Madonna

An icon of unabashed ambition and sexual magnetism, Madonna has been making headlines since the early MTV Age for her musical talents and much more. Cosmo caught up with the Material Girl in July 1987 to talk about her rising hopes for a career in Hollywood and her then-marriage to bad boy heartthrob Sean Penn. Endearingly frank and forever flirting with the wild side, some things never change: 36 years later, she remains the star we fell for then.

You can see and hear her laughing at herself on the video version of the 1985 live concert tour. The titles come up on the screen—MADONNA LIVE. THE VIRGIN TOUR—and over them, Madonna chants in a pseudo-Brooklyn accent: “I went to Noo Yawk…I din’ know anybody, I wanted to dance, I wanted to sing…I wanted to make people happy, I wanted to be famous, I wanted everybody to love me, I wanted to be a star, I worked very hard and my dream came true.” The real joke is, her dream did come true. Now she’s so famous, she can’t eat her asparagus without strangers interrupting. Even the staff of the elegant hotel dining room gets into the act. “The chef would like an autograph for his daughter,” says the maître d’. Okay,” Madonna says, “but you gotta give me a lot of cookies. You know, those really thin wafer cookies?” The maître d’ is amused. “But the autograph is not for me, it’s for the chef.” “Well then,” says Madonna, scrawling her name on a piece of paper, “tell the chef to give me a lot of cookies.”