It’s been almost eight years since Prince died, on April 21, 2016. His first wife, dancer/actress/author/philanthropist/animal activist Mayte Garcia, learned the shocking news that day via a phone call from — of all people — Prince’s second ex-wife, Manuela Testolini, who had become her friend in recent years. As Garcia revealed in her compulsively readable and at times truly heartbreaking memoir, The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince, published by Hatchette Books in 2017, Prince began an affair with Testolini while she and Prince were still married; at the time, she and Prince were still grieving the tragic death of their 6-day-old son, Amiir, from a rare genetic disorder called Pfeiffer syndrome, followed by the miscarriage of their second pregnancy.
But the now 50-year-old Garcia — who reveals that she has been in a fulfilling relationship with Danish jazz pianist Niels Lan Doky for over a year (more on that later) — obviously made peace with the past long, long ago. “I believe in karma, and I think what you put out is what you're going to get back,” she explains, adding with a giggle: “I mean, I have my moments! I'm not perfect. I have a temper — I’m Puerto Rican! But I just try to live with positivity.” Garcia continues to honor Prince’s legacy and their complicated but eternal love story via the charity they co-founded in honor of Amiir, LIVE4MUSIC, as well as via The Most Beautiful, which is now being made into a biopic that she hopes will come out in 2025.
“I just signed off to the rights to my movie for a production company, and now they're in the process of writing it and all that,” divulges Garcia, who first met Prince when she was just 16 after he was impressed by an audition tape of her bellydancing, began a romance with him at age 18, and married him when she was 22. And she already has the perfect A-list actress in mind to play her. “It’s so funny, because a picture of just came out of Zendaya with her V-shaped bangs like mine; I can't even tell you how many people sent that photo to me! I don't know if she'd be interested, but I think she'd be a good one to possibly play me.”
As for which actor could possibly play Prince, one of the most iconic rock stars of all time, Garcia, perhaps the woman who knew him best, laughs: “Oh, they better hire a good casting director! But hey, they found Freddie Mercury with that guy [Bohemian Rhapsody Oscar-winner Rami Malek], and that's what actors do: They transform and become. So, I have faith that somebody is going to be able to play him. I know I'm going to have to be the advisor and be like, ‘Yeah, no.’ I'm going to try my hardest to make sure they cast it right.”
Garcia is aware that revisiting her past via this movie project will be sometimes painful, just as it was when she wrote her book a year after Prince died. “I don't know if you heard the Audible, but that is a real gut-wrencher. It's gut-wrenching,” she admits. “I remember when I did it, I broke down. But [the audiobook engineer] was like, ‘No, no, we're keeping that. That's true. That's raw.’ I felt so scared that it would come out weird. But it was amazing. So, I'm excited for [the film] to come out. I want it to show the love, I want to show the funny stuff, all of it — because it's all true.”
Garcia says when she first decided to tell her story, in her own words, she “wanted it to come from a loving place,” especially since her ex-husband had been aware that she planned to pen an autobiography. “I did it so soon after he passed; I wanted it to be one of the first ones coming out, because of course there were going to be many [posthumous Prince books]. So, I wanted it to be beautiful. I always had a diary. I always kept stuff I didn't want to forget. I didn't forget the beautiful moments, and I also didn't want to forget the painful ones — so I could go back and say, ‘Wow. I survived that.’”
Certainly, the most painful part of Garcia and Prince’s epic but doomed love story — the part that could make her break down in the Audible studio — was the chapter about her pregnancy and Amiir’s death, the full details of which had never been made public before her book was published. After Amiir died in 1996, she and Prince sat down for an exclusive interview with Oprah Winfrey at their fabled Minneapolis home, Paisley Park, bizarrely keeping up the façade that their son was still alive (even giving Winfrey a tour of the estate’s empty nursery) and dodging questions about his rumored health issues. Prince also convinced Garcia to return to the hospital where Amiir had been born to shoot a pregnancy-themed music video for “Betcha By Golly Wow.” Garcia stresses that openly discussing baby loss in the media — the way Chrissy Teigen and John Legend did after the 2020 death of their son Jack — was almost unheard-of, even taboo, in ’96.
“This whole thing of [celebrities] showing their personal side is something that's kind of new. Our generation still was all about ‘just keep it together,’” Garcia explains. “We had to do Oprah [an interview already scheduled to promote Prince’s forthcoming album at the time, Emancipation], and I didn't want to let him down. But really, we were thinking, ‘Let's bring [Amiir] back. We're going to bring him back.’ Well, that's all I kept thinking in my head. That's why I did it. I can't speak for [Prince], of course. He was hurting — but he was also doing his job.”
Garcia feels being able to write and talk about Amiir now, as well as honor him through her nonprofit work, has not only brought her peace, but has consoled other grieving couples as well. “I was hoping [The Most Beautiful] would help people who have lost children, or who have miscarried, because I know if I would've seen something like that when I was going through it, it would've given me a little more strength, maybe one less tear, just helped me heal better and faster,” she muses. “And now I have gotten feedback that people love [Prince] even more because he went through that. I can't even tell you the emails and letters I got after the book came out, from people just saying, ‘Thank you so much for sharing this.’ And then they would share their stories with me, which was so beautiful. I think people are more open to sharing and talking about it now, instead of just keeping it in and not dealing with it.”
