Goddess: Inside Madonna (42 page)

Whether it was a coincidence or a calculated publicity ploy, Madonna began dating Warren Beatty, who, against the advice of his producers, decided to take a chance and cast her as Breathless Mahoney in his production of
Dick Tracy
. She said about Breathless the same thing that she would say about
Evita
, that she had been “preparing for the role for her entire life.” “She is a girl,” Madonna explained. “She’s scared. She’s a seductress in a lot of pain.”

Warren Beatty and Stephen Sondheim had been friends for about ten years before they began working together in 1990 on
Dick Tracy
. Sondheim had written the music for Beatty’s film
Reds
, the story based on the life of John Reed, the American journalist who covered the Russian Revolution and introduced his readers to the burgeoning Communist Party. The collaboration between Beatty and Sondheim on
Reds
had always been symbiotic. Sondheim’s compositions and orchestrations were harmonious with Beatty’s roles as director and star. Things were not as harmonious when the composer agreed to score
Dick Tracy
.

Madonna found the three songs that Stephen Sondheim wrote for the film to be extremely difficult for her to learn and to sing because, as she explained, “He writes in a kind of chromatic wildness. For instance, one song was written in five sharps. Another was a torch song, kind of slow and sad, that a singer sings at a smoky nightclub at three in the morning when the club is empty, kind of melancholy, just a piano and a voice.” The third song was about gluttony and was more up-tempo, funny, and ironic, similar to “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Madonna performed “What Can You Lose” as a more modern duet, accompanied by her pianist in the film, Mandy Patinkin, who starred in
Sunday in the Park with George
on Broadway. He also played Che in the New York stage production of
Evita
.

Dick Tracy
never achieved the level of success that similar films such as
Batman
or
Superman
did, although Madonna got decent reviews for her performance and as a result was once again optimistic about her film career.

In 1990, Robert Stigwood was
still trying to make
Evita
, and during a lunch at Il Pallazzo, a Hollywood bistro, with Sid Bernstein, Alan Grubman, and Freddie Gershon, the former president of Stigwood Productions, Madonna’s name was once again mentioned as the “only actress who could make the film a reality.” When it came to the music and the format for the movie, her demands were unreasonable. She had her first meeting with the composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and alienated him by demanding that a whole new score be written in keeping with her image as well as to accommodate her limited vocal range. As Webber remarked after the meeting, “Madonna wanted
Evita
revamped to become
Madonna
.” Eventually, Madonna backed down when she realized that she had come across someone whose ego was justifiably as large or larger than her own.

Despite her initial unpleasant meeting with Webber, Madonna was still considered the sole contender for the part until Disney Studios decided not to put up the money. According to Alan Grubman, the lawyer on the deal, “Basically, Disney was fearful that the film would never be brought in under budget, and since musicals were not known to be big box-office successes in Hollywood, they were certain that they would never get their money back.”

Added to their concern was that neither the film
Dick Tracy
nor Madonna’s performance as Breathless Mahoney had impressed Disney enough for them to reconsider financing the project. At the time, those close to the negotiations predicted that if there was to be a solution, it would have to be between Madonna and Disney directly. In other words, Madonna would have to lower her fee substantially and provide other guarantees that would satisfy the financial people. Either she couldn’t or she wouldn’t, but in the end Disney walked away from the deal.

After Disney dropped out, the project went to Paramount Studios, who also worried about costs. One executive recalls the concerns back then: “If film people really believed that the movie could be brought in for fifteen million dollars, then everyone would have jumped up to make it. Unfortunately, it had the smell of being a difficult film to control. Madonna’s a professional, but she’s also a big star, and if the director has to please her as well as everyone else, then it’s going to become a thirty-million-dollar picture.” As it turned out,
Evita
cost $60 million to make.

