Some critics commented that during the filming of Who’s That Girl? Madonna looked as if she had stepped right off the set of The Seven Year Itch, one of Monroe’s most famous movies — although Madonna did add a contemporary element to the look with a leather jacket. Sandra Bernhard, who was at one time extremely close to Madonna, went as far as saying that “she thinks she is Marilyn Monroe.” (One of Madonna’s funniest and most clever moments on television occurred in 1993 during a sketch on Saturday Night Live when she spoofed Marilyn’s “Happy Birthday” song to President John F. Kennedy, complete with skin-tight gown and bouffant blonde wig.)
Through the years, John F. Kennedy, Jr. — son of the late president of the United States — had also expressed his own interest in and passion for Marilyn Monroe. As he was growing up, it became well known that his father had indulged in an extramarital affair with Monroe, which, say his friends, seemed to fascinate John. As an adult, when John Jr. started his own magazine, George, he astonished many observers by featuring Drew Barrymore on the cover of one of the issues — dressed as Marilyn in a replica of the gown Monroe wore the night she sang “Happy Birthday” to his father at Madison Square Garden in 1962. Most people were amazed that Kennedy should pay homage to a woman who had indulged in an adulterous affair with his father.
Either they met at a party in New York in December 1987, as John had said, or at a “fitness salon” that same month, as Madonna has recalled. After one date, the dashing, dark, muscular Kennedy gave her a set of keys to his apartment. According to what Madonna once told a friend, John walked into his home shortly thereafter to find her lounging on the couch wearing nothing but sheets of clear plastic wrap, the kind purchased in the supermarket. He said later that he couldn’t believe his eyes. After a beat, Madonna smiled lasciviously at him and purred, “Dinner’s ready, John-John.” (The press always referred to him as John-John, but family or friends never did.) That night, they laughed and danced and drank great quantities of wine.
Later, one oft-told story would have it that, while making love to her, John would apply peanut butter to her legs, and then lick it off. “Nonsense!” Madonna has said when asked if this story was true. “Do you know how many calories are in peanut butter? Low-fat whipped cream, yes. But not peanut butter.”
*
Madonna may have found him fascinating, but she was not yet close enough to John Kennedy, Jr., to discuss the troubling lump in her breast that had ruined her holidays. No doubt it was on her mind. To whom could she turn?
One lonely evening, according to a later recollection, she picked up the telephone and called the one person she felt closest to, despite the shattered state of their relationship. Though there was such acrimony between them — and had always seemed to be, even before they were married — she still sensed that the one person who knew her best and could tell her what to do about this dizzying scare was Sean.
“Sean was distraught to hear about the lump,” says his friend actor Stephen Sterning. “He told her that she simply had to have it looked at, have a biopsy done. He later said that she was crying on the telephone, saying she was frightened and didn’t know what to do. So he offered to go with her, and that’s what he did. They went to the doctor together. She had the biopsy. A few days later it came back negative. She was fine.”
Said Sean at the time, “Nothing sobers a man like knowing your wife might have cancer. I finally got the message that I had to get serious about my life, about Madonna’s life, about our marriage.” He now believed that if they could only recapture the sexual passion they had felt for each other at the beginning of their relationship, she might change her mind and not divorce him. Still, he was not naive. He knew they had problems. “Ultimately, we had different value systems,” he would say to writer David Rensin.
However, for Madonna, it was too late in 1988 to recapture anything with Sean. As much as she appreciated his support during a tough time — perhaps one of the most difficult in her recent memory — she felt that it would take more than the occasional medical crisis to keep them together. He had been the only real love of her life, but she was no longer comfortable being with him. She understood him all too well. Says Sterning, “She told Sean that she loved him still, but because of their differences, there was no way they should be together. She said that the cancer scare made her see even more clearly that life was too short not to be completely happy. Sean had to agree, actually. I think that little crisis made them both see the light . . . and, ironically, maybe in seeing that light it somehow brought them closer together as it pushed them closer to divorce.”
