Goddess: Inside Madonna (37 page)

There were 220 close friends, family, and professional associates. Madonna’s father, stepmother, seven siblings, and grandmother were there, along with Andy Warhol, who had suddenly become an admirer of Madonna’s after having ignored her when she was starting out in New York. Cher was there as well, along with Rosanna Arquette, Madonna’s costar in
Desperately Seeking Susan
, and Carrie Fisher, who would marry Paul Simon, who had coincidentally been married to Shelley Duvall, the future companion of Dan Gilroy, Madonna’s musician boyfriend with whom she had lived for a while in the abandoned synagogue in Queens. Christopher Walken was another guest, Sean Penn’s costar in
At Close Range
, who would play Madonna’s guardian angel in her video “Bad Girl” years after she and Penn were divorced. Diane Keaton was present as well. At the end of Madonna’s marriage to Sean Penn, Keaton would be the only person on the cooperative board at the San Remo apartment building on Central Park West in New York City to vote in favor of Madonna buying an apartment there. Ultimately, on January 23, 1988, Madonna would buy another apartment for $850,000 that was several blocks away on Central Park West.

Tom Cruise was there as well, along with the Sheen family and the other members of the Brat Pack, while James Foley, the man who had introduced the couple, was Penn’s best man. Paula Ciccone, the sister who looked most like Madonna and who resented her success, served as her maid of honor.

The ceremony was not unlike one of Madonna’s videos or, more aptly, as Penn had said, like
Apocalypse Now
. As Madonna walked down the grassy aisle on her father’s arm with the Pacific Ocean in the distance and the guests standing on the lawn facing the beach, the helicopters continued to buzz overhead. There was a brief exchange between father and daughter as they walked. “This is it, Madonna,” Tony said, “the one and only time.” “Cross my heart,” Madonna answered, making the sign of the cross on her chest with her left hand. As she reached Sean, who stood between James Foley and Paula, Madonna kissed her father’s cheek and said, “Bye, Dad.”

The ceremony took five minutes and was conducted by Judge John Merrick, who incorporated words that had been written by the couple. Because of the noise from the aircraft, the judge, along with Madonna and Penn, were forced to shout their vows to be heard. “Although there will be times that your moods may falter,” the judge read from a small white card, “and you’ll question each other’s motives, the faith and love that you share will help to show that your inconsistency is only for the moment.”

After the couple were pronounced man and wife, Penn lifted Madonna’s veil and kissed her to the theme from
Chariots of Fire
.

Unfortunately, those momentary inconsistencies would last for more than two years before the marriage was irretrievably and definitively over.

The wedding dinner, catered by
the Spago restaurant in Hollywood, consisted of lobster ravioli, rack of lamb, swordfish, and baked potatoes stuffed with sour cream and caviar and served with an Acacia pinot noir from California’s Madonna Vineyard. Michael Ochs, a friend of Madonna’s, who had a vast archive of music, helped her choose a combination of operatic and classic romantic tunes. The result was Michael McLaren’s
Madame Butterfly
and standards by Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, and Sarah Vaughan. At the end of the sit-down dinner, as Madonna prepared to cut the cake, she turned to Cher, who was standing directly behind her. “Hey, you’ve done this before. Do you just cut one piece or do you have to slice up the whole thing?”

Following the meal and family photographs, the guests were invited to move to the tennis courts, which had been transformed into a parquet dance floor with pink floodlights and small tables surrounding it. Terence Toy, the disc jockey, played some of Motown’s biggest hits along with Madonna’s songs while the crowd danced until the early hours of the morning.

Shortly before midnight, Madonna and Sean left their guests and slipped quietly away, to spend their wedding night at the groom’s parents’ house. Midnight, August 17, was Sean’s twenty-fifth birthday, and a group of the couple’s most intimate friends came over to celebrate. Later that day, Mr. and Mrs. Sean Penn left for Antigua in the West Indies for a brief honeymoon.

Several weeks after they returned from that idyllic island, Madonna sought psychiatric help to learn how to cope with Penn’s drinking and violent outbursts.

