by Lucy O'Brien
Seidelman suggests that later movies didn’t work so well for Madonna because of the “layers of bullshit” that accompany celebrity. “In subsequent films, I don’t know if there were a lot more agents, managers, and hangers-on. As a performer becomes an icon, it makes it harder for people to see beyond the icon ‘baggage.’”
Although she was a newcomer to Hollywood filmmaking, Madonna handled the situation with aplomb. “I’ve never seen her nervous,” says Seidelman. She showed unusual self-control, pursuing a strenuous exercise regime. “First call for the actors would be around six thirty in the morning. Madonna was picked up even earlier. Before she showed up on set, she’d get up about four a.m. to swim laps at the YMCA. She had amazing self-discipline.”
By the time the film was released eight months later, the Madonna circus was in full swing. For Rosanna Arquette, this was a little galling. When the project was initiated, she was the star element that got the film green-lighted. By the time filming was finished, the press were speaking of “the Madonna movie.” Arquette complained later: “I thought I was going to be making this small, charming film, not some rock video.” Seidelman concurs: “It must have been disorienting. Circumstances had changed. And Madonna’s character got to wear the funkier clothes, do the fun stuff, while Rosanna’s character was a frumpy housewife in pink chiffon. It had to be hard.” Seidelman could see the film reflecting real life. “Ironically, the subtext of the Roberta character strangely paralleled the whole Madonna phenomenon that was to follow. There’d be all these Madonna dress-alikes, wanting to be like her.”
Madonna’s free-spirited energy pulsated from the screen. The release of the film coincided with her Like a Virgin world tour, where many people would see her live for the first time. It was at this point that many “got” her. In the tour video, she is a study of pure exuberance. Warm, engaging, funny, she speaks directly to her predominantly female audience. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Dan Kleinman, director of the video. “The crowd was made up almost totally of girls dressed like her.” He shot the film on the last date of the tour in Detroit. “We were given a very tight budget,” he remembers, “so we had to be as inventive as we could with just a few cameras. It wasn’t easy. Live videos weren’t a big priority in the music business then—the full concert film with backstage shots and arty angles; that didn’t come till later.”
Although it is a basic, no-frills production, the film captures Madonna’s earthy appeal. Wearing a turquoise miniskirt, purple leggings, and booties, she wiggles her wide butt and round belly, yelling out, “Are you ready? Tonight you’re mine!” with unfettered delight. The show is no more complicated than two backup dancers, a band, and a few costume changes, but it’s definitive. Madonna sings slightly flat and out of breath, while dancing strict, choreographed routines. She changes into black leggings and crucifix for her chic, pop, biker-chick look, and then wears her white wedding outfit for the “Material Girl” finale. At the end of the song, she shouts to the girls in the front row: “I’m not a material girl, ain’t that right ladies?” Throwing off her fake mink stole and diamonds, she yells, “I don’t need money; I need love!”
It’s an emotional night for her. She gazes out over the crowd, jubilant through her tears. “I was never elected the homecoming queen or anything, but I sure feel like one now,” she says, trembling. For many women, this was the moment we realized she was one of us. She was eager to reach her female fans, and though the sexuality projected in her videos seemed to be aimed at men, there was a mischievous subtext that we could find if we looked hard enough. The joy was that in the live show this subtext became totally transparent. Here we got the Madonna who loves life and other girls, because she seemed so comfortable in her own skin. She was a celebrant and conduit for female energy. This was an explosive message for young 80s women finding it hard to express their sexual desires at the same time as they were fighting for equality. With a glorious disregard for male approval, Madonna expressed the urges that many of us felt compelled to hide: her obvious libido and lack of inhibition were powerful tools.
“I like to combine things but in a humorous way, like a uniform skirt and fishnets,” she said at the time. “I love dresses like Marilyn Monroe wore, those 50s dresses that were really tailored to fit a voluptuous body. A lot of stuff made now is for an androgynous figure, and it doesn’t look good on me.” She dismissed her critics by saying that her fans came from a wide age range and all kinds of backgrounds. “If they’re happy, I’m happy—so much for all the goofs who want to decide if my show deserves an R or an X rating.” Maripol did a merchandising line with Madonna for the tour, and sold truckloads of bracelets and crucifixes. Her New York shop, Maripolitan, was doing big business. “It was great—I refilled, refilled, refilled, you know? There was such a craze with my rubber bracelets.”
