Goddess: Inside Madonna (32 page)

When Camille Barbone, Alter’s partner, who had nurtured Madonna during those early days, acting as mommy and manager, got her priorities mixed up and let her personal feelings override her professional duties, the singer made it clear that there was a time to play and a time to work.

A
dam Alter lives in a small, cluttered apartment in a quaint three-story, wood-frame private house in Cornwall, New York, with a parrot and two small dogs. The atmosphere in the three large rooms is similar to that of a graduate student’s apartment in which every surface is covered with papers, unopened mail, textbooks, and notepads, while unwashed dishes are piled in the kitchen sink and clothes are strewn on the living-room sofas. The furniture in the apartment is heavy mahogany, vintage 1950s thrift shop or heir-looms that have been taken out of a family garage or attic to fill up a house in which the owner seems to be in transition. Alter, who is forty-nine and bears a striking resemblance to John Malkovich, is currently working in the Westchester County court system in the foster-care section while completing a master’s degree at Hunter College in Manhattan.

Adam Alter met Camille Barbone in 1975 when he was twenty-three and she was twenty-six. At the time, he had a truck route and was selling alfalfa sprouts to health food stores throughout the New York City area, not exactly a profession that gave him hard life lessons to go out into the world of rock and roll. Still dressed in army fatigues with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, Alter resembles the “nature boy” that he claims he was when he decided to go into the music business. “I learned about horticulture,” Alter says, “because it interested me. At the time I lived at Fourteenth and Third Avenue and felt really like a nature boy trapped in Manhattan.”

Adam Alter grew up in the music business. His father, Lewis Alter, was a jazz and popular instrumentalist and composer who wrote, among many other hits, the well-known instrumental “Side Street and Gotham,” which was the inspiration for the name that Adam Alter chose for his company, Gotham Music. In his childhood, his family lived in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive, Central Park West, and eventually on Park Avenue, where Henny Youngman and Milton Berle were considered part of the family and even taught Adam how to play pool.

“My childhood could be described as privileged, I guess,” Alter says. “My mother was an opera singer, and she had a lot of good times until I was born and then my sister came along, who is a dwarf. We were very stressful on her and she suffered for fifteen years from terminal cancer, so things weren’t what you’d call ideal.”

Looking back to the exact moment when he first got interested in the music business, Alter admits that it was naturally due to the atmosphere around his house. But he also got involved in the underside of the business through a manager and friend named Keith Allen, who introduced Alter to Camille Barbone.

“When I met Camille,” Alter explains, “I was very naive, especially about business. Camille came in with some experience because she had worked at CBS Records, so she felt very sure of herself and high-and-mighty. And me, not having any experience on my own other than my parents and what they had shared with me, I took her word as something like gospel.”

It was a bad moment for Adam Alter to consider going into the music business. In 1980 and 1981, the business, which had revolved around rock and roll, hit bottom. People were not investing, mainly because the earnings were not good, and because they sensed a new wave was coming and that the music would be drastically shifting and changing directions, although no one could really predict what the new sound would be. Barbone told Alter that before she could commit to any partnership with him, she needed to borrow several thousand dollars to get her out of a previous arrangement she had made with someone else. If Alter was hesitant about joining up with Barbone, he quickly changed his mind when she produced the Rolling Stones’ rhythm guitarist, Keith Richards, as a friend and someone who knew her when she had worked with the group at CBS.

“I gave Camille the money to bail her out of that other partnership deal and we formed Gotham Music,” Alter recalls. Working against incredible odds, with little financial backing and surrounded by people who were heavily into drugs, Alter regrets that he didn’t pay more attention to his father’s warnings. “At the time,” he says, “my father saw that, and I see now what he saw back then.”

Gotham Music took offices in the Music Building, and there, waiting for the elevator one morning, Adam Alter met Madonna. Furiously cracking gum, she was dressed in her usual outfit of torn jeans and a midriff blouse, her hair sleeked back in a boyish bob, her big green-blue eyes taunting and amused as she approached him.

“I was wearing my John Lennon glasses,” he recalls, “these small, round shades, and she struck up a conversation, telling me how cool my glasses were and how I looked just like John Lennon.” It took only minutes more for Madonna to explain that she was camping out in one of the abandoned studios and was looking around for a manager who would be willing to let her use his studio to rehearse and to listen to a demo tape that she had made.

