Goddess: Inside Madonna (28 page)

When Madonna appeared on Arsenio Hall’s show and talked about spanking as she used it in “Hanky Panky” from the album
I’m Breathless
, which was inspired by the film
Dick Tracy
, starring Madonna and Warren Beatty, Hall claimed that finally “Madonna went too far.” When Hall asked Madonna if the song expressed her own feelings on discipline, Madonna replied, “I don’t like it really hard, though. Just a little stinging, and it’s good.” The theme came out of a line used in the film
Dick Tracy
, when Madonna, playing Breathless Mahoney, extols the virtues of a good spanking and says to Dick Tracy, portrayed by Warren Beatty, “You don’t know whether to hit me or kiss me.” The song also features the important line “My bottom hurts just thinking about it.”

The miracle of Madonna is
that the scandal she creates has always been for public consumption. Unlike her peers and colleagues who have made it to stardom, she has never risked drugs or asylums, trashed hotel rooms, bounced checks, involved herself with a married partner, got caught masturbating in a public place, or carried a concealed weapon.

A prudent rebel, she has guaranteed her “wanna-bes” that they could change their appearances without permanently marring their looks. She has also assured their parents that their children’s transformation is an innocent moment, after which they can revert back to themselves. Interpretation for Madonna was always safer than definition. It gave her the possibility to change her mind, her style, her tune, and her image, which gave her fans the possibility not to commit themselves to any one fad.

On May 27, 1985,
Time
magazine did a cover story on Madonna, which was “a defense of teenagers who are caught up in the Madonna craze.”
Time
pointed out that “these same young people who were Madonna fans could be out stealing hubcaps or doing drugs. At least onstage she exhibits a kind of asexual sexuality, mostly caught up in a style that is less revealing except for a naked midriff than it is a thumbing the nose at conventional fashion. The difference between Madonna and the other girl singers that emerged during the recording heyday of the middle 1980s is that she has never been a product of MTV or any other superficial media packagers as she has always exhibited too much personality and independence.”

Madonna set other examples as well for her public.

Madonna never feared success. Defeat was her enemy, to be forced to go back where she’d come from, either literally or metaphorically. For a while when she first landed in New York, she refused to say the name of her hometown, as if by articulating it, something beyond her power would carry her back there against her will.

S
everal months after Madonna and Norris Burroughs broke up, she bumped into him on the street. Back then, her life moved at such an incredibly fast pace with so many changes that if a day or a week passed, not to mention a month, it was impossible to know where she was living, or with whom. Since she had last seen Burroughs, Madonna had moved twice and was currently living in the Riverside Drive apartment of a Columbia University professor and his two teenage sons.

Every year, on May 1, Norris Burroughs, along with a musician friend of his named Dan Gilroy, a quirky, clean-cut Irishman, a cross between Art Carney and Jimmy Cagney who usually had a toothpick stuck in his mouth, had a “rites of spring party.” Currently, Dan Gilroy writes music for commercials and lives in Texas with the actress Shelley Duvall.

“We’d borrow a loft,” Burroughs explains, “and we’d celebrate spring, dance around and act wild.” It was at the party that Madonna met Dan Gilroy, who was not particularly impressed with his friend’s ex-girlfriend. Madonna judged Gilroy to be rude and pompous, while he thought that she was depressing and morose. As the evening wore on, they found themselves in a lively conversation about rock and roll and the general state of the music business. At the time, Dan, along with his brother, Ed, were living in an abandoned synagogue in Queens, which they also used as a studio to compose and record their music.

“We all used to go to the ‘gogue’ and hang out,” Burroughs recalls, “and basically listen to Dan and Ed try and find new sounds, which they were hoping to record.”

Dan Gilroy is credited with giving Madonna a guitar and encouraging her to experiment with different chords and sounds. “I heard the songs she wrote in the beginning,” Burroughs continues, “and I even used to sing with her. They were basic bar chords and guitar, and while it’s easy to write simple rock-and-roll songs if you can sing and play basic chords, she had something special.” He smiles. “When she was with Dan, we still had a few kisses here and there, but mostly I would help her with her music.”

