Authors: Andrew Morton
The first signs were physical. Not only did she grow her hair and wear flowing Eastern-style robes, she abandoned her three-hour daily workouts, gave her fitness equipment away to charity and took up ashtanga yoga, her friends Sting and Trudi Styler, themselves notable exponents, recommending the husband-and-wife teaching team they employed. Unshowy and down-to-earth, Madonna and her friend Ingrid Casares regularly joined a public class in SoHo, paying $15 a session like everyone else. On one occasion she and Casares were joined by Jim Albright, who immediately noticed the changes in his erstwhile lover. ‘She had always had a tight body but now she was much more streamlined, her back was now a perfect “V.” Incredibly flexible in a way that she hadn’t been before,’ Albright remembers.
Yet the changes in Madonna were much more than physical; she was quieter, more relaxed, comfortable in her own skin, no longer the brassy young woman whose every second word was a curse. ‘Way back I was loud and, I guess you could say, obscene. Today I use the power of silence,’ she says, the performer finally accepting the differences between her creative and personal lives with dignity. Her star quality, instinctively sensed by her first manager, Camille Barbone, but never appreciated or recognized by the singer herself, is now her most potent weapon. No longer the garrulous, rather defensive artist, in interviews nowadays she is ‘passively aggressive,’ rather like a queen granting a supplicant an audience, using the interviewer’s nervousness to her advantage.
If she now appreciates the value of silence, time is no longer her enemy. She has been on an artistic treadmill throughout her career, always with places to go, people to see, her disciplined lifestyle not only a mechanism for keeping the negative at bay, but also a nervous addiction. It was ‘a great liberating moment to suddenly realize that it’s OK when you’re not in control of everything. I’ve been struggling with that for years,’ Madonna admits. The coming of Lourdes – Lola – changed all that. She spent time reading to her daughter or making up stories, or lying on the floor playing with toys. ‘She’s very keen to stimulate Lola’s imagination, and they paint together and use PlayDoh,’ said her friend, the makeup artist Laura Mercier. ‘Between working and being with her daughter, Madonna hardly has any time to herself any more.
Motherhood certainly suited her. Albright was enchanted by the serene woman he encountered after Lola’s birth, observing, ‘Madonna has a lot of love inside her so Lola was well taken care of. During my time with Madonna I saw her happy but never as happy as when I saw her with her little girl. She is definitely in love with that child.’
The other passion to take over her life was the study of Kabbalah – a mystical set of Jewish teachings – or at least the version popularized by a former insurance salesman, Rabbi Philip Berg, which she began studying in Los Angeles with Rabbi Eitan Yardeni while she was pregnant with Lourdes. In an attempt to understand her mystical side, Madonna has over the years consulted astrologers and studied Hinduism and Buddhism – her friend Jenny Shimizu gave her spiritual texts to read – and, more recently, yoga, especially for its emphasis on humility, peace, and patience. With the millennium fast approaching, Madonna found herself, like millions of others, looking for an anchor and an explanation for existence. Drawn to the dark mystery of Catholicism, yet repelled by its emphasis on guilt and repression, she found a spiritual resonance in Kabbalah. So too did many of her Hollywood friends, among them Barbra Streisand, Courtney Love, Elizabeth Taylor, Jeff Goldblum, and her one-time lover, Sandra Bernhard, all of them disciples.
Inevitably, there were those who suspected Madonna of simply hitching a ride on the next available bandwagon, like ‘lipstick lesbianism’ or the fashion for celebrity single mothers. Yet she took her lessons sufficiently seriously to seek the advice of her teacher, Yardeni, on the best day to give birth to her child. He suggested the day of Rosh Chodesh, or new moon, and that was the day she chose to have the baby (which was born by Cesarean section). Indeed she has even taken her daughter along to Kabbalah meetings, occasionally running into Sandra Bernhard, who argues that her own study of the ancient scripts has made her more tolerant and compassionate. Those sentiments do not extend to her view of her former friend, however. ‘We recently had a Kabbalah event and Madonna brought her little girl. Smart as a whip. And not impressed with her mother. Kept a healthy distance all night,’ Bernhard remarks.
