Madonna (46 page)

In December there was a court battle over Madonna's shrubbery. It seems that when she moved into her new house off Sunset Strip she didn't read a rider requiring her to maintain the trees and bushes around her property in accordance with strict guidelines. The owner of the property up the hill from her was having his view of the ocean blocked by several cypress trees and other foliage that Madonna had added. She sent her brother Christopher to appear in court for her. Her neighbor, Donald Robinson, attempted to sue for $1 million in damages. That petition was rejected by Superior Court Judge Sally Disco, but Madonna was ordered to trim her hedges.

In January 1991, Madonna and Tony flew to New York so she could work on her new film: Woody Allen's
Shadows and Fog
. Co-starring with Mia Farrow, John Malkovich, and Allen himself, Madonna plays a circus performer in the 1920s. Shot entirely in black and white, the comedy features Madonna with still another look: a curly top brunette.

Two months later there were rumblings about trouble on the set, and rumors that Woody hated Madonna's acting in the film so intensely that he was planning to cut all her scenes. In a statement released to the press, Allen proclaimed, “It's a total fabrication. Not a frame of her has been cut, nor has that ever been contemplated. She's first-rate in the film.”
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With regard to working with Woody, Madonna found him to be an elusive character. Arriving on the set she was amazed at the small amount of specific directions Allen gave her. She found that his directing technique calls for each actor to bring some kind of instinct to a character. While she was put off by this style at first, she found that it exerted a strong subliminal control to the situation.

According to her, Allen's casting the right people in the right roles is part of his genius. “This is what he does that is so great, is that he casts you perfectly. Basically I think he hires people to sort of exude what they already exude. It's not a question of trying to be somebody else,” she claims.
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The fact that Woody Allen had asked her to appear in one of his movies was an offer she couldn't refuse, even if it proved to be a semi-traumatic experience for her. “To me, the whole process of being a brushstroke in someone else's painting is a little difficult,” she explained. “I'm used to being in charge of everything. So on this movie it's hard for me to shut up and do my job and, well, O.K., I have this stupid little part and I have to sit around on the set and wait all day and then say a few lines and blah, blah, blah.”
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It is hard to imagine quiet and methodical Woody Allen working with a take-control broad like Madonna. She admits that just sitting still and doing what she is told to do is a bitter pill for her to swallow. However, if she is going to actually become the respected actress she would like to be thought of as, she will have to begin to alter her ways.

“I'll never learn patience,” she proclaims. “But I've learned, watching Woody, how a real artist works. Woody is a master of getting things out of people in a really gentle way. He's not a tyrant, and that's good for me to learn because I can be something of a tyrant, in a working situation. Well, in a living situation, too.”
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The second week in March, the April 1991 issue of
Vanity Fair
magazine hit the newsstands, with Madonna on the cover as Marilyn Monroe. With Madonna striking ten of Monroe's most famous poses, photographer Steven Meisel and stylist Marina Schiano worked lighting and makeup miracles to transform the former Material Girl into a sex goddess of the fifties. For the cover shot she wore a revealing low-cut Bob Mackie gown that made her look sensational, and more voluptuous.

If the teaming of Madonna and Woody Allen seems a bit bizarre, then the mere idea of Madonna collaborating with Michael Jackson sounds like a “Twilight Zone” episode! Yet, on March 16, 1991, Madonna was seen at a chic Los Angeles restaurant called the Ivy with none other than “Wacko Jacko.” An immediate alert went out for the paparazzi photo opportunity of the week.

