by Lucy O'Brien
Madonna wanted to see ideas, but not being an artist, Morse got someone else to draw a design. “She was an early MTV artist—visually oriented and used to seeing storyboards. I showed her the design. She looked at it, frowned, and said, ‘Where’s me in the picture?’ I said I’d get someone to draw her in. ‘Do it now,’ she snapped, ‘I don’t have time.’” Morse then drew a little childish stick figure in the middle of the picture. “Madonna wasn’t happy about that. She doesn’t like it if you get funny with her!” recalls Morse, who was unceremoniously fired.
For the next tour, however, she was back on the phone. “They were in the last week of rehearsals of the Who’s That Girl tour. Things hadn’t worked out with their lighting designer, so they brought me in. I had a week to save it.” Morse’s dramatic flair and confident use of color were perfect for the show, so by the time it started that June in Japan, he was back in Madonna’s good books.
She had a much bigger cast for this show, including two new backup singers—Niki Haris and Donna DeLory—who would become her close friends. Together they would become a triumvirate, a force to be reckoned with onstage and in the studio. Donna was the daughter of famous L.A. producer/arranger Al DeLory, who’d played with The Beach Boys and Glenn Campbell. She started dancing and singing at an early age, doing backup vocals for a range of artists, including Carly Simon and Santana. In 1986, she was Gardner Cole’s girlfriend, and she actually sang the original demo of “Open Your Heart.” Cole remembers Madonna calling him soon after she got the song, asking, “Who sang the demo?” Donna met Pat Leonard, and was swiftly recruited for the tour. “She and Madonna have similar qualities in their voices, they sound very alike,” says Cole. “And Donna is really sweet as well.”
Niki Haris was a Michigan girl, like Madonna. Though her father, Gene Harris, was a Grammy Award–winning jazz artist (and former pianist with Count Basie), Niki had no plans for show business, wanting instead to be a history teacher. She fell into singing as a struggling student in L.A. “I went out with musicians, and before I knew it, one gig turned into four. I saw the music business as work, a way to make a living,” says Niki. She had been working with Anita Baker and Whitney Houston, and was singing with The Righteous Brothers in Las Vegas when Madonna’s manager Freddy DeMann called her, saying, “Can you learn seventeen songs and seventeen dance moves in five days?” Niki went to an audition feeling decidedly underwhelmed.
“I was more into jazz and R&B than pop, and I didn’t know who Madonna was,” Niki recalls. “There were two hundred girls at the audition, and I was thinking I’ll never get the gig, please let me go on the first flight back to Vegas. Wham bam, before you know it, I was in the back of Madonna’s limo, looking for a phone to call the Righteous Brothers’ people. ‘You can’t go back, don’t you know who I am!’ she screamed at me. I said, ‘I’m grateful for the gig, and the money’s cute, but let me be polite!’” Niki then joined the tour, and quickly mastered the songs and dance routines. “Luckily enough I fit the costumes, and the music wasn’t that hard. I’m a quick study. It wasn’t brain surgery, it wasn’t like learning Porgy & Bess or Carmen.” At first it was just another gig for Niki, “but then we started to become friends and hang out more outside the tour. It was fun.”
There was plenty of showboating in the Who’s That Girl tour—the gold lamé jackets, gangster hats, and guns shtick; the moving walkway; the Busby Berkeley–style stairs. But undercutting this were ironic moments like the “Dress You Up” medley, where Madonna popped up as a clownish trickster figure, dressed in a pantomime-meets-Carmen-Miranda costume with the word KISS on her behind. There were songs delivered with moving passion; when she sang “La Isla Bonita” to an audience of thousands, for instance, the song transcended its coyness, gaining the resonance of a popular folk tune. The image of her in the red flamenco dress has become as iconic as the boy toy or the black-corseted siren.
This was the first glimpse of Madonna’s circus. Onstage she was MC and ringmaster, and as agile and muscular as the girl on the flying trapeze. She was the young boy, the acrobat, the clown—she was them all. The beefy backup dancers were her animus, the female singers—Niki, Donna, and Debrah Parson—were her anima. They danced around her and with her, they were her tribe. The stage was big enough, it seemed, to encompass her talents. It was here that all her interests were drawn into focus. This is why so many fans point to the live experience as the “real” Madonna.
