by Lucy O'Brien
Studious and devout, Tony decided to break free from the restraints of his background. “He wanted to be upwardly mobile and go into the educated, prosperous America,” Madonna once told Time magazine writer Denise Worrell. “I think he wanted us to have a better life than he did when he was growing up.” After a stint of military service in Texas in the U.S. Air Force, in 1952, he returned home to Pennsylvania to get a degree in engineering at Geneva College, a Catholic institution in Beaver Falls. He had a long-term plan. The previous year he had met Madonna Fortin, the younger sister of his air force friend Dale Fortin. Tony was invited to Dale’s wedding at a small chapel on the Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas, where they worked. The seventeen-year-old Madonna was maid of honor. A quiet beauty with wry wit and a gentle smile, she descended from pioneering French-Canadian stock—generations of farmers and lumberjacks who worked the land with a pragmatic, determined outlook. Her father, Willard Fortin, was a top manager in a Bay City construction company, and together with her mother, Elsie, raised their eight children to be pious Catholics. “She was very beautiful,” remembered Madonna. “I look like her. I have my father’s eyes but I have my mother’s smile and a lot of her facial structure.”
It wasn’t just Madonna Sr.’s beauty that attracted Tony to her, but the fact that she came from a similar hardworking ethnic Catholic background. Both had high ideals and a strong attachment to family. They began courting almost immediately, Tony making the lengthy round trip from Pennsylvania to Bay City as often as he could. A windy town on Lake Huron, near the border with Canada, Bay City was once a center of the logging industry. By the time Madonna Fortin was born, the lumber barons had moved on and the sawmills were nearly gone, to be replaced by the fishing industry. Life there was slow and quiet, like Tony and Madonna’s three-year long-distance relationship. They got married after Tony’s graduation on July 1, 1955, at the Visitation Church in Bay City. After starting a job as a defense engineer with Chrysler, he moved with his new wife to Pontiac, near Detroit.
Very soon after their wedding, Madonna Sr. became pregnant, and their first child, Anthony, was born on May 3, 1956. Martin arrived a year later on August 9, and the following year, on August 16, 1958, their first daughter, Madonna Louise, was born while the parents were vacationing in Bay City. This little triumvirate was at the center of Ciccone family life: Madonna Jr. had a competitive relationship with her two elder brothers, and together they vied for their parents’ attention, a factor that is present in the combative, mocking way that Madonna sometimes treats her men. “I was considered the sissy of the family, because I relied on feminine wiles to get my way,” Madonna said. “My older brothers…picked on me, and I always tattled on them to my father.” It has taken years for these sibling rivalries to be resolved, and even now there is an uneasy truce. Had Madonna Sr. lived longer, maybe the family dynamics would have been less polarized. By 1959, Madonna lost her status as the only girl, when her sister Paula was born. Christopher arrived in 1960 and Melanie in 1962. By then a shadow hung over the family. Although the Fortins and the Ciccones put on a brave face, pretending that it was business as usual, Madonna Sr. was dying.
WHILE PREGNANT with her youngest daughter, Melanie, Madonna Sr. was diagnosed with breast cancer. Many blamed it on her work as an X-ray technician. The protective lead-lined apron that is now obligatory was then rarely used. Treatment had to be delayed until after Melanie was born, but by then it was too late. Madonna Sr. struggled on for another year, spending more and more time in a hospital. The children were farmed out to relatives, and the times when their mother was at home, she was too exhausted to give them the nurturing they needed.
For five-year-old Madonna Jr., just becoming aware of herself and her place in the world, this was an intensely bewildering experience. As the eldest daughter, she had a strong sense of independence, yet also a deep need to be noticed. She was always challenging her parents, even as a child. Madonna remembers her mother cleaning compulsively, kneeling in the kitchen, scrubbing the floor. “She was always picking up after us. We were really messy, awful kids. I remember having these mixed feelings,” said Madonna. She spoke of loving her mother but being confused at the lack of boundaries. “I think I tortured her. I think little kids do that to people who are really good to them. They can’t believe they’re not getting yelled at…so they taunt you. I really taunted my mother.”
