So it was that, in April 1951, Katherine Gautier and her mother, Dale’s mother – the indomitable Elsie Fortin – and his sister Madonna all crammed into the car of Dale’s friend and best man Leonard Beson for the long, dusty ride to Goodfellow airbase in Texas, where Dale, a veteran of the fighting in Korea with the rank of sergeant in the USAF, was stationed. There he had become friendly with Silvio Ciccone, now known as Tony, whom he invited to the marriage service. It was a fateful decision.
Tony, in his smart blue USAF uniform, watched the bride and groom intently as they took their vows before Chaplain Carlin in an intimate Roman Catholic service at the small chapel on the airbase. But he only had eyes for the maid of honor, seventeen-year-old Madonna Fortin, whose dark, radiant beauty was perfectly complemented by the pale yellow lace dress and matching organdy cape that she was wearing that day. ‘Oh, she was a real beauty,’ recalls Katherine. ‘He was the one who fell for her.’
Shortly afterwards, Dale was discharged from the service and returned to Bay City, where he set up home and took a job as a lumber salesman. Tony Ciccone visited as frequently as Air Force leave would allow, and it was clear to everyone that in Dale’s sister Madonna he had found the woman of his dreams. ‘They were both quiet,’ recalls Katherine. ‘She was attracted to him because he was a nice, decent man, very handsome, who treated her well.’ The fact that Madonna had been engaged for a few months to a besotted young man from Monroe, Michigan, proved no hindrance to the budding romance. Within weeks of meeting Tony she ended her other relationship, and for the next three years they conducted a long-distance courtship while he took up his studies at Geneva College in Pennsylvania and she started work as an X-ray technician for two Bay City radiologists.
They were married on July 1, 1955, by Pastor George Deguoy at the Visitation Church in Bay City, where the Fortin family regularly worshipped. This time Dale Fortin was the best man, Madonna’s lifelong friend Geraldine ‘Chicky’ Sanders her maid-of-honor. Naturally both sets of parents were present, and it is worth noting that on the marriage certificate Gaetano Ciccone was named as Guy. The gradual process of assimilation, re-creation and reinvention, which is at the heart of the American story, was finding, and would continue to find, its perfect expression in the Ciccone family.
The newly married couple seemed to represent the dreams and values of the Eisenhower years, an era of full employment, rigid convention and cultural conservatism, yet also of an unbounded optimism and unquestioning faith in the American dream. Not only had Tony shaken off his given name, but he had left behind the gritty blue-collar life of Aliquippa and had taken an office job as an optics and defense engineer with Chrysler. He was to spend his career in the defense industry, eventually earning a substantial six-figure salary with General Dynamics, working with the Hughes Corporation on tank design.
In those early days, though, the college graduate was at the bottom of the white-collar ladder. After a short stay in Alexandria, Virginia, where Tony worked on a defense contract, the Ciccones moved into a cramped bungalow on 443 Thors Street in the suburb of Pontiac, Michigan, about twenty-five miles north-west of Detroit. They had barely unpacked the Catholic statuary, crucifixes, and other religious artifacts that had adorned their homes, when Madonna became pregnant. Anthony was born on May 3, 1956. Madonna and Tony took to heart the Old Testament injunction to be fruitful and multiply – for most of their marriage Madonna was either pregnant or recovering from childbirth. Their second child, Martin, was born on August 9, 1957, while their third, Madonna Louise, arrived into the world on the morning of August 16, 1958. Her heavily pregnant mother had traveled to the home of her parents, Elsie and Willard, in Bay City for a rest, and had given birth at the local Mercy Hospital. The family nicknamed the dark-haired baby ‘Little Nonni’ to distinguish her from her mother, who from now on was referred to as ‘Big Madonna.’
The baby Madonna may have been cooed over and cosseted as the first girl in the family, but her status did not last long. Another daughter, Paula, was born just a year later, followed by Christopher in 1960 and Melanie in 1962.
