Authors: Andrew Morton
They had met earlier at a party in New York, the late President’s son subsequently seeing her backstage after her Who’s That Girl? Tour performance at Madison Square Garden, and then meeting up with her again in December at a downtown fitness center, after which they sometimes went jogging together in Central Park. With his craggy saturnine features, well-toned body, and keen intelligence, as well as his family pedigree, the charming John Kennedy, Jr, was an eminently suitable squire for one of the world’s most glamorous and exciting women.
Beyond that, however, Madonna was interested not just in Kennedy, but in his mother too, Jackie Onassis, an American icon to match, perhaps to outshine, even Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. ‘She was one of the few people in the world she really admired,’ recalls a friend, adding, ‘Madonna was impressed by her style.’ Unfortunately, those feelings were not reciprocated. A stilted meeting at Jackie O’s elegant Fifth Avenue apartment, at the end of which Madonna signed herself ‘Mrs Sean Penn’ in the visitors’ book, left her under no illusion that her charm had failed to win over her hostess. It was clear that Jackie O did not want her son to be seen with, let alone to date, such a controversial character, especially as Madonna was still married. That John Junior was something of a mother’s boy did nothing to help her cause. Although they were lovers for a brief period, the affair was not a success, John Junior as intimidated by Madonna’s reputation as he was by his mother. For all her outward aggression, explained one of her former lovers, Madonna is a woman who expects her man to take control, more of a kitten than a tigress in the bedroom. Rather ruefully, she explained to friends after the end of her affair with Kennedy that he was just too nervous for them to click sexually. The chemistry simply wasn’t there. ‘Some guys can handle the fame, others can’t,’ says a former lover. ‘He couldn’t.’ What the affair did do, however, was annoy a husband always prone to jealousy. Even after their divorce, her fling with John Kennedy, Jr, rankled with Sean Penn. Indeed, when the two men met years later at a party in New York, Penn told Kennedy bluntly that he owed him an apology.
In reality, the affair proved to be as short-lived as her decision to divorce her husband. A week before Christmas 1987, just two weeks after she had filed for divorce, she withdrew her suit. The arguments of concerned friends, a charm offensive launched by Sean Penn – among other blandishments he sent her balloons and a singing telegram – and their agreement to work harder at making their marriage endure all helped to build a bridge between the estranged couple.
Nevertheless, neither could do anything about the demands of their respective careers. Madonna threw herself into her work, starting filming
Bloodhounds of Broadway
on Christmas Eve 1987 and later, as soon as shooting had wrapped, embarking on six weeks of grueling rehearsals for
Speed-the-Plow
. Sean Penn missed the opening night in May because he too was working, filming
Casualties of War
in Thailand with his co-star and friend Michael J. Fox. From the point of view of his marriage, the opening performance of
Speed-the-Plow
was to assume a significance out of all proportion to its importance as an event.
In the audience that night was a stand-up comedian, Sandra Bernhard, a woman who would have a powerful impact on Madonna’s life, her marriage and, ultimately, her future relationships. Bernhard’s one-woman show, which included a skit about Madonna’s iconic pop-star status, was running in a downtown theater at the time, and when the two women met backstage they immediately struck up a friendship. ‘It seemed like the right thing at the right time,’ recalls Bernhard. She and Madonna and a third member,
Bloodhounds of Broadway
co-star Jennifer Grey, made up a boisterous threesome who called themselves the ‘Snatch Batch’ – an ironic reference to the ‘Brat Pack’ tag given to Penn and his clique of young actor friends.
Throughout that summer they terrorized the city’s most fashionable spots, going to parties, restaurants, gallery openings and clubs together, beating up the town in best Brat Pack fashion. For Madonna, it was just like the old days. Their behavior was juvenile and uninhibited, on one reported occasion seeing them stage a belching competition in a downtown restaurant. Meanwhile, teased and tormented by the trio, the media now speculated that Madonna and the openly bisexual Bernhard were more than just friends. Contemptuously amused by these allegations, the two women merely added fuel to the rumors. Their appearance on
Late Night with David Letterman
for which they wore matching jeans, tee-shirts and clumpy shoes, gave the gossips a field day. In a raucous, now infamous chat, the terrible twosome claimed that they frequented the Cubby Hole, a lesbian hang-out, while Bernhard boasted that she had slept with both Sean and Madonna.
