by Lucy O'Brien
ONE OF Madonna’s first, primary relationships was with her audience. It has been remarked that although they were very volatile, the Ciccone family “didn’t seem that close.” Consciously ignoring stepmother Joan, competitive with her siblings, and craving attention from her hardworking father, Madonna grew up with a deep longing to be touched. Physicality has always been important to her, not just through sex and the dynamics of relationship but also in the connection she experiences with an audience. While she performs, the audience feeds back her own pulsating energy.
She has always had an awareness of dress, of costume, of disguise. The nuns at Saint Andrew’s, her Catholic elementary school, fascinated her, because they wore long, dark habits. Curious about what lay beneath these mysterious clothes, she and a friend would climb up to convent windows to spy on them undressing.
She recognized their power.
The nuns’ habits were symbolic of their status as brides in mourning. When a nun took her vows, it was as if she were marrying Christ. She would lie prostrate before the altar (an image that Madonna has replicated in both her Sex book and her Confessions tour), as a declaration of love for the Holy Spirit. Because priests and nuns remain celibate, there is a seam of repressed sexuality in Catholicism. As a result of that repression, sexuality becomes the focus.
Early on, Madonna felt compelled to acknowledge the sexual undertow she felt in Catholic teaching. Chafing against Joan’s insistence on dressing all the Ciccone girls in clothes cut from identical patterns, Madonna found ways to assert her own style—whether it was wearing tight sweaters, short skirts, and red lipstick, à la 1950s floozy, or going to church in a coat and nothing on underneath. She made it her mission to solder that connection between sex and spirituality and this was the link that she was to make in her work, over and over, for years to come.
2
A MAGICAL PLACE
IN 1968, MADONNA’S FAMILY MOVED FROM PONTIAC TO A bigger house in the more affluent suburb of Rochester. Her father was doing well in his career, working as an optics and defense engineer for General Dynamics. The house where she spent her teenage years was at 2036 Oklahoma Street, Rochester Hills, a colonial-style building with a generous garden surrounded by pine trees and poplars.
“Even though people thought our parents were crazy for living in Rochester, saying ‘How could you live out there? All the way out there?’, it was a real comfortable place to grow up,” Kim Drayton told me. A woman who was at school with Madonna, she has warm memories of their hometown. “You could ride your bike three miles into town, and there was a big forest behind our subdivision that we could explore. In the summertime you’d leave in the morning and not come back till dinner. You’d have lunch at a friend’s house or pack and go somewhere, ride your bike through the woods or by the fields.” When Madonna was young, Rochester was a new suburb on the edge of the countryside, near dirt roads, farms, and open fields. Kim paints an idyllic picture of a close-knit community of young families: “It was a huge mixture of families. Just about everybody worked for the car companies. All the dads, I should say, as back then moms didn’t work outside the home. And just about everybody went to church, and you knew everybody in the church.”
Madonna’s family went to Saint Andrew’s church, a large concrete 1960s affair decorated with iron sculptures of Christ and vivid stained-glass windows. The car park is spacious—Drayton asserts that in its heyday, on a Sunday it would be full. The Ciccone family were regulars there, and made an impact in the neighborhood. “They were a big Catholic family. I remember her dad looking old, kind of weathered. And her stepmom, very attractive,” says Kim. Her mother, Maree Cooper, worked with Joan as a teacher’s aid at the elementary school. “Joan was a wonderful, wonderful girl. She had two younger ones—Jennifer, a sweet girl, and Mario, a little guy who was great with video equipment. Every time we had a problem we went to him, he was so mechanical. Joan was very concerned about her children, particularly those two,” she recalls. “Whenever we needed her we could call on her. You couldn’t say that for everyone.” As for Madonna’s father, Maree met him only once or twice. “He was a very quiet little man. Not at all like his daughter!”
