Madonna

by Lucy O'Brien

  After becoming a mother, Madonna decided to take him up on his offer. Impatient with traditional “princess” stories, she decided to write one of her own. “The women in Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or Snow White are really passive. They don’t move the plot along at all. They just show up, they’re beautiful…the princes tell them they want to marry them, and then they go off and live happily ever after,” Madonna remarked. “I thought, ‘Well, what’s a girl supposed to get out of this? That’s such a load of crap.’”

  Her first book, The English Roses, was inspired by her daughter’s schoolfriends, whose names were (as in the book) Nicole, Amy, Charlotte, and Grace. It’s a gentle lesson in dealing with jealousy, as the girls are nudged by a fairy godmother to be kind to another girl, Binah, whom they have ostracized. Binah is beautiful and good, but leads a sad existence and she is seen by the other children as an outsider. In a story that echoes Madonna’s childhood, the heroine’s mother is dead and she has to do household chores all day for her father. Her life is transformed when the girls bring her in to their elite circle. “First they invited Binah to a tea party, and then they started walking to school with her, and not long after that, they were doing homework together,” writes Madonna. “Binah even taught them how to bake an apple pie. They soon found out that she was very likeable indeed.”

  This was the first of five stories that she presented to Callaway in 2002. Wanting to make books that had a classic feel, she and her publisher searched long and hard for suitable illustrators. Warhol protégé Jeffrey Fulvimari was their first choice, and he illustrated The English Roses with a sophisticated, whimsical style that echoed 1930s French classics like Babar and Madeleine. The book became an event, published simultaneously the following year in thirty languages and more than a hundred countries. On the day of publication, Madonna hosted a children’s tea party in London. Dressed in a flowery dress and glasses, looking every inch the demure housewife, she read from her book. One of the onlookers noted with bemusement the bizarre crowd, saying: “It was a mixture of fidgety children, gay men weeping, and skeptical journalists.”

  For children’s literature expert Wendy Cooling, the party was memorable. “It was a beautiful day on a roof terrace in Kensington, a posh champagne launch party where we all had a bit of fun,” she recalls. “Madonna read to the children, but they found it difficult to listen—they were all a bit young. Madonna was very charming. She was delightful to her children, she obviously has a good relationship with them. Afterward, she was sweet to me, giving me roses from the display, saying, ‘Take something home, take a rose, take a butterfly.’ I warmed to her, but, sadly, didn’t warm to the books.”

  The English Roses was soon followed by Mr. Peabody’s Apples, a three-hundred-year-old Ukrainian Kabbalah tale updated to 50s America and lusciously illustrated, with a nostalgic “innocent art” feel, by Loren Long. In 2004 came Yakov and the Seven Thieves, adapted from another story by the same Ukrainian rabbi, Baal Shem Tov. This one preached that “all of us have the ability to unlock the gates of Heaven—no matter how unworthy we think we are.” There was also Arabian Nights–inspired The Adventures of Abdi, and, in 2005, Lotsa de Casha, a story reflecting on the age-old adage that money doesn’t buy happiness.

  Though eyebrows were raised at the thought of the Sex book heroine writing for children, in some ways Madonna wasn’t taking a huge leap. Some of her songwriting is in a nursery-rhyme style, and woven through her music is a sense of childlike innocence—whether it’s “Dear Jessie” on Like a Prayer, or “Mother and Father” on American Life. Sometimes her lyrics are clumsy, as if English is her second language, as though she’s keeping it simple for the mass demographic—“Impressive Instant” from the Music album being a case in point.

  As theorist Roland Barthes once wrote about pop music in “On Popular Music,” “The music, as well as the lyrics, tends to affect such a children’s language…[like] repetition…the limitation of many melodies to very few tones, comparable to the way in which a small child speaks before he has the full alphabet at his disposal…also certain over-sweet sound colors, functioning like musical cookies and candies.”

  Madonna is great at “simple.” As she told producer Guy Sigsworth, “I do simple really well.” But while this works in her songwriting, her artless approach to children’s books isn’t quite so effective. She tells the tales in a straightforward, rather dry way, interrupting the flow at points with self-conscious humorous asides. Although they have sold moderately well, the critical reception has been muted. “I found them too moralistic, too obvious,” says Wendy Cooling. “I suspect if they’d been [written] by anyone else, other than Madonna, they wouldn’t have seen the light of day. They don’t read aloud terribly well. A book for young children has to have a kind of rhythm and an element of surprise.”

