Read Goddess: Inside Madonna Online

Authors: Barbara Victor

Tags: #Singer, #Music, #Nonfiction, #Biography & Autobiography, #Madonna, #Retail

Goddess: Inside Madonna (6 page)

Camaro read the words out loud that were etched in the marble: Rest in Peace. The irony was that it had taken nearly two decades after her death for the former first lady to actually rest in peace, since her body went missing for all those years before it was finally found in Spain and returned to Buenos Aires. Madonna listened with rapt attention as Camaro explained that a lot of people had lost their lives over that incident. Sadly, he added, it was all over now, the mass hysteria, demagoguery, and with it, perhaps, the glamour that had all but disappeared with that tumultuous era in Argentine history.

As Madonna bent down to place a bouquet of violets at the entrance of the mausoleum, she noticed another epitaph etched in stone: Don’t Cry for Me Argentina. “That must bring a flicker of memory,” she said wistfully, “or maybe even a tear.”

While Madonna was wandering around the Gothic ruins of La Recoleta, Caresse Henry-Norman, as planned, was seated in the back of the star’s car. On the way to the cemetery, two teenagers who had been hired by several paparazzi threw themselves in front of the decoy car, forcing it to come to a screeching halt. The hope was that “Madonna” would jump out to see if anyone had been injured, whereupon the photographers would be able to take their daily quota of pictures. Everything went as planned except that when Madonna’s assistant jumped out of the car, the paparazzi realized that they had been fooled. Madonna had successfully eluded them. They were furious. By then, a crowd had gathered. While the press yelled insults at Caresse, the bystanders began pushing and shoving to get closer to the car. Finally, the chauffeur somehow managed to get the terrified woman bundled into the backseat so he could head to the safety of the hotel. They never made it. En route, they were stopped by the police and charged with leaving the scene of a hit-and-run accident. Within minutes, Caresse and the driver were in custody and on their way to jail. Several hours later, after Madonna was already back at the hotel, she learned through one of her bodyguards what had happened. Fortunately, he had contacts within the police department and was able to arrange things so that the pair were released. Madonna was outraged that the security detail of the regular police force who were in charge of keeping her and her entourage safe had made such a potentially life-threatening mistake. In response to a furious phone call that she made to the minister of police, two officials arrived at the hotel. In her diary that appeared in
Vanity Fair
, Madonna described her meeting with the two officials. “We discussed Peronism,” she wrote, “and of course Evita and how her enemies were divided into two camps, the aristocracy and the Communists.”

After several more minutes of abstract political discussion, one of the men explained to Madonna that while he was not a Peronist, he nonetheless admired Evita for what she done for the country. “And then,” Madonna recounted in her diary, “he said the most amazing thing. He said that people were angry with Evita in her day for the same reason they are angry with me today, because we are both women with power.”

For Madonna, it was just another sign that both she and Eva Perón were victims of men who could deal with powerful women only by discrediting them. As Madonna became more familiar with Eva Perón’s effect on men, she even concluded that the lyrics and music as well as the story line in Parker’s film wrongly portrayed her as a whore who had slept her way to the top. At one point, in one of their weekly phone conversations, she even suggested to Parker that “the implication in the musical was a male chauvinist point of view and absolutely ludicrous.” Parker didn’t bother to argue. He had more serious concerns than worrying about his star’s analysis of Evita’s character.

When Madonna turned on the television that evening, there were images of Eva Perón ministering to the poor during her political heyday, juxtaposed with clips of Madonna in some of her more raunchy videos. Hugo Rodríguez Cananilla of the Eva Perón Foundation, one of the most vocal opponents of Alan Parker’s
Evita
and of Madonna in particular, had come up with the idea to draw those negative visual comparisons.

Furious, Madonna called the leading newspaper and told them she wanted to make a statement. Consuela Stamos, a young reporter who was fluent in English, took the call. Madonna began by saying that the reaction of the Argentine people had “hurt her deeply.” “Form your opinions after you have seen the movie,” she said. “I am full of admiration for her. She came from nothing and ended up with enormous influence over the country.”

