Madonna

by Lucy O'Brien

  Madonna’s staged scenarios, however, are static and ritualistic. “The definition of S&M is letting someone hurt you that you know would never hurt you,” she said at the time. This included the rape scene in a high school gym, where she is pointedly laughing. When asked by journalist Andrew Neil if her pictures might unleash “a kind of evil, a dark side,” she says: “I’m dealing with sexual liberation of the mind…. This book is based on fantasies in an ideal world—a world without abusive people, a world without AIDS…. It’s a dream world.” Her viewpoint is at times vacuous and naive. “Generally I don’t think pornography degrades women. The women who are doing it want to do it,” she writes. And then later: “I think for the most part if women are in an abusive relationship and they know it and stay in it they must be digging it.”

  There is a dark side here, shot in basements and vaults, in the subterranean gloom of an underground America. This contrasts with the body-beautiful S&M—perfectly lit Helmut Newton–style shots of Madonna biting the nipple ring of a statuesque black man, or a shaven-headed man licking her foot encased in an impossible shoe, like a deformed leather hoof.

  Madonna moves through every taboo drama: young boys, old men, gay men kissing at the Gaiety. There’s a celebrity sex sandwich with rapper Big Daddy Kane and supermodel Naomi Campbell, plus shots with Madonna’s then-boyfriend, the rapper Vanilla Ice. The latter complained afterward that he had no idea the pictures taken with her would end up in the Sex book. “I didn’t want to be part of her slutty package. At all,” he said later. The two began dating after she came to a concert of his in the early 90s. “It was fun. We were comfortable with each other…she was a sweetheart. Then the monkey wrench with the book came and flipped the whole deal.” After the book came out, he refused to speak to Madonna. The more he slammed the phone down on her, the more she called. “That turned her on,” he said in disbelief. “I’m not trying to turn you on, I’m just trying to turn you off!” Madonna didn’t like to be refused, seeing rejection as a challenge.

  Her extreme behavior, though, seemed to invite rejection. And with that in mind, she indulged in one of the most taboo—for women—subjects of all. Placed judiciously and gloriously throughout the book are images of masturbation. There’s Madonna, astride a mirror on the floor, hand down her panties, gazing at her reflection; or lounging on a fleecy sofa in unzipped jeans, blowing smoke rings. And there she is, pulling down a pair of cutoff jeans and touching her bare backside. These pictures are taken in plain, dirty rooms that are empty apart from old carpet and a few props. They are the most erotic in the book, as Madonna captures the private, fevered world of female desire. It isn’t stylized porn, manufactured for a male gaze with a come-hither expression. Instead, she has turned away from the camera, lost in her own pleasure.

  Somewhere, though, something slips, and she is no longer a Brigitte Bardot goddess cavorting in the sand, displaying the joys of sexual freedom. By the end of the book, a tone of alienation creeps in. The photographs in Miami were done at the end of the shoot, in early 1992. By then she looks hardened, her blond hair brittle and her makeup smudged. There is that famous Technicolor shot of her walking naked down a highway hitching a lift, and her playing exhibitionist, eating naked in a pizza parlor while fully clothed customers look on. When this picture was taken, the owner was apparently so disgusted he threw Madonna and her entourage out of his restaurant. Among the final shots is Madonna playing a streetwalker, bare-breasted on neon-lit streets. There is an air of desperation, like the shots of rock star Courtney Love naked in a London taxi, taken years later for Q magazine. By the end of the book, Madonna had somehow crossed over from carefully managed erotica to bargain-basement soft porn.

  Sex was problematic. A million copies were published in seven countries on the same day—October 22, 1992—and sold out. “There were lots of sleepless nights before the book was published,” Charles Melcher recalls. “We had to sign our lives away before we saw any pictures upfront. It was all very top-secret and hush-hush. We had armed guards at the printing plant. What with the metal and the Mylar bag and the CD, it was like building a car. The assembly line was staggering, and all at super-speed, because Madonna had a lot of other commitments. Then the day it came out people went berserk. They lined up to get the book, and they bought stacks.” At $49.95 a copy, the book was not cheap.