The more her mother’s energy ebbed away, the more the little Madonna tried to physically summon it back. There was one oft-quoted memory of her ailing mother trying to rest on the sofa and Madonna beating her on the back, desperate to get a response. Her anger faded when she realized her mother was crying. “I remember feeling stronger than she was. I was so little and I put my arms around her and I could feel her body underneath me sobbing and I felt like she was the child.” This was a critical moment. Scared by her mother’s frailty, Madonna would develop a lifelong aversion to weakness. “I knew I could be either sad and weak and not in control, or I could just take control and say it’s going to get better.”
Despite her lax discipline with the children, Madonna Sr. was a trooper. She was remembered as “forgiving and angelic.” A former dancer and lover of classical music, she had grace, poise, and considerable quiet inner strength. She laughed and joked with her children whenever possible, tried to keep up with the housework, and pretended nothing was wrong; but the strain showed. She spent a year going in and out of the hospital. Then, on December 1, 1963, nine days after the assassination of President Kennedy, she slipped away. She was only thirty years old.
In her teenage years Madonna read Anne Sexton, and discussed with her sisters how much the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet looked like Madonna Sr. Sexton’s poetry resonated with her, no doubt because of its intense exploration of life, art, and death. Like many of the women Madonna admires, from Sylvia Plath to Virginia Woolf and Frida Kahlo, Sexton had a troubled life, fighting depression and inner torment. And, like the work of these women, her work was highly personal, often autobiographical, and laced at times with gallows humor. Sexton committed suicide in 1974, after publishing eight collections of poetry that combined beat style with high-art Romanticism and a graphic sense of the emerging feminism. Her economy of language and unflinching look at death in poems such as “Madonna,” which was about the death of Sexton’s mother from cancer, would surface later as an influence on Madonna’s later albums. But in the early 1970s, to a teenage girl missing her mother and looking for answers, Sexton’s poetry just offered a strange kind of solace.
Madonna Sr.’s funeral was held in 1963 at the Visitation Church in Bay City, the same church where she had gotten married eight years previously. She was laid in an open casket, decked out like an angel. Only one thing was askew. Her mouth, as Madonna remarked many years later, “looked funny.” When she got closer and peered at her mother’s face, she saw that Madonna Sr.’s lips had been sewn together. This nightmarish image was to haunt her for years to come, and it was one she appeared to have later captured on the somber black-and-white video for “Oh Father.” After her death, Madonna Sr. was symbolically silenced. The angel of the house, the humble martyr, could never again speak her truth, could never tell her daughters what her life was really like, could never grow old with them, could never mature and in that maturing show her fallibility, her doubts and in securities as well as her wisdom. Instead all that was preserved were a few precious photographs, some enigmatic Super 8 film of family occasions, and a pristine memory of perfection that could never be tarnished. For Madonna Jr., her mother’s perceived purity was a standard that was also impossible for her to live up to.
No wonder Madonna’s work is littered with allusions to secrecy and the need for disclosure, with urgent exhortations to speak out and express oneself. “I hardly said a word, I couldn’t stop her talking,” remembers Pet Shop Boys vocalist Neil Tennant, who interviewed her as a Smash Hits journalist in the early 1980s. Many friends remark on her garrulousness, her need to verbalize
what she is wrestling with at any given moment. In interviews she is articulate, wordy, sometimes using words as a shield to protect herself from people she accuses of trying to “rape [her] soul.”
Madonna’s journey through songwriting started here. First, as a former boyfriend and DJ Mark Kamins says, through “nursery rhymes” that projected the artful innocence of her five-year-old self, a Dionysian celebration of loving and dancing, a world populated by angels and heroes. Then there was the searching, rebellious phase, the questions about religion, sex, and erotica; and then there was the movement toward spiritual transformation, political doubt, and a new kind of transcendence. The restlessness, however, would never be resolved.
