The hapless soft-drinks corporation, which, in 1989 had paid the singer $5 million to appear in the much publicized commercial, was caught in the crossfire. Faced with a boycott of their products by religious groups concerned that Madonna was ‘ridiculing Christianity,’ Pepsi withdrew the commercial, although the company agreed that the singer should keep the fee. Madonna had squared the circle, occupying the artistic high ground while achieving a stunning commercial success. Indeed, in 1990 she was the world’s top earning female entertainer, grossing an estimated $39 million. Unlike Michael Jackson, Paula Abdul and Britney Spears, who have all been willing to endorse commercial products, Madonna endeavored to give the impression that her ventures into the world of advertising were simply art by another name. ‘I do consider it a challenge to make a commercial that has some sort of artistic value,’ she says, constantly at pains to disguise her keen head for business and commercial opportunities.
For example, during negotiations that year for a potential personal endorsement of Nike running shoes Madonna took control and issued personal invitations to senior company executives – ‘the suits,’ as she calls them – to her Los Angeles home to try to seal a $4.25 million deal. They balked when she argued that she wanted to keep her endorsement to a bare minimum; that is to say, she would not even wear their sports shoes. When the company pulled out, Madonna telephoned Nike chairman Philip Knight, fighting to get the deal up and running again. She was unsuccessful although that did not stop ‘Team Madonna’ negotiating with Nike’s rival, Reebok, for a similar deal. As her lawyer, Paul Schindler, has said, ‘She has an excellent sense of sell.’
In what was to become a familiar pattern Madonna enjoyed her artistic cake while taking a good chunk of the commercial pie. So, when she was cast as the sultry nightclub singer Breathless Mahoney in the 1990 Disney movie Dick Tracy, it was announced that she was so enthralled by the opportunity to work with the actor Warren Beatty, who was both directing and starring in the film, that she was accepting the standard union rate of $1,440 a week. However the public relations equation omitted the fact that she was to take a percentage of the box office gross and the rights to the film soundtrack. In all, she made an estimated $13 million, and change, from the deal.
Artistically though, it was worth every cent. In her role as a modern-day Mae West, the saucy platinum blonde earned plaudits for her brassy, sassy style: ‘Quivering with lust, double entendres and bad intentions, Madonna is smashingly unsubtle as the femme fatale,’ noted one reviewer. Given her all-time best-selling single, ‘Vogue,’ which paid homage to the stars of the 1930s, Madonna appeared to be simply unstoppable, an artist at the top of her game. Warren Beatty, by then her lover, seemed to be stating the obvious when he observed, ‘She is funny, smart, beautiful, musical. She has everything, she’s an actress, a singer and she’s great at it all. She has irony and wit. She has sexuality, she’s generous-spirited. She’s going to be a huge movie star.’
Her sexual chutzpah, eye for controversy and commercial instincts came together again in her 1990 video Justify My Love, an erotic fantasy in which a sultry Madonna encounters a sensual netherworld in a Paris hotel. It was banned by MTV, particularly for its focus on same-sex kissing, one such scene showing Madonna with the model Amanda de Cadanet. Undaunted, the singer marketed the five-minute video herself, selling a remarkable 800,000 copies.
She continued to explore and develop her own ideas about ambiguity in gender and sexuality, a feminist agenda in which a woman is in control of her body, her role and her life. Although she examined this theme in her Like A Prayer video, it was most fully expressed in her audacious four-month, twenty-seven-city Blonde Ambition Tour, which established her as a modern-day Amazon, her erotic and exotic routines invariably ending with the woman on top. She strutted the stage in contemporary armor, Jean-Paul Gaultier’s cone-shaped bustier, presenting an enduring image of Madonna as superwoman, her dancers playing musclebound slaves utterly subservient to her will. Yet the French designer’s description of the garment that will be for ever identified with the singer can also be applied to her own psychology; as he said, ‘A tough outer shell protects hidden vulnerability.’
