It seemed that, as with her earlier decisions to leave college, to give up dance, to return from Paris, and then to leave Dan, Madonna had chosen risk over safety, suffering over comfort, apparently bent on enduring her own artistic Calvary. The most pointed example of this tendency toward martyrdom was when her father, then earning a substantial salary in the defense industry, visited her in New York in the fall of 1978 and offered her financial help, which she rejected. ‘It was as if she was giving him and her family permission to write her off,’ observes Camille Barbone. ‘She was very much into the drama and romance of going without for the sake of her art.’
So when Madonna cornered Barbone in the elevator of the Music Building, it was not only a last, desperate throw of the dice for her and Emmy, but also yet another indicator of her absolute determination to be recognized. Camille agreed to see Madonna in concert at Max’s Kansas City and went to watch the band rehearse a couple of times in the Music Building. Unfortunately, she missed the first gig at Max’s because of a migraine. The outraged singer stormed into Camille’s studio and verbally attacked her, complaining that she was just like other potential backers who had let her down. It was a performance as aggressive – and risky – as it was desperate. Madonna was rapidly running out of options in her self-imposed quest for stardom.
Fortunately, the management at Max’s had been sufficiently impressed by Emmy to invite them back for a repeat performance a few days later. The club, which had its own independent record label, had its own ideas for the band. So when Camille turned up to watch the gig, Madonna pulled out all the stops, dancing on tables and cavorting with patrons as she went through the five-song set. She had even been to see her old boyfriend, Mark Dolengowski, and had him cut her auburn hair and give her a more ‘punk’ style like that of her heroine, Chrissie Hynde.
After her set, Camille brought Madonna a cup of tea with honey to soothe her throat, raw from the performance, and asked her if she wanted a manager. The tousle-haired girl, still sweaty after performing, threw her arms around the older woman and shouted: ‘Yeah.’ Minutes later, the manager of Max’s came to congratulate her and promptly offered the band a coveted record deal. In twenty-four hours they had changed from nobodies to rising stars. Yet even as Madonna caught her breath, she began to realize that she faced a dilemma.
Barbone made it clear immediately that she was only interested in Madonna as a singer with a backup band and not Emmy. As well as offering to mastermind her career, Madonna’s potential new manager, aware of the squalid conditions in which she was living, promised to fund an apartment of her own, give her a salary of $100 a week and find her part-time work. Madonna had to make a decision: to strike out on her own, or to stick with the band that she had helped to found, and which had just been offered a record deal. In a matter of days, and without telling the other band members of her decision, she chose to go with Camille, signing a contract with Gotham Records on March 17, 1981 – Saint Patrick’s Day. Afterwards they celebrated with pints of green Guinness.
As she toasted her new artiste, Camille believed she was on the way to making her dream of managing the biggest star in the world a reality. It was a dream that rapidly turned into a living nightmare, a year-long emotional rollercoaster ride of drink, fights and, ultimately, a nervous breakdown. Her first mistake was to try to tame Madonna. Her second was to fall in love with her.
In Camille’s view Madonna was a rough-cut artistic diamond who needed careful polishing in order to shine. Her stage act was all wrong, disguising her greatest asset – herself. In performance she had an adequate, although not a great voice, and hid herself behind a guitar she could hardly play. For her part, Camille instinctively understood what Madonna, and the world, would later come to appreciate: that the key to the singer’s power and appeal was in the whole package – dance, movement, song and music. In short, Madonna’s latent energy and charisma had to be released.
Camille’s first order of business, within days of Madonna signing the contracts, was to fire Madonna’s backup band, a brisk procedure that left Steve Bray, Gary Burke and Brian Syms feeling rather sore and used. A few days after the breakup of Emmy, Gary confronted Madonna in the Music Building and yelled at her, accusing her of ‘betrayal.’ Later they made up, Madonna often visiting her three former partners in the apartment she had once shared with them to ask for musical advice and tuition.
At first, Madonna was very much in awe of the older, more experienced Camille and initially deferred to her judgment, even though she was keen to continue her unusual collaboration with Bray. Camille delved into her contact book and brought in an array of top-class musicians to audition for a new band. It was a process that took months. Session players like Jeff Gottlieb, John Kaye, David Frank and Jack Soni, musicians who had played with artists of the caliber of Dire Straits and David Bowie, jammed with the young Madonna. Moreover, just as she was flattered and impressed by this level of musical interest, they, in turn, recognized her potential.