Stamos took everything down and then asked Madonna why she thought it would be a good idea for President Menem to allow the film to be shot on location in Buenos Aires. “For one thing,” Madonna replied, “it would stimulate the economy.” Gathering momentum, she asked rhetorically, “Why do you think I can’t sleep at night? Because all my fans are in the street screaming for me. What do they care about not sleeping? They’re unemployed so they don’t have to get up in the morning.”

Stamos feigned sympathy. “Look, with all the unemployment,” the star continued, “the people should be grateful that a big movie company comes to Buenos Aires and offers hundreds of them jobs as extras. It’s more than they have now, thirty dollars a day plus lunch.” On that note, the interview was over.

When Madonna had calmed down and thought about what she had said, she summoned her bodyguard, a gentle blond giant of German extraction named Hans. One of the more amusing scenes around Buenos Aires was Hans scurrying after Madonna as she went sight-seeing or shopped, holding her small Evita box handbag daintily between his enormous hands. Madonna now wanted Hans to contact the newspaper and, in Spanish, prevail upon the reporter not to print the piece. “Explain that I was stressed-out and exhausted,” she pleaded.

It was too late. The following day,
Clarín
published an exclusive three-paragraph interview with the star that did little to further her cause in Buenos Aires.

The next day another member of the Eva Perón Foundation issued a statement to the press: “. . . the wife of the former Argentinian leader should not be played by a woman named after the mother of Christ who has appeared in rock concerts in skimpy outfits, singing of lust.” That evening, Madonna fired her bodyguard.

Despite all Madonna’s efforts to seduce the people of Argentina, negative opinion only escalated. Marta Rivadera, a deputy in Congress from Menem’s hometown province of La Rioja, went so far as to propose a decree declaring Madonna and Alan Parker personae non grata. The next time Madonna spoke to Parker, she referred to the phrase used by Rivadera, saying that it was just another way of calling them “dirty rotten scum.” One wonders if Parker had ever heard that expression translated from the Latin in quite that way.

chapter four

S
till with no firm appointment with the president, Madonna was rightfully apprehensive when, on February 1, she met Alan Parker and Antonio Banderas at the airport in Buenos Aires. Parker had decided he would make the trip anyway to save time if things worked out, and to check out locations as well as to see if he could do anything to make things happen. As planned, Madonna whisked the director and costar directly to a cocktail party at a foreign embassy. There, they received a message from one of the president’s aides that Menem would meet Madonna on February 7.

For the next week, she read everything that she could find in English about Menem. One of the things that impressed her was that he fashioned himself “a man of the people,” a passionate yet vulnerable leader who believed that he was the quintessential example of what he called the New World “caudillo,” a first-generation Argentine who had made a success of himself. It was yet another mystical sign. She saw amazing similarities between Carlos Menem and her own father. While the Argentinian president’s family had immigrated from Syria without money or family contacts, Silvio “Tony” Ciccone was a first-generation American of Italian descent whose parents had sailed from Europe to America without any resources. Like Menem, Tony Ciccone had succeeded far beyond the dreams of his immigrant parents.

The day of the meeting finally arrived. Dinner with the president was to take place on a remote island in the middle of the El Tigre River, accessible only by helicopter or boat. This was the house at which he conducted high-level political meetings. The arrangements to get Madonna to the island were straight out of a James Bond movie. Two secret service agents in charge of delivering her to Menem brought her down the servants’ elevator of the hotel and smuggled her out through the kitchen and into an unmarked government car. Instructed to lie on the floor of the backseat until they had cleared the busy downtown area, she was finally allowed to sit up only when the car was speeding down the highway. When they arrived at a small military airport on the outskirts of the city, they were waved through the gates and directed onto the tarmac. There, the car stopped near a helicopter, rotary blades whirring in the soft summer breeze. Without a word, the star followed her two minders out of the car and aboard the craft.

After a trip lasting forty minutes, most of it over water, Madonna discerned from the window of the helicopter a small patch of earth in the middle of El Tigre on which were clusters of pine trees. As the helicopter began its descent, she noticed a small concrete landing pad right in the middle of an expansive manicured lawn. Approaching its mark, swaying slowly in the breeze, the helicopter set down four minutes later and approximately ten meters from a sprawling stone house, trimmed in white, with flowers lining the large bay windows on the first floor. After one of the secret service agents jumped from the craft, a uniformed guard rolled a staircase up to the door of the helicopter and Madonna, holding tightly to the arm of the other official, exited. The noise was deafening. Madonna, dressed in a long evening gown and mink wrap, was hunched over against the wind that whipped around her. Walking quickly away from the craft and barely daring to look around, she followed her minders into the house.

