Madonna is one of the most iconic pop stars of all time, so why was her brother living
under a bridge? Here are the details on the tragic real-life story of Madonna Ciccone.
Tragedy struck early in Madonna's life, as her mother,
also named Madonna, died of breast cancer when she was only 6 years old. The future
pop star and her siblings didn't realize how sick her mother was at the time. In 1991,
Madonna admitted to the Los Angeles Times how difficult it was to be without a mother figure
to support her through her ups and downs. She observed her friends' relationships with their
moms and wondered how her own life could have turned out differently. As she put it,
"Let's face it. I probably wouldn't be sitting on this couch here talking to you now if I'd had
a mother. I really miss it. My role models who nurtured me when I was growing up were all men."
"And I always say, 'God, I wish I had a mother that I could call.'"
Those sentiments lasted for years. Madonna has insisted that she didn't have a mother complex,
but she was nevertheless always on the lookout for someone to fill that role.
As she revealed in a Rolling Stone interview,
"I've turned my need on to the world and said,
'OK, I don't have a mother to love me, I'm going to make the world love me.'"
Madonna fulfilled that promise to herself by becoming the entertainer we know and love today.
Three years after Madonna's mother died, her father Tony remarried, but young Madonna didn't
get along very well with her new stepmom. Tony had a penchant for grounding his daughter and
making her do chores when she misbehaved, but he never laid a hand on her. Her stepmother Joan,
on the other hand, physically abused her and slapped her on a regular basis.
As Madonna recalled during an interview with Rolling Stone, when she was around 12 years old,
her stepmother hit her so hard that her nose bled. Ironically enough,
Madonna was actually happy about it for an odd reason. As she put it herself,
"I was thrilled about it because my nose bled all over an outfit that she made me
for Easter. I really hated it, and I didn't want to wear it to church."
Madonna's complaints about the dress angered Joan so much because she had personally made it
with the little amount of money the family had to spend on clothing. But the young
Madonna didn't like that she and her sisters looked identical in the exact same dresses.
"You want to stand out. You want to be treated special."
Raised in a strict Catholic household, Madonna was expected to remain a virgin until she got
married. She was also even forbidden from using tampons before marriage.
The idea that tampons affect a woman's virginity may seem antiquated, but it's
actually not that uncommon among some religious institutions. Madonna joked to Rolling Stone,
"My stepmother told me I wasn't allowed to wear tampons until I got married. Can you imagine?"
A friend of Madonna's eventually wound up showing her how to use them. Even though she
found them awfully uncomfortable, she still wore them as a way of rebelling against her
family's stringent beliefs. Plus, she also wanted to go swimming, which was difficult
to do without proper hygiene training. As she colorfully summarized the situation,
"No, you just don't go swimming –- just like you don't f--- when you're Catholic
if you don't want to get pregnant. There are all these stupid rules."
In 1989, Madonna was in the midst of filming the comedic crime movie
Dick Tracy alongside Warren Beatty. In a Chicago Tribune interview from that time,
she opened up about her Catholic upbringing. She stressed how challenging it was for young
girls like her to go along with all the rules the religion demanded of its followers. She recalled
becoming interested in boys when she was 10 years old: she would try to chase them around during
recess, but that didn't fly with the nuns at the Catholic school she attended. Madonna elaborated,
"I didn't understand what was so bad about it,
so I would do it anyway. And I would get punished for it."
The young Madonna was also frustrated because she wanted to wear pants like
boys did to school and mass, but she was forbidden from doing so. Her father's
reasoning for the rule was simply "Because I said so." Her struggles with Catholicism have
only continued throughout her life since then. In a 2015 interview with Billboard,
she revealed that she's even been excommunicated by the church on more than one occasion.
"Catholicism is based on punishment and guilt and sin, and it's a very sexist religion."
Madonna eventually moved to New York City to pursue her artistic ambitions, but she wasn't
fully prepared for what she would encounter there. She was simply a girl from Michigan,
and the big city wasn't as welcoming as she'd hoped. Within her first year of living there,
she was threatened with firearms, her apartment was broken into numerous times,
and on one occasion, she was even assaulted.
Madonna went into detail about the attack during a 2015 interview with
Howard Stern. She asked a stranger for money because she needed change to make
a phone call. He seemed trustworthy enough that she took him up on his
offer to go to his house to use the phone — a decision she would quickly regret.
Madonna ultimately decided not to press charges against her attacker. She was told by authorities
that she would need to undergo a physical, attend a court hearing, and open up about
personal details, a process that she decided was simply not worth reliving the pain for.
On her 27th birthday in 1985, Madonna tied the knot with actor Sean Penn.
