A Blaze of Gloria

Gloria Estefan is laughing. The laughter, unlike her, is not very small. It is more like her music, actually, the way it fills a room, the way it makes her shoulders shake, the way it lets her throw her head back as if allowing something good and warm to wash over her. As she walked me out of her Miami mansion after a two-hour conversation, Estefan explained that she likes to laugh because it releases endorphins, protein for the brain. But now, sitting on the white couch in the art-filled living room of her $6 million guest house, she is telling the Pope story, and the laughter is such that it lifts her feet right off the ground, nudging that tray on the tile floor and making the tiny cups of Cuban coffee on it quiver.

"The Pope thing was a very tough gig," she says. "There were bishops, cardinals, and nuns listening to me sing, and when you grew up going to Catholic schools, that can be a pretty tough crowd. But the Pope was right next to me, just a few feet away. The Pope! And I kept saying to myself, ‘What am I doing here? I’m just a pop singer.’ "

Did His Holiness like the song?

"He seemed to," Estefan says

How did you know?

"He nodded his head."

That’s it?

"Well, it’s not like I expected him to conga."

It had been more than two decades since Estefan was that nervous before an audience. She had always been painfully shy. Her three-year-old daughter Emily, is the same way, "pulling down her carriage like the top of a tank when people get too close," Mom says. Estefan fought through her timidity because "it was important to show people how I felt about music." Back in 1975, though, as she stared out at a Chilean mountainside blanketed by 65,000 people unfamiliar with her music, she was terrified. Her band at the time, The Miami Sound Machine, was in Chile as part of a festival, but was largely unknown then, playing mostly weddings and just beginning to open for other acts. Estefan had always performed close to her band, dancing around them, hiding behind them, she admits now. But this stage was set up so that she had to be 50 feet out in front, alone.

"My knees were knocking," Estefan says. "I always thought that was just an expression. It literally happens when you are [experiencing] deep, deep fear. You can actually hear the noise of your knees hitting each other louder than you can hear your heart thumping. The people couldn’t see my knees, fortunately, because I was wearing a dress, but I felt naked. I was looking out at this mountainside, and I had been warned that if they didn’t like you, they would throw sh-t at you. With the Pope, I felt exactly the same fear, but at least I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to show his displeasure by throwing anything at me."

Estefan is good at a lot of things, including making fun of herself. Our conversation focused on her image – where it has been and where she wants to take it. She told the Pope story for the same reason she used the expletive: to illustrate her normalcy, if you can indeed be normal when one of the holiest of holy men sets aside a talk with God so he can hear your voice instead.

Estefan’s friends know all about what she calls her "sick sense of humor." That’s why they tease her relentlessly about how magazine stories featuring her all seem to sound the same. You know: "She floated into the room like an angel, bathed in light, and then the finest role model in the music industry, blah, blah, blah ..." After Estefan’s near-fatal 1990 bus accident, which required that two titanium rods be permanently inserted near her spine, Estefan’s sister, Becky Fajardo, grew so bored of the media’s accounts of Gloria’s purity that she began answering the house phone with "Our Lady of the Rods" and asking callers if they would like to buy some holy water taken straight from Estefan’s pool.

"I hope to God people don’t think I’m a saint," Estefan says, cracking her knuckles. "Maternal? Yes. Saintly? No. A saint isn’t real. It’s an image, not a person, but it’s easiest for the media to focus on a generality instead of something multidimensional. It’s easiest to exaggerate my sainthood and make me only ‘Miami Nice.’ I’m sure Dennis Rodman has a very quiet, reflective side, but we never see that. It’s the nature of commercializing. The more the media grows, the smaller the world will get, and the more that will happen. Because of my bus accident, I was going to be either the gimp or the saint, so I guess I’d rather be the saint. It’s not a burden."

Estefan, wearing sandals, lifts her right foot off the ground and taps the band of silver wrapped around her second toe. "Look, though, I’ve got a toe ring," she says through a smile. "Puts me closer to Dennis Rodman than you thought, huh?"

The Estefan universe is expanding. Gloria, nudged by husband and manager Emilio, has opened a Cuban restaurant in Miami Beach and has agreed to build another in Disney World because, she says, "we still have that immigrant mentality and can never feel safe enough." (Though it seems Gloria can afford to relax: In September Forbes reported that Estefan Enterprises has an estimated net worth of $200 million.) She has something else under construction, too – an acting career.

Estefan recently left William Morris, her representative of 15 years, to join Creative Artists Agency, the group that has helped Madonna, Barbra Streisand, and Janet Jackso make the movie from song to screen. C.A.A. has enlisted a team of agents to oversee that transition for Gloria. One of them, Emanuel Nunez, confirms that "all the major studios are interested in being in business with her."

So far, Estefan has taken acting lessons and is reading scripts at night, trying to select a film that fits her. She says she has turned down Oliver Stone’s overtures. She also passed up the chance to play Eva Peron in last year’s film version of Evita, the role that eventually went to Madonna. Estefan says it gave her the same too-much-too-soon feeling she got staring at the crowded mountainside.

                              There is
                              NOTHING LEFT FOR ME TO

"These next two, three years are crucial," says Estefan. "If I don’t take the opportunity to act now, it might be lost. I want to start small, no pressure. I want to do it slow and well. I wouldn’t want to star in my first film, wouldn’t want the pressure of carrying it. I hope one day to lead in something I truly care about, something Emilio can produce with creative control, but right now I want strong actors around me to pull people in. There is nothing left for me to do in music. I’ve done everything that fulfills me: the Olympics, the Super Bowl, performing at the Vatican. I want to grow." She shrugs and smiles. "There’s [only] so much room on the radio," she says.

