Madonna (41 page)

Regardless of the details of the friendship between the two women, they were having a great time in each other's company. Sandra wasn't in awe of Madonna's superstar status, and they both felt as though they could let their hair down with each other. In October, when butch-looking Canadian country singer k.d. Lang was presented in concert at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, Madonna, Sandra, and Jennifer Grey were on hand to cheer her on. When the trio went backstage to meet the mannishly tailored girl whose voice is likened to that of Patsy Cline, Madonna posed for press photographers and shared her lipstick with k.d. For Madonna it was just another night out with the girls, but for the press it was another event to inspire sexual conjecture about Madonna and Sandra.

When the speculation about their relationship created too much heat for Sandra, that fall she announced, “We're friends and that's it…. The press can't just be happy that two cool girls like us are tight buddies—like no competition, no bitchiness, except that mock stuff we put on, kind of like Martin and Lewis. By the way—did anyone ever accuse Dean and Jerry of getting it on?”
²⁰⁵

The ongoing rumor that they were lovers gained more attention than any denial would. When she was promoting her
Truth or Dare
film in 1991, Madonna addressed the issue. She neither denied or admitted to an affair with Sandra; however, she just magnified the confusion.

“Whether I slept with her or not is irrelevant,” said Madonna. “I'm perfectly willing to have people think that I did. You know, I do not want to protest too much. I don't care. If it makes people feel better to think that I slept with her, then they can think it. And if it makes them feel safer to think that I didn't, than that's fine, too. You know, I'd almost rather they thought that I did. Just so they could know that here was this girl that everyone was buying records of, and she was eating someone's pussy. So there.”
²⁰⁶

While production on
Dick Tracy
progressed, Madonna released three more hit singles: “Express Yourself,” “Cherish,” and “Oh Father.” Only the last failed to reach the Top Ten. At a reported $1 million in production costs, the “Express Yourself” video had the distinction of being the most expensive promotional rock video ever produced.

Directed by David Fincher, “Express Yourself” is one of the sleekest, sexiest, and most fascinating of Madonna's videos. Shamelessly stealing from the look and plot of the classic 1926 fantasy film
Metropolis
, it shows Madonna living in a high-rise tower, while the poor—and incredibly muscular—toil below ground in a damp world of machines. The blonde, sexy Madonna—in her man's suit and monocle—decides to go slumming.

Doing an exotic dance in which she flashes her breasts and grabs her crotch, Madonna visits the underground area. In another scene, which doesn't seem to relate, Madonna is seen with a collar around her neck, chained to a bed. As though hearing Madonna's mating call, one of the underground hunks comes up to Madonna's tower to find her naked and waiting. In the scenes in between Madonna is seen slinking across the floor of her apartment like a cat. Dressed in a sexy black slip she laps milk from a dish on the floor, then pours the milk down herself so that it can be lapped off her body. The stud who she summons from the depths of the working-class quarters is male model Cameron. The video debuted to much acclaim by her eager fans in May 1989.

The video for “Cherish,” which premiered in August, was directed by Madonna's friend and photographer, Herb Ritts. Shot in black and white, it depicts Madonna in a short dirty-blonde haircut rollicking on the beach, in the waves. In the lightly plotted video, Madonna falls in love with a half-fish merman and plays on the beach with a merchild.

Her next single and video in America was for “Oh Father.” Also shot in black and white, this autobiographical adaptation of Madonna's childhood brings a haunting song to life. An actress plays childhood Madonna, rollicking in the snow, carefree, while her mother dies. In a snowstorm on a hillside in a soundstage, Madonna sings the song as the narrator of the flashback. The graveyard scenes, and shots of her mother's corpse with her mouth visibly sewn shut, were a bit macabre.

Explaining the source of the painful imagery in this video, Madonna says, “I have not resolved my Electra Complex. The end of the ‘Oh Father' video, where I'm dancing on my mother's grave, is an attempt to embrace and accept my mother's death.”
⁹⁹

In England, the song “Dear Jesse” was pulled from the
Like a Prayer
album as a single. It was accompanied by a cartoon video that depicted the pink elephants and pink lemonade of which the whimsical song's lyrics speak.

