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MADONNA: A Rebel Life,<\/strong> by Mary Gabriel<\/p>\n \u201cI want to be alone,\u201d Greta Garbo\u2019s dancer character<\/a> famously said in \u201cGrand Hotel,\u201d a quote permanently and only semi-accurately<\/a> attached to the actress after she retreated from public life. Garbo was first on the list of Golden Agers in one of Madonna\u2019s biggest hits, \u201cVogue<\/a>,\u201d but the pop star has long seemed to embody this maxim\u2019s very opposite. She wants to be surrounded<\/em>, as if with Dolby sound.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cBefore Madonna even had a manager, she had a court of valets and minstrels following her everywhere,\u201d the record executive Seymour Stein<\/a> observed.<\/p>\n Though technically a solo vocalist, Madonna has been backed by dancers from the beginning<\/a> of her career in the early 1980s. She has six children: two biological, four adopted from Malawi. Many more consider themselves her spiritual offspring: gay men to whom she\u2019s been den mother; younger female performers she\u2019s inspired.<\/p>\n And she\u2019s trooped around the world with an elastic entourage of friends, writers, producers, directors, handlers, photographers, publicists, reporters and fans, all of whom helpfully populate Mary Gabriel\u2019s big, indignant new biography of her: a dogged, brick-by-brick bulwark against any detractors bobbing in the moat of her castle.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMadonna: A Rebel Life\u201d is one of those books you measure in pounds, not pages: almost three, which would have been more if the publisher hadn\u2019t decided to post the endnotes and bibliography online rather than printing them. It\u2019s not going to fit on the little shelf of the StairMaster at the gym \u2014 a classically Madonna piece of exercise equipment<\/a> \u2014 though you might hoist it afterward for wrist curls.<\/p>\n If you wander into an aerobics class instead, not only are chances high that the instructor will play a song from Madonna\u2019s catalog, but she\u2019ll probably be wearing a hands-free headset microphone \u2014 and that is muy <\/em>Madonna as well. As Gabriel notes, though the technology was used before by pilots and Kate Bush, it was her subject who popularized it on her 1989 \u201cBlond Ambition\u201d tour.<\/p>\n For this book, though, the woman born Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1958, the same year as Prince and Michael Jackson, stayed quiet. Her voice is piped through from plentiful previous interviews, recorded performances and the occasional post on Instagram, where early in the pandemic she outcringed the Gal Gadot \u201cImagine\u201d video with one of herself<\/a> naked in a bath amid floating rose petals, declaring Covid-19 \u201cthe great equalizer.\u201d<\/p>\n The closest Gabriel gets to Madonna in the actual flesh is half a dozen conversations with her brother, Christopher Ciccone, whose best-selling 2008 memoir, \u201cLife With My Sister Madonna,<\/a>\u201d caused at least temporary estrangement between the siblings, longtime professional collaborators. (Madonna\u2019s sense of betrayal is hard to jibe with her ardent defense of free personal expression.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Gabriel also talks to 30-odd other sources, surprisingly few for the scope of the work, and turns up a few interesting archived nuggets, such as Norman Mailer, in an early draft of the more than 200 he wrote for a 1994 Esquire profile,<\/a> describing Madonna as a \u201cpint\u2010size\u201d Italian American (he used an ethnic slur instead) \u201cwith a heart built out of the cast\u2010iron balls of a hundred peasant ancestors.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Previous Madonnagraphers have either been breathily unauthorized \u2014 Andrew Morton, J. Randy Taraborrelli<\/a> \u2014 or taken a more \u201cThirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird\u201d<\/a> approach; universities have offered entire courses<\/a> on her. Gabriel brings extra intellectual cred to the task. \u201cLove and Capital<\/a>,\u201d her book about Karl Marx and his wife, Jenny, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; her group portrait of five female painters, \u201cNinth Street Women<\/a>,\u201d was rhapsodically received. But she doesn\u2019t describe her own connection to this project, as she did the others, and this reader was left wondering if it might be less love than capital.<\/p>\n Not that Gabriel doesn\u2019t make a diligent case for Madonna\u2019s cultural importance<\/a>: inviting us to consider, for example, her Mylar-encased coffee-table book \u201cSex,\u201d pummeled with judgment when it was published in 1992, in the same light as James Baldwin\u2019s novel \u201cGiovanni\u2019s Room.