Madonna Read online

  Madonna: Like an Icon

  Lucy O’Brien

  TO MALCOLM, ERRAN, AND MAYA

  AND

  DOROTHY O’BRIEN

  (1906–1951)

  Contents

  Introduction

  Book One: Baptism

  1 The Death of Madonna

  2 A Magical Place

  3 The Arrogance and the Nerve!

  4 Jam Hot

  Book Two: Confession

  5 Sick and Perverted

  6 How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Madonna

  7 Makeup in That Great Hollywood Way

  8 Me in the Picture

  9 The Sin is Within You

  10 Giving Good Face

  11 Fallen Angel

  12 I Only Shoot What I Need

  Book Three: Absolution

  13 Bits and Zeroes and Ones

  14 HardWorking and Hard-Laughing

  15 Mommy Pop Star

  16 American Wife

  17 Abba on Drugs

  18 Coming From God

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Discography

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by Lucy O’Brien

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  I FIRST BECAME A FAN OF MADONNA IN 1985. I REMEMBER one evening going into my friend’s bedroom, where she was watching TV. “What’s on?” I asked, plonking myself next to her. “It’s Madonna doing her show,” she replied. “Oh no.” I nearly walked out again. For me, Madonna was that cheesy pop bimbo in Lycra, writhing on a Venetian gondola for the “Like a Virgin” video. “No, wait a minute,” my friend said. “She’s actually quite good. Quite funny. There’s something about her that’s really attractive.”

  I carried on watching. And within minutes, I got it. The woman who came across as a desperate starlet on Top of the Pops had a whole other dimension. In fact, the video of her Like a Virgin tour was the first time that many people understood what was so engaging about her. She had a warm, ebullient energy. She spoke directly to her female audience. She had a pudgy midriff and she didn’t care. She smiled a lot, winked at the crowd, and invited you to share in the joke. And her music—beats-driven, danceable, and fused with melodic sass—was very appealing.

  She sparked my interest with the Like a Virgin tour, and when the film Desperately Seeking Susan came out, she won me over. Here she played a cheerful, street-smart, devil-may-care woman. She wasn’t just another manufactured icon; she was herself. Madonna then went through many changes of image—from the peroxide vamp of the mid-80s True Blue era, to the smells, bells, and dark-haired mysticism of Like a Prayer. To a former Catholic girl, the latter was inspiring. Seeing the Blond Ambition tour, with its enormous cathedral nave and a penitent Madonna, stopped my heart.

  Then there was the commercial glitz of the Dick Tracy movie, and the decadent elegance of 1990s “Justify My Love” video, directed in black-and-white in an anonymous Parisian hotel by Jean-Baptiste Mondino. There was the sheer joy of “Vogue,” the soundtrack to a summer of dancing, before the revelations of her Sex book and the Truth or Dare documentary. She once said, “I’d rather be on people’s minds than off,” but by 1992, this became a challenge even for her most devoted fans.

  Yet I still admired her adventurousness, her fearlessness, and the way she championed in her work alternative cultures and ways of being—whether it was the S&M lesbians of the Sex book, her convincing pastiche of gay disco in Confessions on a Dance Floor, or kissing a black Christ full on the lips in the “Like a Prayer” video. Madonna has always done this with an eye on mainstream appeal—with her starring role in the film Evita, for instance, she turned herself into a more conventional Hollywood-style icon. After she became a mother, it seemed like the rebellious days were over and she had settled down, but then she came up with the boldly experimental textures of the 1998 Ray of Light album and Music, released in 2001. With these records she won her first Grammy Awards, and was finally accepted by the rock crowd as a serious artist.

  SINCE THE 1988 Who’s That Girl tour, I have seen Madonna’s every live show, and watched her develop as an artist. I’ve also followed her personal life with interest, seeing many parallels with my own. We are from the same generation. Like her, I was a lapsed Catholic girl fired up by feminism. I played in an all-girl band and knew the thrill of performing. Like her, I was drawn to punk and the underground club scene. Like her, I focused on my career until I met and married my partner later in life. Like her, I had two children (a boy and a girl) after I turned forty. In many ways, her story is typical of my generation—feminism made us brave, yet, despite the freedom we fought for, there was still intense conflict between work and motherhood.

