By SUSANNAH CAHALAN and JEANE MacINTOSH
Last updated: 9:46 am
July 20, 2008
Posted: 4:16 am
July 20, 2008
Shock value - miming masturbation on stage, posing on a cross, kissing Britney - is what made Madonna famous and is keeping her there, thanks to A-Rod, as she's approaching the ripe old age of 50.
But it's the last thing Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher expected when they were invited over for a quiet Sunday dinner at Madge's opulent Los Angeles home.
Minutes after Demi and Ashton, fellow Kabbalah followers, put down their forks after finishing the main course, Madonna stood up.
"Guy and I are going to see a movie. But you and Ashton are welcome to stay for dessert," she announced - as Madonna's brother, Christopher Ciccone recalls in his scathing, entertaining tell-all "Life with My Sister Madonna."
It's a minor moment in Madonna's life, but a telling one. While the public artist is wildly creative and larger than life, her private self is controlling, vindictive, socially awkward and selfish, according to Ciccone.
Ciccone, who worked as his sister's backup dancer, dresser, art director and interior decorator, was a part of her "royal we," her "humble servant," and ultimately a dismissed former member of her entourage. Ciccone has followed the chameleon from when she was a punk-rock chic in "Desperately Seeking Susan" to her present British white-gloved persona.
But many things, he writes, have remained constant in her ever-changing life.
She's rigid: wakes up at 9 a.m. and heads to bed around 11 p.m., with a 6-mile run every morning, and everything must be cleaned according to her obsessive specifications.
"Every hour in between planned by her as rigidly as any military campaign," he says.
Her motto? "This isn't a democracy," Ciccone writes.
She's a cheapskate: despite being one of the richest women in the world, she even refused to give her own 90-something year old grandmother more than $500 a month to live.
And though Ciccone insists he still loves his sister despite her glaring flaws, his tone speaks volumes. His "Machiavellian" sister uses men to get what she wants (in one case, inciting jealousy in JFK, Jr. by flirting with Don Johnson and artist Futura); a terrible actress of whom Ciccone was "embarrassed"; and a half-hearted philanthropist, whose main reason for adopting her Malawi son, David, was to compete with Angelina Jolie.
Even the smallest things enrage her.
"What the f - - -, Christopher?" shouts Madonna backstage during her Virgin Tour in the mid-1980s as Ciccone helps her into a black bra top and long black gloves. "You haven't pushed out the little finger! F - - - you, you piece of s - - -," she screams at him.
Oddly, that's the moment he decides that he will never leave his sister, he claims.
"I'll endure the abuse, endure the pressure," he writes. "And I won't walk out because ultimately in the midst of the show, in the heat of the moment, my sister is at her most vulnerable."
