Madonna (48 page)

Is this then the same performer – and catalyst for changes in attitudes over two decades – who sold over 100 million records, scored more number-one hits than The Beatles and Elvis Presley, and energized, enthralled and enraged a generation? As one of Guy Ritchie’s gangland characters might say, has she gone all girlie on us?

Well, in a word yes. Through her personality and her performances, the last year has seen Madonna reveal and explore the duality of what it is like to be female; from mother to murderess, passive victim to cold predator, woman as creator or devourer, capable of changing swiftly from men’s prey to praying mantis.

The lyrics of her 2001 single ‘What It Feels Like For A Girl’ capture the innate tension in a modern woman, expected simultaneously to display both strength and weakness. The violence of the song’s accompanying video, directed by her husband, reflected the singer’s anger, not just at the balance, or lack of it, between the sexes, but at how women are prisoners of their hormones, victims of their biology. It was no coincidence that she wrote the song while she was pregnant with Rocco and when her future with Ritchie was far from assured. The video, she says, ‘shows my character acting out a fantasy and doing things girls are not allowed to do. This is an angry song.’ So angry and violent, indeed, that MTV banned the three-minute film, which shows Madonna driving round in a souped-up car, with a senile old woman in the passenger seat. She robs a man at a cash machine, sets fire to a filling station as a male gas attendant lies prone on the floor, drives through a boy’s hockey match and aims a gun at two cops – when she pulls the trigger it is seen to be a water pistol. In the final scene, Madonna drives the car at full speed into a lamppost, presumably killing both her and her passenger.

For a woman who has always eschewed violence, both in her personal and her artistic life, the
What It Feels Like For A Girl
video was a radical departure. While critics rather patronizingly pointed to Ritchie’s fascination with violence, and to Madonna’s need to compete with the chainsaw-wielding extremes of pop sensation Eminem, as the reasons behind her change of heart, the reality is that the video and the iconography of her Drowned World concert, is entirely consistent with the themes that she has been exploring for the last twenty years, namely the relationship between the sexes, the ambiguity of gender, and the unresolved conflict, for women in a patriarchal society, of being fully female and sexual while exercising control over their lives. Artistically, too, it was a logical development from the
Substitute for Love
video she made in 1998, which attracted controversy for its use of images of the hounding of Diana, Princess of Wales, by a predatory, male-dominated mass media. Woman as victim then, woman as avenger now.

Vengeance upon men was a theme she explored further in the Drowned World concert tour of 2001, Madonna in one scene shooting her male tormentor, in another, dressed as a vengeful geisha, taking a sword to her aggressor; images of battered women assailed the audience from video screens. The audience saw a Madonna transformed from ‘Mrs Ritchie,’ earth mother, nurturing wife, spiritual seer, into a contemporary pop version of Puccini’s operatic heroine Turandot, wreaking her revenge on the world of men. Thus her carefully cultivated ‘Mrs Ritchie’ persona is as deceptive as it is beguiling. In many respects the changes in her personal circumstances, her willingness to lead a life rather than pursue a career, have given her the stability and impetus to take on new artistic challenges and renew her assault on society’s sensibilities.

Indeed, her first full-length feature-film collaboration with her husband, a remake of
Swept Away
, a 1975 film by the Italian director Lina Wertmüller, gives an indication of the direction of her future career, and her concerns. Although Ritchie was keen on making an historical epic in the style of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, it seems that his wife had other ideas, not least because Wertmüller’s interests and concerns neatly dovetail with Madonna’s. While Italians accuse her of being too feminist and Americans see her as too sexist, Wertmüller, as a feminist director, has continued to break taboos in order to examine the politics of gender, role reversal, and the subordination of women.

If Wertmüller’s aims sound familiar, so too is Madonna’s role as the lead in Swept Away, in which she plays a rich Italian socialite who is shipwrecked while on a yachting holiday, ending up on a remote island with a Marxist sailor. He becomes the master, she the slave, not only because he is stronger, but because he knows how to survive. Yet the underlying message is that women can be victims of sexism even when they have escaped established ‘female’ roles. That the character played by Madonna, Rafaella, is rich and independent means that she is further victimized because she does not fit the traditional, stereotyped male view of what a woman should be and how she should act.

When filming starts, what will test Ritchie’s directorial abilities – and indeed his marriage – will be whether he is able to succeed where many of his predecessors have so signaly failed; that is, whether he can control Madonna’s natural inclination to make her characters more glamorous and sympathetic, so that the audience view her, Madonna herself, in a more winning light. For the truth is that the bleeding of her personality into her performances, so effective in her songwriting, her videos and her concerts, has been the fatal flaw in her career as an actress. She has wooed Oscar, but has yet to win him.

It also remains to be seen whether motherhood and marriage, and the gradual teasing away of her life from her career, can replace her almost visceral need for mass adulation, and for love. Totally in control of her career, so often out of control in her love life, Madonna is a prisoner of her biology and background, themes that she has explored again and again. Indomitable in public, insecure in private, the paradoxes at the heart of her personality have propelled her forward, this blonde’s ambition powered by that insatiable need to be adored. For the last twenty years we have shared her artistic journey and her personal pilgrimage as she has exchanged one mask for another, from ‘Dita Parlo’ to ‘Veronica Electronica,’ to ‘Lady Madonna’ and ‘Mrs Ritchie.’ In a sense, she has been continually revealing, yet always concealing.

