Authors: Andrew Morton
For her, collaboration may have been all very well, but the criticism served to reconfirm her belief that only when she had total control could she truly express herself on the big screen. Over the last two years Madonna has deliberated over whether to become involved in a film of the life of one of her favorite artists, the feminist Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (who died, aged just forty-seven, in 1954), or whether she should buy the rights to Arthur Golden’s bestselling novel,
Memoirs of a Geisha,
and turn it into a screenplay. She has also talked of her desire to be a film director. To be director, producer and star, all in one, would indeed bring her total control. Whether or not it would make of her a better, or better-regarded, actress, must for the time being remain unanswered, however.
If, for Madonna, acting in films was all about control, the creative and commercial tension between teamwork and rule by diktat, nurture and authority, ‘Dita’ versus ‘Veronica,’ was most clearly expressed in her Maverick empire. The way in which Madonna wooed and won two of her most successful signings, the Canadian singer Alanis Morissette and the British band Prodigy, was testament to her canny business sense and her creative nous. It was also a tribute to her maternal instincts, for when they arrived in New York she personally drove to the airport to pick them up, and spent time with them in the city’s clubs and bars. She was particularly drawn to the young Canadian singer, seeing in Morissette’s raw rebellion something of herself. ‘We had a couple of girlie nights,’ recalls Morissette appreciatively, if somewhat cryptically.
Although Prodigy was a different musical proposition, executives from the band’s record company were also impressed. ‘She attended a meeting early on,’ said Richard Russell. ‘She was very good. Part of it was just that she was interested enough to turn up and press the flesh, but she also asked what the band were like as artists, what drives them. They were smart questions and they were different to the ones that the chairmen of other labels ask.’ Since those signings in the mid 1980s, Madonna has spread her net wide and eclectically, investing in an Asian recording studio, starting a Latin record label, signing a singer from Sweden and a band from Mexico. Not everyone has fallen for the Madonna charm, however, Maverick notably failing to hook the Icelandic singer Björk and Courtney Love.
For a time the incredible success of Morissette’s 1995 debut album,
Jagged Little Pill,
which sold 25 million copies worldwide, masked underlying tensions in Madonna’s company. In private, she increasingly complained about her manager, Freddy DeMann, saying that he was less concerned with her well-being than with sending her on tours so as to make money from her. Her discontent had first surfaced when her book, Sex, was being put together. Madonna clashed with him over his plans to make her tour the
Erotica
album, and she had occasionally griped about DeMann ever since.
Perhaps inevitably, there were other forces at play. In a story as old as rock and roll itself, the singer believed that she could do without her manager, could run her own show and keep the percentage she was paying him. In 1988, after many years together, there was a parting of the ways, although DeMann is rumored to have walked away with a $25 million payoff. Such splits are nothing new in the music business; both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones ended up managing their own affairs, with mixed success. As her former business manager Bert Padell reflects, ‘Artists start off as nobodies, then become somebodies and then think they can do it all themselves.’ He had suffered the same experience as DeMann when on July 1, 1987, Madonna’s one-time secretary, now her new manager, Caresse Henry-Norman telephoned and told him that, also after fourteen years, Madonna no longer required his services. The singer refused to take his calls, and Padell lamented his loss in a poem entitled ‘Time for a Change.’
The prosaic reality was that, for Madonna, it was business politics as usual, Maverick’s CEO simply tightening her personal control over her company, a case of the captain dropping the pilots. It may have just been coincidence, but her ship began to founder soon afterwards, taking on financial water. There was no escaping the fact that after nearly a decade in business, much of the success of Maverick still rested on Madonna’s shoulders, something merely highlighted by the sell-out success of her Drowned World Tour in 2001. With losses of $60 million over the previous two years, heads rolled, the president of Maverick’s recording arm and several other executives leaving the company.
With the ousting of the old guard, it seemed that Madonna was increasingly surrounded by ‘yes men,’ eager to do her bidding, unwilling to challenge her authority. The delicate balance between teamwork and control that had characterized the boom days of her career seemed to have gone. During the mad scramble into the Internet, where music, sports and other stars made millions endorsing products or developing systems, Madonna held back, uncertain about how to deal with this new medium. ‘Britney Spears and others were all over the Internet, Madonna was very late out of the blocks,’ Bert Padell observes. In the end, though, she had the last laugh, making record-industry history by signing a $42 million deal with the American software giant, Microsoft, to broadcast her performance at London’s Brixton Academy in 2000 live on the Internet.
