Madonna claims she was tortured for being a weirdo
 

Stubble proved to be a great character builder during Madonna's formative high school years.

"I didn't fit into the popular group," the sinewy, refreshed-faced pop icon, 49, tells the May issue of Vanity Fair, which features her in a variety of bendy, corset-clad poses. "I wasn't a hippie or a stoner, so I ended up being the weirdo. I was interested in classical ballet and music, and the kids were quite mean if you were different."

But "instead of being a doormat," she says, "I decided to emphasize my differences. I didn't shave my legs. I had hair growing under my arms. I refused to wear makeup, or fit the ideal of what a conventionally pretty girl would look like."

That led her to be "tortured even more," bullying she believes "further validated my superiority, and helped me to survive and say, 'I'm getting out of here, and everyone is a heathen in this school -- you don't even know who Mahler is!'"

That lemonade-from-hairy-lemons approach is now the Big M's philosophical backbone.


Madonna graces the cover of Vanity Fair.

"Ultimately everything's good," she suggests. "Even bad is good, because bad is there to help you resist it ... If you look back at your life and say, 'Well, what did you learn?' What happened that changed your life, that made you strong, that made you grow, it's always things you perceived as bad."

(Which seemingly means Mrs. Guy Ritchie has been able to accentuate the positive in her long-ago hookups with the likes of Dennis Rodman and -- eep -- Vanilla Ice.)

Her deep thoughts dovetail with her study of Kabbalah, the red string-festooned lessons of which she breaks down thusly: "One is that we are all responsible for our actions, our behavior, and our words, and we must take responsibility for everything we say and do."

According to Madonna-rishi, "I am the architect of my destiny. I am in charge. I bring that to me, or I push that away. You can no longer blame other people for things that happened to you."

In other words, if her forthcoming album, "Hard Candy," tanks, she can't put it on collaborators Justin Timberlake and Pharrell, with whom she had an uneasy start.

"It's not like we hit it off right away," she says. "Writing is very intimate. You have to be vulnerable and it's hard to do that with strangers."

(Madonna and Timberlake eventually became intimate enough for her to stick a B-12 shot into his bare butt.)

And here's hoping her personal accountability credo extends to dubious remake claims, because the London Daily Mail is convinced she's hoping to star in a sure-to-be audience-repelling, critically eviscerated redo of "Casablanca."

"She wants to update the story and maybe set it in a modern war zone such as Iraq. There is no script yet," threatens a source. "Madonna and her people are testing the waters to see if this is the right vehicle for her and if a major studio will get behind the project."

(When contacted for comment from beyond the grave, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman responded, "Oy.")

Speaking of things that cause suffering, Madonna touches on the subject of her onetime tongue-tangling partner Britney Spears, labeling the situation "very painful."

"When you think about the way people treat each other in Africa," she posits to the magazine, "about witchcraft and people inflicting cruelty and pain on each other, then come back here and, you know, people taking pictures of people when they're in their homes, being taken to hospitals, or suffering, and selling them, getting energy from them, that's a terrible infliction of cruelty. So who's worse off?"

Meanwhile, after three decades in the public eye, Madonna believes she's finally cracked the fame equation.

"You have to get to a point where you care as little about getting smoke blown up your ass as you do when you become a whipping boy in the press," she explains, "because ultimately they both add up to s---. You just have to keep doing your work, and hope and pray somebody's dialing into your frequency."

Besides, she concludes, "If your joy is derived from what society thinks of you, you're always going to be disappointed."

http://entertainment.msn.com/music/hotgossip/3-31-08_2

Considering Stevies' fear of her deriere, I wonder what would go through her mind if she read this?

now that would have to rank as one of the most preposterously awful films of all time. first of all she is nearly twice the age of Ingrid Bergman in the film and looks it (not that she was anything to look at even when she was 25) and secondly she is truly one of the worst actresses ever to have major roles in films..Any filmmaker that allowed this abomination to come to fruition deserves to be struck down by God..if there was one.:)

I think this is a bit of revisionism, on her part. I have seen some of her high school photos from a VH1 or MTV special years back. She was conventionally pretty looking- nothing outrageous or shocking. Her black hair was long and parted in the middle like Stevie during the BN years, her senior portrait features a more 'set' hairdo which looks too mature for her. There were photos shown of her wearing a varsity letter sweater with the cheerleading troupe, and footage of her performing at the senior talent night. Nothing at all suggests that she was weird, different, a rebel or a bullied little shrinking violet.

I could swear back when Madonna was first being noticed by the public she did an interview where she said something like she had an ordinary life and was pretty popular - she was a cheerleader - and went to parties and all that but felt too stifled in her hometown and moved to NYC. Whether she was exaggerating then or now is the question I guess.

Madonna looks hot on the new Interview cover.

airbrushed

True. But so is just about everyone in/on a magazine.