  Children’s expert Julia Eccleshare agrees: “Her books are very message-ridden. These celebrities think that writing a children’s book should be easy. It isn’t that simple. It’s like trying to hit a moving target. Charlotte’s Web, for instance, [is] a story about a pig and a spider. Who’d have thought that would become a classic? But it has a lot of humanity and warmth, and the story drives along in an exciting way.” By the time Too Good to Be True, Madonna’s 2006 sequel to The English Roses, appeared, various celebrities, from Fergie, Duchess of York, to Julie Andrews and Kylie Minogue, had tried their hand at children’s literature. “Childhood is the new nirvana. Being a good parent is part of celebrity status,” remarks Eccleshare. “Also with Madonna we get the sense of strong messages she wants to convey.”

  As well as the Kabbalah themes and the promotion of Spirituality for Kids, the underlying message in Madonna’s children’s stories was one of retreat, a nostalgia for stability, tradition, and family values. This was strikingly expressed in her next persona, the Lady of the Manor.

  16

  AMERICAN WIFE

  UP AN ANCIENT ROMAN ROAD ALONG THE ROUTE TO Salisbury from Winchester, on top of a hill near Cranborne Chase, the valleys and rolling hills of a Wiltshire countryside are in full, decadent bloom. Down a steep path, past bald signs that say KEEP DOGS ON LEASH, a tree-lined path opens, giving way to rearing pens for pheasants and partridges. Game is everywhere, primed for shooting. The turrets of a house are nestled behind a screen of trees. A black ornamental gate and fence protect a sloping garden filled with more rearing pens.

  Ashcombe House is a modest red-brick country manor with a brown roof and bedrooms tucked in the eaves. It exudes a reassuring, cozy, storybook air—seeming completely private, but then not. Madonna’s back garden skirts a public right of way.

  A path from the house leads down to the village of Tollard Royal, comprised of a few cottages and a pub called the King John Inn, run with flair by an attractive brunette, Michelle Birks. “Madonna used to come in here for a pint. Not so much now,” she says tersely. The pub interior is dark wood and crushed velvet, with a photo montage on the walls of themed Rocky Horror party nights. It has the same 1970s bikers’ feel as pubs on the Isle of Man. In the country, nothing changes.

  In August 2005, Madonna was featured in U.S. Vogue sitting astride a horse, wearing tweed and jodhpurs, leaning down to put one arm around Guy, who stood in front of her in his flat cap and country woolens. She also appeared in twinset and pearls, feeding the hens, blond hair coiffed like a 1930s American heiress. “Speaking in carefully modulated tones…making polite but distracted small talk, she has the air of an Edwardian dollar princess—the moneyed American belles who were married off to impecunious British nobles in the golden age,” wrote Vogue’s Hamish Bowles.

  The magazine displayed photographs of the interior of her £9 million country home, Ashcombe House, former residence of 1930s society photographer and diarist Cecil Beaton. Madonna and Guy bought the house when it came on the market a few years before. Initially, Guy was the one eager to buy a rural retreat. “Guy has always wanted to live in the countryside,” said Madonna. “He’s the country person,
not me. He loves nature and animals.” Loves animals so much, in fact, that he wants to shoot them. Propelled by boyhood memories of Loton Park, his stepfather Sir Michael Leighton’s estate on the Welsh borders, Guy has always been passionate about hunting and fishing. “We did a couple of days in West Yorkshire. Fantastic birds—150 feet high, at least. We were stood in this deep valley. These birds were seriously high—fucking fantastic shooting,” he once said. “But I’m out for the craic as much as anything. All I want is seven mates to go and have a scream with.” He realizes that not everybody approves. “If I was an outsider looking in, I would not approve…. I would think everything about it was Machiavellian and slightly macabre,” he admitted.

