Life with My Sister Madonna

by Christopher Ciccone

  She is determined to find a father for her child, and her search becomes a running theme between us. Going to a sperm bank is unthinkable for her, as the press would find out in two minutes flat. She decides to select a man to father her unborn child, whether she marries him or not.

  We come up with the term Daddy Chair. Every now and again I will ask her, “Who’s sitting in the Daddy Chair today?” She requires the ideal Daddy Chair candidate to be smart and good-looking. She has no strictures about race or religion. She just wants a father for her child and is casting around for the perfect fit for the Daddy Chair.

  For a while, Enos is in the running. Then she goes to a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden and fixes on Dennis Rodman—the six-foot-seven basketball player, famous for his tattoos and multicolored dyed hair. The next time she’s interviewed on television, she makes sure to mention how much she wants to meet Rodman. Three months pass, but Rodman doesn’t contact her. My sister isn’t a quitter, so she engineers an assignment to interview Rodman for Vibe and flies down to Miami to meet him.

  In his autobiography, Bad as I Wanna Be, Rodman claims that the moment the interview ended and the photo shoot began, he and Madonna were “just all over each other,” and that they went straight to bed. According to Rodman’s book, she tells him exactly what she wants with no preamble: that he father her child. Along the way, she tells me she’s frustrated by the fact that the NBA schedule doesn’t coincide with her ovulation and that Rodman’s estranged girlfriend still seems a factor. “In any case,” she says, “it’s nice to have to chase someone around for a change.”

  The “estranged girlfriend” turns out not to be estranged from Rodman at all. Her name is Kim and Rodman is double-timing Madonna with her. Nor does Rodman exactly fit into the somewhat louche lifestyle Madonna and I have embraced with so much gusto. We decide to throw a party at the Coconut Grove house to celebrate her birthday. I arrange for Albita to entertain us and also invite a bevy of drag queens: Madame Wu, Damien Divine, Bridgette Buttercup, Mother Kibble—the crème de la crème. Madonna invites her coterie of basketball players, including Rodman.

  As soon as the drag queens flounce into the party, a Capulet/ Montague scenario unfolds. The basketball players turn their backs and stay away from them. The drag queens follow suit. With both factions now firmly ensconced in opposite corners, the party might have passed without incident, except that Madonna and I make what turns out to be the fatal mistake of going inside the house for a few moments. When we come out again, we are met with mass squealing coming from the pool. The basketball players have pushed all the drag queens into the water.

  Eyelashes float on the surface of the pool, wigs bob about in the water, along with all the drag queens, some of whom can’t swim. I dive in and pull a few of them out while Madonna looks on, trying hard not to laugh too loudly.

  Then she throws the basketball players a look. “I don’t think they like drag queens,” she cracks.

  Rodman’s days are numbered, and my sister launches another casting call for the Daddy Chair.

  Soon after, Danny asks to see me. We meet at my New York studio and talk about reconciling. He tells me he wants to fight to save our relationship, and we explore the possibility of getting back together. Then the subject inevitably turns to his financial situation. I feel bad for him, so I give him another $50,000. A few days later, his mother writes to me saying that I owe Danny alimony. I don’t answer her letter. Nonetheless, I still love Danny and am distraught about our breakup.

  I SPEND SOME time in Miami trying to forget, then fly back to New York where I attempt my first one-night stand—safe sex, naturally. I don’t enjoy it. I always have had the sense that when I’m involved with someone, I become a better person. I know I need to be in a relationship. Random anonymous sex leaves me feeling lonelier than before.

  ON APRIL 26, 1994, Madonna: The Girlie Show—Live Down Under is released on home video and laser disc. It will be certified gold, signifying sales of five hundred thousand copies. The following January, Madonna will release her second book, The Girlie Show, for which I took many of the photographs and get paid $100 per photo used. I am beyond caring. Haunted by all my memories of Danny, I find living in New York intolerable, so I move to a duplex in L.A. I have two friends move in with me, as I am not accustomed to living alone anymore—nor do I want to.

