Madonna

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  When the author once asked Madonna what happened between her and Sandra, she said, “I can only tell you this: there was a huge misunderstanding about something, and she went off the deep end and never returned. That’s all I will say on the subject.”

  Truth or Dare

  In May 1991, Truth or Dare was finally released. In “pushing the envelope,” as she would put it, this movie, along with several upcoming projects, would prove that even Madonna could push too much, and go too far . . . until finally crossing the line between good taste and bad.

  Truth or Dare is fascinating to watch, not so much because its star is particularly witty or clever in it but rather because of what happens around her — the way her dancers fawn over her and vie for her attention, the way her manager Freddy DeMann is mistreated by her, and how she alternately rides roughshod over and also mothers everyone about her. It is truly a camp “performance.”

  It’s also intriguing to watch a woman in action who is, apparently, narcissistic enough to believe that everything she says or does has great importance and relevance. Why otherwise would she want herself committed to film while having her makeup applied, or while talking on the telephone, or even visiting her mother’s grave for the first time since she was a child — in a limousine, her eyes hidden by big and round Jackie O sunglasses? (“I wonder what she looks like now?” she mused of her deceased mother, her voice a monotone. “Probably just a bunch of dust.”)

  As the cameras rolled, Madonna bickered with Warren Beatty, whispered secrets to Sandra Bernhard, and recalled a sexual encounter with a high school girlfriend, who later turned up in the proceedings to say with a mixture of embarrassment and astonishment that she had no recollection of the incident. “But she did finger fuck me,” Madonna insisted. “I remember looking at her bush!”

  Shrewdly, she also showed her soft side by playing mother hen to her brood of vulnerable, pampered backup dancers and singers — some of whom were so young they were leaving home for the first time. Madonna led them in a prayer before every concert, she advised them on their love lives and refereed their arguments. In the film, she explains that she selected dancers and singers who were “emotionally crippled” so that she could “mother” them. She said, “This was the opportunity of their lives. I wanted to impress them. I wanted to love them.” At one point, when twenty-two-year-old dancer Oliver Crumes — who kept insisting that he was the only heterosexual dancer in the troupe — was rumored to have become sexually involved with her, and the story made the front page of one of the tabloids, Madonna counseled the others as to how to deal with their jealousy of Crumes. During a scene when she learns that Canadian officials may shut down her show because of its alleged indecency, she prays to God because “all of my babies are feeling fragile.” At the end of the movie, she cavorts in bed with all of them, in various stages of undress. “Get out of my bed and don’t come back until your dick is bigger,” she orders one giggling dancer. Her manner was one that suggested cruelty and humor at the same time.

  “I see a huge paradox in me,” she told the Advocate, in talking of her impression of the film, “the intense need to be loved and the search for approval juxtaposed with the need to nurture other people, to be the mother I never had. I didn’t realize how matriarchal I am, how maternal I am, until I watched this movie.”

  Further, she told Vanity Fair, “People will say, ‘She knows the camera is on, she’s just acting.’ But even if I am acting, there’s a truth in my acting. You could watch it and say, ‘I still don’t know Madonna’ . . . and good! Because you will never know the real me. Ever.

  “I think the impression of me will be twofold,” she said. “People will think, ‘Oh, she isn’t just a cold, dominating person.’ I think that’s the world’s perception of me, that I’m power-hungry and manipulating. I think a great deal of the movie shows a gentler side of me.”

  When a journalist asked her if the movie was shocking, Madonna became defensive. “Is what shocking?” she asked. “Me giving head to a bottle? You see people doing it in movies all the time. It’s a joke. What’s shocking? Why don’t you know if it’s shocking or not? Don’t you know your own feelings? It’s a joke.”

  Her manager Freddy DeMann felt that the movie would damage Madonna’s reputation. As she later recalled, he tried to convince her to cut several scenes.

  “The one where you stick your finger in your mouth to indicate that Kevin Costner makes you want to vomit, that has to go, Madonna,” he told her during one meeting.

