No Big Thing?

On April 13, 1996, Madonna’s future manager Caresse Norman telephoned America’s premier gossip columnist, Liz Smith — always a big supporter of Madonna’s career — and confirmed the news of Madonna’s pregnancy. Smith’s article about it was published in newspapers around the world the next day. “Surprise, surprise, the stork couldn’t wait,” Liz Smith wrote. “The happy news from Budapest has just arrived — that Madonna is indeed pregnant.”

“Madonna doesn’t want this to be a big thing,” Liz Rosenberg told Liz Smith in a follow-up call, “though I don’t know how she thinks it won’t be a big deal. But she is deliriously happy, and so is everybody close to her. I hate to resort to a cliché, especially about Madonna, but she is radiant!”

Just prior to the phone call that was made to Liz Smith, Madonna telephoned her father, Tony, with the surprising news. During the filming of Evita, she had developed a closer relationship with her family, ironically enough by long-distance telephone communication. Each time Madonna called her father from Argentina to let him know how she was faring, he was thrilled to hear from her. He was proud of her, he said. The frequent conversations he had with her about her life and career at this time were certainly more civil than talks they’d had in recent years. Inadvertently, Tony had always seemed to rub Madonna the wrong way.

For instance, a year and a half earlier, father called daughter to tell her he had seen the video for “I’ll Remember” on television and thought she looked “pretty” in it. Rather than just accept the compliment, Madonna couldn’t help but be annoyed.

“But, Dad, it’s been out for six months and you just now saw it?” she remembered telling him.

“Well, we don’t watch much television,” he said.

“You would think you would keep up with what I’m doing,” she told him. “My God. Do you even have cable?”

From there, the argument escalated. “My father just refuses to acknowledge who I am and what I’ve accomplished,” she told a reporter shortly thereafter.

However, now so many miles from home and with so much on her mind, Madonna seemed able to distance herself from her vexation enough to feel nostalgic for her father and for the rest of her family. “She was homesick,” says her brother Martin, whom she also called periodically. “She was calling all of us, her brothers and sisters and even some cousins.” Or, as Tony told one relative, “We’ve been talking, and not fighting. I don’t know, maybe things are changing.” It was as if, in some ways, Madonna was actually transforming herself into a gentler, more reasonable person — the kind of woman she had been trying to convince her public she really was at this time. “Not that she was a saint,” says Alan Parker, “but I did notice that as time went on with the film, she seemed to mellow.”

When Madonna learned she was pregnant, she said that she didn’t want her father to read about it in the press. She telephoned him with the news, and also confessed to him that he was the most important person in her life — and that she hoped her child would not let her down the way she had let him down so many times in the past. Of course, Tony was concerned that Madonna was unwed and didn’t seem at all eager to marry Carlos Leon. However he was also elated and filled with genuine emotion by her call. “We cried on the phone,” he recalls. “I knew my kid was growing up. And she was nice to me,” he says, laughing. “No smart cracks.”

Perhaps along with her pregnancy finally came a sense of acceptance and recognition for Madonna that she had only one surviving parent, and that she should at least try to be good to him. If she had directed her fury about her mother’s death at Tony — and it certainly seemed to most people that she had done just that over the years — maybe she now realized how unfair she had been to her father. Or, maybe she had just grown to accept her mother’s death as a terrible tragedy for which no one was responsible, and that her father’s ability to move on with his own life was an act of strength and courage, not a betrayal of her mother’s memory. Certainly, if a similar tragedy were to ever befall Madonna, she too would somehow carry on with life, as difficult as it would be to do so. The Ciccone spirit — as passed from father to daughter — is strong and unwavering. Or, as the saying goes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

The expected media frenzy about Madonna’s pregnancy was not a surprise to anyone in her camp; the news traveled across the globe as rapidly as a war bulletin. Her characteristic flair for the dramatic at work, Madonna complained about the attention: “Well, the world knows,” she said at the time. “And I feel like my insides have been ripped open. The front page of the Post, CNN, even Hungarian Radio. What’s the big deal?” she asked. “I wish everyone would just let me do my work.”

Carlos’s mother, forty-nine-year-old Maria Leon, who is a social worker, rose to Madonna’s defense. “Everything people say about her is not true. When you get to know her, you know she’s very affectionate, very warm. She’s a real person, like you and me.” His father, Armando, who owns several Manhattan check-cashing stores, added, “She loves Carlos very much. And we love her, too.” (Armando has said that when his son first showed up at a family gathering with Madonna for what they would later learn was her favorite meal of black beans, “we couldn’t believe it. We thought it was a lookalike or something. We played Cuban music and talked all night.”)

