60 Minutes Australia transcript

Mariah: Hello.

Liz: Hi, Mariah.

Mariah: I'm so sorry.

Liz: That's okay. I'm Liz Hayes. Nice to meet you. I love your outfit.

Mariah: We're doing a little kitschy thing, so it's perfect.

Liz: The theme for the photo shoot is Mariah through the ages of rock. Then, for our interview, she morphs again, this time into sporty and spicy Mariah, in a jersey donated by that other legend, Michael Jordan. You actually wear it a whole lot better than he does.

Mariah: I don't know about that.

Liz: I do.

Mariah: Thank you very much.

Liz: Humility doesn't sit all that comfortably, not when you remember she's been portrayed as everything from cultural icon to the pop bitch from hell. The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in between.

Mariah: Clearly, my life has been written about by a lot of people and not all those people are, um... Some of them aren't necessarily as passionate about their jobs as others, so some people can tend to ride with a story and it's easier for them to look at the last three stories written, pick apart what other people say, go on hearsay or even pick up a tabloid and then sort of embellish.

Liz: Everything you do is under the spotlight?

Mariah: Scrutiny, right. So basically my whole thing is I'm a people pleaser, I try to be nice. No matter what, if you're female and successful, you're a bitch, they call you a bitch. It used to really bother me what people said about me. Now I could care less. They've said it all now, so it doesn't really make a difference to me.

Liz: So you are not a bitch.

Mariah: I don't think I am.

Liz: We can make it official.

Mariah: Hey, if somebody wants to believe that, if that's going to make their life any better, then go on ahead and believe it.

Liz: You could hardly blame her if she started to believe her own publicity. After all, the real Mariah Carey story is almost too good to be true. She's the kid from a broken home on the wrong side of the tracks, with the big voice and even bigger dreams. At a party, a friend hands Mariah's demo tape to the head of Sony music, Tommy Mottola. He actually plays it and hears solid gold. Mottola becomes the fairy godfather, taking Mariah to the top. Every year in the '90s she has a number one hit. Are you aware of how extraordinary your voice is? Do you actually understand what it is that your voice offers?

Mariah: Well, thank you for the compliment first of all, but I am very grateful for my voice and for the gift of music in general because what it gives to me is... I don't know where I would be, I mean, I really don't know where I would be if I didn't have the ability to write songs, to sing songs, because it's what saved me. Throughout my entire life from childhood, any time there was something - I come from a very dysfunctional family. A lot of stuff was always going on in my house that was not normal, not standard. I kept it to myself because to me it was like the one thing that made me feel worth something or special, but I also worked a lot at my range, I worked a lot at...

Liz: That's quite a range.

Mariah: Thank you.

Liz: How many octaves is it?

Mariah: I don't know. They say certain things. I'm not a technically trained musician. My mother went to Juilliard. My mother made her debut at Lincoln Centre as an opera singer. I didn't. I didn't even go to college.

Liz: With her talent and her Tommy she didn't have to. Keeping to the fairytale script, in 1993 they marry, making Mariah pop's tallest poppy. How important, though, do you think your former husband was to your career?

Mariah: I think he was very important in terms of his understanding of how to market people and his understanding of how to get a company to really rally behind an artist and also in the way that I was presented initially, but see, I came to him with the voice that I have. I came to him with the songs that went on to become number one records. I came to him looking the same way, so it's not like he imaged me, like, "Hey, why don't you grow your hair long and make it curly?" or, "Why don't you wear a black dress?" When I met him I only had two dresses. One was pink, one was black.

Liz: Is that right?

Mariah: It was pretty simple.

Liz: On a business level, it's an extraordinary collaboration. Mariah sells over 150 million records, becoming the most successful female recording artist of all time. Did you feel as though you had to prove yourself more perhaps?

Mariah: Yes, 100 percent, yes.

Liz: Because you were married to the head of Sony?

