Goddess: Inside Madonna (47 page)

The relationship with Guy was
not progressing, and Madonna, desperate to see him again, asked Trudie Styler to arrange another meeting. The occasion was Guy Fawkes Day, a holiday in England on which Sting has always opened his estate to neighbors and other local residents of Wiltshire, for a barbecue and an extravagant fireworks display. Styler complied and invited Ritchie, who accepted, although she warned Madonna that the young director was still involved with Tania Strecker. Whether he was or whether the affair was not an exclusive relationship, Madonna and Guy were inseparable for the entire evening. Instead of staying over as planned at the estate, Madonna left Lourdes with the couple and went back to London with Ritchie.

If Madonna expected a radical change in her new lover, she was mistaken. When the affair was only weeks old and Ritchie had obviously not turned over his life and fate to Madonna, nor given any indication that he was willing to settle down, to change his style of clothes or his habits, or to accept her lavish gifts and eventually be referred to as Mr. Madonna, the star became even more determined to land him. It was an agonizing few months for Madonna, who was aware that while they were having an affair, Guy was still seeing other women, including Strecker. According to a friend, she even asked Guy for a part in his next movie. “He turned her down,” the friend says. “She was too brassy for him.” Another English friend says, “By then, Madonna was into her I-want-to-get-Guy-Ritchie mode. She took up this simple, natural look because she didn’t want to look like a man-eater.”

Her British incarnation had begun, and Madonna embarked upon a quest to turn herself into an upper-class Englishwoman, softening her looks by styling her hair in Pre-Raphaelite waves that fell to her shoulders, wearing loose-fitting clothes carefully chosen to be chic and not vulgar, and finally, softening her Midwestern vowels and assuming a Harrods store-bought English accent as well as many English expressions.

Patsy Rodenburg is the most respected vocal coach in England, who has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, where she is currently the head of the voice department. Rodenburg has taught such British stars as Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Sir Ian McKellen, and Ian Holm how to speak and project their voices. One of Trudie Styler’s close friends claims that Madonna engaged Rodenburg to help her perfect an upper-class British accent. According to the source, the lessons took place in the privacy of Madonna’s London home once a week. According to Rodenburg, she never coached Madonna.

In yet another attempt to become the ideal woman for Guy Ritchie, when Madonna learned that one of his greatest pleasures was to wander down to the local pub and drink a couple of beers, Madonna, a teetotaler for most of her life, suddenly developed a taste for Guinness stout. As that same Styler friend says, “By doing all those things, Madonna thought it would be easy to get control and get him.”

Ritchie’s mother, Lady Amber, was not particularly enamored of or impressed by the American star who seemed determined to snare her son. A friend of hers claims that she was convinced that her son was unprepared for this campaign and too naive to defend himself. “Amber told me that Guy got sucked up so quickly into Madonna’s fantasy world,” the friend says, “that he didn’t even know what hit him. And Amber feared that things would get even more sticky.”

Another friend of Lady Amber’s, a titled English gentleman who has known Guy Ritchie since he was a small boy, remarked that it was nothing more than an infatuation. “Guy got entangled with the glitter of her life,” he maintains, “as if he was a child who was mesmerized by a circus performer.”

All of Guy Ritchie’s friends as well as those people who have worked with him professionally claim that, despite his youth, he is a straightforward man who has a healthy ambition to succeed as a director. “Everything he does he takes his time and makes sure that he will do it right,” an old friend says. “Whether it comes to shooting ducks or drinking at the neighborhood pub with his buddies, Guy is a man’s man, an honest bloke who is exactly what he seems to be. There are no hidden agendas or double meanings in his personality.”

The more that Guy Ritchie resisted, the more obsessed Madonna became. To her mortification, he showed little interest in her except for the “occasional date on a timetable of his choosing.” He continued to see other women openly, and often when Madonna would reach him on his mobile phone, he would tell her that he was with someone else and couldn’t talk. What drove her even more crazy was that while they were dating, he not only refused to move into her house but refused to spend the night. “Guy really didn’t want to be in a position to see Lourdes in the morning,” another friend explains, “as long as he was completely unsure of his intentions toward Madonna. But the other thing was that he refused to give up his single life at that point. He still intended to go off with his friends without telling her. If Madonna found out, he would hear about it afterwards.”

