Madonna

by Lucy O'Brien

  One of the most memorable aspects of the video is Madonna’s T-shirt, emblazoned with the slogan ITALIANS DO IT BETTER. “That was a masterstroke,” recalls Foley. “She had someone send it to me on set, asking if it was all right to wear. ‘Yeah! That’s great!’ I said. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d seen it on someone in the street and bought it from her. It made me laugh when people said she was calculating. She’s not at all. She could be very spontaneous.” The video marked a new direction for Madonna, and a more streamlined look. It was less stylized and arch, reflecting her slowly growing stature as an artist. “I’m proud of that video. It caught the essential elements of her in a correct way and put them side by side. It showed two very different individuals in the same body. That’s real acting,” declares Foley.

  Madonna also conveyed passion and sense of theater on “Live to Tell,” a True Blue track that took her away from the bubblegum image and presaged the dark tones of Like a Prayer. With its oblique lyrics and dense strings, this is a forceful morality ballad. She sings of the burning power of past secrets and shame. Secrecy, initiation, and the gaining of knowledge were to become key themes in her work—here she sings of it for the first time. It was also featured on the soundtrack to At Close Range. Directed by James Foley, the movie was a brutal father-son drama about a criminal who returns home to kill those he feels know too much about his past. Starring Sean Penn and Christopher Walken, it received mixed reviews when it first came out in 1986, but has since achieved a major cult status.

  Although “Live to Tell” was an obvious hit, there was opposition from Warner about putting the song on the film soundtrack. “I remember having lunch with Madonna and a big-cheese record executive. She got up to go to the bathroom, and he held my wrist, looked directly at me, and said, ‘If you’re her friend, tell her you don’t want that in the movie. It’ll ruin her career,’” says Foley. True Blue wasn’t ready yet, and releasing a single without an album would disrupt their careful marketing plans. Having had two hit albums, Warner Bros. were keen to keep up the momentum on their terms. When Madonna came back to the table, Foley’s head was spinning. “Being selfish, I convinced her to do it, but then asked if she was sure. I brought up what the Warner guy had said—‘Your album’s not ready yet’—and she said, ‘I don’t give a shit.’”

  “Live to Tell” went on to become one of her most enduring hits, and a live favorite. It resurfaced twenty years later as the key number on her 2006 Confessions tour, where she was presented on a giant mirrored cross with a crown of thorns. Far from ruining the impact of her new album’s release, it provided the perfect advertisement for it.

  TRUE BLUE came out in June 1986. The cover showed Madonna in profile, with head thrown back and eyes closed, her bleached-out skin and platinum-blond crop against a background of sky-blue. Taken by Herb Ritts, it was a moment of Warholian pop art. A mixture of innocence, idealism, and hand-tinted 50s-style Technicolor and hand-tinted color like a 60s Warhol silkscreen print, this was our first glimpse of Madonna as a classic icon. “She was already highly aware of the value of her image and was in control of it,” said Jeri Heiden, the album’s cover designer. Gone was the mussed hair and the belly button of the boy-toy era. This album ushered in a newer, sleeker Madonna, while drawing on the enduring appeal of celluloid icons like Marilyn Monroe. “It was like she was floating—her clothing was not visible. She took on the appearance of a marble statue—goddess-like,” recalled Heiden. With this picture Madonna made explicit the connection between Warhol and herself; the vivid nexus between pop art and commerce. The late 1980s marked a new era of the pop artist as a brand, and Madonna was one of the first to exploit this.

  Madonna and Warhol always had a guarded appreciation of one another. “I asked Madonna if she would be interested in doing a movie, and she was smart, she said that she wanted more specifics, that she just didn’t want to talk and have her ideas taken,” Warhol wrote in 1984. “She’s very sharp. She’s really hot right now.” Then, in 1985, when her Like a Virgin tour was in full swing, he sighed: “Gee, Madonna was just a waitress at the Lucky Strike a year ago.” He is there at her wedding, clothed in black, the negative to her white dress. He responds to her surface glamour, seeing her with the detailed eye of the painter: “Madonna really knows how to do her makeup in that great Hollywood way,” he wrote. “Somebody must have showed her or always does it for her—everything painted just perfectly.”