\u201d She airs at length the praise of the curator Jeffrey Deitch, who worked with Madonna on a 2013 multimedia installation called \u201cX\u2010STaTIC PRo=CeSS<\/em><\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Maybe we\u2019ve all miscast Madonna as the Queen of Pop \u2014 a dubious analogue to Aretha Franklin<\/a>\u2019s Queen of Soul \u2014 and she\u2019s closer, on a mass scale, to Karen Finley, the performance artist who used to smear her nude body in chocolate or honey? Indeed, describing the period Madonna lived in Miami, Gabriel writes of her \u201cdaily ritual of covering herself in honey and jumping into Biscayne Bay, where she floated until the honey melted away,\u201d with no apparent concern for sharks.<\/p>\n \u201cMadonna: A Rebel Life\u201d is organized as a busy, seven-decade, mostly urban travel itinerary. Like Franklin, Madonna lost her mother early and was raised in Detroit, where her father, who also had half a dozen children, \u201cthought we should always be productive,\u201d she said. Her Barbie would tell Ken: \u201cI\u2019m not gonna stay home and do the dishes. You <\/em>stay home! I\u2019m <\/em>going out tonight. I\u2019m going bowling, OK, so forget<\/em> it<\/em>!\u201d Among her formative influences were J.D. Salinger and Anne Sexton (literary); the Shangri-Las and David Bowie (musical); Martha Graham and Frida Kahlo (visual). \u201cThe sight of her mustache consoled me,\u201d she said of the latter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n I might be biased as a native who craved rubber bracelets and lace socks and waited to hear if FM radio played \u201cBorderline<\/a>\u201d through the \u201cla-la-la-la,\u201d but the section when Madonna arrives in New York City, though well trafficked, is one of the most compelling in this book. She eats French fries out of garbage cans; learns guitar at an abandoned synagogue in Flushing Meadows nicknamed \u201cthe Gog\u201d; brings a demo tape to the DJ booth at Danceteria; and, signed by Stein from his hospital bed, hangs with a \u201ccoterie\u201d of artists that included Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She was also raped at knife point on a rooftop, an ordeal not publicly aired until the punishing Abel Ferrara film \u201cDangerous Game\u201d<\/a> in 1993.<\/p>\n Having segued to Hollywood (and later Broadway and the West End), she gave the middle finger to its male establishment: walking away from an early marriage to Sean Penn, cursing out David Letterman on the air and roundly shushing Harvey Weinstein when he offers feedback on \u201cTruth or Dare,\u201d<\/a> her 1991 documentary. (\u201cI don\u2019t care what your point of view is,\u201d she tells him. \u201cI never want to hear it. Who the hell are you to tell me what kind of film I should be doing?\u201d) Her onetime paramour Warren Beatty, who directed her in \u201cDick Tracy,\u201d mocked how she wanted to live on-camera<\/a> all the time; who with an iPhone now does otherwise?<\/p>\n Madonna is rightly celebrated here as a pioneer of AIDS education \u2014 she lost countless friends to the disease \u2014 and a genuine philanthropist. But as she grows more practiced with the press and isolated by her fame, the book softens and suffers. The muchness of Madonna, her cross-disciplinarity \u2014 from MTV to \u201cEvita\u201d<\/a> \u2014 seems impossible to corral.<\/p>\n Madonna\u2019s drug is work \u2014 she makes a discipline of even decadence \u2014 and \u201cA Rebel Life\u201d increasingly becomes a litany of remote description and tabulation: boundaries crossed, records broken, shows staged, money made, countries visited, foreign cultures sampled. \u201cAll <\/em>artists appropriate,\u201d is how Gabriel defends her against a frequent charge. \u201cIt is called inspiration.\u201d<\/p>\n Clich\u00e9s sneak into her prose. Madonna is burning the candle at both ends, igniting a firestorm and is a lightning rod for controversy. She has never taken the road most traveled, but does take a long hard look in the mirror.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Speaking of mirrors: Gabriel acknowledges Madonna\u2019s talent for self-reinvention, but oddly ignores her transformation after cosmetic procedures and the resultant backlash \u2014 a sensitive matter to parse, but hardly irrelevant for someone whose oeuvre has been so entwined with image. \u201cI\u2019m going to make it easier for all those girls behind me when they turn 60,\u201d the star said when promoting her 2019 album, \u201cMadame X.\u201d Well, some of those girls want to know why she can\u2019t shake her skull-topped cane at the anti-aging industrial complex.<\/p>\n \u201cA Rebel Life\u201d hits its marks but rarely soars, as Madonna did suspended by cables during her Drowned World tour. (Rather, the book is submerged in names, places and dates and historical exposition.) Then again, assessing Madonna\u2019s legacy before she has a chance to recover from recent health setbacks<\/a> may be an impossibly premature endeavor.<\/p>\n \u201cThe verdict time and again would be that she had gone too far, that her career was over,\u201d Gabriel writes. \u201cTime and again, the jury was wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n MADONNA: A Rebel Life<\/strong> | By Mary Gabriel | Illustrated | 858 pp. | Little, Brown & Company | $38<\/p>\n
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