Madonna

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “Madonna first fell in love with her daughter, and that taught her how to fall in love for real,” says Rosie O’Donnell. “When you’re ready, it comes to you. She’s definitely ready. I’ve never seen her happier . . . more grounded, more able to leave the star part behind.”

  Happy Endings

  Perhaps no one is as proud of the way Madonna has turned out as her father, Tony Ciccone. While he didn’t support her dream to be a dancer and had hoped she would go to college before beginning her career, he fully understood her wanting to, as he now puts it, “make something of herself, which she did — boy, did she ever!”

  When Rocco was born sickly and prematurely, it was Tony who, by telephone from his northern Michigan vineyard, suggested that his daughter summon a priest to administer the last rites. Though Madonna is ambivalent about such sacraments, it’s a testament to the respect she feels for her traditional Italian-American father that she even considered the notion of last rites for little Rocco. As it happened, such a sacrament would not be necessary. When it was determined that the baby would be fine, Tony and his wife, Joan, tearfully collapsed into each other’s arms — and then toasted with a fine wine the new addition to the family, Tony’s eighth grandchild. “Sometimes I think I’m better as a grandfather than I probably was as a father,” he now says. “But, let’s face it, Madonna was a special case,” he adds. “I think anyone would sympathize with the father who had the job of raising Madonna.”

  The day after Rocco’s birth, Tony Ciccone continued his hard labor on the structure of the Ciccone Vineyards and Winery, a vineyard which would open to the public a month later on a hilltop between the Grand Traverse Bay resort town of Sutton Bay and the hills of the Leelanau Peninsula. Tony founded his winery in 1994 after retiring from his job as a physicist and engineer at General Dynamics in Detroit. It is dedicated to his parents, Gaetano and Michelina, who immigrated from Pacentro, Italy, to the United States three years before he was born. The Ciccone Vineyards has been a joint project for Tony and his wife, Joan, the stepmother with whom Madonna never got along as a youngster but to whom she is now — thirty-three years later — quite close.

  “It’s our life together,” he proudly says of the winery, one of twenty-five in the state of Michigan, “mine and my wife’s. We have Pinot Grigio, Dolcetto, Cabernet Franc and Chardonnay planted here. I think it keeps me and Joan close, even at this old age we’re in,” he says of the winery. “We raised vegetables in Rochester [Michigan] before owning the winery,” he adds. “My father was a vegetable farmer, too. Good, solid work. The Ciccones have always been solid workers.”

  It was about ten years ago, Tony explains, when he first began cultivating grapes. As a surprise gift, Joan purchased an antique grape press for him. “He always wanted a winery,” she recalls. “It was his dream. We knew it would be hard work. But when the Sutton Bay property went up for sale, we also knew we had to buy it.” (The Ciccones will not say if Madonna contributed to the purchasing of the fifteen-acre property.)

  Most of his neighbors are not even aware that Madonna is Tony’s daughter. “I don’t advertise it,” he says. “It’s not necessary. If they find out, they find out. I don’t tell them. Some know. But they don’t make a big deal out of it.”

  Today, as an adult and a parent, Madonna seems to understand that Tony was doing his genuine best at the time he was raising her, and that his marrying Joan was not a betrayal of his first wife but his only alternative if he was to move on with his life — and give his children a mother.

  Certainly, it can be argued that nothing matures a person more than becoming a parent. It seems that Madonna was now identifying with the parent role and not so much the child role, thereby putting her on the other side of the table for the first time. Perhaps she was finally able to see that she needed her father more than she needed her anger, and so she was finally able to give up some of that anger. Indeed, seeing things through a parent’s eyes was, for Madonna, a hopeful sign — it would allow for significant changes in her relationship with her father.

  “I love my father,” she now says. “He is a say-what-you-mean-and-mean-what-you-say kind of guy. I’m the same way. Anyone who knows me knows that I am my father, at least in that way. He’s strict, like me. Loving, too, I hope like me. His work ethic is ingrained in me. Now that I have a family, I have so much respect for him and the way he tried to hold ours together, back when I was a bratty little kid. He didn’t have the privileges I have, either. It’s hard to see all of that until you have children.”

