by Lucy O'Brien
The next major event on Madonna’s calendar was her wedding to Sean Penn, which took place on her twenty-seventh birthday on the grounds of a cliff-top house in Point Durne, near Malibu Beach. The A-list gathered, a glittering throng that included Cher, Diane Keaton, Carrie Fisher, Andy Warhol, Martin Sheen, and Christopher Walken. While many famous acquaintances were there, some of her old friends from New York weren’t invited. Andy Warhol was surprised that Johnny Dynell did not get an invitation. “‘But you’re her friend!’ Andy said to me,” Dynell recalls. “‘That doesn’t make any difference. I’m not in a movie.’ Then Andy said: ‘You should just ride her coattails, she’s going to be so famous.’ ‘She is already.’ ‘No, but even more!’”
On her wedding day, Madonna wore white taffeta and a bowler hat that was buffeted by the wind. Despite tight security, news of the venue had been leaked to the press, and in their determination to get a shot, photographers disrupted the ceremony by hovering over the site in helicopters. “It was very bonkers,” recalls James Foley, who was Penn’s best man. “Suddenly the sky was full of helicopters and you couldn’t hear a word the preacher was saying. It’s common now to have paparazzi shooting pictures from the air, but then helicopters were only used like that by police tracking down criminals. Madonna and I thought it was amusing, but Sean was not amused at all.”
Bill Meyers also recalls the craziness. “I was standing next to Martin Sheen as the helicopters came in. He was flinching and jerking involuntarily because it reminded him of his experience in filming Apocalypse Now. Madonna was going ballistic, giving them the finger, while Sean was running in the house for his shotgun. The funniest thing about it was they were serious. It wasn’t staged.” Despite the gravity with which she took her vows, Madonna ended up laughing at the spectacle. “It turned into a circus,” she said. “You couldn’t have written it in a movie. No one would have believed it.” An hour after the ceremony, in an attack that was to be the first of many, a drunken Penn grappled with Kip Rano, a U.K. photographer, who had crashed the wedding with a hidden camera.
Andy Warhol considered it the most thrilling weekend of his life. It was “the perfect mixture of nobodies and celebrities,” and the hovering helicopters were “the most exciting thing ever.” He painted a vivid portrait in his diary, saying, “I looked really close at Madonna and she is beautiful. And she and Sean are just so in love. She wore white and a black bowler hat, I don’t know what that was supposed to mean.” Nightclub owner Steve Rubell was “really out of it on I guess Quaaludes. And I think I saw Madonna kick him away from her and later he threw up in the car. She was dancing with the only little boy there…. And those young actors seemed like they were in their fathers’ suits, like Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise. All those movie-star boys with the strong legs who’re 5’10” or so. I guess that’s the new Hollywood look.”
The next day Sean celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday as the couple jetted off to Antigua for their honeymoon. After their return, they settled in Beverly Hills and took the obvious next step of starring in a film together. When they got the script for Shanghai Surprise, a romantic adventure set in 1930s China, they envisioned a modern classic along the lines of The African Queen, the 1951 John Huston film starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. Shanghai Surprise, however, was an altogether more prosaic affair. Produced by ex-Beatle George Harrison’s Handmade Films, it was a messy amalgam of textbook action adventure and arch romance. Madonna stars as Gloria Tatlock, a prim missionary who hires an adventurer (played by Sean) to track down a stash of opium for wounded soldiers before it falls into criminal hands. It was a challenging role for Madonna to play. Gloria Tatlock was “someone very removed from how I actually am…I still needed a role where I could prove to people that I could really act.”
This was a risky decision for her. Desperately Seeking Susan had worked well for Madonna because it revolved around a world she knew. She had also worked with Susan Seidelman, a sympathetic director skilled at motivating non-actors. In Shanghai Surprise, Madonna was playing in a period piece, totally removed from her daily experience. This would have been challenging even for a seasoned actress. No wonder her performance seems stilted, self-conscious, and inconsistent. In one scene she plays prim and proper, while in the next she is handling cash like a hustler and seducing Penn’s character with admirable ease for a moral-bound missionary. Madonna complained afterward that the director, Jim Goddard, “had no knowledge of what he was doing…[he] didn’t have an eye for the big screen and it seemed as if he was in a bit over his head.” Though he was an accomplished TV director, this was his first major feature. As Seidelman pointed out, Madonna liked a lot of direction, and maybe this wasn’t Goddard’s style.
