Life with My Sister Madonna (29 page)

At the ceremony she performs “You Must Love Me,” written by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, which she sang in
Evita.
It wins Best Original Song, and this reflects on her well, and I am delighted.

 

W
HEN
Madonna: The Girlie Show—Live Down Under
is released on DVD, I am temporarily pulled back into pleasant memories of our work together. But I am now playing hard, doing drugs a couple of times a week, and Madonna is hearing about it. She calls me and says, “I am hearing awful things about you. Are you addicted to cocaine?”

I don't think that I am, and I tell her so.

She hangs up, unconvinced.

I
N
M
AY
1997 I direct Dolly Parton's “Peace Train,” my seventh music video. We meet and she is friendly. She's dressed in a tight dress, but her arms are covered, as they will be whenever I see her. She tells me she doesn't want a bunch of dancers behind her. I ask her what kind of dance she plans to do herself.

“I'm a mover, not a dancer. And I'm a bit top-heavy…” she says.

Before the shoot, she asks that we send a car to the airport to pick up her wig lady, and a second one to pick up her wigs.

Some of the video is shot with her placed on a dolly in front of a wall. As I don't want the wall to be much higher than Dolly, I call her manager, Sandy Gallen, and ask how tall she is. He says he will get back to me.

After a few hours, he calls: “Dolly is five foot nine in hair and heels.”

She's probably five three without. On the day of the shoot, I arrive at 5 a.m. The wig lady arrives at six in one car, as do the wigs in another. Dolly arrives at seven, completely made up, in a wig and outfit. She disappears into her trailer for two hours, while the makeup man does her makeup. He leaves, then the wig lady goes in and does her hair.

Dolly never wears the same dress twice in public. She has three dresses made for the shoot, all in a similar cut: long sleeves, tight cleavage, arms covered.

On the set, she is casual, easy to work with, cracks a few dirty jokes, and says, “I'm not all boobs; I'm partly brain, too.”

She finds it difficult to move around, though, because her shoes are so high and her wig so carefully balanced. She ends up doing a little wiggle that I christen the Dolly Chug, and she is amused.

We break for lunch and she sits between me and my producer, Michelle Abbott. Dolly is rail thin, with a tiny, tiny waist, but orders fried chicken and collard greens. Michelle asks her how she can eat that kind of food and stay so slim.

“Well, aah always leave a little on ma plate for the angels,” she says.

In part of the video, we use doves supplied by a dove wrangler. Dolly is supposed to hold one of the doves, then let it fly away, but the doves refuse to fly. So every time the wrangler puts a dove into Dolly's hands, instead of flying away, it flops to the ground again. He puts it in her hand again, she throws it up in the air, and it flops to the ground.

“I'm sticking my finger up its ass, but I think it likes it,” Dolly jokes.

She's great to work with, we have fun, and everything goes really well. The next morning, she leaves me a phone message: “Hi, Chris, I just want to tell you that I had a good time last night.” I am so amazed by that. The first time in all the videos I've shot that an artist has done that.

Not long afterward, I suggest to Dolly that she and Madonna record an album together, each one recording five of the other's hits. Dolly tells me she thinks it's a great idea, but Madonna just says, “I'll think about it,” which really means no. She and Carlos have now split for good, and I am not surprised.

 

I
ADD ANOTHER
string to my bow; I've become a screenwriter. Before I started, I read a basic book on the rules of screenwriting, then just began to write. I know I could take screenwriting classes, but I don't want to. As usual, plunging headfirst into a new endeavor without any training for it challenges my creativity.

My screenplay, “Nothing North,” is inspired by a documentary I see about a female bullfighter named Christina. At first, though, I write it as a short story set in Seville, Spain. I send it to Madonna.

She calls me and says, “This is a really beautiful story. Have you ever been to Seville?”

I tell her I haven't.

“Well, I have, and you described it perfectly. What are you going to do with the story?”

I explain that I am going to adapt it into a screenplay.

She tells me to go for it, then offers me space at her Maverick Records offices in West Hollywood, and I am grateful.

