Life with My Sister Madonna (25 page)

After the show in Philadelphia, on October 19, 1993, Madonna and I drive straight back to Manhattan. I get home to the apartment at around two in the morning. There I find Danny sitting on the floor, holding Richard's card. One look at his face and I know I'm in trouble.

He throws the card at my feet and accuses me of cheating on him. He demands that I confess then and there. I tell him I have nothing to confess. He insists that I swear that I won't be unfaithful to him again. I tell him that I won't swear that because, if I do, I'd be lying, because I haven't been unfaithful to him in the first place. I tell him that what happened with Richard and me was only friendship, that I am not in love with Richard.

Danny rounds on me and says, “You decide right now. Tell me that you will never be unfaithful to me again, or leave.”

I am utterly dumbfounded.

We spend the next couple of hours arguing.

At four, Danny finally goes to bed.

I sit on the kitchen floor till the sun rises, asking myself if I can go on. Do I want to remain on this isolated little planet with just Danny for company and never experience the wider world again? Or do I want to carry on exploring, living, being part of the world I crave, rather than watch from afar while life goes by me?

As dawn breaks, I decide. I grab my bags and move to my studio.

In the morning, I call Madonna and tell her what has happened. We rarely talk about our feelings in our family, so I know better than to expect her to offer me her shoulder to cry on; still, I secretly hope that she will care enough about me to be slightly sympathetic.

“Don't worry, I never liked him anyway,” she says.

For a second, I am speechless.

Then she goes on, “Don't worry about it. Everything will work out.”

End of discussion. Back to work again.

No suggestion that I come over for breakfast or sit with her on the plane so we can talk.

Nothing.

Ten years of my life, gone.

At this moment, the loss of my mother is at its most profound. There is no one for me to turn to, no one to understand. No one.

I concentrate, instead, on retaining my professionalism—and succeed. On October 21, we play the Palace of Auburn Hills; on October 23, we play Montreal; then we fly to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where, on October 26, Madonna performs in front of twenty-six thousand fans and, by pulling the Puerto Rican flag up to her crotch, ends up being condemned by the Puerto Rican House of Representatives for desecrating their flag. Fortunately, we are allowed to leave the country.

From there, we fly to Buenos Aires, then perform in São Paulo and in Rio, where Madonna appears in front of a sold-out crowd. In Mexico City, Madonna puts on three shows, flying in the face of religious groups that have fought to bar her from their country, but have failed.

By the time the tour moves on to Australia on November 17, where Madonna performs in Sydney, then in Melbourne, Brisbane, and Adelaide, I am starting to be somewhat distracted from my breakup with Danny.

After New York, Richard and I have embarked on an intimate relationship after all. Although I am on top of the world professionally, I am still acutely aware that my personal life has come crashing down on me.

When I arrive in Tokyo, where
The Girlie Show
tour ends with five sold-out concerts, all I can think of now is Danny. However much Richard has succeeded in saving me from the dark days, now that I am confronting the reality that I am about to return home to America without Danny there waiting for me, I feel as if I have thrown away my last chance at love, the best man I'll ever know, and I'm distraught.

I think back on my life with Danny and decide that I want to compensate him for all the years we have spent together. I send him almost a quarter of my savings—$50,000—funds I've been saving for the last fifteen years.

I tell Madonna, and I am deeply moved when she writes me a long and comforting letter. Addressing me as “My dearest tortured brother,” she says that it's nice to discover that “indecision, self-doubt, the inability to be alone, and masochism is a familial trait and nothing exclusive to my own genetic structure.”

She confesses that not a day goes by without her experiencing those same feelings. With a degree of insight that surprises me, she tells me that she feels I have outgrown Danny and that she understands how break-ups are particularly hard for us because we never got enough love as children.

“You need to be around a man that disagrees with you loudly…I'll race ya! Let's see who gets there first.”

She is right on all counts. Moreover, she has demonstrated such sisterly love toward me that I am deeply touched. I guess that's how it is with siblings—we disappoint the hell out of each other one moment and shower each other with unconditional love the next.

 

Y
ET HOWEVER POSITIVE
and encouraging and sisterly Madonna is, I still feel my life has somehow ended. In contrast, hers is beginning again, and she is moving in a new and dramatically different direction; she plans to get pregnant. She doesn't yet have a father in mind, so she launches on what she calls “The Daddy Search.”

She tells me she's reached a crossroads in her life when her maternal instinct is starting to kick in. I believe that she wants and needs someone of her own, something of herself to carry on when she's gone, and I surmise that she wants to be the mother she never had, and to have her child experience the maternal love she never received herself.

She is determined to find a father for her child, and her search becomes a running theme between us. Going to a sperm bank is unthinkable for her, as the press would find out in two minutes flat. She decides to select a man to father her unborn child, whether she marries him or not.

We come up with the term
Daddy Chair.
Every now and again I will ask her, “Who's sitting in the Daddy Chair today?” She requires the ideal Daddy Chair candidate to be smart and good-looking. She has no strictures about race or religion. She just wants a father for her child and is casting around for the perfect fit for the Daddy Chair.

For a while, Enos is in the running. Then she goes to a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden and fixes on Dennis Rodman—the six-foot-seven basketball player, famous for his tattoos and multicolored dyed hair. The next time she's interviewed on television, she makes sure to mention how much she wants to meet Rodman. Three months pass, but Rodman doesn't contact her. My sister isn't a quitter, so she engineers an assignment to interview Rodman for
Vibe
and flies down to Miami to meet him.

