Madonna (32 page)

When his fans crowded into a New York club Vanilla Ice was determined to crank up the music, bigtime. As the kids grooved to his rapping lyrics, the music boomed out, those giant woofers working overtime. Plaster dropped from the ceiling on to a few heads. Thinking lawsuits, Tommy Quon was a worried man. But it was chill. Everyone went home happy. No one went deaf or sued anyone. It stood to reason. Vanilla Ice had made a study that said loud music was cool.

Backstage after the concert things started to heat up, as though they weren’t hot enough already. Charles Koppelman, the head of their record label, SBK, pushed his way through the crowd tailed by an entourage that included Madonna and a sexy girlfriend. Vanilla Ice didn’t catch the girlfriend’s name in the hubbub, but he remembers that she told him she was a porn-movie actress. He expressed his skepticism, but she left him in no doubt when she showed him photographs she pulled from her handbag. ‘Whoa baby, want to ride in the limo?’ he asked. The result was that Vanilla Ice, Madonna and her porn-star friend got to talking, and finished off the evening swapping telephone numbers. He never did see the porn star again.

He saw plenty of Madonna, however, for the meeting marked the start of an unlikely love affair between the rap artist and the pop icon that would last, on and off, for more than a year. In truth, it was a familiar pattern in Madonna, a latter-day hunter-gatherer seeking out that season’s latest trend and biggest name, her hunger for love and validation matched only by her addiction to publicity. From the end of her marriage to Sean Penn in 1989, the men in her life had served either as counterpoint or complement to her celebrity, social pygmies like model Tony Ward lending scale to her gigantic status, while her superstar menfriends like Warren Beatty and Michael Jackson confirmed and endorsed her status as a legend. In 1991 they didn’t come much bigger than Vanilla Ice.

Or, for that matter, Madonna. Since her divorce she had amply demonstrated that she needed no help from Hollywood royalty to be the undisputed queen of popular entertainment. When she met Vanilla Ice, Madonna was at the zenith of her career.

By 1989 Madonna had found the formula, an artistic alchemist who was able to blend creativity and controversy in equal measure, and so create commercial gold. Ironically, it was a lesson learned in part from her ex-husband. She had been inspired by him to confront the demons in her marriage and her childhood, openly and honestly. The result was distilled into her critically acclaimed album,
Like a Prayer
, which was dedicated to her mother, who she said, ‘taught me how to pray.’ Indeed, Madonna’s frenetic activity seemed to be a manifestation of her awareness of the shortness of her mother’s life, and of a feeling that every day had to be lived to the full.

Not only did the album, released in 1989, explore the breakdown of an abusive relationship, it touched on other sensitive subjects; the death of her mother, the unresolved relationship with her father and her confused feelings about her Catholic faith. Her ability to express, through her music, the burdens that she carried in her heart, showed her growing stature as an artist of some eloquence and power, a performer who was prepared to reveal her doubts and vulnerability to the world. ‘It’s taken a lot of guts to do this and I’ve taken more risks with this album than I ever had before and I think the growth shows,’ she would later admit.

She took more risks with the video of
Like A Prayer
, a dark, disquieting film, directed by Mary Lambert, which was released simultaneously with the first showing of the sunny, sentimental commercial based on the same song she made for Pepsi. In her video Madonna witnesses a murder, falls in love with a black man who is falsely accused of a crime, and eventually rescues him from a racist mob. In this feminist fairy tale, a bold inversion of the traditional damsel-in-distress story, Madonna, dressed in a black slip, is seen dancing in front of burning crosses, kissing the black saint Martin de Porres, in church, and experiencing Christ-like stigmata on her hands. The message of racial tolerance was, however, buried in the subsequent controversy, particularly the outcry from the moral majority and the Vatican at what they saw as the blasphemous use of religious iconography in a pop video.

