Madonna

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  One day while listening to the various demo tapes and other music that pours into the Maverick Records offices on a daily basis from both aspiring and established songwriters and producers, Madonna happened upon the tape of an album from writer/producer Mirwais Ahmadzai, who had earlier praised her musical abilities. Except for lovers of rave music, Mirwais (he rarely uses his last name) is practically a stranger to America’s pop music fans. “I heard it and was just like, ‘This is the sound of the future. I must meet this person,’ Madonna would tell Rolling Stone. “So I did, and we hit it off. And that’s exactly how it happened with [Ray of Light producer] William Orbit, too.”

  In a meeting hastily assembled by Guy Oseary, Madonna and Mirwais had such a rapport that Madonna decided that the “sound of the future” would also be the sound of her next album. Three weeks after shaking hands, she and producer were in the studio together; most of the music was recorded in London, beginning in September 1999. By the end of January 2000, the record was almost finished.

  Madonna has always considered competition between her producers to be the way to get the best out of them, but William Orbit said he didn’t have a problem with Mirwais being on the scene. In any case, neither producer would hear the result of the other’s toil until the album’s arduous mastering process in London.

  Since William Orbit was already well aware of Madonna’s idiosyncrasies in the studio, it was Mirwais who had to familiarize himself with the artist’s creative working style. As much technician as musician, the Frenchman would endlessly tinker with the music tracks, adding effects and taking away others, layering some sounds and remixing others. Like many artists with a clear vision of what they want in the studio, Madonna has a tendency to be impatient, and Mirwais’s tedious manner would often drive her to distraction. She recalled, “I just put my foot down and said, ‘It’s good enough now. We’re done. We’re done working on it.’ He [Mirwais] could just sit there in front of his computer screen, changing, honing, editing, cutting, pasting — whatever. And it would never end. But life is too short for that sort of nonsense. My persona in the studio is, ‘I’m in a hurry.’ I think he was more put off by the fact that I knew what I wanted so clearly, and I wasn’t interested in lots of embellishments when it came to the production.”

  “She took a big risk with someone like me,” Mirwais told a reporter after the album was completed. “When you arrive at that kind of level of celebrity, you can just work in the mainstream and just stay there. Everything she does, for her is like a challenge, and I like this kind of personality.”

  When the work was done — accomplished between London, Los Angeles and New York — what would emerge was Music, a slick, orderless landscape of pop melodies and swirling electronic pop funk where Madonna’s coy, often indifferent emotion is often the only living thing on the terrain. Music, for all its masterful gadgetry, would be nothing if not passionate. The final selections for inclusion on the CD would include “Impressive Instant,” rife with abstract sounds and driving grooves designed to do just what the synthesized refrain suggests, put the listener in a trance, and “Amazing,” a stylized, guitar-powered, uptempo Orbit collaboration that could have been the musical cousin to “Beautiful Stranger” (the song Madonna and Orbit had contributed to the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me soundtrack). Also included would be “I Deserve It,” a moody, acoustic guitar ballad obviously dedicated to Guy Ritchie (“This Guy was made for me,” Madonna sings).

  Of course, the project’s flagship track would also be its first single and title song, “Music.” The song is a shot of electronic funk-pop, a dance anthem that reaches into the future but which also slyly conjures up images and feelings for the good ol’ days of disco (with its affectionate call out to “Mr. DJ,” a relic of disco days gone by). It’s a sparse, determined arrangement that quickly gets under one’s skin.

  Like the song’s lyrics, its playful video would have a very simple storyline that ventures no deeper than three girls out on the town, looking for fun. The concept was inspired by real days gone by of the late seventies and early eighties, when young Madonna Ciccone and her friends Debi Mazar and Nikki Harris used to prowl Manhattan’s eclectic club and art scene in search of music and romance. Originally, actresses were cast in the roles of Madonna’s video entourage. However, when the women proved to be too pretty and stiff, a frustrated Madonna, in the middle of the shoot, got on the phone and asked Mazar and Haris to join her on the set.

