Goddess: Inside Madonna (13 page)

Many people who have worked
closely with Madonna confirm that she responds well to stress and stays balanced “in the center of a hurricane.” When John Schlesinger directed her in
The Next Best Thing
, he was amazed that despite her lack of acting experience, she never doubted for an instant that she had mastered her part. The film was difficult even for a consummate professional, Schlesinger adds, and was one of the “worst experiences” in his life for a number of reasons. From the beginning, he had problems because the producers were reluctant to address the issue of a gay man becoming a parent (the theme of the film) and were constantly calling for rewrites of the script.

In the film, Madonna plays Abbey, an unmarried yoga instructor with no love prospects on the horizon who is very aware that her biological clock is running down. After a drunken one-night stand with her best friend, a gay gardener played by Rupert Everett, Abbey gets pregnant. “Madonna has a highly developed and elaborate defense mechanism against criticism and loss,” John Schlesinger says. “As someone who grew up in an extremely loving home, I can only imagine that Madonna’s mother must have given her a phenomenal combination of nature and nurture for her to have such self-esteem. She is indomitable. Whatever her failings as an actress, it’s difficult for a director to ignore that attitude she has of ‘I am the center of the universe.’ Madonna projects the kind of energy that makes a star.”

On the surface, Madonna appears to be bulletproof. She has the unusual ability, especially for a performer, never to get paralyzed by her failures. Instead, she is propelled forward by every bad review and negative article that is written about her. “I think I have a motor inside of me,” she says, “that makes me never go down. I feel it pulling at me, and sometimes it’s stronger than at other times. But no matter what happens, working is the one thing that makes me fight all those demons inside of myself.”

According to a close friend and business partner, Madonna has been extremely hurt by criticism and bad reviews. “She has always said that people assume because she’s rich and famous,” the woman says, “that all that nasty stuff that’s written about her is just part of the price she has to pay. When she feels that she has done something really good, whether it’s a video or a film, and the critics massacre her efforts, I have seen her really upset and crying. The only thing that gets her up and active again is her discipline that she will beat the depression. She always minimizes her problems by comparing them to what happened to her mother. I give her a lot of credit.”

By giving her favorite daughter such exceptional nurturing and unconditional love, Madonna Fortin Ciccone is also responsible for Madonna’s belief that there are no limits to her capabilities. According to Schlesinger, during the shooting of the first half of the film, Madonna would constantly question his efforts to direct her. “Her determination to manage the film set cost her in terms of her performance,” Schlesinger says. “For the first few weeks, she would constantly tell me that she didn’t understand what I was trying to say to her or to get her to do. At the time, I knew I had to try and find a means of communicating with her, because I couldn’t just treat her as one would a consummate professional actor. What I tried was to not have too much premeditation when it came to directing her, because I thought that things would happen naturally. Unfortunately, she turned out to be a famous performer who has made it based on a certain artificiality and connotation. In the end, I blame myself, because I was the director and unfortunately I made the mistake of believing that her talent in the realm of music and video would carry her as an actress. But what was most incredible was that because of her powerful belief in herself, she almost convinced me.”

Rupert Everett is more indulgent about Madonna’s performance in
The Next Best Thing
. “Her main problem is that her ‘Madonnaness’ overpowered any acting talent she may have,” Everett says. “By that I mean, the art of being Madonna, the persona that her fans depend on for always giving them the best performance, never holding anything back or disappointing them, but always giving them the sheer shock they expect from her performances, often gets in the way of her talent. The fact is that she didn’t challenge us enough in the right way obviously, because she didn’t have the experience to know what should be changed. For instance, being good in a film has a lot to do with having a good role. If the actor is supposed to light a cigarette and set fire to her hair, it’s a great scene no matter how you act it. But if someone cuts the part about setting fire to her hair and all the actor does is light a cigarette, then no matter how well you do it, it’s just another cigarette being lit. Basically, the powers that ruled were afraid of making Madonna unsympathetic and quirky, which was hard luck on her. Had they left the scenes the way they were written, she would have come across as funny and eccentric. In the end, we failed her, all of us, because we left her with a role that was bland and forced her to act in a film that didn’t give her a lot of scope.”

