Madonna (47 page)

That he was involved in a year-long relationship with the TV presenter Tania Strecker, whom he had known for fourteen years, hardly helped. ‘He was the love of my life,’ she says, the leggy, six-foot blonde blaming the diminutive singer for her eventual break up with Ritchie. For while he was seeing Strecker, at that time a recovering alcoholic, he was also quietly showing Madonna around London when she was in town, accompanying her on househunting expeditions and taking her out for dinner. When they were apart, Madonna reverted to characteristic behavior, calling him endlessly, demanding to know where he had been and who he was seeing. During one dinner with Trudi Styler, Sting and others in New York in late 1999, she was physically restrained from phoning Ritchie by other guests, who suggested that her behavior was likely to drive him away. Indeed, like several of her other lovers, he became so exasperated by her insistent phoning, especially when he was carefully editing his latest film, that he refused to return her calls. There were, too, other occasions, so Strecker claims, when Madonna called while he was with her.

As the millennium came to an end, Madonna was the first to give way, agreeing that she should live permanently with Ritchie in London. As she told one friend, the writer Ingrid Sischy, ‘I picked up my life and my daughter and everything and I rented a house in London and moved there. And that’s really when our relationship started to work. But it was a huge sacrifice for me.

Nevertheless, she put a brave face on it, deciding to record her latest album,
Music,
in London with Mirwais, an unknown French producer, and putting her daughter’s name down for the Lycée Français in South Kensington – ‘because I’m half French’ – and considered sending her to the exclusive Cheltenham Ladies’ College as her senior school. Her previous lukewarm comments about her newly adopted homeland – ‘I’m sure Britain is beautiful somewhere, I’ve just never found it’ – were forgotten amid the swooning media coverage of her decision to live in Britain.

‘Veronica Electronica,’ it seemed, had been superseded by a new alter ego, ‘Lady Madonna.’ In her latest incarnation, she was immediately installed as the new queen of British society, no charity gala, no award ceremony, no social event complete unless graced by ‘Her Madge-esty.’ It was not long before she was dining with Prince Charles at his country home, Highgrove in Gloucestershire, discussing the dubious joys of jet lag with the heir to the throne. ‘I’m an Anglophile,’ she now declared, citing William Shakespeare and Sid Vicious as examples of eminent Englishmen she admired, apparently without irony. Her old friend Ed Steinberg, who produced the video for her first single all those years ago, saw in her a desire to go upmarket, to win the hearts and minds of her new British constituency. ‘She now has English aristocracy on her mind and she wants to change her image. She wants to become a lady now and forget about the past.’

Amidst all the turmoil and change in her private life, in the winter of 2000 Madonna discovered that she was pregnant once again. This time, however, there was no question that she would have her baby. Even so, her uncertainty about her relationship with the child’s father was hardly helped on Valentine’s Day, just a few weeks into her pregnancy. She was crestfallen when she discovered that a wonderful arrangement of tiger lilies, her favorite flowers, had been sent by a business associate rather than her lover. It was only after an assistant called Ritchie to remind him of the significance of the day that he bought her a modest bunch of blooms. ‘They looked like he had picked them up from a petrol-station forecourt,’ recalls one former member of staff, who was there when Ritchie arrived with the wretched bouquet. After a brisk exchange, the couple left for dinner in silence.

While Madonna confessed that, after years of searching, she had found her ‘soulmate,’ there seemed to be a marked reluctance on Ritchie’s part to commit to a woman ten years his senior. The fact that his other lover, Tania Strecker, was still in the background only complicated these delicate matters of the heart. ‘I’m not saying the last time we [that is, she and Ritchie] met because that’s a bit of a sore one – not for me but for her,’ Tania Strecker has said. ‘She is frightened of me.’ The implication is clear; he was still seeing Strecker after he had taken up with Madonna.

In February 2000, however, as Strecker’s relationship with Ritchie petered out, Madonna and her lover deliberately adopted a higher public profile. They attended the
Evening Standard
Film Awards together, were seen out at numerous fashionable restaurants, and even took Lola to see the children’s movie
Toy Story
2. At the same time, Madonna made it clear that the other new love of her life, her infatuation with Britain, was only skin deep, for she flew back to Los Angeles to prepare for the birth of her second child, taking a swipe at her new home country’s ‘old and Victorian’ hospitals before she left.