After a while, Ritchie couldn’t stand Madonna’s aggressive and controlling behavior, and he stopped calling her altogether. Madonna found herself without even that small part of him that he had once been willing to give her.

In March 1999, Ritchie sent a message through Trudie Styler that he wasn’t seeing Tania Strecker anymore. Madonna took that to mean that he was finally ready to settle down. She rang Ritchie and told him that she had to go to Italy to do some publicity for the Italian release of
Ray of Light
and had decided to stay several days longer to go on a yoga retreat. While in Italy, Ritchie called her and arranged to meet her. Instead of staying on for several days, they stayed for two weeks, and when they returned to England, they were a couple, a couple, however, who had frequent arguments. They were still the same two people who were used to getting their own way, two strong-willed individuals, each of whom had a temper.

Arguments would erupt from reasons as simple as Guy’s forgetting a dinner date to his canceling at the last minute because he had to stay late in an edit room, making cuts on his movie, from Madonna’s criticism of the way he chewed his food to Ritchie’s making fun of his future wife’s hair-pieces and extensions.

People who know the couple maintain that it was because of his strong character that Madonna fell in love with him, while still others argue that Madonna chose him because she desperately wanted someone who would guarantee her a sense of belonging in a foreign country. Those close to Madonna hold the cynical belief that she desperately wanted to have another child and considered Guy Ritchie the perfect partner. Even long before she met Ritchie, she had often said that Lourdes, or Lola as she calls her, needed “some competition.” “I don’t want her growing up to be a spoiled brat,” she said.

All the reasons given for the attraction between the couple were undoubtedly accurate. Madonna wanted a secure and guaranteed place among the rich and famous in England. She wanted Guy Ritchie. She wanted another child. In essence, she wanted all of the above and not necessarily in that order.

In September 1999, their relationship had once again reached an impasse because Madonna and Ritchie couldn’t agree on where they would live, or at least, if they would divide their time between England and the United States. Madonna had made a commitment to Carlos Leon that she would be spending a good portion of the year in America so that he and Lourdes could see each other. Guy, in the meantime, refused even to consider spending months away from London, where he had his film company, his future, his financial backers, and his friends. It was then, in the middle of these ongoing disputes, that Madonna offered to move Leon over to London and buy him a business. Leon refused, claiming that his life was in New York or in Los Angeles since he was still trying to establish himself as an actor.

In an effort to give her ex-lover and their daughter some time together alone, when Madonna went to New York, accompanied by Ritchie, for the opening of
The Next Best Thing
, Carlos Leon went to England to stay with Lourdes in the couple’s London house. After Madonna returned and presumably after Carlos Leon realized that her living in England was not at all “temporary,” when he saw that Lourdes had friends and seemed happy in her new school, he confronted Madonna. “What about our arrangement?” he asked her. “Do you intend to keep your word?” In confidence, she told Leon that she intended absolutely to keep her word about dividing her time, and she was certain that she would ultimately convince Guy Ritchie that this was the only way things could work out between them.

One of Ritchie’s friends at the time commented that this “geographic problem” was the basis for a potential rift or breakup in their relationship and eventually in their marriage, if it ever got to that point. “He is too young and too headstrong to be controlled,” the friend said. “And he doesn’t want to be bought or paid for or use Madonna’s connections to further his career. He has his own ambitions and confidence in his own talent. Hollywood simply doesn’t interest him.”

R
eal estate reveals a great deal about people. The houses that Madonna has bought, sold, and rented in Los Angeles, Miami, and most recently in London show that she is not only quixotic in her tastes but also unconventional, daring, original, and has a need to change homes every few years. It is a metaphor for her restlessness, and not for her wealth. Most people, even movie stars, regardless of how much money they have, don’t move or renovate houses every few years. It is as if Madonna can’t stay put in a house just as she can’t stay in one place in her career, which is what has kept her so successful, the endless reinvention. Her need to move from house to house reflects, in her private life, the restlessness that has served her so well in her public life.