As it happened, the vulnerability Madonna had exposed in her songs for the Like A Prayer album was clearly evident in her life away from the stage. Undoubtedly, she had become the epicenter of the entertainment world, and yet she still wanted more. Her emotional need for mass adulation and acceptance existed in stark contrast to her image of effortless female ascendancy and control. It was a contradiction that Vanilla Ice would come to experience at first hand, struggling to square the strident stage persona with the woman who complained when he didn’t call, or who phoned very late or early in the morning wanting to know if he was with another girl.
From the beginning, it was she who pursued him, intrigued by the success and personae of white rapper Vanilla Ice, but he was not the easiest of conquests. She flattered him, telling him that he reminded her of Elvis, but he was not particularly impressed with her at the outset. He didn’t much like her music – ‘friendly-assed corny shit’ – and he was concerned about the ten-year difference in their ages. Yet in the end he lost his caution. ‘She started calling me,’ he remembers. ‘We started talking, feeling each other out. Real personal and in-depth conversations.’
When, that summer, Madonna went to Evansville, Indiana, to film A League of Their Own, a comedy about an all-female baseball team, she and Vanilla Ice would meet up, often adopting a series of light disguises, usually wigs and hats, to keep their assignations secret. They went to movies and restaurants, invariably arriving separately and without their chauffeurs or bodyguards so as not to attract attention. ‘What was really cool was that we kept it quiet for a long time and we bought ourselves a lot of time to get to know each other,’ he recalls. He expected a ‘snotty, rude’ star, and instead discovered a ‘sweet, innocent, but sexy girl.’ As he says, with more than a nod to her stage performances at that time, ‘She’s not about whips and chains at all. She was very romantic, very sexy, but not in a slutty way.’ At the same time he was beginning to enjoy being with a woman who seemed genuinely interested in the direction of his career and life, and to like having a girlfriend who sent him flowers and love letters.
As the relationship deepened, Madonna would sometimes visit him in Florida when she wasn’t filming, recording or on tour. They would lie on the deck of his boat, which was moored off Star Island on Florida’s west coast, and as he watched the stars he would chat to her for two or three hours at a stretch. ‘It was like going back to high school and talking to your sweetheart,’ he reflects, the intimacy created by their meetings and their long-distance conversations forging a growing bond between them. ‘She really dug me a lot and told me she loved me. Madonna was everything you would want to marry. There is no doubt that if she had stayed that person we would be married and have kids today. The way she was talking she was really desperate to have kids. I knew that. Her biological clock was ticking and she was ready to have a kid when we were going out.’
As the months passed, however, he began to see a different side of her character, a needy, anxious side, insecure and suspicious. It was perplexing. She didn’t seem to understand that Vanilla Ice, whose own life was by this time a haze of touring, publicity and cocaine, was trying his best to act the regular boyfriend. ‘Hey, it isn’t like that sweetie,’ he would soothe her. ‘Everything is cool, calm down.’ Paradoxically, it was her very insecurity, waking him in the middle of the night or leaving pleading messages on his answering machine, that began to push him away. He realized that the woman who seemed to have everything was at heart an unhappy soul, a sad figure searching for love and contentment. ‘I was digging her,’ he recalls, ‘but there was a desperate neediness about her, an impatience to get married.’ Soon he began to see sides of her personality that he didn’t ‘dig,’ all too often finding her self-obsessed, selfish and snappy.
Just two years since her divorce from Sean
Penn, it was clear to her latest beau that the hard-drinking actor was still very much on her mind – and in her heart. ‘I felt that she still loved him,’ says Vanilla Ice. ‘In fact, I know she did because she told me. But it didn’t work out between them.’ When Sean’s lover, the actress Robin Wright, gave birth to girl, Dylan, in April 1991, Madonna fell to wondering distractedly what might have been. As well as sending gifts for the new baby, she reportedly sent a note to her ex-husband that read, ‘Silly boy, if you’d given me a baby, we’d still be together.’ Given their history, and especially her choice of career above motherhood, the sentiment seems more than a little disingenuous. A month later, when she launched Truth or Dare, the documentary film of her Blonde Ambition Tour, at the Cannes Film Festival, observers speculated as to whether her spectacular invasion of the French resort to premiere her film was done more to impress Sean, who was there to promote his own film, The Indian Runner (his debut as a director) than the judges, the critics and the media.
