Madonna

by Lucy O'Brien

  LEON’S DEDICATION was severely tested when Madonna took on one of the most high-profile film roles of the 90s, that of Eva Peron in the movie Evita. It had taken over fifteen years for Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit 1978 musical to be turned into a Hollywood film. Plans had passed through the hands of a number of directors, including Oliver Stone and Ken Russell, along with a host of possible leading ladies, from Meryl Streep to Michelle Pfeiffer. “For years we never got the right team together,” recalls lyricist and coproducer Tim Rice. “Studios were suspicious about musicals on film—they felt they were more successful on stage. By the mid-80s things went cold, but it perked up in the early 90s, and that was largely because Madonna showed an interest.”

  When the project finally got underway with British director Alan Parker at the helm, Pfeiffer was a firm favorite for the lead part. An avid fan of musicals, Madonna had been obsessed with the role for years, and didn’t want this one to slip through her fingers. She felt that this could rehabilitate her battered movie reputation. She managed to convince Tim Rice that she was born to do the part. “I was always pro the idea of Madonna,” he told me. “I didn’t want a conventional film actress. I wanted someone accustomed to putting over a story and emotion in song. Madonna acts so beautifully through music. Better actresses, like Meryl Streep, weren’t right because they’re not singers. They can hold a tune, but they’re not brilliant interpreters of songs. I wanted Elaine Page at first, but she was too old by the time we got the film together.”

  With Rice on board, Madonna just had to convince a wary Alan Parker—so she sat down over Christmas 1994 and wrote him a four-page letter, explaining why she was passionate about the part. She claimed that as she wrote the letter, “it was as if some other force drove my hand across the page.” Thanks to Rice’s petitioning, and the fact that Pfeiffer had just had a baby and was therefore unavailable for the grueling film schedule, Madonna landed the role. Andrew Lloyd Webber was still unconvinced about her ability to sing the part, so she enlisted the help of esteemed voice coach Joan Lader to develop her vocal technique.

  Those sessions in Lader’s Manhattan apartment paid off. Lader taught Madonna how to sing from her diaphragm rather than her throat (strange that it took the star so long to grasp that, even though she had been touring for years). She learned how to project in a much more structured way. Every night Madonna would go home, thrilled at the sounds she could create. She would call friends and sing to them over the phone at full volume. By the time she arrived for soundtrack rehearsals at CTS Studios in London that September, she felt confident that her performance would be up to snuff. The first day of recording, however, was a bewildering experience. She was used to singing in the intimate surroundings of a studio, with one producer and maybe a couple of musicians. On what Alan Parker later dubbed “Black Monday,” Madonna had to sing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” the most difficult song in the musical, in front of Andrew Lloyd Webber and an eighty-four-piece orchestra. Not surprisingly, she felt unprepared. This was an environment that she couldn’t control, that had a completely different protocol and set of expectations. The sheer scale of the operation was so intimidating that she found it difficult to perform.

  By the end of the day, Madonna was distressed and tearful. “I was so nervous,” she said later. An emergency meeting with Lloyd Webber and Parker was called, at which it was agreed that she’d record her vocals in a smaller studio, and the orchestrations would be done elsewhere. Recording was a painstaking process, with the cast working for four months before the soundtrack was complete. But the result, a seamless combination of gung ho musical theater, pop, and proficient musicianship, was worth the effort.

  On this record, the sweetness and power of Madonna’s voice comes out as never before. It is displayed to best effect on tracks of the young Evita, like “Oh What a Circus” and “Buenos Aires,” where she could inject some of her pop funkiness. Where she comes slightly unstuck is the later songs—on “I’d Be Surprisingly Good for You,” for instance, her duet with Jonathan Pryce, she gives a pulpy, romantic reading, ignoring the scheming, manipulative side of Evita’s character. Then on “A New Argentina,” the track where Evita is proselytizing in front of the workers, Madonna’s limitations are exposed. What’s needed here is a rich, operatic voice, but in contrast to the mass choir, hers comes across as bare and one-dimensional. And there is the party piece itself, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” delivered with a sense of vulnerability rather than strength. But despite the lack of emotional complexity in her voice, Madonna still makes it a compelling show tune. Right up to its grand orchestral finale, she gives it her all. This is her perfect moment, the one that she has been understudying for her whole life. For Madonna, this was a point where everything came together—song, film, and a major starring role.

