Madonna (48 page)

If not Eva Peron, than perhaps the life story of Martha Graham or painter Frida Kahlo is destined to be embodied on screen by Madonna. Both women were legendary nonconformists with whom Madonna is fascinated. Kahlo was the wife of famed Mexican mural painter Diego Rivera, and she had a tormented life that spilled out on her unconventional canvases. Her bizarre self-portraits comprise her most compelling work.
The Two Fridas
(1939) depict Frida sitting next to herself, a pair of scissors in her hand. There is blood on her dress, as she has just performed open-heart surgery on both of her images and linked their exposed hearts with a vein she has pulled from her own body.
The Little Deer
finds Frida's head on the body of a deer in the forest, with antlers protruding from her head and the bleeding wounds of hunters' arrows covering her body. One of Madonna's most prized possessions is an original Kahlo painting that hangs in her Hollywood hills home. It is called
My Birth
, depicting an adult Frida's head emerging from her mother's fully opened vagina. Madonna has already purchased the film rights to Kahlo's life story.

Since she became as wealthy as she is famous, Madonna has been collecting art. She not only has an original Kahlo, her house is a veritable museum of paintings and photography. She also has an original Rivera, several Tamara de Lempicka paintings, and a Langlois that was originally painted for Versailles. Her collection of original photographic prints includes those of Lartigue and Man Ray. However, it is the Kahlo that intrigues her the most. If someone doesn't like the painting she knows that that person can't be her friend.

For Madonna, life is one big piece of art. There is never a question of “Is there more to come?” Rather it is “What canvas will I choose next?” Film? Theater? Music? Something multimedia?

Without missing a beat, in mid-1991 Madonna was already two movies ahead of her last release. She spent several weeks in Chicago at Wrigley Field filming a supporting role in Penny Marshall's film about a female baseball team, called
A League of Their Own
. Unlike her personal life, Madonna has learned to become a team player on film. Since her success in
Dick Tracy
she has discovered that she is much more effective as part of an all-star ensemble. Co-starring with Geena Davis and Tom Hanks in the 1940s baseball film, Madonna portrays the role of Mae, a girl with a fast reputation and a razor-sharp tongue.

While filming
A League of Their Own
in Evansville, Indiana, later in the year, Madonna found herself bored to tears when she wasn't on the set. “I may as well have been in Prague,” she bitched to one reporter—complaining that she had spent three months without MTV! Unthinkable torture for the video prima donna. She did however fit in a highly publicized date with rap star Vanilla Ice. According to her, “I always like to befriend the underdogs.”
²⁴³

While she has achieved the kind of fame that is in the upper stratosphere of stardom, life has not mellowed Madonna, nor has success erased any degree of her pushy, bratty attitude. Career-wise, she can write her own ticket in Hollywood, but among her peers, Madonna isn't winning any popularity contests. In the summer of 1991, while being interviewed on the CBS television show “This Morning” Cher went so far as to call her a “cunt.” The word was naturally bleeped off the audio track on the air, but it was easy to read her lips. Said Cher, “There's something about her that I don't like. She's mean, I don't like that. I remember having her over to my house a couple of times, because Sean and I were friends, and she was just so rude to everybody. It seems to me that she's got so much, that she doesn't have to act the way that she acts, like a spoiled brat all the time. It seems to me when you reach the kind of acclaim that she's reached and can do whatever you want to do, you should be a little more magnanimous and a little bit less of a cunt.”
²⁴⁴
In a rare 1991 interview, Barbra Streisand recalled her 1983 dinner with Madonna, Jellybean, and Jon Peters. She commented that Madonna had a lot of gall seeking out the most expensive thing on the menu to order for dinner, and she found her overall nerve appalling. Likewise, grand diva Patti LaBelle complained on the Joan Rivers show that Madonna had stepped on her foot at the American Music Awards and never so much as uttered the words
excuse me
.

