Sassy, brassy and beguiling, she laughs her way to fame
By John Skow.
Now then, parents, the important thing is to stay calm. You've seen
Madonna wiggling on MTV right, she's the poptart singer with the trashy
outfits and the hithere belly button. What is worse, your children have
seen her. You tell your daughters to put on jeans and sweatshirts, like
decent girls, and they look at you as if you've just blown in from the
Planet of the Creeps. Twelveyearold girls, headphones blocking out the
voices of reason, are running around wearing T shirts labeled VIRGIN,
which would not have been necessary 30 years ago. The shirts offer no
guarantees, moreover; they merely advertise Madonna's first, or virgin,
rock tour, now thundering across the continent, and her bouncy,
loveitwhenyoudoit song Like a Virgin. The bright side of this
phenomenon is that these Wanna Be's (as in "We wanna be like Madonna!")
could be out somewhere stealing hubcaps. Instead, all of them, hundreds
of thousands of young blossoms whose actual ages run from a low of
about eight to a high of perhaps 25, are saving up their babysitting
money to buy crossshaped earrings and fluorescent rubber bracelets like
Madonna's, white lace tights that they will cut off at the ankles and
black tube skirts that, out of view of their parents, they will roll
down several turns at the waist to expose their middles and the
waistbands of the pantyhose.
Does anyone remember underwear? The boldest of the Wanna Be's prowl
thrift shops looking for ancient, bulletproof black lace bras and
corsets, which they wear slapdash under any sort of gauzy shirt or
foundintheattic jacket. They tie great floppy rags in their frazzled
hair, which when really authentic is blond with dark roots.
To Madonna Louise Ciccone, who is 26, and her Wanna Be's, such getups
somehow suggest the '50s, now conceived on the evidence of old Marilyn
Monroe movies to have been a quaint and fascinating though slightly
tacky time, rich in flirtatious, prefeminist sexuality. Although to her
it's a joke, Madonna's "Boy Toy" belt buckle offends almost everyone
except the Wanna Be's. Those who snoozed through the '50s the first
time around are mystified. Some feminists clearly feel that Madonna's
selfparody as an eyebatting gold digger, notably in her song Material
Girl, is a joke too damaging to laugh at. Somebody has said that her
high, thin voice, which is merely adequate for her energetic but not
very demanding dancepop songs, sounds like "Minnie Mouse on helium."
Other detractors suggest that she is almost entirely helium, a
gasfilled, lighterthanair creation of MTV and other sinister media
packagers (these doubters have not felt the power of Madonna's
personality, which is as forceful and well organized as Dday). That
mossy old (41) Rolling Stone Mick Jagger says that her records are
characterized by "a central dumbness."
Kids born since the breakup of the Beatles, however, don't want to hear
any of this. Can't hear anything else, at this tick of the clock except
brassy, trashy, junkjingling, stagestomping Madonna, who has been world
famous for almost two months. Just now she is the hottest draw in show
biz. Michael Jackson? History. Prince? The Peloponnesian Wars. Cyndi
Lauper? Last week's flash, and besides, if you wanna be like Cyndi, you
have to dye your hair orange and fuchsia, and your parents freak. No,
Madonna is the full moon you see at this bend in the river, and never
mind what is around the corner.
Her numbers, as they say, are spectacular. Her first album, a batch of
dance tunes called simply Madonna, started slowly nearly two years ago,
but now, at 2.8 million copies sold in the U.S., is closing in on
triple platinum (in recordbusiness jargon, 500,000 albums sold is gold,
and 1 million is platinum). Her second, Like a Virgin, which includes
five of her own songs, has gone quadruple platinum at 4.5 million
copies in domestic sales, with 2.5 million more worldwide. Her singles
have found 6.3 million buyers in the U.S. (or the same buyer 6.3
million times, exasperated parents may feel). Like a Virgin has sold
1.9 million copies as a single in the U.S., and the ballad Crazy for
You recently dislodged USA (United Support of Artists) for Africa's We
Are the World single from the top of the charts, though it has now
slipped to sixth.
