Goddess: Inside Madonna (38 page)

Madonna was cast against type as Gloria Tatlock, the starched and proper missionary, who hires an alcoholic drifter, played by Sean Penn, to recover a cache of stolen opium to be used for medical purposes. Before leaving on location to begin shooting, Madonna gave several interviews in which she claimed that she could “relate” to Gloria Tatlock when it came to the religious and pious aspects of the movie role’s character. “Like me,” Madonna said, “she falls in love with someone as different from her as Sean is from me, and that’s how I explain Gloria’s attraction for the character my husband plays.”

From the beginning, Madonna and Penn were both miscast. Penn’s part had initially been offered to Harrison Ford and Tom Selleck, because the director rightly felt that it called for an older actor to play the part of the used and cynical drifter. When both actors turned it down, the idea of getting the newly married couple took form. Madonna, who brought an innocence to the role, did not have the kind of experience or weight needed to play a determined, courageous, and headstrong missionary, which, if done right, might have been compared to the role that Katharine Hepburn played in
The African Queen
. Another disappointment was that though the couple spent every free moment in a trailer making love, on-screen there was no chemistry between them.

Paul Freeman, who played Walter Faraday, the villain in the picture, arrived in Hong Kong after the others had already starting shooting as he had been called in to replace another actor who had initially been hired to play Faraday.

“Interestingly, I tested against the actor Bernard Hill, and I lost out to him on the first round,” Freeman explains. “Jim Goddard, the director, had already worked with Hill, and he wanted him. As it turned out, Bernard Hill didn’t get on with Sean, because Sean observed that Hill had nothing of the ‘boy’ in him which he judged was essential for the part. He was quite right. There are men who are dour and that’s perfect if you want that sort of character, but that was not how Sean perceived Walter Faraday. Sean and I got on fine, there was never any problem.”

From Paul Freeman’s point of view as an actor, the movie was a challenge. “Most of my part was played in a disguise, and it’s essential that the audience doesn’t know that it’s me since I get killed after the first five minutes. In the next frame, Madonna is working around the front of what is meant to be Shanghai, but what is actually Hong Kong, and a Scottish missionary comes up and talks to her and ends up accompanying her throughout the film. The missionary is me, but the audience doesn’t know that the villain has come back until the very end when I whip off the disguise.”

When Freeman arrived to take over the part, Goddard had not yet worked out how his character was going to change appearance and costume. “For me,” Freeman says, “it was a big challenge to take control of that stuff because I had to reveal who I was on-camera just as I had gone into disguise on-camera.”

On his own, Freeman decided that he was going to wear contact lenses, false teeth, and padding, which, according to him, was “a lovely thing to do as an actor.” Freeman continues, “The director was out of his depth and had no clue. Goddard was a good social-realist television director, but this film required someone who knew how to do fantasy and who also knew how to deal with big stars.”

In one scene in the film, Freeman reverts back into being the villain and locks Penn and Madonna in packing cases before kicking them down a flight of stairs. “They were both good fun,” he says, “about getting into the cases, and they never complained. I was amazed by Sean’s acting ability, and there was a problem on the set only once.” The problem scene was when Penn was supposed to be suffering from a hangover. “He plunged right into the part and actually stayed out the night before and got very, very drunk,” Freeman says, “so he really did have a major hangover during the shoot and couldn’t work. It was ludicrous. We carried on and eventually got it.”

Along with his crew, Goddard would behave badly toward Madonna. “There was a lot of sexist banter and innuendo going on when Madonna was around and which she didn’t like at all and stamped on pretty firmly,” Freeman recalls. “I think Goddard was intimidated by both Sean and Madonna, and his general method of coping with that was with dirty jokes and put-downs. I was amazed by it, and I was amazed that Madonna never slagged him off or punched him. She reacted badly, but she was always quietly furious and fuming. Sometimes she would simply say that she didn’t want to hear that kind of talk and walk away.”

A source who worked for George Harrison at the time at Handmade Films claims that Sean Penn tried to get rid of Jim Goddard. However, the film was already too far over schedule and budget to change directors.

