Goddess: Inside Madonna (2 page)

“I remember sitting down and writing an impassioned letter to Alan Parker,” Madonna recalls, “listing the reasons why I was the only one who could portray Eva.” She told Parker that she felt a “supernatural drive to play the part.” She concluded, “I can honestly say that I did not write this letter of my own free will. It was as if some other force drove my hand across the page.” She ended the letter by saying that fortune-tellers had been predicting for years that she would one day play Eva Perón on the screen.

Within days, Parker called Madonna and arranged for her to audition for Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Although the composer and lyricist were pleasantly surprised by Madonna’s physical resemblance to Evita, they used that point against her by expressing their concern that her level of celebrity might eclipse the personality of Eva Perón. “Could she be contained,” Webber asked, “in such a controlled atmosphere as moviemaking? After all, there were budgets to consider and a time frame that allowed no room for star temperament or caprice.” Andy Vajna, the producer on
Evita
when Robert Stigwood had the film, and the producer as well for Alan Parker, recalled that he was concerned because “here was this pop icon and we weren’t sure what we were getting involved in.” As a result, Vajna called Penny Marshall, who had directed Madonna in
A League of Their Own
, and asked how she was to work with. According to Vajna, Marshall told him, “You don’t have to worry about anything.”

When Webber and Rice were still not convinced, Alan Parker made the point that despite her previous track record, she was still one of the few female stars who could attract large crowds at the box office, and Hollywood musicals, with the exception of
Grease
, which had appeared in 1978, were almost always losing propositions. In the end, they relented, and Parker closed the deal. Madonna would star as Eva Perón for a fee of $1 million. Despite her sense of triumph, Madonna admitted to several close friends that she felt as if she was going into a project with all the “odds stacked against her.” On one hand, she had faith that the part would finally catapult her to respectful stardom, while on the other, she felt that everyone was just waiting for her to fail. Only after she had finished recording and was at the stage when she had to lip-synch the songs while actually shooting the scenes did she discover, much to her delight, that the process was similar to making videos. Months later, when the film was finally finished, Madonna breathed a sigh of relief.

“I consider it an act of God that I got
Evita
,” she told Parker. What Madonna did not know at the time was that Alan Parker, like his predecessors, was having problems getting permission from the Argentine government to film certain key scenes on location. He knew that if he was forced to make the movie on a soundstage, he would fail to project the mystical undercurrent of evil that had pervaded Argentina during the Perónist era. Parker didn’t tell Madonna she wasn’t the only one who would consider it an act of God if the film ever got made.

To make his star feel at home and relaxed in her new environment, Alan Parker had arranged for Tim Rice, the lyricist for
Evita
, to shepherd Madonna around London and to introduce her to interesting people. It was an especially happy time for Tim Rice, not only because
Evita
was finally going into production, but also because Rice had four musicals running in theaters in Los Angeles:
Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Chess Moves
, and
Beauty and the Beast
. Even more exciting for Rice, he was in the middle of a collaboration with Elton John for a Broadway production of
Aida
.

As arranged, Rice telephoned Madonna at noon the following day at her hotel and was surprised when his star informed him that for the moment she would not be venturing out in public. After unpacking her Jean-Paul Gaultier wardrobe, she had decided to transform herself into what she imagined was the typical British woman. To achieve that new image before she transformed herself once again into Eva Perón, she had called Gianni Versace in New York and asked him to design a somber tweed suit with a skirt that fell demurely to the knee for her “London incarnation.” Until the suit arrived two days later, Madonna hid in her $3,000-a-night penthouse suite at Claridge’s.

