The Most Beautiful

by Mayte Garcia

  And for a while, it was.

  Working together on “The One” brought the fresh surge of tenderness and connection I’d been longing for. We decided to buy a house in Spain. Something in Marbella, looking out over the sea. While he went out on tour again, I went to Spain and put wheels in motion. It felt like I looked at a hundred places, and finally, he circled one in a Realtor’s catalogue and told me to buy it. It was a big mansion on the coast, not a normal person’s house like our house in Minnesota. From the balcony, you could see the Rock of Gibraltar and the distant coast of North Africa. The plan was for me to go to Spain and buy this house after I did some media. I went on BET for the world premiere of “The One” in June 1998, but after that, I stuck around long enough to go on Vibe with my husband, Chaka Khan, and Larry.

  My husband loved the details of the costuming in “The One,” including fine curls sculpted on my forehead instead of bangs. “You should do that for Vibe,” he said, so before we went on the show hosted by Sinbad, I had his hairdresser Kim carefully create them. She’s a true artist when it comes to curls.

  During the first part of the show, Sinbad was a big, adorable teddy bear, Chaka was her fabulous self, and Larry was the coolest dude you’d ever want to sit next to. I’d been waiting backstage with my husband, not expecting to go on the show itself, but when Sinbad introduced “the Funkateer Himself” with the iconic opening chords of “1999,” he caught my hand and wouldn’t let go.

  “What—am I doing this? I’m not hooked up with a mic or anything,” I said, but he was already pulling me toward the stage manager who held a curtain aside. The stage manager and I smiled and shrugged at each other, and my husband and I walked down the stairs together and sat on the sofa next to Chaka after a quick hug from Larry. Things started out great. My husband cracked everyone up, talking like Mickey Mouse, and then he said something very sweet and heartfelt about how “being married did help a lot, opening me up to be more comfortable with speaking in public.” He went on to speak intelligently about the cause he’d been fighting for the past three years:

  “What a lot of artists, I think, don’t recognize,” he said, “is that when they get into the business and they sign away the rights to the master recordings, it in fact makes you a slave, in the sense that the proceeds from those master recordings, for all of time, will go to whoever owns them.”

  “Some cat who can’t play,” Sinbad said. The audience hooted for that, and we all laughed and nodded.

  “Well, you said it, I didn’t.” My husband smiled. “What we’ve been trying to do with New Power Generation, what it stands for is a creative freedom and financial freedom to run and operate your own Genesis, so to speak, so that you reach a much brighter Revelation.”

  There was a round of applause, and I was part of it. I was incredibly proud of the way he’d stood up for his rights as an artist, and he was finally starting to get people on his side. Not record people—music people. The people who loved and respected him and wanted to work with him, and the massive audience who just wanted to see and hear him do his thing.

  “Now, when is this thing hitting?” Sinbad asked, holding up the Newpower Soul CD.

  “Bam,” said , and the audience loved that, too.

  He talked about “The One” and Crystal Ball and about how albums had drawn him to Chaka and Larry in the 1970s. Sinbad brought up the name thing and talked about why he himself picked the name Sinbad—for the daring dude in the old movies.

  “That’s sort of a precarious situation for me,” said my husband, “because to people who love me”—this made the crowd go nuts and call out, “We love you!”—“to people who love me, I get off on the fact that they think of me as a prince. So I’m pretty much cool with that. It’s when they don’t respect the fact that I’ve adopted a name that has no pronunciation that it gets to be troublesome.”

  Sinbad broke for a commercial. Tina, Larry’s wife, was not about to remain offsides after I came out, so she came and sat with us, which confused me a little, but okay—Tina was great, and Larry and Tina together were great as long as they didn’t start—

  Oh, God. It started.

  “Originally, when I had written this song,” said my husband, “I must admit, I was a little fearful to call it ‘The Christ,’ and my good friend Larry hit me to some things, and it woke me up to… or maybe—Let him explain it.”

  Larry was already on the edge of his seat, more than willing to get in there and explain it.

  “Well, actually we’ve had a number of, uh, very good Bible discussions,” he said, “and we do this on a regular basis, the whole family of us, and—”

  “Well, that’s a different artist tour,” Sinbad quipped, trying to keep it light.

  “Yeah, we do a lot together, and each day, each time you have these deep discussions, you enlighten to various things, and you make various adjustments in your life. You make various adjustments in a lot of areas.”

  I sat there with a frozen smile, thinking, Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up. Please.

  “In this one particular Bible discussion we were having had to do with stauros, which is an upright stake or pole…” Larry went off on one of the arcane scripture lessons with which I’d become more familiar than I ever wanted to be. I squeezed my husband’s hand, but he was looking at Larry with rapt attention.

  “… and come to find out,” Larry finally seemed to be wrapping it up, “Jesus actually died on an upright stake or pole.”

  “He was impaled,” my husband said, and Tina echoed, “Yes, impaled.”

  “Like this.” Larry demonstrated with his arms above his head. “He was impaled, as opposed to like this.” He opened his arms to demonstrate a crucified Jesus.

