IN BED WITH MADONNA
The material ma ma could always capture the attentionof a‘ Beautiful Stranger’
With the arrogance and mischief for which she would very soon be famous, Madonna had a game she liked to play in 1983, just as her career was beginning to heat up. In the company of her backing dancer Erika Belle, she would go to the Mudd Club, the centre of New York nightlife, and terrorise attractive men.
“Rika,” she’d announce to her friend, “I’m the bestlooking white girl here and you’re the best-looking black girl, so let’s do it.” They’d target cute boys, kiss them on the mouth, take their phone numbers, and while the hopeful young men were still watching, crumple up the numbers and throw them away.
As she approaches 60, a mother to two biological children and four more adopted ones, acclaimed as an iconic artist and an increasingly vocal feminist, it’s clear that Madonna’s life and career amount to far more than a list of the men she loved and left or occasionally lost. But then again, few women have had such a remarkable talent for making men – and women – fall in love with them or had such a good time doing it.
Madonna’s romantic history features Hollywood actors, fellow pop stars, male models, producers, sporting icons, film directors and sons of presidents. But like those deluded boys on the dance floor, most of them haven’t managed to slow her down for long.
Popular, sexually curious and never short of boyfriends in her teenage years, Madonna lost her virginity at 15 with high-school g heartthrob Russell Long, before shifting her attention to school football player Nick Twomey, now a pastor. Her outward persona was the alpha-female big mouth, but Madonna has protested that she was never promiscuous and only slept with her steady boyfriends.
Later, studying dance, she met musician Steve Bray, who would become a key collaborator. Once describing her as “a force of nature ...
not completely human”, Steve found Madonna hard to pin down. She liked to turn up to his gigs and bust her moves. “I wondered if people came to the shows because they knew she’d be there dancing,” recalled Steve.
In the summer of 1978, she arrived in New York, eager to be the centre of everything. But it was to be four long years before she got her first record deal.
She played the drums in a band with another boyfriend, Dan Gilroy, before she and Steve rekindled their romance. He realised early on that being Madonna’s boyfriend was a difficult job. “Some people are very upfront and some are like, ‘You’ll find out eventually you’re not my boyfriend and that I’m seeing 12 other people.’ That was more her approach,” he says.
Friends report that even before she was famous, Madonna exhibited a kind of narcissism that drew people in. Ken Compton, another boyfriend in the early years, was a little bemused when she once asked frankly, “So what do you like best about me?”
When Madonna persuaded DJ Mark Kamins to play her homemade demo tape, she quickly became his girlfriend and they moved into a small flat. “We had no money and we were sleeping on milk crates,” he remembers. “She wasn’t a home-maker. To Madonna, a boyfriend was secondary. She knew how to use her sexuality to manipulate men – everyone from promotion guys to radio programmers.”
By the time her first single “Everybody” was setting New York alight in 1982, Madonna was the lover of young up-and-coming black artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Her disciplined lifestyle contrasted with his penchant for getting stoned and sleeping until the afternoon.
According to Jean-Michel’s assistant Steve Torton, Madonna bailed out because the artist “never saw the sun”.
Soon, she moved into a spacious apartment with John “Jellybean” Benitez, producer of her early hit “Holiday”, in New York’s SoHo district.
When it finally arrived, stardom came fast, propelled by hits including “Lucky Star”, “Borderline” and “Like a Virgin”.
After her relationship with John fizzled, she met hotheaded actor Sean Penn on the set of the Marilyn Monroeinspired video for her single “Material Girl”. He apparently became her protector and a jealous, domineering force.
Sean’s friend James Foley, a film director, recalls, “They were inseparable and couldn’t wait to get married. She became the entire centre of Sean’s life.”
On their wedding day, in the grounds of a clifftop house near Malibu Beach, in front of guests including Cher, Carrie Fisher and Andy Warhol, Madonna wore white taffeta and a bowler hat. In their determination to get a shot, photographers disrupted the ceremony by hovering over the site in helicopters.
From the moment they got engaged, Madonna and Sean found themselves number-one fodder for tabloid stories. In 1986, while they were filming
in Hong Kong, Sean was arrested after hanging an intruding photographer by his ankles from their ninth-floor balcony.
In 1987, while Madonna was on her Who’s that Girl? Tour, Sean served 33 days of a 60-day sentence in the Los Angeles County Jail after assaulting songwriter David