Life with My Sister Madonna

by Christopher Ciccone

  For a second, I am reminded of Hank, his guard dog.

  Just in time, I slam the door right in Sean’s face—and lock it.

  Madonna falls into my arms. Her face devoid of makeup, usually so pale, is flushed and she’s crying.

  I put my arm around her and lead her over to the sofa. I hold her while she sobs. Meanwhile, Sean is banging on the door, yelling her name.

  He keeps on thumping at the door for a full five minutes, yelling, “Open the fucking door, Madonna, open the fucking door.”

  My first instinct is to open it and beat the shit out of him. But I know that will only escalate the situation. So instead, I hug Madonna.

  We listen in silence as Sean yells and bangs.

  Finally, Madonna falls asleep in my arms. Soon after, I fall asleep as well.

  In the morning, she’s gone.

  When I see Madonna again on the set later that day, her makeup is immaculate, her hair perfect, and she is smiling her bright, confident smile. Sean comes over to me, but I ignore him completely.

  Until last night, I was his biggest defender. No matter how weird I thought our blood-brother ceremony was, I felt that it meant something, that we had really and truly become blood brothers. From then on, I always defended him no matter what everyone said about his tantrums and press paranoia. Not just because I felt honorbound, but because I did really feel that we were brothers beneath the skin.

  Here in Hong Kong, I was Sean’s only defender amid a cast and crew who generally despise him. But that no longer holds true. Now I am neither Sean’s defender nor his friend. Although I don’t say this to Madonna, I wish that I weren’t his brother-in-law.

  Remembering Sean’s admission that he was drunk during Shanghai Surprise, it becomes eminently clear to me that once again my sister and I have made similar choices: we have both fallen in love with men who have, at one time in their lives, become violent from the effects of too much alcohol.

  Filming in Hong Kong ends. Sean and Madonna fly to Berlin, where his movie At Close Range is being premiered. He stays there for a few days while Madonna flies ahead to London. I fly in from Hong Kong in time to meet her.

  At Heathrow, I am escorted to the tarmac. Madonna, in a black scarf and dark sunglasses, along with a bodyguard and her trainer, disembarks. A police escort is at the end of the Jetway and walks with us to customs.

  After the officers have finished with everyone’s bags, the police throw open the door between the customs hall and arrivals. A posse of photographers lie in wait for us. All hell breaks loose. The hall is ablaze with exploding flashbulbs and the glare of TV cameras. Fans scream and photographers yell, “Over here, Madonna, over here.”

  As we walk past the barrier, fans and photographers jump over and surround us. With the bodyguard and the trainer, I form a protective circle around Madonna. We try to edge our way to the curb and our waiting limo.

  The police are being less than helpful, and although they make a halfhearted attempt to clear the way for us, it takes us a full fifteen minutes to make it to the exit.

  I push cameras out of Madonna’s face. What seems like three hundred photographers keep right on snapping.

  I can see Madonna’s about to crack.

  I hold her more tightly. “Stay close, Madonna, I’ll get you out of here,” I say.

  Finally, we get to the car, a black Mercedes. The door is already open. Madonna and I jump into the back. Cameras are shoved against the car windows. A massive thump, and the car shakes. A photographer has jumped on the roof. Another on the hood. Five or six are banging on the windows.

  “Madonna, Madonna, talk to us.”

  She slides down in her seat. I hold her close. We are both near hysteria.

  Another loud thump and a photographer lands on the back of the car.

  “Get me out of here, get me out of here!” Madonna screams.

  But the driver can’t move because we are surrounded.

  “Just drive,” Madonna yells.

  We inch forward, and I feel a little bump.

  A photographer has slid off the roof and onto the road.

  We pull away.

  I look back.

  He is on the ground.

  All the other photographers start to snap his picture.

  He tries to get up.

  “Lie back down again,” the other photographers yell.

  He does, and they take his picture.

  As the car pulls out of the airport, we look out of the back window at the crowd of screaming photographers behind us, and the thought flashes through my mind that we are a long way from flying Air India, economy class, eating curry in Soho, and buying jeans in Camden Market.

