‘Veronica Electronica,’ it seemed, had been superseded by a new alter ego, ‘Lady Madonna.’ In her latest incarnation, she was immediately installed as the new queen of British society, no charity gala, no award ceremony, no social event complete unless graced by ‘Her Madge-esty.’ It was not long before she was dining with Prince Charles at his country home, Highgrove in Gloucestershire, discussing the dubious joys of jet lag with the heir to the throne. ‘I’m an Anglophile,’ she now declared, citing William Shakespeare and Sid Vicious as examples of eminent Englishmen she admired, apparently without irony. Her old friend Ed Steinberg, who produced the video for her first single all those years ago, saw in her a desire to go upmarket, to win the hearts and minds of her new British constituency. ‘She now has English aristocracy on her mind and she wants to change her image. She wants to become a lady now and forget about the past.’
Amidst all the turmoil and change in her private life, in the winter of 2000 Madonna discovered that she was pregnant once again. This time, however, there was no question that she would have her baby. Even so, her uncertainty about her relationship with the child’s father was hardly helped on Valentine’s Day, just a few weeks into her pregnancy. She was crestfallen when she discovered that a wonderful arrangement of tiger lilies, her favorite flowers, had been sent by a business associate rather than her lover. It was only after an assistant called Ritchie to remind him of the significance of the day that he bought her a modest bunch of blooms. ‘They looked like he had picked them up from a petrol-station forecourt,’ recalls one former member of staff, who was there when Ritchie arrived with the wretched bouquet. After a brisk exchange, the couple left for dinner in silence.
While Madonna confessed that, after years of searching, she had found her ‘soulmate,’ there seemed to be a marked reluctance on Ritchie’s part to commit to a woman ten years his senior. The fact that his other lover, Tania Strecker, was still in the background only complicated these delicate matters of the heart. ‘I’m not saying the last time we [that is, she and Ritchie] met because that’s a bit of a sore one – not for me but for her,’ Tania Strecker has said. ‘She is frightened of me.’ The implication is clear; he was still seeing Strecker after he had taken up with Madonna.
In February 2000, however, as Strecker’s relationship with Ritchie petered out, Madonna and her lover deliberately adopted a higher public profile. They attended the Evening Standard Film Awards together, were seen out at numerous fashionable restaurants, and even took Lola to see the children’s movie Toy Story 2. At the same time, Madonna made it clear that the other new love of her life, her infatuation with Britain, was only skin deep, for she flew back to Los Angeles to prepare for the birth of her second child, taking a swipe at her new home country’s ‘old and Victorian’ hospitals before she left.
Her medical caution was justified. Unlike the first time she gave birth, when she had joked that she was going for a cosmetic nose job as she was being wheeled into surgery for a Cesarean operation, this time there was a degree of genuine concern about her second child’s birth. Months before, she had been diagnosed with a condition known as placenta previa, in which the placenta covers the birth canal, cutting off the baby’s blood supply and greatly increasing the risk of hemorrhage for the mother. As a result, she had made arrangements to have another Cesarean once her unborn child had gone to full term. With a month to go everything seemed fine. Then, on the evening of August 10, Madonna felt unwell, and as a precaution asked a member of her staff to drive her to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. On the way she rang Guy Ritchie, who was at a private screening of his new movie, Snatch, elsewhere in the city. By the time he arrived specialists monitoring her condition had realized the gravity of the problem and decided that immediate surgery was necessary.
By then Madonna was losing blood fast and, according to at least one report, was close to going into shock. With Guy Ritchie holding her hand and whispering words of comfort, she was sedated and wheeled into surgery where, at 1 am on the norning of August 11, 2000, she gave birth to a 5-pound 9-ounce baby boy, Rocco John Ritchie. Because he was jaundiced – normal for premature births – he was placed in an incubator, where he remained for the next five days, Madonna taking him to her Los Feliz home in time for her forty-second birthday. To Ritchie, it seemed the right moment to make an honest woman of her. On her return home, Madonna discovered a crumbled paper bag by the side of her bed. She was about to throw it away, ‘Then I noticed something in it, a little box,’ she recalls. Inside was a diamond ring. ‘Then I saw a card. In it was a really sweet letter that he wrote to me about everything we’ve been through, my birthday and the baby and how happy he was.’ The film producer Erin Berg, a friend of Ritchie’s, later told the world that the couple were to marry before Christmas. ‘He just wants them to be a family,’ said Berg. ‘He has been over the moon since the birth of his son. The man is gushing.’