Burroughs admits that he has never been a big fan of Madonna’s singing or songwriting ability, but he can still understand why it became so popular: “It’s infectious, the timing is good, and it’s all about girl power, feminism, and young women’s sexuality.” He pauses. “Basically, it’s all about her special kind of energy.”

On September 25, 1979
, the Broadway production of
Evita
, starring Patti LuPone, opened at the Broadway Theatre and instantly became the toast of New York. Through a friend who knew someone who worked at the theater, Madonna managed to get in after the curtain went up. She stood in the back, behind a pillar, and watched the play. Though she was lucid enough to know that she would never have the chance to play
Evita
on the New York stage, seeing Eva Perón’s life acted out before her eyes was enough to convince her that one day she would achieve similar success and international recognition.

At the same time that the Broadway show opened, the British director Ken Russell was set to direct
Evita
for the screen. He immediately sought Julie Covington, who made the role famous on the London stage, to play Evita in his film. When Covington turned it down, Russell proposed the role to Barbra Streisand, who also turned the project down. In a last effort to keep
Evita
alive, Russell offered the part to Liza Minnelli, who accepted it, only to learn that Russell was unable to get the financial backing he had been promised. At the time, Tim Rice, the lyricist, was lobbying for his good friend Elaine Paige to sing the title role on-screen as she had also made the role famous on the London stage. When Ken Russell argued with Rice, refusing to cast someone who resembled Princess Margaret in the title role, Russell did nothing to endear himself to the man who had considerable say in pushing the project forward.

Added to Russell’s woes was that at this point in his career, after a series of overbloated and overblown films that were failures at the box office, including
Lisztomania
and
Tommy
, followed by such unimpressive bombs as
Altered States
and
China Blue
, he was considered a bad risk.

While Ken Russell was at a glitch in his career, which would result in his losing the movie project, Madonna was working with Dan Gilroy on her music. Years later, she once said, “How ironic that
Evita
was introduced to the American public at the same time that I was writing my first song.”

By 1980, Madonna was concentrating mainly on her music. Dan Gilroy had become not only her primary romantic interest, but the person who, more than anyone else, encouraged her to practice on his synthesizer and to go out on as many auditions as she could, if for no other reason than to gather experience and to see what her competition was up to. One of those auditions was held in a cavernous rehearsal hall on Broadway. Two music producers from France, Jean Van Lieu and Jean-Claude Pellerin, were looking for a group of girls to sing backup for a French singer who had made an international name for himself with one disco tune called “Born to Be Alive,” which had sold 25 million records throughout the world.

Patrick Hernandez, who is half Spanish and half Italian, is still referred to as The Myth throughout Europe because of the enormous success of that one hit record. A thoughtful and down-to-earth man, who never had any formal musical training, Hernandez, at fifty-two, lives quietly in the south of France with his family. Tall and stocky, with unkempt, graying hair, he still recalls the audition and remembers one hopeful who stood out in the crowd of more than fifteen hundred young women. Once again, Madonna was lucky. She could have auditioned for anybody, but instead fell upon an international star who also happened to be a decent human being. “At the time I met Madonna in New York,” Hernandez says, “she was running after the best opportunity, anything that paid her something to survive.” He shrugs. “And I’m a nice guy, I never exploited her. I only helped her.”