The Virgin tour was different from the stadium spectacles Madonna went on to produce. Running across the United States from April to June, it was essentially a rock gig that grew and grew as more people responded to the Madonna phenomenon. 1985 was her year. “We started in Seattle playing to two thousand people, and then all hell broke loose. We ended up playing Madison Square Garden in New York with a capacity of twenty-two thousand,” recalls Bill Meyers, the keyboardist in her live band.
He remembers being contacted by Pat Leonard, who had been hired as musical director after his work on Michael Jackson’s Victory tour. “There was a band tryout and all but one of the members were accepted. The one who didn’t get it was a great guitar player, but he was losing his hair. Madonna wasn’t too happy about that. After I was chosen, she came up to me and said: ‘You’re the most like a man, you’re the most mature.’ I thought that was pretty forward, but kinda nice.” The band, including drummer Jonathan Moffet and James Harrah on guitar, were forced into shiny Nehru-collar suits with Beatle boots. “They were godawful,” laughs Meyers. Like the gangsters in the Quentin Tarantino film Reservoir Dogs, each musician had to pick his color. “Pat Leonard was working on his synthesizer when the tailor came, so the only thing left for him was silver. He was fighting a weight problem at the time, so he ended up with his gut hanging out, looking like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. We laughed uproariously, and he disappeared. Five minutes later, Madonna stormed out to me, yelling, ‘You asshole. He’s demanding another suit, and it’s all your fault!’ I tweaked the tail of the dragon there,” Meyers adds mischievously. Leonard had to wear the silver suit all the way through the tour, with Madonna encouraging him to work out when it was over.
Madonna’s relationship with Leonard was intense from the start. A respected musical director and keyboardist who went on to play with Pink Floyd, he had more of a rock sensibility. When he was initially approached to musically direct her tour, he declined, saying she was “too poppy.” Madonna then called him personally and persuaded him to change his mind. “I’ve never known anyone so direct in all my life,” he said. “She knew exactly what she wanted and what she expected…. It typified Madonna.” Once on board, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the project, smoothly translating her sound on record to a live format.
There was a sense of camaraderie on this tour, and a democratic dynamic. “Madonna was young and new and inexperienced. She relied on the musicians a lot more than other tours did. We were up on stage with her,” says Meyers. As ever, she worked hard. “She always impressed me as someone who did the absolute most with what she had. At one point, she asked to do some vocal takedowns with me, her and the vocal coach. Some singers feel they don’t have to do much, but she did.” A trainer was brought on tour with her, and she would run five miles a day. “She and her dancers invited me to play basketball, so I joined them and they had me dying after five minutes of strenuous workout!”
Morale was good. Madonna had seven U.S. top-five singles throughout 1985, including four number ones, so as the hits racked up, Madonna-mania spread from city to city. Although she loved her fame, the constant pressure and lack of privacy wa
s a challenge. “I saw her grow up as the tour went on,” observes Meyers. “She had fears and insecurities, but she had the courage to stand up and face those things. She didn’t run away from the challenge.”
He met her father, Tony Ciccone, when they played Detroit. “Madonna had talked about him, the conflict they had. So I was surprised, when I met him, at how soft-spoken and caring he was. He was in a no-win situation. She wasn’t real comfortable with showing insecurity…and people who showed insecurity—she’d have a hard time with that. I would talk back to her and she liked that. She liked other people to be strong.”
While they were on tour, something happened that indicated how much the phenomenon was escalating out of control. “We played a bizarre, standing-room-only venue in San Francisco. The promoters didn’t realize what a force she was becoming. The place was absolutely jam-packed. Even Prince had come, and was standing with his bodyguards, a hooded figure in the middle. Madonna was working the crowd, getting close to the edge of the stage. I could see people reaching out to grab her and pull her down, so I shouted as loud as I could, ‘Stay away from the front of the stage!’” recalls Meyers. “Afterward she came to me and said, ‘Thanks.’ She could see it was getting out of control. She didn’t do any more gigs like that. She was getting too big.”
