Okay, I figured. I can rock Martha.
The “Diamonds and Pearls” music video was an elaborate vision that cost a bundle and was being directed by Rebecca Blake, who also directed “Kiss” and “Cream” for Prince. (She’d also done a few music videos with my old heartthrob Luis Miguel.) When I presented myself to her, she said the polite but dismissive things directors say to you at a cattle-call audition you’re not nailing. Later Prince told me what she’d said to him: “I don’t think she’s sexy enough. I don’t think she’s got that thing.”
Hard to hear. But good to know.
“I cannot believe she doesn’t see what I see,” he said, “but… okay.”
He trusted her judgment, and I can’t argue with the final results. The music video is a thing of beauty with gorgeous locations, grand pianos, dancers, musicians, children, bubbles, a chase scene—it was a huge, huge production. I was pretty crushed not to be a part of it, but I took it like a professional. It was still thrilling to be in LA, visiting Prince at his house and helping him make breakfast the next morning.
He asked about my parents, and I said, “They broke up again. Sort of.”
“How do you sort of break up with your wife?”
“They’re still living together, but they’re both seeing other people.”
“Huh-oh. That don’t work.”
“They love each other, but together—I don’t know. It’s a strange relationship. I keep saying, ‘Would you guys please, please break up?’ I think they’re waiting until I leave home, but I can’t take the fighting. It’s just like when I was a little kid. Arguments and jealousy and… just that lack of respect for each other.”
He squeezed my hand. “My parents were like that, too.”
He slid eggs off the griddle onto our plates, and while we ate, he told me a bit about his own battlefield childhood. He told me that when he was around seven years old, his mother came home from a shopping trip one day with her shirt inside out, because she’d been trying on clothes and was in a hurry to get home. His father jumped to the conclusion that she’d been out cheating on him and went ballistic. As he was telling me about the violent scene that unfolded, I could see how deeply it still affected him. You see some allusions to it in Purple Rain. You see the house where he grew up witnessing a more vicious—and sometimes violent—version of what I grew up with, but not everything you see in the movie is literally autobiographical. His father didn’t have a gun, and his parents split when he was a little boy. His mother remarried, and Prince went to live with his father, but that didn’t last long. He was basically on his own when he was twelve.
This was the first of many conversations we had about his father over the years. Before we were married, I asked him, “Will I ever get to meet your dad?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We had a falling out.”
“About money?” I guessed, because if there was one thing that caused friction between my dad and me, it was money.
But Prince said, “No, it was about music. He kept sending me cassette tapes just pounding on the piano and maybe after an hour, he finally hits three beautiful notes, but I gotta listen to a whole tape of that pounding for these three notes? I think he lost it.”
At the end of the day, we both loved our parents and saw them for the beautifully flawed people they were. The best we could do was try to understand life from their perspective and be grateful for what they gave us.
“My mom grew up without any affection,” I said, “so she’s not a very affectionate person, but she’s smart and witty and incredibly strong, and she has a strong faith. Daddy’s the opposite: emotional, an atheist—which I don’t get at all. I’m like, ‘How can you think that? Don’t tell me you haven’t seen any miracles in your life.’ It’s a soul thing. We have these deep discussions, and he goes with me to almost all my gigs. He’s my best buddy, but sometimes—I mean, would you believe he brought his girlfriend along to a Frankfurt gig when I was fifteen? We’re on our way, and he stops off to pick her up, and I’m like, ‘She’s coming? Excuse me?’”
“Ah, nah.” He cringed. “That’s not right. There’s a thing called discretion, man. There’s a thing called savoir faire.”