Authors: Andrew Morton
The two women had first met a few weeks earlier in the elevator of the Music Building. Madonna knew that Camille and her business partner, Adam Alter, ran Gotham Records, the only recording studio in the Music Building, and that, if she attracted their notice, it might lead to opportunities for her and Emmy. The way she grabbed their attention was nothing if not gauche, but it was also intriguing: she flattered the bearded Alter by saying he looked like John Lennon, and later confronted Camille in the elevator and posed a series of
non sequiturs.
‘Do you get it yet?’ was one question she threw at a bemused Barbone, before stalking off. It was a classic Madonna tactic, employing that rare ability to intrigue, shock and captivate, and with a touch of the apparently wide-eyed wonder she had deployed before Pearl Lang at the dance festival.
By then, Madonna was living off her wits – and bags of paprika popcorn. In January 1981, when the heating in her West 37th Street loft had failed during the cold snap and Gary Burke had found her lying curled up on the floor, she had considered leaving New York and going home. Instead, sick and suffering, she had picked up the phone and called Dan Gilroy, plaintively asking if she could return to the synagogue for a while, to recuperate. She and Dan had remained friends after their breakup the previous summer, and he was happy to help her out. Indeed, a few weeks later, she sent him a homemade Valentine’s card, calling him the ‘big noodle head of my dreams.’
She was nothing if not resilient, however. After only a few days, she forsook the warmth and security of the synagogue and headed back downtown, desperate to keep Emmy together. ‘I could feel the band breaking at the seams,’ Gary Burke remembers. So, too, could Madonna. With her loft room virtually uninhabitable, she moved in with Gary, Steve Bray and Brian Syms, sharing a cramped, one-room apartment near the Music Building. Although it was far from ideal, after Gary secured the Max’s gig, the four of them at least knew they had a goal to work toward. In their hearts they all also understood that the performance at Max’s would make or break the band. They rehearsed constantly, Madonna sometimes sleeping over in the studio space. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, one step removed from Skid Row. She earned a little money by life-modeling, mainly for the painter Anthony Panzera in his SoHo studio, and she had now become adept at scrounging meals from friends and acquaintances. From time to time, Dan’s friend Curtis Zale would come by with a couple of bags of cast-off clothes for her, along with his mother’s discarded makeup.
It seemed that, as with her earlier decisions to leave college, to give up dance, to return from Paris, and then to leave Dan, Madonna had chosen risk over safety, suffering over comfort, apparently bent on enduring her own artistic Calvary. The most pointed example of this tendency toward martyrdom was when her father, then earning a substantial salary in the defense industry, visited her in New York in the fall of 1978 and offered her financial help, which she rejected. ‘It was as if she was giving him and her family permission to write her off,’ observes Camille Barbone. ‘She was very much into the drama and romance of going without for the sake of her art.’
So when Madonna cornered Barbone in the elevator of the Music Building, it was not only a last, desperate throw of the dice for her and Emmy, but also yet another indicator of her absolute determination to be recognized. Camille agreed to see Madonna in concert at Max’s Kansas City and went to watch the band rehearse a couple of times in the Music Building. Unfortunately, she missed the first gig at Max’s because of a migraine. The outraged singer stormed into Camille’s studio and verbally attacked her, complaining that she was just like other potential backers who had let her down. It was a performance as aggressive – and risky – as it was desperate. Madonna was rapidly running out of options in her self-imposed quest for stardom.
Fortunately, the management at Max’s had been sufficiently impressed by Emmy to invite them back for a repeat performance a few days later. The club, which had its own independent record label, had its own ideas for the band. So when Camille turned up to watch the gig, Madonna pulled out all the stops, dancing on tables and cavorting with patrons as she went through the five-song set. She had even been to see her old boyfriend, Mark Dolengowski, and had him cut her auburn hair and give her a more ‘punk’ style like that of her heroine, Chrissie Hynde.
