The letter was and, heartfelt, and surprisingly vulnerable especially when one considers that the writer is perhaps the most famous woman on the planet.

'I will never get over you,' it said. 'You have touched me in an unfathomable and unexplainable way.
'You say that there can be no love without trust and I couldn't agree more. But you mistrusted me long before I behaved in an untrustworthy fashion.
'All of this just perpetuated more negative and reactive behaviour in both of us. We went to our corners and drew our swords.
'The irony now is that I'm alone completely. Alone with my thoughts and my memories. I have so many fond memories of you in my house and, m fact, they we the happiest memories of my life. It is so very hard to let go of them.
'I wish so many things. I wish that we were together and happy. I wish that we'd had a child wish that you were feeling fulfilled, artistically and creatively you have such a brilliant mind I wish I wish, I wish...'
'Most of all, I wish you happiness and peace in your heart and mind. Please know that you are my last thought before I go to sleep and my first thought when I wake up.
'My love for you is profound and immense. Confusing and mysterious. I long to put my arms around you.'

These were the words that Madonna wrote to the man who was the last great love of her life before her marriage to film maker Guy Ritchie a dreamy impoverished Englishman named Andy Bird. They came towards the end of their tumultuous 18 month affair.
For Madonna, Bird followed a long list of high profile partner's including Sean Penn and Warren Beatty, pop singer Prince and John F Kennedy Jr. But as her letter suggests, this anonymous figure stirred deeper feelings in her than any of his celebrity predecessors.
Indeed, had fate taken a different twist, perhaps Andy Bind rather than Guy Ritchie might have followed Seen Penn as Madonna's second husband. Certainly, but for a harrowing abortion that we will return to later, he would now be the father of Madonna's child.
Few would recognise Andy Bird's name today. Yet his relationship with Madonna spanned a crucial period in her life, ending in bitter arguments around the time she met Ritchie.
At the start, they were blissfully happy. The lyrics of Madonna's song Beautiful Stranger To love you is to be part of you, I've paid for you with my tears, And swallowed all my Pride - were inspired by Andy Bird.

Extraordinarily, Madonna, wealthy, ambitious and famously astute lost her heart to this charming drifter who slept on friends' sofas.
It was an attraction of opposites the material girl and the man with nothing; the health conscious singer and the chain smoker; the glamorous star and the face in the crowd.
But together as we are about to discover, their life ran a rollercoaster course from the heights of emotion to arguments about Bird's sweaty feet (she would make him disinfect them before he came to bed).
The affair wrenched this unassuming figure from the provinces born in Birmingham, the son of an accountant and an educational social worker to the centre of a very different and dazzling world.
Bird came to know the private Madonna: the woman who would sing snatches of opera as she cooked Pop Tarts for breakfast, whose hopeless driving would cause havoc on the roads, who gave him clothes that ware invariably the wrong size.
To learn the inside story of their relationship - as we will do during this exclusive Mail series, which continues on Monday - is to gain an entirely new insight into the world's most scrutinised woman. She emerges as a far more tender and attractive figure than previous accounts have suggested.

Over the coming days, we will discover the truth about that abortion which left them both drained and distraught; their extraordinary life together with Sting, Stella McCartney and some of showbusiness's greatest names and the very public clash in which Ritchie scuffled with Bird at a London bar.
Until now, Bird has never talked publicly about his love for Madonna. He has shrunk instinctively from the public gaze. The reason he has chosen to speak out now, he says, is to put right the many inaccuracies which continue to be written about him.
By telling the truth, he hopes, he can draw a line under the past and move on.

It is not a task he finds easy. At times, as we talk, he squirms with reluctance. That Madonna should fall for this likeable, irresponsible man far younger than his years, is the greatest surprise of all.

Madonna, after all, is famed as a manipulator, renowned for her need to control - most notably in her affair with Carlos Leon the handsome fitness instructor seemingly picked out to father her child. Lourdes, then cast aside.
Perhaps the clearest sign of the depth of Madonna's feelings for Bird is that she found it impossible to discard him in the same way, He was her 'beautiful stranger' and for many months, even after she had met Guy Ritchie, impossible to let go.
They met in the summer of 1997 through a mutual friend. Alek Keshishian the moviemaker, who had directed Truth or Dare: In Bed With Madonna, the film of her 1990 world tour. Andy was 32 seven years her junior and living a bohemian life in London's Notting Hill.
A former art, student, he was Involved on the outer edges of the film industry, working as a runner for production companies and creating film scenarios of his own.
He earned money sporadically, sleeping on friends' sofas for weeks at a time, and wrote a script for an off-beat comedy that he showed to an American film producer he met In London. The American agreed to fly him to LA, using her surplus air miles to try to develop the project.

