Goddess: Inside Madonna (45 page)

Carlos has also begun acting. While he made his debut on Don Johnson’s television series
Nash Bridges
, he has only managed to get insignificant parts in several films, including
The Big Lebowski
and
Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies
, directed by Jack Sholder, which went straight to video.

Long after
Evita
made its premiere in theaters throughout the world and Madonna had already given birth to Rocco, her son with Guy Ritchie, she was even more convinced than ever that if she hadn’t traveled to Buenos Aires and received that ebony icon of the African god of fertility from President Menem, she would never have had her children.
“Evita
was really challenging,” she says, “an emotionally exhausting and soul-searching couple of years for me. It was a real education, the farthest I’ve ever had to push myself creatively. It was exhausting and intimidating. I’ve never been so drained by anything. From the beginning I walked into another world—and kissed the world as I knew it good-bye. Even more important, it was an event that profoundly changed my life and gave me enormous joy because, after it was over, I had my two children.” Once again, there was no doubt in her mind that everything that had happened to her since she had embarked upon the project had been directly influenced by the spirit of Eva Perón.

M
adonna won a Golden Globe award for her performance in
Evita
, but was not nominated for an Oscar that year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a slight that she has still not forgotten. “The Academy was too scared to nominate me,” Madonna says simply. “I wasn’t politically correct enough to make a speech about the downtrodden. Unfortunately for me, my concept of winning an Oscar is all about my performance as an actress.”

A member of the Academy, a formidable actor and much-loved performer, responds to Madonna’s interpretation of events. “She is absolutely right,” he says. “Winning an Oscar should be all about her performance as an actress, and there you have it. She just wasn’t good enough in that particular film.”

Undaunted, Madonna continued to search for roles that mirrored her own life. Soon after she gave birth to Lourdes, Madonna became involved in several film development projects for her company Maverick Films. “I’m interested in unforgettable cinema,” she said, “like directors such as Martin Scorsese has made, not the uninteresting products that Hollywood turns out today.” Several of the projects she pursued were
Dino
, written by Scorsese; an adaptation of the Oliver Mayor play
Blade to the Heart;
as well as Jennifer Belle’s novel,
Going Down
—none of which ever went further than discussions. Following those unsuccessful attempts, Madonna became entranced by the story of Libby Holman, the torch singer from the 1920s and 1930s who had been suspected of murdering her husband, Zachary Smith Reynolds, the heir to the R. J. Reynolds tobacco fortune. Holman was ultimately acquitted of the murder during a sensational trial. Her love affairs, with a series of such well-known women as Tallulah Bankhead, Josephine Baker, and Jeanne Eagels, were constantly exposed in the press long after Holman became a recluse. According to Madonna, she felt a “kinship” with Holman because she, like the torch singer, experienced “ridicule and shame as a result of the unconventional pattern of my life, my sexuality, and the tremendous drama and passion which motivates me.”

After the Holman project fell through, Madonna expressed interest in acquiring a novel called
Velocity
, written by Kristin McCloy. The story centered on a young woman whose mother dies and who returns home to repair a strained relationship with her father. “It’s my life,” Madonna explains. “In the midst of all the tragedy, the character falls in love with someone who is all wrong for her. I can relate to that especially since, in the end, the girl doesn’t get the guy, but she becomes close to her father, which I found especially touching.”

If McCloy wasn’t confident that the plot would entice Madonna, she made sure that the star knew that while she had been working on her book, she had kept two photographs in sight: one of the Dalai Lama and the other of Madonna. And finally, in July 1999, when Madonna considered optioning the best-seller
Memoirs of a Geisha
, she took on the physical persona of Hatsumomo, the book’s protagonist. During the Grammy awards that year, Madonna performed a Kabuki-style dance dressed in a red kimono and subsequently appeared in her video “Nothing Really Matters” dressed as Hatsumomo. In the end, she did not option the book, undoubtedly because Columbia Pictures made it clear that if they financed the project, Madonna would definitely not be under consideration for the part.

