Goddess: Inside Madonna (26 page)

Despite the intensity of their physical relationship and Burroughs’s great admiration for Madonna, he never took her seriously as a girlfriend. “I didn’t think it was possible for two single-minded and self-centered people to be an item,” he explains. “I was never possessive with her because I sensed that she was more serious about her career and her goal to be famous. Given the type of person that she was, I found it difficult to downplay that type of energy, that indomitable ‘I am the center of the universe’ kind of energy that sustained her.”

In 1989, things seemed to break for Norris Burroughs. At the time, a music craze that became an underground cult sound called house music was spreading across England and France. Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime minister, had banned it as “immoral” and “sexually suggestive.” Burroughs had a band he had appropriately named Craze that played only house music, which, because it never really caught on in the United States, forced him to go overseas.

“It actually started as underground club dance music in Chicago,” Burroughs explains, “and then got really popular in Europe. We had a hit record in England and in France, just about the time that Margaret Thatcher banned it. I remember going to Paris and being treated really well and then coming back to New York and being nobody. That was another reason I never tried to get in touch with Madonna again, because I realized how illusionary fame is and how it doesn’t really matter what you have to say, even if it’s interesting and important, as long as you’re famous.”

Norris Burroughs admits that his one chance at stardom lasted the proverbial fifteen minutes. He is convinced the reason Madonna never faltered is because she’s a “goddess.” “Goddesses make mistakes,” Burroughs says, “but they go on. I believe that to the extent that I believe in life energy. What separates a god from a mortal? Why does Madonna have a divine spark that lifts her above the average person? Because people embody ideas and energy, and because we make people out of myths. She’s like Jim Morrison, who was ripped apart by women but kept renewing himself every year until his death. Madonna continues to renew herself and has survived to become a myth.”

In the same way that Christopher Flynn sensed an innate sensibility in Madonna, Burroughs also saw a woman who, while not having been grounded in the classics, had managed to develop her own intellectual tastes. “She was very into the Hemingway book
A Moveable Feast
,” Burroughs says, “and loved anything that romanticized the artists’ life in Paris. She read everything she could on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, Picasso, Françoise Gilot, Gertrude Stein. She just loved the idea of being an artist or a dancer, a bohemian expatriate.” According to Burroughs, she also identified with James Dean, whose mother had died when he was a young child. “She thought he was beautiful and magnetic,” Burroughs claims, “and she was generally attracted to that flash-in-the-pan star, like Dean or Jim Morrison, the Roman candle that explodes across the sky and then burns out.”

Burroughs always felt that Madonna was a case study in what makes a star. “When our affair ended,” he says, “I sort of thought I would catch up with her later.”

“Later” for the couple never happened.

M
adonna’s new apartment on Morningside Drive was typical of the prewar buildings in that area of Manhattan. The large and airy rooms included two bedrooms, a living room with a wood-burning fireplace, beamed ceilings, and a kitchen with enough space for a small table. She was ecstatic. Her new living conditions would not last more than several months, but while she was there, it would be the first time since leaving home and moving out of her dorm at the University of Michigan that she felt secure. Upgrading her standard of living brought an additional problem. Even if she worked every day as a counter girl, earning $50 a day for eight hours, most of which she spent on her feet, she simply wasn’t making enough money to pay the rent, eat, and have change left over for carfare. Even if she managed to work overtime to make ends meet or took on a second night job, there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day for her to go out on auditions or take dance lessons. The solution came to her once again through Christopher Flynn. During a phone conversation with her former teacher, he reminded her that when she had been at the University of Michigan she had posed nude for the students in the art department. At the time, she claimed that not only was it easy work and no problem for her to get undressed in front of a roomful of strangers, but that she could earn more money in an hour than she could in a week doing menial jobs. “I basically spaced out,” she said, “and thought about a million things other than I was stark naked while a bunch of people sketched me.” Posing nude in New York brought an even higher hourly rate, and Madonna calculated that she could earn more money in an
hour
working for a photographer or an art teacher than she could working all
day
as a waitress. Within days, Madonna found work posing nude for several photographers through word of mouth around the struggling community of would-be actors and singers.

