Madonna Tells Fellow Rich Lady Messiah She Did It All For The Children
If Oprah Winfrey's audience members are good for one thing—besides screaming as if their heads were on fire whenever brought into direct contact with swag—it's blabbing about the goings on inside the top-secret celebrity visits they were explicitly instructed not to blab about. So even though the talk show host's high-profile interview with a fellow zillionaire feminine icon with a God complex is not set to air until Wednesday, we get to find out today what was going through Madonna's with her recent adoption-cum-PR fiasco:
"She said she met with the father, she looked him in the eye," said [audience member Sheryl] Lewis. Madonna, according to Lewis, told Oprah that she and Ritchie had followed the country's customs and had secured both "oral and written approval ... and just now the press have gotten to him." [...]
Another audience member, Amanda Bannon of Crawfordsville, Ind., said, "the biggest thing was that Madonna wants to get the point across that she doesn't want this to be a discouragement to other families to not adopt." [...]
Robyn Radecker, also of Crawfordsville, described Madonna's interview as being focused on motherhood, not celebrity. "It was about her loving her kids and wanting to be a mom," she said.
Eye-contact or none, the boy's father still maintains he always understood the arrangement as meaning he would get his son back—but as he has recently told Time, he's resigned himself to letting go for the sake of the kid's future. Still, in reading Madonna's (albeit secondhand) words, we're struck by just how far she has come in such a short time: It wasn't so long ago that the singer could barely weather the subhuman conditions of a slightly underventilated European television studio. That stands in sharp contrast to the recent images of Madonna the Nurturer, virtually impervious to the brutal elements as she wanders the scorched African landscape in a quest for the perfect, motherless Malawian boy to roll up into a Gucci yoga mat, before tossing the orphan-wrap into her carry-all and being airlifted out of the country.
