It's twenty minutes into my interview with Mariah Carey and things are not looking good. I thought it was going so well. But now Mariah is sighing heavily. “I'm going to have to stop you there,” she says, with a worried expression. What did I say? All I asked her is where she likes to hang out with her friends, and now she's waving her hands at me and reaching for her bag. My heart is beating and, to put it frankly, I'm panicking. This is Mariah's only UK interview and it looks like I've just cocked it up.
“I'm sorry,” she scowls.
I grit my teeth, thinking of the ‘You're fired’ notice that will probably land on my desk when I return.
“But I've had something in my eye for like the past hour,” she continues. “Do you mind if we stop and try to get it out? I can talk while I do it.”
Phew! What a lovely person Mariah Carey is. As she reaches into her bag for a compact, we try to discover the source of her pain — a fiendish “bending eyelash” — and she continues to chat as if I was her best friend.
For a moment I forget that I'm sitting next to a woman who has sold over 75 million albums. Someone who is reckoned by industry observers to be capable of earning over $200 million.
A lady whose jaw-dropping seven-octave vocal range is going to literally blow her fans' socks off when she plays at her first-ever UK date here at Wembley Arena on June 23.
“Did you know that some of my friends call me Emma or Emmy?” she chirps, interrupting my thoughts. “It's been ‘M’, you see.”
Wow! I have the same name as Mariah! That's so cool. I'm beginning to like her more and more because she keeps surprising me with things I didn't know and never would have guessed about her before today. But then, Mariah Carey is a very remarkable person.
She was born on March 27, 1970, the third and youngest child of Afro-American Alfred Roy and Irish-American Patricia Carey. It wasn't an easy marriage, partly because people made an issue of the fact that the couple were of different races, and Mariah's parents had split up by the time she was three.
“My mother's family basically disowned her when she married my father,” Mariah explains. “So later, I was like: well, where does that leave me? Am I bad person, you know? It's not that common still to be a multi-racial person, but I'm happy to be the combination of things that I am.”
Mariah and her brother Morgan stayed with their mother while their sister, Alison, went to live with their father. They moved around a lot, always staying in Manhattan… but not necessarily in the best neighbourhoods. Mariah's mother worked as a professional opera singer and vocal coach. And it was she who first noticed Mariah's remarkable talents.
“She was singing Rigoletto (a posh opera) when I was three with the New York City Opera,” Mariah recalls, “and she kept singing this part over and over and over. And she messed up, and I corrected her in Italian, so she tells me.” Mariah smiles almost in disbelief at this memory.
“But I mostly remember singing whatever was on the radio — taking my portable radio and singing under the covers when I was little…”
It was her mother's support that encouraged Mariah to pursue her dream of becoming a singer. “She was a great mother in terms of allowing me to develop my own personality. A lot of my friends' parents were very oppressive, and so my friends ended up getting pregnant and stuff. I think because my mother always said to me: ‘If you really believe, you can do it’ that I didn't give in.
“My teachers didn't give me the same reassurance, they were like: ‘This is a far-fetched dream. Forget it. Study your algebra!’ ”
Mariah quit school as early as possible and went to New York to follow her dream when she was 17. A friend of her brother's took her in.
Mariah grins. “I lived in a loft that was, like, the size of this couch (she indicates the three-seater leather couch we are sitting on) above the kitchen. You had to climb up on the counter to get into it. That friend was like a big sister to me.”
“A lot of people have done some pretty good things for me,” Mariah gratefully admits. In fact, it was Mariah's friends who helped keep her going as she tried to get her big break. It was a long slog of grotty part-time jobs waitressing, sweeping up hair and singing backing vocals as she tried to get heard. For almost a whole year, she wore the same black outfit and leaky pair of shoes. She could hardly afford to eat.
“Three months before I got my record deal, I was having a bagel a day and one Snapple ice tea drink. My friend and I would go to the deli and beg this guy to give us Snapples. He was our friend,” she says.
But perhaps Mariah's best friend at that time was Brenda K. Starr, a singer in her own right, who took Mariah under her wing and campaigned to get people to hear her. “A lot of people wouldn't have done that.” She pauses.
“No,” she corrects herself, “most people wouldn't have. She was the one who brought me to that party…”
Ah, that party. The one on which Mariah Carey's Cinderella story of legend hangs. For it was at that party that Mariah's dream came true. A prince in the form of Sony Records head honcho Tommy Mottola snatched her tape out of her hands. Thinking that nothing would come of it, Mariah left the party and, with Brenda in tow, headed for home. Meanwhile, Tommy got in his car, put the cassette into the tape deck and listened.
Two songs later, he was back at the party searching for the girl on the tape with the incredible voice. This was the girl he had been looking for. The girl with the golden voice who was going to make Sony Records' — and his own — fortune swell.
But she was nowhere to be found. The tape had no label — how would he find his princess?
The next day he was on the phone at the office, desperately trying to trace her. He tracked down Brenda, and then finally Mariah. Two days later, Mariah turned up at Sony Records with her mother and signed the contract that would make her a star.
“I was just freaked out when I first met him,” Mariah explains. It was all a bit overwhelming. Mariah's debut album, Mariah Carey, shifted by the bucketload, hitting the top spot in the charts worldwide.
Then, gradually, Mariah found herself falling in love with the man who had helped make her a star.
“It took a while,” Mariah smiles, fidgeting with her stunning rings as she talks. Two diamond bands and an engagement ring set with a diamond the size of a small rock are slid repeatedly up and down her fingers as she recalls the beginning of their relationship.
“I didn't talk about it until we were going to do. He was pretty much my first serious boyfriend — I mean, anyone else was in my high school days.”
What they were going to do about it was get married. On June 5, 1993 Mariah became Mrs. Tommy Mottola at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in New York. They had a bried honeymoon in Hawaii and then headed back to the States.
Mariah had work to do. With her first tour ahead of her and her next album due for release, she had everything to prove.
Already the critics were making snide comments about her talent, suggesting that perhaps it was only Tommy's money that had bought her success. Mariah was ready for them coming out of the corner with her gloves on.
The all-American girl with the golden good looks was prepared to prove that there was a hard-headed businesswoman with a burning talent behind that sweet exterior…
