Madonna (12 page)

What Madonna needed the most was a manager who believed in her talent. Someone to invest time and energy into the business side of things, so that Madonna could concentrate on the creative end of things. Enter: Camille Barbone.

“Madonna says she's stepped on a lot of bodies to get where she is. I'm one of those bodies,” claims Camille,
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who has asserted that their relationship was more than just that of client and manager. Camille claims she was used emotionally to benefit the singer's climb to the top of the music business.

Says Camille Barbone, “Madonna loves beautiful women, and she is into anyone sexually—male or female—who is beautiful.”
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She especially recalls the night she and Madonna went to see Tina Turner perform at The Ritz on East 11th Street. During Tina's performance Madonna stood transfixed next to the stage just staring at those famous

Madonna would call all over town—to managers, agents, record companies, club owners—but no one would return the calls of the then unknown.

When she met Camille, however, Madonna decided to turn the tables. This time she was going to be in control of the situation. Camille, a shrewd professional with an eye for talent, was obviously impressed by the young girl from the moment she laid eyes on her, and Madonna played the situation for all it was worth.

“One day there was a knock at my office door, and it was Madonna,” Camille distinctly remembers. “She wanted me to listen to her tape…. There was something about her that was sensational…. She needed money immediately. I gave her some. She wasn't shy about asking for more money after that.”
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Once she met Camille, Madonna's days of searching the waste-baskets for uneaten french fries were over. The next thing she knew, Camille had signed her to a management contract and moved her to a spacious Upper West Side apartment.

“What struck me most… was her extraordinary beauty, her star quality, her sexuality, and her sense of dignity,” recalls Barbone.
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Madonna also knew how to use her looks to get what she wanted, and she flirted with Camille.

“Madonna has a really nice body and she's proud of it,” says Barbone. “She sweats profusely while she is performing…. She'd rip off her clothes, throw me a towel and say, ‘Towel me off.'”
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According to Camille, “Madonna and I share the same birthday, August 16th…. For her twenty-second and my thirtieth birthday we went to the beach and I made a lobster dinner… I told her what a big star she was going to be, how special she was and that I did love her very much…. We drove back to New York hugging.”
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Things accelerated very quickly, and before long it was Madonna who was in a position of power. As she had done time and time again, she learned how to get someone else to do what she wanted. At first it was Camille who had rescued the seemingly helpless singer from the gutter, but before long it was Madonna who had the unsuspecting manager eating out of her hand.

“She seduced me psychologically,” admits Camille. “After that, I put her first, which was my downfall.”
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Professionally, Camille fired Madonna's “lousy” band, and tried to put the girl on the right track. As Madonna tells it, “I had a band called Emmy when I came across this manager who told me to forget all this adolescent band crap.”
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Camille hired first-rate studio musicians to accompany her, and she encouraged Madonna to write her own songs, but in the long run, the two had different ideas about the direction of Madonna's career. Things only became more and more complicated after that.

Part of their professional agreement involved several rules that Camille laid down. One of the first things she insisted upon was that Madonna not sleep with any of the members of the band. When Madonna had an affair with the band's drummer, Bob Riley, a lot of stress was put on the working relationship of the band. At first Madonna denied sleeping with Bob, then in a sudden turnabout she told Camille she wanted him fired—and replaced by Steve Bray. In an effort to retain her position of authority, Camille had the unpleasant task of canning Bob. After she fired him, the band was told that if they were to fool around with Madonna, they, too, would be canned.

At that point Madonna and her manager had a blowout fight over her behavior. It was at this point that Camille realized Madonna was out of control. “I knew I had created a monster who would turn on me.”
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Madonna resents authority figures, and she loves to play mind games with them. Camille recalls another of Ms. Ciccone's sexual antics, involving a female friend. “A dancer called Janice would come to town and they would hang out together,” says Barbone. “They used to sit in the back of my car and just kiss. Often before Madonna or Janice would go to bed with a man, they'd put him through a test. They would kiss each other in front of him.”
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When Camille's teenage cousin, Peter, came to see one of Madonna's shows, another scene ensued. Madonna focused all of her attention on Peter, and he was fascinated. After the show, the two had a few minutes alone in her dressing room. When Camille returned, the two were kissing. To this day Peter hasn't forgiven his cousin for thwarting his one opportunity to sleep with Madonna.

