The Most Beautiful Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Mayte Garcia

  Jacket design by Amanda Kain

  Jacket photographs © Randee St Nicholas

  Author photograph by Fabian Benhamou

  Jacket copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First edition: April 2017

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Garcia, Mayte, 1973–

  Title: The most beautiful : my life with Prince / Mayte Garcia.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Hachette Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016054437| ISBN 9780316468978 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316508803 (large print) | ISBN 9781478974253 (audio book) | ISBN 9781478948575 (audio download) | ISBN 9780316468961 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Prince. | Rock musicians—United States—Biography. | Garcia, Mayte, 1973– | Dancers—United States—Biography. | LCGFT: Biographies.

  Classification: LCC ML420.P974 G37 2017 | DDC 781.66092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054437

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-46897-8 (hardcover); 978-0-316-46896-1 (ebook); 978-0-316-50880-3 (large print hardcover); 978-0-316-56025-2 (signed hardcover)

  E3-20170225-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Afterword

  Photos

  A Note From the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Image Credits

  Newsletters

  For Gia, my angel

  For what we are about to see next, we must enter quietly into the realm of genius.

  —YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN

    prologue

  Chanhassen, Minnesota, April 2016

  The chain-link fence around Paisley Park is woven with purple ribbons and roses, love notes, tributes, and prayers for peace. Tall poplars and elms, still naked from winter, stand over rolling brown grass. It hasn’t been very long since the snow melted off, but below the cold surface, the whole place is waiting to be reborn. The sky is overcast with low clouds, but I keep my sunglasses firmly in place, because my face is a train wreck from a week of weeping.

  There is a woman who sits all alone by the pier

  Her husband was naughty and caused his wife so many tears

  I always thought it was interesting that Prince saw this sad little figure sitting off to the side in “Paisley Park,” a song about colorful people and happy children. If I allow myself to get existential about it, I wonder if she is me. I hear the cool, sharp clang of zills, and a chill slips down my backbone. I imagine Prince sitting at the piano in those hypercreative hours just before dawn. For a fleeting moment, there I am in his mind’s eye. He studies me briefly and then jots the words on notepaper, recognizing on some level this moment of truth from another time.

  He died without knowing forgiveness and now she is sad, so sad

  Maybe she’ll come 2 the Park and forgive him and life won’t be so bad…

  There’s a familiar Midwestern bite in the air. Springtime at Paisley Park smells like clean fog, wet fir trees, and distant city traffic. I take in a deep breath and wait to exhale. My four-year-old daughter, Gia, tugs on my coat sleeve.

  “Mama, is it time to go?” she asks for the thousandth time.

  “A few more minutes.”

  I’ve done my best to explain to Gia why so many people have brought so many flowers. I’ve told her that the man they called Prince has died.

  “Prince is in heaven now?” she says.

  “Yes. He’s in heaven.”

  “With Boogie?” Gia asks, remembering what I told her when we lost our beloved golden retriever.

  “Yes. He’s with Boogie in heaven.”

  “Mama,” she says, “can we get a ladder and climb up to get him?”

  That’s Gia. As sweet and unexpected as a raspberry.

  Gia knows that I am her real mommy. Someday I’ll explain to her how her birth mother and I helped the universe get that right. I’ll tell her about her brother, Amiir, who was waiting for his daddy in heaven. I’ll play her the songs my husband sang for our son.

  tears go here

  tears go here

  I stroke her cheeks, which are pink and a little dry, because it’s early spring in Minnesota. We’ve barely made it past Easter, and already 2016 has been a jarring year for celebrity obituaries, particularly in the music industry. Natalie Cole died on New Year’s Eve. David Bowie passed ten days later, followed by Glenn Frey of the Eagles, Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire, and Prince’s own protégé Vanity. Then Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, passed away, and then Nancy Reagan and Patty Duke, and then Chyna, which shocked me to the core, because—well, because she was Chyna and only forty-six years old when she died.

  April 21, 2016, had begun like any other Thursday. I dropped Gia off with my dad and joined the streaming LA traffic on my way to Baldwin Park Animal Care Center in the San Gabriel Valley for a dog-grooming class. We were practicing on shelter dogs, which, according to our teacher, meant there was no pressure. In my mind, the very opposite was true: I felt an intense sense of responsibility to animals in peril. I wanted these little guys to be at their most adorable when people came to check out pets waiting to be adopted. That first impression is the difference between life and death for many of these animals; it’s hard for people to see them as a potential family member if they’re not looking their best. I was not about to screw that up.

  “If I bring my cat,” I asked the teacher, “will you show me how to do it?”