Theirs was a notorious double act that was to continue for the next few years, long after Madonna’s marriage had ended in divorce. In 1989, for example, before she and Bernhard went on for an AIDS ‘Dance-a-Thon’ in Los Angeles with Stacey Q and their other dance partner,
Who’s That Girl?
co-star Coati Mundi, they discussed how they were going to freak everyone out. ‘It was like a game,’ recalls Coati Mundi. ‘They went out together, hugging and dancing in step.’ Again, at a charity benefit in New York in June the same year they performed a hilarious pastiche of the 1965 Sonny and Cher song ‘I’ve Got You Babe,’ grinding their hips together and fondling themselves in front of a delighted audience.
Behind the light-hearted banter and the deliberate sexual ambiguity, however, there had been an intriguing change in the dynamic of Madonna’s relationships. As she entered her thirties, she took to ensuring that there was always another woman, invariably a lesbian, by her side. Sandra Bernhard at first, then, later, nightclub owner Ingrid Casares and model Jenny Shimizu. They were her
doppelgänger,
shadowing her every move, advising her, shopping with her, or simply spending time with her. Whatever the sexual chemistry between Madonna and these friends, their constant presence helped create an emotional buffer between herself and the current man in her life. Since those to whom she had given her heart, notably her husband and mother, had, for whatever reason, let her down, the presence of these ‘shadows’ in her life now gave her, in some way, protection, from hurt, from commitment and from emotional intimacy.
When Sean Penn returned home from filming in South-East Asia in June 1988, he discovered that there were now three of them in their marriage: Madonna, Sandra and himself. As Madonna has admitted: ‘I’d say that my friendship with Sandra was just beginning as my relationship with Sean was dying.’ They went everywhere together, Sandra tagging along, for instance, when the Penns joined their friend, the artist Peter Max, on his yacht for a cruise up the Hudson to celebrate the Fourth of July. It was an arrangement that did not sit well with the temperamental actor who, like several of Madonna’s future male paramours, had little time for Bernhard or her involvement with his wife. As far as Madonna was concerned however, her bisexual friend provided a raucous, girly counterpoint, or even antidote, to Penn’s endless petulance.
That petulance had certainly not abated. When he arrived back in the States he began where he had left off, abusing photographers and fans at a Mike Tyson fight in Atlantic City in June, and a couple of weeks later kicking in the car door of a photographer in New York. Nor was it long before he turned his anger on his wife, inevitably over her friendship with Bernhard. Sandra had been hanging out with Madonna in Hollywood as she worked on her latest album,
Like A Prayer
, and while Penn was rehearsing a new stage play,
Hurlyburly.
Worried about his behavior towards photographers and his heavy drinking, Madonna would drive to the theater at the end of the day to collect him, mainly to ensure that he didn’t get into any more trouble. By now, however, relations between husband and wife had hit a new low.
It was not long before evidence of the rift became visible in public. The opening-night party for Penn’s play in the Twenty-20 club, saw a very public altercation between the virtually estranged couple. When Madonna arrived with Bernhard as her ‘date’ for the evening, Penn exploded in fury. ‘You cunt, how could you do this to me?’ he screamed, his outburst witnessed and reported by several alarmed bystanders, including the actor Sylvester Stallone. For Penn, red-blooded male cast in the Hemingway mold, his wife’s behavior seemed to add injury to the greatest injury of all: the fact that she insisted that her career came before children. Years later, Madonna admitted; ‘Sean wanted to have a child. It wasn’t the right time, you know everything is about timing.’
Although the conflict over children and career lay at the heart of their difficulties, Penn’s suspicions about his wife and her friend can only have exacerbated the divide between them. Were they lovers? While she and Bernhard have kept the public guessing, privately Madonna answered in the affirmative when asked point blank about her relationship. Jim Albright, who enjoyed a stormy three-year relationship with Madonna during the 1990s, certainly believed that they had slept together. ‘I asked her why, because I can’t stand her [Bernhard]. She didn’t give me an explanation.’ It cannot have been very surprising, therefore, that as their marriage careened out of control, Sean Penn moved back in with his parents, while Sandra Bernhard stayed at the couple’s Malibu home with Madonna.
