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Mariah On The New Ebony Magazine
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It could have been called "The Vindication of Mariah," and people would have understood. Yet, Mariah Carey titled her most recent recording The Emancipation of Mimi, and the tremendously successful six-times platinum CD became the best-selling disc of 2005 with more than 9 million units sold. It also earned her three Grammy Awards and anchored what some say is the best year ever for this multitalented songbird.
For Carey, success is perhaps the best revenge and response to the media critics and naysayers in the music industry and beyond who had written her off and sounded the death knell for what started out as a brilliant career. The resilient artist has demonstrated what it takes - enormous talent, guts and perseverance - to overcome adversity and endure personal and career setbacks.
The second phase of the comeback celebration is Carey's two-month tour that will kick off in early August and continue into October. The buzz escalates as the kick-off date nears. "I'm really excited about it," she says of the tour, adding that she also is especially excited about working with Randy Jackson, who will resume his role as her musical director. She says she knew Jackson long before he became famous for his role on American Idol. "There will be more than a few wardrobe changes," she says, adding that she will be mindful not to bore her fans by being off stage too often.
That's because concertgoers will want to hear her sing her endearing hits, from her debut "Vision of Love" on through to her recent No. 1 singles, "We Belong Together" and "Don't Forget About Us." She has now tied Elvis Presley's 17 Billboard Hot 100 hits, but Carey has a good chance of surpassing the Beatles' all-time high of 20 No. 1 hits.
She named the tour The Adventures of Mimi: The Voice, The Hits, The Tour (rather than The Emancipation of Mimi) to reflect her life. "It's been like a roller-coaster ride," she says in an interview while relaxing in her home in Tribeca in New York City. "I don't take myself too seriously. I always try to turn things into the positive - the glass is half-full, not half-empty. I just turn it around and don't let anything keep me down. I've come a long way in terms of just getting through each obstacle that was put in my way. This tour is going to reflect that, but in a subtle way. I'm not trying to ram a message down anybody's throat. The true message is in my songs overall. This is a moment in my life that is really exciting, and it really has been a ride to get here. If you don't take a risk, you never have the experience. I've definitely taken some risks! But that's what life is. It's like God doesn't put anything in front of us that is too much for us to handle. I really believe that.
"I just want to go on the road and enjoy myself with my fans. It's our moment to celebrate, to have an adventure. First, you get emancipated, then you have an adventure."
Carey's emancipation came at a price, a very public price. After her debut album earned her two Grammy Awards, followed by a succession of hits each year during the '90s, her life and career hit a series of potholes. The rough period began with the breakup of her four-year marriage to record executive Tommy Mottola (20 years her senior), who had signed her to his label in the late '80s. She finally got out of her contract with Sony and signed with Virgin Records. Then there were reports that she has a "breakdown" in 2001 while dealing with the pressures of filming the movie and recording the soundtrack for Glitter. (Neither project did well.) She checked herself into a treatment facility for exhaustion. Soon after, Virgin bought out her contract. It was a difficult time for Carey, who was still in her 20s. She recalls how she spent hours on a particular flight reading negative and incorrect press clippings about herself.
"I was just really surprised by how big a deal people made out of it," she says of the incident, adding that she simply was exhausted and needed some rest. "I was working within a system where my ex-husband was still in control, so those were some of the hardest days of my life. That was really why I was struggling, I was off Sony, finally, but at the new label I had two weeks to set up a record. It was just draining the life out of me because I still felt I had to fight against the system... The intensity of the label that I came off of was so huge that I still had to fight against it because I think certain people knew that if I succeeded, it made their efforts to make me look like a puppet in vain."
"For me to fight on their level, their playing ground, didn't work. I was in an uphill battle and it was time for me to just stop. Sometimes you have to do that because you're literally, physically going to collapse, and that's what was happening to me. I never looked at it as breakdown. Even a therapist told me that people don't have breakdowns and then the next day you're talking to them and they're fine. 'This is what happened to you [the therapist said]: You were overworked and nobody was treating you like a person, and you allowed it because you've been pushing yourself that way forever and you are used to a dysfunctional life. That's how it is'."
That was then. Today Carey says she is surrounded by a "really good support system," with entertainment veteran Benny Medina as her manager and L.A. Reid as chairman of Island Def Jam Music Group, now her record company. "L.A. is the first record executive who really understands me as an artist," Carey says. "He wasn't trying to put me in some box that everybody wanted to put me in."
