Goddess: Inside Madonna (3 page)

According to Cortesi, one of Madonna’s greatest pleasures was to sit around Maria and Armando’s kitchen table and drink the rich Cuban espresso that Carlos’s mother made. “One thing I really liked about the family,” Cortesi continues, “is that they didn’t blink, they took Madonna as just another person, a friend of their son, which made Madonna very comfortable.”

While Maria Leon may have felt at ease around Madonna, she was less comfortable that her son was in love with a woman whose reputation preceded her, as far as her inability to make a commitment to one man and nurture a relationship that would last forever. Maria Leon made it very clear to Madonna that Carlos was her “baby,” and her major concern was not Madonna’s stardom but rather that she would treat her younger son properly so that he wouldn’t end up hurt and disillusioned. “The mother told Madonna that her son was a very sensitive person,” Cortesi says, “and she made it very clear that her first concern was that her baby wouldn’t get hurt.”

Madonna was attracted to Leon for all the obvious reasons but she was also touched by his innocence and sense of morality and the fact that he wanted to remain a simple person without any particular ambitions to further his own life or career. Yet, Madonna, hyperintuitive and forced to be aware of hidden meanings and unspoken goals even when it came to her closest confidants, was also someone who was attuned to the slightest change in a person based on a word, an expression, or a gesture. It was because of her highly developed sense of survival and her determination to protect herself that Madonna became wary of Carlos’s motives. The incident that introduced a certain mistrust into the relationship occurred one night when Madonna asked Carlos a question and apparently got what she considered to be an unsatisfactory reply. “I remember we were together once,” Cortesi recalls, “and Madonna asked Carlos, sort of in a joking way, so now that you’re going out with me, what happens if you become a big star, will I have to kiss your ass?” According to Cortesi, Carlos Leon’s reply put Madonna on her guard. “He told her not to worry, if he ever became a big star, she shouldn’t worry about having to kiss his ass.”

It was then, again according to Cortesi, that Madonna began enlisting him to follow Carlos and find out all there was to know about his activities when she wasn’t around, whether or not he was setting up auditions for himself or if he was talking to photographers or journalists in an effort to further his own career. “Everyone knew he wanted to be an actor,” Cortesi continues. “It was no secret, so it wasn’t so much that Madonna was jealous of other women,” Cortesi continues, “as it was that she just wanted to know everything he did or said to other people. In fact, if anyone was jealous during the relationship, it was Carlos.”

Despite Madonna’s sporadic misgivings about Carlos and the fact that he was often ill at ease around her friends, the relationship flourished. As the couple saw each other more frequently and it became obvious to everyone close to Madonna that she was becoming more involved and attached to Leon, those same people who had functioned as the singer’s closest friends and business associates felt threatened by the Cuban trainer’s influence on her. “Madonna had two weak spots back then,” Cortesi claims, “having a baby and finding someone who would function as her mother and she viewed Liz Rosenberg as a mother figure.”

Rosenberg, who is called the “validator” by the millions of members of Madonna’s fan club and who is the woman in charge of every aspect of Madonna’s personal and professional life, is about ten years older than the star, married to her second husband and the mother of three children: a son from a former marriage, a daughter from her current husband, and a second daughter whom she and her husband adopted. While there was certainly cause to assume that Madonna was in love with Leon, Liz Rosenberg need not have worried that her illustrious client and close friend was about to change her habits or relinquish her way of life for one that would exclude the coterie of people who surrounded and advised her. Even while Madonna and Carlos were at the height of their love affair, according to Cortesi, she still found time to send her advance security man out with other messages for other men. “One night after Carlos and Madonna went to a Knicks game,” Cortesi reports, “she told me to take Carlos home and get in touch with Sam Cassals and bring him to her apartment.” Cortesi laughs. “To avoid the paparazzi, I picked up Cassals in the skashabonga and brought him back to the Central Park West apartment. Madonna was obsessed with him.”

