Oh, to be Mariah Carey's mum. Last year, the eight-octave sexbomb secretly bought her mum a dream house in a beautiful area of New York State. Only she neglected to tell her mum about it. Instead, Mariah quietly began to move her mother's favourite possessions into the place before casually taking her along to visit “some friends.” “She instantly adored the house,” Mariah laughs. “But when she looked more closely, she started to realise the pictures on the wall were of her and her family when she was young. We made it so that there was coffee on the stove, her clothes in her closet — even her piano. It was like she had lived there for ten years. It was one the best moments of my life.”
Of course, if you're as successful as Mariah Carey, you can afford to do away with the house-warming present and buy the whole house instead. Far and away the biggest-selling female recording artist of the Nineties, Carey is worth an estimated £200 million. Worldwide sales exceed 120 million albums and singles since her self-titled debut in 1990.
Sneering critics said the secret to that success was her marriage to Tommy Mottola, the man who is boss of Sony Music, Mariah's record company. Sales of Carey's two albums since the much-publicised split in 1995 have knocked that theory on the head. Risking alienating her fan base, Carey went for a slightly more street sound, ditching her goody-two-shoes image for a wardrobe of revealing frocks. Yet the first single from her latest LP Rainbow went straight to number one in the US, leaving her only three behind Elvis Presley and six behind the Beatles in the most successful artist of all time list.
She has won a stack of Grammys. But when she was recently given the Award Of Achievement at the American Music Awards, Carey became only the third person — and the first woman — to achieve that honour, previous winners being Michael Jackson and Prince. The woman is still only 29 for goodness sake! The measure of her fame was confirmed recently when she was spoofed by MTV's cult Celebrity Death Match show, exploding opponent Jim Carrey's head with the deadliest of high Cs.
Claridge's is a suitably swanky joint in which to meet the world's favourite female artist. Dressed in a black top and jeans and sitting cross-legged on a double bed, Mariah Carey proves to be surprisingly friendly for a diva, slipping between comic cockney and New York accents to make her points: Although when I accidentally rest my laptop on the edge of the bed, an assistant quickly removes it. Look, but don't get too close seems to be the message. There is a glass of white wine beside the bed (she says she's off red because it's more fattening), but she hardly touches it.
For Carey, the gift to her mother symbolises that their lives have not always been so good. Still an insomniac who only sleeps well in planes, trains and cars (“I need noise”), Carey's earliest memories are of constantly moving house, largely because of her parents' mixed-race marriage. Carey's father is of African-American and Venezuelan descent, her mother, a former opera singer and voice coach, is Irish Catholic. “My father had money and things like that,” says Carey, “and we lived in so-called ‘good’ neighbourhoods in New York, which didn't matter because they were totally discriminated against, no matter how hard they tried.”
Mariah was only three when her parents divorced. From that point on, she says, “I always thought the world could be pulled out from under me. My mother never owned a house when I was little, it was always rented. When I used to tell the story about moving 13 times from the time I was three until I was 12, people used to ask why. I don't know. I think it was money, things would happen. Landlords wouldn't like us, or she changed jobs. It was just crazy.”
At around the age of three, there was another significant ocurrence. While Ma Carey was rehearsing the role of Carmen over and over, she kept messing up one part. “Apparently I said, ‘No mummy, it goes like this’ and then sang it in Italian,” Carey says. “She turned around in shock, but realised I could pick up things. Then she taught me how to harmonise.”
Stardom was still many years away for young Mariah, but by the age of 13 she was already dividing her time between high school and travelling to New York to work as a session singer. The chance meeting that changed everything came when the 19-year-old Carey, then working as a waitress, went to a Manhattan party and met her future husband, Tommy Mottola, who had recently been appointed head of CBS Records. Carey handed him a demo tape, and the rest is history.
