Andy Bird

In many ways, the nineties had been tough, challenging years for Madonna. Even though she continued to enjoy great commercial success, she felt that the fame she had once so craved was now nothing more than a hungry and insatiable leech sucking her dry, keeping her from being truly happy. Much of her public had the false impression that, because she was famous, she also felt an incredible sense of self-fulfillment and of truly being loved. But people who are famous can tell you that the opposite is true — that if you are not truly fulfilled in your personal life, many thousands of people adoring you can actually make you feel emptier. At its worst — as it had been for Madonna — fame had become a substitute for love, a disruptive influence in her life, often giving the feeling of happiness when, really, no happiness truly existed. “I used to be so unhappy,” she said recently. “Maybe that’s why I was so, I don’t know, maybe mean to a lot of people . . . though I don’t think I’m ready to cop to that,” she added with a laugh. The birth of Lourdes helped an immeasurable amount in this regard, giving Madonna a sense of satisfaction she had never before known. “Ever since my daughter was born, I feel the fleetingness of time,” she said. “And I don’t want to waste it on getting the perfect lip color.”

She proved to be an excellent mother, says her close friend and confidante Rosie O’Donnell. “She’s a tough-love kind of mother,” says Rosie. “For instance, she doesn’t want her kid watching TV. Can you imagine that? Me, I use the television as a baby-sitter for my [four] kids. If it wasn’t for the tube, I don’t know what I would do to keep them occupied.” (As a child, Madonna was also forbidden to watch TV by her father, Tony, who felt there were better ways for a child to stay occupied.)

It’s true that Madonna insists that her daughter not watch television, saying that she doesn’t want the girl to be influenced by sexual and, also, violent images. Even though she made a career out of being an outrageous sex goddess, she believes children should be protected from such imagery. (She also says that if she ever found out that Lourdes was dating a married man, “I would have to kill her.”)

“And no junk food for Lourdes, either,” says O’Donnell. “So when that girl comes to my house to visit for the weekend, forget it! She leaves here a totally different child, a candy-bar-eating, MTV-watching, spoiled little kid. To tell you the truth,” says the comic, “I think Madonna knows how tough she is on the kid and lets her spend time at my house just to give her a break. But when she goes back to Mama, she toes the line. Then, when she visits me again, I have to start the process all over again of turning her into one of ‘my’ kids.”

In her private life, Carlos Leon had served his purpose, whether it was as a partner in a temporarily committed romance, or as just a trusted friend who was able to give her the child she so desperately desired. Now, with him all but out of the picture, she was anxious to move forward with her personal life and career.

In September 1997, Madonna embarked on what would amount to an unsteady relationship with an aspiring British actor and screenplay writer, Andy Bird, after having met him in Los Angeles through mutual friend Alek Keshishian (who directed Truth or Dare). It would be with Bird that Madonna would pick up her romantic life after Carlos Leon. While her choice in men was flawless when it came to Carlos, it seemed somewhat weaker in the choice of Andy Bird. She may be the world-famous Madonna, but she is as fallible as anyone else when it comes to choosing a mate. True, she had learned certain lessons about love and relationships along the way, and perhaps she thought she was applying them to her life when she chose to be with Andy. However, as it happened, she was mistaken.

Madonna was immediately smitten with the six-foot, two-inch Englishman who wore his light brown hair at shoulder length and always dresed in black. “It was lust at first sight,” a friend of hers revealed at the time. “Madonna calls Andy ‘Geezer.’ He isn’t exactly rolling in cash. The guy didn’t look like he had two bucks to his name, but Madonna was totally smitten. When they were together, she couldn’t keep her hands off of him.”

On the surface, it was easy to see why Madonna enjoyed Andy Bird’s company, for he is a man who genuinely appreciates women. On their first dates, he seemed intensely curious about her, seldom speaking of himself and, instead, asking thought-provoking questions about her. In doing so, he actually became more of an enigma in their early relationship than she was. Soon, Madonna found herself immensely intrigued by his sense of mystery. Based on what she had heard about him through mutual friends, he was also a man of wide sexual experience, though he rarely spoke of any of it. His discretion in that regard fascinated Madonna, who is old-fashioned in that she considers it chivalrous of a man when he doesn’t kiss and tell. Also, that particular characteristic would bode well for any man in a relationship with a celebrity of her stature, she must have reasoned.