“She was very young and very, very seductive, and she asked me if I knew anyone who could help her make music. I didn’t hesitate for an instant. I told her that maybe I could help her, or my partner, and I took her right upstairs, which was basically just one flight up, to meet Camille.” With Madonna in tow, Adam walked into the office and was about to introduce the two women when Camille and Madonna, at the same moment, started laughing. “Apparently, Camille had already met her in the lobby and probably just thought she was another ‘tobacco row’ squatter, because she had ignored her pleas to help her meet someone in the music business.”

Madonna played her one demo tape for Alter and Barbone, and immediately both knew that there was something special about this young girl. “We both had a good ear for music,” Alter says, “but our ability to convince the industry about Madonna was our weak point and would turn out to be our downfall. At that point, with the music business in such bad shape, we just couldn’t do it. The industry just locked up. Two years later, the industry was shopping, buying, and picking up everyone around and signing them up.”

Years later, Adam Alter still believes that Madonna could have been their major shot to make their business succeed. “I don’t know if I looked at it that Madonna would stay with us forever,” Alter admits, “but I believed she was our stepping-stone, and I saw that in her immediately.”

When Alter and Barbone formed their partnership, it was understood that Alter would finance the company. “At the time,” he says, “I was the man who paid the rent, all the expenses, as well as Camille’s salary.” After they signed Madonna up as their first client, Alter began paying all of Madonna’s expenses as well, including her rent, food, pocket money, dental bills, as well as giving her free studio time during which she could practice on the company synthesizer and the Rhodes piano, which he had brought from home. Eventually, after Gotham Music went bankrupt, Alter donated the piano and all the other equipment in the studio to Staten Island College.

For the two years that Adam Alter was paying the bills, Barbone was engineering Madonna’s career to the exclusion of any other client they managed to get as well as ignoring the business. For most of that time, Madonna followed Barbone’s advice and created music that was light rock. “Her voice was possibly the least special thing about her,” Alter recalls, “although for some reason, she sounded better when we had her. It was her writing ability, her enthusiasm, her zest for working, that was responsible for her stardom. From a strictly professional point of view, she had tremendous drive. She was unwilling to take no for an answer, and if you do something and do it well and keep on doing it, you can’t fail.”

According to Adam Alter, the problem was that Camille Barbone was not only enchanted by Madonna, but physically attracted to her as well.

Adam Alter believes that Barbone took her professional relationship with their client Madonna to the “brink of impropriety.” Alter says, “I don’t know if they actually had an affair, but it was close.” He himself had an “intense relationship” with both women. “My relationship with Madonna and Camille was brief and chaotic, and in a sense we were like a family. I was like an orphan and Camille felt like an orphan, and Madonna was all alone in a strange city,” Alter explains. “We were like a family and spent a lot of time together. We argued. We made up. It was only a year, but it was fast and furious and a lot happened during that time.”

In one incident between Madonna and Barbone, the singer made it clear that her rejection had nothing to do with her sexual tastes and everything to do with her freedom. On the way back from a downtown club, Madonna necked in the backseat of Barbone’s car with a girlfriend, while the distraught manager was at the wheel, looking in the rearview mirror and cursing her soon-to-be ex-client. According to Barbone, often before Madonna or the girlfriend would go to bed with a man, they would put him to a test. Kissing each other in front of him, they would watch his reaction. If he got flustered or embarrassed, they would leave him. If he seemed open to their relationship, they would give him their seal of approval.

According to Alter, Madonna was flirtatious by nature and always in need of something, either money or free studio time to practice or just someone to comfort her when she felt alone. Although Adam Alter insists that he drew “strict boundaries” with Madonna, Barbone had a penchant for mixing up her personal and professional relationships. “Camille wound up taking an apartment with another client we had,” Alter says, “a lady who went to Sarah Lawrence with my ex-wife and who was a very talented keyboard player and songwriter and a much more genuine person than Madonna. Camille had no scruples or ethics about mixing business with pleasure. Eventually that client wanted to sever the personal aspect of their relationship, because it was getting too strained and incestuous.” For a brief time Alter and Barbone moved in together after he lent his studio apartment on the Lower East Side to the client, in an effort to keep her and to help her to distance herself from Barbone. “Camille and I just decided we were sick of the city, so we rented a four-story Victorian house on the water in Bayside, Queens, where we each had our own floor. We had a car and we drove in every morning and back out every evening.”

