Madonna

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Indeed, critics “murdered” Madonna in reviewing the film, declaring Body of Evidence a third-rate rehash of every murder mystery of the past twenty years (and particularly of Basic Instinct, the box-office blockbuster of the year before). Reviewers were quick to compare Madonna unfavorably with that movie’s leading lady: “It’s not just that Madonna does not make an effective Sharon Stone,” a critic for Rolling Stone complained. “She doesn’t even make an effective Madonna. Instead of emoting, Madonna strikes poses and delivers stilted lines that sound like captions from her book Sex read aloud in a voice of nerve-jangling stridency.”

  Bad notices and the condemnation of religious groups had certainly never hurt Madonna’s career before this time, but when it was reported that movie audiences had been laughing out loud at Madonna’s supposedly serious characterization in Body of Evidence, it became clear that she had pushed the envelope as far as it was going to be accepted. It was becoming clear even to her that a new reinvention would have to be in the offing, that is if she was going to be able to sustain a career — especially when another film, Dangerous Game, was released (in 1993) to terrible reviews and dreadful box office. In this one, Madonna plays an actress with limited skills who has sex with practically everyone in her life. The sex is violent — Madonna gets to strip several times, and does so with great zest. In one scene during Dangerous Game, actor James Russo says of Madonna’s character, Sarah Jennings, “We both know she’s a fucking whore who can’t act.” Again, it was all more than critics — or her public — could bear. What a disappointment this movie was, especially considering that it was directed by the highly respected Abel Ferrara (known at the time for The Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Keitel, who also co-starred in Dangerous Game) and that Madonna had financed much of it with her own money.

  Meanwhile, happily for her, Madonna’s recording and performing career still had enough momentum to overcome the slump that had resulted from such exploits as Body of Evidence and Dangerous Game. Facing the barrage of publicity, Madonna chose not to hide. Instead, she decided to do what she had always done best: she took her act out on the road.

  In the last quarter of 1993, Madonna forged ahead with a limited twenty-date, four-continent world tour — her first in four years — which she called “The Girlie Show.” Wisely, she realized that a complete about-face in her career would be transparent, and at the same time would probably diminish much of what she had done prior to this time. She really had expanded the consciousness of much of her public, even if the way she’d gone about it was sometimes questionable. Now, if she was going to come up with a new image, the transformation would have to come about slowly. As a result “The Girlie Show,” was a transitional tour. While still sexy, it was more of an innocent burlesque rather than a blatant attempt to shock. Gone were the hard core S&M images and the blasphemous religious iconology of the previous two years. Rather, this concert had the feel of a racy Barnum and Bailey circus, even revealing a softer, gentler Madonna.

  Time described it as, “At once a movie retrospective, a Ziegfeld revue, a living video, an R-rated takeoff on Cirque du Soleil — opens with Smokey Robinson’s ‘Tears of a Clown’ and closes with Cole Porter’s ‘Be a Clown.’” The critic concluded that Madonna, “once the Harlow harlot and now a perky harlequin, is the greatest show-off on earth.” “The Girlie Show” enabled Madonna to end the difficult year on a successful note. Many observers and fans considered it to be her best show to date, reaffirming that, as a singer and stage performer — if not a movie star — Madonna could still please her audience. Still, she was now more sensitive than ever to criticism, probably because she’d had to endure so much of it in recent times. Even the slightest negative tone to a review would send her reeling. “No one understands me,” she complained to one close friend. “I’m breaking the rules. Why don’t people get that?”

  “Maybe because people are sick to death of you and all of the sex nonsense,” said the friend. “Even toned down, it’s still too much.” Madonna didn’t speak to that person again for six months.

