Mariah Carey: An Unmarried Woman

Mariah has been linked by the press to an assortment of men, including Sean "Puffy" Combs, Q-Tip and New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter. Actually she seems to hang with her close girlfriends and a more loosely knit community of professional friends — rappers, radio and record people, and whatever Russell Simmons is (even impresario no longer seems sufficient) — whom she sees in groups, as if she's stepping into the social scene pretty much where being a world-class superstar and suburban wife had caused her to step out in her late teens and early 20s. Asked whether she feels she missed her youth she says, "No, because I don't think it's gone."

If Mariah's relationship to her own adulthood is one that's only just being allowed to blossom, her relationship to her childhood is a carefully preserved flower, maybe like the single rose Mottola sent her at the very start of their relationship, a rose she still has. She doesn't have many pictures of herself from when she was a child, so she values the ones she does have — there's one with the Christmas tree in the background, where she's a little, little girl, and another where she's older and has some majorly large blond-and-black hair. We are at Mariah's rented town house — the place came furnished, which Mariah doesn't mind, since it's nicely furnished and she feels like she spent the last four years choosing fabrics, wallpaper and carpet for the Bedford house. We are sitting in Mariah's large, clean kitchen, talking about her childhood. "My mother gets very upset when I say we were poor," says Mariah, who is wearing a little tank top that says FLIRT and a pair of jeans. "But, then again, we had a conversation the other day, and she was recalling that she worked three jobs at one point. And I don't think that's something to be ashamed of. She really worked hard to keep us afloat."

Mariah's dream, in the wish-that-your-heart-makes sense of the word, has been, since childhood, to be a star. This dream started to come true almost 10 years ago, when she (legendarily) handed her demo tape to her future husband at a Columbia party she had gone with late-'80s disco diva Brenda K. Starr, for whom she was singing backup vocals at the time. "I almost didn't go to the party, because I had this deal with Warner Bros.," she says, "but I went. I waited, like, two hours for her, freezing my ass off in the one little black dress that I had, sitting on the floor. And she finally showed up and we went. And the rest..." Is history? "Yep."

The funny thing about Mariah's dream (in this context) is that it is the direct result of the kind of feelings that may also have prompted her other, sleeping dream. Hers is the kind of drive that draws strength not only from the desire to reach what lies ahead but also from the desire to lose what's left behind. "I've always felt so separate from everybody, even if I never talked about it to my friends, or my mother, or my family," she says. "Because of a lot of reasons. Because I didn't have as much as my friends. Because my father's black and my mother's white. Because I'm very ambiguous-looking. Because white people often mistake me for white and will therefore say things in front of me that are offensive."

Mariah has a brother and a sister, but both are almost 10 years older, and she was, in effect, an only child. (Her sister, who was pregnant and married by 16, and, according to press reports, subsequently a drug addict and prostitute, may have presented a more immediate example of the path not to take, as well as a living cautionary tale on the virtues of caution itself.) Whatever the particulars, her childhood while not miserable, was not easy. The dream of a singing career along with the support and love of her mother, are, she says, what pulled her through. "If there were difficult times when I was growing up, I got through them by being an optimist, praying and hoping, at the risk of sounding cliched and corny, that through music I would rise above the whole thing and I wasn't going to be like people I saw."

Mariah has always known she could sing. She is no longer much in touch with her father, but one of her earliest memories, from before her parents divorced and her brother and sister left home, involves singing and its relation of self-assertion. "My father was very strict, one of the strictest disciplinarians, and there was this whole dinner-table etiquette; everybody spoke only when spoken to, and so on. And I was a more free spirit; my mom kind of shielded me from that. And I loved singing; I was singing since I started talking. I can't help it, I have music going on in my mind all the time. So I was singing at the table, and my brother and sister were just, like" — she pantomimes horrified astonishment — "and my father said: 'There will be no singing at the table!' So I got up from the table, and I went into the living room, and I got up on the coffee table and continued singing at the top of my lungs. I guess that was an early indication of who I was going to be."

I guess that could mean she was going to be a singer; or it could mean that she was going to be a singer in rebellion against a controlling male authority figure; or it could mean that she was going to be a singer who stood on coffee tables, though if that is the case, she has successfully concealed it from press scrutiny. She is, of course, a big, big, big, big star, possessed of the kind of the fame that even people who don't know who she is know who she is. But Mariah has, for a couple of reasons, been very guarded about her personal life from the very start of her career; she had the kind of childhood that leaves you naturally guarded, and her success was so huge and immediate that being guarded (literally as well as figuratively) was a condition of survival.

Not coincidentally, from the very start of her career, Mariah has been dogged by rumor: first, that she was having an affair with Mottola, who is 20 years her senior and was married when the couple met (true, as it turned out); then, that her marriage to Mottola was oppressive and confining (more on this later); and, currently, that she is out swinging from rafters of every nightclub in town, partying down with rap artists and dating Donald Trump (as are we all).

Also, while publicizing the private lives of big, big, big, big stars is hardly ever bad for business, publicizing the private lives of the chief operating officers of big, big, big, big multinational corporations like Sony is hardly ever good for it. In Mariah's case, owing to her marriage, these things were one and the same.

"It's unnatural to curb what you say; it's fucking hard," says Mariah, miserably, of the limitations on what it's OK to reveal. "I mean for me to get to this point...it took an enormous amount of strength for me to get out from where I was." We are at a lunch at a Japanese restaurant, and Mariah, I would be derelict if I did not inform you, is wearing a honey-colored spaghetti-strap suede minidress with matching ribbed wool tights and high-heeled boots. She has a honey-colored cardigan tied around her waist and a pair of Fendi sunglasses pushed back in her honey-colored hair. "Can't we go shop for kittens or something?" she asks wistfully when the subject of her marriage comes up.