Madonna

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  While trying to decide how to proceed, Madonna decided to reveal the news only to her immediate circle: her trainer, her assistant, and the child’s father, Carlos. She chose not to tell her sisters, or any of her other friends. “Not because I was ashamed of anything,” she later explained. Her biggest fear, she added, was that the story would somehow be leaked to the voracious press. She knew that the notion of Madonna-as-unwed-mother would become instant, worldwide news and cause a sensation that would, in her view, make her life a living hell. “They will send their camera crews to torture me,” she said at the time, “and I am desperate to finish filming in peace.”

  Finally, when she realized that she had no choice but to inform Alan Parker, Madonna picked up the telephone.

  “Are you sitting down, Alan,” she asked by way of greeting. Then she blurted out, “I’m pregnant.”

  “How much?” the stunned Parker asked, dazed. “I mean, when is it due?”

  A Race to the Finish

  Alan Parker tried not to panic but, as he would later recall, he couldn’t help but do some quick calculations after learning that his star actress was expecting a baby: how many shooting weeks were left on his $59-million film, against how many more weeks she would look slim and trim. What could he do but congratulate Madonna, and agree with her that they would both just have to “see what happens next.” They also agreed to keep the pregnancy a secret, again for fear of the disruption the media’s reaction might cause the film. Madonna would later say that she felt like a frightened adolescent trying to keep an unwanted pregnancy from her strict parents.

  It wasn’t long, though, before some of the crew began wondering about the unexplained and dramatic changes Parker began to make to the shooting schedule, especially where the dance sequences were concerned. “They started to wonder if I had finally lost my marbles,” Madonna recalled. So, she and Parker had no choice but to fill the other producers in on the secret. Madonna, however, continued to keep her pregnancy from her friends and co-stars, realizing that the fewer people who knew about it, the greater her chances of keeping it out of the news. “I feel like we are all in a race against time,” she said at the time. “How will I do all those glamorous photo shoots to promote the film when I can’t even fit into my costumes?”

  Alone in her hotel room at night, Madonna brooded. Being pregnant should have cheered her up, but it didn’t. She had a nagging feeling that she was about to destroy what she and the crew had worked so hard to accomplish. But was success in this film really so important, she would recall wondering to herself. “All I want, really, is some peace in my life,” she remembered saying aloud to no one in particular. “Is that so much to ask?”

  The days were long, filming scenes outdoors in freezing temperatures, marching up and down the streets while leading torch-carrying masses, all of whom were singing for Perón’s freedom. On some days, she was on her feet for hours at a time, mostly dancing. In one scene, as the increasingly ill Evita, she had to fall to the floor clutching her womb. Take after take, Madonna patiently repeated the fall until, when the scene was finally completed, she was covered in bruises. Although she bitched and moaned, she confided privately that she was very proud of her acting that day. (“I know it’s going to be a very moving scene.”) It was all hard work, perhaps even more so than she had anticipated when she lobbied for the role.

  Back at the hotel, when gazing at herself in the mirror she did not see the happy glow of pregnancy. Instead, her reflection revealed an exhausted woman with an imperfect complexion. Clearly visible was a network of lines around her mouth, a web of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Sitting at her dressing table, she would begin the careful application of makeup. Her eyes would not leave her image until she was satisfied that her public mask was perfect. However, as she would later recall, it would take longer, with each passing day, for her to achieve that goal.

  Constantly feeling chilled, Madonna just couldn’t seem to warm herself. Nor could she put aside the memory of the day’s work just completed so that she could relax and, hopefully (but not often), fall asleep. She felt panicked, on edge, “like Judy Garland in her final days,” as she put it to one of her handlers. Later, she would have to admit that she couldn’t shake the sick feeling that she was experiencing the unraveling of her carefully constructed life, that everything she had worked so hard to attain was about to be irrevocably lost.

  It wasn’t a good time.

  No Big Thing?

