"Who would have thunk it?" says Madonna with a laugh. "The last thing I thought I would do is marry some laddish, shooting, pubgoing nature lover—and the last thing he thought he was going to do was marry some cheeky girl from the Midwest who doesn't take no for an answer!"
In the warm ivory sanctuary of her office in her ambassadorial Georgian town house in London, Madonna is on the latest turn of the roller coaster that is her thrilling, adventuresome, and fecund life. The room, its walls expensively
craquelure'd to resemble fractured eggshells, its pale taffeta curtains billowing in the chill English breeze, is more Hollywood boudoir than office. Propped against the fireplace, newly arrived from her rambling Wallace Neff-designed twenties hacienda in Los Angeles, sits Frida Kahlo's
Self-Portrait with Monkey; Madonna wanted to enjoy it privately for a few days before it is sent off to Tate Modern as one of the stars of their blockbuster Kahlo retrospective. On the mantel, nestling between a brace of glamorous Francis Picabia portraits, is Kahlo's traumatic
My Birth. "She's a bit shocking, that one," says Madonna, who clearly does not shy from unsettling images. Elsewhere in this room is Helmut Newton's photograph of a perfectly groomed glamazon with a large gun in her mouth, and on an art tour of the house, Madonna points out the photographer Collier Schorr's life-size portrait of a beautiful flaxen-haired boy in Hitler Youth costume. "People don't know what to think when they come here and see this photograph," she tells me. "I'll let them be … confused." Does Madonna, who presented the prestigious Turner Prize at the Tate in December 2001 (where she introduced herself as Mrs. Guy Ritchie), collect Brit Art, too? "I have a Francis Bacon," she says coyly. "Does that count?"
Speaking in carefully modulated tones, dressed with faux-bourgeois sobriety (this afternoon in Issa's prim satin blouse with a print of flying ducks, black Kate Hepburn pants, and Marc Jacobs teal lizard shoes), a flotilla of charming, noiseless assistants close at hand and a courtly husband making polite but distracted small talk, she has the air of an Edwardian dollar princess—the moneyed American belles who were married off to impecunious British nobles in the golden age—and the fragile beauty and substantial real estate to match. But no one understands metamorphosis better than Madonna; she even named her 2004 tour "Re-Invention." That tour is the subject of Madonna's documentary
I'm Going to Tell You a Secret, directed by Jonas Åkerlund and to be released later this year. In some ways the new movie is a pendant to 1991's
Truth or Dare, which a mellower Madonna now admits "in some ways is hard for me to watch. I was a very selfish person. You go through periods of your life where the world does revolve around you, but you can't live your whole life that way. On the other hand, I kind of admire my spunk and directness!"
The new movie "starts with the struggle of a dancer trying to get into a show" and ends with Madonna's controversial trip to Israel (to visit Rachel's tomb as part of a Kabbalah experience) and a sweetly naïve vision of peace in our time expressed in footage of a Palestinian and an Israeli boy walking together in friendship. "If I'm going to take people through a journey of my life, they are going to see all my journeys, and I hope they will also be moved by it," she explains.
"The feeling in Israel is like no other place," says Madonna. In Jerusalem she had "a sense of really going back in time … that I was being pulled into something. I felt very comfortable there. It's weird; on the one hand it's a very desperate place that could erupt at any time … it's also very special—that's why everyone wants to claim ownership of it. It's not one of those places that beckon everybody, [but] I'm a bit of an excitement junkie."
Aside from Jerusalem and its attendant dangers, Madonna's movie takes you on an adventure to some of the key cities of her tour, Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, Dublin, and Paris among them—a giddy round of athleticism and lightning costume changes. For these cinematically inspired costumes, Madonna collaborated for the first time with Christian Lacroix, creating the armorial embroidered corsets that she adored. Meanwhile Karl Lagerfeld designed exquisite Weimar Kabaret-ish costumes (these ultimately proved too fragile to attach Madonna's monitoring system to. "I was really bummed out because I loved what he did," she says. "But I still have them—they might show up somewhere!"). Her friend Stella McCartney designed the "Savile Row three-piece-suit number."