Albright, himself now an Internet entrepreneur, visited her at her New York apartment on Lola’s third birthday in October 1999 to make a presentation to Madonna, her new manager Caresse Henry-Norman, and some of her other advisors. While she showed only polite interest in his scheme, of more significance was the fact that also wandering around the apartment that day were Carlos Leon and a British film director named Guy Ritchie. In retrospect, this tableau might have formed the subject of a contemporary version of a Renaissance painting: Madonna, child, and a triumvirate of fathers – real, prospective and possible. It would have been a symbolic moment, had any of them been able to see into the future, the ‘significant others’ she had encountered during her long search for love present on her daughter’s special day.
For the first few weeks the birth of Lola papered over the fissures that had begun to appear in the relationship between Madonna and her Cuban lover. As she had confessed to Albright, she had been growing disillusioned with Leon before she became pregnant. During her pregnancy, however, the demands of her shooting
Evita,
the loneliness of hotel life, her loss of confidence and self-esteem as her body changed, meant that when he and, invariably, Ingrid Casares arrived to join her they were welcome faces at a difficult time. When Leon was not with her, Madonna, feeling vulnerable and unattractive, would constantly call him, always fearful that her handsome boyfriend might be seeing someone else. Her obsessive jealousy placed an added strain on the obvious problems that faced an obscure young man of modest means dating one of the world’s best-known women.
In the event, the difficulties of her pregnancy – she was constantly tired and often uncharacteristically unwell – were outweighed by the joy of Lola’s birth. Madonna and Carlos were delighted with their new arrival, as was everyone else, her New York apartment seeing a constant stream of visitors laden with gifts. Al Pacino brought three teddy bears, the Versaces sent a hand-sewn quilt, her Italian designer friends Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana sent baby clothes, her brother Christopher, Lola’s godfather, gave her an inscribed bracelet, while at a baby shower held in Rosie O’Donnell’s apartment an assortment of friends and relations gave her clothes and silver jewelry, including a crucifix. The cascade of flowers, clothes and toys from fans was so overwhelming that her staff hired a van to take them to a children’s charity.
Determined that no photographer would earn the $350,000 being offered by tabloid editors for the first picture of mother and baby – one enterprising cameraman was caught hidden inside a builder’s dumpster outside the building – Madonna, Carlos and their daughter kept a low profile, staying inside the apartment. They had engaged a nanny, but Carlos enjoyed putting the baby down to sleep, and the couple placed matching his-and-hers rocking chairs in Lola’s nursery so that they could sit with her.
Inevitably, such domesticity could not last. Soon it was back to work, Madonna giving a grueling series of back-to-back TV interviews at the publicity launch of
Evita
in December 1996, breaking off only to feed Lola. ‘I have been so incredibly blessed this past year,’ she told the audience after receiving a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Musical at a ceremony in January 1997. With Carlos by her side, she looked every inch the contented celebrity and proudly glowing new mother. ‘It was a very jolly evening,’ recalls Sir Tim Rice, who was at her table. Doubtless it was, but the happiness, like the brief, peaceful domestic interlude, was destined not to last.
Once the couple had time to draw breath, it was clear to them that the relationship was not working out, that they were more friends than life partners. The fault line in their romance was highlighted by differences over his career. For his part Carlos, uncomfortable in his role as yet another ‘Mr Madonna’ and hurt by media gibes that he was simply a sperm donor, felt that she could do more to help his budding acting and modeling career – so far all he had managed was bit parts in a couple of movies, including The Big
Lebowski
. As far as Madonna was concerned, she felt that he should stand on his own two feet – as she had had to do.
Difficulties with the chihuahua Carlos had given her symbolized the growing rift. The dog became very jealous of Lola, wetting rugs, gnawing shoes and slippers and even Madonna’s bedspread, growling at anyone who smelled of the baby. Even visits to a famous animal psychiatrist, Shelby Marlow, could not cure the dog’s jealousy. Finally the couple reluctantly agreed that Chuicita must go for the sake of the baby. It was a heartbreaking decision to say goodbye to their first ‘baby,’ their failure with their pet anticipating their own problems. In May 1997, just seven months after Lola’s birth, Carlos and Madonna parted. ‘It was a real relationship,’ says Rosie O’Donnell. ‘They made a valiant effort to stay together.’ Lola, of course, remained with her mother, although Carlos, an adoring father, is a regular visitor.
