Goddess: Inside Madonna (43 page)

Madonna’s performance is shamelessly narcissistic, and if she does anything positive in the film, it is to remind the public that good acting should always seem effortless on the part of the actor. In
Body of Evidence
, the viewer can actually see the mental transition that Madonna makes every time she speaks her lines. With two expressions to carry her through the story—sullen or in paroxysms of ecstasy—she faces her costars, either dressed primly or bare-breasted with one hand sliding inside her panties, feigning masturbation. She delivers her dialogue in a stilted and unnatural style and is generally unbelievable, especially when the audience is forced to listen to her thin, tinny, whiny voice in her emotional outbursts. After one watches
Body of Evidence
, the only positive comment that any lucid person could make is that Madonna could have been a devastating actress in silent films. A beautiful dancer, she moves gracefully in every scene where she is vertical and expertly in any scene where she is horizontal.

Following
Body of Evidence,
instead
of retiring to a convent for hard-core meditation, Madonna went into serious talks with Abel Ferrara, the director who made
Bad Lieutenant
, a film in which a nun is raped on an altar. That scene alone was obviously the impetus that Madonna needed to seek Ferrara out as someone who could produce a script that would suit her. When the collaboration with Ferrara did not work out, Pedro Almodóvar seemed receptive to putting her in one of his films. This was a logical choice since Almodóvar consistently writes female roles in which his actresses portray exaggerated versions of neurotic or sexually dysfunctional women. The problem, according to those who work with the Spanish director regularly, was that his usual stable of actors and actresses resisted the idea because they were afraid that Madonna’s presence in a film would lower its quality and cause the audience and critics not to take it seriously. As one Argentine extra who worked with her in
Evita
and, later, worked with Almodóvar said of her, “She dared to jump in with lightly developed vocal equipment and acting skills while many of us sat at home with Juilliard-trained voices and heavy talent, afraid to make a move. She inspires me as much as a physically handicapped person who beats the odds to live a normal life.”

In 1993, Madonna would finally get her wish and work with Abel Ferrara, who directed her in
Dangerous Game
. Again, the result was disappointing. “The way he edited it completely changed the ending,” Madonna said after it appeared and disappeared. “When I saw the cut film, I was weeping. It was like someone punched me in the stomach. If I’d known that was the movie I was making, I would never have done it.”

At that moment in her life, her wealth and success no longer interested her. She could have bought anyone and anything except the only thing that really mattered to her—credibility as an actress. She was thirty-five years old, childless, and with no particular romantic interest that could ultimately fulfill her other desire of becoming a mother. There had been too many men in her life, too many meaningless dalliances with women, and there were still plenty of volunteers for a one-night stand, but none, in view of her past, who saw her as a reasonable risk for the long term. And she craved the long term. She missed being married. She had to prove to herself that she hadn’t spent all those years clawing her way to the top, sacrificing friends and family along the way, just to end up as a rich and famous star who was destined to be alone. She had feelings she needed to express, and suddenly there was no one to talk to, learn from, or confide in.

In 1994, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, the feline creature who had insinuated herself into the psyche of a generation of her fans, had used up eight of her nine lives.

“
S
he didn’t say much,” the Che character, played by Antonio Banderas in the film
Evita
, sings about Eva Perón, “but she said it loud.” In another song, Che remarks that Eva Perón is the greatest social climber since Cinderella.

Both lines bring up the similarities between Evita and Madonna.

Most of the lyrics sung either by Madonna in the role of Eva Perón or about her by others who observe her climb to power are vintage Madonna. For instance, the first time that Eva Duarte meets Juan Perón, they are at a benefit concert for victims of the famous San Juan earthquake. When she sings “I’d Be Good for You, I’d Be Surprisingly Good for You,” the words are a harbinger of what she would tell Guy Ritchie after they met and during the tortuous period when he resisted her advances. At that same benefit concert for earthquake victims, Eva bumps into the hapless Maguldi, the has-been tango singer who drove her out of Junín and into the big city. “You haven’t changed,” he says, intending to give her a compliment. Looking at him from head to toe, she answers dryly, “Neither have you.”

