MAD FOR EVITA

By Richard Zoglin

It's a brisk afternoon in late April, and the Evita crew has set up shop outside a small white church in a suburb of Budapest. They are filming the wedding of Eva and Juan Peron, and 100 or so onlookers from the neighborhood are watching Jonathan Pryce and Madonna, as the Argentine general and his bride, emerge from the front door, wave and get showered with rice--then repeat the sequence half a dozen times. One person in the crowd is not watching the actors: a tall, well-muscled man, standing with his arms folded, named Bob Izzard. Each time the cameras roll, he looks in the opposite direction at the crowd. He is Madonna's bodyguard.

"I'm looking for M.D.s," Izzard explains. That's security-guard lingo for "mad dashers"--people who dart out of the crowd without warning and try to touch the star. In Buenos Aires, where the Evita crew spent its first five weeks of filming, M.D.s and other unruly fans were a big problem, and Izzard had to get the help of a six-man security detail. Budapest is more laid back--but so are the police. When the cameras roll, they too stare at Madonna.

Who can blame them? Over her nearly 15-year career as pop-music chameleon, sometime movie star and cultural provocateur, few have been able to avert their eyes from Madonna for too long. Her new film, Evita, which opens Christmas Day in New York City and Los Angeles and in January around the country, has been trumpeted with a publicity campaign so lavish and long winded that many people probably think the movie has already opened and they've already seen it. Evita is, to be sure, in many ways a landmark: the most ambitious musical Hollywood has turned out in years; the culmination of an almost 20-year effort to bring the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice pop opera to the screen; the catalyst for a storm of political protest in the country where the real story took place; the inspiration for a line of makeup and a boutique at Bloomingdale's. It's an event.

And, more precisely, it's a Madonna event, a crucial milestone in a career that has been "reinvented" so often that the very term has grown trite and useless. For this film--as she has not tired of telling us--Madonna went on an artistic and spiritual quest. She campaigned intensely for the role, taking just a measly--by movie-star standards--$1 million fee and even forgoing a percentage of the profits. She personally lobbied the President of Argentina for the right to film at the Casa Rosada, the Perons' official residence. She felt an almost mystical identification with Evita, another ambitious woman who was both revered and reviled during her lifetime and wore neat clothes.

"Perhaps it's made me a stronger person, more resilient," Madonna says, when asked what she has learned from her long communion with the character. "It's comforting to know that I'm not the only person the press picks on or tries to turn into a monster or dehumanize in some way. In the end, I feel like I have a lot of compassion for Eva, including any bad decisions she may have made. Because I feel like I understand where she came from. And I love her."

She didn't love the filming. In her diary of the experience, published in Vanity Fair, she whined at unseemly length about everything from bad dreams to uncomfortable hotel rooms. ("As I descend further into this labyrinth called moviemaking, I am stunned by the number of possibilities for feeling lonely and alienated...") In Buenos Aires she was shaken by the protests against the film as well as the hordes of fans who rarely left her alone. Then, on a stopover in New York before moving on to Budapest, she learned she was pregnant. Some rejiggering of the schedule and tinkering with her costumes allowed the filming to barrel ahead to the finish. But it was a close call: a few weeks earlier, and the $60 million project would have been seriously jeopardized. (The filmmakers had no insurance against the star's pregnancy; such a policy, they say, would have been prohibitively expensive.)

In frigid Budapest, the pregnant star was stressed out and unhappy. When not on the set, she spent most of her time in her room on the top floor of the Kempinski Hotel, coming and going through a private entrance ("She is here for 30 days, and I have not seen her once," said a forlorn desk clerk). "It was a difficult time for everyone," Madonna recalled three months later, polite and composed if still a bit distant, in the lounge of a recording studio in the San Fernando Valley. "We went from 100-degree weather in Argentina, the Latin culture, very embracing, warm, passionate, to a country where people are just learning to be expressive without being afraid. Everybody has a sad expression on their face. And it's difficult to work in an environment where there is no joy. It was the toughest experience of my life."

It was tough partly because of the odd sort of film being made. All the music had been recorded in a London studio the previous fall, so the actors' performances were largely locked in. Watched over closely by director Alan Parker--a rumpled, penguin-shaped Brit who paced the set with head down, like an Oxford mathematician pondering a calculus problem--the actors had to focus mainly on lip-synching accurately and hitting their marks at the right time. It was tedious work that allowed for little spontaneity, but Madonna, the music-video veteran, handled it skillfully. Shooting part of her waltz with Antonio Banderas (as the narrator Che), for example, she whirled and gesticulated around a restaurant table for more than a dozen takes, conferring quietly with Parker in between them, with scarcely a flub or a misstep.

From all accounts, Madonna was punctual, serious and well prepared on the set. "She's a tough worker," says co-star Banderas. Producer Andrew Vajna (Nixon, Die Hard with a Vengeance), while admitting that he and Madonna "had some words" when she complained about hotel accommodations in Buenos Aires and London, praises her as "one of the most professional actresses I've ever worked with. She devoted passion and time beyond the call of duty."