  Something that felt like a fire alarm went off inside my head. How is this happening right now? Observing my husband from the corner of my eye, I felt my heart sink. No way would he have allowed Larry to go off on a ramble like that without agreeing in advance that that’s how this was going to go down.

  “So then the question was, well, then, why is it then that, you know, people do this and people choose this or that, and, uh, so he chose to wanna make it clear…”

  The audience sat there, silent and confused. You could almost hear the eyes glazing over. They were here to see the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. They were here for the music. Now the studio was heavy with that feeling you get when the Jehovah’s Witness knocks on your door and you know he already saw your car in the driveway. You don’t want to be rude, but—dang.

  “… and sometimes the truth—it may hurt a little bit sometimes—various things—if a person finds out, ‘Well, I was thinking this or thinking that the whole time,’ and now all of a sudden, you need to make an adjustment in your thinking, well, that’s not on me. It’s written. It is written…”

  He went on like that for another three minutes until Sinbad smoothly intervened and said, “Looks like we’re about to go to church!”

  Big laugh.

  There was another commercial break, thank God, and then , Chaka, and Larry performed and blew the doors off the place, because that is what the funk they were born to do.

  Alone with my husband that night, I could see he was so proud. He knew he was pushing the envelope but thought it went great. I didn’t have the heart to ruin it for him, so I kept my opinion to myself. I was just happy to be with him. I told myself he was grieving. Everyone has to grieve in his own way. I was certain he’d work through this difficult phase. Larry would have his collaborative role in the music and then disappear. On to the next thing. I’d seen my husband go through plenty of other creative phases. He loved learning and needed a friend. Larry was a good teacher and had a perpetually inviting energy. How could that be a bad thing? I seemed to be the only one who had a problem with it.

  As the study sessions expanded, I felt less and less like a part of the group because my beliefs so clearly didn’t fall into line. Now whenever I mentioned Akhenaten and Nefertiti, he explained to me how idol
atrous and misguided they were. He kept encouraging me to hang out with Tina, and I tried to participate in the study sessions, but it simply wasn’t my truth. Men and women studied separately, and I believe faith should bring people together. I believe birthdays are beautiful. I believe all good people will be rewarded in the end.

  We went with Larry’s family to meetings on Saturday morning, and I was certain I smelled alcohol as we made our way to our seats. Either some of these people got tore up drinking the night before, or they were drinking first thing in the morning. Since we were married, we could sit next to each other; otherwise, men and women were segregated. People recited scripture, interpreting it with a strained logic that seemed to have a lot more to do with what they wanted it to say than what it actually said. “Judge not, lest ye be judged”—something as straightforward as that—could be morphed to some kind of diatribe, and then everyone would nod and agree, stricken by this profound truth. After an hour or two of that, I was yearning for a shark tank to dive into.

  I kept comforting myself with the memory of another celebrity trying to win him over to Scientology years earlier. “It’s intriguing,” he said, “but I don’t need somebody telling me how to believe in my God.” He was always a spiritual seeker, I told myself, fascinated enough in all possibilities to integrate the signs of the zodiac and third eye and reincarnation into the Christian beliefs his Baptist mother and Seventh-Day Adventist father had exposed him to. He was way too smart to be sucked into something just because he was vulnerable in that moment.

  There was a brief tour to raise money for our charitable organization, Love 4 One Another, and though I was too beat down to go with him, I needed to see him, so I showed up to surprise him one night. In the craft service area, I saw this girl who kind of looked like me but… earthier, wearing jeans and flat boots with no makeup. She was youthful, easygoing, like a kid fresh out of school. My husband had been spending a lot of time in online chat rooms. Someone told me she was a superfan who’d connected with him on one of the sites dedicated to all things Prince. I looked at her and got a bad feeling in my gut.

  Listen to your gut, girls. A woman’s intuition is no joke. I casually asked a few people, “Who’s that girl? Why is she on the tour?” and someone introduced me to her.

  “Mayte, this is Manuela. We hired her to do some charity work and merchandising.”

  “Really?” I said, looking directly into her dark eyes. “Because I’m in charge of merchandising and Love 4 One Another, and I’ve never met you.”

  She laughed. I smiled my ballerina smile. And that’s when my husband walked in and shook her hand. Just as he’d shaken my hand years before, when we were both so much younger.

  When we were alone on the tour bus later, I said to him, “I’m not stupid. I know something is going on.”

  “There’s nothing going on,” he insisted. “Why would you even think that?”

  “I know that handshake. I remember it from when I was eighteen years old and Carmen Electra was standing there next to me, thinking she was the only woman you’d ever love.”

  When I got the handshake in front of Carmen, he and I weren’t intimate yet, but we both knew it was going to happen. With Manuela, I could feel the “coming attraction” energy like the moment the lights go down in a theater before the main act comes onstage. He hadn’t been intimate with her yet, or so I’ve been told, but the overture was playing. And this time, he was a married man. In my mind—and in his, I know—this made a huge difference.

