Goddess: Inside Madonna by Barbara Victor Read Free Book Online

on about how wonderful she was. The minute I turned off the camera, they revealed horrible details about her. People were terrified of saying anything against her. Even now, no one wants to speak ill of her in public, so she can’t be dealt with as a human being. Unfortunately, Madonna will just keep the myth alive.”
    If Madonna was perceived by some to be the incarnation of religious blasphemy and sexual abandon, many intellectuals believed that Buenos Aires had a past that rivaled her own in terms of immorality. Alicia Sternberg, a well-known feminist writer, was one of those who stood up for Madonna. In several press interviews concerning Carlos Menem’s refusal to allow Madonna to sing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, she accused the president of hypocrisy, since he had recently pardoned the leader of the military junta who had organized the Dirty War in the 1970s.
    “How bad is Madonna compared to that monster General Videla,” Sternberg asked, “who now jogs freely around the streets of Buenos Aires?”
    Elsa Osario, another outspoken journalist and writer whose screen credits include The Tango Lesson and There Are No Men Left , directed by Alberto Fischerman, also came to Madonna’s defense or, more accurately, used the debate to further criticize President Menem. “With his pardon of the generals and his whitewash of everything that happened during that period in our country’s history,” Osario claimed, “the president gives society permission to forget. People develop antibodies to defend themselves until the whole country suffers from amnesia.”
    One of the most erudite and cultured women in Buenos Aires claimed that Madonna, thrust into a strange and foreign environment, simply had little or no frame of reference to keep up her end of a conversation.
    “Most of the people who came to my parties,” she explained, “were international, rich, and not particularly impressed with anyone. I felt sorry for Madonna, because she was obviously in way over her head and painfully aware that she was limited. Most of the time, she nodded and pretended to understand and that was fine, but when she asked a question or decided to express an opinion, it was off the subject, irrelevant, banal, and embarrassing for everyone. It seemed as if the only time she felt comfortable was when she discussed sex or the impact that Eva Perón had on the country from a sensual point of view.”
    The same woman recalls how shocked Madonna was when she saw that Argentines kissed friends and even strangers upon meeting them instead of shaking hands. “She told me she was afraid of catching germs and not being able to perform.” The woman laughed. “And yet, during a dinner party I gave to welcome her to our country, she slipped into one of the bedrooms and was caught necking with one of the most notorious playboys in Buenos Aires!” As she was leaving with the man in question, Madonna asked her hostess whether his claim of being close to President Menem was true.
    José Camaro, a close friend of Carlos Menem’s, was on leave from a diplomatic post in Europe and was visiting Buenos Aires at the same time that Madonna was on her mission of goodwill. President Menem took advantage of the coincidence by instructing his friend to find out what Madonna’s impressions were of Buenos Aires and of Eva Perón. Camaro was delighted to oblige, not only because he was loyal to Menem, but also because it would give him the opportunity to meet the woman whom he considered to be his sexual equal. Tall and dark with a dramatic shock of white hair, Camaro was a minor literary figure in Argentina and had written a roman à clef that had angered many of his closest friends and political colleagues. Camaro was the butt of jokes around European publishing circles since he made a point of telling everybody that, back home, people considered him to be the “Marcel Proust of Argentina.”
    In addition to his