Madonna

by Lucy O'Brien

There was speculation about the fact that, despite being “transfixed” by little David, Madonna found time to go to the gym and conduct a global publicity tour for her new children’s book, The English Roses: Too Good to Be True. She spoke to the BBC Newsnight anchor Kirsty Wark in a room dressed with drapes and candles; she appeared again on national TV in the United States, inviting talk-show host Regis Philbin to be the godfather of her new son. In an interview with NBC’s Today show, she said: “I didn’t expect to be demonized…. I didn’t expect to be accused of kidnapping or doing something illegal.” She speculated that much of the criticism was motivated by racism, the fact of a rich white woman adopting a black baby. “That’s underneath a lot of people’s prejudice about me adopting David,” she claimed.

  Unrepentant and angry, Madonna seemed unable to retreat from the limelight, thus laying herself open to more condemnation. Fellow celebrity Angelina Jolie felt compelled to comment, saying she was “horrified” by the attacks on Madonna, but then said she would choose children only from countries where adoption rules are clearly defined.

  Madonna didn’t help her case by going on a shopping channel to promote her book. And there was the bizarre paparazzi shot of Madonna jogging in Central Park followed close behind by her nanny running along with David in a pushchair. Guy lambasted Madonna for getting involved with the publicity circus, saying it made it look like the adoption was just about her, rather than their joint decision. Critics said that if Madonna had really wanted privacy, she should have gone to Malawi without the cameras. After all, other stars, like Ewan McGregor and Meg Ryan, had adopted children from overseas and managed to keep it low-profile in the media. This was ignoring the fact that Madonna has always resolved her issues in public. Compelled to seek mass love and attention, yet overly sensitive to criticism, she creates her own vicious cycle. When the BBC’s Kirsty Wark dared to suggest to Madonna that she must find the situation bewildering because she was used to being in control, the star retorted: “I’m a detail-oriented person, [but] I often don’t have things my way. The world’s reaction was quite shocking. There’s no way I could have prepared myself for that.”

  Within weeks, fuel was added to the media fire with rumors that Madonna wanted to adopt another African child, this time a girl. Guy wasn’t thrilled, because he wanted to assimilate David into the family first—but Madonna was on a crusade. “I saw this child in the village, with questioning dark eyes and the saddest smile,” she said. “I thought, ‘She looks just like me.’ I told Guy, ‘We must give this child a home too.’ We may still. The conditions here devastate me.” The adoption was bringing up old traumas from the past, and memories of how she felt abandoned as a child. There seems to be a pattern in the way wealthy menopausal stars like to create their own rainbow tribe—with women like Josephine Baker, Audrey Hepburn, and Mia Farrow embarking on a personal odyssey to save the world’s children. Approaching the end of their “natural” childbearing years, it is as if a menopausal crisis is triggered and projected out into the world. Their urge to create another, bigger family is a way of healing old, long-buried hurts. In solidarity with Madonna, Mia Farrow felt moved to comment: “She’s a wonderful woman and I think that child at least will have every opportunity and I’m happy for the child and for the family.”

  Underlying this issue is the world’s continuous unease with a powerful woman, particularly one who provokes Western anxiety and guilt over global poverty. There is envy of Madonna’s millions, a need to curtail her influence, to cut her down to size. But there is also admiration at the way she pursues her goals and tells the world in the process, dragging the issues that concern her into the open. With the adoption of baby David and her pledge to Malawian orphans, she did more than most pop stars in highlighting the desperate poverty in Africa.

  The twenty-first-century star resurrected that ancient image of Madonna and child, only this time it was in modern form, with modern issues. She had launched a crusade that in time will either backfire on her or lead to her universal respect as a humanitarian. By Christmas 2006, though, she was exhausted and unhappy. There was a Friday-night ceremony at the Kabbalah Center in London to bless David and welcome him into the fold. “Guy was there, looking jowly and comfortable, with Rocco on his shoulders. Lola was talking loudly and running around, like the precocious free spirit she is,” remarked a friend. “But Madonna sat on her own, with David. She was gracious, but she did not look happy. She seemed kind of isolated.” The media frenzy had taken its toll.

