Goddess: Inside Madonna (36 page)

The most popular song from the album was “Material Girl,” which Mary Lambert directed as a video. It would mark the beginning of Madonna’s ascent into superstardom.

After their first meeting on
the set of “Material Girl,” Sean, still carrying the rose that Madonna had given him, headed over to James Foley’s house. Sitting around the living room and talking about Madonna, Penn picked up a book of quotations. Opening it, he turned to a page at random and read a passage to himself: “She has the innocence of a child and the wit of a man.” Reading it over again to himself, he finally read it out loud. Foley looked at him and said, “It’s Madonna. Go get her.”

For a while, the relationship between the bad girl of rock and the bad boy of film was romantic, both of them believing that just possibly they had each found the person they had been searching for all their lives. Too many times the violence and drunken and jealous rages strained them to the breaking point, but what kept them together until the end was the intense sexual attraction they had for each other. Madonna had become accustomed to making love in some abstract middle distance, remote from her emotions. When she found Penn, for the first time in years she felt no separation between the current of their sex and the depth of her feelings. As Paul Freeman would recall when he worked with them on their ill-fated film,
Shanghai Surprise
, whenever they weren’t required on the set, they would retire to one of their trailers. “The one thing they were doing whenever they could, which was normal for a young couple who had just gotten married, was making love. By contract, they had separate trailers, but they would usually use Madonna’s and the trailer would rock between takes.”

While each seemed to have found an ideal sexual mate, during the filming of
Shanghai Surprise
Penn realized how different he was from his wife when it came to promoting their respective careers. Penn was perceived as an actor who embraced his art without concern for the commercial aspect of Hollywood. Madonna was the epitome of what was considered marketable. Penn hated publicity. Madonna lived for it. And yet, because they were both adolescent iconoclasts of their generation, fragile in their emotional development, Madonna profoundly believed that they were perfect together. At one point during the filming of
Shanghai Surprise
, she told Paul Freeman, “We have so much in common that Sean is almost like my brother. His temperament is so similar to mine.”

I
n 1984, during her courtship with Sean Penn, Madonna made her third film. Her work in
Desperately Seeking Susan
is still considered, along with that in
Evita
, which appeared in 1996, to be her best cinematic performance. In fact, during the filming, Madonna was offered a role on Broadway in
My One and Only
, which she turned down because the part called for tap dancing, which she had never studied.

Desperately Seeking Susan
was an all-woman effort. Susan Seidelman directed, Sarah Pillsbury and Midge Sanford produced, and Lenora Barish wrote the script. The part of Susan had originally been written for Diane Keaton, who, because of other commitments, was forced to turn it down. The character Madonna portrayed was a parody of herself during her early days in New York City when she lived the life of an uninhibited street child, slept in abandoned music studios, and occasionally scoured garbage cans behind the Music Building for untouched and discarded Burger King hamburgers. In fact, Madonna identified so closely with her character that she insisted on doing her own hair and makeup until she completely changed the role to fit her own chemistry and identity. The reviews were good, and the gossip around Hollywood circles was that Madonna was destined to make the transition from singer to actress as Barbra Streisand had done when, by age twenty-eight, she had won an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Grammy. Working with Madonna on the set, the crew was not only impressed with her talent but also with her discipline.

In 1975, Susan Seidelman was a film student at New York University in Washington Square when she joined an organization called AIVF, or the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers. Founded in 1974 by New York University professor John Culken, and Ed Lynch, a cameraman, AIVF was an outcrop of the Filmmakers Cooperative, which had been started in 1962 by Jonas Mekas with the idea of supporting a more avant-garde generation of film directors. With Culken and Lynch at the helm of AIVF, they changed the focus of the group in keeping with the changing tastes of the public. As a result, AIVF became more conscious of what Hollywood wanted in terms of product and orientation and became more sophisticated when it came to distribution, showcasing the product, and marketing. They also made sure that AIVF functioned almost like a union or an advocate for actors, directors, and writers, while providing its members with information concerning who was available or suitable to work on a project that any of their members was interested in doing. In 1985, AIVF celebrated its tenth anniversary and had thirty-five hundred members, among whom were the Coen brothers, John Sayles, Claudia Weill, and Jim Jarmusch.

