When Mariah Carey disappeared from view in summer 2001, apparently suffering a nervous breakdown, Dr Thomas Stuttaford described her as displaying the features of a histrionic personality, noting that such people are driven to frustration and rage if someone else seizes the limelight.
So the rehabilitated pop diva won’t have been best pleased at being upstaged by U2 at the Grammies this week: although, after a 16-year drought, Carey won three awards, they were not major ones and the Irish rockers claimed five, including Album of the Year, which Carey was tipped for with the five million-selling Emancipation of Mimi.
Carey is the most successful female recording artist in history — and possibly one of the most insecure. Born to a Catholic opera singer mother and an Afro-Venezuelan father who disappeared when she was 2, she was discovered in 1988 by Tommy Mottola, then head of Columbia Records and twice her age.
Mottola produced her debut album Mariah Carey, married her in 1993 (she had 50 flower girls and a Vera Wang gown) and carried her off to a mansion in upstate New York, where she complained of being a virtual prisoner, followed to the lavatory and required to look at paint colours and swatches of material. Her husband loved rural life, she said later: “He was very much, like, let’s go stare at the foliage.”
By the time the couple divorced in 1998, Carey was one of the biggest names in pop with a series of bestselling albums and sellout shows. Then came the split with Sony Records, an unhappy contract with Virgin (which paid her £21 million not to make a record) and a series of failed relationships. After an exhausting round of promotions for a film and an album, both called Glitter, both flops, in 2001, Carey left a series of flaky messages on her website voicemail and booked herself into a psychiatric hospital. An album the next year bombed.
Advertisement
But she got herself a new manager, signed with Island Records and, in 2005, produced The Emancipation of Mimi (her childhood name). In promotional interviews, more than one journalist ushered into Carey’s hotel room noted her minimalist clothing (“the tiniest shorts and a scrap of fabric failing to cover her breasts”) and gynaecologically revealing poses. Carey is famous not only for her five-octave vocal range but also for her eye-popping clothes and diva-esque demands, including puppies backstage and red carpets. “It’s just a showbusiness façade,” she said last year. “Tra la.”