In the superstar stakes, they don't come much more super or more starry than Mariah Carey, the curvaceous pop diva with a five-octave voice, 12-carat smile, 15 US number one singles and almost 150 million record sales worldwide. The statistics speak for themselves: Mariah is officially the biggest selling female artist in pop history. But that is only half the story. Her rags-to-riches ascent is ripe with enough fertile subplots for a Hollywood melodrama.
To briefly recap: born in 1970, the product of a mixed marriage, a broken home and grinding poverty, she was discovered as a buxom ingénue at a party and went on to marry her mentor, Tommy Mottola, one of the recording industry's most powerful executives. Her meteoric rise to fame was counterbalanced with growing personal unhappiness culminating in turbulent divorce. Breaking away from her ex-husband's label, Sony, to sign the most lucrative recording deal in history with rivals EMI, Carey was humiliatingly dropped amid a very public breakdown that had her babbling incoherently on TV and being hospitalised after collapsing on her mother's floor.
EMI apparently decided there was no future in the 1990s' biggest star, paying $28 million to extricate themselves from their contract. But no showbiz epic would be complete without a comeback: in Carey's case, a 2.5 million-selling album, last year's Charmbracelet (on Island/Def Jam), crammed with tremulous ballads about making it through the rain and finding saving grace, with Carey's voice warbling at full power.
Let's take a closer look at Carey's greatest asset. Soft-toned with tremendous range, her voice has not always made her a critics' favourite, perhaps because it is mostly employed in the service of lush, sentimental, mainstream R‘n’B pop (which, to give her full credit, she co-writes and is fully creatively involved in the production). Yet last week, an MTV poll declared her to be “the greatest voice of the last two decades”. They have some curious support in this regard from the Guinness Book of Records, which asserts that Carey is the singer who can hold the highest note in the world. The only mammal capable of producing a higher note, apparently, is a dolphin.
“Oh please!” says Mariah. “I don't know where they come up with that stuff. I don't even know what my octave range is. Today it's probably minus one because I haven't slept. I'm not sure where the notes come from sometimes. In the studio, I'm like: ‘I hope you saved that, 'cos it ain't coming out any time again today.’ Maybe they could get a dolphin in.”
As a matter of record, I should state that Carey bears no physical resemblance to the aforementioned sea creature. She is one of those rare stars, being more attractive in the flesh than she is in photographs. This is undoubtedly something to do with size. While most celebrities, when you meet them, turn out to be disappointingly diminutive, Mariah is a strapping 5ft 9in. She has all the glamour money can buy, and exudes physical well-being and personal warmth.
“The MTV poll, what it really means is voice of the MTV generation,” she points out. “Of course it's an enormous compliment, but I don't feel that way about myself. This is the truth: all the nice things they say about me, I can't take them seriously, because then I would have to take all the bad things they say seriously too. And they say a lot of bad stuff.”
They certainly do. Carey's spectacular fall from grace in 2001 was greeted with an unpleasant tone of exultation in the press, as if a jumped-up bimbo with airs and graces was getting the comeuppance she richly deserved. “After my collapse, my mother called 911 and it became this whole big panic which everybody took and blew out of proportion. They literally made up lies. They said I had my wrists bandaged, tried to imply it was a suicide attempt, but even the ambulance guy was saying ‘No, she was fine, she was on her pager in the back of the ambulance.’ It's crazy that people can actually print things without verification. I guess I should have sued, but it is not worth the money or the aggravation and at the end of the day every story has an ending, so who really cares?”
Carey has regularly been portrayed as an airhead diva with an attitude, her every outrageous demand catered to by a supplicatory entourage. In the quiet of her hotel suite, the first accusations seem ridiculously wide of the mark. She proves to be friendly, considerate, intelligent and articulate, with a rambling, discursive conversational style that is hard to do justice to in print (suffice to say that “tangent” is one of her favourite words). She does have a large entourage (including security, stylist, personal assistant and 24-hour on-call masseuse), but they appear to be a loyal group of professionals who have been together for years and whom she treats with courtesy and deference. Indeed, she says that her closeness to her entourage was part of the problem leading up to her collapse.
