Goddess: Inside Madonna by Barbara Victor Read Free Book Online Page A

literary pretensions, Camaro had also acquired quite a reputation for himself as the typical Latin lover. According to several attractive and very married European hostesses who had succumbed to his charms, after the lovemaking was over, he would play an air guitar and serenade them with melodious tango songs. One former mistress who was treated to a medley of his make-believe strumming and passionate singing said of his postcoital behavior, “He was a parody of the Latin lover. In fact, after I saw Evita , it occurred to me that he could have played the part of that second-rate tango singer in the film better than the actor.” She was referring, of course, to the part of Maguldi, the man who served as the young Eva Perón’s ticket out of the small-town barrio where she was born, played by Jimmy Nail in the film.
    Long after Madonna left Argentina and the film was already in theaters throughout the world, Camaro wrote a novella in which he described in lurid detail one torrid night that his protagonist, a man considered to be the best lover in the world, shared with an American movie star, a woman who was reputed to be the high priestess of sensuality. Although the names and places were changed, the book was never published.
    Buenos Aires was a candy store stocked with her perfect physical type, the dusky, taut, romantic Latin lover who could dance the tango and talk about Eva Perón, one of the positive aspects of her visit.
    Several days after Madonna had transformed herself into Eva Perón, Camaro arrived at her hotel suite for lunch. Approaching the star and kissing her hand, he took a step back and clutched his heart. The resemblance to Eva Perón was astounding. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It was as if she were there in the flesh, alive and breathing. For him, he confessed, time had stopped. Madonna couldn’t have been more flattered. Seated opposite her in the large living room of the suite, Camaro repeated, in case she had forgotten, that he was “working on the president” to allow the film to be shot on location in Buenos Aires. “You must be patient,” he said.
    “How patient?” Madonna asked.
    “We may have to spend a few weeks together,” he said suggestively.
    This time, in response, Madonna sat forward on the sofa and looked directly into his eyes. “Look, José,” she said evenly, “I want to have a good time while I’m here. I like Buenos Aires, and you look like someone who could make life interesting. But I didn’t come all the way down to this godforsaken place to go back to England and record Evita on a soundstage.”
    Confident in his ability to seduce any woman in the world and very aware that he had what she wanted, a direct line to Carlos Menem, Camaro did not seem troubled by Madonna’s ultimatum. Instead, he suggested that an interesting afternoon outing for the star would be a visit to the cemetery where Eva Perón was buried. From the moment Madonna arrived in Buenos Aires, she had been trying to organize a visit to La Recoleta, the famous cemetery in the heart of the city. The press had been hounding her to the extent that every excursion involved elaborate plans that included a decoy car and roundabout routes. Madonna decided her assistant, Caresse Henry-Norman, would ride in the star’s usual car, wearing a scarf and sunglasses, while Madonna would actually be lying on the floor of Camaro’s car, leaving the hotel thirty minutes earlier. The idea was that the press would follow Caresse Henry-Norman as she made her way to the cemetery while Madonna would already have arrived, free to spend a few solitary minutes at Evita’s tomb. With José Camaro at the wheel, they set out for La Recoleta undisturbed by motorcycles or screeching cars filled with paparazzi. When they arrived, Madonna claimed that she had “stepped into another world.”
    The cemetery, an unusual community of dead people, is a collection of miniature Gothic-style marble mansions, each one more ornate