Indeed, maybe it was Madonna’s so-called central dumbness that sparked the interest of much of her public, fans hungry for a sexy and provocative star who actually conveyed that she enjoyed the limelight and her celebrity. There really hadn’t been a pin-up phenomenon since Farrah Fawcett’s reign in the late seventies, and her reign as one of “Charlie’s Angels” had been relatively short-lived before she tired of her bathing-suit-blonde image and sought recognition as a serious television actress.
Madonna, though, had been fantasizing about fame and fortune for years and was more than happy to give to the public the provocative, double-entendre female image that had been absent from the spotlight since the days of Marilyn Monroe. Her new album taunted, with song titles like “Dress You Up,” “Angel,” “Material Girl,” and of course the title tease, “Like a Virgin.”
Further to fuel Madonna mania and the success of Like a Virgin, Warner Bros. Records sent her on a heavily promoted tour. Not surprisingly, the tour was a smashing success; at Radio City Music Hall it broke all attendance records when the show sold out in a breathtaking twenty-four minutes. It certainly seemed that by the mid-eighties there was no stopping her — Madonna’s albums were selling at a staggering 80,000 a day. Although she was looking to the future with declarations such as “I want longevity as a human being. I want it to last forever,” critics like Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times were already predicting her rapid decline. “It’s like having a new toy,” Hilburn stated. “Everyone wanted the Cabbage Patch Doll for Christmas. She’s the Cabbage Patch Doll this year.” Other critics were placing their bets that Cyndi Lauper, with her pure and powerful yet quirky voice, would be the pop diva who would endure. Billboard magazine editor, Paul Grein, predicted that “Cyndi Lauper will be around for a long time; Madonna will be out of the business in six months.”
“In the beginning, I was called everything from a Disco Dolly to a One-Hit Wonder,” Madonna recalled in 1999. “Everyone agreed that I was sexy, but no one would agree that I had any talent, which really irritated me.”
In fact, if she was going anywhere, it would be straight up. After all, this was the 1980s. In many ways, Madonna was exactly what people wanted at this time. During the previous decade, Andy Warhol had made the statement that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, and many seemed intent on making that prediction come true. Many people not only wanted fame, they wanted money, name brands and everything else in excess. On television, ordinary citizens were discovering talk shows as a viable forum to indulge in exhibitionism by exposing their most intimate secrets to a worldwide audience. Cable television brought sex and violence into America’s homes as never before. On Wall Street, brokers in their early twenties were becoming rich by selling junk bonds to yuppies eager for overnight millions.
In a sense, Madonna became the human embodiment of a junk bond. People were willing to exploit and sell her in order to make as much money as possible — and she was happy to be exploited . . . ifit meant money in her pocket, too. The public, fascinated with fame, was happy to watch.
Not to denigrate Madonna’s talent — because she certainly had a great deal of it (most of which hadn’t even been explored yet) — but the notion of “celebrity” has never had much to do with what special abilities a person has, or what he or she has accomplished in terms of artistry. It’s always had to do with personal marketing — and never was this more true than it was in the 1980s. With burgeoning cable TV, videos, magazines, billboards, radio and film media, a celebrity could now be exploited twenty-four hours a day: in living rooms, at clubs, in supermarkets or on the streets, the same image projected from every direction, at every turn. Madonna was one of the first artists to understand this cultural twist; Michael Jackson also got it. At the beginning of her career as a singer in the 1980s, she always made sure she had all areas covered for total media saturation. She would gladly appear on any television show, magazine cover, splashy video, whatever it took . . .
Meeting Sean Penn
Perhaps one of Madonna’s most popular videos is the one she filmed for “Material Girl,” a modern-day reworking of Marilyn Monroe’s most famous vocal performance, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Madonna said at the time, “Marilyn was made into something not human in a way, and I can relate to that. Her sexuality was something everyone was obsessed with, and that I can relate to. And there were certain things about her vulnerability that I’m curious about and attracted to.”
