Life with My Sister Madonna Read Free Page A

and steels herself to face her audience.
    The lights go up, and a burst of screaming hits us. An intense jolt of electricity bolts from the seventy-five-thousand-strong audience onto the stage and crashes over us like shock waves, powerful and exhilarating.
    Circus music booms through the stadium. Onstage, in front of a red velvet curtain, dancer Carrie Ann Inaba, naked except for a red G-string, slithers down a forty-foot pole, while a blue satinclad clown—the leitmotif of the show—watches onstage.
    I am now standing in the pit, the five-foot gap between the front-row seats and the stage. As Carrie Ann reaches stage level, then slides below, the curtain goes up to reveal Madonna on a smoke-filled stage, singing “Erotica.” Her close-cropped blond hair glitters in the limelight and she cracks the whip.
    Her dancing is elegant, fluid, a tribute to the early training we both shared. And her body is a work of art, thanks to the daily two-and-a-half-hour gym regimen she follows when she’s not on tour. Her yoga classes, too, are responsible for her perfect tone and muscle definition, her queenly posture, her poise. In a yoga class, of course, all her competitive instincts come to the fore. Whether it is yoga or friendships or Kabbalah, my sister always has to be the best, the greatest—the one woman who can wrap her leg around her body twenty-five times and stand on one finger.
    Madonna’s competitive spirit, of course, is part of what made her—well, Madonna. That, and her intelligence, her capacity to learn, her superlative memory, her unrivaled charm, and her talent for live performance, which—as I watched her in The Girlie Show —takes my breath away. I marvel at her connection with the audience, the vivacity and precision of her performance, the grace of her hand gestures, the artful turn of her head, exactly as we rehearsed them together.
    For the next number, “Vogue,” Daniel has added a black sequined headdress to her outfit, part Erté, partly Zizi Jeanmaire. The passionate interest Madonna and I both share in the icons of the past has heavily influenced the content and the vibe of The Girlie Show , and in particular The Virgin Tour scene in which she parodies Marlene Dietrich.
    Throughout our time living and hanging out together in downtown Manhattan, and when I lived with Madonna in Los Angeles—initially in the home she shared with her first husband, my then brother-in-law, Sean Penn, and later in the one she sometimes shared with Warren Beatty—we used to stay up until all hours watching old movies together. Dietrich’s movies—especially The Blue Angel and Morocco —were particular favorites, but we also loved Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box , Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce , Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night , and Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday .
    Madonna’s hitherto unrealized dream is to become a great movie star. I wish her well, but secretly believe that the only part that she is truly capable of playing is that of herself, Madonna. A part that she has created and curated. And what a part it is: cross Shirley Temple with Bettie Page, Elizabeth I with Lucille Ball, Bette Davis with Doris Day, and you have a flavor of the artist known as Madonna.
    Â 
    T HE MOMENT THERE is a brief interlude between songs during The Girlie Show and Madonna goes offstage, I run backstage to her dressing room. If she was calm before the performance, during the interval she is always extremely nervous and jumpy. While she re-touches her makeup and sprays herself with Annick Goutal’s Gardenia Passion, her favorite perfume, I give her a heightened version of my standard pep talk:
    â€œYou look fantastic. Your voice is strong. And your moves were terrific.”
    She stops trembling, takes a gulp of Evian.
    And strides back onstage.
    Part of what I said to my sister was true, part was slightly bullshit. Her moves are, indeed,