Her career is heating up and the world now seems to be revolving around her 24-7. “Burning Up/Physical Attraction” hits number three on the U.S. Hot Dance Music/Club Play Chart, and she releases her debut album, Madonna. She is still living on Broome Street, and no matter how much money she may now be making, she never mentions it. All I know is that she is well on her way to the top.
NOT LONG AFTER I first meet Danny, Madonna calls and tells me that the backup dancer who beat me to the job hasn’t worked out and she wants me to start dancing with her after all. Without skipping a beat, I say I will.
When Danny finds out, he says I am spineless for jumping at the chance to dance with her given our history. I don’t think I am. I know I am going on an adventure, and besides, at last I’m going to be dancing with my sister. Moreover, I owe her, because I love dancing, and if she hadn’t taken me with her to Christopher Flynn that night, I would never have become a dancer in the first place. Not only that, she introduced me to modern dance, and, at the Rubaiyat, to myself.
SO ON MOST Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, we work together on track dates, each of which lasts just twenty-five minutes, and when our time is up, we leave the club as quickly as possible. Madonna earns around $1,000 a night, depending on the club. The other dancer, Erika Bell, and I each make $200 or so. Not bad. So we dance behind Madonna with a mix of jazz, modern, and pop dancing. Simple stuff. Martin Burgoyne is roped in as our road manager and promoter and travels to the shows with us.
Every night is the same. An hour before the show—though to call it a show is a bit of an exaggeration—we arrive at the club and go to the always-shabby dressing room. Sometimes there is no dressing room at all, just the club manager’s office.
We wait around while Marty collects the cash. In the meantime, the three of us—Madonna, Erika, and I—go over the choreography of each song: “Holiday,” “Burning Up,” and “Physical Attraction.” During those discussions, Madonna listens to me, listens to Erika, and we all work out the exact details of how we are going to choreograph each song in each venue. Generally, we end up doing the same steps every night. During those discussions, we are all equal. Madonna isn’t bossy, though she obviously is the boss.
I’ve long since accepted that she’s no longer Madonna the serious modern dancer. She is a pop star now and is well on her way to becoming rich and famous. I believe in her talent as a performance artist and wish she were still a modern dancer, but am forced to concede that, in contrast to being a dancer, being a pop singer is relatively effortless. After all, a modern dancer has to sweat and train and dance until she drops. Nowadays, on track dates all Madonna has to do is sing to the track and bounce around with Erika and me behind her. Not so much cost to her body or her soul, but the route to mass adoration. Her ambition is in high gear, and her life is clearly now about moving forward, about making another record, about becoming famous.
I don’t look at her and think my sister is on the way to becoming a star. I am still a trifle disdainful of her switch from modern dance to pop, and it’s difficult to envision stardom when you’re all scrambling to change in a club manager’s grimy office somewhere in East Flatbush.
Erika and I dance behind Madonna at Studio 54, the Roxy, Area, the Pyramid, Paradise Garage, and Roseland. We go down to Fort Lauderdale and perform at the Copa, where I am a bit embarrassed for my sister because disco diva Sylvester is in the audience and Madonna isn’t very good that night. We play Uncle Sam’s on Long Island, where the crowd just stands still and stares at us. I find the whole experience extremely curious but it puts Madonna in a bad mood. When we drive back in the dark blue Lincoln Town Car Martin has rented for the night, she starts bitching that it cost too much and he shouldn’t waste money on expensive cars. But Martin holds his ground and counters that he would never have driven all that way in a minivan. She shuts up. I turn on the radio and we head back to Manhattan.
Most nights, though, we have a good time. After the show we all usually hang out and dance together. There is only one bad moment, a night at Roseland when Martin offers me some coke. My first line, and I hate it. Afterward, dancing onstage, I feel like a crazy person. I can’t remember any of the steps, as I twirl around and around and feel awful for the next few hours. I realize I can’t do drugs and dance.
