True, there were compensations. Only a year earlier she had been ‘the black Madonna,’ scarcely acknowledged by her record company when her first single was released. Yet the following November she was in a Chinese restaurant chatting about her music, her crucifix jewelry and her life in Detroit with Peters’s girlfriend and business partner, Barbra Streisand.
It was a meeting, if not of soul sisters, then of two women who were each driven by an almost visceral desire for mass adulation, for universal love, acclaim and acceptance. Theirs was not an act, a performance to be switched on and off at will, but a deep-seated craving to be the center of attention every day, in every way. It was, and is, a feature of Madonna’s personality, which left her father, a self-effacing and private man, simply baffled. ‘Do you always dress like that? Is that a costume?’ he asked quizzically when, later that month, his flamboyant daughter arrived at his home for Thanksgiving, with Jellybean Benitez in tow.
She remained unabashed by such criticism, her self-belief as powerful as a force of nature. A few weeks later she met up with another name from her past, budding actor David Alan Grier, joining him at Studio 54 where she was due to perform at a birthday celebration for the Italian fashion house Fiorucci. Surveying the room, she told Grier, now a well-known actor, ‘You and me and are going to be big stars, baby, and leave these other suckers in the dust.’
Until now, only her friends and a handful of acquaintances had witnessed her vaunting ambition at first hand. That was soon to change. In January 1984, the success of ‘Holiday’ earned Madonna her national television debut, a spot on the world’s most famous teenage dance party, American Bandstand. When the show’s evergreen host, Dick Clark, asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up, she replied without hesitation, ‘Rule the world.’
Clark was amused, but her reply had been breathtakingly honest, a precisely truthful statement of her deep-seated desires and needs. The pathology of her ambition, primal and unyielding, made her willing, even eager, to sacrifice anything – love, affection, friendship, stability, anonymity- on the altar of stardom. Perhaps more accurately, she was prepared to pursue her longing for love by pandering to the fickle, dark-hearted god of fame. Her psychology made it inevitable that she would enter wholeheartedly into this Faustian pact, anxious to see her name in lights and her picture on magazine covers, to watch her screaming fans adoring her.
As it turned out, she did not have long to wait.
Chapter Eight
‘I’m a Sexy Woman, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!’
A GIANT WHITE WEDDING CAKE stole the show at the first ever MTV Video Music Awards on September 14, 1984. Or rather, the young singer perched on top of the cake did. The ceremony, which was being broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall in New York, had been carefully rehearsed, but even its host, Bette Midler, seemed taken aback when Madonna, dressed in a tight white bustier with a skirt and veil of white tulle, and accessorized with her trademark ‘Boy Toy’ belt buckle, strings of pearls, crucifix jewelry and rubber bangles, launched into the title song of her yet to be released second album, Like A Virgin. If the word ‘virgin’ was not in itself enough to make the audience sit up, the sight of this far from coy-looking bride writhing on the stage in unmistakable simulation of sexual intercourse, certainly was. They had seen nothing like it.
While Bette Midler made a couple of weak jokes following the performance, the audience at Radio City was bewildered. A bemused Arthur Baker and his wife Tina, who were sitting near the front row, could not believe their eyes. ‘Afterwards we all said that her career was over, that she had simply lost the plot,’ Baker recalls. What they didn’t know at the time was that, while they may not have enjoyed Madonna’s raunchy act first-hand, it looked great on camera, and TV viewers loved it. The single of ‘Like A Virgin’ was set to be Madonna’s biggest hit so far, going multi-platinum and staying at the number-one position for six weeks from December 1984. ‘It was the performance that made her career,’ Baker had to concede. ‘It showed that she was savvy enough to know how to use the camera to her advantage.’
If there had been any doubt at Sire Records that Madonna was more than a one-album wonder – the company had held back her second album while trying to reap maximum profits from the first, and were still pushing singles from the now million-selling Madonna album into the charts as the singer introduced ‘Like A Virgin’ – these were now swept aside. Rather, the record company found itself in the enviable position of promoting the newly crowned Queen of Pop.
