September 2, 2021 • 46 mins
Her desire to "rule the world" drew the dancer and fledgling musician from Detroit to New York's East Village where Madonna became a fixture on the early '80s punk scene. She turned heads with a sexy ragamuffin look that would eventually spawn a world of wannabes. Always leading the pop zeitgeist, Madonna's music has evolved from dance-pop to earthy R&B to balladry to techno. From club scenester to cultural icon to mother (her most satisfying role yet), Madonna's moves are endlessly fascinating. She talks about the price of fame, the great love of her life, and the one "m" word she never wants to hear again. Hear that and more about Madonna's life behind the music.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
She was a fresh faced Midwestern girl who came to
New York with a humble goal. Along the way, Madonna
accrue power, wealth, and fame, and a reputation that intimidated
just about everybody. She treated the world like a NonStop party,
changing styles and boyfriends and time warp speed until today
she had too much fun, and people asked if she
(00:23):
had gone too far. But even at that point, Madonna
didn't want any tears shed for her, and it wasn't
long before she was touched by a ray of light.
The Queen of Pop found herself blessed with the new
priorities of love and family. Now a revealing journey into
(00:44):
the heart and mind of music's undisputed matriarch, Madonna. Behind
the music, I'm really good at provoking people, and I'm
really good at getting attention. But now that I have
(01:04):
everyone's attention, what do I have to say? It was
the most coveted ticket in music, Madonna's long awaited returned
to the concert stage when she launched her Drowned World
tour in the summer of two thousand one. Madonna was
quite simply the most famous woman on Earth, the title
she earned over the course of two tumultuous decades. She's
(01:26):
been one of the most successful female stars in the
history of the world. Has put her right there next
to Cleopatra and Marie Antoinette and women who enter into
mythology kind of, you know, in terms of achieving the
awards and the record sales and the adoration of the
entire planet, she's got to be happy. She has kept
(01:48):
her fans guessing by remaining in a constant state of change,
evolving from material girl to movie star to mother under
the harsh gaze of a scrutinizing public, and along the
way she somehow managed to find inner peace and happiness.
I do think that if I've been enlightened, and I
(02:09):
truly feel like I've been enlightened, then it's my it's
my responsibility to share what I know with other people.
In the decades since her first record in three she
sold one d and fifty million albums, had forty one
top ten songs, starred in seventeen movies, and been listed
(02:30):
in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most
successful female recording artist in history. Her career has played
out like a heroic odyssey in an industry traditionally dominated
by man. The man was going on behaving the way
I did, and I don't think that he would be considered, um,
(02:55):
you know, the Antichrist or the Marquis de Sade or
whatever else people may be. Certainly, yes, in fact, those
are some of the kinder names Madonna has been called.
No matter how successful she's bad, She's had to continually
dodge the slings and arrows of outraged critics. People stop
thinking of you as a human being, um or people
(03:17):
write about you and um incredibly kind of thoughtless ways,
and never imagine that you actually have feelings that they
could be hurting. And it's not just the critics who
can be insensitive, even people she encounters in everyday life.
They know they have the right to judge her. We
were in an elevator and some building going up to
(03:38):
uh top floor, I don't remember our hotels and and
and it opened up and there was a twenty four
year old messenger guy there. He goes in Madonna. She
goes yeah, He goes, yeah, it looks like like that
you should you should keep it blonde. I thought, boy man, fame,
that people don't even think you're a person anymore. By
stirring up an explosive mixture of religion, racism, and sex.
(04:00):
Critics complain she uses controversy to sell records. Madonna insists
that those issues are why she makes records in the
first place. The whole reason I got into the music
is this wasn't because I thought I had a spectacular voice.
It's because I had something to say. I think she
likes to be controversial, and I think she likes to
push button. She's caused a lot of dialogue to happen
(04:20):
in our culture, you know. And people don't want to
give her credit for that. But credit or not, Madonna
has always pushed boundaries with a consistent message that sex
isn't the enemy, hypocrisy is, and in the last two
decades of the twentieth century, she used that message to
single handedly lead her own sexual revolution. The thing that
(04:44):
I love about Madonna is that she said she believes
this sex is good. She made it okay for a
girl to want to get laid, want to get want
to kiss a boy. Before then, it was okay for
a guy to want to get laid, and it was
okay for a guy to want to kiss. The girls
into all that stuff. But the girls were always very
(05:05):
chaste and all that, and Madonna broke down all these barriers.
But breaking down barriers is dangerous work, and on more
than a few occasions, the controversy swirling around Madonna has
threatened to bury her art. That just seems to overwhelm,
Like when we did Like a Prayer and then the
(05:26):
video came out, and that overwhelmed the album, you know,
and that album has some amazing, brilliant stuff on him.
There was a real magic about that whole time, and
a real intensity and a real it was really powerful.
One of her biggest controversies occurred in when she was
about to release Like a Prayer. Petsy had signed a
(05:51):
five million dollar deal with Madonna to use the song
in a commercial, and they were thrilled until they saw
the Like a Prayer video. Madonna specifically wanted to push
the racial issue in it. The idea of and interracial
(06:12):
love seeing continues to be a sort of an under
the carpet taboo in our society, and I think both
of us wanted to say something about that and compare it,
you know, to the persecution of Jesus Christ. Like a
Prayer wasn't the first time, and certainly not the last.
That Madonna has used her art to explore the deeper
(06:33):
meaning of faith and God and found the religion of
her childhood in conflict with her own values. The Catholicism
of my childhood was just a series of rules that
were um forced on me in a document that I
didn't understand. It was just like, this is what you do,
and there is no reason why this is just what
you do. It could have been that the Catholic Church
in our childhood just pushed the contradictions too far. The
(06:57):
idea that French kissing and murder can both put you
into hell, it's just a pretty wild idea, you know.
On August eight, in Bay City, Michigan, a young French
Canadian woman, Madonna Fortune Jaconi, gave birth to her third child,
her first daughter and her namesake. For the first years
(07:20):
of her life, Madonna was called Little Nanny to distinguish
her from her mother. My idea of my mother, I
think is mostly fantasy, because she died when I was
so young that at this point, you know, she's like
a picture of Jesus Christ, you know, I mean, it's
the most perfect nature of a human being that ever existed.
Madonna's mother died after a long about with breast cancer
(07:41):
when Little Nanny was just six years old. All these
years later, it remains the defining moment in Madonna's life.
If you lose your mother like Madonna did, that can
do a lot of things to you. It could crush
you forever. It could make you forever distrustful of happiness
in life. Or it could make you very very courageous.
(08:02):
I do think when you grow up without a mother,
you have a real sort of unfulfilled need inside of yourself,
and you are on a mad search for love. I
also think that you carry around a kind of unspoken
despair and that can also be something that can inform
all of your music. That you're right, and actually your
sadness will would inspire you. Certainly has inspired me. Madonna's dad, Sylvia,
(08:30):
left alone to care for Madonna. Her three brothers and
two sisters, ran a strict household. The Chaconi kids weren't
allowed to watch TV and went to Catechism every morning
before breakfast. I suppose some people would consider him a fascist.
Maybe the way he raised us is something like, you
will do this because I said so, and you don't
need any reason, and um, I mean he was. He
(08:53):
disciplined us, and at the time, you know, I hated
him for it. Madonna learned how to hide her pain
from the outside world. She had selled at school, a
straight a student, the star of high school plays like
Cinderella and The Wizard of Oz. But the place where
Madonna was always the happiest was on the dance floor.
(09:14):
I've always loved to dance until was a little girl.
I always get up on chairs and tables, and that's
for you know, everybody. When she was thirteen, Madonna started
taking vallet lessons from Christopher Plan but dance wasn't the
only thing he taught her. And that Christopher saying, my
whole life changed. He taught me about art and classical music,
and he also took me up to my first game discotheque,
(09:37):
and I just saw a different side of life that
I've never seen before. It was in those Detroit gay
discos that a now sixteen year old Madonna began to
realize that she had a real gift for dancing and
for grabbing the spotlight. In the fall of nineteen seventy six,
Madonna enrolled at the University of Michigan on a full
dance scholarship. Thoughts of brighter lights blinded her unless and
(10:00):
two years later, in July of nine, she was on
her way to New York with a one way ticket,
thirty seven dollars in her purse, and a dream of
becoming a professional dancer. I knew I wanted to be
an artist. I knew I wanted to be a creative person.
I wasn't sure what form that would take, but I
felt like I needed to be an environment that really
celebrated all of those things, which is why I came
(10:21):
to New York. I certainly did not think for a
second that I would have the sort of global impact
that I've had. I mean, I was trying to get
the hell out of Michigan. She became part of New
York's East Village scene, which at that moment was at
the epicenter of the punk rock movement. But even among
the mohawks and safety pins, Madonna's unique look stood out.
I remember walking down the street with her before we
(10:42):
put on any singles, before we did anything, and she
would stop traffic. I mean, people would just stop and stare.
And she wasn't famous yet. She had the sexuality that
everybody just latched onto one thing Madonna didn't have was money.
