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January 8, 2002
SYNDICATED: Immaterial girl
A VERY odd and lovely little book I own, called I dream of Madonna, collects women’s accounts of the nights the all-singing all-dancing all-provoking cultural beacon set up camp in their deepest subconscious.
Heady stuff, but I can beat it. A man I know, not even a journalist, recently had a nightmare about Madonna. He’d be interviewing her, think he’d finished, and put away his Dictaphone, only for another ‘Madonna’ to turn up and the whole process start up again. Madonna just kept coming back, like some many-headed MTV hydra. Having interviewed Madonna myself, my friend’s ‘mare made me giggle. (We should all be so lucky to have all the Madonnas show up). However, reading Andrew Morton’s new biography on La Ciccone, I couldn’t help but speculate how much better it might have been if the author had had the same nightmare as my friend.
With Morton’s best known work, his Diana book, one at least came away the impression that Di herself was lurking and whispering in the shadows — Cherchez La Femme with bulimia and tiaras. With Morton’s Madonna book, a tome which manages to be more thorough but less entertaining than a second-on-the-bill Vanity Fair interview, it is more a case of Cherchez La Point.
We begin with Morton taking a ride from JFK airport into Manhattan, just as his subject did so many years ago. ‘The striking skyline glitters, alight with promises, dripping with possibilities’, Morton growls dreamily, like a pulp fiction writer with a heavy deadline. New York sorted, it’s time to hear all about... Morton!: ‘A biographer is a personality detective,’ he muses. ‘A literary gumshoe searching for clues, testing alibis, and gathering evidence that will help illuminate a character who has made an impression on our world.’ Finally, we arrive at Madonna, but far from the subject being ‘illuminated’, it’s as if lights that have always been on are being clicked off one by one.
It’s not that it’s not all here — it, droningly, exhaustingly, is. The Catholic childhood, the mother who died young from breast cancer, the dance training, the switch to music, the struggle, the success, the sex talk, the backlash, the tears. The men, the women, the marriages, the abortions. The ambition, the audacity, the bad decisions, the worst movies. The children, the comeback, the abduction by aliens. I made that last one up, because I thought you might be getting bored. That’s the point really. With Madonna, Morton achieves the implausible. He takes an interesting woman and an astonishing life and manages to make both seem incredibly boring.
Once you get used to Morton’s pace (dull plod, with occasional snooze), it becomes quite amusing joining him on the journey, a bit like watching someone dragging a dead body around, trying to find some place to hide it.
Meanwhile, Madonna herself is smothered in gamey autograph-hunting flattery which does little more than reveal that Morton would rather deal in abstract tosh-prose than get up close to his subject. Similarly, Morton’s take on her music hints that he might be the only human being alive never to have heard any of it. Rather painfully, he doggedly describes her songs like someone listening through a cup pressed up against an outside wall.
Ultimately, all you learn from this book is that Madonna has a lot of ‘friends’ with big nasty mouths. Only once did I catch my breath and really feel what was being written, and that was when Morton describes Madonna looking into her mother’s open casket. To the five-year-old Madonna, her mother’s mouth ‘looked funny’, and she only realized later that that was because it had been sewn up. We could have done with more of this, more Madonna the real, hurting person, less Madonna the strutting famous monster thing.
Madonna remains one of the sanest mega-celebrities the world has ever seen, and a biographer has a duty to ‘illuminate’ that. With Morton’s Madonna, the problem is not that he’s never met his subject, but that he clearly has no special feel for her legend or her life. Maybe Morton didn’t need to have the same nightmare as my friend, but it might have helped if he had dreamt of her at all. — Dawn/ Observer news service
Madonna
By Andrew Morton
O’Mara Books
256pp. £18
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