In his autobiography,
Bad as I Wanna Be,
Rodman claims that the moment the interview ended and the photo shoot began, he and Madonna were “just all over each other,” and that they went straight to bed. According to Rodman's book, she tells him exactly what she wants with no preamble: that he father her child. Along the way, she tells me she's frustrated by the fact that the NBA schedule doesn't coincide with her ovulation and that Rodman's estranged girlfriend still seems a factor. “In any case,” she says, “it's nice to have to chase someone around for a change.”

The “estranged girlfriend” turns out not to be estranged from Rodman at all. Her name is Kim and Rodman is double-timing Madonna with her. Nor does Rodman exactly fit into the somewhat louche lifestyle Madonna and I have embraced with so much gusto. We decide to throw a party at the Coconut Grove house to celebrate her birthday. I arrange for Albita to entertain us and also invite a bevy of drag queens: Madame Wu, Damien Divine, Bridgette Buttercup, Mother Kibble—the crème de la crème. Madonna invites her coterie of basketball players, including Rodman.

As soon as the drag queens flounce into the party, a Capulet/ Montague scenario unfolds. The basketball players turn their backs and stay away from them. The drag queens follow suit. With both factions now firmly ensconced in opposite corners, the party might have passed without incident, except that Madonna and I make what turns out to be the fatal mistake of going inside the house for a few moments. When we come out again, we are met with mass squealing coming from the pool. The basketball players have pushed all the drag queens into the water.

Eyelashes float on the surface of the pool, wigs bob about in the water, along with all the drag queens, some of whom can't swim. I dive in and pull a few of them out while Madonna looks on, trying hard not to laugh too loudly.

Then she throws the basketball players a look. “I don't think they like drag queens,” she cracks.

Rodman's days are numbered, and my sister launches another casting call for the Daddy Chair.

Soon after, Danny asks to see me. We meet at my New York studio and talk about reconciling. He tells me he wants to fight to save our relationship, and we explore the possibility of getting back together. Then the subject inevitably turns to his financial situation. I feel bad for him, so I give him another $50,000. A few days later, his mother writes to me saying that I owe Danny alimony. I don't answer her letter. Nonetheless, I still love Danny and am distraught about our breakup.

 

I
SPEND SOME
time in Miami trying to forget, then fly back to New York where I attempt my first one-night stand—safe sex, naturally. I don't enjoy it. I always have had the sense that when I'm involved with someone, I become a better person. I know I need to be in a relationship. Random anonymous sex leaves me feeling lonelier than before.

 

O
N
A
PRIL
26, 1994,
Madonna: The Girlie Show—Live Down Under
is released on home video and laser disc. It will be certified gold, signifying sales of five hundred thousand copies. The following January, Madonna will release her second book,
The Girlie Show,
for which I took many of the photographs and get paid $100 per photo used. I am beyond caring. Haunted by all my memories of Danny, I find living in New York intolerable, so I move to a duplex in L.A. I have two friends move in with me, as I am not accustomed to living alone anymore—nor do I want to.

By now, Madonna is focusing on an acting career and doesn't plan to tour in the near future. Norman Mailer has recently named her “the greatest female living artist,” in
Esquire,
and she has little left to prove in terms of her music.

Through Ingrid—who introduces me to Gloria and Emilio Estefan, who both love my work on
The Girlie Show
—I am offered the opportunity to direct a video for the legendary Cuban performer Albita.

I have never directed a music video before, but although I'm nervous, I jump at the chance. As always, I relish the challenge of mastering a skill without any help or guidance. So I agree to do the video, and it's a success.

 

A
FTER SEEING AN
Yves Klein exhibit of anthropometries—body prints of blue-paint-coated nude models made directly on canvas—I persuade my friends to let me paint their bodies, then I press their body parts strategically against my walls and doors. Along the way, during a party at my home, one of my friends pulls his pants down and kneels on Madonna's prayer bench from Coconut Grove—the one that I gave her and that she discarded, as she generally did most of my presents—and I paint his butt, then press it against the wall. Soon, the walls of my apartment are covered with the imprints of butts. I also decide to take Polaroids of my friends' backsides.

I am probably partying harder than I should, a direct result of living in L.A., a city that doesn't inspire me but has manifold temptations, including, in my case, cocaine.

I start doing the drug once a week, on Saturday nights, when I might share a gram with four other people, dance my ass off at a club, have a few drinks, then go home to bed. Not a massive amount of coke, but nonetheless I am beginning to form a pattern of destructive behavior.

Madonna isn't particularly happy either and sends me a letter in which she sounds surprisingly depressed: “I have no interest in working lately. It's not like me but I just wanna have fun—read, watch movies, see my friends—what's happening to me??” Although I don't tell her, I think her problem is that she hasn't yet found a suitable candidate for the Daddy Chair.

 

I
N THE FALL
of 1994, Madonna meets Carlos Leon, a personal trainer, in Central Park. Soon after, she asks me to redesign her Manhattan apartment because she is now planning to start a family. Moreover, she tells me that Carlos fits the Daddy Chair perfectly—and that he is an aspiring actor.

I say, “Great, another actor.”

“Shut up; he's sweet,” she says.

I meet Carlos, and she's right. He is sweet. He's also handsome and sexy. But she's not sure he fulfills the intelligence requirement of the Daddy Chair.

I meet him, spend time with him, and decide that he is a fish out of water in Madonna's rarefied world, but he's far from stupid. Down the line, I will observe him on the red carpet with her, and my misgivings about the permanency of their relationship crystallize.