Authors: Andrew Morton
The pun had its echoes elsewhere, for the man and woman really turning heads in New York that summer were Madonna and John Jellybean Benitez. After weeks of flirting and warily circling around each other’s characters, they began to be seen together regularly, arriving as a couple at the trendiest restaurants, hip venues and hot parties around Manhattan – when their busy schedules allowed. As Benitez concedes, speaking of their careers and business interests, ‘We kept trying to set up a meet, then make a plan, and ended up canceling because I had to be in the studio and she had to go to Europe or something.’
In this relationship, however, it seemed that Madonna had for once met her match. Unlike her former lover Jean-Michel Basquiat, Benitez was as consumed with ambition as his girlfriend, each taking from and learning equally from the other. ‘We’re both very career-oriented, very goal-oriented,’ he has said. Although by nature a quiet, even shy, young man, his hunger for fame was every bit as great as Madonna’s, as was shown by his decision to hire his own publicist, David Salidor, when he landed a DJ job at the Funhouse. It was a shrewd move; Benitez was invited to those parties and meetings that would normally be closed to a DJ. Once again Madonna proved a quick study, quizzing Benitez’s publicist closely about the mechanics of dealing with the media. ‘She took that knowledge and applied it to her own career,’ Salidor observes.
Just as Benitez had introduced Madonna to Bert Padell, so he was now instrumental in giving her a sense of the social and commercial possibilities open to her. He showed her how to manipulate and exploit the downtown scene in a way that was cool and hip. In short he conducted for her a daily seminar on how to be a star – or at least behave like a star. As she once acknowledged, ‘I always acted like a star long before I was one.’
When they were not busy trying to add themselves to the stars glittering in the New York scene’s firmament, they would steal away to a cliff-top beach house in the Hamptons, which had been rented the year before by the actor John Belushi, not long before his tragic death from drugs. The party, usually comprising Jellybean, Madonna, her brother Christopher, the record producer Arthur Baker and his singer wife Tina, and session musician John Robie, would arrive in the early hours of Saturday morning after Benitez had finished his stint at the Funhouse. If they didn’t crash out they would go swimming, watch the sunrise and feed the ducks. Other friends would arrive and sleep out on the porch, and the whole group party all night. Cocaine and other drugs were in plentiful supply; Arthur Baker, then at the peak of his career with five records in the Top Twenty, remembers that they spent most of the time ‘totally off our faces.’ Everyone, that is, except Madonna. ‘I always got the impression that this wasn’t what she wanted to be doing,’ Baker adds. ‘Things were happening for her then. She wanted to be working.’
Not that she had much opportunity to party, for things were indeed happening for her. Her new association with Freddy DeMann soon began to pay dividends, as the Hollywood manager secured a meeting for her in September, with film producer, Jon Peters, who asked her to play the part of a club singer in a movie he was making, a romantic comedy called
Vision Quest
. A few weeks later she found herself, ‘cold, bored and lonely,’ in Spokane, Washington, for the shoot. It didn’t seem fair, especially as that month she was celebrating the fact that ‘Holiday’ was now the number-one dance song in America, a song, as one critic remarked, ‘as infectious as the plague.’
True, there were compensations. Only a year earlier she had been ‘the black Madonna,’ scarcely acknowledged by her record company when her first single was released. Yet the following November she was in a Chinese restaurant chatting about her music, her crucifix jewelry and her life in Detroit with Peters’s girlfriend and business partner, Barbra Streisand.
It was a meeting, if not of soul sisters, then of two women who were each driven by an almost visceral desire for mass adulation, for universal love, acclaim and acceptance. Theirs was not an act, a performance to be switched on and off at will, but a deep-seated craving to be the center of attention every day, in every way. It was, and is, a feature of Madonna’s personality, which left her father, a self-effacing and private man, simply baffled. ‘Do you always dress like that? Is that a costume?’ he asked quizzically when, later that month, his flamboyant daughter arrived at his home for Thanksgiving, with Jellybean Benitez in tow.
She remained unabashed by such criticism, her self-belief as powerful as a force of nature. A few weeks later she met up with another name from her past, budding actor David Alan Grier, joining him at Studio 54 where she was due to perform at a birthday celebration for the Italian fashion house Fiorucci. Surveying the room, she told Grier, now a well-known actor, ‘You and me and are going to be big stars, baby, and leave these other suckers in the dust.’
