Life with My Sister Madonna

by Christopher Ciccone

  By the time the Who’s That Girl? tour kicks off, she’s lost the slightly plump look she had on The Virgin Tour and is now sleek, with a sinewy, muscled back. Her body is lean, but still soft and feminine. She is much more athletic, sure of her body, sure of herself.

  Who’s That Girl? is far more theatrical than The Virgin Tour and has a Spanish theme. She has recently released “La Isla Bonita,” which hits number four in the U.S. charts and will remain an enduring favorite among her fans. Not every scene is Spanish-oriented, though. When Madonna sings a medley of “Dress You Up,” “Holiday,” and “Material Girl,” she wears rhinestone-studded harlequin glasses, and her dress, decorated with dice, charms, and plastic toys, is extremely difficult for her to wear as it is boned for support. She keeps bitching that she “can’t dance in these fucking bones,” but still does. The dress is also extremely tight, and when I disrobe her, her body is covered in red marks as if she were a medieval martyr scourged in the service of her faith.

  By now, I’ve got the change of clothes and the whole backstage operation down pat. I am braced to ignore all the tirades Madonna unleashes on me practically every time she storms offstage. I know how to cope on every level, and she trusts me implicitly, secure in the knowledge that she can rely on me completely.

  I still have to pick up the dancers’ clothes after the show, collect baggage at the airport, and have the costumes delivered to each room. I hate it, but grin and bear it because I love every moment of working on the show, traveling everywhere, and making sure that backstage everything goes smoothly.

  Despite how proficient I’ve become at my job, despite how much my sister needs me, she still takes great pains not to show me any favoritism. While we are on the road, she always has a four-room penthouse suite, but as far as she is concerned, although I have been working for her longer than anyone else on the tour, I still don’t rate a suite. Even her personal assistant has a better room than I do. The rest of the people on the tour, though, treat me with great respect, making sure to defer to me—simply because I am Madonna’s brother. I have become accustomed to my role, and I am content.

  On The Virgin Tour we were playing arenas seating no more than fifteen thousand a show. On Who’s That Girl? we are playing stadiums seating eighty thousand. Our track dates—always great fun—are far behind us. Even The Virgin Tour seems, in retrospect, to be kids’ stuff. Now that Madonna is playing stadiums, she is making millions of dollars a night, much more is at stake, and life on the road is now more serious.

  The Who’s That Girl? tour opens on June 14, 1987, at Nishinomiya Stadium, Osaka—the first of Madonna’s five concerts in Japan. More than twenty-five thousand fans flock to the show, each paying around $45 a ticket, many dressed in identical black leather and sunglasses, presumably believing this to be Madonna’s current style. Although troops are called in just in case of trouble, I discover that Japanese fans are civilized and well behaved. During the show, instead of standing up and screaming, they are orderly, sit with their arms folded, and never stand up and yell. When the show is over, they don’t jostle to get out, but exit by row, and if anyone leaves something behind, it is immediately turned over to lost property. Both Madonna and I feel relatively safe in Japan.

  In Osaka, we hear about a great noodle shop, so Madonna hides her hair under a scarf, puts on men’s trousers and a men’s shirt, and together we sneak out of the hotel. The restaurant is packed, we eat in the middle of crowds of people, but no one recognizes her.

  One night, all of us—Madonna and me, the dancers, Liz and Freddy—visit a geisha house, in a huge hall, all dark wood and pretty. We sit around a twenty-foot-long dining table and are served a ten-course dinner. Once we have finished eating, six geishas appear, singing, dancing, and playing all different instruments.

  Madonna, in particular, watches the geisha performance like a hawk. In the future, the geisha costumes, the makeup, the music, even the movements, will be appropriated for her performances and videos.

  After our geisha evening, we decide that we want to experience more of the mysteries of Japan, so our guide suggests we go to Kyoto. There, we visit a Shinto temple, surrounded by light blue bamboo trees, and little hills covered with fur coats of moss. Madonna and I feel elated that we have finally encountered the mysterious Japan we’ve glimpsed before in Kurosawa’s movies, but the impression is slightly mitigated when we take the high-tech bullet train back to Osaka.