After her set, Camille brought Madonna a cup of tea with honey to soothe her throat, raw from the performance, and asked her if she wanted a manager. The tousle-haired girl, still sweaty after performing, threw her arms around the older woman and shouted: ‘Yeah.’ Minutes later, the manager of Max’s came to congratulate her and promptly offered the band a coveted record deal. In twenty-four hours they had changed from nobodies to rising stars. Yet even as Madonna caught her breath, she began to realize that she faced a dilemma.
Barbone made it clear immediately that she was only interested in Madonna as a singer with a backup band and not Emmy. As well as offering to mastermind her career, Madonna’s potential new manager, aware of the squalid conditions in which she was living, promised to fund an apartment of her own, give her a salary of $100 a week and find her part-time work. Madonna had to make a decision: to strike out on her own, or to stick with the band that she had helped to found, and which had just been offered a record deal. In a matter of days, and without telling the other band members of her decision, she chose to go with Camille, signing a contract with Gotham Records on March 17, 1981 – Saint Patrick’s Day. Afterwards they celebrated with pints of green Guinness.
As she toasted her new artiste, Camille believed she was on the way to making her dream of managing the biggest star in the world a reality. It was a dream that rapidly turned into a living nightmare, a year-long emotional rollercoaster ride of drink, fights and, ultimately, a nervous breakdown. Her first mistake was to try to tame Madonna. Her second was to fall in love with her.
In Camille’s view Madonna was a rough-cut artistic diamond who needed careful polishing in order to shine. Her stage act was all wrong, disguising her greatest asset – herself. In performance she had an adequate, although not a great voice, and hid herself behind a guitar she could hardly play. For her part, Camille instinctively understood what Madonna, and the world, would later come to appreciate: that the key to the singer’s power and appeal was in the whole package – dance, movement, song and music. In short, Madonna’s latent energy and charisma had to be released.
Camille’s first order of business, within days of Madonna signing the contracts, was to fire Madonna’s backup band, a brisk procedure that left Steve Bray, Gary Burke and Brian Syms feeling rather sore and used. A few days after the breakup of Emmy, Gary confronted Madonna in the Music Building and yelled at her, accusing her of ‘betrayal.’ Later they made up, Madonna often visiting her three former partners in the apartment she had once shared with them to ask for musical advice and tuition.
At first, Madonna was very much in awe of the older, more experienced Camille and initially deferred to her judgment, even though she was keen to continue her unusual collaboration with Bray. Camille delved into her contact book and brought in an array of top-class musicians to audition for a new band. It was a process that took months. Session players like Jeff Gottlieb, John Kaye, David Frank and Jack Soni, musicians who had played with artists of the caliber of Dire Straits and David Bowie, jammed with the young Madonna. Moreover, just as she was flattered and impressed by this level of musical interest, they, in turn, recognized her potential.
As well as taking charge of Madonna’s musical career, Camille set about re-ordering her day-to-day existence. Besides paying her $100 a week and finding her a job as a house cleaner, she gave her unlimited access to her studio, where Madonna endlessly wrote lyrics and practiced her music.
Madonna’s new management also helped find her a place to live, a shabby, one-room apartment on West 30th. This arrangement did not last long, however, for she was forced to move a few weeks later, after a break-in. It appeared that she had been stalked, the intruder climbing in through a window and stealing only a packet of nude photographs from one of her numerous photographic sessions. While Madonna, cavalier about her own safety despite her earlier experience, was happy to stay on in her room on 30th Street, Camille and Adam Alter thought otherwise and installed her in an uptown apartment off Riverside Drive.
As the months passed, it was clear that Camille had become much more than a business manager. She was Madonna’s mother, her best friend, and her guide, the heroine who had come to her rescue at a time of need. Upon Camille, eight years her senior, Madonna exerted a continual fascination and a seductive charm. Camille found herself falling in love with her – an affair which, although never consummated, profoundly altered the dynamics of their professional relationship. While Alter provided the funding, he admits that he too was drawn into the intensity of this new ‘family.’
‘There was this raw sexuality about her,’ Camille recalls. ‘The attraction was there, I mean TOTALLY. But you don’t go there with someone like Madonna because she controls people through her sexuality. It was taboo. It isn’t true that we were lovers, but was I in love with her? Yeah! It was a crazy kind of thing, protection, maternal, playing with each other in a very flirtatious way. Was she in love with me? In her own way, I think so. She loves strong women and I was her hero. She loves handsome, powerful, mothering women. Always did.’
