First, the VJ introduces him, explains that the questions were being asked by his manager, and says, “Now, Prince is not alone here. The interview was shot at the filming of his new video ‘America’.…” and a bunch of other stuff I’d try to fast-forward through until the video cuts to a vision of Prince looking excited, innocent, and fresh. He’s surrounded by his castmates, friends, and dancers, like a landscaper sitting in the middle of a rose garden. Oh, how I envied those dancers. They sat there with serious expressions and big ’80s hair and consciously casual clothes, hardly breathing, hanging on his every word. Prince wore a ruffled white shirt with a tawny tweed greatcoat, that same tasteful dash of eyeliner that worked so well for Amir, and a perfect mole in exactly the right place on his cheek. I loved that mole most of all.
He spoke softly, deliberately, choosing his words as quietly and carefully as I would later hear him choose the lyrics of a song. Long after I became one of those dancers, when I was his wife and his baby was doing slow stretches and bicycle kicks in my belly, I’d wake up and hear him at the piano. I’d pull the sheet off the bed and wrap it around myself like a sari and sit on the piano bench next to him while he found what he was looking for. You see a more formal version of that understated search for words when you watch that MTV interview. He’s so young; it makes me ache to look at him. Our son would be almost that same age now, with his father’s full lips and dark eyes, and I like to think he would have been as thoughtful about expressing himself.
“One thing I’d like to say… is that I don’t live in a prison,” he says. “And I’m not afraid of anything. I haven’t built any walls around myself. I’m just like anyone else. I need love and water, and I don’t really consider myself a superstar. I live in a small town, and I always will, ’cause I can walk around and be me. And…” He shrugs his shoulders inside the oversize coat and laughs a little.
“That’s all I wanna be. That’s all I ever try to be. I didn’t know what was gonna happen. I just tried to do my best, and somebody dug it and…” He purses his lips and finishes the thought with an air kiss, assigning his remarkable existence to the kiss of fate.
He goes on to talk about how James Brown influenced his style, but when he’s asked how he feels about people comparing him to Jimi Hendrix, he says, “A lot had to do with, I could say, the color of my skin, and that’s not where it’s at—at all. It really isn’t. Hendrix was very good, but there’ll never be another one like him, and it would be a pity to try. I strive for originality in my work, and hopefully it’ll be perceived that way.”
The interviewer says, “Some people have criticized you for selling out to the white rock audience with Purple Rain and leaving your black listeners behind. How do you respond to that?”
At first, Prince clowns around: “Aw, come on. Come on! Cuff links like this cost money, okay? I mean, let’s be frank. Can we be frank? If we can’t be nothin’ else, we might as well be frank, okay?” But then he says, “Seriously… I was brought up in a black and white world, and—yes, black and white, night and day, rich and poor. Black and white. And I listened to all kinds of music when I was young. And when I was younger, I always said that one day I was gonna play all kinds of music and not be judged for the color of my skin, but the quality of my work. And hopefully that’ll continue. I think there’re a lot out there that understand this. They support me and my habits, and I support them and theirs.”
I find it interesting in retrospect that he felt compelled to end this interview by saying, “I believe in God. There’s only one God. And I believe in the afterworld, and hopefully we’ll all see it. I have been accused of a lot of things contrary to this, and I just want people to know that I’m very sincere in my beliefs. I pray every night, and I don’t ask for much. I just say thank you.”
“I’m going to marry Prince,” I told my mother. “Or Luis Miguel.”
She laughed, but I was completely serious. This wasn’t just a tweenager’s “someday my prince will come” fantasy or the fact that I generally had a thing for guys with green eyes. This was a plainspoken certainty I felt. I had absolutely no logical reason to think that this was remotely possible, but I had seen it in my mind’s eye, or perhaps remembered it from that soul-spiral—all possibilities at all times—and I knew it would happen.
Years later, this sort of premonition would be a recurring theme between Prince and me. I’d feel something in the air when he was about to call. Somehow the mailbox had a different personality when there was a letter from Prince in it. I remember watching a television special on Herb Ritts when I was a teenager, and I thought, I’m going to shoot with him. It was odd that I saw this at all, because we were living on a military base in Germany; there was only one TV channel, and this wasn’t the type of thing we usually saw on it.
A day or two later, Prince called and said, “Wanna come to Minneapolis and shoot some pictures for Vogue?”
“Who’s the photographer?” I asked.
“Herb Ritts.”
I felt that small, satisfying ping you get when synchronicity happens. This sort of thing came up all the time, and we’d laugh about it. We didn’t find it spooky or illogical at all, and we never felt the need to validate it or prove it to ourselves or to anyone else. We simply accepted it as coincidence or fate, just a little shout-out from the universe, reminding us that we were exactly where God wanted us to be.