The Most Beautiful

by Mayte Garcia

  Without asking questions, I said, “Sure.” I didn’t know it at the time, but he was already envisioning a compilation of music videos that would become 3 Chains o’ Gold—his operatic answer to “Bohemian Rhapsody”—and all he really knew about it himself was that it had something to do with me and what I was doing as a dancer and the story all this was beginning to tell inside his head. All this time, he’d been sampling from the tapes I sent, beginning with me as a little girl with a sword on my head on That’s Incredible! He didn’t know exactly what would happen if he sent Randee St. Nicholas and a well-equipped crew of a dozen or so people with me, but he knew it would be something beautiful.

  “Just do what you do,” he told us, and that turned out to be the most brilliant direction he could have given.

  Randee went everywhere with me, asking a million questions about the people and the pyramids and the art of belly dancing. We hired someone from the hotel to take us out of the city, but the guy turned out to be a bit shady and made off with the passports of everyone on the crew. As they followed me around Egypt—my Egypt, not the one you get from the double-decker tour bus—Randee picked up on how this place had always fed my soul, even before I understood what that meant.

  She put me in a little black jumper Prince had bought for me that day on Melrose, added a sheer white veil, and had me dance on the pyramids when no one was around. (That footage ended up in “Damn U.”) She asked an old man to come over and talk to me, and before she started shooting, she said, “Pretend he’s telling you something that breaks your heart.” The moment I heard his voice, tears started coursing down my cheeks. We just kept creating these moments and images and sending them to Prince, who was completely open to whatever we sent. He’d already sent me early versions of “7,” but for the most part, we didn’t know what our work was inspiring on his end. We had as much faith in him as he had in us.

  We’d been hearing disturbing rumors about someone breaking into the hotel rooms of American women, robbing and raping them. One night, I was getting ready for bed, and a man walked into my room. I was seriously shaken up about this later, but in the moment, I felt only a rush of adrenaline—oh hell no!—and I whipped out my sword. The astonished guy took off running, and I went after him. Someone from the crew opened her door when she heard the noise. “I just remember you chasing him down the hall,” she said to me recently, and she sounded kind of astonished by it herself.

  If you listen closely to “7,” you hear the swooping sound of a sword cutting the air, and you see me in the video, brandishing my sword with both hands on the hilt. I love that stance in contrast to the way I am when the sword is balanced on my head, turned by just the tip of my finger. It’s a fitting symbol of a woman’s great power, I think. There’s the posture, the balancing act, but there’s also a sharp blade of badass when needed.

  In November 1992, I turned eighteen. I was officially my own woman, and it felt good. Prince was working hard to prepare the Diamonds and Pearls show, trying not to be distracted by the Arabic vibe and Egyptian imagery that seemed to be speaking to him.

  “My heart’s already there,” he told me, “but my head has to do this thing right now.”

  Ideas for “7” and “The Sacrifice of Victor” were taking shape but would have to wait for his full attention. This was the way he always worked. That’s how he was able to shrug it off when something didn’t sell as well as he’d hoped or the critics trashed him; by the time that particular thing was released to the public, he was already on to the next thing creatively. He wanted me to be on call, essentially, so I’d be close by when he did have an opportunity to work on the new stuff, and to be totally honest, he wanted me to be available to hang out more often, so he asked me to come to Paisley Park and stay for a while.

  I didn’t expect to stay at his house. It was semi-cool for a female friend to visit now and then, but not to camp there on an ongoing basis. At first, I stayed at the Sofitel, then they moved me to a nice little prairie house at the Country Suites, but I couldn’t even make a cup of tea there, so they got me an apartment and rented furniture.

  I asked his assistant, “How long is he expecting me to stay?”

  “I don’t know,” said the assistant, and handed me the key.

  It was an odd arrangement, and I knew how it probably looked from the outside.

  “What are you doing there?” Jan asked, and I didn’t have a solid answer.

