Goddess: Inside Madonna (39 page)

Goose and Tom-Tom
played a limited engagement, as planned, in repertory at Lincoln Center. Madonna played a moll to Penn’s gangster, and some would say that Rabe’s play was good experience for her eventual role as Breathless Mahoney in Warren Beatty’s
Dick Tracy
.

D
uring the fall of 1986, shortly after
Goose and Tom-Tom
closed, the couple returned to California, where Madonna committed herself to a film called
Blind Date
. When the studio went back on its word and hired Bruce Willis as her costar, after having promised her approval of the male lead, she withdrew. Eventually, the role went to Kim Basinger. Through her own development company, Siren Films, Madonna became involved in an adaptation of French writer/director Agnès Varda’s 1962 melodrama,
Cléo de 5 à 7
. At the same time, Diane Keaton and Joe Kelly, a producer at Fox, were trying to commission a script for a remake of the 1930 Josef von Sternberg classic
Blue Angel
, which had starred Marlene Dietrich, for Madonna. When
Cléo de 5 à 7
and
Blue Angel
stalled, Madonna went to work writing the lyrics for a song for her husband’s movie
At Close Range
, with Patrick Leonard, who was writing the music.

In what was considered to be the only positive moment in a film that bombed at the box office, Madonna’s song, “Live to Tell,” had a moderate success. Since the film was about a rural family, Madonna’s video, directed by James Foley, shows her more in keeping with the rural setting of the film. Sitting on a chair on a blacked-out set, wearing a house-dress, her eyes less blue and more gray to fit in with the dreariness of her character, and with only a single spotlight on her, she sings “Live to Tell.” Immediately afterward, Madonna had another success with her record and video “Papa Don’t Preach.”

Griffin Dunne had seen Madonna
in
Goose and Tom-Tom
and decided that he wanted to work with her in a movie. “She seemed to be very inside herself,” Dunne said. “When she came out with a cigarette that needed to be lit, all you were concerned about was who was going to light it.”

In 1987, Dunne finally got his wish when he was cast with Madonna in
Who’s That Girl
, directed once again by James Foley. From the beginning of their collaboration, Dunne had difficulty adapting the way he worked with the way Madonna approached acting on a set. “We work very differently,” Dunne said. “She likes her first take best. I think my best is around the fourth. She drove me crazy because she kept telling me, ‘You got it,’ just the way her character would. I mean she’s a very noisy girl. If you’re having lunch or something, she’s not at all like that, but on the set she’d use this talent she has for grating on my character’s nerves—talking nonstop between takes—and I’d look at her and really would go, ‘Who
is
this girl?’”

After
Shanghai Surprise
failed so abysmally,
Who’s That Girl
was supposed to be Madonna’s comeback film. Foley brought the script, originally called
Slammer
, to Madonna as a draft and found her to be instinctively cautious. “I told him that I liked the script,” Madonna said, “but I could see where it needed a lot of work.” This time around, not only did she exhibit prudence about accepting a role without questioning the director’s, writer’s, and producer’s intentions, but she also had much more control. As a result, the script was rewritten several times by several different writers until Madonna finally approved it, judging it to be the way “we wanted it.”

Who’s That Girl
is a romantic comedy, based loosely on Howard Hawks’s movie classic
Bringing Up Baby
, which starred Katharine Hepburn as a zany heiress and Cary Grant as a serious paleontologist. In
Who’s That Girl
, Griffin Dunne plays a humorless young lawyer who is about to marry a debutante whose father frames Nikki Finn, played by Madonna, for a murder that he has committed. In what turns out to be a fatefully wrong decision, on the day before the wedding, the father instructs his future son-in-law to drive the newly paroled Nikki Finn to the train station, from which she will speed out of his life. Finn ends up wrecking Dunne’s car, getting them chased by gangsters, and going through a host of other mayhem, which predictably makes the prudish lawyer fall madly in love with her.

One of the main problems with Madonna’s performance was that, unlike Mia Farrow in
Broadway Danny Rose
, her adenoidal accent, little-girl demeanor, coy facial expressions, and shrewish tantrums did not charm the audience. Another problem was that Madonna played the role as she portrays the characters in most of her videos: as a girl who gets her revenge on the bad man who is out to use her and abuse her. In this case, it was clearly art imitating life.

