Madonna

by Andrew Morton

  That was not, however, the way Jim Albright saw it. While she was filming in Hungary, Madonna phoned him from the set, telling him that he would always occupy a special place in her heart, and thanking him for everything he had been to her. She then went on to complain about Carlos, saying that he was too immature, too much of a macho Latin man, and that their relationship was floundering. When he put the phone down, her former lover had the distinct impression that she wanted to rekindle their affair.

  Two weeks later, on April 13, 1996, a news flash announced that Madonna was pregnant. ‘It was a shock to me – and to her,’ Albright says. ‘She definitely would not have called me if she had known that she was pregnant.’ Six months later, on October 14, 1996, Madonna, now thirty-eight, gave birth to a 6-pound-9-ounce baby girl in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. She named the baby Lourdes Maria Ciccone Leon, but she was known to everyone as Lola.

  Madonna’s curly-haired daughter was walking and talking before Jim Albright got to meet her for the first time. ‘Beautiful eyes, very smart, just like her mother,’ was his verdict when Madonna invited him over. He brought along his nephew Teddy, the youngster whose birth had caused such friction between them. They went into Lola’s nursery, once the room she had decked out as a state-of-the-art gym. Madonna put on a record and they joined hands, the four of them dancing round and round to the music – mother and daughter, ex-lover and nephew.

  The change in Madonna was striking. Here was a woman who now exuded a tremendous sense of calm, truly someone in touch with herself, with both her spirit and her soul. At long last she seemed to have found what she had been searching for all her life – true, unconditional love. And it had come from inside her.

  Chapter Twelve

  Me, Myself and I

  IF FAXES COULD KILL, then Abel Ferrara was history. He shook his head in disbelief as page after page of handwritten bile spewed out of his machine. After reading just one heavily underscored sample sentence: ‘You fucker, you’ve ruined my fucking career, you scumbag,’ the film director got the drift. Then he began to laugh. He showed the pages to his wife, Nancy, then picked up a red pen and circled the words ‘I’ and ‘me’ on each page. Soon the fax paper was covered in blotchy red circles, as though suffering from an unpleasant rash. It proved contagious, for Ferrara soon put pen to paper himself, replying in kind to the venomous missives from Madonna, the co-star and co-producer of his latest film, Dangerous Game. ‘She was so angry about the movie, hysterical, screaming, crying,’ recalls Nancy Ferrara, who also appeared in the film. ‘The faxes were just nasty, “You fucker, you’ve fucked my life,” that kind of thing. The whole tone was about her, “I” and “me”, “I” and “me.”’

  For once the head of Maverick Films had met her match, coming up against a real live maverick. It proved to be a searing experience for her, emotionally, artistically and financially. Their first meeting had set the tone. She had invited him to watch a rough cut of her latest, as yet unreleased, movie, Body of Evidence, in a private viewing cinema in New York in the fall of 1992. After a few minutes he had fallen asleep, snoring loudly through the scenes where Madonna, who plays a sex-driven gallery owner, utters lines like: ‘Have you ever seen animals make love?’ When he woke up his verdict was not favorable: ‘It’s such a bad movie. It’s terrible, but it’s not her fault.’ It was a judgment she took to heart.

  She took to Ferrara, too, describing him as an ‘underground genius.’ The provocative director, whose gamey, often indigestible films like The Driller Killer and Body Snatchers: The Invasion Continues, had for years been providing critics and art-house audiences with food for thought. Madonna, who has been a student of cinema for much longer than she has been interested in music, had admired Ferrara’s work from afar, appreciating the European influences in his work, particularly that of the French director Jean-Luc Godard. Grim and often repulsive, Ferrara’s films are populated with perverse and often perverted low-life characters who exist in a kind of a depraved purgatory within New York’s seedy underbelly. Madonna was particularly intrigued by his latest film, Bad Lieutenant, the degrading story of a corrupt New York detective, played by Harvey Keitel, on the trail of a gang of thieves who have raped a nun.