Carey has never fit neatly into anybody's box. As a child, she loved to sing and she credits her mother for the "genes." She started vocal lessons when she was 4. As a kid she spent a lot of time listening to radio and her sister's records, taking in the soulful sounds of Gladys Knight, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Al Green. Gospel music also was a great influence, and on occasion she accompanied her late paternal grandmother, who was Black, to a Baptist church. By the time Carey was in high school, she was writing her own songs, several of which appeared on her debut recording.
For most of her life, Carey says she was not in touch with her father and had limited contact with the African-American side of her family. But in recent years that changed, and she is grateful that she had a chance to spend time with her father before he died several years ago. "I was fortunate to be able to have a relationship with my father," she says. "My parents got divorced when I was young. When you grow up with one parent, you get one side of the story. I'm not saying there was a deliberate thing that happened, but that's just the way it is. So I was fortunate to find out things I never knew about my father. For one thing, I never knew he was in touch with my music and my career. He wrote me a letter [during those rough times]: 'It doesn't matter whatever is happening. You've always been a star to me, even before anybody knew who you were.' It meant so much to me."
In her home in Tribeca, she has a special place for the cards, photographs and family mementoes that her father left her, including notes she had written when she was kid. "I never knew he was sentimental," she says. "I was grateful to be able to spend time with him before he got sick. It was unfortunate that I lost him soon after, but I was grateful for the time I was able to spend with him."
Carey often jokes about having a "dysfunctional" family, marriage and life. But she has found stability and solace by establishing a strong relationship with God and her church. "I really give credit for everything to God. Everything I have is because He has given it to me. So if I've had to go through some times that were a little difficult, and where some people had some different opinions about me - they still do and always will - but as long as I have that unconditional love from God, and I realize that no matter what, He is the one who will always be here for me, regardless. For this particular moment in my life, I've been able to have a really good relationship with my pastor, [the Rev.] Clarence Keaton of True Worship Church [who performed on the Grammy telecast with Carey earlier this year]. He's just really a great person. That is something that has really helped me."
When asked if there is a special man in her life, Mariah says she prefers not to divulge details. "I don't feel comfortable being in like 50,000 different relationships," she says. "I've never been that type of person. I was married and that didn't work out, and that is something that in a lot of ways shaped the way I approach relationships." The man she chooses to spend time with "would be on the same page with me spiritually, have a sense of humor and is not concerned about being overshadowed by the fame thing."
After the tour, Mariah immediately will start production for the movie Tennessee. Acclaimed producer Lee Daniels saw her performance in Wise Girls and felt that she was perfect for the role of a waitress who takes a cross-country journey to tend to family business. "It's not a money-making moment for me," she says of the independent film. "It's another way to explore my creativity and to be able to work with someone of Lee's caliber."
While some say that Mimi is the best record of Mariah's life and career, she disagrees. "I don't feel that this is the best album of my life. That is yet to come. I'm ready to get back into the studio. I have so many ideas." And so much more music to make.
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She climbed her way back to the top of the pop charts, but nothing's more satisfying to Mariah Carey than coming home to her penthouse pad in Manhattan.
It would be difficult to describe the past year as anything short of a triumph for Mariah Carey. Her album The Emancipation of Mimi was the best-selling CD of 2005, won her three Grammys (she now has five), and helped the 37-year-old singer tie Elvis for the second most number-one singles (17) of all time. But Carey also staged a miraculous comeback on the domestic front: overhauling her 12,000-square-foot Manhattan triplex after a water tower burst, soaking much of her elaborately hand-painted, antiques-laden, chandelier-strung abode.
"Everything was perfect and then - whammo! Talk about a leak!" says Carey's interior designer, the renowned N.Y.C. decorator Mario Buatta. "All the furniture had to be taken out and put into storage, every wall had to be repainted, the baseboards had to be ripped out - the place had to be completely redone. It was a nightmare."
A garden-variety superstar might have lost her cool, but Carey, who rented a house in Bel-Air while the damage was being repaired, didn't get all worked up over the matter. After a few difficult years she's in a good place - literally and figuratively - and on this balmy March evening she's utterly relaxed in her newly dressed-up digs, despite being more than an hour late for a flight to L.A. The plane isn't going anywhere without her, though: It belongs to movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, who sent it to fly her to his Oscar party, at which she has agreed to perform. "Remember, Mariah, it's not your plane," her personal assistant anxiously reminds her. "Oh, right," Carey replies nonchalantly. "I forgot."
