By Chrissy Iley
Sunday Jul 20 2008

I am in a windowless room up in the Manhattan offices of Simon and & Schuster, where I am to read the book that is surrounded in so much secrecy, controversy, hype -- Life With My Sister Madonna -- written by Christopher Ciccone who starts off telling us he was born his mother's son but will die his sister's brother.

The book is an attempt to redress that, to redefine Christopher as Christopher, but the waters are dark and muddy. It's a story of two people so close they make each other who they are and torture each other for the privilege. If you thought that the book Sex With Madonna, which has her all trussed up in leather bits and handcuffs, was as close as the singer got to S&M, then think again.

A few pages in, I've got goose bumps. Not because we learn that Madonna is a control freak. Not because we learn that she doesn't sleep much because any kind of relaxing doesn't sit well with all that drive, determination, self-discipline and focus.

No, I was embarrassed to learn that Madonna, who likes racy outfits and to have her nipples exposed to millions on a stadium tour or in a book, can't bear anyone to see her naked except her brother. Madonna likes to wear fishnets at all times, even under jeans.

We discover how, when Madonna started off, Christopher learnt how to give insincere applause. She was always a brilliant dancer, but he would tell her that she had a great voice, and no, she wasn't fat. Now he tells her he lied to make her feel better. Yes, she was fat. No, she couldn't sing. And what he shows us was vulnerable, needy Madonna, a Madonna that not many others have seen because she dresses it up so well.

But what's interesting about this book is the stuff that can't be controlled. A brother who she gave just enough to hang-on, but not enough to preserve his self-respect. A brother who had nothing left to lose. She yanked his chain until she choked him. His guts spilt out and here it is, her worst nightmare. All the nakedness of mind, body and soul told with excruciating minutiae.

You can't help but wonder what the tipping point was. The next day, on the terrace of a cafe in the meat packing district I meet Christopher. He has a gentle handshake and sad eyes. The sad eyes change to searching. He's wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his face, chameleon-like, sometimes looking much younger than his 47 years, sometimes not. Sometimes he looks Italian handsome, and sometimes his features disappear.

In his eyes, you can see the darkness. All the family have had that darkness. All six siblings probably have that darkness. They've just lived with it in different ways. Rupert Everett said that he (Christopher) was her dark side and she was his. But he was also, according to Everett, "a solid raft in shark-infested waters". When did he opt to join the sharks? Was it the moment he decided to write the book?

"It happened in stages," he says. "Our relationship was very strained back in 2003 and over a period of three or four years I got a chance to look back on it. I had some therapy and some soul searching. I had been attached to her life for so long and it was hard to see myself as a separate person."

He is the middle brother. He has always searched for identity. In the beginning of course, it was easy to follow his older sister. It seemed natural, but then it got to seem very unnatural. "I finally got to redefine myself and that is what the book is for me."

Yes, but isn't a bit of paradox that you're redefining yourself through her? "Hm," he says. He gives a hollow half chuckle under his breath.

"Our lives can never be fully unwound. But now I can walk past a store and hear her song playing and I don't get a knot in my stomach. Somebody can talk about her at a table and the hair on the back of my neck doesn't go up, my defences don't automatically rise when her name is mentioned."

He says he still loves her, but has felt better since she has not been in his life. She has accused him of being a drug addict. He says that he only took drugs socially. "My only drug was her. That was what I was addicted to."

All her life Madonna has been able to suck people in, flirt, cajole. She could always melt her father. Her mother died of breast cancer when she was five, a tragedy that has become part of her mythology. Why was she daddy's favourite? "Maybe because she looked like our mother and because she had our mother's name."

She always had charisma and the outer confidence that Christopher lacked. When she moved to New York she invited Christopher to come with her to learn dancing. Upon arrival at her dirty cockroach-infested apartment she said, "You can't stay here, you'll have to find somewhere else." The 'push-me pull-you' pattern is something that remained for the rest of their lives. She wanted him to choreograph her first tour, but only if he would be her dresser as well. He could be the artistic director of the whole tour, but he wasn't allowed to stay in hotel suites, only single rooms.

She wanted him to design the interior of her house, but only on condition that he would be paid when she felt like it. She refused to sign a contract for his work. She asked him to buy some paintings at Sotheby's but then told him to take them back. He'd paid $65,000 of his own money, and Sotheby's don't have the same policy as M&S. It was all the money he had and he couldn't afford to pay for the roof over his head. And it goes on... She told him the script he wrote was wonderful. He could work on it from her offices in LA. But would she lend her name as executive producer? No.

Sometimes, there would be conditions to him getting paid for his interior design work. He'd have to go to Kabbalah. He'd have to accept payment in terms of a business class ticket to Scotland to attend her wedding with Guy Ritchie, who he had already clashed with.

But on the good side it was exciting and wonderful. It was flying on private planes. It was partying with any celebrity on the planet.

I tell him that this is the same neural circuit as a cocaine hit. It has the masochistic aspect of a gambler. You keep going because you hope you'll get the good stuff back. A sadist never stops, but a masochist can finally take back the power and say stop. "And that's what I did."