  There was a storm of media debate. For some people, it went too far, for others, not far enough. “The desperate confection of an ageing scandal-addict,” wrote Martin Amis in the Observer, while the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins grumbled that the book was “more about layout than getting laid.” For Melcher and others at Calloway Editions, the pictures were less steamy than they had imagined.

  “One of the most amazing elements of that project was to show how fantasy is more powerful than reality. The build-up had us imagining God knows what,” he says. “We were excited about it being a great erotic art book. I’ve been a student of this genre; it was unprecedented that a top celebrity pop star should do something so sexual. But I found the pictures to be a bit of a letdown. In the end the packaging helped to give them more of an edge, but they were not as forbidden as I thought they’d be.”

  Sex had a confusing philosophy. Most female critics pointed out the vacuousness of Madonna’s remarks about porn and abuse. “She can dig her own abusive relationships, perhaps, and then swan out of them,” wrote Marina Warner, “but a brief visit to the red light districts of most cities, to the prostitutes’ haunts behind railway stations where women hitch rides to perform blow jobs for derisory sums…might give her pause.”

  In reality, it was not about the degree of nudity or the number, as Norman Mailer so elegantly put it, of “beaver shots.” The book crossed over into pornography because, despite its ostensible call for human liberation and safe sex, it felt like an empty exercise in mass marketing. The premise was courageous, with genuine exploration of queer sex, but it drifted into the flippant and commercial. Madonna, finally, was overexposed. Pornography is cynicism about human feeling, with a dead-eyed aspect that is formulaic and antilife. It’s no surprise that a few years after the book was published, one of the men featured in its pages, porn star Joey Stefano, was found dead of a drug overdose in a motel room.

  Stefano had been thrilled to appear in the Sex book. “Here at last was a ‘legitimate’ gig of a sort, involving perhaps the biggest pop star in the field. But the pay was ‘legitimate’ too,” wrote Stefano’s biographer Charles Isherwood. Stefano complained that he was paid only $150 for the shoot. “When Madonna and Co. packed up and left the Gaiety, they took the tawdry chic that reeks from the pages of Sex with them. They left behind the mundane reality and the boys who had to live with it seven days a week…like Stefano’s celebrity escort clients, Madonna had contracted with him for certain specific services. When those were duly rendered, he and the pop star parted ways.” Despite her wish to appeal to the human spirit, Madonna was compromised by the cheap mundanity of the porn business that she passed through.

  One young man I interviewed for this book was eleven years old when Sex came out. He was unaware of her previous Virgin incarnations; that was his first encounter with Madonna. “At school we all thought she was an old porn queen. We had no idea about the other stuff,” he says. “There was the feeling that she was a bit wrong.” One of Madonna’s peers is singer/songwriter Tori Amos, who has always explored sexual issues in her work. She recognizes that many women artists feel the need to pillage “their own repressed self.” For Madonna, this took the form of Sex. “Who am I to say?” Amos muses. “If you’re not hurting anybody else, maybe on your path to self-discovery and the transmutation of a domineering ideology, you need to allow yourself to be defecated on. You can choose to explore that, it’s part of your damage. Many women play it out behind closed doors. She chose to do it in public in front of voyeurs.”

  The general reaction to Sex was unease, the sense that underneath that nonchalant exterior was a troubled psyche. Mado
nna was upset when one of her favorite producers, Patrick Leonard, claimed: “If she doesn’t marry soon she’ll do herself lasting psychological harm.” His tone was moralistic, but he anticipated her crisis. Shortly after the Sex book came out, her next studio album, Erotica, was released. The inset picture on the CD sleeve featured a blurred Madonna holding a black crop and wearing studded leather wristbands, her eyes closed and mouth open, with tongue hanging out in S&M porn pose. When set beside the cover of True Blue, the difference is striking.

