Madonna (29 page)

Throughout the entire two-hour play, Madonna chewed gum and acted like Judy Holliday in
Born Yesterday
. The costume designer was Kevin Dornan, who was formerly the fashion editor of Andy Warhol's
Interview
magazine. Madonna made several beautiful costume changes, Sean wore fuschia-colored socks and shoes, and the overall look of the play was decidedly abstract. When asked if Sean and Madonna were getting along, Dornan claimed that they were crazy about each other.

Although the play was awful, several people enjoyed Madonna's performance in it. According to Griffin Dunne, “She seemed to be very inside herself. When she came out with a cigarette that needed to be lit—all you were concerned about was who was going to light it.”
⁷

On a warm Friday night, August 29, amid the brief nonpublic run of the play, came Sean Penn's next battle with the paparazzi. It seemed like a routine photo opportunity for the media. Sean and Madonna left Lincoln Center, walked to a local restaurant, and strolled home to their new apartment. Waiting for them in front of their building was a group of half a dozen well-known press photographers, including the renowned paparazzo Ron Gallella. When the cameramen began shooting photos, Sean flew into a rage, which erupted into a midnight fistfight with two press members, Anthony Savignano and Vinnie Zuffante.

The ensuing fight was a natural for instant worldwide coverage—and received it in spades. With six press photographers present, everyone from the
New York Post
to the
Star, Us
, and
People
magazine ran splashy stories on Sean's latest atrocity. Especially popular were one of Ron's shots of Sean spitting at Anthony; Vinnie's photos of Sean and Madonna hiding behind a “doggie bag” of leftovers, and Geoffrey Croft's photos of Sean struggling with Anthony, whom he had gotten in a headlock. It became the paparazzi photo opportunity of the year.

As one of the top paparazzi in the business, Vinnie Zuffante had been shooting the stars for years. From New York to Los Angeles to Cannes, he had traveled all over the world to take pictures of Madonna. From the very beginning of Madonna's relationship with Sean in 1985, Zuffante had followed the couple. Madonna knew who Vinnie was by sight, and whenever she asked him not to take a photo, he would obligingly wait until she was ready. On certain occasions, he would wait up to five hours for her okay to snap the one exclusive pose of the evening. Up until this point, Vinnie had what he considered to be a good working relationship with Madonna.

Sean, on the other hand, was an adversary from as far back as he could remember. According to Vinnie, “I remember Sean Penn when he was in New York doing a show called
Slab Boys
. He was going out at the time with Bruce Springsteen's sister, and he didn't like being photographed then—he never liked it. So he made the mistake of going into this business and not liking it. And then, marrying her, the most popular woman in the world—he just didn't have common sense about

Vinnie vividly remembers that particular evening on New York's Upper West Side when Sean went berserk. “We were outside their apartment. They were doing a play at Lincoln Center,
Goose and Tomtom
, and they were on their way back from it. So we were shooting pictures of them walking up the street. After the performance they went to The Gingerman for dinner, and they had a bag full of food, and they're walking with the bag in front of their faces so they can't be photographed. And, they were laughing, thinking it was funny and stuff like that. They had smiles on their faces.”
¹⁴⁹

Suddenly, and without warning, the look on Sean's face changed. When the six photographers reached the doorway, they turned the corner, and stepped into the entranceway. That was all the provocation Sean needed. They were no longer on the sidewalk, and he felt as if he were justified in resorting to violence. “We stepped into the courtyard by accident, and they misunderstood what we were doing,” explains Vinnie. “Ron Gallella and Anthony stepped into the courtyard, and that's when Sean went crazy.”
¹⁴⁹

He recalls that the fight between Anthony and Sean was more of a shoving match than a fistfight. “No one ever really got a hit on anybody, because—it was a ‘hug' more, and they were trying to hit, no one could get in any punches. At one point Anthony got Sean over to the banister, and could have thrown him over the banister—down about fifteen feet. But then he realized, ‘Oh shit! I might kill him!' So they got away from that, and the doorman was there with a broom, hitting us. There was one Puerto Rican kid that was walking by, just ran into the courtyard, and was starting to pull Sean away—trying to break up the fight. Sean was more angry that he couldn't hit the photographer than anything else.”
¹⁴⁹