Madonna’s life has been set up in opposition to her mother’s. If her mother’s silence meant death, then she would speak out. If her mother’s illness meant sleep was dangerous, because one could die in her sleep, well, then, she would stay awake. If her mother’s body failed her, Madonna would make sure she was in peak physical condition. She chose dance, not just as her primary means of expression but also as a way of exhibiting physical strength and stamina, feeling alive and rooted in the present. “Sometimes I just assume I’m going to live forever,” she once declared. “I don’t want to die. It’s the ultimate unknown. I don’t want to go to the dark beyond.” She avoided drugs and alcohol, because anything that tranquilized the spirit was a mini-death, a threat to her being focused and “knowing where everything is.” A friend suggests that Madonna doesn’t reflect. “She just doesn’t do it. She has no interest in what she did last week, let alone ten years ago. It’s accomplish one thing, then on to the next.”
Madonna has talked about “growing up fast” after her mother’s death, and learning to rely on no one but herself. According to the groundbreaking psychologist John Bowlby, “the most frightening characteristic of a dead animal or a dead person is their immobility. What more natural, therefore, for a child who is afraid he may die than for him to keep moving.” He also identified “overactivity and…compulsive self-reliance” as a disorder that often develops after childhood bereavement.
At odds with this picture, though, was the grief-stricken five-year-old who became agoraphobic, who couldn’t leave the house without being physically sick, who stayed close to her father, almost clinging to him for comfort. “For five years after she died, I dreamed every night of people jumping on me and trying to strangle me,” she once said. Madonna also became what Bowlby termed a “compulsive caregiver,” looking after her younger siblings and replacing her mother as the next little mother of the household. For as long as her father remained a widower, grieving and single, she could continue under the illusion that she now fulfilled that crucial role. In later years, she acted that part with her dancers, proclaiming that she was mother to them all, a common instinct with choreographers keen to keep their company intact and working as a team.
A succession of housekeepers were employed to keep the Ciccone tribe in check. But like the governesses dispatched by the Von Trapp family in The Sound of Music, or those repelled by the children in Nanny McPhee, they never lasted more than a few months. That was until the disciplined but devoted Joan Gustafson arrived. Until then, a bereaved Tony Ciccone had retreated and buried himself in his work, struggling to keep his young family together. Like the traditional Victorian patriarch, he couldn’t do it on his own—he needed a woman to nurture his six motherless children. Joan coaxed him out of his shell, and within six months the two were married. At the age of eight, Madonna was usurped. On top of losing her mother, she was abandoned by her father, the person with whom she felt she had a special relationship.
From that point, she began to develop a tough emotional edge. You can see it in the family pictures: a prepubescent Madonna, long brown hair cascading to her waist, one hand placed possessively on her father’s arm, looking uncertain, haunted, into the camera. Uncertainty dogged her, but anger replaced the earlier sadness. She rebelled against her stepmother, Joan, refusing to call her “Mom” and flouting her rules. In her mother’s death, Madonna found a curious kind of liberation. “I think the biggest reason I was able to express myself and not be intimidated was by not having a mother. Women are traditionally raised to be subservient, passive…the man is supposed to be the pioneer. He makes the money, he makes the rules. I know that…my lack of inhibition comes from my mother’s death,” she once said. “For example, mothers teach you manners. And I absolutely did not learn any of those rules and regulations.”
Madonna did not grow up with a constant model of motherhood, but in the end, that gave her an alternative way of looking at the world. In 1976, the feminist poet Adrienne Rich wrote: “Mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr.” In her flawless devotion to her religion and her family, Madonna Sr. provided a model of selflessness. “Catholicism is a very masochistic religion. And I saw my mother doing things that really affected me. She was passionately religious, swooning with it,” Madonna remembered.
