Madonna (20 page)

On the surface, Madonna was simply one attractive face among a remarkable crowd, but she did have her own ‘crew’ of friends. At first glance, it was a pretty motley crew, running around town in their rags and tatters. Yet club owner Erika Belle, smart-mouthed New Yorker Debi Mazar, dancers Martin Burgoyne and Bagens Rilez, fashion retailer Maripol, poet and impresario Haoui Montaug, even her old college friend Janice Galloway – all displayed a kind of insouciant artistic integrity that set them apart from the crowd.

By the 1980s, these bright young things, defined as much by their creativity as their ambition, had become colorful, stylish reinventions of their earlier, younger selves. Their talk was always of the future, of dreams and deals, schemes and ruses. The past was another country, a world only ever discussed in amused, exaggerated anecdotes, usually dismissive. It would probably never have occurred to Erika Belle or Madonna to swap notes about their fathers, both successful, highly paid scientists; indeed, Madonna’s only apparent reference to her past at this time was when she chastised a friend for wearing the same eyeshadow as her stepmother. Their chatter was only of themselves, the next gallery opening, the newest club – and the next big idea.

As exhibitionist and self-absorbed as they may have been, Madonna and her brat pack nevertheless made an impression on downtown New York, turning every head when they walked into a club. ‘Madonna and her friends were the kind of kids you wanted in your venue,’ recalls Roxy manager Vito Bruno. ‘She was a stand-out, trendy and eye-catching. They got into the VIP rooms before they were VIPs.’

They dominated the dance floor – Debi Mazar was an early exponent of break dancing – but they were also at the cutting edge of style, with attitude to spare. The flair Madonna’s displayed for fashion, and for that matter in terms of her music, lay in her ability to pick and mix from her friends, from the streets and the clubs, and from these and other influences make her own statement. In dress, her style was a blend of leggings from her dance days, cute cast-offs from Curtis Zale, thrift-store chic and clothes hand made by Erika Belle, topped off with crucifixes and rubber bracelets (actually electric-typewriter drivebands, supplied by her friend, the French socialite Maripol, who had her own store). She also mixed and merged New York street culture and fashion, especially that sported by chic Latina girls, with the hip New Romantic look, transforming it into her own fashion statement. It was a style that would, within two years, clutter the wardrobes of teenage girls around the world.

Most important, though, was Madonna’s attitude. She could be sexy and wild, but she always remained in control. At that time the most outrageous dance on the scene was called the Webo, corrupted Spanish for ‘ball-shaker’, an explicitly sexual routine in which a girl would be ‘dogged’ by several male dancers wildly grinding their pelvises against her. It was sexy but it was also sexist, the girls obvious victims of male desire. Madonna and her crew turned the tables, earning the nickname the ‘Webo Girls’ from those who watched them perform. For they deliberately ‘dogged’ the guys, dry-humping them on the dance floor, laughing and joking as they did so. As Fab Five Freddie, who had been on the receiving end of Madonna’s fake sexual attentions while dancing, observes, ‘You could say she was a tramp but that was missing the point. She was never some ding-y white chick who slept around with the guys, she was smarter than that. All the way through her career she has been very sexy but take a closer look and she is always in control. Like Sharon Stone in
Basic Instinct,
she flashes you her pussy, but she’s in charge. A strong woman with a sense of humor.’

Her attitude said it all: attractive but in command, a modern-day Calamity Jane who, instead of a pistol, packed a can of spray paint with which she scrawled her tag, ‘Boy Toy’, on the walls of downtown New York. Her tag, which eventually became the name of her company, perfectly illustrated her self-conscious approach to sexuality, tongue-in-cheek, arch and knowing, but utterly removed from the sexual plaything of many men’s dreams. ‘Early on she knew what she wanted, she was incredibly focused but could play the little innocent girl,’ recalls a senior music producer.

That focus was fixed firmly on becoming famous, and not for one moment did Madonna ever deviate from that goal. So much of her life was a matter of calculation that she even calibrated her spontaneity. She would be outrageous and wild, but never in such a way as to interfere with her primary ambition. ‘When she told me that one day she would be the most famous person in the world, I totally believed her,’ recalls Erika Belle. ‘She had a highly attuned self-protection mechanism that many of us at that time didn’t have. Her risk-taking would be choreographed. She would never be so out of control that it would, for example, stop her writing lyrics in the morning.’

