Madonna: The Saga Continues

She made it through the wilderness, all right. And she's remained at the center of global pop culture ever since. The mother of reinvention talks about her art, her husbands and her early years as "an ego-driven nutcase."

By Merle Ginsberg

It doesn't really matter whether you buy the transformation of the world's onetime reigning sex kitten -- okay, lioness -- into a New Age Mother Theresa determined to bring a ray of light into your spiritually parched life. It doesn't matter at all.

Because she believes it ardently for all of us.

Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone Ritchie simply has more conviction than you do. Much more. She practically reeks of it. It's in the way she enters a room, in the way she exits, in the rather regal pronouncements that pepper her conversation, and most of all, it's in her seeming immunity to criticism -- something she's had a surfeit of since she and her husband of two years, director Guy Ritchie, released their movie Swept Away last fall.

Madonna, clad in black pants, a leopard-print and flower-strewn black top, a greenish fuzzy fur jacket, stilettos and a crocheted black beret, may have left the house today sans makeup, but she is more than adequately shielded by her own psychic armor, as thick and dense as concrete. Call it what you will -- centeredness, smugness or egomania -- but don't think for a second you'll pierce it. It's the quality that let's Madonna be Madonna, that defines her as a star, perhaps the biggest star who ever lived, and that compels us -- more than 20 years after her first single, "Everybody," became an underground dance club hit -- to still be sitting around talking about her.

No doubt her forthcoming album, American Life, to be released this month, will lead to another round of Madonna-musing. An introspective tour de force, less melodic or pop than Music or Ray of Light, the record is both darkly self-reflective and socially engaged. Indeed, rumors about the album's political stance began to circulate before anyone had heard a note: Matt Drudge reported that the "American Life" video, directed by Jonas Akerlund, "may be the most shocking antiwar, anti-Bush statement yet to come from the show business industry." (In the video, she plays a fatigue-clad glam superhero who tosses a grenade on a fashion runway, among other things.)

Madonna's response: "Who's Matt Drudge? He's on the Internet? Never believe anything you read on the Internet. I don't want to comment on idiotic people making assumptions."

She had to postpone our interview one day owing to a cold, and now, after a visit to Beverly Hills fave Joseph Sugarman, M.D., the 44-year-old pop diva (a proud devotee of Ashtanga yoga, numerous trainers and a macrobiotic diet) is, uncharacteristically enough, fending off a wicked cough and a case of the sniffles. Still, like the indomitable force she is, she's shown up to do her job.

As for the other big item of recent speculation -- that the return to her natural dark brown hair color just might signal that another baby is on the way -- she rolls her eyes. "Do I look pregnant to you?" she asks, sitting on a couch at the Beverly Hills office of Maverick Records, the label she started with Warner Bros. 11 years ago. "I am a brunette after all, and I just like to match my pubic hair sometimes," she adds with a laugh. "People who have nothing better to do than talk about my hair color have no lives."

It wasn't so long ago that Madonna seemed thrilled to have people talking about the color of her hair. And the color of her pubic hair, for that matter. Not anymore. "Let's talk about serious issues," she begs.

"I just saw Michael Moore's one-man show in Camden Town [in London]," she continues, " and I loved him for it. It was so amazing and revolutionary. He basically was saying we're all in the 'comfortable class' -- and we can't be f*cked to do anything about 'what's happening over there [in Iraq],' because we don't believe it will make a difference. And of course that isn't true. Michael Moore is one person, and he's making a difference. Afterward, I felt like, 'Okay, I'm ready to go! I'm starting a revolution by myself!' I felt so inspired."

Despite being a mother of two, with several mansions and a record label to worry about -- in addition to sessions at West Hollywood's Kabbalah Learning Center several nights a week to pursue her ongoing studies in Jewish mysticism -- Madonna remains, she insists, a rebel.

"Because what is a rebel? It's someone who thinks outside the box -- someone who doesn't subscribe to any program. Besides, I think the Kabbalah is very punk rock. It teaches you that you are responsible for everything. We don't realize there's a bigger system at work. Everything that comes to you is for a reason. And I think that's really revolutionary, because we are not trained to think that in our society."