Camille Barbone has a different
interpretation of events, especially concerning any impropriety that occurred between her and their client. “Is Madonna a lesbian?” she asks rhetorically. “I wouldn’t exactly say so. What I will say is that Madonna loves beautiful women, and she is into anyone sexually who she thinks is beautiful.”

According to Barbone, for the year and a half that they were together, she functioned not only as a manager and mentor but also as a mother figure. “She confided in me and revealed some of her most intimate hopes and fears, and I even arranged for her to get birth control,” Barbone maintains.

Barbone insists that if anyone was the seducer in the relationship, it was Madonna: “She used to taunt me by flaunting her body. She sweats profusely while she’s performing, and when she did a show, she used to rip off her clothes and throw me a towel to dry her off.”

In August 1981, while Madonna
was waiting for her big break in the music business, Camille Barbone suggested that she meet a friend of hers from Queens. Steve Lewicki, a graduate student at the film school at New York University, was making a Godard-type movie that he described as “primitive and fluid,” and that its detractors would eventually label pornographic. With a budget of only $20,000 to make the film, Lewicki put an ad in
Back Stage
, describing the woman he wanted as his star for the movie he would call
A Certain Sacrifice:
“a dark, fiery young woman, dominant, with lots of energy, who can dance and is willing to work for no pay.” Barbone showed Madonna the ad and suggested that she answer it immediately. Lewicki had already gotten more than three hundred replies from young, would-be actresses, who were willing to work for nothing, when Camille Barbone delivered a three-page letter herself to his office. Madonna had written it in longhand.

“Dear Stephen,” the letter began, “I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, where I began my career in petulance and precociousness. By the time I was in the fifth grade, I knew I either wanted to be a nun or a movie star. Nine months in a convent cured me of the first disease. During high school I became slightly schizophrenic as I couldn’t choose between class virgin or the other kind. Both of them had their values as far as I could see . . .” Signed, “Madonna Ciccone.”

Camille Barbone didn’t wait around to find out what Lewicki thought. After he read the letter and studied the photograph, he knew without any doubt that Miss Ciccone was perfect for the role.
A Certain Sacrifice
is the story of a young woman named Bruna, who, not unlike Susan in
Desperately Seeking Susan
, is a vagabond, street-smart New Yorker. But any similarity between the two characters that Madonna plays ends there. Bruna, a girl with a healthy sexual appetite, lives with three sex slaves, whom she agrees to give up only when she falls in love with the perfect man. Eventually, Bruna’s Prince Charming appears, but just as she is about to embark on a new life, she is raped and enlists the help of her three ex–sex slaves to avenge her rape. They agree and track down the rapist, kill him, and drink his blood. Key scenes in the film include a dance orgy with her lovers, her rape in a coffee-shop rest room, and the ritual sacrifice of the rapist.

The film was shot from September 1980 through June 1981. On September 20, 1980, in the middle of production, Madonna signed a release authorizing commercial depiction of her performance at the same time that Lewicki agreed to give her $100 to pay her rent. Several years later, when Madonna was just beginning to be successful with her singing career, she tried to stop Lewicki from selling the film. Madonna’s lawyer Paul Schindler accused Lewicki of trying to capitalize on his good luck at having captured Madonna on film while she was an unknown. In an affidavit in which Madonna also sought unspecified punitive and compensatory damages from Stephen Lewicki, she stated, “While I have consented to the use of my voice and pictures of my physical likeness from the movie, I did not consent to the use of my name.” Justice Ethel Danzig heard the case and assigned a show-cause order that required Lewicki to show why he should not be barred from distributing the film with Madonna’s name attached. In response, Lewicki claimed that the movie was not pornography and Madonna’s current image was hardly “saintly.” He described the film as “new wave, Lower East Side, postpunk,” and insisted that it was “definitely not porn . . . but sexy.” In the end, Paul Schindler conceded that any effort to prevent Mr. Lewicki’s exploitation of the film could result in publicity that would give it black-market value—which is exactly what happened. In the end, Lewicki released the film on videocassette for $49.95.