At a time when many of her contemporaries were in thrall to drugs or drink – or both – Madonna kept a clear head and a clean body, allowing herself only the occasional puff on a joint or a vodka tonic. ‘She never suspended reality for one second,’ recalls Steve Torton, who shared an apartment and worked with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, later, briefly, one of her lovers. One night Steve Rubell, owner of the Palladium Club, waved his arms and offered Madonna her heart’s desire: coke, booze, girls, boys, anything. It was two in the morning. She yawned and replied, ‘A nice big salad, please.’

Hungry only for success, Madonna was, as one friend noted, ‘pure unrefined ambition,’ and would seize every opportunity that came her way. She used the club scene in the way a successful businessman uses his country club, to network and broker deals. ‘Restlessly ambitious to the point of exhaustion,’ as one contemporary described her, it was therefore entirely appropriate that she should take her next step on the ladder of success in her ‘office’ – the nightclub scene.

In February 1982, after the breakup with Barbone, Madonna effortlessly eased back into the popcorn-and-phone routine, making endless calls while she munched. At first she appealed to the charity of her old college buddies. She moved in with Janice Galloway, before teaming up with Steve Bray to continue their musical collaboration. They worked well together, Bray’s approach complementing Madonna’s drive and earnest ambition. While she wrote the lyrics, he would help her out with melodies, chords and musical progressions. After several weeks’ work, Madonna and Bray felt that they had enough material to ask a couple of the musicians who had worked with her over the previous eighteen months to help them record a demo tape. They took over a studio and recorded a four-track demo for her to tout around town, for with Camille Barbone out of the picture, Madonna had to do her own legwork. These four tracks, ‘Burning Up,’ ‘Everybody,’ ‘Ain’t No Big Deal’ and one other, were the songs that finally got her noticed.

What better place to begin than Danceteria, the club in which she spent most of her waking hours? The hottest DJ in the four-story club was Mark Kamins, who also worked as an A-and-R (artists and repertoire) scout for Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. As legend and ‘made- for-TV’ bio films describe it, Madonna virtually seduced Kamins into playing her demo tape, flirting madly with him as she tore up the dance floor. In reality, Kamins, who was handed numerous demo tapes every week, was passed a copy by her, listened to her songs on his headphones, and decided to give her sound a spin. The crowd liked it, and he liked her. ‘She was cute and we went out for a while,’ he recalls. ‘I can’t say I saw a star but she had something special.’ For a time she shared his bed, or what passed for a bed – a collection of egg crates in the middle of a spartan room on East 73rd Street. Not that she was a fixture – Madonna was always on the move, dashing from one place to the next on her bicycle, always with people to see, places to go. ‘I believe she suffered from ADD [attention deficit disorder]; she was never still,’ Kamins continues. ‘Like she was wired all the time even though she never took drugs. A lot of artists have that.’

She was always juggling, whether it was her career, her jobs or her men. For a time she was dividing her time between Mark Kamins, Steve Bray and Ken Compton; indeed, in a fit of jealousy, Kamins banned Compton from the Danceteria nightclub. It always bugged him when she came to the club, borrowed some money and then promptly hightailed it to another venue where, he suspected, she was seeing someone else. As he observes, ‘She’s an incredible juggler of people. With regards to her sexuality she is more like a guy keeping several different girls on the go at one time.’

In truth, Madonna and Kamins were drawn together as much by their mutual ambition as by sexual attraction. Knowing that she was without a manager, he promptly signed her to his own fledgling music company and made an appointment with his boss, the legendary Chris Blackwell, who was making a flying visit to New York. He met Madonna, listened to her tape and then, after she had left, told Kamins that he didn’t sign the girlfriends of his A-and-R scouts. As would later emerge, the real reason was rather more earthy; ‘She smelled too bad,’ the offbeat record mogul told Kamins some time later.

Undeterred, Kamins called Seymour Stein, president of Sire Records, an arm of the giant Warner Brothers music corporation, whom he knew after working with Stein on projects with the Tom Tom Club and Talking Heads. Stein expressed muted interest after listening to the demo tape but referred him to his thrusting young A-and-R agent, Michael Rosenblatt, to deal with the details. After listening to the four tracks, Rosenblatt chose two to record, ‘Ain’t No Big Deal’ and ‘Everybody’. As far as he was concerned, ‘Ain’t No Big Deal’ was the A-side. ‘She had a great tape but what’s more she had that intangible certain something,’ Rosenblatt remembers.