Audiences have been building, meanwhile, for Desperately Seeking Susan,
a funny, likable film comedy in which Madonna costars (with Rosanna
Arquette) as a rambunctious East Village vagabond whose free life
becomes the obsession of a repressed New Jersey housewife. Madonna's
current 28city, 38date concert tour, of which she is not only the lead
singer and dancer but the director and driving force, has sold out
almost instantly just about everywhere tickets have gone on sale. Sheer
velocity of box office is watched very closely by concert promoters.
Big stars are supposed to sell out, but stars whose shows sell out
slowly may have peaked. When Madonna tickets went on sale for three
June dates at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, fans who had huddled
all night in the rain managed to slap their waddedup, wet money on the
counter fast enough to buy the 17,622 seats available in, yes folks, a
new record of 34 minutes. (The old record was 55 minutes, jointly held
by Elvis Costello and Phil Collins, who presumably are lolling by the
pool somewhere, plenty worried.)
What is more, Madonna paraphernalia posters, at least ten different
kinds of shirts, bracelets and crossshaped earrings like the ones
Madonna wears in salute to herself for having survived a strict
Catholic upbringing are selling at concerts at a rate not seen even in
the megameltdown tours of Michael Jackson and Prince. This is very
important, and not just because it brings in money by the frontend
loaderful. Fathers new to the bubblegum rock ramble (though they may
have hung out at the Stones' concerts only a few years ago) may think
that all they have to spring for is a pair of $15 tickets, a couple of
$1.50 hot dogs and the parking fee. Not so. The young fans are telling
their dads that they have to have some jewelry costing between $5 and
$30, which is on display so that the dads can say no, feeling wise and
fatherly, lawgivers. Then the dads compromise on the shirts, which turn
out to cost $13 to $22, and Jennifer has something to wear in school
the next day to prove that she's seen Madonna.
Why the hard little hearts of all of the Jennifers, and quite a few of
the Kevins, ache for Madonna is another question. Bigtime show biz is
threefourths mass hysteria, especially when teenagers and rock music
are involved, and anyone who thinks he can explain it fully is
dreaming. But incredibly lucky timing is clearly part of the Madonna
craze. As it happens, few other big rock stars are diluting media
attention. Also the neoconservative mood of the kid culture seems to be
just right for an entertainer whose personality is an outrageous blend
of Little Orphan Annie, Margaret Thatcher and Mae West.
Madonna's best bit of luck may be her uproariously appropriate part in
Desperately Seeking Susan. Here too, the timing was superb. As Director
Susan Seidelman points out, when the movie was cast in the summer of
1984, Madonna was not quite a star. She was just another pretty pop
singer, just beginning to be widely known. Madonna's style and attitude
got her the part, though not without a lot of hesitation among male
executives of Orion Pictures who had never heard of her. A year later
she would have been too famous and too expensive for a nonsinging role
in a lowbudget comedy. Any film cast then would have been the usual
rockstar exploitation flick, with songs, writhing dancers, guitarists
with their shirts off and too much tricky camera work.
As things are, Susan gives Madonna an audience she can't reach with MTV
or disco. When she sings she lacks the allthere quality of a great pop
singer like Linda Ronstadt or Tina Turner. She disguises this with
vocal intensity and good dance moves. The kids are so caught up in
their own emotional storms that they don't notice it, but in the love
songs Madonna is not in love, and in the heat songs, like Burning Up,
she is not in heat. But in the funny songs, like the pop reggae
Material Girl, she is very funny. Allthere people are not funny, most
of the time, but detached, cool people like Madonna often are. And if
you watch Madonna's video routines more than once, you begin to realize
that almost all of her songs, as she bellyrolls her way through them,
are sharply comic sendups, mostly of rock'n'roll sexual gyrations as
delivered by male rockers from Mick Jagger to Prince.
In fact, Madonna is a talented, practiced comedian, who has been wising
off constantly since grade school. And in the title role of Susan she
proves it, playing a calamitous neohippy who clunks in and out of
people's lives, and whose total selfabsorption amounts to innocence.