She lived in a rat and fested tenement on East
four Street and ate popcorn for dinner for months to
(11:03):
get by. She worked at dunkin Donuts before she found
a better paying job. When I first moved to New York, UM,
I was a dancer, So I did a lot of modeling,
nude modeling, thank you very much, um. And it was
really good money in very flexible hours, which is why
it has to do it. It's not because I enjoyed
taking my clothes off or anything like that. It was
almost by accident that Madonna turned her attention to music
(11:26):
when her boyfriend at the time, Dan Gilroy, let her
join his band, The Breakfast Club as a drummer and guitarist.
The one thing they wouldn't let her do was sing
They already had two singers in the band, so they
would never let me get up and sing a song,
because what's the point. One day, I finally against them.
They finally said, okay, I got singing one song and
(11:47):
the other guy went back to play the drums, and
like I got standing ovation that one moment in the
in the spotlight in front of the band's thing and
was like a really big high. When the band refused
to let Madonna immediately become the lead singer, she quit
the Breakfast Club to start her own band. Playing in
small clubs around New York, Madonna quickly established a reputation.
(12:10):
In the spring of night. Less than two years after
she got to New York, Madonna cut a demo tape.
It wasn't long before she caught the eye of Sire
Records A and R director Michael rosen Black at her
favorite haunt, dance Ateria. She was radiating whatever that it is.
She had it more than anyone I had ever seen
up until that point or since. I mean, it was
(12:31):
just bouncing off the walls. But I was incredibly innocent
and naive, and I just put one ft in front
of the next, and I just put myself out there.
And I don't think what I did was mindless. I
just you know, you just don't know what you're in
for when you get started in this business. You know,
what is the twenty three year old have to say
about life? Anyways, two days after they first met at danceteria,
(12:52):
Michael Rosenblack was ready to offer Madonna a recording contract.
It was, however, one little problem. I did not believe
that her name was really Madonna, so I asked her
to show me some I d She said she didn't
have any, and then she came back to next day
on Tuesday with her passport and there was Madonna. Luis Jacone.
I was very surprised. It was too perfect. Madonna's first single, Everybody,
(13:14):
was released in the fall of two. Within weeks, it
was at the top of the dance charts, and Madonna
was determined to stay there. Coming up next, Madonna loses
her virginity on national television. But it was what Madonna
did in her thirties that really shook the world. When
Behind the Music continues, it was the spring of three,
(13:46):
and with her first hit, Everybody, riding high on the
dance charts, Madonna threw herself into writing songs for her
first record. She quickly showed a knack for writing hit
songs with both a message and a group. She came
up to the office she said, Michael, I think Harry
wrote the song I Want to See Who You Think?
And I put in a demo and it was Lucky
Star and it just blew me away and I knew
and I turned her and I said, you just wrote
(14:08):
yourself a huge hit. I always remember years later singing
in her at Giant Stadium and performed that song. So
in my head I went back to the day she
came and went office, Michael, what do you think of
the song? And then five years later seeing sixty kids
sing along at Giant Stadium. That first album sold well
(14:30):
based on its first two singles Lucky Star in Holiday,
but the Madonna era really began in the summer of
when she and director Mary Lambert climbed onto a New
York City rooftop and gave everyone a first good look
at Madonna. We were off on a rooftop trying to
steal off a shot and the sun started to sit
in that beautiful golden light lit up her face and
(14:52):
I was looking through the camera and I just looked out.
I knew we were going to have a great video.
All I had to do a shooter her face. Well.
I did my first video to border Line, and then
suddenly I had that crossover that I've been waiting for
for Salon because people could see who I was and
could put a face together with a song. Border Line
went into heavy rotation on MTV, and that first album
(15:12):
stayed on the charts for over a year, which was
surprising considering that Madonna wasn't touring. Instead of going out
on the road, she had gone off to make a
movie desperately Seeking Susan. It was a role that seemed
to capture the very essence of Madonna. I thought that
was a great persona that she played in their wonderful
free character who would never get a phone or a
place of her own, you know, but was really lovable
(15:35):
and really innocent. Madonna continued to at least play innocent
as she got ready to release her second album. On
the night of September six, Madonna went from merely famous
to infamous. Although she already had four top ten singles,
a few people had seen her perform live At the
(15:56):
first ever MTV Music Awards, Madonna gave every one a
glimpse of the future. She appeared in a wedding dress
and she asked all that choreography, very sexy choreography that
all of the audience was very shocked. But some months after,
like she was selling millions and millions of record with
(16:21):
like a Virgin. They were saying, oh, she's great and fabulous,
but in their minds that they didn't like A Like
A Virgin was the number one single end album in
the country, and millions of women, not just teenagers, not
only a daughter, they wanted to be her. I wanted
it so barely have a forty five euros want to
be It's terrible if you'd look out and there be
(16:42):
five thousand dons in the crowd. You know, she just
tapped this thing with with with these with these girls
that nobody else will was tapping into them. Well, let's
totally trip me out to see people dressing like me.
I had no idea that the way I dressed was
going to influence people or the people were going to
dig it. I mean, I've been dressing that way for years,
(17:03):
and suddenly that became this fashion statement. And those kind
of things always happened by a mistake. You don't can't
premeditate something like that, premeditated or not. People started complaining
that Madonna was a bad influence on America's youth. Barns
are sometimes a little strange, not to sing like, for example,
Madonna had bad influence on the young girls. At the contrary,
(17:26):
I think that Madonna makes them, lets them to express themselves.
For her next video, from like a virgin, Madonna went
right to the very definition of femininity, Marilyn Monroe, and
in the process gave herself a nickname that she's hated
from day one. If I had known when I was
doing those songs that for the rest of my life,
(17:46):
you know, I was going to be referred to as I,
just probably never would have done it. She became that person,
that cultural icon. Madonna has gone far beyond just being
a pop singer. You know, she became Ovis Presley, Marilyn Monroe.
She became that cultural thing that just went way beyond
where we where it had started. It also made Madonna
(18:08):
a big target. In July, Playboy and Penthouse simultaneously published
dozens of nude pictures of Madonna, the photos taken during
her brief period as a nude model back in the
late seventies. That was my first taste of like feeling
like my skin got ripped off of me, and oh
my god, what is my father going to think? You know, um,
(18:31):
my father can't see me naked. God knows. I never
thought I was going to become famous and that those
photographs were going to like show up in magazines all
around the world. But you know. I said, hey, you
know this, this is what happened, and there's nothing I
can do about it. She had the best answer. It was,
what did it say? It's had Madonna on nude pics?
So what I thought? That was this classic? That was
(18:54):
the way to handle that. So what next? A month
later everyone learned what was next. On her birthday August sixteen,
Madonna and actor Sean Penn, who initially met on the
set of her Material Girl video, were married on a
clifftop in California after an eighteen month court chair. But
(19:14):
the wedding was anything but smooth. Sean carved out a
message in the sand for the hovering helicopters, and that
was only the beginning. The press rarely left them alone,
prompting several violent outbursts from Sean. It got particularly bad
during the couple's ill fated attempt to make a movie together.
The continual press scrutiny and Shawn's violent reactions were Ultimately
(19:35):
They're undoing, and Madonna and Sean divorced in nine after
a four year marriage. It's hard enough when one person
is famous, but two people in the demands and the
media scrutiny and I think it's it's nearly impossible for
it to work when both people are famous. But um,
you know who Madonna is today and who she was
(19:56):
when she married Shawn, two different people. Mada on his career,
continued to rise throughout the eighties, from True Blue to
Like a Prayer. She somehow managed to stay one step
ahead of the public taste, which some people call genius,
others called it cold and calculating. David wants to think
a versus some some superhuman calculated machine who's just going
(20:19):
through accumulating and acquiring and just hoarding and as opposed
to a woman who's recognizing going through the jury of life.
Of course, when you're the most famous woman in the
world that journey has talked about and chased after in
every corner of the globe, she plays out in a
public forum where we don't have to so we get
(20:40):
to nitpick it, and you know, like, oh, she's making
a bad mistake now, well we don't have you know,
I's trying something different. She shouldn't be doing that now,
and like she's she's living her life. It's a big fantasy,
and everybody would like to have it and lead that life,
or maybe they wouldn't like to have it if they
could stand there and see how it feels. Finally, in
(21:01):
Madonna decided to let the world see what it's like
to be her. She commissioned a documentary film that would
follow her Blonde Ambition tour around the world. Backstage, Madonna
let the cameras follow her everywhere, and we all got
a chance to see Madonna first thing in the morning,
interacting with her family and hanging out with her friends.
(21:22):
That movie was not about hesitating. That was about making
a hardcore documentary of everything we did on the road.
And if I was gonna do it, I was gonna
do it. She was herself, you know, she was not playing.
She was showing truly Madonna kind of exhibition. But at
the same time so also it's like she has not
(21:44):
nothing too hide. Many people thought Madonna took that nothing
to hide stands to the extreme and that her whole
life was summed up in one comment from her then
boyfriend Warren Beatty, who while she was getting her throat examine,
thought she should get her head examined. And at the time,
I think that moments seemed very smart and very on
the point and very kind of scriptive. Descriptive of narcissism,
(22:06):
you know, and I remember thinking that's a smart comment.
I think it's very off the mark. In fact, it
doesn't feel at all to me to be true of her.
