Madonna: Like an Icon, Fully Revised and Updated Edition

453 Pages·2018·13.65 MB·English

by  Lucy O’Brien

About the Book
Madonna Ciccone is the biggest-selling female recording artist of all time and
one of our greatest living pop stars. With each pioneering album she has
consistently reinvented her music and image, transcending the world of pop to
become a global cultural icon.
Complete with revealing interviews with her intimate inner circle – her dancers,
backing musicians and producers – Lucy O’Brien follows Madonna from her
difficult childhood and those frenetic early years in New York, through the
shocks and scandals of the 1990s Sex era to her twenty-first-century incarnation
as an outspoken activist, encompassing her humanitarian work and the
controversial Malawian adoption saga.
Providing a fascinating insight into Madonna’s life, her relationships and what
motivates her as a woman and as an artist, here at last is the definitive biography
of one of the biggest stars in the world.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Book I: Baptism
1 The Death of Madonna
2 A Magical Place
3 The Arrogance and the Nerve!
4 Jam Hot
Book II: Confession
5 Sick and Perverted
6 How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Madonna
7 Make-up in That Great Hollywood Way
8 Who’s That Girl?
9 The Sin Is Within You
10 Giving Good Face
11 Fallen Angel
12 I Only Shoot What I Need
Book III: Absolution
13 Bits and Zeroes and Ones
14 Hard-working and Hard-laughing
15 Mommy Pop Star
16 American Wife
17 ABBA on Drugs
18 Coming from God
Book IV: Redemption
19 Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You
20 Holy Water
Epilogue
Picture Section
Notes
Select Bibliography
Discography
Videos, Films and Theatre
Picture Credits
Index
About the Author
Also by Lucy O’Brien
Copyright