It was not a role that everybody was happy to see Madonna in. While many fans seemingly couldn’t get enough of the song, outraged moralists were quick to condemn ‘Like A Virgin,’ which they saw as undermining traditional values and encouraging sex outside marriage. The controversy was one that she herself had anticipated when she chose to record the track, predicting that the resulting ‘virgin or whore’ debate would win publicity for her and the song. ‘I was being provocative,’ she said. ‘I like irony. I like the way things can be taken on different levels. “Like A Virgin” was always absolutely ambiguous.’
With its accompanying video set in Venice and featuring a slutty-looking Madonna singing in a gondola, alternating with rather romantic scenes in which she wears a wedding gown, the song actually owed its success to the fact that it appealed both to the sexually inexperienced, who were happy to see it as a celebration of true love, as well as to those who saw it as being about sexual desire and fulfillment.
Meanwhile, Madonna’s public persona – indomitable, sexually unashamed, supremely confident – had begun to strike a chord with a new generation of teenage girls. Many of these young women had been brought up, like their heroine herself, with old-fashioned stereotypes of women as virginal brides or as whores, or with feminist values that rejected the use of a woman’s looks for her self-advancement. To these girls, Madonna was saying that it was okay to show off your body as well as your brain; that one could be sexy and successful. Here was a woman who dressed wantonly and behaved badly, yet who, far from being punished for this behavior, was instead richly rewarded.
In addition, at a time when eighties fashions were promoting flat-chested, stick-thin women as ideals of beauty, the more curvaceous Madonna made average girls feel that it was fine to be the shape they were. The new word ‘wannabe’ perfectly described the thousands of girls who tried to emulate the singer’s look. At one point Macy’s allotted an entire floor area to the sale of Madonna-look clothing, including cut-off gloves, rubber bangles and lacy leggings.
The Madonna phenomenon was now such that university professors, gender-studies experts and feminists earnestly discussed her influence as a post-modernist cultural icon. Yet, in the words of Angie Bowie, the former wife of Madonna’s hero, David Bowie, Madonna’s creed was simpler: ‘I’m a sexy woman, yeah, yeah, yeah.’
Although she had now achieved the success and adulation she had craved for so long, 1985 was to be a year of very mixed emotions as Madonna the individual struggled to cope with her new life as a modern icon. At first she reveled in her celebrity status. Ever since Madonna had first appeared in a fashion spread in the Village Voice, she had saved every press clipping about herself, carefully labeling and dating each one. Each morning she read the New York tabloids and the New York Times, scouring them for stories about herself. Then she would look over clippings sent by her press secretary, Liz Rosenberg. While publicly she feigned indifference when a critic wrote a withering review or when a reporter made up a negative story about her, she was frequently hurt by such coverage, often losing sleep if a particular remark hit home. She took, and takes, the position that those who judge her negatively, since they neither know her nor have ever been in her position, artistically or personally, have no right to throw stones. It would take several years before Madonna truly began to feel comfortable with her star status, with the adulation and the isolation.
She came to understand that constant limelight was both a blessing and a curse. Gone were the days of ge
tting around New York on her bicycle, taking the subway, or visiting the local laundromat unrecognized. When she went to restaurants, other diners would talk about her or just stare, while paparazzi photographers waited for her outside, the more daring walking up to her table and snapping a picture as she ate.
She was disconcerted to find that universal recognition was not something that she enjoyed. ‘It really bothered me,’ she recalls, and admits that, at times, she felt ‘caged’ in her own room. As Steve Bray commented laconically, ‘She always wanted to be the center of attention. Now it’s her job.’ Her changed circumstances were witnessed one evening by video producer Ed Steinberg, whose path and Madonna’s had first crossed in 1981 when she was a struggling unknown. He spotted her at the Lucky Strike Club, trying hard to be inconspicuous at the back of the room, and surrounded by bodyguards and other assistants. ‘I thought that it must be great to have her money, entrée and fame, but I would not want to be her. She looked very lonely. Who could she now trust? Did people want to be her friend because of who she was or what she could do for them?’
