Nothing satisfies Madonna for very long

In 1994, Norman Mailer called Madonna ‘our greatest living female artist’. She was huge in those days. I remember teenagers like my daughters constantly asking ‘What would Madonna do?’ But my grandchildren haven’t even heard of her. She seems to have faded faster than most.

Why? Perhaps it’s because, as often claimed, she’s the ‘queen of reinvention’. But people who reinvent themselves every few months, as Madonna always did, tend to leave other people behind. Her ‘rebel life’, as told here by Mary Gabriel, is a frenzied churn of friends, lovers, mentors and collaborators who were vital to her for a year or two and then discarded. Her first manager, Camille Barbone, bust a gut to launch her New York career, but when Michael Jackson’s manager took an interest, Madonna jumped ship without hesitation. Barbone said of Madonna: ‘She wasn’t intentionally malicious; just incapable of seeing life from anyone else’s point of view.’

She was born in 1958 in Pontiac, Michigan, the third of Tony and Madonna Ciccone’s six children. They were very religious – ‘swooning with it’ – and went to church every day during Lent. But her mother died of breast cancer when she was five and Tony, a widower at 32, relied on housekeepers until he married one of them and had two more children. He was a strict disciplinarian, but Madonna said: ‘I’d do anything to rebel against my father.’

After winning a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan she went on a six-week summer programme to New York, and ‘once I got a taste of New York, I knew I had to be there’. Her father refused to finance her, and said if she went she’d no longer be his daughter. But she went anyway, and lived on a dollar a day, taking food from garbage bins and relying on ‘benefactors’.