Malibu Nightmare

By Christmas 1988, Madonna’s marriage to Sean Penn was more than three years old. To say that the forty months since their August 16, 1985, union had been difficult would be an understatement of epic proportions. Penn’s drinking and his violent temper had been more than Madonna could handle, and by the end of 1988 the marriage was all but over. She said that it was as if she had married a child in a man’s body, someone who operated on the emotional level of a ten-year-old.

By this time, of course, Madonna fully understood that Sean Penn had a drinking problem, and that this made it impossible for him to focus on saving their marriage. His temper was more unpredictable than ever. For instance, after one bitter argument, he threatened to drown their dog, Hank. Somehow, Madonna managed to change his mind. The next day — at the suggestion of actor Robert Duvall — she personally drove Sean to Palm Springs to the Betty Ford Center where, she hoped, she could convince him to dry out. They signed in as Mr. and Mrs. Victor Cobb, but after speaking to counselors, they realized that the chances of keeping Sean’s presence there from the press were negligible. They weren’t even halfway back to Los Angeles on the two-hour drive home when calls began coming in on their car telephone from Madonna’s manager Freddy DeMann, telling them they had been recognized at the Betty Ford Center. “But how did anyone know?” Madonna remembered asking Freddy. “Someone must have told someone.”

“The press is psychic when it comes to you,” he told her.

Once back in Malibu, Madonna didn’t know what to do about Sean. “I have to help him, I know. But he doesn’t want any help,” Sandra Bernhard would later recall her saying. Sandra had flown to the West Coast to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with Madonna.

“I don’t know what to do,” Madonna continued. “His drinking is wrecking our marriage. He pushes me away. I’m miserable.”

“Let me ask you a simple question,” Sandra asked her. “Do you ever have fun?”

“What do you mean?”

“Fun, Madonna. Do you and Sean ever have fun?”

Madonna looked dispirited. She had answered her friend’s question, and without saying a single word.

“Then he’s got to go,” Sandra decided.

Madonna said she agreed, even though she and Sean had been thinking about having a baby to save their marriage. She had promised him that 1989 would be the year that they would start a family. She feared having Sean’s child, she said, because she didn’t want a baby to be raised in a broken home, “and we are nothing if not broken,” she added tearfully.

“You’re crazy if you bring a kid into this mess,” Sandra said. “I’m telling you, he’s got to go.”

After another fight, Madonna asked Sean to move out. He moved in with his father, director Leo Penn. A few days later, on the morning of December 26, Sean telephoned Madonna to discuss the state of their relationship. During the conversation, Madonna told Sean that she had decided not to have his baby. In signing a contract to appear in Dick Tracy, she explained, she would have to postpone a family for another year.

According to documents she would later file with the Los Angeles County Court House, Madonna said that Penn was “disgusted and pissed off” with her after that conversation, and they engaged in a heated argument.

“It’s over,” Madonna told Sean on the telephone, she later remembered. “I want a divorce. I need a divorce.”

When she hung up the telephone, she must have been shaking.

That afternoon, Madonna telephoned John Kennedy in New York. Recalls Stephen Styles, “By this time, John and Madonna had cooled their own romance, but she was still depending on him for emotional support. She asked him to fly to the West Coast and help her solve some problems related to her marriage.” According to Styles, Madonna further explained to Kennedy that she needed “moral support to get through this time in my life.”

John decided not to fly to California. “I think he didn’t want Madonna depending on him,” said Stephen Styles. “He was afraid that if he came to her rescue every time she called, they would end up back in a relationship — which would only upset his mother, and he didn’t want to do that. He felt badly about it, but he also felt he shouldn’t just drop everything and be at Madonna’s beck and call.

“Instead, what he did was track down Sean,” says Stephen Styles. “He had his cell phone number. Madonna had given it to him, earlier. And John called Sean and said, ‘If you lay one hand on her, I will come out there and pulverize you, you little punk.’ He actually threatened him with bodily harm. Penn was furious and told him he would call the cops on him. So, John backed off. He didn’t need that kind of attention.”

(Adds Stephen Styles, “John told me that he ran into Sean Penn at a party a couple years later. Penn wanted him to apologize for sleeping with his wife while she was a married woman. John told him to take a hike, and then left the party before a fight could break out. Madonna apparently found out what had happened because the next day, John received a funeral wreath at his home. The message on it read; ‘In Deepest Sympathy, from Madonna.’ He thought that was pretty funny.”)

Although Madonna was perceived by her public as strong and independent, at this point in time she was actually frightened and vulnerable, causing some of her friends to wonder what was really going on in her marriage. Doubtless, Sean Penn was angry that Madonna was engaging in what appeared to him to be an extramarital affair with Warren Beatty. “He would follow her at night and, always, they would end up at Warren’s,” says a friend of Penn’s. “He’d sit in his car in front of Beatty’s gate, waiting for her to leave. Often, she wouldn’t do so until the sun rose. This was driving Sean crazy, along with her decision to not start a family with him. It was all building up in him, a fury that was bound to explode.”

Madonna’s telephonic declaration of independence from her husband that December morning was her first step in regaining her identity. However, it wasn’t that simple. Nothing with Sean was ever simple.

In the late afternoon of December 28, 1988, Sean Penn allegedly scaled the wall surrounding the Malibu house and burst in, finding Madonna alone in the master bedroom. She had given the live-in help the night off to attend a holiday party. According to a police report later filed by Madonna with the Malibu Sheriff’s Office, the two began once again to quarrel over Madonna’s decision to divorce. When she told him that she was going to leave the house — at least, according to the official report — he tried to bind her hands with an electric lamp and cord. Madonna fled from the bedroom.

Sean chased her into the living room. Once there — again, according to the report — he tied her to an easy chair with heavy twine. Many other dreadful things occurred — at least according to published accounts of this incident, none of which was ever contested by Madonna — but, suffice it to say, it appears to have been a night of physical and emotional abuse.

As per the police report, Penn was “drinking liquor straight from the bottle,” and his abuse of her went on for several hours, during which time he allegedly smacked her and roughed her up. After a couple of hours, Penn went out to purchase more alcohol. Several hours later, he returned and — back to that police report — continued his attacks against her.

In desperation — again, according to official documents — Madonna finally persuaded Sean to untie her by telling him that she needed to go to the bathroom. Finally free, she ran out of the house. Sean stumbled while racing after her, which gave her an edge. She got into the coral-colored 1957 Thunderbird, which Penn had bought her on her twenty-eighth birthday. She locked herself inside the car.

While Sean pounded furiously on the automobile windows, Madonna called the police on her cell phone. When she had finished speaking to them, she threw the car into reverse, and sped away — headed for the Malibu Sheriff ’s Office on Pacific Coast Highway.

“When Madonna staggered into the station [fifteen minutes later], she was distraught, crying, with makeup smeared all over her face,” remembered Lieutenant Bill McSweeney. “I hardly recognized her as Madonna, the singer. She was weeping, her lip was bleeding and she was all marked up. She had obviously been struck. This was a woman in big trouble, no doubt about it.”

Police officers, stunned by details Madonna had provided of her nine-hour ordeal, went to arrest her husband. Sean Penn was still inside the house when the officers pulled up outside. Remembered one officer, “We had to use our bullhorns. ‘Sean Penn, come out of the house with your hands in the air,’ we said. The suspect came out and we took him away in handcuffs.”