Visiting Mrs Nabokov

by Amis, Martin

  It would be rash to try to make up your mind about someone like Polanski. He is something of a ranter, his speech dotted with show-biz cliches ('Jack Nicholson - he is a great professional') and self-consciously quotable tags ('I like food, I like women, and best of all I like women who like food' etc, etc). But there is a great deal that is generous, natural, even transparent, about him. His confidence, for example, is a real thing, and not the grinning shambles that often passes for confidence in the film world. Clearly he has sometimes gone too far into the gratifications that his fast-lane milieu offers him, as the case in California amply demonstrates. But he has survived an extraordinary life, and is still himself.

  After lunch he invited me to his cutting-room in the Champs Elysées, where he is preparing Tess for the English and American versions. It was a gloomy flat, full of gloomy, Gitane-smoking Frenchmen. Polanski spent twenty minutes cutting half a second out of a reaction-shot to a fresh stage in Tess's doleful decline. I asked him if he was worried that the film might be mistakenly regarded as a blow for Women's Liberation.

  'What? Tess responds appropriately to events, and as an individual. Women's Lib is an absurdity! A few just postulates do not make a movement just. How can one half of the species organise against the other half? There's not anyone who said at certain time, "That's the way women behave." Things are the way they are because of evolution! This is the way it is between monkeys, between dogs and between butterflies!'

  'What about spiders?'

  'Spiders, mm,' he said, nodding and looking serious. 'No, male spiders don't have a good time. Maybe they should get together and do something about it. I don't know.'

  Tatler, 1980

  MADONNA

  Originally I came, not to review Madonna, but to interview her. Now, when you are circling round a star of this magnitude — stacked like a package tourist above her fogbound airport - you never negotiate with the star herself. You negotiate with her people or, in best post-modern style, with her people's people: her agent's agent, her assistant's secretary's assistant's secretary. The messages come back in a remote and cautious cipher. At first it looked as though Madonna had singled me out as someone she was especially keen to see. (Truman Capote, I remembered, gave the same impression, an impression gravely qualified towards the end of the interview when he abruptly addressed me as 'Tony'.) A few days later Madonna apparently decided that, on the contrary, she didn't want to see me at all. The reason she seemed to be giving was this: I was too famous. Madonna (I wanted to tell her), don't say another word. I completely understand.

  Wearily I was envisioning my arrival at Kennedy Airport. As the Concorde taxied to a halt, its engines already outscreamed by the fans gathered on the terminal rooftop, my security guards would be patrolling the runway, using their infra-red binoculars to scan the skies for media helicopters. Paparazzi disguised as ground crew and maintenance men would vex my progress through immigration and customs.

  The real trouble would begin in Arrivals. By this time the unconscious bodies of twelve-year-old Martin Amis look-alikes and wannabes would be heaped up by the improvised paramedical tents, as, with a slight movement of my left forefinger, I signalled to the police chief to start fire-hosing the crowds that besieged the waiting motorcade ...

  MAIMED BY MADONNA ran the Sun headline, after one of its reporters had managed to sprain his ankle in a Madonna crush (probably by throwing himself under her car). I had simply been Aimed by Madonna. But I went along anyway, out of aroused interest, and fellow feeling, to review Madonna — or more particularly Madonna's new book: Sex.

  In the old, benighted, pre-modern days, a new book was normally sent to the reviewer, encased in a jiffy-bag or, under exceptionally glamorous circumstances, a Federal-Express wallet. But Madonna is perhaps the most post-modern personage on the planet, so in this case the reviewer was sent to the book, by supersonic aeroplane. The book lives under lock and key in the Sixth Avenue skyscraper of Time Warner, and in a few other hurriedly Fort-Knoxified locations. There have already been leaks and thefts, involving police investigations and, in one case, an FBI 'sting' operation. Most books submitted for review are top secret, in the sense that nobody knows anything about them. But Madonna always tends to do things the other way round.

  The reviewer gets cleared and tagged, and gauntly rides the elevator to the tenth floor. He gives his name and sits waiting in a vestibule whose shelves are adorned with recent Time Warner offerings: rock biogs, real-life murder stories, accounts of financial delinquencies, mystery novels, fluff novels, novels written by two or more co-novelists. Summoned within, the reviewer sees on someone's desk a copy of a book - a whole book - called Why Men Have Nipples.