When the time came to film the video (two days in Los Angeles in February 1985), Madonna decided on a clear and obvious homage to her blonde inspiration, Monroe. The video featured Madonna wearing an exact replica of Marilyn’s shocking pink gown from the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (she hated the dress, however, complaining that it constantly slipped down her bosom), singing on a reconstruction of the film’s set, complete with staircase, chandeliers and bevy of tuxedo-clad chorus boys. (“I can’t completely disdain the song and video, because they certainly were important to my career,” she said later. “But talk about the media hanging on to a phrase and misinterpreting the damn thing as well. I didn’t write that song, you know, and the video was all about how the girl rejected diamonds and money. But God forbid irony should be understood. So when I’m ninety, I’ll still be the Material Girl. I guess it’s not so bad. Lana Turner was the Sweater Girl until the day she died.”)
Freddy DeMann’s assistant Melinda Cooper drove Madonna to the sound stage where “Material Girl” was to be filmed. A photograph taken that day shows Madonna wearing a pink bodysuit and a black velvet shirt, unbuttoned enough so as to reveal her black Chantelle bra. She also wore large dark sunglasses and a wide-brimmed red hat, lest she be recognized.
Because of the enormity of the video production — and the Marilyn Monroe association that was bound to cause a sensation — Melinda Cooper sensed that Madonna’s life and career were about to be transformed. It was an exciting notion. “Do you realize how much things are going to change for you now?” she asked her as they drove to the set.
“What do you mean?” Madonna responded. She had her compact mirror out and was inspecting a pimple. “Jesus Christ. Of all the days to get a zit,” she said, preoccupied. “I ask you, can anything else go wrong in my fucking life?”
“I mean, your whole world is going to change after this video,” said Cooper, ignoring Madonna’s rhetorical question. “Do you know that?”
Madonna snapped the compact shut. “I know that, Melinda,” she said, perturbed. “Now can we please just get there!”
On that first day on the set, while Madonna was standing at the top of the staircase and waiting for filming to begin, she gazed down and noticed a guy in a leather jacket and dark sunglasses striking what seemed to be a deliberate pose in a corner, looking back up at her intently. He was twenty-four-year-old actor Sean Penn — born on August 17, 1960 — at the time considered the most moody and brooding (and probably most talented) of the young Hollywood actors who made up what was known as “the Brat Pack.” (Others in the so-called Pack included young actors Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez.) Because he hailed from a privileged background, having been raised in Beverly Hills with both parents in show business (his father is television director Leo Penn, his mother actress Eileen Ryan), Penn didn’t have to struggle much to break into the business. However, his privileged lifestyle didn’t make him any less angry. He had a reputation for being an intensely private, sometimes violent and extremely jealous young man — and he was also thought of as a proficient actor thanks to roles in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Racing with the Moon and The Falcon and the Snow Man. After having expressed an interest in meeting Madonna, Sean Penn had been brought to the set of “Material Girl” by the video’s director, Mary Lambert.
“He was somebody whose work I’d admired,” Madonna has said, “and I think he felt the same way about me. I never thought in a million years I would meet him.”
As soon as Madonna, still at the top o
f the stairs and waiting to start her descent, realized that the stranger below was Sean Penn, her heart skipped a beat. Though she fancied actor Keith Carradine at this time (who appeared in the video and with whom she was seen making out in between takes), she knew that she had to meet Penn. Even at first glance, he seemed self-confident and cocky — just her type. When they finally did meet at the bottom of the stairs, he didn’t disappoint.
“Well, just look at you,” Sean Penn said to her as he motioned to the gown and wig. Full of swagger, he hooked his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans. “You think you’re Marilyn Monroe, don’t you?” He was joking, but Madonna didn’t appreciate his brand of humor.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked, annoyed. “You don’t even say hello? You just go straight for the insult? Is that what you do? You don’t even say, ‘It’s nice to meet you?’
“Oh, I’m sorry, Marilyn,” Sean Penn said, his voice dripping with phony sarcasm. Sean’s eyes were a bit glazed, a cigarette dangled from his mouth. He extended his hand to shake hers. “It’s nice to meet you,” he said with a warm smile.
