Madonna (37 page)

‘She has a good spirit and a good heart,’ Albright observes, ‘but there are two sides to her, one of which is loving and caring, the other totally selfish. Madonna’s greatest need is for love. So she uses sex as a form of love because of her great desire to feel loved and receive love. Love is Madonna’s driving force at every level, from having the fans love her to having the people she sleeps with fall in love with her. She takes the physical act of sex, whether it is with a man or woman, and turns it into love. Madonna feeds on love, she feels starved of love.’ He adds, ‘Sometimes I feel that she sleeps with someone hoping that something of them will rub off on her; their talent, their wit, their athleticism.’

The tension between them came to a head during her 1993 The Girlie Show Tour, a brilliantly staged burlesque that was a sell-out around the world. At first, things went well between them. She and Albright spoke every day on the telephone, wrote often, and when she made a flying visit to New York to see her throat specialist, they met for dinner in a downtown restaurant. During their cozy chats over the phone she had made it clear that she really did want to have his baby. Organized as ever, she wanted him to fly out to Japan in December, at the end of the tour, so that she could conceive, and she would then take a break from her other commitments to prepare for the child’s birth.

There were two problems. The first was that his sister was pregnant and he wanted to be present at the birth, which was likely to coincide with the end of the tour. When he explained this to Madonna, however, she became angry and upset that he was prepared to put his family before her. Secondly, before he saw her, Albright discovered that she had bought a man’s suit while out shopping earlier that day. It was not his size, and it was not for him. When he taxed her with this they argued until Albright, angry and frustrated, walked out of the restaurant, leaving her to pick up the tab. A few days later, after she had returned to Europe for the next leg of her tour, he discovered that the suit was for his rival, John Enos.

The argument now continued at long distance, until finally Albright refused to take her calls, even though she would call him up to thirty times an hour. By the time she arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in October, during the South American leg of the tour, Madonna was so distraught that she would no longer perform unless he spoke to her. Still he refused. In desperation Liz Rosenberg, her press secretary, called and pleaded with him to speak to his lover. Again he refused. With the minutes ticking away before the show was due to start, her manager, Freddy DeMann, called Albright and, in a man-to-man chat, convinced him to speak to the singer. She was crying and hysterical, but after they had spoken she calmed down enough to go through with her stage show that night.

On the following day they had a long conversation, in the course of which Albright told her that they were through and that he didn’t want to see her any more. He was tired of having his heart broken. Nevertheless, they patched things up over the next couple of weeks, although he did little to help their relationship when he told her over the phone that he had had a brief fling with a girl at the club. Madonna freaked out, furious that he had had the temerity to cheat on her. Now it was her turn to hang up on him. ‘I was amazed by her reaction because I had forgiven her umpteen times. She had fucked women, multiple men, the dog in the
Sex
book might have got a lick in, and I go and get a blow job and am man enough to tell her about it,’ Albright observes wryly.

Their long-distance relationship continued to limp along, although Madonna became increasingly cool towards him, her reaction to the birth of his nephew Teddy on November 6 nothing if not muted. Since the tour did not finish until just before Christmas, Albright suggested that he fly out to meet her in the Far East. This time it was she who was ambivalent and unenthusiastic, tell-tale signs, if he had needed any, that she had done a complete emotional about-turn: ‘There was probably someone else in the background,’ he reflects. Then, on her return to America, she was reluctant even to meet him again, but he insisted, telling her that, if they were ending their three-year relationship, they should say goodbye in person.

They met at the beginning of January where it had all begun, on a deserted beach in Miami early one morning. They talked and walked for a while, and then spent the day together before sharing their last night as a couple at her home on Biscayne Bay. Next morning, as he prepared to leave, they shared a long last hug and shed a few tears before he walked out of her life. Like some latter-day Mrs Danvers, Ingrid Casares watched the fading melodrama silently and inscrutably from the shadows.

In New York six months later, Madonna was out running in Central Park when she did a double-take as she passed a fellow jogger. She thought it was Jim Albright or, if not, his brother, for he was the same height and had the same smooth, lightly tanned skin and well-muscled physique. She was intrigued. Shortly after returning to her apartment she asked one of her entourage, Danny Cortese, to do a little detective work and find out who the runner was. Eventually he discovered that he was a fitness instructor named Carlos Leon who worked at the Crunch gym in Manhattan, and she had apparently met him a couple of years earlier at a party. (His version of events is that he first stopped her to advise her on her fitness regime.)

Now even more intrigued, she instructed Cortese to deliver a message to Leon and arrange a meeting by the children’s playground in Central Park. It was an appropriate rendezvous. Close up she liked what she saw, once again taken by the remarkable similarities between him and Albright. Furthermore, not only did the two men look alike, but they had similar personalities: quiet, rather shy but fiercely independent, with a clear, if streetwise, sense of morality and considerable dignity. Like Albright, Leon doted on his parents, Maria and Armando, and in time the singer became a frequent visitor to their modest 91st Street apartment. On one occasion she brought her actress friend Rosanna Arquette to join them, everyone tucking into black-eye beans as Cuban music played in the background.

Her new relationship with the sensitive and introverted Leon made a refreshing change from the hectic love life she had enjoyed since she and Jim Albright had parted. Carlos Leon proved himself to be a gentleman, considerate, affectionate and protective. He and Madonna led a quiet life, often walking unnoticed to the cinema in the nearby Lincoln Center, picking up an ice cream or shopping along Amsterdam Avenue, the picture of a normal everyday couple, holding hands in the sunshine. Inevitably, however, Ingrid Casares would be around, ensconced in Madonna’s apartment or joining the couple for dinner.