  Just as she plugged into the electronica scene for the music, for the video Madonna would shamelessly imitate the notion of “Ghetto Fabulous” — an over-the-top look popularized by East Coast rap and urban music stars like Sean “Puffy” Combs, Lil’ Kim and Mary J. Blige and characterized by designer clothes and floor-length furs, gaudily accessorized with gold and diamonds (including in the teeth). When Puffy steps out of his Bentley dressed in this fashion, he’s serious. In the “Music” clip, however, Madonna would wear her flash and gold with a playful wink. To give the video humor, cast as the zany limousine driver was British comedian Ali G, whose brash, irreverent ways amuse Madonna whenever she’s in England. (Ali G hosted a television talk show in character, insulting politicians and other upstanding members of British public service.)

  At the end of January 2000, Madonna had great hopes for Music . “I have to stay current,” she concluded over lunch with two of her friends in Los Angeles where some of the songs were being finished. She looked stupendous in a chocolate brown Balenciaga jacket and Donna Karan trousers. Though her hair was pulled back and she wore large sunglasses, she still drew stares. While being served a tomato and mozzarella salad, she said, “God help me, but I guess I have to share radio air time with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.” She shrugged her shoulders. “What choice do I have?”

  “Well, you could always retire,” one of her friends offered jokingly.

  Madonna dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “But what would the music business be without me?” she asked with a laugh.

  Rocco

  In February 2000, Madonna finally confirmed what the tabloids had been declaring for months, that she was determined to have another baby. “I think Lola should have a brother or sister,” she had said in an interview. “I think she’s incredibly spoiled. She needs a bit of competition. But I would want to be in a stable relationship.” Though Madonna stopped short at saying who she thought the father should be, she probably had Guy Ritchie in mind since, by all accounts, her love affair with the British filmmaker seemed to be the real thing.

  A month later, when Matt Lauer of the Today show asked Madonna if she was pregnant, her answer was a definitive “no.” But, then, less than three weeks later she and Guy Ritchie released a joint statement to the media: “We’re happy to confirm rumors that we’re expecting a child at the end of this year.” Actually, Madonna knew she was pregnant when asked about it by Lauer, but didn’t want to announce it to the world before she told the baby’s father — and she didn’t want to inform Guy until he had finished his work on Snatch.

  Having a second child seemed like a natural progression in Madonna’s life. She’s proud of the way Lola is being raised — of course she employs a nanny (not a team of them, just one), but she prides herself on doing most of the work herself — and she was excited about the opportunity to double her efforts as a mother.

  “The last thing I’m going to do is raise my children the way I see a lot of celebrities raising their children,” Madonna has stated. “I don’t want to traipse around with nannies and tutors. I think it’s really important for children to stay in one place and to socialize with other children. I had that [in her childhood]. I’m not saying I don’t want to go on tour or make movies anymore, but I realize I’m going to have to make a lot of compromises, and I’m comfortable with that.”

  For his part, Carlos Leon offered his congratulations to Madonna via an odd medium, the television tabloid show Inside Edition. “I want to wish her all the luck in the world,” he sa
id to the mother of his own child. He stroked his goatee reflectively. “I am thrilled for her,” he said. “I hope she has a very healthy and happy baby who will be a wonderful brother or sister for Lourdes.”

  Her second pregnancy was, for Madonna, about as boring — and as uncomfortable — as the first, particularly during the last couple of months. Guy noted to one friend his amazement that Madonna had become so shy in the bedroom around the seventh month, always turning out the lights before undressing. Perhaps, like many expectant women, she simply did not feel attractive.

  On August 10, just a couple of days after Gwyneth Paltrow hosted a baby shower for her, Madonna began to feel unwell. That morning, she and Gwyneth had a telephone conversation (Madonna later remembered) during which they laughed about the fact that Madonna had worn the same maternity clothes during the second pregnancy that she had worn for the first — “and I don’t care what anyone thinks about it,” she said. She spoke about being photographed in a burgundy Abe Hamilton – designed sheath with a black lace overlay for a recent charity event, and not giving a second thought to the fact that she had been photographed in the same outfit a couple of years earlier. “I guess it’s safe to say that fashion is no longer my greatest concern,” she said (not in the same conversation with Gwyneth, but rather to a reporter, later).