I think she lives most of her life off camera,
but when you're Madonna, you're off camera. Life is never
completely off limits. As she herself found out in the
high stakes game of Truth or Dare. It was the
(22:28):
only moment in the movie that she thought violated her
zone of privacy, and in the end, Madonna agreed and
left it in because, like the rest of the film
she was making, at that moment, it was the truth.
I think most people have that one person, you know,
I mean the person that you're you know, live and
die for, the person that gets right down in your
(22:50):
heart and soul. Be great if it would happen again.
But I think most people can say they have that
that one you know. Truth or Dare may have helped
soften Madonna's image, but in the early nineties, she wasn't
about to let anything stay soft for long. The video
for her single Justifying My Love was banned from MTV
(23:11):
for being too suggestive. While there's no question sexuality has
always been a part of her art, by it seemed
to have overtaken it. The video for the title song
of her tenth album, Erotica, was filled with images that
some people found incredibly hot, in which others found deeply disturbing. Me.
It's scared A lot of people think it's scared anybody
(23:33):
who's afraid of sexuality or he's been raised to think
of sexuality as as some dirty taboo. But the album
Erotica was just the beginning. Almost simultaneously, Madonna's next movie,
The sexually charged Body of Evidence, was released, and on
the heels of that, Madonna's Sex Book was published, a
(23:53):
metal covered, spiral bound cornucopia of Madonna and a host
of compromising situations. Compared to most of the pictures, the
famous shot of Madonna hitchhiking naked seemed downright innocent. She
was showing me pictures of and I was like, why
are you doing this? You? And no, I don't know
what people said. She had a need to express herself
in a certain way and to sort of, you know,
(24:15):
provoke and sort of hold a part of people up
to themselves to look at. And unfortunately she also gets
the criticism for that. You had the sex book, you
had the erotica album and body of evidence. So those
three things taken together, we're all sexual in nature and
not very good at least in my opinion and opinion
(24:37):
of a lot of the public. It just wasn't her
her high point artistically. First of all, I was really
being explicit about my own sexual fantasies. I was turning
my nose up at the whole idea that, you know,
women aren't allowed to be sexual and erotic and provocative
and intelligent and thoughtful at the same time. I think
(24:58):
women have a right to be set to all and
invariably a woman who pushes that too much, it's going
to be punished for it. And she was punished for it.
The reaction was immediate, and definitely there was a time
where I could not open up a magazine or a
newspaper and not read something incredibly scathing about myself. I mean,
(25:21):
I did really have to put a wall up and
like work hard to detach myself from caring about what
people think, and I did have I did feel like
I reached an all time low as far as the
cruelty of humanity, you know, just feeling like I never
saw so much ugliness, just in terms of what was
directed at me. That was a difficult time for her
(25:45):
and a lot of criticisms. But I believe in the
back from mine she knew that, hey, it's just art.
Madonna wasn't living that. You didn't go over to our
house and see, you know, gadgets on the wall for
her to be hooked up to. It was. It was
a little old, tiny thing that she was just sort
of like a piece of art she was making. But
few people saw it as are They took it as
(26:06):
a literal picture of Madonna's life, and wild rumors started
going around about Madonna's dangerous liaisons with everyone from comedian
Sandra Bernhardt to basketball player Dennis Rodman. People have always
accused me of of of being sort of raving in romania,
and they said things that I did with men that
were true, and they said things that I did with
womens are true. I'm very intrigued by bisexuality and homosexuality.
(26:30):
That doesn't mean that I necessarily experience it. Um. I
don't think it's relevant. Even though the Sex Book sold
out its entire first edition some half a million copies
within weeks, the press portrayed erotica, and the sex Book
is commercial bombs. It's my erotica album sold. I don't
know if I or six million, and that that's It's
considered a failure. It's considered a flap, you know. And
(26:51):
I just think, well, based on what I think, our
society is set up too put people up on pedestals
and to glorify them just for the sake of knocking
them down. We get off on it for some reason,
you know, And I think it's just an ugly side
of of our of our culture today. Even Madonna acknowledges
(27:17):
that her motivation for doing the sex Book was only
partially about sex. It was also about dealing with the
very demons that had been haunting her for years. You know.
It was an act of rage on my part. In
the beginning, everyone agreed that I was sexy, but no
one agreed that I had any talent, and that really
irritated me. And the Sex Book was sort of like
the pinnacle of me challenging people and saying, you know what,
(27:39):
I'm going to be sexually provocative and I'm gonna be ironic,
and I'm going to prove that I can get everybody's
attention and then everyone's gonna want going to be interested
in it and still be freaked out about it. And
it was like sort of my way of saying, see,
the world is hypcritical, tired of trying to make America
(28:00):
as its own sexual phobias. She simply put her clothes
back on and continued on her path. I'm not sure
how much good I did it. I did actually doing it,
and um, at the end of the day, probably the
most it did for me was like helped me to
lose my own sexual inhibitions that I had been raised with.
(28:20):
Just ahead, Madonna lands the role she'd always dreamed of.
She begged on her knees that she put it herself
for years to do the movie, and nobody would give
her a chance. But it was the other role she
landed as a wife and mother, that would prove to
be the most fulfilling of all when behind the music continues.
(28:49):
By the early nineties, Hollywood had also come around to
Madonna's side. First, she played the beautiful villainist breathless Mahoney
in Tracy. Then she hit a home run in the
comedy A League of their Own. So here was this
dancer girl who was you know, didn't know which end
(29:11):
of the bat to hold, and but she really did learn,
and you could teach her through dance moments. In fact,
you could teach her like you know, step step, twist
to hit the wall. But when it came to off
the field matters, it was Madonna who did the coaching
for Rosie, who also lost her mother as a child.
Madonna was a kindred spirit and the two formed a
friendship that has only gotten stronger over time. The best
(29:34):
part for me about doing that movie and Get was
getting to know her. I feel understood by her. I
think in a way that I don't feel understood by
many people who haven't lived through uh the same experience
as I did as my in my childhood. Madonna's close
circle of friends echo that comment over and over when
(29:54):
they're in need of understanding. The person they turned to
is Madonna. The most loyal friends I have. I will
never forget that I was coming from Italy to Miami
and the first person got on the phone landing Miami
was Madonna and should She told me in the middle
of a night, and I think you need you know
(30:15):
Mere for you That's was very important to me. But
by after the aggression and anger of the sex book period.
Revealing that softer side was the first step in Madonna's
next big transformation from dark mistress to a ray of light.
I think that Madonna today, her public persona is more
(30:36):
like she was in private with me for a long time.
It makes me very sort of happy to see that
she is secure enough to allow her vulnerability and her calmness,
her beauty to come through without all that distraction that
she had before. Until you, you know, end something, or
(30:57):
or you know, close the book on something, you can't
really move on and grow. As it turned out, Madonna's
growth came from a seed she'd planted years before, Back
in six when the Broadway musical Evita was being planned
as a movie. Madonna had lobbied hard for the part.
(31:20):
It took eight long years before Evita was ready to roll,
but Madonna's dream came true. Madonna was if at Paron,
I mean, she really did it. She was the slightly built,
pale skinned, extremely loving, complex person that nobody could figure out.
There are many people who think she's a saint, and
(31:41):
then there are other people who think she was Satan herself.
So and I could certainly identify with them. So could
a lot of Argentine eas from the moment Madonna set
foot in the country. She was met by pro testers
who felt her reputation would tarnish Avidas. But many people
(32:05):
didn't love the idea of sharing Avida's famous balcony with Madonna.
At the last minute, she personally appealed to the president
of the country. At a March twelfth Madonna stepped on
to that balcony and felt chills run up and down
her spine. Before Avida finished filming, Madonna had another surreal moment.
(32:27):
In the middle of production, she discovered she was pregnant.
She managed to keep her pregnancy secret for months. Then
the story exploded. I come out of my apartment and
there's all pressed there, like what do you think about Madonna?
What do you think about Madonna? In my heart dropped
through my chest and I get into the car. I
slammed the door and I'm like, Jimmy, what happened to Madonna?
(32:48):
My driver He's like, she's pregnant. I was like, like,
come because I didn't know what happened. And I called
her up and I'm like, you could have tall The
Madonna's pregnancy set off another media fire. Store were with
some members of the press calling the baby a calculated
career move and referring to the baby's father, fitness trainer
Carlos Leone, as a sperm donor. It's totally un true.
(33:10):
You know, she met Carlos in the park and fell
in love with him, and you know, I was very
content and happy, I think, and the two of them
were together for a long time, and she was thrilled
that she was pregnant and had tried for a while,
uh to be pregnant with him. She was in love
and it was following her heart lords. Maria Chiconi Leone,
(33:32):
known as Lola, was born in Los Angeles on October four,
a date Madonna now says marked the second big turning
point of her life, the first being the day her
mom died more than thirty years before. If you didn't
have a mom, I think that you try very hard
to be a good mom. It's like the goal of
your life. And I think she's succeeding. I definitely do.
(34:00):
Two months after Lola was born, Madonna made her first
post baby appearance at the Avida premiere in Los Angeles.
Although the film wasn't a runaway hit, Madonna's reviews were
the best of her career. From two months later, at
the seven Golden Globe Awards, all her hard work finally
paid off. Her appearance at the Golden Globes mark Madonna's
(34:21):
last public act for more than a year. During that time,
her relationship with Carlos Leone cool to a solid friendship.