Meanwhile, Madonna fell head over heels for a musician named Ken. When Madonna found out that Ken was seeing other women she threw a tantrum. Consulting Camille on everything from sex to contraceptives, she asked how she could get Ken to do what she wanted him to. Camille suggested he might not stray if she didn't openly flirt with so many other men. Madonna, needless to say, couldn't be bothered with her advice.

Spurned, Camille used to watch Madonna flirt with dozens of men, many of whom Madonna slept with. According to Camille, Madonna had standard ways to hook men like they were fish. “Do you want to stay after rehearsal and play a little music?” she would ask invitingly. After that she would ask, “Why don't you take me for a drink?” The final ploy would begin with, “You have great lips. Why don't you kiss me?”
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Camille claims that Madonna's siren antics virtually always worked.

In spite of her flirtatious flings with countless men, the working relationship between Madonna and Camille went on for almost two years. Finally, stylistic differences split them apart. According to Madonna, “She wanted me to do Pat Benatar-like rock. I was trying for a more funky sound, black stuff.”
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Madonna and Camille had vastly differing ideas about the future star's image. “We split not too amiably,” Madonna recalls.
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In one of their last arguments, Camille realized she would never be able to satisfy Madonna. Unfazed, Madonna replied, “I always want more. That's me. I'm a bitch and you are a bitch, but we work well together.”
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Realizing that she had gotten onto the next step of her career via Camille, it was again time for Madonna to move on. At the time Madonna was heavily influenced by the music she heard on the radio, on the streets, and in the clubs—dance music. She wanted to create music that would be played in clubs and that people would want to dance to.

Right after her split with Camille, disillusioned, Madonna broke up the rock band they had assembled. She and Steve Bray stuck together, and she started writing songs in the “urban contemporary” genre, as personified at the time by the New York radio station WKTU.

Another consequence of the professional break with Camille meant that Madonna was back on her own for living quarters. She immediately headed down to the East Village, an area that is a strange dichotomy of seedy drug dens and slums and a young hip-hop urban arts and music scene. In addition to Keith Haring, Madonna befriended several other young creators of new wave art there, including the graffiti artist who calls himself Futura 2000 and a young gay graphic artist, Martin Bur-goyne.

Her living situation continued to evolve and change—almost monthly. She ended up losing one East Village apartment when Futura 2000 spray-painted his name on the walls. At another point she moved into a tiny apartment adjacent to Martin Burgoyne's pad on the Lower East Side. When Madonna's apartment was vandalized by neighborhood kids, she fled to a building on East 13th Street, which was reportedly Abbie Hoffman's old digs. Two days later, Burgoyne's apartment was not only ransacked, it was strewn with voodoo symbols: chicken droppings and blood. He quickly fled for Madonna's place on 13th Street, where they helped each other struggle to survive.

In 1981 Madonna stumbled into two more paying gigs. The first was a job singing background vocals on a handful of dance songs that were being recorded by an aspiring German vocalist named Otto Von Wernherr. Madonna lent her vocals to three songs: “Wild Dancing,” “Cosmic Climb,” and “We Are the Gods.” Her actual participation on the tracks was minimal, consisting of repetitive chorus lines behind Von Wernherr's mainly spoken, flat, and heavily accented vocals. Six years later the songs were remixed to bring Madonna's vocals farther out in the songs and released on Receiver Records, a London-based label. The disc containing the three songs (featuring two extended dance mixes) is now marketed as
MADONNA (& Otto Von Wernherr): In the Beginning
. Not only are the songs dreadful, but Madonna's vocals are shrill and off-key.