  Sean doesn’t join us on any of the Asian tour legs. Instead, Madonna spends much of her time with a straight dancer on the tour, Shabadu. I don’t know whether she is cheating on Sean, and I don’t know the nature of her relationship with Shabadu, but I can’t imagine that after the show she would have any energy left over for sex.

  On June 27, 1987, the nineteen-city U.S. leg of the Who’s That Girl? tour opens at Miami’s Orange Bowl, and sixty thousand fans brave a tropical downpour to see Madonna. We are staying at the Turnberry Club, where Madonna, as always, has the penthouse. Sean, clearly on his best behavior, fills the suite with white lilies and white orchids and spends a couple of days with her there. They sunbathe in their private rooftop solarium, but even though they are staying in the honeymoon suite, I can tell that this is the swan song for their marriage, and that Madonna is only making an effort because, on July 7, Sean will begin a sixty-day jail term for assaulting a photographer who snapped a picture of him on the Los Angeles set of his latest movie. I feel momentarily sorry for him, then decide that—judging by his past antics—jail might do him some good.

  AFTER MIAMI, WE move on to Atlanta, Washington, Toronto, Montreal, Foxboro, then Philadelphia, and on July 13, at Madison Square Garden, Madonna performs an AIDS benefit concert in Marty’s memory, during which more than $400,000 is raised on behalf of amfAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Research.

  We both miss Marty, and I know the concert is emotionally draining for Madonna. Yet the show must go on and we both know it, so immediately afterward we move on to Seattle, then Anaheim, Mountain View, Houston, Irving, St. Paul–Minneapolis, Chicago, East Troy, and Richfield.

  The physical demands of the tour on Madonna are grueling, yet we rarely fight. Madonna sometimes complains about her voice and her throat and how tired she is. She has been working for weeks, singing, dancing, projecting her megawatt personality to the audience, with never a hint of tiredness or boredom, so if—now and again—she is close to exhaustion, I can hardly blame her.

  I don’t sympathize with her much because I know that while my sister might trawl for sympathy, she isn’t really comfortable when she gets it, nor does she want to spend any time playing the role of victim. So instead of commiserating with her, I give her a quick hug and crack, “I know, Madonna. But just think of what you’re earning.” She perks up immediately.

  On August 7, Madonna is scheduled to play Pontiac, but causes an uproar when she goes on the Today show and cracks to Jane Pauley that Bay City is “a smelly little town.” After the show, she calls me in a panic asking me if I can remember the name of the plant near Grandma Elsie’s house. I do, and she incorporates that information into her apology to the forty-two thousand fans who attend her performance in Pontiac, and all is forgiven.

  After the show, we travel home to our father’s house for a barbecue. This is Madonna’s day off and she’d much prefer to be spending it in her hotel suite. I’m relieved, though, to be out of my room, but then it isn’t nearly as nice as her suite.

  My father has invited everyone from the tour to the house, and we all travel there by bus. My father barbecues. Joan makes upside-down pineapple cake. Madonna is civil to her, but distant—as she always is in front of our father. Fortunately, she and Joan are never alone together, so Madonna never has the opportunity to give vent to the ever-present bitterness she feels toward Joan.

  Someone has tipped off the press about our visit, and some of them are lurking in front of the house. Madonna is wearing sunglasses, blue jeans, a white shirt, and little Moroccan flats, with
her hair pulled back with a headband. I am in my usual T-shirt and jeans. She looks tired and definitely doesn’t want the press to get a shot of her today, so we stay in the yard. She’s also clearly bored.

  Some of our neighbors come over, including my first “girlfriend.” She becomes a little worse for wear and starts crying about how much she still loves me and how she wishes we were married. Madonna and everyone else—with the exception of my father and Joan—laugh themselves silly. The old girlfriend has no idea that I am gay, nor, at this point, do my father and Joan.

  My dad tries his best to give us all a happy day. We play volleyball, eat a lot, talk about old times, but I know Madonna and I both feel the same: far removed from our past. We find it impossible to go back and spend the afternoon by our childhood sandbox and my old tree house and pretend this is fun when it isn’t.

