Baby you can drive my car

I've been lucky enough to meet a number of divas in my time as a driver, women who often came from dirt poor backgrounds and, through sheer ambition, determination and talent, made it to the very top of the tree... Mariah Carey is the biggest selling female recording artist of the 1990s. She has sold 120 million albums and singles and despite her recent troubles - a breakdown and a split from her new record label EMI - remains one of the major stars on the showbiz scene. Mariah has had 14 number ones on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and spent a total of sixty weeks at the top of that chart, a record. She also wrote every single one of those hits herself, with the exception of her cover version of the Jackson 5's "I'll Be There". I met her when she was just starting out, though, when she seemed to be little more than a shy little girl. I had no idea how big she would become but I witnessed the transformation - from disco baby to diva.

I first met Mariah Carey in 1991. At the time she was a little-known singer in England and as I picked her up from the airport with her entourage of just our people - hairdresser, make-up artist and two dancers - I found myself wondering, who's she? The five of them piled in to the back of my Daimler limo, looking like nothing so much as a group of excited youngsters on their first trip broad. Mariah herself appeared to be rather shy. I took them to the Mayfair Hotel, which is a nice hotel in London, but not absolutely the tops, and dropped them off, wondering what on earth they were all doing here. The next day I found out.

I drove the five of them up to the Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham. They were all chatting away in the back of the car, talking about America and their boyfriends - I, like the rest of the world, had no idea who Mariah was going out with - while Mariah issued instructions about what they were going to do when they got to the studio. When we arrived, I followed them in, curious to see what Mariah was going to do. I knew she was a singer, but I didn't know a great deal more than that. And then, quite suddenly, Mariah came on to sing. She opened her mouth and launched into "Emotions" and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I couldn't believe that this shy little girl had a voice like that. I later discovered she has a seven-octave range, which is extremely unusual even amongst very famous singing stars.

From then on, Mariah was much more relaxed and confident. "How was it, how did it look Keith?" she asked when she came off the set. "Fabulous," I replied. "I didn't know you had a voice like that." "Why thank you Keith" she replied. The mood became increasingly jolly as the trip went on. The five of them would sing and dance in the car as I drove them around London, unless Mariah was going to a performance, in which case she would warm up her voice by going through her singing exercises in the car. "I do apologise for my screeching," she would say. And she seemed quite awestruck at the hand life had dealt her. "You know Keith, I used to be a waitress in New York before someone heard me sing," she once told me. "I just can't believe that everyone's making this fuss about me, laying on a car like this and everything."

In due course I began to learn more about Mariah's background [then has a short biography of Mariah with all the familiar facts about her parents divorce, racial abuse, writing songs from junior high, Brenda K Starr]... she claimed that twenty restaurants had fired her because of her "bad" attitude, although she was always perfectly alright with me. It was while working with Branda that Mariah got her big break. She got close enough to Columbia boss Tommy Mottola to slip him her demo tape. Tommy acted fast. He signed Mariah up immediately and, just ten months after she moved to Manhattan, she released her first album in 1990. It sold over six million copies and went to number one.

I knew nothing of this as I took Mariah around London, showing them sights such as Buckingham Palace, Westminster Cathedral, Big Ben and the Tower of London. To me they were just a bunch of fresh-faced kids. Mariah was greatly excited when I stopped on London Bridge to let her take pictures - techinically its illegal - and rather shocked when I began telling her about England's history. "What went on in The Tower?" she asked. "It's where they beheaded people." Mariah was horrified. "No! That doesn't happen in England does it?" "Not any more, but it used to. And you know what they did to traitors?" "What?" "They would chain them to the banks of the Thames, so that when the water level rose with the tide, they'd drown." "Euow. No, I don't believe it. Oh that's so gross."

Once she got over our barbaric history, though, Mariah fell in love with London. She particularly liked Trafalgar Square, especially Nelson's Column and the lions. "Your architecture here is so great," she would say, "I can't believe that a little while ago I was a waitress and now I'm seeing stuff like this. We don't have anything like this in the States. Don't you think it's so great, you guys?" Her friends would agree and there's be much commenting on the sights until they went back to singing, dancing and talking about their boyfriends.

On the last day of her visit, I drove Mariah to the airport. She was dressed entirely in leather and for the first time I began to realise what a spectacularly beautiful woman she is. Often celebrities who I don't know that well would jump out of the car without saying anything, but Mariah didn't. She hopped out, headed towards the door of the VIP lounge and then turned back and gave me a little wave, at that moment she looked exactly what she was back then: a sweet, shy little girl.

Times change. The next time Mariah came to Britain a few moths later, to appear on "The Des O'Connor Show", there was a visible difference in her. She was much more relaxed with the treatment she was receiving and there was no more talk of her past as a waitress. A lot had been going on in the States in those months. Her album Emotions had been a huge success and Mariah was making the transition from up-and-comign singer to superstar. She was still friendly: "Hi Keith, how ya been?" she asked before giving me a peck on the cheek. There were no more jolly sing-songs in the back of the car though, and no cheerful talk about America and boyfriends. Mariah was on her own now, and concentrating on business.

I didn't see Mariah again until some years later. When I finally did, the situation couldn't have been more different. For a start she was staying at the Lanesborough, one of London's smartest and most expensive-hotels. Secondly, her entourage had grown. Whereas before everyone had bundled in to the back of the limo, now everyone got their own car. Her entourage had grown from four to twelve, with five cars and two people carriers to ferry everyone around. And Mariah herself was no longer the sweet little girl she used to be. There are two words to explain this: Tommy Mottola.

Her boss was now her husband and he wanted nothing but the best for his biggest star. This was 1994. The year before, Mariah and Tommy had formalised their relationship. Inspired by the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer - perhaps unwisely, given the outcome of that marriage - the couple spent $500,000 on their wedding in June 1993. There were fifty flower girls, an eight-piece orchestra, and a boy's choir alongside a 300-strong guest list including Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Robert De Niro, and Ozzy Osbourne.

"When I look back on it, it's so unbelievable. I mean, it really is like Cinderella" said Mariah and the couple - she was twenty-four and he was forty-four when they wed - went to live in a large mansion outside Manhatten. But the marriage went the way of Charles and Diana's and in March 1998, Mariah flew to the Dominican Republic to obtain a divorce. She then flew to Tampa, Florida to watch baseball player, Derek Jeter, with whom, she had been romantically linked, though that romance fizzled out. "Media pressure was too much for them as a couple," said a spokesperson for Mariah. It was a long way from the little girl I had known, who was so excited about driving around London and who couldn't believe she so recently had been a waitresss, but the signs were there on that last trip. Success has many benefits, but it can harm you as a person and is no good at all for your long-term relationships.

At the back of the book, Keith gives a paragraph about each of the stars featured, telling you what they've done since. Here's what he says about Mariah: Mariah Carey has had a difficult time in recent years. Now divorced from Tommy Mottola she has had a series of breakdowns, and in 2002 was dropped by her record company, EMI, with a reported settlement of £35m. However, a new deal is in the offing, and her career looks set to reignite.

(Mariah Connection UK)