Inside Mariah Carey's Mailbag - June 7, 2005

"JUNE 7--Due to the roaring success of her platinum comeback album, 'The Emancipation of Mimi,' Mariah Carey has been on our mind lately. So we decided to dig into The Smoking Gun's back catalog for one of our favorite collections of documents. A TSG source once found five boxes of Mariah fan mail stacked at a Manhattan curb, apparently awaiting the garbage truck. The nearly 2000 letters--sent to the singer care of Columbia Records and her management firm--praised Carey for an album, offered congratulations on an award, or just sought an autographed picture. The correspondence--excerpts from which you'll find below--contained a mixture of (sometimes creepy) mail from little kids, prisoners, servicemen overseas, and lovelorn guys. For some reason, many fans included photographs of themselves, though Mariah apparently declined to press them into one of her famous scrapbooks. We've included some of these discarded photos, including one of a months-old Texas belle whose parents wrote to report that they had named their darling after the singer. As for why we've placed a red bar across the eyes of these fans, well, would you want anyone knowing you once wrote a gushy letter to Mariah Carey? (13 pages)"
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