“Guy loved it there and got on well with Sir Michael,” says John Ritchie. “He could roam around the estate and was really keen on shooting and trout fishing. He actually wanted to be a gamekeeper or go into the army to keep up the family tradition.”
His mother, Amber, Lady Leighton, divorced Sir Michael Leighton in 1980. Today, she lives with her daughter, Tabitha, in Wandsworth, South London. Tabitha, two years Guy’s senior, works in the health and fitness business.
Guy has lost touch with his stepfather, Sir Michael Leighton, who has remarried. He also has some distant connections to royalty. His paternal grandmother, Doris, is descended from the royal house of Stewart. Through her, Guy is a cousin (albeit three times removed) of Sarah, the Duchess of York, and the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Through Doris, Guy can also claim Sir Winston Churchill as a distant cousin.
Throughout his childhood, Guy battled dyslexia and, after attending ten different schools, gave up on his education at the age of fifteen. It was then, he claims, that he had been expelled from the 4,725-pounds-a-term Standbridge Earls School near Andover, in Hampshire, whose teachers specialize in teaching dyslexics, for “doing a line of sulfate.”
“Education was lost on me,” he told the London Sunday Times. “I may as well have been sent out in a field to milk cows for ten years. I had no interest whatsoever in what I was supposedly being taught.”
Guy’s father, John, now seventy-two, retired and living in a 1.3-million-pound house in Chelsea, has different memories of Guy’s school days. “The headmaster rang saying he [Guy] had been a naughty boy and that if I brought him back next term he would have to expel him,” he recalls. “But it wasn’t drugs — he had been caught in a girl’s room and wasn’t going to his lessons.”
What followed in his life, Guy Ritchie says, was a wild period of “hanging out with villains” and doing drugs. “I took everything and anything, and most of the drug dealers I met along the way were in public school.”
“Guy has a certain wit, a certain humor that people don’t always get,” says his father. “He says things sometimes in joking, I think. Then the newspapers print it, and it sounds like he’s pretending to be a scallywag. He hasn’t really been one, though. Not that I know of, anyway.”
When he was about eighteen, Ritchie took off to Africa, and then to Greece where he dug sewers for a time before returning to England. Some press reports have indicated that Guy worked as a bricklayer when he returned to England, but his father recalls his son as having worked as a “messenger” for Island Records, after which he worked as a bartender, and then as a furniture mover — a job that ended abruptly when Guy strapped an antique table to the roof of his van and inadvertently drove through a low tunnel.
He then became a messenger for his father’s advertising agency and soon after, with practically no training in the field — but by using his father’s contacts — began making music videos for “Eurotrash techno-rave bands.” He soon applied his budding directorial talents — and entrepreneurial business sense — to making short films. Eventually, at the age of twenty-nine, he found critical and commercial success as the writer/director of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking BarrelsWith Matthew Vaughn as its producer, the movie owed much to Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Thanks to an audience for his films that was largely young and male, the film went on to generate 18 million pounds in Britain alone, though it cost only 1 million pounds to make. Moreover, after having been publicly embraced by Tom Cruise, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels also had a respectable — though not overwhelming — release in the United States.
It is both ironic and paradoxical that Guy Ritchie would find himself in a romantic relationship with Madonna — an entertainer widely considered to be a gay icon — since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels as well as the more recent Snatch both have obvious homoerotic undercurrents, as well as disturbing homophobic leanings.
For instance, in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels one of Ritchie’s characters explains what he believes could be the perfect scam: place an advertisement for “Arse Ticklers Faggot Fan Club analintruding dildos” in gay magazines, and wait for the checks to roll in. Then, send out letters saying that you’re out of stock and enclose a check stamped “Arse Ticklers Faggot Fan Club.” “Not a single soul will cash it!”
“Do you have big brave balls,” asks footballer-turned-actor Vinnie Jones in a confrontational moment in Snatch, “or mincey faggot balls?” (Snatch is a black comedy; a gangland story largely set in London’s Hatton Garden, about diamond heists and bare-knuckle boxing. It stars Brad Pitt, who cut his normal fee by percent to take the role of the gypsy boxer and who, incidentally, is almost entirely incoherent throughout.)
