Madonna (42 page)

Even as Mailer moved on to tilt at other cultural windmills, Sir Tim Rice, the co-creator of the 1978 hit musical
Evita,
cantered, fully armed, over the horizon. Desperate to be taken seriously as an actress and still smarting from her failed attempt to secure the leading role in
Casino,
Madonna now threw all her chips on one last roll of the dice – an all-out effort to win the lead in the film version of his musical.

When she first met Rice, at a gala dinner in Los Angeles in honor of his composer partner, Andrew Lloyd Webber, her chances of scooping the jackpot looked slim. The project had endured an elephantine gestation period, the planned film of Evita trundling through numerous Hollywood studios and gathering a caravan of possible directors, including Oliver Stone, Ken Russell and Glenn Gordon Caron, and actresses, notably Glenn Close, Meryl Streep and Michelle Pfeiffer. (It is worth noting that in the days after the success of Desperately Seeking Susan, when Madonna was seen as a solid box-office draw, she had met Oliver Stone, but after a short conversation she realized that she could never work with him.) Yet Madonna, the woman described by the influential film reviewer Roger Ebert as ‘the queen of movies that were bad ideas right from the beginning,’ was scarcely best placed to scoop a role for which so many first-rate actresses had been nominated, however long she had coveted it. As she tucked into her first course with the dashing Spanish actor Antonio Banderas seated beside her, she launched another charm offensive, chatting animatedly to Rice and the film’s producer, the English impresario Robert Stigwood.

So matters stood, until finally, at Christmas 1994, it was announced that the British director Alan Parker, the man behind hits like
Fame, The Commitments
and
Bugsy Malone,
would direct the movie of the musical about the life and times of Eva Perón, nicknamed Evita, the charismatic wife of the Argentinian dictator Juan Perón. Madonna wasted no time in contacting Parker, sending him a four-page letter that outlined why she was perfect for the part, and including with it, for good measure, a copy of her latest video,
Take A Bow
, which drew heavily on Latin-American and Catholic iconography. Ironically, little seemed to have changed since the days when she arrived back from France and sent an equally long missive to Stephen Jon Lewicki for a part in his shoestring movie A
Certain Sacrifice
. Only this time the budget was $55 million and her career in films – as well as the small matter of a $1 million fee – hung on the outcome.

Rice immediately recognized the importance of the movie to the singer, remarking that, ‘If this fails she may not have a film career for a while.’ So the English lyricist went in to bat on her behalf. It was a sticky wicket. His partner, Andrew Lloyd Webber (now Lord Lloyd-Webber), refused to have her at any price. ‘He felt that she had been rude to him so it was a clash of two giant egos,’ Rice recalls. ‘He was also worried because he didn’t think she could sing the part. I felt it didn’t really matter although in the end a couple of songs had the notes brought down, which meant they weren’t as good.’

As for the film’s director and producers, they opted for Michelle Pfeiffer. Even though Madonna had explained to Parker that only she could understand Eva Perón’s ‘passion and pain,’ her screen failures told against her; in short, she was seen as a cinematic kiss of death. ‘He was very wary of her,’ Rice tells of Parker, the down-to-earth Cockney director probably bemused when she confided in her letter that fortune tellers had been predicting for years that she would play Evita on screen. ‘I can honestly say that I did not write this letter of my own free will. It was as if some other force drove my hand across the page,’ she had written.

In truth, the one force that was with Madonna at that critical moment was support from Rice, who felt that, for all her obvious failings, she was perfect for the part. Yet although it would be satisfyingly ironic, in a strictly post-modern kind of way, to be able to say that this cricket-loving, card-carrying Conservative Party member was wholly responsible for restarting her film career, to do so would be slightly wide of the mark. Rice valiantly put forward a strong case, but the fact that Michelle Pfeiffer had just had her second child meant that it would be difficult for her to cope with demanding film shoots in Argentina, Britain and Hungary. As a result, the scales began to tip in Madonna’s favor.

