Life with My Sister Madonna

by Christopher Ciccone

  Nonetheless, in July 1998 she launches her first collection and invites me to Paris to see the show. She is still wounded by the loss of her brother, and I can see the sadness in her eyes. She tells me how frightened she is about doing the show on her own. I know that everyone is waiting for her to fail, and I sympathize with her.

  I suggest that I make a documentary about her, starting in Calabria, where she was born, through her brother’s death, and ending with her first solo show. She loves the idea. She arranges a ticket for me and a room at the Meurice. I arrive there at seven on a Sunday morning, take a nap, and call Donatella, who tells me to come over to the Ritz and bring my camera. Liv Tyler, Billy Zane, and Catherine Zeta-Jones are all staying there as well.

  I say hello to Donatella, then sit in a corner and film the models. Suddenly, I notice that none of the clothes have been completed. I can’t understand how Donatella can put on a show in five days. Then she walks me into the Ritz ballroom, where fifty Italian women, all with sewing machines, are primed to make the collection. In a second ballroom, the fitting models are waiting around, with cloth draped around them.

  The following three days, I go over to the Ritz and shoot. Every half hour, someone brings food down for Donatella to eat, but she refuses to touch it. Every couple of hours, she grabs me, pulls me up to her suite, and we do blow together. This goes on 24-7 for three days, during which I get about two hours of sleep a day.

  The show models arrive on Thursday. On Friday, an hour before the show, Kate walks in, comes right up to me, and says, “Christopher, I need some coke and a glass of champagne.”

  I say, “Kate, are you crazy? You just got out of rehab and you are not getting it from me.”

  The day after the show, Donatella and I are supposed to fly to London together, but when I get back to the Ritz, I find out that she is sick. Her assistants tell me she is staying in Paris and that I should go ahead to London without her.

  I check on her, thank her for arranging for me to come to Paris, and wish her well.

  Just as I am about to leave, someone pulls me back into the room and hands me a film canister full of cocaine.

  “Take this, we need to get it out of the room,” he tells me.

  I tell him that I can’t take it with me because I’m about to get on a plane.

  He forces it into my hand and says I should do whatever I want with it, but just get rid of it.

  I take it back to the Meurice and stare at it regretfully, trying to work out some way of keeping it because the cocaine I had with Donatella is the best I’ve ever had in my entire life. I sigh and flush ten grams of the finest blow in the stratosphere right into the French sewer. It’s just as well. This week, I’ve done way too much and I’ve started to like it more than I want to.

  I take the train back to London, then fly to L.A. There, I view the footage, and it’s fascinating. A few days later, Donatella writes and tells me that the family doesn’t want her to do the documentary after all. I am disappointed, but understand. I still have other options: directing videos, painting, designing furniture, working on Madonna’s new tour. Although I don’t dwell on it, I am acutely aware that most people look at me and see Madonna.

  A prime example: I meet a tall, thin, blond, lively young man at a party in L.A. We talk a lot and I ask him if he wants to go on a dinner date with me that Friday. He tells me he does. I pick him up, and we go to Benvenuto on Santa Monica. Afterward, we have drinks at the Abbey, then he invites me back to his apartment in West L.A.

  When we arrive, we go straight into his bedroom. The lights are out, and the room is only illuminated by a small candle. We start making out on the bed, then, all of a sudden, he clicks on the light switch. There, above his bed, a life-size picture of my sister, half-naked, draped only in a sheet. For a second, I stop breathing. Then I look around the room. Pictures of my sister all over every inch of the wall, and on every surface. Talk about a buzz kill.

  I immediately throw my clothes on and run out. The experience freaks me out completely. Later, however, we become very good friends, simply because I now know exactly where he is coming from. He’s a Madonna fan, not some weird stalker, and I feel that I can trust him.

  ON DECEMBER 9, 1998, Donatella hosts the Fire and Ice Ball at Universal Studios in Hollywood and asks me to design and create for it a Diva Room for her at 360, the penthouse restaurant with panoramic views of L.A. So I devise a French-courtesan boudoir look: pink heavy brocade drapes, pink flowers, candles everywhere, a massive chandelier, and a baroque baby carriage full of Cristal Champagne.