  Trash Talking on TV

  While on “The Girlie Show” tour, Madonna engaged in a heated telephone conversation with her father, Tony, during which he told her that he wished she would “stop being so racy.” According to what Madonna would later recall to intimates, he said he was embarrassed not so much by what she was doing, but by what people were saying about her. Rather than empathize with what her father was probably trying to say, which was that it hurt his feelings when strangers criticized his daughter, she took his comment as criticism. The two then became embroiled in the same battle they had been fighting for years, having to do with Madonna’s belief that her father had never supported her aspirations or understood her art. Or, as Tony would later say, “When a father is concerned, does that mean he doesn’t approve? Why is she such a hothead? Why does she take everything so personally?”

  So many years had gone by, yet Madonna was still so hurt and angry by her mother’s passing that there was really nothing Tony Ciccone could say or do that would be right, as far as she was concerned. It was the same story: she had to blame someone for her loss, so she blamed her father. Yet, she still wanted his approval.

  No doubt, Tony had to have been concerned when he saw his daughter’s appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman on March 31, 1994.

  Madonna’s recent understanding that her ability to generate interest in herself by shocking the public was no longer working must have been buttressed when she saw the public’s reaction to her on the Letterman show. She made the appearance on the night of Holy Thursday, when Catholics commemorate the Last Supper during the Easter holidays.

  In what was perhaps a last-ditch attempt to be shocking, sexy and controversial, Madonna embarrassed herself on Letterman’s program almost from the moment she sat down. Dressed in a tight black velvet dress with matching scarred combat boots, her black hair pulled severely back, she walked onto the stage holding a pair of panties. Within seconds, she had launched into what many considered to be an offensive performance that included a string of obscenities she made while she smoked a cigar. She asked Letterman — whom she called “a sick fuck” — if he would smell her panties. Though Letterman attempted to avoid answering the question, Madonna would not let it go. “I gave him my underpants,” she said to the audience, laughing, “and he won’t smell them!” Then, after asking Letterman why he was so obsessed with her sex life (since it was often the subject of his comedy monologues), Madonna continuously tried to lead the conversation back to . . . her sex life.

  In a verbal tug of war, a ruffled Letterman (showing an unsteady side of himself not often seen on television) tried to change the subject, but Madonna was unrelenting. “Would you like to touch my dress?” she asked him. Letterman promptly cut to a commercial. When they came back from the break, Madonna was smoking a cigar and explaining that it was “just the right size.” Later, with the sex talk leading nowhere, and her attempts at double entendre falling flat, she seemed desperate to appear provocative. “Did you know that it’s good to pee in the shower?” she asked, without provocation. The audience was silent. Undaunted, Madonna pressed on, “I’m serious. Peeing in the shower is really good. It fights athlete’s foot. Urine is like an antiseptic.”

  “Don’t you know a good pharmacist?” Letterman shot back. “Get yourself some Desenex.”

  By now it seemed to most observers that Letterman was hoping to cut her segment short, but Madonna, perhaps realizing that she was floundering, wanted to score some points before exiting.

  “We have to say good-bye now,” Letterman told her.

  Madonna stalled. “She can’t be stopped,” David said. “Something’s wrong with her!”

  “Something is wrong with me,” she shot back. “I’m sitting here!”

  Inexplicably, Madonna picked up her peeing in the shower thread by declaring “everybody pees in the shower and picks their noses.”

  By now an audience membe
r was shouting for her to get off the stage, and Letterman was nearly pleading with her to do the same, explaining that he had other guests waiting to appear. “Thank you for grossing us all out,” he said to her before she finally took her leave.

  Says Paul Shaffer, musical director for Letterman’s program, “We know that Madonna is not going to appear on a show unless she can make an impact, and on this show she used language to make her impact. I remember saying to myself, ‘The Material Girl has no material.’ We were all amazed by it, shocked by it, really. And it was kind of shocking to hear the kinds of words she said on national television.”