  By now, Madonna is focusing on an acting career and doesn’t plan to tour in the near future. Norman Mailer has recently named her “the greatest female living artist,” in Esquire, and she has little left to prove in terms of her music.

  Through Ingrid—who introduces me to Gloria and Emilio Estefan, who both love my work on The Girlie Show—I am offered the opportunity to direct a video for the legendary Cuban performer Albita.

  I have never directed a music video before, but although I’m nervous, I jump at the chance. As always, I relish the challenge of mastering a skill without any help or guidance. So I agree to do the video, and it’s a success.

  AFTER SEEING AN Yves Klein exhibit of anthropometries—body prints of blue-paint-coated nude models made directly on canvas—I persuade my friends to let me paint their bodies, then I press their body parts strategically against my walls and doors. Along the way, during a party at my home, one of my friends pulls his pants down and kneels on Madonna’s prayer bench from Coconut Grove—the one that I gave her and that she discarded, as she generally did most of my presents—and I paint his butt, then press it against the wall. Soon, the walls of my apartment are covered with the imprints of butts. I also decide to take Polaroids of my friends’ backsides.

  I am probably partying harder than I should, a direct result of living in L.A., a city that doesn’t inspire me but has manifold temptations, including, in my case, cocaine.

  I start doing the drug once a week, on Saturday nights, when I might share a gram with four other people, dance my ass off at a club, have a few drinks, then go home to bed. Not a massive amount of coke, but nonetheless I am beginning to form a pattern of destructive behavior.

  Madonna isn’t particularly happy either and sends me a letter in which she sounds surprisingly depressed: “I have no interest in working lately. It’s not like me but I just wanna have fun—read, watch movies, see my friends—what’s happening to me??” Although I don’t tell her, I think her problem is that she hasn’t yet found a suitable candidate for the Daddy Chair.

  IN THE FALL of 1994, Madonna meets Carlos Leon, a personal trainer, in Central Park. Soon after, she asks me to redesign her Manhattan apartment because she is now planning to start a family. Moreover, she tells me that Carlos fits the Daddy Chair perfectly—and that he is an aspiring actor.

  I say, “Great, another actor.”

  “Shut up; he’s sweet,” she says.

  I meet Carlos, and she’s right. He is sweet. He’s also handsome and sexy. But she’s not sure he fulfills the intelligence requirement of the Daddy Chair.

  I meet him, spend time with him, and decide that he is a fish out of water in Madonna’s rarefied world, but he’s far from stupid. Down the line, I will observe him on the red carpet with her, and my misgivings about the permanency of their relationship crystallize.

  I am sure that Madonna has prepared him in advance for being in the spotlight—the screaming, the shoving, the adulation surrounding her. But he is scared and out of his depth. I can also tell that she is rolling all over him, metaphorically speaking. And I find it symbolic that he lags behind her on the red carpet. He allows other people to get physically between him and Madonna and doesn’t stand his ground. He’s a decent guy, but I fear that in the end Madonna’s insatiable need for attention is going to suck the life out of him.

  She has now bought six apartments in the same New York building and joined them together. I design a spiral staircase, add a huge gym, a media room, an additional master suite, and a rose-marble steam room.

  Her relationship with Carlos progresses. In January 1995 we spend a few days in London, whe
re she is singing “Bedtime Story” at the British Music Awards, and I design the set and direct her performance. We build a grid; she stands on it; light, smoke, and air rise up; and her hair blows in the air. She now resembles an angel, soaring through the sky, and she is terrific.

  Soon after, she signs to play Evita in Alan Parker’s movie of the same name. I am delighted for her, as I know she has always dreamed of winning that role, a role I consider ideal for her.

  I have a new boyfriend now, Kamil Salah, a lean and handsome young man of Tartar descent, a salesperson at Prada in Manhattan. For the next two years, we see each other sporadically. Like Carlos, he is really sweet, and Madonna likes him. But, just as she once observed, I need a man who is more his own man, and not overly compliant or obsequious. Kamil sets no boundaries, and I know that they are necessary for me if the relationship is to endure. In the end, the challenge isn’t there, and we split, but remain good friends.