Darius Khondji is a cinematographer whose work in the film
Delicatessen
had so impressed Bernardo Bertolucci that he hired the young Frenchman for his film
Stealing Beauty
. Parker, impressed with Khondji’s work on both of those films, hired him to do the cinematography for
Evita
.

Alan Parker considered
Evita
to be a baroque opera rather than a simple musical, so Khondji immediately decided to liken the look of the film to that of Evita’s own life. For him, that would be to show the gritty and realistic style that was so typically Buenos Aires. “It’s kind of broken like the life she has in the film,” he explained, “and she was very broken herself. It has an edge to it . . . so it doesn’t look always very polished but rather really harsh and very minimalist in lighting.”

Khondji, much the way Madonna had done before shooting began, did extensive research on Eva Perón, not only studying and eventually incorporating actual newsreels into the movie, but watching hours of footage of a 1951 rally of
los descamisados
, or the “shiftless ones,” the workers who were Perón’s biggest supporters, to see exactly how the rally had been lit. In another example of Khondji’s quest for reality, he viewed a film of a demonstration that took place in Buenos Aires after Juan Perón was arrested, when more than a million supporters turned out to persuade Evita to continue her candidacy for vice president. The same meticulous research went into the scene in which Eva renounces her candidacy and appears on the balcony of the Casa Rosada to inform the crowd that she will step down. “For some reason,” Khondji explains, “there were searchlights crossing the huge crowd, which I re-created in the film.”

Khondji was intent on doing the same kind of minimalist and gritty lighting when it came to his star, although he knew that Parker would have done nothing to stop him from straying from his style to make Madonna look better. Convinced that to make an exception and make Madonna look more beautiful would be “cruel to the director and would have killed his film,” Khondji decided to maintain the atmosphere throughout. “The problem,” he explained, “was that to light Madonna in the style that best suited her would jar with the technique I had chosen for the film.” Standing firm, Khondji went directly to Madonna to discuss the lighting, warning her that she would not look as good as she always had on her videos or in the film’s promos. To her credit, without any hesitation or argument, Madonna agreed, not only because she respected Khondji professionally, but because she had worked with him before and liked him. According to what she wrote in her
Vanity Fair
diary, of all the people on the film, she felt closest to Khondji, who brightened her mood each time she saw him on the set and on every occasion when they went out together after a day’s work.

The most popular and recognizable song on the
Evita
album, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” had been a hit for Julie Covington in 1977, who took it to number one on the charts in England. Two years later in 1979, the Shadows recorded an instrumental version of the song with strings and harp. When Madonna sang it, the words became even more meaningful to the millions who heard it again. Several lyrics could have described Madonna’s as well as Evita’s justification for her ambition: “
And as for fortune and as for fame, I never invited them in . . 
.” Another song, “You Must Love Me,” which Evita sings to the people when her motives are found to be more self-serving than altruistic, became a hit single for Madonna in 1996. Since the song makes no specific reference to Evita or to the political situation in Argentina, it stood on its own. When Maguldi sings “Beware of the City” to a young Eva Duarte, the audience is aware that it could have been the same warning given to Madonna when she left her hometown and set off for New York in search of stardom. In the same vein, “Another Suitcase in Another Hall,” also a hit single for Madonna, in 1997, describes not only Evita’s nomadic existence once she arrived in Buenos Aires, but also Madonna’s itinerant life in New York when she lived in abandoned buildings or in a rat-infested tenement.

“High Flying Adored” is sung by Che to Evita to remind her that she is
“a fantasy of the bedroom, a saint, and a back street girl
.” When Madonna answers him, “
And I did it all at twenty-six
,” it draws the clear comparison between the two women, since Madonna “did it all” at twenty-five—five years after she’d arrived in New York in 1978—when she had her first hit single.

