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Madonna likes it hot,
but as LYNN HIRSHBERG discovers,
the hyperdrive diva is becoming
increasingly isolated behind
her white-heat fame ?? just like Marilyn
Can anyone justify her love?
On New Year's Eve, Madonna had her fortune told. She was giving a
party in her Manhattan apartment for forty friends, including her brother
Christopher and her then boyfriend, Tony War, and one of the guests was a
palm reader. The first time this woman looked at Madonna's hand, she
would not read it. She said, I am afraid of your hand, your hand reveals
too much. But Madonna pressed the woman to tell her what she saw.
"She looked at my palm," Madonna says a month later, "and she said
I'm never going to have any children. She said that I had my heart
broken really badly once and it was a really important relationship in my
life and it was going to happen again. I asked her, `That's just a
passing thing, it's not lasting.' I said, `What about my career?' She
said, `Whatever you're working on now, you're not well suited for.' And
I was just like, Get the fuck out of here. I was devastated."
So Madonna, who is thirty-two, did something she never does - she
got drunk. Two martinis may not sound like a knockout punch, but
Madonna's body is a temple - she exercises two and half hours every day
and is a strict vegetarian. She hadn't easten and she had to see to the
caterers and her friends and her family, and by 9:30 the room was
spinning. She disappeard into her bedroom and lay down on the bed and
then went into the bathroom. "I puked and puked and puked," she says.
"And then I passed out on the marble floor. For the first time in my
life, I got sick. I lost control. And I missed my party. When I woke
up, I was in my bed. It was four A.M. I called everyone the next day
and them how my party went.
"They all had a good time," she continues, "but that woman..."
Madonna opens her palm and eyes it suspiciously. "That woman said things
that made me believe her. And I kept thinking, What a way to start the
New Year."
My fantasy was always, Oh, God, I'd love to be Madonna's best
friend," says Alek Keshishian, the director of Truth or Dare: On the
road, Behind the Scenes, and in Bed with Madonna, the
destined-to-be-controversial documentary about her Blond Ambition tour.
"If I became her best friend, suddenly the world would be my oyster. And
now we are good friends, and it's like, yeah, the world will be my oyster
- in a little fishtank." Keshishian laughs. "Just thank God she's the
pearl," he adds. "But her life is hardly as glamourous as you might
think."
Keshishian takes a puff on his cigarette - he is strikingly
handsome, with long black hair ("Madonna won't let me cut it") and large
brown eyes. Last night, here in Los Angeles, he showed a rough cut of
Truth or Dare, scheduled for May release, to a small industry audience.
The movie, which incorporates concert footage from last year's tour and
behind the scenes moments with Madonna, her dancers, and the rest of the
entourage, is remarkably candid and extremely entertaining. Truth or
Dare has a voyeristic appeal - Madonna allowed Keshishian (and his
camera) to spend almost every waking moment with her. She is seen without
makeup, stripped down, and (quite literally) bare. He deftly juxtaposes
her "real life," which seem rather solitary, with her onstage life, which
is quite electrifying, thereby demystifying the razzle-dazzle of stardom
while simultaneously showing Madonna to be a larger-than-life performer.
Oh and, just for fun, you get to see her go down a water bottle.
This Madonna is different from the sex-bomb, chock-baby persona she
usually pushes in public. In the movie, and recently in interviews, she
appears to have changed, and, as always, when Madonna's mood shifts, so
does her image.
Which isn't to say that Madonna's previous incarnations have been
false - they've all been manifestations of her feelings at the time. The
Madonna of 1991 appears to be devoutly hardworking, more accessible, and
rather maternal. Gone is the boy-toy guise, although vestiges still
remain. "My sister is her own masterpiece," say Christopher Ciccone.
"Is there any other way to do it right?"
Keshishian agrees. A Harvard graduate, he met Madonna two and a
half years ago, but had been fascinated by her since the beginning of her
career. "And at Harvard," Keshishian says, "I can't say that was always
considered that cool."
