by Lucy O'Brien
Despite the racial prejudice that divided the city and its suburbs, there was a rich musical cross-pollination that Madonna grew up with, and which later influenced her sound. Right back to her early childhood in Pontiac, she had a strong interest in black style. She remembered dancing in backyards to Motown 45s with her black girlfriends. “None of the white kids I knew would ever do that,” she said. “I wanted to be a part of the dancing…I had to be beaten up so many times by these little black girls before they would accept me, and finally one day they whipped me with a rubber hose till I was, like, lying on the ground crying. And then they just stopped doing it all of a sudden and let me be their friend, part of their group.” Madonna’s backyard dancing gave her the edge over her white schoolmates, an understanding of what was musically hip.
“Like everything else in Detroit, it goes back to the automobile, and specifically the black Southerners who migrated here in the early twentieth century and brought music traditions with them,” says Brian McCollum, music critic for the Detroit Free Press. “It’s one of the ironies of Detroit that it’s considered to be one of the most segregated cities in the United States, but in the cultural sphere there has always been a mingling of black and white. You saw it with Motown, which was basically a group of black musicians and entrepreneurs catering not just to a black audience but, in a big way, to a white audience for the first time.”
The automobile industry created a new, more prosperous blue-collar class, which allowed a vigorous nightlife to flourish. There was a collision of R&B and rock with white 60s and 70s artists like Mitch Ryder, Ted Nugent, and Bob Seger. “They were literally just imitating black singers. Today, Eminem and Kid Rock are obvious examples of white stars who’ve latched onto black music forms,” McCollum adds. Because of the lack of a public transit system, people in Detroit drove everywhere in their cars, and by the 1950s radio became very important. There were numerous stations playing an eclectic range of music. “Madonna would have been exposed to that simply by being a typical Detroit-area teenager, turning on her radio after school. She would’ve been hearing stuff on WGLB, the big black station. It was a really vibrant place. You could kind of soak it up like a sponge.”
On her trips to downtown Detroit, Madonna also became aware of gay culture, which in the early 1970s was totally taboo. “Just leaving Rochester, our safe little haven, and seeing the world in Detroit’s eyes would be so different,” says Kim. “And back then homosexuality wasn’t even discussed.” Just as Madonna’s adult self was emerging at the age of sixteen, she found a gay man to make sense of her world. For a young woman raised in stultifying suburbia, negotiating her way around the straight binary gender politics of high school, the gay underground represented freedom and release. “In school I felt like such a misfit…I kept seeing myself through macho heterosexual eyes. Because I was a really aggressive woman, guys thought of me as a really strange girl. I know I frightened them. I didn’t add up for them. They didn’t want to ask me out. I felt inadequate,” she said later. “And suddenly when I went to the gay club, I didn’t feel that way anymore. I just felt at home. I had a whole new sense of myself.”
In the mid-1970s, pre-AIDS, this subculture was buoyed up by the exuberant campaigns of the gay liberation movement. In its hedonistic pursuit of pleasure there was a theatricality and creativity that captivated her and became one of her key reference points.
The main club that Flynn took Madonna to was Menjo’s. Originally a ritzy supper club where Al Capone used to take his mistress, it opened as one of Detroit’s premier gay night spots in December 1974.
“It was the hottest dance club in the city. We were open seven days a week from noon to two a.m., and there were always people waiting in line,” recalls one of the cofounders, Randy Frank. “Madonna used to come here and act all crazy and giddy and dance around. She was the center of attention. She didn’t drink, she was just the life of the party. She was a cool chick, really outgoing. She had beautiful eyes. I remember her eyes—God, they were beautiful.”
