For years, Mariah Carey's career was in the hands of the record boss she married. Now, following her divorce last year, she's in charge
Interview by James Patrick Herman. Photography by Richard McLaren

Mariah Carey is dead. She collapsed, aged 29, suddenly, right in front of me - her eyelids fluttered, a gasp escaped her lips, her knees buckled, and wham, down she went. Even posthumously, she remains drop-dead gorgeous. Her motionless body, clothed (just barely) in a midnight-blue silk robe, is sprawled across a shaggy white carpet that appears to have been made from a sheepdog. Her renowned hair fans out and delicately frames her face. I rise to my feet and applaud.

Okay, so Mariah was only playing dead, but it was a convincing impromptu performance. Although considering it's nearly 1am in Marrakech, and that Carey awoke this morning at eight for a photo shoot that lasted seven hours and still hasnn't eaten dinner, it's surprising that the cause of her collapse isn't sheer exhaustion. But, in fact, Mariah was re-enacting a scene from her movie debut in The Bachelor, released in America this autumn, in which she plays a temperamental opera singer who is unsuccessfully courted by Chris O'Donnell.

On the surface, this career move might seem as inspired as Whitney Houston's first acting endeavour, The Bodyguard, in which she played, basically, herself. Mariah, who in person, and even on very little sleep, comes across as far more intelligent, articulate and funny than her reputation leads one to believe, saw in this role an opportunity not only to parody her uberdiva image, but also attain some on-set experience before she begins production this summer on All That Glitters, her star vehicle about a struggling singer in early Eighties New York City.

"It's over the top," Mariah says of the sassy soprano role she portrays in The Bachelor. "I'm singing La Traviata, which is highly dramatic, and my character dies at the end of the scene. The director said: 'Okay, you need a stunt double for that fall, right"' And I said, 'Nah, I can do that,' not realizing that I was going to have to do 30 more takes. My hips and knees wee killing me. A medic had to bring me ice, and I was like: 'Never again.'"

Nor that Mariah is complaining; she isn't a complainer. Actually, she's more of an apologiser - repeatedly saying she's sorry that she's so tired, sorry that she doesn't have more time to talk - which proves to be endearingly disappointing, since I had always imagined her as the type who, unprovoked, throws hissy fits and small small blunt objects.

She's grateful to have been given a shot at a movie career, as she has been studying with acting coach Sheila Gray for the past two years. "The problem with smaller roles is that a lot of directors, well, they're afraid it might seem overwhelming for the viewer who knows me as..."

"Ma-ri-ah!" I say, by which I mean that even non-fans know her as The International-Superstar-Producer-Songwriter-Singer-with-the-Seven-Octave-Range and the Top-Selling Female Artist in History.

"Yeah," she says, quietly. Then she lays all 5ft 9in of her down on a white antique coach, props her bare feet on a pillow, wiggles her silvery-painted toes, and stares up at the ceiling. We're talking in one of the dozens of ornate rooms in a Moroccan villa that, I'm told, belongs to an Austrian prince, who rents it to holidaying superstars.

As it turns out, the current tenant is not Mariah but rather her obviously smitten 'friend,' Latin singing sensation Luis Miguel, who is sitting underneath a UFO-sized crystal chandelier in the dining room, attempting to throw a lavish dinner party, despite the fact that his guest of honour is submitting to an interview.

"The problem that superstars who want to make movies have is transcending your image," she says. "And my problem is that, until two years ago, I wasn't allowed to transcend my image, even as a singer. But I don't want to dwell on my old relationship - everybody's already beaten it into the ground.

The subject on which Mariah does not want to dwell is Tommy Mottola. Aside from being her husband of five years (they divorced in 1998), Mottola, 48, remains her boss, as he is the chairman of Sony Music Entertainment; Carey, whom he signed to an eight-album deal in 1990, still owes two more records.

At the age of 19, Mariah was too poor and naive to think twice about signing a contract that would require her to produce eight records, though the fact that she churned them out at the astounding rate of nearly one o year suggests that she either prefers living in recording studios to apartments or else she is simply very eager to fulfil her contractual obligations. Mariah doesn't say which is the case, though she eventually agrees to discuss her marriage to Mottola.