They were also filming in difficult circumstances, in a run-down, dangerous area of Hong Kong, where gangs daily demanded protection money just so the crew could keep filming. They were at one location for eighteen hours, for instance, because a man had blocked the exit and demanded $50,000 to move. It was a freezing cold January, rats ran under the trailers, and cast and crew were down with food poisoning. To top it all off, they were hounded by the international press eager to get an intimate shot of the star couple. Penn lashed out at a photographer caught in their hotel room. His overt hostility to the press and her exasperation with the whole filming process led to their being dubbed “the poison Penns,” a nickname that stuck. “I kept saying, ‘I can’t wait till I can look back on this thing, I can’t wait,’” said Madonna. “It was a survival test. I know I can get through anything now.”
George Harrison flew out to see the stricken crew, and when they returned to England to shoot indoor scenes at Shepperton Studios, he called a press conference in an effort to smooth over the situation. By then, little could be redeemed, especially when the couple’s limousine accidentally ran over a photographer’s foot. Madonna lashed out at Harrison, saying, “He has given me more advice on how to deal with the press than how to work on a movie.”
The ex-Beatle later commented that onscreen Sean looked “pissed off” rather than professional, while Madonna had fallen into the trap of being a “famous pop star…They get surrounded by people saying how fab they are, all these sycophants. You have to see it from the other side, too—it sometimes does get you crazy when you can’t do anything because everybody’s bugging you and shooting cameras in your face. So I can sympathize from that point of view, too. But all Madonna needs is five hundred milligrams of some good LSD.”
When it was released in August 1986, the film was universally panned. Variety dismissed it as “a phony…concoction,” while esteemed critic Leslie Halliwell called it “astonishingly abysmal.”
Andy Warhol was slightly more impressed: “I was the only one awake in the theater but the movie isn’t bad,” he wrote in his diary. “Madonna was beautiful, the clothes were great.” For Madonna, the experience was bitterly disappointing. And for Sean, who’d been carefully building up his reputation as a serious actor, it was galling. “As a friend, please don’t watch it,” he once said to Chrissie Hynde. It’s notable that he and Madonna never worked on a movie together again.
Madonna was on safer ground with her music career. In the autumn of the previous year, she had began recording her third album,
True Blue. For this she teamed up in the studio for the first time with producer Pat Leonard. He helped her create the quintessential commercial Madonna sound. Her debut album had been disparate songs in search of an artist, while the quirky Like a Virgin was a sound in development. With certain tracks on True Blue she nailed her signature style—rhythmic, dramatic, danceable, and distinctively melodic. Leonard drew melodies out of her as if he was excavating a pit. He looked beyond the dance diva and the ironic pop princess to find something more personal.
It took a while before she trusted him in the studio. A musical director on Madonna’s Like a Virgin tour, Leonard had been eager for her to notice him as a songwriter. “They had a tumultuous relationship,” recalls B
ill Meyers. “Pat was as relentless as Madonna—a hard worker and a fine musician. He knew that with Madonna the smart move would be to push her to write with him. He’d leave tapes at her hotel door and be dismayed at her ignoring them. I would have given up, but he kept offering them to her. Then, through the course of the tour, he made friends with Sean, and Sean invited Pat to have a go at the soundtrack for At Close Range. If you don’t get in with Madonna, you go to the one closest to her!”
The result was “Live to Tell,” a mood-driven song that appealed to Madonna’s sense of drama. With her unerring instinct for successful collaborators, she decided to make Leonard the main producer on her new album. “She needed someone with strong ideas. They fought continuously. Pat’s a proud, incredibly creative person, and so’s she. They worked really hard together,” says guitarist Bruce Gaitsch, who played on many of the True Blue sessions.
