It is of course sad that Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s relationship should end in
divorce after 7½ years – the couple have three children: her daughter
Lourdes, 12, their son Rocco, 8, and David, 3, who was adopted from Malawi
in 2006. But it also goes to show that Madonna, despite being a global
superstar worth £300m, remains a perfect mirror for her female fan base – by
which I mean those of us who have liked her since she sprang on the scene in
the mid1980s in cheap lace and rosary beads, with a wink in one eye and a
steely glint in the other.
(Quick recap for our younger readers: pre-Madonna, being a young woman who was
explicit about what she wanted, and being seen to work hard to get there,
was simply not done. You had to shrug and little-me and self-deprecate,
preferably while wearing a scrubbed face, giant specs and some sort of
hideous sackcloth. PostMadonna, no girl is embarrassed about voicing
ambition, or about going haring after it with all guns blazing. Her
influence and achievements are hard to overstate.)
Unusually for a celebrity, Madonna’s private life seems real, and thus
provokes empathy rather than derision. This may be because it so closely
echoes that of lesser mortals. She does what we do, for the reasons we do
it. She did it two decades ago, by being pert and batting her eye-lashes at
anything that moved, and – rather remarkably – she’s still doing it now, by
getting divorced.
Unlike her male counterparts, whose entire life trajectory seems to involve
going from badly behaved, priapic rock star to really old, slightly tragic
badly behaved, priapic rock star, Madonna has evolved in a recognisably
human and very female fashion.
Despite the millions and the sold-out stadiums and the awards and the
deification, she remains one of us, buffeted in similar ways by the vagaries
of children and relationships, finding it hard to juggle work and home and
ambition and wifehood despite being a squillionaire superstar.
Compare and contrast with, say, Victoria Beckham: even though Madonna is
considerably older, richer, more successful and more globally famous, her
tribulations are resonant in a way that Posh’s could never be.
Never mind the enduring brilliance of Madonna’s self-created “brand” or the
many reinventions of her stage persona, fabulous though they are. The real
appeal is in the twists her life has taken, and the way they always seem to
echo the experiences of “ordinary” women.
Take this latest instal-ment. The divorce rate may be falling nationally, but
the number of older people – especially women – seeking an end to their
unhappy marriage is on the up. Madonna is in the same boat as many of the
women who cheered her first Top of the Pops appearance in 1984.
The soon-to-be-former Mrs Ritchie remains the zeitgeist queen, a one-woman
barometer of where women are at. To mix metaphors, it’s as if she’s the
digital image and we’re the pixels.
We may not prance around on stage aged 50, looking freakishly toned and
wearing tiny leotards, but, like Madonna, many of us were bad girls in our
twenties, good girls (and mothers) in our thirties and divorced at some
point in the following decade or two.
Madonna did all of this with knobs on, as befitted her status. She was
thrillingly bad, like when she took off all her clothes and hung out in
lesbian leather bars for her brilliantly subversive book Sex – brilliant
because, having made a career out of cheerfully inclusive,
equal-opportunities sluttishness, so that every lardy middle American
thought he was in with a chance, she suddenly revealed herself to be so
comprehensively and terrifyingly sexually knowing that every male
commentator in the US and Europe felt she’d “gone too far”.
Really, all she’d done was show her enormous fan base what a woman in control
of her sexuality looked like, and shocked them to the core by suggesting it
perhaps wasn’t quite as cute as Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman – a heroic act
for which we should all be thankful, and which is still a welcome corrective
to the hundreds of little wan-nabe starlets writhing on a TV screen near you
in a depressing, male-scripted parody of sexiness.
Having scared men into anxious detumescence for a little while, Madonna then
became reassuringly “normal”. She had her first child, Lourdes, by a man
with whom she didn’t stay, Carlos Leon, adding single motherhood to her bow
(though she and Leon remained on good terms). Eventually she got married,
like you do.
The party was at Skibo castle, which is a pop star’s grand version of a
marquee in your parents’ back garden – that is to say, traditional and
old-fashioned, with stiff flower arrangements and linen napkins.
She became a devoted Anglophile, claiming to like bitter and sprinkling her
speech with bits of cockney: again, she was doing what women do, especially
in the first flush of a new relationship, which is to love everything about
their boyfriend and adopt it as their own – see sudden newfound passions for
West Ham or random bands or hiking.
She had another baby, Rocco, and took to hosting shoots and weekend house
parties at her Wiltshire country house, Ashcombe, which had once belonged to
Cecil Beaton. Granted, she probably had armies of staff and three nannies on
call 24/7 and perhaps never knew the drudgey exhaustion that comes from
caring for young children, but still. Her fans from back in the 1980s were
going through similar motions, relatively new to both marriage and
motherhood, not entirely comfortable yet with hanging up their clubbing
clothes, feeling as though they were playing at being grown-up.