  At this point, a defensive Madonna felt that even her closest friends had let her down. She had clashed with Stella McCartney, in particular, over the animal rights issue. A fan of fur, Madonna upset Stella when in 2001 she wore a £1,000 Philip Treacy fox fur hat. Then, in the December after her adoption of David, she was pictured coming out of Cecconi’s restaurant in London’s Mayfair wearing a £35,000 coat made out of forty chinchillas. This, plus the fact that Madonna and Guy regularly rented out their Wiltshire estate to shooting parties, was too much for Stella. They exchanged some frank words, with the result that from the New Year 2007, Madonna agreed not to have shooting parties at their country house. This decision was also affected by complaints from local residents saying that birds from the shoot were flying into high-voltage power lines and causing power outages in the area. She must have been aware that the image of a caring, spiritual Madonna didn’t quite fit with wearing real fur and killing birds. “Someone in Madonna’s position should act more responsibly,” said Mary Brady, of the Animal Rights Coalition. Once more, Madonna felt the heat of public disapproval.

  It had been a year of career highs and emotional turmoil. She had a bestselling album and tour, but also personal struggle in her marriage and an ongoing battle over the adoption of David. By the New Year, she had called it quits. For the moment. Guy and Madonna renewed their wedding vows in a low-key ceremony at their home in Wiltshire and then went to an island in the Indian Ocean over Christmas. “I don’t usually go on vacation but it was great,” said Madonna. “But with three kids, you need a vacation to get over the vacation!” She sounded settled and renewed, but already an edginess was creeping in. It turned out that for much of the holiday Madonna had worked out furiously in the gym, while Guy took the children to the beach. Not a fan of the sun, because she didn’t want to risk the wrinkles, Madonna often stayed indoors. On a deeper level, she and Guy were drifting back to more separate lives. After the brief patch of harmony during the adoption crisis, former difficulties resurfaced, and they began having verbal battles in public.

  Rebelling against Madonna’s controlling behavior, Guy went out drinking, shooting, and fishing with his friends. She would call his drinking haunts, looking for him, wanting to know when he was coming home. Often he would turn off his mobile phone. In trying to prove that he was his own man, Guy was going overboard. “Guy is really tough on her. He won’t let her get away with anything,” said a friend. “It’s not good news. It’s as if he thinks it’s his duty to put her in her place every now and again. She just gets tired of it sometimes. She wishes he was nicer to her.” Both desperately wanted to make the marriage work, because of the children, but it was under strain. She was homesick and wanted to move back to New York, whereas he wanted to stay in London and not disrupt the children’s schooling. They put on a brave face in January, when they went as a family to the opening of Arthur and the Invisibles, a Luc Besson animation, in which Madonna was the voice of Princess Selenia. Although she clung on to Guy as if for dear life, it was rumored that she was privately considering plans to move back to New York, with or without him. And she was plowing on with her career: designing a collection for Swedish fashion giant H&M, producing a documentary about Malawi, starting work on her next record. In April 2007, she went into the studio with the two hottest names in the business—Justin Timberlake and Timbaland—to create a “hip-hop inspired” album. She also directed her first short movie, a low-budget comedy called Filth and Wisdom. And she found time to go back to
Malawi with David, so the little boy could see his father again. Despite previous criticism from aid agencies there, many Malawians welcomed Madonna back as their heroine.

  As Madonna sings in her song “Jump,” there was too much to do, too much life to live, and never, ever, did she intend to stay in one place when she had learned from it all she could.

  WHAT NOW for the icon, as she approaches fifty? “Madonna’s over it now. She’d say she isn’t, because she has to, but she is,” says her video editor Dustin Robertson. “How can she say good-bye? How can she let go of all this? It’s an epic process to go through for the woman, the artist, the icon. Let alone to watch from the sidelines, as we all surely will.” Maybe Madonna will move further into the political arena, using the power that she has with her mass audience. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is one of the few women alive that she looks up to, and Madonna makes no secret of her friendship with Hillary’s husband, Bill, and other prominent Democratic activists, like Michael Moore. Madonna’s Raising Malawi campaign has raised her consciousness to such an extent that we could expect her, Bono-style, to become more involved in the global campaign against poverty. In July 2007 she appeared at the global Live Earth event, and released the charity record Hey You for the campaign. In the 80s and 90s, her goal was to liberate women. Now, it seems, she wants to be part of liberating the world.

