Mariah Carey is in her natural habitat, one of the most expensive hotels in London. And yet, sitting upright in jeans and a simple white vest, on a king size bed amidst decor that wouldn't look out of place in Buckingham Palace (which is only half a mile down the road), she seems strangely out of place. At her feet is a vanity case-sized beat box, blasting out the kind of hip hop you'd expect to come labelled with a Parental Guidance sticker.
“Well, we live for the glamour,” Mariah admits, albeit sarcastically, but is unable to think of one specific moment when it all became too much. “Actually, the things that look the most glamorous are the things that are the most difficult to do. When I did the ‘Honey’ video, swimming and running in the Gucci pumps, it was a drama, but I still love that video. I didn't get to be very glamorous for the first part of my career, because everyone kept me very plain and simple. There was a conscious decision made to keep me very simple, very accessible and non-threatening sexually and visually. But I grew up wanting to play dress up.”
The fact that two gay men had a hand in her upbringing may have had something to do with it. Mariah's parents, a half-black, half-Venezuelan father who worked for NASA and a white, Irish opera-singing mother, split when she was very young. Though she grew up with her mum, she says, “A lot of people who've been pivotal characters in my life have been gay men. My mother's best friends were a gay couple, Ernie and Mort, who were kind of like my aunt and uncle. Ernie was a schoolteacher and Mort was a very groomed guy who used to walk around in a kaftan and was like a loving aunt, and they had a golden lab called Sparkle. They were upwardly-mobile, had a nice brick house and they really had a great impact on my own life. My mother and I moved around a lot, and I had this crazy mixed race family, and it was all jumbled and bizarre. They were the one stable thing in my life, even though that wasn't normal in terms of my friend's reality.
“Because my parents were divorced, no one really took that many pictures of me except for Ernie, who was a photographer. That's when I developed my qualities as a ham in front of the camera. I have pictures of myself on the beach as a six-year-old in a bikini…” with this she vamps it up, lying across the bed with her head thrown back and her feet up in the air. “The funniest thing about it is that I signed the photo like I was a star. So, I find it funny when people say, ‘What's this new sexy image?’ It's nothing new.”
Yep, there are a lot of misconceptions about Mariah, and the whole “Is she black? Is she white?” issue and the relationship — she says it ironically — with Sony's head honcho, Tommy Mottola, are subjects she refers to a lot and says have been hard for her to get over.
“People don't understand what I've been through, but I don't expect them to, and I'm sure you've got your own set of struggles going through your life. I think there are some people who will never like me because they have this image they just don't want to shake, and that's cool, but you know what? If they spent time with me, they would know it's all bullshit. That I'm a real person. As real as one can be in this bizarre reality that I live within.
“If I've contributed anything as an entertainer, I think it's that there are kids who write me letters and say ‘Thank you for making me feel good about being a mixed-race person.’ And for that to happen in America is a pretty big deal.”
A flavour of what the real Mariah is like can be seen on the promo for “Heartbreaker,” in which she goes to the cinema (breaking into a butt-slappin' dance routine en route), to discover her low-down, two-timing boyfriend dating her evil alter-ego, with whom she has a bitchfight in the toilets. It's dollier than Crystal Barbie. “Thank you,” she smiles. “People who know me are so glad that my personality is finally coming out of the closet.”
Did she do it to prove something to her detractors? “I don't think about it in those terms, I just love doing characters. I call the black-haired girl Bianca, and it's funny, a lot of people I know don't even recognise me as that girl. She's the epitome of a bitch, and I love being her. It's not Just the make-up, it's the whole prissy attitude, which are not standard for me. I've just done a remix video for ‘Heartbreaker’ which I'm very excited about, and I resurrected Bianca, but this time she's really mad, and we're wrestling in jello! I never got to play around with the campy side of who I am. Which is a lot of who I am.”
The cover for her new album, Rainbow, is also testament to how far she's come from the days she was marketed as a five-octave-warbling Snow White in a clingy black dress. She leaps off the bed to fetch it. “David LaChapelle did the artwork, isn't he the best?
“He was so cool,” she gushes, showing me pictures of her reclining in high-heeled mules. “This is my inside spread. Like the shoe? I live for a loose high heel.”
The cover is a shot of her in a white vest with a rainbow spray-painted across it. “They really did spray paint that over me. I had to stand perfectly still.”
Shouldn't you have had a tantrum. I ask.
“But that's why David liked me. Because I wasn't a diva with him!”
So, what's your take on the word?
“Hmmm, Diva's not a new term for me. My mum's an opera singer, and the term diva was thrown around the house like the word ‘kitchen,’ but it's over-used. I don't care, you can call me diva if you want, but they call everyone a diva now, so it's not even special anymore. Even my dog's a diva.”
“He's very nice to me, he's very different from the average guy. Very sensitive,” she smiles. “He's also an artist, so he understands me in a way that I don't think a lot of other people could. He gets a kick out of the ‘diva thing,” which I think would make a lot of other people sick: he understands if I have all these people around, one person on my nails, one on the dress… he thinks it's hysterical.”
So, are you a good girlfriend to have in return?
“I don't know. I think I'm a good person, and that overshadows everything.”
But how would you react, say, if you found a hair longer than yours in your bed, as Jay Z outlines In the “Heartbreaker” rap?
“First of all, there shouldn't be a hair on my sheet! I mean,” she pouts ironically, “Why hasn't it been changed!?”
