The Most Beautiful

by Mayte Garcia

  I’m smiling a few more right now just thinking about it.

  We toured Japan for two weeks in January 1996, and early one morning, I woke up in the hotel room and heard him playing piano on the other side of the door. I dragged the sheet off the bed and went to sit beside him. He was so content, so sure that he was exactly where he was supposed to be, and the music he played was full of that feeling. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was working on Kamasutra, the music that would be played at our wedding. It flowed so easily from his heart to his hands to my ear. I rested my head on his shoulder, and he kissed my head, both of us wise enough to cherish that moment.

  On the airplane as we flew home, he ripped pages from Vanity Fair and Vogue.

  “Look at this dress for your sister.”

  “Oh. Okay. Um—”

  He decided he wanted us to get married on Valentine’s Day in Paris. We couldn’t make that happen on such short notice, but he was fixed on that date and wanted me to find a wedding planner who could figure out a way to make it happen in Minneapolis.

  We decided to get married in a small ceremony at a church in Minneapolis, followed by a private dinner for family and close friends at Paisley Park, and then move to the soundstage for a huge party that would include over a thousand friends, coworkers, and devoted fans.

  When I got home, I interviewed wedding planners and hired the one who stressed me out the least. When she asked me about my vision for the wedding, I said, “Well, I always wanted a long train. And for my dad to wear his uniform.”

  “Good…” She looked at me expectantly. “And…”

  “And… wow. That’s all I got. Never thought about it.”

  Apparently, my fiancé had thought about it a lot. He chimed in with specifics for everything from flowers to flower girls—there would be seven. We had a casting call. Yep, you’re reading that correctly: we had a casting call for our flower girls. And yeah, I get the rock-and-roll fantasy over-the-topness of that, but I was moved by how much he cared about every detail of this wedding. It was a work of art, not a show for an audience—there were very few people there; he wanted us to have this beautifully orchestrated memory in our own heads. The rich visuals were important to him, because the memory of it all was a gift he wanted to give me, along with music he was working on. He kept the songs closely guarded so I would hear them in the perfect setting. The reveal. The audience he was playing to was me—the me of that moment and the grandmother me. The old woman who would look back and tell her granddaughters on their wedding days how she was greatly, artistically, lavishly loved by their grandpa.

  He’d come home from the studio, all excited, like a kid, singing, “Wait till you heeeear.”

  “What? I’m going over there.”

  “Noooooo, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  He’d go up a third—“ No, you’re not”—and then go higher and higher—“ No, you’re not, no, you’re not”—until we were both laughing.

  While all this was going on, work went on as usual at Paisley Park, including my album project Child of the Sun. This wasn’t something I asked to be involved in. It came about because of a show we had done in Spain the year before. After a long, crazy concert of amazing songs, dances, and love, he was preparing for the encore while I went out and worked the crowd, tossing out tambourines and saying hi to fans. They started chanting, “Mayte! Mayte! Mayte!” and they didn’t stop, even when he came back out onstage. After a minute or so, looked at them, looked at me, and then leaned in to shout over the noise.

  “You need to do an album.”

  “No, I don’t,” I shouted back.

  “You’re doing an album.”

  That was the whole discussion. Within weeks, it was in the works. I loved him all the more for being so supportive, but my calling was to dance, and as I evolved as an artist, I was getting more and more interested in directing and editing—which strikes me as a very natural progression, because it’s all about rhythm and motion and technical precision. Just like dance, it transforms the emotional into the visual.

  The album, Child of the Sun, was released by NPG in Europe later that year. It was actually a lot of fun. We did a duet, “However Much U Want,” which was the first song I ever sang in the studio and was written with me in mind. I did a gender-bend version of “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World”—“The Most Beautiful Boy in the World”—and he came in to put a new spin on the Commodores’ “Brick House.” The cover has me in full-on golden Egyptian goddess mode, though we didn’t discover the hidden significance of the title track, “Children of the Sun,” until years later.