  We're in the editor's actual office now. But before the book is at last produced, the reviewer is obliged to sign a long and menacing legal agreement. 'You agree that Warner and/or Madonna', it says, among much else,

  shall be entitled to issuance of an ex parte temporary restraining order, and a preliminary and permanent injunction against you for any threatened or actual violation of this agreement, and shall not be required to post a bond to secure such relief.

  The reviewer boldly signs. And then, in an atmosphere of laughable solemnity, the book is grimly shoved across the desk. When it eventually hits the shops, Sex will be swaddled in a kind of nuclear-hardened polythene sachet, unbreachable except by carving knife or chainsaw. (The sachet will bear a warning: This Book Contains Adult Material And Its Exterior Packaging Reflects The Controversial and Sensitive Nature Of What Is Inside. But the main angles, clearly, are to intensify suspense and to thwart the browser.) Here in the office, though, Sex stood proudly unsheathed, naked as nature intended, and massive, with its spiral binding and aluminium covers. The reviewer is suffered to sit with it for an hour on a sofa, monitored throughout. He is not allowed to discuss it with anyone afterwards. And he is not allowed to take notes.

  Looking through a hundred-odd cardboard pages of Madonna and others in the nude and semi-nude was, as expected, no great hardship in terms of tedium, though to be frank (and there isn't much point, hereabouts, in being anything else) she hasn't done a damned thing for me physically since she went blonde and hardbody circa 1986. (The time I liked her was in the Desperately Seeking Susan period: 'the indolent, trampy goddess', as Pauline Kael described her.) I also reposed considerable trust in my own jadedness: Madonna might shock Middle America, but she wasn't about to shock this reviewer. And yet I will admit to being mildly disquieted by Sex — by its hostile iteration, by its latent anger and impatience, above all, perhaps (and to this I will return), by its palpable otherness.

  The opening chunk of Sex is all hard-edged and black-and-white and predominantly gay and punk and sado-masochistic in its themes. Nothing here or elsewhere in the book is technically hard-core, but the milieu is in itself pornographic, and darkly pornographic: the heavy-gay, pre-AIDS sex-crypts of downtown Manhattan - one of which, I recollect, was undesigningly called The Toilet. The joint featured in Sex, anyway is called The Vault, a sooty basement furnished with lockers and urinals and, this being Madonna, religious knick-knacks like crosses and candles, before which she poses as if entombed or ready for sacrifice.

  We also glimpse Madonna in mid-threesome with two girl skinheads covered in tattoos and with every stray protuberance pierced with pins and rings. In one photograph they hold a knife to Madonna's throat; in another, to her groin. The men on view here sport the half-dressed-policeman look of outdated career gaydom; in the elastic bands of their jockstraps Madonna's head is variously entangled. She is also often seen at the centre of a great press of gay-male flesh, in 'playful' gang-rape scenarios. The atmosphere recalls the intent, aggressive, leathery, specialist sexuality of the Seventies; the actors are a dedicated janitoriat in the venereal boiler-room.

  After a while the book starts cooling down and brightening up. Many of the snaps that follow could be out of Playboy or Penthouse or even Health and Efficiency. There are some striking 'found' set-
ups, where the dare element is simply a result of location: Madonna half-nude in a dumbstruck pizza parlour; Madonna on the kerbside in Miami, wearing only high heels, a handbag and a cigarette. The diversification in tone is accompanied by a diversification in personnel and 'preference'. Characteristically - indeed crucially — Madonna's bawdy house has many mansions: hardly anyone who isn't already in jail need feel at all locked out.

  Apart from gays and sado-masochists, Hispanics and blacks are of course represented in all inter-ethnic combinations. There are cross-dressers and androgynists. There are posed encounters with the very old and the very young. There is even a shot of Madonna looming over a belly-up Alsatian with an expression of fond indulgence on her face. And the book winds up with a solid reversion to hot-sheets sleaze: an eight-page narrative of stills with paste-on speech bubbles, depicting a fuddled orgy in a cheap hotel room, during which a grimy rock musician has sex with, among others (Madonna included), his sister. Then the acknowledgments, in predictable style: private jocularity plus apocalyptic gratitude.

