Goddess: Inside Madonna (27 page)

Transforming herself into the Monroe character was another example of how Madonna made her own rules and even had her own interpretation of method acting. Since Monroe had once had an affair with John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Madonna made it her business, during her Monroe incarnation, to have a brief one-night affair and several weeks of intense phone sex with John Kennedy Jr. Even if Jacqueline Kennedy hadn’t expressed her outrage about the brief fling, admonishing her son for his “lack of discrimination,” it is improbable that the encounter would have developed into a relationship. One of Mrs. Onassis’s former colleagues at Viking Books in New York City recalls how embarrassed the former first lady was. “I think that was the moment when she really began to wonder if her son would end up with the same inability as his father to have a lasting and faithful marriage. I don’t think it was a question of Mrs. Onassis considering Madonna to be vulgar, as it was a fear that her son, like his grandfather and his father, had a penchant for Hollywood stars. This worried her more than anything, since she hoped he would eventually settle down with someone from their world.”

Beginning a career of transforming
herself, Madonna’s first attempt to change her image happened during those early days in New York. This delicate-boned girl from nowhere, who still used hokey Midwest expressions, managed to create a fashion look that was an early version of poverty chic. Disguised as an urban bohemian, she had a flair for pulling together outfits that were a combination of baby-doll pink satin and lace and biker black leather and chains. Through Norris Burroughs and his connections with some of the people who were regular fixtures at Andy Warhol’s Factory, a white, mirrored loft at 33 Union Square West in lower Manhattan, Madonna met Futura 2000, Fab Five Freddy, Keith Haring, the artist she had admired when she was at school in Michigan, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, with whom she would have a brief affair several years later.

On the surface, Madonna looked as if she fit right in with the sexually ambiguous, visually shocking, underground, homoerotic artistic world Warhol had created. And yet, despite Warhol’s own humble beginnings in Pennsylvania, he never accepted Madonna as part of the crowd. She was different from the others, not because she came from a small town or had less talent, but because she had built-in boundaries that allowed her to survive. Or, perhaps because he sensed she had more talent than most of the others.

In 1983, Ed Steinberg, who produced Madonna’s first video, “Everybody,” ran into Madonna at a party at Mr. Chow’s, a trendy Chinese restaurant on East Fifty-seventh Street. Tina Chow, the wife of the owner of the restaurant, was an old friend of Andy Warhol’s and would ultimately become one of the early female victims of AIDS. Her death would make the public aware that the disease was not limited to drug addicts or gay men.

At the same party was Jean-Michel Basquiat, barely twenty-three years old and already a well-known artist whose paintings were fetching $10,000, bought by such collectors as Richard Gere and Paul Simon. Though Basquiat looked vaguely familiar to her, Madonna did not remember that she had met him during the days when she hung around Warhol’s Union Square loft. Back then, his hair wasn’t dyed blond, nor was it cut in a punk style. Her first impression of the artist from Brooklyn, the son of a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, was that he was exactly her physical type. Later on, after they talked, she would discover they had other things in common as well. Like Madonna, Basquiat had had a tumultuous relationship with his father and had left home at fifteen to find success as an artist. Also similar to Madonna, Basquiat had had no doubt, even when he was living on the streets of New York, that one day he would become famous. Their affair was brief and passionate. Not only was Madonna seeing several other men, but she was disapproving and unwilling to watch him sink deeper and deeper into his dependence on hard drugs. Two months after they met, Madonna aborted his baby, or at least that was what she told Basquiat. There were rumors that even Madonna wasn’t certain who the father was. Some people thought it was Jellybean Benitez, the self-promoting songwriter, and disc jockey at the Fun House, while others believed it was Mark Kamins, the disc jockey at the Danceteria. As one friend of Madonna’s says, “Back then, there was no limit to the possibilities of whose baby she aborted.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat believed the baby was his, and the abortion was something, according to one young woman who had known both of them briefly during the Warhol period, that the young artist never got over.

Kitty Romano, a bubbly and plump Italian American girl from Brooklyn who hung around the Factory in the hope that she would get a part in one of Warhol’s underground movies, looks back on those times with nostalgia. She also remembers Madonna as “extremely funny with unbelievable energy, but someone who was hopelessly naive.”

