Madonna’s Magic The Material Girl Will Surprise A Lot Of People With Her Ability To Carry The Major Role Of ‘Evita’

If necessity is the mother of invention, Madonna is the mother of reinvention.

Not only that. She’s also the mother of a 2-month-old daughter named Lourdes, after the French shrine associated with healing. Not only that. While not exactly the mother of the new musical film “Evita,” costarring Jonathan Pryce as Argentine dictator Juan Peron and Antonio Banderas playing Che Guevara as its cynical Brechtian observer, Madonna is the driving force behind it. To nail the title role, she wrote director Alan Parker an impassioned four-page letter convincing him that she could tango her way to the heart of the music better than anyone.

Not only that. After Parker spent a year tangoing nowhere with Argentine president Carlos Menem, vainly trying to get his approval to use the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires, from whose balcony Juan and especially Eva Peron addressed Argentina, Madonna dined with Menem. Soon afterward, Menem said yes, Madonna stood where the real Evita stood, and reincarnated her for the $60 million movie (which opened in Los Angeles Wednesday and elsewhere on Jan. 10), on which a lot is riding.

At 38, Madonna is going to surprise a lot of people - and prove that she can carry a big movie. As Parker - who rolls his eyes at the memory of scrambling to rejigger the shooting schedule after Madonna told him she was pregnant with five months to go - tells it: “She’s an extraordinarily good writer, very passionate, completely committed. She’s smart, strong, very driven and dedicated. You don’t get to keep it going as long as she has without drive. It’s all from her, no managers. She’s a fierce, intuitive intelligence. As for the Casa Rosada, for a year it was no, no, no, at every turn. Then, out of the blue, she had a personal unofficial meeting and they no longer wanted to kick us out. I think he was impressed by her sincerity.”

Identifying with Evita

Enter Madonna - polite, demure, soft-spoken, giving no indication that she hasn’t slept much the night before - like most breast-feeding mothers - or that she needed to get to a dentist for a bothersome root canal. Perhaps one should say re-enter Madonna. A few minutes into the interview at a marina hotel in Los Angeles, to a counterpoint of swaying sailboat masts, Madonna is interrupted by an aide who informs her that Lourdes requires feeding.

Twenty minutes later, Madonna returns, looking tired, smoothing her clingy floral print dress. “Sorry,” Madonna says, smiling as brightly as fatigue permits, “the milk truck has returned. Sometimes I feed her bottles, but I don’t like feeding her too many. I wanna do it.”

I Wanna Do It, was, in the end, the only battle plan that would have worked when it came to getting “Evita” made. For 16 years after its successful London and Broadway stage runs, it was gathering fame as one of those films destined to become legend for not being made. Parker turned the job down in 1978 because, he said, he didn’t want to direct back-to-back musicals after making “Fame.” He re-entered the picture after Ken Russell, Francis Ford Coppola, Franco Zeffirelli, Michael Cimino, Hector Babenco, Herbert Ross, Richard Attenborough, Glenn Gordon Caron and Oliver Stone came and went.

“Evita,” meanwhile, attracted Patti LuPone, Gloria Estefan, Cyndi Lauper, Elaine Paige, Ann-Margret, Liza Minnelli, Olivia Newton-John, Pia Zadora, Meryl Streep and, most recently, Michelle Pfeiffer. Madonna, too. “The part was sort of mine three times. It came and went. The third time it stayed,” she says.

“It was I don’t know a kind of destiny. There were so many parallels to her life that I felt I could relate to, I was sure I could capture her better than any actress could. I feel she was terribly misunderstood, maligned, portrayed in this demonic way, and the media do that to me here.

“I think that she was very sad as a child growing up without a father, and I was very sad growing up without a mother.

“I think she had an incredible desire to make something of her life. What she did, what she accomplished, required an enormous amount of courage. And I could relate to that. She went to the Big Apple at a very young age, and so did I. Without any money, without any formal training, and so did I. People were so divided; they either hated her or loved her, and I can certainly identify with that.