The show was Madonna’s psyche writ large. For the song “Open Your Heart,” she amplified the video, dancing in black corset and tassels, a giant Tamara de Lempicka portrait projected behind her. The Polish artist was an apt choice—her distinctive style was known as “soft cubism,” epitomizing the cool modernism of Art Deco. Born in 1898, de Lempicka fled to the United States at the start of World War II. Actively and scandalously bisexual, she explored themes of desire and seduction in her work. One of her best-known paintings is The Musician (1929), featuring a woman in a flowing blue dress playing the lyre. She’s heavily made up, with copper-red hair and long fingernails, and behind her is the jumbled, jazzy New York skyline. Displayed in the Who’s That Girl show, it was a summation of Madonna’s approach, mixing high art with glamour, vulgarity, and the urbane. It’s woman as a muse, creator, and sexual being. No wonder it held such power for Madonna.
As a presage of ideas she would explore later, the backdrop to the song “Papa Don’t Preach” featured a church nave and a succession of images, including the Moon landing, 1960s civil rights riots, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Black Power, and Ronald Reagan. Here she positioned herself as a child of the 60s, turning “Papa Don’t Preach” into a message song against racism and censorship. As musical director, Pat Leonard had an acute understanding of music as drama. A master at creating tension, he also brought out the dark side of the song “Live to Tell,” making it long, slow, and loaded. Madonna’s rendition emphasized a sense of isolation, being cut off from the crowd. In one part she knelt low on the stage, her head down. When she performed this in London, someone decided to disrupt the private intensity of the moment and lobbed an empty drink carton onto the stage. They succeeded in riling her. “Don’t throw shit at me,” she barked, after the song was over. It was as if she had been pulled away from an extended meditation.
Much of the show was about celebration, the spinning energy of life. But within that was expression of some gnawing doubts. At the end of “Who’s That Girl,” a song jubilant in its evocation of the female spirit, she sang the words over and over till they echoed around the auditorium in ghostly form. “Who’s that girl?” she sang, as if trying to decide herself.
This show and the True Blue album were her stab at immortality. The record sold 19 million copies worldwide—no studio album by Madonna has sold more. And the Who’s That Girl tour went on to establish her as a global phenomenon. As writer Danny Eccleston said: “In a funny way, it’s been downhill from here.” The previous winter, her beloved friend Martin Burgoyne passed away of an AIDS-related illness. Four months before Madonna’s tour started, Andy Warhol died of a heart attack after a routine gall-bladder operation, and in 1988, her former lover Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose. Sean, meanwhile, began to show more and more of his violent side. The sunny skies of True Blue were beginning to darken. Through this, Madonna began to feel her way to a different style of songwriting—to a deeper reflection of her own psyche.
By 1987, it was apparent that the man Madonna had married was becoming a liability. From the moment they got engaged, they found themselves prime fodder for tabloid stories. For Madonna, who had striven for fame all her life, this attention was annoying but bearable. For Penn, however, it was torture. Paparazzi were a permanent irritant, to the extent that his period with Madonna was littered with incidents of assault and ensuing criminal charges.
In 1986, for instance, while they were filming Shanghai Surprise, he was arrested after hanging an intruding photographer by his ankles from their ninth-floor balco
ny. He broke out of jail and escaped the country by jetfoil. In 1987, while Madonna was on her Who’s That Girl tour, he served thirty-three days of a sixty-day sentence in the Los Angeles County jail for skipping probation. The sentence was for assaulting songwriter David Wolinski, who had kissed Madonna on the cheek. Sean had a predilection for punching photographers, and an attachment to guns. Seemingly uncomfortable with her gay friends, jealous of her ex-lovers, and fond of whiskey, he wasn’t an easy person to be around. “It was internal combustion,” Sean said later. “There wasn’t anything that resembled peace in my spirit.”
As a child, he was troubled and shy, and didn’t really speak outside his home until he was five. His father, Leo Penn, was an ex-actor and Communist sympathizer, who in the 1950s was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Unable to find work, Leo moved into directing for television, making high-profile shows like Columbo. When asked by his son how work was going, Leo would joke wryly: “Trying to make a better piece of shit out of a worse piece of shit.” This led to what musician friend David Baerwald described as a life “much diminished.” Both Leo and Sean’s mother, the actress Eileen Ryan, had a drinking problem.