For his thesis, Keshishian mounted a production of Wuthering
Heights, set entirely to pre-recoreded pop music. "The voice of Cathy
was Kate Bush - until she marries Linton," he explains. "And then her
voice changes to Madonna." Wuthering Heights was a smash and Keshishian
moved to L.A. He wanted to direct, and got his start directing music
videos, most notably for Bobby Brown. Through a friend from Harvard who
had become an agent at CAA, Keshishian met Jane Berliner, who is, along
with her boss, Ron Meyer, Madonna's agent. "Jane convinced me to show
this tape of Wuthering Heights to Madonna," Keshishian recalls. "And at
the end, she said, `I love it. O.K. what do we do?'"
Despite her enthusiasm, Keshishian didn't hear from Madonna for
quite a while. She didn't call to ask him to direct "Vogue" or any other
music videos. "I said tomyself, Go on with your life, Alek. You are not
going to work with madonna. And then, out of te blue, one afternoon at
the end of March last year, the phone rings and it's Madonna asking me to
make his documentary."
The film, which ended up costing Madonna around $4 million (it will
be distributed domestically by Miramax), was originally conceived as a
concert film about the tour. David Fincher, who directed some of
Madonna's best videos ("Express Yourself," "Vogue"), was scheduled to
make the movie, but reportedly he and Madonna were romantically involved,
and when their personal relationship cooled, so did their professional
alliance.
When Madonna contacted Keshishian, it was three days before the
start of the tour, in Japan. "I found Alek quite attractive," she
recalls. "But I had kept my distance because I never like to have a
crush on somebody everybody else has a crush on."
Keshishian was given total access, but instructed his crew never to
speak to Madonna - and to wear only black so as to be unobtrusive. "I
would say, `We are not human beings,'" Keshishian recalls. "`We are just
here to report.'" He got some remarkable footage: Madonna eating
breakfast in her European hotel room, saying, "Even when I feel like
shit, they still love me," as fans scream wildly outside her window; a
depressed Madonna having coffee with pal Sandra Bernhard, who tries to
cheer her up by asking, "Who would you most want to meet?," to which
Madonna replies, "I think I've met everybody"; Madonna visiting the grave
of her mother, whose death when she was six seem to have been the seminal
event in her life; and a guest appearance of Reason. "This is crazy," he
says. "Does anyone make a comment when you're doing this film about the
insanity of doing this in front of the camera?" "Who's anyone?" Madonna
demans. "Well, anyone who comes into this insane atmosphere," he says.
Beatty gets the last word when Madonna's doctor asks if she would prefer
to discuss throat malady off-camera. "turn the caera off?" Beatty says
in mock horror. "She doesn't want to live off-camera, much less talk."
Truth or Dare is also racy, and Freddy DeMann, Madonna's manager,
was initially appalled by the idea of it. "I thought she was exposing
too much of herself," he says. "But Madonna didn't agree, and when she
doesn't agree she has a doll, and she squeezes it in all the right
places, and I feel pain." DeMann laughs, although he is clearly only
half joking. "But I was wrong about the movie. It works. The makeup is
off and all the gloves are off, and it's the real real."
Apparently, part of DeMann's nervousness had to do with the fact
that all but one of Madonna's dancers are openly gay, and their sexuality
is very much a part of the movie. In once scene, two men kiss
passionately while Madonna looks on enthusiastically. "That's my
favorite scene in the movie," she says. "I love that people are going
to watch that and go home and talk about it all night long. I live for
things like that."
The larger question that the movie, like most documentaries raises
is: What is real and what is for the benefit of the camera? "People
will say, `She knows the camera is on, she's just acting,'" says Madonna
rather defiantly. "But even if I am acting, there's a truth in my
acting. It's like when you go into a psychiatrist's office and you don't
really tell them what you did. You lie, but even the lie you've chosen
to tell is revealing. I wanted people to see that my life isn't so easy,
and one step further than that is, the movie's not completely me. You
could watch it and say, I still don't know Madonna, and good. Because
you will never know the real me. Ever."