Her medical caution was justified. Unlike the first time she gave birth, when she had joked that she was going for a cosmetic nose job as she was being wheeled into surgery for a Cesarean operation, this time there was a degree of genuine concern about her second child’s birth. Months before, she had been diagnosed with a condition known as placenta previa, in which the placenta covers the birth canal, cutting off the baby’s blood supply and greatly increasing the risk of hemorrhage for the mother. As a result, she had made arrangements to have another Cesarean once her unborn child had gone to full term. With a month to go everything seemed fine. Then, on the evening of August 10, Madonna felt unwell, and as a precaution asked a member of her staff to drive her to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. On the way she rang Guy Ritchie, who was at a private screening of his new movie,
Snatch,
elsewhere in the city. By the time he arrived specialists monitoring her condition had realized the gravity of the problem and decided that immediate surgery was necessary.

By then Madonna was losing blood fast and, according to at least one report, was close to going into shock. With Guy Ritchie holding her hand and whispering words of comfort, she was sedated and wheeled into surgery where, at 1 am on the norning of August 11, 2000, she gave birth to a 5-pound 9-ounce baby boy, Rocco John Ritchie. Because he was jaundiced – normal for premature births – he was placed in an incubator, where he remained for the next five days, Madonna taking him to her Los Feliz home in time for her forty-second birthday. To Ritchie, it seemed the right moment to make an honest woman of her. On her return home, Madonna discovered a crumbled paper bag by the side of her bed. She was about to throw it away, ‘Then I noticed something in it, a little box,’ she recalls. Inside was a diamond ring. ‘Then I saw a card. In it was a really sweet letter that he wrote to me about everything we’ve been through, my birthday and the baby and how happy he was.’ The film producer Erin Berg, a friend of Ritchie’s, later told the world that the couple were to marry before Christmas. ‘He just wants them to be a family,’ said Berg. ‘He has been over the moon since the birth of his son. The man is gushing.’

With her forthcoming marriage announced, Madonna threw herself into planning the event with her customary energy and focus. Once more Trudi Styler was on hand when her friend was considering the religious side of her wedding, and she recommended that she should talk through the issues with Canon John Reynolds, who had blessed her own marriage to Sting in 1992. The clergyman, whose parish covers Sting’s home at Lake House in Wiltshire, was telephoned by Madonna from Los Angeles shortly after the birth of Rocco. ‘She wanted to discuss the ecclesiastical options with me,’ the canon remembers, adding that, ‘She was very friendly and asked intelligent, pertinent questions.’

He was not the only one to voice his admiration, for the world was once more infatuated with the talented Mrs Ritchie-to-be. Just weeks after giving birth, Madonna was managing to juggle motherhood, run an entertainment empire, mastermind the worldwide launch of her Music album, plan her wedding, pick up two music awards at an MTV ceremony, plan two concerts in New York and London in November 2000 – and get herself into a pair of low-slung hipsters. She was a living, breathing tonic for every woman over the age of forty. Her two invitation-only concerts were a chance for the glitterati to pay homage to someone who was almost a latter-day version of the Madonna: icon, mother, mogul, superstar, corporation – oh, and a singer, too.

While in New York the concert was billed as the return of the homecoming queen – ‘It’s great to be back,’ she told her fans – in Britain she was embraced as an honorary Brit, as English as fish-and-chips, warm beer and cricket. That the staging, designed by her friends Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, for the short six-song set resembled a trendy Texan hoedown, and that the songs were as American as mom’s apple pie, mattered not in the least.

The christening of Rocco, followed on the next day by her wedding, both in the far north of Scotland, merely confirmed her effortless social ascendancy. In the event, the wedding, held just before Christmas on Guy Ritchie’s thirty-second birthday, although eagerly anticipated by millions, managed to remain completely private. Memories of the fiasco on the clifftop at Malibu were still painful for Madonna. It would not be repeated. The couple’s choice of the grand but remote Skibo Castle outside the quiet town of Dornoch, the kind of place where the purchase of a new car is hot gossip, was about as far removed from Hollywood glamour as it is possible to be. Yet there was a fitting symmetry about the decision, not just for Ritchie, whose Scots ancestry and links with the Seaforth Highlanders made the north of Scotland an appropriate choice, but also for Madonna. After all, it was her immigrant Ciccone forebears who had labored in the steel mills of Pennsylvania for the Scots-born tycoon Andrew Carnegie, the man who, in 1897, had restored Skibo, by then a crumbling ruin, to its former glory. It seemed fitting, therefore, that a descendant of the men who had helped make Carnegie’s fortune should now reign supreme, if only for a few days, over his former domain. It was a point that would not have been lost on Tony Ciccone, who, like his father and brothers, had worked for a time in the steel mills in order to fund his education.

