Madonna

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Awed by Madonna’s raw talent — she was performing a combination of dance and rock and roll music at this time — stunned by her colorful imagination and even a little startled by her brazen chutzpah, Camille Barbone’s fascination resulted in the quick signing of a management contract between herself and Madonna. In another amazing coincidence, the twenty-nine-year-old Barbone — seven years Madonna’s senior — shared birthdays with her new protégée. It certainly seemed like the stars, karma, the universe, God or simply Lady Luck were always on Madonna’s side during these formative years, in perfect alignment with her personal goals and professional ambitions. Over the next twenty months, Barbone and her business partner, Adam Atler, would exhaust most of their company’s funds in promoting and developing the burgeoning career of Madonna, whom Camille referred to as “a nobody who was about to be a somebody.”

  During the course of their relationship, Madonna and Camille would become players in a confounding game of wills and emotions. Years later, Camille Barbone would confess that she had probably fallen in love with Madonna. Though Barbone did not admit her feelings to Madonna at the time, surely the instinctive young performer was able to sense their intensity. She would not be able to resist this tantalizing turn of events. After all, by now every step of her career was a seduction — one person after another being seduced by her to do her bidding — and it had been that way for some time.

  The truth was that — talent, luck and cunning aside — Madonna was just an extremely ambitious person in a city overcrowded with extremely ambitious people, all of whom were jockeying for the best position to get noticed. Was it wrong for her — she must have reasoned — to realize that she needed people in her corner, pulling for her, pushing her, making the right contacts for her?

  In the particular circumstance in which she found herself with Camille Barbone, Madonna would play the role of little-girl-lost to Barbone’s sensible and influential mother figure. The older Barbone was more than happy to accept her part in Madonna’s real-life drama, first by paying for her to have four wisdom teeth extracted and then letting her recuperate in her Bayside, Queens, house. Soon, Camille was loaning — giving — her money, food and, perhaps most important, a sense of security.

  “I thought that the first thing I needed to do was to make her feel safe,” Camille now recalls. “So I needed to find a place for her to live. She had found a small place that she adored, a one-room apartment across the street from Madison Square Garden on West Thirtieth Street. The building was called — ironically enough — the Star Hotel. So I moved her in there, paid for it for a few months in advance — sixty-five dollars a month — even though I was frightened to have her live there, it was such a dump. She was there for about two weeks when she got robbed. They only took her photographs, but it was still very upsetting to both of us.

  “So I moved her out of there and into a much bigger apartment on the Upper West Side, on Riverside Drive and Ninety-fifth. My business partner knew a middle-aged guy who lived there, and convinced him to let Madonna move in as a roommate. We also gave her a hundred bucks a week to live on.”

  Because Madonna said that she wanted to act, Camille sent her to an acting coach, a Russian émigré named Mira Rostova, who had taught such notable actors as Montgomery Clift and Roddy McDowell. It didn’t go well. After one session, Mira refused ever again to work with Madonna. “I doubt that this girl will ever be taken seriously as an actress,” she told Camille. “First of all, she’s vulgar. Second, you can’t tell her anything because she’s already decided that she knows all there is to know, about everything. Third, she doesn’t listen, and if she doesn’t listen now, she never will. If I were you, I’d reconsider representing her.”

  *

  It was spring 1981. “You are so goddamn selfish,” Camille Barbone was telling Madonna.

  As Camille recalled years later, she had been experiencing personal problems with a member of her family and wished to talk to Madonna, as a friend, about what was happening. However, Madonna — often preoccupied and seldom really paying attention when it came to listening to other people’s problems — seemed disinterested in Camille’s ordeal. It hadn’t taken long for Camille to understand that, at this time in her life, Madonna was too self-absorbed to truly care about anything other than her career. “When you have a problem, I solve it,” Camille said, frustrated. “But when I have one, you couldn’t care less.”

