Goddess: Inside Madonna (5 page)

On one occasion, a journalist from a local Buenos Aires newspaper was allowed to watch one of her tango lessons. After it was over, the reporter asked Madonna if she understood the words. “You can kill my wife, kill my woman, but don’t touch my mother or sister,” he translated before asking if she didn’t think they were misogynistic.

“Men danced the tango together while waiting for their turn in the brothels,” Madonna replied, repeating what she had read in one of her tour books. “So, you know, guys say things when they’re together and acting macho that they don’t necessarily mean.”

“Do you get the impression that this is a macho society?” the journalist pressed.

Like a true ambassador of goodwill, Madonna answered without hesitating, “Women in Argentina are treated well because Eva Perón was the champion of women’s rights, and that’s something I can relate to.”

“Eva Perón is often called a whore and an opportunist,” the journalist challenged the star.

“Either she was called a saint or a prostitute,” Madonna replied, “which is what I’m called by everyone, because of my name and because I’m in touch with my own sexuality. It’s the obvious way to put a woman down, to call her a whore and imply that she has no morals and no integrity and no talent. And God knows, I can relate to that, too.”

Days later, when asked his impressions of Madonna, the journalist thought for a moment before saying, “She is fascinating because she is so self-involved. Everything is ‘me’ or ‘I’ or whatever she can ‘relate to’ based on her own life. In mind and soul, she embodies Eva Perón!”

T
hough Madonna was confident about her creative ability to master the role of Eva Perón and felt at ease with the religious, mystical, and astrological symbolism in Buenos Aires, she had difficulty grasping the fundamental differences between Argentina and other Spanish-speaking countries. Based on her penchant for Puerto Rican and Cuban lovers and her instinctive gravitation toward anything that was Latin, she thought that she understood the mentality and culture of the Argentine people. For Madonna, Argentina was like any other country with strong Spanish roots where life is somehow more relaxed and love is seen as raw sexual fantasy. Madonna didn’t understand that despite the similarity of language, Argentina is a country steeped in European culture, a blend of puritanism and sophistication. In fact, the ongoing joke around BA, or Buenos Aires, is that a
porteño
, or a native of Buenos Aires, is someone who “dressed French, talked Italian, and thought British.” Her inability to grasp the cultural disparities was a result of her ignorance of certain historical facts that had made a large segment of the population so violently opposed to Juan and Eva Perón. At that time, Buenos Aires was a class-conscious society where social and political acceptance depended on one’s being a member of one of the ten top families. The former first lady came from the lower class, the illegitimate and often neglected child of an impoverished servant and a married man. Not surprisingly, she had spent her entire life striving to be accepted by Argentine society. Madonna, the middle-class girl from Middle America, set out to shock the establishment. If Madonna passed herself off as the “poor girl made good,” Evita obliterated the seedy side of her early life. Some lyrics and phrases in the film conjure up images of the life and times of Madonna, or more precisely, the hardships she has invented for her public. Both she and Evita understood how to seduce and overwhelm their public to win international acclaim and approval.

According to a well-known writer in Buenos Aires, once Juan and Eva Perón broke down those social boundaries that had created an ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor, they set a new standard of acceptability in which anyone could succeed. “I explained to Madonna,” the writer said, “that because of their climb to the top, they became an enemy of the aristocracy.”

The writer was amazed when Madonna interpreted the lesson as further proof that she and Evita were heroes of the downtrodden. She was delighted that two people from the “wrong side of the tracks” had “made good” and gone on to take over the country. “She absolutely identified with Eva Perón,” the writer goes on, “because she considered that she had also succeeded against the same odds.” As they were about to part, Madonna thanked the writer for “making things so clear” and left him with the following words: “What you’re really saying is that the Argentine people found out that all you had to be was bigger, bolder, and smarter than the rest to get to the top.” In America, perhaps. In Argentina, never!

