Madonna

by Andrew Morton

  To make matters worse, as Camille’s drinking grew heavier, the buzz around Madonna was getting louder. Club managers, college promoters, record scouts were all beating a path to her door. Concerned that Camille was missing opportunities, Madonna started seeing music-industry executives behind her back, further damaging the already frayed relations between them. ‘I was under siege and didn’t know how to handle it,’ admits Camille. ‘I tried to hold her tighter, which was a big mistake.’

  A showdown meeting between Madonna and co-manager Bill Lomuscio ended with the nascent star tearfully promising to abide by their contract and to stop pursuing her solo agenda. Inevitably, however, the truce did not last long. Madonna could not resist using her sensuality, street savvy and musical experience to seduce any number of record-company executives into thinking that she was theirs for the taking. They treated her to dinner or concert tickets, while she kept them intrigued and excited, teasing them with the prospect of delivering more.

  Much now depended on the crucial gig at the Underground Club in November. Invitations were sent to dozens of movers and shakers in the music business, Madonna appeared in a fashion spread in the influential Village Voice, and the club was decked out with exotic flowers for the performance. As a result, she found Curtis Zale’s well-meant but ill-timed donation, just before the gig, of another couple of bags of old clothes for her, not at all in keeping with the rather more hip image she was now trying to convey.

  It was well into the early hours of the morning by the time Madonna performed and the only music executive who had stayed long enough to watch her set was Paul Atkinson of Columbia Records. He had listened to her demo tape and was considering whether to offer her a deal, and if so, a single or album deal. After the gig he was still undecided and, like several other executives from rival companies, decided to hold fire until he had seen and heard more material.

  The band, meanwhile, went from strength to strength. On New Year’s Eve they won their biggest break to date when they opened for David Johnason of The New York Dolls at a club called My Father’s Place. On stage, Madonna’s act was seductive and sensual, leading her younger sister Paula, who was watching from the wings, to berate Camille Barbone for sexually exploiting her. Fresh from Madonna’s old college, the University of Michigan, Paula had clearly never heard that sex and drugs made rock and roll. The audience, however, liked what they saw. Madonna pranced off the stage, all smiles, ready for her next big date – the New Year’s Eve party hosted by a recently launched television company that broadcast only pop programs and music. The fledgling company was called MTV. She arrived in a limo and David Johnason, who recognized her star potential, escorted her all evening, introducing her to many of the big names on the music scene.

  Elsewhere, however, matters were coming to a head. The fact that her showcase performance at the Underground Club had not immediately yielded results was, in Madonna’s eyes, a further sign of the weakness of her management team. How much longer must she wait? By now she was being actively, if secretly, courted by agents like Rob Prince of the powerful William Morris agency. He suggested that she should privately discuss her future with music attorney Jay Kramer, who then represented Billy Joel, among other big names. As a result, in February 1982 Camille and Bill found themselves invited to a meeting with the high-powered attorney, ostensibly to discuss Madonna’s future. The night before, Madonna had called her manager and said, ‘You’re a bitch, I’m a bitch. We work well together and we can still work together.’ Little did Camille realize that Madonna was offering her a job, albeit as her publicity manager. Even less did she realize that the brief call was to be their last conversation.

  The legal meeting lasted precisely five minutes. While Madonna sat silently on a sofa, Kramer told Camille and her partner that the singer no longer required their services. When Camille protested that Madonna had a legally binding contract, he told her that they were terminating it. Stunned, Bill and Camille walked out, resolved to take legal action against their mutinous client. This led to an endless series of legal wrangles, drawn out over the years, that has left Madonna’s songs from this period, the so-called ‘Gotham Tapes’, in limbo with regard to copyright and ownership issues. A decade later, Barbone secured a modest settlement from her former client.

