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Celeb News: Madonna and her brother end feud?
Member Since: 4/3/2012
Posts: 1,973
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Madonna and her brother end feud?
There's about 30 articles, but this is the actual initial interview that it comes from I believe...
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Christopher Ciccone: No one sees Madonna’s children. My parents barely even see them
Meet Christopher Ciccone. He wants to redesign your world, one shoe collection at a time. But when he meets Nick Curtis, talk inevitably turns to his slightly famous sister: Madonna
It would not make me unhappy to read an article that said ‘Christopher Ciccone’ and then ‘Madonna’s brother’, rather than the other way round,” says Madonna’s brother, Christopher Ciccone. Sorry, cheap shot. But I imagine Ciccone, 51, is expecting it. For the best part of 30 years his life was inextricably interwoven with that of his superstar sister, as her backing dancer, choreographer, dresser, tour director, interior designer, walker, confidant and rant-recipient.
Then in 2008 he wrote a rather brilliantly bitchy tell-all bestseller revealing that she was bossy, sweaty, capricious and, above all, mean. It ended their already waning professional relationship but left him even more firmly shackled to the monster in the public’s imagination. Lots of his famous friends dropped him, which was unfortunate since his main source of income, interior design, depends on the rich. In a revolution, the aristocrats are the first up against the wall but in a recession, he says, “the designers are the first to go”. He’s been directing music videos for unknown acts and selling his paintings but no one has been queuing up to get him to mastermind a stadium tour on the level of Blonde Ambition or The Girlie Show. I sense he was in need of a revenue stream.
So we have met to discuss the Ciccone Collection, a range of predominantly rubber footwear that he is debuting at London Fashion Week today. He designed it at the behest of Igor Grosaft, head of the Bratislavan rubberwear and raingear manufacturers Novesta. I kind of wish they’d asked him to design an underwear line called Novesta, Nopantsa, but keep that to myself.
He and I know he was asked on board because he is Madonna’s brother, and that I am here because he is Madonna’s brother. This is awkward, not least because he is much cooler and more drily self-mocking than I expected, with a cigarette-ravaged voice like hot asphalt. Physically, he looks more like Tony Soprano’s brother than Madonna’s.
So we make a valiant stab at discussing the shoes. At their first meeting, Ciccone told Grosaft: “Interiors, art, photography, stage stuff, I got that down. But I am not a footwear designer. He said, ‘I don’t want a footwear designer, I want an artist’.” So Christopher looked at his own shoes (he only has five pairs, which for a gay designer in LA seems meagre), did a lot of online research and found a pair of Balmain boots that inspired him. “You can have more fun with women’s shoes,” he says. “Men are stuck with basic things. Unless you are a drag queen, of course. But I’m not designing in those sizes.”
The women’s shoes are named things such as Donatella and Mona, and indirectly inspired by “Georgia O’Keeffe, Mondrian and John Singer Sargent”. The rubber is layered , different colours revealed through cutouts. No one has ever done this before, apparently, perhaps for good reason. The men’s are mostly classic male-shoe shapes but in rubber. “They came out really cool,” says Ciccone, “and they are perfect for this city, or wherever God made weather. You don’t have to wear galoshes …” The kids’ shoes are “fun”. There are plans to turn the Ciccone Collection into a lifestyle brand, perhaps with some outerwear and homewares, “maybe even a high heel”. What, in rubber? “No, not in rubber, you couldn’t stand up in them.”
OK, deep breath. Does he really think the name Christopher Ciccone has enough cachet to carry a lifestyle brand? “I certainly hope it does,” he answers. “I do have some kind of a history. I have been working for the past 25 or 30 years, creatively.
“Obviously a huge portion of that was for Madonna, and that connection is always going to be there. But she doesn’t have complete ownership over the Ciccone name. And this is nothing to do with her.”