Yet Madonna stood out, her very name her badge of distinction. Unlike her siblings, who were given straightforward Anglo-Saxon Christian names, common and anonymous, Madonna’s name automatically made her different, the choice of the Virgin Mary as a Christian name as audacious as it was devout. For many years her Christian name was a curse rather than a blessing, a cross she had to bear. Not only did it distinguish her from her siblings, it stood her apart from her schoolfriends while, later, when she ventured into the cool New York scene, her name automatically defined her as Catholic, ethnic and regional – a girl from an unsophisticated working- or lower-middle-class family. In short, a hick from the sticks. In a sense, the tension between the way she has both accepted and denied her family and her ethnic roots, and the enduring conflict between her stern upbringing and her creative inner self, are laid bare in that simple yet iconic seven-letter word: Madonna.
Added to that equation is her rather melodramatic appreciation of her life, both as it was and as it is, which often obscures rather than illuminates the existing narrative of her career. For although events may have been true to her, they did not always constitute the truth, only her truth. Thus in the melodrama of her life, because Elvis Presley died on her birthday (her nineteenth, August 16, 1977), she has since felt a deep spiritual connection to him and his work, coming to see his persecution for daring to swing his hips to his brand of rock and roll as being similar to criticism of her own endeavors to push back sexual boundaries.
By all accounts she was a bright, articulate and very expressive little girl, with a vivid imagination. She loved her mother to read her bedtime stories, her favorite about a garden populated with talking vegetables and friendly rabbits. Like many toddlers, though, she was afraid of the dark, and her earliest memories are of snuggling into bed with her parents, the feel of her mother’s red silk nightgown invariably sending her off to sleep. ‘I wanted to be with the A team,’ she recalls. If her parents, in particular her mother, represented safety and security, her siblings were all too often a pain in the neck. Her elder brothers, Tony and Martin, relentlessly teased and tormented her, while the arrival of her younger sisters, Paula and Melanie, presented a threat of a different kind, focusing her mother’s attention on their needs, rather than her own. ‘She liked attention from the family and she usually got it,’ recalls her grandmother, Elsie Fortin. ‘I used to feel sorry for Paula.’ Like a fledgling in an overcrowded nest, she knew that the emotional nourishment she craved would only be provided if she squawked the loudest and the longest. Thus, her later compulsion to shock, her itch to rebel, might be traced back to that childhood need to belong, her unquenchable thirst for love and admiration.
Naturally, the primary object of her love was her mother, whom she remembers with fondness and regret. In memory, Madonna sees an ‘angelic, beautiful woman,’ patient and long-suffering, who scrubbed and cleaned, prayed and nurtured. But Big Madonna had also been an accomplished dancer, and had had a passion for classical music so strong that the Fortin family often wonder if, had she lived, her eldest daughter’s talents would have been channeled into the world of the classics rather than pop.
The other love of Madonna Senior’s short life was her religion. A member of the Roman Catholic Altar Society, her faith was bone deep, reflecting not just her own deep sense of devotion but also that of the Fortin family, particularly her mother Elsie. During Lent she would kneel on uncooked rice and sleep on coat hangers as penance, and is even said to have covered the many religious statues in her home when a friend who was wearing front-zipped jeans came to visit. This faith helped her to endure her terminal illness with fortitude. While she was pregnant with Melanie in 1962, she was diagnosed as suffering from breast cancer. As her friends and family absorbed the awful news, they blamed it on the fact that during her days as an X-ray technician the protective lead-lined apron, now obligatory, was rarely used.
Still nursing baby Melanie, Madonna Senior gamely attempted to run a home and minister to her children. All too often she slumped exhausted on a sofa in the sitting room as her children climbed all over her, wanting her to play or tearfully asking her to resolve disputes, or simply wanting a cuddle. Interpreting her mother’s listlessness as rejection, little Madonna redoubled her efforts for attention, on one occasion drumming her fists into her mother’s back in frustration when she was too tired to play with her. She vividly remembers the time her mother burst into tears and how she impulsively put her arms round her in a childlike gesture of comfort and support. Little Nonni recalls feeling stronger than her mother, that she was the one consoling her. ‘I think that made me grow up fast,’ she has said.
