“I'm a spiral queen,” admitted Mariah Carey, relaxing in her antiseptic, predominantly beige Soho Grand hotel suite. She raised her hands in front of her and pantomimed falling down a hole. “Spiraling is like, ‘Spiraling, spiraling, why are we spiraling?!’ ” she shricked, giggling as she described her frequent plunges into depression. “I even put spiraling in two of my songs,” she added, suddenly growing serious. “They didn't promote it, but, whatever.”
It was midsummer when I interviewed Carey for the beauty magazine Allure, and back then all her talk of spiraling seemed like a joke. With more number one singles to her name than any artist except the Beatles and Elvis Presley. Carey, at 31, had just signed a record-breaking contract with Virgin, $23.5 million per album for four albums, and was awaiting the imminent debut of her first feature film, a musical biopic titled Glitter. This victory was sweeter still because Carey had wiggled out of her contract with Sony Music, which is run by Carey's ex-husband Tommy Mottola, one album early. Glitter the album would be
released by Sony in Japan, but the company would have nothing to do with its promotion. “This is my stuff,” she said proudly, a large gold nameplate that read GLITTER swaying around her neck. “This is my show.” She laughed. “I'm Supergirl!&rquo;
Again and again she pointed out that she finally had her career completely under control. “I even do all this stuff that people don't realize that I do and think I don't even know exists,” Carey said, and then launched into a long exegesis on how to master and sequence an album. Clad in jeans that hung loosely off her five-foot-nine frame, Carey remained jovial as she fielded my softball questions — how she did her makeup, the coolest dress she owned, her predilection for cutting the waistbands off her jeans. “Yeah, my stylist started that whole trend,” said Carey, pouring herself another glass of wine. “Not like we got paid for it or shit!”
But as upbeat as Carey seemed determined to portray herself as being, by the end of our two hours together it became clear that her mind-set was not as sunny as she was trying to make it sound. For one thing, her break-neck schedule and the constant tugging of her handlers had clearly taken a toll. Even Supergirl needed a break sometime, she complained. “These days I don't have time to go to the bathroom!” There were also other, darker forces arrayed against her, ones that Carey alluded to often during the interview as “powerful people” who had “done things to me,” and when she spoke of them her madcap persona slipped into something not so nice. As anyone familiar with Carey's background knows, the people she was referring to had to include her ex-husband Mottola, who helped make her a star when they married, in 1993. Following their fractious split, in 1997, Carey becare increasingly convinced that Mottola was trying to sabotage her career and often suggested to reporters that he was plotting against her.
During our interview she also reserved special bile for her longtime rival Jennifer Lopez, who records for Sony. Carey complained to associates that Mottola had taken Lopez under his wing, much the way he had Carey, and she claimed that Sony had even styled and coiffed Lopez to look like her. When I mentioned that I had recently interviewed Lopez, Carey responded with a snort. “I bet it was really intellectually stimulating,” she said. “I bet you could just see the depth in her eyes, she was so soulful.”
She also scoffed at Lopez's contention that she gets eight hours of sleep every night. “If I had the luxury of not actually having to sing my own songs,” said Carey, looking straight into my eyes so that I didn't miss the implication, “I'd do that too.”
Looking back on the interview nos; I didn't notice much to suggest that Carey was heading toward a full-fledged breakdown. Her melodramatic Ab Fab flourishes seemed to be just a product of her diva image. But those closest to her soon began to realize that the singer was spiraling out of control. A perfectionist who boasted that she slept only three hours a night, Carey began to push herself even harder as the album's release date approached. She would stay in the studio until 3 or 4 a.m. and then go home and write a personal thank-you note to a sound engineer, says one colleague. Eventually the sleepless nights began to take their toll. One day, after she had nearly fainted while shooting the “Loverboy” video, Carey did an interview with VH1 sitting on a sheet to protect her from a stress-related skin disease called dermographia, which causes her to break out in hives. Even in her weakened state, however, she spent an hour directing the crew to shoot her exactly to her specifications, with lights bright enough to blow out ay imperfections.
Another time, after a grueling three-hour live performance, Carey insisted on going back into the studio to remix some vocals for an upcoming single. Spent, she fell back on the studio's couch, her dark sunglasses still on, a pashmina shawl draped over her shoulders. “Louise, talk for me,” she instructed her manager. “I have to sing in 36 hours!”