Meyers and his fellow musicians took their direct access to her for granted. On later tours, musicians were less the visual focus. They were seen as more of a “pit band,” there to accompany the stage show. “I heard she would get mad if musicians didn’t address her through the proper channels. After the film Truth or Dare came out, people asked me: ‘Was she really like that?’ It wasn’t always like that. Ultimate power corrupts,” he says.
While the Like a Virgin album and tour transformed her career, Madonna’s personal life, too, was changing. Gradually, she would bring that more and more into her work, creating a story that was as disturbing as it was compelling. With the entrance of Sean Penn, she shifted to another gear, and the footloose Aphrodite got hitched.
7
MAKEUP IN THAT GREAT HOLLYWOOD WAY
It was the end of 1984. Sean had broken up with his previous girlfriend [Elizabeth McGovern] , and he was living on my couch. We were watching MTV and “Like a Virgin” came on. Sean mentioned that a friend’s sister was working as assistant director on a new music video called “Material Girl.” I lived in Hollywood quite close by, so we decided to go down and check out this chick.
—Film director James Foley, on the first time he and best friend Sean Penn talked about Madonna
AT THIS POINT, SEAN PENN HAD ALREADY MADE A NAME for himself as one of the emerging Hollywood “Brat Pack” actors, a group that included Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, and Molly Ringwald. Sean was devoted to acting, having done repertory theater as a teenager. While he was in high school, he made a sixty-minute Super-8 film with his brother Christopher (who also became a Hollywood actor), called Looking for Someone. “We were out all night in Westwood, shooting in parking lots and doing stunts that nobody would ask a stuntman to do,” he said. This fearlessness became a strong element in his acting. He could take emotional risks and improvise much like, as the late film critic Pauline Kael suggested, a young Marlon Brando or James Dean. By the time he met Madonna, he had already received acclaim for such film roles as the rebellious military cadet in Taps and the surfer stoner in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Though gifted, Sean was building up a reputation as a young hothead, on-and offscreen—which increased his desirability to women. He had been engaged to rocker Bruce Springsteen’s sister Pamela, and Elizabeth McGovern was one of his costars. The twenty-four-year-old liked to appear cool, however, and despite the fact that it was his suggestion to go to the “Material Girl” video shoot, Sean seemed unmoved by the early Madonna. “When we were sitting around talking about who’s hot, he never expressed any particular notice of her,” maintains Foley.
Neither, it seems, did she. Although she said later that she saw Penn on the set and thought, There’s my future husband, when they approached her, the reception was lukewarm. “Madonna was getting made up between shots. She was correct, polite, and no more. By that time Sean was famous. He’d been on the cover of Rolling Stone. She knew who he was, but made no indication that she did. She reminded me of how somebody acts when they’re the queen of England. It wasn’t unattractive, there was no social awkwardness. Just very straight-ahead,” recalls Foley.
At that point, Madonna had other things on her mind. Her career was blossoming, but her personal life was fraught. For the previous two years, her boyfriend Jellybean had been her rock and her ally. He had helped her steer a path through the business, but because he was equally ambitious, they often ended up competing with one another. While their relationship was falling apart, she found herself pregnant with his child. She decided not to keep the baby, but it was an agonizing decision for her. While she cavorted on a soundstage in pink satin, à la Marilyn Monroe, she was feeling torn inside. Foley sensed that discrepancy between her private and public self. “The way she acts when she’s dancing around in costume and being Marilyn Monroe is a totally different person from the one sitting in the chair getting made up. As I got to know her, I saw that difference between her onstage and offstage personality again and again.”
As Madonna extricated herself from her relationship with Jellybean, she began spending time with Sean. “At first, she was a minor interest for him. They did old-fashioned dating for a while. It wasn’t passionate love at first sight in the beginning, but it slowly became that for both of them. It was kinda unexpected. Marriage wasn’t on either of their minds,” says Foley. But within a few months, something clicked. “Suddenly they were madly in love and inseparable and couldn’t wait to get married. She became the center of Sean’s life.”