  There is also pathos in the way she sings “You Must Love Me,” a completely new addition to the musical. It was Rice’s stab at an Oscar, because one can only win an Academy Award for a new song. Madonna’s reaction to the song was typical of the way she lobbied throughout to have a more sympathetic portrayal of Eva Peron. Alan Parker intended to emphasize in the film the shrewd manipulator, who connived her way to success, whereas Madonna, overidentifying with the part and concerned about her own image, wanted to project a softer, quieter strength. In many scenes, she got her way, but with this song, she lost out. “‘You Must Love Me’ was written and rewritten five or six times,” recalls Rice. “I remember taking lyrics to Madonna and she was trying to change them. Her view was that Peron loved Eva, but my view was more cynical. The scene can be interpreted in different ways, but my lyrics were kept, thank God!”

  THOUGH SHE performed well for the soundtrack recording, Madonna still had to fight feelings of inadequacy. In an attempt to prove herself, she launched into a month of assiduous research, becoming a virtual ambassador for Evita. She delved deep into the story of Eva Peron. Born Eva Maria Duarte, in 1922, the first lady of Argentina was an illegitimate child from a poverty-stricken background. In her teens, she left her rural town and went to Buenos Aires to “make it,” scratching a living as a prostitute before becoming an actress. By her twenties, she was well known for her portrayal of self-sacrificing, patriotic heroines. She met and soon married Colonel Juan Peron, then minister of labor for the military regime. When he was ousted from that post and arrested in 1945, Evita encouraged the unions to strike for his release, and to back his presidential bid the following year.

  A valuable aid in his campaign for popular support, Evita was a national inspirational figure. A highly glamorous woman, she mixed Dior with politics, and campaigned for women’s suffrage. She initiated welfare reforms and was the frontwoman for the Social Aid Fund, a massive program of public spending. Although Evita was elevated to near-sainthood after her death from cancer in 1952, there was ambivalence about the way she exploited her fame and wealth and her working-class origins. She was despised by the ruling class, who considered her an upstart, and violently opposed by the army, who were suspicious of a woman in politics. Undoubtedly, Madonna saw parallels with her own experience, her picture of Evita fitting some of the more grandiose notions she had about herself.

  Because of this, Evita is one of Madonna’s better roles. Filming began in February 1996, with a $55 million budget and a cast that included Antonio Banderas as revolutionary leader Che Guevara and Jonathan Pryce as Juan Peron. In the first half of the movie, Madonna makes an effortless good-time girl; she is less convincing as a political leader, rousing the workers with bouts of self-conscious brow-furrowing. Toward the end, though, she comes into her own, portraying Evita’s deteriorating health with a real sense of sadness. It’s here that her research paid off.

  In a journal she kept for Vanity Fair magazine, she details how Peron was so revolted by the smell of his wife’s cancer that he would wave to her from the bedroom door but refuse to come in. Aware of how important she was to his popularity, Peron decided that he would put her body on di
splay after her death. Before she died, Evita was injected with chemicals to preserve her organs and flesh, and not allowed painkillers that interfered with the process. “I can only imagine how she must have suffered,” wrote Madonna. She dreamed of Evita. “I was not outside watching her, I was her. I felt her sadness and her restlessness. I felt hungry and unsatisfied and in a hurry.” Throughout the strenuous filming schedule in Argentina, Budapest, and London, Madonna came to realize why Evita lived at such a feverish pace. “She wanted her life to matter.”

  What also gave depth to Madonna’s portrayal was the experience of her mother’s death. When acting the hospital-bed scenes, she imagined how her mother must have felt when her father told her she was dying, and this brought on floods of tears. Madonna painfully missed her real mother on Mother’s Day, and bonded closely with her screen mother. “Her English is as good as my Spanish, but we speak the language of hurt people, so all is understood.” The actress, Victoria Sus, told her about a dream she’d had, where Madonna was a child pressing her head against her belly and saying she wanted to go back inside her womb. “If only she knew how close to the truth this is,” wrote Madonna.