He often brought her gifts of small boxes to add to her trinket collection, and took to putting boxes of candy on her bed – naturally, ‘Red Hots’ are her favorites. For Valentine’s Day in 1995 he gave her a teddy bear and filled a heart with jellybeans and other sweets, much to her amusement and delight. She was thrilled, too, when he surprised her with the present of a small pedigree dog she had taken a fancy to during a visit to a midtown pet store.

Although he had aspirations to be an actor, Leon found his elevation to instant celebrity hard to take at first – especially the attention of the paparazzi. On one occasion he gave the waiting pack the finger, a gesture that earned him a rebuke from Madonna, the bruising legacy of Sean Penn never far from her thoughts. Nor was he especially comfortable with her starry friends, while Madonna was both careful and watchful of the new man in her life when they were at a glitzy party or other public event. Yet Leon, a jealous man, was often the one looking out for her. He was uneasy when he discovered that Sean Penn was scheduled to present his ex-wife with the award for Most Fashionable Woman of the Year at the 1994 Fashion Music Awards held in New York. While Leon sat in the audience, he was unaware that backstage Sean Penn and John Enos were messing around with each other and Madonna, as Liz Rosenberg looked on with disapproval, conscious that a photograph of their lighthearted fooling could turn the scene into front-page news. At the end of the show Leon went home, claiming he was tired, while Madonna, Sean, the ever-present Ingrid, and others went barhopping. It did seem, though, that Madonna might have turned over a new leaf, especially when she told friends at her thirty-seventh birthday party in August 1995 that she and Carlos were planning to start a family – but after the filming of
Evita.

That was not, however, the way Jim Albright saw it. While she was filming in Hungary, Madonna phoned him from the set, telling him that he would always occupy a special place in her heart, and thanking him for everything he had been to her. She then went on to complain about Carlos, saying that he was too immature, too much of a macho Latin man, and that their relationship was floundering. When he put the phone down, her former lover had the distinct impression that she wanted to rekindle their affair.

Two weeks later, on April 13, 1996, a news flash announced that Madonna was pregnant. ‘It was a shock to me – and to her,’ Albright says. ‘She definitely would not have called me if she had known that she was pregnant.’ Six months later, on October 14, 1996, Madonna, now thirty-eight, gave birth to a 6-pound-9-ounce baby girl in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. She named the baby Lourdes Maria Ciccone Leon, but she was known to everyone as Lola.

Madonna’s curly-haired daughter was walking and talking before Jim Albright got to meet her for the first time. ‘Beautiful eyes, very smart, just like her mother,’ was his verdict when Madonna invited him over. He brought along his nephew Teddy, the youngster whose birth had caused such friction between them. They went into Lola’s nursery, once the room she had decked out as a state-of-the-art gym. Madonna put on a record and they joined hands, the four of them dancing round and round to the music – mother and daughter, ex-lover and nephew.

The change in Madonna was striking. Here was a woman who now exuded a tremendous sense of calm, truly someone in touch with herself, with both her spirit and her soul. At long last she seemed to have found what she had been searching for all her life – true, unconditional love. And it had come from inside her.

Chapter Twelve

Me, Myself and I

I
F FAXES COULD KILL, then Abel Ferrara was history. He shook his head in disbelief as page after page of handwritten bile spewed out of his machine. After reading just one heavily underscored sample sentence: ‘You fucker, you’ve ruined my fucking career, you scumbag,’ the film director got the drift. Then he began to laugh. He showed the pages to his wife, Nancy, then picked up a red pen and circled the words ‘I’ and ‘me’ on each page. Soon the fax paper was covered in blotchy red circles, as though suffering from an unpleasant rash. It proved contagious, for Ferrara soon put pen to paper himself, replying in kind to the venomous missives from Madonna, the co-star and co-producer of his latest film,
Dangerous Game.
‘She was so angry about the movie, hysterical, screaming, crying,’ recalls Nancy Ferrara, who also appeared in the film. ‘The faxes were just nasty, “You fucker, you’ve fucked my life,” that kind of thing. The whole tone was about her, “I” and “me”, “I” and “me.”’

For once the head of Maverick Films had met her match, coming up against a real live maverick. It proved to be a searing experience for her, emotionally, artistically and financially. Their first meeting had set the tone. She had invited him to watch a rough cut of her latest, as yet unreleased, movie,
Body of Evidence
, in a private viewing cinema in New York in the fall of 1992. After a few minutes he had fallen asleep, snoring loudly through the scenes where Madonna, who plays a sex-driven gallery owner, utters lines like: ‘Have you ever seen animals make love?’ When he woke up his verdict was not favorable: ‘It’s such a bad movie. It’s terrible, but it’s not her fault.’ It was a judgment she took to heart.

She took to Ferrara, too, describing him as an ‘underground genius.’ The provocative director, whose gamey, often indigestible films like
The Driller Killer
and
Body Snatchers: The Invasion Continues,
had for years been providing critics and art-house audiences with food for thought. Madonna, who has been a student of cinema for much longer than she has been interested in music, had admired Ferrara’s work from afar, appreciating the European influences in his work, particularly that of the French director Jean-Luc Godard. Grim and often repulsive, Ferrara’s films are populated with perverse and often perverted low-life characters who exist in a kind of a depraved purgatory within New York’s seedy underbelly. Madonna was particularly intrigued by his latest film,
Bad Lieutenant,
the degrading story of a corrupt New York detective, played by Harvey Keitel, on the trail of a gang of thieves who have raped a nun.

A blonde Madonna in a typically suggestive pose.