Mark Simpson of the Independent dubbed both of Ritchie’s films “gay porn for straight males.” In an article headed “Just What Sort of a Guy’s Guy Is Guy Ritchie,” he wrote of Snatch , “Its ‘mockney geezer’ dialogue is thick with references to ‘aving me pants pulled down,’ being ‘bent over,’ ‘full penetration,’ and being ‘f — ked.’” This isn’t very surprising since, as in Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and the spin-off TV series he executive-produced, women are conspicuous by their absence — the only snatch in Snatch belongs to other men . . .“In an age of masculine confusion, [Ritchie] is the pre-eminent example of a rising phenomenon: the homo-hetero,” Simpson wrote. “Exclusively and adamantly heterosexual in the bedroom, the homo-hetero is nevertheless entranced by masculine images, forever fantasizing about a world of homosociality that is just a dropped bar of soap away from homosexuality. Could it be that Guy Ritchie — who lives with the woman famously described as a gay man trapped in a woman’s body — is a gay man trapped in a straight man’s body?”
Perhaps analysis such as Simpson’s is why Guy Ritchie seems prickly about his public image. When a reporter from male-oriented FHM magazine asked him about his taste in clothes, he became defensive, using words such as “fruity,” “queeny,” “fucking fruit-tree” and “mincey.” He also said, oddly enough, that he would be happiest “in a gladiator outfit.” Later, in another interview, he said that he “will not allow Madonna to dress me like a poof.”
Guy Ritchie is tall and athletic-looking, with tousled dirty-blonde hair and dark brown eyes above sensitive, chiseled features. His charm is infectious; he draws people like a magnet (except when Madonna is around; her magnetic quality is obviously stronger).
When Guy was in Los Angeles in January 2001 for the United States opening of his film Snatch, the author had a chance meeting with him and was surprised by how young he seemed and acted. Though thirty-two, his demeanor is that of a friendly, outgoing college youth. There is nothing pretentious about him, as if he could be anyone’s pal — all of which makes his relationship with Madonna more intriguing, even confounding.
No matter how one looks at it, upon meeting her, Madonna seems anything but “normal.” It would stretch the imagination to think that she could quickly become anyone’s “pal.” Even when she wasn’t a star, she wasn’t the kind of girl one would feel was accessible, easy to know. Now, because she’s been a celebrity for so many years, she carries herself with definite regality and a sense of glamour that springs not so much from her looks as from her character and personality. Her presence tends to create a distance between her and any admirer. One wonders, then, how she ended up with the much more grounded and affable Guy Ritchie — and how he ended up with her.
While it seems futile to analyze matters of the heart (especially when the romance is still in full bloom and can change in many ways), suffice it to say that these two probably balance each other’s personalities. Maybe in this extraordinary mingling of contrasts, Guy adds a sense of normalcy to her life and she a sense of excitement to his.
From the beginning, Madonna enjoyed being with Guy Ritchie, she said, because he treated her “like a normal person, not an icon.” When he speaks to her, he has the priceless gift of making her feel that she is the most important person in
the world to him. Also, she’d never met anyone so full of compliments; he raised flattery to an art form. “And he’s not intimidated by fame,” Madonna has said, “he calls me ‘Madge’ and even makes me wash his car with him,” she says. Finally. This one — Guy Ritchie — seemed to have it all: he was handsome, sexy, gainfully employed, sensible and with a sure, clear-eyed maturity about him. More important, he loved Madonna and she returned his affection with equal emotion.
In any relationship, though, there are personality traits to which both partners must adapt. One issue the two faced early in their romance was that Guy sometimes contradicted Madonna in public. Rather than cause a scene, she would bite her lip. Later, she would let him have it. “Don’t ever contradict me in front of people,” she told him, according to two good friends. The four were sitting in a darkened pub, each drinking a pint of Guinness under a haze of cigarette smoke. Madonna was wearing what appeared to be a Versace turtleneck, a Gucci leather jacket and secondhand Levi’s. (“Never in a million years could I have imagined myself sitting in a pub, drinking,” she later said, amused by how relaxed her standards for healthy living had become.)
