Madonna

by Lucy O'Brien

  The daring stage set heightened the drama in this scene. “For the church nave, Madonna insisted that the Greek pillars be real. There was a 3-D effect to it, not just flat sets,” recalls Morse. “She had forty-foot aluminum castings rise up hydraulically from the floor. Nothing was phony or fake; it had real depth.”

  The sex and religion scenes were so powerful that on the North American leg, Toronto police threatened to arrest Madonna on the grounds of obscenity if she went ahead with the show. In response, she hammed up the masturbation sequence even more. After all the brouhaha, the Canadian Mounties maintained a polite distance and the show passed without a hitch. There was also opposition in Italy, when Catholic pressure groups urged a boycott of the concerts. They were very effective, as Italy was the only country where the Blond Ambition didn’t sell out. According to musician Guy Pratt, she and Pat Leonard came up with the ruse to hold a press conference at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome in order to boost ticket sales.

  With a sideswipe at the Vatican, she told the assembled press that she was proud of being an Italian-American and proud of having grown up in a country “that believes in freedom of speech and artistic expression.” She said that her show was a piece of theater that takes the audience on “an emotional journey…I do not endorse a way of life but describe one, and the audience is left to make its own judgments.” Despite the ensuing storm of publicity, the second date at the capital’s Stadio Flaminio was canceled, the only tour fixture that didn’t sell out.

  Along with her yen for artistic expression, Madonna has always had an eye on the bottom line. The third segment of her show shamelessly promoted the film Dick Tracy, which opened as the tour progressed through Europe. Although the movie was a box office success, the Dick Tracy section is the least dynamic part of the show. Playing a nightclub singer in a striped vaudeville-style corset, Madonna lies across a grand piano, lip-synching the Warren Beatty duet with Salim dressed as Dick Tracy. For Slam, though, this was his most memorable experience of the tour: “I just left Belgium two years before, I went to a strict ballet school, and they all made fun of me going to America to pursue my dream, and now I’m here onstage, she’s introduced me to twenty thousand people, and I’m lip-synching to Warren Beatty’s voice. It was amazing.”

  Dick Tracy segues into a comedy sequence, where Madonna sings “Material Girl” as a suburban housewife wearing an embroidered dressing-gown and her hair in curlers, and performs “Cherish” to men in campy mermaid tails. Wilborn was less enamored with the kitsch element of the tour. “I’ve never been that drawn to that gay campness. Guys as mermaids, guys with cone tits,” he says. “I am gay, but I’m not into camp. Madonna could sense that wasn’t a comfortable place for me.”

  For the final segment, she was back on safer ground as party-girl Madonna, striking a pose for “Vogue,” and ending “Holiday” in a Harlequin outfit. The final song, “Family Affair,” has the cast in outfits reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. Resurrecting the Cabaret-style chair and bowler hat, Madonna intones the words “People together” with arms outstretched. This is the message that underlies the show; one that celebrates “love, life, and humanity.”

  THIS FOUR-month world tour broke records. Although Pepsi withdrew their $3 million sponsorship deal as a result of the “Like a Prayer” video, electronics company Pioneer were happy to take over as sponsors. Madonna was being paid $28 million for the Japanese shows alone. Eighteen trucks and a 747 plane transported the tour equipment, while the stage took a crew of a hundred to assemble before each show. It was a massive undertaking, and the tension of this became apparent in the documentary of the tour, Truth or Dare.

  The backstage scenes are filmed by Alex Keshishian, then a twenty-six-year-old Harvard graduate who had made a few humble rock videos. He was brought to Madonna’s attention by the Creative Artists Agency (CAA). She liked his graduate film, a popera based on Wuthering Heights with music from Kate Bush and Madonna. So, when her original director, David Fincher, pulled out shortly before the tour started, Madonna decided on Keshishian as a replacement.