  MEANWHILE, DANNY HAS quit Fiorucci and we are both living off my salary (around $50,000 for this tour), so he has to put up with my working for Madonna again. And on August 6, he comes with me to the Times Square premiere of the movie Who’s That Girl? in which she plays an ex-con named Nikki Finn.

  Madonna looks beautiful in a vintage Marilyn Monroe dress decorated with gold bugle beads. A crowd of more than ten thousand love-struck fans cheers for her. Before she goes into the theater, she says a few words to the crowd over a microphone that’s been set up for that purpose: “This is a real irony. Ten summers ago I made my first trip to New York and I didn’t know a soul here. I told the taxi driver to drop me off right here in the middle of Times Square. I was completely awestruck. And now here I am looking at all of you people and I’m completely awestruck. Thank you, and I hope you like the movie.”

  Her pride is palpable, and however exaggerated the story of her first visit here, the essence is true, and she deserves to be proud of all she has achieved. After all, who else could bring Times Square’s traffic to a halt during rush hour? Her sheer star power is immense.

  Going into the movie, she is happy. Coming out, she is not.

  The movie, yet another screwball comedy, is awful, and much too late, she’s realized it. Although the screening is in front of an invited audience of friends and associates, and everyone laughs politely in the obvious places, I find it difficult to join in. Even Madonna must have read the writing on the wall and confronted the truth that this abysmal movie is destined to fail.

  She has never asked my advice regarding whether to take a particular movie part. It’s beginning to dawn on me that she probably doesn’t involve any of her business associates, such as Freddy, Liz, or Seymour, in her moviemaking choices either. Just as she reached for success in the music business with untrammeled self-confidence and an almost insane optimism, blinkering herself to the possibility of failure, she seems to be straining for movie stardom without having any perspective on her acting talent or the roles she takes.

  She sees herself as a latter-day Judy Holliday and hasn’t yet realized that Judy was a genuinely funny actress—who won an Academy Award for her performance in Born Yesterday—and that she is not. She hasn’t learned her lesson from Shanghai Surprise, and it seems unlikely that after Who’s That Girl? flops, she will be prepared to step back and make a dispassionate evaluation of her acting talent, or lack of it.

  The U.S. leg of the tour ends a couple of days later, on August 9, at Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey, close to the New York State line. On The Virgin Tour we started the tradition that on the last night of the tour, we play a practical joke on one of the tour members. I decide that I am going to play one on Madonna. When I dress her in her Spanish skirt and bolero, I stuff the end of a roll of toilet paper into her shorts. She marches onstage trailing it. The moment she hears the crew and the band laughing, she realizes and pulls it out just before the audience sees it. She doesn’t talk to me for two days, and I guess I can’t blame her.

  A lot of my friends come to the last night of the American tour, but I don’t want them to discover that I am merely her dresser and not her personal assistant, which is what I routinely tell them. During the scene in which she throws her glove into the pit and I have to scramble around, find it, and hand it to her, I hide my face so my friends won’t recognize me. Not the proudest moment of my life, but being my sister’s dresser is somewhat degrading and is not an appropriate job for an adult male, and I just don’t want to advertise that I’m doing it. Not that I ever regret being Madonna’s dresser, because, after all, I am part of a huge artistic enterprise and have the opportunity to travel the world and, above all, help my sister.

  The European leg of the tour opens on August 15, in Leeds, England, before we move on to Wembley Stadium in London, where Madonna performs three sold-out concerts. In Frankfurt, she also plays to sold-out crowds, and in Rotterdam, as well.

  In Paris, on August 28, Madonna presents Jacques Chirac with a check for $85,000 to benefit AIDS charities in France. In Paris on August 31, at the Parc de Sceaux, Madonna plays to one of the biggest crowds of her career so far, 130,000 fans. We have a police escort to and from the show. When I look out in the audience, I can’t quite believe that all these people are here to see my sister.

