“I want to be alone,” Greta Garbo’s dancer character famously said in “Grand Hotel,” a quote permanently and only semi-accurately attached to the actress after she retreated from public life. Garbo was first on the list of Golden Agers in one of Madonna’s biggest hits,

“Vogue,” but the pop star has long seemed to embody this maxim’s very opposite. She wants to be surrounded, as if with Dolby sound. “Before Madonna even had a manager, she had a court of valets and minstrels following her everywhere,” the record executive Seymour Stein observed.