"Whether it's real or is only important for her to know," says
DeMann. "The fact that it keeps you guessing - well, she's already
succeeded."
It's 10:30 on a Friday night and Madonna is walking home after
dinner. She is amll and pale, and tonight she is dressed like a street
urchin - a schoolboy's cap covers her hair completely and she wears no
makeup. "Straight from the cast of Oliver," says Keshishian. "When
Madonna puts on her cap and overcoat, she looks like a twelve-year-old
boy. She wore that one day in Los Angeles and we went to the Body Shop,
this go-godancer place, and when we left, the valet guy goes, `Are you
leaving so soon? I Hear Madonna's in there.' He was looking right at
her when he sait it."
Madonna stares at the ground when she walks, careful not to make eye
contact with passerby. The strategy works; even though the streets are
relatively crowded, Madonna walks home without causing a commotion.
"It's not always this easy," she says. In Europe she is mobbed no
matter how she dresses, and outside her New York apartment building there
are nearly always paparazzi and fans lying in wait. The photographers
seem to upset her the most - their constant presence certainly wreaked
havoc during her three-and-a-half year to Sean Penn.
"Sean was very protective of me," she says, rather sadly, as she
walks by the newsstand at Columbus Circle. "He was like my father in a
way. He patrolled what I wore. He'd say, `You're not wearing that
dress. You can see everything in that.' But at least he was paying
attention to me. At least he had the balls. And I liked his public
demonstrations of protecting me. In retrospect, I understand why he
dealt with the press the way he did, but you have to realize it's a
losing battle. It's not going to get you anywhere, and I don't think
Sean can give that up. He'll defend you to the death - it's irrational,
but also noble."
Madonna says she misses being married, misses the constancy, the
ongoing domesticity. "When I as married, I did the wash a lot," she says
almost witfully. "I liked folding Sean's underwear. I like mating
socks. You know what I love? I love taking the ling out of the lint
screen."
Friends claim that Penn truly lover her, but he could not tolerate
her unshakable drive, her absolute dedication to her career. When
Madonna speaks abot the breakup, she is caeful, rather guarded. She is
clearly somewhat conflicted on the subject - Madonna's enough of a good
Catholic girl to view her divorce as a sacrilege, but she also knows the
relationship was impossible. "It's a big loss," she says. "But let's
face it - Sean and I had problems. We had this high-visibility life, and
what that had a lot to do with the demise of the marriage. When yuo're
always being watched, you almost want to kill each other.
Madonna pauses a moment. "I still go to see his movies, though,"
she says. "I have to see his movies because sometimes that's the only
way I can see him. It's peculiar - especially with the last one, State
of Grace, the on he did with his girlfriend - future mother of his
child." (Penn is engaged to actress Robin Wright and their baby is due
this month.) "I really wanted to see it and I felt so embarrassed
because I thought, Everyone's going to see me going into the movie - is
this pathetic? I don't know, I had to rub my nose in it.
"And I could go, It's just a movie, they're just acting," Madonna
continues. "Until it got to the kissing-nipple scene. And then I was
like, I can't watch this. I am going to throw up. I still feel
territorial - it's like, Hands off, bitch! I was married to him!"
In 1989, as she was going through her divorce proceedings, Madonna
was approached by Warren Beatty to co-star in Dick Tracy. She was
flattered, and accepted, even though she was offered only scale ($1,440 a
week) for her performance as Breathless Mahoney. "I was not convinced
she should do it," says Freddy DeMann. "But Warren Beatty promised me -
he said, `I will photograph her better than anyone has before.'"