She focused on being a mother to Lola and working
on material for a new album. In March of Madonna
resurfaced on the cover of Vanity Fair. She had a
whole new attitude, a whole new look, and gave the
(34:44):
world its first glimpse of Lola, a decision Madonna had
agonized over. She was reluctant about her daughter because you know,
people sometimes have this way of seeing things that all
of a sign, you're sitting your daughter to make yourself.
But I just think that's a bit stupid, because we
want to know, we want to see her daughter. It's
just a a beautiful daughter. I mean, it's a part of
(35:06):
her life as honest as any other part, probably the
most honest part of her life. With Lola in her life,
Madonna found herself re examining her priorities. You have to
give up a lot of selfish behavior. After you become
a mother, and we've talked about that, you just you
just have to give it up. You kind of give
(35:28):
it up joyfully. It certainly feels like the sense of
unconditional love that Madonna feels from her child and the
sense of unconditional love that Madonna feels towards her child. Okay,
is something that she has been searching for for a
very long time in her life. Motherhood inspired Madonna to
(35:51):
look inward and begin a new search, a search to
know and love herself. Most human beings get to a
certain points in their life and they do say, Okay,
why am I here? What is the purpose of life?
What is the meaning of life? I started practicing yoga,
I started just kind of reading lots of different literature
(36:15):
and suddenly coming to a realization, I really I didn't
think I knew that much at all. Madonna began studying
the Kabbala, a book of ancient Jewish teachings. The Cabala
is the mystical interpretation of the Torah. Essentially, it is
a manual for living. She says her readings led her
to a new sense of understanding. It is about looking
(36:36):
beneath the surface. And taking responsibility for everything that you do,
and understanding the law of cause and effect. Then Madonna
started practicing yoga for two hours a day, a discipline
some swear changed her physically and spiritually. The practice that
she's doing is a very demanding practice, and I think
(37:00):
it develops, you know what, kind of patients, a kind
of compassion for yourself in the process, and then for others.
All of that's probably happening for her, Madonna says. The
combination of motherhood and spiritual searching brought about a period
of intense personal discovery. A woman who had adopted so
many identities over the years was finally peeling back the
(37:22):
layers to uncover her true self. Before you can get
to the core of things, to the things that are
essential to the thing that lasts forever, which is our soul,
you have to go through the layers. By the summer
of Madonna was anxious to apply her spiritual growth to
her music. She began working on her thirteenth album, Ray
(37:43):
of Light, a work that would prove to be a
huge leap of faith. I think that for a while
I was wallowing in a world of confusion in terms
of what I felt like my purpose in this earth
was and what was important in life. And when I
was writing that record, after the birth my daughter, after
you know, lots of things that I was doing and studying,
(38:06):
and you know, just after taking some real time out
and and thinking about things I did, I feel like
I had rediscovered a lot of things and was a
certain extent born again. Madonna had opened herself up to
an entirely new way of thinking, and she knew it
required a complete evolution of her sound. I love a
(38:29):
lot of sort of techno music. But the thing about
techno music is that you never think of it as
being very emotional. So what I wanted to do was
make it intimate, make it emotional like, sort of proof
that it could be. Madonna hired the London based producer
William More of It to bring her vision to light.
Their collaboration would produce a groundbreaking synthesis of electronica and
(38:51):
emotional insight. I was surprised by how far she was
prepared to experiment. I think she had a very clear
idea of it's kind of it's aura of a record
from the word go, and wasn't gonna let anything detract
from that. I've done a lot of collaborating with artists,
and really did I really get inside the music as well.
I took much more of a leap of faith and
much more of a risk something, and my gut told
(39:13):
me that, you know, it was going to be a
good lesson for me to sort of give up certain
aspects of control and really let somebody else's opinions truly
influence me. The risk paid all. When Ray of Light
was released in March of ninety eight, it entered the
Charge at number two and went on to sell over
ten million copies worldwide. I thought the Ray of Light
was a big turning point for her. I thought it
(39:35):
really was her making an announcement to people like, oh,
by the way, I am human. Ray of Light is
a result of several more years of soul searching and
introspection and just really coming to terms with who I
am and feeling more comfortable with myself as a writer,
as an artist, as a human being. Ray of Light
won four Grammy Awards in February of ninety nine. She
(39:58):
clearly appreciated the critical acclaim, but at the age of forty,
Madonna's happiness was no longer measured by professional success. Fame
can be very disruptive. It can be like a drug,
you know, like it gives you the feeling that you're happy,
It gives you the feeling that you're fulfilled. It gives
you the feeling of self importance, and it can distract
(40:19):
you from what's really important. Madonna had shifted her priorities
to focus on her personal fulfillment, and in early ninety nine,
she found what had eluded her for years, true love.
Madonna met thirty year old British filmmaker Guy Richie at
a dinner party hosted by Sting and his wife Trudy
(40:40):
Styler brought them together. She recognized Madonna and he as
these two personalities that would probably mesh. Madonna and Guy
hit it off instantly, in a long distance love affair
was born. I think that she needed something more, you know,
and then she found the perfect guy. It was a
man's man who was his own guy, and it is
going to take crap from her. She can lean on him.
(41:03):
I think that's important for a woman. It helps her
to put down the sword and shield that she's been
carrying for so long. It's comforting to have someone that
can be um an anchor and and a rock and
those are attractive qualities, and those are attractive qualities to Madonna.
(41:23):
By the summer of ninety nine, Madonna was spending most
of her time in London to be close to Guy.
I looked at him on a couple occasions, and he
just seems beside himself with with Joy. I think she
likes just being one of the girls or one of
the guys. I think she likes being normal once in
a while and going through the pub. But she also
must to get off on the fact that she can
buy the pub, you know. By the spring of two thousand,
(41:48):
Madonna and British filmmaker Guy Ritchie with a toast of
the British tabloids. After a year of dating, they had
set up residents in London. I think the British had
taken ownership with her. I think Madonna is their honorary queen.
I think they're done with the other one, who hasn't
bought new pantyhouse since. In March of two thousand, the
world first got word that Madonna was pregnant with her
(42:09):
second child. In August of that year, Rocco Ritchie was born.
Madonna and Guy had their son baptized on December two thousand.
In the storybook Hamlet of door Knock, Scotland. The next
Night or Nate skiboad Castle was transformed for a wedding
befitting Royalty, Madonna insisted on a total media blackout. I
(42:32):
think she's at a point where she's going to keep
certain things sacred to her and the people around her.
By having children, by allowing herself to truly love again,
She's becoming a really incompassionate person. She's got this beautiful
new baby and just a beautiful family, and you can
(42:53):
see how that's completed her life in a lot of ways.
Lola and Rocco have helped Madonna heals some of her
child eldhood wounds, especially concerning her dad. I think that
he thinks that I've grown up finally, because you know,
my father is really ill fashioned, and it's some something
that we have in common now having children. Inspired by
(43:16):
her personal happiness, Madonna returned to the studio to create music.
Released in September of two thousand, the album debuted at
number one in twenty four countries. The album's first single
and its video were clear indications that Madonna was back
to her dance roots and back to having fun. That
song was like, thank you, Madonna. We needed to hear
(43:39):
this again. We needed to feel that moment again of
shaky group think for a minute. The whole thing was
done with sort of tongue in cheek, with a wink.
I felt that she was kind of taking the piss
out of Puffy and on all those people and maybe
take themselves seriously after feeling the rush of motherhood and
the growth there. I think maybe she just wanted to
(44:00):
show that she's still a fun, lucky star after all.
In the summer of two thousand one, Madonna returned a
live performing for the first time in eight years. Her
Drowned World tour was the most anticipated concert event in years,
had a massive success. Everybody just goes crazy. We were
(44:20):
just coming over the rail. Her fans are just crazed
about seeing her, and they'll just be singing along, cheering along,
and standing up, dancing and by the end of the show,
I mean, people can't jump any higher. In eight Madonna
arrived unknown and penniless in Times Square, declaring she wanted
(44:43):
to conquer the world. More than two decades later, she
has done exactly that. I mean, she's the female Elvis.
You can't get as big and stay there as long
as Madonna has without being smartest, you just can't like
step in it and oh my god, I'm gonna be
famous for the next teen years. It doesn't happen like that.
Her years of soul searching and creative exploration of paid
(45:05):
off with personal happiness and professional success, but Madonna insists
her journey is far from over. The more in touch
you get with the spiritual side of yourself, the less
afraid you become of anything, and the more you realize
and have a sense of purpose. The girl who started
out needing the whole world to love her is gone forever,
and in her place is a woman who is grateful
(45:26):
for everything she has and everything she's been through. I've
just begun. It's like the tim of the iceberg. I
have such a long journey ahead of me, and where
it goes I don't know. Hopefully closer to the truth.
After more than fifty years in the music business, Madonna
has rightfully earned her title as the Queen of pop,
(45:47):
as the best selling female recording artist of all time. Ever,
the chameleon, Madonna has stepped into the roles of artists, businesswoman, philanthropist,
and mother while always staying true to her unique voice
and vision. With two Golden Globes, seven Grammys, twenty MTV
Music Awards, and countless other accolades, her trailblazing career is unmatched.