The Ciccone children were a mixed bunch. According to a former classmate, Martin was “flamboyant, loud, and kind of obnoxious. He was quite over the top, and later he did try and take advantage of his relationship with Madonna.” Anthony was “very smart and quiet and kept himself to himself,” while Christopher, an agile dancer with a strong artistic flair, turned out to have the most in common with his famous sister. However, he was always more guarded. “I’m a very private person and not terribly gregarious. I cherish the privacy that I have and I’m sorry that she doesn’t have as much,” he once said. “But that’s what she wanted—I don’t need to be a star.”
As for the girls, Paula is fiercely independent and a little more angular than her sister. “She was really nice, not as eccentric as Madonna,” remembers Kim. “Madonna had the looks, she was very attractive, even way back then, but Paula was always very plain, not a lot of makeup, not being a cheerleader or anything like that.” Melanie, too, had some of that Ciccone quirkiness. “She was half blonde and half brunette, and I remember her being different…being, you know, just different,” Kim laughs. Then there was Madonna’s half brother and sister, Mario and Jennifer. As the eldest girl, Madonna was required to change nappies and help with household chores. She doesn’t recall this period as being much fun. “I resented it, because when all my friends were out playing, I felt like I had all these adult responsibilities…. I saw myself as the quintessential Cinderella.”
The children went to the same schools, moving from Saint Andrew’s elementary to West Junior High, a squat, square building on Old Perch Road in Rochester. The move marked a transition in Madonna’s development as a performer—she took tap and jazz lessons, and began to act in school productions. The turning point came at the age of twelve, when she shocked the audience at the school talent show by dancing to The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” wearing little more than a fluorescent body stocking. Her father was not impressed. A disciplinarian at home, he felt uneasy with his daughter appearing so publicly “out of control.” Madonna’s eldest brother, Martin, remembered a home life where certain values held sway. “I wouldn’t call it strict, I’d call it conservative. My father was a strong believer in leadership, maintaining a competitive edge, pray, do well at school, and you will reap the rewards of your investment.”
Yet although Madonna rebelled against sartorial rules and criticized the double standards that meant her brothers could get away with behavior she couldn’t, she has always had a deeply conventional streak. A straight-A student (spurred on by the extra pocket money Tony Ciccone gave if one of his children had a good report card), she knew how to play the system from the start. “Bitch never had to study, man. Never. Got straight As,” recalled Martin. “I studied all the time but my mind wasn’t on it. I did it because I was supposed to. Madonna did it ’cause she knew it would get her on to the next phase.” And maybe Tony’s financial reward for achievement planted in Madonna’s psyche the need to always make her art a commercial success.
In 1972 she transferred to Adams High, a large, brand-new school on the corner of Tienken and Adams, next to open fields and golf courses. It attracted higher-income families. “Kids nicknamed it the Country Club,” says Drayton. “Those of us who had gone to West Junior High divided into those who went to Adams High, and those who went to Rochester. We became rivals in all of our games. Rochester was downtown, and because of the way the boundary lines were split, the Adams area was more high-income.” Here, the aspiring Madonna gained the ultimate marker of social status and acceptance by joining the cheerleading squad. It seems strange that, with her nonconformist streak, Madonna opted for such a conventional role in high school. But this combination of athletics and choreography was a physical outlet for her. It also gave her a degree of power among her peers.
“High
school campuses are like little villages, and being a cheerleader is the apex of female status in that hierarchy,” suggests Dr. Wendy Fonarow, writer and anthropologist at UCLA. “You can wear cute, sexy skirts that are very appealing. It’s provocative dress that’s socially sanctioned. Cheerleading is the high school ideal; you can use it to solidify your queen bee status. And there’s prestige for guys going out with cheerleaders; it’s a great way for a girl to get noticed. For the cheerleaders and football players, high school is often the best time of their lives. They’re the kings and queens of their universe.”
Adams High has a well-equipped mini-stadium. You walk down a slope at the side of the concrete school building to the football field at the end. Though windy and exposed, this is an atmospheric place. It feels carefully tended and well-loved, and it is easy to imagine the young teenage Madonna executing her choreographed moves here, getting her first taste of crowd adulation. “In her junior year, she looked very mainstream. She was part of the ‘Kids Lend a Hand’ program, where older students helped out the younger ones,” recalls Kim. “A lot of those girls were cheerleaders; most of them were very smart. Now it’s about the show-offs, but back then it was those who were smart, pretty, and popular. If you weren’t all those things, you never tried out for cheerleading. You didn’t fit, so to speak.”
