“WHYYYYY?” Mariah Carey is squirming in the beige leather seat of her private jet.
“Whyyyyy?” She's having trouble getting the raffia blind on the window down. An item of luxury hand-luggage is in the way and she's trying not to knock over her post-breakfast champagne.
As Wayne, one of the bevy of black guys in her entourage, rushes in to help, she peeks over her outsize Gucci shades at me, to make sure I know she's just doing a superstar thing. I know. If I've learnt one thing on this overnight jaunt to Madrid, it's that where Mariah goes, a whole cloud of camp follows. As we speak, three burly security guys in the back of the jet are playing “Guess the price of this white leather Joseph skirt” with a copy of French Marie Claire.
Every time she comes in, it's an entrance. She can't help it. When she slinks down to the hotel lobby, preceded by much “MC is leaving her room, MC is in the elevator”-type buzz on mobile phones, a group of serious-looking businessmen start giggling and nudging each other.
As she steps outside to her limousine, a group of fans runs over to shout in her face, press home-made packages in her hand or, in the case of one young man, stand silently sobbing. There's even a crowd at the gates of the private airfield way outside the city, happy to take photographs of a fleet of speeding cars.
All of this Mariah Carey deals with archly, like she was playing a Jackie Collins-type superstar pop singer in a mini-series. I even notice her strike a pose on the tarmac and slightly shake her hair, like you would if you were the most successful female singer of your generation.
“You are so much more fun than you used to be,” I tell her when we finally get the blind down and she finishes explaining how she can now actually run faster in a four-inch Dolce & Gabbana heel than she can in bare feet. She may have made some top-class Saturday night dance records in her nine years at the top — “Emotions,” “Dreamlover,” “Honey” — and made herself the best-selling global artist of the decade bar none with power ballads like “Vision of Love” and “Without You” but she's done it all without ever being in danger of becoming the slightest bit interesting. Madonna once went so far as to say that she'd rather be dead than be Mariah Carey.
The stridently girl-next-door image of the mousy, curly, dimply moppet in cut-off jeans may have helped her sell more than 80 million albums, but there comes a time when every diva worth her salt must knuckle down and start wearing serious dresses.
I tell her what a relief it was to finally see her in the “Honey” video in some proper Gucci spike heels and big hair. She nods her head in understanding, takes her shades off, sips her drink and plonks my tape-recorder in her crotch. For private jet travel, Mariah Carey is wearing a simple Gucci vest, brown suede heels, immaculate jeans and a diamond-encrusted pendant. Her hair is honey-coloured superstar perfection and her skin a shade you might choose from a colour chart.
“But I was always like this!” she protests. “I was just never allowed to show it before. I've always had the same personality, it's just that I was encouraged to act like this drab… er…” She starts laughing and throwing her hair around. “I'm not quick with the words because I'm too tired.” (Tired because she was out until just a few hours ago watching flamenco dancers and drinking cheap — her idea of cheap, that is — Spanish wine).
“I was encouraged to act like a drab… I'm thinking of the word…”
“Non-controversial?” suggests an equally Guccied-up assistant fingering some fruit on a silver tray.
“Yeah, but there's a word missing.” She starts snapping her fingers. “Like a drab, lifeless, vacant…”
“Cow?” I suggest, but she's not having that either.
“I just wasn't encouraged to be myself.”
But drab doesn't sell records, does it?
“Well, actually I think it does.”
She may have a point. First there's Celine Dion. And then there's the fact that Mariah's latest album has been no big deal in Mariah terms, despite being her best.
Her current British top five single, “My All,” has just become her 13th American number one, making her the most successful chart artist ever after Elvis and The Beatles, but the Butterfly album has “only” sold nine million copies compared to Music Box's 24 million. Maybe that's just what happens when you stop making squeaky-clean videos with your hair in bunches and start wearing stockings and suspenders and drag queen make-up.
“Whatever. If the image thing freaks people out, well, I'm sorry.”
“So the real you is very camp.”
“Ooooooooh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes indeed.” It's something she gets from her mother, a mezzo-soprano with the New York City Opera and from her best gay buddy at her high school on Long Island — a suburb of New York that is to New York City what Essex is to London. They got themselves nominated for Prom King and Queen — a graduation ritual where the most popular and gorgeous couple are fêted — and fought over who was going to be the Queen.
She loves telling that story. She loves telling any story that features clothes. She can remember the dress they designed between them down to the last bow: “It was, like, very Cher, open in the middle, this part was closed, this part was open and it was tight all the way down. It would have been a cute dress except, you know, we were in Long Island so it was a bit tacky… and we were at the tanning salon for about a week and I had like blonde streaks, big hair…”
When you start to get the picture of the suburban girl with 500 hours of beauty school to her credit, a girl willing to hold a party to raise funds for that prom dress, you realise that the years of being a major star and yet having to wear denim cut-offs must have been torture. She must have been gasping for Gucci.
So who wanted her to be the drab… thing?
