Why Madonna decided to date only toyboys – and why, as she pushes 60, she’s finally got bored with them
By J. RANDY TARABORRELLI, the writer who knows her best
SINCE he first met Madonna 35 years ago, Hollywood writer J. Randy Taraborrelli has always had the inside track on her turbulent private life. Now, as the defiant Queen of Pop is about to turn 60, he has updated his best-selling biography — with the full story of her late-life penchant for toy-boys . . .
BY MARCH 2008, Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s sevenyear marriage was under strain. She felt he was becoming dull and set in his ways; he thought she, at almost 50, should dress less raunchily and start acting her age.
In particular, the film director felt her continued insistence on doing gruelling and lengthy world tours meant that she couldn’t devote enough time or attention to their children — her 11-year-old daughter Lourdes, from a previous relationship, and their sons Rocco, then seven, and Malawian-born David, two, whom they’d adopted as a baby.
They were living in Wiltshire where Ritchie, ten years her junior, wanted a more settled life in the country for the family.
But the tensions between them didn’t improve and in December 2008 the couple divorced, with Madonna citing irreconcilable differences.
After the break-up, Madonna came to a decision. She no longer wanted a strong and equal partner in her life; instead she wanted fun at the end of a stressful day, good sex and a few laughs — in short, a companion who’d make few demands of her. And he’d have to be young and hot.
So what if she was 50? She was fully aware that her status as a pop icon made it easy to pull gorgeous twentysomethings, that she could offer them money, travel, celebrity and a sumptuous lifestyle.
And if a young stud found that an attractive package, then she certainly wasn’t going to discourage him. IN LATE 2008, not long after her divorce was announced, Madonna found the ideal candidate. He was 21 — easily young enough to be her son — intelligent, extremely handsome and had an engaging personality.
She’d met Jesus Luz when he was hired as a model for a magazine photo-shoot. In career terms, he was struggling, but everything changed as soon as he was known to be her lover.
He dumped his agent — the one who’d sent him to the Madonna photo-shoot — and signed with Ford Models.
Within a year, he’d modelled for Dolce & Gabbana in Milan, shown off the winter collection of Pepe Jeans and even attracted the attention of the staid New York Times, who suddenly found Jesus worthy of an in-depth feature.
And by the end of 2009, he was asking for €33,000 a night to work as a guest DJ in nightclubs. Such is the power of Madonna’s stupendous fame. Yet she didn’t mind at all. Jesus was a nice kid, she figured, so why shouldn’t he cash in while he could?
Her friends, however, had misgivings. Some were convinced that she was in the midst of a severe mid-life crisis — and to an extent, they were right.
‘She tried to act like turning 50 was not a big deal for her,’ said a member of her family, ‘but it was. I know for sure that it was.’ Judging by Madonna’s appearance, you’d never have known that she minded. Her body was slim and toned, the result of yoga workouts and a strict macrobiotic diet. Her skin glowed. Thanks to Botox, not a line could be detected on her face.
But despite radiating youthfulness, she was finding it hard to accept her advancing years. Jesus was a welcome confidence-booster; he made her feel young and attractive again.
Sometimes, she felt comfortable enough to joke about the relationship. When asked how young was ‘too young’ for a mate, she quipped: ‘As long as they’re old enough to dress themselves, they’re good enough.
‘Younger people are more adventurous. Have you met many guys my age? They’re usually grumpy and fat and balding.’
She said that sex with Jesus was ‘the best I’ve ever had — and that’s saying a lot’.
Madonna loved the fact that nothing ever seemed to get Jesus down, that he brimmed with optimism and hope for the future.
‘It never even occurs to him that at any moment his whole life could just go to s*** and for no good reason,’ Madonna told one confidante. ‘I remember being like that, before this business turned me into the jaded shrew I am today.’
Crucially, Jesus was also supportive; they spent hours talking about... her. Her new album, her new tour, her plans for new movies, her many goals and aspirations. The flipside, however, was that Jesus was perfectly happy to be dominated by Madonna. He did what he was told; never once did he challenge her.
When I met him myself in 2009, he sounded more like a fan than a lover.
‘Can you imagine what it’s like just talking to her about her career, about what she has seen and experienced?’ he told me.
