Watching the preliminary version of a music-video edit for the single “Honey,” from her new album, Butterfly. Mariah Carey watches herself being carried down a secluded beach by a buff Adonis of the dunes. “Jack kept trying to tear off my skirt,” Carey says, smiling impishly, watching the screen, and sucking on a straw in a can of Coca-Cola Classic. Here we go! Millionaire songstress recently separated from husband reveals tropical romance! Not quite. “Jack's the dog,” she says. And there he is: Carey's Jack Russell terrier dashing down the beach, nipping at her hem.
At this stage of the Mariah metamorphosis, she's somewhere between having muscled her way out of the pupa (the cosseted splendor of the $15 million mansion in Bedford, New York, she shared with her husband/musical Svengali/corporate sponsor, Sony Music chief Tommy Mottola) and fluttering free. The wings aren't hardened yet; they're still a little mushy, but she's gulping air and testing them… tentatively.
Carey's going out to clubs but not really dating. Dumping Mottola but on the phone with him almost every day. She's landed her first acting job but is not talking about it. And she's defying Sony with Butterfly by indulging her passion for rap music — well, at this push-me-pull-you juncture in her career, “indulging” might be a bit strong. But she's emphatically, incontrovertible dabbling. Carey would like to latch on to some aura of the street after years up on the curb, in the chilly remoteness of a perfect pop vacuum. But it's hard to surrender the whole hair-teased, Michael Kors-frocked, Prada-shod dreamworld of a suburban mall rat made spectacularly good. Seeing Carey-on-the-cusp is like watching a high school cheerleader venture over to where the cool kids are hanging out by a chain-link fence: The girl bravely burns a cigarette, takes a drag, and for one hovering half-second no one is sure whether she's going to start coughing up her esophagus or smile and blow a smoke ring in the coolest guy's face. In other words: perfectly developed except for the wings.
Meeting Carey, it's hard to know what to expect. Aspiring harridan? She reportedly reamed out Mottola in the lobby of the Peninsula hotel in Los Angeles last year after a grim shutout at the Grammy Awards, and she was seen berating producer Walter Afanasieff on a New York sidewalk not long ago. (“When I have an issue or a problem with somebody,” Carey says, “I like to settle it. Get it out in the open, deal with it. And go ahead.”) Spoiled diva? Having a fabulous career dumped in your lap at a tender age (she and Mottola hooked up when she was 18) can be a tad warping to the personality; Carey arriving for work at the Quad recording studio near Times Square with her other dog, a yappy Yorkie named Ginger, isn't an encouraging sign.
But here's what you get: a nonharridan, not particularly diva-ish young woman in a teensy white dress with a powder blue Ballantyne Cashmere sweater cinched at the waist, Mariah Carey signature sunglasses (sold briefly in Japan) perched on her messily piled hair, pink toenails, all accessorized with the can of Coke and straw. It adds up to a slightly post-Lolita look, but she's 27 years old, and with her Prada stacked heels and her hair up, the five nine Carey clears six feet. There is, though, something awfully young about her. It's as if, having been preserved in the world's most expensive aspic for most of her adult life, she's picking up where she left off before hooking up with Mottola and being groomed as the official voice of swoony '90s romantic ballads. But again, she's doing it cautiously.
“I love a lot of more hard-core stuff that people don't think I listen to,” she says of her interest in rap. She rustled her wings slightly with her last album, Daydream, by using Sean “Puffy” Combs, Ol' Dirty Bastard, and others on remixes of songs, but those extended versions don't get distributed much beyond dance clubs. This time out, on “Honey,” Carey worked with Combs, Q-Tip, et al., choosing to ignore her record-label handlers, who in the past have cautioned her about sounding too black (Carey's mother is of Irish descent and her father is an African-American of Venezuelan descent). “In the past, people have been concerned some things were too R&B,” she says. “Everybody would say, ‘Don't use that! People might think it's a rapper on there!’ ” She's talking defiantly. Boldly. You can hear the great whacking noise of wings gearing up for takeoff. But then the “whoops”; scaling-back Carey kicks in: “If there's one little part with a tiny bit of harder rap on it, who cares?” and “It's not like I'm going wacky, off the deep end. That's not what people want.” One step forward; half a step back. Maybe that's why she calls the dog Ginger.