Another of Kabbalah's lessons, she adds, is the power of words -- and the negative energy of gossip. And no one seems to have more gossip swirling around her than Madonna. "If we truly believed," she says,"that every act of denigrating somebody is a small form of murder -- the negative energy you create by talking badly about somebody -- we'd never do it again. Because all anybody does anymore is slag everybody off. That's American life. That's our media. And isn't it important to speak up against?"

Some speculated it was precisely this sort of negative energy that Madonna was seeking to avoid when she skipped the Golden Globe Awards, where her theme song from the James Bond movie Die Another Day was nominated for Best Song. Elton john, who was to have been seated next to her, claimed she begged off to avoid running into him after he publicly called the song "the worst Bond tune of all time."

Madonna sighs upon being asked about this. "Every once in a while," she admits, "you do get caught up in that -- Oh, they said about me? You feel that twinge. But then I snap out of it and think, Oh who gives a shit? That's when I'm reminded I need to stay focused on my spiritual studies."

The real reason she didn't go to the Golden Globes? "I wanted to hang out with my kids," she says. "On my list of priorities, it wasn't that important. I have a hard time with awards shows. We spend far too much time making popularity contests, and not enough time caring about each other. They're just dumb. They're just fashion shows and ratings for TV, and they don't mean anything."

Boldly pressing forward through a veritable asteroid belt of negative energy, we speed-chat through the rest of recent Madonna rumors.

On prepping a movie musical: "Yes, I'm working on a musical project. It's already been written and it's totally original. The director and I have put together a creative team, and we're working on getting financing right now."

On why she giggled upon meeting Queen Elizabeth at the premiere of Die Another Day: "Well, there's nothing to say, really. I met the Queen."

On whether she spent the last week of photographer Herb Ritts' life at his bedside: "Yes. He was a friend. That's what friends are for. Herb was a good egg. He didn't want people to know he was sick -- he didn't want them to feel sorry for him. He just got on with his life. He was a very shy guy and didn't do the fabulous thing. Like a lot of other photographers who shall go unnamed."

On supposedly hating London: "I've already said this -- I love London. And I live there a good part of the year."

On the debacle of Swept Away: "My husband and I set out to make a small movie, with not a lot of people involved, about power and politics within male-female relationships. People wanted it to fail before it came out. And people wrote bad things about it that permeated people's consciousness. And that's how it goes. Would I work with him again? Sure."

On Frida, the biopic she'd once hoped to star in. "I didn't like it. Not at all. I think Salma Hayek did a great job, but I still think ultimately the soul of Frida Kahlo nobody knows. The movie doesn't even scratch the surface of who she was and what she went through."

On possibly mounting a huge Celine Dion-style extravaganza in Vegas:"That's insane. I hate Las Vegas. I couldn't bear it for five minutes."

Those with the Material Girl CD still stuck on repeat might argue that Madonna and Sin City were made for each other, but the singer has changed more than her hairstyle over the years. She tired of the whole shallowness-can-be-liberating act well before her fans did, around the same time she also gave up the whole obscenity-can-be-liberating routine. Interestingly, the riskiest about American Life -- which may actually go down as one of her riskiest albums -- is its searching quality, both musically (with its dark melodies and meandering sensibility) and lyrically. While she holds forth on what's wrong with American society, she also pointedly questions her own place within it. "I tried to be a boy, I tried to be a girl," she sings on the title track. "I tried to be a mess, I tried to be the best." Ultimately, she acknowledges, with decidedly un-divalike self-analysis, "I guess I did it wrong."

"While insisting she doesn't regret a thing, Madonna nonetheless admits,"I do certainly wonder, Why did I make that choice? What was I really trying to prove?"

With, for instance, all those sensational erotic escapades -- the book Sex, the S&M imagery, etc. -- she offered up for public consumption over the years.

"Well, it wasn't just about sex," she says. "It was about money and power and the way things looked -- getting people's approval -- all that stuff. I was just being an ego-driven nutcase! I thought I was doing a service to mankind, being revolutionary, liberating women, yada yada. I wasn't! But that is the nature of fame and having power, suddenly realizing you have a voice. You really think you are the shit. Well, that's just immaturity, and I've realized that I do have voice and I've been given this place in the world for a reason."

Madonna also seems to have matured quite a bit when it comes to relationships. After her divorce from first husband Sean Penn, she told a reporter, "I think everyone should get married at least once so you can see what a silly institution it is." But on hearing the quote read back to her, she winces.