If Carlos Leon was aware that Madonna was sporadically involved with other men, he was smart enough never to confront her. He made no secret of the fact, however, that Ingrid Casares’s constant presence at Madonna’s apartment annoyed him. There was one particular incident that upset Leon more than others and that happened during the Fashion Music Awards in 1994 in New York at the Twenty-third Street Armory. On that evening, Ingrid as usual went along with Madonna and Carlos, as did Chris Paciello, Casares’s business partner. When their chauffeured Mercedes pulled up in front of the armory, Liz Rosenberg met them and immediately arranged for Carlos to take his seat in the audience. It was a good thing she did, because within minutes after Carlos left, Sean Penn, accompanied by John Enos, was waiting backstage for Madonna. In the presence of the others, Sean hugged and kissed Madonna and informed her that he would be giving her the award for the most fashionable woman of the year. According to Dan Cortesi, Liz Rosenberg was beside herself with worry that the press or the paparazzi would manage to slip in unnoticed backstage and take photographs of Madonna and Sean with Ingrid and John Enos. Carlos, who was in the audience, was forced to sit quietly while he watched Madonna’s former husband, Sean Penn, present the award to Madonna. Instead of going out after the event, Leon announced that he was tired and wanted to go home. “Afterwards,” Cortesi maintains, “I drove Madonna to the St. Regis, where she met Sean in the bar. She told me she would call me when she was ready to leave. Two hours later, I picked her up. For some reason, Carlos sensed that she was with Sean because he called me while I was waiting for her and wanted to know why I was still on duty. His excuse for calling was to find out what time I would be picking him up to take him to the Cirque du Soleil with Madonna in the Village the next day.”

Shortly before Madonna signed the contract to star as Evita in Alan Parker’s film, the idea of having a baby with Carlos was paramount on her agenda. According to Cortesi, she consulted Dr. Stanley T. West, a reproductive endocrinologist who had offices on the Upper East Side and in lower Manhattan. “The first time Madonna went there, I took her to Dr. West’s office uptown,” Cortesi maintains. “Another time I picked Carlos up at his apartment and took him down to West’s downtown office. He was carrying a small cup and at first I thought it was a urine specimen but he told me it was sperm. He didn’t want to do what he had to do in the doctor’s office and instead did it at home, which meant he only had a little over an hour to get the sperm to the office. One of the times that I took him when he was carrying a cup, Madonna was waiting for him at the doctor’s office.”

After Madonna signed the contract
for
Evita
, she went to London regularly for voice lessons and Carlos visited her there several times. By the time she was preparing to record the score, before the actual shooting of the movie would begin, she had not yet gotten pregnant, although she and Carlos had been together for more than fourteen months. During Carlos’s visits to Madonna, she had once again foisted Ingrid Casares on him. As far as Madonna was concerned, it was the perfect threesome, although she made it clear to Leon and Casares that though they would be welcome for the three consecutive weekends, she wanted them out of London during the week. Her reason was strictly professional, she explained, since she needed time alone to concentrate and prepare herself emotionally for her part.

Each weekend the routine was basically the same. While Carlos Leon and Madonna spent hours together in the star’s suite or in the hotel gym, Casares spent most of her time on the phone, trying to wrangle invitations to various high-profile parties. Not surprisingly, she had less success than Tim Rice. When she bundled her friends back to the States, Madonna’s social life got more active. On several occasions, she would enlist her publicist to arrange dinners with certain English actors or rock stars who appealed to her. Hugh Grant accepted a dinner invitation only to back out at the last minute and stand her up without any explanation. Another arranged date that didn’t work out was with the sexy but bizarre rock singer Henry Rollins. Then Madonna decided that the actor Rufus Sewell was even more attractive. Sewell, one of the few men she pursued without an intermediary, was starring in the British theater production of
Rat in the Skull
at the Duke of York theater. Slipping into the audience just before curtain, Madonna went backstage during intermission to invite Sewell to dinner at Le Caprice, a well-known London bistro. Sewell accepted Madonna’s invitation, although before dessert was served, he ducked out to meet his regular girlfriend. Later the actor offered an explanation for his sudden departure by saying that he had always been extremely uncomfortable with people like Madonna and with all the other beautiful people because he mistrusted their intentions. According to Sewell, he never got over the fact that he was a chubby teen. With Sewell out of the picture, Madonna set her sights on Antonio Banderas, who immediately summoned his new wife, Melanie Griffith, to London. Apparently, Griffith thought that Madonna presented enough of a threat that she rearranged her schedule and remained on location with Banderas in England, Argentina, and Hungary.

