The Tonight Show audience is going crazy, and Jay Leno is out of his seat, dancing by he side of the stage as Gloria Estefan, dazzling in a silver lamé gown, belts out the final note of her new song, "Reach." Over half of the audience leaps to its feet with applause.

Less than five minutes later, Estefan, now wearing black leggings and a plain black sweater, is canging the diaper of Emily, her sixteen-month-old daughter. "This is the best part!" she says sarcastically. "Very glamorous." But the truth is, the pop-music superstar wouldn’t have it any other way. "When you get offstage with all these thousands of people loving you, the saddest thing is to go back to your hotel room by yourself."

The thirty-eight-year-old singer will certainly not be sad this summer when she performs "Reach" (from her new album, Destiny) at the closing ceremonies of the Olympics. The Atlanta performance helps kick off her first world tour in five years, and all the Estefans are along for the ride. For this tight-knit clan, the music business is clearly a family affair. Emily’s mom, the star, is just the front person. Emilio, her producer and husband of seventeen years, is the charismatic mastermind who has deftly marketed his wife’s talents to sell over thirty million albums worldwide. Their fifteen-year-old son, Nayib, will join the act by introducing his mom with a magic trick. And even little Emily has her role down pat. When her father asks, "Who’s the boss?" she claps her hands with delight and burbles, "Emileee!"

Family has always come first for Estefan, a first-generation Cuban-American. As a teen growing up in Miami, she helped nurse her father, who was confined to a wheelchair with a neurological disorder for twelve years before he died. In 1975, to please her mother, she went along to a wedding where Emilio was playing in the band. Gloria, then a seventeen-year-old about to enter the University of Miami as a psychology major, was struck by his "strong-looking" hands, his "tush – my favorite body part," and his daring – "I couldn’t believe he was playing ‚The Hustle‘ on the accordion." At her mother’s urging, she joined Emilio onstage to sing two Cuban songs. The duo started performing together, formed Miami Sound Machine, fell in love, and three years later Gloria married the first boyfriend she’d ever had. That was eight platinum albums ago.

But along with success, the pair have had more than their share of tragedy. Six years ago, the family was on tour when their bus crashed on a snowy Pennsylvania highway, leaving Estefan with a broken back. Remembering her wheelchair-bound father, she was terrified when she realized she couldn’t move her legs. "It was a very strong fear all my life that I would wind up like that, and then it happend," she says.

Miraculously, doctors were able to fuse her spine with two eight-inch titanium rods, but the singer’s recovery was slow and painful. "It was four months before I could put on my underwear by myself," admits Estefan, a strong-willed but private woman who relied on her husband for everything during this time. "And the day I did, I celebrated! When you go from having everything anybody could possibly want to being overjoyed at putting on your underwear, it drives a lot of things home."

But there was one thing the singer still deeply wanted: another child. After trying for a year with no luck, the couple learned that one of her fallopian tubes had been crushed in the accident. "They fixed it, and within two months, Emily was conceived," Estefan says. "I didn’t know how I could possibly love someone [else] as much as Nayib, and it’s a mindblowing experience. That’s where the song ‚Along Came You‘ comes from, because love just keeps surprising you over and over."

So do the antics of her teenage son, who recently got expelled from his exclusive prep school after making a crank call to a classmate’s mother, impersonating a school official and telling the woman that her son was being suspended for throwing fod in the cafeteria. Determined that her son learn his lesson, Estefan grounded Nayib for six weeks and made him work with the construction crew on the guest house they were building. "He had to get up early, use the jackhammer and everything, the same shift as everyone else. No favors," she says with a no-nonsense edge to her voice.

Shaking her head with resignation, she is the first to call Nayib "a gigantic ham. He’s pulled a lot of pranks. But what do you expect when his forty-three-year-old father hides around the house and jumps out to scare the housekeeper, or makes crank calls to my mother pretending to be someone from the press?" she says, rolling her eyes. "The difference being that when you’re an adult, you know when to quit. It was an important life lesson for Nayib, because I don’t think he ever thought he’d really get expelled."