  “People underestimated me, didn’t they?” she said in 2006. “They thought that what I was doing in the 1990s was all that I was as a woman…. I’m not ashamed of anything I did. But so much of it was coming from a place of anger and defiance, of trying to be in-your-face about feminism. It took Kabbalah for me to see that all of that controversy wasn’t necessary, that women can better send a message of empowerment by the example of living their lives in a good way…what they do with their time on this planet.” Traditionally, a woman in her fifties was seen as “past it,” no longer useful to society. The best she could do was wind up her work and retire gracefully to look after the extended family. Now more and more women are reaching key career positions at fifty, and making a major cultural impact in the world. Female heads of state today include German chancellor Angela Merkel; Finnish president Tarja K. Halonen; Luisa Diogo, the prime minister of Mozambique; and Helen Clark, prime minister of New Zealand. Back in the early 1980s, a slogan we liked was “The Future Is Female,” if only because that seemed a distant dream. Maybe Madonna sees that in the political world, that is where the real power lies. Maybe, like her old flame Warren Beatty, she will even seek the presidential nomination from the Democratic Party.

  Even if it isn’t overtly political, Madonna will always have a public role. A huge collector of visual art, she once said that when she was “very, very old,” she would like to be like Peggy Guggenheim, a patron of artists. Madonna has always had the ability to draw a wide range of people under her wing. According to cultural theorist Andrew Ross, she functions “like what environmentalists call a charismatic mega-fauna: a highly visible, and lovable, species, like the whale or the spotted owl, in whose sympathetic name entire ecosystems can be protected and safeguarded through public patronage.”

  The world Madonna lives and breathes is her art. There is no doubt she will continue to make music—but where will she go as an artist? She would hate to become a parody of her former self, like her heroines Mae West and Marlene Dietrich, wobbling onto the stage at eighty in a wig and heavy makeup, singing “Like a Virgin.” In her fifties, will she still be trying to defeat the aging process? Or will she go within and explore something more artistically radical, as did her dance icon Martha Graham, who, at the age of fifty, choreographed Herodiad, one of her most powerful pieces?

  THERE ARE many parallels between Madonna and her idol. A former Graham dancer, Jane Dudley, has a vivid memory of Graham’s Herodiad performance: “When she performed it, it was unreal…. She would take you into herself in a way that was almost hypnotic.” Madonna has done the equivalent with “Like a Prayer,” with “Justify My Love,” with “Mer Girl,” and “Mother and Father.” And it’s not just those moments of psychodrama that have a transformative power: Madonna still understands the inclusive, celebratory dynamism of dance—from “Into the Groove” to “Vogue” to “Music” and “Hung Up.” She has given her fans a glorious array of images and years of enticing live shows. She will continue to express in her body and her sound what she sees as the zeitgeist. Whatever the outcome, Madonna’s story is long, her influence far-reaching. She was born at a boom time for the Virgin Mary in U.S. Catholicism. She rose to fame in the 80s, when the Virgin was worshipped at shrines throughout the world. And there has been a resurgence of Madonna’s fame during a period of global uncertainty and conflict. In her desire to save Malawi, she is moving beyond the pop world to take on a role of spiritual mother. As fellow pop iconoclast Tori Amos says: “She introduced the new paradigm that the Virgin Mary may have been spiritual and sexual. Whether or not the Madonna of modern times fully understood the implications does not matter; she was christened Madonna and she saw the gift in a song called ‘Like a Virgin.’ It represented the resurrection of the Virgin Mary as a woman. We have long equated spirituality with a denial of the sexual being, but Madonna challenged this.”

  Though flawed and all-too-human, it’s her fearlessness that inspires. Like the icon who originally bore her name, this Madonna is here in perpetuity.

  Book Three

  ABSOLUTION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks first and foremost to Malcolm Boyle, for his love, humor, and inspiration. Huge thanks to my researcher Rob Diament (lead singer/ songwriter of the band Temposhark and an impressive Madonna archivist). His intelligence and enthusiasm inspired me whenever the going got tough. Thanks, too, to my agent, Jane Turnbull, and my editors: Doug Young and Sarah Emsley at Bantam Press, and Mauro DiPreta at HarperCollins U.S. for their belief in the book. Also Robert Sabella, for his support and insight.