Buckling under a schedule that included shooting a second movie, Wise Girls, with Mira Sorvino, while at the same time going on a promotional tour for Glitter (which included a 14-day, seven-city tour through Europe) and remixing songs for the Glitter album, by mid-July Carey had started to have “incidents.” At an autograph signing on Long Island she behaved so erratically that her publicist finally grabbed the microphone from her hand and led her away. Later, during an appearance on a BET talk show, which she attended sporting a pair of microshorts, Carey began fretting that she looked fat and covered her thighs with a mountain of pillows.
Things got odder still in July. Arriving late for a scheduled appearance on MTV's Total Request Live, she beckoned the show's host, Carson Daly, to follow her into a corner.
“Um, Carson,” said Carey, whispering into his ear, “will you kidnap me?” She then launched into a rambling fantasy that involved her and Daly escaping to a far-off locale, accompanied by no one but her bodyguard.
According to sources at MTV, a startled Daly declined the invitation, and Carey proceded with the show. Trailed by panicked handlers, she entered the studio inexplicably wheeling an ice cream cart, making her entrance onto the TRL set from behind heavy felt curtains. On the videotape of the show, which MTV now declines to release, Daly, who was on the air at the time, seems genuinely surprised by the singer's bizarre antics. “Ice cream! Yeah!” Carey begins to shout, prancing behind the cart and shimmying madly, clad in an oversize lavender T-shirt ripped Flashdance-style. She slowly strips off the extralarge T-shirt to reveal sparkly gold short-shorts and a tight tank top, and she twirls around on tiptoe. A few moments later she asks, “Do you guys like my shirt?” I notice the logo on it: SUPERGIRL.
Carey looks nothing like the confident, composed person I met — she looks disoriented, eyes way too bright, talking in a singsong voice. Daly appears stunned at her behavior. “Wow,” he says, trying to stay cool. “Is something wrong?”
“See, every now and then everybody needs a little therapy.” Carey explains. “And today is that moment for me.”
She starts to wander around the stage and over to the set's window, which overlooks Times Square. “ I have an ice cream truck — hey, try to avoid these [long] shots, because these shorts are really short… There are some folks on the nice street.
“I just want to have one day where I can swim and eat ice cream and look for rainbows and learn how to ride a bike,” she explains, hurling popsicles to the screaming teenage studio audience. “See, if you don't have ice cream in your life you might just go a little bit crazy. And I'm not going to do that.”
In the middle of it all, a clearly unnerved Daly turns to the camera for a soliloquy. “Ladies and gentleman,” he says. “Mariah Carey has lost her mind.”
Six days later it was official: citing “mental and physical exhaustion,” Carey checked into Silver Hill Hospital, a Connecticut rehab facility, where she would remain for two weeks. The night before her admittance she spent an anxious night in the penthouse of the Tribeca Grand Hotel (where she was staying, even though she has a recently renovated loft just blocks away). From the hotel she left an incoherent message for her fans, whom she called “little lambs,” on her website; “I don't know what's going on with my life” was one of the things she said. Around 6p.m. she threw a frightening tantrum, shrieking and throwing glassware and plates, so alarming her bodyguards that they drove her up to the Westchester County house she bought for her mother, Pat Carey. Later that evening Pat called 911 to ask for “help with my daughter.”
It was a classic tabloid story — VH1 Behind the Music in real time. Over the next few days the papers served up scores of anonymous “friends” who hinted at many equally improbable reasons for her breakdown, including a rancorous breakup with her boyfriend of two years, Latin singer Luis Miguel, and drug abuse (friends insist that Carey has always been steadfastly opposed to drugs). The National Enquirer wrote that it had discovered the “tragic secret” behind Carey's breakdown: She was “drowning in a sea of alcohol.” Us Weekly theorized that Carey was upset because a new crop of younger divas like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera was homing in on her turf. In a front page story on July 28 headlined MARIAH THE PARIAH, the New York Post claimed that the diva was distraught over the realization that everyone despised her.
All that may or may not be true. But her close friends and associates believe that Carey's breakdown also had its roots in an incident that has gone virtually unreported. Her increasing paranoia, they say, was fueled by Carey's belief that Jennifer Lopez had pilfered part of the melody from Glitter's not yet released first single, “Loverboy,” and used it in a song on her own album J.Lo, which debuted in January, a full six months before Carey's single. The background melody of Lopez's single “I'm Real” is a light variation of the melody from “Firecracker,” a song composed by a now defunct Japanese band named the Yellow Magic Orchestra. As it turned out, Carey had used the same loop when she recorded “Loverboy” the summer before. The song is also featured in the movie Glitter. When she found out that the backdrop of Lopez's single mirrored that of her own, a devastated Carey insisted that “Loverboy” be redone. Months after the song was first recorded, she was back in the studio, rerecording.
