Thursday 21 October 1999

Exclusive: Mariah Carey's marriage hell

"I had this amazing career but I wasn't allowed to be happy... I existed without living"

She's the biggest-selling female pop act of the decade. But Mariah Carey confesses that at the height of her stardom she was in the depths of misery. The pop beauty uses words like isolated, alone and unhealthy. And she confesses for the first time that she was teetering on the brink of despair. That was three years ago, when she was a "prisoner" in her marriage to Sony Records boss Tommy Mottola, who is 20 years older. Mariah was at her lowest ebb emotionally and she felt powerless over every aspect of her life.

Now newly-divorced, Mariah feels she has come out of those dark days and been reborn. Her new album is aptly called Rainbow - because the clouds in her life have disappeared. Mariah has just notched up a record-breaking 14th No 1 in the U.S. with her irresistible Heartbreaker - out here next week. I reckon it is destined for the UK top spot too.

We are talking on the bed - yes, the bed - of her plush suite in London's Laneborough hotel. At 29, Mariah looks fresh and radiant. Sipping a glass of whte wine, she tells me: "In 1996 I was exciting without living. I had this amazing thought that I wasn't allowed to be happy. It was as if I just had to be thankful for what I had. Why should I be allowed to have all this AND be happy? It was a miserable situation. No one knows what happened behind closed doors. I have always been grateful for my success but my personal life was a wreck for quite some time."

Mariah adds: "Imagine yourself coming off-stage from a very high moment then being whisked into a car and the vibe is all dark and critical and not celebratory. I wasn't allowed to feel what I was. I didn't know where my life was going to go. I didn't see it staying the way it was but I couldn't see myself being strong enough to leave. I got to a very bad point - it's politically difficult for me to talk about it. I was the type who needs freedom to thrive and be creative. I was the type who was always saying, 'Don't worry, everything's OK'. But I wasn't allowed to say certain things. I was afraid to be myself and was made to feel insecure. I look at that person I was and it makes me sad. It was my fault that I allowed myself to stay in that situation so long but you live and learn. There were some very special moments. I tried very hard to make it work. It represents a huge portion of my life and I would like to feel good about the positive aspects of those years - it still makes me very emotional. It will always stay with me in some way for the rest of my life, I'm sure."

Mariah still has to complete an eight-album deal with Sony where her ex-husband is still in charge. I ask her whether she still sees Tommy - and if it brings the bad memories flooding back. She says: "We try to maintain a pleasant working relation."

The pain of her marriage break-up is healing though, thanks partly to her love for Latin singer Luis Miguel. Mariah's eyes light up as she talks about him. She says: "I met Luis last Christmas and it's great. He's a beautiful and talented person. People ask me if I want to have children but it would be when I wasn't doing a million things careerwise. I don't think that would be fair. I'd want it to be perfect and for it to be stable and for them to have a normal mum. I'm not thinking about having children right now." Mariah has a fortune estimated at £150 million. Yet despite her wealth, she is not extravagant - she does not have a fleet of sports cars and recently moved from her rented New York home because she thought she was being overcharged.

She says: "I had this townhouse in Manhattan and it was a waste of money, the rent was really high. They were overcharging me. It was such a waste as I wasn't there for months. I still worry about money - I will never waste it because I grew up poor. My mum had to have two jobs - and I'm afraid of being poor again. I also signed a deal to a producer who made half of my money so I felt ripped off for many years. My only extravagance now is that I like to go on trips to exotic places and go snorkelling - I enjoy nature and experiencing new cultures."

Mariah doesn't have much luck with houses - earlier this year, snooty residents in a Manhattan apartment block banned her from living in Barbra Streisand's £5 million penthouse. She giggles as she tells me: "These committees turn a lot of people down - especially if you're young and single. I was interviewed and it was like being in the principal's office at school. Most of these people are in their sixties and were living there before I was born."

At this point I change the subject - and when I ask her whether she's splashed out on a boob op to enhance her spectacular figure, she leaps off the bed and thrusts her cleavage in my direction. (It's a hard job but somebody's got to do it...) She growls: "Do these look like double Ds to you? Far from it, I'm a 34C - I always have been. I was covered up in my earlier videos. People ask me about my legs all the time too - are they supposed to be new as well? You just never saw them so much before! If you look at my childhood photographs I was always very leggy. Even as a four-year-old in my Bumble Bee suit my legs were really long."

She admits, however, she went on a "rampaging" diet after Joan Rivers made quips about her weight at the Oscars. She says: "I'd only put on about six pounds and was wearing a white dress - the remarks hurt though. My weight goes up and down. People expect me to be a little thing but I'm 5ft 9in with muscular legs."

Mariah is about to go into acting too - playing a singer in a movie next spring called All That Glitters. It's something that makes her very happy and she says: "I feel it's been a therapeutic healing process, just learning about my inner slef through acting. People have been asking if I take my clothes off in the film but I don't, I'd never take all my clothes off - you take away the mystique."

Her album Rainbow is full of emotional lyrics about weeping and losing someone. So I ask Mariah when she last cried. She says: "I had some tears yesterday - I'm very in touch with my emotions. It's very easy for me to think about something intense and cry. There are songs on this album that make me very tearful. I write songs for people who were part of my life who I no longer see any more and that can be very emotional for me. I can't talk to these people or see them any more but I hope they get the message when they listen to them. There are a lot of messages to people in my music."

(The Sun)



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