  For Camille, the emotional fallout was, if anything, even more catastrophic, akin to experiencing a sudden death or a brutal divorce. ‘It was like the breakup of a love affair,’ recalls Camille. ‘We were a team, a marriage that in better circumstances would have thrived.’ She suffered a nervous breakdown, withdrew from the music industry, went to cooking school, and then spent a year working in a nursing home because ‘I needed people to say “thank you.’” Camille, who is now a non-drinker, found that she couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing Madonna’s voice, open a newspaper without reading a story about her, or walk down the street without seeing her picture on a billboard. ‘I just about went out of my mind,’ she admits. ‘I felt like I was the only person on the planet feeling these things. It was scary.’

  At the time of the split, however, it seemed that Madonna was the biggest loser. Prince did not end up managing her after all, so she was almost back to square one, with no manager, no income, no record deal and now no band. In addition, she faced the prospect of a lawsuit for walking out on her contract with Barbone and Lomuscio. However damaging or exhausting the personal conflict with Camille, she was risking much and gaining little. Her natural – indeed, ingrained – impatience to move on, doubtless contributed to her decision to drop her managers, coupled with the fact that she had begun to suspect Barbone no longer had the money to back up all the promises she had made. Even so, she had once again traded security for uncertainty, with only the vaguest prospect of success to buoy her.

  That said, the Madonna of 1982 was a very different proposition from the rather jumpy, uncertain young woman who had first arrived in Camille Barbone’s office. Sassy and savvy, Madonna had proved, in Camille’s phrase, ‘a quick study,’ not only learning the ins and outs of the music business, but also filling up her little black book with useful contacts. In addition, she felt deeply that other creative artists and performers of her generation, many of them friends, had been moving forward in their careers while she had been marking time. By now she was well established as a member of New York’s in-crowd of young artists, singers and performers who all seemed to be going places. The clubs were both their meeting place and their collective office, where they went to dance, have fun and to network. Just as CBGBs and Max’s had spawned stars of the seventies and early eighties like Blondie, Talking Heads and Television, now the new places to be seen at were Danceteria, the Roxy and the Mudd Club. The British singer Sade worked behind the bar of the Danceteria, while the graffiti artist Keith Haring, whose paintings would sell in the future for hundreds of thousands of dollars, was a coatcheck boy there, sleeping on subway trains by day and working in the club at night. On any one night the place would be filled with emerging artists and musicians; the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Grandmaster Flash, and makeup artist Debi Mazar (now a Hollywood actress), could be found dancing, drinking and trying to get noticed. Congregating over at the Mudd Club were black graffiti artists like Michael Stewart, Lenny McGurr (aka Futura 2000), Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose tag or signature ‘Samo’, shorthand for ‘same old bullshit; would one day see his art worth millions, and rap artist Fred Brathwaite (aka Fab Five Freddie).

  On the surface, Madonna was simply one attractive face among a remarkable crowd, but she did have her own ‘crew’ of friends. At first glance, it was a pretty motley crew, running around town in their rags and tatters. Yet club owner Erika Belle, smart-mouthed New Yorker Debi Mazar, dancers Martin Burgoyne and Bagens Rilez, fashion retailer Maripol, poet and impresario Haoui Montaug, even her old college friend Janice Galloway – all displayed a kind of insouciant artistic integrity that set them apart from the crowd.

  By the 1980s, these bright young things, defined as much by
their creativity as their ambition, had become colorful, stylish reinventions of their earlier, younger selves. Their talk was always of the future, of dreams and deals, schemes and ruses. The past was another country, a world only ever discussed in amused, exaggerated anecdotes, usually dismissive. It would probably never have occurred to Erika Belle or Madonna to swap notes about their fathers, both successful, highly paid scientists; indeed, Madonna’s only apparent reference to her past at this time was when she chastised a friend for wearing the same eyeshadow as her stepmother. Their chatter was only of themselves, the next gallery opening, the newest club – and the next big idea.

  As exhibitionist and self-absorbed as they may have been, Madonna and her brat pack nevertheless made an impression on downtown New York, turning every head when they walked into a club. ‘Madonna and her friends were the kind of kids you wanted in your venue,’ recalls Roxy manager Vito Bruno. ‘She was a stand-out, trendy and eye-catching. They got into the VIP rooms before they were VIPs.’