  “No. It stays,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Well, the one where you say that woman finger-fucked you, that has to go. It’s disgusting.”

  “It stays,” she said. “There’s nothing disgusting about it.”

  “Okay, but the one where you are a bitch to everyone . . .”

  Finally, Madonna cut him off. “Fuck you, Freddy,” she said, according to his memory of the meeting. “Everyone knows I’m a bitch. Who cares? People think I’m Saddam Hussein. They compare me to Hitler. Leave my fucking movie alone! It’s not telling people anything they don’t already know.”

  Apparently, one aspect of her life that Madonna did not want revealed in the film was any that involved the running of her business affairs. While she is known to be open, revealing and forthcoming, on matters of business, she chose then (and still does today) to remain an enigma. So, cameras were forbidden in business meetings, even though director Alek Keshishian tried to force his way into them. “Get out!” she screamed at him.

  Rather than have her public understand that a good deal of her immense celebrity had to do with her genius for public relations as well as her talent, it seemed that Madonna wanted the public to believe that it stemmed from only her talent. So, when magazine editors scheduled articles that were to focus on her extraordinary business savvy, she refused to discuss profits, revenues or business strategies. Likewise, Madonna instructed her staff and friends not to talk about those matters, either.

  In 1991, Madonna’s revenues from her assorted music, film and commercial projects would be about $60 million, including the $36 million generated by the “Blonde Ambition” tour. She put in long hours managing her holdings and investments, seldom delegating important responsibilities to others. She also set up a number of lucrative companies: Boy Toy, Inc., for music and record royalties; Siren Films, for film and video production (taking the place of Slutco, a video production company that she dissolved soon after starting); Webo Girl, for music publishing; and Music Tours, Inc., for live performance contracts.

  Madonna was — and still is today — involved in all negotiations that relate to her career, always walking into meetings with a legal pad, a pencil and a great many questions. Says her former boyfriend John “Jellybean” Benitez, “She has a lot of people feeding her the information she needs, and she looks at it more creatively than other artists do. She absorbs everything, and she asks a lot of questions.”

  In 1991, Freddy DeMann received up to percent of her annual earnings. Her accountant, Bert Padell, had his services capped at $1 million, annually. Her legal negotiations were handled by Paul Schindler of Grubman Indursky Schindler, a company that used a system called “instinctive billing,” where fees are negotiated with clients after a deal has been struck, depending on how lucrative the outcome. Madonna felt that the attorney was worth the curious billing method. Still, says the manager of another rock star, “If she treated me the way she treats the other people who work for her, I would be gone in twenty-four hours. She is known for mistreating the people who work for her, and I think she feels that if she pays them enough she’s allowed to treat them badly. Or, maybe the privilege of working for her at all is supposed to be some kind of reward.”

  Her fans, however, didn’t really care what went on with Madonna behind the scenes, as long as she delivered to them onstage. Truly, the most wonderful part of Truth or Dare is the concert footage from the “Blonde Ambition” tour. The dancers, the sets, the music and, of
course, Madonna . . . all are visually spellbinding. While watching her perform, one marvels at her level of commitment to her act and her audience. Certainly, few entertainers work as hard as Madonna to please a crowd. Few have even an inkling of Madonna’s expansive imagination and vision. Also, in the video, when Madonna brought her father, Tony, onto the stage in Detroit so that her audience could sing “Happy Birthday” to him, it was a genuinely touching moment. Daughter paid homage to father by literally bowing down to him in front of her fans, and only those closest to her and her family saw the real significance of the gesture. “She was saying, ‘I love you, Dad. I want you to accept me. Look at all of these people. Look at how they love me,’ says Nikki Harris, who was onstage with Madonna at the time as one of her two singers. “It was a genuine moment.”