Downtime is so precious to Carey that it's easy for her to overlook such relative trifles. But as far as her over-the-top image is concerned, she is always ready to have a good laugh at her own expense. "The greatest thing about this apartment is that it's the first place I've owned by myself, so it's all me," she says. "If someone else ever bought it, she'd have to be a total diva!" Plush sofas, taffeta curtains and hallways dripping with glittering sconces make the triplex "art deco-y and Old Hollywoodish, the kind of place I dreamed about having when I was little." After her parents divorced, when she was 3, Carey and her siblings grew up living with their mother in 13 successive houses on Long Island, which left her feeling "like a rug was literally being pulled out from under me. I remember saying to myself, 'I want to have a good life and feel secure,' I had to have faith. That's how I got over every obstacle along the way - by visualizing and believing in something better."
During the early years of her career, Carey married music-industry titan Tommy Mottola and had a taste of the world she once could only imagine, living on a majestic 50-acre estate outside N.Y.C. (the couple later divorced). "Unfortunately this was a time when all I was allowed to do was sit there and pick out sconces," she says. "I can still spend hours talking about door handles." A remnant from that era, which sparked her passion for interior design, now anchors her informal family room: an ornate, hand-carved cherry mantelpiece featuring flowers, hearts and her trademark emblem, a butterfly. "This piece took two and a half years to finish," Carey says. "It's a little garish, but I love it because of what the butterfly represents: freedom."
Both extravagant and comfortable, Carey's apartment reflects her hard-won maturity and independence in almost every corner. Hallmarks include glazed peach walls (they required eight coats of paint), a marble steam room with a waterbed (the humidity is good for her voice), and a brand-new Marrakech-inspired solarium that looks like something out of Arabian Nights. "After my roof garden is finished and I put a hot tub out there, I'm going to call this room Chez Mimi," she says, referring to her nickname. "I won't go to smoky clubs anymore. I'll party with my posse here, and we'll watch the sun rise."
Surprisingly, her biggest indulgence looks anything but: a chipped white baby grand piano, which set her back $662,500 at a Christie's auction of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia. "I could have gotten the 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President' dress or whatever," Carey says, "but that would have represented Marilyn Monroe's stardom, whereas the piano belonged to her mother and was a piece of her childhood." The singer identifies strongly with the often misunderstood icon and has even accessorized one of her bathrooms with photographs of the star and other mementos. "She had such a childlike quality," adds Carey, who tends to embrace her own youthful impulses more often than not. Her fans love to send her stuffed animals, butterfly figurines and Hello Kitty keepsakes; she has created a sort of shrine to the latter in another small bathroom. "Lindsay Lohan, Sean Lennon and I had a jam session in there the other night. They were obsessed with my Hello Kitty bathroom."
If the apartment has a pulsing heart, though, it is most certainly the family room. When Carey's father died of cancer in 2002, he left behind dozens of family photos that she had framed and hung from pink ribbons on the walls. Other inherited pieces include a flag from his stint in the army, cards that she had given him as a young girl, and her grandmother's pink hand mirror, which has a yellow butterfly painted on it. "My father was going to give the mirror to me as a birthday gift, but then he passed away," Carey recalls. "He had saved all kinds of things for me, and I never knew it. I never knew he cared about me like that. This is the stuff that really matters."
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"People ask me, "Isn't this really the vindication of Mariah Carey?" Not really. My whole life has been about obstacles."
"Let's drink from festive glasses," announces Mariah Carey, a bejeweled champagne flute in each hand as she tiptoes barefoot into "the Moroccan Lounge" - a sitting room on the top floor of her three-story New York apartment that is decorated like a Marrakesh hash parlor, minus the hash. She sets the flutes down on a table alongside the less festive glasses from which we'd already been drinking and then reassumes her position curled up in the corner of the couch. Her personal assistant brings in a tray that carries a large bottle of water for Mariah and a can of Diet Coke for me, and she hands each of us a small linen napkin. It's past midnight, and Mariah doesn't usually allow herself caffeine at this hour, because she's an insomniac and has a very low tolerance for "things that make you speedy." Still, she asks if I mind sharing a splash of my Diet Coke, reasoning that she's in an "awake moment" anyway.
Among her assorted Mariah-isms, the concept of "moments" looms large. In the course of the evening, she refers to precisely forty-nine different kinds: analytical moments, schmaltz moments, fairy-tale moments, complete-truth moments, celebratory moments, Biblical moments and, yes, diva moments. In 2001, following an embarrassing "TRL moment," Mariah says she had her share of "bleak moments" and even a couple of "woe-is-me moments." Her favorite canary-colored bathing suit from when she was nine, she says, was a "clingy-to-the-body moment." As is her current ensemble: painted-on jeans and itty-bitty white tank top with the number seventeen ironed on the front in bold black digits. Seventeen, no doubt, as in how many Number One singles Mariah has amassed in the past decade and a half. In December, when "Don't Forget About Us," the latest cut from her five-times-platinum The Emancipation of Mimi, reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, Mariah tied Elvis Presley's record for Number Ones; four more top singles and she'll outpace the Beatles.