  I was determined, personally and professionally, not to miss a call from Prince, but he always seemed to hit me up when I was either in the shower or taking out the trash. I’d come back and see that I’d missed a call from a Paisley Park number and I’d scream. I felt like a prisoner, waiting for those phone calls, and I hated that, so I bought a long phone cord I could stretch all the way out the door while I dodged down the hall with the garbage. That wasn’t enough, so I dipped into my dancing money and bought a cell phone, which was not a small expense back then. The bill was insane, but essential to my sanity. Some days when I felt like I was about to lose my mind, I’d go into Minneapolis and take a ballet class or go to the mall and smell perfumes.

  I pride myself on my nose, by the way. I have a knack for matching the perfect scent to the right person, and not long after this, I was buying all of Prince’s perfume (Dune, Samsara, Carolina Herrera, and Yves Saint Laurent) and cosmetics (all MAC, until he started stealing my Dior mascara). He loved the essential oils I brought from Egypt. These days my favorite is rose oil with vanilla. He would have happily stolen that.

  When he called, no matter what I was doing, I acted like I was doing nothing.

  But he always knew. “Where are you?”

  “Ballet.”

  “Cool. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

  In January, he sent me to New York to do a photo shoot and press training.

  “Why me?” I asked.

  “You’re the princess,” he said. “I want you to be that princess.”

  And he wasn’t saying it in a method acting “if you see it, you can be it” kind of way. He wanted me to tell people that I was a princess from Cairo, because he was certain that, in a previous life, I had been one, and at this moment, that version of me was more real to him than any other.

  “But what if they ask—”

  “Just smile,” he said. “They won’t be able to breathe.”

  Something had been shifting in our relationship since I became my newly emancipated self. I was an interesting adult instead of a charming kid. Our odd little friendship deepened with every long conversation. The connection was becoming more personal. A different kind of flirtation began to go both ways. I was his muse of the moment, and he was becoming more obvious about the things he was trying to communicate to me through his music.

  He realized that she was new to love, naïve in every way, he wrote in “The Morning Papers.” That’s why he had to wait.

  Speaking for myself, I was in love, but I was no fool. I was driving a rental car and living with rented furniture. After a few months, I asked him, “Am I ever going home?”

  “Going home?” he said, genuinely surprised. “But… you’re in the band.”

  “I need to go back,” I said uncomfortably. “I can come back if you want, but I feel weird not working and being able to buy stuff I need.”

  Being part of the New Power Generation was an exciting concept, but apparently it hadn’t crossed his mind that while these things I was doing for him were fun, creative things I loved doing—other people actually paid me to dance for them. At Paisley Park, I wasn’t getting paid; I was just… I didn’t know what I was.

  “I hear you talk about girls wanting money from you and agents calling and ‘getting rates,’” I said. “I’m not that person. I need to know that you know that. I was never that person with my parents. Why would I start being that person now? If that’s what it’s about, then I’d rather go back to Germany. I have my work visa, and I can get another contract in Cairo.”

&n
bsp; “But you’re going on tour.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We just haven’t gotten to that part of the show yet. Why do you think you’re here?”

  “I honestly have no idea.”

  The next day, someone came from administration with paperwork to put me on the payroll. My heart sank. I was to receive a salary of $300 a week. I could make more money belly dancing for one night than I would get paid for a month at Paisley Park.

  Okay… suck it up, I told myself. My rent was being paid, and I still had a healthy stash of money in my American checking account. I was determined to prove my worth, stick out the tour, and do my best until I couldn’t any longer, and after that, Egypt would still be there. I knew it wasn’t the most financially prudent decision I’ve ever made, but by this time there was no use denying my strong feelings for this man. I didn’t really expect that to go anywhere; I just wanted to hang out with him as long as it felt right.

  But just to reality check myself, I called Daddy and asked him what he thought.

