Authors: Andrew Morton
Then, with their romance up in the air, Madonna discovered that she was pregnant. Even though she had spoken of having more children, she was clear that she wanted a stable relationship, and this was anything but. Several media reports stated that she decided to have an abortion, others that the decision was made for her, when she suffered a miscarriage in the early stages of pregnancy Whatever the truth or otherwise of these rumors, she remained brutally honest with herself, telling the writer Alan Jackson that she had ‘regrets’ about the decisions to terminate previous pregnancies. ‘You always have regrets when you make those kind of decisions, but you have to look at your lifestyle and ask, ‘Am I at a place in my life where I can devote a lot of time to being the really good parent I want to be?’ None of us wants to make mistakes in that role, and I imagine a lot of us look at the way our parents raised us and say: ‘I definitely wouldn’t want to do it quite that way.’ I think you have to be mentally prepared for it. If you’re not, you’re only doing the world a disservice by bringing up a child you don’t want.’
For a time the relationship with Bird continued, the couple kept more or less together by transatlantic phone calls and occasional meetings. She even said that she had been inspired to write a song about him, ‘Beautiful Stranger,’ which contains the (not very original) line, ‘You’re the Devil in disguise.’ Ironically the lyric won her a Grammy Award for the best song written for a motion picture, in this case the comedy film,
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.
By the time she picked up the award in 2000, however, Andy Bird was history.
The affair with Andy Bird had followed a routine familiar to those who knew her well. The deep, unresolved psychological wound of her mother’s death established within her a desperate emotional dynamic, in which her unquenchable need for love was matched only by her inability to commit to one person for fear of being hurt. Consciously and unconsciously, she engineered relationships in which she drove away those she cared for and then seized on their bewilderment, anger and frustration as an excuse to move on, an endless merry-go-round of love, jealousy and, ultimately, unhappiness.
Her close friends, who know a Madonna very different from the sexually empowered public persona, have watched, with the helpless anticipation of spectators witnessing an impending car crash, the singer’s tortured love life. It has become a fact of her life. It is likely, therefore, that matchmaking was at the very back of Trudi Styler’s mind when, in the summer of 1998, she invited Madonna to Lake House in Wiltshire, the listed manor she shared with her husband Sting. Certainly the singer had men on her mind. Or rather, one man, for she called her father in Michigan to wish him happy Father’s Day midway through Sunday lunch.
Not that her friends minded. Since her arrival in England, Lake House had become Madonna’s home from home, on occasion showing her friends round the mansion, pointing out the 400-year-old tapestries in the King’s Room, as well as Sting’s impressive recording studio. Since both singers have homes in London and New York (as well as elsewhere) they share similar circles of friends, and even share their domestic staff to keep costs down. They split the cost of flying their New York yoga teacher to Britain, although Madonna complained at paying him when he was not working. In New York they dine together, they have together taken their children to local art galleries, and Madonna has joined Sting’s family at his holiday villa outside Florence in Italy. Furthermore, when she decided in 2000 to make London her home permanently, Trudi Styler did much to smooth her path, arranging several social events so that she could meet London artistic society. The fashion designer Stella McCartney, daughter of Sir Paul McCartney, became a fast friend after one such occasion. Again, when she was househunting Trudi Styler recommended a number of suitable houses near her own homes in North London and Wiltshire, although Madonna was aghast at the high prices, losing several prime properties because she thought they were too expensive.
Business of another kind was high on the agenda during the lunchtime discussion. As Sting’s butler hovered, the talk was of the indie film Trudi Styler had part-financed and co-produced,
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,
a violent story of gambling, gangsters and stolen ganja filmed in the flashy, edgy style of a pop video. The director sitting next to her, Guy Ritchie, and his partner, producer Matthew Vaughn, son of the actor Robert Vaughn, were looking for a record company to produce and market a soundtrack album. Would Maverick be interested? The CEO was indeed enthusiastic, not just about the movie, but about its director. ‘I had a whole premonition of my life fast-forward,’ she recalls, experiencing the same sensation as when she had first seen Sean Penn on the set of the
Material Girl
shoot. On that occasion she had instinctively felt that she and Penn were going to marry. This time she went, as she put it, ‘wobblybonkers.’ ‘My head didn’t just turn, my head spun round on my body,’ she recalls of that fateful day. ‘I was taken by his confidence. He was very sort of cocky but in a self-aware way.’
