Madonna (34 page)

For Madonna at this time – successful, rich, and with a huge international following – there remained a yawning gap in her life: someone to love, and who would love her in return. It had become a quest, with the result that during her search for love – ‘I’m not sure who I’m looking for,’ she confessed – she was playing the field. Her model toyboy was not the only man to share her bed, for by the summer of 1991 she was also seeing Vanilla Ice, as well as briefly dating the young Hollywood heartthrob Luke Perry, the star of the teen-cult TV show
Beverly Hills 90210,
after he presented her with AmFAR’s Award of Courage for her AIDS work at a ceremony in Hollywood. Indeed, when she was in Evansville that summer filming A
League of Their Own
, Madonna, a master at juggling people and relationships, managed to arrange matters so that both Tony Ward and Vanilla Ice flew to the Midwest location to keep her company. She organized the timetable so that they would not meet.

Her juggling act continued during the shooting of her now notorious book
Sex
. The conception and rude birth of this curious amalgam of aluminum and paper offer a telling insight into the world of Madonna, businesswoman, artist and woman. It was the first offering from Maverick Entertainment, the multi-media venture, started in April 1992, which gave Madonna what she had been striving towards for years – total control.

Born after a year-long negotiation between her manager, Freddy DeMann, and her record company, Time-Warner, Maverick was truly Madonna’s creation, enabling her to dabble in the world of books, film, video, merchandising and, of course, record production. Even the name, Maverick, was her idea, reflecting her vision of herself as an outsider and non-conformist. That may have been her perspective – the men in suits who backed her venture to the tune of $60 million were more impressed by Madonna’s extraordinary ability to transform the creative and the controversial into real commercial success.

Typically, Madonna gathered a strong team around her, with DeMann as manager, Seymour Stein as record scout and a young Israeli, Guy Oseary, who became a close friend, as head of A and R. However, she was the one in charge. ‘Warner didn’t hand me this money so I could go off shopping at Bergdorf’s,’ said the singer, six months after the deal had been signed. ‘I have to work and come up with the goods.’

While the star label is nothing new – The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had their own imprints – Madonna’s vision owed as much to her old friend Andy Warhol as to anyone in the music industry. Over the years his factory in New York had produced a dazzling array of underground talent, from artists to singers and movie makers. As she herself said of her new venture. ‘Maverick will be an intellectual thing. It started as a desire to have more control. There’s a group of writers, photographers, and editors that I have met along the way in my career who I want to take with me wherever I go. I want to incorporate them into my little factory of ideas.’

The genesis of
Sex –
originally known as
The Rock –
fitted that philosophical template perfectly, Madonna the star and
raison d’être
of the whole enterprise. Artistically, the concept behind the book incorporated and developed previous highly successful and equally provocative enterprises, namely her video
Justify My Love
and the documentary
Truth or Dare
.

Sex
, then, was the logical extension of her creative and commercial vision, an audacious piece of pop culture, conceived, designed, directed, written, and marketed by Madonna; iconoclast, sex goddess and company chairman. As an exercise in vanity publishing it took some beating, the CEO indulging in an illustrated sexual journey, a story that was part autobiography, part fantasy. For a woman who wanted the world to love her, it was a high-risk strategy in which she attempted, by sleight-of-hand, to be the multi-millionaire company executive who presents herself as a knowing but lovable sexual subversive.

During her frenetic career she had successfully aired the issues of teen pregnancy, blasphemy and gay rights. Now she was aiming to tackle sexual taboos in strait-laced America. As befitted Maverick’s first high-profile venture, Madonna was in total control. She carefully selected pictures from the 20,000 shots taken by the photographer Steven Meisel on location in New York and Florida, discussed the design with the art director, Fabien Baron, and debated the text with the laconic writer Glenn O’Brien. Her hand was in everything, from the famous silver Mylar bag used to cover the aluminum-bound book, to the volume’s size and shape – she originally wanted it to be circular, so that it would be ‘different’ – and the obsessive secrecy surrounding its production.