“But when you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” he said, maintaining an almost clinical composure.
“Absolutely not,” she insisted, dramatically. “When I’m wrong, I’m still right — in public.” She took her hand mirror out of her bag and — with a rapid flourish — applied a fresh slash of what appeared to be black raspberry lip gloss. “If ever you have a problem with something I said,” she concluded, looking at her reflection, not at him, “do take it up with me privately, won’t you?”
It was as if she had to indoctrinate Guy to the way she had been living for almost two decades. If someone asked her to do something she didn’t want to do — “which happens about thirty times an hour,” as she has said — she usually just fibbed and said she had other plans rather than put the person off or make excuses. Once at a party when Madonna was being pestered by a photographer, she lied and said she couldn’t allow him to take her picture that evening because she had dinner plans. Guy cut in and said, “No, Madonna, that’s tomorrow night. You’re free tonight.” She shot him a glare, the intensity of which didn’t escape anyone present to witness it. It’s not likely that Guy Ritchie ever made that mistake again.
Guy, whose old-fashioned English charm is matched only by his impeccable, polished manners, also had to become accustomed to the way Madonna eats salad. The same two friends who were with them in the pub recall what happened at dinner later that night when the salad was served: Madonna began eating it with her hands.
“But that is so . . . wrong,” Guy told her, his face registering disapproval.
“What do you mean?” Madonna asked. She scooped up a crouton using a salad leaf dripping with dressing, and popped it into her mouth.
“That . . . why, that whole thing . . . eating with your hands?”
“Oh,” Madonna said, laughing. “That. Well, that is how I eat salad. Get used to it.”
Possibly because of her increasingly serious romantic involvement with Guy Ritchie, and her professional involvement with Rupert Everett, one surprising change in the Madonna mystique by the end of the nineties was her startling habit of speaking in what seemed like an upper-crust English accent that also somehow embraced Italian. It’s similar to the affectation Elizabeth Taylor picked up after she became involved with Richard Burton. “True, that,” she is known to observe often. Madonna actually loved the British and was determined to make London her home base. “I hate to use the phrase, but it’s true that you can start all over again in England,” she said. “What I really think is that even the most stupid Englishman is about ten times smarter than the most stupid American.” Soon, she traded in her $15,000-a-month rented home in Notting Hill to purchase a 200-year-old, four-story house in South Kensington for $5 million.
Madonna has grown up, and as a result she’s a different person than she was when she was younger and more frivolous. For instance, she’s no longer a shopaholic. She used to spend thousands on clothing a week. “I’m too puritanical for that now,” she says. “I’m too reserved to spend my money that way. I’m careful, so careful that I actually forget I have a lot of money.”
Madonna is so careful, in fact, that people who work for her say that she is thrifty beyond all reason. She keeps flowers in her home long after they have wilted, just so that she won’t have to spend money on fresh ones. She insists that her housekeeper shop using coupons, so that she can save a few dollars on groceries. She runs throughout her home turning off lights so that her electricity bill will be low. She won’t allow friends to make long-distance calls on her telephone. She seldom picks up the tab when dining with friends. She rarely has cash on her, and is always complaining that she’s “cash poor,” as she calls it — even though she is one of the richest women in show business. Her spokeswoman, Liz Rosenberg, admits that when she’s performing on the road, she does her own laundry because she believes hotels charge too much. She goes over hotel bills herself to make certain that she hasn’t been overcharged, and if she finds that she has been she then has her accountant take up the matter with hotel management.
One extravagance: shoes. She has hundreds of pairs, many of which she feels are too fragile and exquisite ever to wear in public for fear that they might be damaged in the mad crush that always seems to surround her. She keeps many of her favorites wrapped in tissue paper, stored in boxes. Now and then, she sneaks away by herself, takes the shoes out, admires them, strokes them, puts them on . . . then takes them off and puts them back in storage, again.
