Goddess: Inside Madonna Read Free

interest in Evita. At the end of her first year of high school, Madonna had been listening to one of her favorite rock stations when the disc jockey had talked about a woman named Eva Perón. Madonna had been fascinated to learn that the wife of Juan Perón had survived poverty to become an inspiration to her country as well as a spiritual and religious icon to her people long after her death. Sitting with Rice in London, Madonna learned that he had also first heard about Evita by chance on the radio. According to Rice, he had been set to do Jeeves for the London stage (along with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn, who provided the book and lyrics) when he happened to hear a program on his car radio about Eva Perón, “the poor girl from a shabby suburb of Buenos Aires who had climbed to the top of Argentine politics and society.” It was then that the idea for Evita had begun to take form and Rice had set out to research the life and death of Eva Perón. In February 1974, Rice had made his first trip down to Buenos Aires to get a sense of the local color and atmosphere, which he would successfully re-create on the stage.
    In London with the woman who would re-create the role on the screen, Rice, the consummate gentleman as well as the lyricist who was concerned about his score and his star, squired Madonna around town. Privately, he was convinced that when people knew she was eager to be asked to all the A-list parties and events, his baby-sitting job would be over. Unfortunately, the empty guest book she kept on the glass table in her penthouse suite was a sad indication of her failure to make new friends. She had come to conquer London, and despite her staid tweed suit, no one seemed to be clamoring for her. With pressure mounting to complete the arrangements for the musical score, Tim Rice became increasingly unavailable, and as he did, Madonna became increasingly lonely. With only three weeks left before she was to begin recording, she decided to summon Carlos Leon and her friend Ingrid Casares over to London.
    In 1993, Madonna had been seeing her former husband, Sean Penn, Harvey Keitel, John Enos, a nightclub owner, and a minor pop star named Louie Louie. She had also been living with Ingrid Casares in her Hollywood home once owned by Bugsy Siegel, the character that her former boyfriend Warren Beatty had portrayed two years before in his film Bugsy . During the time she was with Casares, Madonna admitted to several close friends and even to an Italian journalist that she had finally “found true love at last.” Coy about identifying her perfect lover, she was nonetheless seen kissing Casares in several Hollywood restaurants. By the time Casares arrived in London, her place in Madonna’s life had settled into that of best friend, close confidante, and trusted business associate. Several years later, Madonna would invest in Liquid, a Miami nightclub, along with Casares and Chris Paciello, a Staten Island man, eventually linked to the Mafia and convicted of murder, who would ultimately end up in a witness protection program.
    Carlos Leon, Cuban born and darkly handsome, first caught Madonna’s eye at a party in New York in 1993, several years before they actually met and began a relationship. Dan Cortesi, who worked for Madonna from 1992 until 1997 as her advance security person, claims that he was the one who arranged the first formal meeting between the singer and the fitness trainer. Cortesi, forty-two years old, small, with dark curly hair and kinetic gestures and expressions, talked about his experiences working for the star during an interview in New York on June 16, 2001. According to Cortesi, Madonna asked him to find out when Leon jogged through Central Park and make it his business to be there with a message that she wanted to talk to him. “Madonna met Carlos several years before,” Cortesi recalls, “but because of her schedule, she didn’t hook up with him until 1994 when they were both in New