For a long time they were an inseparable double act, going to the movies together, scouring the thrift stores, going out to clubs and restaurants and attending business meetings where they would work the room and, as Camille puts it, ‘kick ass.’ They went out to Fire Island that summer, Camille taking her lover, Madonna bringing her on-off boyfriend of the moment, artist Ken Compton. Like a doting parent, Camille constantly indulged her younger friend, bringing food for her to the studio, lending her money, organizing her contraception, taking her for surgery to have impacted wisdom teeth removed, and bandaging her up when she cut her finger during her work cleaning houses.
Aware of Camille’s feelings toward her, Madonna constantly teased and tormented her would-be lover, at the end of one concert stripping off and then asking Camille to towel her down; on another occasion deliberately making out with a girlfriend, Janice Galloway, her old friend from Ann Arbor days, in the back seat as Camille drove them in her car.
Yet although the sexual tension placed Madonna in a position of power and heightened the intensity of their relationship, Camille could smell the fear at the heart of the young girl’s being. Her hunger for fame and love was matched only by her low self-esteem, her self-abasement leading to a chronic unwillingness to accept just how special and different she was. Camille came to realize that the more outrageous Madonna’s behavior, the greater her terror of failure.
So, for example, when she went out for dinner in a Japanese restaurant with music scouts from the prestigious William Morris agency, she deliberately let out a huge belch during the main course. (It has to be said that belching does seem to have been a favorite attention-seeking ploy of hers.) The scouts dismissed it as obnoxious behavior, but Camille saw it as a nervous reaction from a young woman fearful of rejection. On another occasion, Madonna walked into Camille’s office while she was on the telephone and proceeded to shave her armpits in front of her. She told Camille that she had to shave at that very moment and as the only mirror in the place was in Camille’s office, she had had to come in to use it. When Camille asked her to leave, she smirked and flounced out. ‘At that moment it was meant to shock,’ recalls Camille. ‘In reality she was afraid that the [telephone] conversation might be about her and whether or not she was going to make it.’
Her belligerence and rudeness colored her working relationship with her acting coach, Mira Rostova, a Russian émigrée, to whom she was sent by Camille. It was a short-lived education. Madame Rostova, who had worked with Montgomery Clift and other Hollywood greats, considered the time she spent with Madonna thoroughly disagreeable, remarking, ‘She was vulgar and very unladylike. Her acting was not particularly interesting.’ As with her clashes over her dancing with Pearl Lang, Madonna’s attitude was an affirmation of her fear of failure, with her always preferring to explain away any difficulties in terms of personal differences, rather than admitting to any professional inadequacy of her own.
Just how desperate she was for the limelight became apparent to director Ed Steinberg when, in 1981, he was shooting a music video called
Konk,
in which Madonna and her friend Martin Burgoyne appeared with dozens of other dancers. As he panned the camera around the dance floor, Steinberg realized to his amusement that Madonna was doing all she could to get into every single shot. He calmly explained to the fame-hungry youngster that he wanted to include more than one dancer.
Camille understood Madonna’s fears and in general tolerated her behavior, partly because she was perfectly well aware that too strong an objection would most likely drive the singer to greater excesses. She drew the line, though, when Madonna sprayed her beloved pet poodles, Norman and Mona, orange and pink respectively, and then stenciled the words ‘Sex’ and ‘Fuck’ on their colored coats. Camille also remembers a photo shoot for designer Norma Kamali, at which Madonna wore rosary beads and a cross that hung down to hover over her waistline. ‘See, Camille,’ she yelled. ‘Even God wants to get into my pants.’ This bratty behavior manifested itself again and again, typified perhaps by an incident when they were waiting in line outside the trendy Underground Club. Impatient as ever, Madonna shouted at the doorman, ‘Remember me? – We made out the other night.’ Camille took her home, scolding her like an errant schoolgirl and pointing out that she had neither reason nor need to behave in such a fashion.