Author’s Note

When I first met her at a press conference in the spring of 1983, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone — twenty-five at the time — struck me as brash, cocky, petulant and self-indulgent. Never one to put on an act for a journalist, she was just what she was — and without hesitation. “Look, I never had money,” she told me of her early, struggling days in New York. “Each month it was a scramble to pay the rent and get some food in the apartment. I literally had to eat out of garbage cans in those days. Now that I have a record out and it looks like it’ll be a success, hell yeah, I feel like I deserve it,” she concluded. She fixed her hazel eyes on me. “People don’t know how good I am yet,” she said, holding me with her gaze. “But they will soon. In a couple of years everyone will know. Actually,” she concluded, “I plan on being one of this century’s biggest stars.”

“And with no last name?” I asked, uncertain that “Madonna” was even an authentic appellation. (Surely, it couldn’t have been.)

“It’s Madonna,” she snapped. “Just like Cher. Remember it.”

It was difficult to argue with her, mostly because she wouldn’t hear of it. Poor thing, I thought. Let her have her illusions. No reigning beauty she, and — judging from her first record — equipped with only a fair voice, yet she thinks she’s going to become a dominant influence in pop music, a big star. Well, we’ll see . . .

Of course, it didn’t take long for Madonna’s prediction to come true.

Everything she is today has been hard earned. With nothing ever handed to her on the proverbial silver platter, her life and career have been built on single-mindedness of intention, the most exhausting work (in recording studios, on movie and video sound stages, and on concert tours), dogged determination and, often, unmerciful and extreme sacrifice. Today, Madonna is arguably one of the most memorable, celebrated and highest-paid women of the twentieth century . . . and to think that I doubted her resolve.

I first began the challenge of writing this book in, but decided to put it away for a few years. I thought then that Madonna should have an opportunity to do more living before I, as her biographer, would be able to do her story justice. Though she was already one of the most famous people on the planet, it takes more than just the accurate documentation of a person’s celebrity to make for a good character study. Most subjects need time for evolution and personal growth before their stories are ripe enough to commit to paper. At the time, Madonna was in an ambitious, self-involved phase during which nothing mattered more to her than her career.

When I picked up work on this book again in 1994, I felt the same way about her. She had prioritized her life — career first, above all else — and would do almost anything to get to a certain point of creative freedom and financial security. I anticipated that when she was finally satisfied with her career, she would begin to work on her life. Happily, just such a personal evolution began to occur in 1996 when she had Lourdes, her first child.

Now, in the year 2001, Madonna has greater concerns than just the next big public relations spectacle in her career — especially since giving birth to another child last year, a brother for Lourdes, named Rocco. She has grown, changed and transformed herself (again) and, this time, in a way that not only inspired me to want to write about her, but admire her as well. Yes, she is still driven, still ambitious and still self-involved — that really hasn’t changed. She’s still Madonna, after all, an artist of calculation known for inventing and reinventing her image, usually for the purpose of publicity. However, as I now see it, in recent years she’s also been shedding certain layers, slowly revealing who she really is as a person, as a woman.

Affluent, powerful and famous people like Madonna are, generally, different from most other people — at once more and less human, they’re walking paradoxes, thoughtful and inconsiderate, generous and parsimonious, disciplined and uncontrolled, self-denigrating and self-important. While it may not always be easy to find the real Madonna amidst the hocus-pocus of public relations she manufactures to hide her true self, she’s there just the same. In pursuit of her, one only has to be perceptive enough to look beyond the thick smoke, away from the confusing mirrors. There hides the real woman. As I found in the years of researching and then finally writing Madonna: An Intimate Biography, finding her is worth the effort.

J. RANDY TARABORRELLI
Los Angeles, January 2001