Carey has the same fast-forward/quick-reverse way of talking about her après-Tommy social life. Ask her if it's from being on her own and going to clubs and a look of pure joy washes across her face. Then, instantly, it vanishes. “I don't want to paint a negative picture of Tommy or of my relationship with him,” she says, and then paints a positive picture of life outside his umbrella: “I love having friends who are young and successful and creative. It's exciting for me.” Except when gossips speculate about her love life, after seeing her at a club with Combs or Q-Tip. She might be working and hanging out with a guy like Combs, who's got the “Though I walk through a valley of the shadow of death…” Bible passage tattooed on his arm, but she doesn't want to be mistaken for a badass hip-hop chick. “I am not going to suddenly become this promiscuous psychopath who's dating this one this week and that one the next,” Carey says. “I'm not like that. Right now, it's like learning to be on my own as an independent adult and doing my work. And having fun.”
She's even had to reconsider what she thought of as the fun life when she was prowling the Bedford mansion, which is furnished with an indoor swimming pool, 64-track recording studio, two sets of electronic security gates, a pair of bodyguards, surveillance cameras stashed in birdhouses, and other amenities whose attractions might begin to pall once the luxuriousness wears off and the penal-colony aspect sets in (hellooo, Papillon!). When Carey started hitting New York nightclubs this spring, she discovered that breathing free also meant inhaling lots of cigarette smoke. “I'll be in a smoke-filled place, and by the end of the night, it's totally affected my voice,” she says. “When you start to go out more, it doesn't have the same allure as when you don't do it that much. It gets played out after a while. And, if it's going to affect my voice and then I have to get written about when I'm not even doing anything wrong, I'd rather hang out with my friends in a restaurant or at somebody's apartment.”
Note the “not even doing anything wrong” — most refugees from broken marriages don't think that going out with somebody new would be wrong. But Carey's still locked in that wavering, on-the-verge state, and Mottola's still the guy who turned her into a star and runs her record company. “This is just a different phase of my life, and his life. Where it leads, who knows? That doesn't mean there is some sort of crazy war going on,” she says. “I love Tommy, and you never know what's going to happen in the future.” Carey insists that she's looking for her own place in Manhattan. But the search has been going on for months, and she hasn't found anything to replace the four-bedroom pied-à-terre they rent on Fifth Avenue.
You could get the bends from talking to Mariah Carey these days. She has taken some decisive steps, like parting with Randy Hoffman, her longtime personal manager and Mottola pal, in August. Watching her in action in the studio, brainstorming a remix of the song “Butterfly” with two backup singers, it's clear that Carey doesn't hesitate over the short-term stuff. “Spread your wings and fly, butterfly,” she sings softly into a microphone. A cell phone chirps. “I'm calling about the lawn mower,” she says, quoting a riff from her heroes, the phone-prankster Jerky Boys. She puts the Coke can in her lap and flips open the phone. “Can they tint it in the retransfer?” she asks about a music-video edit. Her assistant tries to get her attention. “Spread your wings and fly, butterfly,” Carey sings into a microphone in the other hand. Her assistant mouths a question: Which cosmetic broke in her purse and needs to be replaced? “We could throw in one more establishing shot of the island,” Carey says into the phone, then breaks off to sing “Flyyyyy” with the backup singers. She points to her purse and tries to describe the cosmetic. She holds the phone to her ear with her shoulder, picks up the Coke, and spills it down her chest. “Oh!” She puts down her microphone, grabs some tissues, and cleans up. Into the phone: “Since it's Super 35, can they blow it up so you don't notice?” Another assistant comes in, reports someone holding on another line, and mentions that a planning meeting for the “Butterfly” video awaits in another room. The music director for a New York radio station arrives; Carey waves. Ringing off from the first call, she takes another one: “I'm on hold.” she tells the second assistant. “I'll hold if you'll go get Ginger.” Then, for about the hundredth time that day she sings, “Spread your wings and fly.”
Flap, flap, flap. But if you're not going very far, why fly when you can take a limousine? Riding through Manhattan in a restaurant-bound black stretch during a break in the recording session, Carey cues up a cassette of a new song called “The Roof.” She lies back in the seat. As the song slides into a sinuous stream of melodic erotica, Carey wordlessly reaches up, presses a button, and starts making the moon roof slide back and forth in time to the music. She reclines there, dreamily smiling, her long tanned legs stretching out, all the way to the shopping bags at her feet.