  On April 13, 1996, Madonna’s future manager Caresse Norman telephoned America’s premier gossip columnist, Liz Smith — always a big supporter of Madonna’s career — and confirmed the news of Madonna’s pregnancy. Smith’s article about it was published in newspapers around the world the next day. “Surprise, surprise, the stork couldn’t wait,” Liz Smith wrote. “The happy news from Budapest has just arrived — that Madonna is indeed pregnant.”

  “Madonna doesn’t want this to be a big thing,” Liz Rosenberg told Liz Smith in a follow-up call, “though I don’t know how she thinks it won’t be a big deal. But she is deliriously happy, and so is everybody close to her. I hate to resort to a cliché, especially about Madonna, but she is radiant!”

  Just prior to the phone call that was made to Liz Smith, Madonna telephoned her father, Tony, with the surprising news. During the filming of Evita, she had developed a closer relationship with her family, ironically enough by long-distance telephone communication. Each time Madonna called her father from Argentina to let him know how she was faring, he was thrilled to hear from her. He was proud of her, he said. The frequent conversations he had with her about her life and career at this time were certainly more civil than talks they’d had in recent years. Inadvertently, Tony had always seemed to rub Madonna the wrong way.

  For instance, a year and a half earlier, father called daughter to tell her he had seen the video for “I’ll Remember” on television and thought she looked “pretty” in it. Rather than just accept the compliment, Madonna couldn’t help but be annoyed.

  “But, Dad, it’s been out for six months and you just now saw it?” she remembered telling him.

  “Well, we don’t watch much television,” he said.

  “You would think you would keep up with what I’m doing,” she told him. “My God. Do you even have cable?”

  From there, the argument escalated. “My father just refuses to acknowledge who I am and what I’ve accomplished,” she told a reporter shortly thereafter.

  However, now so many miles from home and with so much on her mind, Madonna seemed able to distance herself from her vexation enough to feel nostalgic for her father and for the rest of her family. “She was homesick,” says her brother Martin, whom she also called periodically. “She was calling all of us, her brothers and sisters and even some cousins.” Or, as Tony told one relative, “We’ve been talking, and not fighting. I don’t know, maybe things are changing.” It was as if, in some ways, Madonna was actually transforming herself into a gentler, more reasonable person — the kind of woman she had been trying to convince her public she really was at this time. “Not that she was a saint,” says Alan Parker, “but I did notice that as time went on with the film, she seemed to mellow.”

  When Madonna learned she was pregnant, she said that she didn’t want her father to read about it in the press. She telephoned him with the news, and also confessed to him that he was the most important person in her life — and that she hoped her child would not let her down the way she had let him down so many times in the past. Of course, Tony was concerned that Madonna was unwed and didn’t seem at all eager to marry Carlos Leon. However he was also elated and filled with genuine emotion by her call. “We cried on the phone,” he recalls. “I knew my kid was growing up. And she was nice to me,” he says, laughing. “No smart cracks.”

  Perhaps along with her pregnancy finally came a sense of acceptance and recognition for Madonna that she had only one surviving parent, and that she should at least try to be good to him. If s
he had directed her fury about her mother’s death at Tony — and it certainly seemed to most people that she had done just that over the years — maybe she now realized how unfair she had been to her father. Or, maybe she had just grown to accept her mother’s death as a terrible tragedy for which no one was responsible, and that her father’s ability to move on with his own life was an act of strength and courage, not a betrayal of her mother’s memory. Certainly, if a similar tragedy were to ever befall Madonna, she too would somehow carry on with life, as difficult as it would be to do so. The Ciccone spirit — as passed from father to daughter — is strong and unwavering. Or, as the saying goes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  The expected media frenzy about Madonna’s pregnancy was not a surprise to anyone in her camp; the news traveled across the globe as rapidly as a war bulletin. Her characteristic flair for the dramatic at work, Madonna complained about the attention: “Well, the world knows,” she said at the time. “And I feel like my insides have been ripped open. The front page of the Post, CNN, even Hungarian Radio. What’s the big deal?” she asked. “I wish everyone would just let me do my work.”