  A blonde Madonna in a typically suggestive pose.

  Madonna with New York DJ John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez, whom she met in 1982. Benitez wrote and produced her first Top 40 hit ‘Holiday.’ While Madonna was deeply in love with him and talked of marriage, their mutual ambition outweighed their love for each other.

  Madonna posing in her provocative ‘bridal’ outfit, which she wore when she performed ‘Like A Virgin,’ the song that was a US number 1 hit for six weeks. Note the famous ‘Boy Toy’ belt, now the name of her company.

  Madonna and husband Sean Penn, whom she married on her birthday in 1985. It was not long before they were being referred to as the ‘Poison Penns.’

  Penn once admitted that he preferred ‘the bar to the gym any day.’ As Madonna’s career went from strength to strength, Penn’s drinking, wild behavior and hatred of the press became out of control.

  Madonna and bisexual comedienne Sandra Bernhard struck up a bizarre friendship during her troubled marriage to Sean Penn. Sean was outraged by the very public show the pair put on, while fans were left guessing about the relationship.

  The success of Madonna’s tours in the early 1990s depended upon her power to shock. The overt sexuality increased her popularity for a time, but with the release of her film Truth or Dare, followed swiftly by her book Sex, fans grew tired of this persona.

  Madonna’s hugely successful Blonde Ambition tour, 1990; she was on the road for four months and played in twenty-seven cities worldwide.

  Madonna began an on-off affair with Warren Beatty in 1989 after he cast her as Breathless Mahoney in the film Dick Tracy.

  Madonna escorted Michael Jackson to the 1991 Oscars – a mutual publicity stunt – and she quickly abandoned him at the post-Oscars party the pair attended.

  Sexually alluring, provocative and surrounded by men; this is Madonna’s abiding public image. Here she poses for the camera for Truth or Dare, 1991.

  With boyfriend Tony Ward, who appeared in several of Madonna’s videos including Truth or Dare. He also features in her book Sex.

  Madonna attends ex-lover Prince’s concert with her secret lover and one-time bodyguard Jimmy Albright (left). Albright, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Carlos Leon, the father of Madonna’s daughter, enjoyed a stormy three-year relationship with the star. They planned to marry, and had even chosen names for their children.

  At a time when the world seemed to have had enough of her, Madonna chose 1993 to embark on another world tour – this time it was The Girlie Show.

  Madonna with San Antonio Spurs basketball player Dennis Rodman, with whom she had an affair in 1994. She was deeply hurt when he published faxes she had sent him in his autobiography.

  Madonna and Carlos Leon at the premiere of Evita. Madonna had become pregnant by Leon during the shooting of the film and gave birth to a daughter, Lourdes, in October 1996. They met when she was jogging in New York’s Central Park and she complimented him on his style of sunglasses.

  Lourdes Maria Ciccone Leon. The birth of her daughter gave Madonna the chance to give and receive the unconditional love she had been searching for all her life.

  When most people meet Madonna for the first time they comment on her stature – she is only 5 foot 4 inches tall – and her penetrating hazel eyes. Here she is in Los Angeles, promoting her film Evita, in December 1996, just two months after the birth of Lourdes. The cleaned-up image helped win back old fans and gain new ones, as well as bringing her respectability as a singer.

  Madonna and long-time friend Ingrid Casares. Unpopular with many of Madonna’s entourage, she has been dubbed ‘the Shadow.’

  Madonna with her younger brother Christopher, to whom she is very close. He has helped with the interior design of her homes, advised on her art colle
ctions and assisted in organizing her spectacular stage shows.

  The singer Sting has been instrumental in guiding Madonna during the last few years. He introduced her to yoga, which she still practices, and it was at a dinner party at his home that she first met an up-and-coming young film director, Guy Ritchie.

  Married bliss: Madonna holds the hand of her daughter by Carlos Leon, Lourdes, as she walks en famille in London in the summer of 2001. Her husband, Guy Ritchie, cradles their son Rocco, at that time not yet a year old.

