Mariah Carey
There are a lot of people in Mariah’s house – a grandiose mansion in a gated community in a suburb of Los Angeles. There’s a camera crew, sound guys, make-up people, photographers, photographer’s assistants, housekeepers, manager, manager’s assistant, bodyguards and people who carry things around.
Outside it’s blackly dark and deathly quiet, inside it’s intense buzzing tour preparation and all of this must be filmed for a documentary. For a person who is notoriously private, it seems strange but not as strange as the hours she and the cast of many seem to keep.
She brushes past me in a black laced up gown and vertiginous Tom Ford heels. Everyone else in the house, including her glamorous manager, seem to be wearing Louboutins. The glamorous manager has reptile Louboutins, drips exquisite jewllery and long thick curls. She tells me I may have to wait.. Mariah has just come back from an event and there is all kinds of filming and I am sure not what else has to be done. A hundred things .So I wait.
I wait in the house that arrived pre-furnished with its over-stuffed couches, mahogany twirly bits and endless chandeliers. The bathroom with its black velvet walls and its black diamond monogrammed hand towels.
I inspect the silver-framed pictures of Mariah and her twins Monroe and Moroccan: they’re at the beach, they’re on a boat, they’re in the sea. They look relaxed in some other life that is the opposite to this bubble of chaos. It’s always just Mariah and her beautiful babies – there’s no man involved. There’s not even a photographic hint of her former husband actor-rapper-entrepreneur-TV presenter Nick Cannon or a hint of her new fiance James Packer, son of the billionaire publishing magnate. He is described as businessman, investor and philanthropist but even Mariah seems unclear about what he actually does.
I’m in a corner perched on a window seat. I email her manager who is somewhere else in the cavernous house to say I need to leave by midnight, knowing there’s very little chance I will.
Every aspect of Mariah’s life is to be filmed and therefore I must be filmed. I resist. This does not go down well. No one seems to understand why I am not thrilled. When a lens the size of a small television looms in, I reach for my jacket to go. Mariah says in her velvet purr: “why don’t you want to be filmed Chrissy?”
Because I want to talk to her not worry about a camera. Because I want cozy, intimate not a performance. She gets it, she asks them to go away. She seems relieved too, that she’s not being scrutinized.
Why does she have all these people in her house? “I want people to see the whole thing, it’s a busy time right now and I happen to be on a night schedule.” (Indeed, communicating with her in the day has been impossible, not because she is a diva but because she was simply asleep). “I do sleep in the daytime but not all day because of the kids so it’s a little bit sporadic. I need to sleep and so I do. I’ve always been a night person. When I was six years old I wasn’t able to sleep. It started then. I was up all night and that was the precedent.”
I am sitting on a velvet cushion on the floor beside her who is in what can only loosely be described as a chair. It’s a multi pillowed arm chair that is halfway between a couch and a chair for a giant. She looks tiny, whatever diet she has been on has clearly worked.
When I look up it’s into her mesmerizing dark eyes, soulful, vulnerable, shy eyes. You imagine her as that child who couldn’t sleep, who felt she didn’t fit anywhere with a white Irish mother and an absent African-Venezuelan father. She was three when her parents divorced. But still, a determined spirit whose only catharsis was singing and writing songs and who never really considered she would do anything else. I am overwhelmed about an incredible sweetness about her. The fact that she’s not confident or showy she doesn’t carry herself as a woman who knows she has the five octave range voice, one of the single most identifiable voices of her generation. The last time she toured Europe was 2003 and she wants to make sure everything is right. After that she will come back for a residency in Vegas which, she says, is an entirely different show.
“I love everything to do with music, I love the creative process, my favourite place is the studio. I love writing songs – to me that’s the best gift.”
She’s been writing songs since she was six and she used to sing them underneath the table because she felt that was the only way she could express herself.
She nods. “t was cathartic. Suddenly I’d come up with a melody. It would come from out of the blue, like a gift, nothing like it.” Prepping for the tour with its endless rehearsals and dress fittings seems less creative. She nods.
Does she have a special diet? An exercise regime? “Yes. My diet is very bleak.” Bleak is one of her favourite words. She giggles. “I overuse the word because there is a lot of bleakness going on. My bleak diet is horrendous but I don’t want to tell anyone about it because it’s none of their business.” I tell her the bleak diet is working well. She sinks further back into her pillows. “I just don’t want to talk about it because I don’t want people commenting.” It seems like she gets hurt if there are nasty comments and a picture where she looks fat but this Mariah in before me is super svelte and even much photographed magnificent breasts are reined in. She’s losing her voice a little. She is rasping. I read that she sleeps with ten humidifiers. She nods. “I need them. At least four or five around my bed. I want them in the bedroom, a group of them. I also like to have a steam.”
Her children will be going on tour with her. “My son keeps asking can we go on an airplane. They’ve been traveling since they were three months old.” Her daughter Monroe, named after Mariah’s long-time girl crush Marilyn, likes to sing.
“She was singing last night with her friend. I can tell she’s got a really good ear – she can mimic what I can do. But she’s only four-and a half and it’s not fair for me to push it on her, so I am allowing her to be who she is. At the moment she’d rather just be silly with it. She knows she’s named after Marilyn and she can recognise her in pictures but I haven’t shown her the movies yet. They are into Disney and Halloween. It took a lot to get them to transition into Christmas.” So she has mini Goth twins? “No, I’m gonna nip that in the bud.”
