Yet, paradoxically, the same woman who, rather romantically, sees herself as beyond the mainstream, a misunderstood artist, is in reality a living, breathing example of the all-American girl, the perfect embodiment of modern Main Street USA. Thus her creative success has been characterized by her genius for making the avant-garde acceptable to the general public. At the same time, while the vaudeville of her sexual politics, particularly her trademark conical bra and bold crotch-grabbing, owes much to the European tradition displayed in shows – admittedly, American shows – like Cabaret and the Ziegfeld Follies, Madonna’s knowing, winking suggestiveness and sly humor is in the mold of Mae West, the American film actress, who believed that a woman’s place was on top.
Even the trajectory of her career – a cheerleader from the Midwest who came to the Big Apple to find fame and fortune and then tried to join the Hollywood elite to pursue her acting career – is as traditional as the Stars and Stripes. Her greatest disappointment is that while she considers herself more an actress than singer, her thespian skills have yet to be fully appreciated by the world of theater. Despite this, just how far Madonna has risen in the firmament of stars is demonstrated in the fact that, while she wanted a ‘Grace Kelly style’ for her first wedding, at her second she actually wore a tiara that had belonged to the late Princess. While her appeal lies in the fact that she can be presented as the ultimate girl-next-door, she truly is one in a million, a living archetype, an embodiment of the radical sexual and social changes in modern America over the last twenty years.
While her place as a sexual revolutionary is assured, her dynamism, ambition and life-affirming philosophy would not be out of place in the corporate boardroom. Ironically, of all the many faces Madonna presents to the world – dancer, impresario, producer, singer, actress, entertainer and artist – the one she tries most assiduously to disguise is that of successful businesswoman. She is quoted as having once said, ‘Part of the reason I’m successful is because I’m a good businesswoman, but I don’t think it necessary for people to know that.’ ‘Get OUT’, she ordered director Alex Keshishian when his camera crew tried to film a business conference during the infamous Truth or Dare documentary (released as In Bed With Madonna outside the USA), which recorded her Blonde Ambition Tour in 1990.
The girl who arrived in New York with a fistful of dollars is, and has been, a publisher, music mogul, TV executive, merchandising magnate and film producer and one of the richest women on the planet, estimated to be worth between $300 and $600 million. ‘She’s a great businesswoman,’ says Seymour Stein, the record company mogul who first signed her. ‘She’s very smart and she trusts her instincts, which are great.’
Her success has certainly impressed the business community. While politicians, feminists and other moral commentators debated the graphic sexual content of her 1992 book, Sex, senior professors at Harvard Business School beat a path to her door. They wanted to know the secret of selling 1,500,000 copies of a $50 book in a matter of days. She considered, but eventually turned down, their invitation to address students and faculty. If she had given a lecture, as she originally intended, they would have learned that, once the hype and controversy of her artistic career is stripped away, Madonna is just like them, an embodiment of the drive, enterprise and can-do culture that has powered the American dream.
She is every inch the conventional self-made tycoon: cautious in her investments, conservative in her spending, controlling every part of her multi-million dollar empire. ‘Sometimes,’ says Sir Tim Rice, the co-creator of the musical Evita, in which she played the lead role in the film version, ‘it was as if you were dealing with General Motors.’
Indeed, Madonna is a classic capitalist, conforming to all the rules, never putting a foot wrong, running her life like clockwork. Like a typical cigar-chomping company chairman, she is the first to arrive and the last to leave, her schedule full, her day disciplined, while every evening she religiously sits down and lists her goals for the next day. The engineered controversy and deliberate chaos she causes in her artistic life contrast with the order and regimentation of her business routine. However, the bottom line always shadows her creative effort. ‘She is not just a businesswoman but an innovator and creator,’ observes Bert Padell. ‘Money comes second, creation comes first.’
Even her joshing sense of humor would not be out of place in the executive washroom. ‘I’ll give you sixty,’ she told Padell during an early morning phone conversation. As he launched into an explanation of a financial issue, the phone suddenly went dead. When he redialed, she laughingly told him, ‘See? I told you sixty seconds. My time is valuable.’
