How tragic tale of Prince’s baby’s death and grief over loss sent pop legend ‘over the edge,’ says ex-wife Mayte Garcia
Wife of iconic singer reveals truth over rollercoaster relationship for the first time
TO the outside world he was the flamboyant and eccentric superstar who kept his private life shrouded in secrecy.
But Prince’s former wife and mother to his only child, Mayte Garcia, saw a side of the music icon no one else did.
The man she knew loved unwinding with a glass of port, visiting supermarkets after hours, and roller-skating with her around his Paisley Park compound in Minnesota.
Mayte, 43, said: “Prince was a classic Gemini, he definitely had two sides and when I woke up in the morning I would see which one I got.”
Talking in New York about her memoir The Most Beautiful: My Life With Prince, Mayte reveals the truth about the rollercoaster relationship for the first time.
She finally opens up about how their son Amiir was born with severe genetic abnormalities and died after six days, and tells of her husband’s strange behaviour in the aftermath of that tragedy.
Prince had long insisted that their child’s fate remain a mystery and refused even to confirm the infant’s existence.
For decades the world believed the child had been named Boy Gregory.
Prince could wear lace and heels and still be more manly than anyone else in the room
Mayte Garcia
Mayte had checked into the hospital as “Mia Gregory” and this fake surname — along with the baby’s gender — had been written above his cot and leaked to the press.
Mayte said: “Part of the reason I wanted to write the book was to honour my son and it felt great to use his name.
"Prince was a genius in so many respects, but not in the way he handled the death of our son. It was a story that needed to be told.”
MOST READ IN CELEB
She revealed they were overjoyed when she got pregnant on their Hawaiian honeymoon.
Excited dad-to-be Prince even used the sound of his unborn child’s heartbeat in Sex In The Summer, a track from his 1996 album Emancipation.
But at four months Mayte began bleeding. Scans showed the baby’s growth was falling behind and doctors suspected a form of dwarfism.
Mayte finally delivered Amiir by caesarian section a month prematurely, on October 16, 1996.
She said: “I had seen the high my husband got on stage from performing to 100,000 people but nothing matched the elation on his face that day when he became a father.
“But then, as he held our baby up to the light, that look of joy changed to terror. It is a moment forever imprinted on my memory.”
Amiir had Pfeiffer syndrome, a genetic condition that causes skeletal abnormalities and abnormal fusing of the skull, meaning the eyes are outside of the sockets.
His hands and feet looked webbed and he had no eyelids, meaning surgeons had to stitch his eyes closed.
Recalling the first time she held her son, Mayte said: “My husband sat on the floor with his body against my knee, humming and whispering to Amiir, and we stayed that way for hours.”
When doctors said they had to put a pipe into Amiir’s throat to help him breathe, she knew they had to let him go, saying: “He was suffering.”
Grief-stricken she went home and lay in bed for days, cradling her son’s ashes.
But Prince dealt with the tragedy by throwing himself into work.
Mayte was horrified when he invited chat show host Oprah Winfrey into their home to do an interview and insisted that she take part.
It was Oprah, not Mayte, who first saw the nursery and playroom that Prince had secretly decorated as a surprise.
Weirdly, when asked about the baby’s health Prince told Oprah “It’s all good” and gave the impression that his child was still alive.
Mayte said: “I sat on the sofa smiling a pretty ballerina smile. I’d been instructed by my husband, ‘Say nothing about Amiir’.”
Even stranger was Prince’s request that Mayte take part in a music video which involved her returning to the same hospital where Amiir had died a few weeks earlier and putting on a medical gown.
The footage, for his 1996 single Betcha By Golly Wow, showed Prince rushing to Mayte’s bedside to celebrate news of a pregnancy.
She said: “Everyone naturally assumed this moment was captured when I was pregnant. But it was filmed only a few weeks after Amiir’s death.
“I couldn’t believe he wanted to put on scrubs in that same hospital again. But it was his way of coping.
"I went along with it because I loved him.”
He thought Amiir's death was price he had to pay for his behaviour as a young man
Mayte Garcia
The couple were dealt a further tragic blow when a second pregnancy a year later ended in miscarriage.