  Besides the jarring reality of how talented Madonna is as a performer, perhaps the one thing the viewer of Truth or Dare is left with is that — at least at that time — she was not someone most reasonable people would ever welcome into their lives. Certainly, she gave definition to the New Age phrase “high-maintenance friend.”

  No doubt, one of the sweetest memories Madonna must have relating to the documentary was her experience at the forty-fourth Cannes Film Festival that year when she went to France to promote it. She and her large entourage checked into the Riviera’s most exclusive and glamorous Hôtel Du Cap at Eden Roc; Madonna stayed in the large and very pink Princess Suite, “which I loved, loved, loved,” she said later. As usual, photographers risked their lives to take her picture, hanging from cliffs by ropes and trying to aim their telescopic lenses as she swam in a waterfall, or circling in chartered speedboats at dangerously high speeds as she caught some sun on a yacht. Rarely did she then — or does she now — ever have a moment of peace and quiet whenever she was out in public in Europe. Somehow, she has managed to become — or at least act as if she has — completely oblivious to the fact that strangers with cameras are crashing into each other all around her as they all try to capture “the perfect photograph.” She first faced the press at Cannes draped in a stunning rose-colored satin gown. Her dark, curled hair was piled atop her head, like a crown. As flashbulbs popped all about her, and at just the right moment, her gown dropped, falling in a heap at her feet. Then, there she stood — posing this way and that way — in nothing but a white satin coned brassiere and matching panty-girdle hot pants. It was fascinating that even in this scanty, immodest outfit — which, worn by another woman, would just seem trashy — she looked polished, feminine and in control. “You could feel her presence — or the reflected glare of her celebrity — at a distance of twenty miles,” wrote Robert Sandall of the London Sunday Times. “Everybody was talking about the real star in town — Madonna.”

  Shortly after Truth or Dare was released, some of the very dancers Madonna was seen “mothering” in it turned against her when they realized that they weren’t getting paid any more money in the form of residuals (even though the movie would go on to gross millions). Sallim Gauwloos, also known as “Slam,” pantomimed the Warren Beatty – Madonna duet “Now I’m Following You” (from Dick Tracy) in the concert. He says he felt “disillusioned” by the entire experience.

  “After the tour and the movie, I never spoke to her again. The movie makes it look like we were this big happy family but it was not like that. We never went to her with our problems; we were never that close, even though that’s how they made it look.”

  Of his former boss, he says, “She was a sensitive person in many ways. But she was very, very insecure, especially with other women. We would have parties, and there would never be beautiful women invited. Only guys. She would freak if there was someone in the room more beautiful than her. That was her rule. Only men would be invited to her parties, or women who were far, far less attractive.”

  He adds, “I thought we were really good friends. We always knew that she was making a documentary. And we had a meeting with her at one point to say, ‘Well, look, we’re getting paid to do the tour, true, but are we going to make money from this movie, too?’ It was obvious to us that, hey, if you put a movie out there starring Madonna, a lot of money is going to be made.

  “She got a little insulted that we even asked about money, and she said, ‘If the movie is a success, then, yes, I will give you some more money.’ So the movie came out, and it was huge. And we never got a dime. Nothing. I was very sad. She could have at least given me a phone call to tell me, ‘Hey, the movie is a hit. Here’s the money I promised you.’ But, no. Nothing.”

  In January 1992, three of the professional dancers featured in the “Blonde Ambition” tour filed a lawsuit against Madonna relating to their portrayal in Truth or Dare. The dancers — Gabriel Trupin, Kevin Stea and Oliver Crumes — filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging that Madonna had lied to them about her intended use of film footage she gathered during the tour. The dancers contended their privacy was invaded by personal offstage footage, and that they weren’t paid for their appearance in the movie. Madonna was angry about the suit. “Those ingrates,” she said to one colleague. “To think that I made them who they are, then they treat me like this.”

  Shortly after the suit was filed, Madonna happened upon Oliver Crumes at a party. “If you want money,” she told him, her tone arctic, “why don’t you sell that Cartier watch I bought for you.”

