Working on two movies, a record and a long-term relationship, Mariah Carey lost control of her life. Now she is in the hospital recovering. When will pop's princess bounce back? By David A. Keeps

Mariah Carey was running on empty. By the time she reached London on July 11, the last stop on a 14-day, seven-city tour to publicize her semiautobiographical film, Glitter, and its soundtrack album, she was exhausted and wondering what life was all about. Her fragility began to show at promotional appearances, where the 31-year-old singer and budding actor looked disoriented and made strange, disconnected comments. Still, she continued to push herself and, after three whirlwind days in the United Kingdom, rushed home to the United States for yet another round of grueling publicity events. By that time, those close to her were growing increasingly worried. Carey was even more unfocused to stumble through appearances at a mall near where she grew up on Long Island and before an audience of millions on MTV's Total Request Live. Then, in the morning of July 25, she posted a series of bizarre messages on her official Web site. Finally, later that day, Carey could go on no more, and through a spokesperson, she said that she was suffering from "extreme exhaustion," canceled all her forthcoming performances (including an MTV twentieth-anniversary concert) and checked in to a New York-area hospital, where she is resting now.

The breakdown of one of the last decade's greatest pop stars came as more of a shock to her fans than to those who were with Carey day after day, watching her slowly buckle under personal and professional pressures. Her dizzying career highs (she has had 15 No. 1 singles, most of which she cowrote and coproduced) created an almost unreal level of expectation. And all she did was work.

Carey finished the Glitter CD while acting as both the star and the producer of the movie and also appeared in an independent film called Wise Girls with Mira Sorvino. Managing her own career, she had already been working for four years on Glitter and the soundtrack, which was her first release since she had switched from Sony to Virgin Records and signed a $118 million, five-CD contract. When the single, "Loverboy" did not immediately crack the top 50, the pressure rose, and she felt even more threatened by the sexy new crop of female pop stars such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, as well as Jennifer Lopez, who had come along after Carey but who had already established herself as a movie star who also churned out hit albums.

Meanwhile, Carey's relationship with Latin pop singer Luis Miguel, whom she had met in Aspen, Colorado, over Christmas 1998, had stalled, largely due to their conflicting schedules and her unwavering focus on work. "I have an overblown insecure streak that runs through me," she said just before leaving on her European tour. "And sometimes it manifests itself as me being a workaholic." Some gossip columnists had Carey linked romantically with Eminem, 27, but she insisted that her late-night meetings with the rapper in New York hotels were all about business, a possible collaboration that music insiders saw as a desperate attempt to increase her "street cred." In any case, Eminem listened to the songbird with the eight-octave range, the woman who has sold some 120 million albums since bursting upon the scene in 1990 -- and reportedly rejected her offer outright.

The horrible irony, according to those close to Carey, is that this year might have been the biggest in her career. "With her new music and a new label and her first movie, this was meant to be a new beginning," says her longtime publicist Cindi Berger, "But she was burning the candles at both ends, working around the clock. She just worked too hard."

Mariah has never been an easy-going woman. Since becoming famous, she has had trouble sleeping, managing on just a few hours per night and saying in November 1999 that "I've been consistently sleepless since I started promotion [for her 1999 album Rainbow], and I'm really exhausted." And her hard-driven perfectionism is legendary in the music business. Associates who worked on her videos and tour have spoken of being ridden so hard by Carey that they were forced to stay up around the clock and had only a bag of cookies to eat in 24 hours.

But for the last several weeks, Carey has clearly been a diva in distress. The reaction to "Loverboy" was surely a blow to the singer. Released in mid-June, the record debuted on the charts only at No. 79 and did not climb to No. 2 until the label slashed the CD single's price to 49 cents. On top of that, the buzz on Glitter is downright bad, and the movie has been relegated to an end-of-summer release date (August 31).

Meanwhile, Carey has been in constant motion. On July 12, while in London, she hosted a private dinner party at homehouse, an exclusive West End club. Over the next three days, she gave numerous radio and television interviews, including one for MTV Europe, during which she reportedly insisted on being shot only from the waist up, because she was unhappy with the way her legs looked on camera. She then organized a party for fans at Ocean, a nightclub in the suburb of Hackney, arriving at 1 A.M. on July 15.

