Goddess: Inside Madonna Read Free Page B

during the first year they were together. She anticipated and understood how uncomfortable he may have felt in her opulent nine-room apartment on Central Park West and Sixty-fourth Street and therefore came to his small flat further uptown to spend the evening. Without exception, she left in the morning before the sun came up, slipping into the car that Cortesi had waiting for her to take her back to her flat. According to Cortesi and what Madonna told him during their early-morning, predawn rides together, one of the things she found so comforting about spending the night at Carlos’s was that it reminded her of the unpretentious atmosphere that she had left behind in Bay City so many years before. Perhaps it would have been more correct for Madonna to claim that she never really knew that kind of peace and quiet, since back in Bay City, she had been one of eight children, forced constantly to vie for the attention of her parents. Whether or not it became a game, stepping back into another world, Madonna apparently found it amusing and satisfying to spend time at her lover’s apartment and fool the paparazzi that hounded her every time she went out in public. In fact, when Dan Cortesi once parked his beat-up old Pinto, a car that he calls a “skashabonga,” in front of Madonna’s Central Park apartment, Madonna was so intrigued with the wreck that she instructed Cortesi to drive her in it to the Ninety-fifth Street apartment instead of in the usual Lincoln Town Car. “When Liz Rosenberg, Madonna’s manager, found out that we were riding around in my skashabonga,” Cortesi laughs, “she was furious. Here’s a woman who is aware of everything when it comes to Madonna every minute of the day and she was afraid that if we got into an accident in my car instead of in a car that had been leased by Maverick or Warner Brothers, the insurance wouldn’t cover her and Madonna could be sued for millions.”
    Until Liz Rosenberg spoiled her fun, Madonna would love riding around in the Pinto with the garbage in the backseat, one windshield wiper, and a radio that worked only if it was slammed once to jostle it into sound.
    From the moment Madonna returned to New York from Los Angeles and resumed her relationship with Carlos, Dan Cortesi was once again the person who carried messages between the couple and who drove her to Leon’s apartment. “Madonna met Carlos’s family about a week after she got back,” Cortesi says. “The first time she went there, she brought along Rosanna Arquette, one of her best friends, to show the Leon family that she had nice friends, too.”
    According to Cortesi, one of Madonna’s greatest pleasures was to sit around Maria and Armando’s kitchen table and drink the rich Cuban espresso that Carlos’s mother made. “One thing I really liked about the family,” Cortesi continues, “is that they didn’t blink, they took Madonna as just another person, a friend of their son, which made Madonna very comfortable.”
    While Maria Leon may have felt at ease around Madonna, she was less comfortable that her son was in love with a woman whose reputation preceded her, as far as her inability to make a commitment to one man and nurture a relationship that would last forever. Maria Leon made it very clear to Madonna that Carlos was her “baby,” and her major concern was not Madonna’s stardom but rather that she would treat her younger son properly so that he wouldn’t end up hurt and disillusioned. “The mother told Madonna that her son was a very sensitive person,” Cortesi says, “and she made it very clear that her first concern was that her baby wouldn’t get hurt.”
    Madonna was attracted to Leon for all the obvious reasons but she was also touched by his innocence and sense of morality and the fact that he wanted to remain a simple person without any particular ambitions to further his own life or career. Yet, Madonna, hyperintuitive and forced to be aware of hidden meanings and