Yet with every day that passed, Madonna was moving away from Eva Perón and closer to the baby growing inside her. ‘Dare I say it? I am tired of being her,’ she said of Evita, the changes in her physical self presaging the spiritual and emotional transformation she would effect over the coming years.
Of the shadow self with which she had shared her life for the past two years. Madonna observed: ‘She was a human being with hopes and dreams and human frailties. I’ve tried my best. There’s nothing more than I can do. It’s time to move on to the next chapter of my life.’
Chapter Thirteen
Lady Madonna
FOR NINE DAYS AND NIGHTS they tortured the Jesuit priest, beating him, crushing his legs, and sticking him with needles to keep him awake. Yet, according to eyewitnesses ‘scarcely a sigh’ escaped Sir John Ogilvie throughout his ordeal, as he continued to refuse to name any of those he had converted to Catholicism during the nine months he had spent in Scotland. Under searching examination ‘his patience courage and gaiety won the admiration of his judges’ – particularly the Protestant Archbishop Spottiswood. Nevertheless, his fortitude did not prevent him from being condemned as a traitor for his efforts to restore the Roman Catholic faith to Scotland. On March 10, 1615, he was hanged in Glasgow, although he was spared the customary beheading and quartering – that is, his corpse being divided into four and put on public display – and hurriedly buried in the kirkyard of Glasgow Cathedral. Three hundred years later his martyrdom was formally acknowledged when the Vatican sanctioned his canonization.
Today, an austere portrait of Sir John Ogilvie, saint and martyr, in his black Jesuit robes, a halo above his head, hangs in a side room of the Roman Catholic cathedral in Edinburgh, unnoticed and ignored by visitors and worshipers alike. Yet the portrait yields a small but important clue to an understanding of Madonna today. One of the saint’s descendants, Isabella Ogilvie, born in 1804, married a Glasgow man, John Ritchie, great-great-grandfather to Madonna’s second husband, Guy Ritchie. The woman who has so often railed against the Catholic Church throughout her adult life, now has a saint in her family. Madonna’s journey, her artistic and spiritual pilgrimage, has returned her to her roots, traveling from the New World to the Old.
In naming her daughter Lourdes she reminded the public of her Catholic roots as well as her family history – friends had visited the center of Catholic pilgrimage during her mother’s illness and prayed for her well-being. The fact that shortly after the birth of her daughter she tried, unsuccessfully, to gain the Pope’s personal blessing was a further sign of the elemental place of Catholicism in her psyche, as also was her decision to have Lourdes christened in a Catholic church. The singer whose Like A Prayer video outraged the Vatican for its sacrilegious overtones, to the point of threatening her with excommunication, seems now to have become the returning prodigal, a telling testament to the Jesuit saying: ‘Give me the child till the age of seven and I will show you the man.’ Struggle as she might, she has never been able completely to escape the embrace of the Catholic faith.
More than that, the all-American girl was playing the part of the very model of a conventional wife and mother. The young woman who once berated her lover Dan Gilroy, for having the temerity to call her a ‘housewife,’ is seemingly now happy to be referred to as ‘the missus’ by her middle-class British husband, whose hit gangster films have elevated violent homophobia to an art form. Not only did she opt for a traditional church wedding in Scotland, but on most Sundays the couple attend Mass at their local church in London. In her new incarnation she has helped her husband wash his car at weekends, has shopped at the local Tesco supermarket, and sometimes walks arm-in-arm with him to their local pub, the Windsor Castle, for a quiet pint of Guinness. In one self-deprecating TV appearance, Madonna, wearing a pinafore and carrying a feather duster, cleaned and dusted in the background while Ritchie spoke to the camera. As the scene ended, she breathed ‘God Save the Queen’ in her newly acquired upper-crust English accent. Unsurprisingly, therefore, her decision to move to England permanently has been seen by some commentators either as transparent social climbing, to rub shoulders with British royalty, or as an attempt to wipe the slate clean and make a fresh start.
The woman who once graced the front of Playboy is now a Good Housekeeping cover girl, a mother who extols the virtues of wholesome food, ‘tough love,’ and a ban on television. At times she sounds just like her father in her denunciation of modern vices: sex and violence on TV, junk food and the lack of a disciplined lifestyle. ‘I am much more puritanical than people think,’ she says. Madonna, who, as a girl, consciously rebelled against her father and everything he stood for, has now realized, to paraphrase Mark Twain, just how much he has grown up over the last decade. ‘It’s very amusing that the rebel wants to be a strict, conventional Catholic mother,’ says Michael Musto of the Village Voice. ‘What drives people like Madonna is the need to be validated, to be praised and accepted.’
