Madonna (33 page)

Ostensibly the documentary, directed by first-timer Alek Keshishian, was a behind-the-scenes look at her sell-out Blonde Ambition Tour. In reality, it was a film about Madonna. ‘It’s like being in psychoanalysis and letting the whole world watch,’ noted Keshishian, who first came to her notice when he sent her his college thesis. That she was prepared to take a risk with a talented novice says much about her artistic courage. That everyone who appeared, from her father Tony Ciccone to her then boyfriend Warren Beatty, was merely a prop to support the star, says more, a point the director made time and again as he juxtaposed her comments about them with their own behavior. So, for example, when she revealed how she and a childhood friend, Moira McPharlin, had indulged in mutual masturbation during puberty, he filmed Madonna’s former friend denying her story. He then set up an excruciatingly embarrassing interlude in which, to Madonna’s evident discomfort, McPharlin asked her to be godmother to her youngest child and Madonna’s namesake.

In another scene Madonna mock imitated fellatio with an Evian bottle while her father and stepmother waited in the adjacent room, and later said to her lesbian friend Sandra Bernhard that as a little girl she could only get to sleep after her father fucked her. ‘Just kidding,’ she added. During the documentary she also revealed that her brother Christopher was gay, and that her elder brother Martin was an alcoholic. In one mawkish scene she lay by her mother’s grave while her younger brother bashfully hid behind a tree. At the time even the chief cameraman, Robert Leacock, had been embarrassed, although it is now one of his favorite scenes. He says, ‘One of the things that I will forever love her for is that she trusted us and let us do it. That’s amazingly brave. Most people will not let their life be that invaded.’

Certainly not everyone was willing to be grist to her publicity mill. Three of her dancers – two of whom she encouraged to French kiss on film – were so upset at the way they were used by Madonna that they sued her for invasion of privacy, fraud and deceit. The matter was settled out of court. Madonna was also shown in the film moaning about her lover, Warren Beatty – on one occasion calling him ‘pussyman’ – to the actor’s discomfort; eventually the point was reached when his attorney took out a court order to stop her from using their private telephone conversations in the documentary. ‘It was a long, very loving conversation that portrayed him in a warm way,’ Madonna argued. ‘But it is illegal to tape someone’s conversation without their knowing about it.’

If her feelings about Penn exposed her vulnerability, then Beatty’s laconic observations about his girlfriend, twenty-two years his junior, suggested another aspect of the girl he called ‘Buzzbomb’ – her insatiable narcissism and exhibitionism.

Beatty, a product of the old days of Hollywood, when publicity had been as much about illusion as revelation, found himself continually taken aback by her apparently total addiction to celebrity. During filming he was happy to be photographed visiting restaurants and clubs with Madonna, displaying the traditional complicity between star and media that ensured his current movie was publicized in return for banal glimpses into his private life. That she was prepared to go far beyond that, however, displaying a willingness, throughout their year-long affair, to use every fragment of her private life, however personal, in order to provide her with her next publicity fix, whether a magazine cover or a newspaper headline, left him bemused, and occasionally furious.

At times he would call her publicity agent, Liz Rosenberg, in exasperation at the way Madonna willingly exposed herself and used the private lives of others, including him, to feed her craving to be the center of attention. Sometimes her statements could be very personal. When she was asked by one interviewer about the size of Beatty’s manhood she responded, ‘I haven’t measured it but it’s a perfectly wonderful size,’ while she boasted to chat-show host Arsenio Hall, on his late-night TV show
Arsenio!
that she was able to satisfy the legendary stud in bed. Of Beatty and his concerns, Liz Rosenberg says dismissively, ‘He was into the publicity game of another era. It’s just not the way publicity is any more.’ That might, perhaps, be put more accurately as meaning that it’s not the way publicity is for Madonna.

