“There’s a new album on the way,” she says reassuringly. “Don’t worry. And it’s always going to come from a place where you can dance. That’s what I’m all about.”
In Toronto to open Hard Candy Fitness, the pop legend says still likes to provoke
but she always has a message.
She’s older, wiser but no less audacious.
It has been nearly 24 years since Madonna’s sexually explicit Blond Ambition tour titillated this city and breached some people’s sense of morality.
In Toronto this week for an interview at the opening of her Hard Candy gym franchise, she stripped for action, sitting down and pulling off the black high-heeled shoes she had been wearing for hours. The sigh that escaped her lips was positively orgasmic and, as she wiggled her toes in liberated bliss, she caught this reporter’s startled gaze.
“Come on, you’re used to this, aren’t you? Ladies undressing for you?”
Sex, front and centre. The Madonna mantra.
She’s tiny in person. Just under 5-foot-4. Her blond hair has that kind of wavy just-tumbled-out-of-bed-and-it-was awesome look that fits her so well. The eyes, which never leave yours for a second, are blue-green, but it’s under them that some fatigue shows.
She was wearing black, a slinky blazer-skirt ensemble from the Canadian design team of Dean and Dan Caten, known more prominently as DSquared2. A trademark black bustier kept her cleavage front and centre while a reasonably discreet crucifix nestled underneath.
In a few minutes, she was going to lead an Addicted to Sweat cardio class alongside her personal trainers for the 32 Hard Candy members who auditioned from the Toronto gym and 20 from other clubs around the world.
But before that, she was going to talk about what it’s like to be Madonna. Her past, her present and her future were all on the table and she answered every question briskly and straightforwardly. This is not a woman who got where she is by hesitating, equivocating or dodging the issue.
Madonna created Hard Candy Fitness with her partners Guy Oseary and Mark Mastrov. There are gyms in Berlin, Mexico City, Moscow, Rome, Santiago, St. Petersburg and Sydney. The company’s mission statement calls it “a global luxury fitness brand with a distinctive footprint. Clubs are focused on innovative group fitness programming and personalized fitness training.”
The Toronto venue at Yonge and Gerrard rests on the fourth floor of the trendy new Aura condominium. At a spacious 42,000 square feet, it is the largest in the Hard Candy empire.
On Tuesday night, hundreds of fans waited for hours outside the centre in the -20 C cold for a glimpse of the Material Girl. Upstairs, nearly a hundred VIP guests, photographers and media types did the same on an indoor red carpet.
Suddenly she was there, 45 minutes late, posing for pictures, chatting to media, looking like she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, even shaking her butt on cue. Then she was hustled into an office where we met. The cramped quarters and sterile white furniture made it look more like the kind of place you’d do interviews with your kid’s kindergarten teacher, not the woman who had the nerve (or simple good sense) to title her 1992 interview and photo book Sex.
The rules of engagement demanded we discuss Hard Candy first. It’s more than just a place that uses her name. She proudly admits to having created the brand, making major decisions about every aspect of its design and having designed many of its exercise programs personally, including one where you do a rigorous dancercise program on four-inch heels, just like the lady herself.
“If dancing wasn’t a part of Hard Candy Fitness, I wouldn’t be here,” she says. “That’s what makes my gym different from everybody else’s. That lets me bring art and creativity into the corporate world. But I don’t even really think about it as corporate.
“I think about it as connecting to people who want to stay in shape. Fitness and nutrition and sports are a big of my life and who I am, so why shouldn’t I share that with people? My hat’s off to anybody who wants to join a gym and come work out every day and make an effort to stay in shape. That requires discipline and initiative.”
She tosses her curls and flashes a bad-girl grin. “If you know me, you know that discipline and initiative are both very high on my agenda.”
And disciplined she is. When she pulled off her shoes, she revealed a bandaged left foot that was obviously causing her pain, but she wouldn’t let it curtail one moment of the scheduled events. She bruised a bone in her foot over the holidays while dancing in high heels, but she worked out on crutches, performed on the Grammys and wasn’t going to disappoint the people expecting her to work out with them that evening. “You make promises? Then you keep them. No matter what.”
