“Madonna: A Lonely Life”

After her brief romance with Prince, Madonna began to concentrate on Sean Penn as a potential mate. In spite of her fanatical need for the spotlight and Sean Penn’s obsessive desire for privacy, the two began a passionate and exciting courtship that, if nothing else, certainly proved that opposites do attract. Impressed as much by his tough guy reputation as by his acting credentials, Madonna would later admit that she was, as she put it, “completely unable to resist him, not that I ever tried. He was the sexiest, smartest man I had ever known.” Sean was equally fascinated by her. He had been a fan of Madonna’s, which is why he had wanted to meet her. Once he got to know her, he quickly realized that she was fun to be with, and also the kind of woman who would, when necessary, meet him at his own level of arrogance. “I admit it, I was a smart-ass,” he says. “And so was she. It was a relationship made in heaven, two smart-asses going through life together. How romantic.”

Of course, the paparazzi were delighted at the pairing of the unpredictable Penn and his exhibitionist girlfriend, Madonna. They were even photographed on their first dates: in New York at a club called Private Eyes, and in Los Angeles where Penn had accompanied Madonna on a pilgrimage to Marilyn Monroe’s crypt at Westwood Memorial Cemetery. (Madonna was shaking with nervous tension during the visit to Monroe’s grave. When she spotted a red rose left there by her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio, she was heard to murmur “Oh, my. He really loved her.”)

At this time, with everyone trying to get a piece of her — or at least that’s how it probably felt to her — Madonna had said she wanted someone in her life she believed truly loved her. “She was lonely, the classic victim of stardom in that she was the popular and well-loved celebrity who went home alone at night and cried her eyes out,” said her former producer and boyfriend Jellybean Benitez. While she certainly wasn’t lacking in sexual experiences, missing in her life was a sense of true intimacy with another person. Of course, those in her circle at this time admit that Madonna wasn’t an easy person to get to know or to be intimate with on an emotional level. “She had a lot of barriers up,” says Tommy Quinn, a New York studio musician who dated her shortly before she met Sean Penn.

While Quinn had heard the charge made against Madonna that she was cold, selfish and aloof, he disagreed. “I found her to be very guarded,” he says. “Of course, she was brash and — oh, man! — she could be a royal bitch. But beneath it, if you really got to know her, she was a different kind of person, a very insecure girl.

“I remember one night in particular: she was at my place and we made love. It was pretty intense, and afterward, as I held her in my arms, I noticed that she was sobbing. When I asked her why, she refused to open up to me. But every time we made love — which was about a half dozen times — she seemed sadder than she was before. I thought to myself, either I’m pretty bad in the sack or this girl has a problem with intimacy. It was more than she could take when she allowed herself to be vulnerable.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked Madonna, touching her tenderly on the cheek.

“Nothing,” she responded quickly. “I’m fine. Leave me alone, will you?” As he recalled it, she took a deep breath and then let it out slowly, as if being pushed down by an excruciating weight. Then, she pulled away from her lover and slept at the foot of the bed in a fetal position.

“At first, I thought she was crying because she thought having sex made her vulnerable, and then that made her feel weak. But, after knowing her a little better, I decided it was because she was just afraid of being hurt, of letting down her guard, of being truly intimate.”

A few nights later, Quinn decided to ask the question that had been on his mind but for which there had never been an appropriate time. “Why do you hate your old man so much?” he asked “Every time you bring up your father, it’s always to say some horrible thing about him. I think that’s the source of your anxiety.”

“What are you talking about?” Madonna said, now crying. “How dare you say that to me?”

She then bolted out of bed, ran into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

The next morning, Madonna — her eyes red-rimmed and watery — put on her black fishnet tights and hip-slung miniskirt in preparation for leaving. She slipped into a hand-painted jacket with no shirt underneath. As she was putting on her spike-heeled boots, she looked up at Tommy Quinn and said, “You know, just because I was crying doesn’t mean anything. So don’t think you have some kind of hold over me, or that I care about you.” She didn’t mention anything about Quinn’s having brought up her father.

As he tried to figure out how to respond, she walked across the room and out the door, without saying good-bye.

A week later, Quinn found her staring out the eleventh-story window of his brownstone on East Seventy-second Street in New York. She looked fetching, wearing his T-shirt and nothing else, certainly putting on a fairly indecent show for the neighbors. “A penny for your thoughts,” Quinn said to her as he brought her a glass of chilled white wine.

“They’ll cost you a lot more than that,” Madonna said with a weak smile. Then, after a sip, she thoughtfully observed, “It’s all a fiction, you know that, don’t you, Tommy? I’m just a character in a novel. None of this is real. None of it.”

“What’s the novel called?” Quinn asked, intrigued.

“It’s called Madonna,” she answered. Then, after a thoughtful beat, she added a subtitle: “A Lonely Life.”

No different from a lot of other people, she wanted to be loved — but she was also afraid to be loved. Or, as her sister Paula observed, “She was a woman, like any woman. She needed someone to hold on to. But it scared her.”

Sean Penn had his own insecurities. His mania for privacy was obsessive, and those who knew him well claim it was because he was never satisfied with the way he looked, always feeling awkward in his own skin and not wishing to be seen by anyone, let alone everyone. His bravado and bad temper, according to those who knew him well, was — not surprisingly — a camouflage that masked a litany of other emotional issues the explanations of which are probably best left to Sean Penn biographers. However, when he and Madonna began to date, they found something in each other that felt like, as Madonna put it, “a sense of personal completion.” Also, their sexual chemistry was explosive. After their first date, he threw her to the floor and stripped off her clothes and his own in such a hurry he left his boots on. Then he made love to her. Later, she said, “We reached orgasm together, and it was as if time stood still.”