The girl who lived off popcorn and dressed in hand-me-downs has no intention of squandering her fortune, keeping well clear of the extravagant and the speculative. ‘She is exactly the same way now as she was when she first came into my office without a nickel,’ recalls Padell. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s a dollar or $10,000, she wants to know about it,’ Unlike her adventurous public image, Madonna is a prudent investor who has eschewed the stock market for the safety of interest-bearing government bonds.
She was not one of those who got their fingers burnt in the Internet bubble – indeed, she was so slow out of the starting blocks that she had to sue for the rights to her domain name, Madonna.com. – preferring to keep her other assets in property and art. While paintings may be her ‘sin,’ as she says, ‘Financially it is an excellent investment, as well as something sumptuous to admire every day.’ However, her shrewd approach has led her to lose numerous paintings because she refused to pay the asking price. It is now the same with property. When she first came to live in London, she was so shocked by the high prices that on several occasions she lost out on homes she liked because her offers were unrealistically low. Frugal as she is in her financial dealings, if there is one song she would withdraw from her catalogue it is ‘Material Girl’; Madonna has always regretted the decision to record a song that defined her as a consumer rather than an artist. As far as she is concerned, money is a means to an end, usually artistic, rather than an end in itself.
Like other self-reliant and self-made millionaires, Madonna believes that work has its own dignity, a belief underpinned by her recent interest in the Kaballah, a mystical text of Judaism. Thus, although she sends her maternal grandmother Elsie Fortin money every month and has bought her and other elderly relatives televisions and other home comforts, Madonna is reluctant to featherbed family and friends.
She likes to present a hard-boiled, sassy image, but her maternal and compassionate instincts are much in evidence, and not only in the way she dotes on her two children, Lourdes and Rocco. When fashion guru Gianni Versace was murdered, Madonna was the first person to phone his sister Donatella to console her. She has also quietly paid for drug rehabilitation therapy for numerous friends and family members, to help them stand on their own two feet. Indeed, much of her charity work is discreet and unshowy. A well-known supporter of AIDS charities, she is also a so-called ‘quiet donor’ to a charity for breast cancer, the disease which killed her mother. Every Friday after Thanksgiving the singer enjoys an annual ritual, visiting the children’s wards of hospitals in Manhattan and Harlem and distributing hats, pictures and small gifts.
On one occasion she was accompanied by Sean Penn, on another by her friend Debi Mazar. There is only one condition – that the hospitals concerned ensure that her visits are absolutely private. Seeing these children struggling to cope with life-threatening illnesses like AIDS and leukemia, leaves her drained and deeply moved. During one visit she walked into a ward where a young boy, in the late stages of leukemia, simply refused to get out of bed. Depressed and upset, he seemed to have given up the fight for life. The boy’s father was beside himself, unable to convince his son to battle on. So Madonna went into his room and joshed: ‘Hey, get out of bed. Who do you think you are?’ Then, for the next thirty minutes she sat quietly talking and playing with him until, finally, he gingerly climbed out of bed and joined the oth
er children. ‘Everyone was moved to tears,’ recalls one eyewitness.
While she may be a compassionate capitalist, she is also a competitive millionaire, her financial ambitions conforming to the dreams of the super-rich American male. For several years she harbored the notion of owning her own basketball team. While she is a fervent supporter of the New York Knicks, her financial advisors sounded out several other teams. Her heart, however, was set on the Knicks but her offer to take a share in the team was turned down. Typically, she wanted to be an active investor, involved in the day-to-day decision-making. The current owners didn’t want that, preferring instead a sleeping partner. In the end, discussions came to nothing.