While making Dick Tracy, Madonna and Beatty became an item, but the
romance fizzled when the movie was released. Friends offer up reasons
why: Beatty was unfaithful, Madonna felt used, Beatty lid about his
trysts, Madonna had some flings of her own, the press drove them crazy,
Madonna gave up on the relationship, breaking off with Beatty in a
"You're fired!" "I quit" scenario.
Although they are still friendly, Beatty is a sore subject with
Madonna. She's prickly about him. "It's a really hard thing to accept
in life that no matter what you do you can't change a person," she says,
heading up Central Park West. "If you say, `I don't want you looking at
that woman,' they're going to do it anyway. It doesn't matter what you
say. You want to think that if this person is in love with you, you have
control over them. But you don't. And to accept that in life is next to
impossible." Madonna pauses. "Then again," she says, "I want to be a
fly on the wall for all of Warren Beatty's conversations, but I wouldn't
want the reverse."
She smiles - she understands the basic contradiction here, but she
doesn't care; she still wants her way. It is an endlessly frustrating
fact that the stubbornness and singled-mindedness that make a career go
are the same traits that can destroy a relationship. One works, the
other doesn't. "I'd go, `Warren, did you really chase that girl for a
year?!?' And he'd say, `Nah, it's all lies.' I should have known
better. I was unrealistic, but the, you always think you're going to be
the one."
Madonna has arrived at her apartment building. As she approaches, a
photographer jumps out, assumes a low angle, and starts shooting. He is
also talking - "Madonna, I'm sorry. Madonna, look at me. I'm sorry.
Just a picture." Madonna doesn't look or stop - she just keeps walking.
The photographer, who is crouching, loses his balance and falls over.
This year I couldn't do anything to stay out of trouble," says
Madonna. She is eating minestrone soup and Caesar salad in a small
Italian restaurant in Manhattan. She sounds geuinely exasperated. "I
know I like to provoke, but this year has been like a train out of
control."
Madonna has her schoolboy cap firmly in place, an no one in the
restaurant looks up from his pasta. Blondness, she says, would be a dead
giveaway. But even without the hat, she might escape notice - tonight,
Madonna doesn't look like the sex siren the world is used to ogling. She
looks, instead, a bit weary - it's been an exhausting few months, what
with her "Justify My Love" video being banned from MTV, and accusations
from the Simon Wiesenthal Center that the lyrics of "The Beast Within,"
the remix of "Justify My Love," are anti-Semitic. Then there are the
charges that if you play the single backward there's a hidden message for
worshipers of Satan.
And yet the controversies have resulted in huge exposure and even
huger profit. "Madonna can turn catastrophes into triumphs," says
Seymour Stein, president of Sire, her record company. "When I saw the
`Justify My Love' video, I went, `Ohhhhhh.' I knew there would be
problems. But it's turned out to be the biggest selling video of its
type."
Which is what usually happens with Madonna. In 1990, Forbes
estimated her pre-tax income at $39 million (and her earnings since 1986
at $125 million); her Blond Ambition tour sold out in twenty-seven cities;
her concert on HBO was the highest-rated nonsprts event ever on that
network; and her albums went double-platnum. "But at what cost?" asks
Christopher Ciccone, who was also the art director of the Blond Ambition
tour. "People who don't think the controversis and the press affect her
are wrong. She doesn't work up a strategy for all this attention. It's
just who she is and what she does. And there is definitely a cost."
Which isn't to say that Madonna has any real regrets. Or, to be
exact, "I have so many," she says, "and I have none. I wish I hadn't
done a lot of things, but, on the other hand, if I hadn't I wouldn't be
here." She pauses. "But, then again, nobody works the way I work."
It's that discipline, mathced with talent, drive, and ambition, that
propels her. "I have an iron will," she says, eating her Caesar. "And
all of my will has always been to conquer some horrible feeling of
inadequacy. I'm always struggling with that fear. I push past one spell
of it and discover myself as a special human being and then I get to
another stage and think I'm mediocre and uninteresting. And I find a way
to get myself out of that. Again and again. My drive in life is from
this horrible fear of being mediocre. And that's always pushing me,
pushing me. Becuase even though I've become Somebody, I still have to
prove that I'm Somebody. My struggle has never ended and it probably
never will."