While Madonna’s eventual success, bolstered by hindsight, has made Stein and Rosenblatt seem like musical oracles, the reality was rather different. Madonna’s romantic version of the story has it that Stein was so keen to meet her that he signed the deal from his hospital bed while recovering from a heart operation. ‘I could tell right then that she had the drive to match her talent,’ he has said. In fact, according to Kamins, Stein didn’t meet Madonna until after the success of her first single, ‘Everybody’ – although admittedly the meeting did take place in the hospital where he was recuperating.

In fact, there was no need for such a meeting – the deal was between Kamins, who had her under contract, and Stein’s company, Sire Records. Nor were the terms especially generous. They offered $15,000 for a two-single deal, out of which Kamins and Madonna would have to pay all recording costs. ‘It was supposed to inspire you to save money,’ recalls Mark, dryly.

Madonna, however, was thrilled. In acknowledgment of that first singles deal, she sat down and wrote a song on a yellow legal notepad, dedicating it to her latest mentor, Kamins. The song, ‘Lucky Star,’ was to be one of her most enduring hits of the 1980s. At long last it seemed that her dreams were about to come true, and the young singer celebrated with a visit to the East Village hair salon where her old boyfriend, Mark Dolengowski, worked.

There, Madonna excitedly told the woman shampooing her hair, ‘Martha, I’m going to be a star.’

Chapter Seven

DeMann and De Woman

B
EARDED AND LONG-HAIRED, Arthur Baker cut an unimpressive figure as he shambled through the lobby of a downtown New York hotel on a summer’s day in 1982. Yet once inside he was greeted like a long-lost brother by many of the participants of the New Music seminar that his friend and record distributor Tom Silverman had organized. For to them the Boston-born Arthur was ‘The Man’, responsible not only for that season’s seminal record, ‘Planet Rock’ by Afrika Bambaataa, but also for bringing the new sounds of rap and hip-hop to a wider audience. He spotted Mark Kamins, one of New York’s hottest DJs at that time, and walked over to talk to him. By Kamins’s side was a dark-haired Italian girl dressed, with artful carelessness, in jeans, tee-shirt and an oversize shirt, whom he introduced to Baker as Madonna. ‘What kind of whacked-out family names a kid “Madonna”?’ thought Baker, as the DJ explained that she was his latest find, that they had just concluded a singles deal with Sire Records, and that he was producing the song.

After this Madonna offered Baker a battered Sony portable tape recorder and asked him to listen to the songs, ‘Ain’t No Big Deal’ and ‘Everybody.’ Good-naturedly, he did so, offering his verdict that her sound was just like that of Patrice Rushen, then riding high in the charts with ‘Forget Me Not.’ ‘Oh thank you,’ cooed Madonna, ‘I love Patrice Rushen: Baker, who would go to work with U2, Bob Dylan, Pulp and Bruce Springsteen, wished her luck and moved away, reflecting to himself that she was just like a million other girls he had met in his music career.

He was more than a little surprised, therefore, to receive a phone call the next day from a rather anxious Mark Kamins. ‘What does a producer do?’ the DJ asked plaintively. Baker gave him an instant tutorial and recommended a couple of musicians, including keyboard player Fred Zarr, whom he thought Kamins should enlist. In double quick time, Zarr found himself at Blank Tape studios in New York, working through the night with Madonna. ‘She only had a singles deal, and if that had failed no one would have heard of her, but I remember telling friends afterwards that I was working with someone who had magical star quality,’ recalls Zarr, who was to work with Madonna on other occasions in the future.

She was a star with an eye on the budget, however. Conscious that she was paying for recording time, she even persuaded Zarr and the recording engineer to eat their sandwiches while the tape was being rewound to save precious minutes. ‘Time is money and the money is mine,’ intoned Madonna, carrying the precept into practice when they had finished by begging a ride home from Zarr, as she didn’t have the money for the cab fare.

During the recording session, a rather apprehensive Mark Kamins looked on from the other side of the glass, as he listened to his girlfriend belt out her two songs. As a DJ, he was confident about the kind of feel he wanted for the record. As a producer, however, he didn’t really know how to achieve it. Madonna became increasingly frustrated as he struggled to give her direction, especially as she no longer had Steve Bray to rely on.