Authors: Andrew Morton
Thus, while the other main stars assessed their characters within the constraints of the operatic narrative, Madonna, incapable of understanding Evita other than through the prism of her own psyche, criticized the Rice-Lloyd Webber story as chauvinistic for portraying its subject as a woman who slept her way to the top. ‘It’s the most obvious and predictable way out, to call a woman a whore and imply that she has no morals and no integrity and no talent. And God knows I can relate to that.’ She lobbied to be allowed to portray her character – or rather more accurately, herself – in a more sympathetic light, kinder, more humane, more vulnerable.
Matters came to a head over the lyrics to the one new song Rice had been asked to contribute to the film, ‘You Must Love Me.’ He wrote it at the urging of both Lloyd Webber and Parker, his collaborator aware that only new songs could give them the chance of an Oscar. Since Rice had already won two Oscars he was not quite so worried as his partner, who had yet to gain one of the coveted awards.
The song, which comes towards the end of the movie as Evita is dying, captures the mutuality of self-interest that drove her and her husband. She recognizes the imminence of her death but still plots with her husband to burnish her image to their advantage, Juan for short-term political gain, Evita in the cause of long-term adulation. The song also highlights both the central thesis and the principal flaw of the musical and the movie – the match between the Peróns was never a love story.
When Madonna saw the lyrics to ‘You Must Love Me’ she was deeply unhappy, feeling that they were not sympathetic enough either to Evita’s character or to her romance with Juan Perón. She therefore wrote changes to the lyrics in her own hand and gave the revised version to Parker, who faxed them to Rice. The lyricist was not amused, sending back a tart fax in which he complained that his song had been changed into a ‘sloppy sentimental love song’ with ‘abysmal and banal lyrics.’ For once, Madonna backed down. It was just as well. ‘You Must Love Me’ went on to win Rice his third Academy Award, the only nomination the film received. Whether the song would have won the Oscar if Madonna had had her way and had changed its tone and form remains an open question.
As hard as Madonna tried to soften Evita’s image, the truth is – another irony – that the two women had essential qualities in common: a driving ambition, and a craving for the adoration of the masses. Moreover, although Madonna could not or would not recognize these parallels, the critics did. As the British film critic Alexander Walker perceptively observed of the singer: ‘Only film fame eluded her ravenous appetite for mass adulation – and it’s this, the very fuel that drove Evita Perón, which the new musical now confers on her. When she said recently that “
Evita
is the first movie big enough to contain me,” she was being vainglorious, but she is right.’
There is a final irony. Just as the two women craved and indeed attained the love of the masses, neither Evita in her lifetime, nor Madonna until then, had ever discovered the love of one special person. To put that more accurately, at the time when she was making the movie, Madonna’s private life was still unfulfilled. Even the discovery during filming that she was eleven weeks’ pregnant was greeted as much with guilt as with joy, for she worried that the constraints of her condition would upset the shooting schedule. Continually nauseous, tired and suffering from stomach cramps, she was pleased when the baby’s father, Carlos Leon, arrived from New York with a resupply of her favorite candy. And if the physical demands of the filming schedule were debilitating, just as wearing was the continual speculation about her pregnancy, particularly gossip that she had chosen Leon simply as a convenient sperm donor.
Yet with every day that passed, Madonna was moving away from Eva Perón and closer to the baby growing inside her. ‘Dare I say it? I am tired of being her,’ she said of Evita, the changes in her physical self presaging the spiritual and emotional transformation she would effect over the coming years.
Of the shadow self with which she had shared her life for the past two years. Madonna observed: ‘She was a human being with hopes and dreams and human frailties. I’ve tried my best. There’s nothing more than I can do. It’s time to move on to the next chapter of my life.’
