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MADGE'S GUY GOES IT ALONE

CELEBRATE: Madonna and Guy were in party mood for her birthday bash

Sunday August 17,2008

By Adam Helliker

WHILE Madonna has been at pains to put on a brave face (she popped in to see her consultant Jean Louis Sebag for a spot of last-minute Botox before yesterday’s 50th birthday celebrations) following the rumours about her troubled marriage, Guy Ritchie has been finding comfort from his great friend Jack, as in Jack Daniel’s.

I hear that while his wife is absent (and with her Sticky & Sweet tour beginning in Cardiff this weekend, she will be away rather a lot) Guy has been holding open house for his chums at Madonna’s Wiltshire estate.

Where Ashcombe House was once the setting for elegant cocktail parties hosted by the fey society photographer Sir Cecil Beaton, it is now the place for more raucous gatherings presided over by the mockney-mouthed Mr Ritchie.

As one guest who has been to dinner at Ashcombe tells me: “He likes to invite the boys down to stay and he’s quite the lad in the country. He loves organising things like drinking races and I think he really enjoys the place when the ‘trouble and strife’, as he calls Madonna, isn’t there.”

When the couple are in London, and while the sinewy singer punishes herself with marathon exercise sessions, Guy prefers to concentrate on glass-lifting at his other “home”, the Punchbowl, the Mayfair pub in which he has invested with the metropolitan entrepreneur Piers Adam.

Guy needs all the solace he can get. As one friend who has known the couple for years observes: “I’m afraid there are two alpha males in that relationship. They have the most awful rows all the time.”

Indeed, as Madonna reaches her half-century, there is a consensus among her friends that her eight-year marriage to the film director is most definitely in trouble, whatever spin her publicists attempt to put on the subject.

As Madonna’s brother, the gay interior designer Christopher Ciccone, has claimed in his new book, the couple’s life is peppered with domestic arguments, fuelled by Guy’s resentment of his wife’s global fame and his disappointment with his own career.

He depicts her as self-worshipping and miserly and says they stay together only with the help of a Kabbalah marriage counsellor.

So maybe it’s no wonder that Guy, the son of a London advertising executive, likes to retreat for boozy sessions with his male chums at Ashcombe.

It explains why he was so upset when Madonna suggested that as she was spending much less time there, and because she no longer liked shooting, that she wanted to sell the 1,200-acre estate.

As his friend confirms: “Guy loves Ashcombe and enjoys the country way of life much more than his wife does. If there was a divorce, you can be sure he would fight to keep that place above all their other assets.”