As Madonna Senior’s condition deteriorated she spent more time in the hospital, her children seeing the forced cheerfulness and wan smiles, their father’s quiet desperation – Madonna remembers him crying just once – and the relentless optimism of the adults around them. Yet they recall, too, how their mother was always laughing and joking with them, so that they looked forward to their hospital visits. Even when, in the final weeks, she was visibly wasting away because she could no longer keep down solid food, she remained cheerful, her faith and her inherited ‘Fortintude’ a comfort and source of strength in the face of the inevitable. On her last night, December 1, 1963, Madonna Senior, her six children gathered around her bed, brightly asked for a hamburger, such was her determination to keep up appearances. An hour after the children were led from her room, she was dead.
This comforting tableau of saint-like stoicism and carefree courage is now part of family folklore, the almost biblical imagery of her last supper – particularly her final request for that ubiquitous, all-American dish – helping to fix and burnish her memory. In a way this story, often told in the family, disguises as much as it reveals, the matter-of-fact, almost jolly, manner of her parting smothering the relentless tragedy of the death of a young woman, only thirty, saying her final goodbyes to six young children – one still just a baby, the eldest not yet eight – ironically at the start of the Christmas season, but also when the whole of America was in deep mourning for the death of President John F. Kennedy, assassinated nine days earlier in Dallas, Texas. The awful confluence of these tragedies, one national, the other family, was almost overwhelming for the Fortins and Ciccones. For all concerned it marked the passing of an era of innocence, the end of an American dream.
Yet in the immediate aftermath of Madonna Senior’s death, so much was suppressed, so much left unsaid, so many untangled and unresolved emotions, of remorse, guilt, loss, anger and confusion, that in the atmosphere of resolute normality, it is little wonder that Madonna, then five, could not properly grasp the concept of her mother dying. It was only at her funeral at the Visitation Church in Bay City – the church where Madonna Senior had married eight years earlier – that her eldest daughter started truly to absorb the enormous and permanent change in her family life. The service of High Mass was deeply emotional, weeping and wailing a continual counterpoint to the hymns and prayers. It is not hard to see that, for little Madonna, a sensitive and imaginative child, this wave of suffocating emotion was both terrifying and traumatic.
She could see her mother, looking very beautiful and lying as if she were asleep in an open casket. Then she noticed that her mother’s mouth, in her words, ‘looked funny.’ It took her some time to realize that it had been sewn up. In that awful moment she began to understand what she had lost for ever. That final image of her mother, at once peaceful yet grotesque, is one she carries with her to this day.
The Ciccone children reacted to their loss in different ways. Martin and Tony, the older brothers, expressed their anger by becoming rowdier than normal, throwing rocks around the place, lighting illicit fires or just making general nuisances of themselves in the neighborhood. By contrast, Madonna withdrew into herself, vomiting if she left her home for any length of time. Home was a sanctuary and a security blanket, a haven of safety and protection in a mixed-up world. Her sleep was often interrupted by nightmares and, as she shared a bed with her younger sister Paula, she regularly ended up sleeping in her father’s bed, not only for comfort but also so that her younger sister could get some rest.
Instinctively loving and maternal, qualities often overlooked in any analysis of her personality, Madonna bustled round her younger brother and sisters, particularly baby Melanie, caring for them as she had seen her mother do. But they could never fill the gap left by her namesake’s death. For a sensitive little girl who had already demonstrated her deep-seated need for love and affection, the loss of the one person who gave her patient, unconditional love changed for ever her relationship to the outside world, making her stronger and more self-reliant, yet with an insatiable need for love matched by fear of commitment. She had given her love once to someone she had completely trusted, and that person had gone from her life. It would be many years before she could utterly pledge herself to another. Indeed, her quest for love without strings would define her behavior, in public and in private, and provide the momentum behind the relentless ambition and craving for attention that has propelled her to universal fame.