Paintings of somebody’s ancestors, surely not Menem’s, adorned the walls of the marble foyer under which were two dark mahogany buffets on either wall. An enormous crystal chandelier, each crystal arm holding a candle, bathed the entrance in a soft, flickering light. A small, dark-haired woman, stern and austere in her dress and demeanor, greeted Madonna formally. The star immediately felt intimidated, as if she were already being judged based on her reputation. In reality, the woman, who would serve as the translator, was herself overwhelmed and nervous in anticipation of meeting someone she would later describe as “notorious.” Her first impression of Madonna, she would also relate after the visit, was shock at the “uncanny” resemblance that the star had to Eva Perón. Without any further conversation, the interpreter gestured toward a set of French doors, mirrored on one side with dark wood on the other, and indicated that Madonna should follow her into the dining room. More wood paneling covered the walls, and a long, rectangular table stood in the center of the room, on which was an exquisite arrangement of blue and white flowers, the colors of Menem’s Peronist Party, set on an embroidered, pale blue tablecloth. Three place settings had several crystal glasses at each, with rows of silver forks and knives on either side of gold-trimmed plates.

For several days prior to the meeting, Carlos Menem had been recovering from his third hair-transplant procedure. With his orange-hewed skin from years of using cheap tanning lotion, he resembled a seedy lothario more than a venerable head of state. Nonetheless, Carlos Menem had gone to great lengths to make sure that the evening would be memorable. One of his close aides recalled that
el presidente
was “more nervous than when he had received the pope.” Yet, despite any trepidation he might have had, Menem, not unlike his illustrious guest, used sex as the most efficient way to communicate and control. Famous for his well-planned seduction scenes, when he wasn’t actively courting a female minister, secretary, or movie star, he created an atmosphere of sexual innuendo that was designed to destabilize his visitors.

Madonna wasn’t feeling very well either. From the time she had arrived in the Argentine capital, she had been suffering from a lack of sleep as well as lingering stomach problems and nausea that she attributed to a diet different from her usual fare of vegetables and grains. Despite her physical problems, she looked stunning, a tribute to her doppelgänger. She was determined to succeed at what she considered to be the most important sale of her life. Aware that her reputation was more Fanny Hill than Harold Hill, the super-salesman from the 1960s musical comedy
The Music Man
, Madonna was determined to emulate the latter and downplay the former.

The president made his entrance into the dining room. If anyone had forgotten to tell Madonna that the head of the Argentine government measured only five feet two inches tall, she concealed her surprise. After shaking her hand and glancing over her body from head to toe, he said in Spanish, “There are serious problems today in Argentina, and I feel a duty to my people to protect the memory of our sainted Evita.”

Despite her nervousness, Madonna rushed to respond: “I understand completely, because I have the same kind of responsibility to my fans.” She hesitated only for a moment after she noticed a bewildered expression cross Menem’s face. “You see, like Evita, my public loves me, because they can relate to my beginnings. I, too, come from nothing, and like Evita, I also had my heart broken at a young age when my mother died.”

The comparison was not one that the president was prepared to draw, that of a woman revered as a martyr with a performer who had consistently denigrated the Catholic Church by displaying her every sexual fantasy. Smiling his typically enigmatic smile, Menem did not respond. Instead, he gestured to the table, indicating that dinner was served, but not before he gently brushed Madonna’s cheek with his forefinger.

Throughout the meal, Carlos Menem maintained relentless eye contact with Madonna, glancing away only once when he focused on her bra strap, which had slipped out of her dress. As they ate the first course, Madonna considered it her God-given responsibility to fill the heavy silence. She began explaining how close she felt to Evita, how connected to her she was in so many ways. As the translator spoke rapidly in Spanish, the president nodded, encouraging Madonna to go on. She recounted the story of her own life and the death of her mother when she was only a child, a loss that had made her determined, like Eva Perón, never to need anyone else ever again. To her credit, Madonna probably knew more details about Eva Perón’s life than Menem.

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