  “Great,” says Madonna. “A whole month in London, and that’s what we’ve got to look forward to!”

  When we finally get to read a British newspaper, we discover the reason for the airport riot. While we were in Hong Kong, leaks from the set were pouring into the British tabloids. Now Madonna and Sean are big news. In Britain, the Poison Penns are now the target of every single paparazzo in the country.

  Moreover, we now understand exactly why George arranged for Sean to fly ahead separately.

  “If he’d have been at Heathrow today, he’d have slugged them all,” Madonna says. And she’s right.

  But no matter how much I now despise Sean, after that terrifying airport experience I feel a flash of empathy for him. After all, I only had to endure the full force of the paparazzi for a few hours, but Sean is condemned to endure it for as long as he and Madonna are married.

  MADONNA AND I arrive in Holland Park, where George has rented Madonna and Sean a house, and me an apartment, and just as we stop, a group of cars skid around the corner in a screech of burning rubber.

  The ever-resourceful paparazzi have caught up with us.

  The exterior of the house is rather like an Elizabethan chalet. We duck inside before the media grab a shot of us. The inside is furnished seventies style, with shag carpeting and a sunken living room overlooked by a big glass window stained with an illustration of a rainbow.

  I am relieved that Sean isn’t here. Madonna and I spend the evening together. We chat about how difficult the movie has been for her, but neither of us broaches the subject of her abortive relationship with Sean, or that upsetting night in Hong Kong.

  Outside, it is cold and wet. I go home to my rented apartment to bed and leave Madonna, protected by her bodyguard, waiting for Sean.

  THE NEXT MORNING, followed by a bunch of paparazzi that have slept outside the house in their cars all night, we drive to Shepperton Studios, where we are due to start filming the movie’s interiors. For the next months, the routine is the same: Every morning the media lie in wait for us outside our house. Each night after shooting, they follow us home again. They spend the night in their cars outside and follow us to the studio again the next morning.

  And so it goes for most of our London stay.

  Finally Madonna explodes: “I’ve had enough of being a fucking prisoner.”

  So we book a table at one of London’s foremost restaurants, Le Caprice. Then we hatch a plot. Madonna enlists a male and female extra, and the following evening they cover their faces and dash out of the house and into a waiting Daimler.

  The Daimler roars away, with the paparazzi in hot pursuit.

  “It worked! It worked!” Madonna exults.

  Then the three of us duck into the black Mercedes parked outside and are promptly driven to Le Caprice, where we spend a relatively peaceful evening without the paparazzi recording our every moment.

  However, when we leave the restaurant, we are besieged by the waiting paparazzi and realize that someone must have tipped them off. But at least we’ve had a few untroubled hours in a paparazzi-free zone.

  EACH DAY, THE British press attack Madonna and Sean in viler terms. So far, the Daily Mail has lambasted her as “the Queen of Slut Rock playing at Garbo, but playing it oh so badly.” The Daily Express has posed the rhetorical quest
ion “Will Madonna and her man ever clean up their act?” Countless other scathing articles have appeared in the British press, and Madonna is hurt and bemused.

  “Christopher, I don’t understand why people are writing this kind of shit about me,” she says.

  I can’t blame her for being puzzled. After all, until now the British press have been among her strongest allies and have always been kind to her. But, thanks to Sean, who isn’t half as much a star as Madonna now is, they have all turned against her.

  Finally, George Harrison calls a press conference to defend his stars. On the afternoon of March 6, 1986, at the Roof Gardens—a stylish sixth-floor restaurant above Kensington High Street, London, where pink flamingos stalk around ornate formal gardens—seventy-five members of the British press gather to meet Madonna.

  Sean was originally scheduled to take part in the press conference as well, but at the last minute, it was decided that it was far more politic for him not to attend.

  Madonna and George sit side by side at a small table. Four bodyguards hover nearby. George is in a blue-and-white shirt and a blue suit and chews gum. Madonna is in a black dress with white cuffs, her hair is down, and her lipstick is bright red.