The week before he was due to leave, Andy went to see Keshishian in Paris to talk about his LA trip. Alek was well known in Hollywood, with no shortage of contacts.
'On a couple of occasions he let slip: Oh I know someone who'd likes you,' Bird recalls. 'He said it was someone I'd really get along with, but he never mentioned who it was.
He's the kind of person who knows everyone and likes to show off the fact. 'While I was there, he was on the phone and suddenly said: 'Andrew, say Hello to Madonna, 'Why he did it I still don't know.
'Anyway, I took the phone and said "Hello to Madonna and there was a little giggly voice at the other end.
Though he knew Alek was a friend of Madonna, Andy was still unsure whether he really was talking to the singer. It could just have been some strange joke.
'But we chatted for a bit and by the end of the call she seemed like a really nice person, whoever it was I was talking to. The conversation ended with her saying: 'Tell Alek to give you my numbers in L.A'

It seems extraordinary for a star like Madonna to give me her telephone number so freely. Perhaps, says Andy, Alek had already mentioned him to her.
He took the number, and. on the Eurostar back to London, decided to find out if they were real, 'I rang up and said: Hi, how are you doing?' and she said 'I'm practising yoga,' or whatever.
'I remember thinking she sounded sweet. She's got a very nice phone voice; quite low and soft. There was a connection between us.'
By now there was no doubt he was talking to Madonna herself.
'I suppose other people would have found it really weird to be taking to her, but somehow it didn't feel that strange,' says Bird. I just thought I was speaking to a girl I was getting on really well with. I was speaking to the person, not the icon.
'To start with, we just chatted about Alek. But she also was making an album with the producer William, Orbit, whose work I really admired, and I was very Interested in that.'

Even though Andy hadn't been looking for a relationship, one soon started to develop. 'We spoke several more times. It ended with us talking for a couple of hours a day on the phone before I even got to LA. She was flirty - she's a very flirty person, and I just flirted back, I asked her: 'Do you want me to bring you a present when I come over?' She said; 'Yes some of those waffle biscuits they sell on the Portobello Road.'
'Our conversations, were a first-thing-in-the-morning, last-thing-at-night kind of deal. There was certainly a degree of intimacy at that point. By the end we were actually saying, 'I miss you'" when we hadn't spoken for a few hours. There was a genuine keenness to meet.'

Back in London for the few days before he left for LA, he made no secret of his strange new friendship. My phone would ring in a bar, and it would be Madonna saying 'How are you?" My friends were a bit surprised and it was a big joke for five minutes, but after that they got used to it,'
Perhaps his friends were too anxious to seem 'cool' to exhibit mere excitement. Whatever the explanation, Andy admits this lack of interest was one of the reasons why, later, he was unprepared for the frenzy of attention when their relationship became more widely known.

Full of anticipation, he flew to LA and went to stay with his producer friend. The next day, he called Madonna.
'It was three clays before we eventually met up. I was a bit nervous.
I met her at this photographer's studio where they were shooting a cover for Rolling Stone magazine, 1 had to wait outside because I couldn't smoke in the studio.
'I had a Safeway bag with her biscuits from Portobello Road in it. I was wearing a fake-fur coat a mate had given me. At that stage I was into wearing ripped?up clothes and holding them together with tape.
'After 20 minutes I was called in. She war hiding behind a curtain. I think her first words were: "Hello, you!" My first impression was: 'Isn't she tiny?' She had very long, blonde Goldilocks-style hair at the time, and she was dressed all in black.
'We chatted for a bit, and then we got into her car and she drove us to a dinner party she'd been invited to.'
Madonna, it appeared, was nervous, too. 'She reversed into a wall as she was turning round, She was screaming: "'Andy, I hit something I think I probably swore - but it was only surface damage' he adds wryly.
The dinner was informal. 'Everyone was in the kitchen, sitting on benches. Even so I felt a bit like a fish out of water, because I didn't know a soul, including her. People always ask questions when they don't know you, and I hate being asked questions.
'Somebody asked: 'Where do you live in London?' Madonna piped up 'He's a sofa surfer' because she knew I slept on friends' sofas. We were teasing one another from the outset.'
Madonna seemed to be testing his reactions, checking out if he could really handle the prospect of a relationship with her.
'We were driving back after the dinner and she said: 'Shall I drop you at a hotel, because that's what I usually do with my dates, or do you want to come back to mine and call a cab from there?'
'It was all very flippant so I just said: 'I'm bloody going to yours.'She made some coffee and called a cab. I think we kissed.'