On the third song from the Von Wernherr sessions, Madonna exclaims the line “Oh, here come the gods!” with all the conviction she might put into the sentence “I've got to do the laundry.” Clearly Madonna had jumped at the opportunity to get some additional experience in the recording studio. These recordings are a curious document of where she was vocally at this time in her musical education. Listening to these recordings, it is hard to believe that she ever landed a recording deal, let alone became the largest-selling female rock artist in the world!

The second gig to suddenly appear that year was due to the return of Stephen Lewicki. He had fallen into another sum of money and wanted to complete his film
A Certain Sacrifice
. Says Lewicki, “I called her up, and I said, ‘Madonna, there's this other scene I want to shoot,' and she'd say, ‘Oh, Stephen, isn't this done yet!?!' She would give me all this shit, and I would placate her on the phone for ten minutes, and then she'd finally agree to do it. Then, when she did it, she was very, very good.”
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At this point Madonna could really use some cash, so she had a certain amount of negotiating power when he called. “The only person I paid was Madonna,” explains Stephen. “I paid her one hundred dollars and that was when she finally agreed to do the last scene I wanted her to do, which was the rape scene, and a couple of other scenes that I wanted her to do. After she agreed to do it, she said, ‘Well, I want a hundred dollars.' She needed the money to pay her rent, she told me.”
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Those final scenes were shot in November of 1981, and Stephen disappeared for several months while he edited the footage.

Stephen was also in touch with Angie Smit, Madonna's former Breakfast Club partner. He claims that after the additional footage for
A Certain Sacrifice
was shot, Madonna and Angie had a falling out. Angie had gotten involved with a group of people who were into drugs, and Madonna wasn't interested in dealing with substance abusers, or with Angie. Says Lewicki, “I remember Angie telling me that Madonna had just become a real bitch… just too much of an egotist, but there are two sides to that story. I met Angie's boyfriend, and he was a real asshole, so I can see Madonna's side of it.”
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Having transplanted herself in the middle of the East Village, with its Puerto Rican street scene and new wave graffiti artist sensibility, Madonna began to develop one of the most important aspects of her initial fame: her look. During this period, Madonna began purchasing previously owned “antique” clothing—including garments that cost almost nothing—and then concoct one-of-a-kind outfits. With rags knotted in her hair and layers of junk jewelry, she created an identity and an image that would eventually be copied the world over.

Through an evolution in the combined elements, her style developed. “Adidas sneakers with different-color laces, nylon tracksuits in all bright colors, belts, leather caps and gloves with the fingers cut off,” explains Madonna.
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After hanging out with artists like Futura 2000, Martin Burgoyne, Keith Haring, and Kano, Madonna began to get into painting graffiti on the decaying brick walls of the East Village as well. Using different colors of spray paint, Futura 2000 would paint his nickname on walls around the city. When Madonna got involved in the graffiti scene she decided that she had to have a title to spray on subway trains and walls, and so she became known as “Boy Toy” to her friends. “It's my tag name,” she explained at the time. “Everybody had their name on a belt buckle.”
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Madonna's silver belt buckle with the words
BOY TOY
spelled out in big letters became one of her unique and identifiable fashion accessories when she became famous. Explaining the reason why she became known as “Boy Toy,” Madonna states with matter-of-fact obviousness, “I toyed with boys.”
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Although the mere idea of a sexy woman declaring that she was a “boy toy” would seem antifeminist, for Madonna it was clearly a play on words. She controlled every situation, and it was the boys who ultimately became her toys.

Camille remembers, “That pre-star Madonna used and manipulated a lot of men to get what she needed. Madonna is an absolutely sexual creature, who has men eating out of her hands.”
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Madonna herself admits, “I used to borrow money from people—I'd let some poor sucker take me out to dinner and then I'd go, ‘Can I borrow a hundred dollars?' I was always borrowing twenty-five, fifty, a hundred dollars from people.”
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