  Some of Madonna’s siblings have not fared as well as she has in life, perhaps in some ways underscoring the difference in her personality and in her determination to meet the challenges of her circumstances. She has blamed the instability of the Ciccone children on the death of her mother. “I have a very large family who are all emotional cripples in one way or another. Emotionally, we’re all pretty needy because of my mother.” Whereas some of her siblings may have allowed the trauma they felt over their mother’s death to jeopardize their futures, Madonna somehow managed to put hers to work to enhance her life.

  Madonna is closest to younger brother Christopher, who accompanied her on a number of concert tours before establishing his own restaurant. Out of her seven siblings, Christopher is the most loyal to her, despite some acrimony that resulted when, in 1991, she discussed his homosexuality with a gay magazine without his permission. Christopher has since traveled with his sister, working with her as artistic director on her concert tours. (People in her employ used to refer to him as “the pope” because of his powerful position in the organization.) He has also designed the interior of some of her homes. “She has her own vision,” he explains. “I offer her a different way of looking at things. Other people do, too. But it’s different with us. We fight a lot, and either she wins or I win, but we don’t let up. Neither of us is afraid to be direct, and Madonna has always known what she wants.”

  An enterprising businessman, as well as owning the restaurant Orient in New York, he also has an interest in the popular restaurant Atlantic, in Los Angeles, which Madonna frequents. He says, “Our father spent most of his time preparing us for the rest of our lives. Things I learned from him were honesty, loyalty and the value of truth. He taught us discipline. We went to church every day. Our sense of art, drama — and decadence — all that came from him.”

  While Madonna is close to Christopher, she remains estranged from two other brothers. Martin is a recovering alcoholic who has suffered significant instability in his life and career. He’s worked as a disc jockey in the Detroit area and has also been employed as a building contractor. In the early nineties, during Madonna’s “Blonde Ambition” tour, Martin had a well-publicized setback in his recovery just a day after being released from a rehabilitation center (paid for by his famous sister). Perhaps somewhat unfairly, he is seen in his sister’s Truth or Dare video apparently incoherent and irresponsible, and either too inebriated or too disoriented to attend her concert and visit her afterward. The way the scenes are framed, it is as if Madonna is let down by his behavior — making her the victim, as opposed to the more sympathetic notion that the troubled, heavily scrutinized Martin may be a victim of Madonna’s celebrity. After his third arrest for drunk driving and a warning from the judge that he could be jailed, Madonna lost patience with Martin. In 1994, he told a U.S. newspaper: “Madonna won’t lift a finger to help me.” The two have not been particularly close since that time. “This is not the sister I grew up with, who mothered me, who was so full of compassion,” he says. “I guess fame really changes people.” (In December 2000, Martin was a patient at the Chabad Rehabilitation Center in Los Angeles, being treated for an addiction.)

  Of Martin, Madonna has countered: “He’s very tortured. I’ve had to get him out of the habit of calling me whenever he needed something from me. I have to feel that Martin loves me for just me and not my money.”

  Her half-brother, Mario, is a former cocaine addict who has also ha
d a number of problems in life. At one point, he faced a ten-year prison sentence on a burglary charge. His salvation came only after Madonna hired a high-powered legal team to defend him on charges that he had broken into a florist’s in Rochester, Michigan, and absconded with about $2,000. At the time, he was already on parole with a three-month suspended jail sentence for allegedly assaulting his then girlfriend. It had been his third conviction in six months, after he also allegedly battered a motorist and fractured a police officer’s nose. “My big sister can’t tame me,” he has said. “I am what I am and she has no right to lecture me. I don’t even like her music.”

  Of Madonna’s other siblings, Anthony and Paula are both television producers, and Melanie is a musicians’ manager in Los Angeles. Madonna has a cordial, yet distant relationship with her half-siblings Jennifer and Mario.

