Buble’s back to rock the heart of blue-eyed soul
Michael Buble’s annus horribilis appears to be something he and his wife can now happily consign to history, writes Barry Egan ahead of the Canadian crooner’s visit to Croke Park
WHEN you’ve sold millions of albums and have almost as many Grammy awards on the mantelpiece in your mansions in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles and Vancouver, you expect the odd dissenting voice, perhaps.
“Morrissey said once, ‘Fire in the belly is essential, otherwise you become like Michael Buble — famous and meaningless’. I just thought, ‘I wish I could be as successful as Morrissey’,” Michael Buble himself said with his famous tongue in his cheek. In 2013 The New York Times went a bit Morrissey when it dubbed Buble, a tad unfairly, “the likeably hale young heir to Frank Sinatra — your daughter’s boyfriend singing your father’s tunes”.
Like Sinatra, Buble had certain self-inflicted problems with the ladies in his early career...
His relationship with film star Emily Blunt — Buble’s Ava Gardner — ended badly in 2008 after three years together. Buble confessed that he needed therapy post-split.
In March, 2015, Buble told Canadian entertainment show eTalk of his shame at his past behaviour. “I was a jerk and I was careless and reckless with the hearts of women I was with,” he said. “And I got my karma. I earned it. I got my butt and heart kicked and it hurt me enough that I looked in the mirror and I didn’t want it to happen again.”
In a searingly candid interview with Vanity Fair in May 2013, Buble — who was by then very happily married to his South American beauty Luisana — said he never imagined when he was starting out that he would be in such a contented space: “I was not a happy man for many years. Insecure. I never thought I could hold a relationship. No way. Because how could anyone love me if I didn’t? That sounds like how a shrink would say it, but it’s the truth,” he said, adding that what ultimately, and painfully, changed that narrative for him was “a harsh public break-up”.
This was presumed to be a reference to The Devil Wears Prada star Ms Blunt. Buble could have written a book on self-lacerating soul-baring (instead he read A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle. It became his secular bible).
Buble recounted how he looked at himself in the mirror “saying, ‘Listen, all of us are f **ked up, right? All of us are f**ked up’. I kept saying to myself, ‘You’re young, Mike. You’re young, and you’ll make mistakes and you’ ll have time to change these things’. Then I started to realise, and I started to go, ‘You know what, dude? You’re not a kid any more. You’re now in your mid f **king 30s. You have these things inside you, but you ignore them. You push them aside, and you don’t want to admit these things to yourself ’.”
“I always say that fame stunts your growth,” he continued in Vanity Fair. “Whatever age you get famous at, it’ll freeze you there. Anyway, I sort of did that thing where I was f **king heartbroken; I had no confidence.”
In October 2015, Blunt was on The Howard Stern Show in New York to promote her new movie Sicario when the shock jock started asking the English actress about her relationship with the Canadian singer.
Stern commented that the whole thing was “heartbreaking”, because “he was not faithful”.
Emily let out a sigh to indicate her lack of comfort with the question, before responding: “I don’t know. It’s complicated. Now I’m going red because I never talk about it. I never want to talk about it.”
Not long after this interview was aired, Buble was on the couch at Entertainment Tonight in Canada putting the record straight. “It didn’t end because of cheating,” he said. “It ended because we weren’t right for each other, and we are now exactly where we’re supposed to be in our lives. Emily is a beautiful and loving person, and I’m grateful for the time I had with her, for the relationship. Without it, I wouldn’t have had a chance to fall in love with myself enough to be with a woman like my wife.”
Buble is the pre-eminent neo-crooner of his generation — loved almost as much by men as by adoring women fans (“he may be catnip to women, but he also connects to men in a buddy-buddy sort of way”, wrote Stephen Holden in 2007).
Yet Michael Buble wasn’t an instant hit with the one woman who mattered: his future wife...
When he uttered the words “You’re my wife, you just don’t know it yet” just like a line from perhaps his most famous song Haven’t Met You Yet, to Argentinian supermodel and actress Luisana Lopilato she was anything but bowled over. Quite the opposite, in fact...
They met when she attended one of his concerts in 2008 in Buenos Aires with her sister Danielle and a male actor friend. Seeing the supermodel in his midst, the superstar approached them and invited them to his after-show party.
He didn’t speak Spanish. Luisana didn’t speak English. Her male friend did, however, and reported to Luisana that Mr Buble how told him how good he looked, with remarks like: “Oh my God, look at your muscles.”
Luisana promptly rang her mum and said: “I am at a party with Michael Buble, and he’s gay!”
According to Michael’s version of the night in question, Luisana walked in “with a man, and the man was so good looking that he made Brad Pitt look dumpy. So I assumed they were together. I naturally assumed that this was her boyfriend or her husband. So I refused to hit on her”, he remembered, gallantly.
