Madonna

by Lucy O'Brien

  For Madonna, London was a place she had to learn to love. “I never thought in a million years I’d live in London. In fact, I quite disliked the place for a while,” she said. “When I started out as a singer, the press was so terrible to me…. So this was always a city I’d get in and out of as quickly as possible. Then I met my husband…. He was a filmmaker, working mostly in London. It just seemed like it was my move to make, which I did. Then I just fell in love with London. If I was in America for a while, I’d begin to really miss [it]…. It’s funny the way things turned out.” U.K. tax laws, which favor the superrich, also probably helped to ease the way. Since the late 90s, London in particular has become “the world’s conduit of choice for private wealth.” As Guardian writer James Meek says, “Its generous treatment of the mega-rich, particularly those born abroad, makes it in some ways a virtual tax haven.”

  By 2004, Madonna was overhauling her business empire. Six years earlier, she had “let go” of her manager Freddy DeMann with a reputed $25 million payoff. Complaining that he worked her too hard and made her tour too often, she hired female managers (first her former secretary Caresse Henry, and then for her “Semtex Girl” management team, “Semtex Girl” Angela Becker), who, she felt, were more sympathetic to her needs. “I consider my manager to be one of my best friends,” she said of Becker. “I like to keep people around me that I’ve known a long time. I have lots of surrogate mothers!” Once DeMann was out of the picture, she encountered problems with Maverick, the label that she had set up with such high expectations in 1991. A former partner in the company, DeMann had been a steady influence, and his exit coincided with a downturn in the label’s fortunes.

  From its inception, Madonna regarded Maverick as more than a vanity label. Taking her CEO role seriously, she and partner Guy Oseary worked hard on the A&R front, spending a lot of time wooing and recruiting acts. Her most successful signing was Alanis Morissette, the Canadian singer/songwriter, whose 1995 debut Jagged Little Pill went on to sell 30 million worldwide. Although Morissette told me that the album was “written from a desperate, dark, almost pathetically sad place within my subconscious,” her anthem-like tales of survival and revenge struck a chord. Like Carole King’s Tapestry in the 1970s, Jagged Little Pill captured the feelings of a female generation. “She reminds me of myself when I was young,” Madonna had said indulgently. And Morissette’s manager Scott Welch picked up on this during her first world tour, saying, “I saw the same thing with Madonna. The girls caught on first, and it was mainly women at her gigs. Then they brought their boyfriends along, and the thing went mainstream.”

  Although Madonna did well with other Maverick acts, such as the Prodigy, Seattle grunge band Candlebox, and singer/songwriter Michelle Branch, her label never repeated the spectacular success of that Morissette debut. The latter’s follow-up albums—Confessions of a Former Infatuation Junkie (1998) and So-called Chaos (2004)—were well received but not nearly as popular, with steadily declining sales. Communications between Maverick and its parent company, Warner Bros., grew tense, until in March 2004 Maverick sued the latter for $200 million, claiming breach of contract and fraud. The following month, Warner countersued, saying that since 1999, Maverick had lost $66 million, and as far as they were concerned, the parent company had fulfilled its commitments. That June, the two parties reached a settlement, whereby Warner agreed to buy Madonna out of Maverick, and Guy Oseary took over as the sole CEO. By 2006, Maverick had a considerably lower profile than in the heady days of the early 90s.

  Madonna’s exile from Maverick symbolized her move away from the United States (where the label had its L.A. headquarters), to focus more on family life in Britain. So assimilated was she into the culture that she was often seen drinking a pint with Guy, not just in their London local but on the Isle of Wight, near Southampton, where his father, John, had a holiday home. Like Princess Margaret drinking with the “great unwashed,” Madonna has been spotted in some rather unprepossessing venues in Nettleston, a small place on the northeast coast of the island. “She’s often been in this pub where the lunch ladies from the local school hang out. It’s all sticky Axminster carpets, nasty beer, and Simply Red on the jukebox,” says musician Jake Rodrigues, whose parents live nearby. The pub was a far cry from the Ivy or other exclusive eateries of the stars, but there is a side to Madonna that almost relishes the frugal.