  Thanks to the interviewees, all of whom were so generous with their time and their recollections. I was struck by the sheer force of creativity and dynamism of so many who have known and worked with Madonna. There was such a wealth of material that it couldn’t all be included in the book. Thanks, then, to the interviewees, including Edward Acker, Lorenzo Agius, Tori Amos, Nancy Andersen, Camille Barbone, Jimmy Bralower, Gardner Cole, Ginger Canzoneri, Louise Carolin, Wendy Cooling, Andrae Crouch, Andre Betts, Jimmy Bralower, Ingrid Chavez, Pablo Cook, Marie Cooper, Wyn Cooper, Kevin Cummins, Marius De Vries, Kim Drayton, Bill DeYoung, Johnny Dynell, Andy Earle, Julia Eccleshare, Brigitte Echols, Ulrich Edel, Maripol Fauque, Deborah Feingold, James Foley, Geoff Foster, Randy Frank, Bruce Gaitsch, Salim Gauwloos, Jon Gordon, Niki Haris, Ramon Hertz, Richard Hojna, Barney Hoskyns, Antony Jackson, Mark Kamins, Mihran Kirakosyan, Danny Kleinman, Pearl Lang, Alex Magno, Bob Magnussun, Brian McCollum, Melodie McDaniel, Charles Melcher, Bill Meyers, Peter Morse, Rick Nowells, Melinda Patton, Guy Pratt, Princess Julia, Raistalla, Tim Rice, Dustin Robertson, Sandy Robertson, Earle Sebastian, Susan Seidelman, Tony Shimkin, Guy Sigsworth, Peter Sparling, Billy Steinberg, Peggy Vance, Carlton Wilborn, Doug Wimbish, Dick Witts, and Peter York.

  And many thanks to Heather Bradford, Sarah Cheang, Wendy Fonarow, Louise Kerr, Adrian Neale, Susan O’Brien, Daniel Theo, and Jane Turner for their wonderful help with research. Last, but not least, thank you to my family for everything.

  NOTES

  *Unless otherwise indicated, all interviews for this book were conducted by the author in the United Kingdom and United States between 2004 and 2007.

  IITRODUCTION

  “I am…l’art,” The Confessions Tour—Live From London DVD, 2007.

  “Her [eyes]…the room.” Everett, Rupert, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins (Little, Brown, London, 2006), p. 181.

  “has rejoined…the harlot.” Paglia, Camille, Sex, Art, and American Culture (Viking, London & New York, 1992), p. 11.

  “she…secretary to herself.” Mailer, Norman, “Norman Mailer on
Madonna: Like a Lady,” Esquire, August 1994.

  “I haven’t…deserve this?” Price, Richard, “War Over Baby David,” Daily Mail, January 25, 2007.

  “Her most…experience.” From Naked Ambition, UK Channel 4, December 2000.

  1. THE DEATH OF MADONNA

  “My grandparents…with.” Worrell, Denise, “Madonna: Why She’s Hot,” Time, May 27, 1985.

  “She was…facial structure.” Ibid.

  “I was considered…my father.” Ibid.

  “She was…my mother.” Ibid.

  “I remember…better.” Ibid.

  “Sometimes…dark beyond.” Zehme, Bill, “Madonna: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, March 23, 1989.

  “the most frightening…moving.” Bowlby, John, Attachment and Loss, Volume 3, Loss (Pimlico, London, 1998), p. 371.

  “For five years…strangle me.” From Truth or Dare documentary, 1991.

  “compulsive caregiver.” Bowlby, op cit, p. 368.

  “I think…regulations.” Thompson, Douglas, Madonna: Queen of the World (John Blake, London, 2001), pp. 16–17.

  “Mother stands…martyr.” Eichenbaum, Luise, and Orbach, Susie, Understanding Women (Pelican Books, London, 1985) p. 60.

  “It promoted…Jansenist influence.” McBrien, Richard P., Catholicism, 3rd ed. (Geoffrey Chapman, London, 1994) p. 639–40.

  “My mother…in common.” Laskas, Jeanne Marie, “Immaterial girl,” Harpers & Queen, November 2005.

  “Until Christ…beautiful.” Madonna, “Madonna’s Private Diaries,” Vanity Fair, November 1996.

  “It’s a central act…the movies.” Chinnici, Joseph O.F.M., “The Catholic Community at Prayer, 1926–1976,” from O’Toole, James, ed., Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-century America (Cornell University Press, Ithaca & London, 2004), pp. 9–87. 13