As far as
Truth or Dare
was concerned, her exhibitionist qualities were perfectly matched to the voyeuristic urges of her audience, but her craving for exposure revealed the extent to which she defined herself by her image, a kind of desperate scorning of the soul. On one occasion during the filming of the documentary she visited a throat specialist, who asked her if she wanted to discuss anything off-camera. Watching out of shot was Beatty, whose shrewd observation serves as a telling commentary on her life. ‘She doesn’t want to live off-camera, much less talk,’ he noted. ‘There’s nothing to say off-camera. Why would you say something if it’s off-camera? What point is there in existing?’ Her former lover, Dan Gilroy, wryly reflected on the truth of Beatty’s remark, recalling Madonna’s early days in New York, when she would spend hours capturing her thoughts and feelings on his tape recorder. He once joked that she even wanted to take the tape recorder with her when she went to the bathroom. There was a difference, of course, for in those days she did not have a wider audience. Now she did.

That Madonna’s romance with Warren Beatty died almost as soon as
Dick Tracy
was released in 1990 seemed to confirm the feeling that the whole affair had been carried out for the cameras, for publicity. To her, Beatty’s celebrity was the hook, but also the catch, for while his stardom had been the original source of his appeal, it proved to be the cause of the failure of their relationship. Madonna admitted that she was in love with Beatty, but realized that he would never play second fiddle to her. As a close friend of the actor observed, ‘It was hard for him being so successful in the past and her being so successful in the present. It was role-reversal for him. There was love there, but it wasn’t a deep relationship. It was a symbolic love affair.’

If Madonna’s search for a life partner, even a soul mate, also included a large dose of celebrity hunting, she was not to be disappointed for long. Nor were the media and her public, for a few months after the demise of her affair with Warren Beatty, another superstar took his place at her side. Just as she had learned from the movie master, she was now about to take a musical seminar from Michael Jackson, the most successful solo singer of the decade. Following the critical acclaim that greeted
Dick Tracy
on its release in June 1990, Madonna was asked to perform the Oscar-nominated song from the film, ‘Sooner or Later’ by Stephen Sondheim, at the Academy Awards ceremony on March 25, 1991. The Gloved One was her date. She and Jackson had met a week earlier in The Ivy, a fashionable Los Angeles restaurant, where the staff had tried in vain to stop paparazzi from taking pictures of the two stars, even though both were happy to be photographed together. In addition to agreeing to be each other’s dates at the Oscars ceremony, they also discussed collaborating on a duet for Jackson’s forthcoming album,
Dangerous
.

As speculation about the relationship between the androgynous singer and one of the world’s sexiest women reached fever pitch, Madonna played her part to perfection, suggesting that she was going to give him a makeover and hinting that he was a closet gay who, she felt, needed to meet her gay dancers to encourage him to come out. Jokingly, she described a night out with Jackson: ‘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.’

Their appearance at the Oscars together – Jackson in a white sequined jacket and white gloves (two, rather than the single glove he usually affected), Madonna in a glittering white Bob Mackie gown and 20 million dollars’ worth of loaned diamonds – caused a sensation. Even observers as seasoned as Barbara Walters were impressed, the TV-show hostess remarking, ‘They looked like caricatures, they seemed untouchable, larger than life.’ It was a good night for
Dick Tracy,
too, ‘Sooner or Later’ winning the award for Best Original Song; the film had also won six other nominations, including Best Supporting Actor for Al Pacino.

Madonna may have given the impression in public that Michael Jackson was some kind of exhibit in a freak show, winking with complicity when questioned by journalists about their relationship, but that did not stop her from trying to add him to her growing list of high-profile conquests. She later told one of her lovers that she had indeed tried to seduce Jackson shortly after the Oscars – but confessed that her bedside manner failed to arouse his interest. The same lover recalled her description of the scene: ‘They were on the couch at his place and she would put the moves on him and he would stick out his tongue for a second. When they touched he would start giggling, like a little boy. Nothing happened because he was giggling so much. That was one man she was not able to conquer.’

If her celebrity boyfriends enabled Madonna to keep capturing the headlines, her relationship with Sandra Bernhard kept the public guessing about her sexual orientation, further stoking the fires of media interest surrounding her. Away from the cameras, Bernhard was always the third wheel in her friend’s love affairs, an invariable feature at restaurants and house parties to which Madonna and her escort of the moment went. Just as Bernhard had always been on hand during the collapse of Madonna’s marriage to Sean Penn, so she was around throughout her affair with Warren Beatty, accompanying the couple to clubs and theaters, or just hanging out with them.

