"'Puffy will be shining my shoes in two years,'" he allegedly said. "And it was no different when it came to the music." She says he "smoothed out" the songs on her first demo before they could be released by Sony, "trying to make them more general," and never wanted her to wear her hair straight because "he thought it made me look too 'urban.'" She also recalls a time when Tommy shared his assessment of rising star Sean Combs, known then as Puffy, who'd just launched Bad Boy Records. "From the moment Tommy signed me, he tried to wash the 'urban' (translation: Black) off me," she claims. Mariah writes that she both witnessed and experienced racial microagressions from Tommy. I had fresh memories of witnessing my mother go through the humiliation of a boyfriend shouting, 'Get out of my house!' I told myself that no man would ever do that to me." She would come to refer to the home as Sing Sing, as it was just ten miles from the infamous maximum-security prison in Ossining and left her feeling as trapped as an inmate. "I insisted on…paying half of all the costs," Mariah says. ![]() After he pressured her to give up her apartment in Chelsea and build a house with him upstate in Bedford, she agreed-on one condition. "The relationship was intense and all-encompassing-after all, we already worked together, which was how we spent most of our time," she writes of their early time together. Upon hearing her demo afterwards, he tracked her down and offered her a record deal. Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesĪfter moving to New York City, where she began singing backup for Brenda K Starr, she met then-president of Sony Music Tommy Mottola at a party. Still, to this day, what he said haunts and hurts me…This was my first glimpse into how misguided words from a mother can really affect a child…Having people you love be jealous of you professionally comes with the territory of success, but when the person is your mother and the jealousy is revealed at such a tender age, it's particularly painful." Almost growling, she said, ‘You should only hope that one day you become half the singer I am.' My heart dropped. "She stared at me until every bit of lightness faded. "I stuttered, 'Um, well…that's just not how it goes,'" Mariah recalls. While on a drive one night, the Rockwell song "Somebody's Watching Me" came on the radio and Pat sang Michael Jackson's hook in an elaborate, operatic voice, which prompted Mariah to giggle and Pat to demand what was so funny. However, Mariah noticed a shift in their relationship when she was around 14. As Mariah's love for the art form grew, it became the thing she and her mother could bond over. Mariah learned at a young age that she could sing because Pat, a former opera singer, always had music in the house. "One of the cops, looking down at me but speaking to another cop beside him, said, 'If this kid makes it, it'll be a miracle,'" she recalls. The cops arrived and Patricia soon regained consciousness. ![]() "My brother had pushed my mother with such force that her body slammed into the wall, making a loud cracking sound." Unsure if her mother was still breathing as she lay "collapsed in a crumpled pile on the floor…a chilling clarity came to me, just as a soft part of my childhood left." With Morgan having taken off in the car, Mariah called one of the few numbers she'd memorized-a friend of her mother's-and asked for help. "Suddenly there was a loud, sharp noise, like an actual gunshot," she writes. With one of four sections devoted entirely to her fraught upbringing as the biracial child of divorced parents with two troubled older siblings, Mariah Carey recalls one particularly harrowing fight between her mother Patricia and her brother Morgan over the use of her mom's car.
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