Every night they would drink heavily. “She never started drinking till we were in bed,” recalled Sean. “They could both get up early the next morning and function.” There was an underlying tension at the heart of his childhood, and somehow Sean shouldered the burden of his father’s failure—trying to make up for the family’s collective disappointment by establishing himself as an A-list actor, fighting injustice, and, later in his career, becoming an outspoken political activist. He wanted to be a hero, but as a young man he confused that with Ernest Hemingway–style macho posturing and antisocial behavior. It was that volatile nature, though, that drove his acting and made his parts memorable. “It’s hard to get through to him, and you feel that at any minute he could blow up at you,” said Woody Allen. “It makes it so interesting.”
It is intriguing that Madonna, so controlled and savvy in her public life, saw Sean’s fractious temperament as strength. She once said that he reminded her of her brothers. “They were wild and rebellious, starting fires in the basement, throwing rocks at the windows…I’ve always been attracted to people [who’re] rebels and irresponsible and challenge the norm. I’m attracted to bums!” Her friends were bemused by Sean. Niki Haris liked him: “He was smart and tough, but gentle at the same time. Kinda shy and quirky.” Others were less convinced. “He was a bit awkward. She’d hold court at dinner while Sean just sat there silent, not saying anything,” recalls musician Billy Meyers. “Once I was talking to the bodyguard about the Dodgers, when Sean piped up: ‘The Dodgers. I hate the Dodgers. They’re the worst team!’ ‘Are you a baseball fan?’ I asked. ‘No, not particularly.’ Everyone was looking at him. But then he put his head back down. Wow, we thought, that was a strange interruption.”
In her own way, Madonna mirrored Sean’s social awkwardness with her need to be direct to the point of rudeness. “She could be very trying. When she took an obstinate stance during an argument you’d give up, thinking, Screw it,” says Meyers. “Well, Sean would go the final mile. She found it endearing. She wanted that. If you gave up too quickly, she didn’t like it.”
A year into their marriage, the volatile energy between them started to get out of control. She became worried about his attachment to guns. She once told Dennis Fanning, the L.A. policeman whom Penn shadowed for research on the film Colors, “Sean is very impressionable so I want you to please be very careful with what you’re teaching my husband.” There were reports of heated brawls, with Sean pushing and shoving her in public. In December 1987, she filed for divorce, and while estranged from him, had a three-month dalliance with the late John F. Kennedy Jr. The son of President John F. Kennedy, “John-John” was extremely well-heeled and well-connected. “In grabbing [him], Madonna hit the jackpot,” said his biographer Wendy Leigh. Madonna enjoyed the fact that her Hollywood idol Marilyn Monroe had had an affair with the father, but like Monroe, she was persona non grata in the regal Kennedy clan. Despite Madonna’s best efforts to meet John-John’s mother, the elegantly glacial Jackie Onassis, she was rebuffed. “The mother hates me,” she confided to Niki Haris. The affair soon cooled, not just because of Jackie O’s hostility. Madonna was less than impressed with John-John’s lovemaking technique. “It’s like going to bed with a nine-year-old,” she said later.
She went back to Sean, but by the summer of 1988, when Madonna was acting on Broadway in David Mamet’s play Speed-the-Plow, her marriage was in trouble again. When she sought escape and solace with lesbian comedienne Sandra Bernhard, Sean was furious. Pithy, abrasive, and on her way up, Bernhard was a more serious rival for his wife’s affections. Like Madonna, she was a Michigan girl with a knack for defying social conventions. Proud of her Jewish features, Bernhard once said, “I’m the only actress in Hollywood who didn’t pay to have these lips.” Once a performer at the L.A. Comedy Store, she first appeared on TV on the Richard Pryor Show in the late 1970s. By the time she met Madonna, her stand-up act was evolving into performance art, culminating in the iconoclastic 1988 Broadway hit Without You I Am Nothing.
It irked Sean that Bernhard (whom he had introduced to his wife) was now Madonna’s new best friend, accompanying the couple wherever they went. There were rumors that Bernhard and Madonna were having an affair, after they appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman wearing the dyke uniform of knee-length jeans, white T-shirts, and black shoes, and talked about going to lesbian watering holes like the Canal Bar and the Cubby Hole. “She’s one of the only girls that can take me. She’s a really ballsy girl,” Madonna said triumphantly. Although Bernhard and Madonna spent a lot of time making mischief, it wasn’t just a surface flirtation. Bernhard was a strong source of support while Madonna’s marriage was falling apart, and their attachment went deep.