Madonna, with her wholesome, moralistic children’s books and demure little
dresses, made all of us feel a bit better about domesticity: she seemed
awfully keen on it, ‘‘which gave the rest of us hope.
Aside from anything else, she made it seem glamorous and satisfying.
It was comforting to us to see that just as we were asking ourselves all of
those tricky questions about trading in a fun-filled youth for motherhood
and fidelity and early nights, Madonna had already embraced them all.
Nigella Lawson is, rightly, credited for glamorising domestic life, but
Madonna has arguably played an equally large part for women of my
generation.
Now, aged 50 and with little left to prove, she’s readying herself to go solo
– like so many women for whom domestic bliss left a great deal to be
desired, and who, postchildren, postproperty and financially secure, get the
distinct feeling that marriage is overrated and that they’d be happier
baling out and pottering about on their own.As is often the case, divorce at
a later age, for Madonna, isn’t theimpromptu version of divorce from one’s
youth: by all accounts, the Ritchies have tried hard to make their marriage
work, to reach compromises and to come up with solutions that would be least
damaging to their family life. However, their attempts – which are rumoured
to have included mouthing “empowering”, loving words at each other, such as
“macho” and “goddess” (a technique that seems so demented and juvenile that
I very much hope the rumour is baseless) – have failed.
Madonna has reputedly hired the redoubtable Fiona Shackleton, who has
represented the Prince of Wales and, more recently, Sir Paul McCart-ney.
Friends of the couple say the split is as amicable as splits can be, and
that Ritchie is expected to behave in a gentlemanly fashion: the antiHeather
Mills, if you like.
The separation, long rumoured, was confirmed last Wednesday in a joint
statement issued through Madonna’s spokeswoman, Liz Rosenberg. “Madonna and
Guy Ritchie have agreed to divorce after 7½ years of marriage, their
representatives confirmed today. They have both requested that the media
maintain respect for their family at this difficult time.”
The gossip mill had been in overdrive since last summer. Guy found his wife
too controlling, apparently (which is a bit like Mrs Khan suddenly noticing
that Genghis had a wee aggressive streak); she was said to be keen on
adopting more children, unlike him; he allegedly found it hard to deal with
her continuing success while his own star had been on the wane for years; he
wasn’t as devoted to Kabbalah, a bonkers-seeming celebrity offshoot of
Judaism, as she was; etc etc. And he wasn’t as famous as her: he would
always be Mr Madonna, which can hardly have come as a massive surprise, but
which must still have rankled.
According to reports, the point at which the Ritchie marriage became
irredeemably doomed was three years ago, on Madonna’s 47th birthday, when
she fell off her horse and sustained serious injuries – shebroke four ribs,
her collarbone, her scapula and a knuckle in her left hand, and later called
the accident “the most painful event of my life”.
A “family friend” quoted last week said Madonna expected her husband to drop
everything to be by her side. Ritchie, though, “approached the whole thing
in what [Madonna] called ‘a very British way’: instead of smothering her
with sympathy, he said, ‘Come on, darling, you’re a tough bird – you’ll be
back on the horse in no time’”.
Americans aren’t good at being told to buck up at the best of times; a spoilt
American pop star was never going to take well to being asked to grin and
bear it.
Ritchie is British enough to cringe at the idea of making an unnecessary fuss
about anything; his wife is American enough to see brisk, British
admonitions about pulling oneself together as signs of monstrous
cal-lousness and disengagement. Madonna was apparently so incensed by
Ritchie’s apparent lack of sympathy that she told him their marriage was a
mistake, and that he was not her “soulmate” after all.
Horses aside, what it boils down to, if you believe the rumours – which I do,
because some of them come from close to the source – is that Madonna, and
Madonna’s needs and Madonna’s desires, had an emasculating effect on her
husband; that she noticed, didn’t find it especially attractive and agreed
that enough was enough.
This is the story of many a modern divorce: forget infidelity or arguments
over money – what kills many marriages today is the erosion of roles that
had been clearly demarcated for centuries. It’s not just that Madonna is
perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist when it comes to middle-aged women.
It’s more that, in an Everywoman double whammy, her relationship has failed
for particularly zeitgeisty and resonant reasons, which will be familiar to
many “ordinary” couples.
It goes like this. Youmeet each other. You’re doing well; things are going
swimmingly at work for both of you; you feel like equals (when Ritchie met
Madonna, he was a hot young director, whose film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking
Barrels was a worldwide success, and of whom great things were expected).
