Madonna (26 page)

Already she was moving to pastures new. Indeed, her fateful first meeting with the man who would become her husband had actually taken place just as the relationship with Jellybean Benitez was ending. Legend has it that, as she stood nervously waiting at the top of a staircase on the set of her
Material Girl
video, Madonna looked down and saw the man she would marry. Director Mary Lambert had invited her friend Sean Penn, the son of television director Leo Penn and former actress Eileen Penn, along to watch the shoot. Hard-drinking, violent and abusive, if immensely talented, Penn was a member of the so called ‘Brat Pack’ of young Hollywood actors that included Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise and James Foley. As Madonna stood poised for descent, and looking every inch the 1950s movie queen in her fuchsia sheath dress, she noticed Penn hovering in the shadows off-set, wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses. At that moment, she later claimed, she ‘immediately had this fantasy that we were going to meet and fall in love and get married.’

If so, she gave the fantasy little thought during the first few weeks of her stay in Los Angeles. Never one to stand still, she was determined to make the best of the opportunities now opening up for her in Hollywood. Yet for all her metropolitan sophistication and pop success, during her first visits to the West Coast she was just a starstruck visitor from the Midwest thrilled to be rubbing shoulders with Hollywood royalty. Within a matter of days she had met Keith Carradine, who played a sleazy Hollywood mogul in her
Material Girl
video, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Prince, who invited her to a concert of his after she presented him with an award at the American Music Awards. ‘She was like a kid in a candy store,’ recalls Erika Belle. ‘She was utterly star-struck. In no particular order she told me that she had met Elizabeth Taylor, Sean Penn and a popcorn magnate. It was exciting for her, but she was serious about making a name for herself.’

Prince squired her around town, taking her for dinner at various Japanese restaurants and sending over a limousine to collect her when he played his concert date at the Los Angeles Forum. While the tabloids talked of a ‘red-hot romance,’ Madonna, focused as ever, was more interested in how Prince was going about his career – in the previous twelve months he could boast a top single, album and movie, as well as an Academy Award for the soundtrack for the film
Purple Rain
. In the event, the ‘red-hot’ romance failed to ignite, but their friendship would prove to be a fruitful musical and business collaboration; although they discounted writing a musical together, they performed a duet, ‘Love Song’, on Madonna’s album
Like A Prayer
. She also later took an interest in his Paisley Park recording studios.

It seemed that Prince was the creative template for her own career as she embraced the world of music, video and film. In the first six months of 1985 Madonna had six separate singles in the charts, with no fewer than five separate music videos on television as well as two films in which she had parts,
Vision Quest
and
Desperately Seeking Susan
, vying for public – and critical – attention. She had always seen herself as the queen of the big screen and, never one to rest on her laurels, had began to turn her thoughts towards Hollywood. Her small part as a singer in the film
Vision Quest
, shot on location in Washington State in November 1983, in which she sang ‘Crazy For You’ (the title used for the film in Britain) and ‘Gambler,’ had helped her to win the part of Susan – ahead of established actresses like Kelly McGillis, Ellen Barkin and Melanie Griffith – in a low-budget film that turned out to be a surprise box-office smash. Directed by Susan Seidelman and featuring Madonna’s song ‘Into The Groove’, which she co-wrote with Steve Bray,
Desperately Seeking Susan
was released on March 29, 1985, and went on to take $27.3 million at the box office in the United States alone, making it the fifth highest-grossing film of that year.

This light and funny social satire, about a bored housewife who, after losing her memory, changes places with the free-spirited and sexually liberated Susan, was intended as a starring vehicle for Rosanna Arquette, who won a British Film Academy award for her role, but the star of the film was undoubtedly Madonna. Of the character she played, the singer remarked: ‘She has no roots, she represents freedom and adventure and all the things that normal people think they can’t do,’ although, in an aside, she also observed that Susan was a conniving opportunist. Interestingly, and perhaps revealingly, she continued, ‘But she really did care about people. Anybody who goes around acting like nobody matters obviously is protecting themselves and hiding what they really feel.’

The critics judged her performance a success, although many remarked that it was that of an actress playing herself. Her former manager, Camille Barbone, thought she was ‘brilliant’ in the part, revealing that Madonna ‘used to lie on my living-room floor taking pictures of herself just like in the film.’ To her former lover, Mark Kamins, the part of Susan ‘wasn’t a character, it was Madonna. A wisecracking, smart-ass, gum-chewing, savvy, streetwise chick. She was the original club kid, riding a bicycle around New York, always off to the next place.’

For Madonna, the next venue had to be Hollywood, her eyes always on the prize of acting success. It was on the West Coast, too, that she found the man of her dreams, embarking on a whirlwind romance that became a whirligig of headlines, heartache and regret. While the tabloids were feasting on the headline-making liaison between Madonna and Prince, Sean Penn was quietly making his moves in the background. The first signs were propitious. Birth dates are important to Madonna, so when she discovered that she and the actor had been born a day apart, her interest in him sharpened. There was also something about the mean, downward curve of his mouth, the eyes set slightly too close together and the luxuriant head of hair that reminded her of someone: her father. A glance at a photograph of the young Tony Ciccone immediately confirms the likeness.

Like Madonna, Sean Penn had just emerged from a serious long-term relationship. For the last two years he had been engaged to the actress Elizabeth McGovern, the couple starring together in the film
Racing With the Moon
. Short-tempered and wildly jealous, Penn had pounded on the side of her trailer when she was being interviewed alone by a male reporter during a break from filming. On another occasion the tempestuous star had allegedly shot the watch off her wrist. Whether such displays had anything to do with the decision or not, by 1985 the couple had decided to go their separate ways, calling off their engagement shortly before Madonna arrived in Los Angeles.