  For Madonna, country life offered a fantasy escape. In the Vogue article, she waxed lyrical about the romance of Ashcombe; how it “has something very mystical about it…in the summertime it’s the most beautiful place in the world.” She talked with glee about the Cecil Beaton–style parties she hosted, weekends of folly where she created a makeshift stage and invited all her friends to stay. “We put red velvet curtains up. Gwyneth and Stella and Chris composed a song together, which was brilliant—a spoof on ‘American Life,’ only they called it ‘American Wife,’” laughed Madonna. Tracey Emin and well-groomed art consultant Zoe Manzi wrote a poem and recited it, while Sting played the lute and Trudie read a Shakespearean sonnet. Madonna herself performed a bawdy scene from a 1930s mock-Restoration play The Town Wench or Chastity Rewarded. There was something slightly cloying about this charade, as if Madonna was playing dress-up with her self-congratulatory friends.

  But deep within there was also a wish for artistic tranquility. “You can choose to go there to work in a very undistracted way…or you can go there and get lost in the environment,” she said of Ashcombe. “You feel protected because you’re sunk into that valley, and as far as the eye can see you can’t see another house. It’s a kind of buffer against the world.” The snag was, her private world abutted a very public right of way. There was consternation among local people when shortly after the couple moved in, they tried to restrict the use of the public footpath. In 2004, she partly won her attempt to prevent ramblers from walking across the estate. A planning inspector ruled that the public should not be granted access to much of the land under “right to roam” legislation.

  “It was a source of some interest to us in the profession as to why the path hadn’t been identified during the legal process,” says Adrian Neale, an estates manager based nearby in Winchester. “Diverting a public right of way has to be done through the county council, and it’s difficult, time-consuming, and costly.” Outweighing the problem of the public footpath, though, was the quality of the 1,200 acres of land attached to the house. It is an optimum site for game shooting. “It’s a trophy estate. The topography is perfect, with low valleys and high ridges,” says an insider. “Guy Ritchie takes his shooting seriously. He buys a day at a premier shooting venue and travels around the country. He and his party are very demanding, apparently.”

  Madonna embraced her husband’s hobbies. “I see England as my home. I now know how to ride. I know how to shoot. I know how to fish,” she said proudly. She hosted shooting parties, with guests including Vinne Jones, Marco Pierre White, and notorious pro-hunter A. A. Gill, who once wrote in GQ magazine of deer-stalking and “that heavy, delicious, repellent scent of cud and blood.” He posed with a gutted stag strewn over his Land Rover like a fashion accessory, his hunting partner proudly wearing blood from the deer entrails like a bizarre face pack. It reminded me of having tea in the home of a wealthy woman who frequently went hunting with her husband. Her drawing room was impeccable, with expensive drapes, antique furniture, and silver cutlery. Which made it all the more strange to see the arrangement of splattered and dismembered fox carefully attached to her beautiful wallpaper. This was the mind-set that Madonna was welcoming into her life.

  In October 2005, she was listed tenth in Country Life magazine’s “Power 100 of the Countryside.” At a time when the Countryside Alliance was fighting the Anti-Hunting Bill that was passed through Parliament, Madonna was being feted as one of the most powerful figures in rural Britain. “She successfully fought access legislation that affected her privacy, her participation in shooting helped boost the rural economy, and her foray into the world of riding…will surely provide a welcome fillip to an equine industry increasingly beset by health and safety…legislation,” declared the magazine.

  This was a perplexing incarnation for Madonna fans, particularly British ones. The United Kingdom is still a class-based society with a wealthy monarchy and landowning aristocracy. Unlike most other European countries, Britain is not a republic. Despite decades of re-branding, marketing, and selling off country estates piecemeal to the “nouveau riche,” there is a lingering feudal mentality, a sense of “us and them.” In becoming the rarefied Lady of the Manor, Madonna transmuted from “us” into “them,” she was the “toff” swanking it over the “plebs.” To those who loved her meritocratic rise from New York City streets through club culture and cutting-edge pop, this adoption of such a conservative persona seemed like betrayal.