Christopher Ciccone is a man for whom small expressions speak volumes. It's just a little sigh, but it's a very deep one. "It took the final email accusing me of stealing from her, of swindling her after 20 years of being the only person that hadn't."

But there were many nails in the coffin of their relationship. Being paid with a really expensive air ticket to go to a wedding that he really didn't want to, "irked me, and it set up the whole wedding to be a disaster". She was blackmailing you. "Yes, and it wasn't the first time. But at that point I was broke."

Christopher did not always just work for Madonna. The first restaurant he designed in Los Angeles was the Atlantic. It looked like a Twenties ocean liner, beautifully appointed in dark wood and art deco finishing. His second was the Central, which suddenly closed before he'd been paid.

Whenever he was doing well, away from her, she'd bring him back into the fold. His relationship with his boyfriend of 10 years Danny, certainly had its dysfunctional moments, usually precipitated when Madonna would call him away on an 18-month tour. Madonna always called the shots, and he always took them.

"I don't think this book was just about catharsis for me. Revisiting these places has actually been really painful. Look, she opened a lot of creative doors for me and she can be incredibly generous, but...

"The last time I saw Madonna was in Miami for her last tour. We were cordial. When she found out about the book we already hadn't spoken for a year. All I got was a curt command by email, 'Call me'. Since I don't respond to commands any more I didn't call her, and after that she left a message, and I didn't respond to that either.

"I knew what it was about, and I knew that to give her any measure of control would have destroyed it. Madonna's thing is control. There are three things in her life that she can't control that are happening in her world right now: She's turning 50, her husband and this book... And it's driving her crazy. She's in a twist about it. Rather than trust her instincts with me she went for the worst possible place. You would think after 47 years your sister would know you, but the fact is she doesn't."

In the book he says that his sister has no real need or curiosity to know about other people. In her head they need to know her.

Some narcissistic tendencies at work? He laughs, "It's not a tendency, it's a lifestyle. But you don't get to where she is by not being narcissistic."

He orders a ginger ale and I order coffee and a frittata of mozzarella, basil and tomato. Christopher doesn't eat.

Christopher isn't in a relationship right now. He felt he had to do a lot of therapy before he was ready. There is a warmth to him, but also an emotional distance; a man still finding his own levels of comfort with the world. His two older brothers were boisterous and macho and terrorised the rest of the family with their BB guns. The two younger sisters were very much the babies of the family.

Christopher, possibly the most artistically talented, was always the least connected with himself and the world. He looks offended when I say this. "I'm not out of touch. I do my own laundry." When I tell him I don't mean that, I mean emotionally disconnected, he agrees.

He claims that Madonna has worked over their childhood and turned it into a revisionist history. "Worst of all is what she was saying about my stepmother. That she was wicked ... my stepmother Joan deserves a Medal of Honour for taking on my dad and six kids.

"I let go of all that stuff a long time ago and Madonna still holds on to it. She likes to think of it as part of her mythology. It's a bubble in which she lives."

The Cinderella with the wicked stepmother who arrives penniless on the streets of New York to make her fortune when in fact she had a solid, middle-class background. Christopher says that this might be what she had in common with Guy Ritchie who gives us the myth of the geezer, a boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks, who was in fact incredibly middle class.

Nonetheless, how she can affect people is even bigger than her own mythology. It's real. Even now, when we talk about the dark things, he feels compelled to say something good about her. The same cycle as there always was --pain pleasure. "For me the moment we peaked together was the moment she spat a cough drop in my hand when we opened in the stadium at Wembley (The Girlie Show 1993). It was an incredible feeling, the electricity of the audience washing through us. It was an incredible high and, yes, her life was a drug to me in many ways, meeting all these stars.

"But at some time you realise you are not one of them and you can't afford to keep up with them... Suddenly, you were like, 'No I can't meet you in St. Tropez because I've only got $10 in my bank account'.

"It was an interesting dichotomy the day I bought a $5m Picasso for her and walked back home to my sixth-floor walk-up with a bathroom in the hallway. It was incongruous."

There are so many times when his relationship with Madonna should have been sent up in ritual smoke. "The first time really was during the filming of In Bed With Madonna." He didn't like the way Warren Beatty, who had always been interested in and kind to him, was humiliated. "He would always talk to you like you were the only person there. Also, in that film she was rolling around on our mother's grave for the camera. If you watch the film you will see me in it and how uncomfortable I am. No warning, just that."

Soon after exploiting her mother's grave she exploited Christopher's gayness. She outed him in an article. "At that point everybody in my immediate family knew I was gay, but not my grandmother. It was not her business to out me. I think she must have been feeling that she'd gone very mainstream. She'd done S&M, she'd done Sex, what she really needed was a gay brother." At the time he tried to forgive her, but he could not forget.

He certainly had a lot of pain to suppress. Is that why he partied so hard? "I think it dulls pain." Madonna always insisted that he was a drug addict. Christopher was just an unhappy guy who had been trapped by his own choices.

Madonna has her own way of blotting out unpleasantness. She simply puts on her blinkers. What she deems unpleasant and unnecessary she swiftly moves through. When Christopher broke up with Danny she shrugged, "I never liked him anyway."