In September 1997 Madonna, hosted a high-powered reception for potential recruits in the courtyard of her Maverick headquarters on Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles. As her one hundred or so guests drank cocktails and ate latkes and knishes, the singer, wearing a red thread bracelet both to ward off the evil eye and to affirm her kinship with the principles of friendship, spirituality and knowledge, told them about the profound impact her study of the ancient mystical texts had made upon her life. ‘I feel like the teaching of Kabbalah embodies modern living. It’s all about revealing the God that’s in you.’
Kabbalah (the name derives from a Hebrew word for ‘tradition,’ in turn derived from the Hebrew word meaning ‘to receive‘) is a collection of Jewish mystical writings passed down for generations and based on the Zohar text, a 2,000-year-old tract that purportedly unlocks the code to the Old Testament. Once the preserve of ultra-Orthodox Jewish males, the Kabbalah explains the link between self, God and the universe, emphasizing the need for peace and harmony between the physical and the spiritual. The Kabbalah Centre, an organization with branches all over the world, has elevated a simplified version of the Kabbalah, dubbed ‘Kabbalah Lite’ and ‘McKabbalah’ by critics, to cult status in the United States. This has been a cause of concern for many Jewish spiritual leaders; as Rabbi Robert Kirschner complains, ‘It is a faddist species of superficial expression of a very significant strain of Jewish religious conviction. It is meant for people who want simplistic answers to the world’s problems. There is a real element of escapism and exploitation to it because it exploits people’s credulity. People believe if they plug into this system they will have all the answers.’ Britain’s only woman rabbi, Julia Neuberger, is more succinct: ‘I think it’s a load of nonsense, but I’m from the liberal, rationalist branch of Judaism.’
Used to criticism, Madonna has persevered with her studies, to such an extent that when I wrote to her about my proposed biography, she sent me a copy of the
Power of Kabbalah
by Rabbi Yehuda Berg, explaining in her covering letter how affected she had been by this fountainhead of wisdom. Just as the picture of the sainted Sir John Ogilvie yields one clue to this complex, self-aware artist, so too did her letter. The subtext was transparent – that she had changed and moved on from her controversial image.
Over kosher cookies in Greenwich Village, a New York rabbi who teaches Kabbalah explained some of its fundamental principles, ideas which help explain Madonna’s fascination with these teachings. For the Kabbalah gives a spiritual rationale, a metaphysical context, to the core values and beliefs that have propelled her so far; namely, the virtues of hard work, self-control and the efficient use of time. Thus the Kabbalah teaches how to control rather than react to events and demonstrates, through the notion of the Bread of Shame, how we only appreciate things in life by working for them. At the same time our lives can be enriched by using time productively, distilling a lifetime’s experience into a few years. At the heart of these teachings is the move away from the physical to the spiritual, in Madonna’s case from material girl to ethereal mother.
Artistically, the change in mood and direction found its fullest expression in
Ray of Light,
released in 1998, her first album in four years, the singer thanking Rabbi Yardeni for ‘creative and spiritual guidance’ in the cover notes. Madonna, who now publicly styled herself ‘Veronica Electronica,’ her mystical alter ego, seemed to have come full circle creatively. The rawness and vulnerability of the first songs she penned in the basement of Dan Gilroy’s converted synagogue nearly twenty years earlier found a resounding echo in this soul-searching album, which was hailed as her ‘most radical, mask-free work.’
She sang about the joy of her daughter’s birth, her mother’s legacy and the perils of celebrity in a way that was candid and mature, the result of a long journey of the heart. Her lyrics about the high price she paid for celebrity at the expense of her own happiness are matched by reflections on her mother’s death, lines she penned during a visit to her father’s home. The imagery of decay is a reflection of her persistent nightmares and endless sense of loss, themes she has returned to throughout her songwriting career.
By contrast with her controlling ‘Dita Parlo’ character, her latest incarnation as ‘Veronica Electronica’ revealed Madonna in a more nurturing mood, the artist as collaborator rather than diva. Old habits die hard, however. In her joint endeavors there was never any doubt who held the whip hand. When the bedraggled figure of the album’s producer, William Orbit, arrived, soaked from a rainstorm, on her doorstep in New York, a plastic bag of tape samples in his hand, it marked the start of fourteen weeks of edgy, creative co-operation to produce
Ray of Light.