Lady Madonna
F
OR NINE DAYS AND NIGHTS they tortured the Jesuit priest, beating him, crushing his legs, and sticking him with needles to keep him awake. Yet, according to eyewitnesses ‘scarcely a sigh’ escaped Sir John Ogilvie throughout his ordeal, as he continued to refuse to name any of those he had converted to Catholicism during the nine months he had spent in Scotland. Under searching examination ‘his patience courage and gaiety won the admiration of his judges’ – particularly the Protestant Archbishop Spottiswood. Nevertheless, his fortitude did not prevent him from being condemned as a traitor for his efforts to restore the Roman Catholic faith to Scotland. On March 10, 1615, he was hanged in Glasgow, although he was spared the customary beheading and quartering – that is, his corpse being divided into four and put on public display – and hurriedly buried in the kirkyard of Glasgow Cathedral. Three hundred years later his martyrdom was formally acknowledged when the Vatican sanctioned his canonization.
Today, an austere portrait of Sir John Ogilvie, saint and martyr, in his black Jesuit robes, a halo above his head, hangs in a side room of the Roman Catholic cathedral in Edinburgh, unnoticed and ignored by visitors and worshipers alike. Yet the portrait yields a small but important clue to an understanding of Madonna today. One of the saint’s descendants, Isabella Ogilvie, born in 1804, married a Glasgow man, John Ritchie, great-great-grandfather to Madonna’s second husband, Guy Ritchie. The woman who has so often railed against the Catholic Church throughout her adult life, now has a saint in her family. Madonna’s journey, her artistic and spiritual pilgrimage, has returned her to her roots, traveling from the New World to the Old.
In naming her daughter Lourdes she reminded the public of her Catholic roots as well as her family history – friends had visited the center of Catholic pilgrimage during her mother’s illness and prayed for her well-being. The fact that shortly after the birth of her daughter she tried, unsuccessfully, to gain the Pope’s personal blessing was a further sign of the elemental place of Catholicism in her psyche, as also was her decision to have Lourdes christened in a Catholic church. The singer whose
Like A Prayer
video outraged the Vatican for its sacrilegious overtones, to the point of threatening her with excommunication, seems now to have become the returning prodigal, a telling testament to the Jesuit saying: ‘Give me the child till the age of seven and I will show you the man.’ Struggle as she might, she has never been able completely to escape the embrace of the Catholic faith.
More than that, the all-American girl was playing the part of the very model of a conventional wife and mother. The young woman who once berated her lover Dan Gilroy, for having the temerity to call her a ‘housewife,’ is seemingly now happy to be referred to as ‘the missus’ by her middle-class British husband, whose hit gangster films have elevated violent homophobia to an art form. Not only did she opt for a traditional church wedding in Scotland, but on most Sundays the couple attend Mass at their local church in London. In her new incarnation she has helped her husband wash his car at weekends, has shopped at the local Tesco supermarket, and sometimes walks arm-in-arm with him to their local pub, the Windsor Castle, for a quiet pint of Guinness. In one self-deprecating TV appearance, Madonna, wearing a pinafore and carrying a feather duster, cleaned and dusted in the background while Ritchie spoke to the camera. As the scene ended, she breathed ‘God Save the Queen’ in her newly acquired upper-crust English accent. Unsurprisingly, therefore, her decision to move to England permanently has been seen by some commentators either as transparent social climbing, to rub shoulders with British royalty, or as an attempt to wipe the slate clean and make a fresh start.
The woman who once graced the front of
Playboy is now a Good Housekeeping
cover girl, a mother who extols the virtues of wholesome food, ‘tough love,’ and a ban on television. At times she sounds just like her father in her denunciation of modern vices: sex and violence on TV, junk food and the lack of a disciplined lifestyle. ‘I am much more puritanical than people think,’ she says. Madonna, who, as a girl, consciously rebelled against her father and everything he stood for, has now realized, to paraphrase Mark Twain, just how much he has grown up over the last decade. ‘It’s very amusing that the rebel wants to be a strict, conventional Catholic mother,’ says Michael Musto of the
Village Voice
. ‘What drives people like Madonna is the need to be validated, to be praised and accepted.’
