Madonna and Me (21 page)

Madonna’s mythological self traffics in pure ideals. It seems like she has tried to drag these ideals through the looking glass and impose them on reality. For instance, we have seen her suffer from touchingly childish efforts to assemble a perfect family life, something any nice Catholic girl would, naturally, dream of.

In her strangely moving old song “Oh Father” (“You can’t hurt me now/I got away from you/I never thought I would”) Madonna declares herself psychologically liberated from what, one presumes, was an unhappy childhood—what with her mother becoming ill and dying (memorably depicted on MTV in an open casket, with stitches across her mouth), and several artsy scenes suggesting her father was abusive.

What I can guess, from reading between the lines of twenty years of random quotes, is that Madonna felt her father never approved of her. When, following the success of “Hung Up”—her hit from her 2006
Confessions on a Dance Floor
album—she was informed that she had finally achieved the same number of Top 10 hits as Elvis Presley, she remarked, “Me and Elvis? Are you kidding? I’m going to tell my dad. Maybe that will impress him.”

This was a painful revelation, suggesting that her dad has never been overly impressed by her cute pouts and fake tantrums—and perhaps revealing some insight into her less-than-ideal love life. We’ve seen her in and out of relationships: all the affairs between husbands—models, boy toys, dancers on tour, Dennis Rodman, Warren Beatty. At times Madonna seemed genuinely infatuated; at others just lonely and grateful for any man who could actually remain standing on his hind legs while facing the white heat of her. “Make a
point of saying something disarming at least once on a date”—I remember her saying something like this to a magazine. But unarmed moments came at a premium, and they were, possibly, quite rare once she got serious about someone. She seemed to plunge into both of her marriages with sincere high hopes, but made the same mistake: She thought both men were capable of being stronger than she is. She proved to be indomitable, and she ate Sean Penn and Guy Ritchie for breakfast . . . and we feel sorrier for them, somehow, even though it is likely that Madonna suffered more. One suspects that she doesn’t really want to crush men under her boot heels, but for some reason, that’s where they always seem to end up.

Her first child was an experiment in pure eugenics, if not an actual virgin birth or act of spontaneous generation: Madonna spotted the right sperm taking a jog around Central Park, made the proper business arrangements—and
pow
. Daughter Lourdes was created, with one perfect Frida Kahlo eyebrow.

One bit of genuine pleasure seems to have been captured thanks to this act of parenthood: The
Ray of Light
album, which—dumb and thumpy as the arrangements are—is clearly a portrait of the artist shaken to her foundations by the overwhelming love attending motherhood. This ecstatic New Age sensibility wore off, however—Madonna’s metabolism for pleasure seemed to grow only faster with age. Subsequent albums seemed mainly to dwell on recapturing pleasures, either sexual or nostalgic.

One look at the cover of 2008’s
Hard Candy
ought to be enough to inform the aforementioned cartoonist Mike Luckovich of his error. Madonna is shown, on the cover, in terrible candor. She is, I believe, honestly revealing what she feels she has become: invulnerable, combative, brittle, and difficult to love. She has successfully worked off all the parts of herself she was insecure about—her ass is rock-tight as any high-school track star’s. But there is no more cushiness, vulnerability, or softness in her; all that remains is vanity and vexation of the spirit. She still always wins, but it hurts, and it isn’t fun
anymore. She has the heavyweight championship belt, the throne, and an expansive kingdom in a world with no king.

There she was, finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, without her husband. It reminded me of the moment at the end of the movie
Elizabeth
when the queen cakes her face white, dons the starchy wig, assumes the corporeal majesty of England, and forsakes all hope of equality in companionship. Madonna was forced, as Elizabeth was, to publicly acknowledge that the reward for all her work is the terrible loneliness of being too singular.

These days, all the sex in Madonna seems predatory and praying-mantis–like—she’s in it for the young blood; it’s an age-reversal injection, like Botox or vitamin B-12. Fertility having abandoned Her Madgesty, the star now chases an expensive motherhood-high by adopting exotic infants, and attempting, like a good Catholic girl, to do a little good in bad places.

