• March 15, 1999

Madonna

By Steve Dougherty

The Mother of Reinvention Set a New Standard of Female Fame

When she writhed onstage at the very first MTV Video Awards show in 1984, wearing a peekaboo wedding dress and warbling "Like a Virgin"—as if!—Madonna was dismissed by critics as a tarty flash in the pan. "I never had someone like [Elvis's manager] Colonel Parker propping me up or telling me what to wear or think or do," Madonna says by way of explaining how she transformed her 15 minutes into 15 years. "I did it all on my own."

And so, with luck, pluck and an uncanny knack for uncorking one fame-fueling controversy after another, Madonna Louise Ciccone, a Midwesterner of modest vocal talent and chutzpah to the heavens, has sold in excess of 100 million albums worldwide and even now, at the ripe old age of 40, continues to rile—and to reflect our times—as few other pop artists have. Madonna obsessives have made her one of the Internet's most hit-on women, and The New York Times calls her "a secular goddess."

Her most recent album, Ray of Light, an ambitious meditation, not on sex, but on birth, death and spiritual growth, impressed critics and inspired a takeoff on the famous tag she has worn ever since her Marilyn Monroe spoof "Material Girl" hit in 1984. ("It was meant to be ironic!" she insists.) "Ethereal Girl? Oh, well, that's funny, I suppose, the opposite of materialistic. Though I hardly think of myself as ethereal. It sounds kind of hippy-drippy. I don't like either of them."

The third of six children born in suburban Detroit to Sylvio Ciccone, a now-retired Chrysler engineer, and his rigorously Catholic wife, Madonna Fortin Ciccone, Madonna the younger suffered a defining loss at age 5 when her 31-year-old mother died of breast cancer, leaving a void that remained until the birth of her own daughter, Lourdes Maria, 33 years later. "When my daughter was born, it was like I was reliving an emotional need," she says. "But I knew that I was going to be able to give my daughter the kind of love I didn't have and to heal myself in the process."

Head of her own successful Maverick Records label (angst diva Alanis Morissette is one of her stars), Madonna has built an estimated fortune of $200 million. Yet, for all her fame and net worth, she does not always find what she desperately seeks. Single since her 1989 divorce from brooding actor Sean Penn, Madonna is no longer romantically involved with Lourdes's father, former personal trainer Carlos Leon, 32. "I do believe we all have soulmates," she says. "I don't believe that we necessarily end up with them." Still, Madonna does not consider herself romantically star-crossed. "All love is lucky," she says, "even when it breaks your heart."

Thanks to her Golden Globe-winning turn in 1996's Evita, Madonna's acting career, derailed by flops like 1993's Body of Evidence, is back on track. Between preparations for her next film (The Next Best Thing) and rehearsals for a tour later this year, Madonna finds time for a hobby. "I make scrapbooks," she says. "I used to do them for my boyfriends. Now I save them for my daughter to look at when she's an old lady like me." While she sometimes dreams of living out of the spotlight in "the countryside of England, on a sheep farm," Madonna has no intention of retiring. "I'd get bored," she says, adding that the "tension and friction" of New York City, where she and Lourdes have a 14-room duplex apartment (in addition to homes in L.A. and Miami), keep her at her creative best. "I feel just as hungry today," she says, "as I did the day I left home."