It seems that Madonna’s ever-present alter ego has been transformed from ‘Dita Parlo,’ the gold-toothed dominatrix of her
Erotica
and
Sex
period, to good old-fashioned Mrs Ritchie – her present name of choice – dutiful wife and mother. Just as she used her Parlo persona to explore the wilder shores of sexual behavior without necessarily owning to those values and impulses herself, so her ‘Mrs Ritchie’ incarnation can be seen as her way of exploring social conformity without losing her radical chic. Intriguing as ever, she leaves open the question as to whether Mrs Ritchie is the real Madonna. With her, appearances are invariably deceptive. ‘On the one hand, the idea of marriage, and the sort of traditional family life repulses me,’ she told the TV presenter Charlie Rose. ‘On the other hand I long for it. I’m constantly in conflict with things, because of my past, my upbringing and the journey I’ve been on.’
‘What was I thinking of?’ she laughed when, in 1987, her friend Rosie O’Donnell played a clip on her television show of her writhing on the floor in a wedding dress during the first MTV awards in 1984. ‘Can you believe that I used to tie a pair of old tights around my hair?’ she asked rhetorically when the clip ended. So what was effectively the defining moment of her career was now relegated to the status of a ‘TV blooper,’ Madonna, demurely dressed in a designer pant suit, conspiring with O’Donnell and her sniggering audience to deny her past self, her music and the radical effect that her earlier personae had had, in terms of both fashion and sexual attitudes, on a generation of teenage girls. Indeed, her public pronouncements over the last few years have consistently denied her earlier creative incarnations while stopping short of renouncing them. ‘I don’t stay in the same place emotionally and my music reflects that,’ she shrugs. Her
Music
video, in which she and two friends go out on the town in a limo, is both an affectionate homage and a farewell to her past; for emphasis, as though any were needed, Madonna’s cartoon character kicks over a neon sign that reads, ‘Material Girl.’
Beyond these indicators, however, she has embraced musical genres and visual styles she once scorned. At various stages of her career she has championed gays, lesbians, blacks and young women. Her latest album,
Music
, is replete with country-and-western imagery, yet the wide-brimmed hats, rhinestones, denim, cowboy boots and other symbolic paraphernalia are to a considerable extent the trappings of a racist and sexist redneck culture she once loathed. ‘Don’t ever let me see you wearing cowboy boots and jeans. If you do, don’t bother coming over,’ she once told her lover Jim Albright, a sentiment she echoed when asked about her supposed ‘crush’ on the Spanish actor Antonio Banderas, replying that she could never fall for a man who wore cowboy boots.
Indeed, her performance of Don McLean’s 1972 classic ‘American Pie,’ wearing a tiara and with an American flag as a backdrop, seemed to symbolize her social aspirations and cultural conformity, subverting the norm but respecting American tradition. In fact the West she depicts in her work, particularly her video of the hit single ‘Don’t Tell Me,’ which shows her walking down a long dusty road in the semi-desert, is romantically conventional, portrayed as an imaginative frontier, a land of opportunity, a place of escape and freedom. And the mainstream loved it. Scandalously neglected by the music-industry establishment, she has been showered with awards over the last five years, earning a Golden Globe for her performance in
Evita
and a clutch of Grammys for her last two albums,
Ray of Light
and
Music.
Her yearning for respect as an artist, and particularly for her acting, seems to have been transformed into respectability. It is perhaps appropriate, therefore, that one of her most recent screen appearances was a typically humorous, self-deprecating performance in a television advertisement, in which she wets her pants during a hair-raising escape from fans and paparazzi in a fast car. The car is a BMW,
the
status symbol for aspiring white professionals, and Madonna was paid a reported £1 million for appearing in the ad, which was directed by her husband.
Her apparent transformation from post-modern icon to mainstream mother began during her first pregnancy. Just as the death of her mother profoundly dislocated her sense of self, and of herself in relation to her father and family, the church, and society in general, so now, since the birth of Lourdes in 1996, and her son Rocco in 2000, she feels born again, her life anchored by the love she feels for her children. The lost, lonely, unfulfilled yet driven woman floating on the latest cultural currents seems at last to have separated her life from her career, her longing to give and receive unconditional love, that love which she only briefly received from her mother, now assuaged. ‘The whole idea of giving birth and being responsible for another life put me in a different place, a place I’d never been before,’ she said shortly after the birth of Lourdes. ‘I feel like I’m starting my life over in some ways. My daughter’s birth was like a rebirth for me.’