The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince

by Mayte Garcia

I can tell you that, while we were so normal about so many things, we lived his belief that life itself should be a work of art.

Second chances happen. This belief stayed with me, a blessing and a curse. Thinking my husband and I would eventually remarry kept me from feeling bitter toward him, but it also prevented me from fully moving on as long as he was alive.

For the rest of my junior year, by night I danced, and by day I hurried to class, passing a large portrait of Priscilla Presley in the school’s hallway. I remember thinking how cool it was that she had been going to this very same high school when she met Elvis, not even suspecting that my life was about to change in much the same way hers had.

If I can give my daughter one thing, I want to give her what I got from belly dancing: a sense of myself as precious. I respected and reserved myself—for myself, not for a man—and the side effect of that was a beautiful romance with a husband who was my first, and in that moment, my everything.

Years later, Prince told me that when he saw me standing there with Jan and Mama, he said to Rosie Gaines, “There’s my future wife.” “Really?” I said when he told me. “Yeah. I said, ‘There’s my future wife,’ and Rosie laughed.” “What made you say that?” I wondered—and I still wonder. “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I thought I was joking.” He liked how the universe boomeranged that little joke back to him. Or maybe the universe smiled and nodded and let him think that it was a joke and not the memory of something about to happen.

I felt calm, suddenly. A peaceful feeling passed through me. Not from him. From within myself. It was that feeling that I belonged here, in the right place at the right time. I hadn’t evolved enough at that point in my life to even consider the deep philosophical questions I’d soon be discussing with him—the third eye, the migration of souls, the great spiral staircase we climb up and down—so I didn’t question the feeling then, but these days, when I revisit that moment in my heart, I feel this reassuring ping. Oh, it’s you! Here you are. It comforts me to think that I’ll feel it again in another time and place.

Something I was about to learn about Prince: He would never allow anyone to be left hanging. If he invited someone to visit, he went to great lengths to see that they were comfortable and well cared for.

The foo foo was not about a pampered star’s outlandish demands; it was about this hydraulic engine being well maintained, fed, and rested enough to pull an entire train. To have that sense of comfort in unknown lands—this was a perk I dearly appreciated during the years when we were a couple. I looked forward to walking into a dressing room that had been preset with all the big and small things that made me feel cared for. It was lovely to check into a hotel and feel like we were coming home to our own life, at least, even if we were far from our own home in Minnesota. After our marriage ended, it took me years to get used to checking into a nondescript, neutral-toned hotel room.

Now I eavesdrop on those conversations in my memory, thinking, What I wouldn’t give for just one of those hours back…

“You can’t look at yourself through other people’s eyes. When you’re working at a certain level, you find that people live through you, and if you don’t act like they expect you to, then you’re the bad one.”

See, people, this is the inconvenience of all lives existing at all times: we cross paths and trip over each other occasionally. I don’t know which self to follow, because so many memories—so many versions of myself—existed in this place at different times. I was both a child and a mother in this house, a beloved wife and an unwelcome ghost who haunted the place until he tore it down.

That’s how he was able to shrug it off when something didn’t sell as well as he’d hoped or the critics trashed him; by the time that particular thing was released to the public, he was already on to the next thing creatively.

Bottom line: You never ever saw him looking wrong. Knowing this, I felt a cold shiver down my spine when I read in the Minneapolis StarTribune that when his body was found in the elevator at Paisley Park, “Prince was wearing a black shirt and pants—both were on backward—and his socks were inside-out.” This made no sense to me. The sheer irony of it broke my heart all over again.

Toward the end of our marriage, I kept that letter among the things I treasured most. I needed those words of commitment and passion from him, and he was no longer able to speak them. One day, I saw him walk over to a girl and shake her hand. And I knew.

One of his crew people told me years later, “Everything was great until Purple Rain. Then he got everything he ever wanted, and he didn’t like it.”

“The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” is a song that was particularly important to him. I know of at least three women besides me who believe it was written specifically for them.

So now you know what happened. To me, anyway. What happened to me and my son. I can’t speak for my husband or describe what this experience was for him. I can only tell you what I observed through the haze of my own pain: Imagine a skydiver leaps from an airplane. He has the best equipment and does everything right. At first, there’s euphoria. He sees so clearly—blue sky, green earth, beauty without limit, a higher perspective. He has absolute faith that he’ll land safely and be a better man than he was before. But it turns out his parachute is tangled. He struggles to fix it, but the chute tears away and disappears into the sky. Panic grabs him by the throat, but still—faith. He has his faith. In free fall, he flails, trying to pray, but the force of gravity takes his breath away. He sees the hard ground coming at him, and he knows that if he survives this, he will never be the same.

I’d been around the military all my life, so I knew about post-traumatic stress syndrome—shell shock, they used to call it—but it never occurred to me that there are all kinds of battlefields in this world. Now I see so clearly that we were both scarred and suffering for years, because we didn’t know how to deal with it in the moment. I was a zombie for months. It was hard for me to see past my own pain long enough to understand what was going on with my husband.

As cliché as it is for sexy older men to date younger women, I think his preference was more than physical; it was about the power balance. He didn’t like to be argued with. He wasn’t used to someone banging on the door and saying, “I’m coming in! I don’t care what you say.”

She tells me now (and most days I believe her) that they still weren’t intimate until much later. She says they were friends. But I was familiar with the “friendship” choreography; it wasn’t so much a platonic buddy relationship as it was an elegant sort of tantric delayed gratification. In any case, it was well beyond the boundaries of okay for a married man.

I’d lost the love of my life, my son, my songs, my job, my band, my home, my home away from home—everything from Larry the Starfish to the “Children of the Sun” master, which, ironically enough, was owned by NPG Records, to whom I was apparently a slave.