Jealousy had been an ever-present issue in the relationship. Indeed, the dog’s behavior was matched, if not outstripped, by that of Madonna’s boyfriend, who was always unsure of her love for him. On one occasion the suspicious Cuban was seen hanging around a downtown restaurant, watching as his girlfriend and Rosie O’Donnell went to dinner in New York. When he was approached by a member of Madonna’s staff, he declined to join them and stalked off to his own apartment for the night. A yellow self-adhesive note on the dashboard of Madonna’s chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Car perhaps held a clue to his behavior. It bore just two words: ‘Ring Birdy.’
An aspiring screenplay writer, Andrew F. Bird was, all things considered, a very suitable guru for the maternal, spiritual Madonna in her ‘Veronica Electronica’ phase. The lanky, long-haired young Englishman who stretched his body into impossible shapes during his daily yoga sessions and endlessly broadened his mind with studies in Hinduism, Buddhism and other branches of Eastern mysticism was the right man at the right time. A friend of the film director Alek Keshishian (of
Truth and Dare
fame), Bird first met Madonna in Los Angeles at Keshishian’s request while he was trying to sell a screenplay about English gangsters. There was, according to eyewitnesses, an instant magnetism between them. Within weeks Bird, the penniless son of a Midlands accountant who usually slept on friends’ sofas, was ensconced in her Los Angeles home while she was recording her Ray of Light album. Indeed, he is listed in the album’s credits, along with Rabbi Eitan Yardeni, as having provided ‘creative and spiritual guidance.’
As the affair progressed, Madonna’s appearance, described by some as hippy, although she preferred ‘pre-Raphaelite,’ seemed to mirror the unkempt grunge look of the would-be screenwriter, who always dressed in black, a newly lit Gitane never far from his lips. Moreover, if her new look shocked those who met her, so did her lifestyle. She really seemed to have gone back to an earlier phase of her life; in late 1997, on the occasions when she visited London, she lived modestly in a rented house on a busy road in Chelsea, happy to visit a local New Age center for yoga classes with other devotees. The gaggle of fans who waited outside the house for a glimpse of her would often be shooed away by Madonna herself, angrily telling them that they were keeping the baby awake. While she was out working Bird stayed at home with Lola, leaning out of the open windows for a surreptitious cigarette, fearful that Madonna would discover that he had broken his promise not to smoke around the baby.
Bird took her to meet his parents at their Warwickshire home, who were charmed by their son’s girlfriend, some twelve years his senior. Meanwhile, there was much bemusement, as well as amusement, among both circles of friends at Madonna’s latest choice of beau. Yet even though Bird himself was often baffled by the turn of events, they conformed to an established pattern in Madonna’s life. She was willing to fall in love, yet unable to sustain her love. Too often this icon of feminine strength and control had been humbled by the frailty of her all-too-human heart. By her own admission she falls in love easily, perhaps too readily, mothering, and very often smothering, the object of her desire. As had been the case with her affair with the young bisexual model Tony Ward, Madonna’s maternal instincts were aroused by Bird. She bought him a wardrobe of new clothes and whisked him around the world, and the jobless writer was by her side at her birthday celebration in New York in August 1998.
At the same time, as with her affairs with Jim Albright and others, she wanted Bird to live independently – she gave him cash to rent his own apartment in Los Angeles – but then, insecure and jealous, would call him constantly, worried that he might be seeing another. It was a recipe for a fractured, uneven and trustless romance, and in the end Bird returned to London to try to make a new start, taking a humble job as a doorman at the trendy Met Bar, but at least away from her ceaseless attentions. Once, when Bird was avoiding her calls, she allegedly phoned the gym he attended in London pretending to be his mother in an attempt to speak to him. Yet he was not always so stand-offish. When she was staying in London in early 1998, Bird arrived at her hotel, Claridge’s, in the early hours to see her, his furtive behavior perplexing waiting fans. Of his affair with Madonna, he later admitted that there was a ‘deep mutual love … a lot of pride had to be swallowed on both sides.’