Madonna’s eighty-nine-year-old maternal grandmother, Elsie Fortin, says of her granddaughter, “I think she has difficulty acting in some of her movies, because when she’s not playing herself, her fans have trouble relating to her.”

During one of her conversations
with her grandmother when Madonna was a child, she learned that when her mother found out she was pregnant with her, she wanted the same doctor who had delivered her twenty-six years earlier to deliver her third baby. It would be the only pregnancy for which Madonna Fortin Ciccone would travel the eighty miles by car from her home in Pontiac, Michigan, to Bay City. Not surprisingly, little Madonna interpreted that revelation as further proof that she had been the favorite child. She relished hearing how her mother had waited out the last few weeks of her pregnancy at Elsie Fortin’s house, where she slept in her girlhood bed covered by the identical blue-and-white lace quilt that she had used throughout her adolescence. On August 16, 1958, Elsie Fortin took her daughter to Mercy Hospital in Bay City, where Dr. Abraham H. Jacoby, the same man who had delivered all of Elsie Fortin’s eight children at his home at 2202 Ninth Street, delivered Tony and Madonna Ciccone’s firstborn daughter. One of Madonna’s deepest regrets was that Dr. Jacoby, who was already sixty-two years old when she was born, was long gone when she was old enough to talk to him.

Elsie Fortin also told her granddaughter that she had been the one who had persuaded her daughter to baptize the baby Madonna, which at the time went against the wishes of Tony Ciccone. It was an unusual request, since French Catholics never call a child after a living relative, especially a parent. Still, Mrs. Fortin insisted that tradition be broken, since she had always had a frightening premonition that her daughter would not live long enough to have “old bones.” In some odd way that the eighty-nine-year-old woman still finds difficult to explain, she had had a sense that her granddaughter was destined to become something special. “When little Madonna was born,” she recalls, “I had a sense of some finality that I could never explain, but because I am a very religious person, I knew if my feelings proved right, at least the name would live on if she gave it to the baby.”

Madonna found that story to be almost mystical, yet one more sign of a divine connection between herself and her deceased parent.

After her mother died and
her father remarried, Madonna felt unloved and alienated from her father. The motherless child who was once the favorite was forced to accept another woman as a mother figure. In reaction to the betrayal Madonna felt, she developed an uncanny sense of survival that stayed with her throughout her life. More than just learning how to survive, Madonna learned how to thrive. As a little girl, she knew to limit her tantrums so that, when she had one, it would make an impression, and people would sit up and pay attention. Whenever she found herself in a situation she could neither understand nor change, she was clever enough to fade into the background. More than any other asset that she possesses, Madonna has mastered the art of control so that her acting passive and humble in an environment she has not conquered is as effective a method as humiliating and terrifying her coworkers or catching them off guard in those situations when she is in charge.

On the occasion of the English premiere of
Evita
, Madonna’s good friend Sting gave a party in her honor at The Ivy, a chic London restaurant. The guests were all important figures in the world of British cinema, stage, and rock and roll. Madonna was the most glittering star of the moment, who deserved all the accolades that were coming her way for her performance in the film. Instead of reveling in her success, Madonna arrived late, dressed in nondescript black slacks and a white T-shirt, her face scrubbed clean and her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. While the guests milled around, waiting for her to appear, she slipped unnoticed into the restaurant and sat quietly at a corner table in the dimly lit bar. One well-known actress recalls her amazement when she finally noticed her. “Everybody was wondering where she was,” the actress recalls with amusement, “and suddenly I turned around and there she was. Sting rushed up to her and hugged her, and then everybody gathered around, raising glasses and applauding.” The actress laughs. “When we asked her why she didn’t let us know she had arrived, she said, in this timid little voice, that she didn’t want to disturb us, because we looked as if we were having so much fun. Can you believe it? The party was for her, and there she was, hiding in the corner like a child.”