  Upon hanging up on Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna then gave a radio interview over the telephone to Los Angeles disc jockey Rick Dees. While sitting at the breakfast table, she announced that her second baby would be a boy. She joked that she would name the child “Baby Jesus.” She then attacked British hospitals as “old and Victorian,” when asked if she would have the child in the United Kingdom. Qualifying her criticism, she said she did not like the thought of the complications caused by giving birth in a foreign country, adding: “I like efficiency.” (In truth, Madonna is known as an Anglophile, having sung the praises of stout, a love of the English countryside and a desire to send Lourdes to a private school in the United Kingdom. “I’m having a love affair with England,” she said recently. Her “love affair” was a surprise to some friends because, as recently as 1995, she apparently despised the United Kingdom so much she wouldn’t even attend her good friend Juliette Hohnen’s wedding there.)

  Having finished on the telephone, she paced restlessly before going to bed, complaining of feeling nauseous. That night, Guy Ritchie attended a private screening of his film Snatch. At nine P.M., Madonna called him on his mobile to tell him that she was having trouble and was going to the hospital. News reports had it that Ritchie rushed home to pick up his girlfriend and then rushed her to the hospital, carrying her into the emergency ward crying out, “Save our baby! Save our baby!” Actually, Madonna was already at the hospital when he got there, “though he likes to think he carried me inside,” she has said. (She was driven to the hospital by an employee.) Months earlier, Madonna had been diagnosed with placenta previa, a condition in which the placenta covers the birth canal, causing the mother to hemorrhage and the baby’s blood supply to be cut off. A cesarean was necessary, but not as the emergency procedure also reported in the press. She had made arrangements weeks earlier to have the baby by C-section, just not two weeks before her original due date.

  Madonna was placed in a room just across the hall from where Catherine Zeta-Jones had, a few days earlier, given birth to actor Michael Douglas’s baby. Specialists then began monitoring her as carefully as the baby, hoping that perhaps she would be able to carry to full term. Unfortunately, like Lourdes’s, the new baby’s birth would not be an easy one. As she was wheeled into the delivery room, a sedated and most certainly scared Madonna was overheard telling Guy Ritchie, “Baby, I love you. We’re all going to be okay.” By this time, Madonna had lost a great deal of blood; she was actually hemorrhaging faster than the transfusions could replace the blood and was close to slipping into shock. The baby was born at one A.M . on August 11, about three hours after she entered the hospital, weighing in at a substantial five pounds, nine ounces. (By comparison, Lourdes, who was carried to term, checked in at exactly a pound heavier.)

  Guy sat by the frightened Madonna’s side, holding her hand and comforting her throughout the difficult surgery. They called the boy Rocco, a name which, it could be argued, has the requisite Italian ring but certainly also reflects Ritchie’s strong cinematic interest in names associated with organized crime. Considering that there was speculation in the press that the writer-director might want to name his son Vinnie or Anthony (“Ant-ny,” as he might pronounce it), Rocco perhaps represents a compromise.

  Immediately after his birth, stories began to circulate that the baby might be brain damaged. Luckily, most of these reports were not heard by Madonna, who was sheltered from all such inaccurate speculation by the protective Guy Ritchie. In fact, because of his premature arrival, Rocco suffered a slight case of jaundice, which is normal in such births. Because his lungs were also not fully developed, he was placed in intensive care.

  By August 15, despite statements from Liz Rosenberg to the contrary, little Rocco was still in the hospital and not scheduled to leave for another few days. Rosenberg had said the child was already home with Madonna, but she was fibbing, probably in order to protect mother and child from the media storm. Guy would visit Rocco in the mornings and early afternoons, while Madonna rested at home. Then, Madonna would quietly visit her son in Los Angeles’s Cedars-Sinai Hospital each day, arriving at about five-thirty P.M. and staying for four hours of feeding and cuddling. At all times, the security around the child was intense, with at least four guards assigned to his suite of rooms, plus private nurses. When Madonna visited, she arrived with a couple more guards of her own.