  The perfect iconic goddess of True Blue was all gone. In the same way that 60s beauties like Nico, Marianne Faithfull, and Brigitte Bardot, after they were famous, set about destroying their beauty, the very thing they felt limited them, Madonna annihilated hers. Within a few short years, she moved from teasing flirtation to a desperate sexual display. It is ironic that after the artistic triumph of Like a Prayer, she hits this bathos. But then she admitted unease when she had to dye her hair back to blond for the Dick Tracy movie. “I felt great having my own hair color for the first time in years…that was the avenue I was going down. But then all of a sudden I had to change it,” she had said. Blond sent her off in the wrong direction. It was as if with the Sex book she showed the underside of the Hollywood dream. So many would-be actors come to L.A. dreaming of stardom and end up on the margins of adult movies. It can be argued that with its emphasis on the sexual attractiveness of its female stars, mainstream Hollywood is a glittery brothel. Many a disenchanted actor has lamented how Tinseltown can “turn your head.”

  In the Erotica pictures, Madonna is bound and gagged, sitting astride a table, the image cut with a scratched blue tint. She’s worth millions, but here she portrays something worthless. Another picture has her Warholian image fuzzily superimposed on the trailer-trash B-movie porn look complete with slutty blond extensions and red nail polish. She looks like a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Something, indeed, had gone wrong.

  PART OF the package of the Sex book was a giveaway CD single of “Erotica,” the opening track on her next studio album, Erotica. A marked departure from previous albums, it showed Madonna veering off in a darker, more experimental direction. Although Like a Prayer had been a thoughtful artistic statement, its thrust was still Billboard-friendly rock-pop. With Erotica, she was going deep down and dirty. When producer Shep Pettibone worked on the first batch of songs they recorded, he opted for a New York house sound and an “L.A. vibe.” Madonna hated it, saying that if she’d wanted the album to sound like that, she would have worked with Patrick Leonard in L.A. She didn’t need light and glossy. She wanted Erotica to have a raw edge, as if it were recorded in “an alley in Harlem.”

  Pettibone’s first impulse was to top “Vogue,” but Madonna told him sternly that she never repeated herself. They worked on the album in his New York City apartment from October 1991 to the following March, in between Sex book expeditions with Steven Meisel. The Dita Parlo character—dominant, playful, sadistic—influenced the album. Pettibone remarked that Dita seemed to bring out the “beast” in her, actually serving as a vehicle for the dangerous territory she was traveling.

  There had been disappointment in her personal life. Her marriage broke up, and her affairs with high-profile men like Warren Beatty and Vanilla Ice had amounted to nothing. After Beatty she had a relationship with the model/dancer Tony Ward. This pretty boy had a predilection for submissive sex, and was one of the stars of her “Justify My Love” video. He moved into her Hollywood mansion, and they enjoyed playing sexual games together. But there were fundamental inequalities in their relationship: while he professed to be her biggest fan, she would always be the boss. Madonna grew tired of this dynamic and the affair petered out. She had a string of willing lovers, including her bodyguard Jim Allbright and nightclub owner John Enos, but that did little to dispel her loneliness and insecurity. “I have an iron will,” she told writer Lynn Hirschberg, “and all of my will has always been to conquer some horrible feeling of inadequacy. I’m always struggling with that fear. I push past one spell of it and discover myself as a special human being and then I get to another stage and think I’m mediocre…And I find a way to get myself out of that. Again and again.” She said her drive centered on that fear of being mediocre “…that’s always pushing me, pushing me.” Those closest to her worried about her inability to settle, not just with one person, but within herself. “Warren used to say I exercised to avoid depression. And he thought I should just go ahead and stop exercising and allow myself to be depressed,” she said. “And I’d say, ‘Warren, I’ll just be depressed about not exercising!’” Her close friend and backup singer Niki Haris was aware of Madonna’s denial. “I remember having a conversation with Warren. He said, ‘She can’t take that truth, it’s too painful for her,’” she recalls.