She dresses weirdly too; in one scene she parades through the streets
wearing what appears to be men's boxer shorts, over which she has
rigged a white garter belt, which holds up white lace stockings, which
disappear into rhinestone boots. Madonna admits that Susan, except for
her foursecond attention span, is to some extent a selfcaricature, and
it remains to be seen what she could do with a role that required her
to wear grownups' clothes. The guess here is that she would be very
good. It does not take much imagination to see her in the Judy Holliday
role in Born Yesterday, beating Broderick Crawford at gin rummy.
Hollywood thinks so too. Director Herbert Ross, who did Funny Girl and
Footloose, is considering her, he says, for the lead in a movie about
Stripper Blaze Starr. Producer Ray Stark has talked with her about
starring in a film about Libby Holman, the '20s and '30s torch singer.
"Considering" and "talking with" do not cost much, of course, but
Madonna's considering is moving in the same direction. "I don't think
of myself as a rock star," she tells an interviewer as she cools out in
her hotel room after her concert two weeks ago in New Orleans. The
comment is not a gesture at modesty; Madonna is not modest. Nor, for
that matter, is she puffed up with selfimportance. She has a very
clear, cold view of her strengths and weaknesses, and those of the wide
world too. She got her first training as a dancer (she won a
scholarship in dance at the University of Michigan, but she stayed only
1 1/2 years). She became a fairly good rock drummer and guitarist
during her knockabout years as a musician in New York City, then turned
to rock singing because she realized she wasn't going anywhere in the
dance world. She says that she might do another rock tour, if her
manager Freddy DeMann "puts a gun to my head," but clearly it is almost
time for another career change.
She travels, just now, with a light load of baggage (see following
story). Her physical possessions, she says, amount to not much more
than the ragbag of goofy clothes that serve as her professional and
private wardrobe, a tenspeed bicycle stored in New York and a Chinese
rug in Los Angeles. No house, no apartment, no car, no richatlast
jewels or stereo system. She seems to have passed through the lives of
a lot of people and to have remained in not many. She sees her father
and stepmother only rarely.
It can be hard, now, to get her to talk about her scroungy years in New
York. She recalls being fired from a long succession of ratty jobs. She
resents suggestions that she slept her way to the top. That is not
because she didn't learn her trade from a succession of musicians and
deejays, some of whom she slept with, but because the idea that she
couldn't make it to the top on drive and talent alone is insulting. In
fact the men in her life talk about her now % without rancor; it seems
to have been obvious even then that Madonna was just passing through.
Mark Kamins, deejay at the Danceteria, a funky, fourfloor Chelsea disco
that caters to purplehaired punks in leather and other exotics, is
credited with "discovering" Madonna in 1982, although like America
before Columbus, she was there all along. "She had this incredible
sense of style," says Kamins. "She had an aura." She also had a
fourtrack demo tape she had made with another boyfriend, a musician
named Steve Bray. Kamins played it and got great response from the
disco crowd for a song called Everybody. Madonna's career began to
gather momentum, and Kamins at one point thought she had agreed to let
him produce her first album. Madonna instead chose a professional
producer, Reggie Lucas. "At the time, I felt stepped on," says Kamins.
"But I don't think there's a mean bone in her body. Maybe a mean
knuckle but not a mean bone."
Madonna's current boyfriend is Actor Sean Penn (The Falcon and the
Snowman), whose name she shouts out with joyful exuberance when an
interviewer asks her a plonking question about favorite actors. But
Penn, 24, is about to start shooting a new movie in Tennessee, and she
is grinding through her tour, and they do not see each other much,
though Madonna calls for half an hour every night after her show. The
dreary fact is that stars sometimes lead lives of chaste exasperation.