‘Every day, it’s like an honour for me, as I think it would be for any person.’
Madonna soaked up this puppydog devotion, but privately suspected Jesus was a passing fancy. The truth is that deep down, she still desperately missed her ex-husband.
Nor could she shake the nagging feeling, she told her intimates, that maybe she’d made a mistake in divorcing Guy Ritchie.
Of course, they’d had their problems. However, it was only after Madonna had replaced him with a downy youth that Madonna realised something important: that she had underestimated the satisfaction of having a lover who was her true psychological and emotional equal.
Jesus was oblivious to her doubts. But one night at the Hiro Ballroom in Chelsea, New York, Madonna tried to warn one of his friends, a model called Anne Wilder, that the relationship had a time limit.
As Anne described it, it was a typical nightclub scene — loud music, people dancing, drinking and having a good time.
Madonna was sitting in Jesus’s lap, her head resting against his chest as they whispered to one another.
When he went to the toilet, he left Madonna alone in their booth with Anne. ‘Jesus is so sexy, isn’t he?’ the model shouted at Madonna, trying to be heard over the din.
‘Yeah, he sure is,’ Madonna shouted back.
Then, after a pause, the singer asked: ‘Is he a friend of yours?’ Anne nodded. ‘Have you f***ed him?’ Madonna asked her. Taken aback, Anne said no. Madonna then sidled up to her on the banquette and whispered in her ear: ‘Well, you should watch out for him because I think he’s falling for me.’
‘I was confused,’ Anne Wilder recalls, ‘thinking I hadn’t heard her right. Finally, Madonna leaned in to her again and said: “He’s a good boy, but he’s in way over his head with me.
‘You’re young and beautiful and just his type, I would think. Make sure he still has your number. He’s going to need it in a few months.”
‘I was a little surprised, and I guess I showed it — because then Madonna said in an oddly affected British accent: “Oh my dear, how tragic can it be to say you’ve had Madonna’s leftovers? Don’t act so appalled! Millions of women wish they could be so lucky. Or,” she
added, “who knows? Maybe a three-way?”’
At that moment, Jesus returned. ‘Come on stud, let’s dance,’ said Madonna as she took him by the hand and led him to the dance floor.
On her way there, Madonna looked over her shoulder, naughtily licked her lips and gave Anne a pronounced wink.
By the time Madonna turned 51 in August 2009, she was well on her way to adopting another child, three-year-old Chifundo ‘Mercy’ James, from the same Malawian village where David was born.
While the adoption was churning through the courts of Malawi, she prepared for Mercy’s arrival by buying a massive townhouse in New York’s Manhattan.
It would represent a new beginning for her, post-Guy, she felt. Meanwhile, she had a new worry: her children were becoming attached to her new lover, just as her own interest in him was starting to wane.
‘Jesus helps the children with their schoolwork, they watch movies together, talk on the phone quite often when he’s not around,’ confirmed one source at the time.
‘I do think the kids would be sad if Madonna broke up with him.’
Madonna, for her part, was uncomfortably aware that the more her children grew to love him, the harder it would be to let him go.
Moreover, when she was having a tough day, Jesus was the only one who could calm her nerves.
After all, he knew her better than anyone else — or so he thought.
As for Madonna, she came to expect Jesus to be there for her at all times, to listen to her complaints and help solve anything that went wrong.
At any time of the day or night, she could also bask in the admiration that shone from his blue-green eyes.
Towards the end of 2010, however, she was growing restless again.
It had by then been two years since she’d split with Guy, and she was gradually recovering from the trauma.
Jesus had been a pleasant diversion, but they were running out of common ground. Once, for instance, she’d been annoyed by something a reporter had said about the age difference between them. Disgruntled, she told Jesus: ‘My God, it’s not like I’m Joan Collins!’
To which Jesus responded, ‘Um . . . who’s Joan Collins?’
Lately, too, the couple had started bickering over nothing. ‘I have this bad habit,’ Madonna confided to a friend, ‘of being judgmental and critical when I’m losing interest in a guy. That’s sort of my thing, being a real bitch.
‘I’m self-aware enough to know it. I’m just not self-aware enough to stop it.’
Then one day, the scales seemed to fall from her eyes.
HER lover, she realised, was the best and most trustworthy assistant she’d ever had. The problem was he’d gone from boyfriend to functionary.