While these songs were playing on the Top Ten music charts of the world, Madonna was busily working on her next film role, that of Breathless Mahoney in
Dick Tracy
. Playing the role of the gun moll—chanteuse was so perfectly suited to her that she accepted union scale pay for the job—a paltry $1,440 a week. It was a bit of a comedown, but for the privilege of joining the cast of a film that would co-star her with Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and James Caan, it was a bargain.

Speaking of films, whatever happened to
Bloodhounds of Broadway?
After Howard Brookner died of AIDS in mid-1989, it ended up being screened on a limited basis that fall and was quietly released as a video cassette that winter, when the producers, American Playhouse, couldn't find a distributor.

Although it had a stylish look and had an interesting cast, the film is quite dull to watch. Based on four of Damon Runyon's stories, there wasn't enough combined action on the screen to keep the film going. It was a shame, because the low-budget film had several strong performances. Madonna's portrayal of the gold-digging Hortense Hathaway was her most subdued and focused film role up till then. However, Madonna and the rest of the talented cast soon sink in the quicksand of a plodding story that never really inspires much interest.

Without the benefit of a premiere, reviews, or a theatrical screen run, at least Madonna escaped the undue bad publicity she surely would have gleaned. In the film, Madonna is seen performing three songs with Jennifer Grey, including “Big Bucks” and “I Surrender, Dear.” In one scene Madonna turns to Randy Quaid after one of her nightclub musical scenes and asks, “Was I terrible?” No, she wasn't, but she should have thought out her participation in this film a little further before accepting it. The film is dedicated to Howard Brookner's memory, and he is seen in a cameo as Daffy Jack.

As 1989 ended, it was time for the media to survey the hits, the trends, and the newsmakers of the eighties. Needless to say, Madonna's name was on everyone's list. She was one of
People
magazine's “20 Who Defined the Decade.” She was one of
Time's
ten “Faces of the Decade.” However, her greatest honor came when
Musician
magazine crowned her the “Artist of the Decade.”

One of Madonna's most amusing honors came from writer Ann Powers in the
San Francisco Weekly
, who saluted her by announcing, “What other major female pop star has the guts to date a woman in public (k.d. Lang sure doesn't, nor does [Tracy] Chapman).”
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Madonna provided the decade with seventeen Top Ten hits, had its most outrageous celebrity wedding and its most headline-grabbing divorce. She startled the public by dating both another woman and Warren Beatty. She was the queen of the nouveau art of the music video, and her ever-changing fashions set trends. Madonna was the most outlandish, the most written about woman of the entire decade. And she had already begun plotting her next multimedia assault.

Whose side are you on?

—Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy

The side I'm always on—mine.
²⁰⁸

—Madonna as Breathless Mahoney

 

W
ith the exception of
Desperately Seeking Susan
, the movie roles that Madonna chose to play in the eighties represent a hodge-podge of ill-chosen vehicles that ran the gamut from bad to worse. With
Shanghai Surprise, Who's That Girl?
, and
Bloodhounds of Broadway
, she had been searching for a wide-screen role that would not only give her the acting experience she desperately sought, but illuminate her strong points and enhance the persona the public adored on record and video. Totaled up, her on-the-job training cost producers millions of dollars, and the end results were less than what one would expect in an average summer stock theater production.

It is fascinating to look at her strongest videos—”Like a Prayer,” “Papa Don't Preach,” “Open Your Heart,” and “Express Yourself”—because each one of these proves that she can indeed act, project, and emote on camera. Yet the minute she opens her mouth to deliver straight dialogue on film, she falls flat on her face. How ironic that she seems to be facing the same dilemma that several silent film stars faced when talking pictures took over the movie business in 1929—an inability to deliver simple dialogue convincingly on screen.

