Authors: Andrew Morton
For the truth is that she did want to be something else, over and above what she had already achieved. She may have got the man she wanted and the success she craved, but Madonna also wanted to be a movie star. As she was to admit later, ‘Music was still very important to me, but I always had a great interest in films, and the thought that I could only make records for the rest of my life filled me with horror.’ Then, in 1985, a script for a comedy movie,
Shanghai Surprise
, was sent to her by the producer John Kohn, a long-time friend of the Penn family. Madonna was intrigued by the storyline about a female American missionary who goes to work in China in the 1930s, during the Sino-Japanese War, and who becomes involved with a handsome young racketeer. She found the idea of herself as the heroine and her husband as the gangster irresistible, and although Sean did not entirely share her enthusiasm, they agreed to meet Kohn to discuss the script.
In fact, Sean had already worked with the producer on two other films,
Racing With the Moon
and
Bad
. Kohn met with the Penns in a Hollywood restaurant, partly in an attempt to persuade Sean to take the part, and a few minutes after they had sat down, his co-producer, the former Beatle George Harrison, who now ran the company behind the project, HandMade Films, turned up to greet the couple. ‘They nearly fell off their chairs with surprise,’ Kohn remembers. ‘He left after fifteen minutes and when he had gone Madonna said to me: “There goes a legend. In all my time I’ve never met a legend and he’s a real legend.”’
The word seems to have received a considerable airing, for when he returned home, Kohn told his wife Barbara that he, too, had met a legend in the making. As he admits, speaking of Madonna, ‘I thought we had the next Judy Holliday on our hands. She reminded me also of Raquel Welch, whom I worked with. She knew all about makeup, publicity and costumes but didn’t know how to act. I thought though that she had the potential to be a terrific actress.’
Sean finally agreed to take on the part of the racketeer, and contracts were drawn up and signed. At first, the auguries seemed good. John Kohn, the director, Jim Goddard, and the Penns got along well on the occasions when they met before shooting began in Hong Kong in January 1986, and thereafter the couple endeared themselves to the film crew when they eschewed their grand suite at the five-star Regent Hotel in Hong Kong in favor of the more modest establishment in which everyone else was living. For once, too, they managed to maintain virtual anonymity, able to walk through the streets of Hong Kong unrecognized.
Sadly, the auguries proved wrong. Nine days into shooting the 16 million-dollar movie, the on-set producer knew that the film was not working. Above all, it was not developing into the charming and sensitive comedy it was supposed to be. There were problems of direction. As far as Penn was concerned, he knew better than Goddard, refusing to take instruction to the point where he would even argue about the framing of a shot. Every scene became a struggle, not helped by the fact that Penn either could not, or would not, abandon his dour demeanor and act the jaunty character he was supposed to be playing. The crisis point came when, during one scene, the severely tested Goddard walked off set, leaving Penn squinting through the camera lens, at which point Kohn intervened, telling him that unless he fell into line, he would be in breach of his contract.
In complete contrast to her husband’s, Madonna’s behavior was extremely professional; always on time, always ready with her lines. She was, too, always happy with her first take – and therein lay yet another problem for the harassed film-makers. As she was to show time and again in her acting career, she invariably believed that her first take was the best, and became unhappy when asked to shoot a scene again, or to play it differently. Furthermore, her lack of acting experience soon caused concern. It seemed that, while she liked the idea of herself in the role, she had not given any real thought as to how she should play the character of the missionary Gloria Tatlock. Cocky and difficult as ever, Sean was only too happy to offer his views on how he saw the part, but since these clashed with the director’s, they proved, for everyone concerned, more of a hindrance than a help.
John Kohn has good cause to remember his leading lady’s failings, though he does so without bitterness. ‘Before a scene she would never ask questions about the character’s inner motivation or how she related to the other characters. So on set the minute the guy shouted “Action!” she didn’t have a clue what she was doing. She was only good in the love scenes with Sean because she really loved the guy. That was her, not the character. In the rest she was very wooden because she was so inexperienced. She would just walk through a scene and think she had given a fine performance when it was nothing of the sort. It was a very funny part but she didn’t carry it off.’
