Nights were the worst. Always a restless sleeper, Madonna could only sleep if Albright rubbed her forehead or stroked her hair. Even then the singer, who has persistent nightmares about death, was not at peace, her eyes beneath the closed eyelids flickering in constant agitation. ‘She was a mess,’ her former lover states categorically. ‘It was the darkest time in her career. She was haunted by the criticism. My role was as a supporter, to take the pressure off her and constantly reassure her that what she was doing was right, and not to let the negative energy from the media and others affect her. She is a very, very sensitive and insecure person and I just had to let her know that she was a great entertainer, one of the most famous people in the world, and there was a price to be paid for that.’
Madonna was concerned about more than bad reviews, however, although Albright didn’t know it at the time. While he was comforting her, she kept to herself the reaction of one of the participants in the book, Vanilla Ice. Still under the impression, not yet confounded by her, that they had a relationship, the rapper was furious when he found out that she had plastered his face – and much else – all over her book without having the courtesy to ask his permission or, for that matter, considering the consequences to his own career.
Vanilla Ice, who beat his drug habit and is now a born-again Christian, remembers how he very ostentatiously burned the signed copy of Sex she sent him. ‘I was so displeased that she put me in this whole slutty package. That was the end for me and her. When she rang I told her that the book belittled and embarrassed me. People looked at me as though I was this big slut and I got bad headlines for it.’ What saddened him as much as anything was that by publishing the book, the Madonna he had come to know was demeaning and degrading herself. ‘I knew her,’ he observes sadly, ‘and what she was portraying was phony, it was fake. She was not this slut at all. She seemed to be doing it just for the money.’
Even as Vanilla Ice and Madonna went their separate ways, Jim Albright too was beginning to see the flip side of his girlfriend. It was not a view he much liked. While they both wanted children, the details seemed to keep getting in the way. There was the thorny issue of a possible pre-nuptial agreement. Madonna was adamant that they draw one up, but Albright argued that as he was not, and would never be, financially dependent on her, there was no need. Nor was he keen on her idea of employing a nanny, believing that they should bring up any children they might have themselves. At the same time there were stories swirling around the mass media that Madonna had contracted AIDS, rumors officially and categorically denied by Liz Rosenberg.
Nonetheless, it must have had the effect of creating further uncertainty in Albright’s mind, especially as he knew that she had had many sexual partners over the years. Even though she seemed anxious to conceive he continued to practice protected sex, his concerns only eased when Madonna received a clean bill of health after taking the obligatory medical prior to starting work on the film Body of Evidence in the summer of 1982.
These differences merely exposed more fundamental issues. Although they had been together for some months, Albright found himself frustrated that their relationship seemed to be a one-way street. He lived constantly on ‘Madonna time,’ his whole world shaped around her strictly organized regime with its rigid timetables, always reassuring her and bolstering her battered ego, rarely having the time to enjoy a normal relationship. With the furor surrounding Sex in the fall of 1992, and the critical savaging her erotic thriller Body of Evidence received when it was released the following January, he felt that Madonna had neither the time nor the emotional strength to prepare for motherhood.
Albright felt, too, a growing sense of distrust not just about the other men in her life, but also the women. Virtually everywhere he and Madonna went the slim, dark-haired figure of Ingrid Casares, the daughter of a millionaire Cuban businessman who first met Madonna at the singer’s 1991 New Year’s Eve party, would go with them. She was Madonna’s shadow, accompanying her and Albright when they went to Florida, Germany, France and Los Angeles together. Like a little lamb – and like Sandra Bernhard before her – everywhere Madonna went, Casares was sure to follow. To Albright, however, she was more than just a shadow; she was an emotional buffer, her presence preventing him and Madonna from growing closer.