After three exhausting months on
location in England, Argentina, and Hungary, Madonna was back in London to shoot the final scene for
Evita
. The action was taking place in St. John the Baptist Church, on a quiet, tree-lined street in a shabby section of the city, not far from where two major city highways merge near heaps of concrete. A handful of curious spectators, bundled up against the chilling London wind, lingered outside along with several members of the technical team, who warmed their hands on steaming paper cups of coffee. Inside the church, twenty women dressed as Argentine peasants, wearing colorful smocks with kerchiefs tied around their heads, were on their knees, their hands clasped together in silent prayer. Set high above the main altar and trimmed in gold leaf and surrounded by a semicircle of votive candles, a statue of the Virgin Mary on an ornate wood platform gazed down on the congregation of extras.

Madonna, her face pale and passive beneath a smart pill-box hat, was dressed in a gray suit trimmed in black velvet, the jacket nipped at the waist. When Alan Parker called, “Action,” the cameras rolled, turned on the star as she led a small procession up the aisle toward the altar. The only sound came from her stiletto heels, which clicked against the white marble floor. Approaching the flickering red candles at the base of the Virgin Mary, she suddenly fainted. On cue, a collective gasp resounded within the small church.

It took thirty-two takes before Alan Parker finally had what he considered a perfect scene. As a result, Madonna was forced to fall repeatedly, her body hitting the floor of the church with a resounding thump and resulting in black-and-blue marks over her left hip and shoulder. Each time she fell, she was careful not to drop the tiny carved African fertility god she clutched in her hand, the same icon that President Carlos Menem had given her so many months before, at the beginning of the long cinematic journey.

It was a torturous scene for Madonna to play, and one that touched her profoundly. While she was elated that the film was finally finished, she was also sad that she would be leaving the cast and crew, people whom she had come to consider a family throughout the course of the project. Perhaps even more significant was that the scene she had just completed represented the moment in the story when the audience realizes that Eva Perón is desperately ill. After immersing herself so totally in the body and soul of Evita, Madonna wondered if the physical symptoms she had been feeling were psychosomatic, just another example of her cosmic connection to the character. When she thought about it, she realized that she had felt weak and drained long before she had arrived in London to film this particular scene. In fact, almost from the moment she had set foot in Argentina, she had had bouts of nausea and dizziness. On one occasion in Buenos Aires, when she was standing on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, about to lip-synch the words to “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” she had almost fainted. Clutching the ornate brass rail, she had attributed her malaise to Evita, or at least to her spirit, which she claimed had “entered my body like a heat missile, starting with my feet, traveling up my spine, and flying out of my fingertips, into the air, out to the people, and back up to heaven.”

Madonna said at the time, “I couldn’t speak, I was so happy, and yet I felt a great sadness, too, because she was haunting me, pushing me to feel things.”

When the cast and crew were preparing to move on to Hungary, where the filming would continue in a winter climate, Madonna’s symptoms became even more acute. The sporadic nausea and dizziness suddenly plagued her every day. “I felt a bit seasick,” she explained, “but it was very hot, and we were working out of doors, the food was bad, and everyone was complaining of upset stomachs. I imagined that I was feeling the same thing as the rest of the team.”

Taking advantage of the several days’ break between Buenos Aires and Budapest, Madonna decided to make a quick trip to New York to see her doctor. The results of the tests revealed that she had never been in better or more glowing health. Her symptoms simply reflected that she was eleven weeks pregnant.

Her first reaction was shock. She had often missed her period when she was traveling and working under stress, so the possibility that she was pregnant had never really occurred to her. Later on, she admitted that she had made no particular effort to prevent it, although she never acknowledged her attempts to be artifically inseminated by Carlos Leon’s sperm.

“You could have knocked me down with a feather,” she said. “I certainly wasn’t planning for it to happen when it did. I had more than enough things to worry about, just getting through the movie. I didn’t want to do anything that could sabotage the film. On top of all that, to take on board the reality of motherhood . . . it was like, ‘Oh, God, this is the last thing I need.’ But I had wanted to have a baby for some time and I was exhilarated and worried about the remaining tango sequences hurting the baby. But everyone involved was so supportive of me, and I was so prepared for what I was doing in my work that, in the end, I settled down.”