“Who’s to say how the heart works . . . it just does,” observes Meg Lowery, an actress friend of Sean’s who lived in Los Angeles at the time and attended acting classes with him. “Sean told me he was crazy about her. But he was worried about it. ‘She’s nuts,’ he told me. ‘And I’m nuts. The two of us together? Man, that’s trouble.’ Plus, he sensed that she wasn’t going to be faithful to him. ‘She’s out there, wild and free,’ he told me. ‘And I don’t think any man will be able to tame her. In fact,’ he said, ‘I think the last thing she wants is to be tamed.’”

Along with his brooding nature, Sean Penn was also a talented actor and an intelligent man. When she found that he was a voracious reader and wrote poetry, Madonna was even more attracted to him. Soon, she was announcing to any friend, foe or reporter that Sean Penn was her hero, her best friend and the “coolest guy in the universe.” She could tell him her problems, she said. Somehow, he had the instinctive understanding of a man who had suffered himself and knew all there was to know about loss and grief, even though his parents were both still alive. She could talk to him as she could talk to no one else.

The couple soon announced their engagement. As word of this big event spread, publicity about Madonna’s life and career reached a new fever pitch. A surprising declaration for some of her fans — but not so surprising for those who knew her — came when the men’s magazine Penthouse announced it would be publishing nude photographs taken of Madonna years earlier. Not to be outdone, Playboy announced its own imminent publication of similarly scandalous photographs. As a media sensation ensued over the idea that photographs of Madonna would expose her in a new and revealing way, it was just as it had been thirty-five years earlier with the news that Marilyn Monroe had also posed nude.

Some observers suggested that these nude photographs of Madonna would somehow damage her career. Reporters pointed to Vanessa Williams who, a year earlier, had been forced to turn in her Miss America crown. It had been discovered that she had posed nude years before she won her title. (Of course, Vanessa Williams would ultimately turn the scandal to her advantage. She is now one of the only Miss Americas whose name anyone can even remember.) The existence of nude pictures, the race between two men’s magazines to beat each other to publication, and Madonna’s bold declaration, “I’m not ashamed of anything,” only fanned the flames of redhot publicity.

Tommy Quinn had not seen Madonna in more than a year when, he says, he received a telephone call from her. She asked if they could meet. When he invited her to his apartment, she said, “No. I’m a trapped animal now. If I come to see you, everyone will know where you live, everyone will know that I know you, and they’ll never leave you alone.” He now recalls, “In order to protect me, she wanted us to meet in a small Italian restaurant on Second Avenue near Seventy-first Street.”

When he showed up, he found Madonna in a back booth wearing large sunglasses, a floppy hat and an old, worn, flower-print “housedress.” He recalls, “She looked like a bag lady. I was astonished.”

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked as he sat down.

“My life. That’s what’s happened to me,” Madonna responded glumly. She leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. “So, how do you like my outfit? I’m a millionaire, but this is what I have to wear in public just so that I can have some peace and quiet.”

After ordering spaghetti, Madonna got to the point of why she wanted to see her friend. “I need your advice,” she said. “Have you heard about these pictures?”

“Who hasn’t?” Quinn answered.

She took off her sunglasses. She looked as if she had been crying. “I just don’t know how to be with this goddamn thing,” she said, sadly. “I mean, I don’t know how to be . . . how to act.”

Quinn would recall years later, “I was astonished. When I first heard about the pictures, I thought she would probably take the position that they didn’t matter, that she was above worrying about them. But, sitting with her, looking at how distressed she was, I saw that the existence of these pictures had really bothered her.”

“Oh, screw it, Madonna,” Quinn told her. “You have to act like you don’t care. What choice do you have?”

“But I do care,” she said. “What about my father? Why should he have to see those pictures? And Sean! What will Sean think?” Her temper rose. “Parasites!” she said, referring to the media. “I feel so . . . misunderstood.”⁸

For the next forty-five minutes, over two plates of pasta with meatballs and a bottle of Merlot, Madonna remembered the time not so long ago, in 1979, when she decided to pose in the nude. “He was a nice guy, actually,” she said of the photographer, Martin Schreiber. “Or at least I thought so at the time. He flattered me. He said I had a good body. He wined and dined me in his loft studio. I trusted him. And I was an idiot for doing so, I guess.”

Madonna and Tommy finally agreed that she had no choice but to act completely unaffected by the existence of the photographs, just as Marilyn Monroe had done before her. The tale of Marilyn Monroe’s naked session in front of the camera is the stuff of Hollywood legend. A few years after posing, when she was arguably the most famous actress in the world, the photographs were released. The naysaying press predicted that if the luscious young woman sprawled naked on red velvet was, indeed, the Marilyn Monroe, her career would surely be over as a result of the scandal. However, undaunted by the media’s histrionics, Marilyn did not deny the photographs. Instead she turned the publicity to her advantage by declaring to reporters, “Sure I posed. I was hungry.” When asked what she had on during the sessions, she quipped, “the radio.”

“If they [presumably the public and press] know that I’m unhappy about them, they’ll just love that,” Madonna concluded, sounding defeated. “Oh, who cares, anyway,” she added, with forced cheerfulness. “I have press agents now, you know?” she added. “Let them figure the whole thing out. I’ll use this thing to my advantage somehow. You know that, don’t you, Tommy?”

“Hell yeah, you will,” Quinn agreed, nudging her. “You’re bigger than this, anyway, Madonna.”

He recalls that she forced a sad smile and then, facetiously, made a sign of the cross.

“Are you happy, Madonna?” he asked her. As she rose, hugged him and said good-bye, it didn’t seem as if she intended to answer the question. She threw fifty dollars onto the table. “Look at my life,” she said, arching a brow. “Who wouldn’t be happy?”