Soon after meeting Andy Bird, Madonna jetted to London for a two-month mission to search for a house there, saying that she felt that Britain was a safer place in which to raise her daughter. “I have really fallen in love with it,” she said. “I’ve made some excellent friends in London and even thought about my daughter going to school here. I think the British are more intelligent than Americans.” With her affair with Bird flourishing under the media’s watchful eye, they moved into a rented house in Chelsea. Twice, Bird drove Madonna miles to visit his parents in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace. Bird’s parents accompanied the couple to lunch at a local pub.

In what some of her friends called “record time,” Bird and Madonna rented a 4,500 pounds a week house in Chelsea, while Madonna looked for a permanent home in London. Then, when she needed to return to Los Angeles on business, he moved into her Los Feliz home. He told one London-based reporter, “I’m living over there now and trying my luck as a film director.”

Madonna’s romance with chain-smoker but nondrinker Andy Bird was tumultuous from the start, generating reams of tabloid headlines over the course of about a year. At one point, she kicked him out of her California home and he ended up back in London, working as a doorman at the Met Bar. Another time, she left him stranded, penniless, in Florida for a week before begging him to come back in a string of heart-to-heart phone calls.

Who can say why Madonna was attracted to Andy Bird? They seemed to have little in common. She was driven and ambitious, he was more laid back about his career. She was a multimillionaire, he didn’t have much money. However, he was a kind man, and also fun. A gentleman with a great sense of humor, Andy made Madonna laugh. He was polite, reassuring. He wasn’t cruel and argumentative like Sean Penn. He wasn’t emotionally crippled like Warren Beatty and John Kennedy, Jr. Actually, he was more like Tony Ward — loving and well-meaning while, perhaps, not terribly stable or financially secure.

To his credit, Andy treated Madonna not like a star, but like a friend, which she found irresistible. They had picnics, they talked about movies, they joked with one another. In July 1998, the two exchanged vows in a Kabbalah ceremony that supposedly united them for all time. Madonna wore a flowing white gown. Both she and Bird were barefoot. She told friends at the time that she hoped to have Bird’s child, but that marriage might not be necessary since “we had this very lovely ceremony.”

In a chapter that seemed right out of Julia Roberts’s Notting Hill, Madonna didn’t much care about Andy’s bank account — at least not at first. However, as weeks turned into months, she could not reconcile the fact that Bird was unclear about his future ambitions while, at the same time, being such a spiritual person. To her way of thinking, the purpose of spirituality was to use it to move your life ahead to the next plateau, not to fall back on it as an excuse to stagnate. Bird, however, felt that career concerns were secondary to those relating to the metaphysical. On a trip to London in the fall of 1998, at his urging he and Madonna visited the Inergy Centre in Kensal Rise, West London, which specializes in teaching yoga. Afterward, she said, “Yoga is very physical and strengthens me from within, not just externally. It helps me be more flexible about how I see the world and other people.”

“She was a lovely girl and seemed to be very fond of our son,” said Bird’s mother after she and her accountant husband, Horace, shared a cup of tea with Madonna. “I liked her. I must say, she surprised me because she was so polite. I don’t know what I expected. I wondered if they would get married, but I knew that young people rarely get married these days. I know he cared about her a great deal. I have nothing but nice thoughts about her, but she had been around more than Andy, I think. She was more worldly.”

At twenty-nine, ten years Madonna’s junior, Andy did seem to have some growing up to do. He was also insecure. Perhaps a defining moment occurred in their relationship when he accused Madonna of having a fling with a young film director while she was in London making a video. Madonna was having no such affair. (At least not yet.) Also, when it came to discretion with the media — a requirement if one is to have a relationship with a major celebrity — Andy Bird was a novice. “She goes through boyfriends like there’s no tomorrow,” Andy told a reporter. No doubt that wasn’t the kind of statement Madonna liked to hear her male companions make about her. She must have known that there were problems ahead.

Madonna didn’t have many people she could turn to to discuss issues having to do with her boyfriend Andy. Those who had known her for years were not the best to give advice, she felt, because, as she put it, “they’ve all heard my stories a thousand times over, and they’re sick of them . . . and of me.” Perhaps this is the reason Madonna turned to a surprising new friend in trying to sort out some of her problems with Andy Bird.