Marikena Monti is an Argentine singer who is often compared to Edith Piaf. She also met Madonna and recalls a conversation they had that left her with the impression that the star had become so obsessed by Evita that she refused to see the subtext of the city, which still included an awareness of a black period in the country’s history. “I tried to explain that we do hideous things to each other here in Argentina,” Monti begins. “We sleep with each other’s husbands and wives, kill each other’s children, and it’s business as usual. And, I tried to tell her within the context of the Perón era and, later on, the tragedy of the Dirty War, when thousands of Argentines simply disappeared. I also tried to explain my pessimism about the economy and the future of the arts under Menem’s regime.”

According to Monti, she told Madonna that there had once been an important intellectual movement in Buenos Aires, when she would sing about issues and humanity. “With the situation in the country today,” Monti continues, “I told her it was hard for me to sing about the privatization of the phone company.” Madonna’s response was predictable when she replied, “I sing about sex, and that’s always in style whether it’s private or public.”

Andrés di Tella is an Argentine filmmaker who had won an award, the equivalent of an American Emmy, for his film about left-wing Peronism. At the time Madonna was in Buenos Aires, di Tella was making a film about the early days of Argentine radio and television. “While I was filming my documentary,” di Tella explained, “the people I spoke to in radio who knew Evita went on about how wonderful she was. The minute I turned off the camera, they revealed horrible details about her. People were terrified of saying anything against her. Even now, no one wants to speak ill of her in public, so she can’t be dealt with as a human being. Unfortunately, Madonna will just keep the myth alive.”

If Madonna was perceived by some to be the incarnation of religious blasphemy and sexual abandon, many intellectuals believed that Buenos Aires had a past that rivaled her own in terms of immorality. Alicia Sternberg, a well-known feminist writer, was one of those who stood up for Madonna. In several press interviews concerning Carlos Menem’s refusal to allow Madonna to sing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, she accused the president of hypocrisy, since he had recently pardoned the leader of the military junta who had organized the Dirty War in the 1970s.

“How bad is Madonna compared to that monster General Videla,” Sternberg asked, “who now jogs freely around the streets of Buenos Aires?”

Elsa Osario, another outspoken journalist and writer whose screen credits include
The Tango Lesson
and
There Are No Men Left
, directed by Alberto Fischerman, also came to Madonna’s defense or, more accurately, used the debate to further criticize President Menem. “With his pardon of the generals and his whitewash of everything that happened during that period in our country’s history,” Osario claimed, “the president gives society permission to forget. People develop antibodies to defend themselves until the whole country suffers from amnesia.”

One of the most erudite and cultured women in Buenos Aires claimed that Madonna, thrust into a strange and foreign environment, simply had little or no frame of reference to keep up her end of a conversation.

“Most of the people who came to my parties,” she explained, “were international, rich, and not particularly impressed with anyone. I felt sorry for Madonna, because she was obviously in way over her head and painfully aware that she was limited. Most of the time, she nodded and pretended to understand and that was fine, but when she asked a question or decided to express an opinion, it was off the subject, irrelevant, banal, and embarrassing for everyone. It seemed as if the only time she felt comfortable was when she discussed sex or the impact that Eva Perón had on the country from a sensual point of view.”

The same woman recalls how shocked Madonna was when she saw that Argentines kissed friends and even strangers upon meeting them instead of shaking hands. “She told me she was afraid of catching germs and not being able to perform.” The woman laughed. “And yet, during a dinner party I gave to welcome her to our country, she slipped into one of the bedrooms and was caught necking with one of the most notorious playboys in Buenos Aires!” As she was leaving with the man in question, Madonna asked her hostess whether his claim of being close to President Menem was true.

José Camaro, a close friend
of Carlos Menem’s, was on leave from a diplomatic post in Europe and was visiting Buenos Aires at the same time that Madonna was on her mission of goodwill. President Menem took advantage of the coincidence by instructing his friend to find out what Madonna’s impressions were of Buenos Aires and of Eva Perón. Camaro was delighted to oblige, not only because he was loyal to Menem, but also because it would give him the opportunity to meet the woman whom he considered to be his sexual equal. Tall and dark with a dramatic shock of white hair, Camaro was a minor literary figure in Argentina and had written a roman à clef that had angered many of his closest friends and political colleagues. Camaro was the butt of jokes around European publishing circles since he made a point of telling everybody that, back home, people considered him to be the “Marcel Proust of Argentina.”