At this important time in filming Evita, Madonna couldn’t help but feel that the public and media’s focus on her pregnancy was a nuisance. What she really wanted, she claimed, was privacy and peace of mind, so that she could finish her movie.

Making matters more interesting for the media to report, the jibes at Carlos Leon began instantaneously. He had been visiting Madonna in Buenos Aires because she wanted him at her side for moral support when she announced her pregnancy, but he quickly grew bored waiting around for her as she worked long hours on the set. Upon flying back to New York, he found aggressive media interest in him. “It’s great to be back in New York,” he snarled when a photographer snapped his picture as he sat on a bench in Central Park. Much to his dismay, the press now dubbed him, “Madonna’s Top Seed,” and her “Baby-Making Beau” (both headlines courtesy of the New York Post).

The press immediately learned that he was a native New Yorker who had grown up on West Ninety-first Street, in a very different neighborhood from Madonna’s ritzy Central Park co-op (into which he had recently moved). Friends also recalled the slight street accent of Carlos’s voice. Some sources hinted that Carlos hoped that meeting Madonna might provide the opportunity for a better life for him. “Carlos aspired to be more,” recalls an old girlfriend of his who asked for anonymity. “He thought maybe he’d get into modeling or acting.”

Loyal friend Michael Gacki quickly came to Carlos’s defense. “He’s not riding her coattails,” he reported to the New York Post. “He’s up at six A.M. every day working twelve or thirteen hours a day as a personal trainer to make it himself. He’s been with her for a year and a half, and in my opinion it hasn’t changed him one bit.” Gacki went on to explain that he and his pal Carlos were both involved with women “more successful” than themselves but, he explained, “we both wanted to make sure that we paid our own way.”

Patrice Gonzalez, who did not become a consort of Carlos’s but who had a platonic relationship with him instead, now says of Leon, “He’s really the kind of guy who can look at people and see them for who they really are, and that includes Madonna. He liked her from the time they first met. He was amazed that she was as timid as she turned out to be.

“But who’s to say if he was ever really in love with her, head over heels. He never wanted to get caught up in her world. She was temperamental, difficult to be around. Also, he’s a jealous kind of guy. If she complimented a model’s looks in a magazine, he would get pissed off. They also had some arguments from time to time about the way she treated him. She’s used to ordering people around.”

Gonzalez was at the home of Carlos’s parents when he and Madonna came to visit. As they were getting ready to leave, Madonna turned to Carlos and, in a rather abrupt tone, said, “Get my coat.”

“Get it yourself,” he snapped back at her, his eyes flickering with annoyance.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked. “You can’t get my coat?”

“Carlos, go get her coat,” his mother, Maria, said, trying to keep the peace. “Be a gentleman.”

“Look, I’m not your personal assistant,” Carlos told Madonna, ignoring his mother’s request. It seemed clear to most observers that, for Carlos, a bigger issue was at stake than just the retrieval of his girlfriend’s coat. Perhaps he and Madonna had engaged in previous discussions about similar matters. “If you want me to get your coat, say ‘please’,” he told her. “I don’t work for you. I’m not on the payroll, you know?”

Madonna rolled her eyes and shot him a cool look. “My God,” she muttered.

“Oh, now I understand,” Carlos said. “You see, I had completely underestimated your capacity for being . . . bitchy.”

Though Madonna looked angry, she somehow held her temper in check. Perhaps trying to tone down the moment because Carlos’s mother was watching, she acquiesced. “Carlos, can I ask you to get my coat?” she said, before adding, sweetly, “Por favor.”

As Carlos helped Madonna with her coat, his mother said, “Now, now. See how nice?”

When Madonna finally told Carlos she was expecting, he realized, according to Patrice Gonzalez, that this child would create a bond with her that he would live with forever. “This was a big adjustment for him,” says Gonzalez, “and forced him to look at her another way, as a woman who would be in his life for the long run.”

Many reporters went so far as to hint that Madonna was having the baby as some kind of extreme publicity stunt for her movie. Though outraged, she probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the insinuation. After all, it seemed to many observers that she would do anything to promote a project. So, why not this? “People have suggested that I have done this [become pregnant] for shock value,” she said. “These are comments only a man would make. It’s much too difficult to be pregnant and bring a child into this world to do it for whimsical or provocative reasons. There are also speculations that I used the father as a stud service,” she said. “Implying that I am not capable of having a real relationship. I realize these comments are all made by persons who cannot live with the idea that something good is happening to me. Something special and wonderful that they cannot spoil.”