Anthony Ciccone: Celebrity Kin’s Hard Luck

Madonna’s brother Anthony Ciccone tells the Michigan Messenger that his family turned its back on him when he was going through some hard times. Even though his sister is a “multibazillionaire,” he has been homeless and living on the street, and at times under the Union Street Bridge, about a year. The 55-year-old Ciccone was being interviewed about why homeless people are gravitating to Traverse City, which has a unique system to help them, providing a free hot meal to anyone in the community 7 days a week. Putting his remarks in context, he made them in response to questions posed to him.

Ciccone also talked about the limits to volunteers’ abilities to help the homeless, particularly in the cold Michigan winter:

“They can’t do everything all the time for everybody, they just don’t have the resources,” he said. “These people that run these things are all volunteers, they don’t get paid to do these things.” He went on to say that frostbite is not an uncommon problem among people who have to live outdoors in the cold. “You get nerve damage. That’s the milder stage, in the severe stage you have tissue damage, that is when you lose parts of your body.” He said he suffered from frostbite on his feet last winter and that a friend of his lost all of his toes, noting that “several have died of hypothermia.”

A couple of years ago, another Ciccone brother, Christopher, published a “tell-all” book about his relationship with his famous sister, Life with My Sister Madonna, with co-author, Wendy Leigh. According to Christopher, Madonna treated him like “a serf paid to decorate her house,” and he complained that she underpaid him and even blackmailed him into taking Kabbalah classes with her.

Another celebrity with a homeless sibling is Chef Gordon Ramsay who described his failed relationship with his brother, Ronald. Writing of the ordeal in his memoir, ‘Humble Pie,” Gordon said. “It’s the one thing I feel I’ve failed at. I find it hard knowing that there’s nothing I can do to help,” revealing that he even gave his brother money for heroin to make sure Ronald would attend their father’s funeral, and paid for 5 trips to rehab before he finally had to cut ties.

The saddest story we ever saw was on TV once when Bee Gee Barry Gibb talked about how he had to turn his back on his brother Andy over drug abuse. Gibb said, at the time, he believed “tough love” was his only option so he refused to talk to Andy who died not long after that last call.