Mariah: Yes, because I was married to the boss of these people that worked at the company, who I would gladly love to hang out with and have fun with. Trust me, any night I could have an hour to myself, that would have been great, you know what I mean? But I was put in a position where people looked at me like this princess and probably a really mean, evil person that you had to walk on eggshells around, because that's what the people around me who worked for him, they didn't work for me, really - I paid half of them, but I think he paid half of them too. The thing is that the image that they put out there was: don't even look at her, don't talk to her, this and that.

Liz: But this and that start to add up. The marriage turns sour. And in a few short years the fairytale falls apart.

Mariah: Being in a very confining relationship which also encompassed my career, that was a major, major thing, because I'm a very free-spirited person and I had to become a very independent person very early on in life. So when you take somebody and you stifle them like that, it's not going to work forever either. Like, I would have completely lost myself.

Liz: Something had to give.

Mariah: Something had to give. But because I was still... So then I got myself out of that relationship, personally, but because I was still tied to that relationship corporately as a corporate asset of that huge company, and not even really realising my worth or my value, I had to learn how to assert myself within that system and that, as a young woman, was ridiculously hard to do.

Liz: So Mariah severed all ties with her husband and his company. Then, in 2001, she signed an astronomical deal with Virgin EMI for over $100 million. But her first album and the tie-in movie, both ironically called Glitter, bombed sensationally. The critics pounced. Her career skidded out of control and the pressure started to show.

Mariah, video clip: We're all just living in the moment of being positive and there's like, people called haters ... [No, no, Cindy] ... and we give them positivity...

Liz: Finally, the much-publicised breakdown. From golden girl to suicide blonde in just 10 years, although Mariah now says it wasn't quite that bad.

Mariah: So what happened was basically I lost... Yeah, I lost control over my life, which I never really had fully, had control over my life, because I was always fighting another situation.

Liz: So, in a sense, was it the breakdown that you had to have, if you know what I mean, to be able to get your life back on track?

Mariah: Yes, I believe so. I believe that everything happens for a reason and it's actually a miracle that I made it as long as I did through the difficult situations that I encountered. It wasn't a nervous breakdown, but it was definitely a breakdown in terms of emotionally and most definitely physically, because any time you go six days without sleep, your body's going to, you're going to collapse, I don't care who you are.

Liz: Did you go six days without sleep?

Mariah: I went more than six days without sleep. Half of it was work. I was like, "I cannot work today".

Liz: Was there a day that you said to yourself, "Stop, something's going awfully wrong"?

Mariah: Yes, and that's when everybody was going, "What's going on with her?" Because they were so used to me always... Mariah will never call up on the phone and go, you know, "No work today." That just didn't happen. Not to speak about myself in the third person, but that's the way everybody...

Liz: Yeah, sure.

Mariah: It was like people were in shock, because I just don't do that.

Liz: To make Mariah's humiliation complete, Virgin bought out her contract, paid her $54 million to go away. She'd become a liability. She might have been battle-scarred, but Mariah was unbeaten. She re-emerged dressed to kill as a true patriot and only too willing to put the cleavage back into khaki. And now there's a new deal and a new album. The first single is yet another of those big ballads. But this time it's personal and owed to the new Mariah and her belief that the fairytale didn't really end in the '90s. But are you going to do things differently musically?

Mariah: Musically I feel that the most important thing is to make honest records and I believe that Charm Bracelet is definitely the most honest album I've made in the sense that lyrically I'm really - I really wrote from my heart. I didn't have somebody looking over my shoulder going, "Hey, how about this?" or "Why don't you try that?" I think that's how it should be: music first, corporate stuff second.

Liz: Mariah, it's time for bed.

Mariah: It certainly is.

Liz: Thank you very much.

Mariah: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Liz: I appreciate your time.

Mariah: I appreciate your time. I know you guys waited a long time, so thanks.

Liz: That's fine.

Many thanks to MariahDownunder.com.