*
“Will you look at how handsome Johnny is,” Madonna told a friend over a martini lunch. She was holding a color photograph of Kennedy — a close-up — which she had carefully clipped from a gossip magazine. His face was raw-boned and lean. If ever a person had “bedroom eyes,” this was the guy. “Have you ever seen a man this handsome? Look at his face. Look at his hair.”
Many years later, her friend (“Don’t use my name or Madonna will kill me”) would recall Madonna saying, “He’s unbelievable. A perfect specimen. And look at that body. Who has a body like that? He’s a god,” she concluded with a sigh.
Again, her friend had to agree.
“Finally, I’m dating someone respectable, someone the public loves, someone I can be proud to be with,” Madonna said. She signaled the waiter to bring her and her friend another round. “Can you see John Kennedy beating someone up and humiliating me in public. Now that would never happen.”
“But what about Sean?” her friend asked.
“You’re still married.” Madonna’s smile quickly faded. She folded the magazine photograph into quarters and put it away safely. “I don’t know what to say about Sean,” she said with a frown. “I love him. I’ll always love him. He’s the one person who knows the real me. But it’s over. Oh,” she concluded, wistfully, “to be a Kennedy. Do you think they have the kinds of problems I have?”
It seemed that “Johnny” felt the same about her. After a few months, as the relationship continued, he pinned posters of Madonna onto the walls of his Manhattan bachelor apartment, and even began to shed his Ivy League wardrobe for a look that he thought was more punk, and one that she would prefer: leather jackets, ripped jeans, spiked hair. He grew a goatee, which looked terrific and just a bit edgy. He told his friends that he was “crazy” about her. After a few months, John seemed to become all but consumed by his fascination with Madonna. He told Thomas Luft, a college friend from Hyannisport, that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. “It’s like she put a spell over me,” he said. “I’m a little obsessed with her.”
Madonna acknowledged that she now couldn’t help but fantasize about divorcing Sean Penn and marrying into the affluent and influential Kennedy family (a fantasy that the troubled Marilyn Monroe had often related in the last few years of her life). “To have a Kennedy baby was a goal Madonna had set for herself,” says a former associate of hers, “and I heard from good sources that she did what she could to interest John in the proposition.”
Sean had been a lot of trouble. She loved him, but how much more could she take, she must have reasoned. Kennedy was smart, sophisticated and . . . sensible. However, there would be one major stumbling block to the continuation of any romance between her and the heir to Camelot — and, as it happened, it would come in the form of the same woman who had put the kibosh on the president’s affair with Marilyn Monroe: Camelot’s queen, Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Indeed, any woman in John Jr.’s life prior to this point had always been measured by a formidable standard: his mother’s.
In spite of the married Madonna’s rather startling suggestion that John father her baby — an offer he chose to decline — his feelings for her continued to grow unabated. Steven Styles, a good friend of John’s who attended Brown University with him, recalled John’s fascination with Madonna:
“He telephoned me one day and sounded uncharacteristically depressed. He eventually co
nfessed that he had fallen in love with a married woman who was a very celebrated personality. Conflicted, he said he didn’t know what to do. He was torn by his desire for this woman and his need to conform to societal pressure that he find the so-called ‘right girl’, someone whom his mother and the other Kennedys would approve. And he said, ‘Believe me when I tell you that this is not the right girl.’ I asked him who she was. When he told me, you could have knocked me over with a feather. It was Madonna.
“He asked me if I wanted to be with him when he told his mother. I told him, ‘John, I actually would prefer to be almost anywhere else.’”
“I know that she wants the best for me,” Kennedy told Styles of his beloved mother. “But sometimes, that means I have to keep secrets from her . . . otherwise, I’d never be able to date. Let’s face facts: no woman will ever be good enough for her. Unless she’s royalty . . . but even then . . .”
