The pictures say it all. Twelve-year-old Lourdes Leon, with her icy gaze and strong features, is quickly eclipsing mom in the style stakes.
Just months after moving from London to New York with her increasingly eccentric mother, little Lourdes, or “Lola,” has made a major impression. In Buddy Holly glasses and skinny jeans, she cuts a striking figure as she leaves the Kabbalah Centre or heads out for Pinkberry with her dad, the personal trainer Carlos Leon, who mom dated briefly in the mid-’90s.
Since her permanent move stateside, Lourdes’ life is looking pretty charmed. She’ll soon boast an address that would make any Manhattan Gossip Girl swoon, since Mom just snapped up a $40 million, 26-room mansion on East 81st Street. And although Madonna long resisted Lourdes’ desire to become a child star, she’s finally caved, allowing her to enroll at the Professional Children’s School, where students (SJP is one alum) fit their class work around star turns in movies.
Even though she might seem like the luckiest girl in New York, Lourdes has the usual tween problems to deal with, including a totally embarrassing mother. Last winter, when Lourdes appeared with her mother at a Gucci-sponsored event in New York, she posed like a pro for the cameras and even placed bids at the charity auction for first edition “Harry Potter” books. The next day, the tabloids seemed to agree: Lourdes had arrived.
But as the mother and daughter primped for the event, say sources, drama was brewing, as Madonna insisted that Lourdes was not allowed to have a hairdresser or wear high heels. Madonna and her ex-husband, Guy Ritchie, were famously strict with their brood in London. If Lourdes left clothes on the floor, Madonna would take them away until the little girl “earned” them back.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Lourdes’ nickname, “Lola,” was inspired by her mother’s love of the “Damn Yankees” song “Whatever Lola Wants (Lola Gets).” At the French Lycee, where she attended school in London, classmates were beginning to gripe that Lourdes was catching on to the power that came with fame, and reports surfaced that she’d bragged about spending her winter break on Madonna’s world tour. One London mother whose daughter attended school with Lourdes says, “You get the sense that this girl is 12 going on 45.”
Now, says another source, Madonna is getting worried that precocious, fashion- and fame-obsessed Lourdes may eventually eclipse her, one reason she told her makeup artists not to touch her daughter’s eyebrows. “Madonna,” says the source, “is obsessed with youth and beauty. And her worst nightmare is seeing Lourdes get more attention than she does.”
Whether Madonna is acting on jealousy or simply being a protective mother, Lourdes’ desire to become a performer comes as no surprise to the rocker, who has said that her daughter showed talent in utero. “I saw on the ultrasound a tiny creature spinning around in my womb. Tap dancing, I think,” she said.
But that’s not to say that the Material Mom has been eager to see Lourdes in the limelight. When talk swirled that Lourdes was up for roles in a Harry Potter film and “The Secret Life of Bees,” Madonna and Ritchie allegedly resisted, hoping that Lourdes would hold out until she turned 14.
Meanwhile, Madonna herself is acting more and more like a crazed teenager. Since her split from Ritchie last fall, the 50-year-old has been in the throes of a major midlife crisis, engaging in public romances with A-Rod and 22-year-old Brazilian model Jesus Luz, bopping around at Lady Gaga concerts and generally seeming a little, well, gaga.
In March, Madge dressed up like a schoolgirl in a micro-mini for the Jewish holiday Purim, pilfering clothes from Lourdes’ closet. In May, she raised more than a few eyebrows when she donned a pair of stiletto boots and a weird blue head piece for the Met’s Costume Institute Ball, apparently determined to deflect attention from the stylishly attired young starlets in attendance such as Katy Perry and Blake Lively.
Madonna may have survived the ’80s, Warren Beatty and her attempts to become more English than the English, but the jury’s still out on whether she’ll live through having a teenager in the house. Lourdes didn’t just inherit her mother’s strong features and distinctive style; she also got the sass. She recently coined a memorable nickname for Jesus Luz, her mom’s latest beau: “The Babysitter.”