Big Break

“You know what you have?” Madonna asked Camille Barbone on one of the last occasions they saw each other. Madonna tapped her mentor on the chest. “You have heart,” she said, “and you really don’t need me.”

It was a confusing moment, one that Camille recalls vividly to this day. Her eyes red from crying, she put her palm on Madonna’s chest and said, “If you had heart, I don’t know that you’d do this to me.”

Tears began to splash onto Madonna’s cheeks. “I have to go,” she explained. “I love you, Camille. You’re such a bitch, like me. We worked well together. But now it’s over. So . . . good-bye.”

Madonna then walked away, never to look back.

“Sometimes I feel guilty because I feel like I travel through people,” Madonna has said. “That’s true of a lot of ambitious people. You take what you can and then move on. If someone can’t go with me — whether it’s a physical or emotional move — I feel sad about that. But that’s part of the tragedy of love.”

“She seduces people,” her longtime friend Erica Bell observes. “She’ll tell you what you want to hear, she flatters you, kisses your ass, makes you feel a part of her life. She’s a smart girl. She knows how to get her way,” says Bell. There is no acrimony in Bell’s seemingly harsh assessment of Madonna. “Then, after she has you set up the right way, she sucks it all out of you.”

“Oh, she’s a sponge, all right,” Camille Barbone concurs. “She soaks up what she can and drains you in every way and then goes on to her next victim.

“I risked my entire career on Madonna and she nearly destroyed me. I begged, borrowed and stole to do what I could do for her. But rules of loyalty and decency that apply to the rest of us didn’t apply to her,” she continues. “She wasn’t intentionally malicious, but just incapable of seeing life from anyone else’s point of view. She wanted what she wanted, and if you didn’t give it she turned her back on you.

“I lost everything in the process because I had focused only on her and spent every dime on her. I ended up losing my studio.”

Camille Barbone says she feels no malice toward the woman whose eventual success she had helped create — even though she would not be around to share in any of the rewards. “I don’t hate her,” Barbone sighed years later. “On the contrary, I miss her. And I understand her. It all has to do with her mother, it all goes back to her death. It has to do with Madonna feeling so beat up by what she felt when her mother died, she never wants to connect to her emotions. So, she leaves people before they can leave her, the way her mother did. I knew that when I was going through it with her. And I know it even better now, having had years to think about it. Her mother,” Camille concluded, firmly, “that’s what it’s always been about.”⁶

Madonna would say that she left Camille Barbone because “she had gotten too attached to me.” Also, she said, it was worth it for her not to take advantage of the Columbia recording contract offering because, as she put it, “the songs they wanted me to sing were crap, and I wasn’t going to build a career on them. No way.”

In another interview she further explained, “I’ve always been into rhythmic music, party music, but Gotham wasn’t used to that stuff, and although I’d agreed to do rock and roll, my heart was no longer in it. Soul was my main influence and I wanted my sound to be the kind of music I’d always liked. I wanted to approach it from a very simple point of view because I wasn’t an incredible musician. I wanted it to be direct. I still loved to dance and all I wanted to do was to make a record that I would want to dance to, and would want to listen to on the radio.”

So, while she waited for what Camille may have called “her next victim” to come along, Madonna and Steve Bray moved back into the Music Building where they slept on cots, sat on crates and sustained themselves on popcorn. (Their relationship at this point was platonic, not romantic.) Meanwhile, Madonna again survived by taking odd jobs around the New York City area. This time, though, her “odd jobs” were music industry related. For instance, she sang back-up vocals for a number of recording artists, including heavy metal superstar Ozzy Osbourne. She could also be seen dancing wildly as an extra in a music video for the group Konk.

Says actress Debi Mazar (GoodFellas), one of Madonna’s best friends who has known her since those early days (and who appears in the video for Madonna’s 2000 hit, “Music”), “Neither one of us had any money. We were just young girls trying to do interesting things in New York City. People weren’t dying yet of AIDS, and here was a small community of artists and musicians — [Jean-Michel] Basquiat, Keith Haring — and everybody was together: black, white, Spanish, Chinese. It was the beginning of rap, and white people and black people were all together making music . . . [Afrika] Bambaataa was sampling Kraftwerk. Madonna and I used to run around and go to the Roxy, go dancing and to art shows.” She adds, “At the time, we both had a taste for, you know, Latin boys.”