The thirty-five-year-old singer has had a momentous year and one that is all the sweeter because it came on the heels of a momentary - though devastating - slump. Released last spring, The Emancipation of Mimi, surpassed the low expectations with which it was greeted to become the best-selling album of 2005. Mariah says that Mimi, her tenth studio album, is a product of her newfound creative freedom. "In the past, I knew people wanted certain formulaic things from me," she says. "By 'people,' I mean executives."
But Mimi incorporates Mariah's cherished hip-hop influences in greater proportion than ever. She brought the Neptunes and her old friend Snoop Dogg in for Say Somethin'," traded verses with Twista on "So Lonely," duetted with long-time producer Jermaine Dupri on "Get Your Number" and teamed with Nelly on "To The Floor." Though there are still the belt-it-out ballads, they're R&B slow jams with a bangin' bottom end that often rivals Mariah's own bangin' bottom end. "The funny thing is, I"ve always known that what I really loved would be commercially successful," she says. Her instincts proved correct: The record has already spawned three hits - "Don't Forget About Us," "Shake It Off" and "We Belong Together" - and has earned her eight Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year. When we met just a few weeks before the awards, it was clear that - no matter how many Grammys she would or would not collect - Mariah had safely reassumed her pop-diva throne.
"People ask me, 'Isn't this really the vindication of Mariah Carey?' she says. "Not really. My whole life has been a series of overcoming obstacles. Since I've always had to struggle, I've always expected that I will have to struggle."
"She's on the third chapter of her career," says Island Def Jam chairman Antonio 'LA" Reid. "The first chapter had major successes. The second chapter had some major disappointments. Now, she's at the point where she has the wherewithal to stay in the game for as long as it takes, to withstand the ups and downs. It's like Muhammad Ali or Frank Sinatra. And I think her fans have a real love for her because she has had those ups and downs and she's still here.
Mariah arrived characteristically late for dinner at a Brazilian restaurant around the corner from her apartment, but she is also characteristically apologetic about it. Affecting exaggerated fabulosity, she purrs, " Sorry darling. The pedicurist fell on her orange stick. Stitches were required." And then, without missing a beat: "What are we drinking? Wine? Vodka has fewer calories. All right, you twisted my arm. I'll have a glass of wine."
Tonight is the singer's last night of indulgence before her personal trainer Patricia comes back on duty to whip her into shape for the Grammys. She's especially concerned about looking her best because of the jabs she took about the low-cut black number she wore a week earlier at the Golden Globes, custom-designed for her by Karl Lagerfeld. "The winner for the too-tight dress... goes to Mariah Carey," wrote one critic. "She takes the cake, and eats it too." Said another, "Carey, according to my seven-year-old, "blew up like a truck tire." "Satin is a very unforgiving fabric," Mariah notes. "And what was I gonna do? Call frickin' Karl Lagerfeld and say, 'Can you please make it out of matte jersey instead?' " Of course, Mariah is used to having her outfits panned: She made Mr. Blackwell's worst-dressed list last year ("The world applauds your musical emancipation... but please - leave that body to our imagination") and she often - let's face it - wears clothes tighter, tinier and generally more hooched-out than most thirty-five-old women. Still, though not a Zellwegerian stick figure by any stretch of the matte jersey, the five-foot-eight Mariah is considerably leaner than you might expect: not so much full-figured as sturdy. She says she has always tended to be muscular and notes that, in seventh grade, she beat every boy in her class at arm wrestling.
"I can't try to compete with people that weigh eighty pounds soaking wet when, look, I'm ethnic," she says. "I've got a butt, and I want to keep it because I like it. That's what it goes! I'm gonna pull it together and be as thin as I can be for the Grammys, but there's only a certain amount of weight that I wanna lose. The weight-obsessed workout monger is not my role model as a singer. They might be pop stars and icons, but they're not necessarily what I like to call a saaaanger. They ain't saaangin'."
Mariah's big voice may be her greatest source of pride - it is, in her words, her "instrument" - but she is equally keen to be known as one of the few pop stars who has had a hand in the writing and/or production of nearly every song she's ever recorded. "Even from the beginning, I said, "'If you want to put me with people to write with and collaborate, that's fine, but don't try to force me to record someone else's song.' I'm not saying I'm friggin' William Shakespeare. But even writing a melody, it's a release. And I really have a need to express myself."
