Madonna (24 page)

While some relationships fell by the wayside, other friendships strengthened and deepened. Thus her creative collaboration with Steve Bray, now drumming with the re-formed Breakfast Club, yielded half the songs for the
Like A Virgin
album, which had been produced by Niles Rodgers. Bray describes the process of working with Madonna thus: ‘I’ve always kind of made the rib cage and the skeleton [music] of the song already – she’s there for the last things like the eyebrows and the haircut [lyrics]. She writes in a stream of mood really.’ It was a process witnessed first-hand by their mutual friend Erika Belle, who watched them at work at the Sigma Sound studio. Bray was struggling with the ‘bridge’ for ‘Into The Groove’, when, undeterred by his obvious difficulties, Madonna stepped up to the microphone and sang the words ‘live out your fantasy here with me.’ ‘It just seemed to come out of her,’ Belle remembers, adding, ‘I was awestruck.’

Diplomatically, her then boyfriend of two and a half years, Jellybean Benitez, acknowledged that people felt ‘exploited’ by Madonna, but argued that their expectations of her were too high. ‘If there is any cooling of that friendship, it’s taken as rejection,’ he said. Eventually he too became a victim of her success. In the beginning many had expected that Madonna and Benitez would marry, especially when they became engaged and began living together in SoHo. ‘He was in love with her,’ observes the DJ’s close friend, Arthur Baker. ‘I knew he was really into her. They were both very ambitious people and they were a great team. But she was the one in charge. She’s a diva – man, they like to command attention. All singers are like that.’

Jellybean, too, liked to command attention, and that was at the heart of the issue. They both had too much ambition, so intent on pursuing their individual agendas that they never had the time to nurture their mutual growth as a couple. ‘He’s a Scorpio and we both want to be stars, so it’s tough-going all the way,’ Madonna admitted at the time. They were undoubtedly at their best when they were working on her musical career, discussing new songs or exploring angles, whether creative or business. Yet even that partnership had its limitations, as Madonna herself acknowledged: ‘When you’re working and your private life is falling apart, it’s hard to carry on. When you’re getting on, you can’t stop talking about the record business and then you wonder if you have anything else in common.’ These limitations were further exposed when Benitez discovered that, behind his back, Madonna was seeing Steve Neumann, a journalist who was in a long-term relationship with Madonna’s friend Erika Belle. While it was a short-lived fling, perhaps because of Benitez’s actions – on one occasion he burst into Neumann’s apartment looking for his fiancée – her behavior did little to cement mutual trust. Erika Belle, however, is calmly dismissive of the situation. ‘He could be a little jealous around the edges,’ she says of Benitez. ‘It was his Latin blood. But you should never underestimate how close Madonna and Jellybean were.’

Perhaps the greatest contribution Jellybean Benitez made to Madonna’s life at this time was simply his presence at her side as she tried to cope with her new celebrity. As he later told the writer Mark Bego, ‘I think it was really good that we ended up meeting when we met – because we helped each other through some very difficult times.’ Besides dealing with fans asking for autographs, many of whom felt at liberty to make such remarks as, ‘Oh, you’re shorter than the pictures,’ or offered comments about her hair, he tried to shield her from photographers, and was there to reassure her when she attracted media criticism. After a time, however, even Jellybean tired of being Mr Madonna, an understandably galling position for a successful DJ and producer in his own right, a man who had employed his own publicity agent when his girlfriend was still an unknown. In an attempt to restore their relationship, in December 1984 they took a Christmas break in the Virgin Islands. Yet the holiday only served to underline their growing social disparity. On the flight home, Jellybean found himself playing both the role of his girlfriend’s public-relations officer and her security guard, shooing away the constant procession of hopeful fans who approached her.

Less than a month later, in January, Madonna flew to Los Angeles to film the video of her latest single, ‘Material Girl,’ a three-minute film directed by Mary Lambert, who had also directed the
Like A Virgin
video. The
Material Girl
video was to become a modern classic, Madonna reinventing herself as an archetypal fifties Hollywood sex goddess, reprising Marilyn Monroe’s role in the Howard Hawks movie
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. It was a punishing schedule – they had only two days to film the video, and matters were thrown into crisis when, while in California, Madonna discovered that she was pregnant by Benitez.

For a woman determined to be in control of her life, her pregnancy came as a tremendous shock. After discussing matters with her lover, Madonna, upset and apprehensive, decided that it would be best if the pregnancy were terminated. Her manager, Freddy DeMann, was on hand to make the necessary arrangements. As Melinda Cooper, DeMann’s assistant, told Christopher Andersen, ‘She came to Freddy and me and she was very upset – just this scared young girl who didn’t want her family to know. Madonna loved Jellybean very much, but she wanted a career and so did he. So we arranged for Madonna to have the abortion, drove her to the doctor’s office, everything. She seemed so innocent at the time.’

It has been said that during her affair with Benitez she had three abortions, her friend Erika Belle cited as the sole source. Belle herself says that, while they discussed contraception, periods and other intimate matters, abortion was never on the agenda. ‘For all her self-protection, she is human, she loves children, has hormones and is a prisoner of her biology,’ she says. ‘Abortion, however, is not something we ever talked about.’

Years later, however, when Madonna and her lover of the time, Jim Albright, were discussing plans to have children together, she told him about the abortions she had had in her life, including the termination of her pregnancy by Jellybean Benitez when she was in California. ‘It was a very traumatic time for her,’ Albright says, reflecting that her ferocious longing for fame was balanced by her maternal feelings and her sense of guilt, partly as a result of her Catholic upbringing.

In early 1985, however, there were few moments in which to dwell on the matter. After filming in Los Angeles, Madonna flew to Hawaii, where she posed on the beach for celebrity photographer Herb Ritts for a Madonna calendar. Meanwhile,
Like A Virgin
had toppled Bruce Springsteen from the top slot in the album charts, so that when she jetted on to Osaka in Japan for a short promotional trip, she had become the hottest property on the planet, her records and tapes selling at an astonishing 80,000 copies a day worldwide.

Yet although she had every reason to be on top of the world, Madonna felt ‘lonely and upset’ after the abortion and in the light of her realization that she was losing Benitez, a state of mind not helped when a hoax caller told her that her father had died. Even though she informed her aides that she wanted her boyfriend to be flown out to the West Coast to be with her, the couple were not reunited until January 28, 1985, when he escorted her to the American Music Awards in Los Angeles – only for Madonna to lose the title of Favorite Female Pop Vocalist to Cyndi Lauper. It was to be their last date together – although, as with many of her lovers, Madonna remained on good terms with Jellybean, even singing on his dance single, ‘Sidewalk Talk,’ in December that year.

Madonna posing for Linda Alaniz. In New York she often earned money modeling nude for art students and photographers; some of the photographs would later come back to haunt her.

A rare handbill for Emmy, the band Madonna put together in 1980. She sang lead, Brian Syms played lead guitar, Gary Burke bass guitar, and Steve Bray (left) drums.

Madonna practicing with her $300 guitar on the tenth floor of the Music Building, New York, a grungy downtown space where her band Emmy rehearsed.

More punk than New Romantic now – Madonna on the roof of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York, 1981.

Madonna performing in men’s pajamas with the fly sewn up during a gig at Max’s Kansas City in Manhattan. Her one-time Michigan boyfriend and musical collaborator Steve Bray is on the drums.