  While filming Evita, she discovered she was pregnant with Carlos Leon’s baby. This gave an added charge to her performance. There was a potent irony in the scene where she dances as Evita in an empty ballroom with Banderas’s character, and falls to the ground, clutching her cancer-ridden womb. At the time she was over three months pregnant, trying desperately to disguise her shape. By contrast with the character she was playing, snuggled within Madonna was a new life, her baby daughter. She writes of an afternoon off, when she had gone riding for the first time at a very slow trot. With remarkable prescience, she says: “I imagined myself galloping through the countryside at full speed without a care in the world, the wind in my hair. I thought to myself, I could have this life if I wanted it. Children and a husband waiting to have lunch with me.”

  Madonna said after the filming: “My life will never be the same.”

  Evita marked a transitional point. When it was released in December 1996, the film was a box-office success. It was also critically acclaimed, earning Rice and Lloyd Webber that coveted Oscar for “You Must Love Me,” and a Golden Globe Award for Madonna. For some of her fans, though, Evita was a perplexing move—a straight, decorative role in a mainstream musical, miles away from the subversive undertow of Erotica and Bedtime Stories. But the role reflected a side of Madonna that needed to be fulfilled and understood. Finally, she felt she had proved herself as an actress. And finally, too, she would become a mother.

  Book Two

  CONFESSION

  13

  BITS AND ZEROES AND ONES

  ON OCTOBER 14, 1996, MADONNA’S DAUGHTER, LOURDES (Lola), was born at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. Soon after the birth, her relationship with Carlos Leon foundered, fueling rumors that he had been a mere sperm donor. Madonna was indignant. “There is speculation that I used the father as a stud service, implying that I am not capable of having a real relationship,” she said. “It’s just all part of the view the media likes to have of me…. That I don’t have any feelings and I don’t really care for people. That I’m just ambitious, cold, and calculating.”

  The truth was that, although Madonna was fond of Leon, she felt he wasn’t the life partner she desired. She found him jealous and possessive, particularly of her friendship with Ingrid Casares. He, meanwhile, chafed at her fame and her career, which would always relegate him to second place. When Lola was seven months old, they parted ways, and Leon granted Madonna sole custody of the baby. Leon went on to pursue an acting career but has maintained strong ties with his daughter. Feeling that the father had an important nurturing role to play, Madonna allowed him to see Lola from the start, and has encouraged them to develop a close relationship.

  Having a child transformed her life, bringing out a gentler, more compassionate side to her personality. It also gave her work a new kind of emotional depth. Madonna christened the baby Lourdes, because she felt her daughter would be a healing influence on her life. “Lourdes was a place that my mother had a connection to. People were always sending her holy water from there. She wanted to go there but never did.” With the birth of her daughter, Madonna continued her own Marian cult tradition in naming her Lourdes.

  At the time of Madonna’s birth in the late 50s, U.S. Catholicism was undergoing a growth spurt with a huge expansion of churches and convents. It was also at the height of a booming Marian cult in America. Each May, millions of Catholic schoolchildren, college students, and parishioners marched in processions to honor the Virgin during her sacred month. They decorated maypoles, crowned statues with flowers, sang hymns, and recited prayers together. A form of popular Catholicism, Marian devotion was a “lived religion” that came from village-centered European immigrants, such as Madonna’s Italian grandparents.

  As theologian Paula M. Kane writes, “Catholics believed that Mary would intercede with Jesus to answer their wishes, cure their diseases, secure employment, find them spouses, and protect their children.” By the 1950s, Mary had come to represent conservative ideals of womanhood. In the Cold War era, she also stood for nationhood and the papacy, with Catholic women encouraged to be models of virtue, to counter the godless influence of the “Red Dragon of Russia.”