  On the night of the event, Goldie Hawn arrives dressed in a halter dress, looking great. I dance with her, and she seems a bit tipsy. Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow arrive. Madonna introduces me to Gwyneth. It’s love at first sight.

  But before we get to know each other, I meet Jack Nicholson, who is at the party along with Dennis Hopper. Jack, Dennis, Donatella, and I go into the Diva Room. Donatella pulls out some cocaine and hands me a key.

  Jack takes one look at me dipping the key into the bag of cocaine and says, “I’ll try that. I’ve never done it like that before.”

  I think, Bullshit. Famous people like Courtney and Jack never want to admit anything about their drug use. I make Jack a bump. He does it and so do all of us. Afterward, we have some inconsequential coke chat, then Jack leaves. I never see him again. But I’ve just done a key bump with Jack Nicholson!

  ON FEBRUARY 24, 1999, Madonna and Ray of Light are nominated for six Grammy Awards: Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Pop Album, Best Dance Recording, Best Recording Package, and Best Short Form Music Video. Although Madonna won a Grammy in 1992 for Best Long Form Music Video for Madonna: Blond Ambition Tour Live, none of her albums or songs has ever won a Grammy—it’s about fucking time and I am rooting for her. She asks me to design and direct her for the opening number.

  By now I have a new boyfriend, let’s call him Mike. We have been dating for three months and he is artistic and charming. He tells me he isn’t a Madonna fan, though I haven’t introduced him to her yet.

  On Grammy night, Madonna is in her trailer at the back of the Shrine Auditorium. I check the stage and make sure that the cameraman knows he mustn’t shoot her closer than midshot, as she refuses to allow close-ups. I run through shots with the director, just to be on the safe side.

  I go back to see Madonna in the trailer, and I take Mike with me. She’s in a rush. I introduce Mike to her. She says, “Great to meet you,” and he says, “Likewise.”

  As we leave, he turns to me and says, “She looks old. Is that really her hair?”

  I am stunned, but am far too busy to say anything. I’ve already invited him to the after party at Le Deux and haven’t got enough time to disinvite him. As an afterthought, I tell him that as I am going to be busy at the party, he should invite a friend. He does.

  I am thrilled when Madonna wins four Grammys, including Best Dance Recording and Best Pop Album. As she accepts the award, she has tears in her eyes.

  “I’ve been in the music business sixteen years and this is my first Grammy—well, actually I’ve won four tonight. It was worth the wait,” she says.

  Technically, she had won once before for the Blond Ambition tour video seven years earlier, but winning awards for the Ray of Light album and single made it feel like the real thing.

  I tell her that she does really deserve it, and she glows.

  When we arrive at the after party at Le Deux, I meet up with Gloria Estefan and Lenny Kravitz in the garden. Madonna stays inside, and out of the corner of my eye, I see that she’s dancing wildly, blissed-out to have won.

  After an hour or so, I’m outside in the garden when I hear her yelling my name. I run inside the restaurant and see her crouching on the floor, picking wax off her arms. Wax is all over her hair as well. I can also tell that she’s had a few lemon drops too many.

  Ingrid and Liz are standing over her.

  “Someone dumped a candle on me,” Mad
onna says.

  Liz whispers that Madonna’s had two lemon drops.

  She and Ingrid take her into the bathroom and help her get the wax off.

  A trail of women follow her. Two stand guard outside the door. I can hear a lot of chattering in the bathroom. I grow impatient and peek in.

  Madonna is standing at the basin trying to remove the wax from her hair. Everyone around her is yelling helpful hints at her.

  I push my way through to the sink and help her. Then I tell her that I think it’s time for her to go home.

  Ingrid and I, and Chris Paciello (Ingrid’s then business partner) walk Madonna to the restaurant door.

  As we are about to get her into the car, Mike springs out of the shadows, pulls out his camera, and says, “I want a picture of Madonna.”

  “Over my dead body,” I say, and grab the camera.

  He runs over to Madonna, puts his arm around her neck, and says, “I want to kiss you good-bye.”

  We pull him off Madonna and then throw him out. Exit artistic boyfriend, never to be seen again.

