by Lucy O'Brien
Madonna needed to establish herself as a priority act for Warner. Major labels were not going to take risks and were heavily reliant on saleable images, particularly for female artists, who have long been considered more difficult to “sell.” Madonna was lucky in that MTV had become second in importance to the music industry as a promotional vehicle. She was to use this medium with devastating aplomb, but at the time of Like a Virgin’s release, she was yet to make her mark as the video queen. In 1984, the big female sellers were black artists like the Pointer Sisters, Tina Turner, Sade, and Chaka Khan—women with big soul voices and lived experience to match. They exuded glamour and dignity, but (with the exception of the anarchic Chaka Khan) not an offbeat quirkiness.
Madonna was a different proposition: white (and therefore easier to market), thoroughly sexual, and provocative. Her only major rival in mass pop terms was Cyndi Lauper, a powerhouse pop talent from Queens, New York, who in 1984 had a major hit with the sparkly girly anthem to female solidarity “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Like Madonna, she came, on her mother’s side, from an Italian-American lower-middle-class background. Like Madonna, she had a subversive, cartoon image, dying her hair green and wearing vivid thrift-store clothes. She had a peculiar voice and impressive range—from the soulful balladry of “Time After Time” to the tongue-in-cheek delights of “She Bop,” a top-three hit song about female masturbation. And she also had a huge audience of screaming wannabes.
Used to being the gawky misfit from a single-parent background, Lauper wanted success “out of anger. People would give me grief about the way I dressed, then Boy George’s success opened the door for me,” she told me in the early 90s. “I was shocked at the reaction. I’d go out onstage and the audience would be filled with girls screaming, ripping at my clothes. I’d never heard girls screaming over a woman before, and at first I thought, They think I’m gay. The only bad thing is I wasn’t!”
Both Madonna and Lauper had tapped into that rich seam of adolescent female desire. The longing expressed by the screaming was a longing to be the desired object, to have her as your metaphorical best friend, to literally walk in her shoes. That way led to self-determination, glamour, and happiness. Add a degree of sexual confusion, and you have a potent mix.
At first, Lauper stole the march, with four top-ten singles and a 4.5 million–selling debut album, She’s So Unusual. “If you were to take Cyndi’s first album and compare it with Madonna’s first album, my God, Cyndi’s is so much better. Just out of the starting gate, she took the lead real fast,” says Billy Steinberg, who went on to write for Lauper such hit songs as “True Colors” and “I Drove All Night.” But while Madonna thrived on adulation and success, Lauper found it an unwelcome pressure. “You can’t live in that sort of atmosphere as a meteoric phenomenon, it doesn’t go with being creative. It’s always been a struggle for me to sell myself,” she says. Steinberg believes that Lauper also made a mistake by ditching her producers. “Her first record was such a success, she got a bit headstrong, saying, ‘I’m taking over the reins.’ With that she sort of sabotaged her career. Madonna was much more shrewd about who she chose to collaborate with.”
By the early 90s, Lauper had retreated more into the background as a songwriter. At one point, she suggested that Madonna “seemed kind of alone, with all her bodyguards,” that she was “a terrific businesswoman and entertainer, but I don’t know if moving people is important to her.” She later modified that view, telling me: “We like a lot of the same things but are very different. When she approaches the rhythm, she comes from that dancer place. It’s almost like Eartha Kitt. She certainly pushes everybody’s buttons. I think every woman has a sexuality and shouldn’t be castrated. They always compare us—but they do that to women. It’s like, no matter what I said or she said, it would always come out like a cat fight. It’s silly.”
The main difference between Madonna and Lauper lay in the former’s urge for immortality, for becoming an icon. And there is no better place to realize that than on celluloid.