  Carlos’s mother, forty-nine-year-old Maria Leon, who is a social worker, rose to Madonna’s defense. “Everything people say about her is not true. When you get to know her, you know she’s very affectionate, very warm. She’s a real person, like you and me.” His father, Armando, who owns several Manhattan check-cashing stores, added, “She loves Carlos very much. And we love her, too.” (Armando has said that when his son first showed up at a family gathering with Madonna for what they would later learn was her favorite meal of black beans, “we couldn’t believe it. We thought it was a lookalike or something. We played Cuban music and talked all night.”)

  At this important time in filming Evita, Madonna couldn’t help but feel that the public and media’s focus on her pregnancy was a nuisance. What she really wanted, she claimed, was privacy and peace of mind, so that she could finish her movie.

  Making matters more interesting for the media to report, the jibes at Carlos Leon began instantaneously. He had been visiting Madonna in Buenos Aires because she wanted him at her side for moral support when she announced her pregnancy, but he quickly grew bored waiting around for her as she worked long hours on the set. Upon flying back to New York, he found aggressive media interest in him. “It’s great to be back in New York,” he snarled when a photographer snapped his picture as he sat on a bench in Central Park. Much to his dismay, the press now dubbed him, “Madonna’s Top Seed,” and her “Baby-Making Beau” (both headlines courtesy of the New York Post).

  The press immediately learned that he was a native New Yorker who had grown up on West Ninety-first Street, in a very different neighborhood from Madonna’s ritzy Central Park co-op (into which he had recently moved). Friends also recalled the slight street accent of Carlos’s voice. Some sources hinted that Carlos hoped that meeting Madonna might provide the opportunity for a better life for him. “Carlos aspired to be more,” recalls an old girlfriend of his who asked for anonymity. “He thought maybe he’d get into modeling or acting.”

  Loyal friend Michael Gacki quickly came to Carlos’s defense. “He’s not riding her coattails,” he reported to the New York Post. “He’s up at six A.M. every day working twelve or thirteen hours a day as a personal trainer to make it himself. He’s been with her for a year and a half, and in my opinion it hasn’t changed him one bit.” Gacki went on to explain that he and his pal Carlos were both involved with women “more successful” than themselves but, he explained, “we both wanted to make sure that we paid our own way.”

  Patrice Gonzalez, who did not become a consort of Carlos’s but who had a platonic relationship with him instead, now says of Leon, “He’s really the kind of guy who can look at people and see them for who they really are, and that includes Madonna. He liked her from the time they first met. He was amazed that she was as timid as she turned out to be.

  “But who’s to say if he was ever really in love with her, head over heels. He never wanted to get caught up in her world. She was temperamental, difficult to be around. Also, he’s a jealous kind of guy. If she complimented a model’s looks in a magazine, he would get pissed off. They also had some arguments from time to time about the way she treated him. She’s used to ordering people around.”

  Gonzalez was at the home of Carlos’s parents when he and Madonna came to visit. As they were getting ready to leave, Madonna turned to Carlos and, in a rather abrupt tone, said, “Get my coat.”

  “Get it yourself,” he snapped back at her, his eyes flickering with annoyance.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked. “You can’t get my coat?”

  “Carlos, go get her coat,” his mother, Maria, said, trying to keep the peace. “Be a gentleman.”

  “Look, I’m not your personal assistant,” Carlos told Madonna, ignoring his mother’s request. It seemed clear to most observers that, for Carlos, a bigger issue was at stake than just the retrieval of his girlfriend’s coat. Perhaps he and Madonna had engaged in previous discussions about similar matters. “If you want me to get your coat, say ‘please’,” he told her. “I don’t work for you. I’m not on the payroll, you know?”

  Madonna rolled her eyes and shot him a cool look. “My God,” she muttered.

