Madonna (35 page)

Madonna had other matters on her mind, however. While Jim Albright was struggling with his feelings for the singer, she was falling in love with Florida, with the ambience, the clubs, the people. She adored the house on Biscayne Bay where they were shooting, and which was close to homes owned by Cher and Sylvester Stallone. After making enquiries, she discovered that the house was owned by department-store magnates, the Nordstrom family. They had no plans to sell, but when Madonna made them an offer in the region of $5 million, it was a price even they could not refuse.

Her enjoyment of life in the winter sun inspired a mood of risk-taking frivolity on set. She was game for anything, something that gave her bodyguard a professional headache – how to save her from arrest. So when she impulsively decided to be photographed hitchhiking naked along the highway, he stood a couple of yards away with a coat to cover her modesty in case the police came by. While that escapade went without a hitch, she nearly gave the Italian owner of a pizza parlor a heart attack when she dropped her coat to the floor and, wearing a smile and nothing else, calmly asked for a slice of pepperoni. ‘Get out, get out or I call the police,’ the woman owner yelled as Madonna and company beat a hasty retreat, Albright throwing a coat over her as, almost hysterical with laughter, she ran out of the restaurant.

This devil-may-care mood merely added to the exhilarating sexual and personal chemistry developing between them. They could not wait until the end of that day’s shoot so that they could sneak a kiss together or retire to her penthouse suite. It seemed that the bodyguard was more than just a passing fancy, for Madonna talked about the two of them coming back to Florida to spend time together if she bought the house. Then, on the night before they left for New York, she told him that she loved him. ‘That blew me away,’ Albright admits. During the three-hour flight back to New York Madonna constantly made eyes at her bodyguard, and when they landed she asked for him to be her security detail at a Lenny Kravitz concert that night. Albright agreed, and during the course of the evening she told him that she and Kravitz, who co-wrote her 1990 hit ‘Justify My Love’ for her, had been lovers. At the end of the show, Madonna took Albright back to her apartment on West 64th Street and asked him to stay the night, knowing that his girlfriend was waiting for him in New Jersey. Sure enough, at three in the morning his pager went off; it was Melissa, wondering where he was. He left the apartment, but it was a pattern that was repeated virtually every night for the next month, until he decided to leave Melissa for Madonna.

They were soon enjoying a ‘hot and heavy’ affair, although, like Vanilla Ice and others, Jim Albright scoffs at the legend that Madonna is a woman with whips and chains hidden in the closet at her New York apartment, but knows her instead as a ‘normal,’ if rather passive, sexual partner. Whatever happened in bed, however, he noticed that as soon as he left his long-time girlfriend, the dynamics of their budding relationship subtly changed. It seemed to him that it had been a little game for Madonna to encourage him to leave Melissa. Yet now that he had done her bidding, she was reluctant to let him come and live with her. Instead, he moved in with his mother for a time until he could find a place of his own. That too caused a certain amount of friction, the hip singer not wanting to be seen dating a guy who lived with his mom. Eventually Albright found himself in a one-bedroom apartment in Hackensack. Perhaps feeling she was going slumming, Madonna came over one evening and he cooked pasta for her.

That, though, was an exception. For the most part it was Jim Albright who drove over the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey to join her at her apartment. Even though he was now living only a few miles away, it was as though he was entering a different world. They ate out every night at midtown sushi bars or at restaurants near the 54th Street studio where she was recording her
Erotica
album, and she took him to shows and plays, often going backstage to meet the stars, especially those she admired.

He was by her side when she congratulated Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange, one of her heroines, after seeing them in the Tennessee Williams drama A
Streetcar Named Desire
, and he accompanied her to watch another of her idols, Peggy Lee, sing at the Hilton Hotel’s Club 53. Madonna, who covered the famous Peggy Lee song ‘Fever’ on her
Erotica
album, was all smiles when she presented Lee with a bouquet of red roses at the end of her show, which she performed from a wheelchair. It was a bittersweet evening, Madonna thrilled at meeting someone she had admired since childhood, yet saddened at the toll age and illness had taken, the younger singer perhaps seeing in Peggy Lee intimations of her own mortality.