“We're at the Ivy, and Madonna and Michael Jackson are there together. It was me and Greg Deguire, and an AP [Associated Press] guy,” recalls photographer Vinnie Zuffante. “We wait for her to come out, and we hear she's with Michael Jackson. We didn't believe it. So we see them, and they're walking out, and the maitre d' says, ‘No, wait, I don't want them getting any pictures.' Both Madonna and Michael said, ‘It's O.K.—no problem.' He said, ‘No, not at my restaurant.' He takes Michael Jackson's hand, walks Michael Jackson to his limo. He goes back, gets Madonna, walks Madonna to the limo. He has the waiters come out, and the busboys, holding up tablecloths, and putting menus in our faces, so that we couldn't get pictures. So I hit him in the head twice with the camera—the maitre d'. Madonna says, ‘It's O.K., you don't have to do this,' and the maitre d' is saying, ‘Not in front of my restaurant.' He's hitting me, I hit him in the head with the camera. Madonna starts laughing. It was crazy.”
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Word leaked out the next week that the reason for the meeting was that Michael wanted to ask Madonna to record a duet with him on his forthcoming album. She liked the idea, but would only agree if she liked the song. According to her at the time, “I'm not going to get together and do some stupid ballad or love duet—no one's going to buy it, first of all.”
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She also bragged how she wanted to turn Michael over to her dancers Jose and Luis, and their whole House of Extravaganza for a week-long makeover session. Explaining her master plan, Madonna intimated that Michael was a closet homosexual who needed to be dragged out of the closet. “I keep telling Michael Jackson, ‘I'd love to turn Jose and Luis on you for a week. They'd pull you out of the shoebox you're in. Anybody who's in a shoebox in the closet cannot be in one after hanging around with Luis and Jose—or me for that matter. I have this whole vision about Michael.”
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It's pretty hard telling what this vision might be. Suddenly she's taking on the biggest, most elusive male media star in the world and proclaiming that she is going to drag him out of the closet! There truly is no stopping her.

Much to everyone's disappointment, when Michael's
Dangerous
album was released later in the year, their collaboration was quite a nonevent. Briefly joined on the potentially exciting cut called “In the Closet,” Madonna and Michael perform the whispery love song about secret love. Neither sexually revealing, taboo-shattering, nor lyrically exciting, the song's only saving grace is its infectious beat. Madonna's name doesn't even appear on the liner notes, as it is billed as a duet between Michael and a “Mystery Girl.” For all of the wasted anticipation, this song could have stayed in the closet.

Meanwhile, on February 13 the Academy Award nominations were announced, and the Sondheim tune “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)” from
Dick Tracy
was up for the Best Original Song award. It was announced that Madonna was going to perform it on the prestigious annual telecast, March 25. Since she had broken up with Tony Ward, she found herself without a beau. Their breakup might have had something to do with the false tabloid reports that he had gotten married in August 1990, right before they started dating.

She later explained about the termination of their affair, “He was a complement, but I insist that whoever complements me has his own identity.”
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By her thirty-third birthday in August, she and Tony were back together again.

For whatever reason, at the end of March she found herself without a date for the Oscars! What an outrageous thought: Madonna was the most talked-about woman in Hollywood, and she didn't have a date for the Academy Awards!

Anyway, said Madonna of Jackson, “We started working together, and I didn't have a date for the Academy Awards, and Michael said, ‘Well, who you gonna go with?' And I looked at him and I said, ‘I don't know, you wanna go?' And he said, ‘Yeah, that'd be great.'”
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Naturally, when the Oscars roll around every year, every paparazzo in Los Angeles is staked out at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with several cameras and dozens of rolls of film. According to Vinnie Zuffante, although they were both already on the premises, the superstar couple was originally going to stage their arrival for the cameras, but that move was nixed by ceremony organizers. Says Zuffante, “Madonna and Michael wanted to make the entrance, but they were warned by the Academy not to. They had all the security. What the Oscars did was tell all the fans they can't have any signs, they can't have any cameras, and they can't have any binoculars. They were doing that for security reasons, and mainly because Michael Jackson and Madonna were going to go through. But the Academy realized that Madonna and Michael were going to get more publicity than anyone else going there, and they didn't want that to happen. They weren't nominees. If Madonna and Michael walked through the front, every magazine would have had that picture on page one, instead of Kevin Costner with his Oscar. And when the Academy found out about that, they told them not to do that. They said, ‘You'd better not go in the front, go in the back,' and they did go in the back. But at all of the parties they made the entrances, and let everyone get the pictures, so that's where all of the pictures are from.”
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Madonna's performance of “Sooner or Later” at the Oscars became the most talked about segment of the entire show. Dressed in the low-cut Bob Mackie gown she wore on the cover of
Vanity Fair
and $20 million worth of diamonds on loan from jeweler Harry Winston, her hair in a platinum blonde Marilyn Monroe style, Madonna looked every inch a movie star from the fifties. In a white ermine stole, with elbow-length evening gloves, Madonna's bumping and grinding version of the song caused several jaws to drop. Although in reality Madonna looked more like Jayne Mansfield than Marilyn Monroe, she certainly made her point.

