The Times, March 18 2017
Mayte Garcia was just 16 when she met the 32-year-old music genius. They married six years later. For the first time she talks about life with Prince inside Paisley Park – and how the death of their baby drove them apart.
Prince, 41 at the time, and Mayte Garcia, 25, at the MTV Video Music Awards in New York in September 1999 GETTY IMAGES
It was Christmas and Prince was lonely. After a decade of restlessly creative music, epic films and staggering live shows, His Purple Highness was one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. He hadn’t made a bona fide classic album for a while but, at 34, he could still dance like James Brown, play guitar like Jimi Hendrix and sing like no one else ever.
At Paisley Park, his vast recording complex and living quarters outside Minneapolis, Prince was the sun around which orbited a rolling 24/7 enterprise supporting musicians, dancers, technicians, designers, hairdressers and household staff. He had recently signed what was thought to be the most lucrative record contract in history. He had friends, devoted fans and a conveyor belt of women throwing themselves at him, drawn to the bacchanalian reputation of the man behind some of the most filthy songs ever written.
Yet as 1992 drew to a close here he was, holed up in Miami, an exotic winter exile from his frozen home state of Minnesota, pining for his latest muse, a teenage backing dancer who was spending the festive season at her grandmother’s house in Puerto Rico.
Mayte Garcia had been 16 when she first laid eyes on Prince. In The Most Beautiful, her intimate new memoir of their life together, she writes that after witnessing him perform live in Barcelona in the summer of 1990, “My world was never the same again.” At that point, she had been so busy with school and her sideline career as a professional belly dancer that she had never had a boyfriend of any sort.
Two and a half years later, despite performing in one of the raunchiest stage shows around, she still hadn’t.
Of course, Garcia didn’t believe Prince when he told her that he was flying in first class from Florida. Then, suddenly, there he was, arriving at Grandma Mercedes’ cramped house in a poor neighbourhood of San Juan, where the washing hung in the backyard and the family ate at a table on the porch. The visit was, she says now, “surreal. They pulled up in the limo and I was laughing hysterically.”
Garcia at 22 with Prince at the VH1 Awards, 1995 GETTY IMAGES
The rock star had dressed as he always did for low-key occasions: fabulously. “There was no toning down,” says Garcia. Prince was probably sporting a lace shirt for the house call. He was definitely wearing make-up and women’s perfume, because he always did. And she remembers clearly how his high heels echoed on the tiled floor where she had danced to his Eighties hits as a little girl. Her father took him up onto the roof to admire the illegal second-floor apartment he had built there. Prince spoke not a word of Spanish but chatted with her family in a “very respectful” way. Grandma Mercedes, who had little English, knew exactly who the visitor was and proclaimed him “so nice”.
Later that night, Garcia went to Prince’s hotel room and found him sitting on top of a piano staring out over the ocean.
“I’m going to change my name,” he told her. To what? He pointed to the unpronounceable symbol on the cover of the album they had been working on. To that. “I bet you’re the only one who won’t try to talk me out of it,” he told her. Garcia rolls her eyes indulgently at the memory. “I thought, ‘Oh, he’s just going through a phase.’ ”
Within weeks she would become Prince’s lover, and not long after that he would be The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, a clumsy nickname he never chose or liked, she says. Later, she would become his first wife and the mother of his son. But he made no attempt to seduce her that night in Puerto Rico. He really did just drop in to say hi.
“I think he liked meeting people who connected to people that he cared about,” she says. “It was his way of trying to be normal.” He was famously protective of his privacy and cultivated a deliberate mystique about his life but, at the same time, he refused to be imprisoned by his fame. “I don’t think he felt trapped. I think he had created his world and if he wanted to reach out, he would.”
When Garcia learnt of Prince’s death on April 21 last year, she hadn’t seen him for years. She was sitting in her car beside a freeway in her adopted city of Los Angeles after picking up a text from the singer’s second ex-wife, Manuela Testolini, telling her to call. Garcia recalls screaming, “No!” repeatedly after she heard the news of his fatal accidental overdose of the painkiller fentanyl. For a while, everything spun around her. Then the two women, bitter rivals turned mourners, wept down the phone to each other.
Once she made it back home, reporters and photographers arrived and camped outside her door for days, while television networks besieged her by phone for a comment. “But I had no comment,” she writes. “Nothing I could say about this man could be squeezed into a three-minute morning-show segment.”
