“I don’t like being controlled,” she told him one day. “To be free, you need a lot of money, and power, which I have”. . . and which Tony didn’t have.
On September 18, Tony accompanied Madonna to a New York City screening of the film GoodFellasat the Museum of Modern Art. Recalls journalist Kelly Winters, “I asked Madonna who her date was, and she said his name was Nick Neal. He [Tony] looked at her with a confused expression, and she turned to him and snapped, ‘Your name is Nick Neal now, so just deal with it.’”
Madonna then ran her fingers through Tony’s thick, dark hair, seeming to luxuriate in the feel. Suddenly, she grabbed a tuft and pulled hard, making him cry out, “Fuck!” With that, she bit his ear. “Fuck!” he cried, again. Madonna looked pleased.
Recalls Kelly Winters, “Later, I heard someone ask her about Warren Beatty. She laughed in his face. ‘Who?’ she asked. ‘Oh, you mean that guy I did that movie with? The last I heard, he was in a [retirement] home somewhere.’”
On December 10, 1990, Madonna learned that she was pregnant with Tony’s child. As she had been feeling queasy for a few days, she had told him that she suspected she was expecting, and asked him to accompany her to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for the necessary tests. She had hoped it was true that she was pregnant. He wasn’t sure what to hope for, “except to just hope for the best.” When her physician, Dr. Randy Harris, confirmed that she was expecting, Madonna was jubilant. “I want this child more than anything else in my life,” she told a friend the next day on the telephone.
“Will you marry Tony?” the friend wanted to know.
Madonna sighed deeply, as if acknowledging defeat in the marriage department. “I doubt it,” she said, sounding weary. “But I guess I can raise the kid on my own. In fact, I know I can do it.”
She must have realized that Tony was not husband material for her. Still, she was happy about the pregnancy. Perhaps she reasoned that if she could not have a satisfying relationship with a man, at least she could have one with her own child.
However, just a few days after the good news, came the bad. Because of gynecological complications, the health of Madonna’s baby was already in jeopardy. In what must have been a heart-wrenching consultation, Harris recommended to Madonna and Tony that she terminate the pregnancy. This was crushing news. Madonna had undergone a number of abortions in the past, and had vowed to bring to full term any other baby she conceived. However, it was not meant to be. On December 14, Tony accompanied her to Cedars for a dilation and curettage (D&C), which took just fifteen minutes, but which also took a toll on Madonna.
Tony, who had been pacing the floor while the surgery was taking place, recalled, “When I came back to the room, she was crying. It was very upsetting. She wanted that baby, and it seemed unfair that she couldn’t have it.”
Madonna was impressed by the way Tony Ward cared for her. He was supportive in every way, determined to show her that he could be a good mate. He loved her, that much was clear to any observer, and hoped for a future with her. Tony, for whatever his faults, was different from the men Madonna had recently known. He seemed really to want to be with her, and to have no ulterior motives. “I’ve been with a great many men and women,” he told her. “But none that I’ve really loved. Until now.” For her part, she said she felt “safe” with him. However, there were problems: Ward was confused and immature in ways that were impossible to deny. He had a secret: he was a married man.
Four days after Tony met Madonna, he and his girlfriend Amalia Papadimos were wed in Las Vegas. After the ceremony, Tony was ambivalent; he didn’t know if he wanted to be with his wife, or with Madonna. Two weeks later, he told his wife that it wouldn’t work out between them.
“We never really spent time together,” Tony explains of his marriage. “She was shocked that I would change my mind like that. But I love her, still. She’s my buddy. Obviously, being married for two weeks and then saying, ‘I can’t do this,’ put her in a really bad spot.”
He also didn’t know whether or not to tell Madonna of his marriage, and opted not to do so immediately. Instead, he moved into her home and, perhaps, hoped “for the best.”