The two of them met in February during the filming of the "Material Girl" music video,
and they found themselves tying the knot in Malibu, California after a whirlwind
seven-month romance. There was trouble in the relationship from the start, though: Penn had
a penchant for drinking, and often appeared mentally unstable. By 1987, he was serving jail
time for violating probation after assaulting an extra on a movie set and getting charged
with reckless driving. These incidents, among others, ultimately led to the couple divorcing.
Madonna later opened up about the relationship years later in
a Rolling Stone interview. While she had never spoken out against Penn publicly,
she still felt hostility towards him since he broke her heart. As she put it,
"When your heart's broken, you're a superb---- about everything except that.
You guard that closely."
Madonna also admitted that the reason the pair got married so quickly was because they were
madly in love with each other, but only the first year of their four-year marriage was any good.
Madonna got married for a second time in 2000 when she wed English filmmaker Guy Ritchie, and
the two welcomed a son named Rocco the same year. Madonna's marriage to Ritchie lasted twice as long
as her marriage to Penn, but they both ended the same way. The divorce settlement was reportedly
quite significant: at the time, Madonna was worth nearly half a billion dollars. She was expected to
give her ex-husband approximately $75 million, which worked out to 15 percent of her fortune.
Part of the settlement included a home in western England,
and a bar that the pair jointly owned. The singer's rep, Liz Rosenberg,
claimed that the divorce settlement was the largest in British history.
Madonna reportedly filed for divorce on the grounds of "unreasonable behavior."
In a 2012 interview with Newsweek, she opened up about the relationship,
admitting that she was essentially going through an existential crisis towards the
end of her marriage. According to her, things were "flawless" in the beginning,
but the picture became much less rosy over the years. As she put it,
"Time goes by, and you share a life, you have children,
and there are cracks in the veneer. It's not as romantic as it used to be. You think,
'This isn't what I thought it was going to be,' and 'How much am I willing to sacrifice?'"
When somebody is rich and famous, you probably assume their family also benefits from that
wealth and celebrity. But that's not always the case. In 2011, one of Madonna's brothers,
Anthony Ciccone, who was 55 years old at the time, revealed that he'd been homeless for more
than a year after losing his job at a vineyard that their father owned. He felt that his family
had abandoned him during a very difficult time in his life, telling the Michigan Messenger,
"You think I haven't answered this kind of
question a bazillion times — why my sister is a multibazillionaire,
and I'm homeless on the street? Never say never [...] This could happen to anybody."
Additional reports also surfaced that Ciccone was living under a bridge.
Ultimately, though, the revelation didn't cause too much of a stir for Madonna,
as it appeared that Ciccone had some issues that his sister couldn't be held responsible for.
When Madonna was growing up, her father gave her orders instead of advice.
She moved out of his house when she was 17 years old, and they never had any conversations
about intimate subjects when she was a young woman. As Madonna admitted to Rolling Stone,
the content in her Truth or Dare documentary was probably extremely shocking to her dad, but he
never actually said anything about it. Instead, he chose simply to ignore the elephant in the room.
Early on in Madonna's showbiz career, her father refused to acknowledge her success,
and that was difficult for her. It's no great revelation that a parent's refusal
to validate their child's accomplishments can be hurtful: as Madonna explained to Rolling Stone,
"I would like it if he talked about it, actually, but he never does.
Maybe I want him to recognize it so that finally I'll have his approval."
While he didn't in fact show that approval, he didn't exactly show any disapproval either,
which Madonna admitted was, quote, "better than nothing." She also felt like she was successful in
his eyes even though much of what she did in the public eye went against his religious upbringing.
When Madonna was in her mid-40s and married to Guy Ritchie, she decided that she wanted
a new sibling for her daughter Lourdes and her son Rocco. She adopted an orphaned child whose
parents died of AIDS in the African country of Malawi, but she had no idea that doing
something she felt was altruistic would be so difficult. As she told Harper's Bazaar in 2013,
"I was accused of kidnapping, child trafficking, using my celebrity muscle to
jump ahead in the line, bribing government officials, witchcraft, you name it."
Madonna was devastated that she was treated like a criminal when all she wanted to do was extend her
love to a child in need. She'd understood the criticism she endured earlier in her life for
simulating sexual acts while performing, but not the hate she'd received for this. She continued,
"Trying to save a child's life was not something I thought I would be punished for."
Madonna experienced a similar fight once again when she adopted her daughter Mercy James in
2009. The second time around, she was looked poorly upon because she was twice divorced,
with a judge in Malawi calling her "an unfit mother." Nevertheless, she was able to follow
through with the adoption and had no regrets despite the effort it took to make it happen.
"You're such a normal mom."
"Mm-hmm. I am."
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