That struggle has a great deal to do with maintaining control,
control being Madonna's primary desire. And these days she's feeling
somewhat out of control. The "Justify My Love" ruckus went much further
than she had anitcipated, and for most of 1991 she will be making movies,
a medium that has been risky for her in the past. Since the beginning of
her career, Madonna has longed for movie stardom. It's a land she has
yet to conquer, and there have been some rather stunning missteps along
the way - Shanghai Surprise and Who's That Girl?, for instance. It isn't
clear whether she can successfully play a character other than herself.
She is surprisingly self-conscious in movies, although later this year
she will star in Evita, directed by Glenn Gordon Caron (who created the
TV show Moonlighting), which would seem like perect casting. In Woody
Allen's latest movie she plays an acrobat, which is a notion that both
flatters and frustrates her.
"To me, the whole process of being a brushstroke in someone else's
painting is a little difficult," Madonna says. "I'm used to being in
charge of everything. So on this movie it's hard for me to shut up and
do my job and, well, O.K., I have this stupid little part and I have to
sit around on the set and wait all day and then say a few lines and blah,
blah, blah... I can feel all the grips and electricians looking at me -
I'm painfully aware of it. They don't see me as an actress, they see me
as an icon, and it makes me extremely exhausted."
Madonns pauses a moment. "Just looking back at the last couple
weeks, where I've felt completely suicidal and totally unable to sleep, I
think I may have learned somethings." Like patience? "No. I'll never
learn patience. But I've learned, watching Woody, how a real artist
works. Woody is a master of getting things out of people in a really
gentle way. He's not a tyrant, and that's good for me to learn because I
can be something of a tyrant. In a working situation." Madonna smiles.
"Well," she says, "in a living situation, too."
She laughs. She knows that her self-discipline drives people mad,
but she also believes that it's the key to her sanity. And her success.
"I'm hardest on myself," she says with great conviction. And there is a
very definite and imposed order in the Madonna universe. For instance,
her workouts. "If I have a 7 o'clock call for Woody's movie, I'll get up
at 4:30 to exercise," she says. "If I don't, I'll never forgive myself.
A lot of people say it's really sick and an obsession. Warren used to
say I exercised to avoid depression. And he thought I should just go
ahead and stop excercising and allow myself to be depressed. And I'd
say, `Warren, I'll just be depressed about not exercising!'"
Madonna takes a sip of white wine. "My whole life is in a constant
state of disarray, and the one thing that doesn't change is the workout.
If I had nothing to do, I would stay in the gym forever. It's a great
place to work out aggression, or, if you're feeling depressed about
something, you get on the Lifecycle and you forget it. If you've failed
in every way in your day, you've accomplished one thing - you've gotten
through your workout and you're not a total piece of shit."
And then there are the lists. When she can't sleep, Madonna makes
lists of whom to call, what to do, mapped out in half-hour segments that
include slots for personaly phone calls - "two hours on the phone every
morning or I would have any friends" - as well as the business calls to
her lawyer, manager, publicist. It's a ritual that borders on the
obsessive. "I never take any time off if I can help it," says Madonna.
"I've taken three vacations in the last ten years. All of them lasted
about a week, and they were all in some tropical place. My boyfriend or
husband at the time would want to go, and I'd agree. Actually, I'd
finally give in."
But even on vacation Madonna is a fiend for order. "I have to
schedule everything," she says. "And that drives everyone I'm with
insane. Everyone. They go, `Can't you just wake up in the morning and
not plan your day? Can't you just be spontaneous?' And I just can't."
Madonna laughs and takes a few more bites of salad. A man at a
nearby table looks over, stares at her a second, then realizes it's not
Madonna after all. "I need to have an organized life," she is saying.