Not everything was wine and roses, however. In the summer of 1993 a night out at a pizzeria in SoHo exposed Madonna’s lover to the darker side of fame. They had gone out in a group that included a couple of Albright’s friends and two of her male dancers. As they were leaving the restaurant, they were confronted by a posse of paparazzi. In the ensuing mêlée a couple of punches were thrown before Madonna and Albright made good their escape and headed back to her apartment. The following morning the headline in one New York tabloid read, ‘Testy Titans of Testosterone,’ the accompanying article blaming the bodyguards for the fracas. The singer, who had valiantly tried to keep her latest paramour out of the headlines, was mortified. Later, one of the cameramen, Kenneth Katz, sued Madonna, his damages suit eventually being settled out of court.

The incident marked a watershed. Albright was still technically her bodyguard, both of them deriving some amusement from deciding when the billing stopped, the point in any day when he changed from hired bodyguard to unpaid lover. For the last few months he had been a regular visitor at her apartment, her staff now shopping for his dietary needs since his six-foot-two-inch frame was hardly sustained by Madonna’s diet of ricecakes and fruit juices. Nonetheless, the clash between his duty as her employee and their emotional relationship was an accident waiting to happen. Realizing this, he quit working as Madonna’s bodyguard, taking another position as head of security for the Palladium nightclub.

It proved a change for the better, as Albright recalls: ‘We just got closer. The relationship seemed so rosy, it was new and fresh. I had an overwhelming feeling of love for her which I felt was reciprocated.’ Indeed, in an interview at the time Madonna cryptically suggested that she was in love, that it was love at first sight, and that it would last for ever. Yet if she would not publicly name the man in her life, she and Albright were on the phone to each other almost constantly. On every day of their three-year relationship she either called or paged him using a secret code. As often as not she would be calling to tell him that day’s joke, gleaned from a joke book or a member of her entourage. For Albright, ‘That was one of the best parts of the relationship. She has a great sense of humor.’

When he could afford it, he bought her tiger lilies, her favorite flowers, or scoured antique markets for little trinkets that might amuse her. A silver charm bracelet he found for her was a particular favorite. For her part she was always sending him flowers, especially when she was out of town. When he moved into a bigger apartment in North Bergen she bought him a microwave and a quilt as housewarming gifts. Indeed, during their three-year affair she was always concerned about his well-being, ‘like a mother sending her child off to school,’ he says, adding that, ‘She has a need to be mothering to her men and the people she cares for in her life. Obviously losing her own mother at such an early age has brought out her own maternal instincts. She is a very caring person with a lot of love in her heart, which she kept bottled up during her childhood.’

He was not the only one in her ‘family.’ There was always someone she was ‘mothering,’ trying to help, whether it was Tony Ward and his problems with cocaine, her friend Ingrid Casares and her drug addiction, or any one of a host of other waifs and strays in her life. Her strength of character, as well as her fame, gave her friends the strength to fight their various problems or addictions, the carrot being the fact that they could continue be part of her circle if they recovered, the stick the knowledge that Madonna’s support would be of limited duration if they did not help themselves.

Of even more immediate concern to her, however, was her own desire to have a family. To Albright, it was clear from early on in the relationship that Madonna wanted children, especially a child of mixed race. As he says, ‘She just loved my skin color and she was always fascinated by interracial children. Quite frankly that was part of my attraction to her. Her biological clock was ticking, she has this incredible maternal instinct and I think that in her eyes it would make her life complete. It would give her the thing she cherishes most in life – unconditional love and admiration.’ They had even chosen the names for the children they planned to have, Lola for a girl and Caesar for a boy. In letters to him she would sign herself ‘Lola,’ and playfully sent her love to their two putative offspring. When she bought the Nordstrom house in Florida she even named the boat she kept there
Lola, Lola.
Yet whatever her hopes, it was to be another four years before her dream became reality.