Her first job was with Bill Stone, a photographer whose work had been published in
Life
and
Esquire
magazines. Best known for his sepia portraits of nudes whom he posed in the style of Botticelli and Modigliani, Stone intended to use Madonna in a setting that was reminiscent of Matisse. Instead, much to his amazement, he found that his new model had her own very definite ideas about how she wanted to be portrayed. The result was a series of photographs in which Madonna appeared both androgynous and feminine, a combination of a feline dancer and a 1950s sex symbol. Everyone who saw them agreed that she brought out both the sensual and paternal instincts in men and the sensual and maternal instincts in women.

The next photographer who hired Madonna was Martin Schreiber, who, in 1980, was teaching a photography course at the New School in Manhattan. His concept was to make nudes more accessible and acceptable to the general public during what he considered to be a puritanical artistic period in the late 1970s and 1980s. “I wanted to make people less uptight about their bodies,” Schreiber explained, “or at least that was my intention.”

In February 1980, his advanced students turned their cameras on a beautiful and unconventional model who had answered an ad in a Village newsletter. Her name, she said, was Madonna, and she had to be paid in cash because she didn’t have a bank account. Schreiber, whose books include
Bodyscapes
and
Last of a Breed
, was admittedly very taken with his new subject. “She was much skinnier years ago,” he recalls, “and there was something special about her, that’s for sure. I think she’s quite beautiful now, but she had a different kind of beauty back then.”

Her attitude was also extremely unusual for a model, since she was completely relaxed and uninhibited. Before the session began, Madonna, draped in a white sheet, wandered over to chat with some of the students who milled around, drinking coffee. She told them that she had come to New York to study dance, but had decided that she wanted to be a singer. One of the photography students recalls his first impression of the future star: “She struck me as someone who had tremendous inner resources, and yet, there was something otherworldly about her. She had absolutely no idea how the real world worked. I suppose I’d say that she was a complete contradiction. One side of her personality was this incredibly sexy young woman, and the other side was this cash register. She just knew she was worth something and wasn’t going to let anyone get away with not paying for her talent.”

For the two days in February that Madonna posed in the unheated studio, she seemed as undisturbed by the freezing temperature as by the fact that some of the students studied her less from an aesthetic viewpoint than a sexual one. One aspiring photographer recalls a brief conversation with Madonna during which she explained that she had never earned more money in her life than she was getting from Martin Schreiber. “I had the distinct impression,” the photographer says, “that she didn’t know where her next meal was coming from, and yet, she knew without any doubt that as long as she was prepared to suffer, she would eventually make it. As a Catholic myself, I understood that whole suffering and reward system.”

Martin Schreiber’s style was to photograph the bodies of his subjects and rarely the faces. In Madonna’s case, he made an exception, and the result was a series of nude studies that were much more intimate than any he had ever done before. Schreiber managed to catch her exactly as she was at the time, raw, brazen, and yet vulnerable, touching in her naïveté and naked ambition. The collection, eventually entitled
The Last of the Madonna Nudes
, depicts Madonna as a guileless, hungry, painfully thin young girl, posing perhaps for her rent or perhaps for the disturbing effect she would have on those who studied the portraits. “I was fascinated by her face and bone structure,” Schreiber admits, “maybe even more than I was with her body.” The photographer and his model began having an affair, although Schreiber always had the feeling that Madonna was more interested in his connections and his ability to feed her a decent meal now and again than she was in him as a lover.

At the same time as she was posing for Martin Schreiber, she was also working at the Art Students League on West Fifty-seventh Street for Lee Friedlander, another well-known photographer who was making studies of anonymous nudes for art and photography classes. His shots eventually landed on the desk of editors at
Playboy
magazine long after Madonna became famous. The photographs of Madonna that were published in
Penthouse
had a more complicated history, and one that ended in litigation.