In the incongruous setting of the Vault, a seedy fetish club in the meatpacking district of New York, the two faces of Madonna were on display, the scantily dressed sex object and master of ceremonies, her persona changing from biddable model to haughty auteur with the speed of a whipcrack. Dressed only in a borrowed blazer and a pair of high heels, she was every inch the pocket-sized tyrant, complaining vociferously about the heating, the food and the lighting. Her bodyguard, Jim Albright, who had just started working for her, noted her behavior with keen interest. ‘In a split second she became the boss and everyone on the set was on tenterhooks. My first impression was that she was bitchy and demanding but as time went on I realized how much power she had over these people, how absolutely everything revolved around her. She had total control.’ Even when the
Sex
circus moved to Florida she never relinquished her grip for a moment. When the owner of the house they were renting was spotted covertly taking pictures of the frolicking star, Madonna called a halt to shooting. The woman, who collapsed in floods of tears, was forced to hand over the camera and made to sign a confidentiality agreement before filming could continue.

Madonna was right to be cautious. Stars like model Naomi Campbell – who was worried about what her mother would think – the rapper Daddy Kane and the actress Isabella Rossellini were on the set, and it was only the force of Madonna’s personality that encouraged these celebrities to shed their inhibitions. When she wasn’t reassuring nervous stars, Madonna was calming nerves in the Time-Warner boardroom, already under siege from moral crusaders like Tipper Gore, the wife of the Vice-President, for signing rapper Ice T, some of whose lyrics appeared to advocate cop killing.

As if this was not enough, Madonna the sexual ringmaster was not only juggling stars and boardroom executives, but was still trying to keep her boyfriends apart. In the winter of 1991—2, when she was shooting scenes for the book in New York, Tony Ward went through his paces as a model, playing a rapist to Madonna’s Catholic schoolgirl and a foot worshipper to her dominatrix – a persona she called ‘Dita Parlo’ – for Meisel’s camera. A few weeks later, in February, she invited Vanilla Ice to join her at the house she and her team had rented in Florida for the second stage of the shooting. The heavily tattooed white rapper was clearly out to impress, arriving in his brandnew customized Porsche, complete with white kid-leather upholstery and a serious sound system that could deafen people streets away. So he was flattered when Meisel asked to use his car for some shots of Madonna.

He was rather less impressed, however, when, after the shoot, he saw that she had left his upholstery stained brown with the fake-suntan cream that she had used to protect her alabaster-white skin from the Florida sun. ‘That was my dream car, man,’ he recalls. ‘She ruined my interior for nothing, they never used a picture.’ She made it up to him when they went back to his house for the night. Before they went out for dinner, he and Madonna cavorted before the camera, Vanilla Ice under the impression that they were posing for a magazine.

Silently watching from the sidelines was the tall, lithe figure of Jim Albright, her new bodyguard. He was trying to figure out the true nature of her relationship with Vanilla Ice. For when she was posing in the Florida sunshine with her rapper lover, Madonna was surreptitiously making eyes at – and suggesting a good deal more to – at the young man who would soon graduate from bodyguard to suitor, and finally to serious marriage prospect.

Chapter Eleven

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

I
T WAS HARDLY love at first sight. ‘One more fucking person stands on my fucking dress and I’m going to kill somebody,’ were the first words he heard from the woman who would one day dominate his life. Her invective was in full flow that night, at the New York premiere in 1991 of her documentary,
Truth or Dare
, where Jim Albright was working on bodyguard detail for a security company. He was not to see her again until he was assigned to be her personal bodyguard for the duration of the
Sex
shoot in New York and Florida.

It was while she was getting ready for the book’s ‘rape’ scene at the YMCA in New York that he first noticed her making eyes at him. She was in her dressing room with Tony Ward, but the twenty-two-year-old bodyguard noticed that she kept glancing in his direction. Of mixed Native American, Afro-Caribbean, Polish and Italian antecedents, Albright’s lightly tanned good looks and sleek physique – he is a martial-arts specialist – had clearly caught her eye. As the day progressed Steven Meisel joked with him, ‘She’s going to have you.’

