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ON the surface, the discovery and rise to fame of Mariah Carey has all the plot elements of a showbiz fairy tale: a young and ambitious girl moves to the big city determined to make her mark. She slaves away at meaningless jobs to get by, singing whenever and wherever she can. One fateful evening, she attends a soiree, at which she passes her demo tape into the hands of a dark, handsome man, and then disappears into the night. The dark prince in this particular tale, Sony Music Entertainment President Tommy Mottola, plays the tape and has an epiphany: he can make this mystery songstress into a star. He seeks her out, and, overwhelmed by the extraordinarily Cinderella-like vibe of it all, they fall in love.… At any rate, that's how Mariah Carey and Tommy Mottola recounted their personal and professional courtship to the press. In a darker version of the story, some music-industry observers suggested that Carey was more like Rapunzel than Cinderella — sequestered in their gaudily enormous Hudson River Valley mansion and creatively stifled by Mottola's Svengali-like domination, the diva was compelled to spin sugary ballads into gold. Carey was born to a half-Venezuelan, half-black father and an Irish mother.
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