  Just before the album dropped, he wrote to me:

  Dearest Darling,

  ’m listening 2 a re-mastered version of your album. It’s deeper and louder. Much better. Kirk did it in L.A. U have the cutest voice! It’s your album now. Anything u don’t like or wanna fix u can. ’ll give u the $$. Forgive me 4 being so distant, ’m just burnt on the studio & the routine of record-making. 16 years of it, guess. ’m ready 4 a change—World tour, new clothes, new money, hairstyle, car, house. ’m ready 2 be . ’m sure u understand.

  Every rain storm passes. Every earthquake stops. Every night brings morning. Please don’t ever doubt my love 4 u. love u with my soul! No one has ever or will ever get close 2 my soul the way u have. Other women want my babies. just find it funny! My future’s all arranged. If they’re not your babies, ain’t havin’ none! wouldn’t want ’em. ’cuz they were never supposed 2 be here! Patience is a virtue. trust God with everything now. Even u. If u stay with me, it’s because ( believe) he wants me 2 be married (a huge extravagant wedding) and have 2 angels for him…

  He put together a beautiful program to hand out at the wedding and included some of the things I’d said in the hypnotic state. He wanted to share a few of the little coincidences and parallels that made us smile. There was the unlikely way we met; he never, never took random tapes from people and immediately watched them like that. There was the prophetic little joke he made to Rosie, and how both our fathers are named John. My mother, Nelly, and his middle name Nelson—Nel’s son. His mother, Mattie, so close to Mayte. When I met John Nelson, we stood in his kitchen, and he told me that I reminded him of Prince’s mother. I told him that my birthday is November 12, just one day off from hers, and he grunted out a brusque, “Damn it. Of course.”

  After a few years, the coincidences began to feel more like fate.

  He asked me to marry him on July 25, 1995, while I was in Barcelona. I didn’t connect the dots until Daddy showed me a ticket stub and pointed it out to me that the first time Prince and I saw each other was at the concert in Barcelona on July 25, 1990. Another moment of fate and coincidence that took our breath away for a moment.

  There was a rehearsal the day before the wedding, and I went back to my apartment so we wouldn’t see each other before the ceremony. In the wee hours of the morning—I could barely sleep from the excitement—I woke up and found Mama crying. When I asked her what was wrong, she said, “I didn’t get to do anything! I never had a wedding of my own, and now—all this, and I didn’t help with anything. I didn’t even cook or make rice or my Puerto Rican wedding cake. There’s nothing for me to do.”

  “Well, that’s not true, Mama. There’s…” I racked my brain trying to find something the wedding planner hadn’t already covered. “You know what? I have some almonds. I was thinking, we should do little, like, little—you know, do them up in little bags. You know how much he likes almonds, so I got them, but I haven’t had time to put them on the table and make them pretty.” This calmed her for the moment, and the next morning, I called the planner and begged her, “Please, please, find something for my mother to do.”

  My husband-to-be called and said, “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m great. Excited,” I said.

  He said, “Me too.”

  I went over to the church to get dre
ssed, and while I was having my hair done, I heard helicopters overhead. Nervously, I asked Daddy, “Do you hear that?”

  “Yeah, that’s for you,” he said.

  “The groom asked for a police escort,” said the planner. “The press caught on.”

  My fiancé called me and said, “Don’t worry about it. I have a way to get there. They won’t see me.”

  A vision of him being wheeled into the church in a roadie case crossed my mind.

  “I’m having a limo come over,” he said, “but I’m riding in the back of the van with the flowers.”

  That made me laugh, because he was wearing a clean, crisp, tailored white suit, and I had a hard time picturing him squatting in the back of a van among the gardenias and orchids. You can see half of his wedding suit on “Holy River”; it’s the bolero jacket. On the back is his symbol with an M superimposed on it. I’d never seen this combination of his new name with my initial. I didn’t know that he’d had it monogrammed all over our home—the china, curtains, napkins, and towels. When I walked down the aisle and saw it for the first time, I was overwhelmed.