  “We’ve had a hard time, but the family tries to stay strong,” says Tony. “They grow up. They lead their own lives. I lead mine.

  “Nonnie has said things about me in the past, probably all true,” observes Tony, reverting to the affectionate diminutive of his daughter’s childhood. “So maybe I wasn’t the greatest father in the world, but life wasn’t easy for any of us.” He says that he has never felt a need to address anything Madonna or any of his other children have ever said about him, “Because we’re Italian-Americans. In our hearts, we know that we love each other. That is all that matters. Sometimes you can’t be close. But life is long and there is always another day.

  “But, Madonna and I have been closer than people know,” he concludes. “There’s a peacefulness about her now that she has Lourdes and Rocco to look after. Why, look at how things have changed for her,” he marvels. “If you were writing a book, this is how it would end. It would have a happy ending. Everyone loves a happy ending . . .”

  Taking Stock

  “In the beginning of my career, I just did whatever I wanted to do and if it made me feel good, if it was fun, that was cool,” Madonna observed in a recent interview. “Now, I feel like everything we do affects society in a potent way. I feel a sense of responsibility because my consciousness has been raised.”

  She wanted nothing more than to be famous . . . she worked hard at it by being creative, imaginative and, also, by keeping her public guessing. She was a veritable workhorse. The twenty-five-year-old woman who once told Dick Clark (in her January 1984 TV debut on American Bandstand) that her goal was to “rule the world” has, in the intervening years, acquired more money, fame and power than most people could imagine possible in a single lifetime. What she has is real, hard earned and clearly her own. In a business where success is entirely dependent on ever-shifting pop trends and the fickle taste of the public, Madonna is nothing if not still competitive. Her survival instincts are as finely tuned as a bat’s sonar. As a result, she remains a chart-topping recording artist into her forties; she has sold more than million records. An October 2000 Rolling Stone cover story estimated her worth at more than $600 million.

  Madonna’s “Music” single, to no one’s surprise, made its way to Number 1 in September 2000, after six weeks on Billboard’s singles chart. The hit record proved, once again, that unlike many of her peers, Madonna is able to bend to her will the concept of what is supposed to happen to familiar pop stars. She continues to make contemporary music that rocks the world, and does so despite the stronghold of alternative music, boy bands and successful Madonna-wannabes, many of whom have styled their careers after that of the original “Material Girl.”

  At the end of September 2000, Madonna celebrated the release of her new album Music with a party meticulously designed to connect the new, serene Madonna of the new millennium with the original, party Madonna of the 1980s. To do this, the star’s camp took over Catch One, a funky, ramshackle, notorious black gay club near Los Angeles’s ethnic south-central community.

  On a regular night, Catch One hosts an urban cross section of drag queens, closet gays, trendy “Ghetto Fabulous” and a small battalion of uptown whites, who come to behold Los Angeles’s black gay culture and dance all night to techno-funk music on the huge dance floor. On Tuesday, September 19, the club hosted perhaps its strangest crowd ever — six hundred people referred to by syndicated newspaper columnist Liz Smith as Madonna’s “closest friends.” Party co-hosts Warner Bros. and the celebrity magazine US Weekly paid a reported two million dollars to transform the normally gritty Catch One into a temporary haven for the Beautiful People, an A-list crowd spiced with an assortment of strippers and exotic dancers, all in the tradition of the Madonna experience of days gone by — those days almost fifteen years earlier when the young star generated all the energy at Catch One whenever she walked through its front doors, when she beckoned her allergy-prone, older boyfriend, Warren Beatty — her “Pussy Man” — to join her on Catch’s dance floor: “Let’s have fun!”

