The British nerve centre for Madonna Inc is to be found in two adjoining
townhouses in central London. The buildings are a home for the singer and
her four children when they are in this country, plus offices and a personal
gym. From the outside, the six-storey edifices are standard-issue London
mansions — that is, way beyond the standards most of us are accustomed to.
There is something impregnable about such streets: an air of discreet luxury
pervades them. Litter seems not to blow or rattle down their immaculate
expanses; no chewing gum or urgently expelled kebab encrusts their gleaming
paving stones. You might glance up at Madonna’s perfect residential pair and
admire their symmetry, the cleanness of their architectural lines. But you
would be more likely, unless you were a lurking paparazzo, not even to
notice them; they are merely two houses in a long, wide street of the
things. Anonymous, ordered, well maintained and with a touch of class.
Madonna wouldn’t have it any other way. “Where do you live?” she asks when
we meet later. Dalston, I say. The name doesn’t register. Stoke Newington, I
add as a pointer. “That’s not even in London,” she scoffs. And it isn’t, to
be fair. Or not in this London, at any rate.
The evening before I walk down her street and ring the doorbell, I visit
another imposing building near the singer’s home. A few days earlier, a
leaflet had been thrust into my hand. “It’s a Sign,” it read, and
considering that it went on to invite the bearer to an introductory talk on
kabbalah at the centre Madonna bought for the organisation six years ago, it
seemed just that. The lecture offered an hour-long precis of what cynics
would dismiss as woolly mumbo jumbo. One per cent of each of us is concerned
with our corporal beings; concentrate on the remaining 99%, the speaker
suggests, and we locate the key to a spiritually nourishing life. There is,
however, an impression of calm, wellbeing, even complacency. And Madonna, as
even a cursory knowledge of her questing, controversy-courting 27-year
career will attest, needs calm. Because the opposite of calm, of control,
is? “Chaos,” she says later. “Pain, suffering.”
We are meeting to discuss Celebration, the two-disc, 36-track greatest-hits
collection that marks Madonna’s final contractual obligation to her record
label before she skips off into the $120m embrace of Live Nation, the
American concert promoters. Conditions have been imposed: no questions about
adoption, about her divorce, about her love life, her faith; discussion is
to be confined to her music. Refereeing the joust is the singer’s longtime
American publicist, a formidable, don’t-mess-with-me powerhouse named Liz
Rosenberg, whose manner, if not appearance, puts one instantly and
inescapably in mind of the character of Roz, the giant snail in the film
Monsters Inc, with her catch phrase: “I’m watching you, Wazowski. Always
watching.” She has worked for the singer pretty much from the moment, in
1982, when Madonna was first handed the keys to the candy store of stardom.
“By the way,” Madonna says at one point, “my dream was always to work in a
candy store. It was because of my obsession with candy; I don’t have it any
more, now that my teeth are all rotten. I did go to a university for a year,
as shocking as that might sound to people, and there was a candy shop that I
used to go to all the time, an old-fashioned one where all the candy was in
these big glass jars. I used to go in there and look at all the candy and
think, ‘God, it would be really cool to work in here; I could have candy
whenever I wanted.’ So I did want the keys to the candy store, but I had
different keys.” Confectionery’s loss, pop’s gain.
In Life with My Sister Madonna, Christopher Ciccone’s bitchy and embittered
memoir, the singer’s brother recounts how every single minute of his
sister’s day is planned and accounted for. Today, however, that schedule has
gone awry. Seconds before I am due at her front door, a call comes through
advising me to delay by 15 minutes. Which I duly do, only to be parked in
the reception hall for a further quarter of an hour. It gives me a chance to
take a look around. As I wait, Madonna appears briefly before descending to the
basement, from which various sounds drift up: a peal of throaty laughter; a
burst of her new single; and the noise of a vacuum cleaner. Is she catching
up on housework, geed up by one of her own songs on the stereo and skipping
round, Dyson in hand? Unlikely, but it’s an appealing image. In the hall
where I wait, a painting by the 17th-century Dutch baroque artist Gerrit Dou
hangs on one of the walls, which are covered with blue brushed velvet. On
another wall, a pair of circular canvases show a troupe of pierrots,
rope-dancing. Scented Christian Dior candles fill the air in a space so
dimly lit, it seems both slightly theatrical and quasi-religious. A huge
telephone with multiple extensions bears labels such as M study, M dressing
room, M bathroom, Laundry, Music Room, Kitchen, Mews. The picture is one of
great wealth combined with logistical and organisational rigour. Discipline,
control, precision. “And that’s the definition of me?” Madonna says later,
finishing my out-loud train of thought. “Yeah, but I don’t even think, when
people write that, that they really believe it. I just think people are
tapping into a zeitgeist and repeating things they’ve heard other people
say; and it makes good copy.”