  Also a bit overwhelming were the flowers. I’d ordered what I thought was a lot of them, though I did tell the wedding planner, “These columns for three hundred bucks a whack? Not happening. We’re only occupying the first couple of rows in the church.” Without telling me, my husband-to-be had ordered an additional half million dollars’ worth of flowers and had them flown in the day before the wedding. White and gold orchids. Gardenias on the railings. Roses and huge arrangements on pedestals. The flowers I’d budgeted with the wedding planner were pretty much a joke next to all that. After the wedding he asked me under hypnosis if I was upset that we didn’t have a big church wedding, and I told him, “I’m glad there were only a few people in the church. More room for angels.”

  Kirk’s brother officiated at the ceremony, which went off perfectly, and afterward there was a private dinner at Paisley Park. I was astonished when I got there. The sleek corporate white and gray walls were painted sky blue with puffed white clouds. The purple carpet was decorated with signs of the zodiac. A kaleidoscope of colors and murals made every corner beautiful. The wall above the elevator was lettered boldly:

  ELEVATE

  I loved that and a million other small, perfect details. There was nothing dull about Paisley Park before, but this was like opening the door to Oz—if Oz was serving a vegetarian meal with edible flowers. Our first dance as a married couple was one of the songs he’d been working on: “Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife.”

  friend lover sister mother wife

  air food water love of my life

  After dinner, we went back to the house to change clothes for the big party on the soundstage. Gianni Versace had generously sent me a selection of dresses for the big reception, and I chose a white strapless number with the greatest turn-around skirt ever made. It was gorgeous.

  We got out of the car, and my husband carried me over the threshold on his shoulder like a sack of coffee beans. The house had been completely redone to make it our home. He took me by the hand and showed me every room. The foo foo magicians had been to my apartment, packed up all my stuff, and had everything put away neatly by the time we arrived. Upstairs in an anteroom outside the master bedroom, there was a crib. My husband went in and cued up the other song he’d been working on: “Let’s Have a Baby.”

  Too bad that gorgeous Versace dress never made it to the party.

    nine

  The next morning, I found that my bags were packed.

  “Where are we going?” I asked my husband, and he just smiled.

  When we got to the airport, we went to the gate for Hawaii. We were both ridiculously happy. Never before or since have I experienced that particular level of being in love. It was so strange and wonderful to look at this beautiful man and think, Husband.

  “We’re married,” we kept reminding each other. “How insane is that?”

  And then we’d go off giggling again. He always laughed about the fact that people often mispronounced my name like “my tie,” so when the flight attendant leaned in and said, “Mai tai?” we both cracked up laughing till we had tears in our eyes. We asked for virgin mai tais, because we were trying to get pregnant, and spent the rest of the long flight giggling, napping with our heads together, and making out under a blanket.

  In the limo on the way to the hotel, my husband was doing his best to tease and distract me, but I saw a billboard over his shoulder:

  Feb 16, 17, 18

  “Seriously?” I said. “We’re working?”

  “I figured we’d get bored and want to play.”

  Lord help me, he was right. I couldn’t even be mad. Michael, Sonny, Tommy, and Morris were waiting to meet up with us at Eurasia, a nightclub in Honolulu. For the rest of the week, we were booked to play the Blaisdell Center, an arena that held about eight thousand people. We rented a boat one day, and he kept me giggling by pretending to be seasick and impersonating people and sneaking video of some guy’s janky old penny loafers. We spent an afternoon communing with dolphins at an aquarium—petting their snouts, imitating their nickering voices, letting them splash us with their tails—and that was amazing, but we didn’t really hang around the beach or do tourist stuff at all.

  We did go to see a local band one evening, and my husband blew their minds by getting up and jamming with them for a while. I loved that he did that. It was very rare for him to play someone else’s guitar, because he hated using a whammy bar. He was very particular about using foot pedals and having them situated just so. I’m not sure what made him jump up and join in that night. I guess he was feeling happy and light and wide open in a way that was brand new to him.