Ironically, the most revealing moment in Truth or Dare was when Madonna confessed that the love of her life was Sean Penn, a moment of vulnerability which, typically, she wanted edited out. ‘Over my dead body,’ Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, the film’s distributor, told her. Yet her frequent and at times impassioned declarations of affection for her former husband drew only pity from her rival, Robin Wright. ‘I feel sorry for Madonna. I think she is a very sad and rather lost soul. Yet deep down there is a real person who is as sensitive as the rest of us.’
Ostensibly the documentary, directed by first-timer Alek Keshishian, was a behind-the-scenes look at her sell-out Blonde Ambition Tour. In reality, it was a film about Madonna. ‘It’s like being in psychoanalysis and letting the whole world watch,’ noted Keshishian, who first came to her notice when he sent her his college thesis. That she was prepared to take a risk with a talented novice says much about her artistic courage. That everyone who appeared, from her father Tony Ciccone to her then boyfriend Warren Beatty, was merely a prop to support the star, says more, a point the director made time and again as he juxtaposed her comments about them with their own behavior. So, for example, when she revealed how she and a childhood friend, Moira McPharlin, had indulged in mutual masturbation during puberty, he filmed Madonna’s former friend denying her story. He then set up an excruciatingly embarrassing interlude in which, to Madonna’s evident discomfort, McPharlin asked her to be godmother to her youngest child and Madonna’s namesake.
In another scene Madonna mock imitated fellatio with an Evian bottle while her father and stepmother waited in the adjacent room, and later said to her lesbian friend Sandra Bernhard that as a little girl she could only get to sleep after her father fucked her. ‘Just kidding,’ she added. During the documentary she also revealed that her brother Christopher was gay, and that her elder brother Martin was an alcoholic. In one mawkish scene she lay by her mother’s grave while her younger brother bashfully hid behind a tree. At the time even the chief cameraman, Robert Leacock, had been embarrassed, although it is now one of his favorite scenes. He says, ‘One of the things that I will forever love her for is that she trusted us and let us do it. That’s amazingly brave. Most people will not let their life be that invaded.’
Certainly not everyone was willing to be grist to her publicity mill. Three of her dancers – two of whom she encouraged to French kiss on film – were so upset at the way they were used by Madonna that they sued her for invasion of privacy, fraud and deceit. The matter was settled out of court. Madonna was also shown in the film moaning about her lover, Warren Beatty – on one occasion calling him ‘pussyman’ – to the actor’s discomfort; eventually the point was reached when his attorney took out a court order to stop her from using their private telephone conversations in the documentary. ‘It was a long, very loving conversation that portrayed him in a warm way,’ Madonna argued. ‘But it is illegal to tape someone’s conversation without their knowing about it.’
If her feelings about Penn exposed her vulnerability, then Beatty’s laconic observations about his girlfriend, twenty-two years his junior, suggested another aspect of the girl he called ‘Buzzbomb’ – her insatiable narcissism and exhibitionism.
Beatty, a product of the old days of Hollywood, when publicity had been as much about illusion as revelation, found himself continually taken aback by her apparently total addiction to celebrity. During filming he was happy to be photographed visiting restaurants and clubs with Madonna, displaying the traditional complicity between star and media that ensured his current movie was publicized in return for banal glimpses into his private life. That she was prepared to go far beyond that, however, displaying a willingness, throughout their year-long affair, to use every fragment of her private life, however personal, in order to provide her with her next publicity fix, whether a magazine cover or a newspaper headline, left him bemused, and occasionally furious.