  In mid-2006, I receive a call from Kamil. I know he is about to publish his book, Celebrity Dogs, and I am excited for him. When he calls, my first thought is that he is going to tell me about the plans for the party his publisher is giving for the book launch.

  Instead, he tells me that he has colon cancer and that it has spread to his liver. I am in Miami and take the next plane to New York to go see him. He is clearly terminal, but I do my utmost to talk to him in the most positive terms about his prognosis. We spend two days together, then I have to fly back to Miami for work.

  Two months later, he is dead, at age thirty-one. His book is published posthumously. I attend his funeral in Leesburg, Virginia. At his grave, I meet his grief-stricken parents. Standing by Kamil’s grave, I can’t help thinking about my mother, and some of my other great friends who died in their prime, but above all I think about Kamil, who never had the chance to live out his full potential.

  IN EARLY 1995, I spend a few months staying with Madonna at Castillo del Lago. We wake up one morning to find that a small, silk, red-and-blue Persian rug, worth around $5,000, is missing. I check the house and find that a door has been jimmied open.

  I’ve told Madonna so many times that she needs security, but she has always ignored me. This morning’s theft of the rug, however, has proved me right.

  “Madonna, we’ve had a break-in, and someone has stolen the Persian rug. At least that’s all they took, and nothing else. You really do need security,” I tell her firmly.

  “No, we haven’t had a break-in,” she says. “It was a ghost that took it.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, I’m serious.” And she is. “I keep hearing weird sounds at night. This house is haunted.”

  I tell her she’s crazy, that she needs security, but she keeps insisting that she doesn’t. Her rationale is based partly on finances and partly on not wanting someone around her all the time. Unfortunately, it turns out that I was right.

  ON APRIL 7, 1995, while I am in New York working on the apartment, Liz calls me and tells me that a stalker, an ex-burglar named Robert Dewey Hoskins, has been caught at Castillo del Lago. He is utterly obsessed with Madonna and, a few months before, hung around her gate, left her a letter saying, “I love you. You will be my wife for keeps,” and threatened her with certain death if she refused to marry him. This freaks Madonna out so much that she finally hires a security guard.

  This time around, Hoskins jumped a security wall and was shot in the arm and pelvis by Madonna’s newly hired security guard, Basil Stephens.

  Fortunately, she wasn’t at Castillo that day.

  I call her immediately and ask her if she is okay.

  She tells me she is, and I am vastly relieved.

  I’m happy when she tells me that from now on she will have security 24-7.

  THE CASE AGAINST Hoskins comes to court, and to Madonna’s horror and mine the judge decrees that Hoskins can remain in court when Madonna gives evidence against him. Her attorney, Nicholas DeWitt, has done his best to have Hoskins expelled from the court while Madonna gives evidence because, in his words, “Mr. Hoskins really wants one thing in this case more than anything else. He wants to see the fear he has instilled in her.”

  I agree, but after Hoskins’s attorney, John Myers, claims that Hoskins has a constitutional right to face Madonna in court, asserting, “He’s entitled to be in the courtroom, just like in any other case,” Madonna’s proposal that she give her evidence on video is rejected out of hand.

  The following day, she takes the witness stand against her stalker. I feel really bad for her. She looks justifiably tense and nervous, but is determined not to betray her fear to the loathsome Hoskins, and I am thankful that she succeeds.

  “I feel sick to my stomach. I feel incredibly distressed that the man who threatened my life is sitting across from me and has somehow made his fantasies come true. I’m sitting in front of him and that’s what he wants,” she says, and wisely closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to meet Hoskins’s gaze.

  In court, where Hoskins is charged with one count of stalking, three of making terrorist threats, and one of assault, Basil Stephens testifies that he has seen many people attempt to scale Castillo del Lago and come face-to-face with Madonna, but that Hoskins was different.