Though the album has been her biggest seller, the initial recording was in a tiny studio in Leonard’s basement. “The studio was so small that, besides tape and recording equipment, there was only room for two people,” Gaitsch recalls. “You don’t need big rooms to make big records.” Madonna was in a giddy mood. “She’d just learned to drive. She rented a car and on the first day drove it through Pat’s fence. He wasn’t too happy about that!” The accident didn’t dent her optimism, however. “She was having a blast. She’d just show up, stick her gum on the mike, and sing. And she was totally in love with a sexy, fun, nice guy. Sean would come to the studio sometimes, jingling his car keys. He wanted to get her outta there as fast as he could. They were so into each other.”
Madonna was also feeling elated because it was the first record she coproduced. “She didn’t have to hire expensive people anymore. Although True Blue turned out to be her biggest album, the previous record she recorded (Like a Virgin) was four times more expensive, because it was with a famous producer,” says Gaitsch.
The first song she and Leonard laid down was the declarative “Open Your Heart,” which was written by Gardner Cole, songwriter for a host of 80s chart acts including Cher, Michael MacDonald, and Tina Turner. “I composed it with Peter Rafelson (son of the famous director Bob Rafelson). It took a long time to get it together—we worked on it, on and off, for about a year,” he says. A demanding song to sing, with a wide octave range and long notes, Madonna simplified it before recording. “She dropped a few lines out of the bridge and took out the second half,” Cole recalls. He was pleased with her delivery. “It’s a powerful song with a high range for her. She wasn’t used to belting stuff out, and this opened up a whole new range for her. It’s one of the first songs where she used a hard voice—most of the others were pretty light, but with ‘Open Your Heart’ she had to dig in. It’s not easy to sing, it took her a long time to get it right.” The labor paid off, because it went straight to number one in the United States when it was later released. “I was so thrilled,” remembers Cole, “my publishers framed a Billboard for me.”
Madonna’s songs had always been easy on the ear, leading to the assumption by many critics that her sound was routine, formulaic pop—what cultural theorist Theodor Adorno would have called “standardization” and rapper Vanilla Ice “friendly-ass corny shit.” In 1941, Adorno sealed a “high art/low art” divide in pop music criticism when he wrote: “In popular music, position is absolute. Every detail is substitutable; it serves its function only as a cog in the machine.” For years, Madonna was underestimated as a musician, because of the deceptive simplicity of her songs. Some album tracks were mere “cogs in the machine,” but her singles always had rich melody lines and lyrical twists. “Open Your Heart” marked a step up for her to a sound that was popular and radio-friendly, but still ambitious. As she grew more confident with her voice, her songs gained depth.
With its sophisticated sheen, True Blue took Madonna firmly out of the dance-diva category into a global pop market. It wove the teen appeal of the 60s girl-group sound into chunkier dance textures, with a mood that was up and unassailable. Madonna was newly married and supremely optimistic. Never again would she sound as pristine and sure. As well as the percussive, joyful air of “Open Your Heart,” there was the jubilant title track, where she revisited the Motown girl-group sound she had grown up with. A song that echoed the call-and-response simplicity of The Dixie Cups’ 1964 hit “Chapel of Love,” it featured Siedah Garratt and Edie Lehman on back vocals, and had the clarity of a convent-school-choir-meets-the-projects. It was a ditty that verged on schmaltzy nostalgia but for the fact that Madonna’s voice rang out with such conviction.
This sense of romantic thrill reverberates through the busy, good-time dance track “Where’s the Party.” It also flows into “La Isla Bonita,” a song with music that Gaitsch and Leonard originally wrote for Michael Jackson. “He didn’t want it, thank God. I didn’t like him. I always thought he was a freak, just creepy. He gave me the willies, like meeting a ghost of a person,” says Gaitsch. Leonard then suggested they give it to Madonna, who was in Hong Kong at the time, filming Shanghai Surprise. “I was so glad it went to her. She’s the most present person there is, a force to be reckoned with.”
