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One writer compared Madonna’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards in September of 1984 to iconic music moments like Elvis Presley causing jaws to drop in living rooms across America with his “pelvic thrusts” on The Milton Berle Show in 1956, and the Beatles’ few minutes on The Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964, which created the template for the ensuing 20 years of pop-rock music. Another observer called it “the award-show equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — the ideal against which all successors would be measured.” It was, in other words, unforgettable.
The stage that night at Radio City Music Hall was filled with stars who had been cajoled into helping launch the show. It was MTV’s first awards event, and if it was successful, MTV executives thought it could be the fledgling music video industry’s very own annual Oscar-Grammy ceremony. Bette Midler and Dan Aykroyd had agreed to host. To perform during the show, MTV lined up Rod Stewart (the dean of music videos simply because he made so many of them), ZZ Top, Hall & Oates, Tina Turner, Ray Parker Jr., Huey Lewis and the News, and the new gal, Madonna.
Rather than one of the tracks from her first album, Madonna wanted to sing the still-unreleased single “Like a Virgin.” Her first idea was to perform with a Bengal tiger (she had apparently soured on lions after her experience making a video for that song in Venice). When the tiger was a no-go for obvious reasons, she suggested emerging from a wedding cake, as she had at Studio 54 for a Fiorucci 15th anniversary bash when she tumbled out of a cake singing “Everybody.” The VMAs’ producers agreed.
Before the show, Madonna and her brother Christopher went to see Maripol, who had designed the wedding attire Madonna wore on her Like A Virgin album cover. Strangely, Christopher said, they weren’t alone. Cher sat in a corner watching like a bridesmaid as Madonna readied for her big night. Maripol told writer Matthew Rettenmund that Madonna had “stage fright” because the hall would be packed with artists and industry types. She believed “it was either break or make.”
From a distance, Madonna looked appropriately bridal atop the cake, singing a song that no one except the people who heard her debut the song at New York’s Paradise Garage earlier that year had ever heard. It was a song about a virgin, sung by a woman wearing a bustier-and-tulle wedding dress and a belt that identified her as a Boy Toy. As she made her way down the cake, the unimaginable became undeniable as she began to shed her bridal wear: first shoes, then veil; after which she loosened her hair, boudoir-style. Madonna likes to say that what happened next, when she famously rolled around the stage, skirt up, panties and garters exposed for all the world to see, was her attempt to retrieve a lost shoe.
That was the official story, which may be how she remembered it, or it may have been a bit of damage control, because Madonna’s handlers believed she had gone too far. Such behavior — which would have been perfectly acceptable, even mild, at Danceteria or the Garage or Studio 54 — was considered beyond outrageous at the MTV Video Music Awards show. The lost shoe story provided handy cover. But that’s not what happened.
Madonna went to the floor twice. The first time it was to retrieve the two shoes she had kicked off to facilitate her descent down the cake. The second time it was apparently for the hell of it — gyrating, crawling, rolling lustily on the floor, simulating masturbation while sullying that ultimate symbol of purity, a white wedding dress — with both shoes firmly on her feet as she did so. That’s when the audience was treated to a full view of Madonna’s derriere.
Christopher Ciccone watched from the Radio City green room, thinking of his father and grandmother, who, like millions of other TV viewers, would see the show at home and be stunned by what appeared to be the on-air despoliation of a bride — by herself.
In mocking the social covenant that traditionally codified a woman’s status as lesser, she declared liberation not in the language of feminist politics but in the language of sex. Madonna in her wedding attire claimed that power as her own. Just the year before, Time magazine declared that the sexual revolution was over. Madonna showed that for women of her generation, it hadn’t even begun.
In the full unpublished transcript of an interview Edwin Miller conducted with Madonna for Seventeen magazine not long after the VMA show, she described what her actual thinking may have been going into that night, and it was an interesting take on the notion that the promise of marriage and the reality of marriage are two very different things. She said she imagined herself on top of the cake “sitting on top of the world,” but she “ended on the ground, broken.”