  There are points where Madonna and Warhol meet: they shared gay friends in New York. They were both awestruck by the power of celebrity, while at the same time undercutting it with a camp sense of irony. They both came from hardworking immigrant Catholic backgrounds in the Midwest to realize their dream in New York City, and they both had a zeal for money. Reflecting the rootless nature of twentieth-century America, they were accused of being vampiric in their art, drawing ruthlessly on popular culture. They were unafraid of blurring the lines between fine art and “business art.” Writer Wayne Koestenbaum described Warhol as wanting to “ease—to lubricate—the wheels of production, to make fabrication a more accessible, democratic, and openhearted realm of conduct.” The same could be said of Madonna. Both loved candy and popcorn. But that is where the similarity ends.

  While she was restless and constantly reconfiguring her style, he loved repetition. He was patient, liked dull things, found boredom inspiring, and was resolutely passive. Warhol suffered from chorea and endured pain most of his life. He portrayed bodies as ruptured while his own body was falling apart. Like Madonna, he wore corsets, but his were for medical reasons. In 1968, he survived a near-fatal assassination attempt when he was shot by the unhinged radical feminist Valerie Solanas. After the shooting he couldn’t quite believe he was still alive. According to Koestenbaum, “Profoundly disembodied already, he became, after the assassination attempt, more radically severed from his body, now a canvas of wounds and scars—the apparatus of his torn and flayed flesh held in place, for the rest of his life, by tightly bound abdominal belts, corsets that Brigid Berlin dyed for him in optimistic pastels like the colors of his silkscreens.”

  By contrast, Madonna is profoundly embodied. Her portrayal of the body is as whole, healthy, and beautiful. What place was there in her work for illness and death? For bad skin? The True Blue cover echoed the bright outdoors light of a world that was alive and alert. Warhol filmed his subjects sleeping, whereas Madonna was in constant motion. Staying still was an anathema to her, and therefore to be avoided at all costs. Warhol was fascinated with the gripping banality of life, what a slow study of “nothingness” revealed, whereas Madonna felt compelled to fill her world with “something.” He invariably dressed in stark black with his trademark platinum wig, while her image was colorful and ever-changing.

  By now, Madonna had reached the level of fame that Warhol once predicted. Her New York friend Johnny Dynell remembers going to the supermarket one day and seeing her on the cover of Life magazine. “Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. It almost knocked me out,” he says. “Oh my God, I thought, the bitch did it. It’s not the Village Voice, it’s the cover of Life. For a long time I thought of her as the same as us, but then I realized, Oh my God, she’s a millionaire. She’s rich. She’s done it.” And for Madonna, there was no turning back.

  8

  ME IN THE PICTURE

  IN 1987, WE HAD YET TO “READ” MADONNA. HINDSIGHT and a body of work spanning decades has put her early “oeuvre” into a more sophisticated perspective. But that doesn’t invalidate the reactions at the time. We’d had the pleasant shock of Desperately Seeking Susan and the Like a Virgin tour, but back then, her commercial tunes and dancing in her underwear meant one thing: mainstream capitulation. She wanted it both ways, it seemed—intellectual respect and huge commercial success. That is a tricky balance to achieve, particularly if the images one toys with are hackneyed and conventional. With the “Open Your Heart” video, she was feeling her way into a more interrogative pose.

  It’s a good exam
ple of her artistic psyche at the time, demonstrating irony and vanity in equal measure. Directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, it shines with the same primary colors as the True Blue cover. As extrovert as Warhol was introvert, Madonna put her new body on display in a black bodice and tasseled bra. She had been working out, working to eradicate the generous belly with its famous navel, and her copious hair was cropped short. In the video, she plays a peep-show queen, teasing the men who have come for titillation. She makes explicit her interest in modern art, with a Tamara de Lempicka–style nude gracing the entrance of the establishment where she “works.” Her unprepossessing customers show one emotional tone: some look dumb, some cynical, some bored. There is even a slavering bull dyke. Madonna dances in a precise, disengaged way, from one window to the next, offering and withdrawing herself by turns. She is always at one remove. The punch line is that she runs off with a little boy, reasserting her girlish innocence.