"And I do. I probably pay a price for that, but this is what I wanted."
Madonna is perplexed. "Damn it!" she says after a moment's
reflection. "Why can't I think of my most recent happiest moment?" She
stares a second. "O.K. - I know. It could be right after the maid has
left for the day. That's my favorite time in the world. Everything's
perfect - no one's allowed on the bed, no one's allowed to drink out of a
glass, I don't want anyone to come over, and I just stand around and
look. And I think I'm in a church, that I'm surrounded by holiness. And
then it's destroyed." Madonna laughs. "So I guess that's not my
happiest moment."
She thinks some more. "O.K. - my most happiest moment recently was
when I went home to visit my family for Christmas. And I was sitting on
my father's lap and a lot of my brothers and sisters were there. And
just hanging out and sitting on his lap and feeling like a little girl
again. And knowing that I was making my father happy. That was my last
happiest moment.
"And at home, nobody brings up the fact that I'm a star," she
continues. "Not one word. At first I thought, Well, how come I'm not
getting any special treatment? But even though I had to sleep on the
floor in a sleeping bag, even though I didn't know who else had slept in
that sleeping bag, the trip was really such a joyous thing for my
father."
Madonna beams - she likes this memory. Family - whether natural,
meaning her father and seven brothers and sisters (two are
half-siblings), or extended, meaning the dancers on her tour and her
assistant/agent/publicit/manager/lawyer team - is extremely important to
her. In fact, her business associates are some of her closest friends.
"People comment on it," she says. "they say, `Do you realize all of your
friends are on salary to you?' And I say, `Oh, my, I really hadn't
thought of that, but maybe you could flip it around and think, Well,
maybe I only work with people I really like.'"
And trust. A large part of the reason for Madonna's success has
been her faith in the people she works with. "She's in conrol of that
group," says Jane Berliner. "She's the matriarch of the family."
Madonna structured it that way from the jump - her gift has always
been to make herself the center of the action. As a child growing up
outside Detroit, she dreamed of being either an international superstar
or a nun. "I would say `I'm gonna be a nun' like you would say `I'm
going to be famous.' Then the nuns announced to me that a girl who
wanted to be a nun was very modest and not interested in boys. After
that, my role model was my ballet teacher, who was fabulous and
demonstrative and extravagant. I wanted to be like him.
"I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name," continues
Madonns, who was named after her mother. "How could I be anything else
but what I am having been named Madonna? I would either have ended up a
nun or this." When she left home at seventeen and moved to New york,
she planned to be a professional dancer. "i sort of got tired of that
after a while," she says now, "because it was very difficult and there
was no money in it." She became interested in acting and was taking
cleasses when she decided to become a singer. The rest is well
docmented: she started writing songs, she joing her then boyfriend's
band, she befriended a D.J., he became her boyfriend, she met this
person, then another, and the pace started to pick up. From the moment
she began performing, her goal was clear: Madonna wanted to conquer the
world. And her clarity of vision was compelling.
"Madonna is more sophisticated than she was eight years ago," says
DeMann, her manager from the start, "but she has the same sensibilities
as she had on the first day I met her. She had balls then and she has
them now. I remember when she first walked in my office. I managed
michael Jackson then. She came in and I was abolutely smitten by her.
She had three problems that day, three pressing problems, and I said,
`I'll make three calls and take of your problems.' And I did it. The
next day she called with five problems. The next day, she had eight.
The next day, ten. I said, `How can one person have all these problems?'
She said, `Well, I do.' Madonna has that ability to grab you by the
lapels and soon all you can think about it her."
The rest of the "family" has a similar response - Madonns is not a
passive star. She controls all aspects of her career, and she is
integrally involved with every business decision, whtere it be looking
over a contract or choosing the plot and look of a video or deciding
whether or not to endorse a product. "She's a great business-woman,"
says Seymour Stein. "She's very smart and she trusts her instincts,
which are great. She also asks a million questions."