So she bided her time, nailed down the publishing deal for the memoir that she had long planned to write, and prepared to tell the world about the Prince Rogers Nelson that she knew. This man only loosely resembles the Prince of popular imagination. Yes, he was controlling and obsessed with music, and prone to stealing her mascara and getting his wardrobe assistants to restructure her clothes to fit him. But he was also a keen port drinker, a sports fan, a quick-witted prankster with a mouth like a “truck driver”, a considerate, unkinky lover and a “hopeless romantic,” who conscientiously read What to Expect When You’re Expecting when Garcia was pregnant.
He was prone to stealing her mascara, and got her clothes restructured to fit him
We meet on a sunny morning in the San Fernando Valley at her local dog park. These days, as well as working as a belly-dancing instructor, Garcia, 43, is the founder of a small dog-rescue charity. She springs like a particularly limber puppy onto the top of a picnic table and sits down. I climb up too and spend the next two hours wishing I had something to stop my sheet of questions blowing away every time the wind gets up.
Birds are singing loudly. A nearby sign warns “Caution Rattlesnakes”.
Garcia has one lithe dancer’s leg stretched out between us and the other tucked beneath her. Her eyes stare intently from behind thick-framed spectacles and a dense mane of dark hair is pulled back in a loose bun.
She speaks in a soft, sing-song voice punctuated by frequent bouts of giggles, but there is tragedy running through her story.
Covering her left wrist is a huge tattoo of Prince’s symbol interwoven with the first letter of her name, a logo that he wore on the back of his white wedding suit and had monogrammed all over their home – on the china, the curtains, napkins and towels – before he burnt everything that reminded him of her after their marriage failed, including the ashes of their son, Amiir, who died in infancy.
She had the tattoo done two weeks after Prince died. “My mom was like, ‘You should have gone bigger.’ ”
Aged 42, outside Paisley Park shortly after Prince’s death at 57, in April 2016 COURTESY OF MAYTE GARCIA
Garcia’s mother, who comes across as a whirlwind of ambition and energy in the book, lives downstairs from her. She’s married to Garcia’s father again – for the third time – in the latest twist in a chaotic relationship, but apparently “they can’t stand each other.”
Home life revolves around Gia, Garcia’s five-year-old adopted daughter, and their animals: A guinea pig, two cats, seven birds and seven dogs. “I could charge you $5 for a petting zoo,” she deadpans.
There’s a blown-up picture on the living-room wall of her with Prince and a clutch of awards in her office, she says, but otherwise little sign of the life she once led.
Two things stand out about how she talks about Prince. For starters, it’s often in the present tense, even though he has been dead almost a year. I’m not sure how conscious she is of it. She cries at night still, weeping partly for her lost soulmate, partly for the two children he gave her who did not survive (a second pregnancy ended in a miscarriage).
The other thing I notice is that she barely refers to him by name at all.
She avoided doing it even as his wife, or when dancing in dozens of music videos, on five world tours and a couple of hundred after-shows. Right from their first meeting, she understood on some level that, “If I would have called him Prince, I would have started screaming and jumping up and down, so I separated the rock star from the man in the hotel room.” She never called him anything.
Garcia was born on a military base in Alabama. Her father was a pilot; her mother a dance teacher. Garcia began dancing at three and was belly-dancing for money at seven, going on to earn a mild dose of fame by dancing with a sword on her head for the same primetime talent show that introduced a five-year-old Tiger Woods to the world.
Around the same time she was abused by a family friend, who would later molest her older sister, Jan. “I think that’s one of the reasons why I stayed a virgin and didn’t date.”
Her parents divorced and her father moved to a new base in Germany. When her mother realised that she had made a mistake, the family flew out to join him. Garcia’s sideline career took off there and she had saved $100,000 by the time she was 16. Belly-dancing continued to dominate her free time when she was not in class, coincidentally attending the same American high school in Wiesbaden where the future Priscilla Presley studied between meeting Elvis and marrying him.
It was her sister who was a real Prince fan, and who persuaded the family to drive across Europe to see him perform in Barcelona in July 1990. But when Garcia saw Prince on stage, everything changed. The power of his performance was like “a marathon jumping into a tornado swallowed by wild horses”, she writes. It wasn’t a crush. “I just remember thinking, ‘I need to meet him, and I need to dance for him.’”
On the way back to Germany, her mother hatched a plan to persuade Prince to recruit the 16-year-old Garcia to dance in his videos (“I hate to say it, but she was a stage mom”). She found out that the Nude tour would be in Mannheim in August and forced her daughter to shoot a video, which they then handed to a dancer to take backstage before the gig.