The hapless soft-drinks corporation, which, in 1989 had paid the singer $5 million to appear in the much publicized commercial, was caught in the crossfire. Faced with a boycott of their products by religious groups concerned that Madonna was ‘ridiculing Christianity,’ Pepsi withdrew the commercial, although the company agreed that the singer should keep the fee. Madonna had squared the circle, occupying the artistic high ground while achieving a stunning commercial success. Indeed, in 1990 she was the world’s top earning female entertainer, grossing an estimated $39 million. Unlike Michael Jackson, Paula Abdul and Britney Spears, who have all been willing to endorse commercial products, Madonna endeavored to give the impression that her ventures into the world of advertising were simply art by another name. ‘I do consider it a challenge to make a commercial that has some sort of artistic value,’ she says, constantly at pains to disguise her keen head for business and commercial opportunities.

For example, during negotiations that year for a potential personal endorsement of Nike running shoes Madonna took control and issued personal invitations to senior company executives – ‘the suits,’ as she calls them – to her Los Angeles home to try to seal a $4.25 million deal. They balked when she argued that she wanted to keep her endorsement to a bare minimum; that is to say, she would not even wear their sports shoes. When the company pulled out, Madonna telephoned Nike chairman Philip Knight, fighting to get the deal up and running again. She was unsuccessful although that did not stop ‘Team Madonna’ negotiating with Nike’s rival, Reebok, for a similar deal. As her lawyer, Paul Schindler, has said, ‘She has an excellent sense of sell.’

In what was to become a familiar pattern Madonna enjoyed her artistic cake while taking a good chunk of the commercial pie. So, when she was cast as the sultry nightclub singer Breathless Mahoney in the 1990 Disney movie
Dick Tracy,
it was announced that she was so enthralled by the opportunity to work with the actor Warren Beatty, who was both directing and starring in the film, that she was accepting the standard union rate of $1,440 a week. However the public relations equation omitted the fact that she was to take a percentage of the box office gross and the rights to the film soundtrack. In all, she made an estimated $13 million, and change, from the deal.

Artistically though, it was worth every cent. In her role as a modern-day Mae West, the saucy platinum blonde earned plaudits for her brassy, sassy style: ‘Quivering with lust, double entendres and bad intentions, Madonna is smashingly unsubtle as the
femme fatale,’
noted one reviewer. Given her all-time best-selling single, ‘Vogue,’ which paid homage to the stars of the 1930s, Madonna appeared to be simply unstoppable, an artist at the top of her game. Warren Beatty, by then her lover, seemed to be stating the obvious when he observed, ‘She is funny, smart, beautiful, musical. She has everything, she’s an actress, a singer and she’s great at it all. She has irony and wit. She has sexuality, she’s generous-spirited. She’s going to be a huge movie star.’

Her sexual chutzpah, eye for controversy and commercial instincts came together again in her 1990 video
Justify My Love
, an erotic fantasy in which a sultry Madonna encounters a sensual netherworld in a Paris hotel. It was banned by MTV, particularly for its focus on same-sex kissing, one such scene showing Madonna with the model Amanda de Cadanet. Undaunted, the singer marketed the five-minute video herself, selling a remarkable 800,000 copies.

She continued to explore and develop her own ideas about ambiguity in gender and sexuality, a feminist agenda in which a woman is in control of her body, her role and her life. Although she examined this theme in her
Like A Prayer
video, it was most fully expressed in her audacious four-month, twenty-seven-city Blonde Ambition Tour, which established her as a modern-day Amazon, her erotic and exotic routines invariably ending with the woman on top. She strutted the stage in contemporary armor, Jean-Paul Gaultier’s cone-shaped bustier, presenting an enduring image of Madonna as superwoman, her dancers playing musclebound slaves utterly subservient to her will. Yet the French designer’s description of the garment that will be for ever identified with the singer can also be applied to her own psychology; as he said, ‘A tough outer shell protects hidden vulnerability.’

As it happened, the vulnerability Madonna had exposed in her songs for the
Like A Prayer
album was clearly evident in her life away from the stage. Undoubtedly, she had become the epicenter of the entertainment world, and yet she still wanted more. Her emotional need for mass adulation and acceptance existed in stark contrast to her image of effortless female ascendancy and control. It was a contradiction that Vanilla Ice would come to experience at first hand, struggling to square the strident stage persona with the woman who complained when he didn’t call, or who phoned very late or early in the morning wanting to know if he was with another girl.