  “Look. I pay you to solve my problems,” Madonna shot back, as if Camille was actually making money from her career.

  “But what do you give, Madonna?” Camille asked, she would recall years later. “You give nothing,” she observed, answering her own question. “You’re selfish.”

  “But I give my all,” Madonna said.

  “Bullshit. You give your all to you,” Camille said. “It’s all for your career, isn’t it? You don’t care about me or my life.”

  It was then, as Camille remembered it, that Madonna went on the attack. “Look at me,” she said, practically screaming, her face instantly red with rage. (She could raise the level of an argument to a full-scale fight in a nanosecond.) “I’m getting old,” she continued, her eyes blazing. “And nothing is happening for me. I’m ready to do something with my fucking life, can’t you see that? And you promised to help me, Camille. So help me, goddamn it,” she concluded, angrily. “If you’re my friend, do something for me. If you love me, do something for me.”

  Camille reached out and stroked Madonna’s face. With an index finger, she wiped away a tear. “Okay. I’ll do what I can,” she told her, trying to calm her down. “I do love you. Relax. Adam and I have meetings set up next week with record people. I have lots of ideas.”

  Taking a dramatic breath, Madonna put the finishing touch on the fight. “Why, oh why, must everything be such a big deal with you?” she asked, exasperated. “Now,” she said, shaking off the drama with a shrug, “tell me, what kind of meetings?”

  Years later, Camille would say, “When the line became blurred between management and friendship, that’s when trouble became inevitable. Of course, I knew she was using me. But what could I expect, really, under the circumstances? I tried to set up some boundaries, some rules, but . . . well, forget it . . . Try giving Madonna rules.”

  One of Camille’s “rules” was that if any member of the band she had organized to support Madonna musically onstage ever had sex with her, he (or she) would be automatically fired for such indiscretion. Barbone felt strongly that romantic relationships within the band would serve only to complicate matters for everyone involved. Also, no doubt, she just didn’t want Madonna being intimate with anyone else. She couldn’t help but be jealous, her feelings for her were that strong. However, the cunning Madonna decided to use Camille’s regulation to her own advantage. Because she wanted her ex-boyfriend, Steve Bray, to replace the band’s drummer, Bob Riley, she decided to seduce Riley. “If you were any more delicious, I’d have to spread you on a cracker right here and now,” she told him with a smack of her red lips. Then, she tumbled into bed with him.

  “Now you have to fire him, Camille,” Madonna said at a meeting with Riley in Barbone’s office the next morning. “I mean, that’s your rule, isn’t it? Whoever screws me gets fired, right? And we can bring Steve in now, can’t we?”

  “My God! I’m not firing Bob just because he screwed you, Madonna,” Camille said, incredulous. “You set him up!”

  “I did not set him up,” Madonna said. “He came on to me. And I told him what would happen if we made it together. But, no, he wanted to do it anyway. Now, you have to fire him. Or you’re the one who will look weak and indecisive.”

  Riley looked at Madonna as if he was looking at garbage. “No one has to fire me,” he decided. “I quit.”

  Madonna blew a big, pink bubble with her gum. “Fine with me,” she said. “Suit yourself.”

  “I wondered what kind of person would do something like that,” Camille recalls years later, still seeming astonished at
just the memory of it all. “I had created a monster who, I knew, would eventually turn on me. I just couldn’t believe she would be so crafty, so mean. Sex, to her, was really just a means to an end, it meant nothing more. I actually became a little afraid of her when she did that to Bob.”

  “I love you,” Barbone remembers Madonna telling her one day. The two had just had a meeting with a record industry executive that went well. It seemed that a record deal for Madonna was imminent.

  “In what way?” Camille asked, suspiciously.

  “Well, in every way, of course,” Madonna said. They embraced. “How can I thank you for what you’ve done for me?” Madonna asked. “I think you’re the most wonderful woman in the world.”