"Oh, well," she sighs. "I was in a bad mood when I said that. It was a reactive statement. Obviously, it wasn't an easy time in my life. In retrospect, I had no business slagging off my first marriage or my first husband in any way, shape or form. Because I got what I deserved. It didn't work out, and that's just the way it was. I do think my first husband was my equal in many ways. He was intellectually challenging. But that's not always what you need to make a marriage work. You can't just share a few hobbies and think each other's hot. You have to be heading in the same direction."

These days, she adds, suddenly speaking in a reverential tone, "I actually think marriage is a very important thing. I had to work hard to get a good marriage. Everyone does. You have to make a lot of efforts and compromises. I knew Guy was the right person in five minutes -- but it took me several years to actually make it happen."

She takes a moment to reflect, and suddenly whips out a Polaroid. In it, her children, Lourdes and Rocco, are giggling for the camera. "My real works of art," she says, smiling proudly.

It's a sweet notion, but of course Madonna has plenty of creative energy to spread around; reading bedtime stories isn't even half of it. Even a simple magazine shoot is, for her, an opportunity to make a statement and to stretch (in a more ways than one), as the preceding photographs make clear.

"I'm not interested in going to a fashion shoot and just trying on a bunch of clothes," she explains. "I can't tell you how boring it is posing for pictures. It's so boring. If I don't feel like I'm creating something that means something, I don't want to do it."

These pictures, a collaborative effort between Madonna and Steven Klein (some of which will be on view at Deitch Projects in Soho, beginning March 27, along with a series of video projections), are the result of several months of e-mails between them, built around a rather loose narrative about, as the final proposal put it, "a performer in her rehearsal space where she creates and brings her ideas to life or death."

"Most celebrities that you shoot, you don't have much access to beforehand," Klein says. "Once she committed, she was 500 percent committed." The goal, he says, was "to capture the idea of 'the process.' She talked about how, when she's rehearsing for a show or a video, sometimes those bits are more interesting than the final piece. Most people don't get to see that process. That's what we based it on."

"I always approach visual projects in the same way, "Madonna explains."We always start with a character, and what we want to get across. It's often a combination of my own clothes and things we find. This si the inner landscape of a performance artist. And I think, if you look at the pictures, they're not even in the most flattering positions, you know? It's not about that."

Neither, she says emphatically, is it about the clothes. "I can enjoy fashion -- sometimes," she allows. "Some of my very good friends are designers. Jean Paul Gaultier is a real artist. And I can see the beauty and the art that is involved with couture and design. I totally respect it. But with everything going on in the world right now, I just feel we are too preoccupied with the wrong things. I'm just not that interested anymore in fashion per se. It used to be mean something a little more special. Now, actresses look like models and models become actresses. Yuck. Who has any individuality? It's so boring."

The spritzing sound you hear is the furious pumping of every Evian-filled atomizer in the ateliers of Europe, as the many designers who've inspired Madonna and been inspired by her, in turn, who've watched with delight as her countless costume changes helped bring edgy new looks to the mall-going masses, try not to faint at the thought of losing affections of their longtime muse.

Of course, nothing about Madonna is written in stone. It's a diva's prerogative to change her mind, and this pop phenomenon, who's already gone full circle more times than a race car driver at the Monaco Grand Prix, will surely come around again. No doubt this antifashion thing is probably just a marketing ploy, the latest in that series of calculated costume changes that has always kept Madonna on top.

Right?

"People always see the evolution of my career as marketing," she says with a laugh. "I change. I evolve. People can't understand that, so they put a label on it like 'marketing.' I call it growing. Most celebrities and iconographic figures have one presentation, and that's what people find unsettling about me. But that's so boring -- just to have the same hairstyle the rest of your life?" She makes a sour face. "Yuck."

So what does she think she'll being doing when she's -- gulp -- 50, a little more than five years from now?

"I don't think about it, " she says. "Who knows? It's not productive to be thinking about what I will be doing in five years. I just have to get through the next few months of responsibilities. But my real responsibility is to bring light to the world and make the world a better place. That's what I should be focused on thinking about in five years. Not -- you know -- being a 'pop diva.'"

What does seem certain is that whatever she's doing, we'll all be watching, gossiping, evaluating...

She smiles. "Then I better do something important, huh?"