  In her music and art, Madonna says a lot about what it means to be a woman in today’s world. She puts it in popular terms and packages it to the hilt, but it strikes a chord every time. As a music writer who has focused on female artists, I have always found her fascinating. Her singularity resonates with me. She doesn’t have the vocal greatness of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and she hasn’t seared a generation with raw rock ’n’ roll, like Janis Joplin or Patti Smith, but she is a towering presence in popular music because of her breathtaking range. Like a cultural magpie, she has picked her influences from thousands of sources and funneled them into one vision. That, in itself, is a work of art.

  “I am the work of art. I am the art. Je suis l’art,” Madonna once said to Sebastien Foucan, hero of the French parkour (the physical art of overcoming obstacles) movement, and a key dancer on her Confessions tour. In the focus on her provocative media image, what truly motivates Madonna as an artist and musician has been overlooked. “There are very talented singers who hire a producer, expect them to do all the work, sing the songs three times in the studio, and go home. Madonna is not one of those artists,” says Guy Sigsworth, a producer on her futuristic, millennial album Music. “She’s very intimately involved in the whole creative process, as a collaborator and producer. That side is ignored by people so fixated on her image. With all those hit songs, it can’t just be twenty years of great hair.”

  That music—combined with an odd, luminous beauty, compelling energy, and highly theatrical shows—has made Madonna a quasi-religious icon. Dubbed the “Immaculate Conception” by actor friend Rupert Everett, she commands a kind of mass worship. “Her [eyes] were the palest blue, strangely wide-set; any further and she would look insane or inbred. When they looked in your direction, you froze,” he said about the first time they met in the 1980s. “In no way was she conventionally beautiful. She was a bit like a Picasso…there was an energy field around her, like a wave, that swept everyone up as it crashed into the room.”

  Madonna the pop star appeared as a challenging twentieth-century image of an ancient icon. Where the traditional Virgin symbolized modesty and purity, this Madonna preached sexual empowerment and spirituality. To writer Camille Paglia, she “has rejoined and healed the split halves of women: Mary, the Blessed Virgin and Holy Mother, and Mary Magdalene, the harlot.” Songwriter Tori Amos agrees, saying: “I believe that the joining of the themes ‘Madonna’ and ‘Virgin’ and sex was the rebooting of the historical Madonna computer. It represented a major sexual awakening for Christian girls—Catholic girls, Protestant girls, Mormon girls, Baptist girls—bring ’em on. The significance of a female called Madonna singing the words ‘Like a Virgin’ could not be downplayed, nor could the effect of little girls around the world singing along with her.”

  IT HAS often been asked, who is the “real” Madonna? The popular negative stereotype is that of a publicity-hungry, manipulative ball-breaker, wh
ile for many women, she is a beacon of feminism. I have always found her work clear and autobiographical, but her personality complex and disarmingly changeable. Having written biographies of the artists Dusty Springfield and Annie Lennox, and a history of women in popular music, I have always wanted to get to the heart of Madonna’s motivations. She is, after all, the bestselling female artist of all time, with over 200 million albums sold throughout the world and fifty-eight top ten U.K. hit singles.

  Ever since her “Like a Virgin” days, I had been building up my own personal Madonna archive, and in 2005 I started writing a book about her. I wanted to look at her life and work as she was approaching fifty—what kind of issues would this bring up? How had she managed thus far to create and maintain an aesthetic that people of all generations responded to? What was she really about? Perplexed by the contradictory personae—vamp, lady of the manor, Kabbalah crusader, female shaman—I was searching for a way to understand her. Madonna was more than a postmodern collection of symbols. She was a flesh-and-blood woman, but her shifting identity made her a puzzle.