  Interspersed with the pictures are sections of scrawled or printed prose from Madonna's own pen. These include various bites of sexual advice, some of which might be seen as contradictory. The now-familiar sloganising about condoms ('Safe sex saves lives') is soon followed by a paranthetical few words about sodomy, hailed as 'the most pleasurable' form of sex although it 'hurts the most too'. Not that that's a contradiction, in these pages, where pain gets a consistently good press (on bondage: 'Like when you were a baby your mother strapped you to the car seat. You wanted to be safe - it's an act of love').

  Other prose sections include accounts of erotic dreams (too boringly circumstantial to be anything but authentic), a series of letters addressed to 'Johnny' (about how the authoress is languidly toying with Ingrid while they thirst for Johnny's return), sexual reverie or heightened reminiscence (trashily generic, with such biological unlikelihoods as the Madonna figure visibly 'gushing' in orgasm), dating tips ('The best way to seduce someone is by making yourself unavailable. Don't fuck them for the first five dates.'), cute panegyrics to her own genitalia ('I love my pussy. I think it's a complete summation of my life'), and a smattering of sexual slogans in praise of freedom, individual choice, lack of inhibition, and courage to explore your etc., etc. 'A lot of people are afraid to say what they want and so they don't get what they want.' But the book, remember, is presented as fantasy, a realm in which it is presumably okay to get what you want, even if it's your sister, or your dog.

  Opinions on Sex will divide sharply, and will further subdivide when the book is dutifully processed by the innumerable interest — and target — groups that make up Madonna's mysteriously vast constituency. All the Middle-American, Dan-Quaylean moralistic objections can be concentrated as follows: if the identikit Madonna fan is still the thirteen-year-old lookalike and wannabe — then what? 'Let's face it,' as Madonna herself said recently, while complaining about the obsessed teens who camp outside her New York apartment, 'they're not that bright.' Any role model, in America today, must be ready for accusations of irresponsibility or even - to use the phrase unintentionally popularised by Woody Allen — 'abuse of trust'.

  It is quite likely that Sex will scare up a political response on the national as well as the socio-sexual level. The Woody Allen story broke in August during the Republican Convention in Houston, where Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson were somehow permitted to frame the party's recklessly militant 'family values' platform. The GOP is already backpedalling from its assaults on every domestic configuration that fell outside the traditional family — after it learned that the traditional family accounts for only 14 per cent of the American population. On the following day Woody Allen jokes were being freely tossed around the convention hall (Woody's upcoming projects, it was said, were Close Encounters with the Third Grade and Honey, I Fucked the Kids). There was even talk of 'the Woody Horton possibility': Allen might embarrass the Democrats just as Willie Horton — the black convict who violently recidivated on a Dukakis-sponsored weekend furlough — had destroyed them in 1988.

  Madonna would certainly be fair quarry in a campaign which finds single-parent TV-sitcom characters worthy of attack. Republican moralism is after all a blunt weapon (its intention here is simply to show that 'left-wing' sexuality can often look like a mess); and never mind, for now, the far-right video vicars who are regularly discovered on the floors of hot-sheets motel bedrooms, under a heap of hookers and forged tax-returns. For the sex that Sex celebrates is not only vigorously perverse but also highly conceptualised. The fact that Madonna regards the book as essentially comic — even the S/M poses are 'meant to be funny' - shows how overevolved and tangential her own sexuality has become. And although love gets a single approving mention, there is no suggestion that younger readers should get some corny erotic normality behind them, before delving into all this glazed and minatory aestheticism. More generally, and more personally, there is the feeling that Sex is no more than the desperate confection of an ageing scandal-addict who, with this book, merely confirms that she is exhausting her capacity to shock.