  Though the show was one of the highest-rated of David Letterman’s career, the press Madonna’s appearance generated for her was some of the worst criticism she had yet received. Every report mentioned the fact that she uttered the word “fuck” thirteen times, causing the network to have to “bleep” it each time. The New York Post’s Ray Kerrison summed up the public’s reaction: “Alas, it is what the world has now come to expect from Madonna. She has built a career, if you could call it that, around blasphemy, lewdness, profanity and smut. It is a pathetic reach for celebrity and notoriety by a woman short on talent and wit. She has nothing to sell but shock. Sadly, since she cannot soar with the eagles, she forages with the rodents.”

  “I called her the next day,” says her friend chat-show host Rosie O’Donnell, “and asked her, ‘What the heck was all of that about?’ And she was upset. She said, ‘They told me to do it. They set the whole thing up. It was mostly scripted, and now they [the Letterman producers] are acting like they had nothing to do with it.’

  “She was pretty pissed off about it. She said that she didn’t really want to do it. She said she knew better at this point in her career than to do it, but that she listened to them. ‘People like it when you are shocking,’ they told her. And she listened, against her better judgment. It was a mistake, she said. She didn’t want to do it. They made her.”

  Maybe. Or maybe not.

  Years later, Madonna would admit in an interview with Mary Murphy of TV Guide, “That was a time in my life when I was extremely angry. Angry with the way I was brought up. Angry about how sexist this society that we live in is. Angry with people who assumed that because I had a sexuality that I couldn’t also be talented. Just everything. The press was constantly beating up on me, and I felt like a victim. So I lashed out at people and that night [on Letterman] was one of those times. And I am not particularly proud of it.”

  Bedtime Stories

  What was she to do now? She had practically trashed her image in recent years with one scalding controversy after another. The mostly negative reaction to Truth or Dare, Sex, Erotica and Body of Evidence caused Madonna to begin thinking — finally! — that maybe she had gone too far, that she had built a wall between herself and her public so high, it would be impossible for her to scale it and reconnect with the world in a way that had always mattered most to her — artistically. The dreadful appearance on David Letterman’s show drove the point home. Even though she followed it with a more tame appearance on Jay Leno’s show, and then another with Letterman at an awards program where the two acted as if they were now great friends, the public still seemed fed up with her.

  According to one of her managers at this time, Madonna realized that she needed to make some dramatic changes in her career or, despite her huge record sales, she soon might not even have one. Always a smart woman, even though she had certainly slipped in recent years, she now realized that she needed to grow up, soften her image, and reconnect with her public. For the next few years, she would try to do just that . . . and her album Bedtime Stories would go a long way toward achieving that goal.

  Bedtime Stories would also be the second of her albums to be released on Maverick, her own record label, funded by (its distributor) Warner Bros. Records with $60 million (the first was Erotica). For years, Madonna had wanted to release her own music on her own label and, expanding that vision, she wanted the label to be a full-service entertainment company specializing not only in music but also in television, film, book and song publishing.

  Since Madonna was still very much a best-selling recording artist by the early 1990s, the existence of her Maverick Records was an anomaly. One of the first female artists to have a real label, and one of the few women to run her own entertainment company, Maverick isn’t just a company in logo only. It is a genuine venture for her with a staff and executives in place, all of whom were, at the time, governed by Freddy DeMann, who served as president of the company. The enterprise had its headquarters in a sleek, anonymous single-story office building in West Hollywood, close to one of Madonna’s favorite shopping haunts, the chic Fred Segal department store on Melrose Avenue. Madonna had discussed such a venture with Warren Beatty on several occasions. He had encouraged her to do it, and was said to have been proud to hear that she’d finally launched the company.

  “My goal, of course, is to have hits with the new company,” she said when speaking of Maverick. “I’m not one of these dumb artists who is just given a label to shut her up. I asked for a record company. So, I’m not going to be invisible or simply phone in my partnership. There’s no honor or satisfaction in palming the work off on someone else.” (Certainly, the biggest artist Madonna has thus far signed to Maverick is Canadian singer/songwriter Alanis Morissette, whose album Jagged Little Pill had sold nearly thirty million copies as of the summer of 2000. The label also features Cleopatra, as well as the Deftones, Jude and Prodigy.)