  His words—“I’ll film you without makeup, I’ll film you when you’re being a complete bitch, I’ll film you in the morning before your sleeping pill’s worn off”—could have been a poster quote for the film. Part of Truth or Dare’s attraction is the implied struggle between star and director for authenticity. Although she was executive producer, she was canny enough to trust Keshishian’s vision. “I would constantly disobey Madonna, to show her she wasn’t directing me,” Keshishian claimed. “I was completely prepared to be fired. That’s when you do your best work—when you’re not scared of being fired. I wasn’t so blinded by the idea of working with Madonna that I’d do anything she asked.” At first she resisted. “She was very demanding at the beginning. At one point my cameraman didn’t know who to listen to. She’d shout, ‘Cut.’ I’d shout, ‘Keep rolling.’ Cut, roll. It would have been easier to recoil and give in. But I fought back and won. And when she gave me her trust, it was all-encompassing.”

  Keshishian shot backstage in black-and-white, cinema verité–style. It had a gritty, grainy feel reminiscent of D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, the documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. Keshishian’s black-and-white scenes were at odds with the prevailing fashion for high-end-production concert films, and indeed, numbers from the show were shot in slick color by a different camera crew. The stark contrast between public and private was pivotal to the movie, and a source of critical debate. “I’m revealing what I wanna reveal,” Madonna later declared. “While you can argue that I chose to show what I wanna show, I can also say that what I chose to show is very revealing.”

  What feels staged is Madonna’s regal cartoon persona. The prayers before performance, the mawkish poetry delivered to her staff, and the way she casts herself as den mother constantly administering to the “emotional cripples” in her charge. Or the way she bawls out her hired hands. Tour production manager Chris Lamb said he practiced a disappearing act whenever the camera was around. “I always just kind of went the other way. I really didn’t want to be onscreen being shouted at, so I made myself difficult to find. Y’know, when she has something to say, she doesn’t mince words. Sometimes you get it between the eyes.”

  Actress and writer Carrie Fisher found this quality strangely appealing. “She often seems to behave like someone who has been under severe restraint and can now say and do whatever she likes without fear of reprisal.” While Madonna revels in being a bitch, her ribald humor also comes across. “Why was I faced with three rows of assholes—all industry—up front?” she shouts to manager Freddy DeMann after one of the U.S. shows. “Everyone looked like goddamn William Morris agents!” After Kevin Costner comes backstage to greet her and calls her show “neat,” she pretends to vomit. “I’ve always thought it weird that celebrities assume a friendship with you because you’re a celebrity too,” she says. “It can get a little awkward.”

  Madonna’s high-handed manner makes those more personal moments with her dancers feel like scripted intimacy. It draws attention to the central conundrum of the film: who is the real Madonna, and does it matter anyway? What is depicted onscreen is neither the two-dimensional tabloid picture of a female ball-breaker, nor an arch manipulator of Baudrillardian postmodern signs. Much cultural criticism focuses on Madonna as a symbol or a stereotype and misses the human being within.

  The overriding sense in this film is of a woman under stress. The whole show rests on her shoulders. Madonna is the central, organizing point, the one keeping it rigorous, precise, and to the standard she desires. She conducts her business all day, in the rarefied air of those claustrophobic dressing rooms and hotel suites, never able to relax. “I’m so desperate for fun!” she exclaims to her friend Sandra Bernhard.

  Madonna reveals moments of vulnerability almost despite herself. There is her deteriorating relationship with Warren Beatty. “Come here you pussy man!” she barks, but the insecurity shows
on her face. Clearly disenchanted with the filming process, he berates her for living in an “insane atmosphere,” and says the immortal phrase: “Madonna doesn’t want to live off camera, let alone talk.” At another point, she waits for him to call, but he doesn’t, and she tries to mask her disappointment with a smile. “He wasn’t around too much. He would just sit in the corner and say things with his dry wit,” says Salim. By this time, Beatty was growing tired of his younger lover. He didn’t appreciate her crude, roadie-like humor and the way she bossed him around. The constant, intrusive camera was, for him, a step too far.

  Despite her bravado, it is evident that Madonna sometimes feels scared and exposed. When the Canadian Mounties in Toronto threaten to arrest her for obscenity, she brazens it out. But as she walks through the tunnel to the stadium, she needs the support of her girlfriends, clutching hold of Niki’s hand as if unable to let go. And there’s the phone conversation she has with her father, part exasperation, part little girl. “The show gets a bit racy sometimes,” she says. “Can you tone it down a little bit?” he asks nervously. “No, that’d be compromising my artistic integrity,” she trots out. After the show, however, she admits: “My father: I worship the ground he walks on. It was harder to do that [Detroit] show than the police in Toronto.”