The last time she talked about it in any depth was last November on the American TV programme 20/20 with Barbara Walters. The veteran interviewer asked Mariah about rumours that Mottola had tried to control her personal as well as professional life.

After their interviews, the New York Post claimed that the recording industry was shocked by Mariah's candour; in fact, she was annoyingly tactful. "Journalists have told me that there's a person out there who's trying to do a smear job on me," Mariah explains. "The fact of the matter is that I've kept my mouth shut about a lot of stuff. What I said to Barbara Walters is nothing - I was very diplomatic. And if I were to speak about a lot of other things that I could have spoken about, it would have been an entirely different story.

From this point on, when discussing the correlation between her marriage and her career, it appears that Mariah is cleverly substituting phrases like "the powers that be" for Tommy Mottola. "This is what annoys me about the whole public-perception thing. It takes five years to create an image and,, probably, five years to change, even slightly. First of all, it was instituted by the powers that be: the young girl with the curly hair at the microphone, belting out a love song. My image was supposed to be a non-image. That's why I was in a field wearing a flannel shirt with cutoffs and sneakers - girls could relate to that. And yes, that was a part of my life, but ever since I've been 12 years old, it was just in me to want to be someone who could change their look and be glamorous."

"And sexy," I add, gesturing to her robe.

"Yes, sexy," she agrees. "Not lewd, but sexy. But that was discouraged. Because people in corporate positions felt it's much more "mass appeal" to be non-threatening visually if your voice is overpowering in terms of strength. It's just like any corporation - if a soft drink formula works, let's not change it, you know what I mean?"

It's the perfect metaphor to describe her work; pop. Despite her natural wonder of a voice, Mariah's perku dance tracks and sentimental ballads have been dismissed by some critics as the musical equivalent of Diet Pepsi - too damn sweer, with a bad aftertaste. That is, until her first post-Tommy Mottola album, 1997's Butterfly; Mariah, who has always written and produced her music, says this was the first CD over which she had complete creative control. Hence, it was a radical departure from her saccharine oeuvre, as it showcased an informed hip-hop sensibility and a harder R&B edge. "Until Butterfly,' Mariah says, "I couldn't do anything different, so I don't know what my image is now."

I tell Mariah that, to a large degree, the perception of her is of a spandex-clad diva who lives in her limo, parties the night away with everyone from rapper Puff Daddy to Donald Trump, and says things like, "When I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry; I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff." That this fictitious quote was reported by respected publications all over the globe would tend to support Mariah's theory about a smear campaign.

"That ridiculuous mess," she says. "Some pathetic soul is trying to make me look like an idiot. But what am I gonna do? Get in a tizzy about it? Whatever."

When you're larger-than-life celebrity, people can't resist shooting at such a big target. For instance, poking fun at Mariah seems to be the only thing that ex-gal pals Madonna and comedienne Sandra Bernhard still have in common. The former said of TV music channel VH1's recent Divas Live special - in which Mariah sang with Aretha Franklin, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, and Gloria Estefan - tha she had trouble seeing the performance through Mariah's hairdo. Carey, to her credit, admits the hair did threaten to take over the stage. "But when I see those remarks being made, it's disappointing. I respect Madonna. No one's going to take away her position as an icon, but when she makes such disparaging comments, I think it diminishes that."

Sandra Bernhard, who devoted an entire monologue from her Broadway show I'm Still Here ... Damn It! to Mariah and her ethinicity, doesn't get off so easy. For Carey, her heritage is a sensitive subject, right up there with her marriage. "A lot of my life I've been in search of a way to come to terms with my ethnic background, and that goes beyond just my mother being Irish and my father being half-black and half-Venezuelan. I was sort of a displaced person growing up."

Born in Long Island, the youngest of three kids of an opera-singer mother and an aeronautical-engineer father - they divorced when she was three - Mariah had a childhood defined by alienation, financial instability and transcience (she moved 13 times). These factors no doubt continue to fuel her workaholic nature and restless drive; it's as if she fears that, no matter how hard and fast she continues to work, she can never fully outrun the past.

"As a defence mechanism, I always blocked out the fact that my background was an important thing to me," she says. "That's the way I've dealt a lot of the issues of my life that felt unsafe."