Since that perceptive comment by a reviewer of
Desperately Seeking Susan
, the criticism that she cannot act unless she is playing herself is one that has very much haunted Madonna. While her on-stage concert performances can be mesmerizing, and she has won praise for her acting in some of her videos, and particularly in the 1986
Papa Don’t Preach
video, in which, aged twenty-eight, she convincingly plays a pregnant teenager, she has not found it easy to transfer her skills to the big screen. As ever, the message was ambiguous. Some critics thought she was pro-life, others that she was encouraging teenage pregnancy.
Madonna herself has admitted that her struggle to come to terms with her part in
Shanghai Surprise
was largely because the innocence and repressed personality she was required to portray was so at variance with her own character. Yet when the film was released in August 1986, to poor reviews and even worse box-office figures, she was quick to blame anyone but herself. She described the making of the film as a ‘hellish nightmare’ and announced that she was ‘extremely disappointed with it.’ Without a trace of irony, she added, ‘The director didn’t seem to have an eye for the big screen. He seemed to be in a bit over his head.’
It wounded her deeply that a film in which she had seen such promise should have become an object of derision, and she herself pilloried when she had believed she would be fêted. Years later, when a friend casually mentioned to her that she had been weak in the film, she snapped back, ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve. At least I took a chance. You have to start somewhere.’
While every single taken from her
True Blue
album would find its way into the Top Ten, getting her film career off the ground continued to be a struggle. True, there were plenty of scripts, but Madonna was now uncertain of her ability to make a good choice, and producers were even less sure about backing her. Nonetheless, the period did at least bring her first acting performance on stage. In the last week of August she again teamed up with Sean in a play by David Rabe called
Goose and Tom-Tom,
in which she played the part of a gangster’s moll. Although the play, staged as a work-in-progress in the Mitzi Newhouse Theater in New York’s Lincoln Center, was only open at this time to an audience of celebrities, the public waiting outside got their share of the drama when Sean assaulted two paparazzi photographers, hitting Vinnie Zuffante several times and spitting on Anthony Savignano, as well as punching him. On the night of her debut stage performance, this was hardly the publicity Madonna was looking for, a situation made worse when both photographers pressed charges.
For her next screen project, she picked another comedy, originally entitled
Slammer
, but later renamed
Who’s That Girl?
since its release in 1987 would have coincided with a 60-day jail term Penn was to serve, having violated the probation he received for assaulting a friend of Madonna’s in 1986 by attacking an extra on the set of his latest film who was taking snapshots. The part she wanted to play was that of a wisecracking street urchin named Nikki Finn, who has been jailed for a crime she did not commit. In the light of the bad publicity surrounding her and Sean, and also of the very public failure of
Shanghai Surprise
, she had to fight hard to persuade the producers, Warner Brothers, that she was up to the part. In addition, Madonna wanted an old friend, James Foley, Penn’s best man at their wedding and the director of her
Papa Don’t Preach, Live To Tell
and
Open Your Heart
videos, to be the director, proclaiming him to be a ‘genius.’ The combination of a dubiously talented movie star and a first-time movie director hardly guaranteed a box-office hit, but the film received the go-ahead from Warner.
This time around, there was a lighter atmosphere on set when filming began in New York in October of 1986. Madonna was approachable, signing autographs for children of the film crew, joining in with the wisecracking, and on one occasion even dancing around a boombox with fellow star and long-time friend Coati Mundi (real name Andy Hernandez), one of the original members of the group Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Her idea of preparing for her part, however, was hardly studied; for example, before a scene in which she needed to appear badly out of breath, she did a series of push-ups before going on set. Once again she was always punctual and professional, and once again she always felt that her first take was perfect. It was a source of conflict. Her co-star Griffin Dunne, who played the male lead, observed; ‘She likes her first take best. I think my best is around the fourth. She always says, “You got it, you got it,” and she was driving me crazy, just the way her character would.’ On one occasion James Foley mockingly went down on his knees and kissed her feet to encourage her to do a retake. Afterwards he noted, not without irony, ‘She’s very instinctual, what comes out is unencumbered by analysis.’