Our encounter finally gets under way in Madonna’s study, an all-grey room with
a Frida Kahlo painting above the huge art-deco desk, glass shelves bearing
art books and family photographs, and two semi-facing armchairs, on which we
sit. In the flesh, in black trousers and a sleeveless shirt, the 51-year-old
is tiny, even in heels, and pretty, her face somehow more animated and
readable than you expect, her features forming into butter-wouldn’t-melt or
knowingly ironic expressions as she talks. Her accent is noticeably clipped,
with a Queen’s English clarity, a result of the amount of time she began to
spend in this country following her marriage to Guy Ritchie. For a good 10
minutes, her discomfort is visible, a hand covering her face as she answers.
And when, during this initial awkwardness, I lean into the space between us
to emphasise a point, I sense without any room for doubt that I have crossed
an invisible line.
You begin to understand why people are so in awe of her: you wouldn’t want to
be on the receiving end of one of her frosty glares. Does that mean, I ask
at one point, that we have stopped treating her as a mere mortal? “A lot of
people are just really confused by me,” she says. “They don’t know what to
think of me, so they try to compartmentalise me or diminish me. Maybe they
just feel unsafe. But any time you have an overtly emotional or irrational,
negative reaction to something, you’re fearing something that it’s bringing
up in you.” She pauses and looks over at Rosenberg. “Let’s all call our
shrinks right now and have that discussion. Liz?”
When, last year, an American magazine writer profiled Madonna and wrote “Think
back on her career. It’s not songs you remember, or not primarily”, you knew
what he meant. Videos, film roles, marriages, haircuts, children, charity
work: all carry visual freight that has often seemed to overshadow Madonna’s
original claim to fame. But doesn’t Celebration, I suggest, indicate that
the songs figured in there somewhere, too? That writer, Rosenberg barks
suddenly from behind the desk, “is an arsehole”. “Those are harsh words,”
Madonna chides, unable to suppress a laugh. “I don’t know, I guess it
depends on what side of the fence you’re on. Some people don’t appreciate my
music, so they’re not going to think of me as a musician or songwriter. They
like to think of me as a sort of cultural phenomenon.” So people listen to
her songs and react visually, more than emotionally or musically? “Right —
‘That’s when she had the cone bra on’, ‘That’s the burning-crosses song’.
That kind of stuff. I suppose that’s partly my fault.” And when we sift
through the milestones of her career, we look for, what? Motivation, irony?
“Manipulation, provocation,” she says.
Another commentator wrote that Madonna’s “ability to absorb and incorporate
knowledge keeps her one step ahead”. Certainly, her instincts about music,
fashion and future cultural trends have proved uncanny. But doesn’t this
concentration on her skill for assimilation overlook what she herself does
with that knowledge? “Well, yeah,” she replies. “We can all take in
information. It’s how we regurgitate it that makes us different. Right?” And
might concentrating on the absorption remove her own subsequent input from
the equation? “Well, it’s an undermining thing to do, isn’t it?” She
laughs. “Isn’t that the point of the exercise?”
I ask her about her early days in New York in the late 1970s, where she
arrived, penniless and a university dropout, to pursue a career as a dancer.
And where she earned a reputation as a stop-at-nothing, manipulative,
sexually promiscuous wannabe, discarding managers, bandmates and boyfriends
on a whim.
Five years of hard graft, thrift, ruthlessness and opportunism paid off when
she signed a record contract in 1982. But they also marked her, indelibly,
as an artist; indeed, from the way she talks about the period, you get the
sense that, no matter the rumoured £300m fortune, the art collection, the
toy boy, the record-breaking tours (her most recent, Sticky & Sweet, grossed
a staggering $408m), there is a part of Madonna that is still motivated by
the cross-fertilisation and experimentalism of early-1980s New York.
Physically, she left it long ago. Artistically, she’s still there, in her own
imagination at least: zooming around taking on influences and collaborators,
draining them dry, moving on, a cultural magpie. The budgets, and the
headlines, have got bigger; the spirit, she argues, remains. “The city will
never be the same,” she says. “It was an amazing time, an amazing
convergence of pop culture and art. To think I used to have dinner on a
regular basis with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.
That was like an everyday thing. It was a much more informative part of my
life than most of the parts people choose to focus on. I got to do gigs at
places like CBGB before I got put underneath the microscope, and that was
helpful to me, as an artist, and also to give me a sense of confidence about
myself — regardless of the subsequent beatings I would take.”
Madonna contra mundum? It’s a condition you find in many artists, a
willed psychological state that pumps them up before they rescale the
heights with each successive album or tour. The affirmation of album sales —
Madonna is the most successful female recording artist of all time — cannot
shake such people from a sense of victimhood, of being misunderstood or
underappreciated. Possibly, this is rooted in the belief that what they
create is ineffably trivial. That might explain why some, especially the
intellectually curious (or insecure), dabble in a multitude of other arts
disciplines or gather around them the appurtenances of cultural refinement
and significance. (How revealing, after all, is that “I did go to a
university for a year, as shocking as that might sound to people”?)
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