Goddess: Inside Madonna (34 page)

The feelings were apparently mutual. “In my opinion,” Nile Rodgers said, “Madonna is an excellent natural singer, a natural musician, a serious artist. It would be real nice if some ostensibly smart people who know about music would get past her image and get into the music. I’m hoping she can just ride out all the crap people are saying about her. I think a lot of the real nasty stuff is coming from men. And all that arrogance bit—she sticks to her guns, that’s all.”

In the beginning, Madonna’s problem was to convince the executives at her record company to take her seriously as a businesswoman and to realize that she was worth their time as a singer. “I think people are intimidated by women who are incredibly ambitious or competitive, because it’s easier to deal with girls who aren’t,” Madonna said. “It’s easier to deal with people who aren’t. Perhaps the people in my record company would have preferred in the beginning for me to be this demure, sweet, accepting girl or something. I don’t know. I think when they finally met me and sat down and had a conversation with me, they were surprised, you know? People tend to expect a certain kind of personality, and then, when they meet me, I think they’re surprised. Perhaps they don’t perceive me to be as intelligent as I think I am. I do like to have control, but I’m not a tyrant. I don’t have to have it plastered on my album that everything is written, arranged, produced, directed, starred in, and so forth by Madonna.”

Madonna’s first album, entitled simply
Madonna
, was a major success, although less for its music than for her sense of style and instinctive understanding of what would shock. After its release, Madonna inspired a national craze among teenagers and eventually among young adults with her lacy underwear, rosary beads as jewelry, Boy Toy belt buckles, and tousled blond hair with black roots. Only after the release of
Madonna
did the singer, despite her many subsequent transformations, settle on what she felt was the right personal style and rhythm in her music. Even after her debut album for Sire Records garnered attention, it took a year before anybody outside the clubs paid attention to her. Once again, she relied on her instincts when she contacted David Bowie’s record producer and convinced him to produce her next album.

Her second album,
Like a Virgin
, made her a star and led to her first video sensation, “Material Girl,” which would ultimately change her life.

C
is Coreman is a movie producer and one of Barbra Streisand’s oldest and closest friends as well as her business partner in Barwood Productions. Coreman remembers meeting Madonna before she became famous and has the same impression that most people have of the singer. At the time, Coreman was casting for Warner Brothers in New York and on one occasion, at an open call, she met the future star. “She walked in with a ghetto blaster,” Coreman recalls, “and she was wearing torn jeans and a T-shirt and had her hair tied up in a rag, but she looked absolutely gorgeous. I knew from the beginning that she was going to be a star because she was so determined and, in fact, she reminded me of Barbra when she was young and first starting out.”

As they began talking, Cis Coreman became intrigued by Madonna’s life story, how she had left home and college and traveled to New York without knowing anyone. “It was this kind of determination,” Coreman continues, “and her electrifying personality and fabulous looks that convinced me that she was extraordinary. Sometimes, very rarely, you see that, as a casting director, when a young person comes in and you just know that they are going to become something important in the business. I knew Madonna was going to make waves.”

Cis Coreman became interested in Madonna enough to consider making a movie about her and her struggle to become a star. “Rusty Lemeron wrote a treatment for us,” Coreman explains, “but unfortunately, it never went anywhere. But I sent a tape of Madonna to Jon Peters, Barbra’s friend at the time, with a note that said he should meet her because I believed that she had absolute star quality.” In fact, she believed it to such an extent that she asked her son, Richard Coreman, a photographer, to go down to Madonna’s apartment on the Lower East Side and take some pictures of her. “The neighborhood was so bad that my son was even terrified, which said something about how courageous Madonna was and how willing she was to suffer just to be in New York. Richard couldn’t imagine how she could have lived there and not been afraid of being raped or murdered.”

Years later, Jon Peters called Cis Coreman, respecting her attempts to develop a movie about Madonna, to ask her if she would mind if he contacted Madonna. At the time, Peters was doing a film entitled
Vision Quest
, starring Matthew Modine as a high school wrestling champion. In the film, released in 1985 by Warner Brothers and directed by Harold Becker, Madonna’s character performs two songs, “Crazy for You” and “Gambler,” when she appears as a nightclub singer. The videos that Madonna eventually made for those two songs used many shots from the film, although neither the movie nor the videos were a financial success.

