Goddess: Inside Madonna (41 page)

Madonna’s friends also came to see the play to lend their support, like Jennifer Grey, who would costar with Madonna in her next film,
Bloodhounds of Broadway
, Lindsay Law, the executive producer of
Bloodhounds of Broadway
, as well as John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal, and the star’s brothers, Anthony and Christopher Ciccone. Also a frequent member of the audience was Sandra Bernhard, who was spending a great deal of time with Madonna.

This was a particularly sad
moment in Madonna’s personal life. Things were not going well in her marriage, and for Madonna, the perfectionist and the woman who believed she could control her destiny, she considered it her failure. It didn’t make things any easier that the press seemed intent on linking Madonna with every man she happened to be seen with. Some were merely friends, trainers, business associates, or jogging partners, while others were used to assuage her loneliness. Freddy DeMann, her manager, introduced her to another client of his, a British rocker, Simon F. For a while, Madonna took him along to make the rounds of her old haunts on the Lower East Side. The relationship that the press focused on, however, was with Sandra Bernhard, who often came to the theater to pick her up and take her to a late supper. Often, Bernhard would stay overnight at Madonna’s apartment, and when she would leave in the morning, paparazzi would taunt her with their cameras.

The two women met when Madonna went backstage after watching Bernhard’s one-woman comedy show, and they became friends almost immediately. Six months into their friendship, Sean Penn accused Madonna of having an affair with Bernhard. Madonna claims he beat her, presumably in a jealous rage, and left her tied to a chair in her Malibu beach house. In May 1989, shortly after Madonna brought charges against Penn, filed for divorce, and subsequently withdrew the charges as well as the divorce petition, she appeared onstage with Sandra Bernhard at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. At a benefit to raise money to save the rain forests, Madonna and Bernhard, dressed in identical sequined bras and knee-length cutoffs decorated with graffiti, sang “I Got You, Babe” as the grand finale. At one point during their routine, with their arms wrapped around each other, Madonna told the audience, “Don’t believe those stories,” to which Bernhard retorted, “Believe those stories!”

Madonna’s attraction to Bernhard was perhaps more a reaction against men in general than it was a physical and sexual attraction to the comedian. Perhaps her boyfriends were less sympathetic about her problems with her husband’s drinking and violence, which may be why Madonna confided more in Bernhard. Despite Madonna’s claim that her former boyfriends—the ones she had loved and left during her early days in New York, including Jellybean Benitez, Dan Gilroy, Mark Kamins, and Tony Ward—“would all take her back,” they were secretly pleased that not everything in her life was going smoothly. Theater critics, all men as well, had destroyed her belief in her acting potential, and she felt that her business associates, also mostly men, were only interested in her as a lucrative product.

Her relationship with Bernhard could have been Madonna’s way of showing the world that she practiced what she preached in her songs and videos. She didn’t need a man to exist or feel fulfilled. And, she had no intention of being the victim of men, who naturally took each other’s side when there was a problem with their wives or girlfriends.

Madonna was so deeply hurt and disappointed by her husband, angry at her father, distrustful of men in general for having dominated her, used her, and abused her that she intended to send out a clear message to the world. Perhaps only a woman could offer her the kind of tender and serene relationship she had always wanted. After all, how many times has a woman, at a low point in her life, taken a lover just for the comfort of having someone there, to be intimate, close, and understanding when she was terrified of being alone?

O
n the evening before Thanksgiving 1988, Sean appeared at Madonna’s New York apartment. He had stormed out three days before during another argument. For the entire time he was gone, Madonna was frantic that something terrible had happened to him. When he finally showed up, her fury took precedence over her relief that he was alive, and she threw him out.

On Thanksgiving Day, Penn, furious and humiliated, flew back to Los Angeles, only to besiege Madonna with phone calls, which she refused to take. On December 4, Madonna filed for divorce, although she confided in several close friends that she was doing it only in a final attempt to “scare him into changing and to get help with his drinking and uncontrollable fits of violence.”