Madonna described the time spent working on
Shanghai Surprise
as both a “hellish nightmare” and a “great learning experience.” While she was already a superstar in the world of pop music, she was a novice when it came to acting, as well as the wife of a star who was considered a superb actor. When Penn would stop the action in the middle of a scene to coach his wife and give her a five-minute acting lesson, she always seemed grateful and happy to learn from him. The other members of the cast thought that those breaks did nothing to help the flow and continuity of the plot.

The only time that Madonna seemed completely relaxed on the set was when Paul Freeman’s wife and five-year-old daughter, Lucy, came to visit. “My family came to Hong Kong very briefly,” Freeman explains, “and Lucy and Madonna would sit on the studio floor and just play together, kids’ games, building bricks. Lucy had her little ‘pony’ with her, a Barbie-doll replica that came with a brush and a long ponytail, and the two of them would spend hours combing the long mane. I had the impression that Madonna was relieved to get away from all the hype that was going on. It was the only time she could finally relax with this little child, who had no idea who she was.”

In midwinter, the cast and
crew left Hong Kong to film the last sequences of the film in London. With snow on the ground and freezing temperatures, Madonna and Penn rented a house in Holland Park. Nothing had changed. The property was constantly surrounded by reporters, which made it impossible for them to open the blinds. If they did, photographers would take pictures with telephoto lenses.

At one point, they were filming in a hospital on the outskirts of London. When the cast and crew arrived at six o’-clock in the morning to start the day, the paparazzi were already there, standing on the hospital walls, ready to pounce and take pictures. The producer stopped the action and walked calmly over to Penn to show him the
Daily Mirror
, the
Daily World
, and several other sleazy British tabloids. “Look what they’re saying about you and Madonna now,” the producer said.

Penn’s reaction was predictable. Swearing and screaming so that the paparazzi got their daily quota of photographs, Penn eventually stormed off to his trailer, where he remained sequestered for several hours while the director was forced to stop the shooting. Madonna sat with him and tried to calm him down. When she reappeared, she was furious. Confronting the producer, she told him quite clearly that he had provoked the incident by behaving in the most cynical and premeditated way to get media coverage for the film.

Throughout the entire experience of making
Shanghai Surprise
, everyone, crew and cast, agreed that Madonna was an unassuming, straightforward woman, extremely professional, who worked harder than anyone else. “You sort of anticipate something with stars, that you’re going to be knocked over by their beauty or their size or their power,” Paul Freeman says. “With Madonna, I was surprised by the fact that she was small and quite ordinary-looking, just a clear and simple person. Another thing about her that surprised me was that she and Sean were always together, they were in every shot and in every scene, and there was never any bad behavior. No Marilyn Monroe stories. She was always on time, always knew her lines, and at the same time, she was very protective of Sean. They were actually very sweet together.”

In early 1986, at the time that Madonna was in London finishing
Shanghai Surprise
, Robert Stigwood was set to direct
Evita
. Madonna had several phone conversations with Stigwood to explore the possibility of taking on the starring role. She backed away from the project when she learned that the director was intent on making the movie as an operetta, exactly as the theater productions had been staged. “For me,” Madonna said, “the only way I would be interested in doing it was if it were done as a straight drama. I’d love to do a movie someday where I sing, but it would be hard to make a transition if I decided to do a movie about a singer.”

By March 6,
Shanghai Surprise
was finished, and George Harrison called a press conference, which he hoped would improve the bad feelings that existed between his stars and Fleet Street. As Paul Freeman remarked at the time, “It was too little too late.” Recently, Freeman reiterated his opinion about that press conference: “My personal feeling was that the producers should have done an enormous press interview in the beginning and defused the problem. Instead, because they obviously wanted as much bad publicity and attention as they could get, by the time they did the press conference at the end, it was simply irrelevant.”

