Madonna

by Lucy O'Brien

  Still, “Bedtime Story” was a vivid track that foreshadowed Madonna’s move toward electronica. “That was a very brave choice,” says De Vries. “Although it wasn’t a Björk cover version, Björk has such a particular and idiosyncratic approach to the construction of lyrics and phrasing. Every aspect of the architecture of her writing is distinctly Björkian. To try to perform one of those songs is a brave undertaking. It’s difficult for the singer to be infected by the way the lyric is so stamped with Björk’s approach to language. Having said that, Madonna captured the atmosphere of it beautifully.” Tackling that song seemed to set something free in Madonna. “She was straining at the leash a little bit, to find some other languages to speak,” suggests De Vries. “‘Bedtime Story’ was an embryonic moment that went a lot further on the next few albums.”

  It also caused a swing in her popularity in Europe. Released as a single, the track didn’t dent the U.S. top forty, but it went top five in the United Kingdom and became a huge dance-club hit, with remixes by Orbital and Junior Vasquez. It also inspired one of her most experimental and expensive videos. Shot by Mark Romanek for a reputed $5 million, it was a Daliesque epic in which Madonna floats through the air, gives birth to doves, lies on a surreal operating table, and has her eyes and mouth switched, Frida Kahlo–style. Strongly influenced by Remedios Varo’s painting The Lovers, the video entered the portals of high art, screened in art galleries and kept in the permanent collection at London’s Museum of the Moving Image.

  The collaboration with Nellee Hooper seemed to add something to Madonna’s aesthetic. She was so pleased with their tracks that she had him remix ones laid down by other producers—such as “Forbidden Love” and “Sanctuary.” “She appreciated Nellee’s sure-footed approach to building rhythms, and his sense of space and spaciousness,” explains De Vries. “She likes attention to detail and good craftsmanship, and demands that. If you can prove yourself to her in that respect, she’ll respond well.”

  De Vries was also struck by the fact that it took them just two and a half weeks to construct, record, and mix five tracks. “That’s remarkable for a major artist. I was amazed at how quick the process could be, and how decisive one had to be under those circumstances. You had to make strong decisions and not second-guess yourself too much. It was a very focused process. ‘Forbidden Love,’ for instance, was done and dusted in two days. You have to have a special mind-set when you’re working that fast. I’d construct something that was fairly close to how it would sound and then she’d sing it in a few takes. Madonna’s rarely unsure about the sounds she wants.” By contrast, a U2 record could take two years, “and then no decisions will have been made until the last minute. That’s a different way of approaching it—drafting and redrafting. Madonna is much more Hitchcockian—I’ll only shoot what I need.”

  When it was released in October 1994, Bedtime Stories received mixed reviews. Rolling Stone’s Barbara O’Dair praised its “lush soul and creamy balladry,” yet she added that the “Express Yourself” message “comes not with a bang but a whimper.” And Mat Snow at Q magazine condemned the album as “tepid,” saying that despite the input of top producers, “the girl remains obstinately and perversely recessed. It’s as if the whole body of her voice has been electronically filtered out to leave only its outline. For all the inventiveness of production…the star of the show seems to have faded to processed featheriness.”

  What reviewers picked up on was Madonna in retreat. Still smarting from criticism over the Sex book, she was evolving a softer, gentler image. Yet despite the pastel tones of her new look, there was also a sense of grit. She combined this, strikingly, with the video for “Secret,” the first single from her new album. Shot in black-and-white in Harlem, the video portrays Madonna as a 1950s-style nightclub jazz singer in a mixed-race relationship. Intercut with scenes of “street” people, misfits, and freaks, it is one of her most distinctive videos. Madonna knew that a lot was riding on her first release after Erotica, and she wanted to create a startling effect.

  “She was ready to go there. At the time she wanted to bring it down a little, instead of the glamour glamour,” the video’s director, Melodie McDaniel, told me. “Madonna had a blond Jean Harlow look at the time. I wanted to combine that old classic Hollywood mix with the edginess of modern contemporary, but make it feel timeless. I was trying to think of something different, something real.”

