Goddess: Inside Madonna (33 page)

By the time
A Certain Sacrifice
was finished
, Gotham Music was in financial trouble, and the relationships between Alter and Barbone, and Barbone and Madonna, were also having problems. One of the last times that the two women were together was on August 16, 1981, which was Camille Barbone’s thirty-second birthday, and Madonna’s twenty-third.

Packing a lobster picnic supper, Camille invited Madonna to a Long Island beach near New York City to celebrate.

“It was a beautiful sunset and we walked along the beach and talked. We were more physically affectionate than we had ever been. I kept telling her what a big star she was going to be, and at that moment, we both felt as if we could do anything. There were no limits.” According to Barbone, at one point, Madonna threw her arms around her neck and hugged her for a long time before she said, “Thank you. I love you.”

“I told her I’ve never put anyone before me,” Barbone concludes, “She lives before I do, she breathes before I breathe. We drove back to New York hugging.”

Despite Madonna’s relationships with both
men and women, her sexuality remains a matter of speculation. There have been rumors about affairs with such well-known women as Sandra Bernhard and Ingrid Casares. In the case of Casares, Madonna fueled those rumors when she and the nightclub owner briefly lived together in Castille del Largo, Madonna’s Hollywood home that once belonged to Bugsy Siegel, the founder of modern Las Vegas. At the time that the affair with Casares was purported to have taken place, in 1990, Madonna had just broken up with a male lover, Tony Ward, and had gone through an abortion. Just as she had done with previous lovers, as a token of her esteem, Madonna featured Ward in her video “Justify My Love,” as the erotic object of her affections.

Equally ambiguous was Madonna’s relationship with the openly gay comedian Sandra Bernhard, which was made public when the two women appeared on David Letterman’s show. The late-night television host held up a magazine article that claimed that the two women’s relationship was more than just platonic. “Is there any truth to this nonsense?” Letterman asked. Bernhard answered, “We party, we drink tequila. We get to know each other a little better.” Letterman then asked how the couple spent their time, and if he could be a part of it. “Only if you get a sex change,” Madonna replied. Bernhard added, “We meet up with Jennifer Grey [the star of
Dirty Dancing
], and sometimes it’s just the two of us. You can usually find us at the Canal Bar or at MK.” If the audience didn’t understand the reference, Letterman explained that these were two gay nightclubs in downtown Manhattan. And, if the audience still didn’t get it, Madonna added, “Or at the Cubby—” “Hole,” Bernhard interrupted, referring to the city’s best-known lesbian bar.

Then, the banter became even more specific as Madonna announced, “She doesn’t give a damn about me. She’s using me to get to Sean.”

“I slept with Sean Penn,” Bernhard suddenly confessed, referring to Madonna’s estranged husband, “and Madonna is better in bed!”

Madonna has never discussed her less spectacular lesbian relationships that occurred in high school, college, and during those early days in New York. If anything, she always rejected any notion that she was either homosexual or bisexual. As she told Kathy, her high school lover, when she quoted Truman Capote, “A person is either sexed or not . . .”

It is perhaps more logical to assume that loving women, for Madonna, was just taking the loss of her mother to another level. When Carrie Fisher interviewed Madonna on two occasions for
Rolling Stone
, published in the June 13 and June 27, 1991, issues of the magazine, they discussed many subjects, including the loss of her mother. Fisher asked Madonna, “What’s your mother complex?” to which Madonna replied, “That I don’t have one, so I’m always looking for someone to fill up my hole—no pun intended.”

W
hen the partnership ended, Alter was angrier at Camille than he was at Madonna for allowing her personal feelings to break up their potentially lifelong friendship. “Camille let the allure of Madonna completely blind her to anything else around her that may have had some real value, like friendship. She should have been stronger with Madonna, but apparently she couldn’t be. Her feelings for her made her keep pushing me to give her more and more money. Eventually, Madonna walked out because I refused to go bankrupt, and Camille couldn’t support Madonna without me. I was the Daddy Warbucks of the group.”