At times he would call her publicity agent, Liz Rosenberg, in exasperation at the way Madonna willingly exposed herself and used the private lives of others, including him, to feed her craving to be the center of attention. Sometimes her statements could be very personal. When she was asked by one interviewer about the size of Beatty’s manhood she responded, ‘I haven’t measured it but it’s a perfectly wonderful size,’ while she boasted to chat-show host Arsenio Hall, on his late-night TV show Arsenio! that she was able to satisfy the legendary stud in bed. Of Beatty and his concerns, Liz Rosenberg says dismissively, ‘He was into the publicity game of another era. It’s just not the way publicity is any more.’ That might, perhaps, be put more accurately as meaning that it’s not the way publicity is for Madonna.
As far as Truth or Dare was concerned, her exhibitionist qualities were perfectly matched to the voyeuristic urges of her audience, but her craving for exposure revealed the extent to which she defined herself by her image, a kind of desperate scorning of the soul. On one occasion during the filming of the documentary she visited a throat specialist, who asked her if she wanted to discuss anything off-camera. Watching out of shot was Beatty, whose shrewd observation serves as a telling commentary on her life. ‘She doesn’t want to live off-camera, much less talk,’ he noted. ‘There’s nothing to say off-camera. Why would you say something if it’s off-camera? What point is there in existing?’ Her former lover, Dan Gilroy, wryly reflected on the truth of Beatty’s remark, recalling Madonna’s early days in New York, when she would spend hours capturing her thoughts and feelings on his tape recorder. He once joked that she even wanted to take the tape recorder with her when she went to the bathroom. There was a difference, of course, for in those days she did not have a wider audience. Now she did.
That Madonna’s romance with Warren Beatty died almost as soon as Dick Tracy was released in 1990 seemed to confirm the feeling that the whole affair had been carried out for the cameras, for publicity. To her, Beatty’s celebrity was the hook, but also the catch, for while his stardom had been the original source of his appeal, it proved to be the cause of the failure of their relationship. Madonna admitted that she was in love with Beatty, but realized that he would never play second fiddle to her. As a close friend of the actor observed, ‘It was hard for him being so successful in the past and her being so successful in the present. It was role-reversal for him. There was love there, but it wasn’t a deep relationship. It was a symbolic love affair.’
If Madonna’s search for a life partner, even a soul mate, also included a large dose of celebrity hunting, she was not to be disappointed for long. Nor were the media and her public, for a few months after the demise of her affair with Warren Beatty, another superstar took his place at her side. Just as she had learned from the movie master, she was now about to take a musical seminar from Michael Jackson, the most successful solo singer of the decade. Following the critical acclaim that greeted Dick Tracy on its release in June 1990, Madonna was asked to perform the Oscar-nominated song from the film, ‘Sooner or Later’ by Stephen Sondheim, at the Academy Awards c
eremony on March 25, 1991. The Gloved One was her date. She and Jackson had met a week earlier in The Ivy, a fashionable Los Angeles restaurant, where the staff had tried in vain to stop paparazzi from taking pictures of the two stars, even though both were happy to be photographed together. In addition to agreeing to be each other’s dates at the Oscars ceremony, they also discussed collaborating on a duet for Jackson’s forthcoming album, Dangerous.
As speculation about the relationship between the androgynous singer and one of the world’s sexiest women reached fever pitch, Madonna played her part to perfection, suggesting that she was going to give him a makeover and hinting that he was a closet gay who, she felt, needed to meet her gay dancers to encourage him to come out. Jokingly, she described a night out with Jackson: ‘First I beg him not to wear his sunglasses and of course he complies, because I’m stronger than he is. Then we exchange powder puffs – we both powder our noses – and we compare bank accounts.’
Their appearance at the Oscars together – Jackson in a white sequined jacket and white gloves (two, rather than the single glove he usually affected), Madonna in a glittering white Bob Mackie gown and 20 million dollars’ worth of loaned diamonds – caused a sensation. Even observers as seasoned as Barbara Walters were impressed, the TV-show hostess remarking, ‘They looked like caricatures, they seemed untouchable, larger than life.’ It was a good night for Dick Tracy, too, ‘Sooner or Later’ winning the award for Best Original Song; the film had also won six other nominations, including Best Supporting Actor for Al Pacino.
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