  Music was the one area where Madonna let her feelings out. The depression she had been avoiding seeped into the grooves of Erotica: all her anger, dismay, bewilderment, and passion ended up on this record. Apart from the power pop ballad “Rain,” there were no sugarcoated top-ten hits. Madonna wanted to tell her stories. She was an experienced thirty-three-year-old woman with complex emotions, and she was determined to reflect that. From the opening track, “Erotica,” the album is as confrontational as her book Sex. In her dominatrix persona, Madonna enters the velvet intimacy of her S&M world, coaxing a lover to submit to Dita’s special mixture of pleasure and pain. The arrangement is sparse—snatches of Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie,” a grainy backbeat, sensuous Middle Eastern sounds, and Madonna’s whispery, dry voice; half-spoken, half-sung. It has some of the trancelike intensity of “Justify My Love,” but none of its vital force. Her voice is thin and surprisingly low on energy.

  Her cover version of Peggy Lee’s song “Fever” compounds the sense that Madonna has lost that sinewy feel so characteristic of her music. Her sound usually reflects a dancer’s agility and playfulness in its elasticity, but here it is brittle. More of a mental exercise, her version of “Fever” doesn’t have the powerful sense of restraint and obsession that marks the 1956 original. With the next track, “Bye Bye Baby,” Madonna is cool and minimal to the point of flatness. Her dance beat is usually like a strong heartbeat, but here it is barely discernible. She sends off an uncaring suitor with perfunctory lyrics, sounding like she is either not fully concentrating or doesn’t have many inner resources to draw on—what alternative healers would call “scattered chi,” a depleted life force.

  But out of this flatness, this lack of feeling, something new emerges. “Deeper and Deeper” is more her trademark adventurous, ambitious pop. She creates her own female wall of sound with Donna and Niki’s tense call-and-response back vocals. “For this track she needed a strong kind of sound,” says Niki. “There was a good feeling in the studio. Madonna always had her note, right there. It had almost become telepathic between the three of us. I knew how to shape my voice more like hers, she knew how to shape hers like mine. By then we knew how to do that in the studio as well as live.”

  The song builds and builds to a compelling house beat and a gutsy flamenco guitar breakdown as she laments falling for the wrong love, again and again. “This was a disco dance number. I was able to have a little fun and came up with the middle bridge section with the Latin influence. Madonna went with it, and embraced it,” recalls Tony Shimkin, programmer and cowriter of the song. With this track, she may have been thinking back to the simple advice her mother gave, that she should trust the healing power of love.

  But maybe it all goes back to the lady garden, the source of life. “Where Life Begins” is her ode to cunnilingus, or, as it was dubbed in the studio, “Eating Out.” Echoing vaudeville blues mamas like Bessie Smith, who sang about the “jelly” in her “jelly roll,” Madonna rejoices in the power of metaphor and innuendo. Coproduced with Andre Betts, who also worked with her on “Justify My Love,” this track is an intimate fantasy rendered even more sensual by its pulsating low-key jazz licks.

  A r
apper/producer who grew up in the Bronx, Betts gave the album a lot of its “dirty” feel. Impressed with the work he had done on “Justify My Love,” Madonna called him up saying she wanted to do some tracks in a studio where she wouldn’t be recognized. He found her a small shabby jingles studio on West 21st Street in New York. “Madonna comes in with this big fur coat all the way down to her ankles,” Betts told me. “She sits down and we start writing together. I’m on the piano and all of a sudden a rat runs across the room while she’s writing lyrics. She looks at me and she says, ‘Dre, did you see that?’ I did, and I said, ‘See what?’ She goes, ‘You didn’t see that?’ I was like, ‘I didn’t see nothing!’ She goes, ‘You’re fucking lying, you saw it.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah I saw it, are you gonna leave?’ She goes, ‘Man, I’m not afraid of fucking rats!’ And she just kept on writing. I was like, ‘Wow’, and she was just, ‘Whatever!’”

  So spoke the girl who had slept on studio floors and egg crates and eaten lunch out of garbage bins. Despite her superstar existence, there was part of Madonna that never lost touch with those early days scraping together a living in New York. And with this album, she was determined to evoke a sense of earthy reality. The day they saw the rat was the day she wrote “Where Life Begins.” “I’m sitting there looking at her writing. She’s blushing and she’s got this smile on her and she goes, ‘Gosh!’ and I’m looking at her like, ‘What the hell are you writing?’” laughs Betts. Though embarrassed to be writing about such an intimate subject in front of her new producer, Madonna clearly enjoyed the process.