When Madonna finally received Tim Rice in her hotel suite, she found that they had something in common about their mutual interest in Evita. At the end of her first year of high school, Madonna had been listening to one of her favorite rock stations when the disc jockey had talked about a woman named Eva Perón. Madonna had been fascinated to learn that the wife of Juan Perón had survived poverty to become an inspiration to her country as well as a spiritual and religious icon to her people long after her death. Sitting with Rice in London, Madonna learned that he had also first heard about Evita by chance on the radio. According to Rice, he had been set to do
Jeeves
for the London stage (along with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn, who provided the book and lyrics) when he happened to hear a program on his car radio about Eva Perón, “the poor girl from a shabby suburb of Buenos Aires who had climbed to the top of Argentine politics and society.” It was then that the idea for
Evita
had begun to take form and Rice had set out to research the life and death of Eva Perón. In February 1974, Rice had made his first trip down to Buenos Aires to get a sense of the local color and atmosphere, which he would successfully re-create on the stage.

In London with the woman who would re-create the role on the screen, Rice, the consummate gentleman as well as the lyricist who was concerned about his score and his star, squired Madonna around town. Privately, he was convinced that when people knew she was eager to be asked to all the A-list parties and events, his baby-sitting job would be over. Unfortunately, the empty guest book she kept on the glass table in her penthouse suite was a sad indication of her failure to make new friends. She had come to conquer London, and despite her staid tweed suit, no one seemed to be clamoring for her. With pressure mounting to complete the arrangements for the musical score, Tim Rice became increasingly unavailable, and as he did, Madonna became increasingly lonely. With only three weeks left before she was to begin recording, she decided to summon Carlos Leon and her friend Ingrid Casares over to London.

In 1993, Madonna had been seeing her former husband, Sean Penn, Harvey Keitel, John Enos, a nightclub owner, and a minor pop star named Louie Louie. She had also been living with Ingrid Casares in her Hollywood home once owned by Bugsy Siegel, the character that her former boyfriend Warren Beatty had portrayed two years before in his film
Bugsy
. During the time she was with Casares, Madonna admitted to several close friends and even to an Italian journalist that she had finally “found true love at last.” Coy about identifying her perfect lover, she was nonetheless seen kissing Casares in several Hollywood restaurants. By the time Casares arrived in London, her place in Madonna’s life had settled into that of best friend, close confidante, and trusted business associate. Several years later, Madonna would invest in Liquid, a Miami nightclub, along with Casares and Chris Paciello, a Staten Island man, eventually linked to the Mafia and convicted of murder, who would ultimately end up in a witness protection program.

Carlos Leon, Cuban born and darkly handsome, first caught Madonna’s eye at a party in New York in 1993, several years before they actually met and began a relationship. Dan Cortesi, who worked for Madonna from 1992 until 1997 as her advance security person, claims that he was the one who arranged the first formal meeting between the singer and the fitness trainer. Cortesi, forty-two years old, small, with dark curly hair and kinetic gestures and expressions, talked about his experiences working for the star during an interview in New York on June 16, 2001. According to Cortesi, Madonna asked him to find out when Leon jogged through Central Park and make it his business to be there with a message that she wanted to talk to him. “Madonna met Carlos several years before,” Cortesi recalls, “but because of her schedule, she didn’t hook up with him until 1994 when they were both in New York.”

At the time, Carlos Leon worked at Crunch, a franchise of fitness training centers in Manhattan, and lived in his own apartment in the same building as his parents, at Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street, not far from Carmine’s restaurant. “Madonna knew that I couldn’t catch up to Carlos running because I was out of shape and Carlos has about 3 percent body fat, so she teased me and said that I should hop on one of those police carts if I had to, it didn’t matter how I did it, but I had to find him in Central Park,” Cortesi says.

Without the help of the police, Cortesi managed to catch up with Leon and give him the message that “a certain person would like to meet you later in the day at the merry-go-round in Central Park. . . . Carlos laughed,” Cortesi continues, “but he knew exactly who that person was.”

When Cortesi reported back to Madonna, he told her that the message had been delivered and that Carlos Leon would be waiting for her at the designated time at the prearranged place. “She came down to the park and the two of them sat by the merry-go-round alone,” Cortesi maintains, “while I waited behind a bench. They talked and laughed and at the end of the meeting, Carlos left and I called the car to come and pick Madonna up to drive her back to her apartment on Central Park West. When she got in the car with me, she told me that she liked him and wanted to see him again.”