  Aspiring to be pop art, the video is too arch in its sensibilities. But it paved the way for a more conceptual approach. “Madonna was the first woman to take on David Bowie’s mantle,” cultural writer Peter York told me. “With her self-actualizing and reinventing, she did in the 1980s what he did in the 1970s.” Madonna’s new, sleek look left her former stylist Maripol high and dry in New York, with boxloads of boy-toy bracelets and crucifixes which she could not shift. “I was clearly put at a disadvantage. But I understand she couldn’t sport the look forever,” she says. Maripol’s company went bankrupt, and she stopped making jewelry for the next ten years. Feeling lost, she went to an ashram to learn yoga and met a female Indian guru who taught her not to fret about material things. “So when the Material Girl got released…I actually un-materialized,” laughs Maripol.

  Madonna, meanwhile, had set her sights on movie stardom. A few months after the release of True Blue, Madonna decided to try another film role. This time it was a part closer to her heart. In Who’s That Girl she played Nikki Finn, a good-time girl walking the streets of New York, on parole for murder, determined to clear her name. Louden Trott (played by Griffin Dunne) is a hapless lawyer ordered by his boss to get her on a bus to Philadelphia. The two end up having a series of adventures in a film that featured a live cougar, fights, car chases, and the inevitable denouement: a wedding. “I was really excited about doing a physical, screwball comedy,” Madonna said at the time. She also identified with the character of Nikki. “I had a lot in common with [her]. She’s courageous and sweet and funny and misjudged. But she clears her name in the end, and that’s always good to do. I’m continuously doing that with the public.” Nikki has a street-smart simplicity. “The toughness is only a mask for the vulnerability she feels.”

  With her fire-engine-red lipstick, leather jacket, and Betty Boop–style voice, Madonna invented a cartoon character that was an amplification of her showgirl self. She took on a role she was comfortable with—Madonna against the straight world—but the result was only partly convincing. As in Desperately Seeking Susan, her best scenes were those in which she was “off duty” and unself-conscious: when she says good-bye to her girlfriends in prison, for example, or the spirited way she handles a gun, or the assertiveness with which she deals with the cougar (reprising the lion-taming theme in her “Like a Virgin” video). The rest of the film is a star vehicle for mid-80s Madonna. She is in nearly every scene, talking a lot of dialogue, much of it affected and cute.

  The director James Foley found making this movie a chastening experience. Having shot the low-budget At Close Range, he was excited at the chance of making a major feature. “I was young, I was twenty-eight. So, being given the opportunity to work on a Warner Bros. film with a huge star was attractive to me for all the wrong reasons. Everyone has a bit of Hollywood lust in them,” he recalls. He was approached by Warner Bros. because they “knew I knew Madonna and could convince her to do it. At Close Range was a dark film, and going to comedy was totally the wrong direction. But I didn’t care.” By the summer of 1987, preproduction was well underway. There was only one problem.

  “Madonna was in a hurry. She had a tour planned. The night before we started shooting I sat in the writer’s bedroom in New Jersey thinking, This script stinks. But I had no choice. The train was on the track, I couldn’t pull out. I tried to make the script better but it was lousy. So I take responsibility, I fault myself and the script, not her,” says Foley. Madonna plowed gamely on, saying: “All Warner’s executives were real positive about the project. It was a process—with the writers—of honing the script, making it better.”

  When it came to the shoot, she was ready to take direction, relying on Foley to give her all the cues. He’d been looking forward to working with her, but found the process oddly elusive. “In person, Madonna actually seems to morph into a whole different body and self. That works most dramatically in her videos. You think that’d be the perfect attribute to have for screen acting. But although she ‘acts’ very well sometimes, she doesn’t push the right buttons at the right times over the course of a film.” The failure of Shanghai Surprise had left its mark.