Their relationship is, he says “on a perfectly personable level right now. As far as I’m concerned, we’re good. We are in contact with each other, although I haven’t seen her for a long time. We’re back to being a brother and sister. I don’t work for her, and it’s better this way.” In the book, he expressed regret that he didn’t see more of Madonna’s children, Lourdes and Rocco (oh, and David Banda, about whose adoption he was magnificently scathing). “Frankly, nobody sees them. My parents barely see them. But I have lots of other nephews and nieces who I see all the time.”
Madonna and Christopher naturally gravitated together in a macho, Italian (but, he stresses, comfortably middle-class) clan that included four more siblings and two step-siblings. Both arty and into dance, both apparently deeply scarred by their mother’s death aged 30. The book is an excruciatingly precise vivisection of a dependent relationship. She brought him to New York and employed him but also demeaned and underpaid him, he claims. She mythologised their past, outed him as gay on television (their granny didn’t know), and used their mother’s grave as a film set. Later, she hectored him into taking kabbalah therapy to combat his cocaine use. Did the religion play a part in healing their rift? “Please, let’s not talk about kabbalah,” he says, eyes rolling. “I got some things out of kabbalah that were useful to me but like anything else in Los Angeles after a while it becomes a cult, and you get Britney Spears hanging around, and it’s kinda weird. So I got out.”
He was wrote savagely about Madonna’s sexual partners — Sean Penn was intense, Carlos Leon thick, Guy Ritchie a poseur — and about his own supposed chums. His “good friend” Donatella Versace didn’t take kindly to his depiction of them snorting coke with Courtney Love, though others like Kate Moss didn’t care about similar passages “because everyone pretty much knew about those guys”. He portrayed Demi Moore as a superstitious loon, and described Warren Beatty rifling through Madonna’s bins. “There was a Hollywood aspect to those friendships,” he says. “You’re friends until you aren’t. I saw a great deal of people in my life vanish. It’s shocking and difficult to find, wow, the room is that empty, f**k. After publication I had to recreate my world. There were maybe five people who still were in my life at that point, apart from family.
“It’s not easy at 51 to make friends, but I have managed it and it’s a good thing. I am happy where I’m at, and I haven’t been happy where I’m at for a long time.”
He has no regrets about the book. “It was absolutely essential for the sake of my sanity,” he says. And maybe for that of his family too. Some years back, their oldest brother Anthony was discovered living rough. Christopher is adamant that this is “his choice”, but admits that Anthony being Madonna’s brother puts a different spin on it. It’s hard to be related to someone as stratospherically famous as Madonna.
“Little things seep into your persona,” says Christopher, “whether it’s that you judge yourself against this massive thing, or the way other people look at you because of that massive thing — their expectations that you must be great, that you must be rich, that you must be famous, and why aren’t you?”
What’s more, for years Madonna was in charge of the family narrative. The book told the other side of the story, and enabled Christopher to reconnect with them. He spends three weeks every July working at his father’s vineyard, where sundry other siblings also work full time.
So I don’t feel too sorry for him. He’s single but “open to persuasion”, and hasn’t done cocaine “for years”. He lives in LA but has “pretty much had enough of that town”, and is contemplating a move to the East Coast, Vienna (handy for Bratislava) or London, “where I’ve always felt people get me”. On this current visit, he’s seeing some of those old friends who stuck around: “Tamara Beckwith, some fashion people — but really, I try and steer clear of famous people these days.”
Is he proud of Madonna? “I couldn’t be more proud of her,” he answers immediately. “She is a force to be reckoned with. Does she have Barbra Streisand’s voice? No. Can she dance like Martha Graham? Probably not. But the combination of her abilities has made her great, and left a huge legacy for her, and through her, for me. So yeah, God bless her.”
He shakes my hand as I leave. “If you need to be bitchy, that’s okay,” he drawls. “I’m cool with that.”
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Link: http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/...m-8139207.html
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Member Since: 2/16/2012
Posts: 6,442
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Good. I still don't like what he did, but at least they're not as bad as they were. 
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Member Since: 8/29/2012
Posts: 2,594
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Nice
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Member Since: 2/28/2012
Posts: 19,176
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i thought he was homeless. 
but good for him.
i wonder what the shoes look like.
