Madonna

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “I remember one night in particular: she was at my place and we made love. It was pretty intense, and afterward, as I held her in my arms, I noticed that she was sobbing. When I asked her why, she refused to open up to me. But every time we made love — which was about a half dozen times — she seemed sadder than she was before. I thought to myself, either I’m pretty bad in the sack or this girl has a problem with intimacy. It was more than she could take when she allowed herself to be vulnerable.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked Madonna, touching her tenderly on the cheek.

  “Nothing,” she responded quickly. “I’m fine. Leave me alone, will you?” As he recalled it, she took a deep breath and then let it out slowly, as if being pushed down by an excruciating weight. Then, she pulled away from her lover and slept at the foot of the bed in a fetal position.

  “At first, I thought she was crying because she thought having sex made her vulnerable, and then that made her feel weak. But, after knowing her a little better, I decided it was because she was just afraid of being hurt, of letting down her guard, of being truly intimate.”

  A few nights later, Quinn decided to ask the question that had been on his mind but for which there had never been an appropriate time. “Why do you hate your old man so much?” he asked “Every time you bring up your father, it’s always to say some horrible thing about him. I think that’s the source of your anxiety.”

  “What are you talking about?” Madonna said, now crying. “How dare you say that to me?”

  She then bolted out of bed, ran into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

  The next morning, Madonna — her eyes red-rimmed and watery — put on her black fishnet tights and hip-slung miniskirt in preparation for leaving. She slipped into a hand-painted jacket with no shirt underneath. As she was putting on her spike-heeled boots, she looked up at Tommy Quinn and said, “You know, just because I was crying doesn’t mean anything. So don’t think you have some kind of hold over me, or that I care about you.” She didn’t mention anything about Quinn’s having brought up her father.

  As he tried to figure out how to respond, she walked across the room and out the door, without saying good-bye.

  A week later, Quinn found her staring out the eleventh-story window of his brownstone on East Seventy-second Street in New York. She looked fetching, wearing his T-shirt and nothing else, certainly putting on a fairly indecent show for the neighbors. “A penny for your thoughts,” Quinn said to her as he brought her a glass of chilled white wine.

  “They’ll cost you a lot more than that,” Madonna said with a weak smile. Then, after a sip, she thoughtfully observed, “It’s all a fiction, you know that, don’t you, Tommy? I’m just a character in a novel. None of this is real. None of it.”

  “What’s the novel called?” Quinn asked, intrigued.

  “It’s called Madonna,” she answered. Then, after a thoughtful beat, she added a subtitle: “A Lonely Life.”

  No different from a lot of other people, she wanted to be loved — but she was also afraid to be loved. Or, as her sister Paula observed, “She was a woman, like any woman. She needed someone to hold on to. But it scared her.”

  Sean Penn had his own insecurities. His mania for privacy was obsessive, and those who knew him well claim it was because he was never satisfied with the way he looked, always feeling awkward in his own skin and not wishing to be seen by anyone, let alone everyone. His bravado and bad temper, according to those who knew him well, was — not surprisingly — a camouflage that masked a litany of other emotional issues the explanations of which are probably best left to Sean Penn biographers. However, when he and Madonna began to date, they found something in each other that felt like, as Madonna put it, “a sense of personal completion.” Also, their sexual chemistry was explosive. After their first date, he threw her to the floor and stripped off her clothes and his own in such a hurry he left his boots on. Then he made love to her. Later, she said, “We reached orgasm together, and it was as if time stood still.”

  “Who’s to say how the heart works . . . it just does,” observes Meg Lowery, an actress friend of Sean’s who lived in Los Angeles at the time and attended acting classes with him. “Sean told me he was crazy about her. But he was worried about it. ‘She’s nuts,’ he told me. ‘And I’m nuts. The two of us together? Man, that’s trouble.’ Plus, he sensed that she wasn’t going to be faithful to him. ‘She’s out there, wild and free,’ he told me. ‘And I don’t think any man will be able to tame her. In fact,’ he said, ‘I think the last thing she wants is to be tamed.’”