With her forthcoming marriage announced, Madonna threw herself into planning the event with her customary energy and focus. Once more Trudi Styler was on hand when her friend was considering the religious side of her wedding, and she recommended that she should talk through the issues with Canon John Reynolds, who had blessed her own marriage to Sting in 1992. The clergyman, whose parish covers Sting’s home at Lake House in Wiltshire, was telephoned by Madonna from Los Angeles shortly after the birth of Rocco. ‘She wanted to discuss the ecclesiastical options with me,’ the canon remembers, adding that, ‘She was very friendly and asked intelligent, pertinent questions.’
He was not the only one to voice his admiration, for the world was once more infatuated with the talented Mrs Ritchie-to-be. Just weeks after giving birth, Madonna was managing to juggle motherhood, run an entertainment empire, mastermind the worldwide launch of her Music album, plan her wedding, pick up two music awards at an MTV ceremony, plan two concerts in New York and London in November 2000 – and get herself into a pair of low-slung hipsters. She was a living, breathing tonic for every woman over the age of forty. Her two invitation-only concerts were a chance for the glitterati to pay homage to someone who was almost a latter-day version of the Madonna: icon, mother, mogul, superstar, corporation – oh, and a singer, too.
While in New York the concert was billed as the return of the homecoming queen – ‘It’s great to be back,’ she told her fans – in Britain she was embraced as an honorary Brit, as English as fish-and-chips, warm beer and cricket. That the staging, designed by her friends Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, for the short six-song set resembled a trendy Texan hoedown, and that the songs were as American as mom’s apple pie, mattered not in the least.
The christening of Rocco, followed on the next day by her wedding, both in the far north of Scotland, merely confirmed her effortless social ascendancy. In the event, the wedding, held just before Christmas on Guy Ritchie’s thirty-second birthday, although eagerly anticipated by millions, managed to remain completely private. Memories of the fiasco on the clifftop at Malibu were still painful for Madonna. It would not be repeated. The couple’s choice of the grand but remote Skibo Castle outside the quiet town of Dornoch, the kind of place where the purchase of a new car is hot gossip, was about as far removed from Hollywood glamour as it is possible to be. Yet there was a fitting symmetry about the decision, not just for Ritchie, whose Scots ancestry and links with the Seaforth Highlanders made the north of Scotland an appropriate choice, but also for Madonna. After all, it was her immigrant Ciccone forebears who had labored in the steel mills of Pennsylvania for the Scots-born tycoon Andrew Carnegie, the man who, in 1897, had restored Skibo, by then a crumbling ruin, to its former glory. It seemed fitting, therefore, that a descendant of the men who had helped make Carnegie’s fortune should now reign supreme, if only for a few days, over his former domain. It was a point that would not have been lost on Tony Ciccone, who, like his father and brothers, had worked for a time in the steel mills in order to fund his education.
Even though the castle had been r
ecommended by friends – Sting and Trudi Styler have a home near by, and the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones calls it ‘the most romantic place on earth’ – the couple flew north to make the final arrangements a couple of weeks before the wedding. As they looked around Dornoch Cathedral, chosen as the setting for Rocco’s christening, Madonna could not help but burst into song. This time it was not ‘Good Golly Miss Molly,’ the tune with which she had once regaled her college friends in a church in Ann Arbor, but ‘Ave Maria,’ the sound echoing through the near-empty cathedral, an impromptu rendition watched only by a couple of tourists – and a local journalist. At the christening ceremony itself, held on December 21, it was Sting, one of Rocco’s godfathers, who regaled the congregation with the same piece, watched by the tearful parents, as well as Madonna’s father and Ritchie’s parents and a clutch of the couple’s best friends, including her business associate Guy Oseary (another of Rocco’s godparents), Donatella Versace, who designed the £10,000 – reportedly – cream silk christening gown, Trudi Styler (another godparent), who also read a hymn, Madonna’s sister Melanie, Ingrid Casares, actress friends Gwyneth Paltrow and Debi Mazar, and Rupert Everett, whose arrival, like that of many of the guests, was delayed because of fog. His endeavors perfectly fitted with Madonna’s Kabbalah philosophy: ‘We wanted to find a place that was really hard to get to, because when people have to work to get somewhere, you know they really want to be there,’ she said.