Romano, who, in the early Warhol days, never did anything more than clean up after his parties, wash his brushes, and pay the maid, seems disappointed even after so many years that the filmmaker and artist considered her too “ordinary for stardom.” Romano smiles slightly. “I wasn’t grotesquely fat enough to make it in his movies,” she explains. “But I was reliable, and Andy was smart enough to keep me around because he knew he could trust me not to get drunk or stoned and lose the keys or forget to do something around the space.”

For the two months that Romano was in Warhol’s circle, she befriended Madonna. “She was so green,” she continues, “and so young in many ways. Almost everyone, except Madonna, was doing drugs. She was definitely not into anything that was self-destructive.”

In one area of her life Madonna was, if not self-destructive, then careless. After years of wearing heavy pierced earrings and of dyeing her hair blond, her lobes had ripped and her hair was beginning to fall out. With barely enough money to nourish herself, she eventually asked Kitty Romano if she knew anyone who could help her. According to Romano, she had a friend who worked at Bumble and Bumble, a hair salon on West Fifty-seventh Street, who gave Madonna treatments for a special price and even let her pay him off over six months. Romano also sent Madonna to her family doctor in Brooklyn, who sewed up the holes in her lobes and, when they were healed, repierced her ears.

Romano believes that Madonna was drawn to her because they were about the same age, relegated to the fringes of the Warhol group, and both had strict Italian Catholic fathers. “I invited her home to my parents one night for dinner, and the first thing my father asked Madonna was if her father knew where she was and what she was doing.” If Madonna was taken aback by the question, she didn’t show it. “She was very honest when she admitted that her father disapproved of what she was doing in New York,” Romano recalls, “but then she laughed and said when she was a star, he would forgive her and understand why she had to do this.”

In 1983, when Madonna and Basquiat became romantically involved, she would come crying to Romano when the artist would disappear for days. “She would go nuts,” Romano says. “She was sure that he was seeing someone else, since he stopped calling.” Romano shakes her head. “I don’t think there was anyone else because, when he wasn’t with Madonna, he was usually unconscious or on some kind of a trip. The irony was that Jean-Michel cared about Madonna as much as he could care for anybody in his state and actually tried to spare her from finding out about his problems. Of course, in the end, she knew, and that was one of the reasons for the breakup.”

Ironically, when Warhol finally noticed Madonna, it was during her affair with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and for a while, she enjoyed the dubious status of being known as his girlfriend. At the time, Warhol insisted upon referring to her as the “girl that Basquiat was doing,” or more often just “that girl with the bizarre name.”

Five years after they met, in 1989, Jean-Michel Basquiat died of an overdose of heroin on the floor of his loft, or as Madonna described his death at the time, he did the “artist thing, filled with self-doubt and guilt about finally making it.” She told friends and mourners at the time, “I don’t get off on self-mutilation.” When her friend Ingrid Casares was having a drug problem, Madonna refused to see her or speak to her until she got into a treatment program.

The rules Madonna lived by were simple, based on her own moral code. Unlike the masses of people who have watched her perform, Madonna can afford to give the impression that she has no limits. The reality is that her rebellion is closely linked to her sense of discipline, which is based on her need to control and succeed. Then as now, she gave herself permission to do whatever she liked as long as it didn’t interfere with her ability to get up in the morning and go to work.

After Basquiat’s death, the charm of the Warhol crowd held little interest for her. She felt stalked by death and abandonment and, to those who knew her only slightly, projected a kind of worldly fatigue. For those who knew her more intimately, she looked more like an exhausted child who had been staying up past her bedtime for too long. She was one of the lucky ones from that self-destructive era. When she eventually made it to stardom, if ambition and discipline got her there, self-preservation allowed her to stay there.