The end, when at last it came, was as dramatic as the beginning, although it was accompanied by the sound of a police bullhorn rather than the pounding of helicopter rotor blades. On December 29, armed police surrounded the Malibu house, and an officer’s amplified voice demanded that Penn should come out, Madonna having apparently complained to the local sheriffs office about an alleged assault. Penn, eating from a bowl of Rice Krispies, sauntered out into the morning sunshine, to be confronted by what he later described as a SWAT team of armed police who had taken that extreme action because they knew he had guns in the house. ‘I had made a threat that I would literally cut her hair off,’ Penn told the writer Chris Mundi. ‘She took it quite seriously. It was pretty dramatic.’
A rather more lurid, and hitherto uncontested, version has been widely published, and contends that Penn, drunk and out of control, had burst into the marital home the previous afternoon, overpowered his wife and then ‘trussed her up like a turkey’ before gagging her. He left her alone for nine hours before she was able to make good her escape, eventually calling the police from the phone in her car, before driving to the sheriff’s office to file charges.
Neither version, of course, is entirely true to what really happened. In fact, the actuality of the incident symbolized the fundamental fault line in their marriage. Penn wanted Madonna ‘barefoot and naked in the kitchen,’ she wanted to explore her artistic career. After hours of arguing and fighting that fateful night, an exasperated Penn grabbed his wife, threw her down and sat on her, pinning her arms to the floor and refusing to let her move. In spite of her screams and tears, he kept her like that for what she later told friends was about four hours. After a while, her sobbing ceased and as the hours ticked by, she just quietly lay there, utterly traumatized by the experience.
‘She is never still for a minute, so to do that was like death to her, like Chinese water torture,’ says a friend to whom Madonna related the true story. ‘There was a lot of symbolism in the actual act, him wanting to hold her back, to stop her career, to have control, to keep her in her place. It was probably a desperate attempt to get his way. It must have been smothering for her.’
In those few fateful hours, any hope of a reconciliation died. In her heart, Madonna realized that, as much as she might love her husband, they were, to use his phrase, ‘reading from different scripts.’ A month later they were divorced, Sean Penn going on to father two children by the actress Robin Wright, whom he then married, Madonna storming on with her career, while at the same time beginning a period of sexual exploration that would both titillate and unnerve her fans and detractors alike.
A few months after the breakup of her marriage, Madonna was sitting with a girlfriend outside a New York café, soaking up the spring sunshine. Unrecognized by passers-by and without a photographer in sight, she was for once able to relax for a moment and reflect. A self-confessed ‘old-fashioned girl’ who revered the institution of marriage, Madonna truly believed that she had put her heart and soul into trying to make the relationship work. That it had failed so spectacularly was a source of pain and regret. Nevertheless, as with almost every significant event in her life, it was an experience from which she was able to learn. She had emerged a wiser, more mature woman, determined never to make the same mistakes again. Even if she was not especially happy, at least she was at peace with herself. Perhaps, she reflected, it all had been for the best.
Nice Ice Baby, Don’t Go
B
OOM.
Boom
. BOOM. Man, that was a heavy sound. Just the way he liked it. He boasted that you could hear his car coming from three blocks away, the deep thud of the bass making window frames and doors vibrate as he passed, his blond head nodding with the pumping rap music. Fitted the speakers in the back himself. Eight-oh-eights – best on the market. And here’s the thing. No matter how loud you pushed those suckers, they wouldn’t hurt your eardrums. At least, not permanently. He knew. Vanilla Ice had done a special study. He was cool about the sound. IT WOULD NOT HURT YOUR HEARING. Got that. You sure? You deaf or something?
So when his manager, Tommy Quon, quietly pointed out that they could be sued for damages if one of the kids who came to watch his sell-out concert tour suffered medical injury, Vanilla Ice turned – so to speak – a deaf ear. Stack them speakers high, man, stack ‘em high. We’re going to rock the house tonight. Quon knew better than to argue with his star. Vanilla Ice – born Robert Van Winkle in Miami in October 1968 – was riding higher than any bank of speakers. Ice was a sky rocket. In 1990 his anthem ‘Ice Ice Baby’ was the first rap single to hit number one in the pop charts, while his debut album,
To the Extreme
, sold an incredible 15 million copies worldwide.