The woman sitting quietly in a corner of her palatial Florida home is using a breast pump to store her milk for her twin babies. There’s little dignity to the time-intensive routine. And even cracking jokes while using the uncomfortable device for the task doesn’t help. She looks exhausted, like scores of other new mothers who have come before her.
With a difference: The mother in question is singer Celine Dion – and she’s pumping for a television audience as well as her boys Eddy and Nelson. “There’s not only food in there,” she says to the camera, “there’s love.”
Called Celine: 3 Boys and a New Show, Dion’s upcoming documentary special on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network is full of gushy, maternal musings. But while they might seem corny, the megastar – who in the past has often seemed to resort to greeting-card clichés in speaking to the press – is clearly not acting. She’s mad for her new babies, as well as her 10-year-old boy René-Charles. Not to mention her long-time husband and manager René Angélil, a man who fiercely protects his wife’s image as a crowd-pleaser with Titanic-sized pipes and has established her as one of the world’s richest women (with a personal wealth estimated at more than $1-billion).
Still, it’s a little unusual for the notoriously private artist, now 43, to invite a camera crew (even her pal Oprah’s camera crew) into her all-white, $20-million oceanside Florida home, where they follow her every move, from nursery to kitchen to walk-in closet, and join in everything from the kids’ baptism to rehearsals as mom Dion prepares – with just five months of prep time – to return to Caesars Palace for her Las Vegas one-woman live show, seen so far by more than 3.25 million adoring fans.
Some may adore her a little too much, of course – there was the fan, for example, who recently entered her Montreal home and had helped himself to pastry from Dion’s fridge and started to run a warm bath before he was caught by police. But there are also folks who don’t love her. Over the years, the singer has polarized listeners, sometimes inspiring a zealous dislike that’s a bit bewildering, given the long-necked, lithesome star’s track record. The five-time Grammy winner has sold more than 220 million records and never made a huge misstep. (Okay, her marriage-vow renewal in 2000 – with the camels, exotic birds and six Berber tents, each representing a scene from A Thousand and One Nights – was a little over the top.)
Regardless of her public image, since the birth of her son, René-Charles, and her 69-year-old husband’s cancer scare 10 years ago, Dion has largely left the limelight. She performs primarily at The Colosseum theatre at Caesars Palace in extended runs that last for years, so she can move her entire family to Vegas to live near her rather than drag them around the world on tours.
“I see this time as the greatest gift of all,” said Dion last week, talking from a limo on Angélil’s cellphone on the way to a concert in Central Park with Andrea Bocelli, David Foster and Tony Bennett (her sister’s with Dion’s children in a second limo behind them – you try doing phone interviews with three kids in the car). “This [motherhood] is the most extraordinary gift that life can give us. I’m trying to cherish every second.”
In her 90-minute TV special, Dion certainly seems to let her guard down more than she ever has: We hear about her determination to conceive (she went through six rounds of in-vitro fertilization for the twins), and see her fretting that her breast milk might leak through the front of her gown while onstage, helping René-Charles with homework in her sweatpants and insisting that she – not a night nurse – will wake up every two hours to feed her hungry babies.