Years later, despite Warhol’s not having nurtured her talent or taken any interest in her, Madonna still managed to take something from him and fashion it to fit her own style and image.
Truth or Dare
, her unrehearsed documentary, was a movie without a plot like the films that Warhol had made so well in the 1970s. Unlike the Warhol works of that era, however, which used the camera to pry and spy on the underbelly culture of the underground, making his viewers voyeurs under the guise of art, Madonna’s so-called
cinéma réalité
gave new meaning to narcissism. When critics doubted that it was unrehearsed, a truthful video of a day in the life of a star, Madonna responded, “It’s like when you go into a psychiatrist’s office and you don’t really tell them what you did, you lie, but even the lie you’ve chosen to tell is revealing.”

Whatever her failings, Madonna rarely confused commercialism with art or pop culture with religion. She is not someone who has taken up the microphone for a variety of causes. When she has, it has always been because she has been personally touched by the issue. When she has given charity concerts for AIDS, she has spoken out on an intimate level, citing those she has loved and lost to the disease, rather than calling attention to an AIDS that ravages millions in Africa because international drug companies refuse to lower prices so the poor can also be saved. Even breast cancer remains a private issue that concerns only her mother’s death from the disease and not a public cause in which she urges women with a genetic propensity to get regular mammograms.

Truth or Dare
was a one-woman show in every aspect of its creative development to the final product, which starred only Madonna with a supporting cast of her peers, friends, family, and colleagues, who all played Costello to her Abbott. The film showed the performer at her most ungenerous, ungracious, and unkind, although several of the most surrealistic and comical moments happened when she made the mistake of transforming herself into an “artist” who stands up for what she calls her “artistic integrity.” In equally dubious taste is that she risks religious blasphemy and offends the believers among her fans more than when she lusts after a black saint in her video “Like a Prayer.”

With Alek Keshishian’s handheld camera recording her every move, every evening before going onstage Madonna gathers her cast to lead them in prayer. In Detroit, we are drawn into a circle with Madonna, sucking on a cough drop, and her dancers holding hands, and she asks God to give her that “little something extra” since she is about to go onstage in her hometown. In Toronto, again armed with a cough drop instead of a rosary, Madonna asks God to see to it that the authorities don’t stop her from doing her masturbation scene onstage. When the prayer ends in that particular city, we are treated to an embarrassing encounter between Madonna and Freddy DeMann, her then manager, during which he tells her that two Toronto policemen are poised to arrest her if she doesn’t cut some of the more risqué dance sequences out of her show. Refusing to sacrifice her art or bow to censorship, Madonna instructs him to make her position clear to the authorities. If they don’t “back off,” she adds, she is prepared to go off to jail. Obediently, DeMann meets the two potbellied law enforcement officers and engages them in a serious discussion of human rights and artistic freedom concerning whether Madonna intends to feign masturbation onstage despite the threat of being hauled off à la Lenny Bruce in the middle of her performance.

The scene is surrealistic because Madonna actually believes that her audience will buy the transformation of Madonna into artist and activist, willing to risk her freedom to stand behind her rights as an artist. After all, this was the twentieth century, when a performer can have oral sex with an Evian bottle, encourage two gay men to tongue-kiss on-camera, have a romp in bed with her entire
Truth or Dare
cast, or feign masturbation onstage. It is comical, because even the Toronto cops appear not to believe the situation they find themselves in. In fact, they seem very aware that their brief moment in the annals of the Madonna archives will be marvelous fodder for all their future New Year’s Eve parties and summer barbecues.

In 1990 when the video “Justify My Love” came out and was banned on MTV, it was Madonna and not her director, Jean-Baptiste Mondino, who took full responsibility for its every note, movement, and sexual innuendo and nuance. Madonna was invited by reputable journalists to appear on a variety of interview programs to defend her work. Wearing a demure white blouse buttoned up to the neck, her hair pinned back in a librarian-style bun, Madonna went on ABC’s
Nightline
with Forrest Sawyer to defend what she described once again as her “artistic freedom.”

Madonna’s most intelligent and realistic defense of her music was a comparison she made to the singer formerly known as Prince. “All his songs talk blatantly about fucking and nobody says anything. He’s allowed, because he’s a man. Male rock stars flaunt it without having their music attacked. I thought about that, and I’d think, why aren’t they letting all this stand in the way of appreciating Prince’s music?”