  The defence will run as follows. Madonna's little clones have all grown up now, and have not been replaced by the current wave of teens - who, Time Warner suggests, will be adequately deterred anyway by the book's civic-minded price tag. Madonna's audience, like Madonna, has always been a shifting thing: teen girls, teen boys, gay men, and now young and not-so-young women in the twenty-forty range. And it is to this last group that Sex is apparently directed. As Warner's Nanscy Lieman appealingly puts it: 'The few men who have seen the book are definitely intrigued. But the women take one look and go [inhalation then exhalation]: "Sshh. Oooh." ' In this version, Sex streaks like a tracer bullet through the dark sky of female sexual fantasy.

  Erotica and pornography are male preserves, made by men for other men; there is nothing out there for women, except the joke beefcake of Playgirl, itself a crude transposition of a male idea. And here Madonna is, as always, on the crest of the contemporary: post-modern, post-feminist, she is the Woman of the Year of the Woman, incorporating Babe Power with the older, simpler Have It All credo of Cosmopolitan. This is womanhood without sisterhood. This is imaginative self-reliance.

  Female sexual fantasy, or so men tend to believe, has always been a constrained and limited arena. Whereas the fierce specialisation of male erotica attests to a ridiculously detailed repertoire (a magazine shelf for every breast-size and leg-length), the female equivalent seems, or seemed, to be confined to variations on the theme of helplessness. In the staple, text-book example, the woman dreamed of abduction and rape (so that if she enjoyed it, it wasn't her fault), usually at the hands of some glistening exotic (who was therefore outside her own society). Such a story-line is clearly a relic — but where do we go from here? For the politically-correct, feminist-approved sexual reverie is just as obviously a contradiction in terms: person meets person on an equal-pay protest march; he is caring and respects her space; over a nut cutlet she frames the parameters of her erotic needs; he doesn't see a problem . . . Sshh. Oooh.

  Half-unconsciously, gathering up all her pop-cultural inklings, Madonna may be on to something with Sex — on to something apart from more money and notoriety and everything else she already has to the point of boredom and embarrassment. The polymorphous perverse, the infantile mishmash of what can arouse us, may now be unprece-dentedly perverse but it is no longer polymorphous. It has exact and fixable shape (in two dimensions, anyway). It is made up of images. Take male homo-eroticism. The conventional notion used to be that the male liked thinking about two women together (the two women would, of course, drop everything if the male thinker actually appeared on stage), but the female didn't like thinking about two men together, because she more modestly assumed that she wasn't wanted or needed, and could not respond to something that seemed to exclude her. And the male-gay subculture felt darker, more hidden, more forbidding (and less legal) than its female counterpart. But
this world, along with every other, is now part of our common currency of images and triggers, part of the visual babble we carry round in our heads. Sex is in the head. And the head has never been so crowded, or so hot, or so noisy.

  From the start Madonna has included pornography in her unique array of cultural weaponry — because she understands its modern, industrial nature. In terms of dollar turnover, pornography in America is bigger than music and movies combined; it is bigger (and I don't know if I find this less or more amazing) than the motor industry. That she has utilised this huge and shadowy power is a tribute, not just to her flair for manipulation, but to her innate amorality - her talent for ruthlessness. The elements of the popular culture that she has melded together may look random and indiscriminate. In fact, they could have been assembled by a corporate computer: pornography, religion, multi-ethnicity, transsexuality, kitsch, camp, worldly power, self-parody and self-invention.

  This last is perhaps the most important. Madonna's protean quality, her ability to redesign herself (evident in each new photo shoot: baby-doll, dominatrix, flower-child, vamp), represents an emphasis of will over talent. Not greatly gifted, not deeply beautiful, Madonna tells America that fame comes from wanting it badly enough. And everyone is terribly good at badly wanting things.

  Alone among celebrities, she seldom talks about the real or private self that she supposedly reverts to when out of the public eye. A good deal of superstar neurosis is probably caused by such futile quests for the innocent original (though a psychotherapist has recently joined Madonna's entourage, maybe with a brief to root out this tiny phantom). Otherwise she is the self-sufficient post-modern phenomenon ('even her publicity gets publicity'), a masterpiece of controlled illusion. She has held nothing back. Her love life has long devolved into a mixture of adult soap and public relations. After this, it is no great wrench to detach your sexuality — your most intimate thoughts, your most delicate susceptibilities - and throw it into the mix.