The Prince and the belly dancer
drawing her out about her past lives. ‘Have we known each other before?’ ‘Many times.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Many places.’ She says that, ‘together we explored universes and lifetimes and emotional truth’.
Overnight, Prince changed his name to a symbol and forbade anyone, including Mayte, from calling him Prince. Why? She’s not absolutely sure. ‘Instead of verbalising a word inside your head, maybe he wanted you to feel something that was uniquely him, to breathe in both artist and art and be with that for just a split second,’ she conjectures. At times like these, you might wonder if she is barking mad.
When she was 22, Prince asked her to become Mrs Prince. ‘Mama was staying in the hotel and came to my room, and we sobbed our heads off.’ Their church was decorated with half a million dollars’ worth of flowers. She became pregnant. Something went wrong: she was rushed to hospital. The doctors said it would be dangerous to go home, but Prince insisted, so she signed the release ‘because I didn’t want to upset my husband who clearly needed me’. The baby had a severe genetic disorder, and died within a week. The following day, Prince said ‘I can’t be here. I have to go’, and left.
A rumour started circulating that their baby was dead. Prince and Mayte agreed to go on The Oprah Show. Following Prince’s instructions, Mayte kept smiling while Prince insisted that their baby was fine.
Mayte started her own dance company. She staged a show called Kamasutra, but it closed after one night.
By now, Prince had fallen in with Jehovah’s F Witnesses, and banned all further talk of past lives. acing another miscarriage, Mayte told him she could bleed to death, but he tried to stop her going to hospital. She continues to regard him as a loving genius. Most of her readers will conclude that he was something closer to a self-obsessed prat.
One night, Mayte surprised him on tour and found him with ‘this girl who kind of looked like me… like a kid fresh out of school’. Prince explained he had hired her for charity work and merchandising. This new girl, Manuela, joined him in his Bible Study Group. In 1998, he insisted Mayte join him for a press conference, at which, to her surprise, he announced that they were having their marriage annulled, and would be ‘free from the chains of that contract’. ‘I sat with a frozen smile on my face,’ she recalls. It looked bad at the time, but, now, she sees things in a better light. ‘I think this is proof that he loved me and didn’t want to lose me.’ They divorced in 2000. Mayte began a relationship with Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe, pictured above, the former boyfriend of Pamela Anderson of Baywatch. Prince died last year. She heard of his death on the way back from dog-grooming class. ‘First and foremost, we were friends,’ she says, ‘…I’ll remember him as a hopeless romantic and a devoted father.’