  They dominated the dance floor – Debi Mazar was an early exponent of break dancing – but they were also at the cutting edge of style, with attitude to spare. The flair Madonna’s displayed for fashion, and for that matter in terms of her music, lay in her ability to pick and mix from her friends, from the streets and the clubs, and from these and other influences make her own statement. In dress, her style was a blend of leggings from her dance days, cute cast-offs from Curtis Zale, thrift-store chic and clothes hand made by Erika Belle, topped off with crucifixes and rubber bracelets (actually electric-typewriter drivebands, supplied by her friend, the French socialite Maripol, who had her own store). She also mixed and merged New York street culture and fashion, especially that sported by chic Latina girls, with the hip New Romantic look, transforming it into her own fashion statement. It was a style that would, within two years, clutter the wardrobes of teenage girls around the world.

  Most important, though, was Madonna’s attitude. She could be sexy and wild, but she always remained in control. At that time the most outrageous dance on the scene was called the Webo, corrupted Spanish for ‘ball-shaker’, an explicitly sexual routine in which a girl would be ‘dogged’ by several male dancers wildly grinding their pelvises against her. It was sexy but it was also sexist, the girls obvious victims of male desire. Madonna and her crew turned the tables, earning the nickname the ‘Webo Girls’ from those who watched them perform. For they deliberately ‘dogged’ the guys, dry-humping them on the dance floor, laughing and joking as they did so. As Fab Five Freddie, who had been on the receiving end of Madonna’s fake sexual attentions while dancing, observes, ‘You could say she was a tramp but that was missing the point. She was never some ding-y white chick who slept around with the guys, she was smarter than that. All the way through her career she has been very sexy but take a closer look and she is always in control. Like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, she flashes you her pussy, but she’s in charge. A strong woman with a sense of humor.’

  Her attitude said it all: attractive but in command, a modern-day Calamity Jane who, instead of a pistol, packed a can of spray paint with which she scrawled her tag, ‘Boy Toy’, on the walls of downtown New York. Her tag, which eventually became the name of her company, perfectly illustrated her self-conscious approach to sexuality, tongue-in-cheek, arch and knowing, but utterly removed from the sexual plaything of many men’s dreams. ‘Early on she knew what she wanted, she was incredibly focused but could play the little innocent girl,’ recalls a senior music producer.

  That focus was fixed firmly on becoming famous, and not for one moment did Madonna ever deviate from that goal. So much of her life was a matter of calculation that she even calibrated her spontaneity. She would be outrageous and wild, but never in such a way as to interfere with her primary ambition. ‘When she told me that one day she would be the most famous person in the world, I totally believed her,’ recalls Erika Belle. ‘She had a highly attuned self-protection mechanism that many of us at that time didn’t have. Her risk-taking would be choreographed. She would never be so out of control that it would, for example, stop her writing lyrics in the morning.’

  At a time when many of her contemporaries were in thrall to drugs or drink – or both – Madonna kept a clear head and a clean body, allowing herself only the occasional puff on a joint or a vodka tonic. ‘She never suspended reality for one second,’ recalls Steve Torton, who shared an apartment and worked with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, later, briefly, one of her lovers. One night Steve Rubell, owner of the Palladium Club, waved his arms and offered Madonna her heart’s desire: coke, booze, girls, boys, anything. It was two in the morning. She yawned and replied, ‘A nice big salad, please.’

  Hungry only for success, Madonna was, as one friend noted, ‘pure unrefined ambition,’ and would seize every opportunity that came her way. She used the club scene in the way a successful businessman uses his country club, to network and broker deals. ‘Restlessly ambitious to the point of exhaustion,’ as one contemporary described her, it was therefore entirely appropriate that she should take her next step on the ladder of success in her ‘office’ – the nightclub scene.