When Alter refused to go further into debt to keep funding Gotham Music and supporting their future star, Madonna threatened to leave Camille. “Camille didn’t level with me about what she had promised Madonna, which was the reason why she walked out on us. She counted on Camille’s guarantees based on what she imagined I had already agreed to. I didn’t know the extent of those financial promises.”

As the relationship between Madonna and Camille Barbone had gradually become more intimate, Alter felt that his star client never really took the time to get to know him. “I was basically the man with the money,” Alter says, “and it was Camille who engineered a lot of that. When she needed some cash, she’d go to Mommy Camille, and Camille would tell her to ask her daddy. And then she’d come to me, very shy and very coy. ‘Adam, can I have a little money?’ In addition to paying all her bills and giving her fifty dollars a week spending money, she had free run of the studio every day. We never charged her for studio time. So when she needed more money, I’d naturally ask her why and for what, which I suppose made me a kind of daddy. The way I saw it, Camille was the good cop, and I was the bad cop. Basically, Camille was ungracious about everything I did to help her and Madonna. Camille was manipulative and kept Madonna away from me, because she knew that eventually Madonna would break away from me. She really thought that if she created this chasm between us, Madonna would eventually break away and go off with her. Of course, she was wrong.”

At one point, shortly before the final rupture, Adam Alter got Madonna a job performing at The Underground, and the response was so overwhelmingly positive, he decided to introduce her to his parents. “We called her Brat or Emmy, and I told my father about her and how she was so completely narcissistic,” Alter says. “My father was reassuring because he told me that if you want to be a star, you have to be narcissistic, it was a form of star quality. You had to have a very evident passion for what you do, something that really shines, comes out of you, an energy, so that whatever you do, you’ll succeed. There was no doubt that Madonna had that quality.”

The meeting took place at the Alter family Park Avenue apartment. Lewis Alter was charmed by his son’s young discovery. In return, Madonna was equally impressed by Lewis, a man she was fascinated to learn was a legend in the world of jazz. Several months later, Madonna’s father, stepmother, and sister Paula came to New York, and she introduced her family to Adam Alter and Camille Barbone. “She was like a little kid,” Alter recalls, “let’s do this, let’s go here. She was really proud to be able to show her parents that, finally, she had people who believed in her. I remember that they were a very lovely, quaint couple, at least that was my impression. I also remember her sister Paula, who looked a lot like Madonna except she was taller. She struck me as the sister who wanted to be Madonna. She was very interested in auditioning and wanted to know if we were willing to listen to her sing.”

By 1982, Gotham Music was
bankrupt. Nothing of any value was left except for the furnishings and equipment. “Whatever the studio earned,” Alter maintains, “went to supporting Madonna when she should have been helping to support the studio. My problem was that I cared for her like a father. When she needed dental work, I sent her to my dentist and ended up paying the bills. Even years later, when she had money, she made no attempt to pay me back.”

More discouraging for both Alter and Barbone was that Madonna, along with Steve Bray, who was still living with her, decided that they did not want to continue singing songs that they described as “pop rock,” the type of music that Barbone had insisted that they focus on. “We were on the verge of getting Madonna a record deal with Warner Brothers,” Alter explains, “when suddenly money got scarce and they dropped out.” According to Alter, he still has one of Madonna’s first master tapes, which was never released. “That was the one we thought was good enough to shop,” Alter says, “and we would have had a record deal if a man we were dealing with at the time hadn’t decided to snort the deal away up his nose.”

Leaving emotion and gratitude at the door, Madonna confronted Camille Barbone in the studio and announced that she was no longer interested in continuing the association. Rather than alluding to the reality that there was no more money left in the coffers to support her, she told Barbone that she and Steve Bray had decided that what worked for them was a harder kind of music. In a fit of rage and frustration, Barbone put her fist through the wall.

