Goddess: Inside Madonna (48 page)

Maurizio Mian has claimed that he represents the Gunther Group, which, he explains, has assets from a trust left to Gunther, the German shepherd, by the Countess Karlotta Leibenstein, who died in 1992. Checking the records of trusts throughout Western Europe, the Gunther Group doesn’t exist, nor does the countess. When confronted with the facts, Mian retracted his original statements and said that the new owners of Madonna’s house are a multimedia quartet called the Burgundians: Barbie K., Gene X., Charlotte R., and G.G. According to Mian, “These are four physically beautiful people who are intelligent and educated. Not just people who can sing and dance, but who are interested in business. In fact, they happen to be marketing and advertising students.” It is a story that is undoubtedly even too farfetched and complicated for Madonna to option for a video or a feature-length film. The only concern Madonna had was that the deal to sell her house in Miami not fall through.

In the middle of her
problems with Guy Ritchie, Madonna went ahead, without informing Ritchie, and bought the house on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills that Diane Keaton had restored and renovated. The property, situated just below the foothills of Beverly Hills, in an area north of Sunset Boulevard known as “the flats,” was designed by the architect Walter Neff. When Keaton sold Madonna the house, it was surprisingly almost in its original condition, although when it had been on the market before Keaton bought it, it was advertised as a “tear-down.” Neighbors were surprised when Keaton restored the four-thousand-square-foot property, modest and considered “cramped” for Beverly Hills, bringing back both the interior and exterior to their most simple and unadorned architectural purity. Many people found not only Madonna’s choice of the house but also the neighborhood curious and inappropriate for a star who craves privacy. The area was not considered chic or trendy, and the house presented security problems. Because the surrounding grounds are relatively small, the house is exposed to the street on all sides, including from a back alley. Even the proximity of the neighbors’ windows on either side was a significant security risk, since, according to a real estate agent, shortly after Madonna bought the house, a neighbor rented out his living room window to a tabloid photographer. But Madonna was into her unpretentious mode, and the house in Beverly Hills was just offbeat and old-world enough by American standards to be what she thought Guy Ritchie would want. Expecting that he would at most be momentarily annoyed when she told him what she had done, she was shocked that he considered it the breaking point in their affair.

In October 1999, Trudie Styler gave a dinner at Chez Es Saada, a bistro on New York’s Lower East Side, to celebrate the New York performance of her husband’s American tour. Guy Ritchie was in London doing the postproduction for his second film,
Snatch
, and Madonna, dressed modestly and described as extremely tense, was one of the twelve close friends who were invited to share the occasion with the couple. During most of the dinner, Madonna was on her cell phone, trying desperately to reach Ritchie on his cell phone in London. Either there was no answer or she got his message machine. Every five minutes she would redial the number, until one of the guests felt incredibly sorry for Madonna. Putting her hand on her arm, she said in a low voice, “Let him be for a while. Don’t smother him or he’ll run away. Men don’t like to be hounded. Give him some space.”

Madonna looked startled for a moment, and according to the woman, she seemed so vulnerable, so fragile, so innocent, that “my heart went out to her.” She says, “She was behaving like any average woman who was madly in love and insecure. She kept saying over and over, ‘But I love him and I’m so frightened that he’s going to dump me.’ Finally, she agreed not to touch the phone, and it became a kind of game. She would look up like a child and say, ‘Now can I try him? It’s been fifteen minutes.’ I would shake my head and say, ‘Not yet, you’ve waited fifteen minutes, let’s try for twenty.’”

Eventually, Madonna gave in to Ritchie’s demands to live in London for most of the year because she realized that, unless she did, there would be no happily ever after to their story. But she kept the house in Beverly Hills, and after their son was born, they would indeed spend more time there than Ritchie had ever dreamed.

When she returned to London
, gossip and rumors reported in the press about Madonna and Guy’s relationship and comments made by friends and the Ritchie family about her propelled her to make a statement about her new life. Once again, she explained that she had changed, that her previous rebellious behavior was because of the trauma she had suffered after the death of her mother. Falling in love with Guy Ritchie had made her the woman she had always known she could be. Explaining away her many romantic liaisons, she added, “All my excesses were in my youth. When I married my first husband, I was in love and truly believed the marriage would last. When I had my daughter with Carlos Leon, it was a real relationship, which I also thought would last.”

