Authors: Andrew Morton
Questions, questions, questions; Madonna, ever the creative detective, searching for clues to the new and the ground-breaking. Even when she is quietly listening to music – the sounds of Ella Fitzgerald, Eastern music and electronic sampling all waft round her home – she is never simply relaxing, but analyzing the sound and the lyrics for a fragment of an original idea, jotting down her thoughts in a notebook bound in marbled paper. Creatively, she is never off duty, pillaging her daily life for ideas and raiding the minds of others for inspiration.
Her bestselling single, ‘Vogue’, for example, came about through a chance conversation with her best friend, actress Debi Mazar, a pal from her days in New York when they were hitting the clubs every night. It was Debi who spotted the dance craze, voguing, which swept the New York gay and Latino scene in the late 1980s. When she told Madonna about this cool, posing dance with its hypnotic hand movements, the singer homed in on its creative and commercial potential, collaborating with producer Shep Pettibone to write the song, which integrated the latest dance style with lyrics expressing Madonna’s own homage to Hollywood stars of a bygone era.
As producer Ed Steinberg, who made her first video says, ‘She is very clear about what she wants but at the same time she accepts the creative input of other people. That is one reason why she is so successful – she is not a total egotist.’ The resulting single, with its accompanying stylish black-and-white video, had perhaps the greatest popular appeal of any of her songs, all the result of a chance conversation, a creative mind and artistic collaboration. Michael Musto of the
Village
Voice commented, ‘That is her genius. She takes something that is totally over with the in-crowd in New York and then brings it to Iowa. Her talent is picking something that is bubbling under the surface and making it her own.’
While her ability to pick over the bones of modern culture and her successful collaborations with other artists are the hallmarks of her career, a constant source of admiration is the way she can effortlessly switch the focus of her attention, moving seamlessly from discussing a merchandising deal to framing the ‘hook’ for her latest song. Songwriter Andy Paley, who has worked extensively with Paul Simon and Brian Wilson, went to her Los Angeles home on numerous occasions while they were working on the soundtrack for
Dick Tracy,
the 1990 film directed by her lover, Warren Beatty. For four hours at a stretch she would focus entirely on the creative process, waving away her secretary and others. ‘She puts the blinkers on when she is working,’ he says. ‘All outside distractions are forgotten. We sat at the piano and she would tap out the rhythm. She wants to feel that she can dance to any song she records. That’s her test.’ Paley and other writers, including her first producer Mark Kamins, reckon that Madonna is one of the best in the business, a much underrated musician and lyricist. ‘She is the easiest person I know to write songs with,’ Paley says. ‘She has a very clear vision, the most direct person you will ever work with.’
While that vision has been clouded by the controversy, much of it self-generated, which has enveloped Madonna’s career, artistically her songwriting is often overshadowed by the striking appeal of her pop videos. Several of her films have been exhibited in museums around the world, notably the Pompidou Center in Paris, as modern works of art.
This stunning visual sense is no accident; Madonna has spent a lifetime studying photographs, black-and-white movies and paintings. ‘She is the perfect example of the visual artist,’ notes graffiti artist and cultural commentator Fab Five Freddie, who watched her blossom during her years in New York. ‘These days you cannot have longevity in the pop game without a firm understanding of the image. She has that and goes so much deeper than people give her credit for. How many pop singers have ever heard of Frida Kahlo, for example, let alone wanted to make a movie about her?’
It is the Mexican artist’s striking work
My Birth
that greets visitors to Madonna’s New York apartment, a painting which she uses as a kind of social litmus test, stating that if a guest fails to appreciate the work she could never consider him or her a friend. Her art collection, carefully chosen over twenty years, means so much to her that she would rather be remembered as a modern-day Peggy Guggenheim than as a singer and actress. ‘Paintings are my secret garden and my passion. My reward and my nice sin,’ she says, the works in her collection acting as indicators to the many paradoxes of her complex personality.