  “Madonna has little to add and nowhere to go as a cultural radical. She could genuinely embrace oppositional politics to mark herself as definitively radical in the early twenty-first century, but has instead embraced the trappings of an English aristocratic lifestyle,” wrote cultural theorist Sean Albiez. “She thinks she the Queen of England,” remarked her former backup singer Niki Haris. “The difference in her voice from, say, the Blond Ambition era and now is marked,” agrees UK voice expert and acting coach Louise Kerr. “Her voice now is fuller, less nasal, more ‘trained.’ She has gone from being American (which is a classless society) to identifying with a class that doesn’t resonate with the fan base. People don’t aim to be part of the aristocracy.”

  An American fan expressed to me dismay at her “elitism,” at the way she appeared to turn her back on the United States. The unease at Madonna’s Lady of the Manor persona has historical foundation. Many of those aristocratic country estates were the result of ill-gotten gains from the eighteenth-century slave trade in the Caribbean. This aspect of history has been obscured, now that the days of the big houses like Blenheim, Chatsworth, and Longleat are over. The countryside is no longer dominated by the rigid hierarchy that Robert Altman so precisely pictured in his 2001 film Gosford Park. The old landowners are gradually being replaced by a new breed of city businessmen and “high net-worth individuals,” but this breed is just as interested in protecting its financial assets. Madonna is not the only one buying up land—she is in the company of bands and musicians like Genesis, Sting, and former Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour. “Those rock stars who’ve made it earn a lot of money. It’s not just the purchase price of a country estate, they need to be pretty wealthy to run it thereafter,” says Neale. “You have to afford the staff to upkeep these listed properties. There’s also the farming, which is not particularly profitable, and capital-intensive, plus gamekeeping, etc. Still, it’s regarded as a bit of a trophy.”

  It is also a serious piece of investment. Madonna’s move to the United Kingdom takes on a new light when one considers that “for overseas buyers, the United Kingdom is regarded as a very secure place to live. They can freely move their money in and out of the United Kingdom without fear of government interference through taxes.” This has provoked a reaction with some of the old guard. “There’s great sadness from long-standing country folk at seeing the great estates being broken up,” says Neale. “There’s a feeling that the asset breakup has tipped over into new money, into countryside, with these ‘outsiders’ coming in. But you can’t pickle a rural property in aspic and expect it not to change.”

  Madonna has talked about meeting Prince Charles. She was very amused at the way he flung his lettuce around at dinner. Maybe eating with royalty was proof that she had made it. The question is, can a wild-card pop star really buy her way into the
British upper class? “It’s entirely possible. It takes about two minutes. The British upper class is very keen on money,” asserts cultural commentator Peter York. “All you need is a flattering tongue, some money, a house, and someone to organize parties for you. Any sensible duke will come and drink your good wine.”

  There has long been a history of rock ’n’ rollers, from Mick Jagger to Bryan Ferry, hobnobbing with the gentry. For York, the issue is why “any intelligent, self-starting human being would want to do that. But it is a fact that quite confident, achieved, and modern people do find certain aspects of the British upper class rather attractive. We’re not talking about the stuffy older end. They like the idea of louche, rather beautiful people who can do what they want. It’s like being a pop star without groveling on the dole at the beginning. What the upper class have is a way of life legitimized and proven by centuries, therefore it can’t go wrong. A lot of these stars are aspirational, they know what the good stuff is, and go for it with a sort of homing instinct.” Marrying ex-prep-school Guy Ritchie was a wise move. “With him she didn’t just have an entree, she had a permanent conduit.”

  The other location for Madonna’s bespoke British lifestyle is her town house in London’s Marble Arch. “London is now the biggest metropolitan area for the international rich, more so than New York,” says York, sitting in his well-appointed abode a few streets away from Madonna’s. He points out of the window. “If you were to throw a brick out of here, you think you’d hit a nice, sensible British person behind these Regency facades. Well, you wouldn’t. There’s a sweet French investment banker there. Two gentlemen sharing there, one Swiss, one German. An Italian restaurateur. A French hedge-fund dealer. In South Kensington, it’s all French Eurotrash. And here there are so many Americans because it’s near the American embassy. This city is very receptive to everybody, and it’s now at the pinnacle of its decadent multiculturalism. Madonna chose to be here. It’s actually very clever of her.” York saw her one evening at the nearby members-only club Home House. “She was small and not very noticeable—like a tiny little Victorian wax doll stuck up on cushions.”