During those tumultuous months, when Madonna was telling friends that she wanted another child, Ritchie, according to members of his family, did not really pay attention or take her seriously. When she finally announced that she was pregnant, during a quiet moment after dinner in her rented house in Kensington in front of the fire in the den, Ritchie was shocked. He slammed out of the house and went to a pub for a few drinks. “Then he went to see his father,” a friend relates. “Apparently, the old man said, ‘Look, if it’s yours, and you’re sure about it, then you have to stand by her.’” Later that night, Ritchie returned to the Kensington house and told Madonna, “Okay, if you really want this baby, it’s great. I love you.”

Privately, both John Ritchie and Lady Amber Leighton were crushed. They had expected that their son would concentrate on his career before he settled down to marriage and fatherhood and that, when he did, he would choose a more refined Englishwoman. One of Amber Leighton’s friends says, “They believed that Madonna deliberately got pregnant. This was not some teenage girl who didn’t know how to use birth control. His father told him that right out. No one in the family was happy about it, although they are decent people and told him that he had to do the decent thing.” But even then, Ritchie did not commit to marriage.

Once again, Madonna was living out one of her most popular songs and videos, “Papa Don’t Preach,” when she made it clear to Guy Ritchie and to his family that she was going to “keep her baby.” If it wasn’t clear in the song to which “baby” she was referring, in real life, there was no doubt that Madonna intended to keep them both, her unborn child and Ritchie.

Throughout the pregnancy, there were rumors that Madonna had refused to marry Ritchie. Friends and spokes-people for the singer assured the press that it was her choice to remain independent. Friends of Ritchie’s maintain that it was the director who was reluctant to make a legal commitment to the mother of his child.

When Tony Ciccone was told that Madonna was pregnant without any firm date for getting married, he made no secret that he considered it damaging to the unborn child. He also criticized Madonna for making it so geographically difficult for Lourdes to see her father. Tony undoubtedly adored his granddaughter and would love his unborn grandchild as well, but he was furious at his daughter for her apparent refusal to “settle down.” The pregnancy would cause an even greater rift between Tony and Madonna, which would only heal when she finally told him that she intended to get married. Curiously, it was Joan Ciccone who leaked the result of a sonogram to the press when she was quoted as saying, “We’re so glad Lourdes will have a little brother to play with.”

What finally persuaded Ritchie to propose was the difficulty of Rocco’s premature birth and Madonna’s heroism.

On Thursday night, August 10
, 2000, Madonna was at home alone in her Beverly Hills house, while Ritchie was at Brad Pitt’s house, only ten minutes away by car. Pitt, who was starring in Ritchie’s new film,
Snatch
, had organized a poker game along with the Welsh actor Vinnie Jones. Both Madonna and Ritchie had no reason to worry about the baby’s impending birth, which was, according to doctors, a month away. In fact, only three days before, Madonna had gone for a complete checkup at St. Joseph’s Good Samaritan Hospital and had been assured that all was perfectly normal. Suddenly, at nearly midnight, Madonna began to hemorrhage. Her first call was to her doctor, who, suspecting that she had what is called placenta previa, or a detached placenta, promptly arranged for an ambulance to take her to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, which has the best postnatal care in the country. Ironically, just a month before Madonna, Lourdes, and Guy Ritchie had left for California in preparation for the birth, Madonna had caused a scandal in England when she had told the British press that she felt more comfortable having her baby in the United States. In several interviews she gave at the time, she stated that American hospital facilities are cleaner and more advanced than in Britain. One hospital source at Cedars-Sinai believes that her decision might have saved her life as well as the baby’s, since the California hospital has the most advanced technology for neonatal care.

