You’d have to reside in a cave to escape the publicity push for Madonna’s new album Hard Candy. There she is on the cover of Vanity Fair! Here’s her new song with Justin Timberlake! Watch her hit the gym with Gywneth Paltrow! For a gal about to turn fifty (Madonna hits the big 5-0 this August 16, can you believe it?) she’s incredibly spry and looks better than most twenty-five year olds. (I mean, let’s face it! A gorgeous woman is pretty regardless of her age.) Beauty Snob interviews Shu Uemura makeup director Gina Brooke, the makeup mastermind behind Madge’s Hard Candy cover. I’m less interested in recreating her makeup, and more interested in recreating her biceps and unfurrowed brow, however…
Anyhoo, I thought you might enjoy my own Madonna story. When I was in college, I wrote movie reviews for the Columbia Spectator. As the nation’s second oldest college daily, we were fairly respected and therefore scored invites to many NYC press junkets. Now, let me set the scene for you. The majority of the people on the paper were highbrow…serious…America’s future newsmen and women.
Then there was Jolie.
My editor very quickly learned that I would eagerly take the crap, fluff movie assignments that nobody else wanted. (Crossroads? The Skulls? 40 Days and 40 Nights? For the love of God, bring it!) The other writers could have their Lars Von Trier Dogme 95 “nonsense”…Britney’s movie debut was more enough to keep me contented. When an opportunity arose to see The Next Best Thing and interview Madonna following the movie, I obviously broke my own neck in the rush to say yes.
If you’ve seen Notting Hill, you have a good sense of how press junkets are run. PR flunkies shuttle journalists from room to room, where celebrities await to be interviewed. For The Next Best Thing junket, all the movie reviewers were instead placed in a room, where we waited…and waited…and waited for Madonna to arrive. Finally, about 45 minutes after we’d gotten there, we heard singing from down the hallway. It got louder and louder, and then suddenly the door to the hotel room opened, and there was Madonna.
It’s been so long that all I remember are snatches from that day. What I do remember is that she looked gorgeous…but weathered. She was absolutely covered in makeup, and her eyes were stunningly blue. She looked beautiful, strong, in shape, and yet surprisingly human, with little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She possessed a wry sense of humor. I asked her one question, she briefly locked eyes with me before answering, and then I sat through the rest of the interview in a daze, satisfied that—for one moment—Madonna and I had connected.
And then she left, and I floated downstairs, and the magic was over.