The next thing he knew, Vinnie was being dragged into the fracas. “I wasn't in the courtyard yet,” he recalls. “Madonna started yelling at me to stop taking pictures. Up to that point, I was sort of like friends with them. I wouldn't photograph when they asked me not to. Madonna said, ‘Stop them!' I said, ‘I can't stop him, look at him, he's a madman. Why don't you go inside, and they'll stop photographing you getting angry.' So she started going inside, and then Sean turned around and pulled me into the courtyard. The first thing he said was, ‘And you,' and then he hit me. I said, ‘What the hell are you doing that for?' And then he said, ‘You're just as bad as they are.' And I said, ‘If that's what you think—just wait—I'm gonna be.' From that day on I went on a streak to get them back. The only reason that I was in the courtyard was because Madonna said, ‘Try to break them up,' and I said, ‘You're crazy, I can't.' And she said, ‘Stop taking pictures.' I said, ‘I can't—this is news!'”
¹⁴⁹

Vinnie maintains that Madonna is, was, and will always be in love with all the media attention. “I know what she is really like, and she is a publicity whore,” claims Zuffante.
¹⁴⁹

His rationale is that if a celebrity is out in a public place, they are fair game for press photographers, whether what they're doing is newsworthy at the time or not. Sean and Madonna could have resorted to different tactics if they didn't want to be photographed together. “They could have taken a cab or a limo,” he maintains. “I can understand that they had their privacy and all of that, but when they're walking down a public street, they don't have their privacy, and they should know that. Even though they were only going a block and a half—hop in a damn cab and take it home. Let Madonna walk in first. Let Sean pay the cab, and then have Sean walk in, and no one would get the picture. They knew that we were down by the [apartment] house, waiting. They saw us walking up toward them, they were walking toward us, and then we backed up the street, walking toward the house. Madonna is not going to go out of her way for us. She will not change her routine, she will not do anything, because we're there. And, if that is going to be the attitude she has, she is going to keep getting what she is getting.”
¹⁴⁹

Madonna claims she enjoys the exposure, but she is not in love with the photographers' attitudes. “The thing that annoys me more than anything about the paparazzi is that they really feel that they have put you where you are,” she complains. “They really think that because you're a celebrity, you owe them all the pictures they can get.”
¹³

What she objects to the most is that the paparazzi seem to appear at the most bizarre times. She could be leaving a workout at an exercise club, shopping for clothes, or riding her bike down the street, and all of a sudden someone with a camera leaps out from behind a bush or a wall. These instances nearly give her a heart attack on the spot.

“It's not fun,” Madonna said when she was questioned about what she thought of Sean's public fights with photographers. “But I've been dealing with the media since the very beginning of my career, and Sean never really had to. I wanted it, and I was sort of ready to deal with it, and he wasn't.”
²⁶

The very next night, the Penns went to Sardi's after their show was over, and a group of fans and photographers clamoring for Madonna had gathered outside. In another of his endearing moves, Sean stuck his head out the second-floor window and spit on the crowd gathered below.

Unfortunately, that month's negative media blitz on “the Poison Penns” was just beginning. It was Friday, August 29, the same day as the New York paparazzi fiasco that the star couple's next major disaster occurred: the premiere of
Shanghai Surprise
.

Even before the film opened, it had failure stamped all over it. The fact that there were no prerelease press screenings was clue number one. MGM-UA, the American distributor, was justifiably terrified of what the critics were going to do when they got a peek at this debacle.

To hold the major media critics at bay, the film opened at four hundred cinemas in medium-sized cities across America. The film was kept off New York and Los Angeles screens until three weeks later. Then, on September 19, those two cities were among the second wave of four hundred theaters screening
Shanghai Surprise
. The longer they could hold off the New York and L.A. critics, the better.