Sometime later, a bodyguard appeared and said that Prince wanted to meet her. She was very sure about how good a dancer she was and “completely composed” as she went to meet Prince. At 5ft 2in, he was 2in shorter than her but was wearing heels, so they were eye to eye. He told her that he liked her tape and asked, “Are you really 16 years old?” “I was proud about it,” she says.
She thinks that there was nothing sinister about his interest in her. She had “been around slimy people” dancing in Cairo, and this was different. Prince invited her to his presidential suite in a Frankfurt hotel that night but, once her chaperoning mother and sister had left, they ate popcorn and watched more tapes of her dancing.
Even though I danced on stage with handcuffs, there was none of that in bed
So began a bizarre long-distance friendship in which one of the most famously sex-fixated men in the world spoke on the phone most days with a schoolgirl belly dancer, to whom he also sent tapes of work in progress and the odd set of first-class plane tickets and VIP concert passes.
After Christmas that first year he flew her to Chanhassen, the snowbound Minnesota town where Paisley Park and his electric blue and rosehip pink home were. His bedroom was like all the hotel rooms she had visited him in – lava lamps, candles, beads, thick rugs and cushions everywhere – and boasted a bathroom stocked with female perfumes and Oil of Olay, plus a walk-in wardrobe sorted by colour: black, brown, red, purple, indigo and blue. They went on long drives together, hung out with his two doves and went to see The Godfather Part III at the cinema.
Garcia in turn sent him videos of her dancing, but also of her life at school. He laughed at footage of her forging an absence slip for a friend, and found her brief prom date with a Hawaiian-American footballer called Papu hilarious – she had to leave for a dance engagement after 30 minutes; Papu had no idea that she even knew Prince.
After she left high school, she had intended to go back to Egypt and pursue a lucrative belly-dancing career. Instead, she ended up on the road in 1992 as the newest dancer on Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls tour.
Her pay, about which Prince seemed oblivious, was a fraction of what she had been earning in Europe, and there were tensions within the group over her arrival.
One night, she says she overheard members of the band laughing about how she still had to stuff her bra. She told Prince, who burst out laughing. “Stop crying,” he told her. “They know their time is limited. I’ve moved on.”
Not long after that, he sent her a note telling her that one of the main reasons he loved and worshiped her was “because u don’t have a history”. “I [being Prince he actually draws an eye] can’t begin to tell u how many women are jealous of u because they know u’re a virgin.”
A pregnancy picture taken at home, 1996COURTESY OF MAYTE GARCIA
By the time Prince came to visit her in Puerto Rico that Christmas, his power in the record industry was unmatched.
Always admired for his versatility – as well as guitar he played bass, drums and piano and 20 or so other instruments, and was his own songwriter, producer and arranger – he could now claim to be a formidable businessman too, having squeezed a $100 million record deal out of Warner Bros earlier that year. That was what his representatives claimed anyway, and whether they were exaggerating or not was beside the point: their figure hogged the headlines and soothed Prince’s competitive ego. It dwarfed anything signed by his contemporaries Madonna and Michael Jackson or, indeed, anyone in the history of music.
Privately, though, he was chafing against what he felt were limits on his freedom as an artist. After he abandoned the Prince name he began to scrawl the word “slave” on his face to dramatise his fight to escape the golden confines of his recording contract.
Garcia had a different breakthrough on her mind. From around the age of 18 she had desired more than Prince’s friendship. Gradually their relationship had evolved and he had signalled his intentions by awarding her a personal bodyguard. But even though they now spent the night together sometimes, “It was never below the belt. Ever.” She arranges her features into a caricature of affronted frustration.
Then, during a video shoot, he told her that it was “time”. A week later, she wrote in her diary, “February 9, 1993 – not a virgin,” with a winking smiley face in the margin.
In her book, Garcia is discreet about sex. I ask her what was it like to go to bed with the man who sang about 23 positions in a one-night stand?
“Very, very tender,” she says, after a pause. “I can’t say for all the other women. For me, it was always very tender and attentive and sweet. Even though I danced on stage with handcuffs, there was never any of that.”
He did not sing to her in bed, although he did play his song Let’s Have a Baby when they were trying to conceive. He wore eyeliner and women’s cologne, “but it worked. He was very masculine.”
Prince, she says, had two personalities. On one side there was the “insatiable sex thing”. She never saw that Prince. “I saw the boyfriend. Nothing crazy. Loving. Respectful.” She did not envy the women who catered to his other side. “I was held high on this pedestal, and I liked it.”