Penn drove Madonna around town, showing her the sights, including Marilyn Monroe’s grave at Westwood Cemetery. She was also shown his gun collection, the actor not only revealing that he kept a weapon in his four-wheel-drive pickup, but also pointing out the shooting range at his home. On their first night out together Penn took Madonna over to the home of his friend Warren Beatty, where, among other Hollywood celebrities, she met Penn’s acting mentor Jack Nicholson, Mickey Rourke and the stand-up comic Sandra Bernhard, who would become a close friend.

The path of the budding romance was hardly smooth, however. Early in March, before it had even become a romance, the pair allegedly quarreled over Madonna being seen out with Prince, while Penn’s encounter with his former girlfriend, Elizabeth McGovern, at a Manhattan restaurant led to a tirade of very public abuse from Madonna. Penn was not used to having his love life played out in the media, but where there was Madonna, there were always plenty of reporters.

In many ways Sean Penn – chain-smoking, short-fused and frequently abusive – was a strange choice of lover for Madonna. There can be no doubt, however, about the effect he had on her. ‘I’m inspired and shocked by him at the same time,’ she told the entertainment journalist Fred Schruers. When she arrived back in New York her friends were amused to see that her casual wear now consisted of rugged outdoor clothes more suited to the mountains than to Manhattan. On being told about the new relationship, several of her circle thought that it was the Hollywood tag that came with Penn that was the real attraction. After weeks of ‘Sean this’ and ‘Sean that,’ however, it became clear to them that Madonna was seriously smitten.

Her friends’ confusion was matched only by their concern. Penn’s first visit to New York was not a success, mutual suspicion merely exacerbating the cultural gulf between the East and West Coasts. It seemed to her circle that he could barely contain his revulsion when he met homosexuals like Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Martin Burgoyne, their dress, values and sexual orientation alien and intimidating to him. ‘He was horrified,’ Erika Belle remembers. ‘He sat there mortified at this crowd of freaks. We made his skin crawl, he couldn’t wait to get the fuck out. He didn’t communicate, he just sneered.’ The truth was, of course, that neither side gave the other a chance, each prepared only to have their own prejudices and preconceptions confirmed. From then on Madonna, sensitive to her boyfriend’s feelings, was careful to keep him away from her New York set.

Yet beneath the immature persona, there was a good deal more to Penn than the spoiled rich kid who had enjoyed a sheltered and overprivileged upbringing. Like Madonna’s New York friends, he was passionate about his art, prepared to take creative risks while having the courage to thumb his nose at the Hollywood establishment. As the writer Lynn Hirschberg has observed, ‘He is a throwback to the sort of men – tough, thoughtful, somewhat dangerous, full of inchoate feeling – who haunt the songs of Bruce Springsteen and the writings of Charles Bukowski.’ Throughout his career he has demonstrated and maintained an almost permanent sense of outrage and moral principle as a means to keeping his art pure. ‘A cowboy poet,’ is the way Madonna once put it, a phrase which, although an oversimplification, still manages to convey something of Penn’s straightforwardness and integrity as an actor.

For her part, Madonna was attracted not only to the bad boy in Sean Penn, and to the wild side of his nature, but also to his basic decency and old-fashioned chivalry. More cynically, there was, too, as some of her acquaintances had suspected, the not insignificant fact that a union with Penn could open many doors to her for a future career in Hollywood. Nonetheless, her close friends accepted that she was in love with Penn. ‘She had very genuine feelings for him,’ noted one. ‘For a woman who wants to be in control of everything, she made herself vulnerable to accommodate his feelings and well-being.’

Such was not the case, however, when it came to her career, and work was once again in the way of romance. Madonna spent time in New York and Los Angeles madly rehearsing for her first nationwide tour, which kicked off in April 1985. Meanwhile Penn was preparing for two months’ filming in Nashville, Tennessee for the movie
At Close Range
, which also starred his brother Chris and Christopher Walken. Thus the relationship now became dependent on long-distance telephone calls and weekend visits when the lovers’ schedules allowed.

For the Like A Virgin Tour Madonna and her manager, Freddy DeMann, plundered talent from Michael Jackson, as well as props and stage designs from Prince. After weeks of remorseless rehearsals, overseen by Madonna, the show opened in Seattle with Sean dutifully watching his lover go through her paces. He was in the audience again in May when the Madonna roadshow rolled into the town of her birth, Pontiac, Michigan. In Detroit she performed a toned-down version of the show, out of respect for her family, particularly her father, and Penn found himself being introduced to Tony Ciccone, Christopher Flynn and various teachers from Madonna’s days at Rochester Adams High. The tour was a huge success, hundreds of thousands of young girls turning up for the concerts dressed exactly like the woman they had come to see.

When she arrived back in New York in June 1985, at the end of her sell-out tour, she received a rapturous welcome from her circle. They had watched her rise to fame avidly, seeing her as a torch bearer for their lifestyle in a country where conservatism ruled. ‘We were just thrilled for her,’ says Jimi LaLumia, former star of Max’s Kansas City. ‘She was one of us made good.’ Nor did it go unnoticed that her choice of backup act, The Beastie Boys, showed loyalty to her roots – the band had been part of the Danceteria club crowd in those early, hardscrabble days.

At a party hosted by her designer friend Maripol at the end of the tour, Madonna hooked up with friends from the old days. For once, she wasn’t in the mood for schmoozing with hip trendsetters; more than anything at that moment, she wished to be the old, anonymous Madonna. She just wanted to party. After a brief chat with Andy Warhol, she, Fab Five Freddie and others jumped into her chauffeur-driven limousine and headed off to seedy Alphabet City. She was eager to find a young Latino named Pedro whom she knew. They stopped the car, she opened the sunroof and yelled out his name. When he didn’t appear they headed off to the Palladium Club to go dancing.