“Holiday” has hit number one on the U.S. Hot Dance Music/ Club Play Chart. By now Madonna, Erika, Martin, and I are the coolest kids on the block, or so it seems to me. We get into all the clubs for free and rarely have to pay for drinks. Sometimes, I have the illusion that the four of us are all equal, but I know that isn’t the truth. For as much as we may work out our moves together, the primary reason for our gigs is to propel Madonna’s career to the next stage. Our track dates aren’t about us all becoming famous together, or Madonna and me becoming closer as brother and sister, but about her and nothing else. It’s fun, though, notwithstanding.
In May, when Madonna is performing “Holiday” at Studio 54, with Erika and me dancing behind her, she does finally meet Danny and is polite, but clearly indifferent to him. Through the years, she will treat him in much the same way as she always treats Joan—rarely mentioning his name, rarely addressing him directly, and rarely curious about our relationship. She acts as if he doesn’t exist and is merely a figment of my imagination, rather than my life partner.
In July 1983, Madonna meets Freddy DeMann, Michael Jackson’s manager, who, at the suggestion of Seymour Stein, the boss of Sire, her record label, signs her as his client. Erika, Marty, and I are on the way out, but we don’t yet know it.
“Holiday” enters the Hot 100 U.S. singles chart, Madonna films a cameo appearance as a nightclub singer in the movie Vision Quest, and she’s even photographed by Francesco Scavullo, who dubs her Baby Dietrich. There is no question that Marty, Erika, and I have become obsolete. But before we are completely dismissed, the three of us are dazzled and surprised when Freddy books us on a European tour with Madonna. I promptly quit Fiorucci, and together, Erika, Marty, Madonna, and I fly to London.
All of us, even Madonna, fly coach on Air India. We are in dance clothes—sweatpants, leg warmers, sweatshirts, and boots—and stretch in the aisles, like chorus-line gypsies.
We arrive at Heathrow Airport at eight in the morning. We didn’t sleep on the plane, so we all feel like shit. London is cold and wet and gloomy. We all check into an inexpensive little hotel in Earls Court, grab some sleep, and then a car picks us up and takes us to the BBC Studios in White City. The next day, January 26, 1984, we are playing Top of the Pops, England’s number one TV music show.
Once in the dressing room, we are told to wait. The four of us sit there, incredibly nervous. We assume that we’ll be filmed in a club setting, but that turns out not to be true. We are led onto a soundstage, and the audience stands around, almost listless.
Madonna, made up with dark eye shadow, dark red lipstick, her hair frizzy, dressed in high-waisted black pants, leg warmers, and a multicolored shirt, her midriff bare, lip-synchs “Holiday” while Erika and I do our usual track-show moves in the background. We feel weird performing in front of an audience who are so uncool that afterward they hardly applaud at all.
We are relieved when the show is over. We go out for an Indian meal, the only edible food in London at the time, and talk about how bizarre the show was, how strange it is not performing live, not having a screaming audience cheering us on.
The next morning, Marty, always the first to know what’s hot, drags us to Camden Market, a flea market in a seedy corner of London, with vendors selling everything from leather parkas to baby carriages. Very much London’s version of the East Village. Madonna and all of us buy jeans and shirts and hats. Madonna also buys a pair of plaid pants with little straps connecting the legs together—very punk.
There was no question, in those days, of Madonna being recognized or mobbed in the streets of London—probably the last time in her life when she won’t be.
ON JANUARY 27, 1984, we travel up
to Manchester by train and perform “Holiday” on The Tube, a TV show recorded at the Hacienda. Inside the club, light shows wobble and flicker on a screen. We know raves are sometimes held at the club and are surprised that the audience is so straight. They are all wearing regular clothes, khaki pants, very much like the Long Island crowd, and not hip at all.
Usually during “Holiday,” the audience gets into the mood and starts dancing. But not this time. They just stand still and watch, faces impassive. Then, suddenly, they start booing and throwing things at us. I’m hit with a crumpled-up napkin, Madonna with a roll, Erika with something else. We’re stunned. It’s obvious that this isn’t about our music, it’s about us.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Madonna yells, and with cash in hand, we bolt. On the train back to London, we bitch about England and the English. If I had told Madonna then that twenty years later she’d be married to an Englishman, and giving a passable imitation of Lady Marchmain from Brideshead Revisited, she would never have believed me and would probably have pissed herself laughing. She hated England that much.
