Madonnarama!

The world is a series of rooms, which are arranged like concentric circles, or rooms within rooms, joined by courtyards and antechambers, and in the room at the center of all those rooms Madonna sits alone, in a white dress, dreaming of Africa.

To reach her, you must wait for a sign. When it comes, if you are pure of heart, you begin to move toward Madonna, and move fast. One moment you are in Connecticut, wondering if it will snow, the next moment you are swept up by a force greater than yourself. You’re in a car on the highway, flashing past sleepy towns, moving closer and closer to the center, which you approach deftly and humbly, in the manner of a pilgrim. Like a pilgrim, you set off before first light. Like a pilgrim, you remove your shoes—to pass through security at the airport. Like a pilgrim, you read and reread sacred texts: profiles and reviews, the first published in the early 1980s, the most recent published just a second ago, which constitute a kind of record, the good news, the Gospel of Madonna.

Taken together, these chronicle the career of Madonna, each different, but each telling the same story, which is so established and archetypal it verges on folklore: the girl from suburban Detroit, which can stand for anywhere other than here; the early years in Eden, memories of which Madonna describes as “grainy and beautiful,” when her mother was young and alive; then tragedy, the wound that never heals, the death of her mother from breast cancer when Madonna was six; empty days plagued by tormented dreams. “You’re aware of a sense of loss, and feel a sense of abandonment,” she told me. “Children always think they did something wrong when their parents disappear.” Then her father’s second marriage, the stepmother, the drudgery, because she was the oldest girl in a house filled with eight children and so was pressed into adult service, cleaning and wiping and changing, when she was still a child herself; secrets and desires, her life before the mirror, which has followed her everywhere; high school, where she was beautiful, but punky and strange. “I didn’t fit into the popular group,” she said. “I wasn’t a hippie or a stoner, so I ended up being the weirdo. I was interested in classical ballet and music, and the kids were quite mean if you were different. I was one of those people that people were mean to. When that happened, instead of being a doormat, I decided to emphasize my differences. I didn’t shave my legs. I had hair growing under my arms. I refused to wear makeup, or fit the ideal of what a conventionally pretty girl would look like. So of course I was tortured even more, and that further validated my superiority, and helped me to survive and say, ‘I’m getting out of here, and everyone is a heathen in this school—you don’t even know who Mahler is!’?” She found refuge in dance class and went on to the University of Michigan to study dance, but for just a year, because then she was gone to New York.

Because this is mythology, a short struggle was followed by a quick ascent to stardom. When was it? Nineteen eighty-two? Nineteen eighty-four? The birth of the music video? “Borderline”? And just like that, every girl in every school is Madonna Ciccone, with her slutty magnificence and lacy driving gloves and bare midriff and spangles.

Here is my favorite quote—it’s an editor at Billboard talking to Jay Cocks in 1985 for Time: “Cyndi Lauper will be around a long time. Madonna will be out of the business in six months.”

I felt the presence of Madonna as soon as I landed at LAX. It was as if she had been there a moment ago, and, in fact, while waiting for my luggage, I scanned a copy of the New York Post and came upon a picture taken the day before which showed Madonna, having come through customs, holding her two-and-a-half-year-old son, David, whom she had adopted in Malawi in 2006, the cameras an inch from her face. “The paparazzi are out of control,” she would later say. “I haven’t been to Los Angeles in quite a while, and I don’t watch television here or in England, and I was told there’s now a television show where the paparazzi are the stars of the show—is that true? That they film each other doing paparazzi jobs? Which gives them more fuel. I usually found that type kept their distance—they definitely do in England, because it’s illegal to photograph children. But that’s not how it is here. They get this close, and don’t care how much they scare your children. Being famous has changed a lot, because now there’s so many outlets, between magazines, TV shows, and the Internet, for people to stalk and follow you. We created the monster.”

I was rushed to Century City from the airport, to the towering new office building of CAA, the talent agency that represents Madonna, and seated in an empty screening room, which was spooky in the same way an empty church is spooky. The lights went down, and for 90 minutes I watched a documentary Madonna has written and produced, I Am Because We Are, which is African folk wisdom that means something like “It takes a village.” It too is about community—about identity and how it’s rooted in place. The movie sings of Malawi, a landlocked little nation in sub-Saharan Africa, ravaged by aids, filled with orphans—a world without adults that has become, in her middle years, the great cause of Madonna’s life. With this movie, it seems, she hopes not only to raise awareness but also to explain her own obsession with the motherless children of Africa.

It opens with Madonna walking in a crowd of Africans. Then her voice, which is the voice of the upper Midwest painted in Oxford glaze: “People always ask me why I chose Malawi. And I tell them, I didn’t. It chose me. I got a phone call from a woman named Victoria Keelan. She was born and raised in Malawi. She told me that there were over one million children orphaned by aids. She said there weren’t enough orphanages. And that the children were everywhere. Living on the streets. Sleeping under bridges. Hiding in abandoned buildings. Being abducted, kidnapped, raped. She said it was a state of emergency. She sounded exhausted and on the verge of tears. I asked her how I could help. She said, You’re a person with resources. People pay attention to what you say and do. I felt embarrassed. I told her I didn’t know where Malawi was. She told me to look it up on a map, and then she hung up on me. I decided to investigate, and I ended up finding out much more than I bargained for, about Malawi, about myself, about humanity.”

To date, Madonna has adopted just the one child from Malawi, David, who has joined Madonna’s other children, 11-year-old Lourdes and 7-year-old Rocco, in a town house in London. It was the birth of Lourdes, in 1996, that put Madonna on the road that ended in Malawi. “If you have children, you know you’re responsible for somebody,” she explained. “You realize you are being imitated; your belief systems and priorities have a direct influence on these children, who are like flowers in a garden. So you start to second-guess everything you value, and the suffering of other children becomes much more intolerable.”

If anyone ever won a lottery, it’s this child, David, who one moment was living in poverty in Africa and the next had been flown to a palace in the great frozen North. You see him in the film, bowlegged and stocky in the endearing way of the destitute man-child, looking adult, wizened. It’s no mystery why Madonna picked David. Look at him, he’s adorable. It was this adoption—the fact that Madonna went into an orphanage of aids-infected children and somehow came out with a child who did not have aids and is not an orphan—that set off the furor, especially in the British press, that the movie seems meant to address. Laws had been brushed aside, the request expedited. As if the dynamic of colonialism or First World/Third World were being played out between this one superstar and this one child. Then David’s father, Yohane Banda, turned up. He told reporters he had placed his son in the orphanage only temporarily, and let him be adopted at the urging of authorities. “The government people told me it would be a good thing for the country,” he told The Christian Science Monitor. “They said he would come back educated and be able to help us.”

What a strange life for David, being carried off to London—like Pocahontas, the beautiful Indian girl found in wild America—because, as Conrad wrote of London, “this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.” Like Pocahontas, who marveled at the brick buildings and endless streets and was shown off and fêted, but still lonely, because the Empire has everything but what is most important—a kind of purity or righteous connection to the land. “Africa is not doing great,” Madonna told me, “but, on the other hand, how much have they contributed to the destruction of the world? Nothing compared to what we have, and we have everything.” In other words, Madonna brings this boy into her house and gives him everything, but gets something in return: a living totem of life as it was lived before machines.