Madonna had better luck with Tim Willocks, a British writer whom she met at a dinner in her honor at the home of Julie Baumgold, the wife of the editor of
Esquire
magazine. Willocks, a psychiatrist by training and a lapsed Catholic, was the author of
Green River Rising
, a book that was being favorably compared to
Silence of the Lambs
. Willocks made the mistake of talking to the press. His mother even made statements about how optimistic she was that the relationship between her son and the pop star would endure. Not surprisingly, Madonna soon tired of him, although she kept in touch after the affair was over. She expressed interest in optioning his book for a movie to play Juliet Devlin, the only female character.

Madonna’s preoccupation with her social life ended when the time came to settle down to work. From that point on, there were no more late-night dinners with randy Englishmen, no more Marlboro Lights or the occasional martini, and no more weekend visits with friends she imported from the States. The tweed suit went back into the closet, and Madonna began her transformation into Evita.

D
uring the four grueling weeks that the principal members of the
Evita
cast were working on the score, Alan Parker still hadn’t received permission from Carlos Menem, the president of Argentina, to film certain key scenes on location in Buenos Aires. But if time was running out for the director, the timing could not have been worse for President Menem.

The summer heat usually slowed down the Buenos Aires press. In November and December 1995, however, it had little effect on the collective hysteria that gripped the city. Several ambitious journalists had written a series of articles about the president’s extramarital affairs, sexual escapades, and political blunders. The latest story to capture public attention was that Carlos Menem had forcibly evicted his naked wife from the Casa Rosada after her lawyers had served him with divorce papers. Even more damaging were reports about Menem’s alleged involvement in a narco-dollar scandal that implicated his sister and brother-in-law in laundering Colombian drug money through Argentine banks and pocketing a large commission for their trouble. Immediately following that story was yet another revelation. One of Menem’s closest advisers had allegedly been selling twenty-five tons of contaminated milk to supermarkets throughout the country, resulting in the deaths of dozens of babies and elderly people.

Though the Argentines always enjoyed a good scandal, the real reason for the attacks on Menem during those lazy summer months was that inflation was at its highest point in a decade with unemployment levels reaching double digits. Given the general political and economic climate throughout Argentina, and the fact that the people had not yet recovered from the humiliating defeat the country had suffered at the hands of the British during the Falklands War, the last thing Menem wanted was to be pressured by a British director who intended to descend upon the Argentine capital with an English film crew to make a movie about a woman whom the people still considered to be a national treasure. Despite all the promises that Alan Parker had made about how his film would portray Evita in a favorable light, the Argentine president feared it would be the same as the stage productions. As usual, Eva Perón would be seen as a woman who had slept her way to the top of Argentine society and, once there, had looted the coffers of the poor to further her own narcissistic desires. Even if he was inclined to take a chance, when news of the project had been leaked in the Argentine press, the anti-Madonna sentiment was so violent that Menem was afraid to antagonize his constituents further, particularly Evita’s most ardent supporters. The hysteria concerning Eva Perón was not a new phenomenon. In the two years following her death, the Vatican had received more than forty thousand letters attesting to various “miracles” that she had performed during her life and urging the pope to declare her a saint. Tomas Eloy Martínez, the Argentine writer, recalled in his best-seller,
Santa Evita
, that in the villages near where he’d grown up people still believed that Evita was an emissary of God, and local peasants continued to see her face in the clouds.

On the day that Madonna
was scheduled to record the title song, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” in the West End studios, the Evita hysteria in Buenos Aires reached an emotional peak. Clara Marin, one of Evita’s former secretaries, threatened the star in front of a group of reporters gathered at a protest site near the Casa Rosada. “We want Madonna dead or alive,” Marin screamed through a bullhorn. “If she comes here to [Argentina], then I will kill her. . . . Evita is our mother, our flag, our motherland.” That evening, the front-page headline in the country’s leading newspaper,
Clarín
, read, “Evita Lives! Madonna, Out!”