(46:12):
In she released her fourteenth studio album, Madam X, and
is co writing a new biographical film on her life
and career with Universal Pictures. Though she has clearly made
her mark on music and the world, the Queen of
Pop's reign is far from over. Listen to Behind the
(46:35):
Music on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Want more episodes, You
can watch remastered best of the vault and new episodes
Behind the Music only on Paramount Plus
She was a fresh faced Midwestern girl who came to
New York with a humble goal. Along the way, Madonna
accrue power, wealth, and fame, and a reputation that intimidated
just about everybody. She treated the world like a NonStop party,
changing styles and boyfriends and time warp speed until today
she had too much fun, and people asked if she
(00:23):
had gone too far. But even at that point, Madonna
didn't want any tears shed for her, and it wasn't
long before she was touched by a ray of light.
The Queen of Pop found herself blessed with the new
priorities of love and family. Now a revealing journey into
(00:44):
the heart and mind of music's undisputed matriarch, Madonna. Behind
the music, I'm really good at provoking people, and I'm
really good at getting attention. But now that I have
(01:04):
everyone's attention, what do I have to say? It was
the most coveted ticket in music, Madonna's long awaited returned
to the concert stage when she launched her Drowned World
tour in the summer of two thousand one. Madonna was
quite simply the most famous woman on Earth, the title
she earned over the course of two tumultuous decades. She's
(01:26):
been one of the most successful female stars in the
history of the world. Has put her right there next
to Cleopatra and Marie Antoinette and women who enter into
mythology kind of, you know, in terms of achieving the
awards and the record sales and the adoration of the
entire planet, she's got to be happy. She has kept
(01:48):
her fans guessing by remaining in a constant state of change,
evolving from material girl to movie star to mother under
the harsh gaze of a scrutinizing public, and along the
way she somehow managed to find inner peace and happiness.
I do think that if I've been enlightened, and I
(02:09):
truly feel like I've been enlightened, then it's my it's
my responsibility to share what I know with other people.
In the decades since her first record in three she
sold one d and fifty million albums, had forty one
top ten songs, starred in seventeen movies, and been listed
(02:30):
in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most
successful female recording artist in history. Her career has played
out like a heroic odyssey in an industry traditionally dominated
by man. The man was going on behaving the way
I did, and I don't think that he would be considered, um,
(02:55):
you know, the Antichrist or the Marquis de Sade or
whatever else people may be. Certainly, yes, in fact, those
are some of the kinder names Madonna has been called.
No matter how successful she's bad, She's had to continually
dodge the slings and arrows of outraged critics. People stop
thinking of you as a human being, um or people
(03:17):
write about you and um incredibly kind of thoughtless ways,
and never imagine that you actually have feelings that they
could be hurting. And it's not just the critics who
can be insensitive, even people she encounters in everyday life.
They know they have the right to judge her. We
were in an elevator and some building going up to
(03:38):
uh top floor, I don't remember our hotels and and
and it opened up and there was a twenty four
year old messenger guy there. He goes in Madonna. She
goes yeah, He goes, yeah, it looks like like that
you should you should keep it blonde. I thought, boy man, fame,
that people don't even think you're a person anymore. By
stirring up an explosive mixture of religion, racism, and sex.
(04:00):
Critics complain she uses controversy to sell records. Madonna insists
that those issues are why she makes records in the
first place. The whole reason I got into the music
is this wasn't because I thought I had a spectacular voice.
It's because I had something to say. I think she
likes to be controversial, and I think she likes to
push button. She's caused a lot of dialogue to happen
(04:20):
in our culture, you know. And people don't want to
give her credit for that. But credit or not, Madonna
has always pushed boundaries with a consistent message that sex
isn't the enemy, hypocrisy is, and in the last two
decades of the twentieth century, she used that message to
single handedly lead her own sexual revolution. The thing that
(04:44):
I love about Madonna is that she said she believes
this sex is good. She made it okay for a
girl to want to get laid, want to get want
to kiss a boy. Before then, it was okay for
a guy to want to get laid, and it was
okay for a guy to want to kiss. The girls
into all that stuff. But the girls were always very
(05:05):
chaste and all that, and Madonna broke down all these barriers.
But breaking down barriers is dangerous work, and on more
than a few occasions, the controversy swirling around Madonna has
threatened to bury her art. That just seems to overwhelm,
Like when we did Like a Prayer and then the
(05:26):
video came out, and that overwhelmed the album, you know,
and that album has some amazing, brilliant stuff on him.
There was a real magic about that whole time, and
a real intensity and a real it was really powerful.
One of her biggest controversies occurred in when she was
about to release Like a Prayer. Petsy had signed a
(05:51):
five million dollar deal with Madonna to use the song
in a commercial, and they were thrilled until they saw
the Like a Prayer video. Madonna specifically wanted to push
the racial issue in it. The idea of and interracial
(06:12):
love seeing continues to be a sort of an under
the carpet taboo in our society, and I think both
of us wanted to say something about that and compare it,
you know, to the persecution of Jesus Christ. Like a
Prayer wasn't the first time, and certainly not the last.
That Madonna has used her art to explore the deeper
(06:33):
meaning of faith and God and found the religion of
her childhood in conflict with her own values. The Catholicism
of my childhood was just a series of rules that
were um forced on me in a document that I
didn't understand. It was just like, this is what you do,
and there is no reason why this is just what
you do. It could have been that the Catholic Church
in our childhood just pushed the contradictions too far. The
(06:57):
idea that French kissing and murder can both put you
into hell, it's just a pretty wild idea, you know.
On August eight, in Bay City, Michigan, a young French
Canadian woman, Madonna Fortune Jaconi, gave birth to her third child,
her first daughter and her namesake. For the first years
(07:20):
of her life, Madonna was called Little Nanny to distinguish
her from her mother. My idea of my mother, I
think is mostly fantasy, because she died when I was
so young that at this point, you know, she's like
a picture of Jesus Christ, you know, I mean, it's
the most perfect nature of a human being that ever existed.
Madonna's mother died after a long about with breast cancer
(07:41):
when Little Nanny was just six years old. All these
years later, it remains the defining moment in Madonna's life.
If you lose your mother like Madonna did, that can
do a lot of things to you. It could crush
you forever. It could make you forever distrustful of happiness
in life. Or it could make you very very courageous.
(08:02):
I do think when you grow up without a mother,
you have a real sort of unfulfilled need inside of yourself,
and you are on a mad search for love. I
also think that you carry around a kind of unspoken
despair and that can also be something that can inform
all of your music. That you're right, and actually your
sadness will would inspire you. Certainly has inspired me. Madonna's dad, Sylvia,
(08:30):
left alone to care for Madonna. Her three brothers and
two sisters, ran a strict household. The Chaconi kids weren't
allowed to watch TV and went to Catechism every morning
before breakfast. I suppose some people would consider him a fascist.
Maybe the way he raised us is something like, you
will do this because I said so, and you don't
need any reason, and um, I mean he was. He
(08:53):
disciplined us, and at the time, you know, I hated
him for it. Madonna learned how to hide her pain
from the outside world. She had selled at school, a
straight a student, the star of high school plays like
Cinderella and The Wizard of Oz. But the place where
Madonna was always the happiest was on the dance floor.
(09:14):
I've always loved to dance until was a little girl.
I always get up on chairs and tables, and that's
for you know, everybody. When she was thirteen, Madonna started
taking vallet lessons from Christopher Plan but dance wasn't the
only thing he taught her. And that Christopher saying, my
whole life changed. He taught me about art and classical music,
and he also took me up to my first game discotheque,
(09:37):
and I just saw a different side of life that
I've never seen before. It was in those Detroit gay
discos that a now sixteen year old Madonna began to
realize that she had a real gift for dancing and
for grabbing the spotlight. In the fall of nineteen seventy six,
Madonna enrolled at the University of Michigan on a full
dance scholarship. Thoughts of brighter lights blinded her unless and
(10:00):
two years later, in July of nine, she was on
her way to New York with a one way ticket,
thirty seven dollars in her purse, and a dream of
becoming a professional dancer. I knew I wanted to be
an artist. I knew I wanted to be a creative person.
I wasn't sure what form that would take, but I
felt like I needed to be an environment that really
celebrated all of those things, which is why I came
(10:21):
to New York. I certainly did not think for a
second that I would have the sort of global impact
that I've had. I mean, I was trying to get
the hell out of Michigan. She became part of New
York's East Village scene, which at that moment was at
the epicenter of the punk rock movement. But even among
the mohawks and safety pins, Madonna's unique look stood out.
I remember walking down the street with her before we
(10:42):
put on any singles, before we did anything, and she
would stop traffic. I mean, people would just stop and stare.
And she wasn't famous yet. She had the sexuality that
everybody just latched onto one thing Madonna didn't have was money.
She lived in a rat and fested tenement on East
four Street and ate popcorn for dinner for months to
(11:03):
get by. She worked at dunkin Donuts before she found
a better paying job. When I first moved to New York, UM,
I was a dancer, So I did a lot of modeling,
nude modeling, thank you very much, um. And it was
really good money in very flexible hours, which is why
it has to do it. It's not because I enjoyed
taking my clothes off or anything like that. It was
almost by accident that Madonna turned her attention to music
(11:26):
when her boyfriend at the time, Dan Gilroy, let her
join his band, The Breakfast Club as a drummer and guitarist.