Not anymore: "Sandra Bernhard," Mariah begins, "used words that every African-American I know - and definitely I, personally - find inappropriate. If my skin were two shades darker, she wouldn't have done it. I think she perceives me as white, which is a common perception. And yeah, I'm a tri-racial freak, but she implied I was a white person trying to be black. And it's offensive to me, because I've been a victim of rascism on both sides. So Sandra Bernhard calling me a 'phoney white bitch' and saying that I 'act niggerish' is acceptable because she figures" 'Who's gonna stick up to her?'"

Yet another formidable rival on the horizon - and on Mariah's home turf of Sony - is actress-turned-singer Jennifer Lopez. Music industry insiders are referring to her debut album as "Latin Mariah-can." Carey is aware that Sony is releasing Lopez's album; what's not clear is if she knows that Tommy Mottola is rumoured to be romantically involved with his latest pet project.

"She's a dancer, isn't she?" Mariah asks.

I say that Lopez co-starred with George Clooney in Out of Sight, and played a murdered Latino singer in the film Selena

"She lip-synched Selena's vocals, you know," Mariah says. "As singers, we're not in the same category."

When her manager enters, holding open the door and flooding the room with rhythmic Moroccan music, Mariah sits up and slips on her black Prada sandals. All the time she's been reclining on the couch while I've been perched on a chair beside her, scribbling down notes, which has made our conversation more akin to a therapy session than an interview.

"Have you ever seen a shrink?" I ask.

"Mmm-hmm," she says. "It was more 'relationship management' and how to survive in that. This is going to sound bizarre, but working with Sheila [her acting coach] has helped me so much in terms of feeling at ease with being myself. Yes, it's a glamorous prospect to be in movies, but for me, acting is about releasing emotions that I've kept locked inside for so long."

In other words, for Mariah, acting has been therapeutic. And she admits that her "issues" - sexual inexperience and intimidation, for instance - are substantial enough to warrant some form of treatment. "I have a self-protective streak," she says, "which has been good for me in one way, but is also very inhibiting. I was in this mind-set where I was like, if I'm going to be with someone, then I'll be with them forever. And that's not reality.

"I'd only been with one person in my life, and it's weird because [following the divorce] I was being linked to all these men. And I was feeling totally insecure about embarking on any new relationships, because I felt that maybe I wasn't good enough. I felt that I didn't have enough experience - and still do. I get close to people, I'm friends with people, I'll stay with people, but I'm very guarded in terms of whom I let into my... personal space."

Mariah takes a long, slow sip of red wine. "It all stems from deep-rooted stuff when I was growing up [including, reportedly, her older sister's teenage pregnancy and failed marriage, as well as her subsequent involvement with drugs and prostitution], and I don't talk about it because it's not my place. So it's definitely this self-protective thing that I have, I'm not out, like, rip-roaring, wild, living it up" - she clasps her hands - "with a million guys, because that's not me. And it's not safe.

"I guess I'm sort of contradiction in terms, because I do feel it's okay to be sexy and free, but there's a difference between sext and ... promiscuous. I wish I could be more that way, and I'm trying to learn how to be more comfortable with things, but it's been a strange situation for me. Last year, when I went from the initial transition period of a committed relationship to 'Here I am, out in the world,' I never had a date. Now I've gone on dates, but really not very many. I don't know what the hell a date is."

And with that, Mariah rises, realising it's about time she resumes what woule be considered, by anyone's standards, the date-of-a-lifetime: the party Luis Miguel has put together resembles a Moroccan carnical of sorts, featuring camel rides, snake charmers, belly dancers, fire-eaters, and a family of acrobats.

"I never thought I'd be in Africa! I never thought I'd ride a camel!" Mariah gushes, but her excitement instantly fades into insecurity about - what else? - her image. "Please don't let people think that I ride camels every day."

Stepping out on to the porch and surveying the utter surrealness of it all - exotic animals, acrobatic children, everyone dressed in freaky outfits - Mariah astutely surmises: "This is all too Michael Jackson."

Mariah Carey's greatest hits, Number 1s, is out now


Many thanks to Kerry from MariahCareyCollection for the scans.