Goddess: Inside Madonna (55 page)

Madonna sings about incest, bisexuality, religion, love, death, and motherhood and is at her best when she makes the world believe that there is no difference between the onstage and offstage Madonna. The dilemma when Madonna’s music is discussed, however, is that her songs depend on many people other than herself. Though she writes the words and the melody and often the chord sequences, the majority of her recordings are collaborations with other songwriters, which makes it difficult to identify what Madonna’s contribution is as opposed to the others involved in any song. Her success is in her ability to move effortlessly, as she has done, from dance music to party music, from pop music to music that was clearly influenced by the 1960s to writing lyrics that dealt with her own very personal torments and tragedies. In 1989, with the release of
Erotica
, Madonna made the transition from a singles artist to one that also garnered a large share of the album market, just as in 1990, with her
Like a Prayer
album, she made the transition from objective lyricist and singer to a performer who guaranteed that every song was autobiographical.

In an article published in
Vanity Fair
in December 2000, the point was made that Madonna’s singer-songwriting-producing abilities have never been given their proper due. In response, Madonna said, “I feel that I’ve been given respect in the world of music. Well, maybe not. I mean I don’t know. I don’t really pay attention. I gave up looking for respect from people a long time ago. You just have to do what you want to do.”

If respect has eluded her, it is because she has always concentrated on style over content, which in itself is ironic since there has never been a more successful performer in the music business whose music has been the subject of so little review and analysis.

In 1993, Madonna was an established singing star and composer with more than 60 million albums sold throughout the world, thirty-nine single recordings released in the United States, all of which had made the
Billboard
Hot 100 Singles Chart. In fact, for the previous ten years, since 1984, with the exception of 1988 when she didn’t release a new record, she had always placed in the Top 10 and had sixteen gold singles, the second highest for any female singer, trailing only Janet Jackson, who had eighteen.

She had also been branded by the press as everything from a teen pop sensation whose “career would be short-lived” to a pro-feminist, from an antifeminist to an exhibitionist to a heretical ex-Christian. In 1990,
Forbes
magazine had estimated her pretax income to be in excess of $39 million and her earnings since 1986 to be more than $800 million with a net worth conservatively estimated in 1994 to be over $250 million. She owned a nine-room apartment on Central Park West and homes in Miami and Beverly Hills. In 1992, along with Freddy DeMann, who had once managed Michael Jackson and who had been her manager since July 1983, Madonna launched her own record company, Maverick, which, after a slow beginning, eventually became the sole international distributor for over 100 million copies of her own albums. Shortly afterward, Madonna added two other divisions, Mad Guy Television and Mad Guy Films, to her corporate holdings. When she claimed that she “ran around like a chicken without a head,” it was no exaggeration. She was very much involved in the management of the television and film companies along with Guy Oseary, a twenty-five-year-old Israeli native whom she hired because of his skills as a marketing expert. Her life was organized and meticulous, and her days were divided into segments of fifteen minutes to one hour, including two hours that were set aside every morning for personal calls to friends, managers, lawyers, and publicists. She had taken only three vacations in the past fifteen years, and even on vacation she scheduled her leisure activities to avoid becoming anxious.

It was not difficult to feel overwhelmed by Madonna. When I finally met her in 1993 to interview her for my article, my first concern was to create a complicity that could somehow be objective in its focus. Almost immediately an unspoken agreement developed between us: every question and answer was couched in cultural or literary terms. It was a game of sorts, and one that she clearly enjoyed playing. As a result, she discussed her feelings and memories in terms of those movies, books, or poems she had most identified with during different stages of her life.

As a child, she recalled that her favorite film had been
To Kill a Mockingbird
, less because she identified with the child in the movie, Scout, than because she saw similarities between her own father and Atticus Finch, the character portrayed by Gregory Peck. According to Madonna, Atticus Finch, like her father, was an ethical man who applied decent principles and sound good sense to everything he did. Both men were committed to justice, honesty, and were quick to come to the defense of the underdog. But perhaps the difference between the two men, a point that Madonna failed to mention, had the most profound effect upon her life. Atticus Finch’s morality was founded on a folksy, small-town, good-neighbor mentality that made him an exception to the others in his environment. Her father’s sense of right and wrong was steeped in the Catholic religion and his determination not to waver from the rules.

When Madonna was only five, her mother, at thirty-one, died of breast cancer. Her death became the central event in the singer’s early childhood. Not only did she carry with her the trauma of her mother’s death, but also her name, the implication of which is the Blessed Mother, the virgin mother of God. By using Catholic iconography, transgression, and prayer imagery, the singer even managed to transform the Madonna from an asexual and passive figure into a woman with erotic potential, a theme that has recurred in the singer’s work as fantasy as well as in her life as reality.

After her father remarried, Madonna made her first transformation into a mythical character. She became Cinderella. In what would become a pattern, she adapted the storybook figure to fit her own personality. Unlike Cinderella, Madonna rebelled. Unlike the mistreated stepchild, she had a big mouth. She answered back. She was disrespectful. “I didn’t resent having to raise my brothers and sisters as much as I resented not having my mother,” she explained.

When she entered college, Madonna first became aware of the poet Anne Sexton. After reading “Double Image,” she drew a parallel between the poet’s words and her mother’s death from breast cancer.

Madonna found that the words of Sexton’s poem reflected her own sense of guilt over her mother’s death. “My earliest memories of my mother,” Madonna says, “is of someone who was kind and good, so I never understood why she was taken away so young. If my mother wasn’t guilty of something, then I began to think that I must be guilty, and that it was my fault she died.”

