“As your friend, I can’t stand by and watch this happen,” Sandra later recalled telling her. “I want this to be over for you. What can I do to help? Get rid of him, once and for all.”
On the same day that she filed for divorce, Madonna met with Deputy District Attorney Lauren Weiss to explain that she now wished to withdraw the charges against her husband. It was said that she feared the publicity the resulting scandal would most surely generate if there was a trial. However, the truth is that she couldn’t bear to see Sean put on trial. She still felt that he was the love of her life, no matter how badly their relationship had degenerated. She cared about him, wanted him to be safe. “May God bless and keep him,” she said at the time, “but far, far from me. This marriage is over.”
“Madonna asked that there be no criminal charges pressed,” district attorney spokesman Al Albergate now says. “There was no other evidence on which to base a criminal charge, so one wasn’t filed.”
The manner by which Madonna’s marriage ended would reshape certain aspects of her personality. She had long ago become accustomed to being in control of her life, of her men. She prided herself on it, even boasted about it. At times she exhibited a startling lack of sensitivity and ridiculed women who appeared weak or vulnerable as a result of a relationship gone sour. She never really understood how a woman would let a man get the best of her. But Sean Penn put an end to her comfort zone of control, and not only metaphorically.
The Malibu nightmare affected Madonna in ways that only she would be able to fully explain . . . and she hasn’t seen fit to do so. For the next few months, her friends say, she would have nightmares about that terrible time in December when her husband lost control of his senses. She seemed psychologically wounded by the experience, more so than she would let on to anyone but close friends.
“She would start crying for no reason,” said a friend of hers who requested anonymity. “At this time, I felt that she was sad, lonely. Her fans and the press had an image of her as being strong and self-sufficient, and she had been — and would continue to be. But she was emotionally wrecked by that ordeal with Sean. She lost a lot of self-confidence and self-esteem as a result of it, and it would take years for her to get over what happened. In some ways, I think she still hasn’t.”
When Madonna packed her suitcases and left the Malibu home she and Sean had shared for her apartment in New York, she left behind her gold wedding ring on the vanity in the bathroom. It had been inscribed “M LOVES S.”
Neither Madonna nor Sean would ever speak publicly about the incident. “Suffice it to say that Sean has a profound anger management problem,” Madonna told one friend, privately. It says much about Madonna’s uneasiness over what had occurred that she didn’t discuss the matter with the media. Certainly, in the past, she’d been known to run to the press with many incidents having to do with her private life . . . but not this one. Those closest to her say that Madonna chose to be silent because she just didn’t know what to make of Sean’s actions, and simply couldn’t bear to speak of them. Moreover, out of affection and respect for Sean, she didn’t wish to sully his name in any way. After all, Madonna knew Sean better than did most people, and she must have realized that what had happened in Malibu did not constitute his finest moment. No doubt, she didn’t want his reputation to be further darkened by publicizing what had occurred between them.
For his part, Sean was said to have been grateful for Madonna’s silence. He felt terribly sorry, he told one friend, explaining that whiskey had led him into a dangerous error of judgment.
Sean didn’t want any of Madonna’s money, though by California law, he could have been entitled to half of her fortune. Instead, he wanted Madonna to keep the entire $70 million her career had generated for her in the three years she was a married woman. “I could have gone any way I wanted,” he said later. “There’s community property in California. But I would never, even under the worst of circumstances, take a penny of somebody else’s change.”
Instead, Sean Penn walked away from the marriage with the approximately $5 million he had earned (while being paid $1 million a film), as well as the couple’s $2-million, three-bedroom, Spanish-style villa. Because Penn’s personal investment in the joint property was only $880,000, he made $1.2 million on it. He also got to keep the Southwestern and Santa Fe – style furniture in the home, including a log-built four-poster bed. Madonna took all of the art deco and art nouveau paintings and sculptures. Oddly, she did leave behind, at least according to one court document, a mutilated doll with pins through it. Madonna kept their New York apartment, but gave Penn $498,000 — the equivalent of his investment in that property. (She purchased for herself a $2.9-million, seven-bedroom home in the Hollywood Hills.) According to legal papers filed, she also handed over $18,700 in “short-term paper” investments and another $2,300 in cash (both sums from a joint financial account).