Without a manager to advance her ambitions, Madonna had no choice but to promote herself. After she and the multitalented Steve Bray recorded four new songs — “Everybody,” “Stay,” “Burning Up,” (“She has a Joan Jett kind of thing going on with this one,” Bray recalls) and “Ain’t No Big Deal” (“We didn’t have access to the vocoder that we wanted for the vocal effect, so Emmy just pinched her nose and pretended,” says Bray) — she began taking the tape to the hottest nightclubs in the city, her goal being to get disc jockeys to play them so that one of her songs would catch on and become a club hit. In the early 1980s, DJs wielded tremendous power on the dance circuit. The songs they chose to play nightly could make an artist. Once a song caught on in the New York dance club scene, its success could easily encourage a major label into signing the artist.

In 1981, one of the hottest clubs in Manhattan was called Danceteria, where Madonna was a regular patron. Madonna had her sights set on the trendsetting DJ at Danceteria, the darkly handsome Mark Kamins. With her eye-catching dancing and sexual aura, she had already become a star in the local club scene. Kamins, who had watched her dance from the DJ booth, was intrigued. He wanted to know her. Apparently, she felt the same way.

One evening, while Mark was playing music from his booth, Madonna strolled over to him, handed him her demo and asked him to play it that evening.

“This is a great song,” she told him. “It’s called ‘Everybody.’ People will love it.”

Kamins shook his head negatively. “What if it’s not good?” he said, warily.

She got closer to him. “Would I just give it to you like this if it wasn’t good stuff?” she said. “Oooh, baby, you are so fine,” she added as she stroked his face.

He would remember feeling an urgency as she approached him. Then, as she kissed the disc jockey full on the lips, he was hers.

While he now says he was “impressed by her moxie,” Kamins still decided that he wanted first to listen to the demo before playing it for an audience. He took the tape home that night, and when he heard it he was impressed.

“The following night I threw ‘Everybody’ on and got an amazing response,” Kamins remembers. “I mean, it was a great song. It was the kind of thing that caught your attention. That voice was so unique, and so perfect for that kind of fun record.”

While Mark Kamins was a DJ by profession, he had hopes of one day becoming a record producer. Although he had already dabbled in music production, he saw in Madonna a chance to further his career, and perhaps further hers as well. He proposed a partnership: he would do the legwork to secure a record contract for her and, then, when the deal was set, she would allow him to produce her first album. Madonna, who craved a record deal and was actually surprised that she hadn’t gotten one by this time, immediately agreed to the partnership. On the edge of tears, her voice faltered: “Maybe this might work,” she said. “Or, at least I hope so.” As confident as she was about her future, clearly there was vulnerability beneath all of the bravado.

It seemed only natural — predictable as her life was, in this regard anyway — that the partnership between Madonna and Mark would become intimate: the two became lovers. “She was always sexually aggressive, and it wasn’t just her image,” Kamins said. “She used her sexuality as a performer, but it’s also how she got over offstage. We started hot, and it just got hotter. She was hard to resist.”

With his new lover in tow, Mark Kamins brought her demo tape to Michael Rosenblatt, a young, aggressive executive at Warner Bros. Records who was eager to sign new talent. As Kamins and Madonna sat and studied his reaction, Rosenblatt listened to the four songs on the tape. He then rewound it, and listened again. “The tape was good,” he now remembers but, echoing others who had shared his view, he adds, “but not outstanding. However, here was this girl sitting in my office, radiating a certain something. Whatever it was, she had more of it than I’d ever seen. I knew that there was a star sitting there.”