The one thing they wouldn't let her do was sing
They already had two singers in the band, so they
would never let me get up and sing a song,
because what's the point. One day, I finally against them.
They finally said, okay, I got singing one song and
(11:47):
the other guy went back to play the drums, and
like I got standing ovation that one moment in the
in the spotlight in front of the band's thing and
was like a really big high. When the band refused
to let Madonna immediately become the lead singer, she quit
the Breakfast Club to start her own band. Playing in
small clubs around New York, Madonna quickly established a reputation.
(12:10):
In the spring of night. Less than two years after
she got to New York, Madonna cut a demo tape.
It wasn't long before she caught the eye of Sire
Records A and R director Michael rosen Black at her
favorite haunt, dance Ateria. She was radiating whatever that it is.
She had it more than anyone I had ever seen
up until that point or since. I mean, it was
(12:31):
just bouncing off the walls. But I was incredibly innocent
and naive, and I just put one ft in front
of the next, and I just put myself out there.
And I don't think what I did was mindless. I
just you know, you just don't know what you're in
for when you get started in this business. You know,
what is the twenty three year old have to say
about life? Anyways, two days after they first met at danceteria,
(12:52):
Michael Rosenblack was ready to offer Madonna a recording contract.
It was, however, one little problem. I did not believe
that her name was really Madonna, so I asked her
to show me some I d She said she didn't
have any, and then she came back to next day
on Tuesday with her passport and there was Madonna. Luis Jacone.
I was very surprised. It was too perfect. Madonna's first single, Everybody,
(13:14):
was released in the fall of two. Within weeks, it
was at the top of the dance charts, and Madonna
was determined to stay there. Coming up next, Madonna loses
her virginity on national television. But it was what Madonna
did in her thirties that really shook the world. When
Behind the Music continues, it was the spring of three,
(13:46):
and with her first hit, Everybody, riding high on the
dance charts, Madonna threw herself into writing songs for her
first record. She quickly showed a knack for writing hit
songs with both a message and a group. She came
up to the office she said, Michael, I think Harry
wrote the song I Want to See Who You Think?
And I put in a demo and it was Lucky
Star and it just blew me away and I knew
and I turned her and I said, you just wrote
(14:08):
yourself a huge hit. I always remember years later singing
in her at Giant Stadium and performed that song. So
in my head I went back to the day she
came and went office, Michael, what do you think of
the song? And then five years later seeing sixty kids
sing along at Giant Stadium. That first album sold well
(14:30):
based on its first two singles Lucky Star in Holiday,
but the Madonna era really began in the summer of
when she and director Mary Lambert climbed onto a New
York City rooftop and gave everyone a first good look
at Madonna. We were off on a rooftop trying to
steal off a shot and the sun started to sit
in that beautiful golden light lit up her face and
(14:52):
I was looking through the camera and I just looked out.
I knew we were going to have a great video.
All I had to do a shooter her face. Well.
I did my first video to border Line, and then
suddenly I had that crossover that I've been waiting for
for Salon because people could see who I was and
could put a face together with a song. Border Line
went into heavy rotation on MTV, and that first album
(15:12):
stayed on the charts for over a year, which was
surprising considering that Madonna wasn't touring. Instead of going out
on the road, she had gone off to make a
movie desperately Seeking Susan. It was a role that seemed
to capture the very essence of Madonna. I thought that
was a great persona that she played in their wonderful
free character who would never get a phone or a
place of her own, you know, but was really lovable
(15:35):
and really innocent. Madonna continued to at least play innocent
as she got ready to release her second album. On
the night of September six, Madonna went from merely famous
to infamous. Although she already had four top ten singles,
a few people had seen her perform live At the
(15:56):
first ever MTV Music Awards, Madonna gave every one a
glimpse of the future. She appeared in a wedding dress
and she asked all that choreography, very sexy choreography that
all of the audience was very shocked. But some months after,
like she was selling millions and millions of record with
(16:21):
like a Virgin. They were saying, oh, she's great and fabulous,
but in their minds that they didn't like A Like
A Virgin was the number one single end album in
the country, and millions of women, not just teenagers, not
only a daughter, they wanted to be her. I wanted
it so barely have a forty five euros want to
be It's terrible if you'd look out and there be
(16:42):
five thousand dons in the crowd. You know, she just
tapped this thing with with with these with these girls
that nobody else will was tapping into them. Well, let's
totally trip me out to see people dressing like me.
I had no idea that the way I dressed was
going to influence people or the people were going to
dig it. I mean, I've been dressing that way for years,
(17:03):
and suddenly that became this fashion statement. And those kind
of things always happened by a mistake. You don't can't
premeditate something like that, premeditated or not. People started complaining
that Madonna was a bad influence on America's youth. Barns
are sometimes a little strange, not to sing like, for example,
Madonna had bad influence on the young girls. At the contrary,
(17:26):
I think that Madonna makes them, lets them to express themselves.
For her next video, from like a virgin, Madonna went
right to the very definition of femininity, Marilyn Monroe, and
in the process gave herself a nickname that she's hated
from day one. If I had known when I was
doing those songs that for the rest of my life,
(17:46):
you know, I was going to be referred to as I,
just probably never would have done it. She became that person,
that cultural icon. Madonna has gone far beyond just being
a pop singer. You know, she became Ovis Presley, Marilyn Monroe.
She became that cultural thing that just went way beyond
where we where it had started. It also made Madonna
(18:08):
a big target. In July, Playboy and Penthouse simultaneously published
dozens of nude pictures of Madonna, the photos taken during
her brief period as a nude model back in the
late seventies. That was my first taste of like feeling
like my skin got ripped off of me, and oh
my god, what is my father going to think? You know, um,
(18:31):
my father can't see me naked. God knows. I never
thought I was going to become famous and that those
photographs were going to like show up in magazines all
around the world. But you know. I said, hey, you
know this, this is what happened, and there's nothing I
can do about it. She had the best answer. It was,
what did it say? It's had Madonna on nude pics?
So what I thought? That was this classic? That was
(18:54):
the way to handle that. So what next? A month
later everyone learned what was next. On her birthday August sixteen,
Madonna and actor Sean Penn, who initially met on the
set of her Material Girl video, were married on a
clifftop in California after an eighteen month court chair. But
(19:14):
the wedding was anything but smooth. Sean carved out a
message in the sand for the hovering helicopters, and that
was only the beginning. The press rarely left them alone,
prompting several violent outbursts from Sean. It got particularly bad
during the couple's ill fated attempt to make a movie together.
The continual press scrutiny and Shawn's violent reactions were Ultimately
(19:35):
They're undoing, and Madonna and Sean divorced in nine after
a four year marriage. It's hard enough when one person
is famous, but two people in the demands and the
media scrutiny and I think it's it's nearly impossible for
it to work when both people are famous. But um,
you know who Madonna is today and who she was
(19:56):
when she married Shawn, two different people. Mada on his career,
continued to rise throughout the eighties, from True Blue to
Like a Prayer. She somehow managed to stay one step
ahead of the public taste, which some people call genius,
others called it cold and calculating. David wants to think
a versus some some superhuman calculated machine who's just going
(20:19):
through accumulating and acquiring and just hoarding and as opposed
to a woman who's recognizing going through the jury of life.
Of course, when you're the most famous woman in the
world that journey has talked about and chased after in
every corner of the globe, she plays out in a
public forum where we don't have to so we get
(20:40):
to nitpick it, and you know, like, oh, she's making
a bad mistake now, well we don't have you know,
I's trying something different. She shouldn't be doing that now,
and like she's she's living her life. It's a big fantasy,
and everybody would like to have it and lead that life,
or maybe they wouldn't like to have it if they
could stand there and see how it feels. Finally, in
(21:01):
Madonna decided to let the world see what it's like
to be her. She commissioned a documentary film that would
follow her Blonde Ambition tour around the world. Backstage, Madonna
let the cameras follow her everywhere, and we all got
a chance to see Madonna first thing in the morning,
interacting with her family and hanging out with her friends.
(21:22):
That movie was not about hesitating. That was about making
a hardcore documentary of everything we did on the road.
And if I was gonna do it, I was gonna
do it. She was herself, you know, she was not playing.
She was showing truly Madonna kind of exhibition. But at
the same time so also it's like she has not
(21:44):
nothing too hide. Many people thought Madonna took that nothing
to hide stands to the extreme and that her whole
life was summed up in one comment from her then
boyfriend Warren Beatty, who while she was getting her throat examine,
thought she should get her head examined. And at the time,
I think that moments seemed very smart and very on
the point and very kind of scriptive. Descriptive of narcissism,
(22:06):
you know, and I remember thinking that's a smart comment.
I think it's very off the mark. In fact, it
doesn't feel at all to me to be true of her.
I think she lives most of her life off camera,
but when you're Madonna, you're off camera. Life is never
completely off limits. As she herself found out in the
high stakes game of Truth or Dare. It was the
(22:28):
only moment in the movie that she thought violated her
zone of privacy, and in the end, Madonna agreed and
left it in because, like the rest of the film
she was making, at that moment, it was the truth.
I think most people have that one person, you know,
I mean the person that you're you know, live and
die for, the person that gets right down in your
(22:50):
heart and soul. Be great if it would happen again.
