There’s a new profile of Madonna (or should I say Madame X?) in the New York Times Magazine and let me tell you, her London house sounds incredible. There are “dark-walled rooms with full bookcases,” a screening room where every surface is “covered in velvet,” and a massive art collection featuring work by Frida Kahlo, Francis Bacon, and Salvador Dalí. But my favorite note about Madonna’s interior decorating skills? It’s what she hangs over her toilet.
Near the screening room, a print of John Lennon’s handwritten lyrics to “Imagine” hung over the toilet — an intentionally hilarious location…
Tell us how you really feel, Madge.
She is cagey in the interview, according to reporter Vanessa Grigoriadis’s profile, which delves into Madonna’s legacy at 60 and how her new music has changed as she ages (and how her past music has changed, perception wise, as the world ages, becoming less controversial in time and opening doors for a legion of women pop stars expressing their sexuality on stage.) A sour spot in her career was Rebel Heart, her poorly-sold last album, and Madonna still feels bad about it:
The songs had leaked online several months early, far from perfection. “There are no words to describe how devastated I was,” she said. “It took me a while to recover, and put such a bad taste in my mouth I wasn’t really interested in making music.” She added, “I felt raped.” It didn’t feel right to explain that women these days were trying not to use that word metaphorically.
Despite the cringe-inducing, casual use of “rape,” she also talks about experiencing Weinstein’s leering behavior while Miramax distributed Truth or Dare.
Harvey crossed lines and boundaries and was incredibly sexually flirtatious and forward with me when we were working together; he was married at the time, and I certainly wasn’t interested,” she said. She added: “I was aware that he did the same with a lot of other women that I knew in the business. And we were all, ‘Harvey gets to do that because he’s got so much power and he’s so successful and his movies do so well and everybody wants to work with him, so you have to put up with it.’ So that was it. So when it happened, I was really like, ‘Finally.’ I wasn’t cheering from the rafters because I’m never going to cheer for someone’s demise. I don’t think that’s good karma anyway. But it was good that somebody who had been abusing his power for so many years was called out and held accountable.
You can read the full profile here.