Robert Stigwood backed out, and Oliver Stone stepped in for the second time. Having been burned once in 1988, the first thing Stone did was to lobby President Carlos Menem of Argentina for permission to bring his cast and crew to Buenos Aires to film on location. The next thing he did was to hire Loretta Crawford, a well-known casting director, and instruct her to offer the title role to Madonna for a fee of $1 million. From that point on, Stone had nothing but problems. President Menem refused to give his permission for
Evita
to be filmed in Argentina, and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice were once again against Stone’s choice of Madonna for the title role. Stymied by these problems and by production costs, Stone finally dropped the project after early production work was delayed by a screenwriters’ strike.

After completing
Truth or Dare in 1991, the documentary based on her Blond Ambition tour, and after enjoying a modest success with
Dick Tracy
, Madonna decided to commission two different scripts based on two women whom she greatly admired and with whom she felt a profound kinship: Frida Kahlo and Martha Graham. Rumors at the time also had Madonna in discussions with Jay McInerney to star in a one-woman show based on his novel
The Story of My Life
.

While Madonna was trying to raise development money and was negotiating to option McInerney’s book, she was offered a small part in Penny Marshall’s movie
A League of Their Own
. The film, starring Tom Hanks and Geena Davis and costarring Rosie O’Donnell, is a charming story set during World War II about a women’s baseball league that takes over and plays for ardent baseball fans while the male baseball stars are called up to war. Madonna played the part of an Italian girl, Mae Mordabato, who is fiercely patriotic, hits long drives to the outfield, and spends most of her time chewing gum and dancing the jitterbug at various soldiers’ canteens. Yet again, Madonna claimed that she had been “born to play the part.” During an interview in 1992 with Simon Banner of the Sunday
Daily Mail
in London, she claimed that because the film is about a women’s baseball team, it was clearly a “feminist statement.” According to Banner, a minute later, she contradicted herself by saying that it wasn’t “much fun being in a film with so many other women, all clamoring for the spotlight.” “If you want to know the truth, I’d rather the other two leads were men,” Madonna admitted, “and I’m sure the other women feel the same. They just didn’t tell you that.”

The movie, which grossed $104 million, was the biggest hit of the summer of 1992 and Madonna, cast in a part that was similar to Susan in
Desperately Seeking Susan
, received decent reviews.

It is not difficult to
understand why Madonna was so intent in believing that she was born to be a movie star. Onstage, she has imaginative and creative people designing her sets and costumes, with original choreography, and with an infectious style singing songs whose lyrics speak directly to her fans. With her energy and charisma, she has the aura of a star. When it came to making a successful movie career, her mistake was not necessarily in trying to mold herself after such stars as Carole Lombard, Judy Holliday, Marilyn Monroe, or even Marlene Dietrich. Her error was in believing that she could take her talent for making videos, which are minimalist movies, four minutes and twenty-two seconds, and sustain it for feature-length movies, or ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes. One of her most impressionistic videos, “Open Your Heart,” showed Madonna as every adolescent boy’s fantasy and every man’s secret desire. Directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino and photographed by Pascal Lebege, with Richard Sylbert as her production designer, who had gained an impressive reputation by designing
Carnal Knowledge
among other films, the video depicts Madonna as a world-weary performer in a risqué nightclub. Straddling a chair, and surrounded by sleazy voyeurs, leering perverts, and an assortment from the underbelly of society’s sexual misfits, Madonna, once again, emulates Dietrich from the prewar cabaret days in Germany. And yet, typical of Madonna’s constant message of female sexual superiority and control, her performance is clearly another example of how women, throughout the ages, have destroyed men by taunting and tempting them with sex. “Open Your Heart” was a four-minute performance that held together as a story with several subplots and messages.

Paul Gambacinni, the London radio personality and rock-and-roll expert, believes that when critics like Vincent Canby from the
New York Times
criticize Madonna for not making good movies, they fail to realize that she has, in fact, made several outstanding films. “If you think about it,” Gambacinni says, “most of Walt Disney’s Oscars were for short films. There is nothing disgraceful about a great video. It’s like a novella or a collection of short stories. It just happens that Madonna is good at impact and not character development. In other words, for five minutes she’ll hold your attention with an image and an effect, but don’t ask her to show you how she got to that point because she can’t.”