By then we were feeling at case with one another. We'd spoken so much already that a lot of barriers had gone down.'
Andy also had his first glimpse of her LA home, an old Spanish-style house, filled with antique furniture and paintings. It was, he says, stylish but understated - a place where a guest could feel at home.
'It felt very natural, not at all forced. And she wasn't at all Madonna-ish, in a predatory way. She was warm and affectionate and womanly. She's really very normal: a lovely, traditional, sweet person.
'There was no problem being alone with her. I was more worried about getting back and waking up my producer friend to borrow some U.S. dollars to pay the taxi.'

Next evening, the two went out to dinner alone, at a restaurant near Madonna's studio. This time it was Andy's turn to tease her.
I remember saying to her: "Kindness costs nothing," when she got fed up with waiting for a table and snapped ever so slightly at the waiter.
'Funnily enough, she seemed to think I spouting 'from some fount of knowledge. For me it was just a proverb, but perhaps in California it sounded like a deep spiritual insight.
'And after all, it was only our second date. We were hanging on each other's every word.'
That evening. Andy mentions in passing, was also one of the few times he paid for dinner. In the excitement of a new relationship, such disparities - her vast wealth, his total lack of it - seemed not to matter.
Perhaps, I suggest, it even added to the romance. In hindsight at least. Andy thinks otherwise. 'She's very much a realist: she probably saw it as problematic but chose to ignore it,' he says frankly.

Already the relationship had developed a sexual spark. 'It was brilliant: warm and exciting but quite gentle,' Andy remembers. 'We were holding hands, she was taking my arm, pretty much from the outset.
'It all seemed very natural. I'm a romantic anyway, and she's got a very big heart.'
When he arrived in America, Andy had scant knowledge of Madonna's life. 'I knew she had a daughter, but what her name was I didn't know.
'I was aware she'd had relationships in the past, but none of them was an issue. I'd kind of separated Madonna as a pop star from the person I was with.
'You get so wrapped up with the person that their past really doesn't matter. We were in the throes of becoming infatuated, falling in love.
'The magic that goes on inside you when just sitting in a traffic jam can be brilliant, because you get to spend time with that person. That's probably why I was oblivious to the whole fame issue.'

Perhaps, for Madonna, that ability to see her as a normal person was the clue to Andy's appeal. In him - in contrast to so many hangers-on, she may have felt she'd met a man who valued her purely for herself.
Whatever the reason, within the space of a week, Andy Bird and Madonna became lovers. Was he nervous, I ask, and Andy looks mortified.
'It wasn't like that. I was having a relationship with a woman called Madonna. I was no more nervous with her than I've been with anyone, before or since. She was an individual I wanted to share a closeness with.'
He pauses, looking wistful. 'It was quite a soulful thing.'

So who really is this Englishman who captured Madonna's heart. When I first speak to Andy Bird, by telephone, his voice is deep and laconic: the kind that might, indeed, suggest romance.
When we meet, he is more shy and diffident than I expect. He is tall, with long dark hair swept back from his face, and striking green eyes. But at 36 he displays an unhealthy pallor, honed on a diet of Diet Coke and Marlboro cigarettes.
Later, when he shows me a photo of himself with Madonna and Lourdes, I am surprised by how much brighter and healthier he appears, the intervening years you sense, have left their mark on Andy Bird.

His parents, he says, were middle-class mavericks who left the city to start a new life in the Warwickshire countryside when he was two. They kept pigs and lived their version of The Good Life. At school - first a local primary, then a nearby prep school, followed by a comprehensive Andy was an unacademic student, spending most of his time 'messing wound with friends in bands'.
After school, he went to London to study design at Kingston Polytechnic. When he left, he drifted. Good-looking and easy-going, he began modelling, his trip to America was partly financed by a fleeting appearance in a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial - and made karaoke videos.
Affable and relaxed, he made friends easily 'I was meeting lots of different people, going to trendy bars, being put on the right guest lists,' he recalls.
By the time he had met Madonna, he had, he says seriously, 500 friends. His social life revolved around fashionable restaurants such as 192 in Notting Hill, his gym on Portobello Green and the Met Bar, where he was friends with the manager. Many of his friends were connected to the media. It should have been obvious that, when he began a relationship with Madonna, there was no chance of it staying secret.
Five hundred 'friends' were ready to sell information to the newspapers. To Andy's surprise if no one else's - his old, bohemian existence would blow up in his face.

