In 1994, Norman Mailer called Madonna ‘our greatest living female artist’. She was huge in those days. I remember teenagers like my daughters constantly asking ‘What would Madonna do?’ But my grandchildren haven’t even heard of her. She seems to have faded faster than most.

Why? Perhaps it’s because, as often claimed, she’s the ‘queen of reinvention’. But people who reinvent themselves every few months, as Madonna always did, tend to leave other people behind. Her ‘rebel life’, as told here by Mary Gabriel, is a frenzied churn of friends, lovers, mentors and collaborators who were vital to her for a year or two and then discarded. Her first manager, Camille Barbone, bust a gut to launch her New York career, but when Michael Jackson’s manager took an interest, Madonna jumped ship without hesitation. Barbone said of Madonna: ‘She wasn’t intentionally malicious; just incapable of seeing life from anyone else’s point of view.’

She was born in 1958 in Pontiac, Michigan, the third of Tony and Madonna Ciccone’s six children. They were very religious – ‘swooning with it’ – and went to church every day during Lent. But her mother died of breast cancer when she was five and Tony, a widower at 32, relied on housekeepers until he married one of them and had two more children. He was a strict disciplinarian, but Madonna said: ‘I’d do anything to rebel against my father.’

‘She wasn’t intentionally malicious; just incapable of seeing life from anyone else’s point of view’

After winning a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan she went on a six-week summer programme to New York, and ‘once I got a taste of New York, I knew I had to be there’. Her father refused to finance her, and said if she went she’d no longer be his daughter. But she went anyway, and lived on a dollar a day, taking food from garbage bins and relying on ‘benefactors’. Barbone said she had an amazing effect on men: ‘She had men lending her money and musicians rehearsing and giving their time without pay – and she wasn’t sleeping with any of them.’

She made her first demo and took it round DJs and record A&R men who all expected sexual favours, which she refused. But she still managed to get a $5,000 advance from Sire Records for two singles. When she first heard one of her songs, ‘Everybody’, on the radio, she cried. Warner Bros signed her for her debut album, but she complained: ‘Warner Bros is a hierarchy of old men… I’m treated like this sexy little girl.’ So she went to see Michael Jackson’s manager Freddy DeMann, who was ‘absolutely knocked off his feet’ and got her on MTV. For her next album she asked to work with Nile Rodgers, who said he’d ‘never come across such an iron will before’. In the video for ‘Likea Virgin’ (1984), she simulated masturbation and DeMann told her: ‘Your career is over.’ In fact it shot to no. 1, and the following year her film debut, Desperately Seeking Susan, made her a star.

Her first, and probably greatest, love was the actor Sean Penn. As soon as she saw him, she says, ‘I immediately had this fantasy that we were going to fall in love and get married’ – as indeed they did, on her 27th birthday. She called him ‘my hero and my best friend’. But then they went to Hong Kong to film Shanghai Surprise and were soon having such public rows they became known as the Poison Penns. He was drinking too much and picking fights with paparazzi and spent 47 days in prison for drink driving. By the time she turned 30, the marriage was falling apart. She wanted to do the film Dick Tracy with Warren Beatty but Penn didn’t like the idea, so she divorced him, though she said afterwards that divorce was ‘like a death’. Inevitably, she had a relationship with Beatty – who would only allow himself to be filmed between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., when he believed he looked his best. He disapproved of her own film Truth or Dare (known as In Bed with Madonna) and allegedly instructed his attorneys after previewing it.

Truth or Dare was shocking enough, but then came her book Sex, with all its S&M and rape fantasies, which Martin Amis called ‘the desperate confection of an ageing scandal addict’. Her Erotica album also bombed, as did her film Body of Evidence, at which audiences cheered when her character died. Then she went on David Letterman’s show and handed him some worn panties and swore repeatedly. She really did seem desperate.

Buying a house in Miami calmed her down, as did meeting a Cuban personal trainer called Carlos Leon while she was out jogging. She had already decided to reinvent herself as a mother and she chose him as the lucky father. Their affair soon petered out, but he was with her when she gave birth to Lourdes, called Lola, in October 1996, and proved a reliable parent.

When everyone fled Miami after Gianni Versace’s murder, Madonna spent time in England and went to a dinner at Sting’s where she sat next to a hot new film director called Guy Ritchie, and ‘he turned my head’. She gave birth to their son Rocco in August 2000 and married Ritchie four months later. ‘The last thing I thought I would do was marry some laddish, shooting, pub-going nature lover.’ But she threw herself into the part, insisting on being called Mrs Ritchie and hosting shooting weekends at their country estate, Ashcombe, in Wiltshire, even though she was a vegetarian.

Her reinvention as an English countrywoman was certainly dramatic, but inevitably it palled and she was soon back in London, working on her next album and her next tour, even though she knew her husband would hate it: ‘It’s hard for a guy to be traipsing round the world with a girl. No one wants to be anyone’s trailer bitch.’ After the tour she starred in Ritchie’s film Swept Away – which got the worst reviews ever seen until his next film, Revolver, which ‘made Swept Away look like Citizen Kane’. His career died while hers suddenly revived with Confessions on a Dance Floor, which grossed $200 million. But Ritchie’s friends complained that ‘it’s as if work is the only thing that interests her’.

She’d heard that there were more than a million Aids orphans in Malawi and put $5 million into a foundation called Raising Malawi. She flew out there, visited orphanages and decided to adopt a boy, David Banda. She stayed with Ritchie until David’s adoption was made official, then asked him for a divorce and reportedly paid him £60 million. Later she adopted another three Malawian orphans, and built schools and community centres all round the country.

In 2018 she moved to Portugal so that David could develop his talent for football at the Benefica Academy. At first she was Billy-no-mates because she couldn’t speak Portuguese, but then she fell in with a group of musicians in Lisbon and decided to involve them in Madame X, her next show. Rolling Stone magazine approved: ‘She’s getting weirder with age. Thank all the angels and saints for that.’

But after she turned 60 in 2018 she began to struggle physically, mainly with knee injuries. She was not the reliable workhorse she used to be and kept having to cancel appearances, once at only 45 minutes’ notice. Audiences complained about shows starting three hours late and some ticket-holders even sued. She was heckled in Las Vegas and pronounced ‘a complete waste of money’ on social media. She was probably relieved when Covid gave her a forced break, and her recent Celebration tour has been greeted with generally rapturous reviews.

Apparently several American universities offer courses in Madonna studies, and Gabriel’s book is presumably intended for them. Exhaustive and exhausting, packed with feminist history and completely devoid of humour, it runs to more than 800 pages, even though the endnotes and bibliography are consigned to an online link. I thought I had an almost limitless appetite for reading about Madonna, but this tome has just proved me wrong.