Madonna Sr. had been influenced by Jansenism, an interpretation of Catholic doctrine formulated in the seventeenth century by the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen. A product of the Reformation, it was Catholicism with a Puritan streak, marked by an austere, pessimistic view of life. According to theologian Richard McBrien: “It promoted the theory of predestination and a morally rigorous style of Christian life…Since Original Sin has so radically corrupted human nature, everything purely natural is evil. Grace is given only to the few.” It was popular in France, becoming a key part of the training of many priests, and was transplanted with the immigrant population to French-speaking Canada. “Much of pre–Vatican II U.S. Catholicism’s obsession with sexual morality,” continues McBrien, “and its relatively narrow eucharistic piety (e.g., infrequent reception of Communion and then only after ‘going to Confession’) has been linked…to this Jansenist influence.”
Much has been made of Madonna’s Italian Catholic background, but her mother’s French side is just as strong. French Catholicism is a defining force, a source of energy for worldwide Catholicism. Her mother’s faith was about living a life of holiness, with a daily examination of conscience. The theory of Original Sin is that one is born with alienation from God, and a believer has to work his or her way back to God through daily prayer. For Madonna Sr., every day was, in a sense, working toward her death, as the quality of her passing was dependent on how she lived her life. Her devotional practice—whether it was stringent fasting, kneeling on rice, or sleeping on coat hangers—involved pain and perseverance. Though Madonna Sr. nurtured her young family with kindness and compassion, she also did so with a stringent sense of self-discipline, assuming her mothering role with the seriousness of a vocation.
“My mother was a religious zealot,” Madonna said later. “There were always nuns and priests in my house growing up. I don’t know how curious my mother was, how much she pushed to know what was going on behind the curtain, and that’s my personality—I want to know what’s going on behind what I can see…my mother was certain she was doing the right thing, so maybe we have that in common.” As a small girl, Madonna imbibed this holy atmosphere. On the Good Friday before Easter her mother would cover up all the religious pictures and statues in the house with purple cloth. “Until Christ rose from the dead. I thought it a bizarre ritual but quite beautiful,” Madonna said. She was also aware of her mother covering up the Sacred Heart statues when a woman once came in wearing jeans. Much later Madonna referenced this image with a close-up of the crotch of her denim jeans on the cover of her 1989 Like a Prayer album. The jeans also appeared with a working zipper on a limited edition of the single “Express Yourself.” In her mother’s day, jeans amounted to sacrilege. According to the doctrine of Enthronement, having a Sacred Heart image was like having a priest in your home. As religious writer Joseph P. Chinnici suggests, “It’s a central act, the placement of the picture of the Sacred Heart in a prominent place, accompanied by the family’s commitment to pray�
��for society’s apostasy, was consciously directed against the forces of divorce, irreligious education, the violation of the sanctity of marriage, and the ‘campaign against Christian standards of modesty in dress, in the press and in the movies.’”
GIRLS USUALLY begin a gradual separation from their mothers at puberty, but Madonna had to make that separation much earlier. With her mother’s death, she felt psychologically free in a way that was unusual for a girl of her generation. As therapists Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach argue, “When a woman gives birth to a daughter she is in a sense reproducing herself…Mother must prepare her for a life spent, like hers, in taking care of others. Mother, whether she is consciously aware of it or not, must also prepare her daughter to take her place in society as a second-class citizen.”
A woman learns from her mother how to suppress her own needs, and passes this on to her daughter. Instead of absorbing this ambivalent message, the young Madonna shifted identification to her father. According to Eichenbaum and Orbach, the father is “the link to the world outside the family, and the daughter must use him as access to that world…Father encourages his daughter to charm him and a male audience, to attract and hold his attention in specifically defined feminine ways, as she will later need to do.” Teenage girls often identify with Daddy as a way of gaining independence, but for Madonna, this process started early. The “showing panties” stories are legion: At any given opportunity she would do gymnastics, show off, or flip up her skirt at the boys. She was acting out teenage anxiety before she was even a preteen. She was preparing her way in the world from the age of five, and her model—proactive, self-determining, goal-centered—was male.