The life they had together sometimes felt normal. Prince loved to impersonate people and prank-call local shops or guests at Paisley Park. They would go to the supermarket in the middle of the night and could eat in local restaurants if they had a private room, though mostly they ordered takeaways. Once they became vegans, they found a pair of green-fingered housewives who grew them more vegetables than they knew what to do with. Prince loved sport, particularly basketball, despite his height, and boxing. He had been in fights at school during a difficult upbringing and liked to wrestle with Garcia.
They spent much of their time closed off from the world in Paisley Park, a place that could feel like an out-of-town business park, only with its own sound stage, studios, editing facilities, basketball court, hair salon and a “constant murmur” of doves. They would stay up till the early hours and sleep in the day. A trip to the shops with Prince was always like an episode of Supermarket Sweep, trying to grab anything that appealed before the other customers noticed him.
She learnt early on that nobody challenged Prince. “I would see other people do it, and then they would get cast out. OK, note to myself. Don’t do that. Don’t talk to him this way, because you’re going to get that.”
He once wrote her a letter explaining that, “When I have a disagreement with someone – it’s usually only one. Then they’re gone.” Whereas he didn’t mind fighting “with u because I know we’ll always be 2gether”.
In practice, though, she never stood up to her husband until the very end of their marriage. It’s one of the reasons she enjoyed being hypnotised by him: it was the only time that he would let her talk without interrupting.
They married in 1996 at a church in Minneapolis. The groom, who wore white bell-bottoms and the monogrammed bolero jacket, had held a casting call for flower girls, redecorated Paisley Park as a surprise for his new bride and filled it with $500,000 worth of floral displays. Above the lift, where he would be found dead 20 years later, he’d had the message “ELEVATE” inscribed.
The next day, they flew to Hawaii for their honeymoon. It was only when she saw a billboard through the back windscreen of the limousine to the hotel that she realised it would be a working holiday, with three concerts. She became pregnant immediately, and the months leading up to the birth of their child were “amazing”, the most “approachable” that she ever saw Prince.
Prince’s new faith had begun to change him. He told her that their struggles were a punishment sent by God
Because of his unusual life, “He’d never been around pregnant people,” but he learnt everything he could about the process and even did a Muppets sketch to amuse her. She laughed at the sight of him wearing hospital scrubs in the delivery room on the day of her caesarean.
As soon as we turn to what happened next, Garcia starts to blink and is close to tears. She says that she was “very, very picky” about her ghostwriter and deliberately selected one who had “lost a child.” She had multiple “emotional breakdowns” recording the audiobook. “It’s really hard,” she says. “I’d have a 21-year-old right now. It’s that wound that will always be there.”
When Amiir was delivered, Prince’s face registered a joy that she had never witnessed on it before – and then within seconds it turned to “pure terror”.
Their son was born with Pfeiffer syndrome type 2, a genetic condition that causes “skeletal and systemic abnormalities.” Amiir had hands and feet that looked webbed, no eyelids and no anus. He lived for only one agonising week, and the passages of the book that describe those days and the grieving that followed – culminating in Garcia’s suicide bid being thwarted by her dog, Mia – are desperately sad to read.
Garcia “felt like I failed us”. She was so besotted with her husband that, “If he had asked me to drive off a cliff with him, I would have done it.” But she did not begin to come to terms with Amiir’s death until many years later, when a psychiatrist on the reality television series Hollywood Exes told her, “You’re a mom who lost her child.”
Although Prince did everything he could to support his wife through the crisis, she now thinks that his own sadness left him “so lost” that he became vulnerable to recruitment into the Jehovah’s Witnesses by his friend Larry Graham, the former bass player for Sly and the Family Stone.
When the couple then lost a second child to a miscarriage, Prince was much less sympathetic. Garcia still believed that she could save the marriage and that they might adopt instead, but she says Prince’s new faith had begun to change him. He believed that their struggles were a punishment sent by God, he told her. She had temporarily moved to Spain to buy a hacienda for them to live in, but he rarely visited. He told a press conference that their marriage had been annulled when it hadn’t. And he was spending more and more time with Manuela Testolini, who had joined his Bible study group.
Eventually the “Witness crew” succeeded with “a steady campaign to separate and alienate me,” says Garcia.
Prince on the day they got their dog, MiaCOURTESY OF MAYTE GARCIA
Prince and Garcia officially divorced in 2000. “I don’t know how I got past all that,” she says now, narrowing her eyes. Having come into the marriage as an 18-year-old of substantial means, she left with next to nothing. Her mistake was to assume that Prince would be there if she ever needed financial help. Now to realise that he’s gone and he won’t be is “heartbreaking.” She is particularly confused by the absence of a will, “Because when I was married to him, he had one.”