WE TRAVEL BACK to London, then in the morning take the boat train to Paris. Paris, though, isn’t much better for us than London. Madonna stays at the Meurice on the Rue de Rivoli. Marty, Erika, and I are stuck in some run-down hotel a few streets away until we complain to Madonna about our accommodations and she eventually relents, letting us stay at the Meurice after all.
We all wander around the city with Marty. He wants to go to Paris’s red-light district, the Pigalle, and as always, we follow him there.
In the evening, we record the show in some illegal club in an old gymnasium with an empty swimming pool in the middle of it. We are made to stand on the bottom of the pool and perform, with everyone else standing above us and watching. We are basically performing to a wall, and it’s ludicrous.
In the midst of the second song, someone shoots tear gas into the room. We run to the nearest exit, tears streaming down our faces. It’s pandemonium, everyone running everywhere.
We spend the rest of the night trying to get the tear gas out of our eyes, complaining that we hate Paris as much as London. The trip gets even worse when we decide to go to Les Bains Douches, a club we’ve been told is hot, only to be stopped at the door and prevented from entering because the door people don’t like the way we look.
The next morning, we fly back to America. I’m happy to be coming home, happy to be back at Morton Street, happy to be back with Danny. I’ve missed him.
AT THE BEGINNING of February, Madonna asks us to dance in her “Lucky Star” video, to be shot in L.A., and Erika and I fly there together. This is my first trip out there since I was a teenager. I have never seen so many palm trees, so much sun, and so many tanned and perfectly stretched faces in my life.
We shoot the video at the old Charlie Chaplin studio, which is pretty much the same as when it was originally built in the thirties. I get paid just $200 for dancing in the “Lucky Star” video and don’t get any royalties either. However, at the time, I am happy just to be a part of it. The camaraderie between Madonna, Erika, Martin, and me is enough for me. After we shoot the video, we all go to Studio One, above Rose Tattoo, and dance the night away.
But when we get back to New York, it’s obvious that things have changed. Madonna has become more businesslike, her new manager, Freddy DeMann is now one of the most important people in her life, and track dates are no longer on the schedule.
Her first album, Madonna, is certified gold, and she’s in the studio recording her second album, Like a Virgin. Soon after, she is signed to play the part of Susan in Susan Seidelman’s low budget, $5 million movie, Desperately Seeking Susan. The movie is conceived of as a hip screwball comedy centering around a suburban housewife who becomes fascinated by a series of newspaper advertisements “Desperately Seeking Susan.” Madonna will play the small supporting role of Susan, a role for which Melanie Griffith, Kelly McGillis, Ellen Barkin, and Jennifer Jason Leigh also test.
Initially, the movie is projected to be a star vehicle for Rosanna Arquette, but, of course, Madonna will walk off with the entire movie—primarily because she is playing herself in every single frame and, as always, plays it to perfection.
Along the way, Erika, Marty, and I are informed by one of Freddy’s assistants that Madonna is dispensing with our services. Madonna, of course, assiduously avoids giving us the news herself. I feel a little betrayed. By now, I have cottoned on at last that if I want to continue working with my sister—and I do—I must be prepared for a modicum of betrayal on her part to be woven into the highly colored fabric of both our filial and professional relationships. For now, though, I reason that working with her has been like working on a movie. It feels as if you were a little family, but then filming ends, and the family splits up. I still feel slightly abandoned, another emotion I am starting to associate with my sister, but it isn’t a big thing.
Besides, I am a little relieved. The act was getting boring—doing the same steps over and over—and the songs repetitious. I go back to work at Fiorucci. I work in jeans, and Danny in corduroys. I tell him I’m not dancing anymore and won’t be away from him night after night. He is clearly delighted. Looking back, I see that warning bells should have rung regarding his possessiveness, but they didn’t. Our relationship seems so perfect. I am too happy with him, and happy in particular that he’s gone out and surprised me by buying me some paints.
