journalist Vanessa Bartholomew was played in the video by Kirstie Alley, who made her name in the cult television series Cheers. Her part was largely cut out of the final album mix. It survives in a short abortive conversation with the star – he hangs up as soon as she admits the conversation is being taped – and in her later attempt to question him about about a rumour that the crown princess of Egypt has become a member of his band, the New Power Generation. He flirts with her, pretends to be called Victor, and hangs up mid-sentence. The princess, for whom the whole elaborate story was confected, was played by a dancer-singer called Mayte. The rock star was, for now, still known as Prince.
Their mystical union was made flesh almost five years later and almost at the date imagined in the video. On February 14, 1996, Prince and Mayte Janelle Garcia exchanged vows at a church in Minneapolis. It was a complex time career-wise for the musician. Over the previous year, he’d taken to appearing in public, most notoriously at the Brits Music Awards, with the word SLAVE written in eyebrow pencil on his cheek. (So iconic a moment was this that some time later a member of Blur appeared at the same event with DAVE pencilled on his cheek.) At the start of 1996, Prince had parted company with his enslavers Warner Brothers, the record company which had made him a star with unprecedented control over his own music, by dashing off in just ten days a contract-fulfilling final album before he launched his own NPG imprint on EMI. Slight it may have been, but that year’s well-named Chaos and Disorder still sold substantially better than Mayte’s own Children of the Sun album, a solo project written and produced by Prince.
In November 1996, just before the launch of a triple set significantly called Emancipation, Mayte gave birth to a premature baby boy. Gregory was fated never to find gold chains in the dust. The infant was diagnosed as having a medical condition known as acrocephalosyndactyly, more commonly as Pfeiffer’s syndrome or ‘clover-leaf syndrome’ after a distinctive deformation of the skull. In what has to be seen as an emancipation for a child fated never to see, hear, taste or smile, the boy died a fortnight later, after his life support system was switched off. To everyone’s astonishment, Prince went ahead with release plans for the new album, threw a lavish party and fulfilled video and press commitments. The rumour mill suggested that the baby’s uterine heartbeat could be heard on Emancipation. The rumour mill also picked up on a line in the seemingly autobiographical ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’ which suggested Prince had suffered from epilepsy in early childhood. Did this explain his small stature – five foot two to five foot four depending on your source – and did it maybe suggest that Gregory’s problems were hereditary? There were more surprises to come. On Oprah, he denied that there had been anything wrong with the child. On a slightly later occasion, three weeks after the boy’s death, Prince told assembled journalists that he was ‘enjoying fatherhood’.
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It may have seemed, and might seem now, just one more self-consciously bizarre pronouncement in a career marked by the most profound self-consciousness imaginable, but there is a recurrent twist to Prince’s references to fathers and sons. An Oedipal strain is never far from the surface, and neither is the romantic presumption that the child is wiser than the man.
For much of his career, Prince has played the knowing child-man, and turned that enigmatic image against an industry which began as nurturing and permissive and became increasingly denying and censorious. The loss of Gregory was followed by separation from the label that had launched his career with an unprecedented emancipation from corporate control. If the first album was a joyous whirl in a hand-held spotlight, Warner expected something different of their artist’s creative adolescence, and the infamous (though in retrospect rather innocuous) Black Album was said to have been made behind closed doors, the musical equivalent of whacking off in the bathroom. Then the sulks and rages, then the inevitable parting.
It’s an image reinforced by Prince’s diminutive stature, by the fatal glamour of momma’s clothes closet, and in the music itself by his addiction to switches and pedals that could switch between a falsetto vocal and a deep parental growl that sounded like the voice of the superego and sometimes like God himself. In that abortive interview with Vanessa Bartholomew, Prince explains why he sounds different on the telephone: ‘It’s a tongue box . . . I use it to disguise my voice.’ It was part of his genius to recognise that the voice is the truest self but also the most cunning disguise. Much of his singing in this period is in borrowed voices: camp squeals that might imitate a mother’s or a girlfriend’s fussing, the soulful bleat of a preacher, a pervert’s heavy breathing or the kind of voice that tells you the kid is safe and where to leave the money. Few artists are more instantly recognisable for not sounding like themselves. What makes a Prince album distinctive is how the music is put together.
There’s a corollary to that in the received view of who and what Prince is. He wouldn’t be the first pop star to rewrite his own biography, lie about his age and about his parents; Jim Morrison of The Doors used to pretend that his mother and his father, an admiral in the US Navy, had been killed in a car wreck, when both were inconveniently and bemusedly alive. What’s interesting about Prince, as Dave Hill points out in his 1989 biography Prince: A Pop Life, is the star’s collusion in the lies and fabrications of other people, childhood friends, ex-friends, Minneapolis hangers-on with a hook into a free lunch or a tip-off fee. It seems scarcely to have mattered to Prince whether the invention was his own or not. As in his work, which plunders all up and down the coastline of black American music, he appropriated anything and everything said about him, as if that was his reality. ‘Image’ – that treacherously inclusive word – was less important than the latest carefully confected persona or alter ego. It was as if every time he looked in the mirror Prince expected to see someone other than himself and certainly someone who did not remind him of his father.
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For all his fantasies of reincarnation and royal blood, Prince’s version of the ‘family romance’ is relatively modest. It’s not unusual for children – and not just self-mythologising rock stars – to imagine that their real parents are dead, or that they are being raised by other than their blood parents, who are, of course, far more high-born and exotic. In the original treatment to the film Purple Rain, then simply known as Dreams, he explored just such a possibility, but for the moment his self-mythologising took a more modest turn. In February 1981, just after Controversy was released, Rolling Stone announced that Prince was the son of a half-black father and an Italian mother. It was a genealogy that from the magazine’s unshakably white middle-class point of view obviously made some sense of Controversy’s new brand of carnal funk and its otherwise indefinable difference from earlier bump-and-grind acts like the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, Millie Jackson or Rick James, for whom Prince was to open on tour that year.
Unfortunately, the lineage was twice wrong. The idea had got around some time previously that Prince was the son of a black mother and Italian father, and that could be traced back to an interview he gave (when he was still giving interviews) to the Los Angeles Times. He’d said that both parents were light-skinned blacks, there was a sprinkle of Italian blood on the paternal side and a poorly researched Native American connection on the maternal. Though common enough, these were important marks of exception, of a potentially exotic lineage, and Prince may well have exaggerated at least one aspect of his descent.
What they were was probably less important than where they met. Mattie Shaw was a girl from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who like many before her had left the South in search of whatever version of a better world she dreamed of: less prejudice, brighter lights, greater economic opportunity. Unlike most, drawn to New York City, Detroit, Chicago, or – the short hop – Washington D.C., Mattie and her sister Edna Mae came to live in Minneapolis, possibly the least black of all the major American cities. There, her singing caught the attention of a local jazz pianist, who asked her to sit in with his group. In June 1956, twenty-two-year-old Mattie became John L. Nelson’s second wife; he was a fellow Louisianan and eighteen years her senior. By day John worked for Honeywell Computers. By night, though, he continued to indulge the showbiz side of his nature, an aspect which surfaced whenever in later years he appeared in his son’s entourage with ever-younger and more glamorous girlfriends. He was the front man of the ‘Prince Rogers Trio’.
Spurious