Goddess: Inside Madonna (46 page)

The photographs that Armando Leon Jr. was alleged to have sold never appeared in any publication, either in the United States or abroad. Several days after telling the whole story to Caresse Henry-Norman, who recounted it to Liz Rosenberg, Dan Cortesi tried to contact Madonna and found that all her private numbers had been changed. Shortly afterward, Liz Rosenberg informed him that his services were no longer required. In April 1997, Madonna and Carlos Leon separated. Within two weeks of the incident, Madonna decided to leave California for London, announcing that she would live there temporarily. She rented a house in Chelsea with the intention of dividing her time behind the United States and England so that Lourdes could continue to see her father regularly.

These days, Dan Cortesi works as a porter in a building in New York City and does odd assignments with several rock stars when they happen to be in New York.

When she first arrived in
London, Madonna began working quietly with the renowned percussionist Talwin Singh, who is considered one of the leaders of the new wave of music and who would do several arrangements on her album Ray of Light. Without fanfare, press, or publicity, Madonna also invested in Anokha, a collective recording studio that Talwin Singh founded that focused on new artists with an innovative sound, a combination of ancient Indian and techno music. In 1997, Madonna also began courting Björk, Iceland’s singing sensation who became popular in the 1980s when she headed up a group called the Sugarcubes, in the hope of recording, publishing, and distributing Björk’s music on the Maverick label. After the group had broken up and Björk went out on her own, she was often compared to Madonna for her originality and innovative music and lyrics.

As Madonna got settled into the music world in London and began to feel more comfortable in a strange country, she put a bid on the first of what would be many English homes, changing her mind either for reasons of security or because she felt that real estate prices were unrealistically inflated. In one of her first real estate ventures, Madonna put a deposit on Toddingham Manor in the Cotswolds, a thirty-room estate with its own river. After George Harrison was attacked by an intruder in his guarded London home on Hampstead Heath, Madonna withdrew her bid on Toddingham Manor. She still remained committed to several new British film projects, however, as well as spending half the year in London. When her album
Ray of Light
was completed, she went into talks to bring Noël Coward’s
Blithe Spirit
to the screen, a project that she claimed she would produce and star in, as well as
Quadrille
, which she announced would begin filming in February 1998 in London and in the south of France, to be directed by Gavin Millar, who directed
DreamChild. Quadrille
, also by Noël Coward, which appealed to Madonna in her English phase, is about a philandering English aristocrat who leaves his wife to elope to the south of France with the young wife of an American industrialist. The aristocrat’s wife, whom Madonna intended to play, teams up with the industrialist to find their respective spouses and avoid scandal. Along the way, they develop a relationship of their own.

On one of Madonna’s trips
back to Los Angeles in September 1997, her old friend and producer Alek Keshishian introduced her to Andy Bird, an accountant’s son from a middle-class English family who lived in Warwickshire. Bird, tall, slim, with long hair and a good sense of humor, who never touched alcohol or drugs and whose show business experience was limited to singing in the streets in London, had come to Hollywood to make a career acting and writing. At the time Madonna met Bird, he was a male Blanche DuBois, relying on the “kindness of strangers,” moving from house to house, staying with friends or house-sitting. The attraction seemed to be mutual, and to the surprise of everyone who knew Madonna, within weeks of meeting him she invited Bird to move into her Los Angeles home. When she traveled back to her rented house in London, Bird accompanied her. Madonna, determined to make him presentable as an escort, bought her new lover a new wardrobe so he could accompany her to parties, gallery openings, and charity events. She also put him on a weekly allowance. Acting as a calm, amusing househusband to supervise the help, watch over the grocery shopping, play with her child, and be available to give her romance and comfort whenever she needed it, much to the distress of Carlos Leon, Bird also became somewhat of a father figure to Lourdes. Unemployed and whimsical by nature, Bird was a good playmate for the toddler when her mother was unavailable.

The relationship between Madonna and Bird would last about a year, during which Madonna met the unemployed actor’s parents. Despite periods of separation when the singer was forced to return to America for her work, she felt a sense of relief that she was in a calm and stable relationship. With a small child to raise on her own, Madonna needed someone in her life whose presence was soothing to Lourdes and comfortable for her.