“It was just before Christmas, I believe, that Tony told Madonna that he was a married man. I guess that was a big hurt for her,” says Tina Stanton, who also dated Tony at this time. “I once overheard Madonna tell him, ‘Guys like you usually bounce right off my radar screen. I’m not even sure why I ended up with you, except that I couldn’t resist you.’ Plus, she saw something in Tony, a naiveté, an innocence, a good heart.”
The fact that Madonna would tell Tony Ward that a man such as himself would “bounce right off” her “radar screen” indicates that she didn’t understand herself as well at this time as she may have thought. If anything, she was attracted to men like Tony, welcomed them into her world . . . and, inevitably, paid the price for such poor judgment. Not only was Tony emotionally unavailable — like Sean Penn, John Kennedy and Warren Beatty — he was married.
It was at a Christmas party at her home in December that Madonna and Tony became embroiled in an argument that would be the subject of discussion among her intimates for years to come.
Dressed for the festive and formal occasion in a black Gaultier halter-top dress, Madonna’s hair that evening was short and blonde. One would never know from her easy composure that she’d had such a bad day. A household employee had poured the wrong bath essences into her hot tub at home, turning her hair green while she relaxed in it. (One can only imagine her reaction upon making this discovery in the mirror on the morning of a big party!) It took her hairdresser four hours to restore her “natural” blonde color, at a cost of $750. Now, she looked terrific. White-coated waiters circulated among the guests — the usual relatives, friends and business consorts mixed with the publicity seekers and hangers-on who hoped to be mentioned in the gossip columns the next day — with trays of chilled champagne and warm hors d’oeuvres.
A pretty girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen — her eyes heavily veiled by drugs — threw herself into Tony’s arms, asking to be taken. Madonna glared for a moment, then shrugged and turned away.
Later, Tony spotted Madonna dancing with a man he had long viewed as a rival for her affections. As he watched them cuddle on the dance floor, he seethed until he could take it no more.
“Hey, you’re my woman,” Tony suddenly hollered. “Knock it off.”
“Oh yeah?” Madonna countered as she broke away from her dance partner. “You have your nerve. I’m my own woman.”
Angry, Tony grabbed an expensive Chinese vase and threw it to the floor, shattering it.
In retaliation, Madonna hurled an antique lamp at him. He ducked. Everyone watched with horrified fascination as the lamp hit the wall and smashed to bits.
In response, Tony took a silver tray of crudités, pâtés and olives and threw it to the floor with a crash.
Then, in the finest tradition of melodramatic frustration and rage, Madonna said, “Out! Everyone, get the fuck out. The party’s over.” Turning to Tony, she further clarified, “And that includes you. Get out!” Then, she turned and walked out of the room, leaving everyone to fetch their wraps and jackets.
The next day, Ward apologized profusely and presented Madonna with a new vase filled with white roses. It was a sweet gesture, yet one that would not change anything. After all, how many more hair-raising scenes could she tolerate in affairs of the heart?
Bingo. It was at this time that she had an epiphany.
Unwittingly, the existence of Tony Ward in Madonna’s world had provided a transformative catalyst, one that would alter her life. Something in her had been adjusted by the holiday confrontation with Tony. Who knows what spurred it — maybe it was the flying vase? — but, finally, she had made a decision about what she expected from the men in her life. It probably wasn’t just the experience with Tony Ward. Rather, it was likely the cumulative experiences of Madonna’s doomed romances up until this poi
nt, all of which, finally, brought into clear focus what she wanted in a relationship . . . and — bless his heart — it wasn’t Tony Ward, or anyone like him.
“Look, I need more,” Madonna told Sandra Bernhard, “than melodramatic nonsense.” Friends like Sandra say that the final conflict with Tony marked a defining moment for Madonna, but, like many such moments in life, it wasn’t thunderous. It wasn’t monumental. It was just a simple moment of clarity, yet one important enough to inform everything that would follow it. Or, as Madonna put it to Sandra, “I feel as if my disorganized mind has just been organized.”
