Mariah Carey: But Can She Carey A Movie?

Now I'm leaning forward in my chair. I've heard stories about Carey's family--a troubled older brother, a troubled sister with kids who Mariah supports. But Carey says, "I apologize. This is something that it's better for me not to talk about."

It's been speculated that the most sick and twisted things that have happened in Carey's life took place during the time she was married to Tommy Mottola, who has been described as a control freak. Are the two still on good terms even though she's left the music label he oversees, Columbia Records? "I'm just trying to make peace and let him live his life and let me live mine, I hope." She leans over, knocks twice on the table and proceeds to change the subject.

"Shouldn't I tell you about Glitter?" she asks, doing her job and mine. "I wrote the treatment. It's a story I've wanted to tell for a long time. We start with my character, Billie Frank, as a nine-year-old girl. She's at a club watching her mother sing. Billie is light skinned, and her mother is black. And her mother is clearly out of it, high or drunk, we don't really know. At a certain point the mother loses it in the middle of a song, she forgets her lines and she calls Billie to come up and sing. And the little girl saves her mother and the crowd goes crazy, because she's got this huge voice and she shouldn't be in a club anyway at two or three in the morning. Wait, am I giving away too much?"

I laugh. "I don't think so," I say. We've seen this movie before anyway, right?

"So Billie is sent to live at an orphanage because her mother is unstable. Billie grows up confused, becomes a backup singer for a girl who really can't sing, and she's pissed off because she knows she's so much better. She signs a bad deal, then meets a DJ who falls for her and makes her a star. But he has a very dark side--"

"Wait. This is getting good. Tell me more about this part."

Carey giggles. "Can I just say right now that this story is not autobiographical?"

"You can say whatever you want," I tell her, "but people are going to read into it. Because you do come from a biracial family, and you did meet the ultimate DJ, who did make you into a star, and he did have a bad side."

"But my mother is white, and she was never unstable. She's an opera singer. And the DJ that Billie meets isn't like any man I've ever been with."

I say, "Uh-huh."

Carey slaps my hand. "Trust me, Billie has totally different issues than I do. Not that I don't have my own."

"For instance?"

"Well, my father is African-American and Venezuelan, and my mother is Irish-American. When they married, my mother's family disowned her. My parents faced incredible discrimination. Someone poisoned their dog, someone torched their house. They split because they couldn't take the pressure. And I never felt like I fit in. I was too white for the black kids, too ethnic for the whites. It shaped who I am. Why am I telling you this?" she says with a laugh.

Carey has talked extensively about her past in previous interviews so you'd think by now she'd know why she goes into it, but all I say is, "I don't know."

"I saw this movie recently, I can't remember what it was, but it showed an interracial love story. And I swear, you could feel people in the audience squirming. I don't think very much has changed in 30 years. I think it's still the one thing that people don't feel comfortable with."

"That, and two women kissing," I tell her.

"What do you mean?" Carey looks absolutely shocked. "I thought men loved to watch two women kiss."

"Men like to watch two women if they think the women are only doing it for the man's benefit. They do not want to think that two women could have a good time by themselves."

Carey thinks this over for a minute. "You're right. Remember the whole frigging mess over Basic Instinct? People didn't care if she was a killer, but they went ballistic when she kissed another woman and seemed to be enjoying herself. It's that kind of ignorance that makes me furious. When I was a little girl I remember hearing the most insensitive things. People would say things about me as if I was deaf or stupid. And believe me, it would cut me to the bone. But please let me stop whining... I hate that woe-is-me crap."

"Have you ever studied acting?"

"Yes," she says. "I have a great acting coach who I really trust. I've been acting my whole life. I did plays when I was young, and it was just a natural part of singing. I love Woody Allen, Mike Myers, Chris Tucker. I would love to do a comedy. I'm embarrassed to say which actors I'd like to work with because I'm afraid that they'll say, 'Ugh, I don't like her at all' and I'll look like an idiot."

"How bad a self-image does the most successful woman in music have?"

"Better than it used to be. When I first started recording, someone told me that I should never be photographed from this one particular side because it made me look ugly. I believed that totally and I would always make sure that the photographer was on the other side of me, and that in my shows I was mostly showing one side. I mean, I was 18 years old and they're telling me this crap. They were successful and older and of course I believed them. And it's only since I started studying acting that I got over it. When we first started shooting Glitter, I was convinced that the director of photography was shooting me on my 'bad' side on purpose. When I talked to him, he thought I was out of my mind. I guess nobody sees this 'bad' side but me. So you know what? I've given it up. People will have to accept me with both my 'good' side and my 'bad' side."

"Glitter takes place in the '80s, which is not your era. What is it about that decade that drew you in?"

"Are you kidding? Can you think of a time where the music was funkier and the clothes were worse? I had Rick James write one of the songs for the movie, and it sounds just like one of his hits from that time. And I love those '80s videos--they were so cheesy. But it was also a time in music when a DJ could play your record in a club one night and the next day, radio stations got hundreds of calls for that song. It was a magical time in music in some ways, and I wanted to pay homage to that."

"Since you admit that it's not such a stretch for you to play a singer, is Glitter going to be both your first and your last film?"

"No way. I've just signed to do Wisegirls with Mira Sorvino. This is very different from Glitter. Mira and I play waitresses in a restaurant that's owned by mobsters and we get involved with them. I was one of the producers on Glitter, and I did the music, and it was a story that I had thought up. I was involved in every part of it. In this one I'm just a hired hand. I'm going to concentrate on my part, and I'm not going to have to make sure that every little thing is going smoothly."

"I get the feeling that you're a control freak anyway."

"A little," she says. "But I can give that control up if the people around me are doing their jobs well."

"Don't you wish you had a cool name like J. Lo?"

Carey laughs. "Next question."

"Did you feel bad when you made the worst-dressed list after wearing a white dress to the '99 Oscars?"

"They made me wear white--they insisted that I wear a white dress. Believe me, not too many people look good in white, and I'm no exception."

I decide not to ask who "they" were.

"I didn't feel too bad," Carey continues. "I tend not to care about that stuff. As long as my records are selling, I can't worry that some photographer snapped me on the way to the deli and that picture gets scrutinized by people whose opinions I don't care about."

"You seem really sweet to me," I tell Carey. "Why do you have such a bad reputation?"

"Jesus, Martha, did you save all the hard questions for the end? Do I have a bad reputation?"

I just nod.

"Well, I don't know. I know exactly who I am--I'm a girl from Long Island who grew up with nothing. My mother and I moved 13 times because we had trouble paying the rent. And I don't want to forget that. I treat everyone around me with respect. I do not throw fits when things don't go my way. I'm good to people and I'm a great tipper. What more do you want?"

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Martha Frankel interviewed Johnny Depp for the March issue of Movieline.

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