Until now, only her friends and a handful of acquaintances had witnessed her vaunting ambition at first hand. That was soon to change. In January 1984, the success of ‘Holiday’ earned Madonna her national television debut, a spot on the world’s most famous teenage dance party,
American Bandstand
. When the show’s evergreen host, Dick Clark, asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up, she replied without hesitation, ‘Rule the world.’
Clark was amused, but her reply had been breathtakingly honest, a precisely truthful statement of her deep-seated desires and needs. The pathology of her ambition, primal and unyielding, made her willing, even eager, to sacrifice anything – love, affection, friendship, stability, anonymity- on the altar of stardom. Perhaps more accurately, she was prepared to pursue her longing for love by pandering to the fickle, dark-hearted god of fame. Her psychology made it inevitable that she would enter wholeheartedly into this Faustian pact, anxious to see her name in lights and her picture on magazine covers, to watch her screaming fans adoring her.
As it turned out, she did not have long to wait.
‘I’m a Sexy Woman, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!’
A
GIANT WHITE WEDDING CAKE stole the show at the first ever MTV Video Music Awards on September 14, 1984. Or rather, the young singer perched on top of the cake did. The ceremony, which was being broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall in New York, had been carefully rehearsed, but even its host, Bette Midler, seemed taken aback when Madonna, dressed in a tight white bustier with a skirt and veil of white tulle, and accessorized with her trademark ‘Boy Toy’ belt buckle, strings of pearls, crucifix jewelry and rubber bangles, launched into the title song of her yet to be released second album,
Like A Virgin
. If the word ‘virgin’ was not in itself enough to make the audience sit up, the sight of this far from coy-looking bride writhing on the stage in unmistakable simulation of sexual intercourse, certainly was. They had seen nothing like it.
While Bette Midler made a couple of weak jokes following the performance, the audience at Radio City was bewildered. A bemused Arthur Baker and his wife Tina, who were sitting near the front row, could not believe their eyes. ‘Afterwards we all said that her career was over, that she had simply lost the plot,’ Baker recalls. What they didn’t know at the time was that, while they may not have enjoyed Madonna’s raunchy act first-hand, it looked great on camera, and TV viewers loved it. The single of ‘Like A Virgin’ was set to be Madonna’s biggest hit so far, going multi-platinum and staying at the number-one position for six weeks from December 1984. ‘It was the performance that made her career,’ Baker had to concede. ‘It showed that she was savvy enough to know how to use the camera to her advantage.’
If there had been any doubt at Sire Records that Madonna was more than a one-album wonder – the company had held back her second album while trying to reap maximum profits from the first, and were still pushing singles from the now million-selling
Madonna
album into the charts as the singer introduced ‘Like A Virgin’ – these were now swept aside. Rather, the record company found itself in the enviable position of promoting the newly crowned Queen of Pop.
It was not a role that everybody was happy to see Madonna in. While many fans seemingly couldn’t get enough of the song, outraged moralists were quick to condemn ‘Like A Virgin,’ which they saw as undermining traditional values and encouraging sex outside marriage. The controversy was one that she herself had anticipated when she chose to record the track, predicting that the resulting ‘virgin or whore’ debate would win publicity for her and the song. ‘I was being provocative,’ she said. ‘I like irony. I like the way things can be taken on different levels. “Like A Virgin” was always absolutely ambiguous.’
With its accompanying video set in Venice and featuring a slutty-looking Madonna singing in a gondola, alternating with rather romantic scenes in which she wears a wedding gown, the song actually owed its success to the fact that it appealed both to the sexually inexperienced, who were happy to see it as a celebration of true love, as well as to those who saw it as being about sexual desire and fulfillment.
Meanwhile, Madonna’s public persona – indomitable, sexually unashamed, supremely confident – had begun to strike a chord with a new generation of teenage girls. Many of these young women had been brought up, like their heroine herself, with old-fashioned stereotypes of women as virginal brides or as whores, or with feminist values that rejected the use of a woman’s looks for her self-advancement. To these girls, Madonna was saying that it was okay to show off your body as well as your brain; that one could be sexy and successful. Here was a woman who dressed wantonly and behaved badly, yet who, far from being punished for this behavior, was instead richly rewarded.