I write for four months, and when the script is finished, send it to Madonna asking whether she would like to help finance it. She says she wouldn't. Naturally, I am disappointed. Her clout as executive producer could easily have gotten the movie financed, but she simply doesn't want to get involved. I find her refusal both disappointing and confusing. But once my disappointment has subsided, I come to the inescapable realization that—because I so wanted my sister to like my script—I had mistakenly jumped to the conclusion that her sisterly enthusiasm and encouragement meant that she wanted to produce it as well.

 

I
N
M
AY
1997, Naomi, Kate, and Johnny Depp—whose movie
The Brave
is showing at the Cannes Film Festival—rent a house in Cannes. Naomi invites me to join them and generously offers to pay my fare. So I fly to France, and by the time I get to Cannes, the Gallagher brothers (Oasis) and Marc Jacobs join me at the house. After a day or two—with the exception of Johnny, who only smokes pot—we are all well into the party scene and have a great time.

Later, on May 11, I meet Demi Moore at the opening party for Planet Hollywood, and we immediately hit it off. Iggy Pop sings, and during his song he accidentally spits on Kate. I duck. Kate is swigging champagne straight out of the bottle and doesn't even notice.

All of us—Kate, Naomi, Demi, Harvey Weinstein, and Johnny Depp—go back to Demi's room at the Hotel du Cap. Naomi dances around the room in a perfect imitation of Tina Turner, while Johnny and Harvey have a serious conversation concerning why Harvey doesn't want to distribute Johnny's film. “Because it's bad,” Harvey tells him in the end.

Later that night, Demi invites me to go to Paris with her in the morning. I tell her that all my stuff is at Naomi and Kate's. She sends someone to pack up my stuff and bring it to the hotel. I am duly impressed.

We stay up all night. Everyone is having a blast. At around four in the morning, for some strange reason, I decide to take a bath. I turn on the water, then promptly forget about it. The next thing I turn, Demi's Louis Vuitton luggage is floating around the room. I feel foolish, but she laughs it off. The hotel staff promptly set about cleaning up the room. In the morning, we fly by private jet to Paris and hang out there together.

From then on, Demi and I get closer and closer. On June 5, 1997, I am her date at the Gucci evening for AIDS Project L.A. From that time on, we hang out together at least once a week. I like her enormously, but am slightly put off by her heavy-handed spiritual sensibility. She carries around a deck of cards that look like tarot, but aren't, lays them out for me, telling me that they will predict my future, but I'm not that interested. I'm focused on the present.

In the past, Demi has had drug and alcohol problems. She's been sober for years, but still exhibits obsessive habits. She lives on coffee, Red Bull, and dried green apples. One night, we go to dinner at Benvenuto on Santa Monica. She brings with her two cans of Red Bull. She orders pasta, which she doesn't eat, drinks Red Bull and coffee, and smokes Marlboros in rapid succession.

Some nights, she picks me up with some of her girlfriends and we all go to this Latin drag-queen club on La Brea, where Demi gets onstage and dances with a group of drag queens. She and I also make great dance partners. At Christmas she sends me a black-and-white card featuring a little boy in a suit and bow tie dancing with a Kewpie doll. In it, Demi writes, “Someone to dance with when I'm not around.” By now, she and I are very close. Sometimes a little too close for my comfort.

“Are you sure you are really gay, Christopher?” she would ask me over and over. “I mean, couldn't you turn straight for me?”

Later on, when I meet Farrah Fawcett and start hanging out with her as well, she also repeatedly poses the identical questions to me.

I don't know how serious either of them is, but I do have some experience with women who have the hots for me. Ever since my college days, I have been pursued by women set on luring me into their beds. Of course, few of them have succeeded.

Thanks to Demi, though, the media are about to start posing interesting questions about my sexual preference.

One Saturday night, when I am hosting an evening at Atlantic, Demi and three or four of her girlfriends show up. As always, at around eleven, we clear the center of the restaurant, a DJ starts spinning music, and all of us—along with the restaurant patrons—spend the rest of the night dancing. All great fun.

