She sang about the joy of her daughter’s birth, her mother’s legacy and the perils of celebrity in a way that was candid and mature, the result of a long journey of the heart. Her lyrics about the high price she paid for celebrity at the expense of her own happiness are matched by reflections on her mother’s death, lines she penned during a visit to her father’s home. The imagery of decay is a reflection of her persistent nightmares and endless sense of loss, themes she has returned to throughout her songwriting career.
By contrast with her controlling ‘Dita Parlo’ character, her latest incarnation as ‘Veronica Electronica’ revealed Madonna in a more nurturing mood, the artist as collaborator rather than diva. Old habits die hard, however. In her joint endeavors there was never any doubt who held the whip hand. When the bedraggled figure of the album’s producer, William Orbit, arrived, soaked from a rainstorm, on her doorstep in New York, a plastic bag of tape samples in his hand, it marked the start of fourteen weeks of edgy, creative co-operation to produce Ray of Light. The London-born producer, who has worked with Belinda Carlisle and Seal, is known as a scatter-brained genius, and certainly his method of working tested Madonna’s patience to the limit. As she admits, ‘I am a very organized, methodical person and he had a tendency to get sidetracked by other things. Then we got used to each other’s rhythms. I learned to be more open and not such a Nazi.’ Even though she has rigorously high standards, a famously short attention span and is a stickler for detail, the two remained friends. ‘Madonna’s very hands-on and that was a challenge for me. I usually keep the artist away,’ says Orbit.
During this incarnation as ‘Veronica Electronica’ the creative philosophy that inspired her to launch her Maverick company, to nurture and inspire new talent, was clearly apparent. Significantly, she chose material for its power to speak to her about her own life, as much as for its intrinsic creative worth. So, for example, she plucked first-time novelist Jennifer Belle from obscurity, turning her book about a student who turns tricks to pay her way through college, has a distant father and a difficult relationship with her stepmother, and works at the Russian Tea Room in New York to help make ends meet, into a screenplay. Madonna, who worked with Belle on the screenplay, which has yet to be filmed, turned out to be a responsive creative partner, treating the novelist like ‘an equal’ rather than an employee: ‘She would always ask my opinion,’ recalls Belle.
For similar reasons, Madonna hooked up with the novelist Kristin McCloy, discussing whether to turn her novel Velocity, about the death of a young woman’s mother and her subsequent attempt to rebuild a fractured relationship with her father, into a movie. ‘It’s my life,’ observed Madonna. ‘In the midst of the tragedy, the character falls in love with someone who is all wrong for her. I can relate to that.’ Unfortunately, the project is now the subject of litigation.
She related, too, to making a movie of the dance musical Chicago with Goldie Hawn – ‘I can do those steps in my sleep,’ she boasted – but it was the screenplay by another new writer, Thomas Ropelewski, that caught her eye. His movie, The Next Best Thing, is about a single woman in her late thirties who accidentally becomes pregnant by her gay friend. The unlikely couple then decide to raise the child themselves. The movie gave her the chance to work with her friend, the English actor Rupert Everett, riding high after playing opposite Julia Roberts in the hit comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding, and to play her favorite character – herself. It was also an opportunity to explore a subject central to much of her creative work, namely gender relations in a contemporary setting.
Sadly, like Shanghai Surprise, her latest movie, shot in 1999, had an aura of doom around it from early on. Like Sean Penn, Everett is relaxed and assured before the camera. Indeed, so assured was he in making The Next Best Thing, that he rewrote much of the script, eventually suing for a writing credit. The film-musical of Evita aside, Madonna’s last real acting role had been in Dangerous Game, a gap of some seven years. Yet, in spite of her lack of recent experience, she was utterly confident in her ability, constantly questioning the veteran John Schlesinger’s judgment and direction during shooting, skirmishes which were soon common knowledge beyond the confines of the set.
