It was a diva tantrum all right. The photo shoot had been proceeding smoothly – the slate-blue cashmere twinset had been chosen with care, a stylist had smoothed the mass of shiny brown curls into primed perfection – but still, the star of the show was not cooperating.

The Style Police were trying to convince the center of attention that the shot would be more, well, tasteful, sans her plastic sandals, when Emilio Estefan’s cell phone chirped. "It’s for you," he said. "It’s Mickey Mouse!"

A valiant effort, but it was not until her mother, Gloria, swooped little Emily into her arms and started to sing "We’re Off to See the Wizard" that a megawatt smile transformed the two-year-old’s face, the offending Jellies were removed, and finally, the show could go on.

For years, Gloria Estefan has been winning people over, but now more than ever, the thirty-nine-old star’s own life seems to be somewhere over the rainbow. Estefan has won two Grammys, sold sixty million records and has become the most successful crossover performer in Latin music history. This month she wraps up her first world tour sine 1990 after high-profile performances at The Olympics, the Inaugural Gala and even the Vatican. But despite her success, and her considerable wealth (estimated at $170 million), the superstar has another honor even more meaningful. She is known as the most positive role model in the music industry, thanks to her strong moral values and simple belief in giving back to others. Still, the secret source of her strength may come as a surprise – it happens to be an unstoppable sense of humor that has seen her through both good times and bad.

Take, for example, her description of the tour’s greatest highlight. "Getting stuck in the ball," recalls Estefan, perched on the couch in her spectacular $15 million waterfront mansion on Miami’s Star Island. During the show, Estefan sings "Higher" while suspended in a large steel ball. But in Holland, "the ball stopped moving, so I started singing, ‘I think I’m stuck in the ball now!’ " She giggles. "They had to pull me out, but it was funny. You’ve got to laugh at those things."

Humor has helped the star through far more serious scrapes, including the tour-bus collision that broke her back in 1990, the surgery necessary to conceive Emily in 1993, and the death of a student who crashed his jet-powered water ski into the Estefans’ yacht two years ago.

In fact, Estefan’s only bout with depression, in 1990, happened before the bus accident. "It was chemical," she explains. "My mind was uncontrollable; I looked at everything with a dark bent." Realizing that her pessimism was out of character, the singer wondered if it was due to the prescription sleeping pills she had just started taking. "After a show you have an adrenaline rush," she explains. "And we were doing thirty days in a row."

As soon as she stopped popping pills, the sadness lifted, although a dark premonition persisted about her 1990 Cuts Both Ways tour, says Estefan. First, the singer developed a serious chest cold and cough, but to avoid disappointing her fans, she performed anyway. After the show, a doctor diagnosed a cyst on her vocal cords and prescribed silence for the next two months. "It was when we went back out on the road to make up those shows that we had the bus accident," she says. "I thought carefully about what I named the next tour, which was Into the Light, because ‘Cuts Both Ways’ was pretty psychic."

Mere days after her tour-bus accident, Estefan, paralyzed, had already recovered her sense of humor. "I was up for a Grammy, and my cousin Laz had been discussing how sometimes when artists have pulled themselves out of alcoholism or something hard, they get recognized," she says. "So he comes into the room, and I’m strapped into the bed, and he looks at me and says, ‘You’ll do anything for a Grammy, won’t you?’ I started laughing so hard, I had to say, ‘Stop it, it hurts!’ "

All joking aside, Estefan also relied on strength drawn from a childhood of hardship. After school, while her mother worked, Estefan would care for her father, who was confined to a wheelchair with a neurological disorder. "She had no life," says her sister, Rebecca, who is six years younger. "She took care of Dad and me. She didn’t go out; she didn’t date. All she would do is sit in her room and play her guitar." Estefan, however, only sees the bright side of nursing her dad. "Had I not gone through that, I would have had a totally different perspective when my accident came around," she says. Happily, the star’s healing, both physically and mentally, seems complete.

But she never forgets her darker days, and reaches out to others who have endured tragedy. For instance, she contacted Christopher Reeves after the 1995 horseback-riding accident that left him paralyzed. "I wrote a long letter to his wife, saying I was there if he needed me," says Estefan. "When I saw him [at last year’s Oscars], I cried. When he came out on stage and made a joke, he single-handedly said so much about the human spirit. I told him he’s an example to all human beings."

Estefan is determined to find the silver linings – even for the 1995 boating tragedy in which a student died. "That was even tougher than my own accident. But it pushed me to change the boating law," says the singer, who successfully lobbied for state safety laws requiring training for minors using personal watercraft.

