Goddess: Inside Madonna (35 page)

In 1983, Penn appeared in
Bad Boys
, a film in which he played a teenage gang member who ends up in a correctional facility. When the prison psychiatrist informs him that his girlfriend has been beaten and raped by his Puerto Rican counterpart in a rival gang, Penn’s instincts were
not
to do “what every other actor in his right mind would have done, which is to go nuts.” Instead, the young actor reached deep into himself and decided that if he had heard that news in real life, he would simply break down and cry. The reaction impressed the critics, especially David Ansen, who wrote in
Newsweek
, “He barely raises his voice, but commands the screen as he commands the joint, winning your sympathy without even asking for it.” Richard Rosenthal, who directed the film, said Penn was “the most talented young actor in films today.”

In 1984, Penn appeared in Louis Malle’s
Crackers
, a remake of the Italian film
Big Deal on Madonna Street
, or, in Italian,
I Soliti Ignoti
, a 1956 movie about a bunch of crooks who run a pawnshop. If the title was prophetic, the film was not in regard to Penn’s future success as an actor. The reviews were bad, and Penn decided to return to the Broadway stage to improve his acting technique. By the time he appeared in a limited run of Robert Allan Ackerman’s
Slab Boys
, his engagement to Pam Springsteen was off. After the run of the play, Penn, with renewed confidence, went back to Los Angeles, where he landed a part in Richard Benjamin’s
Racing With the Moon
, playing a country boy who, in 1942, is waiting to be called up for the war. The year was 1984, and Sean Penn fell in love with his costar Elizabeth McGovern. During the filming, Penn’s penchant for violence and jealousy became a troubling reality, both for his costars and his girlfriend. When Penn learned that a male reporter was sitting with McGovern in her trailer during a break, he began rocking the trailer back and forth and shouting obscenities until a startled McGovern and the photographer finally emerged after they realized what was going on. “It was not a question of Penn being fearful of his fiancée talking to the press,” one of the extras remarked, “than he was livid that she was alone in her trailer with another man.”

His temper tantrums and uncontrollable rages continued in proportion to his drinking, which was also getting out of hand, and Penn developed a reputation for being “difficult on a set.” He had also developed a hatred for the press. During those rare times when he agreed to sit for an interview to promote a film, if he didn’t end up stomping off in fury, he affected long silences during conversations, imitating Robert De Niro, another of his cinematic heroes.

In 1984, John Schlesinger directed Penn, along with Timothy Hutton, in
The Falcon and the Snowman
, a film about two friends who sell secrets to the Russians. Though Schlesinger had enormous respect for Penn as an actor, he considered the time spent making the film a veritable nightmare. “No one,” Schlesinger said, “is that talented to have to take all that violent crap.”

In 1985, Penn’s drinking, womanizing, and hostility to the press along with his wild antics when he was roaming Hollywood with his buddies in the Brat Pack gave him a reputation as unreliable. Although he was still getting good reviews, directors were increasingly reluctant to cast him because he got in brawls on the set, showed up late, or turned up so hungover that he was unable to work.

James Foley, who had directed
Reckless
in 1984, starring Aidan Quinn and Daryl Hannah, a movie about a young man who is thrown out of his house by his alcoholic father and goes on to live a reckless life, would also direct one of Penn’s least memorable films,
At Close Range
, costarring Christopher Walken and Chris Penn. The film is about a rural family who murder another rural family to get their farm equipment and is filled with gratuitous violence.

James Foley knew Madonna and would eventually direct her in one of her most embarrassing films,
Who’s That Girl
, as well as two of her most successful videos, “Papa Don’t Preach” and the European version of “True Blue.” Also a close friend of Penn’s, Foley sensed that Penn was depressed over the breakup with McGovern and despondent that his career had stagnated. He decided that Penn needed a successful and strong-willed woman to calm him and inspire him to get sober and refocus his energy on his talent. He suggested that Penn might want to meet Madonna, although Foley’s idea to introduce the pair was in response to a comment that Penn had once made about the singer: “She’s me,” he said, “my female counterpart.”