It seems that Madonna’s ever-present alter ego has been transformed from ‘Dita Parlo,’ the gold-toothed dominatrix of her Erotica and Sex period, to good old-fashioned Mrs Ritchie – her present name of choice – dutiful wife and mother. Just as she used her Parlo persona to explore the wilder shores of sexual behavior without necessarily owning to those values and impulses herself, so her ‘Mrs Ritchie’ incarnation can be seen as her way of exploring social conformity without losing her radical chic. Intriguing as ever, she leaves open the question as to whether Mrs Ritchie is the real Madonna. With her, appearances are invariably deceptive. ‘On the one hand, the idea of marriage, and the sort of traditional family life repulses me,’ she told the TV presenter Charlie Rose. ‘On the other hand I long for it. I’m constantly in conflict with things, because of my past, my upbringing and the journey I’ve been on.’
‘What was I thinking of?’ she laughed when, in 1987, her friend Rosie O’Donnell played a clip on her television show of her writhing on the floor in a wedding dress during the first MTV awards in 1984. ‘Can you believe that I used to tie a pair of old tights around my hair?’ she asked rhetorically when the clip ended. So what was effectively the defining moment of her career was now relegated to the status of a ‘TV blooper,’ Madonna, demurely dressed in a designer pant suit, conspiring with O’Donnell and her sniggering audience to deny her past self, her music and the radical effect that her earlier personae had had, in terms of both fashion and sexual attitudes, on a generation of teenage girls. Indeed, her public pronouncements over the last few years have consistently denied her earlier creative incarnations while stopping short of renouncing them. ‘I don’t stay in the same place emotionally and my music reflects that,’ she shrugs. Her Music video, in which she and two friends go out on the town in a limo, is both an affectionate homage and a farewell to her past; for emphasis, as though any were needed, Madonna’s cartoon character kicks over a neon sign that reads, ‘Material Girl.’
Beyond these indicators, however, she has embraced musical genres and visual styles she once scorned. At various stages of her career she has championed gays, lesbians, blacks and young women. Her latest album, Music, is replete with country-and-western imagery, yet the wide-brimmed hats, rhinestones, denim, cowboy boots and other symbolic paraphernalia are to a considerable extent the trappings of a racist and sexist redneck culture she once loathed. ‘Don’t ever let me see you wearing cowboy boots and jeans. If you do, don’t bother coming over,’ she once told her lover Jim Albright, a sentiment she echoed when asked about her supposed ‘crush’ on the Spanish actor Antonio Banderas, replying that she could never fall for a man who wore cowboy boots.
Indeed, her performance of Don McLean’s 1972 classic ‘American Pie,’ wearing a tiara and with an American flag as a backdrop, seemed to symbolize her social aspirations and cultural conformity, subverting the norm but respecting American tradition. In fact the West she depicts in her work, particularly her video of the hit single ‘Don’t Tell Me,’ which shows her walking down a l
ong dusty road in the semi-desert, is romantically conventional, portrayed as an imaginative frontier, a land of opportunity, a place of escape and freedom. And the mainstream loved it. Scandalously neglected by the music-industry establishment, she has been showered with awards over the last five years, earning a Golden Globe for her performance in Evita and a clutch of Grammys for her last two albums, Ray of Light and Music. Her yearning for respect as an artist, and particularly for her acting, seems to have been transformed into respectability. It is perhaps appropriate, therefore, that one of her most recent screen appearances was a typically humorous, self-deprecating performance in a television advertisement, in which she wets her pants during a hair-raising escape from fans and paparazzi in a fast car. The car is a BMW, the status symbol for aspiring white professionals, and Madonna was paid a reported £1 million for appearing in the ad, which was directed by her husband.
Her apparent transformation from post-modern icon to mainstream mother began during her first pregnancy. Just as the death of her mother profoundly dislocated her sense of self, and of herself in relation to her father and family, the church, and society in general, so now, since the birth of Lourdes in 1996, and her son Rocco in 2000, she feels born again, her life anchored by the love she feels for her children. The lost, lonely, unfulfilled yet driven woman floating on the latest cultural currents seems at last to have separated her life from her career, her longing to give and receive unconditional love, that love which she only briefly received from her mother, now assuaged. ‘The whole idea of giving birth and being responsible for another life put me in a different place, a place I’d never been before,’ she said shortly after the birth of Lourdes. ‘I feel like I’m starting my life over in some ways. My daughter’s birth was like a rebirth for me.’
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 e
xtent 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.’
Madonna Page 30