  Mostly, we spent our days the way we spent all our days on tour: sleep in as late as possible, head over to the venue for sound check, hair, makeup, warm-ups, go time. If we had any free time, one of us would nudge the other and suggest, “Let’s try to have a baby.”

  The second day, my husband started saying, “I wonder if you’re pregnant.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I think you’re pregnant.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Do you think you’re pregnant?”

  “I don’t know! The only pregnant girl I ever knew dropped out of high school.”

  “I need to know. We need one of those tests.”

  He was going to call home and have someone FedEx us a pregnancy test, but I reminded him that they do have drugstores in Hawaii, and we now had the whole entourage in tow, so there would be someone to go get it for us without anyone knowing who it was for. This happened and the test was negative, but he thought maybe it was so early we would need a blood test. Off we went to a clinic to see a doctor. I felt like an idiot asking for the test.

  “We’re newlyweds,” I told the nurse. “Pretty excited.”

  “It’s too soon. You’ll have to wait just like everybody else,” she said.

  When I got back to the hotel room, he sighed. “Okay. I guess we’ll keep trying.”

  “Fine by me,” I said, crawling back into bed with him. This aspect of it was a joy, but honestly, if we’d had any more downtime, he would have driven me nuts with the pregnancy questions.

  It ended up being the perfect honeymoon for us. Hard to imagine having more fun than we had when we were onstage together. We were doing a lot of music from The Gold Experience, including “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” which sent fans into a fit of ecstasy. We performed it the same way we’d been performing it for the past year and a half, with exacting choreography we worked out together for the World Music Awards, but it was different somehow. He kept referring to me as “my wife, Mayte.”

  Ah, I thought. That’s why it feels so different. Because it is.

  When we got home, we were right back in the swing of things at Paisley Park. There was a lot going on that winter, which left little time for obsessing over the pregnancy question. We had booked some t
our dates and one-off shows and aftershows. was working on music that would become his Emancipation album, celebrating his separation from Warner Bros. The Spike Lee movie Girl 6 was about to come out with a soundtrack album featuring music by Prince with The Family, Vanity 6, and New Power Generation. There was a movie about Selena in development, and I had been asked to screen test for it.

  On a day-to-day level, there wasn’t a huge difference in my life. We had worked hard before we were married and kept working hard after. We were still doing what we loved, but now we had a real partnership. Before we had been driving down the same road; now we were on the same bus. He talked to me about finances and asked my opinion about decisions, and I started thinking about things like utility bills and taxes. I was still performing with him, but he was feeling less comfortable with some of my costume options, not loving that his wife was out there in hot pants and bikini tops.

  Thinking ahead to what I’d do when I did get pregnant and couldn’t tour with him for a while, I went to the office and said, “You can take me off the payroll since I’m his wife now.”

  A year before that, not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined myself saying the words “take me off the payroll,” and looking back now, I just sigh and shake my head. Baby girl, what were you thinking? I wanted to stay involved, stay productive—I was still on my standing mission to always prove my worth—but it seemed odd to me that I would be paid a salary when I could have anything I wanted. We were in this together. A partnership.

  We didn’t do much sleeping in those days. I remember a lot of work, but it was the kind of work that breeds joy. I heard the piano a lot, at all hours of the night and into those creative hours before dawn. I wish I’d had a camera phone back then. It was such a luxury to be sleeping and hear his lavender piano being played just on the other side of dreaming, and then slowly wake up to realize it was him, and he was creating something. He spent most of the time recording and jamming, and through the jamming came songs and more songs. I started cooking for us—mostly what I called Love Soup—garbanzo beans and lots of veggies, which we eventually started growing in our own greenhouse. I felt like a wife and wanted to be a mother, so I started rethinking my hot-pants-wearing, stage-diving lifestyle. I knew I wanted to get behind the camera, directing and editing music videos, and my husband was totally on board with that idea.