  But these weren’t the old days, and Madonna — who wore her honey-blonde hair straight and parted in the middle, and boasted a black T-shirt promoting Guy Ritchie’s latest movie, Snatch — was no longer a gum-chewing, profanity-spewing party girl. While she did mingle with the famous guests, she spent most of her time off the dance floor with a small circle of friends and associates in a so-called VIP room. She left early, after only ninety minutes. It had been her first night away from Rocco since she’d brought him home from the hospital a month earlier, and she wanted to get back home to breast-feed him. Her career was on autopilot, anyway: Music would debut at Number 1 — in fifteen countries, including the United States.

  The morning after the party for Music was a morning like any other at Madonna’s Mediterranean-style Los Feliz home.11

  In order to keep tabs on the day-to-day operations of her companies, including Maverick Records, Madonna’s residences are equipped with fax machines and multiple phone lines. Each morning, when she’s not on the road, she makes a list of goals to accomplish that day, and also lists tasks for her two assistants and other associates. From eight to nine A.M., she answers and sends E-mail on her computer. From nine to eleven, she makes business calls to attorneys, agents and to her spokeswoman and dedicated and able publicist of eighteen years, Liz Rosenberg (whom Madonna’s friends refer to as “The Validator” — the one who separates truth from rumor, or at least does her job well by protecting Madonna from negative publicity).

  “My job is more casual than people might think,” says Rosenberg. “Madonna does not wake up in the morning and plan her media campaign, nor do I. We don’t think, ‘Who are we going to fuck over today?’ There’s no master plan, no army of press agents and tanks.”

  If he’s not similarly busy with his own career, Guy will often be found in the kitchen helping the cook prepare breakfast. (He’s an excellent chef, whereas Madonna says she doesn’t “have the cooking gene. I don’t want to go into the kitchen and do things. I want to go into the kitchen and be served.”) She keeps a maddeningly detailed daily planner. “If she wants me to look into ten things, and I’m only able to look into nine, she remembers the one thing I forgot,” says Liz Rosenberg. “She isn’t big on wasting time.” The rest of the day is devoted to rehearsals, recording sessions and interviews. Intermittently, she somehow makes quality time for her two children — each of whom has their own nanny. (She also has an army of assistants helping her at home and in her Maverick office.)

  Maybe as a result of meditation and yoga — or is it that she’s just grown up? — Madonna now projects the glow of someone who has come to terms not only with herself but also, possibly, with the death of her mother, and with her father’s enduring place in her life. In recent appearances, her hazel eyes seem to flash with a new knowledge, a sense of triumph, maybe. “I came to the realization that I didn’t really know that much at all,” she said when analyzing the onset of her personal journey into metaphysics. “I started asking myself the most elementary questions: ‘What’s really important about life? Why am I here?’”

  Perhaps what’s most intriguing about the w
ay Madonna has evolved is that, at least based on her now-conservative demeanor, she seems to believe that true sensuality — true female sexual power — derives not from exhibitionism but from its opposite, from peaceful elegance and calm detachment. Today, she handles her life and loves with greater dignity than before — though, of course, there will probably always be the occasional tabletop dance and public kiss with someone like Gwyneth Paltrow just to keep her life — and ours — entertaining. Now, her image is polished — not trashy. Her clothes tease without screaming and are by Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Oscar de la Renta and Gianfranco Ferré (most of her clothes are given to her complimentarily because of the exposure she gives their designers). She’s sexy and modern, truly her own person, more tolerant of others and — surprise! — even bashful at times. Most telling to some observers was the way she shrieked when, at the New York premiere party for The Next Best Thing at the Saci Club in Manhattan, she was asked if Guy Ritchie — on her arm — had ever seen her sexual and masochistic film Body of Evidence. Visibly blushing, she exclaimed, “He never did, and he never will, thank you very much.”

  “I’ve been incredibly petulant, incredibly self-indulgent, incredibly naive,” she recently observed. “But I needed to do all of those things to get where I am now, and where I am now I’m happy with. I don’t have any regrets, even though there are moments when I go, ‘Oh, God, I can’t believe I said or did that.’ But you know what? I love that person too. She brought me here.”