  She looks exceptionally beautiful.

  George starts the conference by welcoming the assembled members of the British press, then asks for order. I stand on the side and watch as Madonna fields the first question: “What kind of a boss is George Harrison and were you a Beatlemaniac?”

  The question is benign, and so is Madonna’s answer: “I wasn’t a Beatlemaniac. I don’t think I really appreciated their songs until I was much older. I was too young to really get caught up in the craze. But he’s a great boss, very understanding and sympathetic.”

  So far, so good. Madonna and I have been lulled into a false sense of security, unaware of the fearlessness of the British press when faced with a global superstar, and of their capacity for asking direct if impertinent questions. George clearly is, hence his decision not to subject the hotheaded Sean to their interrogation. By the third question, “Is it fun working with your husband, Sean Penn?” the writing is on the wall. Initially, Madonna deftly sidesteps any problems by giving a bland answer: “Of course it is. He’s a pro. He’s worked on several films and his experience has helped me.”

  The next question is more of a zinger: “Has it caused any personal problems off set? Do you row at all?”

  George jumps in before Madonna can answer. “Do you row with your wife?”

  The journalist is temporarily silenced. The questions become more general, but only for a few moments, then they are again aimed at eliciting comments from George or Madonna on Sean’s tantrums.

  Did they expect the kind of coverage they received? Would George work with Sean again? “Sure, I happen to like Sean very much,” George counters.

  Madonna stays silent until a journalist asks why Sean isn’t at the press conference.

  I give a silent answer: If Sean were here, most of the journalists in this room would have been toast by now.

  George says, “Because he’s busy working.”

  Madonna backs him up with “He’s in more scenes than I am,” which is true.

  Then the press go directly on the offensive. A journalist asks, “Madonna, I wonder if either you or your husband would like to apologize for incidents which have involved bad behavior on your behalf.”

  Madonna draws herself up to her full height. “I have nothing to apologize for.”

  George laces into the press. When a journalist challenges him with “We have loads of film stars over here, but never have had these sorts of fights,” Madonna comes to her own defense and I’m proud of her.

  “When Robert De Niro comes to the airport, are there twenty photographers that sit on his limousine and don’t allow him to leave the airport?” she asks.

  Things become increasingly ugly when George says, “We expected nonanimals,” and a journalist leaps up and yells, “Talking of animals, is it true Sean Penn has been on the set giving orders?”

  George counterattacks. Then the journalists bring up the incident at the airport and say, “It wasn’t the press that was at fault.”

  Madonna looks genuinely upset.

  I want to sock the journalist. I stand up and say, “I was in the car. He got up and then lay down again for the photographers.”

  Madonna mouths me a silent Thank you.

  In the face of the unrelenting British media onslaught, she is calm and polite, and the tide of public opinion begins to turn in her favor.

  But when Shanghai Surprise, which ends up costing an estimated $17 million to make, premieres in August, then goes into release at four hundred U.S. theaters, the reviews are abysmal, with Time’s critic declaring, “Madonna seems straightjacketed by her role and Penn, for once, looked bored,” and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker dubbing the movie a “listless bore of a film.”

  But instead of becoming downhearted or depressed by the reviews, Madonna refocuses her attention on her music career, which just zooms from strength to strength. “Live to Tell,” the theme to Sean’s At Close Range, is released and hits number one in the United States. Madonna is featured on the cover of Rolling Stone. “Papa Don’t Preach” (the lyrics of which, despite speculation to the contrary, are not rooted in anything to do with our father) is released and hits number one on the U.S. charts for two weeks, while “True Blue” stays there for five.

  I eventually see Shanghai Surprise and am embarrassed at how bad it is. Madonna and Sean have zero on-screen chemistry. Not that I am surprised, because offscreen there is little tenderness between them either.

  Clearly, neither of them ever examined their own performances. Overall, the movie is a victim of the creative control Sean and Madonna exerted over it.

  However, Madonna flatly refuses to take any responsibility for the movie’s failure.