  The darkest, most moving part of the film is when she comes to Detroit. It was “the hardest place we went to on tour,” she says. “Going home is never easy for me.” Here we see her relationship with her alcoholic older brother Martin. She eats a meal backstage, waiting for him. He is delayed, and she assumes he’s not coming. When he finally arrives, all washed and brushed up, she’s gone to bed. We see her awkwardness with an old friend, Moira McFarland. “She used to finger-fuck me,” Madonna says inelegantly. And then: “Where’s my idol?” as she comes out of the hotel room.

  Her excitement turns to embarrassment when they meet and Moira, who has fallen on hard times, asks Madonna to be the godmother to her unborn child. “What was really weird was that here was this girl that I idolized from my childhood. I really thought she was the cat’s pajamas, you know? Then it was like, Look what’s happened to our lives,” Madonna said later. “…I was touched she asked me to be the godmother but I don’t have time to fly to North Carolina and participate in this whole ritual. Can you imagine me with all her family and neighbors? It would have been…like a creature landing from Mars.” After the meeting, Moira calls Madonna a “little shit,” but in the next moment forgives her when she remembers Madonna Sr. “I remember praying to her mother, Madonna, because it was the closest thing to God,” she says, breaking down in tears. “When her mother died it was really sad.”

  Madonna’s visit to her mother’s gravesite has been criticized as overblown and staged. But, as she said later, she hadn’t been there for years, and on that hot summer afternoon it took her and her brother Christopher nearly an hour to find it. No wonder she lies down with her head on the grave, searching for an emotional connection and sense of comfort. Christopher, though, felt uneasy. “[That] drove me crazy,” he said later. “They filmed Madonna lying on our mother’s grave, and then they were like, ‘OK Chris, now it’s your turn at the grave,’ and I’m like, ‘Fuck you, it’s not for you.’ That’s why you don’t see very much of me in that movie. I prefer the privacy that I have.”

  This part of the tour is not easy. As it rolls on to New York, tempers fray within the dance troupe, and Madonna has to reprimand her gay boys for picking on Oliver, the only straight dancer in their entourage. “You three together can be pretty ferocious,” she says with unguarded directness. “He doesn’t have the thick skin you have, the survival techniques you have.” Salim recalls the teasing as a playful way of passing the time. “We made fun of Oliver because he wasn’t ballet-trained, he was the only dancer who wasn’t gay. You know how when you’re a gay man and a straight man thinks you want him, and it’s like, ‘No!’ He couldn’t believe that Luis and Jose wore skirts, he was so amazed by it, so we had to make fun of him.”

  Salim admits that much of this was due to partying that got out of hand. “I was twenty years old, I was coming out, growing up, and dealing with all kinds of things. I wish I understood then what I understand now, because I would have enjoyed it so much more. We partied too much, in every city, it was just too much.” Wilborn remembers “a lot of bitching among the dancers. Jose and Luis came in with the expectation that they had a certain position they wanted to hold on to. For me it was comical to watch. The other boys were a lot younger. I’d had success in my career already, and didn’t get caught up in the whirl of it. Some of the boys had issues; they let the frenzy of it override their thinking.”

  For Madonna, after all “the tension and darkness” of the States, coming to Europe feels like “such a relief.” Here we see Madonna joshing with her dancers, ordering one of them to “get your dick out” for fun, and looking on appreciatively while Salim and Gabriel kiss. That kiss was to become legendary. “We did the kiss, forgot about it, and then it ended up in the film. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’” Salim said to me. “I was in a relationship; so was Gabriel. And his parents didn’t know he was gay. This is where me and Madonna get a little weird, because he was really petrified. I remember him asking her not to put it in there. It was a little nerve-wracking. I didn’t realize it would have such a big effect on people. What people are scared of is that guys might have had a little homo moment, you know, a little homo feeling, and that’s the worst thing in America.”