He may have been a generation younger and living on a different continent, but in Ritchie she had found another ‘cowboy poet,’ a character similar to the man she had married thirteen years earlier. The young film director’s memory of that first meeting is rather less romantic, however, Ritchie recalling, perhaps whimsically, that it was his partner, Vaughn, who took a shine to Madonna. No matter: eighteen months – and a baby boy – later, he and Madonna were married in a traditional church ceremony, just as she had always wanted.
At the time, though, the only baby on Ritchie’s mind was the film he had spent years writing, selling to backers, and finally directing. This was to be his big break, the project on which he had pinned all his hopes. As a result, the meeting with Madonna at Sting’s house proved doubly fortuitous, for at her suggestion he and Vaughn flew to Los Angeles to discuss a possible soundtrack deal with Maverick executives. (In the end it was released by Island Records.) Romance came later – although not much later. At the time both had entanglements, Madonna with Andy Bird, Ritchie in a long-term relationship with Rebecca Green, the daughter by his first marriage of the television mogul Michael Green, and then later with TV presenter and former model Tania Strecker. As an added complication, Rebecca Green had helped him produce his first film, a short called Hard Case, and had also persuaded her mother and stepfather to put money into his first full-length feature film,
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
At first sight, Ritchie is an unlikely movie-maker. Born in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, in 1968, he was raised in a well-to-do middle-class family with a proud military tradition and links to the Scottish gentry dating back to the twelfth century. Fascinated from an early age by guns, adventure stories, outdoor pursuits and all things military, it was widely expected that he would become an army officer. Indeed, he had been named for two relations, officers in the Seaforth Highlanders (the regiment in which his family had served for generations), who had been killed in action.
His great-grandfather, Major-General Sir William Ritchie, had been a Gunner Major-General in the Indian Army, while his grandfather, Major Stewart ‘Jack’ Ritchie, had been posthumously awarded the Military Cross after being killed in action with the 2nd Seaforths while defending British troops during the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940. His father, John, continued the tradition, being commissioned, as a National Service officer, into the same regiment on the same day as James Murray Grant, the father of the actor Hugh Grant. After completing his service, he had squired numerous glamorous young women around town, finally marrying a model, Amber, and landing a job in the advertising industry, in which he would eventually be responsible for the famous Hamlet cigar campaign. When Guy was five his parents divorced, his mother later marrying Sir Michael Leighton, the eleventh holder of a 300-year-old baronetcy.
Although his mother moved into the Leighton family estate, Loton Park near Shrewsbury, Guy only spent a few months there, for he was farmed out to a succession of private schools. ‘He went to the local school for a few weeks but he certainly wasn’t brought up here, by no stretch of the imagination,’ says Sir Michael, who divorced Guy’s mother in 1980. He remembers his stepson as a promising clay-pigeon shot with a flair for art and an interest in the natural world. For his part, John Ritchie remembers of his son that ‘he wanted to be a gamekeeper, or continue the family tradition and go into the army.’
Certainly he was no academic, not least because his severe dyslexia proved a considerable handicap, and he left the last of the ten or so private schools he attended aged just fifteen, with one GCSE qualification in film studies to his name. ‘Education was lost on me,’ he once said. ‘I may as well have been sent out in a field to milk cows for ten years.’ He later claimed that he had been expelled from his £4,275 ($6,000)-a-term Standbridge Earls School near Andover in Hampshire – which specializes in teaching children with learning difficulties – for taking drugs. His father disputes this, recalling that his son was caught cutting lessons and entertaining a girl in his room.