Even though the castle had been recommended by friends – Sting and Trudi Styler have a home near by, and the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones calls it ‘the most romantic place on earth’ – the couple flew north to make the final arrangements a couple of weeks before the wedding. As they looked around Dornoch Cathedral, chosen as the setting for Rocco’s christening, Madonna could not help but burst into song. This time it was not ‘Good Golly Miss Molly,’ the tune with which she had once regaled her college friends in a church in Ann Arbor, but ‘Ave Maria,’ the sound echoing through the near-empty cathedral, an impromptu rendition watched only by a couple of tourists – and a local journalist. At the christening ceremony itself, held on December 21, it was Sting, one of Rocco’s godfathers, who regaled the congregation with the same piece, watched by the tearful parents, as well as Madonna’s father and Ritchie’s parents and a clutch of the couple’s best friends, including her business associate Guy Oseary (another of Rocco’s godparents), Donatella Versace, who designed the £10,000 – reportedly – cream silk christening gown, Trudi Styler (another godparent), who also read a hymn, Madonna’s sister Melanie, Ingrid Casares, actress friends Gwyneth Paltrow and Debi Mazar, and Rupert Everett, whose arrival, like that of many of the guests, was delayed because of fog. His endeavors perfectly fitted with Madonna’s Kabbalah philosophy: ‘We wanted to find a place that was really hard to get to, because when people have to work to get somewhere, you know they really want to be there,’ she said.

After the thirty-minute ceremony the trio posed briefly, albeit regally, for photographers, Madonna, veiled and with her hair swept back in a bun, looking like a cross between her Evita persona and a minor member of the royal family. That photocall, however, was the only morsel thrown to the ravenous media, whose representatives descended upon Dornoch in droves, for after it the couple retreated to the well-guarded seclusion of their castle redoubt. No thudding helicopters this time to ruin the big day, only the noisy protests of paparazzi photographers being flushed out of the undergrowth on the 7,500-acre estate by the security team Ritchie had engaged.

On the following day, a lone piper broke the silence as Lourdes led the wedding party through the castle’s great hall, lit with hundreds of sputtering candles, scattering rose petals as she went. Here, too, there was another significant difference between Madonna’s first and second weddings. For her marriage to Penn, she had wanted her ensemble to have a ‘Grace Kelly feel: This time, at this altogether more grownup event, she had the real thing, for she wore the same Cartier tiara that Princess Grace had worn for the wedding of her eldest daughter, Caroline.

Guy Ritchie, wearing a kilt of Hunting Mackintosh plaid, and Madonna, in a strapless ivory gown designed by her maid of honor, Stella McCartney, took their vows before the Reverend Susan Brown, watched by her father and Ritchie’s best men, Matthew Vaughn and nightclub owner Piers Adam. Many commentators had wondered whether the feminist icon would promise to ‘love, honor and obey,’ but in fact the couple had written part of their vows, which included the words, ‘cherish, honor and delight in family.’

Once they had taken their vows, they swapped specially designed rings, after which the Reverend Brown presented the newlyweds with a twin pack of toilet paper, her traditional wedding present, explaining the symbolism thus, ‘Two rolls together reminding them that their marriage should be strong and long.’ On the following day the newlyweds left the castle for a brief honeymoon at Lake House, where their romance had started, Madonna reflecting on a‘truly magical, religious experience.’

Now that she had officially become Mrs Ritchie, Madonna delighted in her new persona, signing her name and even changing her credit cards to reflect her new status. If not truly domesticated – ‘I don’t have the cooking gene,’ she jokes – her life seemed redolent of home, hearth and family, echoing an observation her father-in-law had made, ‘She is a delightful and talented person and quite homely.’