The Most Beautiful

by Mayte Garcia

    eight

  Have you ever been hypnotized?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You would know.”

  “Not if there was a posthypnotic suggestion. Like, ‘You will not remember being hypnotized’ or something like that.”

  “Truth. Good point.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I want to hypnotize you. Lay still. Listen to my voice.”

  “I listen to your voice all day.”

  “This’ll be different.”

  “How?”

  “You’ll be in a trance. You’ll travel through time to past lives. You’ll speak deep truth from the subconscious mind.”

  “I don’t think that works on me.”

  “Not if you keep messing around, girl. Lay still.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “Shhhhh… breathe in… breathe out… let go of the tension in your forehead… let go of the muscles in your legs… feel your mind become pure energy… feel your body fill with light…”

  He stroked my face, speaking softly, whispering me into a deeply meditative state. He liked to call it “hypnosis,” and it was a kind of hypnotic spell, I think, but not like a Vegas act or clinical “stop smoking” type of hypnosis. The first time he tried it on me, I couldn’t stop giggling, but then I gave myself over to it, and I liked it. I closed my eyes and watched the natural kaleidoscope inside my eyelids.

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Mayte.”

  “Princess Mayte?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Cairo.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “For you.”

  When I was in this altered state, as we went there more and more often, I could answer his questions without weighing whether I should tell the truth. I could spin long Scheherazade-style stories that seemed to come from a part of my brain I’d never accessed before. In those clear, quiet hours just before dawn, I’d lay beside him, completely relaxed, no ballerina mask hiding my emotion, no showgirl costume telling me who I was supposed to be. I’d let myself go and freely speak to him. It was weirdly therapeutic for both of us. This was the only time he’d let me talk without interrupting me. He listened, 100 percent attentive, and I felt safe. There was an absence of the whipped-cream-paycheck power imbalance. Whatever came to light, there was no blame or shame or lack of faith. Sometimes it felt like a child’s game. Sometimes it was a connection even deeper than sex.

  “Have we known each other before?”

  “Many times.”

  “Where?”

  “Many places.”

  “How did we find each other?”

  “Before your soul set off to live its first lifetime on earth, my soul said to your soul, ‘We need a plan so that you’ll recognize me when you see me. Everywhere you look, you’ll see reminders. At first you’ll think it’s coincidence. Then you’ll know it’s fate.’”

  Together we explored universes and lifetimes and emotional truth. Under his hypnosis, I could finally speak about the family I wanted to create—forgiving and trusting, not like my family—and that’s something I couldn’t say to him in real time. When he was ready to bring me back, he’d snap his fingers next to my ear and say, “When you wake up, you’ll know that you are loved and safe and warm.”

  Afterward, he’d tell me what I’d said, and he never tried to alter my words or use them against me. This gave him a way to tell me everything he couldn’t say in real time. It gave him a way to be honest with me about the family he wanted to create, about his fears and struggles. He could speak about other women in his life and what they meant to him, knowing that I wasn’t going to pop off or judge.

  We still loved the simple act of hanging out together, watching old black-and-white movies and talking about the mysteries of the universe and the unexplainable power of love. These long conversations had deepened to a more spiritual level as we became closer. He asked me about the angels in the room, and I described them in detail. We talked about the possibility of our two souls having met before and where that might have happened. He was fixated on the idea of Egypt then, maybe because of the music taking shape in his head—and sometimes the music took shape because of the conversations.

  He once wrote to me:

  Whenever imagine what my work would look like had not met u, must admit—it’s quite a different picture. It’s not better or worse. It’s just different. regret nothing except whenever ’ve made a compromise because felt u wouldn’t understand. know that u don’t mean 2 make me feel that way but there again—it’s a fact of life. accept it as the very reason must love u because care about your feelings. In the past could do a movie and kiss the leading lady and not care what another woman would think. That’s what time it was. But these are the people ’m not with 2day! What words do use 2 make u realize what u mean 2 me? If imagine holding another it would only reinforce the fact that no one fits my arms the way u do.

  During those years, our chemistry onstage combined with our chemistry in private, and the result was something neither of us anticipated. We incorporated props and set pieces and costumes as if we were performing an opera. We didn’t know where any given idea would take us; we just kept going with it, working the choreography that gave the music a story we could communicate to an audience, and people loved it.

  In 1994, there was no official tour, and in 1995, there was only the Ultimate Live Experience Tour in Europe, but we were always working. During those two years, in addition to recording three albums—Come, The Black Album, and The Gold Experience—New Power Generation did hundreds of one-off concerts, dance parties, aftershows, and television appearances.

  Prince and I talked a lot about music, but we didn’t talk much about the music business in those early years. I was his oasis from all that. I’m not sure I would have understood it at the time, anyway. One of his crew people told me years later, “Everything was great until Purple Rain. Then he got everything he ever wanted, and he didn’t like it.” That made sense from my perspective.

