The Affair with Prince

Soon after their first meeting on the set of the “Material Girl” video, twenty-six-year-old Madonna and twenty-four-year-old Sean Penn began dating. “After the video shoot, I was over at a friend’s house,” he explains. “And he had a book of quotations. He picked it up and turned to a random page and read the following: ‘She had the innocence of a child and the wit of a man.’ I looked at my friend and he just said, ‘Go get her.’ So I did.” Complicating matters a bit for Sean, however, was the fact that Madonna was also dating the rock star Prince at this time, whom she had met backstage at the American Music Awards earlier, in Los Angeles on January 28, 1985. He wasn’t her type, and it’s difficult to know why Madonna was even interested in him, except for the fact that she respected him as a musician and probably just wanted to know what made him tick.

Prince (real name Prince Rogers Nelson) was — still is — an eccentric man known for strangely shy demeanor in private and outrageous sexuality — prancing about in bikini briefs and high heels — on stage. During an interview with the author the same year he met Madonna, Prince refused to speak. Instead, he sat silently in his chair in front of a dinner of Chinese food and spent the entire evening playing with shrimp fried rice, all the while with a grim expression on his face. In response to any question, he would either nod affirmatively or shake his head negatively. When the interview was over, he departed without saying good-bye. “And that, my friend, is Prince,” said his publicist by way of explanation.

As their first date, Prince invited Madonna to accompany him to one of his performances in Los Angeles. Though she was scheduled to leave for New York to begin rehearsals for her own concert tour, she decided to delay that trip a few days so that she could spend some time with the rock star. The night of his concert, he picked her up in a white stretch limousine and took her to the Forum, where he was performing. Madonna later said she was amazed to find that the diminutive rock star smelled so strongly of the scent of lavender, “Like a woman,” she observed. “I felt like I was in the presence of Miss Elizabeth Taylor. He reeks of lavender. It turned me on, actually.”

Once in the limousine, recalled T. L. Ross, who was a friend of Prince’s, “I heard she was pretty aggressive, that the poor little guy had to fight her off. She was strong. He told me that she had the strength of ten women.” Because he had a performance that evening, Prince didn’t want to exhaust himself with Madonna. He suggested that they wait.

After the show, the two ventured out into the Los Angeles night and eventually ended up at the Marquis Hotel in Westwood for a party with Prince’s entourage. The gathering turned rowdy when Prince leaped up onto a table and began to undress. Joining him on the table, Madonna engaged him in a sensual bump-and-grind, her shoulders bouncing up and down, her body undulating. The party broke up at five in the morning, after which Prince and Madonna — arm in arm and practically holding each other up — retired to Prince’s private suite.

For the next two months, the couple continued seeing each other, though they didn’t seem to have much in common other than their status as superstar performers. While she was honest and forthright, he was secretive and bashful. Luckily, they both idolized Marilyn Monroe. When he told her that his home was filled with posters of the blonde movie goddess, Madonna said that she couldn’t wait to see his collection of memorabilia.

One romantic evening, Prince leased the entire Yamashiro mountaintop restaurant overlooking Los Angeles, with its breathtaking view of the city lights. Madonna wore a lacy purple skirt with trademark black bra peeking out from behind a sheer white blouse. At the restaurant, they ate Japanese food and then, after three hours of what appeared to some observers to be little conversation, they departed for a nightclub called Façade.

“I’ve been nibbling around the edges of this thing long enough, because I didn’t know where to start or how to tell you,” Prince told Madonna once they were at the club with friends. He was being much more courageous than he’d ever been with her, and in front of witnesses, which made it even more surprising. “Madonna, I think we should hook up, you and I. I want you to be, you know . . . my girl.”

Seeming surprised, Madonna let the request linger as if anticipating a punch line. But he wasn’t joking. He waited for her response. “Hmmm,” she said while frowning and looking as if she was trying to figure out just how to handle the moment. “Now, that’s food for thought, isn’t it?” Her words didn’t hold much conviction.

When Prince look deflated, Madonna grabbed his hand. “C’mon, let’s dance!” she said cheerily as she walked him out onto the dance floor.

After about two months, when there really wasn’t anything left for them to say to each other, Madonna became bored with Prince. They had recorded a couple of songs in his Minneapolis studio, and one would even be released later. But her friends recall that, while she complained about his passivity, he griped about her aggressive nature.

Says T. L. Ross, “Prince is way too cosmic for Madonna. For him, making love is a spiritual experience. For her — at least at that time — making love was just a physical expression. While he wanted to savor every second of the experience, she was into multiple orgasms. After two months, he cut her loose. Then, she did the scorned woman act.

“After he stopped acting interested in her, that’s when the phone calls started. Madonna pestered him for weeks. He said later that she screamed at him, ‘How dare you dump me. Don’t you know who I am?’ She was definitely not used to getting dumped.”

Madonna would have the last word on Prince, though, with the Los Angeles Times years later, in October 1994: “I was having dinner with Prince and he was just sipping tea, very daintily. I was stuffing food down my face and I was, like, ‘Aren’t you going to eat?’ She mimicked a delicate, whispered no. Continuing, she concluded, “And I thought, ‘Oh my God!’ I have this theory about people who don’t eat. They annoy me.”