by Mayte Garcia
“Fuego!” I screamed in Spanish, “Fuego! Fuego! Ayúdame!”
The gardener, God bless him, came running with a hose. He had things basically under control by the time the fire department came. They told me the American adapter on my computer had started an electrical fire that quickly crawled up the wall. It was a little too symbolic: the curtain monogrammed with our family crest was now a sooty, blackened rag.
The first swing of a one-two punch came with the release of my husband’s single “The Greatest Romance Ever Sold.” The lyrics about why Adam never left Eve were clearly about me and might have given me another pang of hope, if not for that bitter little twist in the refrain—the greatest romance that’s ever been sold—though I wasn’t sure who sold it to whom. The accompanying music video featured my husband getting down and dirty—and I mean very down and very dirty—with a girl I later discovered was a stripper from Le Crazy Horse. This was pushing the envelope, even for him.
Mama had blood in her eye after she saw that video. “Who would humiliate his wife in public that way? No good man! No son of mine!”
I was angry when I saw it, but more than that I was worried about him. It wasn’t like him to be so cynical.
In November 1999, released his twenty-third album, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. He’d been bartering tracks with several artists, including Ani DiFranco and No Doubt—you play on mine, I’ll play on yours—which was such a cool development in the whole artist-empowerment-revolution thing. The song Ani played on (and this has nothing to do with her or her mad guitar skills) was called “ Love You but Don’t Trust U Anymore.” The lyrics are the bitter lament of a betrayed lover, and when people heard the lyrics, they leapt to the obvious conclusion that I’d been cheating on him. Because I was living it up over here in Spain, where the fun never stops, except when you’re engulfed in flames. The truth is, the lyrics echo everything I said to him during that long, horrible night in Marbella.
I remember meeting you here in the good ol’ days
I would never pick the flower of my favorite protégé
One. Two. Punch.
On December 31, 1999, the last of the contracts he’d signed as Prince Rogers Nelson expired, so early in 2000, he announced that he would be called Prince again. Apparently, he felt that the unpronounceable symbol no longer suited him. I’m sure that was a relief for everyone who’d been bending over backward to insert that symbol in font collections and figure out what to call him and asking me what I called him, but I was sad to see it go. It meant something on a plane beyond words, beyond fame, beyond the ordinary—and that’s the plane where his soul recognized mine.
In all the years we were together, I never called him Prince. Now I did. I felt an era ending, and I knew our marriage was ending with it. He’d humiliated me, going around with Manuela and putting out a video of himself crawling up another woman’s cooch. He’d drained the money I was supposed to be using to maintain the house in Spain, so bill collectors were banging down the door. He made me feel banished—and not just banished by my husband, but banished by God. It was as if he expected me to simply disappear, and in a way, I did. I felt myself slipping down the drain and didn’t have the will to fight it anymore.
I woke up every morning in a fog of depression and spent the day pushing terrible thoughts out of my head. My love for this man had been the formative force of my entire adult life at that point. I was only twenty-six years old, but I felt like I’d lived ten lifetimes in the ten years I’d known him. I didn’t know how to be a grown-up woman without him, and I didn’t want to learn. No one had ever ignited my mind or body the way he had. No one had taken me to the heights he took me to, creatively, professionally, and emotionally. We’d given each other a child. We’d given each other the dream of children. We’d held each other in the darkest imaginable moments and in the brightest possible sun.
On March 20, 2000, I wrote him a letter and told him how enormously unhappy I was. Seeing the words on paper, I sobbed myself empty.
I have come to terms with the fact that you don’t love me anymore.
That was a lie I tried to tell myself. I hadn’t come to terms with the loss of him. I never really did. And I believed that on some level—even though it was a level now lost to him—he did love me and always would.
… what you really want is to have me out of your life without having to go through the legal system. Regardless of my feelings for you, I do not wish to be humiliated anymore…
I couldn’t bear to write down the word divorce.
