The Age Of Madonna: Touched for a Very Long Time

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Madonna: Cover Girl

The Material Girl has long been a cover girl, regularly gracing magazine covers for the last 25 years. See how she has changed her image over time with this sampling of covers spanning 1984 to the present.

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Justin: Oooh, save the world! Save the world!

Or something like that.

Summer horribilis! She for whom there was never such a thing as bad publicity cannot possibly be enjoying her latest headlines, can she? The narrative is seemingly no longer in Madonna's control. (Unless it is. There is the possibility that she now masterminds her own "bad" publicity.)

The rumors (denied over and over) about an impending divorce from her second husband, Guy Ritchie, with both sides reported (also denied) to be lawyering up. Headlines about Madonna the succubus, accused (falsely, Madonna's camp says) of luring A-Rod away from his spurned wife and new baby with the promise of spiritual enlightenment.

Headlines about her younger brother's tell-all book, "Life With My Sister Madonna," No. 2 on the New York Times list. (A summary of the book, of sorts: She was always a you know what, even at 5, especially at 17, even more so at 38. She still owes him for these myriad home-decorating jobs he slavishly agreed to do; she is such a you know what; she didn't give him a very nice room in the Scottish castle where she got married; she deliberately didn't tell him about the Kabbalah prayer meeting at Demi Moore's house; oh, the nightmare of knowing her so well.)

One of the biggest Madonna fans I know says he stopped reading after about Page 22, because of the possibility that the book was too true, and worse, too banal. It has pictures of Madonna as a teenager, wearing a dress her stepmother made. It has pictures of Thanksgiving with the Ciccones. It is devastatingly unmythological.

"Listen, once you pass 35, your age becomes part of the first sentence of anything written." -- Madonna, to Out magazine, April 2006

It becomes the last sentence, too, my love.

A week or so ago, there were those death-mask pictures of Madonna, seen leaving a yoga class in London, sans makeup. In these pictures, she is gaunt and stranger than her normal strange, with Ginsu cheekbones and these throbbing veins snaking up and down the sinew of arms that have seen much mystical discipline. The world stares and stares at these pictures. Every magazine in the checkout line desperately seeking sutures: Madonna -- What happened to her face?!

The Hollywood gossip shows all ask it, too -- what's wrong, what is it? Experts are called in, diagrams are made, and nobody seems to say, well, she's 50 you know. She'll be dead someday. We all will.

When you get to heaven, what's the DJ playing?

"Ray of Light"?

Maybe, if you're a Madonna anti-fan fan, you'll get there and you'll hear those synthesized chimes from the opening of "Lucky Star," and it's a Friday night at the lake, and it is always 1980-something, and it happens all over again.