Saturday, October 18, 2008

The mad world of Madonna: Grains for every meal, rice milk, no TV and sleeping in a plastic suit covered in £500 cream

The mad world of Madonna: Grains for every meal, rice milk, no TV and sleeping in a plastic suit covered in £500 cream

By Alison Boshoff
Last updated at 11:42 PM on 17th October 2008


The gossips at Cannes were agog this spring at the news that Madonna had installed twin treadmills in her hotel suite, apparently so she and Guy Ritchie could work out side by side.

Things in the world's most talked-about marriage, it was reasoned, must not be so bad if they were at least continuing to share a passion for gym.

But that second treadmill was in fact for personal trainer Tracy Anderson who, for the past year, has been living in Madonna's London home and playing far more of a role in her life than her soon-to-be-ex-husband.

Steak-and-kidney pie made her leave the room in disgust: Madonna was a domestic tyrant

Steak-and-kidney pie made her leave the room in disgust: Madonna was a domestic tyrant

Guy and Madonna slept in separate rooms on that break, as had become usual, and were by then communicating only via their personal assistants. The treadmills are a neat metaphor for the way Ritchie has been excluded from Madonna's life.

Her irrational food fads and increasingly bizarre attempts to hold back time - via surgery, exercise and every therapy going - certainly helped to doom their marriage.

How could anyone expect Ritchie, a macho man who is fond of the pub and likes to shoot pheasant, to dine contentedly every night on quinoa grains and organic vegetable dumplings?

And how was he supposed to react when his wife took to retiring at night slathered in £500-a-pot cream and covered in a plastic body-suit to hold back the signs of ageing?

It now emerges that every aspect of life at the Ritchie residence in London was dictated by the lady of the house. Madonna, who embraced a macrobiotic diet in the early 1990s, told her chefs what was permitted: she chose the precise blend of Colombian coffee and tutted over the exact provenance of air-freighted Canadian blueberries.

Guy, then, has allegedly had to endure a life married to a 5ft 4in domestic tyrant whose rules apparently included no TV, no newspapers, and no welcome for his 'London' friends - sustained on a diet which would make a Hollywood starlet feel faint.

For instance, gossips claim his Christmas meal was minus chipolata sausages last year because she would not hear of processed meat crossing the threshold.

He had to drink his tea every day with rice milk, as dairy is banned.

Meat is only very occasionally present on the menu. The only exception to this was at their country estate, Ashcombe House, in Wiltshire, where Guy was allowed to serve a full breakfast to shooting parties - even including such fat filled items as steak-and-kidney pie.

(Madonna thought this kind of food so foul that she would leave the room in disgust when it arrived and sip reproachfully at her bowl of Japanese miso soup.)

Madonna

Close: Madonna and her personal trainer Tracy Anderson work out together daily

Guy apparently used to complain that she was giving her children an unhealthy
attitude towards food: she banned sugar entirely, which made biscuits, ice creams and cakes objects of almost otherworldly fascination for her daughter Lourdes and their son Rocco. She also banned cheese, cream, salt and preservatives.

One in Guy's camp suggested to me that Her Madgeness had to be talked into permitting Rocco to have a birthday cake last year.

Even when the pair went out for 'romantic' meals - and in the final two years of the relationship this was one of the few activities they shared - Madonna would generally refuse to eat anything.

One associate said she doesn't 'trust' the kitchens, even in Claridge's and Nobu, to prepare food to her exacting standards.

'If you were to use the word controlling, you would not even be coming close to describing the way she is about food.'

Guy Ritchie today: the director wasn't allowed to eat sausages at Christmas

Guy Ritchie today: The director wasn't allowed to eat sausages at Christmas

So she would sit with a glass of water as Guy wolfed down his meal. The topic of discussion, chosen by Madonna, was generally the kabbalah, or an earnest exposition about President Bush. It wasn't fun.

No wonder Guy bought himself a pub in February. And, sources insist, the food was not even the worst of Guy's daily miseries as Mr Madonna.

Her exercise routine, never less than two hours a day, six days a week, rules her life.

She went to the gym the day her adopted son David Banda arrived from Malawi, and spent nearly four hours honing her body. She worked out on her birthday this summer, and on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Guy's entreaties to her to do less, and spend some time with him and the children, were ignored.

'I'm not going to slow down, get off this ride, stay home and get fat,' she told a magazine.

'There are no short cuts to being Madonna.' The star whose ambitions have propelled her from obscurity to fame and a £315million fortune regards 'being Madonna' as roughly equivalent to running a multi-national company. And she thinks her extraordinary body is its main asset.

For this reason Tracy Anderson, who has helped her to build muscles with her own variant on aerobics and pilates, probably sees more of Madonna than anyone else.

After breakfast in London, Madonna would spend a short time at her computer before going to the £6million property next door which houses her gym and working out with Tracy, a pint-sized American blonde whose sweet smile masks a formidable drive.

Madonna started working out properly around the time of the Blond Ambition tour in 1990. She met Carlos Leon, the father of Lourdes, while jogging around Central Park.

As a fitness instructor, that meant they always had something - apart from sex - in common, and they remain close friends. While pregnant with Lourdes she would do 45 minutes on a Stairmaster every day. Pilates was her next enthusiasm, then the more vigorous Ashtanga yoga.

She also jogs, pumps iron and swims, and for a period tried a brutal looking wooden rack known as 'Gyrotonic expansion' designed to stretch and tone muscles.

As a result of all this she has recurring back and knee problems, and tours with a chiropractor and physiotherapist. In concert in the U.S. yesterday, she sported two enormous plasters on her knees.

'People talk about Kabbalah, but her one fanatical devotion is to her body,' said an associate.

Interestingly, she did try, back in 2005, to boost the marriage by taking up judo. Ritchie is a black belt, and she went to his unpretentious gym in Fulham, and for a while seemed keen on learning her moves. At that point they had been trying for two years to conceive a brother or sister for Rocco.

Despite visits to various fertility clinics in Los Angeles, and following Kabbalah teachings to help them, she failed to become pregnant.

It was a source of deep disappointment to them both, and brought Madonna's insecurities about her age (and the ten-year gap between her and Guy) to the fore.

But, within months, Madonna abandoned Ritchie to his martial arts and went back to yoga and pilates. A plan slowly took hold to adopt a child instead - and we all know how that turned out.

Now she is on tour, she looks exhausted and grey-faced. Her knee is strapped up between dates. Some plastic surgery - allegedly done this summer although she denies it - is unpleasantly obvious. And because she is so very thin - a stone and a half lighter than when she had her first hit 25 years ago - downy hair is growing on her face.

No wonder Madonna is feeling uncharacteristically fragile. She has a small band of female friends whom she calls her 'Semtex girls' and they are constantly required to bolster her with calls and e-mails.

They include Tracy Anderson, Madonna's assistant Johanna, who also lives in, and Shavawn Gordon, the nanny hired to look after toddler David. Madonna also confides regularly in Gwyneth Paltrow. 'She really relies on this group of women,' said the source. 'She doesn't like them to be with anyone else while she needs them.'

As she approached her 50th birthday this year, Madonna turned from chemical peels, Botox and fillers to full-scale cosmetic surgery, a fact reported after she was pictured walking about with black eyes and bruises.

Ritchie seems to have greeted her changing face with blank incomprehension.

In the end, of course, something had to give. And Madonna sure as hell was not going to give up her gym.

Now, you can bet, Guy Ritchie is already looking forward to openly eating his first sausage rolls in almost a decade.

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