In addition, at a time when eighties fashions were promoting flat-chested, stick-thin women as ideals of beauty, the more curvaceous Madonna made average girls feel that it was fine to be the shape they were. The new word ‘wannabe’ perfectly described the thousands of girls who tried to emulate the singer’s look. At one point Macy’s allotted an entire floor area to the sale of Madonna-look clothing, including cut-off gloves, rubber bangles and lacy leggings.
The Madonna phenomenon was now such that university professors, gender-studies experts and feminists earnestly discussed her influence as a post-modernist cultural icon. Yet, in the words of Angie Bowie, the former wife of Madonna’s hero, David Bowie, Madonna’s creed was simpler: ‘I’m a sexy woman, yeah, yeah, yeah.’
Although she had now achieved the success and adulation she had craved for so long, 1985 was to be a year of very mixed emotions as Madonna the individual struggled to cope with her new life as a modern icon. At first she reveled in her celebrity status. Ever since Madonna had first appeared in a fashion spread in the
Village Voice
, she had saved every press clipping about herself, carefully labeling and dating each one. Each morning she read the New York tabloids and the
New York Times
, scouring them for stories about herself. Then she would look over clippings sent by her press secretary, Liz Rosenberg. While publicly she feigned indifference when a critic wrote a withering review or when a reporter made up a negative story about her, she was frequently hurt by such coverage, often losing sleep if a particular remark hit home. She took, and takes, the position that those who judge her negatively, since they neither know her nor have ever been in her position, artistically or personally, have no right to throw stones. It would take several years before Madonna truly began to feel comfortable with her star status, with the adulation and the isolation.
She came to understand that constant limelight was both a blessing and a curse. Gone were the days of getting around New York on her bicycle, taking the subway, or visiting the local laundromat unrecognized. When she went to restaurants, other diners would talk about her or just stare, while paparazzi photographers waited for her outside, the more daring walking up to her table and snapping a picture as she ate.
She was disconcerted to find that universal recognition was not something that she enjoyed. ‘It really bothered me,’ she recalls, and admits that, at times, she felt ‘caged’ in her own room. As Steve Bray commented laconically, ‘She always wanted to be the center of attention. Now it’s her job.’ Her changed circumstances were witnessed one evening by video producer Ed Steinberg, whose path and Madonna’s had first crossed in 1981 when she was a struggling unknown. He spotted her at the Lucky Strike Club, trying hard to be inconspicuous at the back of the room, and surrounded by bodyguards and other assistants. ‘I thought that it must be great to have her money, entrée and fame, but I would not want to be her. She looked very lonely. Who could she now trust? Did people want to be her friend because of who she was or what she could do for them?’
Certainly, some of Madonna’s closest acquaintances were having trouble coming to terms with her rise to fame. Her ex-lover from 1983, Jean-Michel Basquiat, went into a deep depression when, in May 1985, her face appeared on the cover of the prestigious
Time
magazine. His artistic sensibilities outraged, he felt that he was more talented than she, and that it should be his face fronting such publications, not hers. Even Madonna’s younger sister Paula complained to Steinberg, who had employed her at the time, that she was a better singer than her sister and should therefore be the star of the family. Steinberg sympathized. ‘It was very hard on Paula always living in the shadow. She was a nice kid, used by the New York crowd as a kind of substitute for her sister.’
Some felt walked over by Madonna on her route march to stardom, others carelessly discarded. Madonna herself was typically unapologetic. ‘I’m tough, I’m ambitious and I know exactly what I want,’ she argued. ‘If that makes me a bitch, that’s okay.’ When her former boyfriend Mark Kamins discovered that ‘Into The Groove,’ which Madonna had specifically written for his latest protégée, Cheyne, had been recorded instead for the film
Desperately Seeking Susan
, he hit the roof. It was only after he had paid to record the song that he learned that she herself had recorded it for the film’s soundtrack. While ‘Into The Groove’ would come to be described as Madonna’s ‘first great single,’ it left an angry Kamins out of pocket. ‘I was pissed at her,’ he says – more angry that she had not taken the trouble to tell him than about the cost.