Madonna continued to compare her life with various works of literature. She recalled that after she arrived in New York on her twentieth birthday, seeking stardom, she discovered
The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath, in which the author described her own traumatic experiences as a new arrival there: “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say, a girl lives in some out of the way town for nineteen years . . . and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself . . . I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty; the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

Years later, after Madonna’s marriage to Sean Penn ended in divorce, when her hope of re-creating her parents’ happy, albeit brief, union had been dashed, she admitted that the film based on Michael Ondaatje’s novel
The English Patient
had had a profound effect on her. She was especially moved by the scene in which the character played by Ralph Fiennes makes his way across a desert to get help for the woman he loves. “To be loved like that,” Madonna said, “or to love someone that way . . .”

There is no doubt that the artistic works that have made the biggest impression on Madonna are the ones that address the five pivotal incidents in her life—the death of her mother, her father’s remarriage, her quest for fame and fortune in New York, her own marriage and divorce, the birth of her two children, and above all, her ongoing dilemma as a woman in moral conflict.

After watching all of Madonna’s films and videos, I found a distinct difference in her styles. When she is acting or singing in a production of her own creation, she draws from her own experiences, either real or imagined, as an inspiration for her many images, personae, and disguises. When she portrays a character someone else has created, she consistently relies on mimicry and on her ability to transform herself physically to resemble the character she is playing. Rather than questioning Madonna’s lack of fantasy, I suddenly found myself wondering if her need to identify with every work of art or every fictional and nonfictional character she portrays reflects a highly developed pragmatism and not merely an overdeveloped sense of narcissism. Is it necessary for Madonna to make a total transformation in order to give her fans the best performance? And, if so, how does she become that other person? What are her sources of knowledge and energy? Does it come naturally or is it all carefully thought out in advance?

In 1996, I was in Buenos Aires for the city’s annual book fair. During that trip, my fascination with Madonna became more focused, and I began to contemplate the notion of writing her biography. After a succession of box-office failures, she had won the role of Eva Perón in Alan Parker’s film
Evita
. Coincidentally, I found myself in the Argentine capital at the same time as Madonna and the rest of the cast were on location to film several pivotal scenes from Eva Perón’s life. Many of the people I met had met Madonna and even helped her as she set about to meticulously research the life and times of Evita. I was invited by a high-ranking political official to visit the Casa Rosada, where I met and interviewed President Carlos Menem. In another coincidence, I found myself there at the same time as the cast and crew were blocking out the scene in which Madonna, as Eva, sings “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” from the balcony of the presidential residence.

While other actors immerse themselves in a role, Madonna becomes a medium of sorts who channels the spirit of the person she portrays into her own body, taking on that person’s identity more for herself than for her audience. What impressed me about her approach to this role was the research she had done to transform herself into a woman who she claimed was her “cosmic soul sister.” According to the journalists, actors, politicians, and singers in Buenos Aires who helped her understand Evita, including several who had actually met and befriended the future first lady when she was a radio personality, Madonna watched countless newsreels from the 1950s so that she would be able to capture Evita’s facial expressions and gestures. She found out what her favorite food was and ate the same. She pored over old photographs and summoned local seamstresses to re-create the same suits and dresses, borrowed similar pieces of jewelry until she had transformed herself physically into the woman who was still revered as an icon and a saint. Madonna even studied voice for six months before shooting began to improve her vocal range.

One evening at the end of my visit, a group of actors and writers invited me to a well-known tango parlor to see excerpts from the late Astor Piazzolla’s
Maria de Buenos Aires
. A commotion at the door signaled the entrance of Madonna, surrounded by an entourage of trainers, assistants, and bodyguards. I found it impossible to be in Buenos Aires and not feel, as Madonna did, the undercurrent of mystery and gothic evil that permeates the city. It was just as impossible not to be aware of the spiritual presence of Eva Perón when I talked to those who had survived the political upheaval of the Dirty War in the 1970s during which a military junta imprisoned and murdered innocent dissidents. The Perón period of the fifties is almost always evoked either as a comparison, reference point, or definition of the soul of Argentina. Listening to the tango music that evening, my fascination with Eva Perón and my newfound curiosity about the actress who seemed to have channeled Evita’s spirit and soul allowed me to approach her to talk about her impressions of the city as well as her role in the film. Obviously consumed by the character she was portraying, Madonna began comparing the similarities between her life and Evita’s. She talked about Evita’s death at thirty-three from inoperable ovarian cancer and about her own mother’s death at almost the same age from inoperable breast cancer. Both she and Eva had lost a parent at an early age, suffered the same rejection from their peers and family, used a succession of lovers to achieve their goals, managed to escape from a small town and make their way to a big city where, against all odds, each had achieved international acclaim.

Many months later, I realized some other, more stunning similarities between the two women, traits that enabled me to understand Madonna better than I had before. Each woman encouraged people to dream by allowing them to witness firsthand how the more fortunate lived—poor girl makes good. Both exist in a space somewhere between fantasy and reality. Each woman stimulates desire without necessarily satisfying demand. And finally, perhaps the most relevant parallel between the two is that both, despite all the success and adoration, all the devotion and fame, longed to be recognized as a serious actress.

In 1999, when I began researching my book on Madonna, interviewing family members and friends of her mother’s, her own friends, colleagues and business associates, as well as people who had worked with her, I realized the biographical facts were less revealing on their own than they were in the context of the events and the people who had most influenced her and contributed to her success. Not only has Madonna invented biographical details about her life, but most articles written about her repeat the same facts or offer contradictory information. Journalists have systematically made up stories to satisfy the public’s prurient interest in the star.