When Madonna saw how the film had been edited, she became almost hysterical, not content with simply sending Ferrara vitriolic faxes, but also screaming her fury at him over the phone. Her own opinion of the film and its director takes no prisoners. In an interview she said: ‘He edited out all the brilliant things I said telling Harvey and James’s characters to fuck off. He took my words off me and turned me into a deaf mute. When I saw the cut film I was weeping. It was like someone punched me in the stomach. He turned it into The Bad Director. If I’d known that was the movie I was making, I’d never have done it. He really fucked me over.’
Although Ferrara was no less scathing about his co-producer – ‘She’s a fucking jerk. Like we sit around taking out the best scenes in the movie to spite her?’ – what is undeniable is that he and Keitel had teased, and sometimes almost bludgeoned, out of her one of the best and most revealing performances of her life. Perhaps that was why she took such exception to a film which, even at this distance, and for all its faults, has at its core a disturbing honesty – the ‘ickiness’ of life, and particularly her life, laid brutally bare. As Nancy Ferrara coolly and generously observes: ‘She looks very vulnerable and that was really pulling her apart. At the end she revealed that when she is not in control, she is not as secure or confident as she would like everyone to think. She revealed something of her humanity. It is one of her best films, fascinating because it says so much about her. That’s why she wouldn’t endorse it. It was too close to the bone. She hit on all that emotion and couldn’t face it.’
Dangerous Game, released in the summer of 1993, marked a critical nadir for Madonna. She had been pounded by the adverse publicity surrounding Sex, published in October 1992, had suffered ridicule for her part in Body of Evidence, released in January 1993, and now faced up to another sheaf of terrible reviews for her first film as a co-producer. That she disowned her first cinematic baby did little to restore her radical chic – or to help the film’s commercial success. It grossed just $60,000 at the box office, one of the biggest flops of the year. She had taken genuine artistic risks in all these projects, revealing herself, personally, as well as physically, only to find herself written off by the critics and her public.
Nor was her musical career any longer in the first flush of youth. Her third single release from the Erotica album, ‘Bad Girl,’ reached a dismal thirty-sixth place in the charts, her lowest ever chart rating. Even friends in the music industry were concerned; as Michael Rosenblatt of Sire Records noted, with considerable understatement: ‘It wasn’t her high point artistically.’ To add insult to injury, the disco diva Donna Summer rejected an approach to cover her selected hits, telling Madonna that she would never give her the rights to sing her songs. It rankled too that, while she was taking on creative challenges and catching considerable critical flak, other singers rode her coattails. She always resented the fact that Janet Jackson seemed to copy her every move, imitating the mood of her pop videos or even using a director Madonna had collaborated with, in this case the photographer Herb Ritts, who had worked on her Rain video. Nor, after so many Hollywood mishits, could it help but hurt a little when Whitney Houston hit a double strike with her 1992 film The Bodyguard, both the movie and soundtrack single, ‘I Will Always Love You,’ becoming major hits.
As Madonna licked her wounds, cultural gurus and intellectuals were lining up to write her off. During the conservative Reagan years, so the argument ran, Madonna had reached a natural constituency with her fan base among young women, gays and blacks. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the ending of the Cold War and the arrival of a Democrat in the White House, the world was a different place. It seemed that her time had come and gone.
With her latest projects, Sex, the Erotica album and now Dangerous Game, she had traveled from the mainstream to the margin, and was in danger of being marooned there. Previously cheerleading intellectuals abandoned the artist to a cultural twilight zone, while her own pronouncements, with their artful and knowing references to long-dead European film stars, artists and photographers, went over the heads of her mainstream fans. It appeared that her automatic place on university curricula as an identity who self-consciously defined modern popular culture, a knowing, winking icon of post-modernism, was no longer guaranteed.