Much to Madonna’s exhilaration, Michael Rosenblatt decided to offer her a record deal: $5,000 as an advance, plus royalties and publishing fees of $1,000 for each song she would write. It had all happened so fast. All of the years gone by, years of struggling and hoping and plotting and scheming and wondering and worrying . . . and, suddenly, Madonna Ciccone had a record deal. However, there was one signature needed on the contract before it could be finalized and that was Seymour Stein’s, President of Warner’s Sire Records, the division to which Madonna would be signed.⁷

Unfortunately, Stein was in the hospital, recovering from heart surgery.

Undaunted — and certainly not willing to sit and wait for someone to recover from a major operation, not after all she had been through up to this point — Madonna pressed Rosenblatt to get the demo to Stein in the hospital. Reluctantly he agreed, probably knowing that there would be no point in challenging his new young artist on this matter. When Rosenblatt told Madonna that he would make sure Stein heard the demo immediately, Madonna took his face in both her hands and kissed it — which must have seemed a little inappropriate but was certainly endearing, just the same.

“I was in the hospital when [Rosenblatt] called me and said, ‘Seymour, I think you should listen to a one-song demo [“Everybody”] by this girl. Her name is Madonna. I listened to it, and I flipped out,’ recalls Seymour Stein, who was in his early forties at the time. “I said, ‘I want her to meet with me at the hospital.’ I had my barber come in and cut my hair and shave me — I didn’t want her to think she was signing a contract with someone who would be dead in six months. Let me tell you, she was so anxious to do a deal that she couldn’t have cared if I was lying in a coffin. She was twenty-three, and I believe she was very poor, but she put herself together great. It was only one song, ‘Everybody’, but there was just a drive, a determination — she was going places.”

Seymour, like so many others, was taken aback by Madonna’s aggressive nature, as well as her apparent star quality. “The thing to do now,” Madonna said, seeming oblivious to the fact that she was talking to a man who was sitting in his underwear, a drip feed in his arm, “is to sign me to a record deal. Take me,” she said, arms extended, “I’m yours.” She was being facetious, but the sentiment was genuine.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Stein remembers saying.

Madonna took a step back, looking confused. After a beat, perhaps to reconsider her strategy, she appeared to marshal her thoughts before jumping back into the game — but now with less aggression. “Okay, look,” she said. “Just tell me what I have to do to get a fucking record deal in this fucking town. That’s all I want to know.”

“Well, you had one before you even walked in the door,” Stein said, good-naturedly.

“Then why screw with me?” Madonna asked.

“Why not?” asked Stein. It would seem that Madonna had finally met her match in Seymour Stein. Probably relieved, she stepped toward his bed, extended her hand and said, “Nice doing business with you, Mr. Stein.” To her delight, he took her hand and touched it with his lips. Their eyes met. There was something conspiratorial in the moment, a suggestion of intimacy, as if they both knew something about Madonna’s future that nobody else knew.

“If the shortest way home was through a cemetery, she would take it, even at midnight on Friday the thirteenth,” observes Seymour Stein. “She had an almost ruthless edge to her. I mean that in all the best ways. You could just tell this woman would go far.”

“This is it,” Madonna later told her friend Erica Bell. The two had become the closest of friends at this time, after Erica hired her to work as a bartender at her New York nightclub, the Lucky Strike, on Ninth Street off Third Avenue. (The job lasted two days.) “With this record deal, I think I’m finally on my way,” Madonna said. “I can’t believe that it’s happened just as I thought it would. This is how I charted my life, for this to happen in it.”

“Tell me. What do you want most in life now?” Erica asked. It was a lazy Sunday morning and she and Madonna were lying on the couch together after a boozy night on the town. Years later, Erica would remember the conversation as if it had just occurred.

“I want to be famous,” Madonna said, quickly. “I want attention.”

“But you get so much attention now,” Erica said, snuggling closer.

“It’s not enough. I want all of the attention in the world,” Madonna said, dreamily. “I want everybody in the world to not only know me, but to love me, love me, love me.”

“Well, I love you,” Erica said.

“That’s nice,” Madonna said while gently stroking Erica’s hair. “But it’s not enough.”