From the beginning, it was she who pursued him, intrigued by the success and personae of white rapper Vanilla Ice, but he was not the easiest of conquests. She flattered him, telling him that he reminded her of Elvis, but he was not particularly impressed with her at the outset. He didn’t much like her music – ‘friendly-assed corny shit’ – and he was concerned about the ten-year difference in their ages. Yet in the end he lost his caution. ‘She started calling me,’ he remembers. ‘We started talking, feeling each other out. Real personal and in-depth conversations.’

When, that summer, Madonna went to Evansville, Indiana, to film A
League of Their Own
, a comedy about an all-female baseball team, she and Vanilla Ice would meet up, often adopting a series of light disguises, usually wigs and hats, to keep their assignations secret. They went to movies and restaurants, invariably arriving separately and without their chauffeurs or bodyguards so as not to attract attention. ‘What was really cool was that we kept it quiet for a long time and we bought ourselves a lot of time to get to know each other,’ he recalls. He expected a ‘snotty, rude’ star, and instead discovered a ‘sweet, innocent, but sexy girl.’ As he says, with more than a nod to her stage performances at that time, ‘She’s not about whips and chains at all. She was very romantic, very sexy, but not in a slutty way.’ At the same time he was beginning to enjoy being with a woman who seemed genuinely interested in the direction of his career and life, and to like having a girlfriend who sent him flowers and love letters.

As the relationship deepened, Madonna would sometimes visit him in Florida when she wasn’t filming, recording or on tour. They would lie on the deck of his boat, which was moored off Star Island on Florida’s west coast, and as he watched the stars he would chat to her for two or three hours at a stretch. ‘It was like going back to high school and talking to your sweetheart,’ he reflects, the intimacy created by their meetings and their long-distance conversations forging a growing bond between them. ‘She really dug me a lot and told me she loved me. Madonna was everything you would want to marry. There is no doubt that if she had stayed that person we would be married and have kids today. The way she was talking she was really desperate to have kids. I knew that. Her biological clock was ticking and she was ready to have a kid when we were going out.’

As the months passed, however, he began to see a different side of her character, a needy, anxious side, insecure and suspicious. It was perplexing. She didn’t seem to understand that Vanilla Ice, whose own life was by this time a haze of touring, publicity and cocaine, was trying his best to act the regular boyfriend. ‘Hey, it isn’t like that sweetie,’ he would soothe her. ‘Everything is cool, calm down.’ Paradoxically, it was her very insecurity, waking him in the middle of the night or leaving pleading messages on his answering machine, that began to push him away. He realized that the woman who seemed to have everything was at heart an unhappy soul, a sad figure searching for love and contentment. ‘I was digging her,’ he recalls, ‘but there was a desperate neediness about her, an impatience to get married.’ Soon he began to see sides of her personality that he didn’t ‘dig,’ all too often finding her self-obsessed, selfish and snappy.

Just two years since her divorce from Sean Penn, it was clear to her latest beau that the hard-drinking actor was still very much on her mind – and in her heart. ‘I felt that she still loved him,’ says Vanilla Ice. ‘In fact, I know she did because she told me. But it didn’t work out between them.’ When Sean’s lover, the actress Robin Wright, gave birth to girl, Dylan, in April 1991, Madonna fell to wondering distractedly what might have been. As well as sending gifts for the new baby, she reportedly sent a note to her ex-husband that read, ‘Silly boy, if you’d given me a baby, we’d still be together.’ Given their history, and especially her choice of career above motherhood, the sentiment seems more than a little disingenuous. A month later, when she launched
Truth or Dare
, the documentary film of her Blonde Ambition Tour, at the Cannes Film Festival, observers speculated as to whether her spectacular invasion of the French resort to premiere her film was done more to impress Sean, who was there to promote his own film,
The Indian Runner
(his debut as a director) than the judges, the critics and the media.

Ironically, the most revealing moment in
Truth or Dare
was when Madonna confessed that the love of her life was Sean Penn, a moment of vulnerability which, typically, she wanted edited out. ‘Over my dead body,’ Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, the film’s distributor, told her. Yet her frequent and at times impassioned declarations of affection for her former husband drew only pity from her rival, Robin Wright. ‘I feel sorry for Madonna. I think she is a very sad and rather lost soul. Yet deep down there is a real person who is as sensitive as the rest of us.’