6
HOW I STOPPED WORRYING AND LEARNED TO LOVE MADONNA
“I’VE BEEN WORKING MY ASS OFF FOR YEARS…I’VE worked for everything that I’ve got and I worked long and hard, so when I got it I thought I deserved it. I always knew it would happen,” Madonna once said. But in September 1984, she took a risk that could have easily backfired. At the first MTV Awards Ceremony, broadcast live from the Radio City Music Hall in New York, she sang “Like a Virgin,” dressed in her white bustier, tulle skirt, and veil, writhing and simulating sex atop a giant white wedding cake. The audience, including host Bette Midler, were bemused. “Tom and I were shocked. There was this amateurish camerawork as Madonna rolled around the stage, exposing her voluptuous, slightly pudgy body,” recalls Billy Steinberg, cowriter of the song. “I thought, oh no, now our song is doomed, it’ll never be a hit.”
Many felt uneasy at her display of hyped-up, over-stylized sexuality, but TV viewers jammed the switchboards. “If something that spontaneous, strong, and true comes along, people love it,” Steinberg says with hindsight. Maripol remembers the press and photographers clamoring to get a picture after the show. “Cyndi Lauper was there, and it was like, ‘Move out, baby!’” she says. “I remember kids at the window and Madonna was looking at them in the limo, like in awe, you know? She knew that she was going to be big, but not that fast and not that big.”
Amid the controversy, the fact that Madonna was celebrating the nomination of “Borderline” for Best New Video got overlooked. In this video, she plays a graffiti girl torn between a rich uptown photographer and her break-dancing Hispanic boyfriend. Her first collaboration with director Mary Lambert, it was a step away from the rudimentary gyrations of “Burning Up” and “Lucky Star.” With one eye on movie stardom, as soon as she could afford it, Madonna made videos with mini-narratives and high production values, raising the standard for women on MTV. In a way that would happen time and again, though, her aesthetic achievement was swallowed up in the provocative hype that surrounded it.
Before the awards show, Madonna had been determined to do something that would challenge the TV audience, so she consulted Maripol. “At first she wanted to appear inside a cage, with a wild animal. So I told her it was pointless, as Grace Jones had just done it for Jean-Paul Goude,” said Maripol. “I insisted that when you sing a song called ‘Like a Virgin’ and you look nothing like a virgin, it’s better to turn the whole thing upside down.” The previous year, Maripol had done an event for Fiorucci, where Madonna jumped out of a huge rubber cake with a zipper. “So we decided to make a giant wedding cake.”
SUCCESS SOON went to Madonna’s head. “I remember Warner threw a big party for her in West Hollywood just before the MTV Awards,” recalls songwriter Gardner Cole. “She had to get up and speak. She was a little inebriated. She was boisterous, loud, and obnoxious, and the Warner executives were cringing. But somehow she managed to turn it around. By the end everyone was cheering. It’s not easy to get jaded Hollywood people in the palm of your hand. I thought, She’s definitely going to go places.”
Who was this cocky new artist? Was she a plastic bimbo or was she for real? To many feminists, she seemed tacky, selling sex and little else. This was borne out by the “Like a Virgin” video, where she vamps up the virgin/whore imagery, gliding through a boudoir in full wedding outfit and dancing suggestively in black and blue Lurex on a Venetian gondola. Shot by Mary Lambert like a twentieth-century fairy tale, the video also features a lioness stalking around the pillars (Madonna’s alter ego, the wild woman within), and a mystery man in a mask. It’s a modern tale of transformation, complete with beauty and the beast. Madonna’s energy leaped off the screen, but people were still undecided about her. She had an ever-growing tribe of wannabes, but women weren’t sure if she was truly supportive of other women.
“Like a Virgin” arrived at a time of high anxiety for feminism. There had been the heady revolutionary rhetoric of the 1960s, when Gloria St
einem, the “Wages for Housework” campaign, and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto galvanized a new generation to fight for women’s liberation. This was followed by the Equal Opportunities legislation of the 1970s and a gradual recognition of gay rights. But by the early 1980s, the backlash had begun, with Reagan’s administration in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain ushering in a new era of conservatism. Civil rights were under attack, including women’s abortion rights.