If planning their family together was one indicator of the close bond between Madonna and Albright, another was when he took her home to meet his librarian mother, Jane, and other members of his family for a Sunday lunch in Hackensack. They chatted in the kitchen, Madonna charming and careful to put everyone at ease, aware that entertaining a living icon is a daunting prospect for most people. Then she and Albright walked hand in hand through the local park and along the main drag, colloquially known as Burgerland Avenue, stopping to buy Terigo, a Cuban wheat drink she likes, from a local store, and admiring a pitbull they encountered (they talked about buying one together). It was the very normality of the day that appealed to Madonna’s lover. No one recognized them, and even when he introduced her to an acquaintance in the street, his friend couldn’t quite believe that she really was Madonna.

Having become close to a woman whose life is so organized and controlled, Albright came to cherish those times when she relaxed a little, showed her humanity, her humor and, at times, her vulnerability. On one occasion they went to a retrospective of the work of the graffiti artist Keith Haring, which was staged in a New York gallery. Haring, another old friend of hers from her time in New York in the 1980s, had died from AIDS in 1999. For the first time, Albright saw her collapse in tears, astonished to find this woman, normally in complete command of her feelings, sobbing in his arms as she reflected on the roll call of friends from those early New York days who had died either from AIDS or from drugs.

She let the mask slip again when she was immersing herself in the character she was to play in the film
Dangerous Game,
which her company, Maverick Entertainment, was producing. There was a scene in the film in which her character smoked marijuana, so Madonna, ever the perfectionist, decided that she needed to experience what that would be like so that she could portray it accurately on screen. So she, Jim Albright and a music-industry executive went to an underground club in the meatpacking district of New York and smoked several joints, the would-be method actress taking a notebook with her in which to write down her thoughts and feelings. As what she calls the ‘dabble weed’ took effect, Madonna slipped into a state that was far from the woman in charge of herself and everyone around her. She became forgetful, continually losing her notebook, amusingly silly and so laid back that she was soon horizontal. ‘It was refreshing to see a control freak so out of control,’ Albright remembers.

She showed her hidden side yet again when she and her lover flew to Detroit in Time-Warner’s private jet to spend Christmas with her family. While the manner of her arrival was entirely suitable for a sophisticated superstar, when she was with her father, stepmother and the other Ciccones she became just another Midwest girl-made-good. Her father loaned them a battered minivan to drive around in, and gave them the use of an empty house he owned. So Madonna, icon of feminism, adopted a new persona, ‘Madge in the Minivan,’ driving Albright round the city like a mother on her school run. They slept in sleeping bags on an airbed in the empty property, huddling together for warmth. For once they were on their own – no Ingrid, no secretary, no publicity agent, no phones or television. They played Scrabble with her family, amid the usual sibling rivalry common to all families, the simmering undercurrents of jealousy and disapproval subdued in the atmosphere of Christmas cheer.

For Madonna, the most enjoyable moment about that trip home was the chance it brought for her to sit on her father’s lap. It made her feel like a little girl again. ‘At home nobody brings up the fact that I’m a star,’ she told the writer Lynn Hirschberg. ‘Not one word. At first I thought: “Well, how come I’m not getting any special treatment?” But even though I had to sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag, even though I didn’t know who else had slept in that sleeping bag, the trip was really such a joyous thing for my father.’ It was joyous for Albright, too, who admits, ‘These were the moments I cherished with her.’

Besides sharing the good times, Albright was also by her side during what became for her a dark journey of the soul, when the controversy over her book,
Sex
, was at its height in the fall of 1992. Published in October by Warner Books,
Sex
ignited a nationwide controversy, albeit one that did little, if anything, to slow its sales. ‘I’ve really bitten off more than I can chew, I really wish I hadn’t done this,’ she confessed to him one day in a moment of utter despair. Every morning when she read the corrosive reviews, sent in the daily clippings service from Liz Rosenberg, her mood would palpably darken. Even though he would devote the day to reassuring her that for everyone who hated the book, there were a thousand who loved her, it did little to lighten her spirits.