But I think most people can say they have that
that one you know. Truth or Dare may have helped
soften Madonna's image, but in the early nineties, she wasn't
about to let anything stay soft for long. The video
for her single Justifying My Love was banned from MTV
(23:11):
for being too suggestive. While there's no question sexuality has
always been a part of her art, by it seemed
to have overtaken it. The video for the title song
of her tenth album, Erotica, was filled with images that
some people found incredibly hot, in which others found deeply disturbing. Me.
It's scared A lot of people think it's scared anybody
(23:33):
who's afraid of sexuality or he's been raised to think
of sexuality as as some dirty taboo. But the album
Erotica was just the beginning. Almost simultaneously, Madonna's next movie,
The sexually charged Body of Evidence, was released, and on
the heels of that, Madonna's Sex Book was published, a
(23:53):
metal covered, spiral bound cornucopia of Madonna and a host
of compromising situations. Compared to most of the pictures, the
famous shot of Madonna hitchhiking naked seemed downright innocent. She
was showing me pictures of and I was like, why
are you doing this? You? And no, I don't know
what people said. She had a need to express herself
in a certain way and to sort of, you know,
(24:15):
provoke and sort of hold a part of people up
to themselves to look at. And unfortunately she also gets
the criticism for that. You had the sex book, you
had the erotica album and body of evidence. So those
three things taken together, we're all sexual in nature and
not very good at least in my opinion and opinion
(24:37):
of a lot of the public. It just wasn't her
her high point artistically. First of all, I was really
being explicit about my own sexual fantasies. I was turning
my nose up at the whole idea that, you know,
women aren't allowed to be sexual and erotic and provocative
and intelligent and thoughtful at the same time. I think
(24:58):
women have a right to be set to all and
invariably a woman who pushes that too much, it's going
to be punished for it. And she was punished for it.
The reaction was immediate, and definitely there was a time
where I could not open up a magazine or a
newspaper and not read something incredibly scathing about myself. I mean,
(25:21):
I did really have to put a wall up and
like work hard to detach myself from caring about what
people think, and I did have I did feel like
I reached an all time low as far as the
cruelty of humanity, you know, just feeling like I never
saw so much ugliness, just in terms of what was
directed at me. That was a difficult time for her
(25:45):
and a lot of criticisms. But I believe in the
back from mine she knew that, hey, it's just art.
Madonna wasn't living that. You didn't go over to our
house and see, you know, gadgets on the wall for
her to be hooked up to. It was. It was
a little old, tiny thing that she was just sort
of like a piece of art she was making. But
few people saw it as are They took it as
(26:06):
a literal picture of Madonna's life, and wild rumors started
going around about Madonna's dangerous liaisons with everyone from comedian
Sandra Bernhardt to basketball player Dennis Rodman. People have always
accused me of of of being sort of raving in romania,
and they said things that I did with men that
were true, and they said things that I did with
womens are true. I'm very intrigued by bisexuality and homosexuality.
(26:30):
That doesn't mean that I necessarily experience it. Um. I
don't think it's relevant. Even though the Sex Book sold
out its entire first edition some half a million copies
within weeks, the press portrayed erotica, and the sex Book
is commercial bombs. It's my erotica album sold. I don't
know if I or six million, and that that's It's
considered a failure. It's considered a flap, you know. And
(26:51):
I just think, well, based on what I think, our
society is set up too put people up on pedestals
and to glorify them just for the sake of knocking
them down. We get off on it for some reason,
you know, And I think it's just an ugly side
of of our of our culture today. Even Madonna acknowledges
(27:17):
that her motivation for doing the sex Book was only
partially about sex. It was also about dealing with the
very demons that had been haunting her for years. You know.
It was an act of rage on my part. In
the beginning, everyone agreed that I was sexy, but no
one agreed that I had any talent, and that really
irritated me. And the Sex Book was sort of like
the pinnacle of me challenging people and saying, you know what,
(27:39):
I'm going to be sexually provocative and I'm gonna be ironic,
and I'm going to prove that I can get everybody's
attention and then everyone's gonna want going to be interested
in it and still be freaked out about it. And
it was like sort of my way of saying, see,
the world is hypcritical, tired of trying to make America
(28:00):
as its own sexual phobias. She simply put her clothes
back on and continued on her path. I'm not sure
how much good I did it. I did actually doing it,
and um, at the end of the day, probably the
most it did for me was like helped me to
lose my own sexual inhibitions that I had been raised with.
(28:20):
Just ahead, Madonna lands the role she'd always dreamed of.
She begged on her knees that she put it herself
for years to do the movie, and nobody would give
her a chance. But it was the other role she
landed as a wife and mother, that would prove to
be the most fulfilling of all when behind the music continues.
(28:49):
By the early nineties, Hollywood had also come around to
Madonna's side. First, she played the beautiful villainist breathless Mahoney
in Tracy. Then she hit a home run in the
comedy A League of their Own. So here was this
dancer girl who was you know, didn't know which end
(29:11):
of the bat to hold, and but she really did learn,
and you could teach her through dance moments. In fact,
you could teach her like you know, step step, twist
to hit the wall. But when it came to off
the field matters, it was Madonna who did the coaching
for Rosie, who also lost her mother as a child.
Madonna was a kindred spirit and the two formed a
friendship that has only gotten stronger over time. The best
(29:34):
part for me about doing that movie and Get was
getting to know her. I feel understood by her. I
think in a way that I don't feel understood by
many people who haven't lived through uh the same experience
as I did as my in my childhood. Madonna's close
circle of friends echo that comment over and over when
(29:54):
they're in need of understanding. The person they turned to
is Madonna. The most loyal friends I have. I will
never forget that I was coming from Italy to Miami
and the first person got on the phone landing Miami
was Madonna and should She told me in the middle
of a night, and I think you need you know
(30:15):
Mere for you That's was very important to me. But
by after the aggression and anger of the sex book period.
Revealing that softer side was the first step in Madonna's
next big transformation from dark mistress to a ray of light.
I think that Madonna today, her public persona is more
(30:36):
like she was in private with me for a long time.
It makes me very sort of happy to see that
she is secure enough to allow her vulnerability and her calmness,
her beauty to come through without all that distraction that
she had before. Until you, you know, end something, or
(30:57):
or you know, close the book on something, you can't
really move on and grow. As it turned out, Madonna's
growth came from a seed she'd planted years before, Back
in six when the Broadway musical Evita was being planned
as a movie. Madonna had lobbied hard for the part.
(31:20):
It took eight long years before Evita was ready to roll,
but Madonna's dream came true. Madonna was if at Paron,
I mean, she really did it. She was the slightly built,
pale skinned, extremely loving, complex person that nobody could figure out.
There are many people who think she's a saint, and
(31:41):
then there are other people who think she was Satan herself.
So and I could certainly identify with them. So could
a lot of Argentine eas from the moment Madonna set
foot in the country. She was met by pro testers
who felt her reputation would tarnish Avidas. But many people
(32:05):
didn't love the idea of sharing Avida's famous balcony with Madonna.
At the last minute, she personally appealed to the president
of the country. At a March twelfth Madonna stepped on
to that balcony and felt chills run up and down
her spine. Before Avida finished filming, Madonna had another surreal moment.
(32:27):
In the middle of production, she discovered she was pregnant.
She managed to keep her pregnancy secret for months. Then
the story exploded. I come out of my apartment and
there's all pressed there, like what do you think about Madonna?
What do you think about Madonna? In my heart dropped
through my chest and I get into the car. I
slammed the door and I'm like, Jimmy, what happened to Madonna?
(32:48):
My driver He's like, she's pregnant. I was like, like,
come because I didn't know what happened. And I called
her up and I'm like, you could have tall The
Madonna's pregnancy set off another media fire. Store were with
some members of the press calling the baby a calculated
career move and referring to the baby's father, fitness trainer
Carlos Leone, as a sperm donor. It's totally un true.
(33:10):
You know, she met Carlos in the park and fell
in love with him, and you know, I was very
content and happy, I think, and the two of them
were together for a long time, and she was thrilled
that she was pregnant and had tried for a while,
uh to be pregnant with him. She was in love
and it was following her heart lords. Maria Chiconi Leone,
(33:32):
known as Lola, was born in Los Angeles on October four,
a date Madonna now says marked the second big turning
point of her life, the first being the day her
mom died more than thirty years before. If you didn't
have a mom, I think that you try very hard
to be a good mom. It's like the goal of
your life. And I think she's succeeding. I definitely do.
(34:00):
Two months after Lola was born, Madonna made her first
post baby appearance at the Avida premiere in Los Angeles.
Although the film wasn't a runaway hit, Madonna's reviews were
the best of her career. From two months later, at
the seven Golden Globe Awards, all her hard work finally
paid off. Her appearance at the Golden Globes mark Madonna's
(34:21):
last public act for more than a year. During that time,
her relationship with Carlos Leone cool to a solid friendship.
She focused on being a mother to Lola and working
on material for a new album. In March of Madonna
resurfaced on the cover of Vanity Fair. She had a
whole new attitude, a whole new look, and gave the
(34:44):
world its first glimpse of Lola, a decision Madonna had
agonized over. She was reluctant about her daughter because you know,
people sometimes have this way of seeing things that all
of a sign, you're sitting your daughter to make yourself.