After the thirty-minute ceremony the trio posed briefly, albeit regally, for photographers, Madonna, veiled and with her hair swept back in a bun, looking like a cross between her Evita persona and a minor member of the royal family. That photocall, however, was the only morsel thrown to the ravenous media, whose representatives descended upon Dornoch in droves, for after it the couple retreated to the well-guarded seclusion of their castle redoubt. No thudding helicopters this time to ruin the big day, only the noisy protests of paparazzi photographers being flushed out of the undergrowth on the 7,500-acre estate by the security team Ritchie had engaged.
On the following day, a lone piper broke the silence as Lourdes led the wedding party through the castle’s great hall, lit with hundreds of sputtering candles, scattering rose petals as she went. Here, too, there was another significant difference between Madonna’s first and second weddings. For her marriage to Penn, she had wanted her ensemble to have a ‘Grace Kelly feel: This time, at this altogether more grownup event, she had the real thing, for she wore the same Cartier tiara that Princess Grace had worn for the wedding of her eldest daughter, Caroline.
Guy Ritchie, wearing a kilt of Hunting Mackintosh plaid, and Madonna, in a strapless ivory gown designed by her maid of honor, Stella McCartney, took their vows before the Reverend Susan Brown, watched by her father and Ritchie’s best men, Matthew Vaughn and nightclub owner Piers Adam. Many commentators had wondered whether the feminist icon would promise to ‘love, honor and obey,’ but in fact the couple had written part of their vows, which included the words, ‘cherish, honor and delight in family.’
Once they had taken their vows, they swapped specially designed rings, after which the Reverend Brown presented the newlyweds with a twin pack of toilet paper, her traditional wedding present, explaining the symbolism thus, ‘Two rolls together reminding them that their marriage should be strong and long.’ On the following day the newlyweds left the castle for a brief honeymoon at Lake House, where their romance had started, Madonna reflecting on a‘truly magical, religious experience.’
Now that she had officially become Mrs Ritchie, Madonna delighted in her new persona, signing her name and even changing her credit cards to reflect her new status. If not truly domesticated – ‘I don’t have the cooking gene,’ she jokes – her life seemed redolent of home, hearth and family, echoing an observation her father-in-law had made, ‘She is a delightful and talented person and quite homely.’
Is this then the same performer – and catalyst for changes in attitudes over two decades – who sold over 100 million records, scored more number-one hits than The Beatles and Elvis Presley, and energized, enthralled and enraged a generation? As one of Guy Ritchie’s gangland characters might say, has she gone all girlie on us?
Well, in a word yes. Through her personality and her performances, the last year has seen Madonna reveal and explore the duality of what it is like to be female; from mother to murderess, passive victim to cold predator, woman as creator or devourer, capable of changing swiftly from men’s prey to praying mantis.
The lyrics of her 2001 single ‘What It Feels Like For A Girl’ capture the innate tension in a modern woman, expected simultaneously to display both strength and weakness. The violence of the song’s accompanying video, directed by her husband, reflected the singer’s anger, not just at the balance, or lack of it, between the sexes, but at how women are prisoners of their hormones, victims of their biology. It was no coincidence that she wrote the song while she was pregnant with Rocco and when her future with Ritchie was far from assured. The video, she says, ‘shows my character acting out a fantasy and doing things girls are not allowed to do. This is an angry song.’ So angry and violent, indeed, that MTV banned the three-minute film, which shows Madonna driving round in a souped-up car, with a senile old woman in the passenger seat. She robs a man at a cash machine, sets fire to a filling station as a male gas attendant lies prone on the floor, drives through a boy’s hockey match and aims a gun at two cops – when she pulls the trigger it is seen to be a water pistol. In the final scene, Madonna drives the car at full speed into a lamppost, presumably killing both her and her passenger.