  This was the first time he’d seen me not know how to deal with a situation, so he flew over to see me a few weeks later. As I came out to greet him, he took my picture, and I rushed over to scold him. Taking pictures at Prince’s home and studio was simply not done. I had a Polaroid when I was pregnant, because I wanted to take pictures of my blossoming belly, but for years, there was almost a phobia of cameras in Paisley Park. Truthfully, there was something liberating about knowing there were no cameras around. There was also something very sad and lonely about it. Given the choice, I’d have to say I prefer the selfie-obsessed culture of connection that lets me see the people I love and share photos of the camera-loving puppies I rescue. I’m that mommy who Instagrams every finger painting and will archive every first day of school from kindergarten through college on Facebook Memories.

  “Your dad got a little crazy when he talked to my manager,” Prince told me later.

  “Oh, no…”

  “I think he must have read a book about the music business on the flight over.”

  “Oh, dear…”

  He told me the over-the-top demands my father had tried to float. Daddy even had the nerve to ask for a point on the records, which was like asking for 20 percent of Prince’s cut. I about fainted, but Prince laughed and said, “Don’t worry. Parents can be like that. I get it. He sees me writing songs about you, and he wants to make sure you’re not being taken advantage of.”

  I didn’t get a raise, but I was grateful that my dad got to see where I worked and hadn’t done anything to screw it up. I called Mama and said, “I need you to send me my things. I’m going to stay for a while.”

  The New Power Generation—also known as NPG—was a movable feast of incredibly talented people who functioned as Prince’s backup band and the core of his filmmaking talent pool from 1990 until 2013. There was never really a job opening in NPG; if Prince saw something that intrigued him, he found a way to bring it into the NPG experience. If he sensed someone would be better off somewhere else, he cut them loose—even if the person was himself.

  When I became part of the group in 1994, NPG was a fairly new development, but they’d found a groove that worked for them. Now here I came—a solo performer who’d always done whatever I wanted to do—and no one quite knew where I was meant to fit in. We didn’t pal around a lot while we were rehearsing for the Diamonds and Pearls Tour, but we bonded onstage and became a unit that Prince accurately referred to as family.

  The drummer, Michael Bland, was a musical genius with perfect pitch, as was Sonny T. Prince would test Michael on it, and I never heard him miss. Sometimes I’d get on the bus and grunt some discordant noise, trying to stump him, and without fail he’d tilt his head to the side and nail it. “I’d call that a C sharp. Or an elephant fart. One or the other.”

  Tommy Barbarella, named after the Jane Fonda movie, played keyboards. Also hair. His hair was long and wavy and key to his showmanship. I’m amazed he didn’t rupture a disc in his neck flipping and swooshing it. Tommy is also a musical genius. There was a lot of that going around at Paisley Park. During my time with NPG, he was usually shredding the keytar, which is kind of like the love child of a keyboard and a guitar, also known as the Purpleaxxe, which was actually invented and patented by Prince. (Fun fact!)

  Rosie Gaines was still playing keyboards and contributing vocals that moved ceilings and walls. Sonny T. played bass, Levi Seacer played guitar, and there was a horn section. I hate to make it sound like “a movie star… and the rest,” but so many people came and went over the years, I can’t begin to list them all here, even if I did remember all their names. I will say that every one of them was unique and brilliant. There was never a member of NPG who failed to blow my mind in some way.

  In Prince’s mind, there was never a hard line between the visual and the musical; it was all one. We all came together—dancer, drummer, keyboard, lights—to transport the audience into an experience that was already a reality inside Prince’s head. I think that’s part of the chemistry that made him a megastar; he brought all this game along with his musical genius at the perfect moment in music history—the moment when “video killed the radio star.”

  All of which is to say, Prince saw his dancers as part of the band. He always talked about the impression James Brown’s backup dancers made on him that time his stepfather lifted him up onto the stage.

  “On my way out,” he said, “I saw some of the finest dancing girls I’ve ever seen in my life. I respected that. He influenced me by his control over his group. His dancing girls. His apples and his oranges.”