Years later, when she was in her early twenties and on the threshold of a music career, she was lying in bed in the New York home she shared with her then boyfriend, artist and musician Dan Gilroy. It was in the days when her personality was her performance and her performance was her personality. She was indulging in an early-morning reverie, talking into a tape recorder about a Korean woman she had befriended who had wanted to adopt her. That encounter clearly stirred the deep well of memory about her mother.
In a voice needy and plaintive, she said: ‘I need a mother, I want a mother. I look for my mother all the time and she never shows up anywhere. I want a mother to hug.’
Clearly close to tears she repeats a slang phrase about being cheated: ‘I got gypped, I got gypped, I got gypped …’
Chapter Three
‘This Used to Be My Playground’
IN A WAY, it was all the fault – if fault is the right word – of the 1980s pop group, A Flock of Seagulls. Back when he was a music journalist in New York, Neil Tennant, now of the Pet Shop Boys, had an appointment to interview the one-hit wonders. They failed to show. Peeved, Tennant fell back on his contingency plan and called a young singer named Madonna, arranging to meet her for coffee in a downtown café. At that time she had a couple of singles released, but stardom was neither assured, nor swift in coming.
She arrived on time, eager to make an impression, knowing that good publicity would help the climb up the greasy pole to fame and fortune. Of course, striking publicity could only be achieved by ensuring she gave great copy, and that in turn depended on entertaining stories about her life – especially her sex life. If that meant a little embroidery and embellishment around the edges, so be it. After all, she was just another aspiring young singer, a co-conspirator in the unspoken pact between those who crave celebrity, and those who have the power to offer it, to give them the canvas upon which to paint their dreams. ‘From the very start I was a bad girl,’ she gushed. The tape recorder mechanically recorded her words, but not the ironic gestures and knowing winks that accompanied them.
‘I hardly said a word,’ remembers Tennant. ‘I couldn’t stop her talking.’ Yet his second-choice interview made great copy, the result a major spread in Star Hits magazine in November 1983. It provided material
which, together with other interviews Madonna gave at that time, has found its way into countless feature articles, films and biographies, so that now, like pebbles in a pocket, her anecdotes and vignettes from early interviews have grown smooth with overuse. When the efforts of her more excitable chroniclers, and especially those who have focused on the sexual and the sensational, are added to her own early propaganda, it is easy to see how the myth of Madonna was born: the ghetto childhood; the schoolgirl rebel; the flirty young Lolita who became a sexual athlete; the mistreated Cinderella, complete with Wicked Stepmother; the misunderstood artist.
Inevitably, all this makes for a confusing narrative. For it seems that at one moment a nun who taught the little girl is beating her over the head with a stapler, and at the next another teacher is writing on her report card: ‘12/1/63 Mother died. Needs a great deal of love and attention.’ (Whether the kindergarten teacher in question wrote that assessment before she taped over Madonna’s foul young mouth, or after she forcibly washed it out with soap and water, remains unclear.) Then we have the picture of the precocious five-year-old tease who taught a young boy how to bump and grind to a Rolling Stones record, set alongside another of the pubescent girl horrified at the mention of the word ‘penis’ when her stepmother attempted to teach her the facts of life.
For the biographer, it is difficult to find a path through the myths and half-truths and exaggerations, not all of them of Madonna’s creation. Yet by reflecting further upon her early life and chiseling out a few of the less worn pebbles of fact from her past, a different picture emerges, a history that is altogether more plausible, and at once both more complex and more compelling. It is a picture that also helps an understanding of the central theme of this book, namely, that Madonna is a considerable artist who has used both her sexuality and her social and sexual codes as her weapons of choice, her method of connecting with her audience; in short, that she is a long way from the popular conception of her as a sexual Amazon who happens to be a singer and occasional actress.
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