The irony was that Madonna, the entertainer who so often excused the far reaches of her behavior as ironic or mocking, was in danger of herself becoming the butt of the joke. A brief but telling exchange with a Hungarian magazine journalist unwittingly caught the irony of her situation. For some obscure reason the journalist, like most of the 1.5 million fans who bought her book, had clearly failed to appreciate that Sex had been inspired by the 1933 photo book Paris de Nuit by the Hungarian-born French photographer Brassaï, which celebrated the seedier side of Parisian nightlife. ‘What was your book Slut about?’ he asked. Madonna corrected him, pointing out the correct title. ‘Not in Hungary,’ he persevered. ‘Here it was called Slut.’
Eastern European journalists aside, it was during this time in her life that Madonna first started thinking seriously about leaving America for good and settling in Europe, actively looking for a suitable house in Britain or on the Continent. Disillusioned with the constant criticism in her own backyard, she believed a change of scene would help her creatively. At the same time she felt that the Old World was more liberal in its sexual attitudes than uptight Americans. Certainly her more recent work, notably her Vogue video and Sex, was highly Eurocentric, cherrypicking from German and French cinema of the 1930s, the gay and lesbian scene in Berlin during the Depression, the work of the German photographer Horst P. Horst and the life of Marlene Dietrich. There was a certain irony in this, given that on her first visit to Paris back in 1979 she had not liked the food, the customs or the lifestyle, but instead had presented a stereotype of the typical middle-American abroad.
Even as she considered her future, however, she masked her private misgivings behind a confident public face. Although she admitted to being ‘very hurt’ by stories saying that she was finished, she retained her sense of humor, lightheartedly suggesting future movie roles with the celebrity interviewer Mike Myers, star of Wayne’s World, in an interview in June 1993. Her idea was to commission a remake of the Billy Wilder classic, Some Like It Hot, casting Sharon Stone in the Marilyn Monroe part and herself not as one of the other two principal characters (played in the original by Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis), but as the leader of the all-women band; her first action, she said, would be to fire the Monroe character for being unprofessional.
Her humor, allied to her ambition and drive, helped to keep at bay, if not vanquish, the demons that assailed her – the ever-present fear of failure and her horror of becoming mediocre. ‘I have an iron will and all of my will has always been to conquer some horrible feeling of inadequacy,’ she said. Never prepared to stand still for a moment, she picked herself up, dusted herself down and set to work with the one person she could rely on completely – herself.
Aware that the vultures were gathering, Madonna threw herself with frenzied vigor into organizing, designing and rehearsing the stage extravaganza she called The Girlie Show. She was thrilled, indeed, ecstatic, when the dance legend Gene Kelly visited the rehearsal space she had rented for the show in Los Angeles and shuffled along with her and the other dancers. Even the fact that he wrenched his leg during one sequence could not diminish her delight when he compared her to Marlene Dietrich, whose style she mimicked for the show. ‘She was like a kid in a candy store,’ her former lover Jim Albright remembers. ‘She was so happy and talked about how honored she was to meet him.’ Inevitably, the media didn’t see it that way. ‘Can Gene Kelly Save Madonna’s Career?’ screamed one tabloid headline.
The singer, her inner doubts only exacerbated by the chorus of often spiteful criticism, spent literally every waking hour arranging the show and the subsequent world tour, feeling, after the events of the last year, that this tour would make or break her career. While her
brother Chris designed the sets, she oversaw casting calls and toured strip clubs in Florida looking for girls who could perform on a pole. Madonna, who occasionally visited strip joints in New York with her lesbian friend Ingrid Casares, spotted one girl in the Crazy Horse Club in Miami whose dancing caught her eye. Normally sassy and bold, the stripper was shaking with nerves when she met Madonna. She was hired.
Finding and casting talented dancers was the enjoyable part. The hard work normally started at dawn with a three-hour workout to get herself in shape. Then she would head for the sound studio in Los Angeles to put her dancers through their paces. Ever the perfectionist, she ended up putting in seventeen-hour days, arriving at her Los Angeles home just before midnight for a massage and sleep. In between dance rehearsals – she complained that dancers needed too much mothering – she was involved in meetings to discuss venues, costumes and set design. With 1500 costume changes to be coordinated and 300,000 pounds of equipment to be set up for each performance, The Girlie Show was a high-risk, high-cost piece of theater.