Sean, meanwhile, tried to blot his problems out by drinking heavily. By the end of the year, he had reached a point of psychological crisis. On December 29, he allegedly held Madonna prisoner in their Malibu home. Some claim he pinned her down and sat on her for hours. “She is never still for a minute, so to do that was like death to her,” said a friend. Sean later alluded to the incident by saying: “She developed a concern that if she were to return to the house, she would get a very severe haircut.” Madonna called a SWAT team to the house, but didn’t press charges, and never spoke publicly about the incident. That fight symbolized the broader power struggle between them. He wanted her to settle down, have children, and lead a quiet life with him (not unlike his second, and enduring, marriage in the 90s to Robin Wright Penn), but Madonna had no intention of retiring from the limelight. Since he was unable to deal with her defiant independence, the only thing left to him was to try to break her spirit.
After their disastrous Christmas, Madonna filed again for divorce, only this time her decision was final. The failure of her marriage was devastating. Here she was, thirty years old, with a glittering, global career, and her emotional life was in tatters. She told friends that she still loved Sean. The heartache forced her to dig deep within herself as she tried to make sense of what was happening. During that troubled year of 1988, she began to reflect on her family background and what had brought her to this point. Steadily, she fed that back into her songwriting, recording what was to become her artistic breakthrough—Like a Prayer.
9
THE SIN IS WITHIN YOU
March 1989. I am the music editor of London listings magazine City Limits. An avalanche of brown cardboard record envelopes lands on my desk. I slowly sift through the overwhelming pile. I open one at random and pull out a record. The smell of patchouli hits me in the face. The scent has been rubbed into the vinyl grooves. And there’s a picture of Madonna’s bejeaned midriff, festooned with beads. She’s also on the cover of Rolling Stone with long, dark hair, looking like a hippie. Atta-girl! The record yields more treasures: dark, more complex songs, more
autobiographical than ever before. The woman has become an Artist. It cheers up my morning.
“I DIDN’T TRY TO CANDYCOAT ANYTHING OR MAKE IT more palatable for mass consumption…I wrote what I felt,” Madonna said of Like a Prayer. With this album, she moved in a rockier direction, leaving some vocals ragged and raw, keeping arrangements simple, and eschewing the high-pop gloss of previous records, like True Blue. She was in tune with the times, as the pop mainstream was gradually being infiltrated by such alternative rock bands as Faith No More, Jane’s Addiction, Throwing Muses, and The Pixies—precursors to the explosion of early 90s Seattle grunge. The rise of these bands, plus intense rap acts, like Run DMC and Public Enemy, signaled a change in public mood. The glitz of the “greed is good” 80s was tarnishing as the long-term impact of Reaganomics made itself felt. In October 1987, the Black Monday stock collapse saw 25 percent lopped off the Dow Jones index. This was larger than the 1929 crisis that had triggered the Great Depression.
In the late 80s, the world was sliding into recession, and it would have been imprudent for Madonna to sing of glamour and parties. The commercial gloss that adorned True Blue now seemed dated. She was growing up, her fans were getting older, and it was time for her to move away from teen appeal to fresh audiences and the longevity of the album market. It was the beginning of the “downsizing” era, when bright primary colors were replaced with hues of black and blue; when fashion spreads and movies lost their sheen in favor of the gritty and the grainy. Madonna’s new sound was instinctive rather than calculating. She needed to change. She was thirty years old, caught in an unhappy marriage. She wanted to sing about her emotional reality. She reached inside and ended up traveling back to the influences that formed her: the Catholic faith, God the Father, and the mother she had lost.
“She was upset and in tears a lot of the time. Normally she’s a very fast worker, but it took maybe three or four times as long to make the record because she kept breaking down,” recalled Pat Leonard. “We called it her divorce album.” Madonna was in a tense mood. “She and Pat fought even more on this record [than True Blue]. They were fighting tooth and nail. It was her second time producing, and she had to prove to everyone it wasn’t a fluke,” says Bruce Gaitsch, a guitarist on the album. “Madonna was in a determined mood. Things were falling apart with Sean and she was on her way to becoming single, so she was concentrating on the music. She’d make very detailed notes on our playing. A lot of the time I was sweating.”