On Thursday night, Mariah Carey revealed that she and her billionaire boyfriend, James Packer, are now engaged. You’ve probably heard about Carey’s colossal, 35-carat ring. (It’s bigger than Elizabeth Taylor’s famous diamond, and approximately the same size as Kim Kardashian West’s and Beyoncé’s engagement rings combined.) What’s even more impressive than her newest piece of jewelry? The elusive chanteuse herself, of course. To toast the bride-to-be, here, five things you probably didn’t know about Mariah Carey.
1. Mariah Carey’s mother, an opera singer, noticed her daughter’s talent while rehearsing Verdi’s Rigoletto for her own New York City Opera debut. “From the time Mariah was a tiny girl, she sang on true pitch. She was able to hear a sound and duplicate it exactly,” her mother, Patricia Carey, told People in 1993. “I missed my cue, but Mariah didn’t. She sang it in Italian at exactly the right point. She wasn’t yet 3.” Mariah’s name has musical roots, too. Her mother named her after the song “They Call the Wind Maria.”
2. Eight years after she split from her first husband, music executive Tommy Mottola, Carey recorded the album The Emancipation of Mimi, which featured the record-breaking smash single “We Belong Together.” As it turns out, the wedding dress Carey wore in the video was the same dress she wore to her wedding to Mottola. “I wanted to burn the train of the dress,” Carey told Vogue.com for the 10th anniversary of “We Belong Together.” “It was 27 feet long and Brett [Ratner, the director of the video] wouldn’t let me burn the train! I don’t know what was wrong with him. He didn’t want to set me on fire, but we could have done it in post. I mean, c’mon.”
3. After she received Norman Mailer’s biography of Marilyn Monroe as a child, Carey has had a long-standing obsession with the screen siren. “Marilyn Monroe Productions was the first female-owned production company in Hollywood,” she told The Guardian in 2014. “She paved the way for women in Hollywood, and every single woman owes something to her for that, whether they agree with her image or not.” In 1999, Carey bought Monroe’s baby grand piano at auction for more than $600,000. “It was her only piece of the childhood she’d never had,” she says. “It was very important for her to find something to cling to.” The singer even named her daughter Monroe, after the actress.
4. Speaking of her children, during the C-section of their fraternal twins, Carey and then-husband Nick Cannon played a live version of her hit track “Fantasy.” “I wanted them to hear the applause,” Carey told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. Birth wasn’t the only intimate occasion that the couple would turn on Carey’s greatest hits. “She makes sexy music,” Cannon told HuffPost Live in 2013. “I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person in the world that listens to Mariah Carey when having sex, it just so happens I’m having sex with Mariah Carey.”
5. Over the course of her career, Carey collaborated with many prominent music-makers, including Boyz 2 Men, Jay Z, and Snoop Dogg, but one of her greatest pairings never actually came to pass: a duet with Courtney Love. The punk rocker allegedly wanted Carey to do a guest spot on her Hole album Nobody’s Daughter. As the story goes, Love was searching for someone to sing a lyric and coming up empty-handed, so she headed to Brett Ratner for help. “I’m at his house and I sing the part, ‘People like you fuck people like me.’ And this little voice goes, ‘I’ll sing it.’ I’m like, ‘Who’s that?’ The voice goes, ‘It’s Mariah,’ ” Love said in 2010. While Carey reportedly did end up singing the lyric, unfortunately for us, there was no recording device present. “It was hysterical. I never met Mariah for more than a minute in my life, but we sort of canceled each other out. We had nothing negative about each other to say. I’m not in her universe and she’s not in mine.”