Back in the autumn of 1997 though, Notting Hill felt far away. Andy was in LA caught up in a burgeoning love affair. Madonna was working in the studio, finishing her best-selling album, Ray Of Light. Andy spent almost every night with her, staying at her house in Los Felix.
Quickly Andy's life fell into a routine. In the morning, he and Madonna would wake up early and takes it in turns to make coffee. Then, while she practised yoga for a couple of hours, he would play with Lourdes - Lola, as her mother called her, or 'set up meetings on his still unrealised film project.
In the evenings they would meet for dinner, sometimes at the tiny macrobiotic restaurant 'really good and cheap' and maybe watch a film.
He also spent time with the rest of the household: Daisy the maid, Lola's nanny Clara, and Manual the gardener. When I meet Andy at a hotel in England, he swiftly befriends every waiter; in LA, though he was dating a superstar, his behaviour was no different.
He rented a Dodge pick-up and often would meet Madonna and follow her in his car. It was a rapid introduction to one of his new girlfriends surprising quirks - her terrible same of direction.
'I'd only been there a short time, but I'd still work out we were going completely the wrong way,' he remembers.
'Following her was a nightmare. You'd be at traffic lights, and out of nowhere she'd edge her way across the lanes and in the lane for turning left, and there was no way you could follow her.
It's ironic really somebody with so much direction in their life not to have a clue where they were going.'

While he struggled with her driving, Madonna would try to get him to wear new clothes.
'She's given quite a lot of stuff by designers and fashion companies, and so a black velvet suit showed up that, thankfully I didn't fit into. Then there was a velvet double-breasted coat all Dolce & Gabbana that was too big.
'It was a bit like getting presents from your granny at Christmas things you'd wear for a couple of days just to please them, and then forget about.'

For the most part, though, the couple enjoyed their new found closeness.
'For both of us there was a real sense of familiarity. You know, when you feel you've met somebody before.' says Andy. 'My feelings were strong, and so were hers. There was a powerful physical and emotional attraction between us.
'There was also a sense of vulnerability the way there is when you meet someone new. She would ask my opinion on a lot of things.
'At that time, Lola was less than year old. Madonna was unsure about motherhood what was normal and what wasn't. I helped out as much as I could.' In the beginning, Andy had intended to go to LA for just three weeks. In fact, swept up in the passion of a new relationship, three months passed before he begun to think about coming home.
That November, Madonna was visiting britain to prepare for the release of Ray Of Light. Andy was short of money and starting to feel homesick. They decided to come to London together, as a couple.
Andy came over a few days before her 'It was brilliant to be back. I knew I'd missed my friends, but I'd been in such a cocoon I hadn't realised how much,' he says.

Three days later, Madonna's private jet landed at Luton airport. Andy picked her up in a Range Rover with blacked?out windows.
'It was great to see her again. She was staying at a house in Tregunter Road, close to The Boltons, one of the most exclusive areas of South Kensington. It was a kind of unspoken assumption that we'd be there together'
For a day or two, no one knew about it. Then Andy took her to a friend's birthday party. Next day, he says ruefully, everything went crazy: their relationship was front-page news.
'It was just awful.' Andy remembers, shrinking into his chair, 'My phone rang incessantly; stories were being written about me. I was being followed.
'One of the red-top tabloids printed a number for anyone who knew mystery man Andy Bird to call. There was even a phone in on Radio 1 for people to say what they thought about Madonna's latest choice of boyfriend.'

For Andy, the media onslaught was a total shock. I knew they'd all be interested in her, but I didn't really think they'd care about who she was dating.
'I know it sound, ridiculous now, and I was obviously being downright stupid but 1 just perceived me as being me and I knew her as somebody else my girlfriend.'
Surely Madonna herself must have known what would happen? 'You would have thought so, but I don't think she wanted to acknowledge the fact it might have a detrimental effect on us, or on me.
'Also, after 15 or 20 years in the spotlight it becomes normal, I imagine. It only became an issue after my reaction to it. It made me really withdrawn. 1 felt paranoid. I hadn't realised I would care what anyone wrote about me, but it really did upset me. 'Most hurtfully, says Andy, he was labelled a 'wannabe'.
'The implication was that the only way I was going to get fame and success and some semblance of a career was by hanging about with Madonna. That hurt my pride a lot.'
The differences between them, which in America had hardly mattered, were rammed in their faces in britain.
At the same time, Andy was still trying to treat Madonna like any other girlfriend. He took her to friends' flats in West London. 'Most people were fine, but some were horrified at the idea of this superstar coming into their homes. 'No! It's filthy!' they'd say. 'You mustn't come!'
'Others went wild with excitement and you'd think: 'For God's sake, calm down.'
Madonna, he says, was charming add polite I think maybe she felt like a novelty, being wheeled about. I think she quite shy in a certain way. But she was my girlfriend and I wanted her to meet my friends.'