Many saw a continuum between advertising, music videos, and soft porn, with women constantly depicted as submissive beings, there for the pleasure of men. This is why Madonna’s exploration of the virgin/whore stereotype was so incendiary—not just to the Christian right wing of the “moral majority,” but also to feminists who saw it as disempowering. Where Madonna fitted in the continuum was a matter for debate. Was she part of the problem or of a solution? Was she a competitive female, just there to grab male attention—or did she have something original to say? Women continued to be ambivalent until the seismic eruption of Desperately Seeking Susan. This was when Madonna’s true strength, Madonna as a three-dimensional human being, fully emerged. “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Madonna,” read the cover of the U.K. feminist magazine Women’s Review in 1985. With her most acclaimed movie role and her first world tour, Madonna began to convince the nonbelievers, becoming a figurehead for popular feminism.
IN 1984, an up-and-coming director, Susan Seidelman, was looking for a supporting actress in her movie Desperately Seeking Susan, a comedy about bored housewife Roberta Glass, who, out of curiosity, trails Susan, a feisty, punky girl from the personal ads. After getting involved in murder and mayhem, Roberta ends up transforming her life so she is more like Susan. It was an unusual film for the time, revolving, as it did, around two women in a positive, upbeat way. Back then, Hollywood females were usually the wives or girlfriends of male heroes, and there was little representation of women’s everyday emotional reality.
“Going to film school in the 1970s, I was growing up in a new feminist environment. I’ve always had female protagonists. To me it was a natural decision,” says Susan Seidelman, with whom I spoke in New York. “There weren’t many female directors at that time, and I didn’t want to work on territory that guys had already mined. Desperately Seeking Susan was not just for a female audience—it was one of the first female-driven films able to get a commercial hold on the marketplace.”
After starting out as a fashion student from Philadelphia, Seidelman went on to graduate from NYU Film School in the late 70s. She studied film at an exciting time. “I lived downtown, in the East Village, under Philimore East rock club. It was very funky. New York was going through a recession. It had a bankruptcy crisis that was bad for the city but great for the arts scene. Everything was cheap, and there were a lot of abandoned buildings. The punk independent film scene rose out of that. It was very atmospheric.” Here she made her first low-budget feature film, Smithereens. Costarring Richard Hell of the Voidoids, it was a “blank generation” hit about the adventures of a groupie in downtown Manhattan. Selected to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982, it put Seidelman on the map as an up-and-coming director.
As a result, she was sent dozens of scripts, but only one stood out:
Desperately Seeking Susan, written by Leora Barish. “It dealt with two worlds that I knew,” explains Seidelman. “I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I know what being a bored suburban girl was like. I could’ve been Roberta Glass. I also moved to New York and knew what was funky and appealing about the world of downtown Manhattan. The film was a fantasy about crossing over from one world into another…about who we are on the outside and who we want to be on the inside.”
The script also chimed with the preoccupations of young 80s women. “The character of Roberta was a stereotypical female figure taking control of her destiny, and not fitting in with her husband and family. It fitted in with feminist ideas of the time. Feminists of the 70s were passing on those ideas, and in the early 80s we were redefining ourselves.”
When it came to casting, Rosanna Arquette was chosen for the role of Roberta. She was a starlet who had made a name for herself playing the girlfriend of murderer Gary Gilmore in the 1982 TV film The Executioner’s Song. “There was a big buzz about her,” recalls Seidelman. Finding Susan was a trickier proposition. Many new young promising actresses were auditioned, including Ellen Barkin, Melanie Griffith, Kelly McGillis, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Despite their credentials, none were right for the part. Seidelman then looked to the New York music scene, and Madonna, who was living down the street from her at the time. This was before “Like a Virgin,” when the singer was still relatively unknown.
“Although she wasn’t an experienced actress, there was something about her attitude. She was so self-confident and right for the character,” says Seidelman. “I thought, If we can bring this quality to the part, that will be amazing. The studio were more cautious. They were used to actors with previous experience. But the Smithereens stars weren’t regular actors. I felt confident I could get that quality onto film; I didn’t mind about the film résumé.”