  “She was very uptight and into every detail, determined to get it right this time. She’s extremely competitive with herself,” says Foley. “That’s probably why it wasn’t so good. In Desperately Seeking Susan, when she didn’t know what she was doing, she was being natural and at her best.” When it came to cutting the film, Foley was happy with what he had. “Now I look back and see the stupid bits and how to fix ’em. But before a movie opens, you don’t know it’s a bomb because you’ve a built-in survivor mechanism, your mind keeps you in love with it.”

  When the film opened in the summer of 1987, it received mixed reviews. Some were condescending: “What’s lacking is pure and simple good humor,” said Variety, while others, like the New York Times, were downright scathing. “My father rang me and said, ‘the New York Times put down your movie as the worst of the year.’ I took it very personally,” recalls Foley. “Boy, when it bombed it took me two years to get over the physical pain every time I thought of that movie. It was my first taste of failure, and it was a very public failure. I felt very bad it didn’t work, because Madonna so believed what I was having her do. She gave me her trust and I squandered it.”

  Madonna’s response was sanguine. With classic toughness, she chalked it up to experience and moved on. “I remember the first time I saw her after it flopped. I was in the lobby of a hotel in Paris and saw her with her movie agent. She was about to walk in the elevator when she said: ‘So it’s a flop, right?…Hmm.’ That’s the only time she ever mentioned it. She never referred to it again. It was as if we both unconsciously agreed it didn’t exist. Sean reacted the same way. He never brought it up, and I never bring up Shanghai Surprise. That’s the thing you do when you have a failure, if you’re still friends.”

  Later, Sean said, “When she and Jamie Foley made the movie they made—I saw another version that I think would have been more encouraging to her as an actress at that time. But…she’s been wildly discouraged, externally…. There’s a lot to be said for people having encouragement and rewards for their risks. I don’t know if there’s anybody who doesn’t require that.”

  Madonna got her rewards in another arena, a fact that impressed itself on Foley when he went to see her Who’s That Girl show. “She was playing a half hour out of Paris in a giant meadow behind a castle. The place was packed beyond belief, a spectacular concert. I was standing backstage watching her, seeing a hundred thousand people scream and clap. I felt worse than she did about the film, because she had this other career, a place where people really loved her. Her ego went through a lot of different experiences that day.” Madonna’s assessment of the situation was simple. “There are people who don’t want me to do well in both fields,” she said.

  Now Foley jokes that he would like to do a director’s cut of Who’s That Girl, only it would be thirty minutes instead of ninety. “In that I could show her as an excellent actress, an extreme turn, a cartoon
version of herself. Despite the reviews though, it’s a film that still does well. I get more residuals from that movie than any other I’ve made.”

  THE FAILURE of the film was eclipsed for Madonna by her worldwide Who’s That Girl tour, a Broadway-revue-meets-post-disco spectacular that competed with the fellow travelers Prince and Michael Jackson in its sheer size and scale. It was in a different league from the Like a Virgin show; here, she moved away from the rock-concert format to a multimedia production. “The first tour was just some choreography and lights, whereas with Who’s That Girl Madonna became more theatrical and focused, and she used projections,” says Peter Morse, who was the tour lighting designer. He went on to work with her on every show up to the 2006 Confessions tour. Though they had a very fruitful relationship, it didn’t get off to an auspicious start.

  Morse first met Madonna in 1985, when she was preparing for her Virgin tour and had hired him for the lighting job. Morse had already worked for top acts like Dolly Parton, Lionel Ritchie, and Tina Turner, but he was nervous. “Madonna was younger and more explosive back then,” he says. He went to where she was working in a studio. “I was sitting patiently in the control room waiting for my moment, and saw a little dish of nuts on the table. I ate a handful. They were the worst thing ever, they tasted like dirt. Then she comes in and starts talking. She has a little dog. It eats from the dish—it turns out the nuts are dog food. This is not a good start.”