by Mayte Garcia
Prince’s decision to have his name legally changed to was a much bigger deal for the rest of the world than it was for us. As our relationship evolved over the years, the man I knew was always separate in my heart and mind from the stage persona, so I’d never addressed him as “Prince” anyway. He once told Oprah, “I’d drop my tea if I heard ‘Prince’ coming from the kitchen.” People kept asking me, “But what do you call him?” and the truth is, I didn’t call him anything. Every once in a while, I’d call him “hon” or “honey,” which made him laugh for some reason, or I’d call out, “Hey!” which also amused him because his stepdad’s name was Hayward.
Most of the time, if I was still and looked at him for more than a second or two, he’d turn to look at me. Perhaps that connection is how the unpronounceable is pronounced: it’s a look, a touch, a stillness. And it went both ways, even after we were no longer together. One night after our divorce, I was at the Sayers Club in LA, and I felt him there standing behind me. I turned to look for him, but I didn’t see him. I did notice, though, that the guitar pedals were set up exactly the way he liked them. Someone told me later that he’d come in to jam with the band that night, but when he saw me sitting there, he didn’t feel like playing.
His given name was Prince, so he didn’t mind when his longtime friends and family called him that, but Prince—the recording artist owned by Warner Bros.—was someone else entirely. And the Artist Formerly Known as Prince was something the media invented because that was the easiest way to talk about him. He didn’t want it to be easy for them. He wanted to make people think about their own identity and about the people they idolize and the concept of being and doing “whatever peanut butters your jelly.” He wanted people to know he had changed.
“In the Bible,” he said, “what happens when a person changes? God changes their name. Abram became Abraham. Sarai became Sarah. Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord and became Israel.”
Prince opened the original Glam Slam nightclub in Minneapolis in 1989 so he’d have a place to go when he wanted to go nightclubbing without causing a stampede or when he wanted to jam with people he liked. The place was named after a song on the Lovesexy album, and over the next several years, he opened up Glam Slams in Los Angeles, Miami, and Yokohama.
After the Act II Tour, he asked me to help him reimagine the Glam Slam experience in Minneapolis with a concept we called Erotic City. He gave me a lot of fantastic unreleased music to work with, and I created vignettes with hanging ladders that appeared to be standing into space, a go-go dancer in a birdcage, and a huge skrim where tricks of light created suggestive silhouettes and reality-bending projections. Dancers came down from the ceiling and through the walls. I did a whole thing with a chandelier on my head.
In mid-January 1994, I filmed the show and flew to LA where he was working at the moment, staying at a house he’d bought on Heather Way. We watched the show together, and he was very excited about it. Afterward, he needed to go back to the studio, but I was exhausted, so I went upstairs and crashed. I was sound asleep at four thirty A.M. when a 6.7-magnitude earthquake gripped the San Fernando Valley for twenty seconds that felt like two hours. I huddled on the bed for another twenty-five minutes as aftershocks rumbled through the house. I heard things falling and breaking. And then I heard the front door.
“Mayte! Mayte!”
“I’m up here!” I called back, because I was frozen in place, terrified to step into the dark. He bounded up the stairs and pulled me into the kind of hard hug where you feel muscles and bones. He kissed my face and neck, asking over and over, “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
“I’m okay. What’s happening out there?”
“It’s bad,” he said. “Light poles were falling. I couldn’t get through. There’s no cell service. I was so worried about you.”
The next day, we flew out of poor, beat-up LA, back to Minnesota, a place that gets cold but remains firmly in place. On the way home, we watched the video from the Glam Slam show again.
“I’m impressed,” he said. “I want you to do this in Miami.”
I was excited about that until he told me the first step was for me to fly down there and fire everyone currently playing and dancing there. I did not want to be that person, but this was an opportunity for me to step out of his shadow a little and take a leadership role in creating something very cool. Besides, I already had a secret plan to rehire most of the dancers after I fired them.