“Tony, you’re just not enough for me,” Madonna said to him, as Tony later recalled. “I’m finally at a stage in my life where I realize that I have to have more than what you can offer. I see that now.” Tony was thrown. It was startling, he would later say, to hear Madonna suddenly so certain about what she wanted, what she deserved. The pain of it, of course, was that her newly painted picture didn’t include him.
“If that’s how you feel about it,” he told her in a crushed voice, “then I guess there’s nothing I can do but leave.”
“It was really hard for me to take, to hear her say that to me,” Tony recalls. “It was a very powerful statement. I was feeling very hurt, very abandoned and all of these ‘poor me’ things. It took me a long time to understand. I still have a very strong love for Madonna, and it doesn’t matter to me whether she’s here with me, or somewhere else. If I never see her again, I will still always love her. I know that if she’s in a pinch, if the chips are down and she needs a friend, that she realizes she can call me and I’ll be there.”
“I don’t want us to hate each other,” Tony Ward remembers Madonna telling him as she hugged him good-bye. “I’m just so exhausted,” she said, perhaps referring to her most recent romances. “After people break up, they say terrible things about each other. I’m not going to do that to you, Tony,” she concluded. “I’m not going to let anyone else do it, either.”
“Madonna, if people knew the real you, I think they’d be surprised,” Tony Ward told her.
“Well, let’s just hope they never find out,” she said. “After all, I have an image to protect.”
The Immaculate Collection
By the end of 1990, a new greatest hits album from Madonna was ready for release from Warner Bros. Records, The Immaculate Collection. Actually, this was much more than a mere collection of Madonna’s biggest-selling and most popular songs. It served as a proud landmark for a career that, from its professional inception, had moved in only one direction: up.
Released in November with its title a clever play on the biblical reference to Mary’s immaculate conception of Jesus, the album contained more genuine hits than a Top 40 radio station usually plays in an hour. It was an audio chronicle of Madonna’s wild ride thus far, starting at the beginning with three of her first singles — “Holiday,” “Lucky Star” and “Borderline” — and moving on to the present day. Detractors could say what they wanted about the woman being a flash in the pan with little talent (and, believe it or not, there were actually sceptics, both fans and members of the music industry, still expecting Madonna to have a short-lived career), but The Immaculate Collection crystallized the reality of the Madonna success story: “Like a Virgin,” “Material Girl,” “Crazy for You,” “Into the Groove,” “Live to Tell,” “Papa Don’t Preach,” “Open Your Heart,” “La Isla Bonita,” “Like a Prayer,” “Express Yourself,” “Cherish” and “Vogue” — fifteen hit records in all. Some of the most successful pop stars in the world have come and gone without ever having even a single Number record. It is the ultimate goal of any pop artist to top the record-selling charts — The Immaculate Collection contained eight of Madonna’s chart-toppers.
Madonna’s success as a recording artist wasn’t really difficult to fathom if one understood what she represented. Someone like Pat Benatar was cool, but she was a rocker, not a pop star. Madonna was the kind of female artist who didn’t come along often in pop culture — a white girl with attitude who could keep a beat. (Nancy Sinatra personified her generation’s version of it in the sixties when she recorded her hit, “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’,” but the jig was up when it was soon discovered the attitude belonged to the record and not to Nancy.)
Madonna’s music always had something for everyone. While not too funky for the white kids in suburbia to embrace, it was still rhythm and blues and hip-hop enough for inner-city kids — her core black audience — also to endorse. After all, several million records ago, Madonna was a dance act, an artist whose energy and inspiration emanated from the streets. If Madonna debuted in the twenty-first century, she’d most likely be considered a hip-hop act — too spunky and independent-minded to be the next Britney Spears and too cutting edge to be the next Jessica Simpson or even the next Mariah Carey. She would still be unique, even if she was a new artist.