In 1965, when Patrick Hernandez was sixteen years old, his parents sent him to a small seaside town near Canterbury in England to learn English. His father, who was a pharmacist, and his mother, an accountant, hoped that their only son would become an English teacher. Patrick always had a passion for music and grew up in a home where music was a regular part of his life. Every Sunday, his father, who played the banjo and mandolin, would organize musicales at their house. Without family or friends and living far from Paris, where he had had access to many different cultural diversions, Hernandez found there was nothing much to do in that dreary English town except study and listen to music. The Beatles had just become popular in England, although not yet on the Continent, and Hernandez, obsessed with their sound, decided to play, compose, and sing his own music. Like Madonna, he had never had any formal musical training and learned to play by instinct and by ear. Little by little, he taught himself drums, the keyboard, and bass and began to write his own music on the piano and the guitar. When he finished his studies, he returned to France and had a marginal success playing at weddings and parties with a series of small groups in the suburbs and provinces. In 1974 and 1975, he joined more prestigious and professional groups and even made several records that never sold. In 1977, he formed his own band called Paris Palace Hotel, or PPH, which also had limited success. For a while his group was the butt of jokes around Paris, often referred to as PPH, or
passera pas l’hiver
, which in French means “won’t last the winter.” After several years, when things still seemed not to be breaking for the aspiring rock-and-roll singer, he decided that he was too old to make a serious name for himself in show business. Breaking up the band, he moved to a region in France called the Périgord, where, along with a girlfriend, he set about cultivating veal for the market.

Though Hernandez believed that stardom had eluded him forever, he was still being represented by a brilliant Belgian impresario and record producer by the name of Jean Van Lieu. Van Lieu and his wife, Muriel, who would work with him throughout his life, until his death in 2000 at sixty-one from lung cancer, had both tried to convince Hernandez not to give up on his group and abandon the music business. By the time Jean Van Lieu called his client turned farmer in the Périgord to announce that he had several interesting projects for him, Hernandez was already getting bored with the country, the veal, and the girlfriend.

Van Lieu pointed out that since Hernandez wasn’t working for anyone and didn’t have his own group, he might consider coming back to Paris and working for Van Lieu. “He thought that maybe together we could come up with something that he could market,” Hernandez explains. After several fruitless phone conversations, Van Lieu finally sent Hernandez a telegram, asking him to come to Belgium. Hernandez left the Périgord and spent several months at the Van Lieu home, marking the beginning of a lifelong relationship.

An innovative record producer, who had a reputation for giving unknown artists a chance either to record their own compositions or to have them recorded by well-known singers, Van Lieu received music written by young composers from all over Europe. His idea at the time was that Hernandez would record several of the more promising pieces, although as Hernandez explained during a recent interview in Paris, “In retrospect, if Jean made one error, it was in thinking that I was solely a singer and not a composer.” As it turned out, Patrick Hernandez was both.

During one of their recording sessions as they searched around for the “right sound,” Hernandez asked Van Lieu if he would mind listening to a “little tune” that Hernandez had composed on his guitar and for which he had written the words in English. The name of the song was “Born to Be Alive.”

According to Hernandez, he was inspired by a song written by Stephen Ball called “Born to Be Wild.”

“It just came to me,” Hernandez recalls. “I was sitting in a corner near my fireplace and just strumming the guitar when I thought about all the people who I knew who were alive but not really living. How they all went about their routine little lives, not daring to pack a guitar over their shoulders and travel the world, smoke hashish, meet new people, have new adventures.”

The year was 1978 and disco had become the rage throughout the world because of the hit movie and album called
Saturday Night Fever
. Van Lieu immediately recognized that “Born to Be Alive” could become a hit, but only if it was adapted to the disco sound. The result was a major success for the Van Lieus and Patrick Hernandez, a recording that entered the
Guinness Book of World Records
as number three in the American Hit Parade for all-time greatest hits. Fortunately for Hernandez, Jean and Muriel Van Lieu, who owned the copyright, and Jean-Claude Pellerin, their partner, who owned the publishing rights, advised him to keep all the foreign rights for the song to be sold, dividing the profits three ways, on a country-by-country basis.

Muriel Van Lieu was eight
months pregnant with her daughter when her husband put her in charge of the New York audition. With the help of her producers and a choreographer, she put ads in all the professional magazines and newspapers, calling for young men and women, dancers and singers, who would eventually be chosen as a backup group for an internationally famous singer. Tall, blond, and attractive, Muriel Van Lieu dresses in designer clothes and comes to Paris once a month from her home near the French/Belgian border to take care of copyright business and to shop. Along with her daughter, who is now twenty-one, she runs a discotheque, H
₂
O, which during an average weekend entertains more than four thousand people. Recently widowed, she remembers with absolute precision that time more than twenty-one years ago when she first met Madonna.