So, for example, in Kahlo’s
My Birth,
the painter imagined her own birth without male intervention, an image that not only undercuts the traditional notion of the female as womb but presents woman as self-reliant, independent and strong, themes which have informed both artists’ work. As she was to show more fully with her roles as an actress, particularly as Eva Perón in
Evita,
Madonna only seems to understand the world around her in terms of herself. So, she not only appreciates Kahlo’s paintings, but personally identifies her own life with that of the tragic artist who saw herself as existing outside conventional society. ‘I worship Frida Kahlo paintings because they reek of her sadness and her pain,’ says Madonna, who admires strong beauties like Georgia O’Keefe, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. Similarly, the singer empathizes with the lifestyle of Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka, whose erotic portraits of stylish sybarites adorn her apartment. She shares Lempicka’s biographer’s view that the painter’s place in the pantheon of modern artists has been denied because, bisexual and libidinous as she was, she was seen as being sexually and politically incorrect. Inevitably perhaps, Madonna sees her own life reflected in the painter’s resistance to conformation with sexual norms.
Madonna, whose unrepentant exploration of traditional gender roles has helped, for example, to make lesbianism acceptable to mainstream society, also identifies with other groups and individuals who were at one time voices in the wilderness. So an Irving Penn photograph of the black champion boxer Joe Louis, the grandson of a slave who hailed from the city she calls home, Detroit, and a small bronze bust of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali reveal the veneration and association she feels with oppressed races of America. She was thrilled when Ali, whom she associates with the fight by American blacks for civil rights, came to her apartment one evening. Similarly, she reveres the memory of Elvis Presley, who died on her birthday. She sees in his early career, when he outraged moral America with his hip-shaking stage routine during the 1950s, a reflection of her own struggle to express the view that women could be feminine, sexual and empowered. That she calls her own multimedia company Maverick underlines her belief that she is a rebel in the face of convention, an outsider who at times has stood proudly independent of her family, church, school and society.
Yet, paradoxically, the same woman who, rather romantically, sees herself as beyond the mainstream, a misunderstood artist, is in reality a living, breathing example of the all-American girl, the perfect embodiment of modern Main Street USA. Thus her creative success has been characterized by her genius for making the avant-garde acceptable to the general public. At the same time, while the vaudeville of her sexual politics, particularly her trademark conical bra and bold crotch-grabbing, owes much to the European tradition displayed in shows – admittedly, American shows – like
Cabaret
and the
Ziegfeld Follies,
Madonna’s knowing, winking suggestiveness and sly humor is in the mold of Mae West, the American film actress, who believed that a woman’s place was on top.
Even the trajectory of her career – a cheerleader from the Midwest who came to the Big Apple to find fame and fortune and then tried to join the Hollywood elite to pursue her acting career – is as traditional as the Stars and Stripes. Her greatest disappointment is that while she considers herself more an actress than singer, her thespian skills have yet to be fully appreciated by the world of theater. Despite this, just how far Madonna has risen in the firmament of stars is demonstrated in the fact that, while she wanted a ‘Grace Kelly style’ for her first wedding, at her second she actually wore a tiara that had belonged to the late Princess. While her appeal lies in the fact that she can be presented as the ultimate girl-next-door, she truly is one in a million, a living archetype, an embodiment of the radical sexual and social changes in modern America over the last twenty years.
While her place as a sexual revolutionary is assured, her dynamism, ambition and life-affirming philosophy would not be out of place in the corporate boardroom. Ironically, of all the many faces Madonna presents to the world – dancer, impresario, producer, singer, actress, entertainer and artist – the one she tries most assiduously to disguise is that of successful businesswoman. She is quoted as having once said, ‘Part of the reason I’m successful is because I’m a good businesswoman, but I don’t think it necessary for people to know that.’ ‘Get OUT’, she ordered director Alex Keshishian when his camera crew tried to film a business conference during the infamous
Truth or Dare
documentary (released as
In Bed With Madonna
outside the USA), which recorded her Blonde Ambition Tour in 1990.
The girl who arrived in New York with a fistful of dollars is, and has been, a publisher, music mogul, TV executive, merchandising magnate and film producer and one of the richest women on the planet, estimated to be worth between $300 and $600 million. ‘She’s a great businesswoman,’ says Seymour Stein, the record company mogul who first signed her. ‘She’s very smart and she trusts her instincts, which are great.’