Of course, there was a time when expressing herself was an uphill battle for Mariah. "They laughed at me at the label when I played them my 'Fantasy' remix with Ol' Dirty Bastard," she says. "They - one person - was like, 'What the hell is this? I could do that." But you can't explain to someone who didn't grow up on hip-hop and who's wanting to listen to the Good-Fellas soundtrack exclusively that this is hot and it will be a classic."
It's not Mariah's style to name names, whether she's dishing about a certain female artist who got skinny with the help of illegal pharmaceuticals or whether she's referring less than obliquely to her ex-husband, former Sony Music chief Tommy Mottola. It was Mottola who discovered Mariah and signed her to Columbia Records after a friend of Mariah's passed him a demo tape at a party in 1988. Mottola and Mariah became romantically involved shortly thereafter, and - once he had divorced his wife - the pair married in 1993. But, as is well-known by now, Mariah was miserable in the relationship, which she calls "abusive" and one that "purposely preyed on every insecurity I have." The couple divorced five years later, when Mariah still had a couple of albums remaining in her contract with Sony.
"It was real struggle being there while still having a certain person in power and being divorced from him," she says. "Things get a little awkward when you're dealing with someone who's obsessed, and angry, and powerful. Leaving him was one of the toughest things I've ever done. It's very easy to manipulate someone when you're twenty-plus years older than them. Whatever. I'm not placing blame. Nobody held a gun to my head." She pauses and smiles. "At least I don't think anybody held a gun to my head."
When Patricia Carey gave birth to a seven-pound baby girl at 7:27 A.M. on March 27th, 1970, the nurse turned to her and said, "That's gonna be one lucky baby." Patricia, an opera singer, even gave her daughter a moniker that she knew would work as a stage name: Mariah Carey. From the time Mariah was old enough to remember, Patricia told her, "You’re gonna be a star."
"My mother was never like, 'Get out there and sing,' " Mariah says. "But her attitude was very much 'Don't say if I make it, say when I make it.' I don't know if that was pressure, but whatever it was, it sold me. I believed it and also had a need to make music, and I had a need to elevate myself from where I was, and I knew I didn't want to grow up and be in that - dare I say? tax bracket. I was like, 'I wanna grow up and have this glamorous life.' "
Her father, Alfred Roy Carey, was the pragmatic one. "He was always saying, 'I think you should do your math homework,' " she says. "He was an aeronautical engineer, whereas I'm not a left-brain queen at all. He had been in the military, and he was very rigid and strict."
Mariah's parents met in the late Fifties in New York, Patricia, a bohemian Irish girl from Springfield, Illinois, had come to Manhattan, according to Mariah, in hopes of meeting Broadway star Yul Brynner. Alfred, who was part Venezuelan and part African-American, was living in Brooklyn, where he was "the lone black man driving around in a Porsche with his shaven head." says Mariah. "He was the hot tamale of the moment, and I guess he kind of resembled Yul Brynner. My mom saw him and said, 'There he is!' And her friend was like, 'That ain't nobody but Roy Carey,' My mom said, "Well, I want to meet him."
After they married, the Careys moved to the North Shore of Long Island to raise their three children: Mariah, her brother, Morgan, and her sister, Alison, both of whom are close to a decade older than her. The community did not respond well to the interracial family, and they endured not only sneers and nasty comments but also having their car set on fire and their pets poisoned. By the time Mariah was three, her parents had split up. In the ensuing years, Patricia and the children moved at least thirteen times, and getting settled in at a new school was always a challenge for Mariah, who says she never quite fit in with either the white kids or the black kids. Additionally, Alison reportedly was involved with drugs and prostitution, and at fifteen she had given birth to a son, Shawn, with whom Mariah is still extremely close.
Though Mariah says she is legally constrained from providing specifics (she and her sister are rumored to have signed a non-disclosure agreement preventing each from talking about the other), she makes it clear that her home life was fraught with peril and that she was often in very scary situations. Her mother spent a lot of time away from home, working two or three jobs to keep the family afloat, and Mariah often had to fend for herself. "I was six years old," she remembers, "and something happened in my house where I had to call some friends of my mother's to come and get things together. There was no adult, there was no teenager, the person left in charge had run out of the house, and I was there alone. My mom's friends came over, and you know people tend to talk over children and think that their kids don't hear? Well, I was very sensitive then, and I still am. I had very good hearing then, and I still do. I heard these words, and I'll never forget it. The