Eventually, her indomitable self-belief got the better of Schlesinger’s vision for the picture. She successfully lobbied for her character, initially a swimming instructor, to become a Californian yoga teacher with a fondness for all things Eastern and, inexplicably, affected an unconvincing English accent. Typically she trained with her own yoga teacher, acting as her assistant in class in order to understand her role better. Her attempt to make her character more like her real-life self was, however, precisely what Schlesinger, who made Midnight Cowboy among other highly regarded films, did not want. Of his leading lady the British director observes, ‘Madonna likes to create characters with a very definite kind of image and I wanted to soften her quite a lot in this film. I wanted people to forget that she was Madonna.’
With Schlesinger’s vision and ideas thwarted – to add to his troubles, he was taken seriously ill at the end of the shoot – Madonna essentially played herself, her absolute self-belief and strength of will, the qualities that have propelled her into the celebrity stratosphere, once again fatally undermining her acting. Released in 2000, The Next Best Thing enjoyed only modest success. In one of the kinder reviews, the film critic Stephanie Zacharek complained that, ‘She seems wooden and unnatural, and it’s tough to watch, because she’s clearly trying her damnedest.’ Madonna put a brave face on the criticism, but privately she was deeply hurt, especially as the film boasted a solid cast, a first-rate director and a strong idea.
For her, collaboration may have been all very well, but the criticism served to reconfirm her belief that only when she had total control could she truly express herself on the big screen. Over the last two years Madonna has deliberated over whether to become involved in a film of the life of one of her favorite artists, the feminist Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (who died, aged just forty-seven, in 1954), or whether she should buy the rights to Arthur Golden’s bestselling novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, and turn it into a screenplay. She has also talked of her desire to be a film director. To be director, producer and star, all in one, would indeed bring her total control. Whether or not it would make of her a better, or better-regarded, actress, must for the time being remain unanswered, however.
If, for Madonna, acting in films was all about control, the creative and commercial tension between teamwork and rule by diktat, nurture and authority, ‘Dita’ versus ‘Veronica,’ was most clearly expressed in her Maverick empire. The way in which Madonna wooed and won two of her most successful signings, the Canadian singer Alanis Morissette and the British band Prodigy, was testament to her canny business sense and her creative nous. It was also a tribute to her maternal instincts, for when they arrived in New York she personally drove to the airport to pick them up, and spent time with them in the city’s clubs and bars. She was particularly drawn to the young Canadian singer, seeing in Morissette’s raw rebellion something of herself. ‘We had a couple of girlie nights,’ recalls Morissette appreciatively, if somewhat cryptically.
Although Prodigy was a different musical proposition, executives from the band’s record company were also impressed. ‘She attended a meeting early on,’ said Richard Russell. ‘She was very good. Part of it was just that she was interested enough to turn up and press the flesh, but she also asked what the band were like as artists, what drives them. They were smart questions and they were different to the ones that the chairmen of other labels ask.’ Since those signings in the mid 1980s, Madonna has spread her net wide and eclectically, investing in an Asian recording studio, starting a Latin record label, signing a singer from Sweden and a band from Mexico. Not everyone has fallen for the Madonna charm, however, Maverick notably failing to hook the Icelandic singer Björk and Courtney Love.
For a time the incredible success of Morissette’s 1995 debut album, Jagged Little Pill, which sold 25 m
illion copies worldwide, masked underlying tensions in Madonna’s company. In private, she increasingly complained about her manager, Freddy DeMann, saying that he was less concerned with her well-being than with sending her on tours so as to make money from her. Her discontent had first surfaced when her book, Sex, was being put together. Madonna clashed with him over his plans to make her tour the Erotica album, and she had occasionally griped about DeMann ever since.
Perhaps inevitably, there were other forces at play. In a story as old as rock and roll itself, the singer believed that she could do without her manager, could run her own show and keep the percentage she was paying him. In 1988, after many years together, there was a parting of the ways, although DeMann is rumored to have walked away with a $25 million payoff. Such splits are nothing new in the music business; both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones ended up managing their own affairs, with mixed success. As her former business manager Bert Padell reflects, ‘Artists start off as nobodies, then become somebodies and then think they can do it all themselves.’ He had suffered the same experience as DeMann when on July 1, 1987, Madonna’s one-time secretary, now her new manager, Caresse Henry-Norman telephoned and told him that, also after fourteen years, Madonna no longer required his services. The singer refused to take his calls, and Padell lamented his loss in a poem entitled ‘Time for a Change.’
