Mariah Scarey

By GAVANNDRA HODGE

A new film out in the US and Britain tells the story of a girl with a dream and a voice, who rose from poverty to stardom, who suffers as she sings a range of 80s hits, until in the end she finds love.

So far, so Hollywood. But if Glitter had told the real Mariah Carey story it would surely have been less ho-hum than Hammer Horror.

"Ladies and gentleman. Mariah Carey has lost her mind," were the words uttered by MTV veejay Carson Daly in July, six days before the singer checked into Silver Hill Hospital suffering from "mental and physical exhaustion".

Less than a week earlier Carey had launched into an impromptu monologue. "I just want to have one day," she burbled, "where I can swim and eat ice cream and look for rainbows and learn how to ride a bike. See, if you don't have ice cream in your life you might just go a little bit crazy. And I'm not going to do that."

Carey was cracking up. Following reports that she had claimed Marilyn Monroe was speaking to her through her piano and that she had decided she was invisible, not to mention the incoherent messages posted by her on her fanclub website, came the news that Carey had had an "accident" involving broken plates.

Her mother phoned the police and said, "I think she is going to kill herself". Mariah was taken to hospital in New York with bandaged arms and was classed as "emotionally disturbed".

The collapse had been ostensibly triggered by her intense schedule promoting Glitter, the film and album, the first she had delivered to her new record company Virgin, and by the break-up with her boyfriend of three years, the "Spanish Elvis", Luis Miguel.

Mariah was phoning friends to ask them to sing her lullabies.

The breakdown was a disaster for Virgin, which had offered Carey an estimated $US140
million ($337 million) deal to join the label. The publicity department has been working overtime to rehabilitate the star's public persona.

"Mariah is back at full strength." So says her British publicist. "Hero has been one of the most requested songs on American radio since September 11. She has been making lots of appearances on American television, but she will be doing performances, but not interviews."

An industry marketing executive has another story: "Mariah is being wheeled out to every event possible by her record company. But she looks ill, and rumour has it that she still is ill."

On Halloween night, Mariah was spotted at a Hollywood restaurant wearing a Wonderwoman outfit: a sequinned bra and knickers and blonde hair, just to go for a burger.

Industry insiders are suggesting Carey's disintegration began earlier than July. "She has been unstable since her divorce from Sony boss Tommy Mottola," says a record producer. That was in March 1998. Mariah had been married to Mottola for five years. He is 20 years her senior.

In 1988, Mariah — then 18, unknown and a self-proclaimed virgin — met Mottola at a party and presented him with a demo tape. Within days she had signed a record deal.

Two years later she was the proud owner of two Grammy awards and had sold 6 million copies of her debut album, Mariah Carey.

Five years after that, they married at a wedding styled on video footage of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer'.

Mariah and Mottola moved into a 20ha, £10 million ($34 million) estate in the Hudson River Valley which they shared with four horses and two pizza ovens.

Despite this conspicuous wealth, Carey had little control over her own finances. The deal she had signed when she was 17 meant that for 13 years she received only half her royalties.

She has since said that her time with Mottola was among the lowest of her life.

Following their separation, she reinvented herself, straightening and dyeing her hair blonde. She developed an image that somehow spliced together elements of working girl and schoolgirl, highly sexual yet oddly, artificially innocent.

Her troubles may go back even further than her doomed marriage. When Mariah was three, her dad left her mum, who was then compelled to take on a second job as a voice coach, with the result that from the age of about six, Mariah pretty much looked after herself.

Her childhood was defined by insecurity — the family moved house 13 times — and alienation. "I always felt like the rug could be pulled out from under me at any time," she has admitted. "And coming from a racially mixed background, I always felt like I didn't fit in anywhere."

Her voice was her salvation. This extraordinary burnished instrument was discovered when, aged three, she picked up her mother's missed cue in rehearsal for Verdi's Rigoletto — in Italian.

By 16, Mariah was dragging herself to school in the mornings after staying up deep into the night working on demo tapes.

Days after graduation she moved to New York with one ambition: to make it as a singer. She was so poor that she had only one pair of shoes — a battered pair of black sneakers, a size too small.

Mariah's lyrics are akin to the secret, self-dramatising poems of a 14-year-old girl.

And she has adopted the traditional behavioural habits of the diva with epic relish. "She is considered a pain," says our industry insider. "Clive Davis [boss of Arista Records] wouldn't even mention her by name, such was her rivalry with Whitney Houston, his star.

"Mariah was constantly trying to get one up on Whitney. When they recorded a track together he would only ever call it the Whitney duet, and wouldn't even play the section that Mariah was singing on."

At last year's World Music Awards in Monte Carlo, Mariah insisted that she collect her award for Female Artist of the Millennium twice because Michael Jackson, nominated for the male award, had been given a more extravagant presentation.

She sees herself as street-smart, wise beyond her years, a woman who "saw things before I was 12 that most people may never see in their lives".

But she also regards herself as an international superstar who must have her own lighting consultant at a cost of $2000 a day, a superstar girl whose favourite colour is pink and who once insisted on being supplied with six kittens to keep her company in her dressing room.

It's easy to see Mariah Carey as a victim of the relentless billion-dollar music industry, of her
restless ambition to escape an under-privileged childhood and the need to replace her father.

She is the victim of her own desire to become something other than herself: a diva, something her mother never managed. To this end she has spent the past 15 years expending herself on a never-ending cycle of self-
creation and re-invention.

But perhaps there is another way of looking at this grimly glittering story. Perhaps this "mad" Mariah Carey, is her latest, most baroque creation yet.

After all, the diva, from her operatic beginnings to her current incarnations, is defined by her tragedy. She exists precariously in that gleaming place where delusion shades into madness. Now that would be a good subject for a film.

- INDEPENDENT