When she worked with Griffin Dunne on
Who's That Girl?
, he was amazed that Madonna would insist that her first take was the best one, and that she would often refuse to repeat a scene. By accepting a role in a film directed by Warren Beatty—a director obsessed with filming every scene twenty to thirty times—she found herself in a position where someone else was in control, someone who was destined to draw out of her a believable screen performance regardless of the cost.

It was fortunate for her that the role of Breathless Mahoney was that of a comic strip vamp. She had only to keep in mind the role of Jessica Rabbit in
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
and she would be all set.

The idea of doing a movie adaptation of the comic strip
Dick Tracy
had been kicking around for quite some time. It was a role that Warren Beatty had been linked with in the late seventies, and along the line a host of directors—including Martin Scorsese, Walter Hill, John Landis, and Bob Fosse—had bandied it about. Warren acquired the rights to the film in 1985 and began shopping it around to the studios. In 1988, when word of the upcoming production of
Batman
was on everyone's lips, Disney Pictures gave Beatty the green light to produce it on a $25 million budget. He not only decided to produce and star in the film, but to direct as well.

In the summer of 1988 Warren assembled a trio of film artisans, all recognized in their fields: production designer Richard Sylbert, costumer Milena Canonero, and cameraman Vittorio Storaro. Their first meeting to discuss the project was held at Warren's house high in the Hollywood hills. Tossing around ideas, Sylbert suggested two possible stars to play the role of the gold-digging Breathless Mahoney—Melanie Griffith and Madonna.

“Everybody said I would be perfect for the role,” Madonna recalls of the buzz around Hollywood when the production was announced. “I waited and waited for Warren to call me. He never did. Finally, I decided to be pushy and called him. It took him a year to make up his mind.”
²⁰⁹

One of the first things they discussed was Madonna's disastrous box office track record. He told her that she had made a lot of stupid choices in movie roles.

Beatty, too, was trying to forget his disastrous last picture,
lshtar
. It could play as a double feature with
Shanghai Surprise
and be billed as “A Night of Cinematic Torture.” Both Madonna and Beatty were in a position where they could use a box office hit.

Finally Warren decided to give Madonna the part. With his Casanova reputation for igniting off-camera affairs with his leading ladies, the mere idea of working with suave and handsome Beatty was an intoxicating offer for Madonna. It was no wonder that she fell for him like a ton of bricks.

Madonna knew what she liked, and Warren knew what he wanted. According to her, “Warren insisted that I get fatter. He wanted to pour me into my dresses. I gained ten pounds. So much depends on the look. It's so stylized. I had to bleach my hair blonde again, pluck my eyebrows. It was traumatic to get the hair right. Hair is the most important thing to Warren. He would walk around me like a vulture, making me feel like the ugliest thing in the world. And the dresses! We were at Western Costume, and he'd say, Tighter, tighter, cut it down lower.' I felt like a mannequin, a slab of beef. I was treated that way on the set—the lust factor.”
²⁰⁹

While the actual comic strip character of Breathless Mahoney looked like 1940s actress Veronica Lake—of the shoulder-length peek-a-boo hair—Madonna's look was a unique incarnation of the vamp. Says costumer Canonero, “At the beginning of the movie, Breathless is wild, rebellious, untamable, a panther and a man-eater. In our story, she mellows down, acquiring a sort of purity like a moonbeam. That's what I tried to do with her clothes. My favorite is her blue dress with the moon and the stars. It's got everything—dreaming, sex, and dreams that don't come true.”
²¹⁰

Her costumes were indeed form-fitting, and in many instances they were exceedingly low-cut—so low-cut that a couple of her dresses nearly had to be glued to her breasts. In one of Madonna's nightclub sequences, every time she raised her arms above her head, her breasts popped out of her dress. This was a matter that even had experts pondering the weighty issue of what glue to use. John Caglione, Jr., one of the many makeup men on the movie, said, “Look, Madonna must have the most valuable bust in the business. I'll bet each one of those honeys is worth six, maybe seven million. What if she has an allergic reaction to the glue?”
²¹¹
Finally, some adjustments were made to the dress, and the idea of glue was abandoned.