From then on the young Guy Ritchie worked in a series of menial jobs, as a laborer, barman, van driver and messenger. Moving to London, he took to dabbling in drugs, affecting a Cockney accent and hanging out with an exotic mix of louche private-school friends and working-class wideboys in the pubs and bars of Soho, Notting Hill and the East End. ‘He seems to have acquired his working-class accent quite deliberately,’ says his uncle, Gavin Doyle. ‘He was always a well-spoken boy.’ In one episode, apparently a row over a gambling debt, he acquired a scar on his face after a close encounter with a knife. He once said, ‘I’ve lived in the East End for thirty years and let’s just say I’ve been in loads of mess-ups and I’ve lost a lot of money on cards.’ Wary of the mesh of fact and fantasy in his story, cynics muse that the injury was more likely the result of falling off a horse and landing on his silver spoon – quite apart from the fact that ‘thirty years’ would mean that he had moved to the East End when no older than five.
Certainly he had a safety net. His father, a friend of the film directors David (now Lord) Puttnam and Alan Parker, used his contacts to help him secure a job with a Soho-based film company, where he cut his teeth on a series of pop videos and promos. He found that the film world was not dissimilar to the military life familiar to his family; the camaraderie and banter, long periods of boredom punctuated by frantic activity, and detailed planning followed by rapid improvisation. Shrewdly following the primary rule for first-time writers – write about what you know – his script for Lock,
Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
was based on an exaggerated version of the underworld stories he had soaked up while carousing around London.
Given the values of his then future bride, it is something of an irony that the movie is a hymn to homophobia and choreographed violence, a self-enclosed, amoral world in which men are macho and women absent, a kind of downmarket gentleman’s smoking club in celluloid. Indeed, during her 2001 Drowned World Tour, Madonna took a sly sideswipe at the boorish male milieu described by her husband’s films when she chanted, ‘Get your tits out for the lads.’ Nonetheless, the film is redeemed by a swaggering, self-deprecating sense of humor, never taking itself too seriously. With witty references to classic movies like
The Italian Job
, and the style of a lads’ night out, Ritchie’s film captured a mood in modern Britain, earning a cult status in his home country even as it slid, almost unnoticed, past bemused American audiences.
One American was very impressed, however, for Madonna had grown keen to develop her relationship with Ritchie. She continued to see in him many of the qualities that had attracted her to her first husband. Ritchie, to her, was Sean Penn with a twist. Like Penn, he came from a prosperous family, and yet cultivated a bad-boy image that was interesting enough to intrigue without ever becoming too dangerous. For while he considers himself ‘media friendly,’ Ritchie has an aggressive streak, like the Californian actor, famously brawling in the fashionable Met Bar with Madonna’s former lover, Andy Bird, and later earning a police caution for kicking a fan outside the house he and Madonna rented in Notting Hill. It is noticeable, too, that during her Drowned World concert tour in 2001 she dedicated a song to her new husband, calling him ‘the coolest guy in the universe’ – precisely the same words she had used when describing Sean Penn.
An artist, a writer and, most importantly, a successful film director, it is no great surprise that Ritchie’s talent and chosen career were immediately attractive to Madonna. She saw in him the qualities so often ascribed to her: ‘He’s a risk taker and he’s got a hungry mind,’ she noted. Nor was he afraid of hard work, another quality he shares with her. The Ritchies, like the Fortins and Ciccones, are from a class of people who place a premium on endeavor and self-improvement. As Colonel William MacNair, historian of the Ritchie family, observes, ‘Guy is from a family within a class who naturally wanted to better themselves, producing the academics, engineers, and military men who scattered around the globe, forming the backbone of the British Empire.’
Unlike so many of her previous boyfriends, Ritchie had made his own luck, and earned his success. ‘Guy works almost as hard as Madonna does,’ her friend Rupert Everett remarks. ‘That’s a good thing for her, definitely a change for her, because he’s definitely not a boy toy. He has got a serious career going so he’s dealing with his own stuff.’
If his independence, and his indifference to her iconic status and ambition proved attractive, his stubborn focus on his career hindered their developing romance. It was very much an on-off relationship, neither willing to give up their home turf, Madonna arguing that she had to stay in America so that Carlos Leon could have access to Lourdes. ‘I wanted to rip his head off sometimes,’ she says of Ritchie, referring to the frustrating first year during which they were reduced to calling each other or writing letters, she on location, filming
The Next Best Thing,
he promoting his debut movie and working on a sequel,
Snatch,
starring Brad Pitt.