As for the advice Garcia — who adopted her daughter Gia in 2013, after Gia’s struggling young bio-mom saw her on the reality show Hollywood Exes and reached out — would give to other couples mourning a pregnancy or baby loss, she says: “I would say really, really take a minute. You have to live in the pain. It doesn't matter how many books you read or whatever — you're going to have to live in it. And of course, try to keep people that you trust around, so that they can be there for you. I talk about depression a lot” — as Garcia revealed in her book, she contemplated suicide in the weeks after Amiir’s death — “and I say, get something that you have to take care of. It could be a plant, a cat, a hamster — just something where you have to get out of bed. Because if I hadn’t had my dogs, I wouldn't have ever gotten out of bed. And also, really communicate with the other person, because that gets lost in your grief. And then you just internalize and forget that you’re even with someone.”
It could be assumed that the lack of communication between then-newlyweds Garcia and Prince in the aftermath of the Amiir tragedy is what ultimately tore them apart. As Garcia wrote in her book, Prince — seemingly not having the tools to process his pain — eventually ordered an assistant to destroy everything that reminded him of Garcia and their late son. At the time, she was even shockingly told that Amiir's ashes had been burned. But as it turned out, that was thankfully untrue. Only two years ago, her longtime friend Kirk Johnson (the New Power Generation member who was the best man at Prince and Mayte’s wedding, and in fact was the one who passed her bellydancing videotape to Prince) finally found Amiir’s ashes, which Garcia then personally picked up in Minneapolis. She now keeps those ashes “very, very close” to her at her home in Las Vegas.
“They gave them back to me!” marvels Garcia. This actually quite cinematic development also brough her more closure regarding her relationship with her ex, with whom she was on “good terms” at the time of his passing. “That was yet another thing of me going, ‘You know what? The love is there. It's always there,’” she stresses. “I see some divorced couples and I'm like, ‘Wow, you guys really hate each other! That's crazy!’ But with us, it was never that. I mean, yes, I was heartbroken — so heartbroken when it was happening. I didn't want to be that [divorced] person, and I made that very clear with [Prince] from the beginning. I was like, ‘I don't want to be my parents,’ and he was like, ‘Neither do I.’ But, the unfortunate happened.”
Garcia admits it was “definitely hard,” as a woman who’d met her first love (a man 15 years her senior) at such a young age and says “Paisley Park was my life,” to establish to her own identity after the split. “I had to learn to be an adult; I'm thinking about writing another book and kind of digging into all that,” she says. “But I don't think being with someone should identify you. … I think my work will speak for itself. And I don't want to take anything away [from Prince], because if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be what I'm doing.”
After her marriage ended, Garcia focused on rebuilding her showbiz career and “dated here and there,” most notably a two-year relationship and brief engagement with Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee, who was also rebounding from his own high-profile divorce from a pop-culture superstar, Pamela Anderson. But Garcia “totally thought that ship had sailed” when it came to finding real love again — she even confessed as much in The Most Beautiful, seemingly still not over Prince at that time.
“I remember I thought, ‘Well, I've already lost my biggest love. So, I’ll just be happy with myself,’” Garcia shrugs. “And I was cool with that. I worked on myself. I learned how to make candles, and you know what? I make really good candles! I just took on things that I love, like, ‘I'm going to learn how to garden.’ And I learned how to garden. I took classes. Just work on yourself, is what I tell women. As cheesy as it sounds, that's the best way.”
But while Garcia concedes that the romance she had with Prince “will always be one of my top — is my top,” she adds, “I can't stop living. That history is who I am, and you’ve got to find somebody that loves you for what you are.” And she has now found “unexpected” love again with the above-mentioned Lan Doky. She first met the jazz musician when she and her friends took a fateful girls’ trip to his native Denmark, to attend a big annual rose festival where the country’s then-princess/now-queen was blessing a new rose called (wait for it) “The Most Beautiful” — introduced at the ceremony by Garcia, the woman who'd inspired the flower. And soon, love blossomed.
“I wasn’t looking!” chuckles Garcia. “Yeah, I rolled my eyes when people said, ‘Oh, you’ll find love when you least expect it, when you're not looking, blah, blah, blah.’ But yeah, it's true! The thing with me was, if I didn't find it, I would be fine, because I know what I’d had [with Prince]. I know it was beautiful, and I tried to create beautiful things with my friends and my family. I mean, I got lucky [with Lan Doky]. But I was like, ‘You know what? I'm fine if he comes along, and if he doesn't, he doesn't.’”
Garcia says dating Lan Doky is “completely different” from her wild allnighter adventures with her famous ex-husband. (“No afterparties, just do the show and go to dinner, and I love that!”) And she appreciates that her current man isn’t intimidated by her romantic history with one of the most famous men of all time — as many potential suitors no doubt would be. “There’s lot of insecurity, and it sucks, but you know what? That's their journey. It’s not like I paraded it around, but it is what it is: I am who I am because of my past. It’s nice finding someone who's secure in that, who’s very supportive, who’s a fan of what I do. He's an amazing musician, very respectful, age 60. ... It all has to do with maturity.”
Now, along with her upcoming biopic, happy relationship, and devoted motherhood to Gia, Garcia is focusing on LIVE4MUSIC’s music education program, which is designed to empower talented youth who don’t have access to advanced music classes. Rising stars have until May 31 to apply for the transformative program, which will include one-on-one private lessons and various ensemble workshops, masterclasses, clinics, lectures, and demonstrations with veteran entertainers and educators, some of whom are musicians that once worked with Prince himself.
"This program that we're doing, if I could have had a chance when I was kid to have Debbie Allen teach me via Zoom, I would've fainted!" says Garcia, who began dancing as a toddler and was performing professionally by the time she was a tween. "Just to have even 30 minutes to get some insight would've been amazing. So, that's what we want to do with LIVE4MUSIC. We have some amazing teachers, amazing musicians, professionals, Grammy-winning people that are willing to teach these children, to help them and make them believe in themselves, to give them some kind of hope. And I'm so excited about that."
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