He thought no more of it until he was detailed to accompany her to a party at the Palladium Club to launch the single by vogue dancers José and Luis, who had featured strongly in the
Vogue
video and the Blonde Ambition Tour. As Albright pushed a way for her through the crowd, she grabbed his hand. A tingle of electricity went through his body. He had felt the Madonna connection for the first time. That night, though, she only had eyes for her date, Nick Scotti, a handsome young Italian model turned singer whom Madonna was grooming for stardom. She and Scotti would go on to sing a duet together for the soundtrack of the film
Nothing But Trouble
starring Demi Moore, and a version of the song also appeared on his first album. Albright hung around during the party, and then ushered Scotti and Madonna into a limousine in which they headed back to her apartment.

The shooting of the photographs for the book continued in Florida in February 1992, Madonna flying to Miami and a suite in the Fontainebleau Hotel, where she stayed for the duration of the shoot. In spite of the misgivings of his girlfriend Melissa, who was worried about Madonna’s man-eating reputation, Albright went along as her personal bodyguard – at the singer’s express request. His room was next to her penthouse suite and every morning at dawn he would accompany Madonna and her girlfriend, Ingrid Casares, as they ran for six miles along the beach. Noticeably Madonna, who has an abiding fear of breast cancer, which killed her mother, wore three training bras to stop her breasts from bouncing. The women teased him that he couldn’t keep up, and despite boasts he had made earlier, he had to admit he was ‘pussy whipped,’ exhausted by the time they had run up the thirteen flights of hotel stairs back to her room. Then he sat and watched in admiration as Madonna went through an hour-long workout with her gym equipment.

Next day he was so stiff that when they went running he bummed a ride from a patrolling policeman, who generously let the bodyguard sit next to him on his dune buggy while Madonna and Ingrid jogged ahead. Throughout the day he was the butt of their jokes, teasing that became ever more flirtatious. Over dinner there was a conversation about tattoos, and Albright admitted that he had one on his back. He coyly refused to reveal all, however, in spite of the urgings of the other people at the table, including Madonna. It was only when he escorted Madonna to her room that he offered to show it to her. In reply she gently touched his back and said, ‘Do you want to kiss me?’ ‘I guess so,’ he stuttered. In almost a parody of a movie cliché, the phone in her room rang just as they were about to embrace. After taking the call, they finally kissed. Then Madonna told him bluntly, ‘You know, I’m not going to fuck you.’ Startled and somewhat breathless, Albright’s response was to tell her that he didn’t fuck on the first date. ‘This isn’t a date,’ she replied tersely.

The next day Madonna, hot and sweaty after her morning run, grabbed Jim in the kitchen of her penthouse suite. This time the electricity really did flow. Wet with sweat from her morning workout, Madonna touched a faulty electrical appliance and both were jolted as the electric shock passed through her to him. Nearly electrocuted or not, Albright was now hooked. Throughout the shoot, their mutual flirtation intensified, Madonna stealing a kiss from him when there was no one around, or holding his hand in the back of the limo. It was not long before the inevitable happened, despite her bold statement after their first kiss, the two lovers sharing a romantic night together in her penthouse, with just the sound of the breakers and the stars in the jet-black sky as accompaniment.

Yet for Albright, that night signaled rather more than simple romance. Besides the usual first-time nerves, he found himself both alarmed and dumbfounded by the turn events had taken. Everything that his girlfriend Melissa had warned him about was coming true, and yet he could not help himself from being caught in the web spun by the singer. Here he was, a young guy from Hackensack, New Jersey, who had strayed on to the wrong side of the tracks, falling for one of the world’s biggest sex symbols, a multi-millionaire with a fabulous Manhattan apartment. ‘I could feel myself being sucked in,’ he remembers ruefully. ‘I knew I was going to break my girlfriend’s heart and yet how far, realistically, was I going to go with Madonna? Looking back, it was like I was making a pact with the Devil.’

The story of the relationship between the young bodyguard and the world-famous singer, eleven years his senior, not only allows a vivid insight into Madonna’s makeup, but also serves as a modern-day fairy story, the mirror image of the tale of Cinderella, in which a humble youth is whisked away by the princess of pop and offered the keys to her kingdom.