Ellen Barkin was Orion Pictures’ first choice, but Seidelman talked them into doing a screen test for Madonna. The studio wanted to keep the film at a modest $6 million budget, but what really swung it for Madonna was the fact that the son of the studio boss had seen her “Lucky Star” video on MTV and declared her “hot.”
Shooting began in September 1984, and, from the beginning, the mood was buoyant. The film is memorable because of the attention to detail. There’s the opening shot of Roberta in a beauty parlor, with pampering pedicures, hairstyling, and The Chiffons singing “One Fine Day.” Shot through cameraman Ed Lachman’s pinky gel (a technique that was groundbreaking at the time), all this captured a retro, girlish world. Then we move to Susan blowing bubble gum and taking Polaroids of herself in a hotel room. The camera dwells on her fishnet gloves, customized jacket, bangles, and round hatbox packed with the trinkets of an urban-drifter lifestyle. It’s that eye for detail that gives the film its authenticity, that speaks so accurately to its female audience. There’s that first shot where Roberta sees Susan, the latter nonchalantly striking a match on her boot and lighting a cigarette. There’s Susan, putting on a stolen Nefertiti earring, a multimillion-dollar Egyptian artifact, as if it’s a thrift-store find. And Susan, wearing big old trousers and drying her underarms in a train-station ladies’ room, her black bra showing under a pink top. This is her version of girly grooming.
“That’s one of my favorite moments,” recalls Seidelman. “It tells you everything you need to know about the character without relying on stereotypical shots or poses. Maybe guys would resort to more femme fatale visual clichés.” As the artist Andy Warhol later noted appreciatively in his diary: “Madonna…does some good things, she sleeps in the bathtub and dresses up and shoplifts.”
Susan’s wardrobe was based on what was in Madonna’s closet at home. According to Seidelman, stylist Santo Loquasto brought out what was vivid about the way she already dressed, without imposing a style on her. Maripol remembers it differently. “Madonna was always complaining over the phone: ‘It’s horrible, they want me to wear retro clothes,’ and I said, ‘Don’t do that, take advantage of the movie to simply stay Madonna…use this opportunity.’ She was coming over to my house every night and we changed the look they had created for her. She really insisted on keeping her own style and they agreed.”
The film also features Madonna’s pumping, worldwide number one “Into the Groove.” Cowritten and coproduced by Steve Bray, the song captured Madonna’s irresistible ebullience. It’s the soundtrack to the film’s underground club scene, shot with regulars at the Danceteria. Here, on the dance floor, Madonna is queen of all she surveys, this is her territory.
Seidelman drew out of Madonna what’s been widely acknowledged as her best film performance yet. She has often worked well with female directors. “Maybe it’s
a more down-to-earth relationship because there isn’t the kind of sexual politics and games that men and women play. There’s less of the sexual bullshit,” Seidelman says. She was also fortunate in that she worked with the star before the latter became famous. “I found Madonna easy to work with. It was a relatively low-key set. In the beginning, there’s a scene with her walking down St. Mark’s Place, going to sell her jacket at a vintage store. Because she wasn’t well known at the time, we didn’t have bodyguards, agents, managers—it was very organic. But by the time we finished filming, her Like a Virgin album had just hit and we could no longer just film on the street without crowd control. Things changed considerably within two months.”
Seidelman bridles at the oft-repeated truism that Madonna was successful in the movie because she was playing herself. “I’ve heard that it was ‘Madonna just being Madonna.’ In all fairness, acting isn’t easy. You’re saying lines you have to learn, there are marks on the floor where you have to stand, the camera is just two feet away. Anyone knows that making a fictional movie with a crew of a hundred people is not a documentary. I felt Madonna was a very self-disciplined person, who was able to learn those skills that make you an actress. Because she was a dancer, her sense of timing was good. She’d done videos, she used the camera, she knew how to project herself. She was able to deliver scripted lines in a way that was believable, not wooden or posy.”