  There was a beat. Just as it seemed they might kiss, Madonna abruptly pulled away. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed with girlish enthusiasm. “I just had the most brilliant, fucking idea. Let’s you and I call that record guy back and tell him . . .” She had deftly moved the conversation back to business. The mood now altered, the two then began brainstorming about Madonna’s “great idea.”

  “She seduced me, psychologically,” Camille Barbone says today. “I put her first. And, really, that would be my downfall because it was all about her, not about us and certainly not about me.

  “There were lots of mixed messages, strange moments . . . and also great ideas as to how to promote her career. There was such imagination and fire between us, such great creativity. We never got together without a notepad because there were so many ideas flying back and forth. I had to keep notes just to keep track of all of the stuff we discussed twenty-four hours a day. She was brilliant, really. Constantly, we had this mad banter about what to do, how to do it, and where we would end up.

  “I often felt like Chicken Little running around saying ‘The sky is falling, the sky is falling’ because there were people telling me ‘I don’t get it. I don’t understand. What’s with that girl? What do you see in her?’ I would say to them, ‘I promise you, one day you will understand. She has a vision. She’s got something no one else has.’ I so believed she would one day be a star. I knew that she was destined to be a great entertainer, a pop star, and I invested everything in her . . . my mind, my heart, my soul, everything.”

  “You know what? I promise that we’ll always be together,” Madonna told Camille one day over breakfast. Just the night before, she and a female dancer named Janice had had sex with a recording engineer from Queens, much to Camille’s chagrin. Madonna looked exhausted, a rag tied into her ratty, short, brunette hair, her eyes sleepy.

  “Sure, you say that now,” Camille told her, annoyed. “But wait until you get famous. You won’t even remember my name.”

  Madonna sighed, shaking her head. “It’s a lousy business, I know,” she said. Her voice was weary with experience, as if she was a seasoned performer.

  Years later, Camille would recall, “I had a feeling then that we both knew my time was coming, that I would be gone soon. We just knew how she was . . . and maybe we just hoped she would change. Meetings, demos, rehearsals, whatever it was . . . she would do it. Except true friendship. That, she had a hard time doing.”

  “Drama Queen”

  In August 1981, Madonna recorded a demo tape of four songs, under Camille Barbone’s tutelage, at Media Sound (also known as Master Sound), a converted church on West Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan in which Barbone had leased studio time. In performances that sound reminiscent of rock singer Pat Benatar’s style, Madonna performed “Love on the Run,” “High Society (Society’s Boy),” “Take Me (I Want You)” and “Get Up.” The recordings — known by Madonna fans as “the Gotham Tapes” — were produced by guitarist Jon Gordon, who would go on to produce Suzanne Vega. According to Madonna’s contract with Camille (signed on July 22, 1981), Madonna was to receive $250 for each unreleased master, and twice that amount for every one that was released, as well as a 3 percent royalty on the sale of every record.

  Notes Madonna historian Bruce Baron, “To this day, the original mixes of these Gotham songs have not yet seen the light of day, though slightly different mixes have leaked out to various collectors in the past few years. Those versions are different, however, and the sound quality on them is poor. It is highly unlikely that the original, perfect-sounding mixes of these four tracks will ever surface. For collectors, these four recordings are probably the rarest, and most sought-after Madonna tracks of all time.”

  (After Madonna became famous, Camille Barbone offered her the opportunity to purchase the original studio master recordings, but no deal was struck. Ownership of these songs would eventually become the subject of bitter lawsuits between Madonna and Barbone, in litigation that would drag on for many years. In March 1993, Camille Barbone played bits of three of the songs during Robin Leach’s television special about Madonna, “Madonna Exposed,” on which the author also appeared as a guest.)