  The suit would drag through the court system for years until the dancers simply couldn’t afford to pay their attorneys. Finally, in September of 1994 — the year Forbes magazine stated that she earned $37 million — Madonna offered an out-of-court settlement to the dancers. Terms of the settlement are still confidential, though one dancer has said, “For what her lawyers put us through, forget it. It wasn’t worth it.”

  “We were nearly unable to pursue the claims in the case because of Madonna’s superior financial resources,” says attorney Debra Johnson, who represented the dancers. “All too often in Hollywood, a powerful figure like Madonna is able to act as if she is above the law,” Johnson concluded.

  Sex

  On October 21, 1992, Madonna’s notorious book, Sex, was published by Time-Warner. When the book finally appeared — after months of speculation and hype — the public discovered that Madonna’s foray into the publishing world would be in the form of an oversized and overpriced ($49.95), 128-page volume, spiral-bound between embossed stainless-steel covers, aptly titled, simply, Sex. As if to make certain that the public fully recognized the controversial nature of this publishing endeavor, the book arrived in book shops wrapped in silver Mylar (which also ensured that only paying customers were privy to what lay between its covers). Also included was a CD of Madonna’s new song, “Erotica,” in a silver Mylar Ziplock bag. “Warner Books is shitting in their pants about it,” said Freddy DeMann in assessing the publishing company’s nervousness about distributing such a work.

  Some might say that the genesis of Madonna’s Sex shows a typical side of her character and the way that she, as she has put it in the past, “takes a little of this and that and turns it into my own.” Earlier, in the fall of 1990, Judith Regan, then an editor of Simon & Schuster Pocket Books, had an idea for a book of erotica and sexual fantasies which she felt would be ideal for Madonna. “I felt that it was right in line with what she was all about at that time,” says Regan. “So I sent a box of material to her manager’s office, which included erotic photos that I thought would interest her, as well as the kind of text I thought would be appropriate. It was colorful and imaginative, if I do say so myself. I was happy with it, anyway. As it turned out, she, too, was impressed and thought it would be a good idea. The next thing I knew I was in Los Angeles sitting with her and her manager Freddy DeMann. I was pregnant at the time, and the first thing Madonna said to me was, ‘Well, you know, I don’t have any children.’ It seemed odd that she would think that I wouldn’t know such a thing about her, one of the most famous women in the world.”

  “I just want you to know that I won’t
even think of doing this thing if you’ve offered it to even one other celebrity,” Madonna cautioned Judith Regan during their meeting.

  “Why is that?” Judith asked. Of course, she knew the answer, but still wanted to hear it from the woman herself.

  “Because it has to be unique to me,” Madonna said, predictably. “It has to be for me, and for me alone.”

  “Well, I started at the top. With you,” Judith assured her. “If you’re not interested, then I’ll go elsewhere. But I hope that you will be interested. I think this could really work for you.”

  Madonna seemed satisfied. During the rest of the meeting, she made it clear that she would only do such a project if she could exert complete control over it. “She has amazing instincts, I learned that right away about her,” says Regan. “She knew just what she wanted to do, and how to do it. She asked intelligent questions about publishing. Not surprisingly, I found her to be very eager, very smart. Shrewd.”

  Perhaps Madonna was even shrewder than Judith realized. By the end of the meeting, she had agreed “in principal” says Judith, “to do a book we would call Madonna’s Book of Erotica and Sexual Fantasies. She said that her manager would call me and we would work out the details. I never heard from her, and decided that she just didn’t want to do it. Then, six months later, I learned that she was doing the project for Warner Books [an arm of Time-Warner, which owns Warner Bros. Records, and now distributes Madonna’s record label, Maverick]. She had obviously taken my concept, my photos and ideas and used it as a proposal to secure a deal with another publisher. I never heard from her, not a word of gratitude, or an apology, or anything,” concludes Judith Regan. “Frankly, I thought it was in poor taste.”