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Member Since: 4/3/2012
Posts: 1,973
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That's her older brother. He is or was homeless and on drugs. The whole family has cut him off because of the chronic drug use and refusal to get help. An article from a year or two ago about the older brother...
Quote:
The last time that Anthony Ciccone saw his sister Madonna, she was stepping out of a luxury limousine, shattering the quiet of a peaceful American Midwest town as flashing camera bulbs and screaming fans greeted the arrival of one of the world’s most famous women.
Madonna was the star attraction at a film festival three years ago, while Anthony was just another face in the crowd.
Having watched his multi-millionairess sister stroll into the cinema, he staggered off for another night of hard drinking with the town’s vagrants.
Only two years separate Anthony and Madonna Ciccone in age, but they might as well be two centuries, given the wildly diverging trajectories their lives have taken.
While she went from their modest family roots in Detroit to find mega-stardom and a fortune that affords her multi-million-pound homes across the globe, it was revealed this week that her big brother sleeps rough under a bridge in a small town in Michigan.
While the Material Girl owns six expensive houses in London alone, just about everything Anthony owns can be fitted into the plastic shopping bag he carries around with him.
Homeless for the past 18 months since he lost his job at his father’s wine-making business, Anthony spends his nights dossing on the cold concrete of a grubby footpath under Traverse City’s Union Street road bridge, sharing damp, threadbare blankets with his companion, a fellow alcoholic named Michael Champ.
Anthony, 55, could not look less like his gym and yoga-toned sister. A white-bearded bear of a man, his ruddy complexion, four layers of stained and dirty clothes and pungent smell are testament to his life on the streets.
He smokes so many roll-up cigarettes that not only his fingers but also his moustache are stained yellow by nicotine.
With Anthony accusing Madonna and other family members of ‘washing their hands’ of him, the startling contrast between his life and his sister’s has inevitably raised the question: how could a woman with a $650 million fortune leave her brother in such desperate straits?
Speaking publicly for the first time this week about his troubled past and difficult relationship with his famous sister, Anthony makes it clear the story is not a simple one — as anyone who has ever dealt with an addicted loved one will probably know.
It is clear that Madonna knows about his plight, and that she has repeatedly offered to help by paying for him to go into rehab. His father has offered to give him his job back if he gets professional help.
But ask Anthony whether his sister and their 80-year-old father, Tony, have helped him and he is immediately riled.
‘I’m a zero in their eyes; a non-person, an embarrassment,’ he tells me, his voice rising.
‘If I froze to death, my family probably wouldn’t know or care about it for six months.’
Anthony, who has considerable reserves of self-pity, but little capacity to be honest about himself, says he doesn’t need rehab, which is ‘boring’. He just needs a job, he says, and to meet the son he hasn’t seen for ten years.
‘My family seem to think rehab is some kind of magic panacea for life’s ills,’ he says, cracking open a bottle of his favourite tipple, Wild Irish Rose, a strong and ruinously cheap fortified wine
He says he agreed to go into rehab six years ago, with Madonna paying for him to spend two months drying out in a clinic in Houston, Texas, for what he calls his ‘supposed’ alcoholism. Perhaps, given that attitude, it’s not surprising it didn’t work.
Madonna’s burning desire for fame and love is usually attributed to the traumatic loss of her mother when she was just five years old and the eight Ciccone children’s subsequent upbringing by an authoritarian father and a strict stepmother.
Listening to Anthony telling his poignant life story, over two days and in varying levels of drunkenness, it strikes me that his mother’s untimely death from breast cancer may have been just as formative an experience for him.
Instead of driving him onwards, though, it has blighted his life — his downward spiral in dreadful contrast to Madonna’s ascension into the celebrity heavens.
An articulate and entertaining man when sober, Anthony is a voracious reader who likes to quote Mark Twain. Sadly, it is plain he could have done so much more with his life.
Though he chooses to make light of his alcoholism, he becomes intensely serious when he talks about his mother, recalling how he and Madonna were the only siblings who viewed their mother in her open funeral casket.