  Madonna’s choice of director was astute. A young Jewish and African-American graduate from the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, McDaniel was an aspiring photojournalist, who liked to work with a “Cassavetes approach,” bringing people together and documenting the results. Her compelling images led to her being signed to Propaganda, a production company with a Bauhaus mixture of art and commercial work, which launched careers of such directors as its cofounder David Fincher. McDaniel had done only two videos—for bands Porno for Pyros and the Cranberries—when Madonna approached her. But what Madonna was most interested in was one of McDaniel’s early short films, where she staged a scenario of a baptism combined with voodoo, in the style of 1940s avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren. This film later was projected on giant screens on Madonna’s 2001 Drowned World tour. “She was drawn to the rawness of my work,” recalls McDaniel.

  Though flattered by Madonna’s attention, she was also terrified. “It was awesome I got this break. I went to meet her and she said, ‘Give me your references, I wanna see what you want to do.’ I was blown away by the song ‘Secret,’ and found it inspiring, but I was freaked out. I was jumping from young artists to working with an icon.” McDaniel presented Madonna with pictures by some of her favorite 1970s photographers, like Bill Burke, “who took pictures of people from the South, most people might think of as freaks or inbred. I was drawn to these images, a certain feel.” She also showed Madonna East 100 Street, a book of photos shot in Spanish Harlem by controversial 70s photographer Bruce Davidson.

  “She likes you to bring her stuff for inspiration. She was drawn to those books. That was enough for her,” says McDaniel. Madonna let the director stay at her New York apartment on Central Park West for a week, to do research. “She bought a couple of my photographs before I did the video, and when I went to her beautiful apartment, they were hanging on her wall next to some pictures of Muhammad Ali and a few Frida Kahlos. She wasn’t in town; she said, ‘Look at my reference books, use what you want.’ She had lots of books on painters, books by Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon. I didn’t realize what a voracious reader she was. She was incredibly bright. I had this idea that pop stars were, not exactly lazy, but they’d sit around being the artist and let everyone do everything for them. Madonna runs the show. She does her research well.”

  Madonna was happy to work with a few people from McDaniel’s team, including a young stylist called Brigitte Echols. “I was never into doing celebrity things. At that time, there was a Herb Ritts kind of thing in videos—not a lot of emotion and depth. I came from a punk background, not a pop background at all. I didn’t want to do Madonna, but I’d go to the ends of the earth for Melanie,” remembers Echols. “Next thing, I’m driving up to Madonna’s gorgeous house in Hollywood. It’s early 1900s Spanish style. I enter the house through an underground tunnel and go up in an elevator. The first thing I see is a Frida Kahlo’s painting. I can see she appreciates art, it’s not just a rich person’s trashy home.”

  The next scene is etched on Echols’s memory. “It was eleven in the morning and the house was full of light. Her assistant says, ‘Madonna will be down in a minute.’ Then Madonna appears at the top of the stairs, freshly showered, in a white sheer dress. You could just see her rose-pink nipples and panties through it, and she looked absolutely gorgeous. She was so sweet and nice. Her first words were: ‘What were you thinking of putting me in?’”

  In preparation, Echols had gone to a low-rent mall called Crenshaw Swap Meet and had a gold necklace made with the name MADONNA on it. “It cost $180, with a teeny diam
ond chip, and it came in a cheap jewelry box. Her eyes lit up when she saw the jewelry box. She opened it up—she was like a child who’d got the best present—and she said, ‘It’s lovely. Could I have it a little bigger?’ It was so nice to find her something that she didn’t already have.”

  They sat on her living-room floor and Madonna chose swatches of material she liked. Echols then had an $80 skirt and $50 top made up at her local dry cleaners, plus vintage clothes she had picked up from costume houses, a La Perla bra, and one or two pieces by budding designer Marc Jacobs. “She didn’t know who Marc Jacobs was, but she could see the value of what it was,” recalls Echols. “She knows clothes. That woman knows clothes.”