“Jackie Refuses to Meet Madonna”
Jackie Kennedy Onassis, America’s revered former First Lady, was already well aware of the whisperings of something romantic going on between her only son and Madonna. She used to purchase all the tabloids and other papers at a newsstand in the lobby of the publisher Doubleday’s Fifth Avenue offices (where she worked as an editor) to keep up on current events, and that’s where she first read the news about the growing romance. She quickly made it clear to John that she did not approve.
Thomas Luft, whose mother was close to Jackie, said, “He couldn’t decide if he was intrigued by her because he liked her, or because Jackie didn’t like her — not that Jackie ever met her. He said, ‘I don’t want to string her along if I’m really just rebelling against mother.’ His therapist had told him that Madonna represented insurrection to him, not romance.”
For her part, what most fascinated Madonna about John was his complete lack of pretense. “We were exercising with her, running through Central Park one day,” recalled Stephen Styles. “She had four bodyguards trailing her. John, of course, had none. It was so ludicrous, I said to him, ‘Why is it that she needs all of that security and you don’t need any?’ He laughed and facetiously answered, ‘I may be a Kennedy but, hey, man, she’s Madonna!’”
“He always introduced himself as just John, never John Kennedy,” another college friend, Richard Wiese, remembers. “The word ‘Kennedy’ never came willingly off his lips. He downplayed it as much as possible . . .”
“Johnny, do you know how big a star you could be if you only acted like a Kennedy instead of just any other person?” Madonna told him. She was nearly unrecognizable in a baseball cap, scruffy hair, and a T-shirt belted outside cycling shorts. She was chewing gum, as John liked to say, “like it’s going out of style.” She said, “I mean, my God! You could be absolutely huge!”
“Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m huge enough,” John said with a grin. He, too, was in tight biking shorts and a simple white T-shirt. A baseball cap was turned boyishly backward. His chiseled cheeks were shadowed by two days’ growth of beard. “I don’t want to be a star,” he said, dark eyes dancing. “I’m just me.”
Madonna seemed stunned. “But how could anyone not want to be a star?” she asked.
“Count me out,” John said, still jogging. “You can be the star in this family.” Then, with a grin back at her, he sprinted off.
While dating Madonna, John moved into a two-bedroom apartment near his mother’s penthouse on Fifth Avenue. As a surprise, Jackie hired a maid to help him organize his belongings. In the process, the maid apparently disposed of love letters Madonna had written to John. When John discovered the loss, he was angry because he thought that the maid had actually been following instructions given her by Jackie. However, those close to the family say Jackie had no idea what he was talking about when he confronted her about what had occurred. Also, she couldn’t believe that her son would accuse her of such behavior. She chalked it up to Madonna’s “bad influence on him.”
When John finally told Jackie that he had fallen for Madonna, she made it clear that she was unhappy about this turn of events. Jackie had been concerned about her children’s social status since they were young. Always protective of them, she was suspicious of most of their friends and unyielding in her demand that both John and his sister, Caroline, remain single until after graduating from law school.
“Jackie wanted her son to be with a woman of a certain breeding,” said a Kennedy family friend, Senator George Smathers of Florida (who was also very close to President John F. Kennedy). “She wanted both of her children to be with a person of class. But John always gravitated toward movie stars and flashy types, a lot like his father. Jack Kennedy ended up with Marilyn Monroe and, somehow, John ended up with Madonna. I don’t know which scenario most upset Jackie: her husband with Marilyn, or her son with Madonna.”
If Madonna had been single, perhaps Jackie would have been better able to deal with the relationship (though, no doubt, she would still have been unhappy with Madonna’s sexually charged image). She didn’t want to have to deal with the scandal it would have caused if word had gotten out that John was dating a married woman. Also, according to those who knew her, she had heard stories — many of which were probably accurate — about Sean Penn’s temper. She feared for her son’s safety. But, says Thomas Luft, who witnessed the scene, John told Jackie, “Mother, I can take that loud-mouthed little punk Penn blindfolded and with one arm tied behind my back.” “And he could have, too,” said Luft. Jackie shivered at the thought. “Oh, great! That’s all I need, John,” she said, “seeing you led away in handcuffs for getting into a fight with that hooligan. Don’t you dare!”