At first, Madonna shrugged off accusations from Albright that she and Casares were lovers, saying that, as a friend, she was helping her to overcome her addictions, both to drugs and to her former lover, Bernhard. Later, however, she confirmed to him that they were more than just friends, thereby exposing the unhappy triangular love tangle between Madonna, Sandra Bernhard and their mutual friend, Casares. This perhaps explains, at least in part, the vehemence of Bernhard’s scorn towards the singer when their relationship ended. ‘I look at my friendship with her as like having a gallstone. You deal with it, there is pain, and then you pass it. That’s all I have to say about Schmadonna,’ she scathingly remarked.
It was another nightclub owner, John Enos, widely thought to be the subject of the erotic faux-‘Dear John’ letters in Sex, whose elusive presence drove a further wedge between Albright and Madonna. On his first visit to Madonna’s new home in Miami since she had bought it, Albright found a Blockbuster Video card in Enos’s name. When he confronted her about Enos, who runs the Roxbury Club in Los Angeles, she at first denied but then admitted that she was still seeing him. She apologized, promised to be faithful, and for a time their relationship flourished.
Over the months, however, his gradual discovery of her secret friendships with everyone from actors to sports stars, and even a supermodel, sapped his faith in her. While she protested her innocence, he began to grow jealous and suspicious, never quite convinced by her protestations, or sure of her motives. Nor were his anxieties eased when he learned from press reports that she had been seeing some well-known personality before she told him that she had done so. It was partly his own fault. A New York Knicks fan, he had inspired her with his love of basketball, and it was not long before she became fascinated with the sport – and its players. For example, on a flying visit to Arizona she sought out Charles Barkley, then of the Phoenix Suns. In time, her taste for basketball stars would cost her dearly.
Given to jealousy, Albright also found it difficult to watch her performance with the craggy actor Willem Dafoe in Body of Evidence, in which they enjoyed wild on-screen sex antics, including a famous scene where she poured hot wax over his naked body. At the same time her growing friendship with the Japanese-American model Jenny Shimizu, described by the Los Angeles Times as a ‘lezbopunk bike-dyke,’ with whom she spent time in Paris when she went to see the designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, further added to an increasingly complicated love life. As Albright observes of their time together, ‘She’d never been faithful to one man – period. She told me that. She is only loyal to herself.’
For him, though, the most painful time came in November 1993, after he, Madonna, her brother Christopher, the singer Tori Amos and the comedian Rosie O’Donnell, among other friends, had spent Thanksgiving together in the recently acquired house in Miami. They had fun, Madonna and O’Donnell, whom she had met two years earlier during the filming of A League of Their Own, keeping everyone amused with their clowning and banter. Beyond that, however, Madonna and her lover were on a high, Albright believing that the worst was behind them. He left the house party early, flying back to New York on his own, but content in the knowledge that their affair was once more back on track. As a result he was devastated to discover later that as soon as he had left, her former lover Tony Ward had joined the house party. Although she dismissed Albright’s accusations that she was still sleeping with Ward, their relationship was now broken-backed, though it would drag on for months yet.
It seemed that while she demanded total loyalty from him, she did not feel the same obligation, for it became clear to him that her concern to keep his name out of the media had as much to do with ensuring that her other lovers could not see who she was with at any o
ne time, as it had with protecting him from media attention. As they became increasingly estranged from each other, however, Madonna seemed, perversely, to become more needy of both his time and his affection. Insecure and possessive, she visited him unannounced at the Roxbury nightclub in New York where he now worked, checking that he was not flirting with, or even looking at, other women. On nights when he went home to his own apartment, she would call him early in the morning to make sure that he was on his own. Her jealousy reached such a pitch that when she arranged a viewing of her new movie, Body of Evidence, for Abel Ferrara, the director of her next film, Dangerous Game, and his wife Nancy in a private viewing theater, she afterwards accused his wife of making eyes at Albright in the darkened room.
‘She became very, very insecure,’ he says. ‘She was always saying: “I saw you looking at her, why were you talking to her?” She was always accusing me of cheating on her. I told her that she only had those feelings because that was the life she led.’ She left endless messages on his answering machine, their tone by turns humorous, cajoling, wheedling, tetchy or desperate. On one occasion she jokingly threatened to jump from her second-floor hotel balcony if he did not return her call, on another she admitted that she didn’t deserve his trust but that she would change and make things right. Endlessly she told him that she loved him, and wanted to have his child.