“Corporate individuals,” she says meaningfully, looks around a bit, then bursts out laughing. By corporate individuals she perhaps means her just-ex-husband Tommy Mottola, the Sony Music Entertainment president. He discovered her, signed her and married her at the age of 18 after she tracked him down to a Columbia Records party in a tight black dress and pressed a demo tape into his hand.
Madonna may have bragged about losing her virginity as a career move, but, in the right light, this could look like the real thing.
“An 18-year-old girl? Come on! I was a virgin, I wasn't someone who was capable of seducing a man twice my age. That's kind of ridiculous.”
It is ridiculous bearing in mind the kind of man Mottola was: a guy who appeared happy to let people think of him as almost a gangster, even calling himself Don Tommy, after the Don Corleone character in The Godfather, not the kind of guy — a married guy at that — likely to be taken in by an eager girl in a tight dress.
Mariah insists that her voice makes her a valuable commodity for any record company, an opinion backed up by rival record mogul David Geffen. There is, however, no doubting that she was fast-tracked at Columbia. Half a million dollars was spent on her first video and a whole million on promotion and marketing, money eventually justified by the fact that the debut album turned out to contain four number one songs.
Her Fifth Avenue wedding in 1993 was based on Princess Diana's, the train was 27 feet long and guests included Barbra Streisand, Bruce Springsteen and Robert De Niro. It was a surefire way for Mariah to put a tough New York childhood firmly behind her. The youngest child in a mixed-race marriage, her father ran away when she was two, in part due to pressure from racists who wouldn't tolerate a black Venezuelan with a white Irish wife. Her mother brought up the family as best she could.
“I didn't know many stable families with a one-home kind of thing,” she says now. “I was practically raised by two gay men, friends of my mother's. Their home was the only place I kept going back to that was a nice normal place.” That she managed to remain a virgin until she met the man she married says a lot about the teenage Mariah. She saw so many examples of how not to live that she stuck to the straight and narrow.
“I'm not a promiscuous gal,” she says now that people are trying to link her sexually with pretty much everyone from Sean “Puffy” Combs, a leading light in rap, through tycoon Donald Trump to Ralph Lauren model Tyson Beckford, though the only hard evidence is of her affair with American baseball player Derek Jeter. “I have never been promiscuous. I grew up seeing a lot of negative influences, who were really extreme and got themselves into a lot of trouble.”
She can only mean her sister Alison, often referred to in the press as a “former prostitute and drug addict,” whose son Mariah apparently had a hand in “kidnapping” in an attempt to rescue him from what the tabloids called “a twilight world of junkies, hookers and crooks.”
Mottola, now 48, exercised ultimate control of her professional and private lives. There were rumours that she seldom left her custom-built luxury mansion in Bedford, New York State, which was fully equipped with indoor swimming pool, recording studio and rifle-range, making it virtually unnecessary for her to go out. If she did, she had to clear it with Mottola first.
Mariah denies that the opening scene of the video for “Honey,” which has her tied to a chair by a bunch of heavies, was a reference to her own experiences, but she says there's a reference to Baby Doll, Tennessee Williams' story of an older man manipulating a young girl, in the opening shots of the Butterfly video.
One of the main disagreements between Mottola and Mariah, professionally at least, seems to be that he didn't want her to introduce black — or “urban” — influences into her music. Being 20 years older than Mariah, he didn't “get” rap like she did. Besides, it was always his intention to keep her slap-bang in the middle of the road as a blonder version of Whitney Houston, a strategy that helped her sell her global millions, but left her famously fuming when she was totally ignored by the music industry's Oscars, the Grammys.
It was something Mariah found it difficult to swallow, just as she found it hard to take criticisms that, with the new album, she was trying to “do” black to get some cred. “If you wanna critique my music or my clothes or my hair,” she says, “that's fine, but don't try to tell me what my heritage is or how much black I have in me.”
Her latest album Butterfly (don't let the significance of that title be lost on you) is full of extremely successful collaborations with the cream of “urban” music (Puff Daddy, Bone Thugs 'N' Harmony).
It also shows how, in an American music industry which is strictly segregated, with “black” stations refusing to play “white” music and vice versa, she's starting to assert her mixed background in a way that her ambiguously catch-all sepia-tinted album covers tried to avoid. The fact that she's seen getting down with a bunch of black guys, looking as California as she does for all her mixed race, is still seen as scarcely short of scandalous in some parts of the States. Something only Madonna would get up to.
“If I had started to show my real personality back then,” she says, still sipping her private jet champagne, “people might have wanted me to do other things beyond the musical world and, in those areas, certain people,” — Mottola again — “wouldn't have been in control.”
Now she's free, the personality is starting to kick in and she's re-arranging her priorities. “Money does not buy you happiness,” she says earnestly. I must have smiled because she jumps straight to her defence. “I know that sounds like the most clichéd-sounding thing in the world, but it's true. But it can get you good shoes…”
The final proof of her new independence is that she's now taking acting classes — something Mottola never would have allowed — in preparation for her first movie role as a member of a showbiz family in the Seventies.
“So you're going to get to wear some great hair!”
“Mmmm hmmm. Exactly. That's what it's all about, the hair!”