On one hand, Madonna has made inroads in showing her public what her personal life is all about. Through
Truth or Dare
she let the world in on several of her family secrets, like her brother Martin's alcoholism, her brother Christopher's homosexuality, and her occasional bouts with loneliness and depression. But the secret sharing is still carefully controlled. While she can talk for hours about her favorite subject—herself—she is defensive when anyone else talks out of turn. She is truly the divine ruler of her own empire, and as time goes on she controls it with a tighter reign. Dreading the idea that any of her employees may eventually make money off their association with her, she has begun signing them to confidentiality agreements. Fearing that if they spoke out of turn about her they would never work with her again, several of Madonna's current associates refused to be interviewed for this book. Madonna relishes the idea of always having the last word.

She continues to titillate her public for sheer shock value. Ever since she started hanging out with Sandra Bernhard, the whole question of lesbianism seems an ever-present theme. Smashing the taboo of homosexuality seems to be one of her strongest personal crusades. When Carrie Fisher interviewed Madonna for a 1991 article in
Rolling Stone
, Carrie asked her if women kissed better than men. “Sometimes better,” she answered, “I've only
kissed
women though. I've had fantasies of women, but I'm not a lesbian.”
²⁴⁵
Knowing what we do about Madonna, if she ever did decide to make love to another woman, she would probably videotape it, write a song about it, and sell a million copies!

To push the issue of lesbianism further, the first part of the
Rolling Stone
piece was accompanied by a photo essay by photographer Steven Meisel called “Flesh or Fantasy.” The black and white photographs were inspired by and mimicked Brassai's controversial
The Secret Paris
, of the 1920s and 1930s. Brassai was fascinated with brothels and gay and lesbian life in Paris. In Madonna's takeoff on
The Secret Paris
, she was photographed in male drag groping a woman's buttocks on a dance floor and cavorting in a hotel room with men in garter belts, black silk stockings, and high heels. In another controversial frame, Madonna is seen in a slip and garter belt, passionately kissing another woman. In a solo shot she posed in her underwear on an upright dining room chair, her knees a yard apart from each other, drinking from a glass she holds with her feet.

In the context of Carrie Fisher's chatty interview with Madonna, she casually mentions that her father, Eddie Fisher, once slept with androgynous film legend Marlene Dietrich. Replied Madonna with jealousy, “Really? I wish I had slept with her.”
²⁴⁵

The tables have already been turned a couple of times on Madonna with regard to who is or isn't sleeping with her. In 1987 Manny Parrish had a hit record in England called “Male Stripper” (from
Man-to-Man Meet Man Parrish)
. When he stepped off the plane in London to promote the single, his record company's publicity director told him that he had arranged a press coup by claiming that Parrish was having an affair with Madonna. Fearing a backlash from the press, Parrish played along with the charade. Based on Parrish's fictitious story about how Madonna longed to have his baby, the story made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic.

Similarly, in 1988, an Italian stud named Ettore Santinello sold a story to a British newspaper,
The Star
, about his tryst with the star during her European Who's That Girl? tour. The story was accompanied by a photo of Madonna kissing Ettore on the cheek and a publicity still autographed “With Much Love and Kisses, Madonna.” When Santinello tried to turn the so-called affair into a publicity stunt to launch his own show business career, she ignored his claims, and his fifteen minutes of fame evaporated. Instead of acknowledging or denying either Parrish's or Santinello's claims, Madonna ignored them. Her entire career has been based on one sex scandal after another, and each one only makes her legend grow bigger and bigger. If Pee Wee Herman's 1991 indecent exposure plight had befallen Madonna, it wouldn't have finished her career, she probably would have sold an extra million copies of her latest album!