Also, Jackie feared that Madonna might influence John to reconsider a future as an actor, something she definitely did not want to occur. He had appeared in a couple of plays in college and, though she attended the performances to demonstrate her support, she asked him not to become an actor. Her dream was to see her son as an attorney.
“I was there at her home on Martha’s Vineyard when Jackie told John, ‘I need you to think about this, carefully. Madonna may be a nice girl, but until she is single, she will be nothing but trouble,’” says Thomas Luft.
“But I like her,” John said, trying to reason with Jackie. “She’s quite intelligent. You should know her, Mother. You’re an editor! She’s just the kind of woman you would find fascinating.”
Luft says that Jackie rolled her eyes and shook her head in what appeared to be complete dismay.
“My goodness, there are millions of intelligent women on this planet, John,” she told him. “And you have to go out with the only one who calls herself a ‘Material Girl’? I just don’t understand it. I mean, really!”
“John got angry,” says Luft. “Even though I was standing right there, and he never talked back to his mother in front of others, he shot back, ‘Mother, let me ask you this: who in this world has been more materialistic than you?’”
Luft recalls that Jackie shot him a look. Then, without warning, tears came to her eyes. She rushed from the room. John was immediately overwhelmed by regret. “Mother, please, I didn’t mean that,” he said, following her. “I’m sorry.” Then, for the rest of the day, he was angry with himself. “How could I be so stupid and mean,” he said. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he muttered, chastising himself. “But I like Madonna,” he told Thomas Luft, “and, damn it, I’m going to date her.”
One wonders if Madonna ever imagined the impact she had on these denizens of so-called Camelot . . . and if ever she would have believed any of it possible just a few short years earlier.
*
With Sean Penn in Asia filming Casualties of War, Madonna was free to explore a number of life options. In her personal life, there was the possibility of a long-term relationship with John Kennedy, Jr., though that seemed a long shot. As adorable as he may have been, she would later have to admit that something was “missing.” She liked strong-willed, powerful men. John seemed too reliant on his mother, his family, for stren
gth. She needed time to marshal her thoughts, but it did seem that her future with Kennedy had certain limitations.
Professionally, Madonna was considering a Broadway show which, she hoped, would allow her to shine so brightly that she would be able to eradicate the memory of the many bad reviews generated by her last two films. She wanted to prove that she could act. Film director Mike Nichols had mentioned to her a part in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. Madonna was a huge fan of Mamet’s earlier works and has said that she went after the role in his new play “with a vengeance.” She personally called Mamet and requested an audition.
The plot of Speed-the-Plow involved a plain, seemingly naive secretary, Karen (Madonna), who comes between two movie moguls (Joe Mantegna and Ron Silver) known for their production of surefire, commercial Hollywood films. Mantegna bets Silver $500 that he can bed Karen. However, she turns the tables by seducing him. She then tries to convince him to put up the money to turn a brainy, pretentious book she has been reading, one with absolutely no commercial appeal, into a film. Mesmerized by the dynamic woman masquerading as a plain office worker, he agrees to her request — almost enabling Karen to destroy the commercial deal that Mantegna and Silver virtually have in the bag. Madonna described her character as, “honest, sincere and naive, and hungry for power, like everybody else.” Her observation proved that, at first, Madonna didn’t even realize that her character was not what she seemed to be; she was anything but naive. “It was a real mind-fuck of a script,” she discovered midway through rehearsals. “Little did I know that everyone else involved saw me as a vixen, a dark evil spirit.”
Whether or not Madonna agreed with the interpretation of the role, her name on the marquee meant big business for the show. It sold out for six months in advance, which meant millions of dollars in ticket sales. Although the three-character play did much to confirm Madonna’s drawing power, it did little to reverse critical reaction to her acting skills. Madonna’s opening night on May 3, 1988, at the Royale Theater in New York City attracted celebrities such as Brooke Shields, Jennifer Grey, Jennifer Beals, Tatum O’Neal, Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel.
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