  Whenever I have been faced with this conundrum, I always go back to the songs. Music leaves a psychic imprint. In recorded sound there is the artist’s world and the artist’s mind. Using that as my starting point, I listened to Madonna’s music and found a compelling story. Whether it was the layers of Catholic liturgy in Like a Prayer, or the dark depths of Erotica, or the shimmering trance of Confessions on a Dance Floor, where Madonna’s voice has just become a texture in the music, she was on a personal journey. Sometimes she was in denial, or she was living a melodrama, but often through music she was confronting pain and searching for joy.

  I wanted to find out more about how she constructed this journey, and, in so doing, went on one of my own. I went from state-of-the-art recording studios to an apartment in Hornsey, North London, where Doug Wimbish and the postpunk Tackhead crew still hang out. I drove around old haunts in Michigan with a woman who went to school with Madonna, and wandered the windy streets of Detroit. I interviewed directors by swimming pools in L.A., and traveled to New York to meet former friends and collaborators. I walked in Wiltshire fields and trod the plush interior of the Kabbalah HQ in London. I talked to dancers, choreographers, musicians, and producers—people who had all worked with Madonna. Along the way, I thought about my own Catholic background and my grandmother, who died young after having six children. I thought about what it means to be a woman of a particular generation, born into the first decade of feminism and punk and gay liberation. And what it means to come to motherhood late, and how having a girl makes you militant about wanting to get it right this time.

  My search for Madonna became maddening. I kept getting two stark pictures of her: there was the woman who was ruthless in moving on and rude to the competition. And there was a woman that I’d never seen before—sweet, childlike, and captivating. “When she’s in a public place and anywhere she’s being looked at, she’s very steely and kind of puts up a wall. She seems imperious, like she’s acting the star,” Madonna’s friend, the director James Foley told me. “But when she gets home and takes off her coat, it’s as if she takes off her personality. Her accent even changes from fake Brit to native Detroit.” If it was simply a case of public versus private, that would be understandable. But Madonna shifts between the two in a more complex way. It took me a long time to figure it out, right to the end of writing the book.

  In interviews Madonna comes across as guarded and studied, as if, as Norman Mailer once remarked, “she is playing secretary to herself.” The famous sense of humor that so many collaborators mention is not much in evidence. She can be this way with friends, and even dances around husbands and lovers with an intricate push-pull game. But many people who have worked with Madonna talk about her warmth and easy, earthy manner. Is she two different people? It wasn’t until I saw footage of her in rehearsals for the Confessions tour that the penny dropped. She looked relaxed and happy. Her face was devoid of makeup, and her clothes casual, but you could tell that every cell of her body was alive and consumed by the process of performance.

  The only place where she seems truly herself is when she is doing her work. Away from that she can be self-conscious, status-conscious, everything-conscious. Only in performance are those layers stripped away and it’s just her. For the moment that she is caught up in the creative process, she forgets herself. Madonna is the sum of all her influences in a given moment. She pulls those influences in—whether it’s from cinema, club culture, literature, or visual art—and lets them move through her body. She reacts to the world, first and foremost, as a dancer, processing and expressing all the information that comes her way. And when it comes out, it isn’t haphazard, chaotic, or open-ended. In Madonna’s world, it is tied to an aesthetic that she has kept near and clear all her life.

  Like all the significant divas, Madonna feeds her life into her work. From the childhood Catholicism to her mother’s death to that terrible sexual attack in New York to the white-hot anger of the Sex years to the salvation she found as a mother, Madonna’s life is her work, her reason for existence. In 2006 she was at the center of headlines worldwide when she adopted the thirteen-month-old baby, David Banda, from an orphanage in Malawi. Her action sparked off an intense debate—whether she was motivated by a social conscience or her own selfish desires. Stung by the hailstorm of criticism, Madonna said privately: “I haven’t been this hated since I brought out my Sex book in the early 90s. What have I done to deserve this?”