Carey could not understand how the song had been leaked from her high-security studio, as she believed it had been. Thinking about it carefully, she realized that the song could also be heard on rushes from the movie Glitter, which was produced in a 50-50 deal by Fox and Columbia Pictures (the movie studio owned by Sony). Always suspicious of Mottola, sources say, Carey concluded that someone at Columbia had leaked her single to Sony, which in turn had offered the track to Lopez. Carey was despondent over the incident, and over the ensuing months the mere mention of it set her off in a fit of angry tears. “It literally drove her crazy,” says one associate.
But sources close to Sony insist that the fact that the same obscure sample was recorded for two competing albums is mere coincidence. They say the loop in question was brought to Sony producer Troy Oliver by a New York DJ, DJ L.E.S., in the summer of 2000; after some remixing Oliver presented it to Lopez's main producer, a smiley, diminutive legend named Cory Rooney. “Anyone can dig into a crate and pick out an old record and use it, and every DJ-producer from Clark Kent to Kid Capri knows the ‘Firecracker’ loop,” says Oliver. “This is the record game right now. It's a race — whoever can come out with these old beats first puts it out first. That's how Puffy controlled the '90s.”
“And if anyone was going to sample that particular song, ‘Firecracker,’ you would use that part, because it's the hot part of the song,” adds L.E.S. (a.k.a. Leshan Lewis). “When I brought it to Cory he played it for Jennifer, who loved it because she remembered it back from the clubs in the '80s. He and Jennifer sat down that very day and wrote the lyrics.”
Though Carey's camp declines to respond to this version of events, Carey herself apparently refused to accept that it was just a coincidence. She was able to use the case of the too popular loop during her negotiations with the Sony honchos, warning them that she would go public with what she considered outright misappropriation or extreme negligence unless they let her out of her contract, an eight-album deal signed in 1990 under which she still had to deliver one more album. Though the exact details of the negotiations are unclear, Sony relented and let Carey fly the coop (the company did retain Japanese distribution rights to her next album). By April Carey had moved to Virgin, though it is rumored that the contract releasing Carey from Sony specifically bars both Carey and Mottola from speaking ill of each other.
That such a proviso might have been inserted was testament to the bitter turn the relationship between Carey and Mottola had taken since they married eight years earlier. When she and Mottola first met, Carey, the Long Island-born daughter of a white Irish opera singer mother and a Venezuelan and African-American aeronautical engineer father, was only 18. There was a gap of more than 20 years between Carey's and Mottola's ages. And while Mottola spent a middle-class childhood in the Bronx, Carey's home life was far from perfect: She had moved 13 times by the time she graduated from high school, and she watched her older sister fall victim to drugs, prostitution, and later HIV. Through it all, however, she never wavered in her ambition to be a star.
Enter Mottola, at a Sony party for Brenda K. Starr, for whom Carey was singing backup. He was given a copy of Carey's demo tape, which he listened to in a limo on the way home, and he signed Carey soon after. Mottola managed every step of her career, and in 1993 he made her his wife in a ceremony attended by more than 300, in which she wore a Vera Wang gown with a 27-foot train attended by six bridesmaids. The couple moved into a northern Westchester mansion almost the size of the White House, with indoor and outdoor pools, 14 bathrooms, two pizza ovens, and a 64-channel recording studio all for her. It was so large that Mottola sometimes called Carey by intercom when they were both inside the house to find out where she was.
