New York Times Magazine: Madonna at Sixty

The New York Times Magazine has a special feature on Madonna, the original queen of pop on aging, inspiration and why she refuses to cede control - and with three new fabuluous pictures.

The night before the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas in May, Madonna was sitting in the arena attached to the MGM Grand hotel, staring at a double of herself. The double, who was standing on the stage many yards away, was younger and looked Asian but wore a similar lace minidress and a wig in Madonna’s current hairstyle, a ’30s movie star’s crimped blond waves. 'It’s always the second person with the wig - she wants to see it,' a stage designer said, adding that when she makes a decision, she is definitive. 'Madonna wants 10 options, but when she says it’s the one, it’s the one.'

Madonna was observing Madonna to make sure Madonna was doing everything perfectly. Up on the stage set of a funky urban street with lampposts and a tiled bar, the double hit her marks and held a fist up to her mouth like a faux microphone for a rendition of 'Medellín,' the on-trend, Latin-inflected song that Madonna would be singing. Madonna looked at a TV and assessed the augmented-reality part of the show, in which four additional virtual Madonnas, one playing an accordion and another dressed like a bride, would materialize in the televised awards performance out of thin air. Nearby, guys bowed heads and said cryptic things like 'Where’s the digital key?' and 'I need the alpha channel' to one another, tensely.

All the fake Madonnas ran through the song a few times before Madonna skipped enthusiastically to the stage. The sex bomb at 60 was slightly less than bionic and wore a Swarovski-crystal-encrusted patch over her left eye ('It’s fashion, darling,' an onlooker explained when I asked why she chose to wear it). Afterward, Madonna mused about something being off, and the next time she messed up the part where she stood on a table and gyrated her legs in and out in a move called “the butterfly” while popping her head in each direction. But by the third run-through she seemed ecstatic. 'It’s so nice to see her smile,' Megan Lawson, a choreographer, said from under a black bolero hat, 'and have it be a genuine smile.'

To read the full article visit: www.nytimes.com/magazine/madonna-madame-x