What saves this performance from preposterous narcissism is a simple corrective: There’s a wink in the act. While Madonna presents her latest illusion, a hint of a smile tells us that we shouldn’t take any of it too seriously. She always hedges her bet with camp, elegant caricature and a style appropriated from the gay underworld on the eve of AIDS.
That style was part of the exuberant rush that accompanied gay liberation, when the doors of many closets flew open and out came leather and chains and whips, every variety of mask, anonymous multiple couplings and a self-conscious insistence on sex as performance. Before she became a star, Madonna moved through that world in New York. Today she presents it as a glossy nostalgia, tempered with irony and served up to everyone from suburban teenagers to aging baby boomers. They all seem to love it.
Without that ironic wink, of course, she would be as square as Jesse Helms. But Madonna is hip to something huge: AIDS made sexual freedom a ghastly joke. At the point where the sexual revolution had triumphed for everyone, the most ferocious sexually transmitted disease of the century arrived, wearing a death’s-head from some medieval woodcut. Every artist was forced to confront it, just as 19th century artists were hammered into dealing with syphilis. Some artistic responses to AIDS were moving and tragic; too many were runny with self-pity. But Madonna came roaring into the room in a spirit of defiance. She would not go gentle into that good night.
But she also knew that the only completely safe sex is the sex you can imagine — that is, an illusion. If you can’t have something you desire with every atom of your flesh and blood, you must be content with a gorgeous counterfeit. That insight became the armature of her work. And she elaborated on it with a shrewd understanding of sexual psychology: The most reliable erogenous zone is the human mind, and the libido feeds on images, not ideas.
Like Michael Jackson, Madonna vaulted to stardom with videos, a form thick with imagery that sometimes triumphs over the banality of lyrics. Jackson’s images were charged with rage, Madonna’s with frank and open carnality. But as the Eighties went on, as the graves filled with the young dead, as AIDS defied a cure, Madonna’s images became more obviously infused with a dark comic spirit. It was as if she were saying: I know this is a lie and you know this is a lie, but it’s all we have.
This surrender to illusion is at once daring and sad. Most American performers spend their careers trying to convince us that their lies are the truth. Madonna is braver than most and more originaclass="underline" She says openly that her lies are lies. She asks you only to admire the form of the lies. This was itself a breakthrough for a pop artist. Until Madonna, the basic task of any performer was to persuade the audience to suspend its disbelief. Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday wanted us to believe that their grieving lyrics and aching tones expressed the pain and hurt of the performers themselves. A millionaire such as Mick Jagger wanted us to believe he was a working-class hero or a street fighting man. But Madonna says something else. Don’t suspend your disbelief, she implies. Disbelief is the basic point.
I went to the publication party for her book, Sex, and, like the book, the party was a celebration of the counterfeit. Scattered around Industria, the city’s hottest photo studio, were many extraliterary diversions: actresses dressed as nuns pretending to offer blasphemous pleasures; peroxide blond androids languidly flogging each other with strips of licorice; black dancers in chains and leather; writhing gym-toned bodies; many undulating bellies; much bumping and grinding. Everything, in short, except actual fucking. And that, of course, was the point: This wasn’t real and the audience knew it wasn’t real.
Madonna’s video Erotica was playing continually, shot in the grainy black-and-white style of Forties porno films. But it wasn’t a real porno film. It was fake porno. Ah, yes: I remember Paris. The Germans wore gray and you wore nothing. Nostalgia remains the most powerful of all American emotions.
Sex went on to become the number-one best-seller in the nation, assisted by the hype but also driven by the genius of Madonna. And that might tell us something about America.
Books have taught us that lpve is an illusion but sex is real. For millions of Americans, that old formulation appears to have been reversed. You can experience love, but anything more than the illusion of sex is too dangerous. The possibility of death is always a marvelous corrective to human behavior. But if such an immense change is, in fact, under way, its poster girl is Madonna. Sometimes life really does imitate art.
PLAYBOY,
April 1993
FOSSE
Fosse was dead and after the urgent calls and the logistics of death, there seemed nothing really to do about it except go for a walk along Broadway in the midnight rain.
This was the square mile of the earth Bob Fosse cared for more than any other. Up there on the second floor at 56th Street was the rehearsal hall where I’d met him years ago. Around the corner was the Carnegie Deli, where he’d have lunch with Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner, trading lines, drinking coffee, smoking all those goddamned cigarettes. On the nth floor of 850 Seventh Avenue, he and Chayefsky and Gardner had their separate offices, and from Paddy’s they would often gaze in wonder across the back courtyard of the Hotel Woodward, at the man in underwear who was always shaving, no matter what the hour. A few blocks away was the building where Fosse lived the last decade of his life.
And down the rain-drowned avenue was the sleazy hamlet I always thought of as Fosseville: all glitter and neon and dangerous shadows. This wasn’t Runyon’s fairy-tale Broadway; it was harder, meaner, as reliable in its ruthlessness as a switchblade. Yet even in his most cynical years, Fosse insisted on seeing its citizens as human, observing their felonies and betrayals not as a journalist or a sociologist but as the fine artist he was. “I see a hooker on a corner,” he said to me once, “and I can only think: there’s some kinda story there. I mean, she was once six years old…” On this late night, I could see Fosse in black shirt and trousers, standing in some grimy doorway, looking out at his lurid parish; he had been young here and almost died here and sometimes fled from the place and always came back. In Fosseville the gaudiest dreams existed side by side with the most vicious betrayals; everything was real but nothing was true. And, of course, he believed in some dark way that all could be redeemed by love.
Nobody loved harder. He loved his wives: Mary Ann Niles, who danced with him in the last years of the nightclub era (and who died a year after Fosse), Joan McCracken, who died on him when they were both young, and Gwen Verdon, who was with him when he lay down for the final time on the grass of a small park in Washington. But Fosse wasn’t one of those men who can be married; the emotional core of his masterpiece, All That Jazz, is not so much the romantic attraction of death, but the impossibility of fidelity. There were simply too many beautiful women in this world, with their grace and style and intelligence and mystery; the demand of monogamy was like ordering a man to love only one Vermeer.
And so he loved many women; most were dancers and actresses, because in the world where he worked they were the women he met. He treated all of them with the same grace. I saw him most often when he was between women; he was then usually engulfed by a bleakly romantic sense of loss (although the only remorse he ever expressed was about Gwen). When he met a new woman, when he was swept away, he would vanish from his usual precincts; no male friends were as important as a woman or the possibility of love.