By 1997, when Madonna had returned to Los Angeles to work on the final aspects of her album
Ray of Light
, boredom had set it. After a long conversation with Carlos Leon, who was undoubtedly the one person who could understand his former lover’s weariness of supporting someone who seemed no closer to his goals of stardom than he had been when they met, Madonna decided that the affair with Bird was over. In a brief transatlantic telephone conversation, she informed him that she wanted him out of her Chelsea house. Penniless and with no job prospects, Bird gratefully accepted Madonna’s offer to pay the first six months’ rent on an apartment as well as to give him $25,000 to get himself settled.

As Madonna was about to release
Ray of Light
, she discovered that she was pregnant. In her mind, this was not the time to have another child, and Bird was not the man with whom she wanted to be connected for the rest of her life. Another brief transatlantic telephone conversation ensued between Madonna and Bird, during which she told him that she was two months pregnant and intended to have an abortion. Installed in a modest flat in London and still singing on the streets near Trafalgar Square for small change, Bird could do nothing much to change her mind.

Within days, Madonna had the abortion and was back at work promoting her new album. According to a nurse who no longer works in the doctor’s office, but who was there at the time Madonna underwent the procedure, the star was extremely upset and worried. “This is an unpleasant moment for every woman who goes through something like that,” the nurse says. “But having an abortion at forty made her extremely concerned about whether or not she could conceive again. There’s no doubt that Madonna planned on eventually having another child.”

After Lourdes was born, Madonna openly discussed the abortions that she had undergone when she lived in New York. At the time, her words were surprisingly honest: “You always have regrets when you make those kind of decisions, but you have to look at your lifestyle and ask yourself, ‘Am I at a place in my life where I can devote a lot of time to being the really good parent I want to be?’ None of us wants to make mistakes in that role, and I imagine a lot of women look at the way our parents raised us and say, ‘I definitely wouldn’t want to do it quite that way.’ I think you have to be mentally prepared for it. If you’re not, you’re only doing the world a disservice by bringing up a child you don’t really want.”

With all the pragmatism that Madonna exhibited, she still admitted that she had a deep sense of regret and sadness whenever she thought about what she had done: “I think about it when I think that I could have a child right now who is five or even ten years old. Things happen when they’re meant to happen, and if it comes along again, the chance of parenthood, and I’m ready, I’ll do it. And that’s all there is to that.”

If there was ever any doubt about the message that Madonna had sent in her controversial video “Papa Don’t Preach,” it should have been apparent to everyone who still wondered what her position was that she was definitely pro-choice. And if there was any confusion about her feelings toward her own father now that she was a mother herself, she cleared that up as well after Lourdes came into her life: “He [my father] could be narrow-minded and stubborn, but he was a wonderful father. I really love that man!”

If the feeling was mutual, Tony Ciccone was still too upset to return the compliment. Though he adores Lourdes, he was not particularly pleased that his daughter had once again defied tradition when she had the baby out of wedlock and dissolved the relationship with the child’s father. Not only was it a difficult time in Madonna’s love life, but it was a disturbing and chaotic moment in her relationship with her father.

I
n the spring of 1998, twelve years after her marriage to Sean Penn, Madonna was invited to lunch at the Wiltshire country home of Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler. Guy Ritchie, a young British director, who had recently directed
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
, a movie that pioneered a new style of British gangster movies and that reputedly made British films once again hip, was a friend of Sting and Styler’s. Trudie Styler considered Ritchie the English version of Quentin Tarantino and, because of her faith in his talent, had invested £2 million in SKA Films, Ritchie’s company along with his partner, Mathew Vaughn, the son of Robert Vaughn, the star of the television series
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
. When Ritchie’s first film effort went on to earn more than £18 million at British box offices, Styler’s faith in the director seemed justified as she more than recouped her investment.

