Mariah Carey: Back from the brink

Mariah unravels

Her self-acceptance is a far cry from where she was in the summer of 2001. Fresh off, singing an $80 million mega-deal with Virgin Records, she watched as her critically savaged film, Glitter - which she now dismisses as "watered down" and "homogenized" - tanked. Meanwhile, its soundtrack (released, incidentally, on September 11, 2001) was a commercial disappointment. By January, she had been dropped by Virgin, and her reputation as a hit-making machine - she has sold more than 150 million albums worldwide and has had a record 15 No. 1 singles - was in serious need of repair. It didn't help when gossip reports came out that she and co-star Mira Sorvino came to blows on the set of Wisegirls, which recently premiered on Cinemax and earned Carey good reviews. "Oh, yeah, I hit her on the head with a salt-shaker," Carey says, roller her eyes. "Like, don't we think there would have been a picture of that? Come on. I learned a lot from working with her, and there was no fistfight, trust me." But things went from bad to worse on July 4 of this year when her dad, Alfred, 72, a retired aeronautical engineer who left the family when Carey was 3 years old, died of cancer. "Losing my father this year gave me a whole new perspective on life," says Carey, who had recently become closer to her father. (She wrote the album track "Sunflowers for Alfred Roy" for him.) "You have to seize the moment and express yourself as a human being."

Her father's death was the culmination of a difficult year that had begun the previous July when Carey raised eyebrows while making a surprise appearance on MTV's Total Request Live. Arriving on the set pushing an ice-cream cart, she proceeded to doff her shirt in front of host Carson Daily. "It was a joke," Carey says. "I wasn't sitting on Dateline making jokes and doing a striptease - and it wasn't even a striptease. I certainly was never nude. I had on a T-shirt down to my knees, two pairs of shorts and two tops. I don't think anybody would have made a big deal out of it had I not collapsed the next week."

Days after her TRL appearance - and just hours after posting strange ramblings on her Web site ("I don't know what's going on with life") - Carey was hospitalized after collapsing at her mothers' house. But a two-week-long stay in a Connecticut hospital didn't do her much good. "I went because I realized maybe I'll get some sleep, maybe these people around me will say, 'She's a human being, she does need sleep, she does need to be taken care of,'" Carey says. "But I didn't get any sleep there." Why not? "Because there were paparazzi and people inventing stories, making it seem as it I was trying to kill myself or I was on drugs or I was going crazy. Nobody thought of me as somebody human enough to have worked myself into the ground and become exhausted and have reached my limit."

Dr. Jane Greer, a New York psycholoterapist (Who did not treat Carey) says, "She had all of her engines burning. Because making the movie was something new, she had more invested in it. She was taking on a new creative challenge at the same time as launching an album. The practical pressure coupled with the internal emotional pressure brought her to her knees."

Carey says she began to mend only after leaving the hospital and sprinting off to several places, including Puerto Rico, with two friends. "First I went to my mother's house, and that didn't work because people were hiding in the bushes with cameras. The next day, front page: Mariah: The First Photo, and it's me in some stupid pajamas drinking a protein drink. I'm trying to do what I'm always saying I needed to do, sleep and eat healthy, and there they are with cameras making me look even more ridiculous standing there in these pajamas outside."

But Carey remains philosophical about the media's Mariah-bashing throughout her ordeal. "I feel like people were waiting to see something so they could go, 'Oh, let's take her down,'" she says. "Everyone has to be the fall guy at some point in their life." Fellow stars were more sympathetic. She says she received get-well wishes from Elton John, Stevie Nicks, Olivia Newton-John, Whitney Houston and George Michael, who sent flowers and a note saying "Don't let the bastards get you down!"

Of course, not every A-lister has been so kind. In last July's Rolling Stone, Eminem claimed he and Carey had had a fling, then he dissed her. "I just don't like her as a person," he said. Carey, who some reports say wrote Charmbracelet's "Clown" track about the rapper (its opening line: "I should have left it at 'How ya dong'/ I should have left it at 'I like your music, too'"), bristles at the mention of Slim Shady's name. "I never had anything remotely physically intimate with him," she says. "I've been with less than five men in my life. I can found on one hand - half of one hand. So I may be friends with people, and I may talk to somebody every day over the phone. I may even hang out with them a couple of times, but that does not make a relationship. So just for the record, nothing physical occurred."

From the bottom up

Although Carey says her role as an aspiring singer in Glitter is not 100 percent based on her life, she and her character share a similar drive. "I've always imposed this work ethic on myself because of the way I grew up - because I didn't feel like I had a sense of belonging because I was racially mixed," says the Long Island, New York, native, whose mother, a former opera singer, is Irish, and whose father was half black and half Venezuelan (in addition to Alison, she has an older brother, Morgan). "And I moved around with my mother, like, 13 times. I didn't have a sense of stability. So I said to myself as a child, 'When I grow up, I'm going to be successful. I'm going to work as hard as I can so I never end up in this place again.'"

Carey's Cinderella-like ascent began in 1988 when she slipped a demo tape to Mottola at a party. Impressed, he called her the next day, and two years later, she released her debut album, Mariah Carey, which sold 5 million copies. Hits such as "Hero" and "Fantasy" followed, and in 1993 she web her boss; they moved into a $10 million mansion in rural Bedford, New York. But even at her peak, Carey was struggling inside. "My personal life wasn't great in terms of the relationship I was in," she says, alluding to Mottola, now 52. "I was settling for something that wasn't healthy. My career was great, and I was living vicariously through the girl in the videos, but everything else was difficult." Although she extricated herself from her marriage in 1998 - friends blamed Mottola's controlling ways - and from her ex's record label nearly two years later, old wounds haven't healed. "I would like to be on good terms, she says of Sony, obviously referring to its CEO as well.

But Carey, preparing to release a second Charmbracelet single, "The One", isn't one to let negatively bring her down now. After all, she has managed to go from the bottom to the top to the bottom and back up again. "I feel good where I'm at right now on many levels - physically, emotionally, spiritually, musically and just in my heart," she says. "And I realize that life is too short not to celebrate every day."

(US Weekly)

Many thanks to MariahC.nu.