What do you suggest we do in order to resolve this matter legally, in a way that is not damaging to us? I’m sure we can handle this quietly and expeditiously as adults instead of making a spectacle out of it.
I left my mansion in Spain and moved in with Jan and Myra, living out of a suitcase and sleeping on the couch in their one-bedroom apartment in Harlem. My attorney was a friend of Jan’s from Jersey. I’d come to Paisley Park ten years earlier with more than $100,000 in my belly dancing account. I was ready to leave with nothing. Jersey Lawyer told me I was crazy. When Prince’s high-powered attorney made an opening offer of settlement—I could keep the house in Spain, but I would get very little cash—Jersey tried to tell me, “That is a crap offer.”
“Tell them we’ll take it,” I said. “I just want to move on.”
I figured I could sell the house and live on that money while I took a moment to recover and start rebuilding my career, but it took years to find a buyer. When I finally got an offer I could live with, to sweeten the deal, I had to throw in a pink BMW my husband had given me as a wedding gift. By the time I unloaded that gorgeous albatross, the cost of maintaining the house and grounds had gobbled up every nickel of equity.
I’m not going to groan on and on about it, but I don’t want to underplay the effort it took to come back from this heartbreak. I was seriously depressed. I would never want Gia to think that a woman’s life is over if she loses her man, but that’s how I felt. I’d lost the love of my life, my son, my songs, my job, my band, my home, my home away from home—everything from Larry the Starfish to the “Children of the Sun” master, which, ironically enough, was owned by NPG Records, to whom I was apparently a slave.
But in that whole purple foo foo world, only one small thing truly mattered to me: Amiir’s ashes. It took me a long time to find out what had happened to the little urn with the dolphin family. I kept asking and badgering and getting no answer. Eventually, a compassionate friend told me that she’d heard about a troubling incident: Prince’s assistant was upset that he had been asked to burn everything in the house that reminded him of me or the baby, including the contents of the nursery—Amiir’s crib and toys and clothes and books—everything.
I stared at her, stammering in disbelief. “But—but surely, he—not everything.”
“It’s all gone,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
I sucked in a deep breath. My whole body felt taken over with rage. It felt hot and toxic and lasted for a long, long time.
In May 2000, less than sixty days after I wrote that letter to Prince, Daddy drove me to my lawyer’s office to sign the final papers. Jersey handed me a thick manila envelope and said, “You’re divorced.” Nothing but numb, I got into the car with Daddy, and we drove back to New York.
Somewhere along the line, I said, “This is bullshit.”
Daddy was startled. He’d never heard me cuss. Not one time in my life. But then he smiled and nodded in agreement. “Yep. Bullshit it is.”
All that summer, he and Mia and Mama and Jan and Myra patiently loved me back from the ledge. It sucked, but I couldn’t wallow in it. I pounded the pavement in New York, hoping to get a recording contract or dancing gigs or anything short of the Playboy spread people kept suggesting. At one meeting, after viewing my demo, the suit told me, “We really dig that Latina-Arabic vibe. We just signed a girl named Shakira.”
Contemplating a new direction for my life, I thought about what it took to get thr
ough that Oprah interview just days after Amiir’s death and realized I was a lot better actress than I ever gave myself credit for, but to make a living at that, I’d have to start a new life in LA, the one place that had always intimidated me.
twelve
Right away, I accepted one hard fact about getting over my ex-husband: I would never get over him. All I could do was move on to the next thing. I hooked up an agent and started acting classes. I started forging a circle of good friends. Wade Robson asked me to choreograph a music video with Britney Spears, which was a lot of fun and got my name into circulation as someone who was still in the biz, good behind the camera, and making something of myself. I was still struggling emotionally, but I worked hard to stay in great shape, continue learning my craft, and keep my chin up. I wasn’t looking to meet anyone or get into another relationship, but Tommy Lee’s drum tech and longtime friend Viggy spotted me at a club one night and introduced us. Prince always said that if he ever had a real rock band, he’d want Tommy Lee and Dave Navarro to be in it, so it’s kind of hilarious that Carmen Electra ended up dating Tommy Lee and married to Dave Navarro, and I ended up dating Tommy after I moved to LA in 2001.