To writer Jancee Dunn in an interview (in the summer of ), Madonna said, “When I go to the Versaces’ homes and see the way wealthy people live, I think, ‘I know I can live that way,’ but it wouldn’t come natural to me. I do appreciate that people can sort of go full-bore and get into it and live a super, glamorous, decadent life. And have gold faucets and statues everywhere. I do appreciate beautiful things, and I have nice things in my house — nice art and I like Frette linens and all that stuff. But I just don’t — I don’t have to show it off. I like to show off when I’m onstage. I don’t like to show off, like, ‘Come in and check it out. Look how rich I am.’ That’s not my style.”
Moreover, though Madonna is worth many millions of dollars, she still fears that her fate could revert back to that of the young girl she says used to eat out of trash cans in New York, back in those struggling days. “You never get over eating from a trash can,” she says, “no matter how much money you make. I wish people could understand me. But I guess that unless you’ve had my experiences, you really can’t relate to them, or to me. I think I am the most misunderstood person on the planet,” she says.
“People think that my goal is to just have hit records and make movies,” she concludes. “I don’t sit here wondering if I’ll still be making videos when I’m fifty. I hope that I’ll have three children and that they’ll be the center of my life . . . not being on MTV.”
Guy Ritchie seemed to be the perfect mate. He loved her, he understood her need for children and he even encouraged her to take time away from her career to, as he put it, “really start thinking more about what will make you truly happy in life.” Or, as Madonna had concluded of Guy, “This one is a keeper.”
Bird vs. Ritchie
It was on March 19, 1999, that Madonna’s past crossed her future when Andy Bird and Guy Ritchie met for the first time in London’s trendy Met Bar, which is attached to the Metropolitan Hotel in Park Lane. What happened said as much about Guy as it did Andy. The two, who just happened upon one another, began talking about Madonna — who was in Los Angeles at the time at pre-Oscar festivities, on the arm of Sugar Ray rocker Mark McGrath.
“We were comparing notes about her when he suddenly hit me,” Andy Bird now says. “It came out of nowhere.” Bird — two years younger than Ritchie — said the punch sent him reeling over two tables. “I just couldn’t believe it,” he
observed.
Ed Baines, a London chef and a friend of Guy Ritchie, says, “Guy sat there listening for half an hour and got more and more wound up. He’s very honorable. This guy [Bird] was going on and on. Guy got up to leave and this guy grabbed him by the arm and said, ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ Guy then felt a punch on the nose wouldn’t do any harm.”
The breakup with Madonna had been difficult for Andy Bird as he went about the business of unraveling their intertwined lives — shared friendships, families, living quarters, possessions. Madonna had been the one to come to the conclusion of the necessity of their breakup, not Andy. It was a huge heartache for him, says a friend of his, “an actual physical pain because he really did have strong feelings for her.”
In late 1999, Andy Bird became romantically involved with British television presenter and interior designer Anna Ryder Richardson. Unfortunately, the relationship ended after three months. “I think I’m a pretty confident person, but there’s only so much you can take. I got pretty sick of the word ‘Madonna’ by the end of our time together,” she has said. “It was a pressure I didn’t need. Ultimately, she did ruin our relationship — if only because he couldn’t let go of her.”
Because he had lost something he wanted very badly, it was difficult for Andy Bird not to be bitter. Also, there was a public element involved in his breakup with Madonna, an element of humiliation since it was clear to most observers that she had been the one to make the decision, not him. Still, it probably wasn’t wise for Bird to express any animosity about what had occurred to Madonna’s current consort, Guy Ritchie.
Guy is a strapping man who doesn’t say much in public but who, among his friends and business associates, is as much known for his tough-guy swagger as he is for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. While he seems somewhat timid when on Madonna’s arm, Guy’s hobbies include karate and judo and, as he put it, “kicking a little arse.” He calls himself “a smart, smug bastard.” Whereas Carlos Leon was gentle and unassuming, Guy Ritchie is a bit of a brawler, much like Sean Penn — a personality Madonna finds irresistible. Like many Englishmen, he appears to be reserved when in public, but privately he is expressive, wild and a great deal of fun — until crossed. He has a small scar, which he wears like a badge, on his face. “All I can say is that it came as quite a surprise to me when my opponent produced a Stanley knife,” he has said in explaining the scar. A pretty good line . . . whether or not it is true.
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