  It has been noted that both she and Guy like a bargain. Careful about cash, Madonna was reluctant to pay the going rate for a large house in London, declaring that people want to exploit her celebrity status. “I cannot believe how expensive real estate is here,” she said. “I’m just too middle-class to throw my hard-earned money away like that.” She once had a meeting with an interior designer who gave what she considered to be a reasonable estimate for custom work on her study. “Madonna said no, it was too expensive. But what she wanted was very expensive!” says the designer. “I found her to be a bit of a spoiled brat, actually.” Inside Madonna still beats the heart of a thrifty girl from hardworking Michigan. She is said to sign every single check herself, which, considering all her various projects and households, is quite a feat. She has an eye for detail: one musician who had been well paid for a session was amused to later receive a bill for the fruit he’d eaten in the studio. Once she was asked to model a designer’s clothes from the Paris collection for a magazine. She said yes, on the condition that she gets to keep the clothes. The designer’s staff demurred, saying, ahem, the models will later need them to wear on the runway. “In that case I won’t do it,” she declared. Madonna always keeps her eye on the bottom line. In her early days struggling in New York, she would let other people pay out first, and that became a survival tactic that stuck. Like many wealthy businesspeople who’ve worked their way up, she still feels the urge to scrimp and save.

  Madonna is often kind, generous, and gracious (she has donated large sums of money to AIDS charities, for instance), but when it comes to business or dealing with hired hands, she is more hard-line.

  Times journalist Ginny Dougary was dismayed when Madonna imperiously told off an assistant before even acknowledging Ms. Dougary’s presence. “It’s one thing to be epater le bourgeois when you’re twenty-something, but it is neither cool nor classy—both of which Madonna aspires to be—for a grown-up woman in her forties to humiliate a member of her staff in front of a stranger. And, for that matter, it’s a pretty poor display of manners to the stranger, too.”

  This graceless, materialistic side seems at odds with the Kabbalah teachings of compassion and spiritual development. But, in the same way that people joked about 80s Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism as “chanting for a Porsche,” there is a strain of the Kabbalah Center philosophy that celebrates material gain. By 2003, the center was a vast nonprofit, tax-exempt charity with assets of approximately $60 million. In 2005, its L.A. center alone grossed $27 million. The head of the charity, Karen Berg, is a woman with a taste for real estate, designer clothes, and a domestic staff of forty full-time volunteers—or chevra. “They look after my lifestyle, which is great for me!” she enthused.

  Regular Friday-night shindigs at the center in Beverly Hills are also networking opportunities for the well-connected. Madonna’s friend, the songwriter Gardner Cole, noted with bemusement how he was courted by Kabbalists after he was seen talking to her at the center. “I’m highly recruitable,” he says. “They recognize the power of celebrity. I got a lot of phone calls after that—How’re you doing? How are your studies going?” Niki Haris saw a shift in her boss after the latter developed an interest in Kabbalah, saying, “Madonna used to laugh at the absurdity of celebrity-ism. But then she only wanted to hang around celebrities and people with money.” A close friend from New York remarks that “I don’t see her so much now. Her friends are mainly those also into Kabbalah.”

  With her life revolving around Kabbalah, Guy, and the children, Madonna was less in touch with the rest of the Ciccone family. Relations with her siblings haven’t always b
een easy—Madonna has said that their mother’s death left them all “emotional cripples”—and they are ambivalent about their sister’s fame. Madonna’s sister Paula, for instance, was incensed when video editor Dustin Robertson came to work in her film production office wearing a Madonna T-shirt. “She refused to work with me until I took it off,” he recalls. The loss of their mother so early has affected them in different ways. Some dealt with it by channeling their feelings into work—Melanie is a music business manager, while Christopher has a multifarious career as an artist, interior designer, and restaurateur. But other siblings have had difficulties. Madonna’s older brother Martin has struggled with alcoholism, and his relationship with her is fraught. Her half-brother Mario, once described by a family friend as “a lovely little guy who was great with video equipment,” is a former cocaine addict with a police record. Although she had bailed them out on a number of occasions, Madonna felt exasperated with her brothers, particularly Martin. She once said that she wanted to feel that the latter loved her and not just her money.