Madonna took part in the teenage party scene. Although she wasn’t a big drinker, the social whirl revolved around alcohol. “We used to go out drinking all the time,” says Kim. “Then there were still a lot of dirt roads in the area, so we’d meet at the gravel pit and bring liquor and there’d be big parties until the cops came. People would have live bands and kegs of beer at their parties. We’d pay five bucks and it was all-you-could-drink. I remember we’d rent out rooms at the Spartan Motel, and have parties there.” Madonna’s father observed a fairly strict curfew, however, so sometimes she had to sneak out under cover of darkness to go to a party.
Popular, sexually curious, and never short of boyfriends, Madonna lost her virginity at the age of fifteen, to a high school heartthrob, Russell Long. After a spell of long trysts in the back of his light blue 1966 Cadillac, Madonna shifted her attention to a school football player, Nick Twomey (now a reverend in Traverse City, Michigan). Both have described her as a sensitive, confused person, troubled by her family relationships. Although her outward persona was the alpha-female loudmouth, that was misleading. Because she was upfront and flirtatious, she was branded by some of her peers as a slut, but Madonna has protested that she was never promiscuous; she slept only with her steady boyfriends. Here we have a misreading that set the tone for the rest of her life’s choices. On one level, she has been perceived as a shameless, publicity-hungry harlot who makes run-of-the-mill pop music. On another level, there is the thoughtful artist who turned herself into a vivid spectacle. Achievement and approval were clearly important to her, but she also cultivated a rich inner life—one that was questing and nonconformist from the start.
Like the anti-cheerleaders dressed in somber black in the Nirvana video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” with their limp pompoms and blood-red anarchy signs on their vests, Madonna took a sudden left turn. She drifted away from the jocks to ballet, bohemianism, and existentialism. “There was a real transformation,” recalls Kim. “In the sophomore year, she was a cheerleader, with smiles on her face and long hair and very attractive, then by her senior year she had short hair. She was in the thespian society, and she didn’t shave her legs anymore, you know, like all of us did, and she didn’t shave her armpits. Everyone was like, ‘Oh, what happened to her?’ She was popular as a cheerleader, then became very individual, so different from everybody else. She didn’t smile so much and was kind of standoffish.”
Wyn Cooper, a former date and close friend, remembers Madonna as one of the few students who moved between groups. “Adams High was a school that was divided between the jocks, those into sports, and the freaks, who were into smoking pot and cigarettes and not going to class. Madonna was a cheerleader, so that put her into the jock category, but she was also a free spirit and thinker, so that put her more in the freak category.”
Cooper met Madonna when she was fourteen and had just transferred to Adams High. He was a year ahead of her, and quite struck by her. “She wandered around our neighborhood with a couple of other young girls, and one day came over to my house. I remember thinking, There’s an interesting, pretty girl. She seemed kind of shy. We developed a friendship and hung out.” He remembers their high school as being predominantly middle-class. “The school had money, so it got high-quality teachers. There was also rampant drug abuse—mainly pot, also acid and mushrooms and a lot of drinking. I had a Mercury Capri with an eight-track tape player and giant cassettes. Madonna and I would hop in the car, drive around, and listen to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars while enjoying a little marijuana.” Though Madonna said later that she wasn’t interested in drugs, it seems she wasn’t averse to a little teenage experimentation.
The picture he paints is at odds with the received notion of Madonna the teenager as endless feisty party girl. “She was a little bit aloof. She took herself more seriously than most of us did at that age. She kept to herself more than most, she didn’t run around in cliques. She read more than your average high school student,” says Cooper. “I read a book a day. School was good but it wasn’t challenging for me. She’d ask me what I was reading, and I’d pass books on to her. She loved Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Aldous Huxley.” Now an established poet and songwriter (his poem “Fun” was turned into Sheryl Crow’s 1993 Grammy Award–winning song “All I Wanna Do”), Cooper impressed Madonna with his pithy poetry. “She used to say, ‘When you grow up you’re going to be my favorite poet.’”