Now able to pay millions of dollars for a painting or a home she likes, Madonna has effortlessly taken on the mindset of the super-rich. ‘But I’m broke,’ is a remark heard all too frequently from the queen of pop, who, like the British monarch, never carries money. Her bodyguard or chauffeur is given a $300 float to take care of daily expenses. For while she may employ bodyguards, chauffeurs, maids and cooks, old habits die hard. The girl who survived by bumming meals from friends and acquaintances has not changed overmuch. When she is out with a group of friends, Madonna is rarely the one to reach for the check. She will wait to see if someone else is going to pick up the tab and then, as a last resort, she will break down the bill, so that everyone pays their share. Jimmy Albright, her former bodyguard and lover, remembers how he would often end up paying for everyone – even though he was the poorest guy at the table. As he observes, ‘I used to tell her that she was so tight she squeaked. She thinks that because people know she has a lot of money they will try and take advantage of her. But she’s on top of everything.’
Her penny-pinching approach startled her Australian-born butler at her Notting Hill home in London. When he splashed out $600 for flowers, including her favorite tiger lilies, she reprimanded him severely for his extravagance. In New York she uses a modest car service rather than stretch limos, to save money, and keeps an eagle-eye out for those who feel that, because she is now wealthy, she can be ripped off. On tour she will personally haggle with hotels for cut-price rates and she checks every bill, refusing, for example, to pay excessive phone or fax charges.
This obsessive need for control goes way beyond the parameters of a typical business manual. Even on the rare occasions she takes a holiday – she has had only a handful in her adult life – she has an organized schedule to work on lyrics and future projects. She is literally never still for a moment, a musical poet in motion. This was the woman who refused to perform ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at the Superbowl, not through lack of patriotism, but because she could not control the light and sound systems.
Indeed she clearly demonstrated her patriotism and concern when she became the first celebrity to make a donation to charities helping the victims of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in September 2001. She gave around $1 million – the proceeds from three Los Angeles concerts – to children orphaned by the disaster, the singer leading her audience of 20,000 in prayer.
Her frequent response to any opposition is ‘This is not a democracy.’ Strict with herself, she is as demanding of her staff and those with whom she works. Madonna is the boss, able to reduce to tears her one-time secretary Caresse Henry-Norman, now her manager, in the search for a missing pair of shoes in her New York apartment, or to snap at her publicist Liz Rosenberg, whom she calls ‘Momola,’ when she brought out her school year-book in the green room just before she was due to appear on the comedy show, Saturday Night Live. Apparently, she didn’t like to be reminded of a past life while she was psyching herself up for a TV performance.
A picture by her bed gives another clue to her deep-rooted need for control, to contain what she calls ‘the ickiness’ of life. The black-and-white photograph, illuminated day and night, is of her mother, also christened Madonna, who died of breast cancer when her eldest daughter was just five years old. Her tragic death took away the implicit sense of security in Madonna’s life. One consequence of this is that Madonna has endless nightmares about death and, despite regular health checks, particularly for breast cancer, sees herself in a race against time, desperate to achieve as much as she can. She says: ‘I’ve got to push myself so hard because I have demons. I won’t live forever and when I die I don’t want people to forget I existed.’
At the same time, her mother’s untimely death snatched from her perhaps the one person she could rely on for unconditional love and affection. Has this resulted in lasting emotional damage? Madonna seems to have spent a lifetime searching for love, yet continually rejecting or discarding those who have loved her, always afraid of being hurt once more.
Although she is in control of her artistic and business life, she has all too often lost control of her love life. In contrast to her supremely self-confident public image, the private Madonna is often uncertain and unsettled in her relationships. ‘She can stand before 80,000 people in a stadium and hold them in the palm of her hand. Yet off the stage she is the most insecure woman I have ever met,’ says her ex-lover Jim Albright.
While the picture of her mother offers a glimpse at the paradox that is Madonna, so, too, does another old black-and-white photograph that hangs on the wall in her children’s nursery – this is a portrait of her father, Tony Ciccone, and a young Madonna. Just as she has spent a lifetime looking for unconditional love, so, too, has she spent years seeking her father’s approval. She remains at heart the little girl continually trying to win over her father, searching for love and acceptance, while rejecting his conformist lifestyle, as a company man working in the defense industry. She is also repelled and attracted by Roman Catholicism, and her father remains a devout Catholic.