  The hailstorm of harsh words—jealousy, betrayal, denial, indignation—it was all sickeningly familiar. I’d listened to my parents have this same fight a thousand times, and so had my husband. We were just keeping up the family tradition, it seemed. He was terribly offended, denied everything, and sent me home to Minnesota. And I didn’t cry all the way home. I never saw this as a deal breaker. My husband was a complicated man. I knew what I was signing up for, and along with the tradition of waging war on each other, my parents routinely strayed, then got past it and stayed together. They had children. They made a life. Their complicated marriage lasted decades, because even when they couldn’t stand to look at each other, they still loved each other.

  I told myself I just needed to be with him. I had to prove my strength as a performer and a wife and a friend and a partner who brought to the table something meaningful of my own. I thought that if I performed with him again, it would bring back that energy we had.

  One night he wanted me to go to a basketball game with him, but I was feeling so wrung out and depleted, I just couldn’t. Somehow my “no thanks” turned into a giant blowout—the first and only time in all our years together that he looked me in the eye and said, “Fuck you.”

  “What?” I was instantly at code orange. “What did you say to me?”

  “You know how many people want to go to this basketball game with me? How many women exhaust themselves trying to get my attention?”

  “Oh, I know,” I promised him. “Believe me, I know.”

  Larry and Tina were now living in our guesthouse. They were touring together, working on an album. I had a hard time understanding what the business arrangement was between him and Larry. I sat through a lot of blather about how contracts are hostile, but Mama had brought me up to know that “good fences make good neighbors,” so the idea of working that way made little sense to me.

  I kept reminding my husband of our decision to go somewhere far away from all this. He suggested we could open an orphanage in Spain, but I had no idea how such a thing would be accomplished. I still don’t. I tried to talk to him about adopting a baby, but he stuck to the company line about God’s will and the superior wisdom of nature. But what’s more natural than loving a child?

  Manuela was now diligently studying with the group, he told me, and she always looked so comfortable in jeans and boots, her hair naturally wavy.

  “You should stop straightening your hair,” said my husband. “Keep it natural.”

  I was starting to feel desperate. I just wanted to get him to Marbella so we could start over. I went to Spain to buy the house, and the money for the down payment wasn’t there. I panicked, and thinking about the Cherokee purchase, I said, “Do you take American Express?” They didn’t. After two anxious days, the money appeared. I bought the house and started the complicated process of moving us over there.

  I made frequent trips home, not wanting to leave him with Manuela too long. If I’m to be totally honest, I have to accept that I’d left him alone too much already. I wondered if I could have tried harder to understand what he’d been through. I thought about the many days and nights I spent locked inside my own pain, not knowing or particularly caring where he was, other than to note that he wasn’t there for me. Trying to shake off the fog of depression, I’d spent time with Jan in New York. I’d taken refuge at Mama’s house in Miami. I went to Hawaii alone. When we were in bed together, if I was able to come home or he’d let me meet up with him on tour, I spooned up to him, wanting to be close, but I could feel the silence, and the coolness, and the tension growing.

  Finally, he did come to Spain, but he had the whole entourage with him, and I noticed Manuela was wearing a gold chain with his symbol encrusted in diamonds. Not exactly the kind of thing you get from the merch table at a concert. He didn’t even bother trying to explain to me why it was important for an administrative person from the charity to be at every concert, including this appearance on my own stomping ground. Conveniently, the extramarital relationship didn’t conflict with the “study” crew dogma, I guess.

  We went back to Europe, and on a chartered flight she sat directly behind us. I sat there feeling sick to my stomach. Onstage in Marbella, we performed “The One,” and I wondered, What kind of woman could watch a man she cared about onstage with his wife, professing their love like that? Did that bother her at all? Later on she told me that they weren’t physical until sometime after that, and I thought, Yeah, whatever. The timing doesn’t seem
all that important to me.

  Several times while I was in Spain overseeing the renovations on the house, I got phone calls from people saying, “Hey, I saw you and Prince in New York at such and such a restaurant. I didn’t come and say hi because I saw you guys walking into the private room.” I stood there shaking, left with two options: humiliate myself by saying it wasn’t me or pretend it was me and be humiliated later when they heard it through the grapevine.

  My husband never went anywhere without the little black bag stuffed with the cash he’d give people when he sent them off to get things. With the growing distance between us, I was no longer certain what people were fetching for him, and that scared me. He asked me to meet him in LA one night, and as soon as I saw him in the hotel room, I could see there was something seriously wrong. He was still in bed, horribly sick to his stomach and on the verge of weeping. He gripped my hand and asked me not to go away again.

  “Not without you,” I said. “Do you think you can do this?”

  “No.” He said he wanted to check out of the hotel and cancel the show.

  “Okay. We can do that. We can go home.”

  He got dressed, and we went to the tour bus. I helped him get in bed and stroked his face and tried to talk to him, but he was beside himself. He told me there were pills in the hotel room. He didn’t trust anyone else. He wanted me to go back up there and flush them down the toilet.

  “Okay. Okay, I will.” I kissed his cheeks and rocked him in my arms. “And then you’re coming to Spain with me. We’re stopping. We’re resting. We’re going to figure out how to be a family.”