Mary Lambert is a quiet
, small, pale woman who left her hometown of Helena, Arkansas, to study at the Rhode Island School of Design. While she was there, she became friends with David Byrne who was just putting together his group, Talking Heads. Byrne inspired Lambert and marked the beginning of her passion for rock and film. When she left Rhode Island, she had a degree in painting, a taste for Wenders and Herzog, and an ambition to make short, personal films. Her only two features movies were
Siesta
in 1987 and
Pet Sematary
in 1989 before she settled into making rock videos, which included Sting’s “We’ll Be Together Again Tonight” as well as “Borderline” and “Like a Prayer” for Madonna. A friend of Penn’s and of Foley’s, Lambert also happened to be directing “Material Girl” when Foley called and asked her to allow the young actor to visit Madonna on the set.

“I was standing at the top of these steps,” Madonna recalls, “waiting while people were doing some lighting, and I looked down and noticed this guy in a leather jacket and sunglasses, sort of standing in the corner, looking at me. I came down the steps and walked right by and said, ‘Hi,’ but very cold, before I realized it was Sean Penn. Hours went by, and it had gotten dark, and I saw him poke his head around the corner again. I was like, ‘Are you still here?’”

Instead of getting discouraged by her chilly greeting, Penn was smitten. He hung around until finally, at the end of the day’s taping, Madonna came downstairs to talk to him. “There were people everywhere,” Madonna continues, “so it was hard for us to have this conversation, but we were just kind of throwing questions at each other and being really protective. Finally, when he was about to leave, I said, ‘Wait a minute, I have something for you.’ I had given flowers to everybody in the cast and the crew of the video, all the guys, and I had one left so I ran back upstairs, and when I came back, I handed him a rose.”

At that moment, Madonna had a fantasy that they were going to fall in love and get married.

When Madonna first encountered Sean Penn, she had been through a series of relationships that had never lasted long enough to culminate into something serious. In the spring of 1983, Madonna met John “Jellybean” Benitez, a talented and ambitious musician from Spanish Harlem who worked as a master of ceremonies and disc jockey at the Fun House, the Danceteria’s biggest club rival. Madonna knew that Jellybean had connections in the music business and was the type of person who knew how to meet the right people and make those contacts work for him. Jellybean used his first paycheck at the Fun House to hire a publicist to make sure that he was known around the club scene. Many people credited Benitez as one of the people who helped Madonna launch her career. Short, barely standing five feet six, with black eyes and dark, shoulder-length hair, he was the typical hot-tempered Spanish lover. Instead of being frightened by his jealous rages if she even looked at another man, Madonna was excited by the attention. Benitez has the distinction of being one of only three or four men in Madonna’s life whom she really loved, or whom she considered a serious partner in a long-term relationship. Unfortunately, the timing was wrong. Neither was willing to sacrifice for the other’s career, neither was ready to commit to an exclusive relationship, and neither was prepared to be a parent.

Monogamy was never one of Madonna’s greatest attributes. While she was having an affair with Benitez, she was also seeing Futura 2000, the artist who was one of Andy Warhol’s protégés, and Mark Kamins, the disc jockey from Danceteria, and Erica Bell, who was running the elevator at Danceteria. Not only were the two women sometime lovers, but they were also good friends and would remain so for many years.

When Sire Records decided to put “Everybody” on both sides of Madonna’s first single, eliminating “Ain’t No Big Deal,” they had a problem replacing it with another song that was a suitable substitute to complete her first album. An even bigger problem was that Seymour Stein and Michael Rosenblatt, the executives at Sire who were in charge of Madonna, were worried that they would be unable to convince the executives at Warner’s, their parent company, to put up the additional money to replace the song for the album. Desperate to find a solution, Rosenblatt decided that the best person to “sell” Madonna was Madonna, and he put her on a plane for Los Angeles to convince the financial people at Warner’s to increase their budget for her new album to include another song. Ultimately, Madonna was successful, although there was a tense moment when she first walked into the meeting with the Warner executives and they saw her in person for the first time. Visibly shocked, they admitted that they didn’t expect to see a pale, blond woman. Based on the sound of her voice and her raw, uninhibited style, they had all assumed that she was black.