When Penn was informed of the divorce, he was shocked, hurt, and eventually depressed. He stopped calling Madonna, which she took as a sign that he had no intention of talking her out of her decision. After two days, Madonna began to panic. She told the same close friends that she was afraid that her husband was actually going to let her go through with the divorce.

On the third day, Madonna picked up the phone and called Penn in California, but this time he wouldn’t take her phone calls. Ignoring her messages, he sent a different kind of message when he began being seen around Hollywood with his friends, drinking, dancing, and making brief appearances at parties. Worried about his mental and physical state, Timothy Hutton, Jan Michael Vincent, and Dennis Hopper began pressuring him to talk to Madonna to try to work things out. On December 8, Penn finally phoned Madonna in New York, but then she was the one who refused to take his calls. Only when James Foley prevailed upon her to reconsider did she eventually agree to speak to him.

On December 11 the couple had their first conversation in almost two weeks, during which Madonna berated her husband for his behavior. After several more days, the calls became warmer and longer, and eventually Penn was sending her balloons, flowers, presents, and even a singing telegram. The singing telegram was delivered by a male singer who not only serenaded her but also delivered the message that “Sean Penn loves his wife very much.”

By the following day, they were setting down conditions to resume their marriage. Penn promised to see a marriage counselor, while Madonna promised to start a family within a year. On December 16, she officially dropped the divorce petition “without prejudice,” which meant that she could refile at any time within the state of California. One week later, Madonna bought Diane Keaton’s house on Roxbury Drive in Los Angeles for $3 million and signed a $10 million deal with Pepsi.

Madonna’s house in Malibu was designed by her brother Christopher and, similar to her apartment in New York, was white, stark, and airy with marble floors and furniture and draperies in earth colors with an eclectic mixture of antiques that ranged from Chinese to French provincial and from English country to art deco.

All Madonna’s homes are filled with art, and her most precious paintings are the ones by the South American artist Frida Kahlo. Madonna not only appreciated her work and sense of color, but she also identified with the artist, especially because of her violent marriage to the more well-known painter Diego Rivera. “I see some parallels,” Madonna once explained. “I mean, she was crippled physically and emotionally in ways that I’m not. But she was also married to a very powerful and passionate man and was tormented by him. Although he loved her and was supportive of her as an artist, there was a lot of competition between them. There weren’t that many female artists at the time, and the Latin community is a very macho environment. It was very hard for her to survive that and have her own identity. And I can identify to a certain extent with having that awareness of the male point of view of what a woman’s role is in a relationship. It’s tough to fight it. She was very courageous, which I admire and can relate to.”

Under the tortured eye of Frida Kahlo, Sean Penn allegedly beat Madonna up, tied her to a chair, and left her there for nine hours. Only when a member of her staff returned home late that evening and heard her cries for help was Madonna finally untied.

On December 28, 1988, the Malibu sheriff’s office received a call regarding a disturbance at the couple’s home. Arriving at Madonna’s house, they were greeted by the star, who, according to one of the officers present, was “in a state of complete hysteria. Her clothes were torn. Her face was cut and bleeding, and she had bruise marks on her neck, arms, back, and legs.” Madonna filed a domestic violence report as well as a formal complaint that her husband had assaulted her. Twelve days later, she met with Deputy District Attorney Lauren Weiss, who would have prosecuted the case had Madonna not decided to drop the charges.

Madonna’s change of heart was not particularly different from the behavior of more than 98 percent of abused women who have been beaten by their husbands or lovers and who refuse to prosecute them. Many of these women stay until their injuries prove fatal. According to Elizabeth Peck, a historian, the question of why women stay with their abusers was first asked in the 1920s. Back then, sociologists believed that battered women stayed in abusive relationships because they were of low intelligence or mentally retarded. During the 1940s, sociologists changed their minds and assumed that battered women remained with their battering mates because they were masochistic and enjoyed being beaten. By the 1970s, the victim was thought to stay with her abuser because, as a married woman, she was isolated from her friends, family, and neighbors, had few economic or educational resources, and had been terrorized into a state of “learned helplessness” resulting from repeated beatings.