It was also a triumph. The sell-out tour, which played on four continents, presented Madonna as a preening harlequin in a show that was mixture of the burlesque styles of Cabaret and the Ziegfeld Follies combined with the sultry sexual decadence of an upmarket bordello. There was uproar in Puerto Rico when she rubbed that country’s national flag between her legs, while in Israel the protests of Orthodox Jews about the show’s sexual content forced it to be canceled. During performances in Argentina, Madonna dropped a big hint to Hollywood producers when she sang a few bars of ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ from the musical Evita, a long-discussed film project for which the female lead had still to be cast.
She returned to her home country in triumph, having apparently vanquished her army of critics. The release of her new, highly acclaimed album Bedtime Stories —the single ‘Take A Bow’ put her back at number one in the Billboard charts – seemed to confirm that her career was once more on track. She even sniped at the uproar over her previous offerings with the song ‘Human Nature,’ in which she sang of being ‘punished’ for telling the world about her ‘fantasies.’ That she could secure the services of an all-star musical cast, including Sting, Herbie Hancock, Björk and Kenny ‘Babyface’ Edmonds, merely confirmed her effortless musical ascendancy.
And yet, and yet … she was restless, unfulfilled and unhappy. ‘She is not good at enjoying success. Its really tough for her,’ observes her press secretary, spokeswoman and surrogate mother, Liz Rosenberg. ‘She’s not good at that.’ While her tour, album and videos were widely praised, this most visual of musical artists was continually frustrated that she had failed to conquer the one artistic mountain that mattered most to her, cinema. As she herself has said; ‘I’ve always seen myself as an actress, first and foremost.’
The bright dawning of her Maverick entertainment empire in 1992 had seemed to bring her what she craved, artistic control and a guaranteed ticket into the elusive world of the movies. Yet after just two disastrous projects, Dangerous Game and Canadian Bacon, the film arm of her conglomerate was peremptorily closed by her backers, Time-Warner. ‘We quickly realized that these peripheral activities were best left alone,’ acknowledged Freddy DeMann, at one stroke shattering what was, to Madonna, the artistic raison-d’être for the company; making it less a creative factory in the Warhol mode, more a workbench.
No longer an auteur or a film producer, Madonna was, in the eyes of hard-nosed Hollywood producers, a successful singer but a box-office bomb. Singers like Cher and, for that matter, Whitney Houston had more solid commercial track records in films. Jim Albright witnessed at first hand her anguish as she desperately continued to try to make it on the big screen. ‘It’s an area that’s caused her a lot of pain,’ he says. ‘She has wanted to take on a lot of roles that haven’t been made available to her.’ The most galling humiliation came when she lobbied for a starring role in Robert DeNiro’s 1995 film Casino, the story of the breakdown of the marriage between a former hooker and the manager of a Mafia-run casino in Las Vegas. She loved the script, and feeling she was perfect for the part of the alcoholic wife, spoke to her friend Al Pacino for advice on how to play the role. Then she went into charm mode, taking the film’s producers to dinner at a known Mafia restaurant in New York in an effort to convince them that she was perfect for the female lead. It was not to be. She went to an ‘awkward’ script reading presided over by DeNiro, before finally losing out to Basic Instinct star Sharon Stone, who went on to win an Academy Award nomination for her performance. The irony of coming second to Stone, whom she had jokingly cast in her imagined remake of Some Like It Hot, was galling.