During the filming of The Next Best Thing
, Madonna came to view Lynn Redgrave, who played Rupert Everett’s proper English mother, as a mother figure as well as an actress whom she greatly admired and was determined to emulate. While Madonna was believable as the character Abbey, a yoga instructor, from a physical viewpoint, since she is an avid student of yoga and is able to put her body into some of the more difficult contortions, she kept slipping in and out of a bizarre English accent, which made Abbey seem affected. According to one of the producers of the film, at one point during the shooting, Madonna told Lynn Redgrave that she looked upon her as a “role model” and was making progress when it came to speaking “proper English.” Redgrave was not particularly flattered, especially since she had no idea why Madonna found it necessary to affect a British accent. For the duration of the shooting, Redgrave, not unlike the other actors, had a feeling of impending doom about how the critics would respond to the movie.

“There were just too many problems,” the producer maintains, “and Madonna certainly didn’t help things by taking on that affected way of speaking. I mean, come on, Abbey was supposed to be an ordinary girl from southern California. The problem with Madonna is that she is often a victim of her own self-confidence. Nothing shakes her. But more than that, she brings her own neurotic baggage with her on the set and ends up screwing herself. Madonna is like a parrot or a monkey. She can take on everyone’s particular physical tics and accents.” He pauses. “As a nightclub mimic, she’d be great. As an actress, the whole experience was a disaster for everyone.”

Some people actually held Madonna responsible for putting John Schlesinger in the hospital when shooting was completed, making him unable to edit the finished product. “His resistance was at rock bottom,” the producer maintains.

It is difficult to blame Madonna for John Schlesinger’s coronary bypass surgery and prostate cancer, although the whole exercise of making the movie completely exhausted him. Still, Schlesinger remains the consummate gentleman. “While the critics questioned her performance,” he explained, weak but recuperating as he sat comfortably on a sofa in his Kensington penthouse in London, “I was the director and therefore responsible for the project. Obviously, I failed, and even my friends in the business began to distance themselves from me and from the movie. Whatever the final result, I felt as if I couldn’t win because of Madonna’s almost hypnotic belief in herself.”

Publicly, Madonna once again blamed the critics for their cynical and relentless determination to destroy any hope of her making the transition from singer to actress. “Music is the good life,” she said after the film was so badly panned. “To delve into acting more is a lot more of a risk for me. The good life is to just stay in music where I’ve already established myself and it’s easier. I will continue to write music as long as I’m inspired.”

Privately, she was crushed. Her age, her image, her desire to start over in a new country, where she could appropriate new styles, customs, an accent, and make different kinds of friends and find new collaborators, accounted for her decision to move to London. The other motivating force that drove her from America was more negative.

In 1995, before Lourdes was born, Madonna had been terrorized in her Hollywood Hills home by a stalker, Robert Dewey Hoskins, who threatened to slit her throat if she refused to marry him. Hoskins was shot in the leg by Madonna’s bodyguard when he was caught on her property. Arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed for stalking, which is a felony in California, Hoskins continued to issue threats from behind bars. After the baby was born in October 1996, Madonna’s relationship with Carlos was fraught with separations and jealous arguments. Dan Cortesi, the former advance security guard, claims that the reasons stemmed mostly from Carlos’s possessiveness. “By then, Madonna was spending all her free time with Ingrid Casares,” Cortesi says, “even though she let Carlos see the baby as much as he wanted. The three of them were in California, in Madonna’s house in Los Feliz. When they got back to New York, Madonna was still spending time with Ingrid and with Rosie O’Donnell without Carlos.”

Al Pacino is a close friend of Madonna’s and someone whom she admires and adores. On several occasions, Madonna and Lourdes would visit Rosie O’Donnell at her home in Rockland County, not far from Pacino’s house, and Madonna would spend the afternoons going between the two homes with her baby. While Carlos was acutely aware of the distance that was developing between them and felt sad and dejected, it was his brother, Armando Jr., who tried to turn that sadness into anger and resentment. According to Dan Cortesi, it was Armando Jr., along with Liz Rosenberg, who was responsible for his being fired.