And she's stubborn. "I do what I want," says Madonna. "I'm the
boss. And, quite frankly, a lot of things I've wanted to do have met
with adversity. I sort of cringe when I have to confront my manager, my
publicist, whatever. I kind of think of them as parental figures. When
I tried to explain my stage show to Freddy, I said, `I'm going to be on a
bed and I'm going to have these two guys with bras on and...' I could
see he was just dying inside. I have to say, `I'm just going to do this
and then you'll see.' But there's always this preliminary shit fit and
then I do what I have to do." She smiles. "And then they like it."
Madonna looks intent - she has very few doubts about her business
acumen. She loves the game and she is almost completely immune to
pressure from her advisers or anyone else. And they do pressure her -
after all, there are massive sums of money at stake. Madonna reportedly
pays DeMann 10 percent of her income, her business manager, Bert Padell,
5 percent, and her lawyers around 5 percent, each said to be capped at $1
million. When she is touring, a tour manager gets 10 percent of the
concert revenues, and then there is Sire Records, a subsidiary of Time
Warner, which has made an estimated half a billion on Madonna albums.
"There's a lot of business stuff," Madonna says. "But that didn't
come as a surpirse. Besides, I love meetings with suits. I live for
meetings with suits. I love them because I know they had a really boring
week and I walk in there with my orange velvet leggings and drop popcorn
in my cleavage and then fish it out and it eat it. I like that. I know
I'm entertaining them and I know that they know. Obviously, the best
meetings are with suits that are intelligent, becuase then things are
operating on a whole other level.
"What you have to understand with Madonna," says DeMann, "is that
she has substance. People forget that. Since she reinvents herself all
the time and does these provocative things, people tend to concentrate on
her image of the moment. But there is a substnace there. If you only
resort to provocation, you don't last long. Madonna is the biggest star
in the universe. And she likes the view."
It's a Saturday night in early February and Madonna is sitting on a
large dark-blue couch in the living room of her Manhattan apartment. SHe
is discussing wheter or not she would prefer to be male. "Fuck, yeah,"
she says with great animation. "When I was a little girl, I was insanely
jealous of my older brothers. They didn't have curfews, they could pee
standing up, they could take their shirts off in the summer, they got to
do outdoor work, while we had to do the indoor work. They had so much
more freedom and I would just mope about that. ANd mope and mope and
mope about how I wished I was a boy. And then when I was in the ballet
world I went through another period where I wished I was a boy because I
just wanted somebody to ask my out on a date." Madonna considers this
notion for a moment. "Actually," she continues, "it would be great to be
both sexes. Effeminate men intruqe me more than anything in the world.
I see them as my alter egos. I feel very drawn to them. I think like a
guy, but I'm feminine. So I relate to feminine men."
This analysis pleases Madonna and she stretches out on the sofa.
She looks quite glamorous this evening - the androgynous look it out.
She is dressed all in white - white Capri pants and a white sweater, and
her hair, too, looks white-blond. Her lips provide the only spot of
color - they are bright red. Madonna appears to be striking an elegant
yet casual pose, perfectly attired for a low-key gathering at home. SHe
is peppier tonight, more at ease. "Let me give you a tour," she says,
hopping up from the couch. "An art tour."
Madonna's home seems to cheer her enormously. The seven-and-a-half
room apartment was renovated and furnished by Christopher Ciccone, and it
is lovely - simple, yet luch throughout. The furnishings are mostly
early French Deco, and they complement the art, which is primarily
Cubist; there are wonderful painintgs by the likes of Tamara de Lempicka
and L?ger and photographs by, among others, Kert?sz and Weston. "There
are a lot of naked women in my house," says Madonna. In the hall she
passes Kert?sz of a nude woman squeezing her stomach. "That's like me,"
she says. "Always looking for fat."