For Madonna on a show night, work begins at about 5, with a sound check
at the arena to make sure the roadies have the equipment adjusted
correctly. At about 7:20 the Wanna Be's start to file in. All of them
head directly for the ladies' rooms, for a last mirror check on their
getups. They are delighted with the two brandnew ancient games,
dressing up and sexual teasing, that Madonna has taught them. Their
dates look confused. Nobody under 40 has teased anyone sexually in the
U.S. for something like 20 years. New Yorker Robert Shalom, owner of
the video club Private Eyes, says, "The guys are scared of these girls.
'What do I do?' they ask. The girls come on so strong, dressed in their
mothers' best fake jewelry, saying 'Don't touch me, I'm the material
girl, spend money on me.' " Waiting for a concert to begin, some of the
boys who have tagged along will say that Madonna is, um, yeah, real
sexy, but the cleverest, even as they scrape the ground nervously with
one hoof, suspect that they are being kidded.
They could be right. When the Madonna show detonates at about 9 p.m.,
after a forgettable 30 minutes by a raunchy rap band called the Beastie
Boys, the strongest impression is of being back in the '60s, listening
to the Shirelles. This is no girl group; Madonna's two backup dancers
are male and masculine. But they are small and unmenacing, dressed
cheerfully in handpainted jeans and jackets, and when they frisk about
the stage with Madonna the mood is light and childish. She wears spiked
boots, black fishnet tights and a hipslung miniskirt below her winking
belly button. A loosefitting handpainted jacket swings free now and
then to show a lacy purple shirt and the trademark black bra. She has a
floppy purple rag tied in her hair. The costume is sexy, and light as
she is, at 5 ft. 4 1/2 in. and 118 lbs., her body is lush. But her
movements to Holiday are skipping and prancing steps, mischievous kid
stuff.
The show turns darker and funkier, with a lot of smoke bombs and
junglequeen strutting in silhouette, toward something like a
14yearold's florid conception of adult sexuality. Madonna comes onstage
with a big portable stereo boom box and goes into a routine that sounds
like the dirty jokes that eighthgraders giggle over. "Every lady has a
box," she says. "My box is special. Because it makes music. But it has
to be turned on." Adults wince, but the youngsters love it. "I like the
way she handles herself, sort of take it or leave it," says Kim
Thomson, 17, a Wanna Be in Houston. "She's sexy but she doesn't need
men, really. She's kind of there by herself." Says Teresa Hajdik, also
17: "She gives us ideas. It's really women's lib, not being afraid of
what guys think."
What the guys think is sometimes seriously scrambled. Madonna comes
onstage dressed in an elaborate baremidriff wedding gown to do Like a
Virgin, the first of two highspirited production numbers that close the
show. "Will you marry me?" she asks the audience. "Yes Yes!" everyone
screams. And in Dallas, one lovesick adolescent male stands up and
yells, "I wanna have your babies!" Madonna sings, as she sashays about
the stage, "You make me feel" hip thrust " like a virgin" belly roll "
touched for the very first time." Mocking virginity, mocking sex,
mocking, some might say, the solemn temple of rock 'n' roll itself.
Then she is back for her best number, carried onstage in a reclining
posture by her backup dancers, looking like Madam Recamier in her
salon, twirling a long rope of pearls and camping a mile a minute.
"This is," she sings to a pop reggae beat, "a material world. And I am"
pause "a material girl." Luxuriating in materialism, poking fun at
greediness she is performing for adolescents who feel deprived if their
cars don't have quadraphonic cassette players Madonna is singing that
she is available to the highest bidder, then denying that. And at the
end, she pulls wads of fake banknotes out of the top of her dress and
tosses them all to the audience. Do the Wanna Be's see materialism
glorified here, or mocked? Of course, they see both, and see no
contradiction.
One last funny, sad, selfparodying joke as the lights go up: a loud,
disapproving, male voice is heard over the loudspeaker, saying
"Madonna, get down off that stage this instant!" And Madonna's recorded
voice, whining, "Daddy, do I hafta?" Then the Wanna Be's, to whom the
war between men and women is still far less real than the eternal
skirmishing between parents and children, file out of the hall,
dreaming of the time when they will be able to do anything in the world
they want. Like Madonna.
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