Before Madonna, the last singer to meld so effectively dance and pop influences was Donna Summer and her songwriters/producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellote (and later just Summer and Moroder), whose brand of Europop successfully transcended mere disco. But Summer, however successful, was not armed with Madonna’s uncanny musical sense of self and of the marketplace — instincts integral to creating the hit records that were compiled for The Immaculate Collection By 1990, the production on some of those hits might have sounded a little dated (the drum machine was both one of the best and worst inventions of twentieth-century pop music), but the songs themselves were timeless.
Unlike most young artists who came along when she did, Madonna could redefine her identity at will. While she could easily create party music such as “Into the Groove” and “Express Yourself,” she could also appreciate a cute pop ditty like “Cherish.” She could also completely relate to serious, soul-bearing love songs such as “Live to Tell” and “Crazy for You,” and do so without exhibiting even a trace of the cynicism required to make smart, self-deprecating records such as “Material Girl” and “Like a Virgin.” (Prince could also be as versatile, but not until much later in his career was he able to take himself less seriously on records. Michael Jackson could never do it. To him, record making is such serious business, there’s no room in it for irony.) For Madonna, the reward for such versatility came in the form of a string of enduring hit records. The Immaculate Collection reached Number on Billboard’s album chart. It eventually sold an amazing eighteen million copies worldwide, nine million of that number in the United States and five million in the United Kingdom. The marketplace spoke loud and clear in its acknowledgment that the music was as enjoyable the second time around as the first.
Of course, The Immaculate Collection had assistance in getting the attention of record buyers with the inclusion of two new Madonna songs. “Justify My Love,” which would serve as the album’s first single, was written and produced by fledgling rocker Lenny Kravitz with keyboardist André Betts serving as associate producer. (Later, Ingrid Chavez, a muse of Prince’s signed to his Paisley Park label, came forward to claim — and also end up receiving — a share of the credit for writing some of the lyrics.)
On paper “Justify My Love” must have sounded rather simple — a funky drum pattern under a droning, aural synthesizer pad, with Madonna speaking sexy verses over the music, Kravitz casually moaning a melody in the background. The result was one of the few songs in Madonna’s career on which she didn’t actually have her creative imprint. Except for adding a few words, she let Kravitz shape the track. The finished mix oozed pungent sex — it was just that passionate. The single would hit Number on the Billboard chart, but not without the controversy that somehow always seemed to surround a new Madonna project.
Since The Immaculate Collection album was to be issued just before the release of her Truth or Dare documentary, Madonna was determined to keep the public’s interest in her at a peak. She decided — no surprise here! — that the creation of a good controversy could only work to her sales advantage. Th
e problem was that she had crossed the line of what most people would consider good taste so many times in recent years, it had now become more difficult for her to shock the public. She needed a new idea, and it came to her when, during an interview, a journalist asked if any of her videos had ever been banned from MTV.
The “Justify My Love” video — directed by Jean Baptiste Mondino — seems to have been made with the specific intention of having it be banned from television broadcast. In order to create the necessary outrage, Madonna incorporated into the video many of the themes that had generated headlines for her in the past. The concept is a simple one: Madonna, once again donning her Marilyn getup, stumbles into a hotel room where an orgy seems to be taking place. Intrigued, she watches as topless and butch-looking lesbians fondle one another, transvestites cuddle, a voyeuristic and drugged-looking Tony Ward leers. Later, Madonna deep-kisses an androgynous lesbian, and then runs out of the hotel, giggling mischievously.
Whether MTV was an unwitting participant or a co-conspirator in Madonna’s scheme to create a sensation seems fairly clear. The convenient chain of events ran like this: after heavily advertising an “All Madonna Weekend,” of which Madonna’s “Justify My Love” video was to be the main attraction, the station suddenly announced with great fanfare that the video could not be broadcast because it was “religiously and sexually offensive.” On November 29, 1990, MTV announcer Kurt Loder explained to the channel’s international audience that, “When MTV programming executives got their first look at the video’s steamy bed scenes, gay and lesbian snuggling, S&M and briefly bared female breasts, they decided they couldn’t air it.” (Certainly few people who watch MTV would be disinterested in such a video with that kind of description.)
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