Madonna invited Carlos to several parties, sports events, and show business functions. Not surprisingly, he was in awe of his new girlfriend and impressed by her world, but at the same time, he was intimidated to find himself mingling with people whose faces he had seen only on the screen or in the press. Despite having been thrown into a crowd that seemed slightly unreal to him, Carlos managed to maintain his equilibrium because he was extremely close to his family, who systematically reminded him that a relationship with an international star was to be viewed only as an ephemeral experience. At the same time, his mother was proud of her son and encouraged him to gain as much experience as he could that might further his aspirations as an actor.

It was no coincidence that Dan Cortesi felt an instant affinity with the young Cuban, since he also came from a modest family. Living in the Bronx and struggling to make a living, it didn’t take Cortesi long to discover that both he and Carlos were a couple of poor kids with “street smarts and street morals” who were allowed in for a look at how the rich and famous lived. While Cortesi knew that there was nothing permanent when it came to either his job or a love affair with Madonna, he became genuinely fond of Carlos and eventually protective of him. Developing more than just a kinship for his boss’s new love interest, Dan Cortesi felt that Leon understood, as he did, the inequities of life. “We were both poor boys, working kids, who were just waiting to make a score, surrounded by people who dropped enormous sums of money without batting an eye. But Carlos wasn’t taken in by all that stuff,” Cortesi relates. “Here was this kid, just a street kid, a trainer, and all of a sudden he was on the top of the world and he was scared. He used to come to me before an event and ask me who was going to be there, because basically he hated all those people who air-kissed each other.” Cortesi laughs. “And he hated all those little sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres they served but basically he felt comfortable around Madonna. I think he fell in love with her that first day, when he left the merry-go-round.”

The couple were together in New York for a brief few months before the relationship was put on hold once again when Madonna left for Los Angeles, and it wasn’t until several months later when she finally returned to New York that it resumed on a much more intimate and serious level. There was something extremely kind and sensitive in the way Madonna treated Leon during the first year they were together. She anticipated and understood how uncomfortable he may have felt in her opulent nine-room apartment on Central Park West and Sixty-fourth Street and therefore came to his small flat further uptown to spend the evening. Without exception, she left in the morning before the sun came up, slipping into the car that Cortesi had waiting for her to take her back to her flat. According to Cortesi and what Madonna told him during their early-morning, predawn rides together, one of the things she found so comforting about spending the night at Carlos’s was that it reminded her of the unpretentious atmosphere that she had left behind in Bay City so many years before. Perhaps it would have been more correct for Madonna to claim that she never really knew that kind of peace and quiet, since back in Bay City, she had been one of eight children, forced constantly to vie for the attention of her parents. Whether or not it became a game, stepping back into another world, Madonna apparently found it amusing and satisfying to spend time at her lover’s apartment and fool the paparazzi that hounded her every time she went out in public. In fact, when Dan Cortesi once parked his beat-up old Pinto, a car that he calls a “skashabonga,” in front of Madonna’s Central Park apartment, Madonna was so intrigued with the wreck that she instructed Cortesi to drive her in it to the Ninety-fifth Street apartment instead of in the usual Lincoln Town Car. “When Liz Rosenberg, Madonna’s manager, found out that we were riding around in my skashabonga,” Cortesi laughs, “she was furious. Here’s a woman who is aware of everything when it comes to Madonna every minute of the day and she was afraid that if we got into an accident in my car instead of in a car that had been leased by Maverick or Warner Brothers, the insurance wouldn’t cover her and Madonna could be sued for millions.”

Until Liz Rosenberg spoiled her fun, Madonna would love riding around in the Pinto with the garbage in the backseat, one windshield wiper, and a radio that worked only if it was slammed once to jostle it into sound.

From the moment Madonna returned to New York from Los Angeles and resumed her relationship with Carlos, Dan Cortesi was once again the person who carried messages between the couple and who drove her to Leon’s apartment. “Madonna met Carlos’s family about a week after she got back,” Cortesi says. “The first time she went there, she brought along Rosanna Arquette, one of her best friends, to show the Leon family that she had nice friends, too.”