In February 1985, despite having made two unimpressive films,
A Certain Sacrifice
and
Vision Quest
, Madonna was selling records at the astonishing rate of seventy-five thousand a day. “Material Girl” was at number 18, and “Crazy,” from the sound track of
Vision Quest
, was climbing on the music charts as well. Her videos were constantly on MTV and viewed by critics with curiosity and acclaim.

In Madonna’s mind, she had not achieved nearly enough. She had more money than she had ever had in her life, which wasn’t too difficult for the girl who had landed in New York a mere six years before with only $35 in her pocket. She was earning more than her father at that point, her reference to financial security, but not nearly her goal.

When she thought about her family, she resisted thinking about them with affection and nostalgia. The trick was not to be crippled by the resentment, but to use every negative moment to its best advantage. Her music came out of her life, and she needed to hang on to all those painful memories to keep making the kind of heartfelt compositions her public craved. Just as she learned how not to separate Madonna the waif from Madonna the star, she taught herself to think about her past as if it belonged to someone else. Only when she was alone did she allow herself the momentary luxury of wallowing in self-pity. Her plan was to convey her suffering to her fans without evoking pity, but instead making every man, woman, and child identify with the waif as if she belonged to them, as if they lived to see her happy and secure. She discovered her voice the way a writer finds the rhythm and beat of his words. She found her style, sexy and tough, which came naturally as it was her very own sexual personality that had attracted so many lovers in the past. On one hand, she offered herself as the hurt little girl from the wrong side of the tracks who grabbed at the romantic heart of anyone who watched her perform. On the other, she was the shrewd businesswoman who knew that any decision she made about her image and sound, any choice of collaborator or manager, would stay with her forever, even if she eventually banned the person from her life. She was on her way to becoming the sex goddess of rock and roll, and she was learning how to act self-assured, rich, and sophisticated. If she was successful at creating a flawless portrait of a woman who was destined for stardom, she was obsessed with belonging in a world that was dangerous and unwelcoming to any newcomer who threatened to upset the status quo. For the first few years of her trip toward fame, it had been nothing but fun. Now that big money was invested in her, she had to perform to perfection. No one had to tell her, because she knew instinctively that one false move and she was out.

Concerning her career, she was certain of only one thing: while it might have its ups and downs and could go from better to best, she was in the public eye forever. Concerning her image, she knew that, deep down, she would never change. She was still the motherless child who felt like an outsider in her own home. It didn’t make any difference that she had created an enormous distance between herself and her family, she was in this alone. She needed an ally who didn’t take a piece of her earnings. She needed a friend who didn’t expect to be carried without pulling his or her own weight. She needed a partner.

She needed a husband, for better or for worse.

While she was on the set of her video “Material Girl,” dressed up like Marilyn Monroe, a brooding young actor, dressed all in leather, walked into Madonna’s life.

A disciple of the Actors Studio, Sean Penn was already considered one of the most talented and brilliant actors in Hollywood. Born in 1960 to show business parents—the actress Eileen Ryan and the director Leo Penn, best known for his television work on
I Spy
and
Columbo
, Penn grew up in a privileged show business environment. There was never any struggle to break into an industry filled with strangers. The people who ran Hollywood had been his parents’ close friends and neighbors all his life, and as he matured, the children of the moguls and stars became Penn’s lifelong friends. Two of them lived next door, Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, sons of Martin Sheen, who, like Sean’s parents, was another well-established Hollywood personality. In fact, the two Sheen brothers, along with Sean Penn and his own brother, Chris, would eventually become members of the Brat Pack, a group of promising young actors that also included Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Timothy Hutton, Matt Dillon, Andrew McCarthy, and the late River Phoenix.