  That 1994’s Bedtime Stories would follow the soft porn of Erotica might have seemed a bit odd to the untrained ear or to the casual Madonna fan. After all, though Bedtime was considerably tamer in tone than the ethereal-sounding, sexually charged Erotica, it demonstrated that, as always, Madonna had a keen instinct about where pop music was headed at the time of its release. By the early nineties, hip-hop music had completely permeated the national music sales charts. It was the “dance” music of the day, the “new” R&B of a generation of kids in fashionably sagging anti-designer designer jeans and backpacks. It was a trend, and, not surprisingly, Madonna wanted to be a part of it.

  Bedtime Stories would prove to be Madonna’s most unique recording to date. It marked the first time since Nile Rodgers and 1984’s Like a Virgin album that she had worked with well-known producers. (For reasons that were as much about creativity as they were about control, she had chosen to work with relative unknowns on her recent recordings.) Certainly, at this point in her famously successful career, Madonna could have worked with any of the era’s biggest record producers, from Quincy Jones (who’d navigated Michael Jackson’s phenomenal success), to a high-priced journeyman such as David Foster (who had done wonderful work with Barbra Streisand) or Narada Michael Walden (longtime producer of the big-voiced Whitney Houston), or even New Jack Swing producer Teddy Riley.

  For the tracks that would be included in Bedtime Stories, Madonna sought out the hottest young producers working in urban/hip-hop music. At the top of her list was Dallas Austin, the twenty-two-year-old songwriter/producer from Atlanta, Georgia, who’d found fame and fortune producing, among others, male vocal group Boyz II Men, teen R&B singer Monica and, especially, the young female hip-hop trio called TLC. Freddy DeMann was also instructed to place a call to another prominent name in pop/R&B, songwriter/producer Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds. Edmonds was black music’s hitmeister of the moment, having penned chart recordings for Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton, among other R&B acts.

  Austin’s and Edmonds’s names among the CD’s production credits would have proved the seriousness of Madonna’s intention to enter the world of R&B and hip-hop proper. However, she also rounded out her team of collaborators by pulling in Nellee Hooper, once the creative core of a British studio tribe called Soul II Soul who had enjoyed 1989 hits with the singles “Keep On Movin’” and “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me).” She also added Dave “Jam” Hall, then one of urban soul’s most solid rising young
songwriter/producers, who had scored hits with, among others, the R&B girl group Brownstone. “She knows how to man a project,” says Freddy DeMann. “She knows how to surround herself with the biggest and the best, and I think that has been one of her greatest achievements. She’s not like a lot of people who feel they have to do it all themselves. She wants assistance, but from only the most qualified people.”

  When “Secret,” the first single from Bedtime Stories, was released, it surprised many Madonna fans, as well as her critics. It isn’t a bigsounding dance track or a twinkling melodic ballad, both of which have been Madonna’s style. Instead, it begins with just the sound of her voice singing over a rhythmic folksy guitar, before opening up to a sparse, retro rhythm section. Madonna’s tangy voice remained at the center of the production. “My baby’s got a secret,” she sang, though she never shares with the listener just what that secret may be. She and Dallas Austin wrote the clever song which, no matter how many times one listens to it, never ceases to intrigue. It rode the Billboard singles chart up to the Number 3 position.

  “Take a Bow” was the second single from the collection, a melancholy and beautifully executed ballad written by Madonna with Babyface. “Take a Bow” is a somber, sarcastic all-the-world’s-a-stage song about unrequited love (a recurring theme in Madonna’s lyrics) whose phoniness might have fooled everyone else, but not her. “Take a bow,” she implored, for rendering a great, transparent performance in life and love. (The picturesque video was filmed over seven days in Ronda, Spain, with a bullfighting theme — using three bulls — and featuring popular bullfighter, Emilio Muñoz. It was partly because of the forties look of the video that Alan Parker thought Madonna might work in the part of Evita.)