In addition to his literary pretensions, Camaro had also acquired quite a reputation for himself as the typical Latin lover. According to several attractive and very married European hostesses who had succumbed to his charms, after the lovemaking was over, he would play an air guitar and serenade them with melodious tango songs. One former mistress who was treated to a medley of his make-believe strumming and passionate singing said of his postcoital behavior, “He was a parody of the Latin lover. In fact, after I saw
Evita
, it occurred to me that he could have played the part of that second-rate tango singer in the film better than the actor.” She was referring, of course, to the part of Maguldi, the man who served as the young Eva Perón’s ticket out of the small-town barrio where she was born, played by Jimmy Nail in the film.

Long after Madonna left Argentina and the film was already in theaters throughout the world, Camaro wrote a novella in which he described in lurid detail one torrid night that his protagonist, a man considered to be the best lover in the world, shared with an American movie star, a woman who was reputed to be the high priestess of sensuality. Although the names and places were changed, the book was never published.

Buenos Aires was a candy store stocked with her perfect physical type, the dusky, taut, romantic Latin lover who could dance the tango and talk about Eva Perón, one of the positive aspects of her visit.

Several days after Madonna had transformed herself into Eva Perón, Camaro arrived at her hotel suite for lunch. Approaching the star and kissing her hand, he took a step back and clutched his heart. The resemblance to Eva Perón was astounding. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It was as if she were there in the flesh, alive and breathing. For him, he confessed, time had stopped. Madonna couldn’t have been more flattered. Seated opposite her in the large living room of the suite, Camaro repeated, in case she had forgotten, that he was “working on the president” to allow the film to be shot on location in Buenos Aires. “You must be patient,” he said.

“How patient?” Madonna asked.

“We may have to spend a few weeks together,” he said suggestively.

This time, in response, Madonna sat forward on the sofa and looked directly into his eyes. “Look, José,” she said evenly, “I want to have a good time while I’m here. I like Buenos Aires, and you look like someone who could make life interesting. But I didn’t come all the way down to this godforsaken place to go back to England and record
Evita
on a soundstage.”

Confident in his ability to seduce any woman in the world and very aware that he had what she wanted, a direct line to Carlos Menem, Camaro did not seem troubled by Madonna’s ultimatum. Instead, he suggested that an interesting afternoon outing for the star would be a visit to the cemetery where Eva Perón was buried. From the moment Madonna arrived in Buenos Aires, she had been trying to organize a visit to La Recoleta, the famous cemetery in the heart of the city. The press had been hounding her to the extent that every excursion involved elaborate plans that included a decoy car and roundabout routes. Madonna decided her assistant, Caresse Henry-Norman, would ride in the star’s usual car, wearing a scarf and sunglasses, while Madonna would actually be lying on the floor of Camaro’s car, leaving the hotel thirty minutes earlier. The idea was that the press would follow Caresse Henry-Norman as she made her way to the cemetery while Madonna would already have arrived, free to spend a few solitary minutes at Evita’s tomb. With José Camaro at the wheel, they set out for La Recoleta undisturbed by motorcycles or screeching cars filled with paparazzi. When they arrived, Madonna claimed that she had “stepped into another world.”

The cemetery, an unusual community of dead people, is a collection of miniature Gothic-style marble mansions, each one more ornate than the next, decorated with statues, religious paintings, and photographs of their departed occupants. Every year thousands of people from all over the world visit the Duarte mausoleum where Evita is buried, more than come to pay homage to Marilyn Monroe in Westwood Memorial Park or to Edith Piaf’s grave at Père Lachaise in Paris. As Madonna approached the pink marble mausoleum of the Duarte family, wild cats scurried in between the alleyways, whimpering or howling as they searched for food.