In Los Angeles, during the years before Guy Ritchie, and then briefly after they were together, Madonna has moved at least six times, ending up in such strange neighborhoods as Los Feliz and most recently in Beverly Hills, which in some ways is even stranger for Madonna than Los Feliz.

Before Madonna met Guy Ritchie, and in the beginning of their relationship, she had the reputation around London real estate circles as a “nightmare client.” For the first eighteen months that she lived in London, from 1999 until the middle of 2000, she looked at property, put deposits down on homes, and even went to contract on several, from Bermondsey to Highgate. One of Madonna’s problems was that a shortage of houses on the market sent the prices soaring. At one point, Madonna bought a four-story house in Chelsea, not far from Rod Stewart, Nicola Horlick, and Adnan Khashoggi. Prior to that, she had been renting a home in Kensington in an area known as Millionaire’s Row, for approximately $6,000 a week. When she finally settled on the idea of buying a house, it was surprisingly in a busy neighborhood of London, in the heart of the West End, not far from some of the city’s most luxurious and trendy stores.

The Georgian mansion cost Madonna $10 million and was bought through her company Chelsea Girl LLC and her London lawyer, Mishcon de Reya, only a week before her wedding to Guy Ritchie. Madonna bought the house from a London property developer, Robert Wallace, who is married to the heiress to the Yates Wine Lodge fortune. Wallace, who only owned the property for six months, had bought it from James Kirkman, a millionaire art dealer, who had a long and lucrative professional relationship with the British artist Lucien Freud.

The property is an interesting choice for Madonna, as it sits directly on the sidewalk of a busy road, close to the crowds and tourists who wander around Oxford Street. Inside, the house is a world apart from the popular neighborhood in which it is located. Eighteenth-century, with an old-fashioned elevator and mahogany staircase, it is completely restored to its original condition, with five living rooms, a wood-paneled library, study, and a twenty-eight-foot salon. Each room has a fireplace and high, sculptured ceilings; the dining room opens up onto a back courtyard and garden, and there are two large kitchens. In addition, there are eight bedrooms, including a master suite with its own dressing room and bathroom. In the rear of the house, over a large garage, are two maid’s rooms, as well as two more servants’ quarters in the basement of the main house.

While Madonna was looking for a permanent residence in London, she was also making real estate transactions in the United States. In February 1999, she put her Biscayne Bay property, in Miami, up for sale, for $8.9 million. The house, which was next door to Viscaya, an Italian palace that had been turned into a museum and gardens, had approximately 7,128 square feet, and according to Alan Jacobson, whose firm, Wimbish-Riteway, Inc., handled the sale, “Madonna started a selling trend among celebrities in the South Beach area. Michael Caine sold his house, Cher renovated hers and sold it, and Sylvester Stallone eventually sold his for $16.2 million.”

In June 2000, Madonna’s Miami home sold for $7.5 million. The owners remain a mystery. At first, rumor had it that a German shepherd named Gunther and his anonymous master had been interested in Stallone’s house, but eventually found the price too high. Dennis Bedard, the vice president of the Gunther Corporation and a lawyer, confirmed that Gunther had bought Madonna’s Miami property. “The money comes from Europe,” Dennis said. “The corporation has one hundred and fifty million dollars at its disposal.” Larry Schatz, Madonna’s New York attorney, whose firm represented her in the sale, also claimed not to know who the actual owners were. “The sale has been completed,” Schatz said. “It’s a done deal. I have no knowledge of who the buyers are, or what they intend to do with it.” By then, more rumors began to spread about the prospective residents, and in response, Dindy Yokel, a publicist, claimed that four “young, blond people, two women and two men in their early twenties,” had moved into the house, along with Gunther, the German shepherd. Still other neighbors in the area claim that the occupants are a rock group called the Burgundians, a boy band backed by an unnamed investor. In European society, the truth seems far more complicated.