Tommy understood what it was like to marry—and unmarry—a pop culture icon. Neither one of us ever bad-mouthed the other person’s ex. On the contrary: he was in awe of Prince, and I thought Pamela Anderson was the bomb. I loved her attitude, her openness, and the fact that she’d given birth at home. I heard through the grapevine that Prince was unhappy about my seeing Tommy Lee. I guess he thought I’d see someone “normal” like an accountant or a software developer or, better yet, stay celibate the rest of my life.
But Tommy was the perfect rebound romance. He was unfailingly honest. Could not tell a lie. He was a great cook and consummate gardener, who loved picking flowers and knew the name of every plant under the sun. He was thoughtful and deeply considerate of others. When he met Mama for the first time, it was ninety degrees outside, but he wore long sleeves so she wouldn’t be confronted with all his tattoos.
We hadn’t seen or spoken to each other for over a year, but in late August 2001, I was stunned by the news that Aaliyah had died in a plane crash, and then I saw the news that Prince’s father had died that same day. My heart ached for him, and I was surprised to find that the hard ball of rage in my gut had softened a bit. It had been about eighteen months since we last spoke, and I was almost ready to hear his voice again, so I left him a message.
“It’s me. I just want to say I’m so sorry to hear about your dad. I hope you were able to make peace with him before he passed. I hope… I hope you’re well.”
He called me as I was driving home after some MTV-related bash not long after that, and we talked for a long time as I drove through the LA traffic. We talked a bit about his father, and he seemed remarkably okay with it. Somehow, seeing his father’s life in its entirety now, he was able to keep the music and let the rest go.
He asked me a question about his taxes, and I reminded him that it wasn’t my problem anymore. He asked me if I’d been able to sell the house, and I said I was working on it. We talked about Aaliyah’s music and about the music he was working on at the time. That summer he previewed his album The Rainbow Children at a weeklong festival at Paisley Park. Musically, it’s Prince and therefore extraordinary, but the storyline is a thinly veiled parable about Jehovah’s Witnesses, and in that scenario, there’s a beautiful unbeliever who gets banished to a foreign land. Meanwhile, the “Wise One” hooks up with another woman conveniently sent to him by God. When I heard it, I fought the impulse to roll my eyes, but he didn’t ask me what I thought of it, and I didn’t volunteer an opinion. It felt so good driving along and talking with him, I didn’t want to say anything that would tip the mood in the wrong direction.
After about an hour, I was almost back in Woodland Hills, and the conversation was winding down. He said, “I should let you know… I’m going to marry Manuela.”
“What?” I almost rolled the car over. “No. Not her. Go ahead and marry anyone else in the world, but this—no. I do not bless this. You do not have my blessing.” I went off on him, and he hung up on me, which was jolting. He’d never cut me off like that before.
I don’t know why I was surprised. I was the “Banished One,” and she was part of the Bible study crowd, which was apparently God’s own Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. On New Year’s Eve, they were baptized together and got married in Hawaii. Again, I fought the eye roll. I fought it hard. I didn’t want to admit that the real reason it hurt so deeply was that I had assumed we’d eventually get back together. Like Mama and Daddy. As a little girl, I learned that marriage is forever, and divorce is just a bump in the road. It was tough for me to grow up and accept that we were over over.
On 9/11, I was in Laughlin, Nevada, with Tommy, visiting his dying father. I was trying to be there for him, but I was emotionally wrecked and drinking, which was very unusual for me. Through a haze of grief and alcohol, we stared at the TV in disbelief, like everyone else in the world, and then we flew home in a private plane. It was eerie; it felt like we were the only plane in the sky over LA. I was so grateful to have his strong hand in mine.