While shock and sensation have been Madonna’s handmaidens in her success as a cheerleader for controversy and hedonism, her father has always lived by the rules and regulations, either of his company or his church. Nowhere was this divide between them better expressed than in the publication of her controversial Sex book in October 1992. She said it was an act of rebellion against her father, the church and the world in general. Yet, predictably, when they celebrated Christmas together that year at the family home in Rochester, Michigan, it was never once mentioned.
It is not surprising, then, that her father, the man who gave Madonna the values of self-help, independence and thrift, has steadfastly refused the gifts she has offered, be it buying him a new house, a car, or the 50 acres of land in north Michigan where he now tends his award-winning vineyard. ‘He didn’t want any part of the money because of the way she made it,’ explained Madonna’s former schoolfriend Ruth Dupack Young, who worked with Tony Ciccone for ten years at General Dynamics. ‘That was definitely the impression he gave. He made everything on his own and he didn’t want to be part of her money. He is a strict Catholic who followed the rules and he found it tough when his daughter didn’t. It was difficult for him at work being ragged by the other engineers. He is proud of her, but also dismayed by her. There comes a point in life when you ask yourself how much do you do just for success.’
Yet it is the dynamic of her personal life, the loss of her mother, the conflict with her father, sin and religion, eroticism and romance, love and loneliness, which have informed her work and formed the bedrock of her success. More than for any other artist, her life is her art, Madonna both the painter and the canvas of that unique creation – herself.
She is the girl who wanted to rule the world but not to change it. She ended up doing a little of both. This is her story.
Chapter Two
The American Dream
UNSHAVEN, RUMPLED and weary, Gaetano Ciccone cut an unprepossessing figure as he emerged, blinking in the May sunshine, from the bowels of the passenger ship, Presidente Wilson, moored in the Hudson River not far from the Statue of Liberty. But so did the 1,230 other passengers who had been crammed with him in the cheapest third-class or steerage quarters of the ship, which earned her keep f
errying human cargo across the Atlantic, arriving every two months at Patras, Naples and Trieste to pick up her quota of Greeks, Italians and Eastern Europeans, all heading for a fresh start in the New World.
On April 19, 1920, Gaetano Ciccone had been one of several hundred, mainly young, men clutching pathetic bundles of possessions, patiently waiting on the quayside at Naples harbor as the rather ungainly outline of the 12,500-ton steamer came into view. Some were returning to America after visiting their families. Most, like Gaetano, were making their first journey; the anxious excitement of embarking on a new life anchored by the sobering recognition that few would ever see their loved ones again.
Gaetano was little different from his fellow passengers. At nineteen he was perhaps a little younger, at 4 foot 10 inches in his stocking feet a little shorter, but he felt similar mixed emotions at leaving those he loved for an uncertain future. He had only been married a short while, inevitably to a girl from his village, dark-haired Michelina di Ulio. Her parents, Carmen and Constantine, were friends of the family, while Michelina, a year younger than Gaetano, was his childhood sweetheart. His parents, Nicola Pietro and Anna Maria, had not only blessed their union but also encouraged their teenage son to leave Pacentro, a dusty village of some 1,800 souls in the Abruzzi region of Italy, north-east of Rome, knowing that his future there was as stony as the soil.
For centuries the Ciccone clan had eked out a hand-to-mouth existence as peasant farmers or farmhands, for a long time exploited by the feudal rule of the Caldora family whose fifteenth-century castle dominated the valley. With the most recent wave of calamities – notably a severe drought, persistent crop failures, the flu epidemic of 1918, as well as the privations of the First World War – many of the Ciccone clan had made up their minds to head west. Most of the able-bodied men in the village left, some lured by the stories, invariably exaggerated, of the wonders and possibilities of the New World. There were in any case enough reports in letters and even joyful visits from family members who had already settled out there, all testifying to the abundance of work in the steel mills around Pittsburgh and the coalmines of West Virginia. Many a young girl, anxious to escape the grinding poverty of home, persuaded her parents to let her travel to the United States on the dubious premise that a potential husband was awaiting her over the water.
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