‘It made a lasting impression on us both,’ he says. ‘It was a macabre thing for two little kids to see.’
He lost his only photograph of his mother some time ago, insisting it was stolen by souvenir hunters.
As we stand under the gloomy bridge he calls home, the morning traffic rattling overhead and the rain bucketing down outside, his stained fingers roll one cigarette after another as he thinks back to his life in Madonna’s shadow.
Anthony’s career path, a mish-mash of dead-end jobs, never crossed Madonna’s, but she did at least share a little of her gilded existence with him. He told me how he once shared a joint with Mick Jagger as they sat around a New York nightclub table with his sister, David Bowie and Iggy Pop.
‘Mick was cool, Iggy was cool, David Bowie was kind of cold,’ he says.
And he relates how he and the Van Halen rocker David Lee Roth spent a ‘bemused’ night wandering about ‘looking at the freaks’ when Madonna threw a bondage-themed party.
He and his sister didn’t get on as children.
‘We hated each other — sibling rivalry, I imagine,’ he says, adding viciously: ‘She was a b**ch, just like she is now. She remains true to form. You have to give her credit for consistency.’
He hardly seems like the archetypal eldest sibling nowadays, but there was a time when he had to look after his seven sisters and brothers. Madonna didn’t make life easy for him, he says.
‘She’d sneak guys into the house when my father weren’t around and I was supposed to be responsible for us all,’ he says.
'She’d be in the bedroom with some guy, and my little brothers and sisters would be standing outside with their ears cupped to the door, listening.
‘I’d have to bust the door open and kick the guy out. She didn’t forgive me for that.
‘To me, she was just an annoying sister; but you have to realise she’s a Leo, which means she’s always on stage.’
So what was it like when she became famous?
‘I’m proud of my sister — but it’s been a burden, because I can’t be me; I have to be related to a celebrity,’ he says, staring into his bottle.
‘People have their ideas and expectations. My sister’s a multi-millionaire — but she earned it, I have to give her credit for that. But you’d think there’d be some more family loyalty, and that’s not the case.’
So how would he like her to show she cares?
‘Just to communicate would be nice.’
Anthony, refusing to see how hard his addictions must be for her to bear, and disregarding her offers of help, sees his sister as a self-absorbed woman who lives in her own world.
‘There isn’t much else that exists outside of what she’s doing,’ he says.
He insists he has little time for Madonna’s music, and even less for her films.
‘My sister’s a terrible actress, but she’s a great entertainer and an excellent businesswoman.’
As for Madonna’s taste in men, Anthony says he was friends with her first husband, actor Sean Penn. ‘I used to drink beer with his brother, Chris, before he died.’
As if on cue, the memory prompts a long burp. Anthony describes Madonna’s second husband, Guy Ritchie, as ‘a little pompous … he gave me a lecture over lunch about kabbalah (the trendy Jewish mysticism also embraced by Madonna).
It's continued here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/ar...y-Ciccone.html
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Some shoe pictures...
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Member Since: 4/23/2012
Posts: 16,691
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I thought the book was rather interesting. It didn't seem like he was exploiting Madonna to me.
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Member Since: 3/15/2012
Posts: 2,801
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Good for him, glad that he always speak the truth about M.
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Member Since: 10/16/2005
Posts: 16,872
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Meh. He published the book for the wealth it would potentially bring him. It was a bad gamble to put the relationship between his sister on the line simply for money.
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Member Since: 2/28/2012
Posts: 19,176
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Quote:
Originally posted by PopRock2012
That's her older brother. He is or was homeless and on drugs. The whole family has cut him off because of the chronic drug use and refusal to get help. An article from a year or two ago about the older brother...
Some shoe pictures...
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thanks for the info. 
the underwear looks kinda sexy. ciccone boy. 
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Member Since: 3/21/2010
Posts: 19,112
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what exactly was he getting at with the Brit comment??
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ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 8/8/2008
Posts: 21,933
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He is so passive aggressive towards her. He pretty much insults her talent but then says he's proud of her. I hope she never speaks to him.
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