But there is no negative publicity for goddesses. A goddess is either powerful, compelling you to project your love or fear or hate on to her, or she is dead, because her followers have lost interest and forgotten her.

I was most impressed with Madonna in 2006, when I believed that the eleven-year-old daughter of a man I was dating detested me. The one place we were able to connect was dancing around the living room to
Confessions on a Dance Floor.
I had to hand it to Ms. Ciccone. I was only a couple years older than the daughter when I rocked out to Madonna’s first album—and here she still was, still fascinating kids enough to give me a few tension-free, girl-power moments with a deeply resentful tween.

But operas rarely have happy endings. Madonna seems to be on the cusp of a certain Wagnerian third act; the Parthenon she has
built as homage to her own realized potential is wobbling, despite her best-laid plans. Certain things have simply been beyond her control. Madonna has yet to realize, as Dolly Parton has, that for a performer to age gracefully, she can’t just look sensational—she must also appear to be
happy
. Life’s wisdom must seem to have enriched her in some beatific way, or there is no point—she has gained the world, but the price was too high.

“Are you having a good time?” Madonna asks her audience in a concert film. There is no joy in this inquiry—it doesn’t sound like
she’s
having a good time. She sounds weary and disappointed; one can hear what effort it costs to combust her way through yet another display of brute strength and rude will, alone in the middle of her eponymous industrial complex.

But this is the point of Madonna. She is working. She is undergoing labor for you. She is giving birth to herself again, and the baby is yours—the projection screens, the dancing boys, the lasers, the drum machines, the corsets, her ass, and her boots. Her id amplified. Her life, her pain, her joys, her sorrows, her indiscretions, her kinks, and her mistakes. This is the point of Madonna.

She is that untouchable object of desire: the beauty myth as
Wizard of Oz.

Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain, because there is no woman behind the curtain. She is, and always has been, in front of the curtain—she is the great flaming head. The soul working the levers is the lonely little girl in the center of the all-consuming fire, always out in front.

Sarah Stodola

 

 

 

 

 

A MEN’S COAT happens to dominate this black-and-white photograph. Stained and grubby-beige, it very nearly engulfs Madonna as she poses in front of the old tenement buildings of St. Mark’s Place; my best guess is she’s standing between 1st and 2nd Avenue. Photographer Amy Arbus (Diane’s daughter) ran into her by chance back one day “when she still had a last name.” She holds a bowling bag for a purse. Her girlish white socks and black patent shoes sit so close together on the sidewalk that the heels touch a la Dorothy’s ruby reds, though they in no way render her girlish. Rather, they emphasize the impenetrability of her tough exterior. She comes across as short yet looming. Her bleached hair is long on roots, hairspray, and volume. Heavy eyeliner, deep lipstick, and a fake mole above her mouth comprise the face she put on that day.

She remains resolutely stone-faced, wears a scarf tight around her neck, rests a hand in a coat pocket, and kind of looks like a bitch. Probably a month after the moment is captured, she will be famous.

The photograph was taken on the spot as part of a series Arbus was working on for the
Village Voice
in 1983. It is my favorite version of Madonna because it is her at her least forced: a rare captured moment when Madonna, not yet an object of universal interest but already a person desperate for attention, is merely walking down the New York City street, perhaps distracted, not hoping or expecting to be seen. It links her inextricably with the city that made her.

What you are seeing is a person, as opposed to the much more common persona. And in her case, especially, each persona was carefully—too carefully—cultivated. For all of Madonna’s innovation as a performer, her successive public guises never managed to shake their contrived aura. But for the Madonna Ciccone who lived in New York circa 1983, this was not quite the case—yet. There were very real things about her then. For one, she didn’t have enough money to manufacture a new look when the whim struck; having famously (albeit questionably) arrived in New York with a mere $35 to her name, she wouldn’t have been capable of doing anything too polished. She had to work with what she had at her disposal, and the result was a mish mash of an image, not unlike many sartorial presentations by women of that age group, but also uniquely her own. Madonna was, like most creative and ambitious people in their early twenties, grasping, emulating, experimenting. Above all, she was looking to set herself apart, and to prove her independence. Independence, in fact, became a cornerstone of her career.