She would be doing more if the relentless Emilio, the only boyfriend she ever had, could have his way. A former Bacardi marketing executive, Emilio has produced albums for salsa diva Celia Cruz as well as songs on both the Evita and Pocahontas sound tracks. He keeps pushing his wife to want, want, want.

The two met at a wedding 23 years ago, when Emilio asked the shy girl to come onstage and sing with his band. She was 17; he was 21. They were married three years later. Estefan admits that if Emilio had met someone else with a great voice at that wedding, he would have turned her into the equivalent of Gloria Estefan.

But make no mistake – it’s not as if she is puppet to his puppeteer. She retains veto power on everything in her career, and Emilio says she has used it plenty. All Gloria ever cared about was the music. He just taught her how to sell it.

"If he was like me," Estefan says, "we would still be on our couch in Ninth Avenue and Tenth Terrace, playing guitars on weekends only for each other."

During the first 15 minutes of an interview, Emilio used the word integrity 13 times to describe his wife. He says Gloria has turned down Norman Lear’s invitation to host a TV talk show based in Miami, plus more than $40 million in commercial endorsements, because she doesn’t want to sell out. Still, Gloria follows her husband’s vision because she understands how quickly a music star’s career can fizzle. All she has to do to be reminded is look down her Star Island street, at the house that was once owned by rapper Vanilla Ice.

"You only have a few golden years, which is why I want to try some different things now," Estefan says. "Eventually I’m going to be too old to conga."

Her music still matters most, though. She says it was what got her through childhood, when she had to help care for her father, who had to use a wheelchair due to multiple sclerosis. When she was little, Gloria often saw her father stand up, having forgotten that he couldn’t walk and fall down. Because he was confined to his deathbed at the time of her wedding, Estefan walked down the aisle alone. (Estefan’s mother is a former elementary schoolteacher who still lives in Miami, where she actively spoils little Emily, despite Gloria’s protests.)

"If I didn’t have music, I would have gone insane," Estefan says now. "It kept me from falling apart. It was very cathartic – my way of laughing and crying and being somewhere else. It was my only escape when I was little. I would leave my father, lock myself in my room, and the minute I started to sing, I’d start crying. It was my only way of getting that out."

Estefan has often written dark lyrics but hasn’t released them for public consumption. She says she has written poetry she describes as "very sorrowful" but won’t let anyone else see that, either. She has collected strength from sorrow – her father’s death, the bus accident, another accident that killed a 29-year-old law student who ran into the Estefans’ boat with his wave runner. But if her voice is going to stretch across the world – and it does, as evidenced by the two Grammys, the 60 million records sold, and the doctor friend who came back from a tiny African hut to tell her the natives were singing her songs – then she wants that voice to sound happy.

"I want to inspire people to move beyond their darkness," Estefan says. "Empower them. The dark stuff I keep to myself. I’ve found that TV and music are like meditation; our collective thought creating our destiny. I don’t want to get all metaphysical on you, but we create reality through thoughts in our mind. If we only knew our power. I was going to be a psychologist – I’ve done a lot of auto-analysis – and I figure, why not fill minds with positive thoughts? I’d rather change my lyrics to include people rather than exclude them. There is enough negative out there without me adding to it."

To illustrate this, Estefan points over her shoulder, over the water, toward the spot across Biscayne Bay where Italian designer Gianni Versace was murdered. They were friends, the designer and the diva; her daughter spent her first New Year’s Eve at a party at his house. After the murder, Estefan had her restaurant send plenty of food over to Versace’s house, so the family wouldn’t have to worry about cooking for a while.

"You want to be alone in times like those," Estefan says. "You don’t want to be naked in front of the cameras. When something like that happens, you are a wire with the protective coating removed. You are so raw. Exposed."

She remembers hearing the TV helicopters overhead after her bus accident. She can still hear their buzz here, in this living room, on this couch, as she puts her hands up, palm out, covering her scrunched-up face, cowering as if something large were about to fall on her. She asked Emilio to hide her pain from the helicopters by putting a sheet over the stretcher.

"But they’re going to think you’re dead!" Emilio replied.

She feels so alive now, working out rigorously five times a week with a personal trainer, and gaining strength in other ways, as she approaches some personal and career crossroads: She celebrated her 40^th birthday in September; is about to embark on a new career even as she prepares another album; and is bracing for the challenge of sending her first child to college.

Seventeen-year-old Nayib, who calls his mother five or six times a day on his cell phone, is a high school senior. Next fall, he will be off to Florida State University, an eight-hour drive away and Estefan’s voice gives a little as she discusses what it will be like to sit at the kitchen table and have one last conversation before he goes. Like is father, who at 44 still hides behind furniture to scare the help, Nayib can be awfully mischievous. He had to help build this guest house, in fact, working on the construction crew as punishment for making a crank call that got him expelled from high school. Mother and son talk about everything – drinking, condoms, fame – but Estefan, like any parent, still worries.

"I have a three-year-old and a seventeen-year-old," she jokes, "and they have the same maturity level."

When she is done saying this, you can hear that healing sound again.

The brain releasing endorphins.

© All rights reserved by New Woman, December 1997

Thank you so much Amanda for sending me this Magazine. You are always so lovely to me! I am so happy about our friendship and will never miss you!!!! You have always a special place in my heart!!!

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