The divorce was finalized on January 25, 1989. Because the necessary documents had been prepared and then filed away so many times in the past, they were updated and ready to be signed by Sean Penn within days. Madonna had loved Sean and truly intended to honor her marriage vows, so she was deeply affected by the divorce. She hadn’t been happy for some time, so she may have thought that she wouldn’t miss Sean. She was wrong. She was actually surprised at the sense of loss she felt in the months after the final decree, as she would later admit. On a deep level, as she would explain to friends, she felt that she and Sean were “soul mates.” It was difficult for her to fathom the way it had all turned out for them.
Today, according to those who know her best, she still looks back on the union with Sean with great regret. She can’t help but romanticize her marriage to him, retrospectively viewing it through a filter that obscures the darker aspects of the relationship. Perhaps to her credit, she only seems to want to recall the happier times with Sean — certainly not the Malibu nightmare. Of course, some of her friends have wondered when those happy times occurred since most people never actually witnessed her and Sean being happy, at least not after their wedding ceremony — and Sean didn’t seem too thrilled that day, either. However, it’s true that no one really knows what happens in a marriage when two people are alone, other than the two people to whom it’s happening.
Madonna also feels, or so she has said privately, that perhaps she could have been more tolerant of Sean’s feelings where Sandra Bernhard was concerned. Also, she wonders if perhaps she should have been more proactive in forcing him to stop drinking. She has said that she felt guilty because, “I should have made him stop. Every time we ever had a drink together, I felt guilty about that.”
Perhaps some of her guilt stemmed from her Catholic upbringing. “Once you’re a Catholic, you’re always a Catholic — in terms of your feelings of guilt and remorse and whether you’ve sinned or not,” she explained in an interview. “Sometimes I’m racked with guilt when I needn’t be, and that, to me, is left over from my Catholic upbringing. Because in Catholicism you are a born sinner and you’re a sinner all your life. No matter how you try to get away from it, the sin is within you all the time.”
Actually, there was nothing Madonna could have done for the deeply flawed Sean Penn. The truth, it would seem, is that Penn was a coward. For whatever reasons, he wanted to break up with Madonna and end their union, but he didn’t have the courage to do it. Rather, he created an appalling scene that he knew would force her hand and cause her to file for divorce. “You can’t change a person, or control their demons,” Madonna later said of Sean Penn. “That’s one of the things I learned from that relationship.”
It could be argued that Sean and Madonna did the best they could with what they had available to them, in terms of common sense and maturity. The fact that both were so famous at such a young age did nothing to enhance their marriage, either. Certainly, today, Madonna would never be as publicly antagonistic to her partner as she was with Sean. While still a complicated, often temperamental and sometimes difficult pe
rson to understand, she’s obviously not the same woman she was a decade ago.
Madonna would also later admit that the breakup with Sean made her “more suspicious of people. You imbue men with characteristics you want them to have,” she observed. “Then they’re not what you expect, at all. But it’s your own fault too for not having done the homework, the investigating. I’m more cautious now. But I’m still a hopeless romantic.”
Since his marriage to Madonna, Sean Penn has worked to clean himself up — he’s not “sober,” still drinks, but hasn’t had a display of public drunkenness in years. He has gone on to be a contented and productive person — though, by some accounts, is perhaps still not the ideal mate. He and his second wife, actress Robin Wright, mother of his two children, have had their own difficulties since their marriage in 1996.
When asked if he thought the marriage to Madonna could have worked, he replies, “No fucking way. Not with what we had to deal with.” Constantly, reporters ask for Sean’s opinion of the latest public relations’ sensation generated by his ex-wife, thinking him an authority on the subject. He usually has no opinion about any of it. “Look, I’m not any better an expert on her than anyone else,” he says. “I don’t know her any better from having been with her. I was drunk most of the time, anyway.”