Madonna had to laugh. She took his hand and, putting on a whispery Marilyn Monroe voice, cooed, “Nice to meet you, too . . .”
Later, she recalled, “I had this fantasy that we were going to meet, fall in love and get married. Suddenly it’s what I was wishing would happen. Why I fell for him that day, I can’t say. I have no idea. I just know I wanted him.”
The Affair with Prince
Soon after their first meeting on the set of the “Material Girl” video, twenty-six-year-old Madonna and twenty-four-year-old Sean Penn began dating. “After the video shoot, I was over at a friend’s house,” he explains. “And he had a book of quotations. He picked it up and turned to a random page and read the following: ‘She had the innocence of a child and the wit of a man.’ I looked at my friend and he just said, ‘Go get her.’ So I did.” Complicating matters a bit for Sean, however, was the fact that Madonna was also dating the rock star Prince at this time, whom she had met backstage at the American Music Awards earlier, in Los Angeles on January 28, 1985. He wasn’t her type, and it’s difficult to know why Madonna was even interested in him, except for the fact that she respected him as a musician and probably just wanted to know what made him tick.
Prince (real name Prince Rogers Nelson) was — still is — an eccentric man known for strangely shy demeanor in private and outrageous sexuality — prancing about in bikini briefs and high heels — on stage. During an interview with the author the same year he met Madonna, Prince refused to speak. Instead, he sat silently in his chair in front of a dinner of Chinese food and spent the entire evening playing with shrimp fried rice, all the while with a grim expression on his face. In response to any question, he would either nod affirmatively or shake his head negatively. When the interview was over, he departed without saying good-bye. “And that, my friend, is Prince,” said his publicist by way of explanation.
As their first date, Prince invited Madonna to accompany him to one of his performances in Los Angeles. Though she was scheduled to leave for New York to begin rehearsals for her own concert tour, she decided to delay that trip a few days so that she could spend some time with the rock star. The night of his concert, he picked her up in a white stretch limousine and took her to the Forum, where he was performing. Madonna later said she was amazed to find that the diminutive rock star smelled so strongly of the scent of lavender, “Like a woman,” she observed. “I felt like I was in the presence of Miss Elizabeth Taylor. He reeks of lavender. It turned me on, actually.”
Once in the limousine, recalled T. L. Ross, who was a friend of Prince’s, “I heard she was pretty aggressive, that the poor little guy had to fight her off. She was strong. He told me that she had the strength of ten women.” Because he had a performance that evening, Prince didn’t want to exhaust himself with Madonna. He suggested that they wait.
After the show, the two ventured out into the Los Angeles night and eventually ended up at the Marquis Hotel in Westwood for a party with Prince’s entourage. The gathering turned rowdy when Prince leaped up onto a table and began to undress. Joining him on the table, Madonna engaged him in a sensual bump-and-grind, her shoulders bouncing up and down, her body undulating. The party broke up at five in the morning, after which Prince and Madonna — arm in arm and practically holding each other up — retired to Prince’s private suite.
For the next two months, the couple continued seeing each other, though they didn’t seem to have much in common other than their status as superstar performers. While she was honest and forthright, he was secretive and bashful. Luckily, they both idolized Marilyn Monroe. When he told her that his home was filled with posters of the blonde movie goddess, Madonna said that she couldn’t wait to see his collection of memorabilia.
One romantic evening, Prince leased the entire Yamashiro mountaintop restaurant overlooking Los Angeles, with its breathtaking view of the city lights. Madonna wore a lacy purple skirt with trademark black bra peeking out from behind a sheer white blouse. At the restaurant, they ate Japanese food and then, after three hours of what appeared to some observers to be little conversation, they departed for a nightclub called Façade.
“I’ve been nibbling around the edges of this thing long enough, because I didn’t know where to start or how to tell you,” Prince told Madonna once they were at the club with friends. He was being much more courageous than he’d ever been with her, and in front of witnesses, which made it even more surprising. “Madonna, I think we should hook up, you and I. I want you to be, you know . . . my girl.”