The London-born producer, who has worked with Belinda Carlisle and Seal, is known as a scatter-brained genius, and certainly his method of working tested Madonna’s patience to the limit. As she admits, ‘I am a very organized, methodical person and he had a tendency to get sidetracked by other things. Then we got used to each other’s rhythms. I learned to be more open and not such a Nazi.’ Even though she has rigorously high standards, a famously short attention span and is a stickler for detail, the two remained friends. ‘Madonna’s very hands-on and that was a challenge for me. I usually keep the artist away,’ says Orbit.
During this incarnation as ‘Veronica Electronica’ the creative philosophy that inspired her to launch her Maverick company, to nurture and inspire new talent, was clearly apparent. Significantly, she chose material for its power to speak to her about her own life, as much as for its intrinsic creative worth. So, for example, she plucked first-time novelist Jennifer Belle from obscurity, turning her book about a student who turns tricks to pay her way through college, has a distant father and a difficult relationship with her stepmother, and works at the Russian Tea Room in New York to help make ends meet, into a screenplay. Madonna, who worked with Belle on the screenplay, which has yet to be filmed, turned out to be a responsive creative partner, treating the novelist like ‘an equal’ rather than an employee: ‘She would always ask my opinion,’ recalls Belle.
For similar reasons, Madonna hooked up with the novelist Kristin McCloy, discussing whether to turn her novel
Velocity
, about the death of a young woman’s mother and her subsequent attempt to rebuild a fractured relationship with her father, into a movie. ‘It’s my life,’ observed Madonna. ‘In the midst of the tragedy, the character falls in love with someone who is all wrong for her. I can relate to that.’ Unfortunately, the project is now the subject of litigation.
She related, too, to making a movie of the dance musical
Chicago
with Goldie Hawn – ‘I can do those steps in my sleep,’ she boasted – but it was the screenplay by another new writer, Thomas Ropelewski, that caught her eye. His movie,
The Next Best Thing
, is about a single woman in her late thirties who accidentally becomes pregnant by her gay friend. The unlikely couple then decide to raise the child themselves. The movie gave her the chance to work with her friend, the English actor Rupert Everett, riding high after playing opposite Julia Roberts in the hit comedy
My Best Friend’s Wedding,
and to play her favorite character – herself. It was also an opportunity to explore a subject central to much of her creative work, namely gender relations in a contemporary setting.
Sadly, like
Shanghai Surprise,
her latest movie, shot in 1999, had an aura of doom around it from early on. Like Sean Penn, Everett is relaxed and assured before the camera. Indeed, so assured was he in making
The Next Best Thing,
that he rewrote much of the script, eventually suing for a writing credit. The film-musical of
Evita
aside, Madonna’s last real acting role had been in
Dangerous Game
, a gap of some seven years. Yet, in spite of her lack of recent experience, she was utterly confident in her ability, constantly questioning the veteran John Schlesinger’s judgment and direction during shooting, skirmishes which were soon common knowledge beyond the confines of the set.
Eventually, her indomitable self-belief got the better of Schlesinger’s vision for the picture. She successfully lobbied for her character, initially a swimming instructor, to become a Californian yoga teacher with a fondness for all things Eastern and, inexplicably, affected an unconvincing English accent. Typically she trained with her own yoga teacher, acting as her assistant in class in order to understand her role better. Her attempt to make her character more like her real-life self was, however, precisely what Schlesinger, who made
Midnight Cowboy
among other highly regarded films, did not want. Of his leading lady the British director observes, ‘Madonna likes to create characters with a very definite kind of image and I wanted to soften her quite a lot in this film. I wanted people to forget that she was Madonna.’
With Schlesinger’s vision and ideas thwarted – to add to his troubles, he was taken seriously ill at the end of the shoot – Madonna essentially played herself, her absolute self-belief and strength of will, the qualities that have propelled her into the celebrity stratosphere, once again fatally undermining her acting. Released in 2000,
The Next Best Thing
enjoyed only modest success. In one of the kinder reviews, the film critic Stephanie Zacharek complained that, ‘She seems wooden and unnatural, and it’s tough to watch, because she’s clearly trying her damnedest.’ Madonna put a brave face on the criticism, but privately she was deeply hurt, especially as the film boasted a solid cast, a first-rate director and a strong idea.