  MAYBE KABBALAH was just one aspect of a significant change in Madonna’s life—that marriage and motherhood were bringing out a conservative side.

  Madonna has homes in Los Angeles and New York, but when she settled in London with her family, there was a sense of hunkering down. Apart from anything, it made financial sense. According to James Meek, “The fact that many of the wealthiest ‘British’ residents actually reside everywhere and nowhere, between London and Moscow or Monaco…deflects attention from a deeper truth—that often the thing which most concerns the very rich is time, rather than geography. Their only true domicile is their own family.” To Madonna, her family is a top priority. Determined that her offspring should stay in one place and socialize with other children in a normal way, she has sent both Lola and Rocco to the Lycée, a prestigious French school in South Kensington. Nancy Andersen, who was at school with Lola, remembers her as “very nice and quite quiet. There was no favoritism. If she was talking in class she would get told off. Teachers would tell us to leave her alone and not bother her because she had a famous mother. They said, ‘She’s normal, like you.’”

  Nancy has a strong memory of Lola getting a lead part in a school circus production. “It was when she was about five. She was playing a cactus on stilts. She wore a green outfit with straw sticking out like spikes, and at one point all the straw came out.” Discipline at the Lycée is strict, and the workload intensive. “All the lessons were in French. If you don’t understand, the teachers don’t help you, they expect you to know it,” remembers Nancy. The school is popular, with impressive results and a certain cosmopolitan flair. One parent recalls that “The headmistress of the upper school was a creation in Dior. She had platinum blond hair, like Eva Peron, and a ferocious reputation. The school had a swap-meet every year, but instead of old rubbish they’d be selling off £80 plates.”

  The school’s combination of rigorous work and Continental style appealed to Madonna; “after all, I’m half-French,” she once said. As far as her children’s education was concerned, she was leaving nothing to chance. Even as a preschooler, Lola was being whisked by her nanny around London art galleries and museums, and she has always been precociously bright. After her stint at the Lycée, she was sent to Cheltenham Ladies College, the most academic and prestigious private school for girls in the United Kingdom. Her brother Rocco, too, has flourished at the Lycée, being moved up a school year when he was six.

  An attentive mother, Madonna has always tried to be home in time to give supper to the children and put them to bed. Following in her disciplinarian father’s footsteps, she believes in rituals and routines, and providing a strong, nurturing family environment. She has come a long way from those days in New York when ex-boyfriend Mark Kamins noted that “she wasn’t a homemaker.”

  In the summer of 2005, Madonna showed this new domestic side when she was featured on the cover of the woman’s bible of Middle America, Ladies’ Home Journal, wearing a dove-gray top hat, Marlene Dietrich–style, and reading a book. The photo shoot within, taken by U.K. photographer Lorenzo Agius, was inspired. Here was “Mrs. Ritchie,” got up like a starched Edwardian lady, reading antiquarian books in a dark library. Here was “Mrs. Ritchie,” in black chiffon and leather lace-up boots, wearing a small black confection of a hat and a monocle. And here was “Mrs. Ritchie,” in velvet and tweed, lounging in a crusty brown armchair. She inhabited a bookish world of magic realism, miles away from the usual glitzy studio shoots.

  “When we were planning the shoot, she was exhausted with the kids, she’d been recording, and she just came across as a very ordinary person going about her day as a mother. It’s nice to see that side to someone; I warmed to that,” recalls Agius. Madonna said she didn’t want to do a fashion shoot—“she doesn’t really like fashion, but she obviously loves clothes”—so Agius decided to have her dress up period-style and pose in a “fairy-tale kind of children’s book setting.” After weeks hunting for the perfect Harry Potter library location, they ended up at a prop house in the London suburbs, which had an eighteenth-century Spanish library installed in it.