  The Warner Bros. situation was brewing and getting closer to the surface. The basic issue was a dispute over when and how Prince’s music should be released. He had a strategy that didn’t jibe with the label’s, and it bothered him that someone else had the clout to tell him when he could and could not put his own music out there. He didn’t have a personal beef with anyone at the label—or with the idea of record labels in general; he recognized that record labels are great for most artists. But Prince wasn’t like most artists. He had his own massive studio where he could do anything the label’s studio could do. He needed the relationship for distribution, and he was becoming more and more uncomfortable with what he had to give up on his side of that deal: commercial control of his music. When he recorded under the umbrella of the record label, they owned the master—the physical finished version of that song. In Prince’s thinking, the logical counterpart to “master” was “slave.”

  This all came to a head in 1994 because of a disagreement over when to drop the album and in what order the singles should be released. The studio wanted to release “7” as the first single; he wanted “My Name Is Prince” first. Ultimately, they did go with what he wanted, but “My Name Is Prince” only got to #36 on the Billboard Hot 100; “7” rocketed to the Top 10 and peaked, coincidentally, at number seven. I don’t think he was bothered by the fact that this made it seem like they were right and he was wrong; it was the fact that the decision was open to discussion at all. He felt he’d earned the right to call those shots, and from my perspective now, I have to agree with him.

  One day I rode to Warner Bros. in the limo with him because he was going to a meeting that had him feeling stressed. I waited in the car, making a few calls. When he came out, he had SLAVE written on the right side of his face.

  “So… that went well,” I said, hoping to make him smile.


  “It definitely changed the tone of the meeting,” he said.

  Honestly, even now, I have only a general idea of what this was all about, and at the time I was completely confused by it, but I could tell there was something weighing on him when we came home from the Act I Tour. He hadn’t told me the details of all that yet. He did say that he’d signed a $100 million deal for ten albums—which was a lot more than some other major stars were getting. He was a long way from delivering the ten albums and already beginning to feel trapped, because he had this mountain of unreleased material in the vault, but they wouldn’t let him release it.

  He said an exclusivity clause in his contract meant he couldn’t just go off and be a member of someone else’s band—an idea that made him happy, in theory—so he developed a character called Tora Tora who had a whole life of his own. When you see him with a scarf or a veil of chains over his face, that’s Tora Tora. And in the middle of all this, MTV kept asking him to do Unplugged—and he really wanted to do it—but again, there was no negotiating ownership of the master.

  During a rare moment of downtime, I invited Mama to bring Hena up for a visit. I didn’t tell Prince that Mama was in town, because he would have thought it was rude to call me to come over while she was visiting, and I didn’t want him not to call me to come over. One afternoon when I hadn’t seen him for a few days, he called me sounding overwhelmed and sad, not saying much but not wanting me to hang up.

  “What’s wrong?” I kept asking.

  “Nothing.”

  “Should I come over?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m sick. I don’t look good.”

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “I care.”

  He sounded hollowed out and foggy, and that scared me a little. He didn’t get sick very often. And this felt different. We sat together on the phone without talking for a while, and then I said, “Hey, remember Hena? The little dog you saw in my dressing room in Florida? She’s um… she’s visiting me. Let me bring her over. She’ll cheer you up.”

  I wasn’t at all sure this was true, but I hoped it would be, and it was the only way in I could think of at that moment.

  Prince surprised me when he said, “Yeah. Bring her over.”

  I hustled Hena into her car carrier and booked over there as fast as I could. I was startled when I saw him. He was in his pajamas, which wasn’t totally unusual at that hour of the afternoon, but he kept his eyes away from mine. He seemed vulnerable and weirdly… loopy.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Not feeling well.”

  I want to be clear: In all the years we were together, I never actually saw Prince doing drugs. He didn’t want me to see it. I’m sure he knew what my reaction would be. I didn’t drink or do any kind of drugs, and I didn’t want that in my life. I knew Prince loved port wine, but he wasn’t a big consumer of anything except sex and music, as far as I knew. He had a black bag that always seemed to be close at hand—like a gym bag, not too man-purse-y—but the contents were pretty tame: candy, vitamins, makeup, a Bible, and a big wad of cash. He had incredible amounts of money, and he always seemed to have plenty on him so he could send people off to get whatever it was he needed. He was still young—in his mid-thirties—and never complained about fatigue or pain. Sometimes on tour, he got vitamin B12 shots, and so did I. For me, that was enough to keep my energy and immune system up to the task of traveling and performing. I never had any trouble sleeping because I was dog tired. I thought it was the same for him.

  But there were a few disturbing incidents that happened while we were together, and this is one of several occasions when he told me he was “sick” or that he had a “migraine.” Looking back, I can see it was something else. I didn’t see it then. Maybe because I didn’t want to.