After Madonna returned to New York with the financial backing and support to find another song, the people at Sire faced an even more complicated dilemma. Where were they going to find a song quickly that would fit in with the sound and style of the album? Once again, Madonna had the solution. She went directly to her boyfriend Jellybean, who came through with a song that he had written called “Holiday.” Initially, Madonna’s album was to be called simply
Madonna
, not only to introduce her name to the public but also to avoid putting her image on the cover since her largest audience so far had been on black radio stations. For a while, Seymour Stein was intent on calling the album
Lucky Star
, after one of the songs that Madonna had written for her lover Mark Kamins as a touching way to end their relationship. In the end, under pressure from Rosenblatt and the others at Warner Brothers, Seymour Stein decided to keep
Madonna
as the title to avoid using her image. Madonna dedicated the album to her father.

The album was released in 1983 and was not an immediate success. Reverting to her old ploy of making the rounds of the downtown clubs and dancing suggestively to her music, Madonna was largely responsible for “Holiday”’s slow but steady climb up the charts within six months. By 1984, both “Lucky Star” and “Borderline,” two more songs from the album, made it into the Top 10. Even more significant was that the album led to Madonna’s appearance on MTV with a video, “Everybody.” At the time, Seymour Stein was not convinced that the video would do as well as the records. As he had predicted, Madonna’s debut video was not a rousing success since it was too disco in flavor for television. Madonna’s next video, “Burning Up,” a combination of surreal special effects with a sadomasochistic theme, was her first major success. In the video, Madonna appears with a chain around her neck while she moves seductively down the middle of a highway, aware that a man in a convertible is trying to run her over. The man behind the wheel was another lover, Ken Compton, which did nothing to improve what had become a tempestuous relationship with Jellybean Benitez. Despite the torment that she was going through with Jellybean, her career was finally taking off. Her next video, in 1984, was “Lucky Star,” which would be the first of fifteen consecutive Top 5 hits, which gave Madonna the distinction of having surpassed the record previously held by Elvis Presley and the Beatles.

With constant episodes of infidelity, screaming scenes in which Madonna was reduced to hysteria, begging Benitez not to leave her, and after undergoing several abortions, Madonna and Jellybean spent more time separating and making up than they did trying to cement a relationship that was supposed to end in marriage.

On one occasion, when they decided to get back together, Madonna was in Spokane, Washington, shooting
Vision Quest
, the movie in which she made a cameo appearance. Lonely and unhappy, she called her new manager, Freddy DeMann, and begged him to allow Jellybean to come out to Washington to visit her. During that visit, the couple decided to get engaged. Madonna, on an impulse, called her father in Michigan to announce the news and advise him that they would be coming to Rochester Hills to visit.

Her appearance at the family home caused bewilderment and was not a relaxed or happy occasion. On seeing his daughter dressed in what had become her trademark punk attire with her hair uncombed and cut in different lengths, Tony Ciccone asked Madonna if she was, by any chance, wearing “some kind of a costume.” According to one of Madonna’s siblings, she was a mystery to the family, as well as Jellybean, who was equally bizarre and unkempt. “She looked dirty,” the sibling recalls, “and he was a shrimp with long hair and these wild black eyes. No one in the family really understood the chemistry between them, except that they were both in show business and looked really weird.”

By the time the couple returned to New York and Madonna was hard at work finishing her
Like a Virgin
album, the relationship with Benitez was over. In Venice to film the “Like a Virgin” video, Madonna was comforted by her director, Mary Lambert. During that trip Madonna and Lambert got to know each other better and discovered that both were deeply moved and influenced by Catholic iconography. As was evident when she directed Madonna’s video “Like a Prayer,” Lambert designed the special effects so that wounds open and close miraculously, churches and angels abound, and there is a sustained sense of mysticism and transcendence throughout Madonna’s performance. Though Lambert was barely ten years older than Madonna, once again the singer had found a substitute mother figure to help her through the sadness of another broken love affair.