In 1979, Martin Sheen, along with Emilio and Charlie, returned from making
Apocalypse Now
in the Philippines. Sheen, recovering from a heart attack that occurred during the filming, was forced to spend time at home to recuperate. The Sheen boys had brought back a bag of prosthetic hands that had been used as props during the filming of the movie. Along with the Penn brothers, they set about to make a super-8 horror film that had a slim plot but spectacular special effects. Tying firecrackers to stage-blood squibs made of condoms, the budding filmmakers made an unpromising start to what would turn into a successful cinematic future for all four. Though the finished product amused the ailing Martin Sheen as well as Eileen Ryan and Leo Penn, everyone agreed that it was not a particularly gripping or impressive first effort. It was enough, however, to convince Penn that his future was as an actor and director. With the encouragement of his parents, he began an apprenticeship with the Repertory Theatre in Los Angeles and was enrolled in a drama class with Peggy Feury, another family friend. Before long, Penn got small parts in one highly rated television series,
Barnaby Jones
, as well as in
Concrete Cowboys
, a series that lasted only seven weeks, from February 7 to March 21, 1981, before he finally got his first role in a television movie,
The Killing of Randy Webster
.

In 1980, just as his future wife had done, Penn took off for New York to try to make a name for himself in the theater. Unlike Madonna, he had the blessing of his family and solid connections that eventually helped him land an audition with the theater director Art Wolff, who was casting for a new play by Kevin Heelan called
Heartland
. According to Wolff, he knew the instant Penn walked through the door to read that he was physically perfect for the part. His first audition was unimpressive, but Wolff persisted until Penn gave him the kind of performance he would continue to give for the three weeks that the play ran on Broadway. Well trained, dedicated to his craft, and with an instinctive technique that was all his own, Penn won rave notices on Broadway. With his spirits high and with confidence in his talent, Penn returned to Los Angeles, where he landed his first film role in Harold Becker’s
Taps
, starring Timothy Hutton. By the time the film was released in 1981, Penn was already working on another movie,
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
, about a group of high school students who are determined to lose their virginity. During the making of
Fast Times
, Sean met Pam Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen’s sister. Within weeks, they were engaged, and within months, Penn was already being compared to a young Marlon Brando. Perhaps Springsteen should have been concerned that the comparison was not limited to her fiancé’s acting skills.

Single-minded about his career, Penn was more focused on improving his technique than he was on settling down. In a statement he made at the time about love and marriage, he said something that was curiously similar to what Madonna would say years later after the couple had married and were billed in the press as the “Poison Penns.” “With the exception of acting, all the other stuff is just part of the experience, you know, as we go along,” Penn said when announcing his engagement to Springsteen. “I don’t mean I’m getting married for the experience of marriage, it’s just like you have to keep breathing.”

In reaction to Penn’s spitting at two photographers, which he claimed was a “protective act” toward his wife, Madonna defended her husband by saying, “Love is like breathing. You just have to do it.”

Sean Penn and Madonna, despite their vastly different backgrounds, had many things in common. Both had taken on the appearance of 1950s icons—Sean as James Dean and Madonna as Marilyn Monroe—and had become two of the most popular figures in a new generation of stars. In the beginning of their careers, Penn and Madonna also wove tales of their poverty-stricken childhood, which in either case was patently exaggerated. Madonna told stories about emotional and financial deprivation, while Penn cultivated a street-tough image that ultimately appealed to his future wife’s sense of danger and excitement. That Penn actually came from a well-established Hollywood family was an added incentive for Madonna to get involved with the young actor. Just as Tony Ciccone had done years before when he courted Madonna Fortin, considering her his ticket into Middle America, as she became increasingly successful, Madonna considered Penn important to her quest for security and acceptance in the world of established Hollywood stars. She had gained recognition in her chosen profession, but she was alone in a world that was not yet familiar or comfortable to her. Just as she would later move to England in 1998 and insinuate herself into the A-list of rock idols, designers, and movie stars, she was determined in the early 1980s to meet someone who would give her the artistic and social respectability that she craved. Before she met Penn, she had seen him in
Taps
and had remarked that he was James Dean incarnate, exactly the type of raw intellectual actor she admired. “He’s a combination of a cowboy poet and a bad boy,” she told a friend.