"She's demanding of the people around her," says Parker (director of Fame and Mississippi Burning), who got the film made after at least three other directors had tried and failed. "But she's not a cliche diva stamping her foot. She's very intelligent. You've got to make sure you have the right answer when she has a question. She's a control freak, but so am I. When there was a problem, I would just say, 'Let her and me solve it.' " Madonna responds in kind: "Alan was very supportive during the shooting. He let me sort of follow my own instincts in a lot of cases. We had both been prepared to expect the worst from each other. And then we got together, and it was probably the smoothest working experience I've ever had in terms of a collaboration."

The other person Madonna managed to win over was Andrew Lloyd Webber. (He and Rice had sold the rights to Evita but retained approval of the casting.) In 1993, when Madonna was involved in an earlier effort to make the film, Lloyd Webber was quoted as saying she was too old to play Evita. "What I said was that by the time anybody gets around to making the movie, she'll be too old," he now explains. Vocally, he admits, Madonna did not come to the role with the powerhouse pipes of such stage Evitas as Elaine Paige and Patti LuPone. But she worked with a vocal coach in New York City, and Lloyd Webber helped by lowering the score a few keys. "She doesn't claim to have the biggest voice," he says, "but theater isn't the same as cinema. If you had done the score exactly as it was in the theater, it might have gotten very wearing."

He maintained his confidence even after a disastrous initial recording session, when Madonna was forced to launch into the show's biggest number, Don't Cry for Me Argentina, backed by an oversize, 84-piece orchestra whose members had never before played together. Lloyd Webber was upset with the musicians, Parker had first-day jitters and Madonna went home in tears. "I was so nervous," she says, "because I knew that Andrew had had reservations about me, and here I'm singing the hardest song in the piece. And all of a sudden there with everybody for the first time, it was really tense." Lloyd Webber and Parker met with her later, decided to bring in a new conductor and musicians, and started the recording sessions over from scratch.

The whole ordeal of making the film seems to have produced--dare we say it?--yet another Madonna, softer, more chastened. Or maybe just more calculated. The former shock mistress brought tears to Oprah Winfrey's studio audience when she described feeling her baby kicking on Mother's Day. Department stores may be pushing the dolled-up "Evita look," but Madonna has switched to pastel colors, soft makeup and a demure, Catholic-schoolgirl hairstyle. (She donned the Evita look for the film's Hollywood premiere, but otherwise, she says, "it's something for special occasions. You're not going to see me with my hair up in a chignon, wearing padded shoulders and a nipped-in-at-the-waist suit every day, that's for sure.") Accepting a Billboard magazine music award on Dec. 4, she thanked her fans, "who have stuck by me through all the years, through thick and thin, when even I wasn't sure exactly what I was doing."

Strange, and all those years we thought Madonna knew exactly what she was doing. She still defends even her worst career missteps, like her 1992 book, Sex, a collection of kinky erotic photos, which finally pushed her provocative public image one notch too far. "If you read the text, it was completely tongue in cheek," she says. "It was a joke. Unfortunately, my sense of humor is not something that a mainstream audience picks up. For me all it did was expose our society's hang-ups about our sexuality. Yes, I took a beating, and yes, a lot of the things that were said were hurtful and unfair. And yes it made my life really difficult for a while. But there are no mistakes. It was a great learning experience."

She is still learning. A couple of years later she appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, unleashed a flurry of four-letter words and spent the next few months trying to repair the damage. Meanwhile, her bumpy movie career--which has wavered between big roles in bad films (Shanghai Surprise) and smaller parts in an occasional decent one (A League of Their Own)--got even bumpier. In 1993 she starred in Body of Evidence, a steamy courtroom drama that bombed with critics and audiences. She complains that the script was changed so that her character, a sex-obsessed vixen on trial for murder, was killed in the end. "In all the movies of the '40s the bad girl has to die," she says. "What I loved about the role was that she didn't die. And in the end, they killed me. So I felt that I was sabotaged to a certain extent. For some reason, when that movie came out I was held responsible for it entirely. It was my fault. Which was absurd. Because we all make bad movies. I mean, Diabolique came out and Sharon Stone was not held responsible for the fact that it was a crap movie, you know what I mean?"

Her next film, Dangerous Game--a grim, low-budget curiosity about a seedy film director whose movie about an abusive relationship is seeping into real life--got even less attention. This time, says Madonna, she was "sabotaged" by the director, Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant), who re-edited the ending and took out most of the humor. "The movie had such a different texture and meaning and outcome for me. When I went to see a screening of it, I cried. Because I really think I did a good job as an actress. I don't think it should be called Dangerous Game. It should be called The Bad Director."

Still, she admits she has "made a lot of really stupid decisions" in her movie career, and she clearly hopes Evita will put all that behind her. Two future movie projects have already caught her eye: a biography of Tina Modotti, the photographer and political revolutionary, and a movie version of the musical Chicago (in the role Bebe Neuwirth currently plays in the hit Broadway revival). "While I'm still very interested in making music and writing music, I want to concentrate on film more. I'm very interested in directing. I know that sounds very trite and boring, but I'm going to. I just have to do it when the time is right."

But first the Evita frenzy will have to be justified by a measure of success at the box office. And that is far from certain. Madonna's presence onscreen has yet to be a big draw, and the massive publicity campaign cannot obscure the fact that Evita is a two-hour opera. "I don't know if it's going to be commercial," she says. "But I am 100 percent sure that I did the best job I could." That may not be enough to finally make Madonna a major movie star. But it has accomplished at least one thing: we're staring at her again.