In bed with a bad girl

Early in this bracingly prurient book about Madonna, the author tells us that, as a girl, the future entertainer would jump on a table and perform an impersonation of Shirley Temple, after which "she would lift up her dress and flash her panties". Later, he describes a scene in which Madonna, by now 32, made an appearance on the David Letterman show, where she "asked Letterman if he would smell her panties". Letterman, apparently, stalled, but Madonna pressed the issue. "I gave him my underpants," she said, on camera, "and he won't smell them!"

The issues surrounding Madonna's panties and their contents are never far away from Taraborrelli's narrative. Waxing sociological, he tells us "when little boys are angry, they have fights. When little girls are angry, they show their panties". Reading this book, you build up a picture of Madonna as an angry, sometimes self-destructive woman who has spent her life vengefully hurling herself at the world, crotch-first. Talking about her mother's death and her father's remarriage, she says: "I was just one angry, abandoned girl. I'm still angry." She also says: "I have this feeling that I'm a bad girl and I need to be punished."

Raised in a middle-class Catholic family in Michigan, Madonna was ambitious and wilful from an early age. She wanted to stand out from the crowd. At home, she has said, "I would even hurt myself, like burn my fingers deliberately, to get attention." As a teenager she was a "nonconformist". A classmate recalls: "Unlike the other girls, she didn't shave her armpits and neither did her sister, Melanie. That was considered pretty weird." She lost her virginity at the age of 13 after some "same-sex experimentation". Sitting in a parked car with 17-year-old Russell Long, she said: "Are we going to do it, or not?" Long's reply, says Taraborrelli, was, "I guess so." Even if Taraborrelli was not present during Madonna's intimate moments, you feel he was there in spirit.

The Madonna in this book - Taraborrelli's Madonna - is powerful, seductive, scary. She chews people up. Sexually, she is an aggressor. Chatted up by a cheesy stranger in a New York street, the 19-year-old Madonna took the man up on his proposition for a date. "It was just an animal kind of sexuality," he said. "She was always sexually aggressive," says Mark Kamins, a later lover. "She was an incredible sexual partner, very imaginative, wild," says John "Jellybean" Benitez, an early producer of Madonna's songs. Of her affair with Prince, we are told that, "While he wanted to savour every second of the experience, she was into multiple orgasms."

The sex hots up as the book goes on. Things get out of hand when she meets Sean Penn. "She's nuts," Penn is quoted as saying, "and I'm nuts. The two of us together? Man, that's trouble." The author reports the facts. "After their first date, he threw her to the floor and stripped off her clothes and his own in such a hurry he left his boots on." Madonna said: "We reached orgasm together, and it was as if time stood still." But things go wrong. Penn, it turns out, was right. He is nuts. She is nuts. Soon, she is conducting an affair with John Kennedy Jnr, desperate for his child. Taraborrelli clears up the peanut butter rumour. No, Kennedy did not spread peanut butter on Madonna's legs and lick it off. "Do you know how many calories are in peanut butter?" he quotes Madonna as saying. "Low-fat whipped cream, yes. But not peanut butter."

Taraborrelli's theory, that Madonna, having been bereaved at the age of five, became driven, both sexually and in other ways, is believable. But is it true? In the end, you'll make up your own mind. This is a book you will find yourself "just dipping into" for hours at a stretch.