From that point on, she began to view him as weak, as not having a life of his own.
Not wanting to drag things out, she was quite cold when she told him the relationship was over.
Jesus took the break-up badly. He was just as worried about how Madonna would cope without him, he told friends, as he was hurt by her decision to finish with him. What had he done wrong, he wailed? He’d been available to her 24 hours a day.
Of course, that was exactly what he’d done wrong. Madonna has always preferred strong men like Guy Ritchie, even if she can’t live with them.
‘When it was over,’ said Anne Wilder, ‘Jesus told me he had to look in the mirror and try to remember who he’d been before she was in his life. He was so used to being Madonna’s guy, he didn’t even know who he was any more.’
With Jesus officially banished, Madonna found her next toy-boy — a 23-year-old French dancer called Brahim Zaibat. He was 29 years her junior.
A devout Muslim, he’d been hired to dance at the launch of a Madonna fashion collection at Macy’s department store in New York.
Although his English wasn’t fluent, and Madonna couldn’t speak French, their sexual chemistry soon swept such trifles aside.
Initially, their affair was ‘problemfree’, as Lance Dixon, one of Brahim’s friends put it. ‘He got along great with her kids,’ he said. ‘And because he was a pop-culture junkie, he and Madonna had plenty to talk about.’
Dixon said Brahim did admit to him that Madonna wished he knew more about politics.
At the end of 2011, Madonna’s latest film, W.E. opened to a stream of negative reviews, and she was deeply upset by this. Brahim was surprised that she, of all people, had such a thin skin. And although he tried to comfort her, she shut him out and they separated.
Wisely, Brahim didn’t push her to see him.
‘She needs to process stuff in her own way,’ he told his friend Lance. ‘I think that the best thing I can do is stay out of her way. ‘She can get dark, moody. My gut tells me she’ll be back when she’s ready. If not, I’m good. I still have a life. She’s not my life.
‘She hates needy people. She hates weakness in people, too, because she hates it in herself whenever it rears its head, which is like pretty much never.’
Of course, he was right: after freezing him out for a few weeks, Madonna came back to him. Unlike Jesus, Brahim never had any intention of becoming her whipping boy or assistant.
Instead, he focused on his dancing and having fun. On tour he liked hanging out with the other dancers and was always keen to visit sights that Madonna had been to a dozen or more times in the past. Later, often much later, he’d head to their hotel suite.
Once, though, Madonna rose in the middle of the night and stormed through their hotel, banging on people’s doors, and demanding to know: ‘Is Brahim in there? Where the f*** is he? Is he in there?’
She was unravelling. Not only was she, as usual, micro-managing every aspect of her tour, but the legacy of a riding accident was causing her recurring pain.
Brahim, who celebrated his 26th birthday during the tour, could barely comprehend the stress that his 54-year-old girlfriend was under. She was also loath to complain about it to him, reluctant to appear old in his eyes.
By the time the tour wound to an end in December 2012, she was no longer in any mood to have sex.
Somehow, Madonna’s relationship with him limped on through most of 2013. Their break-up, when it came, was explosive and acrimonious, although details are scarce. All that’s known is that it is best never to mention Brahim to Madonna — unless you want something thrown at you.
Barely a month after finishing with Brahim, she hooked up with Timor Steffens, a 26-year-old Dutch choreographer and dancer — eight months later, she ordered him to pack his bags and leave.
In 2016, she started seeing Aboubakar Soumahoro, a 25-yearold model. Unlike Jesus and Brahim, he remained on the margins of her life — which was exactly where she wanted him.
Last year, Madonna adopted four-year-old orphan twins Estere and Stella, again from Malawi.
‘Six kids, no husband, single mom — I never thought that would be me,’ she said, ‘but pretty much everything that’s ever happened to me in this life is something I never imagined.’
On August 16, she turns 60. It won’t make much difference to her: she’ll continue to mount her elaborate shows, pump out new songs and face the world with defiance.
Privately, however, Madonna admits that it would be nice to have a boyfriend ‘who might be old enough to remember the TV show Friends’.
ADAPTED from MADONNA: AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY OF AN ICON AT 60 by Randy J. Taraborrelli which is published on July 12 priced €21.