Shock value – miming masturbation on stage, posing on a cross, kissing Britney – is what made Madonna famous and is keeping her there, thanks to A-Rod, as she’s approaching the ripe old age of 50.
But it’s the last thing Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher expected when they were invited over for a quiet Sunday dinner at Madge’s opulent Los Angeles home.
Minutes after Demi and Ashton, fellow Kabbalah followers, put down their forks after finishing the main course, Madonna stood up.
“Guy and I are going to see a movie. But you and Ashton are welcome to stay for dessert,” she announced – as Madonna’s brother, Christopher Ciccone recalls in his scathing, entertaining tell-all “Life with My Sister Madonna.”
It’s a minor moment in Madonna’s life, but a telling one. While the public artist is wildly creative and larger than life, her private self is controlling, vindictive, socially awkward and selfish, according to Ciccone.
Ciccone, who worked as his sister’s backup dancer, dresser, art director and interior decorator, was a part of her “royal we,” her “humble servant,” and ultimately a dismissed former member of her entourage. Ciccone has followed the chameleon from when she was a punk-rock chic in “Desperately Seeking Susan” to her present British white-gloved persona.
But many things, he writes, have remained constant in her ever-changing life.
She’s rigid: wakes up at 9 a.m. and heads to bed around 11 p.m., with a 6-mile run every morning, and everything must be cleaned according to her obsessive specifications.
“Every hour in between planned by her as rigidly as any military campaign,” he says.
Her motto? “This isn’t a democracy,” Ciccone writes.
She’s a cheapskate: despite being one of the richest women in the world, she even refused to give her own 90-something year old grandmother more than $500 a month to live.
And though Ciccone insists he still loves his sister despite her glaring flaws, his tone speaks volumes. His “Machiavellian” sister uses men to get what she wants (in one case, inciting jealousy in JFK, Jr. by flirting with Don Johnson and artist Futura); a terrible actress of whom Ciccone was “embarrassed”; and a half-hearted philanthropist, whose main reason for adopting her Malawi son, David, was to compete with Angelina Jolie.
Even the smallest things enrage her.
“What the f – – -, Christopher?” shouts Madonna backstage during her Virgin Tour in the mid-1980s as Ciccone helps her into a black bra top and long black gloves. “You haven’t pushed out the little finger! F – – – you, you piece of s – – -,” she screams at him.
Oddly, that’s the moment he decides that he will never leave his sister, he claims.
“I’ll endure the abuse, endure the pressure,” he writes. “And I won’t walk out because ultimately in the midst of the show, in the heat of the moment, my sister is at her most vulnerable.”
On yet another World Tour, Ciccone incited two days of rage and silent treatment when he didn’t spot toilet paper that hung out from her Spanish Bolero costume. Luckily Madonna – horrified by the crew and dancers laughing at her – caught the paper offense before she walked on stage.
She’s “utterly unable to laugh at herself,” he writes and is the “world’s worst joke-teller.”
In Madonna’s world, claims Ciccone, ‘Everything has to be done her way, according to her timetable, and [she insists] that life must be lived by her rules. You must make her feel as if all your ideas, in actuality, came from her.”
He recalls one night at his sister’s home, surround by David Geffen, Rosie O’Donnell, Ingrid Caesares and John Enos. Madonna, as was common, suggested a game of truth or dare.
“If you had to kiss anyone in the room, who would you like it to be?” she asks the room.
Everyone, except Ciccone, responds: Madonna.
“Who is the most beautiful person in the room?”
Madonna.
If you had to have sex with anyone who would it be?” she continued
Her self-centeredness impinges on her bizarre choice of art. Ciccone recounted with horror how Madonna “insists” on hanging a bizarre, eight-by-twelve foot photo of herself – decked out in leather – in her home, in full view of her two young kids.
“I think it is sad that [they] have to wake up each morning and come face-to-face with this huge picture of their mother dressed in a blatant S&M outfit, lying on a bed with dead animals all around her,” Ciccone says.
But what really put Ciccone over the edge was the filming of Madonna’s “Truth or Dare” – during which she trotted a camera crew out to her mother’s grave and staged a tearful, theatric scene. “I am horrified at the lengths my sister is prepared to go to promote herself and her career. I fear she no longer has any boundaries, any limits. To Madonna nothing is sacred anymore.”
Ciccone saves most of his venom for Madonna’s second hubby, Guy Richie, whom he paints as a severe homophobe whose “pride in his own heterosexuality swells noticeably” in the presence of gay men.
He recounts how, at Madonna’s Scottish castle wedding – a five-day affair where guests were ordered to turn over their cell phones and agree not to leave the highland fortress for the duration – Ritchie and his pals made several cracks about gay men in his presence.
Ciccone claims he got his revenge during a dinnertime toast that shocked guests – but drew praise from rock star Sting’s wife, Trudy Styler. He raised his glass and said, “I’d like to toast this happy moment that comes only twice in a person’s lifetime. And if anybody wants to f – – – Guy, he’ll be in my room later.”
If that was his first small stab of revenge, this book is Ciccone’s broadsword.
But by the end, his tone is more sadness than glee. During one of their final blowups, centered, as crazy as it sounds, on light fixtures, Madonna explodes, “I’ve made you who you are. You wouldn’t be anything without me.” She’s harsh but correct.
“I was born my mother’s son,” Ciccone says, “but I will die my sister’s brother.”
Life with My Sister Madonna
by Christopher Ciccone
Simon Spotlight Entertainment