  MADONNA NOW HAS a $6.5 million contract with Max Factor to promote several new cosmetic products and appear in commercials throughout Europe and Japan. I see the commercial and note her geisha look, remembering the evening we spent together at the geisha house, and applaud her for remembering and using the image.

  ON MARCH 21, 1999, I go with Madonna to the Academy Awards. Afterward, as we walk into the Vanity Fair party at Morton’s, a fifteen-piece salsa band is playing. The party is jammed. Fatboy Slim is deejaying. Warren, Barry Diller, Ricky Martin, David Geffen, and all of Hollywood are here. But only a solitary couple is on the dance floor. The band strikes up a great salsa number.

  I ask Madonna if she wants to dance.

  “Let’s go,” she says.

  I offer her my hand.

  We go onto the dance floor together.

  Within moments, everyone stands back and watches us on the dance floor. We fit together perfectly. She responds to my slightest touch, and I to hers. This truly is dancing with the stars. We are completely in step. We are so in tune that night—my sister and I—genetically so similar, trained by the same teacher, ideal dance partners.

  Cameras film our dance, and it’s displayed around the entire restaurant and outside in the street. The music stops, we end on a perfect dip, everyone at the party applauds. A precious memory, and though I don’t realize it at the time, my last dance ever with my sister.

  MADONNA IS STILL hearing about my partying—which I generally just do on a Friday or a Saturday night, and not more—and she continues to disapprove. She is not altogether wrong. After partying so hard in France, I am finally forced to confront the fact that I am clearly capable of sliding down the slippery slope far too fast, and make the decision to cut back once and for all.

  Nonetheless, presumably as a result of her suspicions that I am partying too much, Madonna opts to have a London decorator, Irishman David Collins—who designed for Victoria’s Secret, as well as many celebrated London restaurants—update the New York apartment instead of me. When I see the results, it is as if someone sticks a knife into my gut and twists it. He has taken my timeless classic design for the New York apartment and made it déclassé.

  He has changed the living room lighting, installed a chandelier that is far too big for the room, replaced the furniture I bought with oversize pillows that don’t suit the apartment. He has painted both the walls and ceiling of the media room a bright kelly green and, in my opinion, has destroyed the feel of the place completely. I am relieved that he hasn’t touched the blue bedroom I had custom-made for Madonna. But it hurts that she hasn’t hired me. I tell myself not to be angry with her. It is after all her home, and she can change whatever she wants. I suppress my anguish.

  I realize that the main reason she hasn’t hired me is because she believes that I have a drug problem. Drugs have never impacted my work. Although Madonna has taken Ecstasy and smoked pot in the past, she won’t tolerate anyone who does drugs on a regular basis, in particular, cocaine. There is no middle ground for her and although I just dabble—and like most recreational drug users, don’t let my use impinge on my professionalism—Madonna views drug-taking in black-and-white: either you do drugs or you don’t.

  PERHAPS BECAUSE OF my feeling of alienation from Madonna, I hang out more with Gwyneth Paltrow. In a way, without perhaps realizing it at the time, ever since Madonna’s role in my life lessened, and our relationship started to downward spiral, I have established a Daddy Chair of my own—except that, in my case, it’s called the Sister Chair. Kate, Naomi, and Demi have all been candidates, but I feel that Gwyneth fits my Sister Chair better than any of them. She isn’t seeing anyone at the moment, so we spend time commiserating. She is more real than any of the other actresses I’ve met. Besides, she never mentions Madonna to me at all, a stellar qualification for my Sister Chair.

  Around this time, I design a line of furniture for Bernhardt Design, a furniture manufacturer, which includes a scroll-armed sofa, a Vanitas table, and an armchair I’ve named “Leda.”

  The line is launched at the end of September 1999, at a party thrown at the Oriont, the newly opened restaurant on Fourteenth Street, which I spent six months designing. The restaurant is inspired by my vision of a Shanghai bordello, complete with black tile floors, deep-olive velvet banquettes, and chairs covered in a blood-red silk that I unearthed in New York’s Chinatown.

  The restaurant gets rave reviews for food and design. But just a month later, an electrical fire starts on the third floor and the restaurant burns to the ground, leaving me unpaid and incredibly unhappy.

  Fortunately, my furniture is well received. In July 2001, rather than spend thousands of dollars on a high-priced designer, President Clinton personally selects my Prague furniture line for his Harlem office. I am extremely pleased.