Unfortunately, in 1992 and 1993, Madonna once again had grander notions of prolonging her five-minute erotic videos into what became a trilogy—a book, a video, and a movie—that had one common theme running in the three different mediums: sadomasochism.

In 1992, Madonna published the book
Sex
at the same time that she released her video and record
Erotica
, which did not do well because of the public’s reaction to the book. These two projects were examples of only several times during her career when the “goddess” erred and forgot who she was, or rather, whom her fans perceived her to be.

In
Sex
, the photographer Steven Meisel shot Madonna in a variety of compromising poses with unknown and known partners, both female and male. In response, many of her fans were disturbed not only by the pornographic contents, but because they were disgusted at her having “sold out” when she crossed the boundary from irony into vulgarity. Others were outraged that, for the first time, she had promised to reveal far more than what was actually seen within the pages. They felt taken in by what most considered to be Madonna’s ultimate slide into crass commercialism.

If those two efforts were not damaging enough, she went on to make
Body of Evidence
, directed by Uli Edel, which proved to be embarrassing to the point of being funny. During a screening of the film in New York, Madonna was literally driven out of a theater on Columbus Circle. The audience booed and made grunting animal noises and bizarre birdcalls whenever she appeared on the screen in a graphic sex scene, complete with a variety of props, including handcuffs, hot wax, and broken glass. Madonna was at the nadir of her career.

The mystery is why the film never even became a cult classic, although one of the producers claims that what saved it from that distinction was the participation of two respected actors, Joe Mantegna and Willem Dafoe, who, according to the producer, had obviously been seduced into thinking that Madonna’s name on the credits would pull in the crowds.

The movie shared the same title with a best-seller by Patricia Cornwell, although the producers promised Ms. Corn-well that the title would be changed to
Deadly Evidence
, which of course was never done. The play on words in
Body of Evidence
was just too good to pass up, since it implied that Madonna used her body as a deadly weapon. In the opinion of some, the film was based on her book,
Sex
, although in the text, even Madonna didn’t write such embarrassing dialogue as was heard in the film. One of the most memorable lines was when Madonna asked Willem Dafoe, “Have you ever seen animals make love?”

The real enigma is why, at that point in her career, Madonna decided to embark on a sexual trilogy that was nothing more than pornography. Apparently, there was no one around at the time to talk Madonna out of copying Sharon Stone, who had already gained critical and box-office success by copying Madonna in
Basic Instinct
, a film that appeared in 1992. Not only did
Basic Instinct
have more texture and plot and an absence of gratuitous sex compared to
Body of Evidence
, but Stone performed the role of the lethal nymphomaniac with a lot more depth and even humor.

In the movie, Madonna plays Rebecca Carlson, an intense woman who lives in a glass house on the water and who preys on cardiac cases, ultimately killing them with her sexual acrobatics. There is no doubt that Madonna believed, after making “Bad Girl,” the video that shows her in a role that is familiar to her audience—a woman who uses her body as a sexual weapon—that she could work the same magic in
Body of Evidence
.

Curiously, before making the Edel movie, Madonna said that she preferred passion to violence in films and began to parrot the European criticism that it is difficult for Americans to express sexual desire in their movies. “Something bad always happens,” Madonna maintained, “violence or the relationship doesn’t last. I will not be attracted to making violent films. I am attracted to roles where women are strong and aren’t victimized. Everything I do has to be some kind of a celebration of life.”

Apparently, Madonna either forgot what she had said or she made an exception with
Body of Evidence
because she would be working with two actors whom she admired, Dafoe and Mantegna. Mira Rostovo, Madonna’s drama coach, was less impressed with Madonna’s philosophical reasons for making the film. She offered the simplest explanation for its failure: “This girl will never be an actress. She’s too vulgar, and she thinks she knows it all.”