Mayte Garcia, Prince’s first wife and longtime muse, doesn’t hold back from getting very personal in “The Most Beautiful: My Life With Prince,” her new book chronicling her time spent with the late pop star.
The memoir, published Tuesday, leading up to the first anniversary of Prince’s death on April 21, covers a lot of ground, including the grief following the 1996 death of their newborn son and also how they met (Garcia has her mom to thank for that).
More interesting, however, is Garcia’s deep dive into the eccentricities that made Prince tick. Here are some of the most fascinating takeaways (via Entertainment Weekly):
Prince liked to hypnotize her.
Garcia recalls exploring “universes and lifetimes and universal truth” with her late former husband. “When he was ready to bring me back, he’d snap his fingers next to my ear and say, ‘When you wake up, you’ll know that you are loved and safe and warm.’”
Prince had to have his house color match his car color.
“Prince’s house was repainted a different color on a regular basis, and a new car… was custom painted to match it,” Garcia writes. “The last week of December 1990, the first time I visited him at the house that would eventually be our home, the exterior was electric blue and rose-hip pink. Two years later, I arrived to find it canary yellow with purple accents.”
Prince loved to talk about their past lives together in Egypt.
Garcia says the two of them “talked about the possibility of our two souls having met before and where that might have happened. He was fixated on the idea of Egypt.”
Prince urged Garcia to change her name.
“When Prince and I were first hanging out — not yet lovers, just friends, and collaborators — he got it into my head that I should change my name to Arabia.” She relented, she says. “No. That would not be cool. My mom would kill me.”
Prince had a staff member dedicated to “foo foo.”
In recalling her first experience stepping into a Prince-approved hotel room, Garcia describes how it was transformed with rugs candles, flowers, veil, great swaths of linen — what Prince called “foo foo,” she says. “I learned later, and Prince had a staff member dedicated to it. Wherever Prince went, it was the foo-foo master’s job to go ahead of him and make sure the hotel suite would be a place where he could feel at home.”
Prince refused to leave the house “unless he was done up pretty.”
“Marilyn Monroe never left the house without full makeup,’ he told me, as if no other explanation was needed,” Garcia writes. “Bottom line: You never 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 on inside out.’ This made no sense to me. The sheer irony of it broke my heart all over again.”