Estefan’s activist character was instilled early on by the strong women who raised her. At the age of two, Glorita Fajardo emigrated from Cuba to Miami with her dad, a former security guard for President Batista, and her mom, a schoolteacher. When her father went off to fight in the Bay of Pigs Invasion and later in Vietnam, Estefan and her sister were raised in a Cuban ghetto, where they survived on cheese and Spam glazed in Coca-Cola while their mother and grandmother often went hungry.

These days, family is still at the center of Estefan’s glamorous, globe-trotting life. She and Emilio, her first and only boyfriend, have been married for eighteen years. They met in 1975, launched Miami Sound Machine together and went on to make nine platinum albums.

Their first priority, however, is clearly their kids – sixteen-year-old Nayib and his sister, Emily, who almost didn’t make it into this world. After Estefan tried for a year to get pregnant, a doctor discovered that one of her fallopian tubes had been crushed in the bus accident. She underwent surgery in 1993, and two months later Emily was conceived.

The little girl has stayed by her mother’s side every since, and even sleeps with her parents. "Since we travel a lot, the one consistency in Emily’s life is that she sleeps with Mommy and Daddy," Estefan explains. So how does the singer manage to keep her marriage, um, exciting? "you get creative," she says with a smile. "There’s a million other places than the bedroom to go."

The Estefans are strict parents who are not afraid to discipline their kids When Nayib broke his midnight curfew while on tour, he was grounded. "I knew I was in deep trouble when my father was pacing outside the hotel," says Nayib. "When I get punished, it’ justified. They are always completely fair."

Still, Estefan cannot deny her son’s charisma – she’s even seen it work on President Bush on a White House visit in 1990. "I thought Nayib was going to be all nervous," recalls Estefan. "But he said, ‘Oh, Mr. President, I watched Mrs. Bush on the Salute to American Teachers, and she was wonderful!’ " Bush was charmed. "He brought out this crystal ball and said, ‘Look, Nayib, this is how we make decisions at the White House. You ask it a question and it says "Yes, no, maybe," ‘ " says Estefan, laughing.

According to tabloid reports that had him engaged to Estefan’s thirty-nine-old-old tour manager, Nayib’s charm also extends to older women. "He does like older women," his mom confirms while denying the engagement. So what does she tell her son about the opposite sex? "I stress respect," she says. "And that he cannot expect the woman to be the only one in charge of birth control."

The singer remembers the first facts-of-life talk she had with her son, when he was eleven. "Magic Johnson announced that he had AIDS," she explains. "I said, ‘Do you know how you get AIDS?’ And we talked about that and about condoms."

Relieved that the discussion was over, Estefan went to shower. A few moments later

Nayib knocked and asked if he could come in. "it was like a confessional, because we couldn’t see each other, and he just bombarded me with questions," she says. "He felt safe, but I sweating bullets behind the shower curtain!"

Estefan has worked hard at keeping the lines of communication open with both of her children. "I teach them to enjoy simple things, like the beauty of nature, loving other people or being affectionate. Because all this stuff," she says, waving her hand around the Picasso-and-Botero-filled family room, "could be over in one day. If you leave your kids a legacy of love, they’re going to share that love with other people, and that’s what sticks around." She feels the same obligation as an entertainer: "When Lucille Ball died, I really missed her. I never met the woman, but she brought so much joy and laughter into people’s lives."

The singer is also thinking of expressing herself another way – in movies, although she does not regret turning down the role of Evita. "That was a grueling shoot," says Estefan, who will start to consider scripts now that her tour is over. "I would love to do an ensemble piece, like Steel Magnolias, or a comedy."

Because she feels so blessed, Estefan is committed to giving back whenever she can. During her Evolution tour, Estefan and Sears, the tour’s sponsor, started OYE! Opportunities for Youth Employment, a program that has given $20,000 grants to children’s charities in thirty-four cities. As a thank-you, Sears gave Estefan a $100,000 donation to the charity of her choice. Moved by their generosity, she added another $150,000, earmarked for the Miami Project, a research center for spinal-cord injuries in Jacksonville.

But just because Estefan is good doesn’t mean that she is a goody-two-shoes. According to her sister, one of Estefan’s favorite pastimes is to write parodies of her own love songs. "Anything For You" becomes "Anything For Food," "Coming Out Of The Dark" becomes "I Got Mugged In the Park," and rumor has it that there is even PG-13-rated version of her song "Cuts Both Ways" entitled "I Go Both Ways." When asked for details, however, Estefan demurs. "I have to keep my raunchy lyrics to myself." She laughs, adding with a wink, "Everyone has to have a secret side."

© All rights reserved by Ladies Home Journal 1997

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