The couple married in 1993, and moved to a $25 million mansion outside New York. Two years later the marriage fell apart (they finally divorced in 1998). The marriage is clearly a prickly subject for Carey, who refers to it as “the situation.” The mansion is long sold, but Carey tells me that she learned late last year that it had burned down. Her words come evenly but with unforgettable force. “Apparently, it was a fluke electrical thing. There were 125 fire fighters, and it burnt to a crisp at the end of the century. All things come to an end. I lost quite a bit of money on that house in fact, but the point is that when it burnt down, I kinda felt good because it had so many bad memories — some nice memories, but a lot of bad vibes and karma, and it felt like that was the end of it. I used to think I'd be haunting that house, walking around it trapped. But now that it's burnt down that's not going to happen.”
So was divorcing Mottola a difficult decision to make? “It was very difficult for me because again, I was coming from a place that was insecure as a kid. I was used to dysfunction, from growing up in a dysfunctional situation. I felt like, OK, well, I have this amazing career, why should I think I'm allowed to also be happy in my personal life — nothing's perfect. But then it got to such a point that I just couldn't handle it any more. I started meeting other young artists who were successful, but also happy and free, and led their own lives, and made their own decisions, and I saw that how I was living wasn't normal. But the more I dwell on it, the worse it will be for me.”
Obviously putting the emotional scars of a failed marriage behind her, Mariah has been snapped out on the tiles clubbing with Leonardo DiCaprio, and her latest single “Thank God I Found You” is widely believed to be about the latest man linked romantically to her, multi-Grammy-winning Latin singing sensation Luis Miguel. Not something Mariah is willing to talk about, but she will reveal the song “was definitely inspired by being in a good place in my life, being with someone I feel at ease with most of the time, which is not something I am used to.”
Continuing to work for the same record company, and for the man she used to be married to (who recently announced his engagement to Mexican soap star Thalia, tipped to be the next Mariah Carey) clearly isn't easy either. Carey, who has always insisted on being involved right through from the writing to the mastering of all her projects, feels “maybe because of my bizarre situation with the personal involvement with the record company, I feel I have to work twice as hard as anyone else, because nothing is going to be handed to me. But then, even when I was in the ‘other situation’ things weren't handed to me.”
Maybe this explains Carey's decision to move into film. She has already had a cameo part as an opera diva in the Chris O'Donnell movie The Bachelor. But after this whistle-stop world tour (her first in eight years), Carey starts work on All That Glitters, a film set in 1981 about a little girl in New York who is taken away from her drug-addicted mother and put in a foster home, where she eventually gets to join a pop group. As well as writing the music, Carey will star in the film, but she admits that the transition from musician to actress has been hard. “The comedic side has always been easier for me — I've been going into characters, doing different voices my whole life. But I think I was blocked emotionally from dealing with sadness. When that comes it's almost like a well, like a dam bursting, and that's what kinda happened when I first started studying acting. My coach made me lay down on the floor to do this relaxation exercise, and it started to come out.”
Clever, funny and vulnerable, yet extraordinarily strong and single-minded, Mariah Carey makes intriguing company. Is there nothing that will ruffle those famous blonde locks? Yes. Simply quiz her about that bold image-change from curly-haired “girl next door” to pop temptress. Instantly, Carey grabs a fashion supplement and points at it. “How can anyone make a big deal out of what I wear when this is what they wear on the runway? Look, they're freakin' nude. What am I supposed to wear, some schoolmarm thing? I don't think so.”
Carey insists that she attended the MTV Europe Awards in jeans and a tank top while everyone else wore revealing gowns. She points out that Barbra Streisand “had her entire butt hanging out” on the cover of one of her LPs, and that Aretha Franklin frequently exposes a bit of cleavage. “But when I do it, people have issues about it, just because I started out wearing flannel shirts and jean shorts and Pumas and high-necked dresses when it was not really appropriate for someone so young to be dressed up. But they were boring.”
So, if you do magically blag yourself backstage at Wembley on Saturday, you'd probably best ask the most successful woman in pop about something else.