On July 20, Carey autographed albums for more than 1,000 fans at the Roosevelt Field Mall FYE music store, in Garden City, New York, where onlookers described her manner as "erratic." During an in-store interview, Carey began complaining about how Howard Stern had been mocking her on his show. At that point, publicist Berger took the singer's microphone away and asked a television crew to stop filming, "I wanted her to talk about what she was there to talk about-- 'Loverboy'," Berger says. "I wanted to bring her back on track."

A few days earlier, Carey made an imprompty appearance on the MTV show Total Request Live, wearing a lavender T-shirt with LOVERBOY written across it and pushing a cart filled with popsicles, which she handed out to the stunned members of the studio audience. She peeled off her T-shirt, explaining that it was a gift for TRL host Carson Daly, and revealed a snug tank top and short-shorts underneath. Daly kept trying to go to a commercial break, but the singer's talking prevented him. She then showed a framed photograph of her mother, Patricia Carey, who she said was a fan of the program, and read aloud a handwritten letter that Patricia had given her for Daly. Later, seeming to be in a more reflective mood, she told Daly, "I just want one day off when I can go swimming and eat ice cream and look at rainbows."

On her official Web site, Carey posted messages that even more baldly illustrated her need for some time out of the spotlight. "I just can't trust anybody anymore right now because I don't understand what's going on... I allowed myself to be a little too paranoid about life," she posted in the hours after midnight on July 25. "If anybody gets this that really cares, just do me a favor, close down the management company that I own... Right now I need a break so I will, as a human being, take that break." (About the postings, Berger says only "Obviously she did that when she was very tired, working on no sleep." The messages have been removed from the site.) Later that day, Carey checked herself in to the hospital, claiming exhaustion. A source from her management company, which remains operational, told Us Weekly, "She's getting the rest she needs, and she'll be back with us as soon as possible. We're not sure when. It's only been a few days, but the doctors will be advising us." Says Nancy Berry, the vice-chairman of Virgin Music Group Worldwide: "Mariah is so very talented and has been working extremely hard these past few months. Whatever Mariah needs, we are 100 percent behind her."

"All I really want to do is just be me, and that's what I should've been in the first place." MARIAHCAREY.COM

Carey grew up in the upper-middle-class town of Hungtington, New York, the youngest of three children born to Alfred Carey, an aeronautical engineer of Venezuelan and African-American descent, and Patricia Carey, an Irish-American who sang with the New York City Opera. Mariah's maternal grandparents disapproved of the biracial union and disowned their daughter; prejudiced neighbors poisoned Carey family dog and torched their house. The pressure tore the marriahe to shreds, Carey has said, explaining why her parents divorced when she was 3. Their breakup only made things tougher on the children. Carey's brother, Morgan, a personal trainer, developed a violent streak, reportedly terrorizing Carey repeatedly. Her sister, Alison, married at 15, struggled with drugs and contracted HIV.

Resembling neither one of her parents, Mariah has said that she felt like "this weird entity" and had a hard time fitting in. "I grew up very fast in terms of understanding of what it's like to be mixed. I was too white for the black kids, too ethnic for the whites," she recalled. She told her friends she did make that she was Italian. With three kids to take care of, her unconventional mother, who had an interest in the occult, struggled to pay the bills and moved more than a dozen times. "Growing up poor made me determined," Mariah once said. "I'm never going to let that happen to me again."

Her nickname in high school was Mirage, because she was rarely seen in class. At age 4, she began singing and by junior high was writing her own songs. According to tabloid reports, one schoolmate recalls that a few weeks before the prom, Carey held a party at her house and charged admission in order to pay for her dress. After graduating and moving to New York, she swept up hair in a beauty parlor, waited tables and checked coats before becoming a backup vocalist for soul singer Brenda K. Starr.