  “She loved it,” recalls Agius. “But it was interesting, because when we started shooting, she said, ‘What are we going to do?’ It was a bit of a surprise that she needed direction and guidance. I mistakenly assumed that someone that experienced, doing it for twenty-odd years, working with the best photographers in the world, would instinctively know, but that was my mistake. We were trying to get something different, not for her to be Vogueing or hamming it up in front of the camera.”

  Agius said to her, “Just kind of pose, just act…” to which Madonna replied, as quick as a flash, “Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it.” They had fun with the shoot, but the most abiding memory Agius has of the day is that Madonna is not just street-smart, but intelligent. “I laid this massive book out for her, a religious book in Hebrew, and she was reading it. She’s pretty impressive, very well-read.” This twilight world of antique books and mahogany tables seemed to chime with her psyche. The pictures symbolized how far removed she felt at that point from the shiny world of current pop.

  BUT MADONNA’S pattern has never been straightforward. Once the children’s books, the house in the country, the cozy marriage were all in place, something happened to disrupt it. On August 16, 2005, her forty-seventh birthday, she was riding a new polo horse on her Wiltshire estate when the animal stumbled and hurled her to the ground. She suffered three cracked ribs, a broken collarbone, and a broken hand. She was rushed to the casualty department at nearby Salisbury District Hospital. According to a source, “Madonna’s voice was shaking when she gave her name and date of birth. She was wearing her riding gear and was trembling. And she was obviously in a lot of pain, but she was lucid.” Guy wasn’t there when she had her accident, but drove to the hospital as soon as he heard, arriving about ten minutes later, “looking very worried.”

  Madonna was given a private room and discharged that night with an armory of painkillers. She was told to rest up, and that she couldn’t dance or do yoga for three months, until her injuries had healed. The accident literally stopped Madonna in her tracks. “It was the most painful thing that ever happened to me in my life, but it was a great learning experience,” she said later. Over the next few months, that brush with mortality seemed to subtly change her. In the Ladies’ Home Journal, she talked about her life, saying, “Marriage is hard. [It’s] a tool for each and every one of us to ultimately make the world a better place.” She described in detail the discipline regimen she followed with her kids—how if Lola was messy with her clothes, she got them taken away until she learned to tidy up. “I’m the disciplinarian. Guy’s the spoiler…I’m doctor’s appointments, lessons, homework. I’m the boring one.” She talked quietly, relentlessly, about the minutiae of her life. “We eat dinner at nine or nine thirty; my husband [it’s always “my husband,” never “Guy”—L. O.] does ju-jitsu and doesn’t finish u
ntil then, which is irritating. We eat dinner late, we go to bed late, I get up early—not a lot of sleep goes on here. I don’t see a lot of my girlfriends.” She said that she just stayed at home and worked. “I hardly ever go out to parties, or even to restaurants.” This, it seemed, was a Madonna in retreat. And some wondered if that was the end of her story as queen of pop.

  17

  ABBA ON DRUGS

  A MONTH AFTER THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED, MADONNA began to reemerge. As the bones healed, she felt the urge to get out in public again. And with an extraordinary volte-face, she pulled the show girl out once more. The Lady of the Manor period and her riding accident had left her emotionally cautious and artistically becalmed. She was about to return, and, as it always had been, she found her way back through music…

  “After the accident she was forced to lie low for several months. Then, when she came out, it was like a bullet from a gun,” says a close friend of Madonna’s. All that pent-up energy was expressed on her new album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, a seamless mix of club tracks recorded with her DJ/producer Stuart Price. The album was conceived after the ReInvention tour, when Madonna had scrapped plans for a musical she had been working on with film director Luc Besson. One element survived, however: a disco section where Madonna told Price to do something that “sounded like ABBA on drugs.” That was “Hung Up,” the opening track and first single from the album, which liberally sampled from ABBA’s 1970s disco hit “Gimme Gimme Gimme (a Man After Midnight).”