  McDaniel and her team scouted out suitably scuzzy locations for the video, doing street-casting—a naturalistic approach that was later copied by countless directors and designers, including Calvin Klein. Wanting to capture a low-rent, speakeasy feel, they assembled a striking cast of offbeat “nonmodel” characters, from transvestites to card tricksters and edgy Harlem teenagers. So far so good, but when it came to the actual shoot, McDaniel had a baptism by fire. “I like the voyeuristic thing—just let the cameras roll and improvise. No, Madonna wanted direction, direction, direction,” recalls McDaniel. “She was sitting there; I was waiting for her to be natural. I’d call, ‘Action,’ and she’d sit there saying, slightly impatiently, ‘What am I doing? What am I doing? Hello?’ I felt a bit frazzled.” Madonna had sailed into Harlem with a fabulous, decadent entourage of Hollywood trucks, trailers, and security. Even Donatella Versace stopped by for a visit. “When it all rolled up, I remember thinking, Oh my God. I tried to give direction to some of her creative team, and they just kind of looked at me like, Yeah,” McDaniel says.

  Overawed by the entourage, she was too shy to tell Madonna that she wanted her raw around the edges, like Jennifer Jason Leigh’s prostitute character in Last Exit to Brooklyn. “When she came out of the trailer, her team had made her look very mild and glamorous, with no edge. All clean and neat and safe. I didn’t communicate clearly enough what I wanted. We did a take. Then I remember pulling Madonna to the side and explaining. She was really annoyed. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?’ she said, ‘Wasting all this time!’ They went back into the trailer, her team rolling their eyes. It was so painful. I felt humiliated, but it was my fault, I should’ve spoken up.”

  Madonna had her hair and makeup redone, and the result is the famously sleazy, romantic image that appears in the video. Her creative team loved it, and so did she. “I realized that she’s game for anything, and I should have really pushed it, really driven it home,” says McDaniel. “I’ve seen her be hard on people, but it wasn’t being mean. There’s no room for dilly-dallying around. She gave me a wake-up call.”

  Echols has a more prosaic memory of the shoot. “The first scene has Madonna walking down the street in Harlem. Fatima, the assistant director, had a great black leather coat on, with a fur trim, She said, ‘Wow, that’s a great coat!’ and ended up wearing it. Then she comes out of her trailer. The guy’s done her hair. I don’t know where that hair fucking dude came from. It was all tight pin curls, such a hairdo. Not Mel’s deal, it’s gotta look natural. We felt intimidated by these fancy makeup people. Celebs have their people become a wall around them. That’s the only time we felt separation. We weren’t sure how to express ourselves in this situation.” When the misunderstanding was straightened out, though, each side appreciated the other.

  Echols noted the close relationship Madonna had with her director of photography. “All famous beautiful film women know their DP. They have to trust them entirely. Madonna knew how to make everything work right—the lighting, the angles, how to play with the camera. She knows what looks good on her. She has a beautiful body, she can do different kinds of looks, she has that composure. She’s fascinated by all the different things she can be, she can see herself in many ways.” Echols sees Madonna’s approach to style as collaborative. “We had ideas about the outfit. She agreed to it and made it work. She wore the necklace for a year after that. And we saw photos of her in the outfit we’d made at Crown Cleaners.”

  Echols gets irritated when people claim Madonna is not so beautiful in person. “That’s bullshit. She’s luminous. Marilyn Monroe had it. It’s a quality that reacts with film and takes on its own life.” She recalls seeing her at the Propaganda offices one day, dressed like Jean Harlow. “I didn’t know her then, and I said, ‘Who is that woman?’ She had on a big coat, heels, sunglasses, and platinum-blond hair. She looked like a movie star from the 30s. Amazing.” Six months after Echols worked with Madonna, the star was on the cover of the U.K. Sunday Times magazine, looking the epitome of high glamour in a shimmering Versace gown, with platinum hair and eyebrows dyed blond. Madonna was fond of Gianni Versace. The charismatic Italian saw himself as a tailor rather than a designer; he was inspired by Andy Warhol and abstract art, and used Madonna as a muse for his creations. But there was something eerily prescient about the Sunday Times cover. Under the headline MADONNA FALLS FOR VERSACE, she lies spread-eagled on a flight of steps, as if she is dead. Two years later, Versace was gunned down on the steps of his Miami beachfront mansion. Madonna mourned his death, and it is notable that she never really went back to that high-octane Monroe-style glamour again.

