Goddess: Inside Madonna Read Free Page A

York.”
    At the time, Carlos Leon worked at Crunch, a franchise of fitness training centers in Manhattan, and lived in his own apartment in the same building as his parents, at Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street, not far from Carmine’s restaurant. “Madonna knew that I couldn’t catch up to Carlos running because I was out of shape and Carlos has about 3 percent body fat, so she teased me and said that I should hop on one of those police carts if I had to, it didn’t matter how I did it, but I had to find him in Central Park,” Cortesi says.
    Without the help of the police, Cortesi managed to catch up with Leon and give him the message that “a certain person would like to meet you later in the day at the merry-go-round in Central Park. . . . Carlos laughed,” Cortesi continues, “but he knew exactly who that person was.”
    When Cortesi reported back to Madonna, he told her that the message had been delivered and that Carlos Leon would be waiting for her at the designated time at the prearranged place. “She came down to the park and the two of them sat by the merry-go-round alone,” Cortesi maintains, “while I waited behind a bench. They talked and laughed and at the end of the meeting, Carlos left and I called the car to come and pick Madonna up to drive her back to her apartment on Central Park West. When she got in the car with me, she told me that she liked him and wanted to see him again.”
    Madonna invited Carlos to several parties, sports events, and show business functions. Not surprisingly, he was in awe of his new girlfriend and impressed by her world, but at the same time, he was intimidated to find himself mingling with people whose faces he had seen only on the screen or in the press. Despite having been thrown into a crowd that seemed slightly unreal to him, Carlos managed to maintain his equilibrium because he was extremely close to his family, who systematically reminded him that a relationship with an international star was to be viewed only as an ephemeral experience. At the same time, his mother was proud of her son and encouraged him to gain as much experience as he could that might further his aspirations as an actor.
    It was no coincidence that Dan Cortesi felt an instant affinity with the young Cuban, since he also came from a modest family. Living in the Bronx and struggling to make a living, it didn’t take Cortesi long to discover that both he and Carlos were a couple of poor kids with “street smarts and street morals” who were allowed in for a look at how the rich and famous lived. While Cortesi knew that there was nothing permanent when it came to either his job or a love affair with Madonna, he became genuinely fond of Carlos and eventually protective of him. Developing more than just a kinship for his boss’s new love interest, Dan Cortesi felt that Leon understood, as he did, the inequities of life. “We were both poor boys, working kids, who were just waiting to make a score, surrounded by people who dropped enormous sums of money without batting an eye. But Carlos wasn’t taken in by all that stuff,” Cortesi relates. “Here was this kid, just a street kid, a trainer, and all of a sudden he was on the top of the world and he was scared. He used to come to me before an event and ask me who was going to be there, because basically he hated all those people who air-kissed each other.” Cortesi laughs. “And he hated all those little sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres they served but basically he felt comfortable around Madonna. I think he fell in love with her that first day, when he left the merry-go-round.”
    The couple were together in New York for a brief few months before the relationship was put on hold once again when Madonna left for Los Angeles, and it wasn’t until several months later when she finally returned to New York that it resumed on a much more intimate and serious level. There was something extremely kind and sensitive in the way Madonna treated Leon