Goddess: Inside Madonna (40 page)

When it was announced that Madonna had signed with Mamet, ticket requests were so unexpectedly tremendous that the small theater at Lincoln Center where it had been scheduled to open could not accommodate the enormous demand for tickets. Since the Royale Theatre in Times Square was available, a lease was signed, which meant that the play was upgraded before it even went into previews. The public had difficulty separating Madonna from any character she was slated to perform, proving what Andrew Lloyd Webber feared when Alan Parker was persuading him to give Madonna the role of
Evita
, that she would eclipse the character with her own. Before the announcement was made that
Speed-the-Plow
would be moving from Lincoln Center to a larger Broadway theater, and before Madonna even uttered a word onstage, a feud began between two actresses who had something very significant in common.

Patti LuPone, who had played
Evita
on both the Broadway and London stage, was starring in a revival of Cole Porter’s
Anything Goes
at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. LuPone was aware that, in 1988, Oliver Stone, now at the helm of the project, wanted Madonna and not LuPone to re-create the role on film. As soon as LuPone learned that Madonna was scheduled to perform under the same roof with her at Lincoln Center in Mamet’s new play, she tacked up a notice on the theater’s bulletin board. “Ms. LuPone,” the note read, “wishes to inform the management that only one Sicilian diva at a time is allowed in this theater.”

Madonna’s interest in David Mamet’s new play had begun two years earlier, in August 1986, when she was performing in repertory at Lincoln Center in
Goose and Tom-Tom
. The artistic director of Lincoln Center and the director of Mamet’s play was Gregory Mosher, who had been associated with Mamet in thirteen of his previous works. Madonna approached Mosher and asked him if she could have the part of Karen, the office temp, who plays opposite Joe Mantegna and Ron Silver, two seasoned actors, the former having starred in Mamet’s first movie,
House of Games
. Mosher refused to commit himself, although he promised Madonna that when the time came, she could read for the part.

When the casting began, Joe Mantegna and Ron Silver were assured of the leads and were made to understand that the office temporary whose presence is meant to be unsettling to both men was probably going to be portrayed by Elizabeth Perkins. Though most of David Mamet’s plays have had macho undertones, as seen in
American Buffalo, Sexual Perversity in Chicago
, and
Glengarry Glen Ross
, the role of Karen in
Speed-the-Plow
is not large but is important since she acts as a catalyst between the two men, who have been close friends and business associates for years. Karen, who pretends to know nothing about the movie business in order to get a major film studio interested in a movie project, is hired by Ron Silver’s character, a cynical film executive. Throughout the play, Karen forces the partners, Silver and Mantegna, to take a close look at the morals and ethics of the film business. After she sleeps with the boss (Mantegna), which tests the men’s friendship and loyalty, Karen suddenly demonstrates surprising knowledge about how to leverage a deal in return for her sexual favors.

After Madonna auditioned for Mosher, who was impressed by her performance, she read for David Mamet, who was also convinced that she was perfect for the part. In fact, during the run of the play on Broadway, Gregory Mosher reiterated his opinion of Madonna as the consummate professional. “She’s a rock,” he said. “She rehearses the changes we make during the day and the play’s on every night. It’s working fine.”

Madonna, cast against type for the role, believed that she would earn the critics’ respect as Cher had done, another singer turned actress. Cher had won an Oscar for her role in
Moonstruck
, playing the spinsterish Italian girl who leaves her comfortable Italian suitor, Danny Aiello, to embark on a secret love affair. In the end, Cher falls madly in love with a baker, Nicolas Cage, an unlikely suitor and an odd young man, and Cher makes more of an emotional transformation than she does a physical one when she blossoms into a woman obviously consumed by passion.

On opening night, in an act of generosity and gratitude for what she said had been “everyone’s patience and understanding with a novice like me on Broadway,” Madonna had thirty bouquets of flowers delivered to the theater for the cast, crew, and even the backstage doormen. As thoughtful and kind as she has been on numerous occasions to those people she has worked with, according to Patrick Leonard—her constant collaborator, the director of her first tour, her cowriter and coproducer on her third album,
True Blue—
and many others, she has been “burned so many times” that she believes it is better “to act like a tyrant than be treated like a wimp and have people walk all over you.”