Another guest that evening at the
Evita
party was an American director who had worked with Madonna on another film. He viewed that “humble act,” as he called it, as typical of what Madonna does when she feels intimidated. “Don’t be fooled,” he says, “she isn’t comfortable around real actors, because she is deathly afraid of being discovered as a fraud. There’s a little bit of that and a little bit of putting on that invisible act to get attention.”

Madonna’s sense of survival and her instinctive ability to use control in different ways on a film set also enable her to learn from other actors’ mistakes. One of her close friends, who brought her daughter, Lourdes, to visit her on the set of
The Next Best Thing
every day, said of her acting technique, “Madonna considers it like high school. She watches and waits like a good Catholic schoolgirl. When one of the others gets chewed out by the director for doing something wrong, she knows never to do what they did. She’s the Goody Two-shoes on a set, which, of course, she learned when she was forced to protect herself after her father remarried and her stepmother constantly picked on her.”

On every set of each film Madonna has made, regardless of the quality of the script, the talent of her costars, or the sensitivity of the director, she has always been given high marks for her behavior. During the shoot, she is a diva on the defensive. After a film is finished, and the reviews aren’t good, her excuse has frequently been that when she acts in someone else’s film, based on someone else’s characters, and speaks words from someone else’s script, when that “someone else” is in control of the production, it is doomed to fail. “I suppose I’m not very good at sitting around and waiting for someone to give me orders,” she has said. “I’ve been unlucky with my films because it’s difficult for me to be a brushstroke in someone else’s painting.”

On a subconscious level, her
obsession with death, the realization that she couldn’t prevent the demise of her mother, accounts for her need to control the only aspect of her life that she can: her career and the people who work for her.

There is a very different Madonna when it comes to her music and videos. On those occasions, she has said, “I’m not going to make a record and not show up for the vocals or do a video and have nothing to say about the script.” When Madonna first launched her own label, Maverick, it was less to create another lucrative financial corporation than it was to guarantee her success as a singer. From the beginning, she understood that for any artist, after a record is cut, a book is written, or a painting is finished, the amount of promotion and ultimate success of the product is up to the record company, publisher, or gallery. Madonna wasn’t taking any chances by putting her career in the hands of people who wouldn’t care as much about her work as she did. Nile Rodgers, one of her most frequent record producers, explains it by saying, “That arrogance bit is all about how she sticks to her guns, that’s all. It’s that attitude that comes from growing up in a huge family, you know, always having to fight and yell for things like time in the bathroom.”

Alek Keshishian is the director of “On the Road,” “Behind the Scenes,” and “In Bed With Madonna,” as well as the Blond Ambition tour. More significantly, he is the person who came up with the idea of filming the Blond Ambition tour from behind the scenes, which was eventually released as the documentary
Truth or Dare
. When Keshishian was a second-year student at Harvard, he began directing Harvard’s Experimental Theater, which he continued to do until he graduated. During that time, he created a pop opera of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
, which included recordings by Billy Idol, Sting, Kate Bush, and Madonna. The source of his inspiration was Madonna. Kate Bush’s music represents “Cathy,” until she marries “Linton,” when her music becomes Madonna’s. The production was so popular that Keshishian was given permission not only to use it as the subject of his doctoral thesis, but also to stage it at the American Repertory Theater. At the time, his agent, who was at Creative Artists Agency, was so impressed by the result that he arranged for a tape of the pop opera to be shown to Madonna. Impressed as well, she invited Keshishian, along with a crew, to come to Japan in March 1990, where she was currently on her Blond Ambition tour, to film her performance, as well as unrehearsed material, which could eventually be used in a television special. After Keshishian showed some footage to Madonna, he suggested that it could be used instead as a documentary. To persuade her, he pointed out that documentaries are often made of feature-length movies, but never of a rock star on tour. She agreed, and in the end, Alek Keshishian shot more than 150 hours of film, following Madonna on her tour throughout Europe and North America.