After the movie was finished, James Foley claimed that while it had been extremely difficult to shoot from a technical viewpoint, Madonna was “absolutely perfect.” He said, “She is precociously talented. She’s very instinctual; what comes out is unencumbered by analysis. We shot a lot on the streets of New York and on the streets in Los Angeles, and she helped. Everyone on the crew observes the tone the star sets, and she emanated such a sense of ease and dignity that it filtered clear down to the caterer. She’s curious as hell, about lights, scripts, people’s names.”

Madonna’s good behavior on the set unfortunately did nothing to change the miserable reviews that she got, although one generous critic compared her to Jean Harlow, even calling her the “Harlow of the 1990s.” Madonna’s analysis of the role was similar to what she would say about all the characters she has portrayed on the screen. “I could identify with Nikki,” Madonna maintained, “as if I was born to play her because I was inspired by her message. A woman can get away with murder if her weapon is laughter, which makes the audience fall in love with her.”

Every year in the United States, about fifty movies are released without press screenings. When that happens, it is usually considered an admission by the distributors that the film is bad, and they want to get it out before advance negative press kills whatever chance they have to get back some of their investment. Warner Brothers, in association with Peter Gruber, Jon Peters, and Roger Birnbaum, decided not to do any prepublicity for
Who’s That Girl
or arrange for any screenings.

According to a list that was published in the
Los Angeles Times
in 1987, thirty-eight films had been released without press. Topping the list was
Who’s That Girl
.

Undeterred by the impending failure
of the movie, on July 17, 1987, almost three weeks before the August 7 release date of
Who’s That Girl
, Madonna embarked upon a world tour. Freddy DeMann, her manager and the man who was known throughout the music business to defer to his client’s every whim, came up with a desperate but brilliant idea to save the film from total disaster. He suggested that Madonna’s upcoming tour should be named after the movie, Who’s That Girl. In keeping with the title, he also thought up a $50,000 marketing campaign that included three-page ads of Madonna’s eyes only with the teasing question “Who’s that girl?”

Though DeMann’s brilliant idea did little to help the movie’s box-office success, when it came to the tour, Madonna had the distinction of selling out the more than fifty-one thousand tickets at New York Giants Stadium in less than six hours. In fact, since her last tour in 1985, she had never played to a seating capacity of less than twenty thousand. Madonna was at the height of her popularity.

The tour was choreographed by Jeffrey Hornaday, whose work on
Flashdance
had put the movie on a caliber with a successful Broadway musical. At one point during her performance, Madonna stood motionless under a single spotlight—exactly what Patrick Hernandez and the others had wanted her to do in Paris—and sang “Live to Tell” with heartfelt emotion. In fact, one of her stops on the tour was in France, where she performed in front of one hundred thousand people in a stadium in Sceaux, a suburb not far from Paris. Jacques Chirac, who in 1987 was prime minister as well as the mayor of Paris, was besieged with requests from residents of Sceaux, as well as political figures, to cancel the concert as they were concerned about crowds, vandalism, and damage to the stadium. Chirac’s daughter, Claude, who is one of his most important political advisers and has helped shape her father’s image to appeal to young French voters, was twenty-four years old at the time and a big fan of Madonna’s. In a recent interview with Claude Chirac, she recalled that she had been responsible for changing her father’s mind and allowing the show to go on over the objections of some of his constituents. “I made my father sit down and listen to Madonna’s music,” Claude Chirac says, “and when he saw how much I loved it, and when he realized that she really had enormous talent, he relented.” In appreciation, after the concert ended, Madonna presented Jacques Chirac with a check for half a million French francs, which at the time equaled approximately $83,000, to be given to a foundation to fight AIDS.

At the time the Who’s
That Girl tour was launched in America, John Scher, a concert tour promoter, called the summer of ’87 the “busiest stadium summer in the eighteen years I’ve been in this business.” Barry Bell, a booking agent with Premier Talent, also called the summer of ’87 “the summer of the stadium tours, which had a positive effect on the promoter’s business.”