  In recent years, Madonna has become close to Stella McCartney (below), who designed the wedding dress for her marriage to Guy Ritchie; Gwyneth Paltrow (left), also a close friend, was her bridesmaid.

  Who am I now? The Material Girl starts a craze for wearing slogan tee-shirts, including those printed with ‘Mrs Ritchie,’ the name of her husband’s latest film, and the names of her children.

  Madonna, the all-American girl, riding high in her 2001 Drowned World tour.

  Mainstream Ferrara is not, and Madonna was taking a creative risk in agreeing to work with a director variously described as ‘talented and fiercely independent,’ but also as a ‘scuzzmeister,’ ‘decadent,’ or simply an incoherent drunk. She liked the script for his latest film, provisionally entitled Snake Eyes, and decided that her new film company, part of her Maverick empire, should part-finance the $10 million budget, though whether this was an act of artistic indulgence or a courageous leap of faith is difficult to determine. For years she had complained that as an actress she was just a brush in the hands of the director who was responsible for painting the resultant picture. Just as she had been in complete control of the text, design, production and photography of her first publishing venture, Sex, so she now expected a greater say in the direction and shape of the film her company was funding.

  Certainly the original script and casting suited her, allowing her to work with two actors she knew and admired, Harvey Keitel and James Russo, the latter one of her ex-husband’s best friends, on a story in which her character, an actress named Sarah Jennings, emerges the winner, a strong woman triumphing over the evil that men do. ‘It was a great feminist statement and she [the principal character] was so victorious in the end,’ Madonna said of the original script. It was an intelligent screenplay, employing the concept of filming a movie about the filming of a movie, with each actor playing dual roles within the film. The plot is centered on a director, played by Keitel, making a film about a failed marriage, while his own marriage ‘off-screen’ is falling apart. At the same time Madonna plays a successful actress-cummistress in the film within a film, and a whimpering, abused wife who eventually triumphs over the violent verbal and physical interplay between Keitel’s director and Russo’s actor and pimp husband. ‘For an actress the role bore a resemblance to going over Niagara Falls in a barrel,’ observed the writer Norman Mailer, who interviewed her, going on to describe Madonna as a rarity among celebrities in that she did not select roles to buttress her status.

  The film’s eventual title, Dangerous Game, was to prove apt, however. She was playing a dangerous game jousting with indomitably cussed individuals like Keitel and Ferrara, for both the film and the process of making it were precisely the opposite of what she had planned. More than that, the movie morphed into a commentary on Madonna herself, becoming a crude, if compelling, biography. ‘It’s a film about her as much as a film about what we were making because I forced her to confront many of the issues in her life,’ Abel Ferrara admits. ‘That’s why I went with Jimmy Russo as her husband because he’s Sean’s best friend. But no one even gets it.’ Certainly not Madonna, the critics or, for that matter, most of the audience. Some in her circle and those on the film set did appreciate what Ferrara was driving towards in this messy but fascinating work. ‘It was a movie about Madonna, we know this,’ notes the video producer Ed Steinberg, a friend of the director as well as of the singer. As Ferrara’s wife Nancy says of Madonna’s place in the film: ‘The people who worked for her, they got it.’

  In an interesting artistic inversion, the perceived realism of Madonna’s documentary, Truth or Dare, merely recorded the essential artifice and staginess of her Blonde Ambition Tour, while Ferrara’s movie, supposedly an exploration of make-believe, ripped away her carefully contrived mask, the director literally wrenching a draining and difficult performance out of her. She never saw it coming. In the weeks before filming, which took place in the fall and winter of 1992, Madonna, ever the professional, carefully researched her part, visiting a home for battered women and numerous uptown churches, besides the occasion when she went out to get deliberately stoned.