  Along with his brooding nature, Sean Penn was also a talented actor and an intelligent man. When she found that he was a voracious reader and wrote poetry, Madonna was even more attracted to him. Soon, she was announcing to any friend, foe or reporter that Sean Penn was her hero, her best friend and the “coolest guy in the universe.” She could tell him her problems, she said. Somehow, he had the instinctive understanding of a man who had suffered himself and knew all there was to know about loss and grief, even though his parents were both still alive. She could talk to him as she could talk to no one else.

  The couple soon announced their engagement. As word of this big event spread, publicity about Madonna’s life and career reached a new fever pitch. A surprising declaration for some of her fans — but not so surprising for those who knew her — came when the men’s magazine Penthouse announced it would be publishing nude photographs taken of Madonna years earlier. Not to be outdone, Playboy announced its own imminent publication of similarly scandalous photographs. As a media sensation ensued over the idea that photographs of Madonna would expose her in a new and revealing way, it was just as it had been thirty-five years earlier with the news that Marilyn Monroe had also posed nude.

  Some observers suggested that these nude photographs of Madonna would somehow damage her career. Reporters pointed to Vanessa Williams who, a year earlier, had been forced to turn in her Miss America crown. It had been discovered that she had posed nude years before she won her title. (Of course, Vanessa Williams would ultimately turn the scandal to her advantage. She is now one of the only Miss Americas whose name anyone can even remember.) The existence of nude pictures, the race between two men’s magazines to beat each other to publication, and Madonna’s bold declaration, “I’m not ashamed of anything,” only fanned the flames of redhot publicity.

  Tommy Quinn had not seen Madonna in more than a year when, he says, he received a telephone call from her. She asked if they could meet. When he invited her to his apartment, she said, “No. I’m a trapped animal now. If I come to see you, everyone will know where you live, everyone will know that I know you, and they’ll never leave you alone.” He now recalls, “In order to protect me, she wanted us to meet in a small Italian restaurant on Second Avenue near Seventy-first Street.”

  When he showed up, he found Madonna in a back booth wearing large sunglasses, a floppy hat and an old, worn, flower-print “housedress.” He recalls, “She looked like a bag lady. I was astonished.”

  “What the hell happened to you?” he asked as he sat down.

  “My life. That’s what’s happened to me,” Madonna responded glumly. She leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. “So, how do you like my outfit? I’m a millionaire, but this is what I have to wear in public just so that I can have some peace and quiet.”

  After ordering spaghetti, Madonna got to the point of why she wanted to see her friend. “I need your advice,” she said. “Have you heard about these pictures?”

  “Who hasn’t?” Quinn answered.

  She took off her sunglasses. She looked as if she had been crying. “I just don’t know how to be with this goddamn thing,” she said, sadly. “I mean, I don’t know how to be . . . how to act.”

  Quinn would recall years later, “I was astonished. When I first heard about the pictures, I thought she would probably take the position that they didn’t matter, that she was above worrying about them. But, sitting
with her, looking at how distressed she was, I saw that the existence of these pictures had really bothered her.”

  “Oh, screw it, Madonna,” Quinn told her. “You have to act like you don’t care. What choice do you have?”

  “But I do care,” she said. “What about my father? Why should he have to see those pictures? And Sean! What will Sean think?” Her temper rose. “Parasites!” she said, referring to the media. “I feel so . . . misunderstood.”8

  For the next forty-five minutes, over two plates of pasta with meatballs and a bottle of Merlot, Madonna remembered the time not so long ago, in 1979, when she decided to pose in the nude. “He was a nice guy, actually,” she said of the photographer, Martin Schreiber. “Or at least I thought so at the time. He flattered me. He said I had a good body. He wined and dined me in his loft studio. I trusted him. And I was an idiot for doing so, I guess.”

  Madonna and Tommy finally agreed that she had no choice but to act completely unaffected by the existence of the photographs, just as Marilyn Monroe had done before her. The tale of Marilyn Monroe’s naked session in front of the camera is the stuff of Hollywood legend. A few years after posing, when she was arguably the most famous actress in the world, the photographs were released. The naysaying press predicted that if the luscious young woman sprawled naked on red velvet was, indeed, the Marilyn Monroe, her career would surely be over as a result of the scandal. However, undaunted by the media’s histrionics, Marilyn did not deny the photographs. Instead she turned the publicity to her advantage by declaring to reporters, “Sure I posed. I was hungry.” When asked what she had on during the sessions, she quipped, “the radio.”