Fast forward a few years and add children, and sooner or later one of you will
get to the point where they can’t shake off the feeling that their star is
on the wane while their spouse’s continues to rise. (Ritchie’s subsequent
movies were increasingly poorly received; Swept Away, starring Madonna as a
rich, spoilt social-ite “tamed” and humiliated by a sailor, came in for
particular ridicule, though Ritchie probably rather liked the plot.)
Worse, the wife knows who she is (she’s Madonna!), she’s good at her job, she
knows what she wants and she’s not really in the business of playing
doormats to soothe wounded male egos. Aside from anything else, she’s busy.
As the months and years pass, her husband’s lack of success – and,sure as eggs
is eggs, growing self-pity – do not elicit cooing sympathy, but irritation.
The more irritation she displays, the more emasculated he becomes. And the
more emasculated he becomes, the more irritated she feels.
It’s an unoriginal vicious circle, one that is played out in tens of thousands
of homes every day, because this whole scenario is one of the side effects
of the whole working-women debate – never mind what going out to work does
to children: it also does extraordinary, and underreported, things to
marriages. Even if you’re Madonna.
Ritchie, meanwhile, is a geezer – an artificially created,
public-school-educated geezer, but a geezer none the less, if only by
osmosis. (Though I wonder what his wife thought when she first realised that
he wasn’t really some East End sexy gangster type but the stepson of a
baronet. She may have felt a bit swizzed.)
He is a bloke. The thing about blokes is that blokeishness is all they can do:
they operate in really only one register. Their requirements arefew and not
complex: respect, which is to say admiration, tops the list, not just from
colleagues or the world at large, but also from the missus.
For men, respect is usually measured by professional success: lose
professional success and respect becomes thin on the ground. People may
really like the way you’re so sweet with your children, but in Geezer World,
sweetness doesn’t really boost self-esteem.
The second requisite for blokes is feeling desirable, in every sense: a geezer
is nothing if he can’t pull birds (wife included). But the wife who no
longer especially respects him may find it hard to muster up urgent sexual
desire, especially if he’s wandering about looking all Eeyorish and glum and
exudingfailure; and, of course, if his wife is Madonna, I expect the
prospect of other birds is more trouble than it’s worth.
The third necessity is food and drink – geezers are a bit like plants. The
food needs to be normal, unfortunately for Ritchie, who strikes one as a
cottage-pie man whose wife follows a strict macrobiotic diet. The drink
needs to be plentiful, and the drinking should preferably be carried out in
all-male group sessions. (Perhaps this is why Madonna and Ritchie bought
their local pub, the Punchbowl, in the spring.)
As I say, simple requirements – but ones that are, for the Ritchies as for
many modern couples, almost wholly incompatible with the realities of
everyday life. Women no longer have the time – or the inclination,
necessarily – to soothe the troubled, self-pitying male brow. It sounds a
callous thing to say, but for working women there isn’t much incentive: it’s
not as if you want them to chuck you a tenner or take you out for a slap-up
dinner or buy you a pretty dress, because you can do all of those things for
yourself.
As love fades, the realisation that it might be an awful lot easier to do it
for yourself becomes overwhelming; the gloomy, slightly broken husband
becomes surplus to requirements. And then you call your lawyer.
Women equate sexiness with success, unless they are especially charitable. The
lure of the alpha male is still strong: marrying an alpha, packed to the
gills with confidence and self-belief as Ritchie used to be, and watching
him turn into a beta, and then a gamma, and then go plummeting towards
omega-hood, is more than many women can take.
Madonna’s marriage has gone wrong for all the modern reasons, which is apt,
because she is all the aspects of modern womanhood rolled into one. You do
slightly get the feeling that there is no hope for modern marriage, because
if she, with all her determination and resourcefulness and loathing of
failure, can’t manage to make hers work, then there is little hope for the
rest of us.
But then perhaps modern marriage is old-fashioned already and needs
reinventing. Celebrity divorces certainly do, and I have opti-mistically
high hopes about the Ritchies on this front: they seem real enough, human
enough, to understand that the three-ring circus, with incredible flying
insults and paparazzi dangling from trapezes, is not especially edifying or
indeed healthy.
It would be nice if, as has been suggested, the dissolution of the Ritchie
union didn’t make it to court and a settlement was privately agreed. Neither
Madonna nor Ritchie seems a hysterical type, and they must both have mourned
the demise of their marriage over the past few months: the
wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth part is presumably over already.
All that remains is for them to go forward, in as elegant a fashion as
possible, and for Madonna to begin to incarnate the mantra by which so many
women now live: I have children, I have a house, I have work and I am free.
She’s going to be a great ambassadress.