Certainly, some of Madonna’s closest acquaintances were having trouble coming to terms with her rise to fame. Her ex-lover from 1983, Jean-Michel Basquiat, went into a deep depression when, in May 1985, her face appeared on the cover of the prestigious Time magazine. His artistic sensibilities outraged, he felt that he was more talented than she, and that it should be his face fronting such publications, not hers. Even Madonna’s younger sister Paula complained to Steinberg, who had employed her at the time, that she was a better singer than her sister and should therefore be the star of the family. Steinberg sympathized. ‘It was very hard on Paula always living in the shadow. She was a nice kid, used by the New York crowd as a kind of substitute for her sister.’
Some felt walked over by Madonna on her route march to stardom, others carelessly discarded. Madonna herself was typically unapologetic. ‘I’m tough, I’m ambitious and I know exactly what I want,’ she argued. ‘If that makes me a bitch, that’s okay.’ When her former boyfriend Mark Kamins discovered that ‘Into The Groove,’ which Madonna had specifically written for his latest protégée, Cheyne, had been recorded instead for the film Desperately Seeking Susan, he hit the roof. It was only after he had paid to record the song that he learned that she herself had recorded it for the film’s soundtrack. While ‘Into The Groove’ would come to be described as Madonna’s ‘first great single,’ it left an angry Kamins out of pocket. ‘I was pissed at her,’ he says – more angry that she had not taken the trouble to tell him than about the cost.
While some relationships fell by the wayside, other friendships strengthened and deepened. Thus her creative collaboration with Steve Bray, now drumming with the re-formed Breakfast Club, yielded half the songs for the Like A Virgin album, which had been produced by Niles Rodgers. Bray describes the process of working with Madonna thus: ‘I’ve always kind of made the rib cage and the skeleton [music] of the song already – she’s there for the last things like the eyebrows and the haircut [lyrics]. She writes in a stream of mood really.’ It was a process witnessed first-hand by their mutual friend Erika Belle, who watched them at work at the Sigma Sound studio. Bray was struggling with the ‘bridge’ for ‘Into The Groove’, when, undeterred by his obvious difficulties, Madonna stepped up to the microphone and sang the words ‘live out your fantasy here with me.’ ‘It just seemed to come out of her,’ Belle remembers, adding, ‘I was awestruck.’
Diplomatically, her then boyfriend of two and a half years, Jellybean Benitez, acknowledged that people felt ‘exploited’ by Madonna, but argued that their expectations of her were too high. ‘If there is any cooling of that friendship, it’s taken as rejection,’ he said. Eventually he too became a victim of her success. In the beginning many had expected that Madonna and Benitez would marry, especially when they became engaged and began living together in SoHo. ‘He was in love with her,’ observes the DJ’s close friend, Arthur Baker. ‘I knew he was really into her. They were both very ambitious people and they were a great team. But she was the one in charge. She’s a diva – man, they like to command attention. All singers are like that.’
Jellybean, too, liked to command attention, and that was at the heart of the issue. They both had too much ambition, so intent on pursuing their individual agendas that they never had the time to nurture their mutual growth as a couple. ‘He’s a Scorpio and we both want to be stars, so it’s tough-going all the way,’ Madonna admitted at the time. They were undoubtedly at their best when they were working on her musical career, discussing new songs or exploring angles, whether creative or business. Yet even that partnership had its limitations, as Madonna herself acknowledged: ‘When you’re working and your private life is falling apart, it’s hard to carry on. When you’re getting on, you can’t stop talking about the record business and then you wonder if you have anything else in common.’ These limitations were further exposed when Benitez discovered that, behind his back, Madonna was seeing Steve Neumann, a journalist who was in a long-term relationship with Madonna’s friend Erika Belle. While it was a short-lived fling, perhaps because of Benitez’s actions – on one occasion he burst into Neumann’s apartment looking for his fiancée – her behavior did little to cement mutual trust. Erika Belle, however, is calmly dismissive of the situation. ‘He could be a little jealous around the edges,’ she says of Benitez. ‘It was his Latin blood. But you should never underestimate how close Madonna and Jellybean were.’