I haven’t painted since high school, but thanks to Danny, I start again and rediscover my love of painting. During this period in the West Village, the prewar tenement buildings are being remodeled—the wood-frame windows replaced with new aluminum ones. Piles of old windows are always on the street corners. Danny has collected some of them, and with his approval I use them as canvases. At this stage, following in my sister’s footsteps, although not deliberately, I, too, go through a religious phase. I paint religious scenes on the windows. I have no idea whether I am a good painter, just that I am passionate about painting, about being creative.
Meanwhile, Madonna the album has sold 1 million copies and is certified platinum, and she follows up with Like a Virgin. Madonna has now far transcended the Manhattan downtown scene, and the entire country is starting to sit up and take notice of her. Half the world does, in fact, except, perhaps, me. Danny and I are building our life together, I am immersed in my painting, and I pay little attention to the public adulation Madonna is now receiving and its possible effect on my life. That changes one morning when I drop into my local Korean vegetable store, run into a friend of mine, tell him I’m back working at Fiorucci, and there is a stunned silence.
“Why the hell are you working when your sister is so rich?” he asks.
I tell him that I am not sure what he means. He explains that she has a record deal and must be making mountains of cash. I tell him, “Just because I’m her brother doesn’t mean I get a monthly allowance. I have to work just like everyone else!”
Until then, I haven’t given Madonna’s financial status any thought. To me, she isn’t a big star, just my sister, and just a few months before I was doing track dates with her. I walk back to my little apartment (I haven’t yet moved in with Danny) past drug dealers on one side of the street, and flaming garbage cans on the other, and don’t give Madonna another thought.
FOUR MONTHS AFTER we get back from L.A., just when I am settling back into life at Fiorucci, she calls again and asks me to join her and Erika and Marty on another European trip, set up by Freddy. But this time, we are also going to Morocco. Of course, Danny doesn’t want me to go, but I have an adventurous spirit and am loathe to contain it just to make my boyfriend happy, so in June 1984 I fly to France.
First we perform at a party in Paris for Fiorucci’s founder. Then we fly to Munich and do a show there. Afterward, we go to the Hofbräu House and are amazed at how much food—meat and radishes and sauerkraut—is on offer. Then we take the overnight train to Bremen. We’ve never before been on a train
like this—beautiful, with dark wood panels and comfortable beds with cool, starched yellow cotton sheets.
We all love the sheets so much that we pull them off the beds and wrap them round us as if they are togas or royal robes of some sort.
“Traveling on this train is like being in an old Marlene movie or in The Lady Vanishes,” Madonna says.
“Hopefully you won’t disappear tonight,” I say, harking back to the plot of Hitchcock’s movie.
“Well, if I do, I’m sure you’ll come and find me.”
“Damn right,” I say.
As the train takes us through Germany, we all become giddy with a sense of adventure, the rush of our new experiences, and can’t sleep. So we take the divider down between Madonna’s compartment and Erika’s and sit up all night long, talking. Erika and I understand that our euphoria is temporary, because although Madonna’s career is escalating, ours with her is practically over. But for that night, at least, the three of us are caught up in the excitement swirling around her and the romance of roaring across Germany in this elegant train.
From Bremen, we fly back to Paris, and from there, to Marrakech, to make a video for a French TV show. The moment we land there, I feel as if we are on another planet. Being in Marrakech feels like taking a step back into the fifteenth century. Turbaned men ride camels through the city square where snake charmers charm, dervishes whirl, and not a woman is in sight.
Once out of the confines of the Club Med, where we are staying, I am immediately surrounded by young boys offering their services as guides through the souk (market)—a maze of tiny, winding alleys in which it is easy to lose your way. I hire one of the guides, tip him, and he not only leads me safely through the streets, but also keeps the other guides from bothering me. An efficient system.
Marty stays at the market on his own. A couple of hours later, he turns up at our hotel wearing just his boxers and brandishing a set of false teeth.
Life with My Sister Madonna Page 8