She had a difficult pregnancy. Pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes and it was suggested that the twins should be induced at 33 weeks. She refused because she didn’t want to be separated from them by an incubator when they were born. “I wanted to keep them with me as long as I could which was until 35 weeks and that worked out good.
There’s a flutter of her luscious eyelashes and I admire the diamond butterfly ring and then I notice the engagement ring. It’s not so much a rock, it’s a brick. It’s a mini choc-ice.
I wonder if she met Packer when she toured Australia. “No. I met him in Aspen where I go every year for Christmas. My friend Brett Ratner (film director and producer) are partners in business. So he invited me over. I didn’t feel like leaving the house but I went anyway. This was about two years ago and I didn’t see him again until I was at a movie premier, we started talking, joking around – stuff like that.” What’s his business with Brett Radner? I don’t want to talk too much about what he does but they produce movies. That’s not his entire job but that’s one of them.”
She once said that growing up without a strong male figure in her life on a day-to-day basis affected a lot of her decision making. It perhaps made her see her first husband, record company boss Tommy Mottola, as a stable father figure. He ended up being stifling. Does she still crave that kind of stability? “My perspective on that has changed. I don’t think it was because I was without a father figure, I think there were lots of elements about my childhood that made me who I am. Some made me stronger, some made me more vulnerable. It’s was a combo plate.”
So what’s on her combo plate now? “Oh my gosh it’s just way too full.” Does she feel happy? “Sometimes.”
“Do you feel happy?” Rarely I tell her “Really? We have to change that. You just have to find the comedy in everything. There’s just so much nonsense that’s just not worth spiraling over.
She oozes empathy. I bring it back to her. Does she work compulsively?
“I had the whole summer off. I was relaxing with the kids. Right now, there’s a lot on. I do really enjoy performing. I like having an experience with people trying to make them feel that they are not just watching an untouchable person. I want them to feel like they are in my living room. I like to talk to them a lot. I want to give them something different.”
Is the dress she’s wearing, a figure-hugging black maxi dress, a tour outfit or a lounging in the house outfit? “I am wearing it because I went to an event but I can lounge in this – it’s stretchy.” Although her high heels have been cast off, she still walks on her toes. “Ever since I was a little girl I liked to walk on tippy toes like a Barbie. My babysitter used to say I was walking like a Barbie. I only had one Barbie and I cut its hair. Then I went to beauty school but dropped out. I was singing and working in Manhattan and I didn’t have time for those early morning classes. But I feel that I’ve learnt in life because I’ve worked with almost every great hair and make-up person there is. My tips? I never will wear red lips – they just don’t look good on me. My ideal day? Lying on the beach without a camera or a phone surrounded by pink sand and the water.” That’s sounding a little honeymooney.
Do you have your wedding planned? “It’s a secret.” It’s really happening? She waves the brick at me and says: “I’m not doing this for laughs.” That ring is pretty hilarious in the way that if you’ve got that ring on your finger you will definitely be grinning. “I enjoy it. When you grow up without a lot of things… I try not to take things for granted.” Why does she like the idea of marriage as opposed to just being in love- she has two failed ones behind her so she is not burnt from the experience. She looks at me very seriously. “I am very traditional. I have babies, it’s more appropriate. I don’t know if most people can relate to that but that’s just how I feel”
Did you know straight away that he was the one or was he a slow burn? “Oh we’re not going to talk too much about this part?” she says sounding a little tortured. “If I start talking about this relationship people will interpret it in their own way, so I think it’s safer for everyone involved to just not talk about the very personal aspect of this relationship.” But is she happy? “Yes. And content but I am also very busy.” Her voice is now cracking with exhaustion. “I am a private person.” And that brings me back to why the cameras are here. “We can’t announce what it’s for yet. It’s a very big thing for me.” A very private person who now has no privacy. “Yes, it’s annoying. I wanted to document this tour because I don’t know when I am going on tour again. I wish I could have documented other tours. I am documenting it for the fans, they’ll love it.”
Much has been made of the fact that Mariah would like to do some more acting. She was extremely well received in the movie Precious, which was hugely applauded but won’t be drawn any further on if she would ever swap singing for acting. She doesn’t enjoy being snapped by the paparazzi and quizzes me when I say I saw a photo of her online recently eating ice-cream. “Ice-cream? Not on the bleak diet. That must have been very old.”
So many contradictions. She feels invaded by the paparazzi and yet there are cameras in her house at all hours.
“I am a pretty insecure person but I have to get over that because this is the reality of my life. I look better than I looked a few months ago but I am definitely not one of those people who says ‘i look amazing today’. I have to point out this is a rented house – I would never have overhead lighting. High hats, they call them. In my apartment in New York it’s all recessed lighting, chandeliers, candles. This lighting is abusive.” I tell her I interviewed Dita Von Teese recently at her house where she insists all walls should be pink with no overhead lighting so you can feel you look good when you walk around naked. “That’s my thing about the pink. I rarely walk around naked in the areas that are pink. You still want to look good with clothes on! When I was pregnant, I had a house with lots of antique mirrors on the walls so as I walked around I couldn’t help but look at myself – this huge pregnant woman. I hated myself for decorating the house with all these mirrors. I was so mad at myself.” She laughs and there’s a real lightness to her laugh.
Her manager tells me that Mariah’s light is infectious and now my whole life is going to change because she shed her light on me. Her fairy dust has been showered. There is something so unexpectedly intoxicating about Mariah. The eyes…the giggles….the empathic being. Definitely wasn’t expecting those. You get why people go to her shows to bathe in her glow.