Perhaps the greatest contribution Jellybean Benitez made to Madonna’s life at this time was simply his presence at her side as she tried to cope with her new celebrity. As he later told the writer Mark Bego, ‘I think it was really good that we ended up meeting when we met – because we helped each other through some very difficult times.’ Besides dealing with fans asking for autographs, many of whom felt at liberty to make such remarks as, ‘Oh, you’re shorter than the pictures,’ or offered comments about her hair, he tried to shield her from photographers, and was there to reassure her when she attracted media criticism. After a time, however, even Jellybean tired of being Mr Madonna, an understandably galling position for a successful DJ and producer in his own right, a man who had employed his own publicity agent when his girlfriend was still an unknown. In an attempt to restore their relationship, in December 1984 they took a Christmas break in the Virgin Islands. Yet the holiday only served to underline their growing social disparity. On the flight home, Jellybean found himself playing both the role of his girlfriend’s public-relations officer and her security guard, shooing away the constant procession of hopeful fans who approached her.
Less than a month later, in January, Madonna flew to Los Angeles to film the video of her latest single, ‘Material Girl,’ a three-minute film directed by Mary Lambert, who had also directed the Like A Virgin video. The Material Girl video was to become a modern classic, Madonna reinventing herself as an archetypal fifties Hollywood sex goddess, reprising Marilyn Monroe’s role in the Howard Hawks movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It was a punishing schedule – they had only two days to film the video, and matters were thrown into crisis when, while in California, Madonna discovered that she was pregnant by Benitez.
For a woman determined to be in control of her life, her pregnancy came as a tremendous shock. After discussing matters with her lover, Madonna, upset and apprehensive, decided that it would be best if the pregnancy were terminated. Her manager, Freddy DeMann, was on hand to make the necessary arrangements. As Melinda Cooper, DeMann’s assistant, told Christopher Andersen, ‘She came to Freddy and me and she was very upset – just this scared young girl who didn’t want her family to know. Madonna loved Jellybean very much, but she wanted a career and so did he. So we arranged for Madonna to have the abortion, drove her to the doctor’s office, everything. She seemed so innocent at the time.’
It has been said that during her affair with Benitez she had three abortions, her friend Erika Belle cited as the sole source. Belle her
self says that, while they discussed contraception, periods and other intimate matters, abortion was never on the agenda. ‘For all her self-protection, she is human, she loves children, has hormones and is a prisoner of her biology,’ she says. ‘Abortion, however, is not something we ever talked about.’
Years later, however, when Madonna and her lover of the time, Jim Albright, were discussing plans to have children together, she told him about the abortions she had had in her life, including the termination of her pregnancy by Jellybean Benitez when she was in California. ‘It was a very traumatic time for her,’ Albright says, reflecting that her ferocious longing for fame was balanced by her maternal feelings and her sense of guilt, partly as a result of her Catholic upbringing.
In early 1985, however, there were few moments in which to dwell on the matter. After filming in Los Angeles, Madonna flew to Hawaii, where she posed on the beach for celebrity photographer Herb Ritts for a Madonna calendar. Meanwhile, Like A Virgin had toppled Bruce Springsteen from the top slot in the album charts, so that when she jetted on to Osaka in Japan for a short promotional trip, she had become the hottest property on the planet, her records and tapes selling at an astonishing 80,000 copies a day worldwide.
Yet although she had every reason to be on top of the world, Madonna felt ‘lonely and upset’ after the abortion and in the light of her realization that she was losing Benitez, a state of mind not helped when a hoax caller told her that her father had died. Even though she informed her aides that she wanted her boyfriend to be flown out to the West Coast to be with her, the couple were not reunited until January 28, 1985, when he escorted her to the American Music Awards in Los Angeles – only for Madonna to lose the title of Favorite Female Pop Vocalist to Cyndi Lauper. It was to be their last date together – although, as with many of her lovers, Madonna remained on good terms with Jellybean, even singing on his dance single, ‘Sidewalk Talk,’ in December that year.
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