And yet, one wishes she didn’t have to be quite so adamant about it. The most successful purveyors of independence accomplish it with a certain amount of stoicism. Demanding that one’s independence be
seen
, be appreciated, really exposes it for its near-opposite: a cry for approval. I prefer her in this black-and-white image, before she became quite so aware of her own hype.

This was the tail end of the New York of the late 1970s and early 1980s, an epoch in the life of the city that continues to fascinate, caveats of crime and poverty be damned. This was a city ravaged by
suburban flight, financial implosion, and general neglect. It was also a city whose nearly complete submission to unearned opulence still lay ahead of it, and where gritty artists, writers, and musicians could still inhabit the place with a straight face. Madonna was a central character in this New York and specifically in the epicenter of the underground creative scene at the time, the East Village.

Starting with the Beats in the 1960s, the East Village emerged, literally, as a distinct neighborhood from the Lower East Side. In the 1970s, the club CBGB opened on the Bowery, showcasing bands like the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie, and Patti Smith. In the early 1980s, artists like Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, and Jean-Michel Basquiat (whom Madonna dated) focused the city’s progressive arts scene on the East Village. The writer Gary Indiana made his name largely through chronicling that neighborhood’s arts landscape for the
Village Voice.
It wasn’t a place for those looking to do things the conventional way, via the traditional channels—it was a tribe of its own, a tribe apart. Art galleries popped up in abandoned storefronts, drag queens held court, musicians pushed through new frontiers. Nothing was too outrageous, and nothing cost a lot of money. The make-shiftier the better. And in this mold, image was everything. Madonna was right in there, honing her look and performing with her band and networking in the local clubs.

Of course, the East Village myth, and especially Madonna’s place in it, somewhat polishes over the truth. The East Village scene purported itself to be composed of a band of outsiders, rebelling against the moneyed establishment, living on the fringes of respectability. In reality, it was already on its way toward becoming fashionable: A
New York
magazine review of
Desperately Seeking Susan
in 1985 already contained a wistful reference to “pre-gentrification Avenue B.” Downtown Manhattan had already taken hold in the popular imagination in a way that assured eventual migration there by a less avant-garde group of people—those for whom adulthood is primarily a series of steps from college graduation to marriage to children; the
types of people who wear jeans only on the weekends. For the moment, though, it embodied that special moment when it begins to dawn on an entire social group that big things are possible. Madonna looked the part, in her hand-me-down, thrift-shop wardrobe, and her wide-eyed fixation on success. Her do-it-yourself look was seen by America at large to reflect the ethos of downtown New York. But there is little doubt that she was merely using that downtown image as a springboard to the very things it supposedly repudiated: wealth and fame.

Also, she was not, in the literal sense, of the East Village. Madonna—a former high school cheerleader, incidentally—lived in Queens for a year during her formative New York time, and after that on 37th Street, then the Upper West Side; all leading up to her first record release. She never actually lived in the East Village, it turns out; she moved to an apartment in Soho at the time of her first record deal. That’s where she lived when this photo was taken. And those clubs where she famously cut her teeth? Danceteria was in Chelsea, Mudd Club in Tribeca, Max’s Kansas City on lower Park Avenue. Our visions of her stomping around the lettered avenues may have more to do with
Desperately Seeking Susan
than anything rooted in accurate history. At least she did appear on the stage of CBGB once.

Still, despite the reality of it, when she burst into the national consciousness, it was largely due to the downtown aesthetic that she so consummately embodied.

And then, as Madonna’s fame evolved, so did her relationship with the city. During the several years immediately following her breakout, she spent far more time in Los Angeles; her romantic involvements took on a decidedly West Coast hue, in tandem with her aggressive pursuit of a film career. Sean Penn, who would become her first husband, was rumored to abhor the eclectic, sexually convoluted company Madonna kept in New York. And as an international star, she became an international resident, touring, recording, and filming
wherever around the globe those things took her. Eventually, she kept a triumvirate of homes in London, New York, and L.A., making England her permanent home. New York had long drifted from the bull’s-eye position.