To Malcolm, Erran and Maya
and
Dorothy O’Brien
(1906–1951)
Acknowledgements
Thanks first and foremost to Malcolm Boyle, for his love, humour and
inspiration. Huge thanks to my researcher Rob Diament (lead singer/songwriter
of the band Temposhark and an impressive Madonna archivist). His intelligence
and enthusiasm inspired me whenever the going got tough. Thanks, too, to my
agent Jane Turnbull, and to my editors: Doug Young, Sarah Emsley and Helena
Gonda at Transworld, Mauro DiPreta and Jessica Sindler at HarperCollins US,
for their support and belief in the book. Also Robert Sabella, for his help and
insight.
Thanks to the interviewees, all of whom were so generous with their time and
their recollections. What struck me was the sheer force of creativity and
dynamism of so many who have known and worked with Madonna. There was
such a wealth of material that it couldn’t all be included in the book. Thanks,
then, to interviewees including Edward Acker, Lorenzo Agius, Tori Amos,
Nancy Andersen, TracyAnderson, Camille Barbone, Andre Betts, Jimmy
Bralower, Ginger Canzoneri, Matt Cain, Louise Carolin, Ingrid Chavez, Gardner
Cole, Pablo Cook, Wendy Cooling, Marie Cooper, Wyn Cooper, Andrae
Crouch, Kevin Cummins, Marius De Vries, Bill DeYoung, Kim Drayton,
Johnny Dynell, Andy Earle, Julia Eccleshare, Brigitte Echols, Ulrich Edel,
Deborah Feingold, James Foley, Geoff Foster, Randy Frank, Bruce Gaitsch,
Salim Gauwloos, Jon Gordon, Niki Haris, Ramon Hertz, Richard Hojna, Barney
Hoskyns, Anthony Jackson, Mark Kamins, Mihran Kirakosyan, Danny
Kleinman, Pearl Lang, Cyndi Lauper, Brian McCollum, Melodie McDaniel,
Alex Magno, Bob Magnusson, Maripol, Charles Melcher, Bill Meyers, Peter
Morse, Rick Nowells, Melinda Patton, Guy Pratt, Princess Julia, Raistalla, Tim
Rice, Dustin Robertson, Sandy Robertson, Earle Sebastian, Susan Seidelman,
Tony Shimkin, Guy Sigsworth, Peter Sparling, Billy Steinberg, Peggy Vance,
Carlton Wilborn, Doug Wimbish, Dick Witts, L’nor Wolin and Peter York.
And many thanks to Heather Bradford, Sarah Cheang, Wendy Fonarow,
Louise Kerr, Adrian Neale, Susan O’Brien, Daniel Theo and Jane Turner for
their wonderful help with research. Last but not least, love and thanks to my
family for everything.
Introduction
I first became aware that Madonna was cool 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. 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 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 podgy 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 so appealing. She
wasn’t just another manufactured icon, she was herself. Madonna then evolved,
from the peroxide vamp of the mid-’80s True Blue era to the dark mysticism of
Like A Prayer, to the psychedelic voyager of Ray of Light, and the reflective
woman in Rebel Heart.
When my book was first published in 2007 Madonna was still defined by her
sex life, her fashion status and her feel-good disco tunes. Many found it hard to
believe that she was a credible musician and an authentic artist. Now, in the year
that Madonna turns sixty, the world is beginning to understand her achievement
and there is a desire to explore how she did what she did.1
It wasn’t until she appeared onstage to collect her Woman of the Year award
at the Billboard Women in Music 2016 event that people realised why she is a
feminist crusader and why, after three decades in the business, she deserves to be
taken seriously. ‘I stand before you as a doormat. Oh, I mean, as a female
entertainer,’ she joked. ‘Thank you for acknowledging my ability to continue my
career for thirty-four years in the face of blatant sexism and misogyny and
constant bullying and relentless abuse.’ And this was a year before the #MeToo
campaign.
In this book I explore how, at 23, Madonna sat in a crummy studio in
downtown New York and put together a demo, playing all the instruments
herself. I show how through each album she grafted with melodies and words,
listening to every bar that was played and contributing to every track. For her
recent albums MDNA and Rebel Heart she shocked the hip young rappers and
singers with her work ethic, sitting in the studio with them from dawn to dusk.
Emerging hip hop producer Charlie Heat, for instance, expressed awe at working
with the woman who created the huge cultural moments of ‘Like A Virgin’ and
‘Like A Prayer’. ‘I still don’t understand how epic that is,’ he said, ‘and she’s
still the hardest working person in her camp.’
Madonna’s personal life parallels many women’s lives – how feminism made
us brave and how, despite the freedom we fought for, there is still intense
conflict between work and motherhood. In her music and art, Madonna says so
much about what it means to be a woman. She puts it in popular terms and
packages it to the hilt, but what strikes me is her breath-taking range. Like a
cultural magpie, she has selected influences from a thousand sources and
harnessed them into one vision. That in itself is a work of art.
Madonna’s unusual, luminous beauty and highly theatrical shows have made
her 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. ‘There was an energy field around her, like a wave, that swept
everyone up as it crashed into the room.’
Madonna the pop star manifested 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. Songwriter Tori
Amos says: ‘I believe that the joining of the themes “Madonna” and “Virgin”
with 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? Having written widely on
feminism and pop culture, I have always wanted to get to the heart of Madonna’s
motivations. Ever since her ‘Like A Virgin’ days I had been building up my own
Madonna archive, and in 2005 I started work on a book about her. I wanted to
look at how she had managed to create an aesthetic that people of all generations
responded to. What was she really about? Perplexed by the contradictory
personae – sexual vamp, Lady of the Manor, Kabbalah crusader, female shaman
– I was searching for a way to understand her, and I found it by going back to
her songs.
Music leaves a psychic imprint; in recorded sound there are clues to the
artist’s world. Listening to Madonna’s music, I found a compelling story.
Whether it was the layers of Catholic liturgy in ‘Like A Prayer’, the dark depths
of ‘Erotica’ or the shimmering trance of ‘Confessions On A Dance Floor’, she
was on a personal journey. Sometimes she was in denial, sometimes living a
melodrama, but through her 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 I went on one of my own. I travelled from state-of-the-art recording
studios to a flat in Hornsey, North London, where Doug Wimbish and the post-
punk Tackhead crew still hung out. I drove round old haunts in Michigan with a
woman who was at school with Madonna, and wandered the windy streets of
Detroit. I interviewed directors next to swimming pools in LA, travelled to New
York to meet former friends and collaborators, walked in Wiltshire fields and
trod the plush interior of the Kabbalah HQ in London. I talked to dancers,
musicians and producers – people who had worked with Madonna, and knew her
artistic self.
From this there emerged two stark pictures: the woman who was ruthless in
moving on and rude to the competition and a woman I’d never seen before –
childlike, and captivating. ‘When she’s in a public place, 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 personas in a more complex way. In interviews she comes
across as guarded and studied, as if, as Norman Mailer once remarked, ‘she is
playing secretary to herself’. The sense of humour that so many people mention
is not much in evidence, a thought echoed by some interviewed for this book
who say she can be brisk and offhand. But many who have worked with
Madonna talk about her warmth and easy manner. Is she two different people? It
wasn’t until I saw footage of the rehearsals for her Confessions tour that I truly
understood what makes her happy. Her face was devoid of make-up and her
clothes casual, but she was relaxed and radiating energy; every cell of her body
was alive and consumed by the performance. The only place where she seems
truly herself is when she is doing her work. She surrenders herself to the creative
process, reacting to the world as a dancer, processing and expressing her
experience.
This reaction is fuelled by her political activism and the fact that in recent
years she has become more and more outspoken. She risks unpopularity: she