Her success has certainly impressed the business community. While politicians, feminists and other moral commentators debated the graphic sexual content of her 1992 book,
Sex
, senior professors at Harvard Business School beat a path to her door. They wanted to know the secret of selling 1,500,000 copies of a $50 book in a matter of days. She considered, but eventually turned down, their invitation to address students and faculty. If she had given a lecture, as she originally intended, they would have learned that, once the hype and controversy of her artistic career is stripped away, Madonna is just like them, an embodiment of the drive, enterprise and can-do culture that has powered the American dream.
She is every inch the conventional self-made tycoon: cautious in her investments, conservative in her spending, controlling every part of her multi-million dollar empire. ‘Sometimes,’ says Sir Tim Rice, the co-creator of the musical
Evita,
in which she played the lead role in the film version, ‘it was as if you were dealing with General Motors.’
Indeed, Madonna is a classic capitalist, conforming to all the rules, never putting a foot wrong, running her life like clockwork. Like a typical cigar-chomping company chairman, she is the first to arrive and the last to leave, her schedule full, her day disciplined, while every evening she religiously sits down and lists her goals for the next day. The engineered controversy and deliberate chaos she causes in her artistic life contrast with the order and regimentation of her business routine. However, the bottom line always shadows her creative effort. ‘She is not just a businesswoman but an innovator and creator,’ observes Bert Padell. ‘Money comes second, creation comes first.’
Even her joshing sense of humor would not be out of place in the executive washroom. ‘I’ll give you sixty,’ she told Padell during an early morning phone conversation. As he launched into an explanation of a financial issue, the phone suddenly went dead. When he redialed, she laughingly told him, ‘See? I told you sixty seconds. My time is valuable.’
The girl who lived off popcorn and dressed in hand-me-downs has no intention of squandering her fortune, keeping well clear of the extravagant and the speculative. ‘She is exactly the same way now as she was when she first came into my office without a nickel,’ recalls Padell. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s a dollar or $10,000, she wants to know about it,’ Unlike her adventurous public image, Madonna is a prudent investor who has eschewed the stock market for the safety of interest-bearing government bonds.
She was not one of those who got their fingers burnt in the Internet bubble – indeed, she was so slow out of the starting blocks that she had to sue for the rights to her domain name,
Madonna.com
. – preferring to keep her other assets in property and art. While paintings may be her ‘sin,’ as she says, ‘Financially it is an excellent investment, as well as something sumptuous to admire every day.’ However, her shrewd approach has led her to lose numerous paintings because she refused to pay the asking price. It is now the same with property. When she first came to live in London, she was so shocked by the high prices that on several occasions she lost out on homes she liked because her offers were unrealistically low. Frugal as she is in her financial dealings, if there is one song she would withdraw from her catalogue it is ‘Material Girl’; Madonna has always regretted the decision to record a song that defined her as a consumer rather than an artist. As far as she is concerned, money is a means to an end, usually artistic, rather than an end in itself.
Like other self-reliant and self-made millionaires, Madonna believes that work has its own dignity, a belief underpinned by her recent interest in the Kaballah, a mystical text of Judaism. Thus, although she sends her maternal grandmother Elsie Fortin money every month and has bought her and other elderly relatives televisions and other home comforts, Madonna is reluctant to featherbed family and friends.
She likes to present a hard-boiled, sassy image, but her maternal and compassionate instincts are much in evidence, and not only in the way she dotes on her two children, Lourdes and Rocco. When fashion guru Gianni Versace was murdered, Madonna was the first person to phone his sister Donatella to console her. She has also quietly paid for drug rehabilitation therapy for numerous friends and family members, to help them stand on their own two feet. Indeed, much of her charity work is discreet and unshowy. A well-known supporter of AIDS charities, she is also a so-called ‘quiet donor’ to a charity for breast cancer, the disease which killed her mother. Every Friday after Thanksgiving the singer enjoys an annual ritual, visiting the children’s wards of hospitals in Manhattan and Harlem and distributing hats, pictures and small gifts.