  He said, “Sure.” But my cat, Willy, was in loud disagreement, churring and squalling as I sped down the freeway. He was being so vocal I almost missed the text from Manuela. We share a strange bond, Manuela and I. I’ll get to that later. Relevant in this moment: Manuela Testolini is Prince’s second ex-wife and not a person who gets on the phone a lot, so it was odd to see her brief text from the corner of my eye.

  call me right away

  My first thought was to ignore it until I got to class, but something pulled me to the side of the road.

  “Hey, girl.” I tried not to sound impat
ient. “What’s up?”

  Her voice was shallow, choked with tears. “I wanted to call you before you heard on the news. Prince is dead.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I’m—I’m freaking out. I’m doing this Earth Day presentation at my daughter’s school and—and he’s dead. They found him in an elevator at Paisley.”

  There was a moment of muffled shock while the words sank in, and then it was as if I’d been sucked into a funnel cloud, everything spinning around me—the traffic roaring by, Willy yowling in the back seat, the sky falling in front of the windshield. I heard myself screaming, “No no no no no.…”

  Not him. Not like that. Not alone. Not now.

  I don’t remember what was said after that. I just remember both of us crying. I remember gripping the steering wheel, forcing myself to breathe, to open my eyes, to steer back into the traffic and find a way to turn around. I needed to go home. I needed to call Mama.

  In the hours that followed, I felt lost in a riptide of memory and emotion, which felt more real to me than the firestorm of rumors in the press. I paced the patio outside my house until my manager, Gladys, sent me a text that simply said: Go inside. Attached was a grainy, zoom-lens photo of me that had just appeared online. My ex-husband was adamant about never being seen without perfect hair and makeup. This photo was the antithesis of that. I wanted to care, but I couldn’t feel anything except dry irony. I drifted inside and sat with the blinds drawn for two days. Reporters remained camped outside, pointing cameras at the windows, yelling my name every time someone stepped in or out of the door.

  The story of Prince’s death was repeated over and over on the 24-hour news channels. At first, the headlines were blunt: PRINCE DEAD AT 57. Then sentimental: WORLD MOURNS MUSIC LEGEND. Then speculative: THE DRUG THAT KILLED PRINCE: WHAT IS FENTANYL? Inevitably, they became sordid: LOVE MACHINE PRINCE WAS CELIBATE FOR LAST 8 YEARS. People who may or may not have known him crawled out of every crevice of the Internet, eager to comment. My phone was blowing up. Mama’s phone was blowing up. There was a barrage of requests from networks and news channels and radio stations, wanting to book Prince’s first wife.

  Mama kept telling them, “She’s not doing any press.”

  They kept telling her, “At the very least, she should make some sort of comment.”

  I had no comment. Truly. Nothing I could say about this man could be squeezed into a three-minute morning show segment. There was a story to be told, but I wanted to tell it in my own way, in my own time, not in sound bites that would be edited to accommodate their dead-rock-star narrative, and at the time, I felt too raw, too exposed. Before I could think about anything else, I needed to be at Paisley. I heard there was to be a memorial service but couldn’t get any solid information. I wasn’t even sure I would be invited.

  “It’s weird,” Manuela told me. “Everything’s locked down.”

  Prince’s coworkers were like family, to him and to me, so I called Wendy and Lisa, his Purple Rain bandmates, and Sheila E, his longtime friend and collaborator and former fiancée.

  “Come,” Wendy and Lisa both said. “We’ve got you.”

  “You’re my sis,” said Sheila. “We are all family.”

  So here I am, along with family and fans and other people who knew and loved and worked with this extraordinary artist. The house we lived in—the house where we made a life together and created two babies—is gone. Years ago, in the darkest possible state of mind, he had it bulldozed to the ground and the contents burned. The elaborate playground he built for our children was torn down to make way for a restaurant so he wouldn’t have to go out for food, but as I understand it, no one got the proper permits, so the restaurant didn’t happen. Looking out across the land, the wealth of timber, the prime real estate, I suspect that very soon the forests around the office complex will disappear as well.

  “Mommy, is it time to go?” Gia says. One-thousand-one.

  “Almost. I want to take your picture.”

  “Mommy, no!” She groans, utterly out of patience. “Don’t take my picture.”

  I laugh at that, because she’s standing in front of the glass doors where my father stole a picture of me more than twenty years ago. He raised his Instamatic camera just as I walked out, and I scolded him, “Dad, no! He doesn’t like people taking pictures here.”

  “Trust me,” said my father, “you’ll be glad I did.”

  The sweet sting of that memory brings tears to my eyes. He was right, of course. That photograph is precious to me now.

  “Trust me,” I tell Gia, “you’ll want to remember all this.”