Christopher wasn't just a brother who worked with her. He was the brother who was always there, who helped her and comforted her in as much as a Ciccone will allow comfort when her biological clock ticked with painful resonance. "She needed someone to fill the daddy chair." But when she found Carlos Leon the relationship was more than just that. She really loved him. It hurt her terribly when the relationship broke up and she did not let go lightly.

Once again, this exposes Madonna in a way that would make her wince. "Because I've made her human?"

When she was with Sean Penn, Sean forced him to become blood brothers, drawing blood from each other's thumbs. I ask to see the scar. He shows me his thumb. The scar is small and white and hard, tiny, but indelible. There was lots of competition between her and Sean and her and Guy Ritchie. Changing the balance of power, the surrender and conquest was what thrilled her. With Sean Penn though it became a little too thrilling. During the filming of Shanghai Surprise Christopher was staying in the room next door when he heard fighting in the middle of the night. She spent the night being comforted by Christopher.

In her next macho marriage she goes to the Kabbalah for comfort. "The question I'm most often asked is where does she get that accent, and I don't know." Christopher's voice is low and soft and warm. Madonna's voice thin, nebulous. "For a time I think she enjoyed playing the English lady. I don't think she enjoys it any more. Guy may not be the perfect person for her, but he was OK, and she wanted a family. Much as I dislike him, I wouldn't wish them to divorce. But look, they are living separate lives... Guy's not had a successful film for some time, and her career continues. He's got to be feeling emasculated by this."

There probably wasn't room in her life for both Christopher and Guy, one replaced the other. Christopher feels that his influence on Madonna has not been good. "She's not the Madonna I knew."

One time Madonna refused to pay him for his work on one of her LA houses unless he went to Kabbalah. "Much as I hated her for that, I actually got some good stuff from it. But it got so cultish, I had to walk away. I am still a Catholic boy at heart and that is not going to go away. Catholicism and Kabbalah don't necessarily conflict each other, but Kabbalah ended up validating Madonna for her bad behaviour. The theory is that on some level you are who you deserve to be. And since she was in a position of power and wealth she thought she deserved to be there and was closer to God than the rest of us. After we had our last falling out I was excommunicated from the Kabbalah meetings."

Pre-Kabbalah blow-out he was very friendly with Demi Moore, who saw him as a surrogate boyfriend. She kept asking him wouldn't he turn straight. He didn't, but he did make out with Courtney Love. "We made out in the office of a restaurant. She said, 'You want to make out?' and I said, what the hell. There was drool all over my face when there was a knock at the door and it was Ed Norton, who she was dating at the time. Why Courtney and not Demi? "Because Courtney was much more interesting."

We talk about Madonna's own flexible sexuality. She's publicly kissed Britney Spears, Gwyneth Paltrow, Christina Aguilera. The gay model Ingrid Casares, who looks like a boy Audrey Hepburn, was her girl toy. They would do girlie things together but she looked like a boy and they were both in love with Madonna. What does he think she means with her flirtations? "I think it's publicity. She craves attention and it doesn't really matter where it comes from."

I wonder if perhaps Madonna had wanted some of Christopher's natural artistry. He can dance, he can paint, and he can write. He directed videos including Peace Train for Dolly Parton. He has a brilliant eye and a gentle touch. Madonna in reverse, all of the talent, none of the drive. He shrugs that he doesn't know about that. Well he would, wouldn't he. For years, Madonna employed him to decorate and design her houses, never with a contract and always below market rate. It must have rocked his self-esteem. "She knew I was broke so she knew I would take the job whatever she would pay me. It hurt, but I had bills to pay. I felt I had no choice."

Everyone in Madonna's orbit was desperate to get closer to her. He describes in his book the various stages. Stage four: "Is the coldest place of all. That's right up close to her. As far as she's concerned that's too close for comfort. You know too much. You are a liability. Result, stage five: No more Madonna. He always knew what would happen when he reached that very close, very cold place. No more Madonna. But perhaps time for Christopher.

He is working on a reality TV show called Mind Your Decor, which is an ironic behind the scenes warts-and-all look at the makings of a decorating show. After that he'd like to work with his father in the Ciccone vineyards in Michigan. Maybe even to do a TV show about the experience.

His own person at last. "I used to play with her by signing letters, 'Your humble servant,' because I know it irked her. It was my way of saying don't treat me this way without having to say it straight out. Madonna is not someone you approach directly. You have to plant a seed, wait for it to be her idea and then she can deal with it." The truth is he did feel a servant, not a sibling, and just as much as she couldn't hear it, he couldn't say it. His father, he says, was a stoical man. His emotions were heartfelt but never spoken about. Without a mother to give more emotional balance and exchange, both brother and sister kept their real emotions hidden. And that has been the making of Madonna, and the tragedy of their relationship. As he says in the book, "Madonna and I -- two children forever yearning for their lost mother -- could love and be loved as best we could." Ultimately, it comes down to just that. Learning to love and express it properly. It's been a difficult journey.

© Chrissy Iley 2008

'Life With My Sister Madonna', by Christopher Ciccone, Simon & Schuster,€19.99

- Chrissy Iley

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