Amid her performance of the song, Madonna ad-libbed, “Talk to me, General Schwarzkopf, tell me all about it,” directly mimicking Marilyn's reference to Harry Winston in “Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend.”
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In the following morning's edition,
USA Today
referred to her as a “Monroe Wanna-be.” The song “Sooner or Later” ended up winning Best Song, but Sondheim wasn't there to pick up his Oscar.

After the show, Michael and Madonna proceeded to superagent Swifty Lazar's annual post-Oscar bash at Spago. Once there, Madonna and Michael chatted and laughed together, while mingling with the star studded crowd. Madonna ended up at Warren Beatty's table, and Michael had Diana Ross perched on his lap at one point. After the party was over, Michael and Madonna went over to Madonna's house, where they looked at her photography books and chatted until the early hours of morning.

Everyone knew instantly that they were just friends.
People
magazine called the duo's night on the town “about as romantically valid as taking your cousin to the prom.”
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Imagining what Madonna and Michael's conversations must be like, Coati Mundi laughs, “Madonna comes from the streets, and has a really ‘street' sense of humor, so she's probably pulling his leg all the time!”
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Jokingly describing a night out with Michael Jackson, Madonna herself laughingly claims, “First I beg him not to wear his sunglasses, and of course he complies, because I'm stronger than he is. Then we exchange powder puffs—we both powder our noses—and we compare bank accounts.”
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The one-time flirtatious boy toy had that night at the Academy Awards staked her claim as
the
blonde bombshell of the nineties. With her role as Breathless Mahoney and her glamorous appearance in the “Justify My Love” video, she now suddenly looked every inch a movie star. In a year of brilliant career moves, she eradicated the memories of her last three cinematic disasters. She was no longer a pop singer playing at acting, she was finally a movie star—now she just needed a movie.

That's where
Truth or Dare
came into play. When she started filming the on-stage and backstage scenes from her 1990 Blonde Ambition tour, no one suspected that it was going to become the movie that would really label her as a bankable film star. In it, she played the most outrageous, the most glamorous, and the most totally entertaining character of her career: herself.

If someone were to script the final print version of
Truth or Dare
and present it as a work of fiction, no one would believe that such a character could exist. And yet, in this film, the Madonna you see on the screen is a character who is wilder, more shocking, and more liberating than any screen heroine since Sally Bowles and Auntie Mame. In the masterful
Truth or Dare
, Madonna isn't just a synthesis of those two outlandish characters; she is also equal parts Isadora Duncan, Glenda the Good Witch, and Dorothy—all rolled up into one.

It all started with a young director named Alek Keshishian. While he was a student at Harvard, he took $2,000 and staged an imaginative theatrical production of
Wuthering Heights
, in which the principal characters mimed the voices of pop singers. Explained Keshishian, the voice of Cathy was sung by Kate Bush until the point where she marries Linton, then Cathy's singing voice changes to Madonna. The show became a huge hit on campus, and he videotaped a performance to preserve a record of it.

After he graduated from college, Alek moved to Los Angeles, where he became the director of music videos. His directing credits included Bobby Brown's “My Prerogative,” Vanessa Williams's “He's Got the Look,” and Elton John's “Sacrifice.” Through a college friend who had begun working for the CAA talent agency, he met Madonna's agents. When agent Jane Berliner set up a viewing of Alek's
Wuthering Heights
for Madonna, she said she was impressed, but he never heard from her after that.