  When she arrived on set on the first day of filming she was line perfect and perfectly poised, every inch the star and the successful businesswoman. ‘The minute she walked into the room she took control,’ recalls Nancy Ferrara, although she adds, ‘but in a very positive way.’ Aware that, as leading lady she would have an intimate relationship with the director, she went out of her way to befriend his wife, sending Nancy a huge gift package of Dolce e Gabbana lingerie and a bottle of Chanel No. 5 for Christmas. ‘She won my heart,’ Mrs Ferrara admits.

  Within minutes of the start of shooting, however, Madonna suffered a rude awakening. First of all Ferrara threw away most of the script and insisted on improvisation, urging the actors to explore not just the characters they were to play, but themselves. They spent hours discussing motivation, filming their discussions, filming themselves in the process of breaking themselves down. ‘I mean, I’m not getting my picture taken by fucking Richard Avedon right now, you know,’ a clearly tired and careworn Madonna says at one point in the finished film, the audience uncertain as to whether she is saying that as herself, or in character as the actress Sarah Jennings. The whole process was raw, uncompromising and dark, as much an exercise in group therapy as in shooting a film. A large part of the reason for this was because the movie, exploring themes of personal breakdown, was being shot as the marriages of Abel and Nancy Ferrara and Harvey Keitel and his wife Lorraine were in trouble in real life.

  ‘In the beginning she wanted to read the script, do the lines and that was it. Start at ten, go home at five. Goodbye,’ Nancy Ferrara says of Madonna. ‘It was not just the lines – the lines were the last and most meaningless thing in this. Abel and Harvey started really to get into the emotion and she was very apprehensive about going forward with that. She really held back a lot, she didn’t like it at all. She just never expected that and had never worked that way before. Somewhere in the first three months they broke her down and she got into it.’

  Every day became a battle of wills between Madonna and Ferrara, on one occasion ending in a fight. ‘She tried to control me but she didn’t have a chance,’ Ferrara observes. ‘I’ve gone up against the baddest producers and toughest actors and it ain’t going to happen. The minute I lose control on the set then I’m useless to them and to her. She tried, she tried the whole time. I fucking hit her on the set even though I promised myself that I wouldn’t ever touch her. She made it sound like I almost killed her. I pushed her.’

  For Madonna, the whole business was as infuriating as it was traumatic, for the sprawling, incoherent film-making process completely cut across the grain of her well-ordered personality. She complained that her director and fellow actors were drunk on the set, Ferrara often sitting in a corner drinking a glass of wine and letting the movie direct itself, and railed against the laissez-faire attitude during filming, as well as what she saw as the mood of misogyny both in the movie and on the set.

  She had reason for complaint. Ferrara laughs knowingly when asked about the story that he picked the ugliest, smelliest film-crew member to simulate having sex with her for a scene that eventually ended up on the cutting room floor. ‘Abel is a misogynist,’ says his wife. ‘He grew up in a house full of women who treated him like a god. He has to have women around him but he hates them. They are a necessary evil.’

  At the film’s end, her screen
character, far from being victorious, is portrayed as defeated, weary and submissive, waiting passively for her violent husband to shoot her in the head. She is everything that Madonna is not. The film, however, is as much an exploration of the singer’s own personality as that of her screen character. In a quiet interlude she talks to Keitel about memories of the real rape she experienced in New York years earlier. Her screen husband, Russo, is portrayed as hard-drinking, abusive and out of control, violently cutting off her hair in one scene, eventually killing her. Parallels with Sean Penn and the genuine drama of their marriage breakup are unavoidable. ‘I’ve seen you suck the cocks of CEOs,’ Russo yells at her on screen. At a time when, in real life, she was being accused of simply publishing, with Sex, pornography for profit, the ‘director’ Keitel forces her, in her screen-actress persona, to admit that she is ‘nothing but a commercial piece of shit.’ In another scene Russo says of Madonna’s character: ‘We both know she’s a fucking whore and she can’t act.’ The very ambiguity of these and other scenes, whether they relate to Madonna or to her character, merely adds to the intrigue; art describing, and often imitating, a celebrity life.