I arrived at Glam Slam Miami a few weeks later with a forced smile on my face and did what had to be done. When the dirty work was over, I went to work on a show for a celebration of ’s first birthday on June 7, 1994. Nona Gaye hosted a simulcast at the LA Glam Slam while we performed live in Miami. He didn’t fall back on any of the old Prince music for this event; it was all about the new music he was creating as —fresh, fire-in-the-belly funk, for the most part.
The night of the birthday party, about a thousand people milled in the street outside the club. Advance ticket sales were big. Unfortunately, fake ticket sales were even bigger. The situation got real as people realized not everyone was going in. Fights broke out, and several people were arrested for disorderly conduct. At half past midnight, security just stepped back and waved everybody in. When my friend and I saw what was happening, we just looked at each other like here goes nuthin’ and stepped out on the stage.
“Hold on to your wigs,” he said, and the place went crazy.
In January 1995, Prince received the American Music Award of Merit. It was a huge honor for him and a major performance for New Power Generation, but beyond all that, it gave a chance to “put Prince to bed,” as he put it. He was proud of everything he’d accomplished as Prince, but by now he was fully invested in this reinvention of himself. He wanted to play live, but the show organizers wouldn’t let him. They wanted him to lip sync so there’d be no surprises and because of union laws.
“I’m not going to fake it,” he said. “If they want lip sync, I’m not using a microphone.”
He took pride in the fact that he wasn’t pretending, but he was still going to deliver a stellar experience for the live audience and the millions of people watching. You can see on the video that he’s brazenly chewing gum, as if to say, “Yeah, we all know I’m not singing right now, but look at this.”
This performance was entirely about the visual. “The Purple Medley” directed by Jamie King involved multimedia technology, a giant staircase, glowing rock walls, fireworks, and Tommy Barbarella flying through the air playing the Purpleaxxe as the climax of a live show that would be broadcast all over the planet. Fifty dancers—many of them from my Glam Slam show—rehearsed in LA while the New Power Generation rehearsed at Paisley Park.
At dress rehearsal the day of the show, he pulled me aside and said, “Tell everybody not to go full-on during the rehearsal. The censors are watching to see if we do anything offensive.”
He nodded toward a woman who was sitting out front. Narrow eyes. Straight mouth. Uptight. Definitely had the look of a censor. We rehearsed the whole thing, modifying the moves or just standing there during the parts that might have been deemed borderline. We left out the part where the backup dancers whipped off their panties, but she did not look like she was buying it.
Before we took our places for the live broadcast, we gathered in ’s dressing room to pray, as we always did, but as everyone else headed for the stage, he caught my wrist and said, “Hold up.” Opening his ever-present black bag, he pulled out a huge wad of cash and handed it to me. “Stuff this in your bra. I want you to pull it out and count it. You’ll know when.”
“Hmm.” I took the cash and tucked it into the front of my shirt. “Do I get to keep it?”
“Nope.”
Nona Gaye introduced him, reading the inscription on the award he was about to receive. “He has proven himself the ultimate showperson. A daring composer/lyricist, an electrifying singer/performer, an outstanding arranger/musician, master of more than two doz
en instruments, a visionary producer, creator of fourteen platinum albums, a motion picture star, and entertainment entrepreneur…”
Hard guitar chords opened the door for the dancers’ company. (And Carmen Electra! I almost forgot.) Everybody was all out there, panties to the breeze. After a medley of Prince hits, there was a light change. The backdrop was lettered in gothic print:
Prince 1958—1993
A woman’s voice: Welcome to the dawn. You have just accessed the gold experience.
A man’s voice: On June 7, 1993, Prince departed from this earth, his name changed legally to an unpronounceable symbol. Ladies and gentlemen, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.