Not long after that, Tommy asked me to marry him. He proposed with a gummy bear ring with my parents sitting there and a cascade of silly string and applause. How was I going to say no? But the next morning we woke up, and had a mutual moment of Oh, God, what did we just do? The media picked up on it right away. I heard through the grapevine that Prince was distraught about it. He called one night and left a message when I didn’t pick up.
“Hello?” It was strange to hear his voice. And we never said “hello.” We always said, “Hi.” In our vocabulary, “Hello?” meant “WTF?”
“Hello?” he said again.
And after a brief silence, he said, “Hi.” And then he hung up.
Tommy and I worked at staying together for a few months, but we never talked about actually getting married. At the end of the day, Tommy and I were each exactly what the other person needed in the exact moment we needed each other, and for that, I’ll always be grateful. We had fun, and I was in serious need of some fun after what I’d been through in the previous two years. The same was true for him. During the two years I was with Tommy, he and Pamela were in a fairly gloves-off custody thing, but despite that, their kids—people, these kids were adorable, smart, good-hearted, grateful little people. Their mom had a pretty freakin’ great résumé there, because children don’t just fall off the plum tree like that, especially in Hollywood.
I loved those kids. Still do. But they had a terrific mom, who was not me, and ultimately, that was a problem for me. I still wanted to have a child of my own, and Tommy was good with the kids he already had. We were honest about it, with ourselves and with each other: it was a deal breaker. We parted with some sadness, but we remain good friends to this day. When Prince died, Tommy e-mailed me: Don’t know what to say. I am so sorry. I got a lovely note from his fiancée as well.
I didn’t speak with Prince again for several years. I saw him, of course. It was hard not to. I still loved his music, and so did the rest of the world, so I saw him on TV and heard him on the radio. We ran into each other one night at the Green Door, and he actually seemed happy to see me at first, but I was feeling spicy, so I said, “Hey, Prince. How’s it going, Prince?”
“Why are you calling me Prince?” he asked.
“Isn’t that your name now, Prince? Nice necklace, by the way.”
He quoted some scriptural teaching about covering one’s chest.
“Typical Gemini,” I said. “Bring your religion to the club.”
He was irritated by that and went off on a toot about how he wasn’t going to vote in the upcoming elections. I finally had to turn away and say to my friends, “We’re gonna need another bottle of champagne.”
In March 2004, the first year he was eligible for it, Prince was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Peopl
e are still talking about how he ripped the place apart with an incredible guitar solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” as part of a tribute to George Harrison. Rolling Stone said, “It could be the single greatest moment in any Rock Hall induction ceremony in its history.” I sat at home watching with tears in my eyes, partly because it truly is a mind-blowing guitar solo, and partly because I was thinking about the night we were there together, honoring George Clinton. That night, I linked my arm through my husband’s and said, “We’ll be back for yours in a few years.”
I heard that he and Manuela had bought a house in Toronto. I knew that choreography, too. It didn’t surprise me at all to hear that they’d split up shortly after that, and their divorce became final in 2006. What did surprise me was that Manuela reached out to me and said that there was some stuff of mine in storage at Paisley Park, and I should go get it. I was skeptical at first, because this message came to me on social media. Assuming it was someone pretending to be her, I replied: Tell me something so I know this is actually you.
She shot back: Tubesocks.
I burst out laughing. Yeah. Only someone who really knew him would know what that meant.
I didn’t hold back when I replied: I have no respect for you. I dreamt of ways to beat your ass if I ever saw you.
She surprised me again by saying: I’m truly sorry.
We ended up having a very long, interesting conversation, which confirmed what I always suspected: she’s a pretty cool girl. Being gorgeous was one thing, but to maintain more than passing interest from Prince, you had to be smart and strong and kind, and now that I’ve gotten to know Manuela, I know she is all those things. Sadly, that doesn’t change the fact that she crossed the line with my husband, so I can’t pretend I’ve never had another unkind thought about her. Let’s just say the relationship status is “Complicated” and probably always will be, but I give her credit for reaching out to me and apologizing. Ten years later, she’s a wonderful mom and still a natural knockout beauty.