As well as taking charge of Madonna’s musical career, Camille set about re-ordering her day-to-day existence. Besides paying her $100 a week and finding her a job as a house cleaner, she gave her unlimited access to her studio, where Madonna endlessly wrote lyrics and practiced her music.
Madonna’s new management also helped find her a place to live, a shabby, one-room apartment on West 30th. This arrangement did not last long, however, for she was forced to move a few weeks later, after a break-in. It appeared that she had been stalked, the intruder climbing in through a window and stealing only a packet of nude photographs from one of her numerous photographic sessions. While Madonna, cavalier about her own safety despite her earlier experience, was happy to stay on in her room on 30th Street, Camille and Adam Alter thought otherwise and installed her in an uptown apartment off Riverside Drive.
As the months passed, it was clear that Camille had become much more than a business manager. She was Madonna’s mother, her best friend, and her guide, the heroine who had come to her rescue at a time of need. Upon Camille, eight years her senior, Madonna exerted a continual fascination and a seductive charm. Camille found herself falling in love with her – an affair which, although never consummated, profoundly altered the dynamics of their professional relationship. While Alter provided the funding, he admits that he too was drawn into the intensity of this new ‘family.’
‘There was this raw sexuality about her,’ Camille recalls. ‘The attraction was there, I mean TOTALLY. But you don’t go there with someone like Madonna because she controls people through her sexuality. It was taboo. It isn’t true that we were lovers, but was I in love with her? Yeah! It was a crazy kind of thing, protection, maternal, playing with each other in a very flirtatious way. Was she in love with me? In her own way, I think so. She loves strong women and I was her hero. She loves handsome, powerful, mothering women. Always did.’
For a long time they were an inseparable double act, going to the movies together, scouring the thrift stores, going out to clubs and restaurants and attending business meetings where they would work the room and, as Camille puts it, ‘kick ass.’ They went out to Fire Island that summer, Camille taking her lover, Madonna bringing her on-off boyfriend of the moment, artist Ken Compton. Like a doting parent, Camille constantly indulged her younger friend, bringing food for her to the studio, lending her money, organizing her contraception, taking her for surgery to have impacted wisdom teeth removed, and bandaging her up when she cut her finger during her work cleaning houses.
Aware of Camille’s feelings toward her, Madonna constantly teased and tormented her would-be lover, at the end of one concert stripping off and then asking Camille to towel her down; on another occasion deliberately making out with a girlfriend, Janice Galloway, her old friend from Ann Arbor days, in the back seat as Camille drove them in her car.
Yet although the sexual tension placed Madonna in a position of power and heightened the intensity of their relationship, Camille could smell the fear at the heart of the young gi
rl’s being. Her hunger for fame and love was matched only by her low self-esteem, her self-abasement leading to a chronic unwillingness to accept just how special and different she was. Camille came to realize that the more outrageous Madonna’s behavior, the greater her terror of failure.
So, for example, when she went out for dinner in a Japanese restaurant with music scouts from the prestigious William Morris agency, she deliberately let out a huge belch during the main course. (It has to be said that belching does seem to have been a favorite attention-seeking ploy of hers.) The scouts dismissed it as obnoxious behavior, but Camille saw it as a nervous reaction from a young woman fearful of rejection. On another occasion, Madonna walked into Camille’s office while she was on the telephone and proceeded to shave her armpits in front of her. She told Camille that she had to shave at that very moment and as the only mirror in the place was in Camille’s office, she had had to come in to use it. When Camille asked her to leave, she smirked and flounced out. ‘At that moment it was meant to shock,’ recalls Camille. ‘In reality she was afraid that the [telephone] conversation might be about her and whether or not she was going to make it.’