  It took some doing, but Camille Barbone eventually convinced her friend Bill Lomuscio, a band manager and promoter, to give Madonna a break and book her into some local clubs for necessary exposure. Barbone hoped to interest other record company executives in the singer in the hope perhaps of starting a bidding war for Madonna’s services. Without having had the benefit of seeing Madonna perform, Lomuscio says he at first wasn’t interested in her. “Camille let me listen to Madonna’s tape [of “High Society (Society’s Boy)”]. It was not anything at all impressive to me,” Lomuscio remembers. “But she wanted a place to try out her live act. I agreed to let her be the opening act for a band I was managing.”

  Whenever Madonna got up onto a stage, the result was predictable: all of her pent-up yearning to do and be something wonderful — her energy, drive and talent, not to mention her need to be the center of attention — burst forth in a rush of sheer spectacle. “It wasn’t so much about the music as it was the personality behind it,” Camille Barbone recalls. “I found that the best way to have a meeting with a record label or a booker was to bring Madonna with me. Once you met her, you either loved her or hated her, but you knew she was fascinating. She was really her own best advertisement.”

  “The band I managed was the house band at this particular club, and they were pretty popular,” Lomuscio recalls. “But out came Madonna, and the band and three break dancers that Camille had picked up in Times Square, and that was the end of anyone’s interest in my band. With her act, Madonna proceeded to blow my band off the stage. She really was phenomenal. A great talent. You could see it immediately. And after three songs, she was being called back for encores. My band was having a hard time even getting on the stage.” When the deeply impressed Lomuscio asked Barbone if she’d like a partner in the handling of Madonna, the two began working together as a team.

  While her new managers were excited about Madonna’s successes onstage in front of live audiences, attempts to impress record executives with her demo tape did not go as well. As with Lomuscio, most people failed to be sold on Madonna’s voice alone. She was a visual performer. The whole package was important, certainly not just the voice, which was, at best, no more than average. “There was a lot of talk that the tape was no good,” Lomuscio says, “and she’d never go anywhere — one person said she sounded like Minnie Mouse on helium on a song she had recorded called ‘Get Up’ — but that was just not true. All you had to do was come down and see her perform live . . . and that was it.”

  Over the next year, as Madonna continued to grow in her New York stage act, she began attracting a cult following, not only of her music but of her funky image (complete with the secondhand street clothes she now enjoyed wearing on stage). Before she even had a record played on the radio, groupies who dressed just like her had begun following her from gig to gig. She didn’t have much of a career . . . but she actually had fans!

  “These people love me,” she told Camille of her “fan club.” Then she giggled. “You know what?” she asked. “I think I will always be nice to my fans. I think they deserve that.”

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sp; Camille smiled. “Well, that’s a nice thought,” she said. “We’ll see how you feel in about ten years.”

  Later, in another conversation, according to Camille, Madonna said, “Some awful person told me today that I was crass, vile, rude and disgusting. What do you think about that?”

  “Well, I think that’s absolutely true,” Camille said, frankly.

  “I know,” Madonna agreed, enthusiastically. “It is, isn’t it? Don’t you just love the fact that people know that about me! I mean, that is so cool, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Camille said. “It certainly is.” “Here, I want you to have this,” Madonna said, reaching into her pocket. She pulled out a turquoise rosary. “It was my grandmother’s,” she explained, tears welling in her eyes. She extended her palm to Camille, the rosary in it. The two women sat down over a cup of coffee, and Madonna then told Camille touching stories about her mother.

  After about half an hour, Camille was overwhelmed with emotion. “I can’t take that,” she said, closing Madonna’s hand around the rosary. “I could never take that from you. It’s too precious.”

  “But I want you to have it,” Madonna insisted. “I don’t want you to think I’m just an ungrateful little bitch. I don’t have anything else to give you.”

  Camille embraced her. “Keep your grandmother’s rosary,” she told Madonna as she ran her fingers lovingly through her hair. “You’ve just given me the best present in the world, and you don’t even know it.”5 Playing out a sexless seduction, Madonna continued to take Camille into her world, teasing her — maybe unintentionally, maybe not — with sentimental stories about her and her family.