  In March 1999, Madonna asks me to work on a new addition to the Coconut Grove house, and I fly down to Miami and spend some time there working on it.

  Madonna comes down for my birthday on Thanksgiving. Naomi and Kate decide to throw a birthday party for me at the Delano.

  Madonna takes some coaxing to agree to go.

  “I don’t like those model girls,” she says, “and I don’t like that you are hanging out with them.”

  “Look, Madonna, they’re very good to me. I trust them. They are just girls having a good time.”

  “Yes, but I don’t want to have it with them.”

  “Well, then, come or don’t come,” I say, exasperated. “But it’s my birthday, and I really wish you would.”

  She finally agrees to go, and we drive to the Delano in separate cars.

  At the Delano’s Blue Door restaurant, of which Madonna is part owner, a big table has been set up.

  Kate and Naomi have done the place cards. Madonna, dressed in black Dolce & Gabbana, is at one end of the table with Ingrid. I am at the other end with Kate on one side and Naomi on the other.

  I am seated with the hostesses and enjoy this rare occasion of being in the same room as my sister and not being eclipsed by her. I can see her looking down her nose at Kate and Naomi and whispering to Ingrid about them. Kate gives me this funny pack of dirty girlie cards from the fifties. Even from far down the table, I can feel Madonna’s disapproval, but I don’t care. I’m enjoying myself.

  The cake is served. The girls toast me. Madonna joins the toast. Then the girls start getting raucous. Madonna makes a face, then she and Ingrid get up abruptly and leave.

  Kate, Naomi, and I all go dancing after dinner. I arrive back at the house at five and set off the alarm by accident. Madonna is livid and accuses me of doing drugs. She isn’t wrong. I am not painting much and am just hanging out, kind of lost, playing with supermodels. My mood is growing darker and darker.

  Madonna, in contrast, is very much involved with Lola and immersed in the Kabbalah movement, and has a new man in her life, ten years her junior: British director Guy Ritchie.r />
  Trudie and Sting introduce him to Madonna when they both attend a lunch party at their home in Wiltshire. Like Sean, Guy comes from a middle-class family, with links to the Scottish military dating back to the twelfth century. I later find out that Guy has been named after two forebears who served in the Seaforth Highlanders, a romantic-sounding Scottish regiment. His great-grandfather Sir William Ritchie was a gunner major general in the Indian army, and his grandfather Major Stewart Ritchie was posthumously awarded the Military Cross after he was killed in the escape from Dunkirk during World War II. Guy’s father, John, was also in the Seaforths, and Guy’s stepfather, Sir Michael Leighton, is an English aristocrat. All in all, young Mr. Ritchie seems to have a lot of history behind him, and a great many illustrious forebears casting a heavy shadow over him.

  It seems to me that he has a great deal to live up to. Consequently, in a way, I can understand why—instead of focusing his filmmaking talents on immortalizing his patently distinguished family history—he employs them on making what some term a “homophobic” movie about London gangsters, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. I am eager to meet this Brit who appears to have captivated my sister so much.

  ELEVEN

  The Wedding Guest sat on a stone:

  He cannot choose but hear.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  DECEMBER 31, 1999, Donatella has a New Year’s Eve party at Casa Casuarina, her Miami mansion, where I first meet Guy Ritchie. He is friendly to me, and I remember thinking that he looked boyish and seemed like a nice guy. He is conventionally dressed in a white shirt and dark-blue trousers and jacket, and I warm to him. He is personable and respectful and seems as if he might be fun to hang out with. Nonetheless, I tell myself that I doubt he’ll outlast Madonna’s usual two-year relationship cycle.

  I go into the garden with my good friend Dan Sehres. We find Donatella sitting at a corner table, glamorous in a silver dress. She looks beautiful, but seems depressed—no doubt thinking of Gianni and happier times at the mansion. She chain-smokes, lighting cigarette after cigarette with her glittery pink diamanté-covered lighter. Next to her, her own special packs of Marlboro, exclusively designed and manufactured for her at the Milan Versace atelier—with the words SMOKING KILLS eradicated and replaced by her initials, inscribed in Gothic script.