When Madonna and her entourage returned from California, she arranged for Liz Rosenberg to represent Carlos in negotiating an agreement to model for a Versace advertising campaign. According to Cortesi, the deal did not work out as Carlos had hoped, and he got less money than he had anticipated. Again according to Cortesi, when Carlos complained that things had not worked out as she had promised, Madonna arranged, through her West Coast lawyer, Rob Heraldson, to give Leon several checks drawn on the account of Maverick, her record company. On four occasions, Cortesi says, he brought Leon an envelope containing a check as well as envelopes that he was instructed to give to Prodigy, Alanis Morissette, and Candlebox, all artists who were signed on the Maverick label. “One time, the envelope was open,” Cortesi claims, “and I saw the amount of the check made out to Carlos was for eighteen thousand dollars.”

Despite the chilliness that had developed between Madonna and Carlos, when the star was obliged to return to Los Angeles several weeks later, she once again invited Carlos to come with her and Lourdes, although on that occasion, she was accompanied by not only Ingrid Casares but also her brother Chris Ciccone and his lover. “I was fast asleep in my apartment in the Bronx,” Cortesi recalls, “when the phone rang. It was a photographer I know who worked for LGI, a photo agency. He was excited. He told me that he had something really hot for me. Apparently, a photographer he knew had made a deal with Armando Jr., Carlos’s older brother, to buy some pictures that he had of the baby and of Madonna in the early days when she was sitting around his mother’s kitchen table, staying over at Carlos’s, getting in the skashabonga and just hanging out up there at their apartment. He told me that the photographer was going to sell the photos to
OK
or
Hello
and he was set to meet Armando at the apartment building where he worked and give him fifty thousand dollars for the shots.”

Cortesi has very mixed emotions even now when he relates the story. On one hand, he admits that his affinity for Carlos, and the fact he can appreciate that fifty thousand dollars is a “score” that only happens once in a lifetime to hardworking people who are struggling to make a living, made him somewhat sympathetic to Armando Jr. On the other hand, at the time he realized that he had his own family to support, which made him come to the conclusion very quickly that he had the moral and practical obligation to report what he had just found out so that the deal didn’t go through. “What do I do now?” Cortesi asks rhetorically, remembering his reaction. “My first thought is forget about Liz, and if I went to Caresse, Madonna’s manager, it’s the same as going to Liz. So I decided to tell Carlos.”

Dan Cortesi had a code to contact Carlos Leon on his portable, so if he left a message that merely said “911,” Leon would know that it was urgent and to call back promptly. “I could hear the whole scenario in my head,” Cortesi recalls. “I was sure that Carlos didn’t know anything about it, but if he did, I could hear Armando telling him, take the money and run. She doesn’t want to marry you, so what difference does it make?”

After trying to reach Carlos several times on his cell phone, Cortesi finally heard from him. According to Cortesi, Carlos was shocked when he heard the story and immediately defended his brother, claiming that the photographer had made everything up to cause trouble. He asked Cortesi to at least let him talk to his brother to make sure that he was innocent before he informed the others. Cortesi agreed, and within several hours, Carlos called him back to report that as he had suspected, Armando claimed to know nothing about it. “He assured me that he would take care of it,” Cortesi says, “but even then, how could I be sure? My heart was broken because I didn’t want to believe that Carlos could do such a thing, but even if he didn’t, what guarantee did I have that those photos wouldn’t appear? I knew that I couldn’t come between two Cuban brothers, so the only thing left for me to do was to go to Caresse.”

The palace intrigue that surrounds Madonna is worthy of Shakespeare. The paranoia and competition among the people who are part of her closely guarded inner circle are undoubtedly the same as in any household where a movie star, rock singer, or member of a royal family is the focal point of all that attention. Dan Cortesi profoundly believes that Liz Rosenberg is a staunch and loyal member of that inner circle. “If I needed someone to protect me,” Cortesi says, “I’d want that person to be Liz Rosenberg. She knows if a photographer is having an affair with a married woman in Tibet. She knows what a paparazzi is eating for breakfast in Venezuela and with whom. At the same time, she has certain photographers that she favors for whatever reason. When Madonna enters a room or appears at an event, Liz always turns her toward one or two in particular.”