Andy was also keen to introduce Madonna to his parents, Horace and Kathleen. 'I wanted to show her another side of me, to show her where I grew up. I didn't envisage spending a lot of time with them; just introducing her and going for a country drive perhaps.
'I rang my parents and said please don't make any more effort than you normally would," and they were fine.'
On a Sunday afternoon, Andy drove Madonna and Lola to the large house his parents built 30 years ago near the village of Clifford Chambers in Warwickshire. With its wide, pitched roof and adjoining garage, it looks like the kind of house stockbrokers retire to.
The three of them arrived late. 'It took us ages to get out of London because we were having to sort the baby out and deal with the paparazzi waiting outside our house.
'And, of course, Americans only drive at 50mph, so me doing 90mph down the motorway isn't go down very well at all.
'We didn't actually get there until 4pm, and when my parents opened the door they were dressed in their best clothes. They saw my face and said: 'This isn't for you we're going to a drinks party. We can only stay 20 minutes.'
My mum said to Madonna something like: 'Oh, let me give you a kiss because I always kiss Andrews girlfriends.'Then she got the baby photos out: 'Here's Andrew naked in the sink at three months old.'
Few families you imagine, would have reacted so calmly to a pop icon sitting on their sofa. Andy's, he explains, is different: 'They hardly watch TV and don't read tabloid newspapers. I suppose you could say the whole cult of celebrity has passed them by
'They were at their ease they're very down to earth people They were more worried about being late for their drinks party than anything else.'
There was, however, one unexpected hitch. A paparazzi photographer had followed them from London and was waiting outside the house.
'That made it very difficult,' says Andy, still indignant at the intrusion. 'We had to close the curtains so he couldn't see in.'
Andy was angry most of all with himself, for bringing his parents into the public eye. All the same, he adds, he eventually took the photographer a cup of tea and some homemade cakes. 'I felt sorry for him' he explains helplessly.

Next day, he was shocked to find the visit was a major news story. I still had no idea that my parents' house would be on the front page of one of the tabloids. When I saw that, I realised the whole visit was a mistake. I didn't want to involve my parents in all that.'
For both him and Madonna, the strain was starting to tell. 'I was starting to withdraw into myself. She could tell I wasn't happy.
'We tried to make light of it, but the situation had changed. It did get to me, and I didn't handle it very well, I was frightened to answer my phone. My stomach churns just talking about it,
'We still really cared about each other, but I was becoming much more aware of how difficult life would be with her.
She was frustrated that this stuff upset me. At one point she said to me 'Oh Andrew you love me, but you hate my life.'That was completely true. But what do you do in that situation? I still loved being in her company. I thought the papers would get bored. But I wanted my freedom back.'
Late one night, when their visit to London was close to an end, he went for a drive on his own. 'I needed to forget about the whole situation.
'I was questioning everything. I'd begun to feel that perhaps I really was this no-hoper everyone said I was. I didn't want to end the relationship, but I had to prove I wasn't just trying to ride on Madonna's coat tails.'
Finally, after driving for many hours, Andy made his decision. He would not go back to America with Madonna, but stay in London and rebuild his life. He hoped their relationship could survive; if not, he would have to accept it.

When he got back to Tregunter Road, Madonna was waiting for him. 'She wanted to knew where I'd been for all this time.
'I just said: 'Listen I've been thinking and I've get something to tell you.'Before I could say another word, she said: 'Well, I've got something to tell you, too.'And that's when she told me she was having a baby.'
The pregnancy was totally unexpected 'We were careful.' says Andy, his voice a whisper. 'I was numb, shocked, happy, panicked, sad, tired. I was looking into her eyes, trying desperately to see how she felt.
'When you're really fond of someone, there's a part of you that's happy in that situation; another part that thinks 'Oh no.'It was very early days in our relationship, and I was beginning to realise events were running me, not the other way round.
'I was full of self?doubt anyway, because of all the things being written about me in the newspapers. I wasn't sure I should even be allowed to father a child. I was in a tumultuous state, but trying my hardest to be calm.'
His main concern was for Madonna. 'When someone tells you that kind of news, your overwhelming sense is to know how they are. A man feels that even more keenly, because it's something that goes on in the other person's body and you are completely cut off from it.'
He pauses, looking helpless. 'I wanted to do the right thing,' he says. 'Whatever that was.'