Her belligerence and rudeness colored her working relationship with her acting coach, Mira Rostova, a Russian émigrée, to whom she was sent by Camille. It was a short-lived education. Madame Rostova, who had worked with Montgomery Clift and other Hollywood greats, considered the time she spent with Madonna thoroughly disagreeable, remarking, ‘She was vulgar and very unladylike. Her acting was not particularly interesting.’ As with her clashes over her dancing with Pearl Lang, Madonna’s attitude was an affirmation of her fear of failure, with her always preferring to explain away any difficulties in terms of personal differences, rather than admitting to any professional inadequacy of her own.
Just how desperate she was for the limelight became apparent to director Ed Steinberg when, in 1981, he was shooting a music video called Konk, in which Madonna and her friend Martin Burgoyne appeared with dozens of other dancers. As he panned the camera around the dance floor, Steinberg realized to his amusement that Madonna was doing all she could to get into every single shot. He calmly explained to the fame-hungry youngster that he wanted to include more than one dancer.
Camille understood Madonna’s fears and in general tolerated her behavior, partly because she was perfectly well aware that too strong an objection would most likely drive the singer to greater excesses. She drew the line, though, when Madonna sprayed her beloved pet poodles, Norman and Mona, orange and pink respectively, and then stenciled the words ‘Sex’ and ‘Fuck’ on their colored coats. Camille also remembers a photo shoot for designer Norma Kamali, at which Madonna wore rosary beads and a cross that hung down to hover over her waistline. ‘See, Camille,’ she yelled. ‘Even God wants to get into my pants.’ This bratty behavior manifested itself again and again, typified perhaps by an incident when they were waiting in line outside the trendy Underground Club. Impatient as ever, Madonna shouted at the doorman, ‘Remember me? – We made out the other night.’ Camille took her home, scolding her like an errant schoolgirl and pointing out that she had neither reason nor need to behave in such a fashion.
For behind the brash image lay a sensitive, intelligent, yet uncertain young woman; a starkly honest girl who wrote a stream of raw, self-exposing lyrics in a composition book with black-and-white marbled covers, songs about being hungry, penniless, hurt, abandoned and unloved; a young woman who loved to read poetry, and who was fascinated by the activities of the Bloomsbury Group, a loose assemblage of British artists and writers influential during the 1920s and 1930s; a contemplative soul who enjoyed the peace of downtown churches, and loved to wander around the Museum of Modern Art and other galleries to gain a greater understanding of the creative process. As Camille observes, ‘This was not some trashy kid who needed to stick her tongue down a doorman’s throat at Studio 54.’ She also noted, however, that Madonna did need time and encouragement if she was to absorb the message that she was no longer just an aspiring run-of-the-mill pop singer, but a star in the making. An evening at the Ritz Club watching Tina Turner strut her stuff across the stage, utterly in command of herself and the audience, gave Madonna an insight into how it could be for her one day. Even so, Camille adds, ‘It took many hours of stroking and building up her ego for her to believe it and own that idea.’
Madonna still had a long journey ahead of her, although by the spring of that year, she was making progress. By now, several session musicians had been signed, although Madonna, perhaps typically, complicated things by having a brief affair with the new drummer, Bob Riley. Since Barbone did not approve of love affairs between band members, Riley was unceremoniously fired. As it happened, that suited Madonna, who had been lobbying for her own candidate for drummer, her old college boyfriend Steve Bray, who was still working in the Music Building.
With Bray on drums, Jon Gordon on lead guitar, John Kaye on bass guitar, John Bonamassa on keyboard and Madonna on vocals, the revamped group made its debut at Max’s Kansas City, followed by gigs at Cartoon Alley, Chase Park and other downtown clubs. Given these modest successes, and even though she was still serving her musical apprenticeship, Madonna was by now taking herself very seriously indeed. On one occasion she shared the billing with an eight-piece combo fronted by Michael Musto, now a Village Voice columnist. Even though The Must were the first act on that night, Madonna spent so long on elaborate sound checks that Musto’s band, left without time for practice, had to go on unrehearsed. Nor would she agree to share the dressing room set aside by the management for both performers. As far as she was concerned, only one person had top billing – Madonna. Musto never so much as saw his face in the dressing-room mirror.