  “Oh, now I understand,” Carlos said. “You see, I had completely underestimated your capacity for being . . . bitchy.”

  Though Madonna looked angry, she somehow held her temper in check. Perhaps trying to tone down the moment because Carlos’s mother was watching, she acquiesced. “Carlos, can I ask you to get my coat?” she said, before adding, sweetly, “Por favor.”

  As Carlos helped Madonna with her coat, his mother said, “Now, now. See how nice?”

  When Madonna finally told Carlos she was expecting, he realized, according to Patrice Gonzalez, that this child would create a bond with her that he would live with forever. “This was a big adjustment for him,” says Gonzalez, “and forced him to look at her another way, as a woman who would be in his life for the long run.”

  Many reporters went so far as to hint that Madonna was having the baby as some kind of extreme publicity stunt for her movie. Though outraged, she probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the insinuation. After all, it seemed to many observers that she would do anything to promote a project. So, why not this? “People have suggested that I have done this [become pregnant] for shock value,” she said. “These are comments only a man would make. It’s much too difficult to be pregnant and bring a child into this world to do it for whimsical or provocative reasons. There are also speculations that I used the father as a stud service,” she said. “Implying that I am not capable of having a real relationship. I realize these comments are all made by persons who cannot live with the idea that something good is happening to me. Something special and wonderful that they cannot spoil.”

  Betrayal

  Madonna understood the pitfalls of her worldwide fame. Certainly, it had cost her a sense of privacy, and she was used to dealing with that fact. She also understood that she had made some serious mistakes in her life when it came to romance. After Tony Ward, she had vowed to be more selective. However, she was a sexual creature with normal needs and desires. Though she wasn’t about to commit to a serious relationship with the wrong man, she still wanted to share physical intimacy with someone. It was understandable to anyone who knew her that she would become intimately involved with libidinous basketball star Dennis Rodman. However, a bad choice is still a bad choice, even if it does result in mind-blowing sex . . . Dennis would end up betraying their relationship by writing about it in his memoir Bad As I Wanna Be.

  Two years earlier, in 1994 — before the filming of Evita — Madonna had begun dating Dennis Rodman, a basketball star two years her junior who had an eccentric reputation — on and off the court. With his outlandish appearance — bleached blond hair, tattoos and various piercings — as well as his f
lamboyant behavior, he relished the celebrity spotlight as much as Madonna did. In fact, borrowing a page from her career handbook, he often made controversial moves just for the sake of titillation — such as the time he announced his wedding and then showed up at the resulting press conference in full drag, complete with wedding dress and veil. He then declared that he was marrying himself.

  The games between them began when Madonna first met Dennis and asked him for his telephone number. Instead of his phone number, he gave her his fax number. “You’re trying to fuck with me,” she faxed him the next day. “You gave me a number that’s for your damned machine. What’s your problem?”

  It wasn’t long, though, before playful and sometimes sexy love messages were flying back and forth between the two. “I want to have six kids,” Rodman faxed Madonna, “what do you think?”

  She faxed back to Rodman that six children would be fine with her, but they would have to get to work on it immediately. “You think I’m joking, but you’ll see that I’m not,” she wrote. She also mentioned that she would still be interested in Dennis even if he were broke and working at a car dealership. “Lay in your bed, close your eyes and fuck me at some point today,” she concluded.

  Perhaps because he was at the height of his own notoriety, Dennis Rodman seemed unimpressed by Madonna’s fame or money, which only served to make him more interesting in her eyes. A friend of Dennis recalls being at a party with Rodman and Madonna. “He and I were flirting with some girls,” he says. “Madonna kept trying to interrupt, but he just ignored her.” Not one to be ignored, when Rodman finally did give Madonna his number (not his fax number, finally) she began a campaign to win him over. “She called ten to fifteen times a day,” Rodman’s friend reveals. “She kept asking him ‘What’s going on? What are you doing?’”