People went nuts when they saw him dancing at the top of the staircase. It took them a minute to realize that it wasn’t him. It was that ingenious moment of reveal he always crafted for a live show. He’d actually been lying flat on the floor with a black sheet over him. He’d been brought on, hiked over the shoulder of one of the dancers earlier in the medley, and because the move was repeated by several other dancers, no one noticed. He sat up abruptly, swung his leg around into a split, scissored up to his feet as if gravity ain’t no thang, slicked his hair back, and launched into “Billy Jack Bitch”—and he did all this with a nonchalant, gum-chewing savoir faire that had the whole place screaming with adoration. Epic reveal. People still talk about it.
I met him on the grand staircase for “ Hate U,” and the choreography was all lyrical romance until “Take off your clothes.” Then I stripped off my skirt, and by the time it was all said and done, I’d poured water down my shirt, beaver-shot the crowd with a little peekaboo between my knees, and did an inverted split with my legs in the air. A lot of stuff didn’t make it onto the live broadcast, but I managed to slip a few tricks past the censors while making my ballet teacher very proud and inspiring thousands of girls to go out the next day and cut their bangs into a V just like mine.
As the rest of the dancers were peeling themselves off the floor, he tipped his head close to mine and said, “Cool?”
“Mm-hmm!”
I gave him a quick nod and a smile and stepped back so he could do the acceptance speech, which included a long list of genuine thanks to everyone from Wendy and Lisa and Sheila E to Muhammad Ali, Joni Mitchell, and Martin Luther King Jr. There was probably some tension in the air as people wondered if he was going to make some statement about his dispute with Warner Bros., but his parting word was a pointed comment “to everyone sweating NPG’s financial bankroll.”
I pulled the cash out of my bra and started counting it.
“Like an Eskimo,” he said. “Chill. It’s all good. Peace and be wild.”
Meanwhile, work continued. When I get sick or exhausted, the first thing to go is my voice. I can hold up as a dancer longer and stronger than I ever could as a singer. I was starting to get scratchy while we rehearsed in Denmark during the summer of 1995 and was full-on barking as we went on to perform in Germany, London, Italy, and Spain. Nonetheless, I loved being out promoting, finally feeling like a full-fledged member of the band. I’d worked hard to come up to speed: jazz, hip-hop, modern, lyrical—you name it, I could dance it. I felt confident and respected, and because I had such great respect for my bandmates, that meant a lot to me.
We were multitasking performances and promotion, so the last week of July, went back to LA to produce an album for someone while Sonny, Morris, and I stayed in Barcelona to do some press for the upcoming release of the New Power Generation album The Gold Experience. My love and I kept missing calls from each other because of the time difference. He finally caught up with me for a brief conversation, but he sounded sad and vacant—the way he did when he had a “migraine”—and I felt an unsettling nudge in my gut. I wished I could be there for him, mostly because he needed me, but also because I was young and insecure, and I knew there would always be someone else on hand who’d be there for him when I wasn’t.
“I wish we could talk longer,” I said. “Do you want me to tell them—”
“No, no. Go do what you need to do.”
I reluctantly hung up and went up to the rooftop patio to meet Sonny and Morris, ready to do my part on the press junket. The idea is to post up in a nice-looking location where TV crews and photographers and freelancers do short interviews one after another. The whole day was booked this way, just like the day before had been booked in another city, and the following day was booked somewhere else. Sonny and Morris are so hilarious, they made it fun, and I was good at playing The Girl, but I couldn’t shake this weird feeling.
I told Morris, “I need to go downstairs for a minute. I won’t be long.”
I just wanted to call him back and say, “I love you.” When I got to my room, the desk phone’s red message light was blinking. It was his security dude: “Hi, it’s Aaron. He wants to talk to you again. Give me a call.”
When I called back, Aaron put him on immediately, which was pretty unusual. He was never one to sit by the phone. That was my job.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
He was quiet for a long time, which was not unusual at all. Sometimes he just needed to sit with that connection for a little while. I was happy to do that under normal circumstances, but I had these people waiting for me on the roof, so I said, “You know where I am, right?”