  “If they [presumably the public and press] know that I’m unhappy about them, they’ll just love that,” Madonna concluded, sounding defeated. “Oh, who cares, anyway,” she added, with forced cheerfulness. “I have press agents now, you know?” she added. “Let them figure the whole thing out. I’ll use this thing to my advantage somehow. You know that, don’t you, Tommy?”

  “Hell yeah, you will,” Quinn agreed, nudging her. “You’re bigger than this, anyway, Madonna.”

  He recalls that she forced a sad smile and then, facetiously, made a sign of the cross.

  “Are you happy, Madonna?” he asked her. As she rose, hugged him and said good-bye, it didn’t seem as if she intended to answer the question. She threw fifty dollars onto the table. “Look at my life,” she said, arching a brow. “Who wouldn’t be happy?”

  “Oh My God! Look at Me!”

  Was Madonna really as upset about the nude photographs as she had indicated to Tommy Quinn? Perhaps an example of her mercurial nature was that she could later make light of the predicament in which she had found herself.

  “I remember when we were both broke and living in New York, Madonna showed me some of the nude shots,” recalls Erica Bell. “We were just sort of being lazy, and a little drunk, and she brought out this envelope and spread the pictures on the floor. ‘Look at me, Rica,’ [Madonna’s nickname for Erica Bell] she said. ‘I’m as flat-chested as you are!’ And we just laughed and laughed, for some reason, thinking the pictures were hysterical. She said, ‘One day I will be world famous, and Playboy will publish these photos, and it’ll be the greatest scandal of all time.’ I asked her, ‘My God, won’t you be embarrassed?’ And she laughed and said, ‘What do you think?’”

  When the photographs were published many years later, Erica received a telephone call from Madonna.

  “Oh my God,” Madonna said, nearly hysterical with laughter. “It’s happened, just as I predicted.”

  “I know,” Erica said, giggling. “I can’t believe it, after all of these years.”

  “But I’m so flat-chested,” Madonna said. “Just like you,” she added, joking.

  Years later, Erica said, “I don’t think she was that upset about the pictures. If she was, I didn’t know it. I just know we laughed a lot about them. We thought it was pretty damn funny, the whole thing.”

  More of Madonna’s past was excavated when filmmaker Stephen Jon Lewicki decided to exploit his association with her by releasing a home-video version of A Certain Sacrifice, the low-budget movie they had made in 1979. Perhaps hoping that Madonna would pay him to keep the film from commercial distribution, Lewicki was dismayed when her people offered him a measly $10,000, which he flatly rejected. Although Madonna took him to court in an effort to keep the film out of circulation, Lewicki ultimately won the right to release it, making him a millionaire in just a short time — not bad for the producer of a movie made six years earlier on a $20,000 budget.

  “I think Madonna tried to stop the movie more as a publicity stunt than anything else,” says Lewicki today. “It was also an interesting use of her power, really, to get the kind of exposure she wants when she wants it. The New York Post had huge headlines on the front page, ‘Madonna Seeks Nude Movie Ban.’ I mean, the hysteria she whipped up over this film was amazing. But in the end, when it came right down to it, she really didn’t put a wholehearted effort into suing me. I think even the judge realized that all that was happening was a certain amount of posturing, and just for publicity. So he threw the case out, and I released the movie.”

  At this point in her career, Madonna really didn’t need to seek out publicity — it came to her in tidal waves. She had a love/hate relationship with the press — for the most part, she loved seeing herself in the media, but at the same time she pretended to hate the attention. Once at a birthday party in her honor she stood up to model a green silk pants ensemble. “I like it,” she told her guests, “because it’s green, the color of envy. I envy all of you,” she continued melodramatically, “because you all have your privacy . . . and I don’t.” Madonna, however, did nothing to stop the media’s attention — on the contrary, she almost always courted it.