Meeting Sean caused a huge shift in Madonna’s life. He became her protector and a jealous, domineering force. But he was also her artistic alter ego—moody, troubled, prone to violence, but passionately dedicated to his craft. His aesthetic was one informed by writers like Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski, the rugged, disaffected American individualist. His single-minded vision was the opposite of hers. Brought up in pampered Hollywood, he was cynical about celebrity, unimpressed by names and fame. His brattish air of privilege was tempered by strong political convictions and an alienation from the star system that spawned him.
Madonna left behind her world in New York and settled on the West Coast with Sean. This caused a little consternation among her old clubbing friends, many of whom had their reservations about Sean. Danceteria DJ and musician Johnny Dynell recalls: “Sean would say things like ‘your faggot friends.’ He was kinda stupid back then.” With Sean, however, Madonna could cement her dream of becoming a movie star. She found someone as rebellious and ambitious as she was, with the sense of artistic confidence she sometimes doubted in herself. He, meanwhile, thought he’d found a soul mate who understood his needs. “The only thing I’m certain about is the choices I’ve made in relation to acting,” he said at the time. “The other stuff is just part of the experience. I’ve met someone whom I always want to be with, she takes care of me. She knows what I’m doing without me having to say anything.” When they decided to get married, he didn’t fully appreciate how much of the press attention, which he loathed, would be focused on him. “She was in the process of becoming the biggest star in the world. I just wanted to make my films and hide,” he said later. “I was an angry young man. I had a lot of demons and don’t really know who could’ve lived with me at the time.”
His demons were severely challenged when shortly after they set a wedding date, nude pictures of Madonna taken when she was penniless and modeling in New York were featured in both Playboy and Penthouse magazines. Although she was secretly excited by the publicity this generated, she scorned the use of the pictures, appearing at Live Aid in several layers of frumpy clothing on a sweltering July day. Live Aid for her was a moment
ous event.
A marathon fund-raising trans-global benefit for the starving millions in Ethiopia, Live Aid took place in London and in Philadelphia on July 13, 1985, featuring every chart act at the time, from Phil Collins to Tina Turner and Queen. Bill Meyers was part of Madonna’s live band for the show. “It was a pretty wild experience. No one really knew what it was about until everyone in the world came to the hotel in one day! There was so much money dropped on cars, rooms, flowers, and so on. There was a really good vibe. It felt special,” he says.
Although Live Aid was a supposedly egalitarian event for an important cause, that didn’t stop backstage assertion of the pop hierarchy. Meyers noted the graciousness of old-school Hollywood stars like Jack Nicholson and Timothy Hutton, and “Phil Collins couldn’t have been nicer.” But Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon “was there with a couple of model girlfriends and wouldn’t give you the time of day. We were dirt on the linoleum. The Thompson Twins lavished Le Bon with praise, and looked at me like, ‘Who are you?’” Bolstered by her relationship with Penn, Madonna was also anxious to assert her celebrity A-list status.
She felt snubbed when a backstage organizer told her that she would have to vacate her trailer after a couple of hours. “He was some guy from Philly, with a real Philly accent, saying, ‘Just to let you know you can stay in your trailer from one thirty till three p.m., and then Tina Turner gets it. There’s only so many trailers…,’” laughs Meyers. When Madonna protested, the organizer turned to someone and said: “Hey, I don’t even like the broad. If Madonna don’t want to split, I don’t care.” Eventually Madonna and Penn were moved to a different trailer that they could keep for the rest of the day.
Despite her haughtiness behind the scenes, onstage she won over the global audience with a warm, wry performance. “I remember the sun burning on my face…and I was really hot and it was right at the time when the Playboy magazine had come out and people were screaming, ‘Take it off, take it off!’ And I said, ‘I ain’t taking shit off!’” Madonna said later. “Before I went on, I really thought, I can’t do this. I just can’t. I was so unsure of what was going to happen…So I decided to be a warrior, and it worked, and that was the first time that I really understood my power.” Afterward she was the one woman photographed amid a lineup featuring all the “great and good,” from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to Bob Dylan. This publicity shot showed how far she had broken down the barriers of the “old-boy network.” Finally she was making a global impact.