The prototype for
Desperately Seeking Susan
was a small-budget film that Seidelman had made for $80,000 called
Smithereens
about a girl who was involved in the East Village punk rock scene. After Seidelman was able to begin production for
Desperately Seeking Susan
, and Diane Keaton dropped out, she heard about Madonna’s interest in taking on a movie role through a friend who claimed that the singer had auditioned for a part in another film, which she didn’t get. Coincidentally, Seidelman lived on Broome Street, only two blocks away from where Madonna was living. She called her up, and Madonna rode her bicycle over to meet her.

In 1985, the same year
that
Desperately Seeking Susan
was released, Madonna began her nationwide, twenty-eight city Virgin tour. During a stop in Michigan where she performed at the Silverdome in front of forty-two thousand spectators, including some of her old friends and relatives, she introduced Sean Penn to her family. This time, Tony Ciccone was pleased. Relieved that his errant daughter was finally getting married and impressed by his prospective son-in-law, whom he admired as an actor, he was optimistic for the first time since Madonna had left home that she was doing something sensible. That Madonna was famous and earning millions of dollars seemed to move Tony less than that she was about to settle down with one man. Elsie Fortin, who also met Sean Penn during that trip, was only concerned about her granddaughter’s happiness. As she said years later, “Madonna seemed to be in love, and if she was happy, that’s all that mattered. He could have been a factory worker, as long as he was decent and honest and treated her right.”

Several weeks later, when the Virgin tour was in Los Angeles, Penn took Madonna home to meet his family. Eileen Ryan and Leo Penn were also pleased that their son was settling down. They viewed Madonna as disciplined and determined to succeed, and they only hoped that she would influence their son and help him to mature. An actor who was a friend and neighbor of the family’s recalls their reaction: “If anything impressed Leo and Eileen, it was that Madonna didn’t drink or use drugs. Her background, her past, her image, didn’t faze them at all. She was a performer, and they understood show business better than anyone. They judged her as an individual, a woman their son loved and wanted to marry. They were one hundred percent in favor and very optimistic.”

It seemed as if everything was finally falling into place for Madonna. The engagement to Sean Penn was about to become official and the marriage was imminent.

In June 1985, Penn was in the middle of filming
At Close Range
, directed by his friend James Foley. Given the violence of his part, Penn reverted to his old habits and was belligerent not only on the set but off, getting into violent confrontations with the photographers and reporters who were constantly present. Madonna came to visit on location and stayed with Penn at a small inn in Nashville, Tennessee. According to the singer, one morning when they woke up, Penn had a curious look in his eye. “I read his mind,” she said, “and I told him, ‘Go ahead and say it. Whatever you’re thinking, I’ll say yes to.’” Penn proposed and Madonna accepted. To celebrate, they went to a neighborhood 7-Eleven and bought jawbreakers.

When the press heard about the engagement and knew that Madonna was visiting Penn, Foley prevailed upon the couple, for the sake of the movie, to hold a brief press conference during which each made a statement about their impending marriage. “There will be times I will regret having gotten married,” Penn predicted, “but it doesn’t matter, you know, as long as you’ve got acting, it doesn’t matter.” In response, Madonna stated, “Anyway, I think it would be kind of boring if everyone really just loved me a hundred percent.”

Privately, Madonna confided in a friend that even if one day she would no longer be Mrs. Sean Penn, she would go on “being whoever it is that I am anyway.”

Describing the events leading up to the marriage and the wedding itself, the incidents of violence that followed, the reconciliation and the ultimate divorce, without mentioning the vulgarity, the excess, Penn’s reaction to the attention of every trashy tabloid, and the involvement of the dregs of show business, would be like describing World War I without mentioning the horrors of the trenches.

Next to the Penn/Madonna nuptials, Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in honor of Katharine Graham could be deemed the most understated social event of the decade, Archie Bunker could be accused of being liberal, and Elizabeth Taylor’s marriage to Larry Fortensky could be considered a heartfelt and elegant affair.