But I just think that's a bit stupid, because we
want to know, we want to see her daughter. It's
just a a beautiful daughter. I mean, it's a part of
(35:06):
her life as honest as any other part, probably the
most honest part of her life. With Lola in her life,
Madonna found herself re examining her priorities. You have to
give up a lot of selfish behavior. After you become
a mother, and we've talked about that, you just you
just have to give it up. You kind of give
(35:28):
it up joyfully. It certainly feels like the sense of
unconditional love that Madonna feels from her child and the
sense of unconditional love that Madonna feels towards her child. Okay,
is something that she has been searching for for a
very long time in her life. Motherhood inspired Madonna to
(35:51):
look inward and begin a new search, a search to
know and love herself. Most human beings get to a
certain points in their life and they do say, Okay,
why am I here? What is the purpose of life?
What is the meaning of life? I started practicing yoga,
I started just kind of reading lots of different literature
(36:15):
and suddenly coming to a realization, I really I didn't
think I knew that much at all. Madonna began studying
the Kabbala, a book of ancient Jewish teachings. The Cabala
is the mystical interpretation of the Torah. Essentially, it is
a manual for living. She says her readings led her
to a new sense of understanding. It is about looking
(36:36):
beneath the surface. And taking responsibility for everything that you do,
and understanding the law of cause and effect. Then Madonna
started practicing yoga for two hours a day, a discipline
some swear changed her physically and spiritually. The practice that
she's doing is a very demanding practice, and I think
(37:00):
it develops, you know what, kind of patients, a kind
of compassion for yourself in the process, and then for others.
All of that's probably happening for her, Madonna says. The
combination of motherhood and spiritual searching brought about a period
of intense personal discovery. A woman who had adopted so
many identities over the years was finally peeling back the
(37:22):
layers to uncover her true self. Before you can get
to the core of things, to the things that are
essential to the thing that lasts forever, which is our soul,
you have to go through the layers. By the summer
of Madonna was anxious to apply her spiritual growth to
her music. She began working on her thirteenth album, Ray
(37:43):
of Light, a work that would prove to be a
huge leap of faith. I think that for a while
I was wallowing in a world of confusion in terms
of what I felt like my purpose in this earth
was and what was important in life. And when I
was writing that record, after the birth my daughter, after
you know, lots of things that I was doing and studying,
(38:06):
and you know, just after taking some real time out
and and thinking about things I did, I feel like
I had rediscovered a lot of things and was a
certain extent born again. Madonna had opened herself up to
an entirely new way of thinking, and she knew it
required a complete evolution of her sound. I love a
(38:29):
lot of sort of techno music. But the thing about
techno music is that you never think of it as
being very emotional. So what I wanted to do was
make it intimate, make it emotional like, sort of proof
that it could be. Madonna hired the London based producer
William More of It to bring her vision to light.
Their collaboration would produce a groundbreaking synthesis of electronica and
(38:51):
emotional insight. I was surprised by how far she was
prepared to experiment. I think she had a very clear
idea of it's kind of it's aura of a record
from the word go, and wasn't gonna let anything detract
from that. I've done a lot of collaborating with artists,
and really did I really get inside the music as well.
I took much more of a leap of faith and
much more of a risk something, and my gut told
(39:13):
me that, you know, it was going to be a
good lesson for me to sort of give up certain
aspects of control and really let somebody else's opinions truly
influence me. The risk paid all. When Ray of Light
was released in March of ninety eight, it entered the
Charge at number two and went on to sell over
ten million copies worldwide. I thought the Ray of Light
was a big turning point for her. I thought it
(39:35):
really was her making an announcement to people like, oh,
by the way, I am human. Ray of Light is
a result of several more years of soul searching and
introspection and just really coming to terms with who I
am and feeling more comfortable with myself as a writer,
as an artist, as a human being. Ray of Light
won four Grammy Awards in February of ninety nine. She
(39:58):
clearly appreciated the critical acclaim, but at the age of forty,
Madonna's happiness was no longer measured by professional success. Fame
can be very disruptive. It can be like a drug,
you know, like it gives you the feeling that you're happy,
It gives you the feeling that you're fulfilled. It gives
you the feeling of self importance, and it can distract
(40:19):
you from what's really important. Madonna had shifted her priorities
to focus on her personal fulfillment, and in early ninety nine,
she found what had eluded her for years, true love.
Madonna met thirty year old British filmmaker Guy Richie at
a dinner party hosted by Sting and his wife Trudy
(40:40):
Styler brought them together. She recognized Madonna and he as
these two personalities that would probably mesh. Madonna and Guy
hit it off instantly, in a long distance love affair
was born. I think that she needed something more, you know,
and then she found the perfect guy. It was a
man's man who was his own guy, and it is
going to take crap from her. She can lean on him.
(41:03):
I think that's important for a woman. It helps her
to put down the sword and shield that she's been
carrying for so long. It's comforting to have someone that
can be um an anchor and and a rock and
those are attractive qualities, and those are attractive qualities to Madonna.
(41:23):
By the summer of ninety nine, Madonna was spending most
of her time in London to be close to Guy.
I looked at him on a couple occasions, and he
just seems beside himself with with Joy. I think she
likes just being one of the girls or one of
the guys. I think she likes being normal once in
a while and going through the pub. But she also
must to get off on the fact that she can
buy the pub, you know. By the spring of two thousand,
(41:48):
Madonna and British filmmaker Guy Ritchie with a toast of
the British tabloids. After a year of dating, they had
set up residents in London. I think the British had
taken ownership with her. I think Madonna is their honorary queen.
I think they're done with the other one, who hasn't
bought new pantyhouse since. In March of two thousand, the
world first got word that Madonna was pregnant with her
(42:09):
second child. In August of that year, Rocco Ritchie was born.
Madonna and Guy had their son baptized on December two thousand.
In the storybook Hamlet of door Knock, Scotland. The next
Night or Nate skiboad Castle was transformed for a wedding
befitting Royalty, Madonna insisted on a total media blackout. I
(42:32):
think she's at a point where she's going to keep
certain things sacred to her and the people around her.
By having children, by allowing herself to truly love again,
She's becoming a really incompassionate person. She's got this beautiful
new baby and just a beautiful family, and you can
(42:53):
see how that's completed her life in a lot of ways.
Lola and Rocco have helped Madonna heals some of her
child eldhood wounds, especially concerning her dad. I think that
he thinks that I've grown up finally, because you know,
my father is really ill fashioned, and it's some something
that we have in common now having children. Inspired by
(43:16):
her personal happiness, Madonna returned to the studio to create music.
Released in September of two thousand, the album debuted at
number one in twenty four countries. The album's first single
and its video were clear indications that Madonna was back
to her dance roots and back to having fun. That
song was like, thank you, Madonna. We needed to hear
(43:39):
this again. We needed to feel that moment again of
shaky group think for a minute. The whole thing was
done with sort of tongue in cheek, with a wink.
I felt that she was kind of taking the piss
out of Puffy and on all those people and maybe
take themselves seriously after feeling the rush of motherhood and
the growth there. I think maybe she just wanted to
(44:00):
show that she's still a fun, lucky star after all.
In the summer of two thousand one, Madonna returned a
live performing for the first time in eight years. Her
Drowned World tour was the most anticipated concert event in years,
had a massive success. Everybody just goes crazy. We were
(44:20):
just coming over the rail. Her fans are just crazed
about seeing her, and they'll just be singing along, cheering along,
and standing up, dancing and by the end of the show,
I mean, people can't jump any higher. In eight Madonna
arrived unknown and penniless in Times Square, declaring she wanted
(44:43):
to conquer the world. More than two decades later, she
has done exactly that. I mean, she's the female Elvis.
You can't get as big and stay there as long
as Madonna has without being smartest, you just can't like
step in it and oh my god, I'm gonna be
famous for the next teen years. It doesn't happen like that.
Her years of soul searching and creative exploration of paid
(45:05):
off with personal happiness and professional success, but Madonna insists
her journey is far from over. The more in touch
you get with the spiritual side of yourself, the less
afraid you become of anything, and the more you realize
and have a sense of purpose. The girl who started
out needing the whole world to love her is gone forever,
and in her place is a woman who is grateful
(45:26):
for everything she has and everything she's been through. I've
just begun. It's like the tim of the iceberg. I
have such a long journey ahead of me, and where
it goes I don't know. Hopefully closer to the truth.
After more than fifty years in the music business, Madonna
has rightfully earned her title as the Queen of pop,
(45:47):
as the best selling female recording artist of all time. Ever,
the chameleon, Madonna has stepped into the roles of artists, businesswoman, philanthropist,
and mother while always staying true to her unique voice
and vision. With two Golden Globes, seven Grammys, twenty MTV
Music Awards, and countless other accolades, her trailblazing career is unmatched.
(46:12):
In she released her fourteenth studio album, Madam X, and
is co writing a new biographical film on her life
and career with Universal Pictures. Though she has clearly made
her mark on music and the world, the Queen of
Pop's reign is far from over. Listen to Behind the
(46:35):
Music on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Want more episodes, You
can watch remastered best of the vault and new episodes
Behind the Music only on Paramount Plus
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