In years to come, he and Madonna would continue to hold strong feelings for each other, though they would seldom speak to one another. “It’s too painful,” Madonna told writer Kevin Sessums when asked if she and Penn were in touch. “It’s horrible,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.
Some years later, in 1995, Sean suddenly appeared on stage unexpectedly before a stunned audience as Madonna was receiving a VH1 Fashion and Music Award. While Madonna enjoyed shocking others, but rarely — if ever — enjoyed it when the tables were turned, she seemed genuinely happy to see Sean. The two embraced lovingly. When he left the stage, she walked to the microphone and said to the audience, “Now, that was really dirty.”
Perhaps her brief 1995 reunion with Sean Penn stirred something in Madonna that had lain dormant for some time. The next day, she tucked her hair under a hat, threw on a leopard-skin coat and rendezvoused with the low-key, baseball-cap-wearing Penn in Central Park. “I miss you so much, baby,” she was overheard saying to him. “Don’t you miss me, too?” The ever-present and stirred-up paparazzi feverishly snapped pictures of the couple formerly known as “the Poison Penns.” This time, Madonna and Sean, lost in each other’s company, didn’t seem to mind.
Like a Prayer: The Album
In March 1989, the commercially prudent thing for Madonna to do would have been to release another dance album of new material. After all, based on the sales performance of the recent You Can Dance, her public would have been happy just to keep dancing. However, Madonna — who was now thirty — had certain matters on her mind, personal thoughts about her troubled relationship with her ex-husband, her family, the world and even her God. So while she still wanted her fans to party, with her fourth album she also wanted them to think. To that end, Madonna began to develop lyrical ideas that, until then, were personal meditations never to be shared with her public so openly and pointedly. Thoughtfully, she sifted through her personal journal and diaries and began considering her options. “What was it I wanted to say?” she recalled. “I wanted the album to speak to things on my mind. It was a complex time in my life.”
As Madonna considered her alternatives, producers Steve Bray and Patrick Leonard individually began to tinker with various instrumental tracks and musical ideas to present to her for her consideration. Though the two producers knew one another well and had even worked together on songs with her, there was always quiet but fierce competition between them as they vied to see who could get the most songs on one of her albums. Since Madonna had become a franchise, songwriting royalties from albums that sold millions of copies globally had already made Bray and Leonard wealthy men. The stakes remained high.
Both producers brought their own special style to the project that would go on to become the Like a Prayer album. Though Bray had a penchant for kinetic pop-dance songs, while Leonard was more melodic in style, both proved indispensable to Madonna’s everdeveloping sound. In fact, the versatility of both producers unwittingly saw to it that there was no real Madonna “sound” to speak of, no way for critics or fans to pigeonhole her. Thus, while Madonna was well aware of the sometimes contentious dynamic of the relationship between Bray and Leonard, she never did much to deter them — the tension was good for creativity and business. “I like it when people go up against one another,” she has said. “I even like it when they go up against me. If you want creativity, you have to have sparks. I’m all for that.”
Moreover, Madonna’s own musical tastes and ideas have as much to do with who she is artistically as anyone else’s. Ultimately, she’s the one who decides for which tracks she’ll write lyrics.
When Like a Prayer was released, music journalists took note of Madonna’s artful, mature way of expressing herself. She had become a proficient song writer and was credited with co-writing ten songs on the album, and writing one on her own.
“Like a Prayer,” written by Madonna with Leonard, deserved every bit of the curiosity it generated. Like the startling music video that would accompany it, the song is a series of button-pushing anomalies. It is filled with references to both the spiritual/religious and the carnal — a joyful celebration of love . . . but for whom? In a twist so typical of Madonna’s clever way with words, the lyrical theme of devotion could either be for a lover, or for God. For instance, throughout Madonna sings “Prayer” with a measure of devotion and reverence, as if to a higher power. Yet the lyric about being “down on my knees,” and wanting to “take you there” evokes distinct images of . . . something else.