Then a classic 70s nightclub with mirrors on the wall, carpeting on the floor, and an expansive dance floor dominated by a huge mirror ball, Menjo’s was a hot venue in a new era of freedom for gay men. Until the Stonewall riots in 1969, when crowds of gay and transsexual people clashed with New York City police and created a watershed moment for gay rights worldwide, homosexuals going to bars were regularly harassed and victimized. “In the 60s there was a Detroit bar called Woodward that was constantly being raided. My uncle was bailed out once a month. He’d get busted and beaten up going in and out of the bars. Young gays don’t realize how good they got it now,” says Frank. “When Menjo’s opened in the 70s, it was still technically illegal in Michigan to promote ‘sexual deviancy.’ Luckily the guy next door was friendly with the police department, and so, they left us alone.” Frank remembers how the disco scene “brought us out of the closet.” He paints a vivid picture of a Sunday tea dance at three-thirty, packed to the gills with eight hundred people. Co-owner with Frank was a charismatic man named Michael Crawford, who ran the place “like Michigan’s Studio 54, but without the promiscuity and the drugs. This bar put gayness on the map. We were legendary.”
Madonna drew on its energy and danced to hundreds of disco classics there, from KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That’s The Way I Like It” to Earth Wind & Fire’s “Twelfth of Never.” She continued going there even after she left Detroit. There are mixed memories of the early Madonna. Richard Hojna, a barman at the club since 1975, says: “She was just a little girl from Rochester. That was before she was ‘Madonna.’ She liked to party, but none of us thought she’d be anyone special. She was just one of the crowd.” To Crawford (who passed away in 1988), though, Madonna had a dynamic quality. “He was flamboyant in a classy, dignified way,” remembers Frank. “‘Nothing but the best for my customers,’ he’d say. He’d go crazy to put on a party and make people happy. He had this energy about him. Madonna got his attention, and he got hers.”
Madonna has described herself as a “gay man trapped in a woman’s body,” motivated by the Hollywood sirens of high camp. She once asked Christopher Flynn why he was attracted to men, saying “I wish I understood it.” Even in her early student days, she was keen to tap into the gay sensibility. “Look at women like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe,” she said. “I wish I knew what it is about them. Is it the glamour? Is it their behavior?” When Flynn suggested that it was because of their air of tragedy, something gay men as an oppressed group could identify with, Madonna scoffed: “Forget it, I could never be tragic.” What she did pick up on, however, was these divas’ love of extravagant artifice and heightened sense of irony.
To the teenage Madonna, Flynn was a love object, an older man who was a guide to the theatrical world she craved, safe because he was gay. “He was my mentor, my father, my imaginative lover, my everything,” she has said. It made her less vulnerable to exploitation, it gave her psychic space. He created the perfect dynamic for her: career opportunities and artistic passion. She responded well to his strict regime of ballet lessons, and lapped up the freewheeling “street” education he gave her in the fine arts. It was also in the gay clubs that she discovered her own bisexual identity and yen for sexual experimentation.
DESPITE HER confident, A-student persona, Madonna felt like a misfit. Flynn was the first person who made her feel beautiful. “I knew I was voluptuous for my age, but I’d never had a sense of myself being beautiful until he told me,” she said. Thanks to his attention to discipline and fine, expressive lines of ballet, she was able to find herself. “I feel superior. I feel a warrior,” she declared. A dedicated teacher of dance, Flynn had a slightly sadistic edge, making his students dance until their feet bled, or pinching their thighs to make them stretch higher, or holding a sharp pencil between a dancer’s throat and chin to make sure she kept her head straight. Madonna was undeterred by this—maybe her desire to create the ideal physical shape echoed her mother’s own strenuous e
fforts at perfection.
As her artistic world opened up, Madonna withdrew from her classmates in the senior class and changed her appearance. She wore dungarees, combat boots, and no makeup. Friends were shocked at the transformation. “The wisecracks were out,” remembered one. “She became almost like a gypsy,” said another. Much has been made of Madonna as a postmodern icon, yet all her reference points have been resolutely modernist—from Steinbeck and Fitzgerald to Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, to her predilection for narrative, psychoanalysis, and personal exploration. In the same way that she later created a succession of images, Madonna adopted the look of beat-poet bohemian, and the aloof attitude to go with it.
