Mariah Carey: An Unmarried Woman

Mariah Carey has an intense relationship with her handbag. Nothing unnatural or bizarre, you understand, just something slightly more emotionally freighted than the average state affairs that exists between a woman and the receptacle containing her cell phone, sunglasses, compact and lipstick. Tommy Mottola, the president and chief operating officer of Sony Music Entertainment, whom she married in 1993 and separated from last spring used to make a joke about the bag, about how she reminded him of his grandmother, always with the bag. But to Mariah, the bag (Prada, what else?) is an extension of herself, sort of mobile home for the soul. She and her mother (her parents divorced when she was about 3) moved a lot when Mariah was a child, being a superstar, as Mariah has been virtually since she signed with Sony subsidiary Columbia Records at 18, is an on-the-move type of a profession. Anyway, she likes to sleep with it next to the bed, so that if anything happens in the middle of the night, she has it right there and can just run out. So that's probably where it was when she had this dream:

In Mariah's dream, she has lost her bag, not to mention her two assistants, Katie and Stephanie, who are supposed to keep track of it. She is in a trailer, surrounded by freaky, drug-addicted people who are all physically impaired in some way, and she knows that if she doesn't find her bag, one of them is going to try to steal her stuff. She runs from the trailer toward a big building, pursued by one of the freaks, who, when she glances back at him, is no longer impaired and is laughing at her, as if in mockery of her gullibility. Continuing on, she bumps into two girls who tormented her when she was little. They are grown up now but have the same weird attitude they had when they used to throw rocks at her window and taunt her while her mom was at work. "Yes," says Mariah, "you used to terrorize me when I was in the third grade and you guys were older. You should have known better." Moving on, she sees a little girl who tells her that she has no friends where she lives now because she doesn't go to school — they won't let her go because she's a TV star. "Who won't let you go?" asks Mariah. "-----," says the little girl, naming a man who in real life tried to turn a sleazy buck off having known Mariah before she got famous. The little girl is not anyone Mariah actually knows, but she feels like she recognizes her as soon as she sees her. She can still see her in her mind.

Until recently, Mariah's official public image has been a pristine and regulated as her dream is chaotic and untrammeled. She is a franchise artist, the best-selling female recording artist of the decade, the vocal pyrotechnician whose sweetly soaring power ballads and bouncy dance singles have helped sell more than 80 million records worldwide since her 1990 debut, Mariah Carey, which itself sold 12 million copies and produced an unmatched four consecutive No. 1 singles. Melodies come to her so easily that she could write a song right now while she's sitting with you. She has never had to worry about her professional popularity; she is the people's pop princess. But she does worry a little; she is the worrying kind. "I'm the type of person who doesn't count their chickens until they're hatched," she says, and this is true. She is not even the type of person who counts her chicken after they're hatched. "In the past, much more so than now," she says, "I was very cautious and easily swayed by people telling me, if you do this, you're limiting yourself, you're limiting your salability, you're limiting your chances of success."

By "do this," Mariah means stirring a little hip-hop and some heavier R&B sounds into her mix, a harder vibe than the people who buy her albums for the ballads and who probably don't listen to the Wu-Tang Clan or Mobb Deep may be used to, as she has done on her new album, Butterfly. The record has caused something of a stir from its first single, the mildly horny and pleasantly funky "Honey," the video for which included a prologue showing Mariah being held captive and interrogated by a sharply dressed mobster. This was seen as a not-so-tacit acknowledgment of rumors that Mottola was possessive and controlling to the point of basically keeping his wife prisoner in their secure and secluded Bedford, N.Y., estate. Mariah denies that the parallels were intentional, and although she is a lovely, charming, down-to-earth person, on this particular point, I don't believe her. She does wonder why nobody has commented on the first shot of her in the "Butterfly" video, which shows her lying on a daybed in a pose that echoes a famous still of Caroll Baker lying in a crib from the movie Baby Doll. In case you are not recalling, Baby Doll is based on a Tennessee Williams story that turns on the boredom and exploitability of a young woman married to a much older man. This reference was intentional, though Mariah does not specify the intention.