How Madonna Got Her Groove Back

"I only tried Vicodin once," Madonna says. "I was in a lot of pain, and everyone kept telling me to try Vicodin. But they kept saying, 'Be careful. It's so amazing. You're going to get addicted.' So I called five people to get advice before I took it, and they all told me I was going to love it."

"She went on a walk with me," Shavawn blurts, as she packs up the bone machine. "And it was really scary."

"Drugs have a weird effect on me," Madonna continues. "They do the opposite with me. I just chewed the entire inside of my mouth. I bitched at everybody. And I was in more pain. It was the worst experience of my life. So I'm happy to say that none of my pharmaceuticals -- and I had a plethora of them given to me -- influenced me."

Madonna's lack of interest in drugs is another reason for her success: The biggest career killer is the mixture of a person who's very confident in her judgments with drugs that impair those judgments.

"I just like the idea of pills," she says as she stretches her legs on the wall of the cabin. "I like to collect them but not actually take them. When I fell off my horse, I got tons of stuff: Demerol and Vicodin and Xanax and Valium and OxyContin, which is supposed to be like heroin. And I'm quite scared to take them. I'm a control freak."

Just the other day, Madonna was in Portugal, where she obsessively rehearsed the first live performance of her undeniably catchy electropop single "Hung Up" thirty times for the MTV Europe Music Awards. The result: She not only stole the show but, nearing fifty and wearing a leotard, still managed to be the best-looking woman on the stage that night.

For Madonna, whose stage productions have become as career-defining as her albums, the next project is to start planning a tour for the new year. "I want to make people feel like they're inside a disco ball," she says, beginning a show description that in part sounds like a non-ironic version of U2's Popmart. "I want to explore the idea of making the dancers more personalities in the show and having their stories come out. And we want to devise a sound system that's surround-sound, because the standard system in a sports arena is crap for people watching, and it's crap for people onstage."

[Excerpt From Issue 988 — December 1, 2005]