Her discovery was a true Cinderella story. Carey was 18 years Old when she met Sony music mogul Tommy Mottola in 1988 at a party for Columbia Records and gave him a cassette of her singing. On his way home, he popped it into his car's sound system and was blown away by Carey's voice. Since there was no contact information on the tape, he returned to the party, only to find her gone. He tracked her down, signed her up and spent two years perfecting her music and image. Some of the fine-tuning wasn't easy for Carey. "When I first started, someone told me that I should never be photographed from this one particular side because it made me look ugly," she says. "I was 18 years old, and they were telling me this crap."

But together, Carey and Mottola made a powerful team. Her 1990 debut album sold 6 million copies and won two Grammt awards. Their story then developed into a version of Pygmalion when Mottola, smitten with his creation, proposed marriage. Despite their 19-year age difference, in June 1993, Mottola and Carey became husband and wife in a lavish ceremony that was reportedly based on video footage they had seen of Price Charles and Princess Diana's wedding. Carey lived far from the day-to-day world of the music business, on a $10 million estate with 14 bathrooms, four horses and two pizza ovens in horsy Bedford, New York. She toured infrequently, but she recorded constantly, and it was in those situations -- interacting with other artists her age -- that Carey realized she was being stifled. "I would think, Why do I have to be so miserable?" she said recently, recalling those days in the early '90s. "I felt like I wasn't as free or as happy as they were because I wasn't living my own life." The marriage crumbled in 1998, after Carey began seeing Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter. Mottola, who had been cast by the press as a controlling Svengali, was "devastated," said his music-industry friend David Geffen.

Still signed to Mottola's record company, Carey declared her personal freedom by releasing 1999's Rainbow -- continuing her metamorphosis from the sheltered cocoon of the girl-next-door ballad singer to a sexy siren with a taste for hip-hop, tank tops and hot pants. Along the way, she had developed a reputation as a diva. On her recent tour contract, her backstage requests -- pasta, a wet bar, wafer-thin slices of honey-roasted turkey breast, bendy straws, tea service for eight and Cristal champagne -- cost promoters tens of thousands at each venue. She was equally extravagant with her own money, reportedly installing a tub in her oak-paneled library so she could read in the bath. In 1999, she paid more than $600,000 for a white lacquered baby grand piano that had once belonged to Marilyn Monroe.

Yet Carey also has an unselfish side. She quietly donates to many philanthropic causes, including the Fresh Air Fund and Children in Need. This June, she appeared with Bill Clinton and singer India Arie at a New Jersey elementary school to donate musical instruments as part of VH1's Save the Music Foundation drive. She also helps support her mother, her siblings and their children. Carey says that in her family, she was both a peacemaker and a caretaker. "I know I don't say this that much, but guess what, I don't take care of myself." MARIAHCAREY.COM

One day last week, before she collapsed from fatigue, Mariah Carey was having her hair done. When she was finished and looked at her pager, it had logged 297 messages.

That was par for thte course lately. By the time she began work on Wise Girls, Carey was up to her sleep-deprived eyelids in post-production work on Glitter. According to The National Enquirer, the cast and crew of Wise Girls had to work around her schedule, which caused friction with costar Mira Sorvino. One day, Carey was three hours late because she had broken out in hives and had to see a doctor.

Ironically, Carey told a reporter that the reason she was excited about her role in Wise Girls was that "this character feels very empowered, very capable of just saying no." But for Carey, for most of her life, saying no has been nearly impossible. "I'll work myself into the ground, but I choose to do it," Carey said in June. "It's like I have and just focus it into being in this moment."

Eventually, however, her stamina depleted. "Being a superstar is exhausting," says stylist Wayne Scot Lukas. "And people have been dishing Mariah, saying that her body was airbrushed for the [Glitter] movie poster. When half the world is dishing you, you don't think about the other half that loves you. You think, What am I doing wrong? What you're doing wrong is listening to that stuff. I have respect for her to say, 'I don't care, I have to get out of here.' Sometimes checking into a hospital just means that you are somewhere where no one can reach you. It's 'leave me alone' at the highest level. Somebody needs to tell her it's OK to slow down."




Many thanks to Kerry from Mariah Carey Collection for the scans.