It was utterly frustrating for Madonna, one moment pondering the delicious career possibilities of running her own film company, the next touting her wares around town in what was little more than a pedigree-cattle market. Moreover, just as her film career seemed to be going nowhere, so too did her personal life. After the breakup of her relationship with Jim Albright in early 1994 her love life became hectic to the point of public ridicule. Jim’s passion for basketball had rubbed off on her and she became a fervent New York Knicks fan to the point where she pestered the team for an autographed basketball. She rarely missed a game, usually accompanied by her friend Ingrid Casares, and joining other notables like Ron Perlman, the head of the Revlon empire, and film director Spike Lee – after one game she agreed to appear in Lee’s latest movie, Girl 6.
Her involvement extended to more than the matches she attended, however, for she became something of a basketball groupie, and took to seeking out the company of several of the big game’s stars.
At a New Year’s Eve party at her Miami home in 1993, just days before her breakup with Albright, she caroused with Brian Shaw of the Miami Heat, while back in New York she apparently asked Danny Cortese to bring Knicks player Sam Cassals to her apartment.
It was, though, her two-month fling with the outlandish and gangling figure of Dennis Rodman that came close to turning her into a national laughing stock. With his bleached-blond hair, pink-painted nails, numerous piercings and tattoos, Rodman was on the far side of outrageous. On one occasion the man nicknamed ‘the worm’ called a press conference to announce his wedding and then, after arriving in full wedding drag, told journalists that he was going to marry himself. ‘I like a man who is in touch with his feminine side,’ Madonna once said – although this probably wasn’t what she had in mind.
She had met Rodman at a party, where they exchanged numbers and afterwards carried on a racy correspondence via fax. Once an affair between them had started, she made it clear that she wanted him to leave his girlfriend and father her child, her desire to become a mother by then verging on the desperate. Her body clock was ticking more insistently with every month that passes. ‘I think about having children all the time,’ she confessed. The eccentric Rodman was ruled out of the equation – and her life – for ever when he published his autobiography where he described their sex life in graphic detail. ‘She wasn’t an acrobat. But she wasn’t a dead fish, either,’ he gallantly told Playboy magazine.
Just weeks after she and Albright parted, the public caught a glimpse of the turmoil in her life when, on March 31, 1994, she made a now notorious appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. What was shocking and rather sad wasn’t the fact that she said the word ‘fuck’ thirteen times (although many viewers and critics were outraged), or that she constantly tried to bring the conversation back to her sex life, alluding to her relations with basketball players, but that this talented young woman, who had achieved so much in life, was still so pathetically desperate to be the center of attention. Her behavior pointed to an aching void in her life, a deep unhappiness unrequited by success or wealth. ‘She is willing to defer everything in the elusive search to be a celebrity,’ one Time-Warner executive who knows her well was reported as saying. ‘It just feeds on itself. It’s like an addiction.’
After the show she left with her gir
lfriend, Jenny Shimizu, drowning her sorrows over a cup of green tea in a midtown sushi bar. Typically she blamed the fiasco on Letterman, claiming that his staff encouraged her to take verbal liberties. It was not an excuse that washed, or at least not with New York Post columnist Ray Kerrison. ‘She will do anything, say anything, mock anything, degrade anything to draw attention to herself and make a buck,’ he wrote. ‘She is the quintessential symbol of the age; self-indulgent, sacrilegious, shameless, hollow.’
Eventually, she was to admit the real reason behind her outburst. ‘That was a time in my life when I was extremely angry,’ she told TV Guide magazine in 1998. ‘The press was constantly beating up on me, and I felt like I was a victim. So I lashed out at people and that [Letterman] was one of them. And I am not particularly proud of it.’
For all her success, by mid-1994 she was undoubtedly a damsel in distress. ‘Very few people came to my rescue. It was an incredibly eye-opening experience,’ she said of this period. So, given that Madonna’s life is an almost classic example of a contemporary fairy story, it would not be complete without a couple of knights riding to her rescue. Since, however, this is also a post-modern fairy tale, in which poses are struck and principles deemed passé, it is suitably ironic that the saviors of this icon of aggressively sexy, strong, modern womanhood should be a pair of old-fashioned gentlemen, in the unlikely shape of a cricket-loving English knight and an elderly American writer.
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