Blond Exhibition

Apparently, the Material Girl has a new recipe for success. Call it Madonna on the half shell: equal parts sun, surf and nudity, sprinkled with a dash of Botticelli à la Miami. We usually think of fantasies in the context of dimly lit bedrooms, but Madonna is about to change all that—again. If you haven't heard that Ms. Ciccone was making waves in Miami Beach by acting out her erotic dreams in the buff for a book shot by her favorite fashion photographer, Steven Meisel, you've either had your head in the sand or been stranded on a Soviet space station for the past ten months. Reports first trickled in from the tabloids before making it into the stuffier newsweeklies: Madonna and Meisel hit the beach with fashion-runway voguer Naomi Campbell; Madonna strikes a pose in public view, stripped down to stiletto heels, long gloves, panties and—huh?—a cottontail on her stern; the newly bronzed blonde then recruits rappers Vanilla Ice and Big Daddy Kane to join in her graphic tableaux. Meisel's pictures (according to "insider" gossip, which is almost certainly a well-timed leak designed to make headlines) gave pause to publisher Warner Books because the pictures, said the proverbial spokesperson, go "beyond erotica." We know that place well: It lies somewhere twixt the land of hype and the realm of flackery. And it sells. Remember when MTV, squirming over Madonna's video Justify My Love, banned it from the network? Madonna turned the video into a hit single. And now, with her latest antics, the bottle-fondling star of Truth or Dare is doing more for coffee-table books than Clarence Thomas did for Coca-Cola. Which should come as no surprise. This is the woman who grossed upwards of $24,000,000 last year, and more than $500,000,000 over the span of her career. She is, by her own admission, a studio singer and an energetic dancer—but her live shows set a new standard for concert spectaculars. She is not the world's most beautiful lady, nor the smartest, yet she has unsparingly applied her entrepreneurial acumen to become the world's most famous woman. With Meisel as her latest girl toy, she is yet again upping the ante for those who would follow, making other so-called sex stars look like Barbara Bush. The Miami Beach book project is just one part of the American crotch-grabbing champ's multimedia assault. Did you know that Madonna appears in two current movies, one (Shadows and Fog) by Woody Allen and one (A League of Their Own) about female hardballers? That she has been filming a third flick, a kinky thriller called Body of Evidence, co-starring Willem Dafoe, in which she plays a woman who so loves receiving and giving pain that she asks lovers to slap her and pours hot wax on naked men? And that she's working on a new album on which she reportedly takes another look at bondage and homosexuality? These are not new interests for Madonna. Her clothing or hair color can vary the way Malibu Barbie differs from Wedding Day Barbie—each incarnation achieving a certain plastic perfection—but her basic instincts remain tried and true. From her concert homilies that celebrate the oft unprintable to her sexual interpretation of religious iconography, the divine M seems intent on sharing precisely what turns her on. The marketing principle is simple: People will pay to see and hear in public the same stuff that they're doing, or want to do, in private. Madonna, though, brings earnestness to her bag of tricks. You get the sense that she's actually doing what she wants, not to shock us, but because it's fun. We shall see. The album, the book of fantasies and the S/M movie are tentatively scheduled for release within weeks of one another, all part of what the Madonna camp calls The Body of Evidence Project. For this year's climax, the queen of the dare is contemplating another tour. How she will outdo last year's performance—which included mimed masturbation and fellatio—is beyond us. But if these shots of a beautiful beach bum are the beginning of a trend, we can't wait for her next move.