Yet even though she was guaranteed regular gigs – and a steady income – Madonna constantly itched to move faster, even beginning to wonder whether she should have signed the record deal offered by Max’s Kansas City. If the wait seemed a long one, it proved to have been worth it, for the longed-for breakthrough came in June 1981 with the signing of a deal with John Roberts and Susan Planer of Media Sound to record a demo tape in their 57th Street studio. This was a real coup: Planer and Roberts were renowned in the music industry, one of their most famous feats being the part they had played in organizing the legendary Woodstock festival. Their recording studio, an old church that had once been home to the Hungarian classical composer Béla Bartók, had been used by innumerable artists, from Frank Sinatra to The Beatles.
Madonna was thrilled with the deal, and honored to be working where musical greats had gone before. The week that she, Camille and the band spent in the church in August 1981 was probably the most creative and happy of their relationship; the experience tamed her impatience, and in breaks from recording she would sit quietly reading or reciting poetry to her friends.
With Jon Gordon and Alec Head producing, and Steve Bray on drums, Madonna laid down four tracks. Typically, the lyrics dealt with her life, particularly her love life. She had written one of them for her lover at that time, Ken Compton, although he drove her crazy by employing her own tactic of playing hard to get. Her relationship with Camille featured in another, in which Madonna lamented her hunger and poverty. She had also written a sheaf of other songs, in one of which she described herself as a bad angel. Few of these songs featured on the demo tape, however; indeed, it took all their time to lay down the first four tracks.
Under Bray’s influence, Madonna was beginning to follow the R and B and disco route, moving away from the punk style of the Gilroy boys. Yet she was learning all the time, absorbing styles and constantly making changes on her own. The notion that Camille Barbone tried to make her sing mainstream rock like Pat Benatar, rather than gritty punk, is wide of the mark – Madonna was, and is, her own woman, and however much her style may be a fusion of other influences, it was not dictated to her, by Camille or anyone else. At the end of an exhilarating week the whole group took off for Fire Island to celebrate the joint birthdays of C
amille and Madonna, lazing in the sun and tucking into lobster and salad on the beach.
For a few weeks, their salad days continued. Madonna now had a modest but loyal following in New York, and evidence of her steady progression mounted when she and her band were hired to open for another group, Over Easy, at US Blues, a biker club on Long Island. The band’s leader, Bill Lomuscio, was a close friend of Camille. Before Madonna was hired, Camille gave him a friendly warning, telling him that the new singer was so good that her appearance would spell the end of his time as a headliner at the club. Sure enough, Madonna wowed the hard-to-please audience and Over Easy were left in her shade. The feisty young singer was now on the way up, earning $800 a gig.
Lomuscio bore no hard feelings; in fact, he took over from Adam Alter as joint manager with Camille and raised $10,000 to propel Madonna’s launch into the big time. The plan was to showcase her demo tape to record-company executives, in the hope of securing an album deal and finally clawing back some of the investment in Madonna. As part of this strategy, Barbone set about trying to create a buzz around her protégée. She gave $20 to a trio of breakdancers she spotted in Times Square to spin and groove while Madonna performed at a nearby club, and before each gig she paid teenage girls to dress in Madonna’s charity-shop-chic style. At the same time, she invited music agents to come and watch her girl in action.
Ironically, the goal Camille had been working toward all her life proved in the end to be her downfall. The early signs came in September 1981, when Madonna was asked to renew her management contract. She prevaricated, complaining that her career was not moving fast enough. However, after she was told that a projected showcase gig at the fashionable Underground Club, planned for November, could only go ahead if she was under contract, she finally signed an extension to her contract.
At this time Madonna’s relationship with Camille, always stormy, was beginning to spiral out of control. Both extremely strong-willed, their disagreements became fiercer and more acrimonious, band members often walking out of the room during their catfights. Looking back, Camille admits that she tried to force her stubborn client in directions she did not want to go. Worse still, in trying to cope with the pressures, both emotional and professional, of dealing with a woman she loved, who was on the verge of success, Camille began to drink heavily. Evenings were the worst. During one particularly vicious row, Camille broke her hand when she smashed it into a wall in fury and frustration. After this display of temper, Madonna snarled: ‘You’ve fallen off your pedestal now,’ and stalked off into the night. As Camille candidly admits, ‘I’m a nasty drunk and most of the fights and insanity would ensue then. I have to admit that she could no longer rely on me.’ The woman Madonna had once idolized could no longer command her respect.
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