So where does she go from here? The banal question merits only an equally banal answer: Who knows? She goes where we go, a cultural bloodhound always on the scent of the fresh, the cool and the credible. That is part of her excitement and appeal, at once the ambitious all-American girl, the clinical corporate chief, the loyal friend, the uncertain lover, and the restless, life-enhancing force of nature, continually challenging, provoking and enchanting.

As she herself says, ‘It feels to me that I’m slowly revealing myself, my true nature. It feels to me like I’m just getting close to the core of who I really am.’

Her journey has only begun.

Acknowledgments

Considering that this is a book about an all-American girl, it seems curious that my research began and ended in a typically English fashion – with a cup of tea and home-made cake. It began with a discussion about the family tree of her husband, Guy Ritchie, at the North London home of one of his relatives, Gavin Doyle. It ended, some months later, with a short journey south to the Thames-side study of Sir Tim Rice. There, surrounded by
Evita
memorabilia, as well as cricketing gear assembled for an impending match in Berlin, the Oscar-winning lyricist talked about the singer he came to know. Even in New York, the home of fast food and filter coffee, it was hard to escape English tea. This time, though, it was served with kosher milk and biscuits in a Greenwich Village apartment, as a rabbi meditated on Madonna’s interest in the Jewish mystical teachings known as the Kabbalah.

For the most part, given the singer’s nocturnal lifestyle in the clubs of New York and Los Angeles, research was perforce undertaken long after afternoon tea had ceased to be served. Her former boyfriend Mark Kamins gave an erudite discourse on different tequilas in a Cuban bar in Tribeca; Scottish friends explained the character of folk in Dornoch, where Madonna married, over a glass or two of malt whisky; while back in SoHo, the film director Abel Ferrara waxed lyrical about the efficacious properties of Budweiser beer, brewed in nearby New Jersey. As he talked about one of the world’s brightest showbiz stars, outside in the street a placard-carrying evangelist denounced the modern cult of celebrity.

Yet, as those who were interviewed made abundantly clear, Madonna is far more than a run-of-the-mill celebrity. By dint of enterprise, creativity and dynamism, the very qualities that helped to make America, she has established herself as a towering figure not only in the world of popular entertainment, but in modern culture. My thanks, then, to all those who shared their insights and observations to help me chart her trajectory and gain a fix on a personality that has, in spite of the thousands of articles about her, remained as elusive as it is enigmatic.

I am indebted to Jim Albright; Lucinda Axler; Arthur Baker; Camille Barbone; Erika Belle; Fred Brathwaite aka Fab Five Freddie; Vito Bruno; Gary Burke; Norris Burroughs; Nick Ciotola and Kerin Shellenbarger at the Senator John Heinz Regional History Center, Pittsburgh; Mary Anne Dailey; Professor Gay Delanghe, the University of Michigan; Mark and Lori Dolengowski; Gavin Doyle; Abel and Nancy Ferrara; Katherine Fortin; Vince Gerasole; Dan and Ed Gilroy; Stuart Graber; Linda Alaniz-Hornsby; Virginia Humes; Geneva College, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania; Mark Kamins; Peter Kentes; John Kohn; Celeste LaBate; Jimi LaLumia; Pearl Lang; Jeff Lass; Robert Leacock; Sir Michael Leighton, Bt; Andrew Lownie; Jock McGregor; Colonel William McNair; Patrick McPharlin; Curt Miner; Coati Mundi; Michael Musto; Claire Narbonne-Fortin; Sioux Nesi; Rabbi Julia Neuberger; Bert Padell; Andy Paley; Tommy Quon; Sir Tim Rice; Mira Rostova; Whitley Setrakian; Bobby Shaw; Peter Sibilia; Ed Steinberg; Carol Steir; Steve Torton; Dr Nick Twomey; Robert Van Winkle aka Vanilla Ice; Bonnie Winston; Ruth Dupack Young; Curtis Zale; Fred Zarr. Those mentioned above who lent me their rare and fascinating photographs are also acknowledged separately on page 9.

My thanks also to my researchers, Lizzie Clachan, Will Hartley and Tania McKeown, for tackling the mountain of paper that has been produced about Madonna, and to my editors, Jacquie Wines and Toby Buchan, for making sense of my additional molehill, as also to their colleagues at Michael O’Mara Books – Gabrielle Mander, Helen Cumberbatch, Karen Dolan, Diana Briscoe, Rhian McKay, Nessa Williams and Athene Chanter. I am also indebted to the people at St Martin’s Press, New York, and especially to my editor there, Hope Dellon, and her assistant, Kris Kamikawa. Martin Bristow worked his usual miracle on the design and setting of the book, on a very tight deadline, and Andrew Armitage compiled the index with great skill. As ever, my publisher and friend Michael O’Mara encouraged me when I was flagging and, more important, kept me up to date with the progress of my soccer team, Leeds United, during the weeks spent across ‘the Pond.’ And finally, to my wife Lynne and daughters Lydia and Alexandra, who cheered me on. I have made a lot of new friends and had a lot of fun, and I can only hope that readers will enjoy reading my book about Madonna as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it.

ANDREW MORTON
Highgate, London, September 2001

Madonna: Discography, videos, film and theater, tours

12-inch vinyl, cassette and CD maxi-singles chronologically