It was McCartney who created Madonna's 2000 wedding dress. "You wanna see it?" she asks conspiratorially, struggling with a vast ivory vellum tome filled with the pictures the world's media didn't get to see: "No one's seen these pictures except my closest friends." For the record, McCartney produced a remarkably classical dress of ivory duchesse satin, with an hourglass eighteenth-century corset bodice ("a real boob squisher!" laughs Madonna) and an acreage of crinoline skirts dramatically billowing into an endless train. The nineteenth-century lace veil was found in an antiques market and secured with Grace Kelly's Cartier tiara. Mr. Ritchie wore a kilt. "You can't get married in Scotland and not wear a kilt," says Madonna, who later put kilted pipers in her show. "It's like, 'Don't show me things—you never know what's gonna show up in one of my shows!'" laughs Madonna. "But I love to work that way."
Since her marriage brought her here, Madonna has become England's latest national treasure; the nation even has its own pet name for her—Madge—a parallel honor to the satirical weekly
Private Eye's anointing Queen Elizabeth "Brenda." "I did hate it when they first started calling me that," Madonna confides, "and then a friend told me that it was short for 'Your Majesty,' so I was 'OK. I like it!' Well, anyway," she adds, "they're stuck with me!"
It was not always a love affair. Madonna's first trip to London in 1982, with her friend, dancer Martin Burgoyne, was financed by their bartending jobs at New York's East Village bar Lucky Strike. "We used to rob the cash register blind!" she says matter-of-factly. When they had saved enough to hit London, "we went out to some nightclubs, and I met Boy George in the [Vivienne Westwood] World's End stuff. He was just this force to be reckoned with, and I was very intimidated," Madonna remembers. "He was really mean to me … he's still mean to me!" Nevertheless, Madonna "found the whole thing quite heady. I couldn't believe how seriously everybody took their looks and fashion and stuff—it was all very exciting and, yes, influential to a certain extent."
But by the time Madonna returned a year later, she was riding the crest of her first success, and her relationship with the country unraveled. "Once I became famous I couldn't stand London, because the press was so horrible to me," she explains. "I didn't understand the whole mentality of the tabloids; I thought, God, they're so vicious. And this place was really different 20 years ago. Everything was closed up. The streets were dead on Sundays. There were no good restaurants. It was a very, very, very different place, and I had absolutely no inkling that I would have the life I have here [now]."
Since she met Guy Ritchie, the "scope of my world has changed," she continues. "At the time, I didn't see the funny side of it, but now I love England and want to be here and not in America. I see England as my home. And I now know how to ride. I know how to shoot. I know how to fish. I could be a connoisseur of ales if I wanted to—I never used to like the stuff, but when you're married to Guy Ritchie you spend a lot of time in pubs, and I learned to like it!" Of her marriage she says, "The whole point of being in a relationship and having children is that you learn to love … unconditionally. That's the best contribution to making the world a better place. It's so nice sometimes just to go into my children's bedrooms and listen to them breathe. It has forced me to get out of myself."
It was Trudie Styler who played cupid when Madonna was invited for tea to her Jacobean mansion in Wiltshire. Here she remembers the "long, sweeping staircase … [where] all of her children were lined up—like the von Trapp family! I went down the line meeting them all, and then at the end of the line was Guy." Madonna was stopped dead in her tracks by the strapping 30-year-old auteur of the nouvelle vague gangster movie
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, an eye-popping directorial debut. (This, together with his sometime Mockney accent—think Michael Caine in
Alfie—belies a respectably patrician past. Ritchie cherishes fond boyhood memories of Loton Park, his stepfather Sir Michael Leighton's estate, on the Welsh borders, where he developed his passion for hunting and fishing.) Of this first electric meeting Madonna admits simply, "My whole life flashed before me. It did."