Her love of children is the one area in her life where she has always been sincere. Her friends claim that she “melts” whenever a child approaches her, whether it is a stranger or the offspring of a friend. “Those are the only people whose motives she doesn’t question,” one friend says. Her detractors believe that her weakness for children is yet another manifestation of her narcissism since, in their view, she relates only in the context of her own memories of vulnerability when she had been so deeply hurt after her mother died.

On Madonna’s thirtieth birthday, August 16, 1988, a group of her teenage fans had bought tickets for the evening performance of
Speed-the-Plow
. They had also arranged for flowers to be delivered backstage to Madonna as an expression of their loyalty and love and in recognition of her turning thirty. However, Madonna, while she was performing on Broadway, had made the transition into actress, forgoing her usual image as rock star and teenage idol. Even if she had made a statement to the press, in an attempt to explain to her fans that their presence would upset her concentration or would be considered inappropriate by the usual theatergoing audience, it is doubtful that they would have understood her sudden denial of what she meant to them. They expected loyalty. Madonna expected unconditional love on her own terms.

When Madonna heard that the theater would be filled with her groupies, she instructed the box office to refund their money and prevent them from entering. According to one of the people who worked at the Royale Theatre, Madonna sent word that she didn’t want “a bunch of screaming kids upsetting her during the performance.” Her fans were crushed, but even more insulting was that, fifteen minutes before curtain, the flowers that had been delivered to her backstage were thrown out her dressing-room window. A ticket-taker at the Royale remembers the scene. “It was pathetic. The kids were picking up all the flowers, some crying, others cursing her. It was not a pretty sight.”

Throughout the three acts of
Speed-the-Plow
, Madonna is dressed in dowdy skirts and simple blouses, her hair dyed a nondescript brown, glasses perched on her nose, the antithesis of her usual image and the opposite of a cover she did at the time for
Harper’s Bazaar
, where she wore a Christian Lacroix polka-dot halter dress. In the article in
Harper’s
, Madonna talked about her character and about Mamet’s play. “She’s a sympathetic, misunderstood heroine who speaks the truth at any risk,” Madonna said. “Fate brought me to this play. I don’t take the characters home with me, but I’m incredibly affected by whatever role I’m playing.” Following that statement, Madonna seemed to contradict herself when she added, “I felt the girl was defeated, and I felt defeated all summer. I didn’t feel she had a lot of focus or ultimately knew what she wanted to do with herself. And I felt that she lost in the end; she didn’t have whatever tools she needed to get herself out of the situation she was in.”

During the run of the play Madonna claimed that she had lost some of her confidence. “I didn’t feel my usual ballsy self,” she said. “I just felt really defeated, is the best word to use. And that actually influenced everything I did, because it made me very sad.”

She went on to explain that in the beginning of her career, she believed that acting was about being someone else. Based on what she described as several “miserable experiences,” she now believed that acting was really about being herself. “It’s about being true to yourself and about being honest,” she said, “which is what my music is about.”

During the run of the play Madonna began writing her album
Like a Prayer
. She claimed that the mood of the music was a direct result of the feelings of defeat she had experienced as she immersed herself in the role of Karen. According to Madonna, the inspiration for her songs and lyrics on the album was her ability to deal with the tragedies in her life that up until then she had buried in her subconscious. “I began to deal with the death of my mother,” she claimed, “and the demise of certain relationships. Not only when I was writing the album, but every night when I performed on-stage, I would find myself exploring everything that had traumatized me as a child and even as an adult.”

In the last scene in
Speed-the-Plow
, Madonna is supposed to walk onstage and convey how deeply upset and frightened she is. “I would sit in my dressing room,” she recalled, “with all the lights off, waiting for that scene, and I would force myself to think of something really painful. I did it every night, and I purged myself that way. It was like a goal I set. I would say, ‘Tonight I’m going to work this problem out. I need to think about this or the possibility of this terrible thing happening.’ They were little psychological exercises that forced me to face my fears.”