“Over the years, she has been presented as this very conniving, driven, ambitious, calculating woman. But I knew there was a human being there. She was driven by this need to help poor people and bring justice to the working class. That’s why she became their heroine. She gave women the right to vote. I don’t think that’s a very popular idea in Latin America.

“I think she (angered) a lot of people because she wasn’t from the middle class, she wasn’t from the aristocracy. She was a very poor girl who came from the sticks and she rose to such power, and I don’t think people could come to terms with that. Once we started shooting, there were lots of weird parallels.

“People would stand outside the balcony at my hotel and shout, ‘Evita … Madonna … Evita.’

“When we were shooting and I was looking at the extras, a lot of them were crying, and I know that they were remembering Eva. It was very moving. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about myself. I was thinking about her.”

Filming surprises

As Madonna continues, a picture emerges of a woman who campaigned hard to woo Argentina, just as she campaigned to get Parker to cast her. Independently, she sought out Peronists, Eva’s contemporaries, loading up on background. Boldly, she went to her dinner with Menem dressed as Eva.

“I was completely in character, and I hoped to sort of convince him with as much passion as possible that I was her, that I had done this research and that I intended to portray her in way he would be proud of. As we discussed her life, I think he tested me. He asked me a lot of questions about her to see if I had done the research. I played some of the music. We discussed politics and history and music and art.

“By the end of the evening, I think he had come around after being completely against it. He didn’t say yes but said he would think about it. After a couple of weeks, we had another meeting with him - the entire cast and Alan - and he said yes. My passion, or maybe something about me, reminded him of her, I don’t know.”

The motherless mother

Whether it’s turning 38, whether it’s motherhood, whether it’s relief at finally achieving the big-screen credibility she has long sought, Madonna seems less extroverted diva than shy, hard-working eldest daughter of a motherless family in suburban Detroit.

“Yeah, I can be nervous and shy,” she says in a small voice. “Perhaps, like Eva, a certain aggressiveness and rebelliousness is an attempt to balance out the other side of you. I had lots of dreams during the filming. I still have dreams - about people filming me, photographing me, following me. I have lots of dreams about my daughter.

“My most extraordinary memory of the filming came on Mother’s Day, usually a sad day for me because my own mother died young. In the middle of a scene, when I was giving a speech and pounding on a desk, my baby kicked for the first time. It took all of my acting ability to keep it inside, not to scream. But I thought it the greatest thing to have happen.

“Besides sleep deprivation, everything else pales in comparison. The things that used to matter a lot don’t matter that much. I don’t think I’ll ever make another selfish decision as long as I live. My biggest surprise was how happy I am when she looks into my eyes.”

That doesn’t mean, Madonna adds, that she wants to marry Lourdes’ father, Carlos Leon.

“There’s not a piece of paper in the world that’s going to keep me with someone, or from someone,” she says. “A relationship is either weak or strong. It’ll survive if it’s meant to survive. If I love a person, I will be there by choice. I’m not sure how I feel about marriage. I think that years ago it came about more than anything out of economic arrangement because women didn’t have any way to take care of themselves.”

Raised Catholic, Madonna has taken issue with what she sees as the church’s patriarchal orientation. She has been condemned inside the church and outside it for such songs as “Papa, Don’t Preach,” for being a single mother now, and for her infamous book, “Sex,” for which she says she won’t apologize, having accomplished her envelope-pushing purpose of validating women’s sex fantasies.

“I think that I will always be a Catholic whether I like it or not,” she says, looking introspective. “There’s a part of me that’s old-fashioned and traditional and a little superstitious,” which is why, she adds, she had Lourdes baptized. Essentially, she says, she wants to keep doing what she’s been doing - writing her own songs, singing them, acting, someday directing.

“I want to have more children,” she says. Reaching back to when she helped raise five siblings, she adds, “Once you learn to change a diaper, it never goes away.”