By William Langley
Last Updated: 11:18PM BST 09 Aug 2008
Of all Madonna's reinventions, the least persuasive are the most memorable. Soaking up the mood of every era she has passed through, she has given us Desperately Seeking Susan, Marilyn Monroe, Madame Whiplash, and, upon acquiring a country pile in Wiltshire a few years back, a passable version of Audrey fforbes-Hamilton. Now, with the arrival of her 50th birthday next week, it may be a good moment to ask who Madonna really is.
This is no simple task. Not least because the multiple personalities are still springing out of her. Earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival she showed up wearing a pink silk Stella McCartney dress with a big pussy bow at the neck that made her look like Grayson Perry reporting for another session of Question Time. Just a few weeks later she was photographed in New York, gaunt and scrawny, with a demeanour that suggested, so help us, that she might be turning into Ronnie Wood.
All this appears to suit Madonna well. Not only because it satisfies her craving for eternal cultural relevance, but because it gives her something to hide behind. Even chameleons have a natural colour, and even pop stars have a life where their act ends. Madonna's life may be a bizarre, opaque and complicated one, but there's nothing to suggest that she doesn't live it for real.
What doesn't change, and hopefully never will, is Ms Ciccone's hypercaffeineated zeal to make the world pay attention. The career? Her last album, Hard Candy, sold slowly, as, reportedly, are tickets for her forthcoming Sweet & Sticky world tour. Not to worry: Madonna, as we shall see, has ways of making us take notice.
She reaches her half-century with three children, a £250 million fortune and an eight-year-old marriage to Guy Ritchie, the mockney-mouthed British film director, which is regularly described as "troubled". The latest source to portray it as such is Madonna's younger brother, Christopher Ciccone, a gay interior decorator from Los Angeles who claims in a new book that the couple's life together is marred by explosive rows, triggered by Guy's resentment of his wife's fame, and that they only stay together with the help of a marriage-counselling rabbi.
In the course of admitting that he and his sis no longer get along very well, Chris also depicts Madonna as self-worshipping, power-crazed and miserly, and Guy as an insecure Hollywood mogul manqué, and allegedly unrepentant homophobe who makes jokes about "poofters". Damaging stuff, you might think, except that, according to the New York Post, Madonna not only collaborated with the book, but "ghost wrote" substantial sections of it, rather as Diana, Princess of Wales discreetly assisted her biographer Andrew Morton.
Why would she do that? Why would anyone want to be described in print as "the sweatiest woman on earth"? Because it refreshes our perception of who she is, and refreshing perceptions is Madonna's true art. Some years ago, the American rock critic Kelefa Sanneh wrote that: "When you imagine Madonna, you don't see a single image but a time-lapse photograph, with one persona melting and warping into the next." The line has been much quoted not only because the imagery works so well, but because it hints at the dedication with which Madonna, after 25 years at the top, keeps herself fresh.
Not that Guy seems to see it like this: "We're not that flash, me and the missus," he once shrugged. "Matter of fact, we're quite low-maintenance." They met at a garden party thrown by Sting's wife, Trudie Styler, some time after the collapse of Madonna's relationship with her personal trainer, Carlos Leon, with whom she had a daughter, Lourdes. Guy, son of a London advertising executive, was luxuriating in the success of his breakthrough gangster movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. "He had an incredible light around him," Madonna said later: "He wasn't intimidated by me. I felt the sparks. He did, too." They were married on New Year's Eve 2000 at Skibo Castle, an ornate pile in the Scottish Highlands, with Guy wearing a kilt.
The self-made Madonna, who, by now, had tried most things, hadn't yet tried the life of the landed gentry, and the heady whiff of ancestral tradition and good breeding that swirled around the banqueting hall that night appears to have given her a new idea. The following year the Ritchies bought Ashcombe House, a magnificent Georgian manor on a 1,200-acre estate in Wiltshire, formerly the home of the society photographer Cecil Beaton. With characteristic fervour she plunged into the world of tweeds, gumboots and shooting parties, and with equally characteristic candour was soon denouncing it all.
"I was mad for shooting a couple of years ago," she told Tatler. "I loved my bespoke outfits and everything. It was so much fun. That all changed when a bird dropped in front of me that I'd shot. It wasn't dead. It got up, and it was really suffering. Blood was gushing out of its mouth, and it was struggling… I haven't shot since… I realized I had a kind of bloodlust, and was manically shooting things and trying to kill as many birds as possible." She was reported to be thinking of putting Ashcombe discreetly on the market for around £12 million.
Madonna now has bigger preoccupations. One is proving it possible, against all the received wisdom, for a woman to be a major pop star in her fifties, although pulling this off will stretch even her powers of ingenuity and re-invention. The crucial "Q Score" index, with which the music industry measures the commercial appeal of its big name stars, currently gives her a rating of 13, against the average of 17. Audience research suggests that her fans are growing older with her – which is the industry's polite way of saying that she isn't finding any new ones. Prince turned 50 in June and Michael Jackson will cross the frontier a couple of weeks after Madonna, but everyone knows that longevity is harder for females.
Then there are her children, Lourdes, 11, Rocco, her seven-year-old son with Guy, and David Banda, two, whom she adopted in Malawi. Madonna prides herself on being a hands-on mother, painfully aware of the deficiencies of her own turbulent, working-class childhood. "I believe that the less you have the more you appreciate," she said in a recent interview. "I'm tough, I'm the bad cop, but I'd hate my children to be spoiled."
There is, too, the issue of what Madonna at 50 believes in and whether, unlike the images she fashions for herself, it has staying power. At the heart of this conundrum is her attachment to Kabbalah, an ancient Jewish belief system that seeks to explain the true nature of God. Although raised a Catholic, Madonna became consumed with Kabbalah after being introduced to it by her former best friend, the New York comedienne Sandra Bernhard. Persistent hints that her commitment was waning appear to be refuted by news that the Ritchies will renew their vows at a Kabbalah ceremony later this month.
Which would also appear to refute the reports that their marriage is collapsing. Last month they issued an official denial that they were divorcing (a PR device which has regularly proved fatal in the past). They say that Madonna is merely spending more time in the US to prepare for her tour.
At 50, she is almost as old as Britney Spears and Beyoncé put together, has sold 200 million records, has changed the world's social history, done more things as more different people than anyone else is ever likely to. If, when she hits 60, we still don't quite know who the real Madonna is, it might be because there isn't one.
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