Unfortunately, the reviews from the heartland set the tone. In the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, reviewer Roxanne T. Mueller called the film “awesome in its awfulness.” Douglas D. Armstrong wrote in the
Milwaukee Journal
that Madonna “acts and emotes with all the conviction of a guest in a sketch on a Bob Hope special.”

When September 19 arrived, the real bloodbath began. “Madonna's first flop,” is how
Rolling Stone
bannered their take on the film. “Shockingly amateurish,” is how Fred Schruers described it in
Us
. It was Janet Maslin's review in the
New York Times
that really hit the coffin nail on the head: “The nicest thing about
Shanghai Surprise
, the widely publicized washout starring Madonna and Sean Penn, is that you can watch it in near-total privacy,” is how Maslin's review began. And she was dead right. You could shoot a cannon through any of the theaters screening this film and not hit a soul. When
Variety
announced that the average box office take at the theaters screening this movie was $1,000 a week, it was time for HandMade Films to cut their losses. According to James Greenberg in the same publication, “I've rarely seen a worse opening.”

Although she was stiff and unconvincing in most of the film, Madonna was singled out for blame in less instances than Sean. Claimed Maslin, “Mr. Penn, ever since his hilarious performance as a stoned surfer in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
, has been greatly overrated.”

Richard Corliss, writing in
Time
magazine, was perhaps the kindest to the stars. Although he claimed—of the film—that MGM “has drop-kicked it into the marketplace like a turkey carcass,” he illuminated the bigger picture as far as Sean and Madonna were concerned. According to him, “Neither glows like the incandescent movie stars they can and will be.”

Shanghai Surprise
disappeared from theaters almost instantly. It was ironic, because the week the film debuted, Madonna had the Number One album and single in the country. What became clear was that her fans wanted to see her behaving outrageously—and singing.

Shanghai Surprise
is one of the most excruciating cinematic experiences ever created. It is dull, moronic, stiff, slow, unmotivated, and just plain boring. Madonna is totally out of her element, and every scene looks as though they filmed the dress rehearsal instead of the real performance. Sean is totally unbelievable as he does his best to play his character as though he were Indiana Jones. Madonna as a prim missionary was the Hollywood miscasting foray of the decade.

Shanghai Surprise
didn't work on any level. It wasn't funny enough to be a comedy, it wasn't dramatic enough to be a drama, and there wasn't enough action to make it an adventure film. Twice the stars get themselves into deadly dilemmas and in the very next scene are shown miraculously rescued. The poor viewer never gets a clue how they escaped. Perhaps a Madonna song in the movie could have added some spark to the proceedings. As it was, George Harrison—who has an embarrassed cameo as a nightclub performer—provided all the film's music. If this was any other music star's first starring film project, he or she would probably be banned from working in the movies again. As a singer-becoming-an-actor, Madonna's performance in
Shanghai Surprise
is so awful that it makes Elvis Presley seem like Sir Laurence Olivier in comparison.

How could Madonna be so electrifying in the five-minute video of “Papa Don't Preach,” and so embarrassing in
Shanghai Surprise?
After the dust settled, and this disaster film disappeared without a trace, the real stories began to surface.

“The truth is, we had just gotten married,” Madonna revealed. “Sean wasn't supposed to do the film. He didn't want to do the film. But he also didn't want to spend four months away from me.”
⁹³

She was looking for a role that would offer her a contrast. After
Desperately Seeking Susan
, people would claim that she was really playing herself. This made her want to play an opposite character to convince everyone that she really could act. That became a real trap for her.

“A hellish nightmare,” is how she remembers the filming of
Shanghai Surprise
. “The director turned out not to know what he was doing, we were on a ship without a captain, and we were so miserable while we were working that I'm sure it shows.”
²⁶
Assessing the blame, Madonna was quick to point her finger at the director. “The director, Jim Goddard, wanted to shoot it fast without any production values. It was like a bad music video,”
⁹³
she explained. “We wanted to do a movie that was about a love story, not about an adventure. Unfortunately, it was edited as if it was an adventure, and it's not. They left out all the important stuff about the relationship.”
²²
Still, she maintains that the film was an excellent learning experience for her.