Unhappy and pining in Hong Kong, Madonna wrote lyrics about her ideal place, a far-off tropical island in the sun. When she told them what the title was, Gaitsch was shocked. “I thought, oh great, that’ll never be a hit. It was so simple. But then I was wrong. It’s hugely popular, and it has become the national anthem for the island of San Pedro.” It’s Gaitsch’s Latin-flavored guitar part that really makes the song distinctive. “This one evolved naturally. I try to do the best for the song and I like strong melodies. I don’t like lots of notes, just notes that matter.”
With its vivid Latin influence, the song was later seen as an attempt to reach the massive Hispanic demographic in the United States. It became a major hit, going to number one in the United Kingdom and number three in the United States, and was accompanied by a striking video featuring Madonna in a rich red dress dancing flamenco. Madonna dedicated it to the “beauty and mystery of the Latin-American people.” Not everyone was entranced with this, however. Miami-based star Gloria Estefan wryly told me at the time: “It’s only Anglos who see her as having popularized Spanish. Madonna’s a bit confused about her Spanish. She mentions a tropical island in the sun—that’s Puerto Rico, then samba—that’s Latino, and then flamenco guitar—that’s Spain. There’s a mishmash of everything in the song. But hey, every little bit helps!”
For this album, Madonna’s love for Sean seeped into every song. “White Heat,” one of the less successful tracks she wrote with Leonard, is a slightly plodding tribute to actor James Cagney, whose unhinged gangster in the 1949 movie is driven to notoriety by the death of his mother. There were some parallels with her life here, not just in Madonna’s loss of her mother but also the romanticizing of Sean as a violent bad boy. He pops up again as a lovable wild card on the tune “Jimmy Jimmy.” She just can’t get him out of her head. “She was very much in love. It was obvious if she’s in love she’ll write love songs,” said a sage Steve Bray, who produced four tracks on the album (including a coproduction of “Where’s the Party” with Leonard).
While Leonard set the tone for much of this album, Bray also contributed to its high pop alchemy. The opening track, “Papa Don’t Preach,” is one of his triumphs. Written by Brian Elliot with additional lyrics by Madonna, it is an 80s take on girl-group pop opera, described by her as “a message song that everyone is going to take the wrong way.” Beginning with a dramatic string intro—“That was the first time she worked with a large live string section,” says Bill Meyers, who arranged the intro, “it led to a prosperous career for me as an arranger, a lot of success came out of that”—and underscored by Bray’s clipped, assured drumming, this is an adolescent girl’s plea to be taken seriously. She’s pregnant, she’s struggling, and she tells her disciplinarian dad she wants to keep the baby. Madonna’s voice is rougher than on previous records. Here she sings in
a grainy, deeper register, as if constantly on the verge of tears. It’s a compelling song with a problematic message. Anti-abortion groups heartily approved of the song, while many others criticized it for condoning teenage pregnancy.
As is often the case with Madonna, the song became inextricably linked to the video. Against a decaying New York skyline, Madonna plays a gamine teenager with cropped blond hair and a heart-stoppingly pretty car-mechanic boyfriend. Her estranged, heavyset Italian father (Danny Aiello) is doing his best to bring up his daughter alone, yet feeling inadequate to the task. These scenes of social realism are intercut with Madonna in a body-hugging black leotard, with bleached hair and glamorous red lips, doing a spotlighted Flashdance-style dance routine.
James Foley directed the video with his trademark attention to gritty detail. “Madonna said she wanted to play a character. Narrative videos at that time, with a little story, were new. We filmed it in Staten Island, New York, where I grew up. I wanted people I went to high school with to read about it and be jealous!” he says. Unlike some of her wooden movie appearances, Madonna is comfortable with video. She projects an image, and uses her body like a dancer, aware of the subtle shapes she can create through posture or expression. “The indigenously glamorous Catholic working-class girl—Madonna pushes that button very well,” says Foley. “It was her idea to cut to her dancing on a black stage; very much the ‘hot-fudge sundae’ concept (that is, contrasting shots) of the heat of the dancing and the coldness of the other scenes. Something bothered me, which shows how Catholic I am. I asked her, ‘Can a pregnant woman dance around in this skintight black thing?’ She just laughed as if it was the most ridiculous thing she’d heard in her life.”