By 1976, she was already “outta there.” As her friend Wyn Cooper says, “She, like many of us, got the hell out as soon as we could. We knew there was a bigger, more interesting world out there.” Madonna was to take the work ethic of Detroit and apply it to her show-business career. “She was a product of her environment,” says Brian McCollum. “I’ve heard people say here, ‘I knew a Madonna in high school. I knew somebody who had that personality and that attitude and that vibe.” Detroit turned out many self-motivators because, according to songwriter Gardner Cole, a native from the area, “There was nothing to do. The winters are so brutally long there, unless you’re into snowmobiling or ice-fishing there’s nothing to do but stay indoors. We called it ‘wood-shedding.’ Like if you were into music, you’d go into a room and keep playing and playing. It’s not like L.A. We didn’t have a beach to hang out on. So, later on, when some of us went out West, we’d run circles around everybody, because we were much more driven.”
COMBINING THAT driving energy with judicious application, Madonna graduated from Adams High a semester early. Backed up by Flynn, she won a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It was here that her horizons truly broadened. By the time she arrived at the University of Michigan, Christopher Flynn had taken up a professorship in the dance department, so he was able to continue tutoring his young protégée. A laid-back, pleasant college town half an hour west of Detroit, with “dreaming spires” and alternative cafés, it was a comfortable place for her to be. One of the top colleges in the United States, it has been dubbed “the Harvard of Michigan.” The dance department is part of the Performing Arts faculty, with spacious, airy dance studios. “Michigan’s long tradition of academic excellence and strong technique training is sure to put its dancers on the edge of the evolution of dance,” asserts Bill DeYoung, chair of the department. “It’s about using your discipline of dance as your creative voice, and then finding your own way, finding your vocabulary. I mean, we want rebels. Modern dance is an art form of constant rebels.”
Madonna was a typical dance student in that she had an intellectual curiosity, good time management, and was very driven. At seventeen, she cut a coltish, sassy figure. Determined to be different and follow her own rules, she would come to ballet class chewing gum and wearing a cut-up leotard held together with safety pins. “It was a punk look but really it was childish, a little girl desperate for attention,” recalls one of her fellow students, Linda Alaniz. Competitive with other dancers, Madonna was disappointed if she wasn’t always the best.
Madonna lived at the stately Stockbridge Hall dorm on campus, and her roommate there, Whitley Setrakian, remembered her as “brilliant, articulate, and very, very thin.” Rebellious in a lighthearted way, Madonna was happy to give herself over to the discipline of dance, with two ninety-minute technique classes a day and two hours of rehearsal for college performances. Desperate to have the approval of Professor Flynn, she lived on a diet of popcorn to achieve the sylph-like body image he desired. At the start of every class, he would make students weigh in, and if they were over 115 pounds, he’d exhort them to shed the extra weight. “I’m sure at the time (Madonna) was borderline anorexic,” said Alaniz. Flynn was exacting, but laced his lessons with a dry humor. “He always had a cigarette in his mouth, even when he was teaching,” recalls DeYoung. “He was puckish, but wise. He had a wicked sense of humor, and those students with a more worldly sense were drawn to him and hooked into his sensibility. He’d play a character to a certain extent to shake up people’s thinking.”
Madonna absorbed a great deal from Flynn, but she was also inspired by the charismatic Gay Delanghe, who taught at the faculty from 1974 until shortly before her death from cancer in August 2006. “She was a real card,” remembers DeYoung. “She was a feminist who battled with the male hierarchy. She stood up for what she believed in. There was a good chemistry between her and Madonna. I’ve heard that Madonna appreciated her honesty, and being herself. Certainly Madonna has no trouble being herself. There’s not a sense of looking for propriety. Propriety is a trap or a funnel for our consciousness.”
Delanghe went to Cass Technical High School in Detroit and was classmates with Lily Tomlin and Aretha Franklin. She worked as a dancer in New York City before coming to Ann Arbor. “If there was ever an example of indelible,” recalls another colleague, Peter Sparling, “it was the impression burned into my memory of a creature with a shock of red hair, infinitely long legs, and dagger feet as she bounded across the stage and hovered in midair.” To him, Delanghe was a potent role model for young women who wanted to emulate her “strength, persistence, and defiance in the face of all odds.”