As the nuptials approached, Nancy Huant, the fiancée of Madonna’s record producer Nile Rodgers, threw a bridal shower for the singer at her Upper East Side New York apartment. Some of the women who were invited were the singer Alannah Currie of the Thompson Twins and Mariel Hemingway, as well as six of Madonna’s male friends who were dressed in drag. The gifts she received included a sequined telephone, lingerie, a quilt, and some jewelry. Two days later, back in California, the couple seemed to be competing for who could throw the most tasteless bachelor or bachelorette party.

Madonna invited ten friends to the Tropicana, a mud-wrestling club in a run-down section of Hollywood. Wearing no makeup and with her hair in a bun and sunglasses covering her face, Madonna seemed to be having a great time cheering on the women who were wrestling in her honor. On his side, Penn hosted an old-fashioned stag party where a stripper, Kitten Natividad, took everything off to the tune of “Material Girl.” According to Miss Natividad, the guests all had a good time although, in her words, they all seemed “a little buzzed.” “The wildest moment,” Miss Natividad recalled, “was when Sean’s friend Harry Dean Stanton arrived a little late.” Pushing Stanton’s face into Kitten’s cleavage, Sean purportedly said, “See what you missed?”

Several weeks later, Madonna lost her engagement ring when it was stolen from a New York hotel. Several weeks after that, a sapphire bracelet that Penn had also bought her was stolen from another New York hotel room. A week before the wedding, while she was driving the 1956 white-and-coral convertible Thunderbird that was a wedding present from Penn and talking on a cell phone, she got into an accident. The car was deemed a total loss by the insurance company.

On August 16, 1985, on Madonna’s twenty-seventh birthday and one day before Penn’s twenty-fifth, the couple married at the $6.5 million home of Dan Unger, a real estate developer and close family friend of Leo and Eileen Penn’s.

As the paparazzi took up their places in the bushes or buzzed overhead in helicopters, Sean Penn’s greeting to his wedding guests was appropriate. “Welcome to the remaking of
Apocalypse Now
,” he said as people gathered high above the bluffs of Point Dume in Malibu.

Security guards dressed in blue blazers were stationed outside the estate to check the identification of every guest who presented an invitation, cross-checking them with the names on a list. Inside the house, another battery of guards were armed with infrared binoculars to scan the perimeter of the property for intruders. One uninvited guest, an Italian photographer in camouflage gear and blackened face, who had been hiding in the shrubbery since early morning, was discovered and thrown off the property, his camera and film confiscated.

Sean Penn, dressed in a double-breasted Gianni Versace suit, paced frantically up and down the beach in front of the house. At one point, he wrote FUCK YOU in the sand as a message to the press that hovered in helicopters above the gathering. One guest recalls a frantic moment when Madonna came tearing out of the house, her hair in curlers, her silk dressing gown flapping in the summer breeze, when someone told her that Penn had a loaded gun. “I just want to shoot down one helicopter,” he told his startled future wife. “I want to watch it burn and see all the bastards inside melt.” Madonna pleaded with Penn to put the gun away and ignore the press.

“She was beside herself,” the guest says. “When Sean threatened to shoot down one of the helicopters, Madonna, more than anyone else, took him seriously. I remember how she took his face between her hands and talked very quietly to him, almost like he was a kid and she was his parent. At one point, he tried to twist out of her grasp and she just pulled his face closer to hers and kissed him on the forehead, the nose, the cheeks, the chin. After a couple of minutes, he seemed to calm down, and Madonna, without talking to anyone who had watched the scene, ran back into the house to get dressed. She was carrying the gun.”

The wedding gown that Madonna wore was designed by Marlene Stewart, the woman who also created her costumes for her Like a Virgin tour. It was a strapless, cream-colored antique tulle with a bustle that Madonna described as having a “1950s feeling and something that Grace Kelly might have worn at her wedding.” Madonna’s hair was wrapped in a French twist that was tucked underneath a black bowler hat with a cream-colored tulle veil that matched her dress and covered her face. The only accessories she wore were one long earring and an antique pearl bracelet that belonged to her grandmother.