  Sean already seems like a distant memory. In Italy, when we take our daily jog, three cars drive in front of us, five cars trail behind us, and at least fifty fans and press all jog beside us. It would have been great to be able to jog through these ancient streets of Rome without the circus following us. Worse than the crowd is that we are spluttering from exhaust fumes streaming out of the cars in front of us.

  Madonna and I kid each other about how Sean would have handled the situation, agree he would probably have liked to kill everyone in sight, and we laugh about it. Instead of drawing a gun, I go up to them, ask them to pull up, and they do. Madonna and I jog on, unfazed. Both of us have long accepted that the press and fans are part of the package, and the truth is that we are both attention junkies and revel in it.

  On September 4, in Turin, in front of a cheering audience of over sixty-five thousand, Madonna wows the crowd with her mastery of the Italian language. First she asks them, “Siete già caldi?” (Are you hot?), then announces, “Allora, andiamo!” (Then let’s go), and finally makes the crowd roar in approval by declaring, “Io sono fiera di essere italiana!” (I’m proud to be Italian). Afterward, there is a riot and the police hustle us out of the auditorium. Both of us are a little scared, but we get back to our hotel without further problems.

  The tour ends on September 6 at the Stadio Communale in Florence. A month later, Forbes will name Madonna the top-earning female entertainer of 1987. Looking back on the Who’s That Girl? tour, I conclude that she’s earned every penny.

  I ALSO THINK that her performance as secretary to a mogul in David Mamet’s new eighty-eight minute play, Speed-the-Plow, which opens on May 3, 1988, at Manhattan’s Royale Theatre, is good. I tell her so after seeing the play on opening night. She is pleased, seems happy, but says she can’t get used to playing to an audience that listens in silence and doesn’t scream at intervals. As the run of the play continues, Katharine Hepburn, Sylvester Stallone, and Sigourney Weaver all come to see her. Nonetheless, she tells me she is often bored doing the same thing night after night. In her own show, she can alter steps or lyrics whenever she feels like it, but not in a play. In the end, she concludes that she prefers music extravaganzas. I concur.

  After Sean is released from jail in mid-September 1987, having served thirty-three days of his sentence, he and Madonna attempt to resuscitate their marriage, but fail. She files for divorce, but later withdraws the petition and decides to try to save the marriage after all.

  She lends me $200,000—on which she does not charge me interest, but which I agree to repay within two years, and do—so that I can buy a studio on Fourth between Eleventh and Twelfth, an open space with fifteen-foot ceilings that offers a fine view of Chinatown and the Brooklyn Bridge, where I begin to paint regularly. I consider painting my vocation and, if I had to enter my profession
on my passport, would unhesitatingly list it as “artist,” and definitely not “dresser.”

  Speaking of art, on May 8, 1987, Madonna takes me to a dinner at the Met in honor of their Egyptian exhibition. Lauren Hutton, one of the first supermodels and the star of American Gigolo, sits next to me looking incredibly handsome. We start talking and click. We exchange numbers.

  She invites me to her loft above an old theater on Jones Street and the Bowery. She’s got a big refectory table with all her magazine covers spread out on it. During our many conversations about life, love, and modeling, she tells me she’s really into art and that she longs to paint, so I advise her to buy a canvas and go ahead and paint. I explain that no one needs to see the result, and if she doesn’t like it, she can paint over it.

  The following week she invites me to the apartment again, where she’s now got an eight-foot-long, ten-foot-high blank canvas, and every conceivable paint supply. I am about to ask her what she’s playing at, why she wants to paint so big, and how she got the canvas into the loft in the first place, when she hands me a blue line drawing of a cross section of a pregnant woman, with a fetus inside her.

  “I wanted you to see this drawing,” she says.

  The drawing is stunning, beautifully executed, almost perfect.

  Lauren tells me she wants to paint the same picture on the canvas and asks if I will help her by starting the painting for her. I am hesitant, but agree. She goes out shopping for a couple of hours.

  During that time, I copy the drawing onto the canvas and am so involved in painting that I don’t even hear her coming back to the loft again, nor do I realize I have nearly completed the painting.