“I think from the way I grew up, not having money, feeling the inferiority complex that I had with everything except music, it drove me to have this intense work ethic. I had to work three times harder than everybody else to compensate for my flaws. I was like Princess Positivity, ‘Let's keep it moving!’ and the people around, we're like a travelling family, there were absolutely no boundaries, no private space, no private time at all.
“I would allow people to walk into my bedroom and wake me up at 5.30am to do a phone interview. And if you've gone to sleep at 3.30 'cos you worked until one and then you need to eat dinner and unwind and suddenly you gotta get up, you gotta do photo shoots for two different magazines, and you gotta be in some ridiculous pose for hours, because nothing that looks good is comfortable, and then you go and do a bunch of interviews, and you're on television and you've got to be completely focused… I was pushing myself for the sake of my career and trying to cram so much in and I became so exhausted that I physically and emotionally collapsed. That was a reality check. I was not taking care of myself and clearly that is not cool.”
She has dealt with this by the unusual step of having contracts drawn up with everyone who works with her stipulating her private space and time. “Basically, I set boundaries,” she says. Yet late on a Friday night in London, after a full day on the promotional trail doing TV appearances and fan events to support her new single (&ldquo,Boy (I need You),” released last week), here she is doing an interview.
The underlying “issues” as she refers to them, clearly run deep. When we first meet, on hearing that I am Irish, she instigates an involved discussion of race. Her mother is Irish-American, her father a mix of Venezuelan and African American, and though she herself is light-skinned enough to be taken for white, her memories of being made to feel an outsider as a child are evidently still raw. Her mother's family disowned her over the issue of interracial marriage and her parents split up when Mariah was three. She relates stories of nursery school teachers laughing at her when she used brown crayons to draw a pictures of her father, and a friend bursting into tears at the sight of her dark-skinned dad.
“You have questions of identity when you don't look exactly like either one of your parents,” Carey says. “I can look at it and say these are the reasons I have been driven my entire life. Even as a 12-year-old I was saying, when am I going to become famous?”
Her mother was an opera singer, who performed in jazz and folk clubs to make a living and appears to have had a great deal to do with nurturing her daughter's talent and nourishing her ambitions. “My mom would say, ‘Don't say ‘if’ you make it, say ‘when’. She told me she named me Mariah because she thought it would make a good stage name.”
Since her breakdown, Carey has been in therapy, which is evident from some of the terminology she employs when discussing her life. She has set up “boundaries”. She takes time for herself. She has learned to “enjoy the moment”. She is “filling the void”. But lurking behind all this is the same ambitious, hard-working showbusiness professional.
As if to emphasise this point, the interview is brought to a close by the impatience of her stylist and dress designer, insisting that they be allowed to fit her dress for a showcase tomorrow night, to which she smilingly accedes.
I point out that it is after 10 o'clock at night. Where are her boundaries now? “Oh, I can do a fitting with my eyes closed,” she says. “They can pin the dress on me while I sleep.” But then she smiles weakly. “I know you're right, but I can't see myself the way the world sees me. I know I have achieved a lot, but I'm still the same person I was as a kid. I've got to keep on going, whatever happens, issues or no issues. That's just the way it is.”
Ex-husband Tommy Mottola: “I didn't expect to be happy in my personal life because growing up, everything wasn't always perfect. I assumed having money and fulfilling my dream of being able to write and sing should be enough, so why should I also expect to be happy at home?”
The commercial failure of Glitter, her first EMI album: “My record was released on September 11, 2001. It was bad timing; it was hardly a big surprise that it didn't fulfill everybody's expectations. But I was post a physical breakdown and, like everybody else, I was worrying about the state of the world.”
Being bought out of her deal with EMI: “I had a deal that I felt comfortable with, and suddenly they wanted to change my contract around. They wanted more creative control, but I didn't feel they were qualified. Who the hell are they to tell me how to make music?”