The marriage son deteriorated, however, and the couple split four years later, with Carey accusing Mottola of keeping her prisoner in the mansion, which she referred to as “Sing Sing,” and Mottola responding that she was paranoid and unstable. Yet the divorce, instead of ending their mutual suspicions, seemed to amplify them. For her part Carey made it very clear in the press that she was “all about independence”: Her first album after the breakup was titled Butterly (no more cocoon for her). She fired “Tommy's team” — manager Randy Hoffman, lawyer Alan Grubman, publicist Dan Klores — and put together one of her own, including manager Sandy Gallin (who represented such movie and music stars as Dolly Parton and Michael Jackson), before moving on to Louise McNally. Carey “reclaimed” her mixed-race identity: She started to date New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter, who is also multiracial, and she began to work with black artists like Puffy. Jay-Z, and Ol' Dirty Bastard. )On the other hand her hair, it must be noted, kept getting lighter and lighter.) She also began to dress more provocatively, maintaining that the old Mariah, of the curly locks and mock turtlenecks, had been Tommy's creation. “That's so not me,” said Carey. “Since I was six years old I've been lying in the sand like Marilyn Monroe.”
But all this was supposed to be old news. The chapter that has been written in the last year or so is the one in which Mottola and Carey move on with their lives. “I haven't heard from him in a year and a half,” says a gossip columnist. “Believe me, my phone would be ringing.” Mottola is now married to Latin singer Thalia Sodi, 30 (Sodi had a 48-foot train), and Carey until recently seemed happy with Miguel (the two reportedly broke up at Carey's behest). As much as she tried, however, she seemed unable to put Mottola behind her. “If that was all I had to deal with, I'd be so okay,” she said when I interviewed her, cocking her head at a door behind which her manager and some assistants were working. “But then I'm getting nonsense from people who can't move on with their lives. It's really irritating, on a personal level. People spend millions of dollars to do nothing except try to anticipate my next move. It's interesting. It's funny.”
Sources say Carey is convinced that Mottola is behind the rash of negative publicity about her upcoming album. She has long suspected her ex-husband of planting negative items about her in the press — particularly when she began to be linked with rappers. “I remember getting a frantic call from Mariah,” says a reporter.” She was concerned that Tommy was spreading stories saying she was a slut.” After Mottola hired as his publicist Lizzie Grubman (whose father Alan Grubman is Mottola's lawyer and closest friend), Carey began to believe that the well-connected Grubman had orchestrated a negative campaign against her in the press. (Grubman, now facing problems of her own, vehemently denies this. “I was hired by Sony to produce events. I never worked for Tommy directly,” she says. “In any case, though I didn't know Mariah well, I always admired her intelligence. This is completely untrue.”) Sources close to Carey say she began to suspect that her own staff had been infiltrated by Mottola-friendly moles, and she suspected that she was being followed. Recently, at the New York nightclub Lots she was hanging out happily with some friends until she became convinced that a few of the bouncers hanging out around her table were “Tommy's guys.”
For his part Mottola contends that Carey's increasingly fantastical accusations against him reflect her deteriorating mental state. “I'm deeply saddened by Mariah's recent illness, and I remain completely supportive of her both personally and professionally,” he told Us Weekly. “Any allegation that I have hindered her career now or in the past is totally untrue.”
The battle is not yet over. Shortly before her breakdown Carey instructed her lawyers to hire a private investigator, Jack Palladino, in preparation for posible litigation against Sony and Mottola, perhaps alleging interference of contract, infiction of emotional distress, and slander. In August Palladino, a well-known private eye who was employed by the Clinton campaign during the Gennifer Flowers scandal, was ensconced in a spacious Manhattan hotel suite for weeks investigating Carey's allegations. “Personally I think for these two people, on the top of their careers, to litigate against each other is a disaster,” says Palladino. “But Mariah has made it clear that she will not be a punching bag for negative and abusive stories anymore, and we will be pursuing an investigation until this adverse smear ends. If it does not, we will be proceeding to litigation.”
As of mid-August Carey remained in Westchester recuperating at her mother's house, though she still had plenty of unwanted company. The day after her release from the hospital the New York Post featured a front page photo of the singer walking in her mom's backyard, her hair up in a ponytail. “I am very proud of Mariah for many reasons, but in this particular instance I am proud of the way she is holding up during this intense invasion of her privacy,” said Pat Carey, who declined to comment on any of the details in this article. “She has taken the action of taking care of herself, and, when she's ready, she'll be back in the public eye. But for now she's just my daughter, and we're doing the best we can to stay positive.”
In the meantime, although she has maintained a dignified silence, the singer has been in regular contact with her publicists, making sure the story of her meltdown gets told the way she would like. As I was finishing this piece I got a call from her publicist Cindi Berger. “Mariah told me to remind you that whatever you talked about in your previous interview that's off the record should remain off the record,” Berger said. Even in her current state, it seems, Carey is still watching her back.