“It didn’t help that she didn’t speak English either at the time. Not a word. But the more I drank that night, the more brazen I got about trying to find out what the situation was between them. Finally, after two hours — and I don’t know how many shots and glasses of whiskey — I finally said ‘You guys are such a beautiful couple’, and he said, ‘We’re not together’.
“He said, ‘She came because she likes you’. And at the same time, she was on the phone texting her mom saying, ‘Oh my god, Michael Buble is all over my friend. He’s so gay’.”
Having discovered that Luisana was romantically unattached, Buble wasted not a moment in getting someone to translate what he wanted to say to her: “You are my wife, you just don’t know it yet.”
Luisana, born on May 18, 1987, in Buenos Aires, is one of South America’s most famous and feted beauties, and had heard such comments from famous men before.
She replied, offhandedly: “Of course you want me to be your wife! Every man wants to marry me. So we will have to see!”
Three months later Michael’s a-wooing went into ultra serious mode. He emailed Luisana to tell her he wanted to meet her in Argentina — with an interpreter — to get to
‘My faith in the fact God had a miracle helped me. I became strong so my son would get better’
know her properly and be introduced to her family.
During the three days that Buble stayed in Buenos Aires, he and Luisana’s first date was dinner at home with her whole family: her parents Eduardo and Beatriz, and Luisana’s siblings Dario and Danielle. In November 2008 he asked Luisana to marry him.
“One night,” she remembered, “we were having dinner in my house with all my family — my father, mother, brother, sister, brother-in-law and a few cousins too — and suddenly Michael turns to me and says, in Spanish, ‘I want to marry you’.”
Luisana says that she and all her family thought that Michael was joking until he said, still in Spanish, “No, really. I really want to marry you.”
Luisana finally knew he wasn’t joking, perhaps, when he took out a ring and gave it to her. But no: not even the dazzling sight of a giant ring that Michael had designed himself could stop his bride-to-be from rattling like a drain with laughter.
“I still thought he was joking,” she laughs now. “Then I noticed that my mother was crying, my sister was crying, even my father was crying, and I thought, ‘This is real because my father never cries’. So I started to cry too.” Luisana added that she “loved” that Michael proposed in the way he did: “I am a family girl and it was perfect that he said it in front of them.”
Such was the gargantuan size of their love for each other that Michael and Luisana had not one, not two, but three wedding ceremonies.
The first one was a mere civil wedding ceremony in Buenos Aires on March 31, 2011 with the bride in a short lilac dress; the second time in Buenos Aires in April 2011, surrounded by 300 friends and family at a private mansion in the hills, with the bride this time in what Marie Claire magazine described as “a dramatic gown with tiered skirt and fitted bodice”; and the third one in Michael’s hometown of Vancouver, in front of more than 500 guests at the Pan Pacific hotel. They then went on honeymoon to Venice for three weeks.
Born on September 9, 1975, in Burnaby, British Columbia, the son of a salmon fisherman, Michael Buble recalls first being drawn to jazzy crooning as a five-year-old when he heard Bing Crosby’s White Christmas album.
As a teenager he sang in nightclubs under the name Mickey Bubbles after his plumber grandfather Demetrio did a nifty deal with the proprietors: stage time for his crooning grandson in return for plumbing.
A few years later he was warbling “May your days be merry and bright” in the family car when his parents noticed he had talent that would eventually made him one of the world’s biggest stars.
When Michael Buble was a teenager he slept with his Bible and prayed to God that he’d become a singer one day.
Two years ago, the Canadian crooner needed his Catholic faith more than any other time in his life.
In November, 2016, his threeyear-old son Noah was diagnosed with hepatoblastoma — a rare type of cancerous tumour in the liver.
Michael immediately cancelled all his upcoming shows and put his career on hold.
Luisana described how their belief in God encouraged everyone in the family to believe in a miracle. That ‘miracle; arrived when young Noah was declared cancer free in February, 2017 after receiving chemotherapy treatment in the United States.
“My faith in the fact God had a miracle helped me,” Luisana said last year. “I became strong so my son would get better. I transmitted that to all my friends and family.
“As a family we were always very united and we fought this together. We did everything we could for our son so he would come through this.”
“When things like those that happened to us occur, your take on life changes,” Michael himself said, adding, “It happened to us. Now I value life much more, the now and the today. My son’s recovery is a long process as you all know and he has to continue with check-ups. But we are very happy. We are looking forward to thinking about the future, to seeing our children grow.
“Luisana and I have put our careers on hold in order to devote all our time and attention to helping Noah get well,” added Michael.
“We have a long journey in front of us and hope that with the support of family, friends and fans around the world, we will win this battle.”
Happily, they appear to be winning the battle. Michael and Luisana, and two-year-old son Elias, celebrated Noah’s fourth birthday last August with a Spider-Man-themed party.
There were more celebrations two months ago when the couple announced they are expecting their third child.
Fly me to the croon. Michael Buble (with special guest Emeli Sande) plays a fully-seated concert at Croke Park in Dublin on July 7. Tickets from €89.50, including booking fee, are available from Ticketmaster.