  Mary symbolized spiritual purity and self-sacrifice. Periodicals such as Immaculate Heart Crusades and Our Lady’s Digest focused on Marian crafts and etiquette, with features like “Do-It-Yourself Madonna” and “Here’s How to Make a Simple Marian Shrine.” Part of Madonna Sr.’s schoolgirl reading would also have been Saint Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life, a seventeenth-century Catholic text that contained instructions on how to preserve one’s chastity and purify the soul. Under such strict moral codes, Madonna Sr. would have found her daughter’s pursuit of sexual expression deeply shocking. She would feel she had failed in some way. Maybe the explicit nature of Madonna’s work was a rejection of all her mother stood for. Maybe in her eyes, all that daily devotion and modesty didn’t do any good, because it hadn’t kept her mother alive. Madonna’s reaction to her mother’s piety was radical, choosing to cut off identification with her from the start. “If she were alive, I would be someone else, I would be a completely different person,” she once said.

  But having a daughter made Madonna see her mother in a new way, and it also reestablished a connection with religion. She experienced a kind of resurrection, and part of this was her interest in Kabbalah. Madonna has said that while she was pregnant with Lola, she felt she should have something to teach her daughter. In the same way that Madonna Sr. handed down the Catholic faith to her daughter, Madonna felt she needed a faith to pass on to Lola. “What should I tell her about life?” She had been practicing yoga, reading the Bhagavad Gita, and taking an interest in Hinduism. This was enhanced by the latest man in her life, the young aspiring screenwriter Andy Bird. A tall, thin Englishman with pre-Raphaelite hair, Bird introduced her to yoga and Eastern mysticism. She met him through director Alex Keshishian, and the two had a passionate relationship that led to her spending some time in London, living with Bird in a rented house in Chelsea. Madonna began to dress like Bird, in a looser, more free-flowing style. She went with him to hip but casual places like the Metropolitan Bar and Nobu, and took yoga classes at the Innergy Center in northwest London. Although eager to downsize her life at this point, she was still superstar enough to cause a distraction. A leading instructor at the yoga center was apparently so disenchanted with the kerfuffle that surrounded Madonna every time she came, he asked her to go elsewhere.

  Andy Bird helped to initiate her search for the divine, but it wasn’t until one evening in 1996 when she went with Sandra Bernhard to the Kabbalah Center in Beverly Hills that her world lit up. Here she found a system of belief that not only fitted her life but transformed it.

  Kabbalah was to inspire the album Ray of Light, and frame everything Madon
na did from then on. Derived from an ancient Judaic philosophy, Kabbalah is about reaching higher states of consciousness through reflection and meditation. It is about rigorously setting aside the ego to effect change in oneself and the world. Having spent several decades immersed in the material world, Madonna was ready to undertake a kind of spiritual rebirth.

  WITH HER next album, she tore up the rule book, and, in the same way she could move dramatically from one persona to the next, she essentially tore up the old life. Ray of Light had quiet beginnings. Early in 1997, when Lola was just a few months old, Madonna began casting about for collaborators. She began writing with Pat Leonard again, and also approached songwriter Rick Nowells. A musician with early 80s New Wave bands in San Francisco, Nowells cut his songwriting teeth with Stevie Nicks, and made a name for himself writing huge hits for Belinda Carlisle, as well as Celine Dion’s best song, “Falling into You.” Initially, it seemed, Madonna wanted to go for a big pop sound. “She invited me over to her house to check me out,” recalls Nowells. “She let me hold Lola. I had a three-year-old boy at the time, so I was in that space.” Their shared experiences as new parents, as well as his songwriting skills, helped Nowells to get the job.

  They met again in late April for a two-week songwriting session at his modest studio in the Hollywood Hills. “Madonna would drive up by herself every day at three p.m., walk in the door, chat for a few minutes, and then get to work. I played keyboards and she sat on the couch with a mike and her lyric book. She’d be improvising melodies, I’d be writing chords. She’d jot down lyrical ideas, or have some ready. Before I worked with Madonna, I never believed you could get a song together in an hour, but she would channel it. We’d have a melody within half an hour. She would always leave bang-on seven p.m. to go to see Lola, but we’d always have a song written and demoed. We wrote nine songs in ten days.”