Whatever her plan had been, Madonna was pilloried in the press and by some of the other artists in the hall. Melody Maker quoted Annie Lennox as calling her performance “very, very whorish . . . It was like she was fucking the music industry. It might have been parody on her part, but I thought it was very low.”
Recalling the event years later during an appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show, Madonna said that when she found her manager Freddy DeMann afterward, he was “white as a ghost. And he looked at me and said, ‘Do you know what you just did?’ . . . ‘Your career is over.’ . . . I was just starting out and I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ . . . I wasn’t that apologetic. I was just like, ‘Well, fuck it, I made a mistake.’”
The VMAs controversy was Madonna’s introduction to the vast cultural gulf between the downtown New York world she inhabited and the mainstream world she was about to enter. She realized she had left her “little gay cocoon . . . From the dance world to the music world, my social strata was mostly gay men,” Madonna told writer Vince Aletti. “That’s who my audience was, that’s who I hung out with, that’s who inspired me . . . I left that world and went into the mainstream. Suddenly there was judgment.”
Cyndi Lauper, who was in the audience and was familiar with both worlds, recognized Madonna’s segment for what it was. “I loved that — it was performance art,” she said. Lauper was right. Madonna was not merely a pop singer; she was also part of a rich tradition of creative women who used everything they had in their art, who simply were their art. Madonna’s performance about women, marriage, and sexuality arose out of that milieu. But most people didn’t get it.
The VMAs would be the first of many episodes in Madonna’s career in which she expressed herself using the methods common in the New York art world only to suffer the wrath of public opinion. The verdict time and again would be that she had gone too far, that her career was over. Time and again, the jury was wrong. Madonna’s actions earned her detractors, to be sure, but they also earned her loyal fans and increased attention.
Maripol, who had stood behind a curtain onstage watching Madonna, told writer Lyndsey Parker, “I knew that day she had made it. Every journalist was rushing, running, going, ‘Oh my God, who is this girl with the white outfit rolling and crawling on the floor, with crosses in her ears, and her name is Madonna?’” “When we left, the kids were waiting for Madonna in the street, cheering,” Maripol said, describing the scene for The Face’s Jeffrey Ferry. “As we went into the limo, I was watching her. She was looking at all the kids, and she was wondering why she was here. She wanted to be there, with them, in the street, yelling at herself. And I looked at her face, and it was pure innocence and pure joy.”
A young French fashion designer in the audience was excited by the performance, too. Jean Paul Gaultier told Charlotte Cowles in The Cut that he was surrounded by “mostly businesspeople, who were horrified. There were just a few young fans — and me, who absolutely loved it. That is when I realized that she couldn’t care less what others thought of her, and I also saw how powerful she was.”
Nile Rodgers also knew Madonna had arrived. In his book, Le Freak, he described watching her performance while sitting with Mick Jagger and another friend in a recording-studio lounge, taking a break from making Jagger’s first solo album. The friend dismissed Madonna as more style than substance. But Nile told him, “I wish I could bottle what she’s got and give you a drink of that shit. Then I could produce your ass and we’d both have a lot more money.”
Madonna was at the VMAs because she was nominated for Best New Artist in a Video for “Borderline.” She lost to Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics, but she stole the show. Looking back from a distance of 30 years, MTV’s Jocelyn Vena said, “That three minutes in 1984 was the point when Madonna became a superstar.”
It was also when MTV’s VMAs became “must-be TV.” Bob Pittman, one of MTV’s founders, said, “The first year, it was everything we could do to get talent to come to the event and fill the seats. By the second year, every act wanted to be on the bill.”
Excerpted from the book MADONNA: A REBEL LIFE by Mary Gabriel. Copyright © 2023 by Mary Gabriel. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. New York, NY. All rights reserved.