The prosaic reality was that, for Madonna, it was business politics as usual, Maverick’s CEO simply tightening her personal control over her company, a case of the captain dropping the pilots. It may have just been coincidence, but her ship began to founder soon afterwards, taking on financial water. There was no escaping the fact that after nearly a decade in business, much of the success of Maverick still rested on Madonna’s shoulders, something merely highlighted by the sell-out success of her Drowned World Tour in 2001. With losses of $60 million over the previous two years, heads rolled, the president of Maverick’s recording arm and several other executives leaving the company.
With the ousting of the old guard, it seemed that Madonna was increasingly surrounded by ‘yes men,’ eager to do her bidding, unwilling to challenge her authority. The delicate balance between teamwork and control that had characterized the boom days of her career seemed to have gone. During the mad scramble into the Internet, where music, sports and other stars made millions endorsing products or developing systems, Madonna held back, uncertain about how to deal with this new medium. ‘Britney Spears and others were all over the Internet, Madonna was very late out of the blocks,’ Bert Padell observes. In the end, though, she had the last laugh, making record-industry history by signing a $42 million deal with the American software giant, Microsoft, to broadcast her performance at London’s Brixton Academy in 2000 live on the Internet.
Albright, himself now an Internet entrepreneur, visited her at her New York apartment on Lola’s third birthday in October 1999 to make a presentation to Madonna, her new manager Caresse Henry-Norman, and some of her other advisors. While she showed only polite interest in his scheme, of more significance was the fact that also wandering around the apartment that day were Carlos Leon and a British film director named Guy Ritchie. In retrospect, this tableau might have formed the subject of a contemporary version of a Renaissance painting: Madonna, child, and a triumvirate of fathers – real, prospective and possible. It would have been a symbolic moment, had any of them been able to see into the future, the ‘significant others’ she had encountered during her long search for love present on her daughter’s special day.
For the first few weeks the birth of Lola papered over the fissures that had begun to appear in the relationship between Madonna and her Cuban lover. As she had confessed to Albright, she had been growing disillusioned with Leon before she became pregnant. During her pregnancy, however, the demands of her shooting Evita, the loneliness of hotel life, her loss of confidence and self-esteem as her body changed, meant that when he and, invariably, Ingrid Casares arrived to join her they were welcome faces at a difficult time. When Leon was not with her, Madonna, feeling vulnerable and unattractive, would constantly call him, always fearful that her handsome boyfriend might be seeing someone else. Her obsessive jealousy placed an added strain on the obvious problems that faced an obscure young man of modest means dating one of the world’s best-known women.
In the event, the difficulties of her pregnancy – she was constantly tired and often uncharacteristically unwell – were outweighed by the joy of Lola’s birth. Madonna and Carlos were delighted with their new arrival, as was everyone else, her New York apartment seeing a constant stream of visitors laden with gifts. Al Pacino brought three teddy bears, the Versaces sent a hand-sewn quilt, her Italian designer friends Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana sent baby clothes, her brother Christopher, Lola’s godfather, gave her an inscribed bracelet, while at a baby shower held in Rosie O’Donnell’s apartment an assortment of friends and relations gave her clothes and silver jewelry, including a crucifix. The cascade of flowers, clothes and toys from fans was so overwhelming that her staff hired a van to take them to a children’s charity.
Determined that no photographer would earn the $350,000 being offered by tabloid editors for the first picture of mother and baby – one enterprising cameraman was caught hidden inside a builder’s dumpster outside the building – Madonna, Carlos and their daughter kept a low profile, staying inside the apartment. They had engaged a nanny, but Carlos enjoyed putting the baby down to sleep, and the couple placed matching his-and-hers rocking chairs in Lola’s nursery so that they could sit with her.
