magazine (Australia, sept. 1996)
Madonna and Child
by Jennifer Gilbert
Caption: Madonna has been totally consumed by "Evita" and impending motherhood. But now she's ready to talk to the world. She invited Women's Weekly's Jennifer Gilbert to fly to LA for this intimate chat about the most exciting time of her life
If Madonna, strident sex machine and control queen, exists other than in tabloid legend, then she is not present this particular hot northern summer afternoon at the Larrabee recording studios in Los Angeles' Universal City.
It is a gentle and gracious woman, radiating contentment in the latter stages of pregnancy, who extends her hand in welcome as we meet for our appointed hour-long chat.
Easing herself into a deck chair in the studio's garden courtyard with the awkward delicacy that is the preserve of the obviously pregnant, Madonna, mother-to-be, is aglow, as she awaits the birth of her daughter - as she confirms the child will be - in October or November. The possibility of having fans camp outside her Hollywood Hills home as the birth date approaches prevents her from revealing exactly when the baby is due.
The 38-year-old singer, actress and media icon, who has championed provocative underwear as outerwear for a significant proportion of her career, is positively demure in sedate all-black maternity garb: a loose, calf-length shift with a wide scoop neck that reveals an impressive expanse of flawless white decolletage; a lace over-shirt; patent leather Mary Jane shoes.
She wears no jewelry and little make-up, which only serves to enhance a serene beauty, her perfect porcelain skin and large pale blue eyes. The only flaw in this Madonna-with-child portrait is a dark regrowth about a centimetre wide along the centre parting of her shoulder-length honey blonde hair.
Although she has radically reduced her pre-pregnancy fitness routine and is now much more relaxed about diet, Madonna stills cuts a petite figure. "Except for the basketball I swallowed!" she says, giggling with delight.
She has given the Australian Women's Weekly a rare interview to discuss the long-awaited film version of the Tim Rice - Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Evita". In it, she plays the pivotal role of Eva Peron, defender of the poor, one of the most famous women of her time and the charismatic wife of Argentinian dictator Juan Peron.
Directed by Alan Parker; the film also stars the Spanish heart-throb Antonio Banderas as revolutionary Che Guevara (who doubles as the film's narrator) and British actor Jonathan Pryce as general Peron.
It attracted a welter of hype and controversy - Madonna's casting caused almost as much polarization of Argentinian public opinion as Eva herself, who was both adored and abhorred by her people. The project has consumed the star's creative energy for the past two years and engaged her imagination for at least seven. It is scheduled to open at Christmas in the US, and in January in Australia. On our interview day, she was recording - as she will until mid-September - the "Evita" soundtrack for release prior to the film.
It had been suggested that Madonna might be guarded, even prickly, on the subject of impending motherhood and her domestic arrangements, but here was a woman only too keen to elaborate on the events which have so dramatically transformed her life.
She is at pains to stress that her relationship with the baby's father - Carlos Leon, 29, a fitness trainer - is a loving and committed one. The rumors that she calculatedly chose him, as one would a stud bull, to impregnate her and forced him to sign away his parental rights in a dacronian pre-natal contract infuriate and wound her. Although the pair do not intend to marry - "You don't need to be married to love someone and raise a child," Madonna asserts - they have every intention of creating a family unit with their daughter.
"Carlos is very excited - he can't wait for the baby and I think he's going to be a great father," Madonna says. "He has handled them [the rumors about their relationship] amazingly well, because it's kind of an insult to both of us. It assumes that his is an arrangement or that there are no emotions involved. It's just another example of people's inability to allow me to be happy I'm having a baby.
"I don't know where these stories about contracts come from - since I never talk about the relationship, how would anyone know? If something did happen between Carlos and me, if we weren't getting along or we were no longer together, there's no way in the world I'd want my daughter to grow up without a father."
While the baby is much longed for, Madonna says the pregnancy came as a complete surprise and that, in fact, she was not aware of it for several months as she concentrated on filming "Evita" in Argentina.
"I'd been wanting to have a child for a really long time, but I wasn't trying, just put it like that," she says. "It was one of those weird surprises. I was so engrossed in making the movie that I wasn't paying attention to my body. I didn't have any symptoms - any feelings of fatigue or strangeness I attributed to working too hard.
"I was tired and I'd sometimes feel a bit nauseous, but we were shooting outside and it was 100 degrees [38C] every day and everyone was feeling a bit sick. If I said, 'I kind of feel sick', the girl doing my make up would say, 'I feel sick, too... I think the lunch was bad'. And I'd think, 'Yeah, lunch must have been bad'. I never, ever thought that i was pregnant. It just didn't seem like a viable option."
Madonna's pregnancy was later confirmed by her doctor in New York, before the 'Evita' cast and crew flew on to Budapest, Hungary, to complete filming. "When I finally did find out, it was kind of like, 'No way! Really? No! I'm making a movie right now - that's absurd'," she recalls, laughing. "But then it was like the greatest thing in the world."
She also had an ultrasound. "When you take a blood test and they say, 'You're pregnant', you just go, 'Oh' and don't feel any different really. But when you see the little baby and it's... [she indicates a few centimetres between her fingers] then it hits you like a ton of bricks. It's real. I cried when I heard my baby's heartbeat. It was the most incredible experience. I fell in love," she says, her eyes literally shining with with emotion.
Even though she and "Evita" director Alan Parker decided to suppress news of her pregnancy for as long as possible to keep all attention focused on the film, Madonna says her condition actually helped her with her portrayal of Eva Peron, who died of cervical cancer in 1952, at the age of 33.