In January 1992, three of Madonna's
Truth or Dare
dancers—Oliver, Kevin, and Gabriel—filed a lawsuit against her, claiming they hadn't signed releases for their part in the film. Madonna was amused—NOT! Remaining in the news, she took her lumps when
Shadows and Fog
opened in Paris and at the Berlin Film Festival in mid-February.
Daily Variety
dismissed her role as a “murky cameo.” Madonna was already at work on her next trio of projects: her own record label, Home; her starring role in the suspense film
Body of Evidence;
and a pictorial project involving Steven Meisel, Vanilla Ice, and several male strippers—in an erotic Madonna photo book on sex—how apropos! The Madonna machinery simply never stops.

Marketing
is
where her true genius lies. She is at such a confident plateau at the moment that she is destined to continue producing one form of art or another. Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe died at the pinnacle of their fame, but Madonna's survival instinct is too strong for that. Brigitte Bardot couldn't sustain it. Undoubtedly, this is not a fate Madonna will encounter—she's too hyperactive, and far too in love with being in the center of the spotlight to ever give it up.

Obviously there is more great music brewing in her. But, since she doesn't do the obvious, one never knows where her next inspiration will come from. After popularizing the whole vogueing phenomenon, there is no telling which segment of society—or herself—will pique her interest next. Whatever it is, it will undoubtedly be promoted to the hilt, as only Madonna can.

At this point Madonna's celebrity is so strongly established that she will be a media star for life. Images of Mae West still come to mind, because it is her sexy audacity that Madonna most closely resembles. When West was in her eighties she had the insight, audacity, and humor to star in a film called
Sextette
, in which she played a femme fatale who was plagued by a horde of suitors less than half her age. Like Mae, Madonna will never mellow with age. If she lives to be a hundred, we can still expect her to be shocking us with her actions and her pronouncements.

Madonna has created the perfect existence for herself. She is able to flit back and forth from New York to Los Angeles with ease. Those two cities match her energy level, and with two permanent residences, she can switch back and forth between them according to her whims. It depends on what kind of a mood she's in. If she wants to be left alone, she stays in L.A. And, if she wants to stir up some trouble, she goes to New York.

What is Madonna going to do to startle us next? This is probably the biggest unanswered question in her career. She shocks us. She provokes us. She mesmerizes us. And she manipulates us. She is more of a brilliant marketing genius than a gifted performer. She herself admits that she is neither the greatest singer nor the best dancer. But she has something more elusive: a magnetism that makes us want to know all we can about her every move.

She has harnessed the world's media more fully than any other star in history. She
is
an artist, and a great one, and her medium is the popular media. She has manipulated the massive forces of television, radio, film, magazines, newspapers, books, videos, and, of course, records, CDs, and cassettes, with an instinctual adroitness no other performer or politician comes close to matching. To Mae West and Marilyn Monroe, two obvious leaders on Madonna's list of inspirations, should be added Andy Warhol, the painter who introduced the world to the idea that in the media age, celebrity itself is an art form.

To further prove her business savvy, in April 1992 Madonna announced the finalization of her mammoth $60 million deal with Time Warner, Inc. Under the company name of Maverick, Madonna becomes a showbiz mogul unto herself with a record company, music and book publishing wings, and fully funded television, film, and merchandising divisions.

Saint, savior, sinner, siren, slut—Madonna is
all
of these. Love her, hate her, worship her, idolize her, or despise her—the only thing you cannot do is ignore her. She is rude, she is pushy, she is lewd, she is liberated, she is beautiful, she is audacious. Like it or not, thanks to the magic of electronic media, she is destined to be remembered as the biggest female star of the twentieth century.

*The only benefit concert Diana ever gave was to fund “The Diana Ross Playground” in New York City's Central Park. The disastrous 1983 free concert ended up costing the city a small fortune.

T
hroughout the 1990s, Madonna continued her track record for high-profile multimedia creativity, shocking pronouncements, and unpredictable antics—ultimately becoming heralded at the millennium by the press as being one of the most memorable women of the twentieth century. She also continued to question and confound society's morals and mores through her creative projects, statements, and artistic endeavors.