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

than the next, decorated with statues, religious paintings, and photographs of their departed occupants. Every year thousands of people from all over the world visit the Duarte mausoleum where Evita is buried, more than come to pay homage to Marilyn Monroe in Westwood Memorial Park or to Edith Piaf’s grave at Père Lachaise in Paris. As Madonna approached the pink marble mausoleum of the Duarte family, wild cats scurried in between the alleyways, whimpering or howling as they searched for food.
    Camaro read the words out loud that were etched in the marble: Rest in Peace. The irony was that it had taken nearly two decades after her death for the former first lady to actually rest in peace, since her body went missing for all those years before it was finally found in Spain and returned to Buenos Aires. Madonna listened with rapt attention as Camaro explained that a lot of people had lost their lives over that incident. Sadly, he added, it was all over now, the mass hysteria, demagoguery, and with it, perhaps, the glamour that had all but disappeared with that tumultuous era in Argentine history.
    As Madonna bent down to place a bouquet of violets at the entrance of the mausoleum, she noticed another epitaph etched in stone: Don’t Cry for Me Argentina. “That must bring a flicker of memory,” she said wistfully, “or maybe even a tear.”
    While Madonna was wandering around the Gothic ruins of La Recoleta, Caresse Henry-Norman, as planned, was seated in the back of the star’s car. On the way to the cemetery, two teenagers who had been hired by several paparazzi threw themselves in front of the decoy car, forcing it to come to a screeching halt. The hope was that “Madonna” would jump out to see if anyone had been injured, whereupon the photographers would be able to take their daily quota of pictures. Everything went as planned except that when Madonna’s assistant jumped out of the car, the paparazzi realized that they had been fooled. Madonna had successfully eluded them. They were furious. By then, a crowd had gathered. While the press yelled insults at Caresse, the bystanders began pushing and shoving to get closer to the car. Finally, the chauffeur somehow managed to get the terrified woman bundled into the backseat so he could head to the safety of the hotel. They never made it. En route, they were stopped by the police and charged with leaving the scene of a hit-and-run accident. Within minutes, Caresse and the driver were in custody and on their way to jail. Several hours later, after Madonna was already back at the hotel, she learned through one of her bodyguards what had happened. Fortunately, he had contacts within the police department and was able to arrange things so that the pair were released. Madonna was outraged that the security detail of the regular police force who were in charge of keeping her and her entourage safe had made such a potentially life-threatening mistake. In response to a furious phone call that she made to the minister of police, two officials arrived at the hotel. In her diary that appeared in Vanity Fair , Madonna described her meeting with the two officials. “We discussed Peronism,” she wrote, “and of course Evita and how her enemies were divided into two camps, the aristocracy and the Communists.”
    After several more minutes of abstract political discussion, one of the men explained to Madonna that while he was not a Peronist, he nonetheless admired Evita for what she done for the country. “And then,” Madonna recounted in her diary, “he said the most amazing thing. He said that people were angry with Evita in her day for the same reason they are angry with me today, because we are both women with power.”
    For Madonna, it was just another sign that both she and Eva Perón were victims of men who could deal with powerful women only by discrediting them. As Madonna became more familiar with Eva Perón’s effect on men, she even concluded that the lyrics and