For a woman who has always eschewed violence, both in her personal and her artistic life, the What It Feels Like For A Girl video was a radical departure. While critics rather patronizingly pointed to Ritchie’s fascination with violence, and to Madonna’s need to compete with the chainsaw-wielding extremes of pop sensation Eminem, as the reasons behind her change of heart, the reality is that the video and the iconography of her Drowned World concert, is entirely consistent with the themes that she has been exploring for the last twenty years, namely the relationship between the sexes, the ambiguity of gender, and the unresolved conflict, for women in a patriarchal society, of being fully female and sexual while exercising control over their lives. Artistically, too, it was a logical development from the Substitute for Love video she made in 1998, which attracted controversy for its use of images of the hounding of Diana, Princess of Wales, by a predatory, male-dominated mass media. Woman as victim then, woman as avenger now.
Vengeance upon men was a theme she explored further in the Drowned World concert tour of 2001, Madonna in one scene shooting her male tormentor, in another, dressed as a vengeful geisha, taking a sword to her aggressor; images of battered women assailed the audience from video screens. The audience saw a Madonna transformed from ‘Mrs Ritchie,’ earth mother, nurturing wife, spiritual seer, into a contemporary pop version of Puccini’s operatic heroine Turandot, wreaking her revenge on the world of men. Thus her carefully cultivated ‘Mrs Ritchie’ persona is as deceptive as it is beguiling. In many respects the changes in her personal circumstances, her willingness to lead a life rather than pursue a career, have given her the stability and impetus to take on new artistic challenges and renew her assault on society’s sensibilities.
Indeed, her first full-length feature-film collaboration with her husband, a remake of Swept Away, a 1975 film by the Italian director Lina Wertmüller, gives an indication of the direction of her future career, and her concerns. Although Ritchie was keen on making an historical epic in the style of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, it seems that his wife had other ideas, not least because Wertmüller’s interests and concerns neatly dovetail with Madonna’s. While Italians accuse her of being too feminist and Americans see her as too sexist, Wertmüller, as a feminist director, has continued to break taboos in order to examine the politics of gender, role reversal, and the subordination of women.
If Wertmüller’s aims
sound familiar, so too is Madonna’s role as the lead in Swept Away, in which she plays a rich Italian socialite who is shipwrecked while on a yachting holiday, ending up on a remote island with a Marxist sailor. He becomes the master, she the slave, not only because he is stronger, but because he knows how to survive. Yet the underlying message is that women can be victims of sexism even when they have escaped established ‘female’ roles. That the character played by Madonna, Rafaella, is rich and independent means that she is further victimized because she does not fit the traditional, stereotyped male view of what a woman should be and how she should act.
When filming starts, what will test Ritchie’s directorial abilities – and indeed his marriage – will be whether he is able to succeed where many of his predecessors have so signaly failed; that is, whether he can control Madonna’s natural inclination to make her characters more glamorous and sympathetic, so that the audience view her, Madonna herself, in a more winning light. For the truth is that the bleeding of her personality into her performances, so effective in her songwriting, her videos and her concerts, has been the fatal flaw in her career as an actress. She has wooed Oscar, but has yet to win him.
It also remains to be seen whether motherhood and marriage, and the gradual teasing away of her life from her career, can replace her almost visceral need for mass adulation, and for love. Totally in control of her career, so often out of control in her love life, Madonna is a prisoner of her biology and background, themes that she has explored again and again. Indomitable in public, insecure in private, the paradoxes at the heart of her personality have propelled her forward, this blonde’s ambition powered by that insatiable need to be adored. For the last twenty years we have shared her artistic journey and her personal pilgrimage as she has exchanged one mask for another, from ‘Dita Parlo’ to ‘Veronica Electronica,’ to ‘Lady Madonna’ and ‘Mrs Ritchie.’ In a sense, she has been continually revealing, yet always concealing.
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