Although Coati Mundi recalled getting on well with Madonna, and was particularly impressed that when one scene they were rehearsing, which involved a live cougar, went wrong, she stayed calm, even he admitted to being ‘flipped out’ by her on occasion. ‘She doesn’t rest,’ he noted. ‘She’s got a bit of that perfectionist thing in her. She was doing the movie, and the sound-track album for the movie, and also planning her Who’s That Girl? Tour at the same time. She’s doing all this stuff, plus she’s got the lead in the film!’
In spite of a glitzy launch, in front of thousands of screaming fans, at the National Theater in Times Square in August 1987, and even though the single of the title song from the soundtrack album reached the top of the charts, once again a Madonna movie bombed. This time, however, there was some comfort. Reviews were poor rather than damning – ‘In Madonna Hollywood has a potent, pocket-sized sex bomb. So far, though, all it does is tick,’ noted Vincent Canby in the
New York Times —
and although critics were not overly impressed by her performance, Madonna’s comic talent was acknowledged. Even so, cinemagoers in the United States stayed away in droves. The movie fared rather better abroad, however, leading Madonna to defend herself, rather weakly, by saying that her ideas were more appreciated in Europe and Japan than in her own country. Yet with a number-one single in America and with her nationwide Who’s That Girl? Tour a sell-out, it seemed that it was only her acting that her home country didn’t appreciate. Americans didn’t want another actress; they just wanted Madonna.
There were other problems, too, for the relentless speculation in the media about the state of her marriage was a low point of Madonna’s life at this time. When Sean failed to visit her on set during the filming of
Who’s That Girl?
it fueled rumors that they were about to split. While she accepted that as a Hollywood couple they were bound to attract attention, media interest merely exacerbated existing difficulties. ‘A lot of times the press would make up the most awful things that we had never done, fights that we never had,’ Madonna recalls. ‘They couldn’t make up their minds: they wanted me to be pregnant, or they wanted us to get a divorce. That put a lot of strain on our relationship after a while.’
The Penns fought back where they could, Sean often with his fists. For her part, Madonna had appeared in a skit about their wedding on the comedy show
Saturday Night Live
. As the strains of Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyrie’ – used in a famous scene in the Vietnam movie,
Apocalypse Now —
faded into the background, along with a clip from the film showing the helicopter invasion, Madonna impishly told the audience, ‘We have a great show … I’m not pregnant and we’ll be right back.’
In the early days of their marriage, their running battle with the press drew the couple together in mutual rage. Yet, although Madonna initially viewed Sean’s displays of aggression as a form of chivalry, she soon grew weary of his behavior. It diminished her image, and proved costly. During the filming of
Shanghai Surprise
, for example, Sean had scuffled with local photographer-cum-publisher, and influential local Hong Kong politician, Leonel Borralho, who filed a $1 million dollar lawsuit against him. Then, one evening in April of 1986, as Sean and Madonna were relaxing in a Los Angeles nightclub, one of her friends, the songwriter David Wolinski, walked over to greet her and kissed her on the cheek. By all accounts, Penn flew into a rage and began beating the hapless Wolinski, only stopping when the club’s owner, Helena Kallianiotes, and a visibly shaken Madonna dragged him outside. Shocked, Wolinski pressed charges, and Penn was fined $1,000 and given a year’s probation.
Penn may have been on probation for his attack on David Wolinski, but thereafter it seemed that rarely a week passed without his being involved in some incident or other, as the couple played hide-and-seek with the media. When Madonna bumped into Dan Gilroy in Hollywood, where he was busy shooting his own video for the first and only Breakfast Club album, they fell to talking about the old days. Commenting on the media’s near obsession with her and her volatile husband, she told Gilroy wistfully, ‘Do you remember the time when I would do anything to get noticed? Now I spend all day hiding.’