  I set Hena down, and she wagged over to him, wanting to love him on pure instinct. We sat quietly for a while. Every now and then, she’d put her paw on his face or nuzzle his hand, and eventually he brought her up to his lap.

  “You should go,” he said. “I don’t want you to get sick.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, but… do you mind if she hangs out for a while?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I can come and feed her in the morning, but you’ll need to take her out later tonight.”

  “Yeah. We’ll be cool.”

  The next morning, when I arrived to feed Hena, Prince seemed like himself again, but I could tell he’d had a long night. He rubbed Hena’s head and said, “She’s an angel. No matter how bad I was feeling, she’d come and put her paw on me.”

  “She’s very intuitive,” I said.

  He nodded. “It gave me a whole new respect for dogs.”

  “Will you be all right if we leave?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure. Of course. But hold up a minute.” He handed me a sealed envelope. “I need you to take this to the office.”

  When I took the envelope, I didn’t ask what was in it. I guess he could see the curiosity and concern in my face.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s just in case—just take it to them. They’ll know what to do.”

  This was not the only time he asked me to do that, and on each of those occasions, I got a distinct vibe that the envelope—which I never opened, of course—had something to do with the future of his music. That’s why it was so strange to me when I read that he had died without a will. I know for a fact that he was on top of his business concerns and did think about a time when someone else would be curating his creative life’s work.

  He wrote to me:

  This was the year grew up. Part of me wants 2 be alone 4 a while, not away from u, just alone with me. There is a difference. Wherever am, whatever ’m doing— think of u. Always. Hypnoparadise. ’d like 2 go away and make serious plans 4 the future. ’ve never felt so adult in my life. Now, there are a lot of things have 2 deal with. My Paris apartment, the property on Melrose pay rent monthly on, the Love 4 one another concept, the renting or sale of the L.A. house (since we’ll be on tour). hope u can grow up a little more with me as well. Cuz ’m gonna need your support as much as your love these next few months. We’ve gone thru so much 2gether. And yet it seems like we’ve just started. I look forward 2 everything…

  In an effort to throw him a bone, apparently, Warner Bros. allowed him to release a single as a one-off aside from his contract. “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” is a song that was particularly important to him. I know of at least three women besides me who believe it was written specifically for them. I hope every woman who hears it thinks it was written specifically for her. Because it was. Take a look at the music video. You won’t see me in it. You’ll see a collage of girls and women of every age, race, and body type. This was his love song to all of us.

  There’s a nervous bride, a woman sweating through childbirth, women working, women mothering, women making a difference. A gorgeous black woman (played by Nona Gaye) is elected president of the United States. A fabulous redhead slays onstage and then drags off a carefully styled wig to show her actual close-cropped hair. At the end, we see education pioneer Marva Collins, a teacher who used her retirement savings to start a small school for low-income black children labeled “learning disabled” by the Chicago public school system. Set against this song, it’s undeniable: every one of them—every one of you—is perfectly and uniquely stunning.

  … this kind of beauty has got no reason 2 ever be shy

  … this kind of beauty is the kind that comes from inside

  It was a pivotal moment in his career, because he was able to release the single as an independent artist on his own new NPG label in a distribution partnership with Edel in Europe. (Yeah, that Edel. Too dramatic, right?) The single was an international hit, his first UK number one hit—the only one during his lifetime—and number three on Billboard’s Hot 100 in the United States. With this one song, he was able to prove that he had the answer to the big question everyone kept asking when
he talked about living outside a label: What about distribution? The song was remixed for the Gold Experience album, released by NPG with Warner Bros., but the handwriting was on the wall. With the successful release of the single, he had proven that it was possible and important for an artist to take ownership of his or her work, creatively and commercially, and he was already reaching out to artists like Chaka Khan to jump ship and follow him.

  “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” was the first recording officially credited to instead of Prince, and this threw people for a loop. In 1999, he told Larry King, “I had searched deep within my heart and spirit, and I wanted to make a change and move to a new plateau in my life, and one of the ways I did this was to change my name. It sort of divorced me from the past and all the hang-ups that go along with it.”

  Suddenly people didn’t know how to refer to him in the media. They came up with the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, which he didn’t love because, to him, it felt like a cheat. Some people tried to shorten that to TAFKAP, and he particularly hated that because it was a double cheat. It’s interesting to see how people wrap their heads around it—or not—and how their handling of it reflects how they feel about artists in general. I mean, is that allowed? Do we get to play with entity and identity that way?

  But I think that’s exactly what he intended. I think he wanted to take it from your mouth and place it in your mind or take it from your mind and place it in your heart. Instead of verbalizing a word inside your head, maybe he wanted you to feel something that was uniquely him, to breathe in both artist and art and be with that for just a split second. So I would ask you to bear with me and do that here so I can honor his wishes. Up to this moment, he was Prince; from 1993 to 2000—legally, professionally, creatively, and spiritually—he was .