"It did add another layer of tension to filming," she admits, "because I'd be worried that I was on my feet too long or working too many hours. I had a lot of dancing to do [Eva was a tango aficionado] until I was about four and a half months. There was a lot of jumping and sometimes I fell and I'd think, 'I've done it this time', and I'd rush to the doctor to make sure everything was okay. I must be built like a tank, because nothing happened.
"It made me very protective of myself, and I think that helped my character, because Eva always had a lot of health problems. Problems with haemorrhaging - she had really heavy periods and things like that. And when she found out she had cervical cancer, she hid it from people for a long time. I think she was very protective over that part of her body," Madonna says, enfolding her tummy, "and so I used that. I easily could imagine being more frail; wanting badly to protect this part of my body. That feeling of being vulnerable."
Madonna's pregnancy has been smooth. "I've never been sick, just more tired than usual. I've been really lucky, I have to say," she reports, rapping on the table beside her. "Touch wood!" She pauses to sip a frothy iced coffee from a plastic tumbler.
"Instead, I just feel I don't fit into spaces anymore, and it's getting harder to put my shoes on. I bent over to put my shoe on the other day and fell off the bench. I thought to myself, 'This is really going to humble me'."
Madonna admits pregnancy has given her a new perspective on the subject of body image - her own and her perception of other people's.
"Some days I wake up and feel like a million bucks; there's a life growing inside me and I'm the luckiest person in the world. And then other days I get up and just go, 'Uggghhh... I'm a fat pig, I'm as big as a whale'. I look in my closet and I just can't find anything to wear.
"It's difficult when you're used to being really fit and agile, having an enormous amount of energy and strength and a really flat stomach. It's difficult when suddenly you have to surrender your body, and it's a very good lesson for me.
"it's given me license to relax in a way that I never really allowed myself to. And, you know, deep in my heart it's all very good for me. It's good for me to have to deal with all these changes. It's going to be good for me to have the baby and have fat and then have to get rid of it.
"It makes you very aware of the importance we, as a society, put on being thin and beautiful and fitting a specific ideal. You become very much more aware of it when you don't fit that ideal. I think it's made me more sympathetic, aware and sensitive. It's disgusting what sort of importance we put on being incredibly thin. It's a tragedy because it forces girls to do all kinds of crazy things to themselves. It encourages a kind of self-hatred."
That's not to say that Madonna has become an indulgent couch potato. She has merely reduced and adapted her fitness routine and there's little doubt she stills does more exercise in a day than many would in a month. "I don't work out like a mad woman, not like I used to," she says. "I used to train like a marathon runner or a triathlete. I don't run anymore - I can't - or do any weights or sit-ups. But I do a lot of exercise, every day."
Her fitness regime now takes in aerobics, using machines such as the lifecycle and Stairmaster, stretching, yoga, swimming and a lot of walking in the hills where she lives.
As for food, her once disciplined diet also has been modified. "I just eat more!" she says, laughing. "I've never been so hungry in my life. I haven't really had any cravings, except when I was making the movie and just had to have poached eggs every day. I wanted eggs five times a day, which is not exactly good for you. I like horrible greasy food, that's the problem. Pizza and french fries. So now i try to eat healthily all week, but I think it's important to have one day a week where you can just indulge - have ice-cream and all the other things you're not supposed to.
"I have a normal life, you know. I get up in the morning. I drink my coffee [decaf], I read the newspaper, I play with my dogs, run around the backyard. I exercise and then I come to work in the studio - and I have Sundays off. I spend time with my girlfriends... we have lunches, dinners, visit each other's houses and go shopping. At night I always go home and I either write [she is currently working on a book, the nature of which she refuses to reveal] or I read. Not very glamorous, but I love it."
And she is preparing for the arrival of her daughter, whom she hopes will look like Carlos. The baby will be born in hospital. ("I'm not brave enough for a home birth," she says.) Madonna has not yet decided what to name her. "I'll know that when I look into her eyes," she declares. Work on the nursery has not started because Madonna is moving house, within LA, in the next few months. She has decided, though, that it will be on a yellow theme.
Madonna has read "every book I can get my hands on" about parenting. "That's my nature, to immerse myself and educate myself and get every bit of information I can on a subject. But once I've sated myself, I rely on instinct," she says.
Her excitement over the baby is almost matched by her interest in the premiere of "Evita". She has invested "my heart and soul" in the film's development and has great hopes that it will transform people's notion about her acting ability and image.
A sneak preview of footage points to a powerfully evocative saga in which Madonna _is_ Eva Peron. The role was everything she thought it would be "and much more", Madonna marvels, in the distinct English tones she has acquired after two years' collaboration with the largely British "Evita" unit.
"It was the most educational experience of my life. First of all there was the research I did before the movie, which was so in-depth, so complex, and the interviews I did in Argentina with _the_ most fascinating people who knew Eva.
"The filming itself was difficult. We travelled halfway around the world to do it and I was away from home for nearly six months. There were a lot of times I was ripping my hair out.
"Then, because there was so much controversy going on around me [despite stories that she was snubbed by Argentinian President Carlos Menem, Madonna met him twice], it was like I was living Eva's life. It affected me... in a good way because I could use it for my character. When Eva was alive, everyone was completely divided, either for or against her."
Other than finishing the "Evita" soundtrack and promoting the movie, for the first time in her career Madonna has no more projects on the boil. "I've been reading scripts and I don't like anything I've read. Perhaps I'll start writing music, but I don't really know. I mean, I don't know what it's going to be like to have a baby, so I think I should leave myself with free time.
"Motherhood is going to be a big learning experience for me and I'm really excited; more than any other thing I've done in my life."