Lenore Walker, an expert on battered women and the author of
The Battered Woman
, believes that “once the women are operating from a belief of helplessness, the perception becomes reality and they become passive, submissive, and helpless.”

On the surface, Madonna did not fit the profile of the typical battered woman. She was financially independent, had no children with Penn, could have fled to any one of her many homes, had access to a battery of lawyers, and had friends who were willing to give her emotional support. By the time that she was the victim of abuse, it was not even a question of love that propelled her to stay with her husband, but rather embarrassment and stubbornness, although Madonna claimed that she had decided to drop the divorce proceedings because she “still considered him to be a soul mate.” “All love is lucky,” Madonna said, “even when it breaks your heart.”

Deeply committed to succeed at everything she tried, she was unwilling to admit that she had made a mistake in picking Sean Penn for a husband. During a conversation that she had with a Catholic priest in Los Angeles who had served as an unofficial spiritual guide for the singer, she was extremely anxious to know if, because she had never married in the Church, she would be excommunicated if she divorced. The priest told her that if she ever decided to remarry in the Church, she would have to get an annulment approved by the Vatican. Privately, the priest told a New York colleague that divorcing a man who “beat her was less offensive to God and the Church than some of her other antics.” Only when Madonna became convinced without a doubt that, as powerful as she was perceived and as she had always willed herself to believe, the situation was hopeless, did she finally make the painful decision that the marriage was over.

On January 9, 1989, Penn had another drunken temper tantrum, this time over what he described as his wife’s “affair with that dyke.” He was referring to Sandra Bernhard, who had been staying with Madonna and Penn in the singer’s Malibu home. Once again, the police were called for what they later said was a “peripheral involvement” and politely suggested that Penn might leave and stay at a friend’s or with his family until things settled down. Apparently, he agreed and went to his parents’ house several minutes away, but sometime during the night, he broke into Madonna’s house through a rear door and the drunken tirade continued. This time, Madonna calmed her husband down by asking Bernhard to leave.

The next day, January 10, when Penn went out to do some errands, Madonna called her lawyers and instructed them to file for divorce in the Santa Monica district court. “That’s it,” she told her staff and friends. “I can’t take it anymore. Sandra is gone, and I intend to go through this alone.” Changing the locks, she called Eileen Ryan, Penn’s mother, and told her what she intended to do.

The papers were filed on January 10, and her staff was deposed by her lawyers about the events that had taken place on December 28 when she had been beaten and tied to a chair. Under California law, which is based on community property, Penn could have demanded and won half of Madonna’s assets earned during their marriage. Instead, he refused to take anything. “I’ll go,” he said, “and I won’t take one stinking cent. You can have it all.”

After the divorce was final, Madonna admitted that the failure of her marriage to Sean Penn had been one of the “great losses in her life,” as he was one of the few men that she respected. “He had balls,” she added.

On March 20, 1989, her album
Like a Prayer
was released, which she dedicated to her mother, “who taught me how to pray.”

In April 1989, Madonna began
shooting a television adaptation of Damon Runyon’s
Bloodhounds of Broadway
, starring Tony Longo as Crunch Sweeney, the actor, who would also briefly become her lover. Longo would also benefit from Madonna’s generosity when, driving together in Los Angeles, she dropped him off at his house and was shocked to see that he lived in a run-down neighborhood. Without being asked, she insisted on lending him money to buy a decent flat.

In 1990, shortly before
Bloodhounds of Broadway
was released, Howard Brookner, the writer and director, who had also made an appearance in the film, died of AIDS. Madonna was devastated. Brookner was only one of many friends and colleagues she would lose to the disease. When the reviews appeared and they were mediocre, Madonna was more upset for Howard Brookner than she was for herself. For probably one of the few times in her career, she ignored the critics and, instead, forged ahead to find a viable theatrical or cinematic project to get her mind off her troubles. Within weeks, she announced that she would appear as a Holocaust victim in a film entitled
Triumph
. The project never went beyond cursory discussion.