One close girlfriend recalls how shocked she was at the way Sean would verbally abuse Madonna and how Madonna would tolerate it without fighting back. Six weeks after she married Sean Penn, Madonna confided in that same girlfriend that she was beginning to wonder if she fell in love with Penn or with the image that she had created of him. “All the questions she began asking herself,” the friend relates, “was the result of her therapy. She wasn’t sure anymore if she really knew who he was or if she had projected onto him the characteristics she needed to make her feel secure. All of a sudden Madonna began questioning her own motives, if her marriage to Sean was based on illusion and not love.”

Madonna tried to persuade her husband to come to one of her therapy sessions. When he refused, she urged him to go into therapy on his own. Again, Penn refused, and not until several months later when he had his first brush with the law after assaulting a photographer would he be ordered by the court to undergo psychiatric counseling.

O
n October 31, almost three months after they were married, Madonna, under the influence of her husband, agreed to star with him in an adventure film set in China in the 1930s.
Shanghai Surprise
, based on a novel by Tony Kenrick and a script by John Kohn, was directed by Jim Goddard, who was primarily a television director and best known for his British television series
Reilly, Ace of Spies
. George Harrison, through his company Handmade Films, was the executive producer, composed the musical score, and appeared in the film in a cameo role as a cabaret singer. Christopher Ciccone, Madonna’s brother, was part of the crew. In addition to functioning as his sister’s assistant, he helped design some of the sets as well as looking after Madonna’s costumes and hair. According to several of the other crew members, “Chris was around a lot, very accessible, and very nice. Their relationship was always very affectionate and very, very caring.”

With no experience making movies, Jim Goddard took on the project with the intention of generating as much advance press and publicity as possible, since he was convinced that it made no difference whether the movie was good but rather that it would be an assured success because Madonna and Sean Penn were the stars. From a commercial and artistic point of view, it was a hypocritical way to approach his job because he obviously concentrated more on benefiting from his stars than assuming the responsibility of giving them solid direction. Curiously, after the pair signed on for the picture, Penn made a comment that clearly substantiated Goddard’s philosophy: “People will go to see this film because we’re in it and not because of the script or the direction or the sets.”

Paul Freeman, a well-known British television actor most famous for his roles in
Dark Room
and
Devil’s Arithmetic
for the BBC, who also appeared with Juliette Binoche in the 1995 French film
Hussard sur le toit
, or
Horseman on the Roof
, maintains that the film was not as bad as everyone was prepared to believe. “The publicity had been so adverse and the producers quite cynically allowed the press as much leeway as they could possibly get,” Freeman says, “that it almost seemed as if the producers started off trying to make a serious film and were looking for the right actors and actresses when suddenly Sean Penn and Madonna arrived in their laps. That’s when they thought they had hit pay dirt and dropped all their ideas about making a serious film.”

Before Penn and Madonna arrived in Hong Kong to begin shooting, they decided to stop in Macao to look around and get acclimated to the time change. What they didn’t know was that Jim Goddard and John Curran, one of the producers, had leaked their whereabouts to the press in an effort to generate advance publicity for the film. Upon their arrival, the couple were greeted by the paparazzi, who hounded them for the duration of their stay. It was only a matter of time before Penn would explode, which he did at the end of their visit when he attacked Leonel Borralho, a photographer. Borralho was only one of the hordes of paparazzi who followed the couple everywhere they went, setting up telephoto lenses that were trained on their hotel suite and terrace in an effort to catch them in compromising positions. Borralho promptly filed a million-dollar lawsuit against the actor.

Their visit to Macao would mark the beginning of what observers claim was a plot by the press to goad Penn into reacting violently. At the time, Penn was insecure about his career and unsure about his relationship with Madonna. Every time she appeared on his arm, the press would shout obscenities at her to provoke him. Given Penn’s temperament and the unrelenting presence of the paparazzi determined to incite him into uncontrollable and violent rages, Madonna knew that she not only had to control her own temper when she heard the insults hurled at her, but more importantly, her husband’s. It was a full-time job. The abuse and harassment went on every day for the entire two months that they were shooting the film. Putting aside her own feelings, Madonna understood that her husband’s masculinity was being threatened since he believed that it was his duty to protect and defend his wife. Ever sensitive to her husband’s needs and the problems he had controlling himself, Madonna never corrected him in front of anyone, nor did she criticize him for reacting violently when photographers called her foul names. Instead, she would gently guide him off to a corner and, much the same as she had done on the day of their marriage, would huddle with him, discussing alternatives to his violent reactions. “They know where his soft points are,” Madonna told the cast and crew. “They call me obscene names just to get him to react. How would you react if someone said that about your wife?”