“Barcelona,” he said.
“It’s so beautiful here, and oh—they have fresh apples in the hotel lobby.”
That made him laugh for some reason.
“I want to talk to you,” I said, “but they’re waiting for me. I just came down to tell you that I love you. And I’m here for you.”
“Thank you.”
We hung up, but something kept me sitting there for an extra second or two, and it only took that long for the phone to ring. When I picked it up, there was a long pause.
And then he said, “Will you marry me?”
“Um… what?”
Probably not the response he was looking for, but I was kind of shocked. This wasn’t something we’d discussed. I loved him, and I knew he loved me. To be honest, I’d been hoping he would ask me to move in with him, but we’d never discussed that, either. I was confident we’d be together forever, but I was only twenty-two.
On the other hand…
“I said, will you marry me?”
I started crying and said, “Yes. Of course.”
“Soon.”
“Okay…”
“I want us to have a family.”
“Me too.”
“What kind of ring do you want?”
“I have no idea.”
“Where are we doing this?”
“No idea. None. Open to suggestions.”
And then came all the things you hope to tell your grandchildren someday: how we sat there for another forty minutes of tears and I love yous, and that Mama was staying in the hotel and came to my room, and we sobbed our heads off, and my makeup was beyond smeared, and that put another monkey wrench in the press thing on the roof, but who cares, because I’d never been so happy in my whole life. Absolute, optimistic, hearts-and-flowers joy. That’s what I would have told our grandchildren on a front porch somewhere in Minnesota.
Oh, I want to believe we’re out there, somewhere in the universe of all possible paths at all possible times, holding on to all that joy with a beautiful grandbaby in my arms and an acoustic guitar in his. I want to believe that this sudden proposal was because he felt a sudden rush of “absence makes the heart grow fonder” and not because he was struggling with guilt or whatever. And maybe that’s just the old insecurity talking, because if it was an impulse, the idea must have grown on him. He certainly never tried to backpedal. Quite the opposite. He couldn’t wait.
By the time I got home from the press junket, he had a grand scheme in full swing—not so much for the wedding, but for married life—including renovations at the house and at Paisley Park. He didn’
t want me to see any of that before the wedding, especially the bedroom, so he’d had a big round bed put in the living room by the piano downstairs. On an impulse, I’d bought him a wedding band in Milan, and he immediately said, “I want it.”
“You can’t have it until the wedding,” I said. “It hasn’t been fitted.”
“I’ll get it fitted. I want people to know that in my heart and mind, we’re already married.”
I didn’t argue with that. A few days later, he was wearing the ring, and other than during the first part of the wedding ceremony, I didn’t see him without it. I guess he thought he was being super sly having Wardrobe call me. “Hi, Mayte, we’re getting ready for this photo shoot with a new designer and new additions to the look, and we lost some of your measurements. What’s your shoe size?”
“It’s 7½.”
“And your hat size?”
“I have a big head. Like—big big. Plus a lot of hair.”
“And your, um… ring size?”
I laughed partly because it was so see-through but also because I honestly had no idea. I’d never had a fancy ring before. One afternoon in October, he called my apartment and told me to come over. I parked in the garage, came in through the laundry room, and found a series of notes on heart-shaped paper.
The first one was just an arrow pointing down the hallway.
The second one said, Message 4 Mayte on Kitchen Table.
The third had an arrow pointing to a glass of port wine. Pour a little, take a sip and then look on “the bench.” I poured a little port and pretended to take a sip. I could hear him spying on me from the loft over the living room. By this time, we were both giggling.
The note on the bench said, Just relax. You’ll smile a thousand smiles. An arrow pointed me in the direction of the big round bed by the piano. The note on the bed was just a smile with an arrow pointing to some flowers and a blanket, and under the blanket was a box, and in the box was a ring, and it fit perfectly. Laughter. Tears.
He was right. I smiled a thousand smiles.