her work is all style and no content. It is an odd thing that she has attracted at least three law suits accusing her of plagiarism. She is fighting a new one now.
She is also answering at least one complaint, that she never performs on stage, and cannot. After an initial bout of paralysing stage fright, she has now completed 10 American dates, and started a world tour. This Sunday at Wembley Arena, she performs in Britain for the first time. “It is a difficult time for me,” she says. “It's a learning experience.”
But the focus of the Carey-rage that flashes through the music scene is on the way she has soared to the top. She is married to the boss, Tommy Mottola, president of Sony Music, and thus among the most powerful men in the business. What is more, Mottola left his wife and two children for her, making Carey — for all her good-girl image — the target of accusations that she is a marriage-wrecker.
“I know people bitch about it all the time,” she says, “but I just don't think about it in those terms.” She deeply resents the idea that she is at the pinnacle of pop only because of Mottola: “Nobody, whoever you are, can make someone go into a store and buy a record.”
But she is pleased with the suggestion that he may have needed her as much as she needed him — she has been the star Sony earner at a time when the company, bled by a frenzy of corporate takeovers, most urgently needed one.
But, perhaps simply because she remains awkward in public, she strikes a flat note when talking about her man. “He's a great guy,” she says, “a very warm person. He cares about me a lot.” And then she adds: “Marriage, like all of life, is a challenge.”
It is hard to get away from the aura of Disney and rags-to-riches fairy tales. Her meeting with Mottola is officially cast as a fairy tale, and she uses the words herself, her eyes brightening just as they do when she talks about her rollercoasters.
The story is that she met him by chance at a music-biz party, back when she was an unknown, unrecorded 18-year-old. She had been taken along by the blues singer Brenda Starr, for whom she was singing back-up, and Starr, generously, was determined to press a Carey “demo” tape into the palm of a record company talent seeker. She found one, who just happened to be talking to Mottola at the time.
“So Tommy grabbed it! I was standing right there!” says Mariah. “Brenda says: ‘Listen, she writes her own songs and sings incredible’ and Tommy takes the tape. I figured he would throw it out the window of his limo…”
But he did not. Instead, he played the first three songs as he journeyed home, turned the car around and sped back to the party. He was too late: his Cinderella had left. He got her telephone number from Starr, left a message on her answering machine, and signed her up the following Monday. There are millions of teenage wannabes who dream of this.
They worked on her first record for two years, and spent $500,000 to get the first MTV video just right. “I worked very closely with him,” she says, “and it evolved that way.” Three years ago, they married in a splashy, star-studded wedding on Fifth Avenue. She trailed a 27 ft train, wore a tiara and $1.000 shoes, and had prepared for her big day by watching a video of the Princess of Wales's wedding day, over and over again.
Carey is actually more interesting in the glimpses behind the fairy tale. Though solidly middle class, her background could as easily have destroyed her as make her.
She was born the third child of an inter-racial marriage that disintegrated when she was three, at least partly from the pressure of being hounded from one Long Island suburb to the next by racists who burned cars, daubed graffiti, and made threats.
Her mother is Irish, her father a blend of Venezuelan Hispanic and American black: the result, in Carey, is the palest of café-au-lait skins, which is perhaps her most attractive feature.
Father was an engineer, and mother an opera singer with the New York Met, and then a voice coach. On her own, mother was always short of cash and Carey speaks of hopping through 10 rental houses as she grew up. “She was a great mother,” she says. “She treated me as an equal, and friend. I had the most freedom of anyone I grew up with.”
She used it to ignore school, and commute into Manhattan to work for her mother's friends as a back-up singer. “If I had not had the experience of seeing other kids with drugs and things like that,” she says, “I might have done that. If I had screwed up, I wouldn't have made it.”
She admits that the example she worked hardest to avoid was that of her older sister, Alison, who became a drug addict and a prostitute, and is now HIV positive. Alison had a son, seven years ago, whom Carey and her mother have recently taken, against the sister's will. Tabloid reports are that Alison is preparing to write a “tell-all” shocker about the Carey family life.
“It's difficult to have public family dramas, especially when someone has real serious problems and it's treated like a gossip item,” says Carey. “We are talking about something that affects little children's lives.”
If she turned away from her sister's sad example, she learnt from her brother. As a child. he suffered from cerebral palsy, and hobbled with one leg an inch shorter than the other. He didn't let it beat him; he took up body-building and kick-boxing, eventually fighting at Madison Square Garden, the city's top venue.
He had the family iron will, and used it. “Yeah, it runs in me,” says Carey, “and it's been like that my whole career. When my friends were hanging out and having fun, I was interested in achieving my goal.”
But she doesn't think she's reached it yet. She works “constantly”; there's really nothing else she has ever thought of doing. She doesn't like to go out too much, and talking, she warns pointedly, can strain a voice she'd rather save for the microphone.
At least, now she can take a private plane and a chauffeured car to DisneyWorld, and catch up on a little teenage fun. There is already a whiff of isolation from the reality of the everyday world about Carey. But perhaps that is what it takes these days to make the dreams of a pop princess come true.