Indeed, double entendres and ironies abound in “Like a Prayer.” While devilishly danceable, the music is interrupted by a quiet break during which Madonna offers a loving homage against a backdrop of heavenly angelic voicings. While the song feels distinctively religious, the underlying sexual tension is undeniable. The jubilant voices of a gospel choir conducted by André Crouch heightened the song’s spiritual nature while a stingingly secular rock guitar kept it dark and mysterious. Like the legendary Marvin Gaye (whose music she greatly admired), Madonna has the uncanny ability to inspire strong, conflicting emotions during the course of a single song, leaving the listener scratching his head for answers — and craving more. This is certainly one of the woman’s great gifts.
“Express Yourself,” one of two tracks Madonna produced with Bray, was a funky dance anthem urging a female call-to-arms in communication and self-respect. “I think it’s one of my better songs,” Madonna has said. “We had fun in the studio with it.”
In three songs on the album, Madonna sought to purge herself of certain personal demons. “Till Death Do Us Part,” her sad, harsh open letter to Sean Penn, revealed her feelings of hopelessness for their marriage. As would any artist intent on exposing herself through her music, she transformed personal experience into art, making clear to anyone interested how she felt about what had happened with Sean. Likewise, with “Oh Father” Madonna revisits the pain and confusion that had characterized her relationship with the most important man in her life. Some critics felt it was a love letter to Tony Ciccone, while others saw it as an indictment. “That’s fine,” Madonna said. “It is what the listener thinks it is, all open to interpretation. I just write the songs, it’s up to others to interpret them to mean what they want them to mean.”
She countered the somber moments with songs such as “Keep It Together,” the other Steve Bray track, which is an up-tempo romp about the trials and tribulations — and the joys — of family.
“Cherish” was a particular triumph for the Madonna/Patrick Leonard partnership. A delightful confection of radio-ready proportions, the song had it all — strong, positive, remarkably dysfunction-free lyrics about love, a memorable, singalong vocal melody and a
tight, punchy, rhythm arrangement. It remains, quite simply, one of the best songs Madonna has ever written; sweet and happy but by no means corny, it’s a perfectly constructed pop song which Madonna delivered beautifully, and with undeniably sassy charm. Indeed, if “Cherish” had been released in the sixties, it would have most likely emanated from Detroit’s Motown or the New York songwriting Mecca, the Brill Building, both sources for some of pop music’s most enduring classics.
Madonna and Patrick Leonard created much of the Like a Prayer album with the exception of “Love Song,” a duet co-produced and performed on the album by Prince. While they were dating, the two superstars had tried writing together, but never came up with anything that ever saw the light of day. Perhaps “Love Song” should also have been kept where light couldn’t find it. A potentially fabulous collaboration is wasted on a meandering mid-tempo song that goes nowhere — an exercise in Prince excess. Though she shared production credit with him, Prince played all the instruments and Madonna’s role was reduced to sitting in on her own album and trying to sing like Prince. Her guest star might have even inspired “Act of Contrition,” an experimental mess that has Madonna mumbling a prayer over edgy, solo rock guitar while a choir’s background chants are played backward, a recording tactic used by the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix for psychedelic effect some years earlier. Like any art, sometimes what Madonna comes up with works . . . sometimes it doesn’t. (Of course, who’s to say what works and doesn’t, all criticism being subjective.)
Every important artist has at least one album in his career whose commercial and/or critical success becomes that artist’s magic moment. For Marvin Gaye, it was What’s Going On. For Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life. For Diana Ross, the soundtrack to her breakthrough film, Lady Sings the Blues. For Aretha Franklin, it was Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky), produced by Quincy Jones and including the Stevie Wonder – penned single, “Until You Come Back to Me.” Of course, for Michael Jackson it was Off the Wall and Thriller. For Madonna, Like a Virgin was just such a defining moment. Like a Prayer was another. For better or worse — usually better! — Madonna pushed onwards as an artist, using her creative wit to communicate on another level, musically. “Like a Prayer is about the influence of Catholicism on my life and the passion it provokes in me,” she explained. “In these songs I’m dealing with specific issues that mean a lot to me. They’re about an assimilation of experiences I had in my life and my relationships. I’ve taken more risks with this album than I ever have before, and I think that growth shows.”
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