But this little family drama was nothing compared to the fatal boating accident the Estefans were involved in last September. While Emilio was slowly maneuvering their thirty-foot pleasure cruiser in the harbor near their Miami home, a twenty-nine-year-old Howard University law student crashed his jet-powered skimobile into the side of their boat and died. Although the Estefans were not at fault and did everything they could to help – Emilio jumped into the water to try to save him as Gloria frantically called 911 on her cellulat phone for help – the couple is clearly still shaken by the tragedy.

When the singer learned that the young man’s mother wanted to speak with her, she summoned all of her strength and made the call. "It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, worse than the [bus] accident," says Estefan. "In my accident I was the only victim. Once I saw that my son was okay, I thought, To hell with it, I’ll take one day at a time. But this was very painful for me because as a mother, I could put myself in her place. She just wanted to know about her son’s last moments. I told her that he didn’t suffer, that he never knew what happened."

The singer has been a dogged advocate for water safety ever since. "I couldn’t let this tragedy slide by without anything [positive] coming from it," she says. So this past April, Estefan appeared before the Florida Legislature to appeal for mandatory safety certification for boaters. When one representative suggested she sing for the comittee, " told him I would sing ‚Cuts Both Ways‘ in his ear if he passed the bill" she says. "Hopefully, I will have to come through on my promise." (On May 20, the bill as signed in Miami, and the singer made good on her promise.)

Trying to better the community is nothing new for Estefan, who helped raise over $3 million in relief after Hurricane Andrew raged across southern Florida in 1992. But her husband says her most charitable acts are the ones she doesn’t mention – sometimes not even to him. "Once I got this American Express bill with a $28,000 charge for a New York hotel, and I called them and said, ‚It has to be a mistake,‘" says Emilio. "And they said ‚No, Mrs. Estefan approved this.‘ It turns out that a paralyzed Latin-American woman need an operation, and Gloria paid for the travel, the operation and rehabilitation."

When asked about her acts of kindness, Estefan demurs. "Charity is a privilege, but I don’t think it has to be monetary," she says. "Sometimes it’s as much as going our of your way to be nice to someone, and that’s something anyone can do. It’s a chain reaction. How many times have you had somebody treat you badly, and then for the rest of the day it affects you?"

While Estefan strives for goodness, she is no pushover. Her husband is the first to say that his wife doesn’t do anything that she doesn’t want to do. This includes passing up the title role in the movie Evita. "I didn’t want the pressure of carrying the first movie I make, and Evita Perón is a controversial figure," she says. "I’m Hispanic. I don’t want to upset anybody in the Hispanic world. Because regardless of how you play the role, you don’t have control over how the character comes out in the movie."

Estefan is glad that the role went to her friend Madonna, and she is even more thrilled that Madonna is starting a family. "I know what it’s like to want a baby and not be able to have one, so I’m happy for Madonna," she says. "This may shock her fans, but she’s a very nice, normal person in a lot of ways. I think Madonna will be a good mom. She can do anything she sets her mind to."

Movies might have to wait, but the Olympics are one event that Estefan wouldn’t miss. Among her most prized possessions is a bronze medal that her father won at the
Pan-American Games in 1952 playing volleyball for Cuba. And she knows from personal experience what it feels like to make an Olympian effort. "The way I approached my recovery [from the bus accident] was like Olympic training, and the first night I was back onstage, to me, was like winning a gold medal," she says simply. Her experience inspired "Reach," a song she and her collaborator, Diane Warren, wrote in fifteen minutes.

Some lucky fans, however, got to see Estefan in action long before the Summer Games. When concert tickets went on sale late this sprng in Miami, the singer happened to drive by the long line of people who had camped out overnight to get them. She bought doughnuts and returned to personally thank her fans. One woman, who was snoozing in a lounge chair, was shocked when she opened her eyes to see Estefan standing there. "She started screaming," says Emilio, laughing. "She said, ‚Oh, my God! I must be dreaming; I must already be at the concert!‘" Not yet, but at least the singer was within her reach.

© All rights reserved by Ladies Home Journal August 1996

Danke Amanda Warnock für das Senden dieser Zeitschrift. Du wirst immer einen besonderen Platz in meinem Herzen haben! Thank you Amanda Warnock for sending me this magazine! You will always have a special place in my heart!

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