JETER HELPED ME ‘CAREY’ ON
Tower of strength in split with Mottola
Mariah Carey is singing Derek Jeter’s praises again, calling the Yankees great a major “catalyst” that helped her gather the courage to divorce record executive Tommy Mottola.
“He got his own song. He’s got a few songs,” Carey said of Jeter when asked by Oprah Winfrey about the “high purpose” the baseball star served in her life after they met in 1996.
“He was a catalyst that helped me get out of that relationship because I believed that there was somebody else,” Carey said in an exclusive clip of Oprah’s interview with the superstar singer shared with People magazine ahead of Thursday’s episode of “The Oprah Conversation.”
Carey, who’s due to publish her new memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” on Tuesday, said Jeter was the right person at the right time because he also came from a biracial background and helped her see her self-worth.
“It was the racial situation. His mom is Irish, his dad is Black. But he was also very ambiguous looking to me. I didn’t know who he was,” she said.
“We met, and I’ve written songs about it,” she said, referring to “My All” and “The Roof.”
“Honestly, I don’t think it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, he was the love of my life.’ Like, at the time I did. ... But he was a catalyst. And I think that it was beautiful,” she said.
“And his family was a healthy family, and they changed my viewpoint that, ‘Oh, it’s because of the biracial situation that my family is so screwed up.’ As opposed to, ‘It’s them,’ ” she said.
“It was healthy for me to see a functional family that basically kind of looked like mine, but didn’t feel like mine,” she said.
“And he was also living his dream job and doing his dream job and stuff,” she added. “I believe we connected in that way.”
Mottola, 71, “discovered” and signed Carey to her first music deal when she was still a teenager. They married in 1993, when she was 23 and he was 43.
Carey has previously said the former Sony boss was very controlling, referring to the $20 million compound they shared as Sing Sing, the maximum-security New York State prison.
Mottola and Carey split in 1996, the year she met Jeter. They announced their separation in 1997 and divorced in 1998.
Carey, 50, told Vulture.com in a profile published last month that she remembered every detail of her first kiss with Jeter, 46. She recalled sipping Moët on the roof of his apartment building during a light rain that curled her hair.
“I can never forget that moment,” she told Vulture. “It happened in a divGine way because it helped me get past living there, in Sing Sing, under those rules and regulations.”
Carey said she still gets a visceral feeling in her gut when she talks about her first husband.
“I say it all in the book. I’d rather people read it that way,” she said. “And by the way, I forgot a lot of that stuff when I was writing the book. And then recently, people that were friends of his from childhood were like, ‘I hope she told the real story.’ ”