Two Texas photographers, Herman and Susan Kulkens, who claimed to have known Madonna from her college days in Ann Arbor, Michigan, also shot nude pictures of her before she became famous. At the time, they got a signed release from Madonna in return for a small sum of money that granted the couple rights to “sell or use the photos as they saw fit.” In early June 1985, they sent twenty-two photos to Bob Guccione at
Penthouse
magazine, although they claimed that they had not made a concrete deal. When Guccione announced that he intended to run a seventeen-page, fully explicit nude-photo layout of Madonna in an upcoming issue, the couple sued to bar publication as well as for $2 million in damages. The case was heard in the Manhattan federal court before U.S. district judge John Keenan. In his defense, Guccione claimed that on June 21, as agreed, he had sent the Kulkenses a deposit of $25,000 along with a letter, confirming the agreement. According to their affidavit, the Kulkenses returned the check uncashed. In response, Guccione, claiming that he had a binding agreement with the Kulkenses, published the photographs in
Penthouse
.

Madonna’s reaction to the nudes that appeared in
Penthouse
after she became famous explains a great deal about her.

A year before the Madonna nudes were published,
Penthouse
had published nude photographs of Vanessa Williams, who had just been crowned Miss America. The compromising pictures cost the beauty queen her throne and embarrassment, just as Marilyn Monroe had been shattered by the “girlie calendar” that had emerged on the market after she became a star. Madonna has often said that she is blackmail-proof, that she has never done anything to be ashamed of. The difference between how Williams and Monroe reacted to the release of nude photographs and how Madonna reacted tells a great deal about the latter’s character. While the former Miss America and Marilyn Monroe both pleaded for sympathy from their adoring fans, Madonna was more concerned that she had neither artistic nor financial control over the photographs. Never for a moment did she regret having posed during those lean years in New York when she had no money for food or rent. At the time,
Penthouse
wrote that the “snap of her great magical garter was more powerful than a thousand ERAs barreling headlong down the vast sexless water slide of Judeo-Christianity.”

Everything Madonna did in her career came out of her own life, her loneliness, the people who treated her badly, the ones who loved her and left her, her conflicts with religion. She never told her story as if it belonged to someone else, nor has she ever successfully sung a song made famous by another singer. She is too smart to put herself up for comparison. When others sing about the girl from the wrong side of the tracks, who meets the guy who transforms her and takes her away to live happily ever after, Madonna sings about her anger that a boyfriend or a parent tried to take advantage of her when she was down or tried to control her when she was without recourse. Her message has always been that she would rather die than have to depend on anyone else to survive.

True to character, Madonna has always made her own rules. The video “Material Girl” is an obvious parody of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. Though Madonna made herself up to look like Marilyn Monroe, she insisted that aside from the blond hair and bombshell image, there was no similarity between the two. In the video “Material Girl,” Madonna wore a replica of the dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. The designer Bill Travilla, who also designed fashions for
Knots Landing
and
Dallas
, had created the original dress for Miss Monroe, but never got any credit or mention from Madonna. Paraphrasing her hit song, Travilla said, “Like a virgin, I’ve been knocked off for the very first time.”

In the beginning, Madonna admitted that she enjoyed the comparison the public made between herself and Marilyn Monroe. “I saw it as a compliment,” she said, “because she was extremely sexy and had blond hair and so on. Then it started to annoy me because nobody wants to be continuously compared to someone else.”

After Madonna had discarded the Monroe image, she began to discuss the basic differences between herself and the star. “I think she really didn’t know what she was getting herself into,” Madonna said, “and simply made herself vulnerable. I feel a bond with that, because I’ve certainly felt vulnerable at times, and I’ve felt an invasion of privacy and all that, but I’m determined never to let it get me down. Marilyn was a victim, and I’m not.”