Everyone asked at the time why Jim Goddard had been chosen to direct the film, and why, when he proved obviously not experienced nor equipped to control the set, he wasn’t replaced. Paul Freeman believes that the answer is that the British film industry is extremely racist, sexist, and class-conscious, something that is not found anywhere else in the world. Those people who work on a film set consider it a “closed shop,” available to certain cockney families who have been in the business for generations. “This man, our director,” Paul Freeman maintains, “pretended to be more cockney than the cockney crew, one of the lads, a good old boy in American parlance.”

After two months on location in China, with such trials as rats in the trailers, fistfights with the press, coupled with a bad script, abysmal direction, and universal pans, promising a commercial and critical failure, the only surprise about
Shanghai Surprise
was that it was ever completed and released.

Long after the film disappeared, when asked why she had agreed to take on the part, Madonna said, “I thought it was a great script and the idea of going to China was exciting to me and the idea of working with my husband was exciting to me, because he’s a great actor. But sometimes everything goes wrong.” That statement was one of the rare examples when Madonna understated a problem, since nothing went right with the film from the very beginning.

Madonna was drawn to the project for another reason. She had always admired Marlene Dietrich, emulating her onstage style in several of her most successful videos, “Vogue” and “Open Your Heart,” and in her offstage electric personal life, with lovers of both genders. Always sensitive to signs, parallelism, and coincidences, it is likely that one of the factors that led Madonna to agree to make
Shanghai Surprise
was that Dietrich had starred in 1932 in
Shanghai Express
, produced and directed by her mentor, Josef von Sternberg.
Shanghai Express
takes place on the Shanghai Express, a train traveling through China, and carrying passengers who have already appeared in one another’s lives. In a juxtaposition of roles, Dietrich plays a notorious “coaster,” or prostitute, Madeleine, or as she has become known, Shanghai Lily, to Madonna’s prim missionary, Gloria Tatlock, in
Shanghai Surprise
, while Clive Brook portrays Captain Donald Harvey, a British army surgeon, to Sean Penn’s alcoholic drifter. Years before the meeting on the ship, Madeleine had been Doc Harvey’s mistress. They eventually broke up over the question of belief. He thought she had another lover and didn’t believe her denial. Also on board is Hui Fei, another “coaster,” who is traveling to China to marry a respectable businessman, Chang, who is actually a warlord in disguise. When the Chinese army stops the train and captures one of Chang’s men, who is also traveling incognito, Chang holds the passengers hostage. At the same time, he suggests that Madeleine/Shanghai Lily become his mistress and threatens to blind Doc Harvey if she doesn’t comply. She agrees. In the end, all the hostages escape, but before leaving, Doc Harvey asks Madeleine why she agreed to Chang’s demands. She refuses to tell him, only saying that she had her reasons. . . . Which leaves Doc with the same problem as the last time—should be believe her? This time, he does.

Shanghai Express
, like
Shanghai Surprise
, hinges on the question of belief. Madonna, in
Shanghai Surprise
, saw the basic lesson as a question of religious belief, as well as belief in the character that Penn played, the alcoholic drifter, when it is implied that he has decided to change his ways.

In the end, when
Shanghai Surprise
was so badly panned, Madonna was understated when she was asked why someone like Sean Penn, who had always gotten such good critical reviews, had agreed to work under such conditions. Contrary to opinion, she replied, her husband was not at all “blinded by love.” “We had just gotten married,” she said simply, “and Sean didn’t really want to do the film, but at the same time he didn’t want to spend four months away from me.”