  Her style is confrontational, her ambition unbound, yet she constantly, compulsively turns her life into fascinating pop art. As her old boyfriend producer Steve Bray said: “Her most effective trait was to have her completely dominate you and for you to somehow enjoy the experience.” Madonna has become a goddess of our age, and an icon that we have all created. This is her story.

  Lucy O’Brien

  London, 2007

  1

  THE DEATH OF MADONNA

  JUST NORTH OF DETROIT IS THE SUBURB OF PONTIAC. Now a depressed area, back in Madonna’s day it was a thriving manufacturing town servicing Detroit’s huge automobile industry. Rising up by the highway is a cavernous bubble-shaped structure called the Silverdome. It was built in 1970s for Detroit’s football team, but since the Lions moved downtown in 2002, it’s been more or less abandoned. In its heyday, it hosted the NBA All-Star games and welcomed such rock bands as Led Zeppelin and The Who. In January 1987, Pope John Paul II celebrated a mass there.

  Just across the road from the Silverdome is a small working-class neighborhood. Here Madonna spent her early childhood, at 443 Thors Street, in a modest, pale green single-story house. When I arrived there in 2006, it had a worn, dilapidated air, as if the ghosts hadn’t quite left the building. Back in the early 1960s it would have been filled with children. It was Madonna’s parents’ first house, the place where they started their married life and where their eldest daughter first hatched her adventurous dreams.

  “My grandparents came from Italy on the boat…[they] spoke no English at all. They weren’t very educated, and I think in a way they represented an old lifestyle that my father really didn’t want to have anything to do with,” Madonna once said. Her grandfather Gaetano Ciccone came from Pacentro, a small village in the Abruzzo region of Italy. He came from a family of peasant farmers, but was encouraged to go to school and broaden his opportunities. In 1920, there was no work for this ambitious teenager, so he left for America, and made his way to Aliquippa, a steel town just outside Pittsburgh. After finding a job working on the blast furnace floor, he brought from Italy his young wife, Michelina di Ulio. They lived in a rented one-bedroom house near the steel mill, and raised six sons, five of whom worked at the mill. The youngest, Madonna’s father, Silvio (also known as Tony), was the only one fortunate enough to go to college.

  The Ciccones found being an immigrant family tough: there was considerable prejudice against the new wave of European immigrants, particularly It
alians, who often came from impoverished backgrounds and were vulnerable to exploitation in the non-unionized mills.

  Gaetano worked hard and got into politics. Spurred on by the historic National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which recognized unions, he helped organize a brief but crippling strike at the Aliquippa mill in the summer of 1937, which led to an improvement in the lives of the workers. Madonna later inherited that sense of justice with her inclusive politics and her open support of the Democratic Party. In the early 1990s, for instance, she filmed a public service announcement for the U.S. Rock the Vote campaign, a movement cofounded by MTV, which led to a 20 percent increase in youth turnout in the 1992 election that ushered in President Clinton. And in the wake of the 2003 Iraq War, Madonna was vocal in her opposition to George Bush, urging her fans to go and see Michael Moore’s controversial documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. In 2004 she endorsed Wesley Clark’s Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidential election with the impassioned statement: “The future I wish for my children is at risk.” Then, two years later, she expressed support for Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency.

  Though she hasn’t been as politically active as other major artists, such as Bono or Peter Gabriel, Madonna has campaigned for years on issues like safe sex and AIDS awareness, and has always opposed discrimination, whether on the grounds of race or sex. As a daughter of second-generation immigrants, she was keenly aware of social marginalization.

  Her grandfather Gaetano was a strong disciplinarian, who managed to provide for his large family, but daily life was a struggle. The strain showed in his addiction to drink, a habit that took hold after he began making his own homemade wine. Madonna has said that both her paternal grandparents were alcoholics, a factor that played a part in her more abstemious attitude toward drink and drugs. Although the Italian community in Aliquippa was close-knit, it was also restrictive, with women expected to be little more than mothers and homemakers. And higher education, with its threat to traditional values, was treated with a degree of suspicion.