On this evening, at around 3 a.m., Demi—a girl who no longer drinks, but clearly still relishes having fun—persuades me to get up and dance on the black granite bar with her.

Within moments, I'm up there and we're dancing wildly. Demi pulls off my shirt, gets behind me, and starts grinding into me.

Normally at this time of the night we would have had the restaurant doors bolted shut, and the blinds would have been pulled down tight, so that anyone passing by would have assumed that the restaurant was closed. But by some strange Murphy's Law, although I didn't realize it at the time, that night one of the blinds is left open enough for some enterprising paparazzo to point his lens through the crack and snatch a photograph of our revels.

 

T
HE FOLLOWING
M
ONDAY,
I am walking through Los Angeles airport, about to catch a flight to New York, and out of the corner of my eye catch sight of what looks like a picture of me on the cover of the
National Enquirer
. I walk up to the rack and discover that I am also on the cover of the
Star
.

Both covers feature fuzzy shots of Demi and a shirtless me dancing together on the bar at Atlantic. Inside one tabloid is a spread and the eye-catching headline “It's Three A.M. No Bruce, No Bra, No Problem.” The second carries the cover line “Demi's Big Night Out with Madonna's Brother.”

I am a little troubled that both articles might give Demi pause and cause her to think that I set the whole thing up to get publicity for Atlantic, which I definitely did not. I was afraid she wouldn't believe me and would then lose trust in me. But I am innocent, and thankfully Demi believes me.

Apart from that, I enjoy all the unexpected attention. I am on the cover of the
Enquirer
and the
Star
, both in the same week. For just a few days, I feel as if I am a star and I like it. I am, after all, my sister's brother.

 

O
N
J
ULY
15, 1997, in front of his mansion on Ocean Drive, South Beach, Gianni Versace is shot at close range by crazed killer Andrew Cunanan. Madonna and I are both deeply shocked by his senseless murder. Just a few weeks later, we are both shaken by the death of Princess Diana in Paris. We think back to how we were also chased through Paris by the paparazzi and realize that, but for the grace of God…

 

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
8, 1997, Madonna and I attend the Gianni Versace memorial service at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Madonna and Gianni have always had a business relationship, have never been great friends, but out of respect to his memory, Madonna and I attend the memorial service anyway.

We gather in the museum's Temple of Dendur, which is decorated with magnificent white flowers. Madonna reads a poem she's written to commemorate Gianni; Elton John and Whitney Houston sing. Many of the supermodels—Stephanie Seymour, Christy Turlington, Helena Christensen, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, and Amber Valletta—are there. So are Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Tom Ford, Ralph Lauren, and Marc Jacobs.

Donatella, making her first public statement since Gianni's murder, gives a speech commemorating him and touching on the profound influence he had on her and her brother Santo. “By the time he was calling Santo and myself to be part of his dream, we were already part of it. He let me do many things that made our mother pale…. I laugh when I remember the adventures that came with being his little sister…. Each time Gianni would ask me to do what back then seemed like these impossible things, I'd tell him I couldn't do it, he'd tell me I could, and I did. He was always the most exciting person I knew; he was always my best friend.”

Her speech, which brings tears to my eyes, is close to what I might have said about Madonna, with the exception of the last line: “In spite of his giant personality, it was impossible to feel overshadowed by him, because his special art was to shine the light on others.” The speech is extremely moving, and I am very sad for Donatella.

Afterward, she invites us back to the mansion off Fifth Avenue. Like the Miami Versace mansion, the five-story Manhattan Versace mansion is all done in heavy neoclassical style, lots of gilt, marble, black-marble floors, and Picassos on many of the walls—hard to relax in, extremely formal.

Madonna and I join a circle of guests in the small garden, sitting on clear plastic folding chairs, all arranged in a circle. Madonna sits on my right, and a woman who looks like a bag lady sits on my left. Madonna whispers to me that the bag lady is Lisa Marie Presley. I am incredulous, but on second glance realize that she is, indeed, Lisa Marie.