NEW YORK—As it turns out, there is a limit to Fantasia Barrino’s tolerance for exposure.
“Why don’t we go back to the car?” she asked, perched on a small sliver of couch at Dusk, a bar in Manhattan. “I’d be more comfortable talking there.”
It was an uncharacteristic moment of shyness from a woman who’s lately been anything but. In the weeks after a suicide attempt, Barrino, the American Idol winner, Broadway star and recording artist, has been everywhere — Behind the Music on VH1, Good Morning America, Lopez Tonight, and on and on — telling her story and promoting her new album, Back to Me.
All that talking has elicited questions. Isn’t the timing of all this a bit fortuitous? Is all this tragedy for real?
“Even from day one I’ve been an open book,” she said, in the back seat of a Lincoln Navigator, sipping red wine she’d brought from her hotel. “Ain’t no need for me to hide now, ain’t no need for me to change now, no need for me to start lying, either. I never did that.”
There are divas who stake their allure on being remote, who use a scrim of made-up personas and “reinventions” to keep fans guessing about their real lives (See: Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Madonna). Then there are singers like Barrino, whose personal tragedies make up the raw material of their careers.
In the six years since winning “The Idol,” as she calls it, Barrino has published an autobiography, played herself in the Lifetime movie Fantasia Barrino: Life Is Not a Fairy Tale, and starred in her own VH1 reality show, Fantasia for Real. (She also took a detour to Broadway, in a highly acclaimed turn in The Color Purple.) Through it all, Barrino, now 26, has been candid about the sometimes grim facts of her upbringing: raped at age 14, a high school dropout and single mother by 16, and the more recent estrangement from her father, who sued Barrino over allegations in her book that he had physically abused her.
On the August night before her new album’s release, Barrino came to Dusk with her manager, her publicist, a reporter, some members of her band and an enormous bodyguard to sing karaoke, celebrate and, once again, tell her story.
Her appearance quickly attracted attention, so she retreated with the reporter to the Lincoln to talk in private. There she recounted the events that led to her intentional overdose of sleeping pills and aspirin on Aug. 9: the affair with a married man, the foreclosure on her home, the realities of a self-described “country girl” catapulted to fame by a reality show.
“I wanted to be so away from all this noise in my world,” she said, wearing black shorts, a vest and booties with 4-inch heels. “Whether it’s ‘mommy’ or ‘Tasia, I need a bill paid,’ or ‘we need you here at the record company.’ No one was taking care of me. It was only what I could do for other people.” A nameplate on her necklace read “Gorgeous,” and on either hand were rings that wrapped over several fingers.
Considering how tragedy has fuelled her career — and given the lacklustre sales of her last album — skeptics have questioned the legitimacy of her most recent round of troubles.
“Here we are a mere two weeks” after her overdose, read a post on the online message board Sodahead.com, “and Fantasia is up and about, working the talk-show circuit. And lo and behold, she has an album coming up. What a coincidence!”
Barrino says she has heard such misgivings and has an answer for people who voice them.
“I don’t think I needed any more publicity than what I was getting,” she said, shaking her head. The story of her affair and the subsequent lawsuit from the man’s wife “was on every news station,” she said. “It was on CNN, it was on Nancy Grace. They were having debates.”
Still, why not take some time for yourself after such a tragic event? “I couldn’t really afford to take more time off,” she said. “I’m still fighting my way out of debt.”
Barrino’s post-Idol story has become familiar in a culture increasingly populated by reality show winners. James Huysman, a psychologist who has spent 15 years consulting with reality shows and their contestants, says that people with tragic backgrounds make great TV but, like lottery winners, are rarely well served by the instant success that the medium hands them.
“When you take a wounded person and infuse them with absolute stardom and celebrity status, all you’ve transformed is the external,” he said in a telephone interview. “But from within you’re still the same person, the same low self-esteem, the same anxiety, the same fears, the same pain.”
Huysman compared Barrino to Susan Boyle, the dowdy Scottish woman who found fame onBritain’s Got Talent but soon ended up in a psychiatric hospital. “All we did was dress her up to make her palatable to a spiritually bankrupt viewership,” Huysman said. But that doesn’t mean Boyle was mentally prepared for the pressures of stardom, to say nothing of the shifting expectations of those around her.
Back in the car, Barrino said much the same thing about herself. After being crowned byAmerican Idol in 2004, she said, she wrongly assumed money would never be a problem again, and began trying to care for an unsustainable group of friends and family.
“I created the monster myself,” she said. “I’m big on family and I want to see everybody happy. That’s where I messed up.” The result, she said, was the debt she is still trying to work out of.
At this point, Barrino took the reporter’s pad and sketched an iceberg. “This part on top that everyone can see, this is Fantasia,” she said. “This is the celebrity, this is the smiles, the bubbly spirits, the red carpets, the cars, the fancy clothes.”
Then pointing to the much larger part of the iceberg below the water: “But here is Tasia,” she said, using her childhood nickname. “Now that’s hurt, that’s fear, the trust issues.”
The key to her recovery, she said, was “to be both. I’m not going to pretend anymore.”
TheStar.com