  I do. I want to remember it all: twenty-five years—more than half my life—of soaring highs and crushing lows, creation and loss, elation and sorrow, the sound and fury that happened onstage in front of millions of people and the silent journey only our two souls will ever know.

  When I was a kid, I kinda liked his music, but my sister was the real fangirl. When I was sixteen, I saw him perform live in concert, and my world was never the same. What’s most incredible to me is that he said the same thing about his world after he saw me dance. We fell into an immediate—and entirely innocent—infatuation that set us on a path neither of us could have imagined. First and foremost, we were friends. Two years later, he became my boss. Eventually, we crossed the line, and I was “his girl.” From that moment forward, he molded my persona and shaped my life experiences.

  Between 1990, when Prince and I first met, and 1996, when we got married, I participated in 129 performances on five world tours, plus a couple hundred aftershows and one-off concert gigs, dozens of music videos, album tracks (credited and uncredited), many national television appearances, countless photo sessions, radio interviews, and press junkets. It’s a little mind-blowing to take stock of it all now, as I try to make sense of what we were to each other. Not one day since I met him, not one night out of the past six thousand, has passed without some thought of him.

  He said many times, publically and privately, that his love for me changed him as a man and influenced much of the music he made during the years we were together. I never pretended I was the only woman he ever loved, but for better or worse, the experience we shared as husband and wife and as parents took us both to a place neither of us was ever able to share with anyone else.

  Prince passed away so suddenly. I wasn’t ready. It’s been years since I last saw him, but I have always cherished what we had and honored his privacy. After his death, so many things surfaced—mysteries and questions that linger unresolved, like a frustrating unfinished octave, for me and so many others who loved him. I’m hungry to hear stories about his life that fill in some of the gaps. I honor the power of mystery, and yes, there are things I’ve chosen to keep private, but mystery can be a lonely place. I want to peel back the layers and let you know the man I loved—the good, the bad, the sad, and the beautiful.

  I will never fully close this chapter of my life. I struggled with the idea of writing this book because, even after all this time, part of me still needs his approval. I hope that in reflecting on all that happened, I’ll be able to shed some light and provide some insight as we each decide for ourselves how to best remember him.

  I’ll remember him as a hopeless romantic and a devoted father who longed to be the dad he never had. Only I saw the look on his face when our son was born. A moment I’ll never forget. I wish I could draw it. I wish it could be danced. I’m not sure there’s a way to express it in words, but words are what I can offer you now. I can laugh with you about the funny things he said and tell you about how he wore my clothes and swiped my mascara and woke up every morning in a tangle of loving arms and perfumed sheets with a little dog barking to go out and a long day of hard work ahead. I can tell you that, while we were so normal about so many things, we lived his belief that life itself should be a work of art.

  Everyone who knew this extraordinary man—friends, family, and fans—has their own stories to tell, and I hope they tell th
em, though some will be painful for me to hear. I hope some scholar of music history will write a book that spans the incredible depth and breadth of Prince’s work, all the remarkable people he collaborated with, his influence on the music industry, his lasting handprint on pop culture, and his contribution to the art of rock and roll. This is not that book.

  This is my story—a private love story that belongs to me alone—and I need to share it my own way, just as he shared it in his. He was a private man, but through his music, he’s already said more than people realize. Beneath the rhythms and between the lines, you hear the love and fate and heartbreak. It’s not as easy to hear the echoes of strength and closure and hope, but they are there.

  The story I’m about to tell you now is the story I’ll tell Gia someday: the story of my life with Prince and my life without him, the career I forged before we met, my struggle after we separated, and how I had to make sense of it all in order to move forward. When I was younger, I thought it was the story of how I found my soul mate, the true husband of my heart. When my heart was broken, I tried to make it the story of how I found myself. But seeing my daughter outside the doors at Paisley Park, I finally understand: it’s the story of how we all found each other.

  At the beginning of the music video for “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” a woman’s voice cuts through the static.

  You have just accessed the Beautiful Experience, she says. This experience will cover courtship, sex, commitment, fetishes, loneliness, vindication, love, and hate.

  That’s an apt description of the story I’m finally ready to tell.

  Please enjoy your experience.

    one

  Poised a breath apart on the middle finger and thumb, the zills hold infinite possibilities, an unlimited range of nuanced sounds and varied patterns. Only one thing is certain: they will come together, move apart, and come together again. I don’t remember the first time I heard the irresistible cling of the finger cymbals, if it was the single pierced sagat or the slotted zills, but I’m certain that it was long before I was born. If it’s true that our souls travel in an endless spiral of incarnations—and I believe it is—then it makes sense to me that certain threads continue with us from life to life, from birth to birth. The zills ring with that inexplicably deep familiarity for me. Some part of me remembers the sound, and it moves me. I move without questioning it.