Before Prince was in love with me, he was in love with the idea that we’d known each other in previous lifetimes. He loved that I was completely open to that idea and willing to spend hours with him, imagining in rich detail the joys and heartbreaks, the births and deaths, and the ultimate meanings of our past lives. One result of all that was 3 Chains o’ Gold. Another result was everything that’s happened in my life since.
The basic plot of 3 Chains o’ Gold begins with the assassination of Mayte’s father. Convinced that only Prince can protect her and her three sacred chains of gold from the assassins, she searches him out and they fall in love. The epilogue ends with his rebirth “marking the beginning and ending of cycles of creation” and the announcement that from this time forward, his name will be the unpronounceable symbol , “for in the dawn, all will require no speakable name to differentiate the ineffable one that shall remain.”
I love the word ineffable—though I admit, I had to look it up—and the idea that for some things, there are no words. As I tell this story, I find myself falling back on words that can’t begin to express what certain moments have meant to me: Profound. Amazing. Beautiful. Love. These words are said so often, they’ve lost their power.
During this hypercreative era, Prince was searching for other forms of self-expression. A lot of that stuff in the vault at Paisley Park was created during this time. I never quite understood my role in all that until years later when I heard him tell someone, “Mayte made me more open. She makes it easier for me to talk to God.” Rolling Stone referred to it as “an existential time in Prince’s life,” because this is when he started actively questioning everything about the way the music industry interacted with artists. Ultimately these questions led him to change his name to the unpronounceable love symbol, but that didn’t happen overnight; it was a place he came to after a long, difficult soul search.
The footage you see in 3 Chains o’ Gold was shot over the course of almost two years, beginning with scenes Randee and I created together in Egypt in 1991 when I was fresh out of high school, and ending with the filming of “7” on an LA soundstage in 1993. Prince continued to work on the pieces during and between the Diamonds and Pearls Tour and the Act I and Act II tours the following year, which is a testament to his unbelievable stamina, because touring—how can I describe it? The most fun you could ever have while putting your entire body through a meat grinder? There were good times and bad.
When we set out on the Diamonds and Pearls Tour in April 1992, I was still well funded by my belly dancing money, but by the time we started Act I in March of 1993, I was broke and paying the rent on my empty apartment in Minnesota. What little money I had left I used to pay my phone bill, because Mama’s voice on the other end of the line was my life raft at times. Sometimes I splurged and got a salad or a basket of bread with Thousand Island dressing from room service. There were times I was hungry enough to sneak food from room service carts in the hotel hallway. I learned that tea with a lot of honey kept me sustained for a long time, especially when I put the whole honey bear into the bottom of the mug. That would be my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
On show nights, I couldn’t eat anything before I danced, because I needed to feel light, but afterward, if there was still food on the crew’s craft service table, I’d quickly wrap up a little meal to go and stow it with my things above my seat on the bus, so it would be there when I came back ready to dig in. Like clockwork, Prince would call me just before we boarded. I’d get on his bus silently praying, Please, tell me we’re eating. I was reluctant to ask him to feed me after the pay-docking incident.
That summer, we were in Minnesota shooting some footage for a music video, and Prince asked me to decorate a video cassette cover that he wanted to use as a prop. I went to Michaels crafts and spent my last few dollars on beads and chains. I took them home and put the thing together, and then I sat there, looking at my empty refrigerator. My empty stomach. My empty bank account. I started crying, and I cried all the way to Paisley Park. It took every morsel of nerve I could scrape together, but shaking in my boots, I walked up to him and said, “I’m leaving.”
Prince was startled, because in the time we’d known each other, he’d seen me in pain, he’d seen me sick as a dog, he’d seen me frustrated and upset, but he had never seen me cry at work.
“What’s going on?” he asked, and I let him have it.
“I could be in Cairo right now, making a thousand bucks a night. Instead, I’m here, living on Triscuit crackers and water and spending money I don’t have to buy foo foo for you. I’m going home. And then I’m going to Cairo. Maybe later on, if you—”
“Hold up, hold up,” he said without raising his voice. “I don’t even know how much you make.”
“Three hundred a week,” I said. “And my rent is six hundred a month.”
He winced like I’d kicked him in the shins. “Let me make a call.”