Goddess: Inside Madonna (50 page)

Family and friends gathered in Skibo’s drawing room for champagne and toasts before going into the oak-paneled dining room for a sit-down dinner. Madonna was gone for several minutes, and when she returned, she had changed into a Jean-Paul Gaultier outfit. Fires blazed in the stone hearths as the guests ate haggis, a Scottish dish that is a combination of lamb, oatmeal, and spices, along with langoustines, salmon, mussels, Aberdeen Angus beef, roast potatoes, and red cabbage, accompanied by champagne and Beaujolais. Throughout the meal, a traditional four-piece Scottish band played, and some of the musicians even serenaded the guests with spoons. Dessert was a caramelized profiterole cake baked by a London chef flown in for the occasion, and the wedding cake was a gift from Sting and Trudie Styler, a customized cake in the shape of a piano, with Austrian chocolate and marzipan, which sat on wooden legs made by a joiner, designed by Harry Gow of Culloden, who had also made a white-iced christening cake for Rocco with his name spelled out in lemon icing.

The affair had the feeling of a family dinner, and Lourdes, along with several of Sting and Styler’s children, ran around the dining room. In the middle of the dinner, Mathew Vaughn read telegrams from guests who had not been able to come, including Luciano Pavarotti, Rosie O’Donnell, Elton John, the Dalai Lama—whose invitation had prompted the rumors that the wedding would be a Buddhist ceremony—and Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.

After dinner, the group retired to a disco in the basement, and Madonna appeared in yet another outfit, an ivory pantsuit that had been designed by Donatella Versace. The disc jockey, Tracy Young, was from Miami, a friend of Ingrid Casares’s, and played a mixture of Madonna and Sting tunes.

At dawn, Madonna and Guy Ritchie left the party and spent their wedding night in the bridal suite, the room that Andrew Carnegie had used as his own bedroom. Later that day, surrounded by Tony and Joan Ciccone, John and Shireen Ritchie, and Lady Amber Leighton, the couple planted a baby oak tree on the grounds, promising to return every year to watch as it grew.

Even Madonna couldn’t persuade the staff at Skibo to let them stay on through Christmas. The castle was reserved and guests were arriving from as far away as Abu Dhabi. Madonna, Guy, Lourdes, and Rocco and their nannies spent Christmas at Sting and Trudie’s country estate in Wiltshire. During the visit, the two couples dropped in at a local pub for beer and sang carols with other local residents during the midnight mass at the town’s church.

It was another circle. Madonna and Ritchie ended their wedding week and the baptism of their son where it had all begun for them, a mere two years earlier, in Wiltshire, in England, Madonna’s new country.

O
nce again, Madonna is a pioneer in the new definition of publicity in the twenty-first century. Instinctively she realized that selling nuptials to tabloid magazines is no longer considered acceptable for celebrities or appreciated by their fans. On her own, even after Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas included the world in their affair, the birth of their son, and their wedding, Madonna understood that the only way to control the kind of press that she wanted this time around was to cloak the event in secrecy. Only then could she be assured of a dignified result. The international media would recount every detail with respect and awe, and the paparazzi would be censored by the mainstream photographers. Just as she once made sex her most potent image, she now uses dignity as the most effective way to get attention.

What is fascinating and a tribute to her sense of timing is that Madonna garnered as much attention by eluding the media during her wedding to Guy Ritchie as she did during her wedding to Sean Penn, when she allowed the press to turn the event into a garish circus.

In 1985, Madonna was a different woman. She was not only willing but determined to get all the publicity that she could get, even if most of it did not depict her as a stunning actress or a refined young bride. In 1998, when she met Guy Ritchie, he was still bent on shedding his aristocratic background, and Madonna, newly arrived in England, was determined to acquire a touch of class. Almost immediately, she understood that her husband did not really come from the rough East End, was not an authentic cockney, did not scrounge around for meals or owe money to nasty underworld characters, but rather was a wellborn, privately educated son of a successful businessman and his beautiful former wife, who eventually remarried and got herself a title.

By the time Madonna was pregnant with their child, she put an end to his fantasy by convincing him in her own inimitable way that luxury and excess, extravagance and success, were attributes that made it possible to have what she most craved, personal freedom, and what her new husband was working so hard to achieve—artistic recognition. She also understood that accepting his beginnings was as difficult for him as it was for her when it came to going back to Bay City as the beloved granddaughter of one of the oldest families in town. In some perverse way, Guy Ritchie accepted his wife’s demands, because marrying Madonna, according to British standards, was marrying down, since money was nothing compared to title and lands and family history, not unlike the Fortin family in Bay City, who considered anyone who had moved there after World War II to be a newcomer and not part of the old guard.

Ironically, both of Madonna’s husbands tried to pretend that they were low-class boys who had passed a misspent youth getting into fights and committing petty crimes. The difference is that when Penn grew up, he dreamed of shooting paparazzi in helicopters, while Ritchie, following family tradition, went about shooting ducks in Dornoch. There is something similar about Madonna, Sean Penn, and Guy Ritchie. Just as Madonna picked the bad boys who came from good families, she tried to do the same when she changed the reality of her own background and family to satisfy what she believed her fans needed to hear.

What is odd is that several weeks after the wedding, close friends of Guy Ritchie suddenly began saying that the thirty-two-year-old director was actually thirty-eight years old. One close friend of Lady Amber Leighton’s denies the age discrepancy. “It is absolutely untrue. Madonna decided that it was plausible to say that Guy, as some people in show business have done, lied about his age when he first began directing, to make him more of a wonder boy. What this tells us is that Madonna is extremely sensitive about the age difference and, as she has done in the past concerning her own life, is determined to rewrite history when it comes to Guy. Lady Amber is a very down-to-earth, realistic woman. She didn’t care about her own age as much as she was appalled at the fabrication for the sake of Madonna’s ego.”

How different is this Madonna
who wandered around the Scottish grounds of Skibo Castle before her wedding, gamely shooting clay pigeons and standing on her balcony, with her new best friends, Gwyneth and Trudie, watching the Scottish mist roll in over the hills, from the Madonna who fell madly in love with the violent and drunk Sean Penn, the woman who made her fame making bad movies and seducing her audience onstage, wearing chains and black leather bustiers?

Was it maturity that changed her, or was it love, or was it simply that she had gone from one extreme to the other?

If Frida Kahlo, the tortured artist and abused wife, was once her heroine, and Eva Perón, the woman who accomplished all her dreams against all odds, was her idol, at forty-two Madonna has a new idea of the ideal woman. She is Mia Farrow, the earth mother and actress, or Trudie Styler, the adored wife of the rock idol who has her own career, four loving children, and the good sense to know that money is not the root of all evil but rather the root of all goods, the best way to buy freedom and a guarantee of living happily ever after.

As Madonna enters her fifth decade, she has decided that stability, common sense, religious values, and a life filled with a husband’s love and adorable children are all she needs to make her feel alive. And yet, shortly after her marriage to Guy Ritchie, someone asked her if her transformations are over, if her public should never again expect the same shocking images and shows that she has given them throughout her career.

“You never know,” she replied, echoing a line that has been her mantra through so many of her transformations. “Never say never.”