Immediately following Madonna’s departure and the dissolution of Gotham Music, Adam Alter dislocated his knee in a karate accident. A friend of his moved all Adam’s equipment from the Gotham space into a smaller studio in the building. While Alter was at home recovering, the friend called to say that Madonna needed some studio time and would he allow her to use it for a while until she got settled. Alter agreed. By the time that he was back on his feet and had returned to the studio, he found that Camille Barbone had stripped it of everything that had anything to do with Madonna. “When you’re surrounded by perverts and sleaze,” Alter says, “a lot of people become innocent victims. It happened to me when all that craziness was just heaped on me and I didn’t know what to do with it.” He smiles. “So, that’s the reason why I’m working for foster care up in Westchester. I’m trying to salvage the people who are victims. My battle now is the have-nots against the haves.”

Those people who expect loyalty are usually prepared to give it. One observer says of Madonna that “if you cross her once, you might as well have never existed as far as she is concerned.” Adam Alter wonders about the reverse situation. “She’s an opportunist,” he says. “What happens to all those people that she crossed on her way to stardom?”

Within days after firing Camille
Barbone and Adam Alter, Madonna went back to the Danceteria to see her friend Mark Kamins. She quickly told him the story of her rupture with Gotham Music and asked him to listen to another demo record she had made. Kamins was not only considered the best of the “New Wave DJs,” but he also did some scouting for Island Records and had just signed up an obscure Irish rock group called U2. After taking the demo to Island Records, who turned it down, Kamins went directly to Warner Brothers, where he had recently finished work on the new David Byrne album. Through his success with Byrne, he had become friendly with Michael Rosenblatt, who was in charge of an offshoot label at Warner’s called Sire. Inviting Rosenblatt to stop by the Danceteria to listen to Madonna’s record and to meet the singer, Kamins predicted that he wouldn’t have to convince Rosenblatt to do anything more. Rosenblatt invited Kamins and Madonna to his office at Warner Brothers headquarters at Rockefeller Center and played the first song on her tape, “Everybody,” before listening to the other three. According to Rosenblatt, the recording was good but nothing spectacular. What kept his interest, however, was Madonna. “She radiated something I had never seen before,” he said. “I knew that she was a star!”

They drew up the contract right there. Madonna would receive an initial advance of $5,000 plus royalties and publishing fees of $1,000 for each song that she wrote. But the deal couldn’t be signed until Rosenblatt got permission from the president of Sire Records, Seymour Stein, who was in Lenox Hill Hospital recovering from a double bypass. The next day, Rosenblatt, Kamins, and Madonna piled into a taxi and headed for the hospital, where they met Stein in his underwear with an intravenous drip attached to his arm.

Madonna’s only problem was that she had promised Steve Bray that he could produce her records, and now she found herself indebted to Mark Kamins, who had every intention of functioning as the producer. In an effort to compromise with Bray but not lose the deal with Sire, Madonna offered him the job of arranger. Bray refused and didn’t speak to Madonna for several years.

Sire Records decided to put out Madonna’s first single with “Ain’t No Big Deal” on the B side and “Everybody” on the A side. When the people at Sire didn’t like “Ain’t No Big Deal,” at the last minute, they made the unheard-of decision to put “Everybody” on both sides of the record, which catapulted the song to the top of the dance charts.

After the success of her first record, Madonna was asked by several journalists if she had used men to get “to the top.” “Every one of those men that I supposedly stepped on to get to the top,” Madonna answered, “would take me back, because they still love me and I still love them.”

It is debatable whether Steve Bray, Mark Kamins, Dan Gilroy, Adam Alter, or anyone else during those early days would “take Madonna back” because they still “loved her.” What is clear is that after the release of “Everybody,” immediately followed by “Physical Attraction,” Madonna already had another record producer. Reggie Lucas not only produced that second hit, but he also wrote it. After that, Sire Records gave Madonna their support and approval for an album. “Reggie Lucas only knew R&B,” Madonna explained, “and he’s a good producer, very open and sensitive, but Nile [Rodgers] has worked with so many kinds of musicians, and every record he’s made is a great one as far as I’m concerned. He has the pop thing in him really strong, and he’s done great dance stuff with Chic and Sister Sledge and all those others, and he’s worked with a lot of female vocalists like Diana Ross. I identified with him, too. He’s a real street person, and we hung out at the same clubs. Even before I started to interview producers, I thought he was the one I wanted for that second record.”