Seeming surprised, Madonna let the request linger as if anticipating a punch line. But he wasn’t joking. He waited for her response. “Hmmm,” she said while frowning and looking as if she was trying to figure out just how to handle the moment. “Now, that’s food for thought, isn’t it?” Her words didn’t hold much conviction.
When Prince look deflated, Madonna grabbed his hand. “C’mon, let’s dance!” she said cheerily as she walked him out onto the dance floor.
After about two months, when there really wasn’t anything left for them to say to each other, Madonna became bored with Prince. They had recorded a couple of songs in his Minneapolis studio, and one would even be released later. But her friends recall that, while she complained about his passivity, he griped about her aggressive nature.
Says T. L. Ross, “Prince is way too cosmic for Madonna. For him, making love is a spiritual experience. For her — at least at that time — making love was just a physical expression. While he wanted to savor every second of the experience, she was into multiple orgasms. After two months, he cut her loose. Then, she did the scorned woman act.
“After he stopped acting interested in her, that’s when the phone calls started. Madonna pestered him for weeks. He said later that she screamed at him, ‘How dare you dump me. Don’t you know who I am?’ She was definitely not used to getting dumped.”
Madonna would have the last word on Prince, though, with the Los Angeles Times years later, in October 1994: “I was having dinner with Prince and he was just sipping tea, very daintily. I was stuffing food down my face and I was, like, ‘Aren’t you going to eat?’ She mimicked a delicate, whispered no. Continuing, she concluded, “And I thought, ‘Oh my God!’ I have this theory about people who don’t eat. They annoy me.”
“Madonna: A Lonely Life”
After her brief romance with Prince, Madonna began to concentrate on Sean Penn as a potential mate. In spite of her fanatical need for the spotlight and Sean Penn’s obsessive desire for privacy, the two began a passionate and exciting courtship that, if nothing else, certainly proved that opposites do attract. Impressed as much by his tough guy reputation as by his acting credentials, Madonna would later admit that she was, as she put it, “completely unable to resist him, not that I ever tried. He was the sexiest, smartest man I had ever known.” Sean was equally fascinated by her. He had been a fan of Madonn
a’s, which is why he had wanted to meet her. Once he got to know her, he quickly realized that she was fun to be with, and also the kind of woman who would, when necessary, meet him at his own level of arrogance. “I admit it, I was a smart-ass,” he says. “And so was she. It was a relationship made in heaven, two smart-asses going through life together. How romantic.”
Of course, the paparazzi were delighted at the pairing of the unpredictable Penn and his exhibitionist girlfriend, Madonna. They were even photographed on their first dates: in New York at a club called Private Eyes, and in Los Angeles where Penn had accompanied Madonna on a pilgrimage to Marilyn Monroe’s crypt at Westwood Memorial Cemetery. (Madonna was shaking with nervous tension during the visit to Monroe’s grave. When she spotted a red rose left there by her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio, she was heard to murmur “Oh, my. He really loved her.”)
At this time, with everyone trying to get a piece of her — or at least that’s how it probably felt to her — Madonna had said she wanted someone in her life she believed truly loved her. “She was lonely, the classic victim of stardom in that she was the popular and well-loved celebrity who went home alone at night and cried her eyes out,” said her former producer and boyfriend Jellybean Benitez. While she certainly wasn’t lacking in sexual experiences, missing in her life was a sense of true intimacy with another person. Of course, those in her circle at this time admit that Madonna wasn’t an easy person to get to know or to be intimate with on an emotional level. “She had a lot of barriers up,” says Tommy Quinn, a New York studio musician who dated her shortly before she met Sean Penn.
While Quinn had heard the charge made against Madonna that she was cold, selfish and aloof, he disagreed. “I found her to be very guarded,” he says. “Of course, she was brash and — oh, man! — she could be a royal bitch. But beneath it, if you really got to know her, she was a different kind of person, a very insecure girl.
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