Inevitably, such domesticity could not last. Soon it was back to work, Madonna giving a grueling series of back-to-back TV interviews at the publicity launch of Evita in December 1996, breaking off only to feed Lola. ‘I have been so incredibly blessed this past year,’ she told the audience after receiving a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Musical at a ceremony in January 1997. With Carlos by her side, she looked every inch the contented celebrity and proudly glowing new mother. ‘It was a very jolly evening,’ recalls Sir Tim Rice, who was at her table. Doubtless it was, but the happiness, like the brief, peaceful domestic interlude, was destined not to last.
Once the couple had time to draw breath, it was clear to them that the relationship was not working out, that they were more friends than life partners. The fault line in their romance was highlighted by differences over his career. For his part Carlos, uncomfortable in his role as yet another ‘Mr Madonna’ and hurt by media gibes that he was simply a sperm donor, felt that she could do more to help his budding acting and modeling career – so far all he had managed was bit parts in a couple of movies, including The Big Lebowski. As far as Madonna was concerned, she felt that he should stand on his own two feet – as she had had to do.
Difficulties with the chihuahua Carlos had given her symbolized the growing rift. The dog became very jealous of Lola, wetting rugs, gnawing shoes and slippers and even Madonna’s bedspread, growling at anyone who smelled of the baby. Even visits to a famous animal psychiatrist, Shelby Marlow, could not cure the dog’s jealousy. Finally the couple reluctantly agreed that Chuicita must go for the sake of the baby. It was a heartbreaking decision to say goodbye to their first ‘baby,’ their failure with their pet anticipating their own problems. In May 1997, just seven months after Lola’s birth, Carlos and Madonna parted. ‘It was a real relationship,’ says Rosie O’Donnell. ‘They made a valiant effort to stay together.’ Lola, of course, remained with her mother, although Carlos, an adoring father, is a regular visitor.
Jealousy had been an ever-present issue in the relationship. Indeed, the dog’s behavior was matched, if not outstripped, by that of Madonna’s boyfriend, who was always unsure of her love for him. On one occasion the suspicious Cuban was seen hanging around a downtown restaurant, watching as his girlfriend and Rosie O’Donnell went to dinner in New York. When he was approached by a member of Madonna’s staff, he declined to join them and stalked off to his own apartment for the night.
A yellow self-adhesive note on the dashboard of Madonna’s chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Car perhaps held a clue to his behavior. It bore just two words: ‘Ring Birdy.’
An aspiring screenplay writer, Andrew F. Bird was, all things considered, a very suitable guru for the maternal, spiritual Madonna in her ‘Veronica Electronica’ phase. The lanky, long-haired young Englishman who stretched his body into impossible shapes during his daily yoga sessions and endlessly broadened his mind with studies in Hinduism, Buddhism and other branches of Eastern mysticism was the right man at the right time. A friend of the film director Alek Keshishian (of Truth and Dare fame), Bird first met Madonna in Los Angeles at Keshishian’s request while he was trying to sell a screenplay about English gangsters. There was, according to eyewitnesses, an instant magnetism between them. Within weeks Bird, the penniless son of a Midlands accountant who usually slept on friends’ sofas, was ensconced in her Los Angeles home while she was recording her Ray of Light album. Indeed, he is listed in the album’s credits, along with Rabbi Eitan Yardeni, as having provided ‘creative and spiritual guidance.’
As the affair progressed, Madonna’s appearance, described by some as hippy, although she preferred ‘pre-Raphaelite,’ seemed to mirror the unkempt grunge look of the would-be screenwriter, who always dressed in black, a newly lit Gitane never far from his lips. Moreover, if her new look shocked those who met her, so did her lifestyle. She really seemed to have gone back to an earlier phase of her life; in late 1997, on the occasions when she visited London, she lived modestly in a rented house on a busy road in Chelsea, happy to visit a local New Age center for yoga classes with other devotees. The gaggle of fans who waited outside the house for a glimpse of her would often be shooed away by Madonna herself, angrily telling them that they were keeping the baby awake. While she was out working Bird stayed at home with Lola, leaning out of the open windows for a surreptitious cigarette, fearful that Madonna would discover that he had broken his promise not to smoke around the baby.
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