  THE “SECRET” video was a huge hit, replayed endlessly on MTV, while the single went top five worldwide. McDaniel and Madonna stayed friends, working on a few more ideas together. “She has an entourage of people, but she brings you in,” says McDaniel. “You go to great places, not just fabulous places—she’d take us to some unknown underground club and just go for it. She loves new discoveries. She knows how to live in both places. It was genuine.” McDaniel doesn’t view Madonna’s impulse as vampiric. “I didn’t feel that at all. Everyone is influenced by everyone. You can take something and make it your own.”

  Madonna gave McDaniel a copy of Push, a hard-hitting novel about childhood abuse, by New York writer Sapphire. The two of them wanted to develop it as a feature-film idea, but Sapphire wasn’t interested. Madonna presented a large package with McDaniel’s show reel, and got Russell Simmons involved. Sapphire’s response was: “Absolutely not, I don’t want to have anything to do with Hollywood.” McDaniel collaborated again on a fateful photo shoot for Vibe magazine, with star basketball player Dennis Rodman. “They were flirting and they wanted to meet. He came to her house in Miami. It was challenging to me to figure out how to make them look real and natural and different. I scouted a neighborhood in Little Havana. It was very raw: the people from the neighborhood didn’t even recognize her. It was a little run-down. I snapped them being playful and cuddling, but it later all went sour.”

  The photo story never ended up in Vibe magazine, and Madonna’s affair with Rodman became one of her biggest regrets. But when they first got together, there was an intense physical attraction. Rodman shared her flair for getting attention. The six-foot-six-inch player had a penchant for flamboyant cross-dressing, and once he appeared at a function in a coffin, like the 50s rock ’n’ roller Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. At first, Madonna appreciated Rodman’s style.

  “Basketball players to Madonna are like ballet dancers or any kind of dancer…graceful and elegant. Very sleek,” he claimed in his autobiography Bad as I Wanna Be. “Athletes are a real turn-on for her because she appreciates anybody who can move with such fluid motions. Madonna’s a connoisseur of bodies. She studies them and watches them closely.” According to the indiscreet Rodman, Madonna hounded him for several months, viewing him as a perfect physical specimen, and a potential husband and father. “I think Madonna was getting some good lovin’,” said her friend Niki Haris. “I think Madonna might’ve got turned on by the brother!” But the relationship soon fizzled out. Hurt by the fact that Rodman gossiped about her in his book, Madonna was judiciously brief in public—the chapter about her, she claimed, had “made-up dialogue that even a bad porno writer would not take credit for”—
while remarking in private that he wasn’t that great in bed, and the affair was short-lived anyway. “I feel exploited once again by someone I trusted and let into my life,” she said.

  What their affair highlighted was her vulnerability. Now in her mid-30s, Madonna was anxious to have children. In an elusive search for Mr. Right, she had brief relationships with various unlikely men. She even had a dalliance with rapper Tupac Shakur, the year before he was killed in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. “I went to a restaurant with her that was full of black rappers,” says Alison Clarkson, formerly U.K. singer Betty Boo. “Tupac Shakur sat with us for a bit. She was going out with him, but then it came to an end, because homegirls were saying to him, ‘I can’t believe you’re going out with a white girl.’ She was open about the fact she’d been dumped.”

  It was in the summer of 1994 that Madonna met a more promising partner, Cuban-American fitness trainer Carlos Leon. She’d noticed him jogging in Central Park and arranged an introduction via her assistant. The affair grew slowly, away from the limelight. Though an aspiring actor, Leon was a proud, private man, wary of Madonna’s superstar friends. She enjoyed meeting his parents, a hardworking couple living in a modest East 91st Street apartment, and going on anonymous dates with him to Lincoln Center and Central Park. For a while, she could make believe this was just a normal relationship. Here was someone she could have been at school with. Many people called him “sweet,” while Tobias Nunez, a friend from high school, remembered Leon as “a nerdy guy; he was very straitlaced…shy and innocent.” Despite this, Leon had a hint of Latin machismo in his temperament, and didn’t relish playing second fiddle to Madonna the star. “Carlos was lovely, but unfortunately met her when she was in the realm of ‘I want to be a superstar, but you gotta treat me as any other girl you’d date.’ It was confusing. She’d want him to be ‘normal,’ then say, ‘I’m flying to London tonight and you should come too,’” recalls Niki Haris.