Even so, the film’s producers checked with Penny Marshall, director of the baseball movie
A League of Their Own
, to find out whether Madonna’s star status would throw them any curve balls. ‘After all,’ said Lloyd Webber, rather prissily, ‘there were budgets to consider and a time frame that allowed no room for star temperament or caprice.’ Yet despite the fact that Marshall gave her a glowing reference – besides a fine performance in
A League of Their Own
, she had earned the respect of old hands by her efforts to master the intricacies of pitching and hitting a baseball – Madonna understood that she had been chosen by default. ‘I knew I was going in with the odds stacked against me,’ she said. ‘That’s an awkward position to be in. You feel everyone’s waiting for you to stumble.’

She threw herself into the part with typical energy and dedication, the young woman who had just learned she was worth $100 million as hungry for success as the day she got her first role in
A Certain Sacrifice
. In the months before filming commenced she immersed herself in Eva Perón’s life, watching newsreels, reading biographies and learning the tango. Earlier she spent months improving her voice under the tutelage of a leading singing teacher, Joan Lader, before flying to London in October 1995 to record the film’s soundtrack with her leading men, Jonathan Pryce as dictator Juan Perón and Antonio Banderas, who played Che Guevara, the Argentinian-born rebel leader who acts in the film as a sardonic narrator. Madonna, already convinced of her empathy with the character she was to play, tried to emulate the heavily Catholic atmosphere of Evita’s home country, dimming the studio lights and lighting candles before recordings.

Indeed, the way she identified with Argentina’s former First Lady was such that she convinced Parker that she should fly to Buenos Aires to explore the myth of Eva Perón, hiring an Argentinian journalist who introduced her to aged Perónists and others who had known her. Her welcome was hardly effusive, however, whatever she may have hoped for. As she was driven from the airport, she noticed graffiti daubed on walls that read, ‘Evita lives, get out, Madonna,’ while protesters even burned an effigy of her outside her hotel. It reflected a feeling among many people in Argentina – a deeply conservative, Catholic country with a strong culture of machismo – that the casting of an outrageously sexual pop singer in the role of their revered national heroine was little short of sacrilegious. President Carlos Menem, a lifelong Perónist, even made an address on national television in which he acknowledged that it would besmirch Eva Perón’s memory if a woman who was ‘the embodiment of vulgarity’ were to portray her.

Undaunted, Madonna continued in her mission to understand Eva Perón, while at the same time acting as a kind of unofficial ambassador for the movie. One of her aims was to convince reluctant government officials to allow the film company to use public buildings, notably the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires, where Eva Perón had addressed her adoring public, as movie locations. It has become part of the Madonna myth that, when the negotiations stalled, she was whisked by boat and helicopter to meet President Menem. Over a flirtatious dinner during which, according to Madonna, the lecherous President spent all evening mentally undressing her, she used her physical allure, her charm and her profound understanding of Eva Perón to convince him to allow filming to take place

As so often with Madonna myths, the reality was rather more prosaic. In the event, the film’s producers, the director Parker, British Embassy officials and others held several meetings with Menem and other government dignatories, the discussions not about whether they would be allowed to film but how much it would cost. Indeed Menem, now out of office and currently facing serious corruption charges, had a reputation as a politician who required something rather more tangible than the smile of a beautiful woman in return for his support. In a withering putdown the President, currently married to a former Miss Universe, said later, ‘Madonna is not as sexy as she thinks she is. I felt neither fascinated nor even attracted to her.’

But if her rapport with the President was transient at best, her soul connection with Eva Perón grew stronger as she began to inhabit Evita’s world and character. Long before shooting started, not only did she take to wearing brown contact lenses that matched the color of Perón’s eyes, as well as a porcelain bridge to disguise the gap in her front teeth and a variety of wigs, she also dressed in the same style, wearing anything from colorful peasant dresses to the classic Christian Dior suits from the era of the late 1940s when the New Look had been in vogue. Even Perónists, hostile to her playing the part, were amazed that her look, her mannerisms and even her walk had become uncannily like those of Argentina’s former First Lady. Madonna, however, went much further than was strictly necessary to portray her image on screen, adopting Perón’s diet and even visiting her grave in the famous La Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires.