So yes she’s disciplined and God knows she’s got initiative, but did she ever think those qualities would bring her where she is today?
“Absolutely not! I never thought my career was going to take me in this direction but then, when I started out, I didn’t think anything was going to happen.” She shrugs her shoulders and becomes a show business yenta. “Who knew? Go figure?”
Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, born Aug. 16, 1958 in Bay City, Mich., the daughter of a man who worked in automotive design and a woman who died of cancer when Madonna was only 8. She was a high school cheerleader in Rochester and a college dance student in Michigan until she dropped out at the age of 20, took her first plane ride ever to New York City and released her first single, “Everybody,” in 1982. She never looked back. Not once.
Her status today is undeniable. She has sold more than 300 million records; the Guinness Book of World Records hails her as “the bestselling female recording artist of all time,” Time Magazine put her on its list of the “25 Most Powerful Women of the Past Century,” and she’s also found time for two husbands (Sean Penn and Guy Ritchie), four children (Lourdes, Rocco, David and Mercy) and lovers no one has the time to count (Warren Beatty, anyone?).
But apart from all the concrete cultural and business achievements, what a lot of people remember her for are the outrageous things she’s done on and offstage: dropping the F-bomb 13 times during a single David Letterman interview, engaging Britney Spears in a tongue-swapping lip-lock on MTV and going to war in 1990 against the Toronto police.
“What am I doing here anyway? Didn’t they try to arrest me here?” she says, referring to the infamous moment on her Blond Ambition tour, immortalized in the documentary film Madonna: Truth or Dare, when she was told the Toronto police were going to stop the show and take her into custody if she simulated masturbation while singing “Like A Virgin.”
But on May 29, 1990, Madonna called authority’s bluff — like she usually has — and did her show without any interruption.
“I’m not going to be masturbating during my workout tonight,” she grins slyly, “or simulating masturbation, so I guess it’s cool. Yeah.
“I think Toronto’s finally learned to accept me.”
It’s her capacity to still generate outrage that delights her the most, whether it’s smooching and twerking with Miley Cyrus on a recent MTV Unplugged special or introducing Pussy Riot during a January Amnesty International event in Brooklyn.
“Look, from one year to the next, my life has been an amazing roller-coaster ride. Everything has been surprising. It would be hard for me to single out any scenario.”
Then the wickedest look yet crosses her face. “Well, maybe being excommunicated by the Pope three times from the Catholic Church would have to take the cake. I mean, when I got him that annoyed, I just have been doing something right.
“But I’d like to think that there’s always an aspect of what I do that’s going to be provocative. Sure, I like to provoke to get a reaction, but there’s always a reason behind it. There’s always some message I want to get across.”
Her eyes are actually shining now. This is what the woman really believes in. No wonder she proudly stood front and centre with Macklemore, Ryan Lewis and Mary Lambert at the recent Grammys to sing “Same Love” in support of gay marriage.
“There’s always some minds that need to get opened, some ears that need to listen, some ideals that need to change. The list goes on and on. My job is never going to be done. There’s still a lot of waking up that needs to happen in the world.”
But maybe Madonna can lean on some of her numerous disciples to help her. It seems that most of today’s top pop stars, like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, all owe a debt to Madonna.
“I find all of it an honour. Really. It’s flattering. I love it. Sure, I even love Miley,” she says, referring to Cyrus’s attempt to channel Madonna in a recent German Vogue photo shoot. “I think she’s great. So many women before me have inspired me, so I’m happy to inspire the next generation.” Over the years, she’s cited females as varied as Marilyn Monroe, Nancy Sinatra, Carole Lombard and Martha Graham as sources that helped to shape her.
But what about music? That’s what made her famous, but in recent years it seemed to be in the background, although 2012’s MDNA helped make up somewhat for the relatively lacklustre impression left by Hard Candy in 2008.
“There’s a new album on the way,” she says reassuringly. “Don’t worry. And it’s always going to come from a place where you can dance. That’s what I’m all about.”
Richard Ouzounian
thestar.com
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