It was natural, therefore, that Bernhard would be present to watch with amused approval when Madonna encountered a bisexual model, transvestite and aspiring actor named Tony Ward at her thirty-second birthday party, thrown for her by the photographer Herb Ritts in August 1990. The handsome, musclebound actor was teasingly offered as her ‘birthday present’ by her half-brother Mario, although she had in fact met Ward before when he worked on her 1989 videos,
Like A Prayer
and
Cherish
. Legend has it that Madonna stubbed out a cigarette on his back, a story that prompted the witty riposte from her spokesman, ‘Madonna doesn’t smoke, she sizzles.’

On the rebound from her failed romance with Warren Beatty, who was by this time squiring the actress Annette Bening, around town, friends considered the good-looking younger man to be the perfect pick-me-up, especially as, at twenty-six, he was half the age of her previous lover. Madonna duly obliged, and picked him up. Perhaps inevitably, they became lovers, Ward moving into her Hollywood mansion a month after the party. For a time, in a rather self-conscious reversal of roles, he became her ‘arm candy,’ his well-muscled body by her side when she went to restaurants or gala events. She flew him to New York to be her date for the film premiere of
Goodfellas
, as well as her escort at a benefit in honor of one of her idols, the legendary dancer, choreographer and teacher Martha Graham, perhaps the most important and influential figure in modern dance.

There was more to the relationship with Ward than simply exorcising the end of an affair, however. Hurt rather more than she cared to admit about the failure of her romance with Beatty, Madonna was also out to prove a point. Or, more accurately, she was hurt that the media focus seemed to be permanently transferred to Beatty and Annette Bening, whom he met in 1991 when he auditioned her for a role in his film
Bugsy.
A year later they were married. ‘It took all of thirty seconds to fall in love,’ he said later, rather sententiously. ‘I knew instantly that she was special.’

In a matter of months, Madonna had gone from dating a Hollywood hero to being squired by a Tinseltown toyboy. While that may have seemed a comedown for her, it was quite the reverse for Tony Ward. A former waiter, he had first fallen for Madonna when he served her and Sean Penn as they dined at the Los Angeles restaurant where he was working. ‘I was totally ga-ga over her,’ he admits. ‘I was really hurt when she married Sean, really hurt.’ In every way he was the opposite of Warren Beatty or, for that matter, Sean Penn. While the two actors, both noted sexual swordsmen, were cut from vigorous heterosexual timber, Tony Ward had a reputation for cross-dressing and sexual submission. Just as her ex-husband and Beatty may have reminded Madonna of her father, so Ward, quiet, unassertive and passive, seemingly brought out the maternal instincts in her. It was not a side of her she necessarily wished to engage. ‘At one point she asked me to leave because she just ended up being a mother to me,’ Ward recalls, with admirable candor.

As a couple they enjoyed, as he says, a ‘very odd connection,’ although excited tabloid reports claiming that just days after he met the singer, Ward married his existing girlfriend, fashion stylist Amalia Papadimos, at a secret ceremony in Las Vegas, turned out to be wildly inaccurate. So too were stories – emphatically denied by Liz Rosenberg – that Madonna had miscarried Ward’s child in December 1990. In actual fact, Madonna was so ‘devastated’ when a fortune teller told her at a New Year’s Eve party that she would never have children that she promptly got so drunk she was sick for days afterwards.

The media were right in one matter, however: Ward’s fondness for cocaine was no tabloid exaggeration. During the time he was with Madonna he twice voluntarily entered rehabilitation clinics, the treatment paid for by his fond patroness. Not only did she encourage him to try to kick his drug habit, she also urged him to pursue his acting career, doing what she could to help – if that is the right word – by featuring him in her erotic video, Justify My Love, which was banned by MTV for its sexual content.

Indeed, a comment she made about her relationship with the gay dancers on her Blonde Ambition Tour could be applied equally well to her affair with Tony Ward: ‘I’ve chosen people who are emotionally crippled in some way and need mothering from me.’ Damaged herself by her mother’s death, she has, perhaps subconsciously, quite often chosen flawed lovers, men impaired by drink problems, like Sean Penn, or drugs, like Tony Ward, Vanilla Ice, and others, or suffering from personal difficulties of one kind or another. Even her second husband, Guy Ritchie, is severely dyslexic.