  According to Basil Stephens, Hoskins was determined, fearless, and refused to leave the property. Evidence is put forward that Robert Hoskins had come to Castillo del Lago three times in two months, and that he twice scaled the walls and sprinted through the grounds.

  Fearless in the extreme, according to Basil Stephens, Hoskins had said that if Stephens didn’t give Madonna his note, he would kill him. Then Hoskins went further and issued his chilling threat: “Tell Madonna I’ll either marry her or kill her. I’ll slit her throat from ear to ear.” The brave and resourceful Basil Stephens called the police and chased Hoskins off Castillo del Lago land, or so he thought.

  But on May 29, Stephens was alone and on duty when Hoskins lunged at him and said he was going to kill him. “I drew my weapon and said if he didn’t stop, I’d shoot. He lunged at me again and I fired. He didn’t go down. He spun around and lunged at me again, and I fired again and he went down. I was upset. I thought I’d taken somebody’s life.”

  Hoskins is convicted on five counts of stalking, assault, and making terrorist threats. I am dismayed, however, when he is only jailed for five years. Fortunately, in September, Madonna’s involvement in Evita means that she is sent to London and is out of harm’s way, for a while.

  She spends two months in London, recording the Evita sound track, and calls me from there. Before she leaves, in person and over the telephone, and while she is in London, we have various long conversations about her relationship with Carlos.

  I know that she wants their relationship to last forever and ever and ever and has cried on his shoulder, complaining that she feels that most people are out to rip her off and wants him to understand. Once I become aware of what she’s told him, it is clear to me that she is trawling for sympathy. For the absolute truth is that despite the longevity of her career, few people have tried to rip Madonna off. Her concept of being ripped off is checking a balance sheet and seeing that one of her employees is receiving a high salary, even though she originally green-lighted it. No matter how much people deserve it, she gets mad that they are making too much money off her and characterizes them as “ripping” her off.

  I know that she has conveyed to Carlos her desire that he pull his weight in the relationship and has insinuated that he should contribute to it financially.

  I think she is wrong. Carlos has no money, and he cannot financially sustain a relationship with her. But she isn’t ready to confront the reality of their situation because she misses him so much. In fact, reading through the lines of what she’s said, she is patently insecure, feels she can’t live without Carlos, and has begged him to never stop loving her.

  UNTIL NOW, MADONNA and I have been extremely close, but with the advent of Carlos in her life, we are starting to drift ap
art. I am not that necessary to her anymore, except as a designer. Fortunately, I am so busy with my own life that I don’t mind too much.

  By now, I am doing business as C.G.C. Art + Design, and all the purchases I make on Madonna’s behalf are paid through C.G.C. and then reimbursed by her, or through her official art adviser, Darlene Lutz.

  One morning, I flick through the Sotheby’s catalog and notice three nineteenth-century landscapes—nothing major, just decorative items costing a total of $65,000, but perfect for the Coconut Grove house.

  I send the catalogs over to Madonna’s apartment, with the paintings highlighted. She approves the purchase. Normally, for “small” purchases I would lay out the money myself on behalf of C.G.C., then when the items were delivered to her, Madonna would pay me back.

  This time, though, I do have slight misgivings because recently, with her prior approval, I bought two antique French lamps, paid for them with C.G.C. funds, which were, of course, really mine, but when they were delivered to her, she informed me that she didn’t like them after all. She flatly announced that I should just take them back to the store and get an immediate refund. After negotiating with the store, they did, indeed, take back the lamps and refund me the money, but the experience was dismaying.

  Despite my misgivings, Madonna says she wants the landscapes and tells me to make an offer for them, so I go over to Sotheby’s, bid $65,000 for them, and win. Then—with the bulk of my savings—I pay for them.

  Invoice in hand, I take the paintings over to Madonna’s apartment and present them to her.

  “I don’t want them,” she says.

  I assume she must be joking. “You’re fucking kidding me, Madonna.”

  “I don’t want them anymore and I’m not paying for them.”