I used to think she was indulging in a little light blasphemy by naming herself after the Holy Mother only to create a persona that would cleverly undermine the sacred by illustrating the profane. But no, Madonna is actually her real name. Called after the mammy, a proper practising Roman Catholic of the old school. Andrew Morton has Madonna senior kneeling on uncooked rice and sleeping on coat-hangers during Lent. "She is even said to have covered the many religious statues in her home when a friend who was wearing front-zipped jeans came to visit."
I have doubts about where he gets that class of information - but never mind. Once a hack, always a hack. The poor woman died in her 30s, leaving six youngsters behind, of whom one is now world-famous thanks in part to the kind of carry-on that would undoubtedly have had the pious mammy spinning in her grave. Or would it?
A world-famous daughter worth hundreds of millions possessed of enough true grit to make her mark with nothing more than talent and ambition to sustain her is something almost any mother would be proud of.
That she used her sexuality as a weapon is commonplace enough; that she uses it in such a calculated, dispassionate way is not. Madonna is no Marilyn. No vulnerable victim she, and it probably amused her mightily to sexually entertain JFK junior just to prove the point.
Hell-bent on achieving power and control, she was never going to succumb to anyone's notion of a plaything to be discarded at will and, to this end, she has served women well. The US academic, Camille Paglia (who gets nary a mention in the book), has well-nigh singlehandedly elevated Madonna to the status of irrefutable modern icon and her writing on the subject is far more contentious and informed than anything Morton delivers, but like the proper old-fashioned celebrity chaser he is, he lends a sympathetic ear to many of the shell-shocked left gasping in her wake.
Her initial manager, a feisty woman, admits her first mistake was trying to tame Madonna, her second was to fall in love with her. Camille Barbone remembers a photo-shoot for Norma Kamali at which the attention- grabbing Madonna wore rosary beads with a cross that hung down below her waist, remarking: "See, Camille, even God wants to get into my pants." According to Morton, poor Barbone eventually withdrew from the music industry, went to cooking school and spent a year working in a nursing home because she needed people to say "thank you".
Then we have hedonists like Steve Rubell (of Studio 54 fame) who was astonished when Madonna, having been offered anything she wanted in terms of sex or drugs to make it through the night, asked only for "a nice big salad, please". This wannabe appears to have been genuinely disciplined, genuinely dedicated and up every morning clear-headed for a three-mile run followed by however many hours in a gym it would take to keep her physically on peak form. She wanted to inhabit her body fully; not to pretend it didn't exist but to exploit its iconic potential. To that end, the old Catholic mantra about the body being a temple had been taken to heart (even if the ends pursued were severely at odds with Catholic teaching). So, yes, she used the NYC club scene, but only in the way an ambitious young businessman might use his golf club. Network but never indulge. Relentlessly ambitious to the point of exhaustion, she left every other wannabe trailing in her wake.
Now a girl who heads for the Big City imbued with the notion that anyone can do anything and all it takes is huge effort, massive concentration and a sustaining belief in the self is normally a recipe for complete disaster. Living from hand to mouth on hopes and dreams has been the downfall of many a young one, and, like or loathe her, one has to give Madonna huge credit for hanging on in there until she finally did become the hottest ticket in town.
Once she made it (and in this context a symbiotic relationship with the fledgling MTV was an incalculable bonus, as she turned out to be the absolute mistress of the three-minute video), her critics were many. One called her the quintessential spirit of the age, "self-indulgent, sacrilegious, shameless and shallow". Warren Beatty concluded that she didn't want to live off-camera, let alone talk. However, Harvard Business School beat a path to her door when Sex, a superlative exercise in vanity publishing, shifted one and a half million copies at $50 a pop in a matter of days. They wanted to know how on earth she did it.
Inventing a series of dramatis personae and inhabiting them fully is how. She set out to capture the imagination of millions of youngsters experimenting with what it is to be female in an age when pop culture reigned supreme. She expanded the variety of roles available and she could try 'em on and cast 'em off with each and every new single, knowing there would be worldwide exposure via MTV. It is a brave new world, Miranda, and not only to thee.
In desperately seeking an angle from which to torment her, Morton makes a big deal of Madonna never having properly made it as a film star. So bloody what? The so-called sirens of the big screen would have sold their souls to have achieved the power and control that Madonna has now managed to exert over every aspect of her working life.
Her love life is another matter entirely. The book is strewn with the emotional fall-out of the many men and women she used up on her route march to stardom. Maybe her present incarnation as Mrs Guy Ritchie is merely the latest in a long line of try-outs. Who knows? Who cares? That's the province of Hello magazine.
If the pious mammy was still with us, she might indeed have spiritual reservations, but she would certainly be amazed at her daughter's phenomenal artistic achievement and as astonished as we all are by her immense material wealth.
Jeananne Crowley is an actress and writer