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WHEN MARIAH CAREY, a 21-year-old with a waterfall of honey-colored hair and a voice powerful enough to light up a small town, was handed the first of her two Grammys at the annual music awards last month, it marked a transition as dramatic as a rare butterfly emerging from an unnoticed cocoon.
A woman who only a few years ago couldn't afford a new pair of sneakers and ate macaroni dinners to save money, she now has been installed as the music world's reigning rookie diva with three hits and a No. 1 album. This is a rocket climb that has startled the industry and stunned friends from her adolescence on Long Island, but only confirmed the expectations of the few who knew of her closely held dreams.
Best friend Patricia Johnson, for instance, was not particularly shocked when Carey, in a clingy black slip dress, sang her hit "Vision of Love" on the Grammy broadcast to 60 countries. Mariah knew from the seventh grade what she was going to do, Johnson says.
"And she always did what she said she was going to do."
What Carey has done is fulfill a storybook tale of the girl from meager beginnings who goes on to stardom. A singer-songwriter with a seven-octave range (the top part is audible only to dogs, says one critic), Carey exploded on the scene like a repressed volcano last June and has been rising steadily ever since.
All this is in sharp contrast to the picture sketched from talks with friends who knew her as an unexceptional student during high school and a shy woman who struggled through lean times in Manhattan. The image is of a directed woman who used her songs to escape from a sometimes insecure world, but who nevertheless maintained an unshakable belief in her own destiny.
"She always had it in her mind to be a singer," says a close friend, who asked not to be identified. "I think a lot of the reasons the people that knew her then were surprised {at her award} is that she didn't talk about it."
Brenda K. Starr, the Columbia pop recording artist who first hired her as a back-up vocalist and later helped her to stardom, describes her...