Madonna, who had known Sting for many years and shared one of his video directors, Mary Lambert, had become close friends with his wife since she’d moved to London. She made it clear that she would not be averse to Styler’s introducing her to an eligible man. Though Styler claimed that she really didn’t intend to “fix up Madonna and Guy,” she realized in her dining room that day the obvious curiosity on Ritchie’s side and the attraction on Madonna’s. Over lobster bisque soup and cold rack of lamb, Guy Ritchie had no idea that the petite blond woman whom he had heard of since he was a child would launch a tenacious campaign to captivate him. Before the lunch was over, Madonna told Trudie Styler that the chemistry was instant. Much the way she had had a premonition about Sean Penn, she told Styler, “I saw my life in fast-forward. He’s my future husband and the father of my second child.” As Madonna later described her feelings to a British magazine, she said that when she first saw Ritchie, she felt “all wobblybonkers.” According to Ritchie’s girlfriend at the time, Tania Strecker, a television personality, Ritchie’s ignoring of Madonna during the lunch piqued her interest. “His upper-crust background gave him an aura of indifference,” Strecker claimed, “which obviously incited her. Madonna is not someone accustomed to people ignoring her or being indifferent.”

Strecker wasn’t wrong.

One reason for Madonna’s attraction to Ritchie was that he was British, which fit in with her plans to make a new life for herself and her daughter in England. What made him even more appealing was that Ritchie, unlike most of her other lovers, who had been passing affairs, displayed an unexpected and surprisingly stubborn immunity to Madonna’s appeal, advances, and ardor.

Still, she persisted and made it her business to research his life much the way she had studied newsreels and interviewed people when she wanted to find out about Eva Perón.

Ritchie covered up his upper-class British background and presented himself as a tough cockney—a man who came from London’s East End—who had mingled with many unsavory characters and been involved in several illegal incidents. The feeling around London was that Ritchie promoted that image to coincide with his gangster movie and to fit in.

“I’ve lived in the East End for thirty years,” Ritchie claimed, “and let’s just say I’ve been in loads of mess-ups, and I’ve lost lots of money on cards.” Ritchie also claimed that the scar he has on his right cheek was the result of a row in a pub where he was slashed with a knife. Others claim that he was attacked because of an unpaid £1,000 gambling debt.

In reality, Guy Stuart Ritchie, who was born in 1968 in Herefordshire, two years after his sister, Tabitha, was raised in a smart West London suburb. He is named after two officers in the Seaforth Highlanders who had died in action during World War II. His father, John, was a military man who had trained at Sandhurst, and his paternal grandfather, Major Stewart “Jack” Ritchie, had won the Military Cross for bravery during World War I. When John Ritchie abandoned the military and went into the advertising business, he became highly successful for his Hamlet cigar commercials, which were popular in the 1970s. His wife, Guy’s mother, Amber, is a beautiful woman who had been a model before her marriage.

When Guy Ritchie was five, the same age as Madonna when her mother died, his parents divorced and his childhood became disjointed as he moved around a lot and mixed with a variety of different people. Shortly after the divorce, Amber married Sir Michael Leighton, a fisherman and wildlife photographer who functioned more as a father for Guy than his own biological father did. Ritchie lived in Sir Michael’s grand Shrewsbury estate, in an atmosphere that was loving and calm. For the first time in many years, Guy Ritchie felt as if he had a secure home. The idyllic family life ended, however, when Guy was twelve and Sir Michael and Lady Amber Leighton divorced. Any stability he had known from that union crumbled, and Ritchie blamed his mother for depriving him of that happy English country family life he had loved so much. From then on, his relationship with his mother became strained.

Immediately after the divorce, Guy, who suffered from dyslexia, was sent off to the exclusive £4,725-a-term Stand-bridge Earls school in Hampshire, which specialized in students with learning disorders. A behavior problem, Guy was eventually expelled for drugs, although his father believes that the real reason was that Guy was caught in a girl’s room and cutting classes. Long after the divorce and right before Guy Ritchie and Madonna announced their intention to marry, Sir Michael Leighton talked for the first time about his former wife and stepson. “Amber was a beautiful woman,” Sir Michael said, “much prettier than Madonna, but our marriage didn’t work out, and I haven’t seen her since she left. But in my opinion, what attracted Madonna to Guy is that she sensed a neediness in him. He suffered from a learning disorder. His parents were divorced, and he was younger than she was.”