Cooper saw another side to her one day. “It was really hot, so I said, ‘D’you want to go skinny-dipping?’ I ripped my clothes off and dove into a pond. She slowly stripped off her clothes. I was stunned. She usually wore loose-fitting clothes and didn’t stand out as extraordinarily beautiful, but underneath she had a perfect body.” Cooper dated her a few times, but their romance didn’t take off, as they had more in common as friends. Once he made a short 8-mm film with her, as part of a high school project. It featured Madonna and her best friend, Carol Belanger, in bikinis by a swimming pool.
“It’s a silly little film with eggs at the center of it,” recalls Cooper. Madonna stands facing the camera, takes a raw egg, cracks it above her head, and lets it drip into her mouth. The camera watches as it drips down her chin between her breasts. She then lies down on the deck and Carol cracks a raw egg onto Madonna’s stomach. With a quick, surreal twist, the egg is fried on the stomach. “For that shot Carol went into the house and fried an egg. I spliced the film together with Scotch tape. Suddenly a fried egg is sitting there. Carol puts salt and pepper on it and eats the egg off Madonna’s stomach. I painted the closing credits across a urinal and got a friend to stand to the side and slowly piss it off. I’m very proud of it. I got an A for it in film class!”
With its subliminal hint of lesbian erotica, the film was Madonna’s first foray into acting. “It was the first time she appeared in a film. It was also a film that focused on her navel—which became her logo.” With Cooper, Madonna started exploring an interest in the arts that was to blossom later when she went to New York. Although she had an ease and charm popular with the “jock” section of the school, there was a side to Madonna that had yet to be expressed.
“She wasn’t an overly charismatic personality. You’d never have guessed she’d become a world-famous pop star. That’s why it was so surprising to many of us when she became big. I remember going to the store and seeing her face on an album. I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s her. I don’t believe it!’ Everyone was very shocked. How did she get to be there? It seemed like such a big change,” says Cooper.
Madonna the stage persona was an invention, a powerful projection fed by a childhood diet of Hollywood films, Broadway musicals, and of
fbeat poetry. It was as if this fermented inside her for years until she found the right outlet for her talent. “The only thing that stood out was how well she could dance,” recalls Cooper. “Everyone would get out of the way and watch her. She combined The Temptations with little syncopated routines, a cross between that and modern dance and Broadway musical. Her thing was a real mishmash, but it worked.” Kim Drayton, too, remembers how Madonna’s true self seemed to shine on the dance floor. “She danced incredibly and so different from everyone else. It was a kind of showstopper. I remember thinking, ‘Oh wow, she can dance!’”
What spurred Madonna’s move from cheerleader to bohemian was ballet. By the age of fifteen, she had outgrown high school politics and popularity contests, and reached the limits of local jazz and tap classes. Looking for something more rigorous and demanding, Madonna joined an evening ballet class in a second-floor studio on Main Street in Rochester. This was where she met Christopher Flynn, thirty years her senior. He was her dance teacher, mentor, and the most important man in her life after her father.
AS SOON AS she met Christopher Flynn, her life took off. Not only did he demand from Madonna complete dedication to her craft, but he also broadened her influences, encouraged her reading and her interest in fine art. He took her to concerts and art galleries in Detroit, and they went dancing in gay clubs. “Madonna was a blank page, believe me, and she wanted desperately to be filled in,” he once said. “She had a thirst for learning…that would not be denied.”
Madonna’s escapades in Detroit separated her from her schoolmates. The race riots of 1967 had left the area in turmoil. Car-manufacturing industries were beginning to pull out of the city, and there were marked social divisions. “Detroit was a no-go area in the 70s,” recalls Kim. “Back then, it was, ‘Black people live in Detroit’ and you don’t go there, you don’t mix with those kind of people. My grandparents lived on Woodward Avenue, at Nine Mile, and you were never allowed to go to Eight Mile. You know, Eminem’s Eight Mile. That was the dividing line between white and black, between right and wrong.”