The picture is of a woman needing love and giving equally of her love, readily falling in love and yet unwilling or unable to give of her essential spirit. Here was the contradiction at the sad heart of Madonna’s soul, a woman looking for love in all the wrong places. She was not unaware of it. She gave her confused, almost continually heartbroken lover a book, Love Junkie by Robert Plunkett, which she felt described something of her emotional condition. The novel is a wry, rather sad tale of a well-to-do if innocent suburban housewife who, following her husband’s death, becomes passively involved in the gay scene. The theme of the narrative explores love as something driven by a wistful neediness rather than sexual desire, an aspect of Madonna’s personality that her boyfriend truly understood.
‘She has a good spirit and a good heart,’ Albright observes, ‘but there are two sides to her, one of which is loving and caring, the other totally selfish. Madonna’s greatest need is for love. So she uses sex as a form of love because of her great desire to feel loved and receive love. Love is Madonna’s driving force at every level, from having the fans love her to having the people she sleeps with fall in love with her. She takes the physical act of sex, whether it is with a man or woman, and turns it into love. Madonna feeds on love, she feels starved of love.’ He adds, ‘Sometimes I feel that she sleeps with someone hoping that something of them will rub off on her; their talent, their wit, their athleticism.’
The tension between them came to a head during her 1993 The Girlie Show Tour, a brilliantly staged burlesque that was a sell-out around the world. At first, things went well between them. She and Albright spoke every day on the telephone, wrote often, and when she made a flying visit to New York to see her throat specialist, they met for dinner in a downtown restaurant. During their cozy chats over the phone she had made it clear that she really did want to have his baby. Organized as ever, she wanted him to fly out to Japan in December, at the end of the tour, so that she could conceive, and she would then take a break from her other commitments to prepare for the child’s birth.
There were two problems. The first was that his sister was pregnant and he wanted to be present at the birth, which was likely to coincide with the end of the tour. When he explained this to Madonna, however, she became angry and upset that he was prepared to put his family before her. Secondly, before he saw her, Albright discovered that she had bought a man’s suit while out shopping earlier that day. It was not his size, and it was not for him. When he taxed her with this they argued until Albright, angry and frustrated, walked out of the restaurant, leaving her to pick up the tab. A few days later, after she had returned to Europe for the next leg of her tour, he discovered that the suit was for his rival, John Enos.
The argument now continued at long distance, until finally Albright refused to take her calls, even though she would call him up to thirty times an hour. By the time she arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in October, during the South American leg of the tour, Madonna was so distraught that she would no longer perform unless he spoke to her. Still he refused. In desperation Liz Rosenberg, her press secretary, called and pleaded with him to speak to his lover. Again he refused. With the minutes ticking away before the show was due to start, her manager, Freddy DeMann, called Albright and, in a man-to-man chat, convinced him to speak to the singer. She was crying and hysterical, but after they had spoken she calmed down enough to go through with her stage show that night.
On the following day they had a long conversation, in the course of which Albright told her that they were through and that he didn’t want to see her any more. He was tired of having his heart broken. Nevertheless, they patched things up over the next couple of weeks, although he did little to help their relationship when he told her over the phone that he had had a brief fling with a girl at the club. Madonna freaked out, furious that he had had the temerity to cheat on her. Now it was her turn to hang up on him. ‘I was amazed by her reaction because I had forgiven her umpteen times. She had fucked women, multiple men, the dog in the Sex book might have got a lick in, and I go and get a blow job and am man enough to tell her about it,’ Albright observes wryly.
Their long-distance relationship continued to limp along, although Madonna became increasingly cool towards him, her reaction to the birth of his nephew Teddy on November 6 nothing if not muted. Since the tour did not finish until just before Christmas, Albright suggested that he fly out to meet her in the Far East. This time it was she who was ambivalent and unenthusiastic, tell-tale signs, if he had needed any, that she had done a complete emotional about-turn: ‘There was probably someone else in the background,’ he reflects. Then, on her return to America, she was reluctant even to meet him again, but he insisted, telling her that, if they were ending their three-year relationship, they should say goodbye in person.