Mayte believes Prince never fully recovered from the heartache of losing Amiir and may even still be alive today had their boy lived.
She said: “If Amiir had survived I know that everything would have been different. Prince came from a broken home and had a troubled relationship with his own dad. Being a father would have changed him.”
Born in Alabama to Puerto Rican parents, Mayte and her older sister Janice grew up in both Germany and America, wherever their father John, a pilot with the US military, happened to be stationed.
As a child, Mayte went to belly-dancing classes with her mum Nelle and by her teens she was performing professionally.
Prince fan Janice persuaded their father to drive them from Frankfurt to Barcelona to see the Purple Rain star live.
Mayte, 16 at the time, met Prince backstage and was entranced. Her mother later persuaded her to send him a video of her dancing.
She said Prince later claimed he told a pal that night they met “There’s my future wife” yet admitted to another friend that she was “jailbait”.
Schoolgirl Mayte was a virgin who had never even been on a date and Prince was a 32-year-old singer famed for his raunchy reputation.
Yet that meeting was the start of an unusual long-distance friendship.
The teen would chat to the megastar for hours on the phone and Prince would fly her first-class to visit and see him in concert.
She said: “It was innocent when I met him, there was nothing sleazy about it. We talked about work. I think he recognised I felt about dance how he felt about music.”
Mayte’s parents eventually allowed Prince to become her legal guardian so that she could join him on the road as a dancer.
After graduating from high school at 18 she moved into Paisley Park full-time and her relationship with Prince intensified.
They were shooting a video when Prince whispered: “I think it’s time for you to get birth control.”
Even so, Mayte said his behaviour in the bedroom was a million miles from his kinky onstage antics.
She said: “There was always a seduction but it was about being with the man I loved. Once he handed me handcuffs and I was shocked because it was so unlike him.
"But he quickly added, ‘They are for the show’. And he’d never have dreamed of playing his own music during those moments.”
Although Prince would steal Mayte’s clothes and have them altered to fit him, and always wore make-up and women’s perfume, this did not dent his sex appeal.
Mayte said: “I don’t know any other man who could put on lace, shoulder pads and heels and still be more masculine and sexy than anyone else in the room.”
From early on, Prince would hypnotise Mayte — a connection she described as being “even deeper than sex”.
She was 22 and he was 37 when they got married on February 14, 1996.
But four years later their relationship was on the rocks.
Prince had become a Jehovah’s Witness, recruited by Larry Graham, bassist with Sly And The Family Stone.
She said: “Prince was always a spiritual seeker. He once explored Scientology after a celebrity introduced him to it. He read all the books but said they gave him a headache.
"The Jehovah’s Witnesses came in at a time when he had suffered the tragedy of losing our son and was vulnerable.
“He got it into his head that Amiir’s death was part of a price he had to pay for the life he lived when he was younger.”
Mayte felt more threatened by her husband’s new religion than by rumours of a fling with Manuela Testolini, who worked for his charity.
She first suspected that something was going on when she saw him shake Manuela’s hand — a rare gesture for someone so afraid of catching germs.
Then, at a press conference in 1998, Prince announced out of the blue that he planned to annul their marriage.
Mayte recalled: “I sat with a frozen smile on my face. He could be a tyrant at times.”
They did not legally divorce until May 2000. Prince wed Manuela the following year, but that second marriage ended in divorce in 2006.
After their split Mayte was horrified to learn that Prince had ordered an assistant to burn everything that reminded him of their marriage or baby, including Amiir’s ashes.
Ironically it was Manuela, 40, who rang Mayte to break the news of Prince’s death last year.
Mayte said: “The news came as a huge shock. I had been plucking up the courage to visit him and introduce him to my five-year-old daughter, Gia. I had even looked at flights. I wish I had taken one now.”
She had seen glimpses of Prince’s prescription drug abuse, but believes he kept much of it hidden.
Mayte, who adopted Gia as a baby, now devotes herself to animal rescue and teaching belly-dancing.
She has dated since her divorce from Prince, including a two-year relationship with Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, but says she has never fallen for anyone in the same way.
“No one measures up to him. It is hard, I guess, to find another Prince.”
The Most Beautiful: My Life With Prince by Mayte Garcia (Trapeze, £18.88) is out now.