  “It’s all Sean’s fault,” she tells me, in a voice that brooks no contradiction.

  AFTER THE FIASCO of Shanghai Surprise, Sean and Madonna start living separate lives. With at least fifteen paparazzi routinely hanging out in front of the New York apartment on Central Park West that they have recently purchased, Sean spends as much time as possible in L.A.

  Madonna flies out to L.A. intermittently to be with him, but they end up fighting all the time primarily because Bukowski is always around the house, still drunk as a skunk. Madonna wants him out of the house, and Sean doesn’t.

  Anytime Sean does come to town, the three of us hang out at the Pyramid, a dark, dingy little bar on Avenue A between Ninth and Tenth, where Madonna, Erika, and I once did a track date. But before we can reminisce and marvel at how far we’ve come, the moment we get inside the door, Sean has to fight for Madonna’s attention—just as Danny often has to fight for mine. Madonna and I have both fallen for possessive, jealous men, and we pay the price.

  Whether or not Sean likes it, he’s compelled to face that we are on her territory now, and everyone wants a piece of her, and he’s not the main event. And when he and Madonna leave the bar, photographers are waiting outside, ready to grab a shot of her. Everything surrounding Madonna is frantic. The press is pulling them apart. Moreover, she is now far more famous than he is. She overshadows him completely, which must feel emasculating. I can’t help being aware of the irony that the man who has always aspired to be the James Dean of his generation has now been relegated to the role of a surly underling trailing around in his wife’s starry wake.

  OCTOBER 1986. MADONNA calls me and breaks the devastating news that Martin Burgoyne, one of our oldest friends and her first road manager, is very sick with AIDS. Although not too much is understood about the disease at this time, we already know a few people who have AIDS and both of us understand the tragic implications. Madonna pays Marty’s medical expenses at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Madonna and I go to the hospital together to visit him one day. While she is with Marty, I wait outside his room. When she emerges, her face is stained wit
h tears. He dies within a month. He was just twenty-four years old.

  Apart from giving Marty as much financial support as possible and easing his last days, Madonna has already established an impressive track record in raising money for AIDS research and braves a media storm by participating as a model at the AIDS benefit fashion show at Barneys New York that will benefit St. Vincent’s AIDS research clinic. Right up until the midnineties, her personal involvement in fighting the disease and raising money to benefit AIDS sufferers remains passionate and unimpeachable.

  Like Princess Diana, she has no fear of AIDS, and her commitment to its victims will help raise public consciousness of this harrowing disease.

  At the end of the year, the release of Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” single and video—in which she simulates a kiss with an underage boy—causes yet another high-octane Madonna-style controversy. The video of The Virgin Tour wins a Billboard Music Award for the Top Music Video of 1986, and she wins the AMA award for Favorite Pop/Rock Female Video Artist for “Papa Don’t Preach” and makes a surprise appearance at the Shrine Auditorium and collects the award in person. Accepting awards—apart from the elusive Grammy, which she still hasn’t won—is becoming an everyday occurrence for her.

  When rehearsals for her next tour—Who’s That Girl?—begin, I agree to be her dresser again. Better to be on the road than here in Manhattan, where AIDS is now decimating the gay men in the city and a creeping sadness is pervading our once carefree existence.

  Danny is, of course, deeply opposed to my touring again with Madonna. But he hasn’t got a chance of stopping me. Despite that I’ve been with him for four years now, and I love him, I still want what I want. Unlike The Virgin Tour, this will be a world tour, so I’ll get to visit Europe and Japan. And since Sean is pretty much out of the picture, Madonna and I are closer than ever, and I really want to help her weather this tour.

  Whenever anyone comes out with the usual crap that Madonna’s success is due to luck, I am always outraged. Through the years, I witness the rigors of her pre-tour preparations. The moment a tour is scheduled, she starts training with a vengeance. When the Who’s That Girl? tour begins, she will run six miles in the morning, then do a two-hour show in the evening. Her self-discipline is impressive, her stamina superhuman, and it’s far from easy to keep up with her.