They met at the beginning of January where it had all begun, on a deserted beach in Miami early one morning. They talked and walked for a while, and then spent the day together before sharing their last night as a couple at her home on Biscayne Bay. Next morning, as he prepared to leave, they shared a long last hug and shed a few tears before he walked out of her life. Like some latter-day Mrs Danvers, Ingrid Casares watched the fading melodrama silently and inscrutably from the shadows.
In New York six months later, Madonna was out running in Central Park when she did a double-take as she passed a fellow jogger. She thought it was Jim Albright or, if not, his brother, for he was the same height and had the same smooth, lightly tanned skin and well-muscled physique. She was intrigued. Shortly after returning to her apartment she asked one of her entourage, Danny Cortese, to do a little detective work and find out who the runner was. Eventually he discovered that he was a fitness instructor named Carlos Leon who worked at the Crunch gym in Manhattan, and she had apparently met him a couple of years earlier at a party. (His version of events is that he first stopped her to advise her on her fitness regime.)
Now even more intrigued, she instructed Cortese to deliver a message to Leon and arrange a meeting by the children’s playground in Central Park. It was an appropriate rendezvous. Close up she liked what she saw, once again taken by the remarkable similarities between him and Albright. Furthermore, not only did the two men look alike, but they had similar personalities: quiet, rather shy but fiercely independent, with a clear, if streetwise, sense of morality and considerable dignity. Like Albright, Leon doted on his parents, Maria and Armando, and in time the singer became a frequent visitor to their modest 91st Street apartment. On one occasion she brought her actress friend Rosanna Arquette to join them, everyone tucking into black-eye beans as Cuban music played in the background.
Her new relationship with the sensitive and introverted Leon made a refreshing change from the hectic love life she had enjoyed since she and Jim Albright had parted. Carlos Leon proved himself to be a gentleman, considerate, affectionate and protective. He and Madonna led a quiet life, often walking unnoticed to the cinema in the nearby Lincoln Center, picking up an ice cream or shopping along Amsterdam Avenue, the picture of a normal everyday couple, holding hands in the sunshine. Inevitably, however, Ingrid Casares would be around, ensconced in Madonna’s apartment or joining the couple for dinner.
He often brought her gifts of small boxes to add to her trinket collection, and took to putting boxes of candy on her bed – naturally, ‘Red Hots’ are her favorites. For Valentine’s Day in 1995 he gave her a teddy bear and filled a heart with jellybeans and other sweets, much to her amusement and delight. She was thrilled, too, when he surprised her with the present of a small pedigree dog she had taken a fancy to during a visit to a midtown pet store.
Although he had aspirations to be an actor, Leon found his elevation to instant celebrity hard to take at first – especially the attention of the paparazzi. On one occasion he gave the waiting pack the finger, a gesture that earned him a rebuke from Madonna, the bruising legacy of Sean Penn never far from her thoughts. Nor was he especially comfortable with her starry friends, while Madonna was both careful and watchful of the new man in her life when they were at a glitzy party or other public event. Yet Leon, a jealous man, was often the one looking out for her. He was uneasy when he discovered that Sean Penn was scheduled to present his ex-wife with the award for Most Fashionable Woman of the Year at the 1994 Fashion Music Awards held in New York. While Leon sat in the audience, he was unaware that backstage Sean Penn and John Enos were messing around with each other and Madonna, as Liz Rosenberg looked on with disapproval, conscious that a photograph of their lighthearted fooling could turn the scene into front-page news. At the end of the show Leon went home, claiming he was tired, while Madonna, Sean, the ever-present Ingrid, and others went barhopping. It did seem, though, that Madonna might have turned over a new leaf, especially when she told friends at her thirty-seventh birthday party in August 1995 that she and Carlos were planning to start a family – but after the filming of Evita.
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