Ironically, while she superbly imitated Evita’s physical appearance and mannerisms in the finished film, as with her previous acting performances, she could only capture her subject’s personality as it related to her own. Certainly there were parallels – for a start, both were singers, both were strong, powerful women who made it to the top – but such similarities were never as convincing or compelling in the movie as Madonna liked to proclaim. Nevertheless, she would not be deflected. As she noted in the diary she wrote for the magazine that had virtually become her house journal,
Vanity Fair. ‘I
cannot talk about Evita and her life without defending myself.’

Thus Evita was only defined in the film in terms of Madonna, not in relation to her life story or Argentina’s history. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that when President Menem told her over their famous dinner that it was his duty to protect the memory of ‘sainted Evita,’ Madonna’s reply left him somewhat bemused: ‘I understand completely because I have the same kind of responsibility to my fans.’ She went on to compare her own life to Evita’s, saying that they had both come from humble beginnings, had known heartbreak and disappointment, had conducted love affairs in order to achieve their goals, and had become successful and influential women in their own right. ‘The bottom line is that we both achieved our objectives for ourselves and for others. Evita elevated the working class and the poor by offering them jobs and equal opportunity, while I gave women the courage to liberate themselves sexually.’ It is not the arrogance of this remark that astonishes, but the way in which it illustrates Madonna’s inability, despite all her pious reading and research, to understand that there was a good deal more to Eva Perón than a simple, and sometimes infantile, desire to shock.

Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that Madonna made a courageous and honest attempt to portray Eva Perón as she genuinely believed her to have been. Indeed, her empathy was such that when she sang the emotional ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ in a scene shot on the balcony of the Casa Rosada she believed that she felt the spirit of Evita enter her body like a ‘heat-seeking missile.’ ‘She is haunting me, she is pushing me to feel things,’ she observed. It is a telling remark, not least because it owes more to Madonna the person than to Madonna the professional actress.

The plain historical reality was rather different from her romantic understanding. Unlike Madonna – the daughter of a technician who designed tanks, and who enjoyed a middle-class childhood in a whites-only neighborhood of middle America – Evita was the illegitimate daughter of a servant who grew up in grinding poverty in the Argentinian countryside, coming to Buenos Aires as an impoverished teenager in the hope of finding work. She lived as a prostitute and worked as a radio actress before meeting and marrying a rising politician, Juan Perón, who became the nation’s president in 1946. Theirs was a match not of love but of mutual advantage, for together they made a golden couple on the national stage, enhancing Perón’s charisma, and thus his power, for which he had an insatiable appetite. With her keen political instincts Evita succeeded in attracting popular support, notably among the poor, while enjoying a lavish lifestyle funded by money plundered from the country’s coffers. Yet, even the millions she and her husband salted away in their Swiss bank account could not help her when she was diagnosed with inoperable ovarian cancer, and she died, aged just thirty-three, in 1952. Denounced after her husband’s subsequent fall from power – even their house was demolished – the cult of Evita was born a decade later, her charity work, her empathy with the poor, her glamour and style elevating her to the status of a national saint. Like other stars who died young, nothing in her life became her like the leaving it.

The musical researched, written and composed by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber captured the dubious manner of Eva Perón’s social climb, the ambivalence of her popular appeal and the emotional ambiguity of her marriage to Juan Perón, while never belittling her undoubted charisma and glamour, or ignoring her longing for mass adulation. At the same time,
Evita
was, after all, initially a stage musical, not a social documentary, and its authors made no secret of having played fast-and-loose with historical events. For example, Che Guevara had been a young medical student in Buenos Aires when Juan Perón came to power but, while he had opposed the new president, he left the country long before Evita’s death. Interestingly, Banderas, unlike Madonna in her literal and self-obsessed interpretation of her character, was rather glad that he was given the opportunity to characterize the revolutionary leader in whatever way he wished: ‘It was a liberation for me,’ he observed.