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In her post-Mottola career, Carey does most of the creative work herself, including the lyric writing and producing. A reluctance to delegate and a crushing travel schedule put more pressure on her. For several years, a Sony executive notes, Carey has had problems sleeping. A close friend was "not surprised at all" by the breakdown. "She works ridiculously hard." Since she became a star at the age of 19 in 1990, she has made nine albums, in contrast to three by Whitney Houston.
Her colleagues don't see her as a raging prima donna. Says the Sony exec: "Except for the usual diva crap--wanting to look nice, needing champagne and bottled water wherever she goes--she's actually kind of cool. She's a girl from Long Island, you know. She works hard." As for her lopsided fame, "She gets the joke."
Maintaining fame is a full-time job, and Carey is not a teenager anymore. In 1990 the Britneys and Christinas were in elementary school. If she was looking anxiously for any signs of mid-career slippage, she found it in the weak air play of Loverboy, the first single off her Glitter album. The star's friend said Carey was "extremely concerned" that the song languished in the mid-60s of Billboard's Hot 100 chart. Finally Loverboy ascended to No. 2, beneath today's hotties a trois, Destiny's Child. Carey could get trampled by the children's crusade.
On the Glitter album, amid all the techno-pop, the coloratura vamps and intricate layers of vocals, a few songs stand out as cries from a pensive soul. In Twister, a tribute to her stylist Tonjua Twist, a suicide, Carey paints what could also be a self-portrait: "She was kind of fragile/And she had a lot to grapple with/But basically she kept it all inside.../Dear God, it's all so tragic/And I'll never have the chance to feel the closure/That I ultimately need." Carey then soars into a passage that might be a request or a requiem: "Lord, I pray she's found some peace/And her soul's somewhere at ease."
Her fans hope Carey, who's had a lot to grapple with, will find her soul's ease as she recuperates. As for students of divadom, they know any catastrophe is also a career move. Mariah can find maturity in crisis and soar to the next stage of her musical destiny. After all, a true diva is divine.
--Reported by Amy Lennard Goehner/New York and Josh Tyrangiel/Los Angeles