  In February 1982, after the breakup with Barbone, Madonna effortlessly eased back into the popcorn-and-phone routine, making endless calls while she munched. At first she appealed to the charity of her old college buddies. She moved in with Janice Galloway, before teaming up with Steve Bray to continue their musical collaboration. They worked well together, Bray’s approach complementing Madonna’s drive and earnest ambition. While she wrote the lyrics, he would help her out with melodies, chords and musical progressions. After several weeks’ work, Madonna and Bray felt that they had enough material to ask a couple of the musicians who had worked with her over the previous eighteen months to help them record a demo tape. They took over a studio and recorded a four-track demo for her to tout around town, for with Camille Barbone out of the picture, Madonna had to do her own legwork. These four tracks, ‘Burning Up,’ ‘Everybody,’ ‘Ain’t No Big Deal’ and one other, were the songs that finally got her noticed.

  What better place to begin than Danceteria, the club in which she spent most of her waking hours? The hottest DJ in the four-story club was Mark Kamins, who also worked as an A-and-R (artists and repertoire) scout for Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. As legend and ‘made- for-TV’ bio films describe it, Madonna virtually seduced Kamins into playing her demo tape, flirting madly with him as she tore up the dance floor. In reality, Kamins, who was handed numerous demo tapes every week, was passed a copy by her, listened to her songs on his headphones, and decided to give her sound a spin. The crowd liked it, and he liked her. ‘She was cute and we went out for a while,’ he recalls. ‘I can’t say I saw a star but she had something special.’ For a time she shared his bed, or what passed for a bed – a collection of egg crates in the middle of a spartan room on East 73rd Street. Not that she was a fixture – Madonna was always on the move, dashing from one place to the next on her bicycle, always with people to see, places to go. ‘I believe she suffered from ADD [attention deficit disorder]; she was never still,’ Kamins continues. ‘Like she was wired all the time even though she never took drugs. A lot of artists have that.’

  She was always juggling, whether it was her career, her jobs or her men. For a time she was dividing her time between Mark Kamins, Steve Bray and Ken Compton; indeed, in a fit of jealousy, Kamins banned Compton from the Danceteria nightclub. It always bugged him when she came to the club, borrowed some money and then promptly hightailed it to another venue where, he suspected, she was seeing someone else. As he observes, ‘She’s an incredible juggler of people. With regards to her sexuality she is more like a guy keeping several different girls on the go at one time.’

  In truth, Madonna and Kamins were drawn together as much by their mutual ambition as by sexual attraction. Knowing that she was without a manager, he promptly signed her to his own fledgling music company and made an appointment with his b
oss, the legendary Chris Blackwell, who was making a flying visit to New York. He met Madonna, listened to her tape and then, after she had left, told Kamins that he didn’t sign the girlfriends of his A-and-R scouts. As would later emerge, the real reason was rather more earthy; ‘She smelled too bad,’ the offbeat record mogul told Kamins some time later.

  Undeterred, Kamins called Seymour Stein, president of Sire Records, an arm of the giant Warner Brothers music corporation, whom he knew after working with Stein on projects with the Tom Tom Club and Talking Heads. Stein expressed muted interest after listening to the demo tape but referred him to his thrusting young A-and-R agent, Michael Rosenblatt, to deal with the details. After listening to the four tracks, Rosenblatt chose two to record, ‘Ain’t No Big Deal’ and ‘Everybody’. As far as he was concerned, ‘Ain’t No Big Deal’ was the A-side. ‘She had a great tape but what’s more she had that intangible certain something,’ Rosenblatt remembers.

  While Madonna’s eventual success, bolstered by hindsight, has made Stein and Rosenblatt seem like musical oracles, the reality was rather different. Madonna’s romantic version of the story has it that Stein was so keen to meet her that he signed the deal from his hospital bed while recovering from a heart operation. ‘I could tell right then that she had the drive to match her talent,’ he has said. In fact, according to Kamins, Stein didn’t meet Madonna until after the success of her first single, ‘Everybody’ – although admittedly the meeting did take place in the hospital where he was recuperating.