There have been other boyfriends since 2000 – notably Pamela Anderson’s ex-husband Tommy Lee, of the band Mötley Crüe – but none that could take the place of Prince, her first love and the father of her dead son. His own death came as a total shock to Garcia. Because he was “very well guarded” from the public and she was no longer “in the circle,” she didn’t realise the extent to which he had become reliant on powerful opioids to dull the chronic pain caused by his athletic stage performances.
In the decade she was around him, she never saw him take drugs. He always had a black bag close at hand containing, she believed, nothing more disturbing than sweets, vitamins, make-up, a Bible and wads of cash. “But,” she recalls, “there were a few disturbing incidents when he behaved strangely … 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.”
The day Prince and I lost our baby son
The night before the caesarean, my body roared into full-blown labour. My husband sat beside me, gripping my hand. I burst out laughing when I saw him in scrubs with booties and puffy hat.
It seemed to take a very long time. There was this weird tugging sensation. There was soft music playing – harps, guitars, spa-type music.
“It’s a boy!”
I don’t know how to describe the look on my husband’s face. I’d seen his face when he stood in front of a stadium filled with 48,000 screaming fans. I’d seen his face as he scored platinum albums and received the highest awards in his industry. None of that compared to the look I saw on his face in this moment, when he became a father.
And then they held the baby up in the glare of those harsh lights.
I heard nothing but his perfect silence.
He made no sound.
Amiir.
The pure elation on my husband’s face turned to pure terror.
On the cold white page of a medical text, Pfeiffer syndrome type 2 is a genetic disorder that causes skeletal and systemic abnormalities. Craniosynostosis is the premature fusing of the bones in the skill, sometimes resulting in “cloverleaf skull,”in which the eyes are located outside the sockets. Brachydactyly is the fusion of bones in the hands and feet, causing a webbed or paw-like appearance. Anal atresia is the absence of an anus, indicating life-threatening abnormalities in the colon and bowels. I learnt all this later. But in that first moment, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.
“He’s in surgery again,” Prince told me later. They’d sewn his eyes shut. Intubation. Ventilation. Feeding tube. Colostomy. Exploratory … something. It was impossible to take it all in.
Two days later, my husband briefly went home to take a shower. While he was gone, I had someone wheel me down to see my son. His skin was incredibly soft. The joints of his fingers were fused, so he couldn’t grab my finger, but he found a way to fold his little hand around the side of mine, hanging on for dear life. My husband came. I worried that he’d be angry, but he wasn’t. He sat on the floor with his body against my knee, humming and whispering to Amiir, and we stayed that way for hours.
There were more surgeries. He didn’t want our son to be alone through any of it.
Every day something new went wrong or collapsed or presented itself, some new problem was discovered, some existing problem got worse. We spent all the hours we could in our little family corner, humming and telling stories, and taking in the softness of his skin and hair, the soft smell of his warm little body, the beauty of his spirit.
After six days, he was struggling to breathe and I said to the doctor, “He’s not leaving here, is he?”
He avoided answering my question. Instead he talked about more invasive measures, including a tracheotomy. He quietly explained to me that if we didn’t allow him to insert this permanent pipe in Amiir’s throat, we were making the choice to let him go, and the more he talked on and on in this cold way, the more hysterical I got.
“You’re torturing him! He can’t live like this!”
My husband pulled me into the next room and tried to calm me down. “If they do this – if they can get him breathing with the machine …”
“Then what? What else?”
We stood there in the empty room coming to the same terrible place.
Holding each other tight, we agreed: “If they take him off the machine and he can breathe, we keep fighting. If he can’t live without the machine … maybe he’s not supposed to be here.”
We went back in and spoke with the doctors. They tried to reassure and comfort us, tried to tell us this was the right thing to do, but the rightness of it didn’t make it any less bitter. We signed papers and agreed on a time when life support would be removed the next day. They sent me home with painkillers and Valium, and I crawled into a dark sleep.
When I woke up again, I heard a phone ringing. A moment later, my husband came and said, “It’s done. They took the tubes out.”
“What? No! I’m supposed to be there!”
“I didn’t know if you could handle it.”
The phone rang again. He answered it, and then he hung up and said, “He’s gone.”
We spent most of the next day huddled together, crying.
Later, I lay in bed with Amiir’s ashes. Sometimes I was aware of my husband lying next to me or sitting in a chair. The next day – or maybe it was a few days or a week later – he came to me and said, “I can’t be here. I have to go.”
The Iconic Prince 