Savoring the Season

posters advertising Parisian productions starring Sarah Bernhardt. ‘These are the only posters I’ve ever bought, because they are the three roles I have always longed to play,’ she tells me.

‘Camille and Hamlet and, especially, Medea. I did Medea when I was 15 in acting class in New York, and I still think it is my best work. I’ll always remember one of her lines: “I have this hole in the middle of myself.”’

The year before, my first cover story for Vanity Fair had been on Madonna who also had a home filled with art. This was my lede: “You reach the house by driving up into the Hollywood Hills as far as you can go. It is, of course, At the Top. Like Madonna herself, it is surprisingly small, startlingly white, all modern angles and hard edges. Everywhere, there is an exquisite incongruity. Outside, a black Mercedes 560SL is parked next to a coral-colored ’57 Thunderbird; inside, twentieth-century art performs a visual pas de deux with eighteenth-century Italian furniture. Catholic candles, tackily embossed with saints, dot the house’s sophisticated rooms. On a kitchen counter, audiotapes of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth lie stacked beside rap tapes by Public Enemy.”

Later in the story, I continued with my description of the interiors—and thus her—as she gave me a tour of her home: “Outside her bathroom, hung on the wall above a Nadelman sculpture, is the photograph given to her on her 31st birthday by Warren Beatty. It is a picture by Ilse Bing of a group of women in diaphanous gowns caught performing a la Matisse’s The Dance She points to the woman whose head is thrown farther back than the others’, her hands not exactly clasped in the thrall of collaboration. The woman obviously wants the attention all to herself, and Bing has captured that blissful desire perfectly. Madonna tilts her head at the same angle and breezes past the photograph. ‘Warren says she reminds him of me. I don’t know why.’

“We circle back to the main room,” I wrote toward the end of the detailed tour she had given me that day. “An ornately gold-framed Langlois, originally painted for Versailles, is as large as the entire ceiling. And that is exactly where Madonna has hung it, Hermes’ exposed loins dangling over our heads. Above the fireplace is a 1932 Leger painting, Composition with Three Figures Across from it is a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, the legendary Mexican artist and revolutionary. Another wall holds a nude painted by Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera. Boxer Joe Louis, photographed by Irving Penn, pouts in a corner across from Man Ray’s nude of Kiki de Montparnasse. All around us are other photographs taken by masters, new and old: Weston, Weegee, Tina Modotti, Matt Mahurin, Lartigue, Drtikol, Blumenfeld, Herb Ritts.

“In the entrance foyer is another Kahlo, titled My Birth The small painting depicts Kahlo’s mother in bed with the sheets folded back over her head. All that can be seen of the mother are her opened legs, the head of the adult Kahlo painfully emerging from her mother’s gaping vagina. There is blood in the painting. There is anger there. Sorrow. “‘If somebody doesn’t like this painting,’ Madonna says, ‘then I know they can’t be my friend.’”

I did like the painting. But I never became her friend. Because the design of a home—the private choice of art and furnishings and even the placement and alignment of it all—tells a visitor a version of the truth as it also knowingly lies. Our aesthetics are the story we tell ourselves about who we long to be even if we have a long way to go to being that person. Aesthetics are neither right nor wrong because good taste and bad taste are finally not about goodness or badness. They just lay out a pathway paved with the need to be perceived as a certain kind of person. The discernment is discovering not what