As he stood up and faced the roomful of journalists and photographers, Harrison chewed gum. It was the first news conference that the former Beatle had given since 1974, and surprisingly, he did most of the talking, answering the hostile questions that were hurled at Madonna and Penn. Harrison began by admonishing the press for the treatment of his stars, which, in his opinion, was worse than he had ever experienced during the Beatlemania in England. “This is easy for me,” he said to the audience, “because I was young then, like Sean Penn is now, and because now I know who I am and how I feel and you can’t get me. I’ve learned how to deal with it.” When Madonna was asked if she fought with Penn, Harrison interrupted before she could respond. “What kind of question is that?” he asked the journalist. “Do you have fights with your wife?”

Madonna’s parting remark as she left the press conference was “We’re not such a bad bunch of people, are we?”

On March 6, Sean Penn
appeared on the cover of
Vanity Fair
magazine. During an interview with the writer David Wolcott, Penn said, “I prefer the bar to the gym any day. I like to drink and I like to brawl.” Asked to comment on his wife, Penn replied, “No whale, no nuclear war, no starving country is more important.”

From rocking trailers to a breaking marriage, things did not improve between the couple after they returned to California. In April 1986, in a Los Angeles nightclub, the Grammy Award–winning songwriter David Wolinski, who also happened to be a close friend of Madonna’s, kissed her cheek in greeting. Once again, Penn’s reaction was irrational. He began beating Wolinski with his fists, kicking him with his feet, and finally, he hit him over the head with a chair. If Madonna had not really grasped the seriousness of her husband’s lack of control, she realized it when he turned on Wolinski. There was no excuse, since her old friend was neither a journalist nor a photographer. Penn was arrested, fined $1,000 for disorderly conduct, and put on probation. A friend of Madonna’s who had witnessed the fight commented, “The marriage has been undergoing stress for some time, but this was the first really traumatic episode for her. Wolinski was someone she knew, and it really shook her up.”

One month later, on Memorial Day, Penn’s probation was revoked when he was arrested for drunken driving and running a red light, charges that were eventually reduced to reckless driving. By August, Madonna denied rumors of a divorce by making a statement for the press: “I love Sean, and I’m feeling hopeful.”

In reality, Madonna was trying desperately to keep up her spirits, for herself and for them as a couple. But after each incident, it got harder and harder for her to ignore the storm of anxiety that plagued her. Her hands shook. She was pale. She had lost weight. She remembered loving Sean, and now she felt as if she had been in love with a person she no longer recognized. She turned to her grandmother as she had always done when she felt completely hopeless and distraught. To Elsie Fortin, she confided that her husband had a problem with alcohol; and that often, she was the target of his drunken tirades. Mrs. Fortin advised her granddaughter to separate, not to prolong the agony of a bad marriage.

To her credit, the more
unfavorable the reviews she received for
Shanghai Surprise
, the more determined Madonna was to prove herself as an actress. The only difference was that she intended to try to find movie projects that would not include her husband. Still, it was difficult for her to focus on her career. She felt completely depleted emotionally. Penn’s violence did not abate.

In another episode, Nick Kamen, a singer and former model who was rumored to have been Madonna’s lover during the final stages of her marriage to Penn, asked Madonna to write a song for his new album. She agreed and wrote “Each Time You Break My Heart” and also ended up producing the album as well. Refusing to believe that his wife and Kamen were working together, Penn accused them of having an affair and would burst into the recording studio and have confrontations with Madonna and Kamen. Even when the couple returned to New York, the violence continued. In August 1986, Penn and Madonna were accosted by paparazzi outside her Central Park West apartment. Penn spit at one photographer, Anthony Savignano, and in response, Savignano shoved Penn. Once again, Penn’s reaction was predictable when he slugged Savignano along with another photographer, Vinnie Zuffante, who had come to his aid.

It is debatable if Madonna
decided to star with her husband in David Rabe’s play
Goose and Tom-Tom
to learn more acting techniques from him, to gain the experience of performing onstage in front of an audience, or to try to keep the marriage together. People who were close to Madonna back then claim that it was Penn who wanted to perform with his wife, and in another attempt to save the marriage, she agreed.