  He also sympathized with Sharon, the makeup artist who was raped after her drink was spiked at a nightclub. What is astonishing is Madonna’s knee-jerk laughter on hearing the news. When the reality of the story sinks in, Madonna stops cackling and looks concerned, but this cannot erase her moment of thoughtlessness. “They spiked her drink. To me that was really sad,” says Salim. “I didn’t get why everyone was laughing, maybe it’s an American thing. But there’s a lot of things I don’t get about this country.” Niki Haris, though, also was unsure about this scene. “Sometimes there was a mean-spirited energy, a nastiness. That’s funny, Ha, ha, ha!” What the scene really showed was Madonna’s discomfort with people who are victims. Maybe the incident brought up her own experience of rape in New York when she had been young, alone, and utterly helpless. Being in control was so important to her during this tour that she found it hard to deal with weakness and insecurity in others.

  This is evident in the film’s conclusion, as Madonna plays to the gallery, inviting each dancer into her bed for “intimate” chats in a way that feels like power play. The film is fascinating in how much it reveals about the stultified world of celebrity, how the pop business nurtures its own aristocracy, and has an almost feudal attitude to human relations. Although Madonna is looking for people to be “real” with her, most in her employ feel the pressure to indulge her or laugh too long at labored jokes (like the fellatio bottle). As even Jean-Paul Gaultier admitted: “I didn’t stand up to her. She knows her own body so well, she knows what to wear to show it off best. The only person I know who wasn’t scared of her was Sean; he wouldn’t take any shit.” Ironically, Madonna came closest here to a poignant picture of those haunted, self-obsessed Hollywood icons—Crawford, Monroe, Hayworth—that she had always so admired.

  Black cultural critic bell hooks was unimpressed by the film, saying: “In Truth or Dare Madonna clearly revealed that she can only think of exerting power along very traditional, white supremacist, capitalistic, patriarchal lines.” Critical of what she saw as a white woman star appropriating black radical chic, she quoted many grown black women grumbling about Madonna, “The bitch can’t even sing.”

  According to hooks: “So why did so many people find it cute when Madonna asserted that she dominates the inter-racial casts…in her film because they are crippled and she ‘likes to play mother.’ No this was not a display of feminist power, this was the same old phallic nonsense with white pussy at the center.” hooks poses the question: “Plantation mistres
s or soul sister?” As a black female singer, Niki is aware of the argument, but says: “Not a plantation owner, not in my mind. More like an empress. Not a queen, more like a dictator.”

  WHEN THE film was edited and ready, Madonna knew she had a big hit on her hands. She exploited it by invading the 1991 Cannes Film Festival with all the efficiency of a German battleship. The night of its premiere, she sashayed up the red-carpeted stairs of the Festival Hall in a rose silk kimono. Turning around to the world’s paparazzi, she dropped the kimono to show the silver Gaultier brassiere and matching pantie girdle she was wearing underneath. The crowd gasped. Mission accomplished.

  From that moment, Madonna made her presence felt in Cannes. She stayed in a $2,500-a-night suite at the Hotel du Cap, and ordered her minders to throw everyone out of the pool when she went for a swim. She turned up at Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever party, wearing big boots and a macho Gaultier Austrian Army–style jacket. She extended her stay so it would overlap with the appearance of Sean Penn, his girlfriend Robin Wright, and their new baby. Amid the melee, actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mike Tyson’s ex-wife Robin Givens, and Malcolm McDowell were ignored. “We wish she’d go home,” said one of McDowell’s friends. “She’s a real pain. It’s difficult to do business when they’re being distracted by what’s going on in her bathroom.”

  Madonna’s concerted bid to make her movie the talk of the season had the desired effect. After its release that May, it quickly became a huge success. “A clever, brazen, spirited self-portrait,” enthused the New York Times, while Time magazine praised it as “raw, raunchy and epically entertaining.” The film went on to become the fifth highest-grossing documentary of all time.

  But there was dissension in the ranks. The following January, three dancers on the tour—Gabriel Trupin, Kevin Stea, and Oliver Crumes—filed a lawsuit against Madonna, saying that their privacy had been invaded by the offstage footage, and that they weren’t paid for their appearance in the film. According to dancer Salim: “They sued because the movie was shown all over the world and it made money and it was like, ‘Why do we not get money?’ It was like a slap in the face.” Two years later, Madonna made a very modest out-of-court settlement. “I still feel a little resentment, because it’s playing all the time and we needed it so much when the show was over,” says Salim.