  I think a lot of people heard that in some sexual way—like the dancers were his harem or something—but Prince’s dancers were more likely to be men. Way before I entered the scene, during the shooting of Purple Rain, Prince walked into the bathroom and found Tony, Damon, and Kirk breakdancing on the tile floor. He was so impressed, he highlighted them in the movie (look for them up in the balcony during “The Bird”), and the dancing beast TDK (aka The Game Boyz) was born. For the next ten years, they toured with Prince, did music videos, and contributed a lot to the general fun and mayhem that went on.

  Lori Elle and Robia LaMorte, aka Diamond and Pearl, were Prince’s mascots at that moment. They were on the Diamonds and Pearls album cover and featured heavily in the touring show. It didn’t take long for me to wise up to the fact that Lori and Prince were romantically involved.

  We did the music video for “The Max” with me belly dancing with my sword on top of the piano, and then we produced a commercial—“Introducing Mayte”—and we continued rehearsing for the tour. This was such a blast for me. I loved being part of that energy that had taken my breath away when I saw that very first show in Barcelona, but there was a bit of an adjustment period.

  I always wore bright red lipstick, because (little dancer secret) it provided a focal point that helped me spot myself in the mirror, and I always showed up stylish and put together, because that’s just me. But on one off day I arrived wearing sweatpants, and Prince made me go home and change. I was annoyed and humiliated, but he knew how to get me laughing again when I came back in spandex. I did understand where he was coming from. He never left the house unless he was done up pretty.

  “Marilyn Monroe never left the house without full makeup,” he told me, as if no other explanation was needed.

  Sneakers were for basketball, period. He always showed up for rehearsal in high heels, makeup, good hair—the works. There were no jeans, ever, around Paisley Park in my era. He wore a jean jacket on “Sign o’ the Times,” and I tried to give him a hard time about it, but he said, “That’s custom. That’s different.”

  Bottom line: You never ever saw him looking wrong. Knowing this, I felt a cold shiver down my spine when I read in the Minneapolis StarTribune that when his body was found in the elevator at Paisley Park, “Prince was wearing a black shirt and pants—both were on backward—and his socks were inside-o
ut.”

  This made no sense to me. The sheer irony of it broke my heart all over again.

    six

  The Diamonds and Pearls Tour was a great introduction to touring life for me. Even though I was in only a few numbers, I was on the soundstage for every rehearsal, soaking in everything I could learn. It was fun. We were doing what we loved. I never woke up saying, “Oh, God, we gotta go to rehearsal.” I did get lonely, though, when Prince was gone out of town or too busy to hang out, and we hadn’t quite figured out my role in the whole Paisley universe, so I had a lot of downtime.

  I loved coming and going from Paisley Park every day. Rehearsals for the tour were in full swing, and in the studio, Carmen Electra was working on an album. Prince went to LA for a few days to produce something for someone, and before he left he suggested that Carmen and I hang out while he was gone. Carmen hit me up to go see a movie. I was surprised to learn that she was nineteen, only a year older than me.

  She picked me up in Prince’s black-on-black Jeep Cherokee with the severely tinted windows, and as we drove to the movie theater, she said, “Every time I get in this car, people honk at me. I don’t know why.”

  I glanced at the dashboard. “Maybe it’s because your brights are on.”

  I reached over and clicked the headlights to low beam, and she giggled.

  “Oh my God! I was wondering what that was.”

  We both got a huge laugh out of that and ended up having a great time. After the movies, we drank tea in my apartment, and the conversation was eye-opening. I hadn’t realized that she and Prince had a thing, and it had never occurred to me before how challenging it was to be his girlfriend. He traveled constantly and worked insane hours. His girlfriend couldn’t call him. Didn’t even have his number. He called. You answered. But he was good about checking in with people and had an uncanny sense of timing—at least he did in my experience.

  When he called me later that evening, I asked him, “Are you dating Carmen?”