Madonna is endearingly thorough about the tour ("This is my stereo,"
she says, opening a closet). She is like a child showing off her
favorite dolls. "This is my prize," she says of a Picasso that hangs
over her desk. "I don't usually like Dali, but I love this one," she
says of a particularly beautiful painting, The Veiled Heart, which hangs
in the living room.
Madonna's bedroom, a pale jewel box of a room, is at the end of the
hall. "Every girl's dream," she says, leading the way into an enormous
and extremely well-organized closet. "When I lived with Sean, he loved
to ball up clothes," she says, looking at her neat rows of shoes. "I'd
say, `You twisted a Versace suit into a ball and I can't bear it.' I
would follow him an dtake his things and hang them up. He'd say, `Leave
me alone. I want to do it this way.' But I just couldn't stand it."
Madonna smiles and heads into her bathroom ("The shower has
steam!") and back through the bedroom and down the hall to her gym,
which, not surprisingly, is outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment.
SHe goes through the gym and into a small maids room and then it's back
into the kitchen, which is old-fashioned in a high-tech way. "Isn't this
great?" Madonns says, reaching for a bowl of popcorn on the kitchen
counter. "I don't have to cook, but other people do."
The apartment was completed last summer, long after Madonna's
marriage broke up, and it seems very much a lplace for one person. It
has the feel of a refuge, a controlled, beautiful environment where dirst
is a memory and each detail is perfect. "Everything is the best," says
Keshishian, "but nothing is ostentatious."
And yet, and yet, in eery dream home a heartache. "It's something
of a clich?," says Madonna, sitting on a stool in the kithcen, "but you
can have all the success in the world, and if you don't have someone to
love, it's certainly not as rewarding. The fulfillment you get from
another human being - a child, in particular - will always dwarf people
recognizing you on the street."
Madonna is quiet for a moment. There have been rumors floating abot
that she was pregnant with Tony Ward's baby and had a miscarriage.
Madonna's spokesperson has emphatically denied this story. Still,
motherhood is definitely on her mind. "I long for children," she says.
"I wish that I was married and in a situation where having a child would
be possible. People say, `Wait a minute, I'm not interested a cripple.
I want a father there. I want someone I can depend on."
It's a problem - who is the right guy for Madonna? "We talk about
that all the time," says Keshishian. "I say, `Madonna, you could turn a
gay man straight! You could ahve any man you want.' And she goes, `No,
I couldn't. It's easy for you to say, but it's just not true. WHo have
I met?'".
Friends say that she was hopeful about Beatty, who is now going out
with Stephanie Seymour, a twenty-two-year-old model with a baby. And, on
the surface, Beatty would seem an attractive prospect, assuming she could
have snagged him: intelligent, successful, and unintimidated by Madonna's
fame. But firends say that she was too independent and that her
stubbornness was destructive to the relationship. There are also those
who say Beatty was only using her to promote his movie.
"I do wonder," she says, alluding to her past romances. "You know,
I can think of isolated moments where I could have given in and it would
have made things better. But, all in all, I'm not with any of the people
I'm not fro a much larger reason: we just weren't meant to be. If I had
changed and given in, or what I conceived to be giving in, to certain
concessions that people had asked of me, maybe the relationships would
have been successful on the one hand, but then I would have had to give
up other things in my career. And then I would have been miserable. So
it's hard to say. I mean, I do look around and go, God, it's great I
have fame and fortune, but then I see Mia Farrow on the set with her
baby, na di think she seems absolutely content. She has a huge family,
and that just seems like the most important thing. And, you know, love
and everything. I don't really have that, but time hasn't run out for me
yet."
Madonna smiles. "I'm not exactly sure who I'm looking for," she
says. "I wish I knew..." She laughs. "I wonder if I could ever find
someone like me."
She ponders this for a second and then breaks out laughing. "If I
did," she says, "I would probably kill them."??
??
Vanity Fair; April 1991 issue; Volume 54 Number 4
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