Madonna’s second call on that harrowing night was to Ritchie’s cell phone to tell him what was happening. Within minutes, the ambulance arrived, almost at the same time as the distraught father-to-be. Paramedics rushed Madonna onto a stretcher, and Ritchie followed her to the hospital in his car. Still wearing her blood-soaked nightclothes and clutching her stomach, she was rushed into the emergency room, where her private physician was waiting along with a team of specialists who would tend to both mother and child. Ritchie checked Madonna into the hospital under the name of Tabitha Leighton (Tabitha is Guy Ritchie’s sister and Leighton is the last name of his mother’s second husband). The telephone diagnosis was correct. The placenta, or spongelike tissue that carries oxygen and other nutrients from mother to child, had detached itself from Madonna’s womb. The decision was made instantly. Madonna would have an emergency cesarean section. Seconds counted in getting the baby out of the womb and breathing, since the risk was great that he could die from oxygen deprivation and that Madonna could bleed to death. As she was being wheeled into the operating room, Ritchie, pale and shaking, ran beside the gurney, holding her hand. “Save my baby,” Madonna kept repeating, “just save my baby.” Ritchie never left her side, standing next to her as the doctors performed the lifesaving surgery.

Two teams of doctors worked on Madonna, one to deliver the baby and the other to stanch the flow of blood. An hour after the ordeal began, at 12:54
A.M.
, August 11, 2000, Rocco John Ritchie was born, weighing six pounds three ounces. Still, Madonna’s only thought was for her child. She kept asking the doctors, “He’s going to be okay, isn’t he? Tell me he’s going to be okay.”

By the time she was wheeled into the recovery room, Madonna’s condition was stable, although she had lost a great deal of blood. Rocco was placed in an incubator under an ultraviolet light in the neonatal intensive care unit. He was suffering from jaundice and was having difficulty breathing. Twelve hours later, Madonna was allowed to see her son. Holding him in her arms, she kissed his head and said tearfully, “This little guy is my little miracle.”

Later that day, Lourdes, accompanied by Ingrid Casares, also pregnant at the time by a German male model, visited her mother and spent time with Guy Ritchie.

On August 25, Eric Berg, a film producer and close friend of Guy Ritchie’s, told the press that Madonna and Ritchie would be getting married before Christmas. He also said that the couple planned to divide their time between London and Los Angeles. “Guy plans to keep a house in London with Madonna,” Berg reported, “but they are going to set up home in Los Angeles. He just wants them to be a family. . . . He has been over the moon since the birth of his son. The man is gushing.”

N
ewspapers and magazines throughout the world carried the story of Rocco Ritchie’s birth and the imminent marriage of Madonna to her baby’s father. What Madonna neglected to share with the press was that as soon as Lourdes was told that her mother and Guy Ritchie were going to get married, she began asking questions like “Why didn’t you ever marry my father?” or “When am I going to see my daddy?” Because of Lourdes and her obvious confusion about her father’s place in her mother’s life, Madonna invited Carlos Leon to the wedding.

In September, Tony and Joan Ciccone flew from Detroit to Los Angeles to see the baby for the first time. Despite the announcement of the marriage, there was still a coolness between Madonna and her father. Several weeks later, after he had returned home, Tony Ciccone expressed his feelings about his new grandson, who had been named after one of Tony’s brothers, and about his daughter’s marital plans. “He’s adorable,” Tony said. “We’re very happy and very relieved that everyone is well. As for Madonna’s wedding plans, I couldn’t be happier. I just hope everything works out.”

By October 2000, Tony and Joan Ciccone were already making plans to go to London for Madonna’s wedding in December. They had also decided to go to a château in the Bordeaux region of France while they were overseas to learn as much as they could about French techniques for growing grapes for wine.

As the British press began inundating the public with stories, speculating on where and when the marriage would take place, the chemistry between Madonna and her British lover mystified many observers who had known the pair both as a couple and individually. The question that everybody seemed to be asking was how could a relatively sheltered thirty-one-year-old man, who was just starting out in a career, who had been virtually unknown, find happiness with a forty-two-year-old superstar who had always picked up the bills for all of her men, with the exception of Warren Beatty?

The question was unanswerable when it came to the emotional and physical dynamic between the couple. If Guy Ritchie had begun the affair as an unwilling object of pursuit and had turned into an ideal husband, his family, more than Madonna’s, was not at all happy with the way things had turned out. In Amber Leighton’s camp, people were pessimistic. “At the moment,” one friend said, “I think Guy is somewhat caught up in the excitement of the wedding and doesn’t quite realize what’s hit him.” Another friend agreed: “Once he realizes how manipulated he has been by Madonna’s fantasies about becoming the perfect English wife and mother, I am afraid this will have a dismal end.”