Madonna responded well to her teachers, even though she found the classes “draining and demanding.” She still had energy to go clubbing at night with her girlfriends Whitley (now an Ann Arbor singer called Whit Hill), Linda, and another student, Janice Galloway. They would take over the floor at such Ann Arbor clubs as the Ruvia and the Blue Frogge. It was at the latter that she met Steve Bray, a local musician who played drums on the Detroit lounge circuit. He would become a key collaborator a few years later, but then she was just hanging out and dating him, along with a few other boyfriends. Bray found Madonna, whom he once described as “a force of nature…not completely human,” hard to pin down from the start. She liked to turn up at his gigs and dance. “I played drums in the Cost of Living band, and Madonna was one of two or three people at the venues dancing up a storm. In fact, I wondered if people came to the shows because they knew she’d be there dancing,” recalled Bray.
While Madonna enjoyed her flings with men, at college she began what would become a major pattern in her life—the need to have a significant female by her side. “She embarked on what seemed to be a calculated campaign to be my friend,” Whitley told writer Randy Taraborrelli. Though she enjoyed Madonna’s company, Whitley found her, underneath the bravado, to be needy and emotionally fragile. Madonna relied on her a great deal, and was physically very demonstrative. They would have long talks about Madonna’s dead mother, and Whitley felt her roommate was still mourning. Madonna was not simply looking for a mother substitute; it was as if she needed to envelop herself in female energy, at some level to be taken care of by a woman.
Not surprisingly, one of her key frames of reference was the woman-centered artist Martha Graham. Born in 1893 in Pennsylvania, Graham “was to modern dance what Pablo Picasso was to modern art.” She was the heroine of a movement that originated in the early 1900s, when dancers like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis rebelled against the rigid constraints of classical ballet with their own expressionistic interpretation of dance. Peter Sparling, who danced with Martha Graham in the early 70s, recalls how “she saw a challenge in herself to break me so that I didn’t dance to the music but that I assumed her mythic dimensions and personas that she created in her works…There was an eloquence and a poeticism about the way she spoke and the way she used images. Later on she could still generate this fierce visceral heat even as she was sitting in her director’s chair all shriveled up and arthritic.”
DESCRIBING DANCE as “the hidden language of the soul,” Graham looked for new ways of expressing emotion, and incorporated natural human actions, such as walking, running, and skipping. Ballet moves were seen as fossilized and un
real. As dance writer Deborah Jowitt says, “It was not natural to live on tiptoe and turn out 180 degrees.” Inspired by psychoanalysis, Freud, and Jungian theories of the unconscious, Graham drew on rich literary metaphor for her pieces—the poems of Emily Dickinson, for instance, or the writings of the Brontë sisters. She delved into her Puritan ancestry and American history, Greek myth and twentieth-century cinematography, to express something essential about American womanhood. For Madonna, this form of dance had an immediate, instinctive appeal. To a Catholic girl from the suburbs, it was exhilarating, female-centered, and free.
Her other main influence was Alvin Ailey, a black choreographer from a small town in Texas, who combined modern dance with ballet and African tribal dance. From the 1950s to his death in 1989, Ailey’s repertory company toured the world, acting as a kind of repository for black American choreography. His most famous work, Revelations, features gospel and rock ’n’ roll, and movements that are athletic, assured, and “as broad as California.” He saw dance as a democratizing force: “I don’t believe in the elitist philosophy where [people] believe that classical dance is beyond them. I always wanted to have the kind of company that my family in Texas could relate to; people on farms or the ghettos,” he once said. “We’re still building audiences in the United States. We’re trying to convince people that dance is for everybody. It should always be given back to the people.”
Ailey influenced a new generation of black choreographers, from the dark, expressive pieces of Pearl Lang to Twyla Tharp, whose work spanned Broadway musicals, movies, and modern dance. When Madonna went on to tear up those dance floors in New York, she wasn’t doing the latest disco shuffle. She was a whirling dervish of all her influences: “In the nightclub I was all over the place, I combined everything. Street dance, modern dance, a bit of jazz and ballet. I was Twyla Tharp, I was Alvin Ailey, I was Michael Jackson. I didn’t care, I was free,” she said. In her stage shows, she was to return again and again to those influences, using Graham’s style as her lodestone, and assembling her dancers with the same multicultural awareness as Ailey. “The dance floor was quite a magical place for me,” she said later. “The freedom that I always feel when I’m dancing, that feeling of inhabiting your body, letting yourself go, expressing yourself through music. I always have thought of it as a magical place.”