At the end of the run, Madonna would sum up her experiences after having worked with two consummate actors in terms that were more familiar to her public. Typical of her obsession with the physical and the sexual, Madonna commented that playing opposite Mantegna and Silver was “like having great sex.”

As seriously as she claimed to take her debut on Broadway, there was one performance in which Madonna broke up laughing. As she was reading from a book in an effort to persuade her boss, Joe Mantegna, that it would make a good movie, she began to giggle. She laughed for several minutes as the audience wondered if they had missed a joke or a line that the actress was supposed to have found funny. Regaining control, Madonna simply said, “As I was saying,” and continued from the script.

David Mamet’s dialogue, which has a particular rhythm and almost a musical beat, requires a special sense of timing for any actor if he or she delivers it properly, so that the words don’t lose any of their impact or drama. Both Joe Mantegna and Ron Silver were able to perform the lines to perfection, guarding their own rhythm and sense of timing that complemented the writer’s prose. Despite all the energy that Madonna displays during her concert tours, she was unable to re-create that energy onstage, and the critics were almost all unanimously vicious in their reviews. Had George S. Kaufman, the eminent playwright of the last century, been alive and sitting on the aisle to review
Speed-the-Plow
, he might have used one of his most acerbic quotes. “I saw the play at a disadvantage,” Kaufman once wrote. “The curtain was up.” Clive Barnes wrote, “She is not ready to light up the lamps of Broadway,” and John Simon reported, “She can afford to pay for a few acting lessons.”

Dennis Cunningham recently retired as the WCBS-TV drama critic after reviewing more than five hundred plays during a career in television that spanned more than twenty-five years. He is a shy man by nature, retiring and loath to be confrontational, especially with his colleagues who share his profession and all the opening nights when they have the fate of so many actors, writers, directors, and producers in their hands. As sensitive and intellectual as he is, with a doctorate in theater from Carnegie-Mellon, a vast experience teaching theater to university and postgraduate students, and a genuine respect and love for the art, when Frank Rich came out as the sole positive voice for Madonna’s performance in
Speed-the-Plow
, Cunningham exploded. In Rich’s review of the play, which appeared in the
New York Times
, he wrote that he found Madonna’s performance “intelligent, scrupulously disciplined comic acting.”

“This woman cannot move onstage,” Dennis Cunningham proclaimed. “She moves . . . as if she were operated by a remote control unit several cities away. She cannot give meaning to the words she is saying. It’s not a matter of opinion, it’s unconscionable. Frank has taken leave of his senses, and he should apologize to every actor he ever gave a bad review for a performance after this. I’m in a righteous rage, like John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. Just think of the hundreds of New York actresses who should have gotten this role. We could have gotten one of the audience who could have read it better than she did.”

Dennis Cunningham also made no secret that he was profoundly offended by Mamet’s agreement and Mosher’s choice of Madonna to star in the play. As far as he was concerned, it was nothing more than a cynical decision that the writer and director hoped would guarantee ticket sales. “Her ineptitude is scandalously thorough,” Cunningham fumed, “and I intend to sit down with Gregory Mosher and David Mamet to discuss their casting decision. The theater is being sold like Veg-O-Matics. I have never seen on a Broadway stage someone who didn’t have the basic elements of Acting 101.”

The reality was that Madonna, despite the opprobrium that the critics heaped on her, was nonetheless performing on the Broadway stage every night at the Royale Theatre, which drew not only fans and curious spectators but also stars like Katharine Hepburn, Sylvester Stallone, and Sigourney Weaver, although Hepburn seemed bewildered by the star’s performance. Later that evening Jeffrey Lyons, the drama critic and the son of Leonard Lyons, the creator of the celebrated column from the 1950s “The Lyons Den,” ran into Miss Hepburn and asked her what play she had seen. “Mamet’s new play with Madonna playing a would-be actress who can’t act. She was absolutely convincing!”