In the summer of ’87, Madonna and David Bowie went out on tour separately, both of them performing on separate occasions to sold-out audiences at Giants Stadium in New Jersey.

Madonna has often been compared and has compared herself to David Bowie. While Madonna has never had as many critical successes as Bowie, she has had more consecutive hits. Both have changed style into substance by transforming their images as well as by predicting the trends and tastes of their audiences. Madonna and David Bowie have also both pursued film careers. Though Bowie has always been cast to type, appearing in films as the androgynous, evil oddity, Madonna has taken on roles that demand more range and dramatic ability than she is able to deliver. Perhaps the most marked difference between the two singing stars is the reaction they evoke from the so-called moral majority or those who make themselves experts in what might be damaging to the young viewer.

Certain of Madonna’s videos have been banned from MTV, including her most recent, which appeared in March 2001, “What It Feels Like for a Girl” from her album
Music
, directed by her husband, Guy Ritchie. MTV executives said that the video had gratuitous violence, with images of Madonna stealing cars, torching a gas station, robbing an ATM customer, and running over street-hockey players before she commits suicide by crashing her car into a utility pole. Concerning censorship of her music, Madonna has always claimed that the reason she has been targeted by the moral majority is less because of her music or videos than because of her gender. “When David Bowie has violent images in his videos, there seems to be no problem,” Madonna stated. “Or, when Prince has blatant sexual images, there isn’t a problem. There’s a problem with me and my so-called image which has resulted in the censorship of several of my videos.”

The nationally syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote about the censorship of “What It Feels Like for a Girl” by MTV in the
New York Post
on March 21, 2001. “I have seen Madonna’s video,” she said, “‘What It Feels Like for a Girl.’ This is the one that has been absurdly banned from VH1 and MTV. (So when will MTV cancel
Jackass
completely?) Am
I
shocked? You bet. Not because of the vid’s violent content. It’s nothing you don’t see on prime-time network programs. No, what is shocking is the misdirection of the clip itself. The song, one of Madonna’s most plaintive, powerful, and well-written efforts, has here been speeded up in a frantic dance remix. The ‘irony’ that Madonna and her director/hubby Guy Ritchie say they intended doesn’t come across.”

In response to what Madonna calls the “moralists” who object to her on the basis of her image and her gender, she has quoted from the I Ching: “So, too, music has power to ease tension within the heart and to loosen the grip of obscure emotions. The enthusiasm of the heart expresses itself involuntarily in a burst of song, in dance and rhythmic movement of the body. From immemorial times the inspiring effect of the invisible sound that moves all hearts and draws them together has mystified mankind. Rulers have made use of this natural taste for music. Music was looked upon as something serious and holy, designed to purify the feelings of men; it fell to music to glorify the virtue of heroes and thus to construct a bridge to the world of the unseen.”

Perhaps more to the point would be Madonna’s admission that she allows herself to be influenced by her husbands. Penn did it when it came to her movies, both directly and through his friend James Foley. Apparently, Guy Ritchie has been permitted to interfere in the one medium where Madonna has few peers.

In May 1988, as her
marriage to Sean Penn was coming apart, and her movie career had proved to be less encouraging than she had hoped, and with her quest to play
Evita
obviously stalled as well, Madonna took a starring role in David Mamet’s play
Speed-the-Plow
, a title that proved to be as bewildering as Madonna’s performance. Curiously, Madonna researched the title and, once again, found parallels between it and the character, while inferring religious undertones in it that she took as a sign that she was “destined to play the role.”

“Speed the plough” is a phrase found in the Anglican, Church of England, service for those concerned with agriculture. During the service the plough is brought up to the center of the church, and members of the farming community gather around to ask God to “speed the plough and the ploughman, the farm, and the farmer.” Not only did the religious connotation move Madonna, but also that
Speed the Plough
was a play written by Thomas Morton in 1798. Morton’s work introduced the name and character of Mrs. Grundy, and the concept of Grundyism as the extreme of moral rigidity. Once Madonna found those biblical links, she felt that she understood the moral message of David Mamet’s play.