  In May 1985, Madonna made the cover of Time, with the accompanying headline: “Madonna — Why She’s Hot.” Though she seemed to some observers to be blasé about much of her newly acquired fame, this particular tribute from such a well-respected publication was not one that she took lightly. According to one of her manager Freddy DeMann’s assistants at the time, “Madonna waited by the front door for the messenger to arrive from Freddy’s office with a first copy of the magazine. I remember the day so well. She was wearing black mesh stockings, a short skirt and brief top, with four crucifixes around her neck. Because she was working, she also had on her herringbone glasses. When the magazine arrived, she ripped the envelope apart trying to get to it. Then, when she saw it, she let out a shriek.”

  “Oh my God, look at me!” Madonna said, dancing around the room in her Gucci flip-flops, magazine in hand. “I am on the cover of Time magazine! Can you believe it? Just look! Can you imagine it?” Earlier in her career, she had said, “I won’t be happy until I’m as famous as God.” Maybe now she was beginning to feel that she was on her way to that goal.

  Truly awed by Madonna’s appearance on the cover of one of the most respected magazines in the world, the incredulous assistant said, “No, I just can’t believe it.”

  Suddenly, Madonna stopped dancing. Whipping around to face the employee, she said, “What do you mean, you can’t believe it? Why shouldn’t I be on the cover of Time?”

  “I didn’t mean . . .” the secretary began to stumble over her words. “What I meant was . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, stop your groveling,” Madonna said, exasperated. “You’re so weak. Just get Sean on the phone. I want him to see this.”

  When the assistant telephoned Sean to ask him to come by Madonna’s home to see the magazine, Sean indicated that he was busy. He asked that she send the magazine to his home, by messenger. Madonna, pacing the room and staring at the magazine cover, overheard the conversation between the assistant and her boyfriend. She went to the employee and grabbed the phone from her. “You get over here, now, Sean,” she said into the phone. She had an angry, imperious edge to her voice. “How many girlfriends have you had on the cove
r of Time? One! Me! Now, get over here.”

  Penn showed up thirty minutes later.

  The fact that Sean Penn was also such a combative person only added fuel to the bonfire of publicity that seemed to erupt on a weekly basis for Madonna. On June 30, 1985, he was charged with assault and battery after he beat up a couple of journalists outside a hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was filming a movie.

  That morning, he and Madonna had received a bouquet of balloons delivered to their room, sent by someone in the media and with a card that read, “Madonna and Sean. Congratulations, Mom and Pop. How about an exclusive?” Penn, who was annoyed by the constant scrutiny, as well as rumors that Madonna was expecting, bolted out of the room, heading towards some waiting journalists.

  Lori Mulrenin, who witnessed the ensuing attack, recalls, “He was screaming at them like he was going to break open their heads. Then, when one of the journalists took his picture, he blew up. He picked up a rock and threw it carefully and precisely at the photographer. Then he ripped the cameras off the photographer’s back and slammed them against the photographer, who fell down. He then picked up the rock again as the other newsman tried to step in. Sean hit that one in the eye with his fist, and also hit him on the head with the rock. Madonna, who had been in the background when the fight started, pulled her hat over her eyes and then ran back into the hotel.”

  Sean Penn would enter a no-contest plea to charges that he assaulted the two journalists. He received a ninety-day suspended sentence and was fined fifty dollars on each of two misdemeanor charges.

  *

  While some of Madonna’s publicity ploys seem fairly unsophisticated in retrospect, they always worked. For instance, when the time came for the planning of her wedding to Sean Penn, she insisted that she wanted it to be a private affair with no publicity. She acted as if she did not want the kind of international attention she knew was bound to be generated by such an event. Besides simply going to Las Vegas where she and Penn could have quietly and quickly married, there were any number of ways Madonna could have ensured an intimate wedding, if such a thing was what she really desired. However, savvy as she is, she no doubt realized that the air of secrecy she pretended to foster only made the press more determined to cover the event . . . and the public more determined to read about it. Of course, to make matters even more tantalizing, Madonna banned the press from the wedding.