  When the baby was finally released from the hospital on August 16, 2000, five days after his birth and, also, on Madonna’s forty-second birthday, his contented and relieved mother took him to her Los Feliz home. (The estate was up for sale at this time for $4.2 million; Madonna had just bought Diane Keaton’s 1920s hilltop Spanish-style estate in Beverly Hills for $6.5 million and was in the process of a $1-million renovation program.) She went into her bedroom, sat down with a breast pump and her new infant — then she noticed a paper bag on the table. She looked inside and found a box. It held a diamond ring from Guy, who had been so wonderful to her throughout the pregnancy (he even gave up drinking during those months, just so that she wouldn’t be tempted). In an accompanying note, Guy told her how much she meant to him, and how proud he was of her and their son. “This is nothing compared to the big present I will soon be giving you,” he wrote. (Madonna would insist that this was her first diamond ring. Perhaps because she gave back Warren Beatty’s, she doesn’t count that one. When she married Sean, she had a simple gold ring.)

  Later, the good friends Madonna usually entertains at her home (“an eclectic infrastructure of friends — writers, painters, poets, art dealers and jewelry designers”) — naturally came by to meet the new addition to the family. Little Rocco — who resembles his father more than he does his mother — was curled up in his bassinet, sucking his thumb and nodding off, a teddy bear quilt tucked around his legs. “Why, he’s just so perfect,” gushed Gwyneth Paltrow, one of five visitors clustered in the nursery.

  For her guests, Madonna had combed her shoulder-length honey blonde hair back from her face. She wore embroidered and patterned blue slacks and a simple white tank top underneath a short-sleeved T-shirt. Manolo Blahnik slingbacks with three-inch heels added a touch of cool, uncontrived elegance. (“Better than sex,” she says of Blahnik’s shoes — she missed high heels while pregnant — “and they last longer.”) Cartier earrings were another nice, unusual touch. Her skin seemed translucent. There was one word to describe her: wholesome.

  “He is perfect, isn’t he?” she said, gazing down at her infant son with loving eyes. At that moment, Lourdes ran into the room with a baby bottle. “Here, Mommy,” she said, holding it up to her mother. “For him,” she added, motioning to her brother. Madonna swooped Lola into h
er arms and held her, tightly. “Not yet,” she said, her voice a low and soothing whisper. “But soon.”

  “It was a feeling of such tranquility,” said another of Madonna’s guests. “Lola then started sucking furiously on the bottle. ‘You’re a big girl now,’ M said as she gently took the bottle away. ‘Let’s go downstairs and get some juice.’ Then she, Gwyneth, Lola and the rest of us tiptoed out of the room. We went into the kitchen and drank beer and ate Doritos. Doritos! I remember when she would never eat junk food, ever.”

  Later, when just a few guests remained, Madonna slipped out of her clothes and wrapped herself in a soft white robe. After joining her guests in the spacious, sun-drenched living room with the Diego Rivera oil painting over the fireplace, she sank into a couch, her infant curled in her lap. “I thought, ‘My, my. Here’s a Madonna the public doesn’t know, a relaxed, freer Madonna,’” said her guest. “A Madonna that maybe she, herself, didn’t know until recently.” (Or, as her brother Christopher said while watching Madonna as she breast-fed Lourdes, “I don’t believe it. I’m looking at it, I’m watching it. And, still, I don’t believe it.”)

  “Have you managed a routine with him yet?” one of Madonna’s friends asked.

  “We feed him at about ten thirty, before we go to bed,” Madonna said, sounding more like a mother than anyone who ever knew her would have believed. “Then, he gets one feed in between two and three. Then, maybe again between six and seven. He’s a good baby,” Madonna said proudly. “He only cries when he wants something, and why shouldn’t he? Guy and I agree that he should get exactly what he wants. Lord knows I always have . . .”

  Says Debi Mazar, who later gave little Rocco his first hair trim (“and if you cut him, I’ll fucking kill you,” warned his mother), “She’s in good shape, and she seems really in love — they [Madonna and Guy] seem to get along wonderfully. I don’t want to say she’s in a new place, because I hate it when people put her in a little box and say, ‘Madonna does this new record, and everything is so different and light and new! She must be in a great head!’ I mean, any day she could be in a good head or a bad head. But she is really happy and beautiful now, and seems very much in love.”