Curiously, therefore, in any account of her youth, two competing and conflicting personal qualities are seen to dominate – her curiosity, and her conformity. As a child, she had a relentless and intelligent inquisitiveness about the world around her, as well as a self-absorbed fascination with her own physicality and, later, her nascent sexuality. But if the question ‘Why?’ was never far from her lips, neither was the question ‘Why not?’ – ‘Why can’t I wear pants to church, why can’t I go out and play, and if God is good why did he take my mother?’ At times, her insatiable curiosity could bring her pain. On one occasion, when she was riding in the car with her father, she refused to believe that the glowing, red-hot end of the cigarette lighter was hot. She put her finger on it to find out.
Of enduring fascination were the nuns, serene, powerful yet seemingly semi-divine, who taught her at the three schools – Saint Frederick’s, Saint Andrew’s, and the Sacred Heart Academy – she attended. Curious to discover if these mysterious creatures were truly human, she and a friend scaled the convent wall to see if they could find out what the sisters wore under their habits. They returned from their mission breathlessly discussing the extraordinary fact that beneath their wimples nuns had hair. Yet despite their apparent oddity, like many Catholic girls before her Madonna flirted with the notion of joining these ethereal beings – although probably not for long.
For all her later disenchantment with the outdated and essentially sexist practices of the Roman Catholic Church, the magical reality of the Catholic faith, its sonorous liturgy and baroque rituals, its teachings of fall and redemption, guilt and confession, and of the certainty of an afterlife, captivated and provoked a young imagination that was at times as melodramatic as it was morbid. ‘I was very conscious of God watching everything I did,’ she told Time magazine in 1985. ‘Until I was eleven or twelve, I believed the Devil was in my basement and I would run up the stairway fast so he wouldn’t grab my ankles.’ If such a belief is little different from the ‘bogeyman-under-the-stairs’ terrors of less religious children, there is no doubt that Madonna’s early upbringing in a deeply Catholic tradition profoundly affected her. Such was her fascination that at her Confirmation she chose the name Veronica to add to her own given names, because it was Saint Veronica who wiped the face of Jesus on the Cross and then carried the cloth with His blood and sweat on it.
Death and its gruesome yet fascinating consequences were never far from her thoughts. A favorite childhood rhyme, and one that she delighted in reciting to adult audiences, went as follows:
Worms crawl in, worms crawl out
The ant plays pinochle in your snout,
Your eyes cave in, your teeth decay,
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
Children, and especially religious children, have always been both repelled and attracted by the mystery of death, as they are by anything that smacks of horror and decay. By the age of five, however, Madonna had already experienced it at first hand. Still emotionally raw and angry after her mother’s death, she once told her father that if he died, she wanted to be buried with him, while on other occasions she daydreamed of life as an orphan, with both her parents killed in a car crash. These childish thoughts crowded into her nightmares, dreams of death and the process of dying that have haunted her into her adult life.
She admits that one of her recurrent nightmares is about the horror of being buried alive, of lying, trapped and helpless underground in a constricting coffin, unable to move as insects, rats and other creatures nibble her flesh. The enduring personal symbolism of this frequent night-time visitation is fueled not only by her fear of death, but also by an equally powerful dread of being constrained. This is not simply physical claustrophobia, but the sense that she is a genuine free spirit who has constantly chafed against anything that might bind her, ties that have included everything from her father’s rules, the edicts of the Roman Catholic Church, or what she considered to be the constricting dynamics of her personal relations, whether sexual, social, professional or emotional.
Added to her thoughts and feelings about life, death and Catholicism, there is a sense that she was both fascinated and repelled by the untidiness – what she called the ‘ickiness’ – of life in general. One of her earliest memories is of an altercation with a little girl who gave her a dandelion. Madonna threw it away, explaining much later that she preferred things to be cultured and cultivated – in a word, controlled. Other handed down-versions of this story say that she attacked the girl, an extreme reaction which, if true, is the antithesis of any concept of ‘control.’
Nowhere was the moist, strident messiness of life made more apparent than in sexual relations. As the whole notion of sex and the physical differences between men and women began to dawn upon the young Madonna’s mind, she, like many of her girlfriends, found herself repelled rather than attracted. Given the teachings of the Church and the advice of her grandmother, Elsie Fortin, who warned of the dire consequences for girls who were not chaste, together with a confused understanding of the physical act, it is not surprising that the pubescent girl found the whole notion ‘icky.’ Glimpses of her brothers’ naked bodies revolted her. ‘I thought they were disgusting,’ she recalled, and was ‘horrified’ when she learned about the, to her, awful reality of sex. She remembers, too, a biology lesson in which she and a fellow pupil, a boy her age, had to dissect a mouse. The sight of the corpse, reeking of formaldehyde preservative, proved too much for her and she left the classroom. When she returned her partner had dissected most of the mouse, but had left the animal’s penis for her to deal with. She was appalled.
Far less threatening were the images of the men and women from the Bible. ‘I think my original feelings of sexuality and eroticism originated in going to church,’ she told the novelist Norman Mailer. If this was true, however, she clearly had a curious notion of eroticism and sexuality, for she admitted to feeling that there was an androgynous quality to Jesus and His disciples, with their long hair and flowing robes (and, presumably, despite their beards). To her mind they were the Barbie dolls of their time, asexual, unthreatening people who could have served as models from a jeans commercial.
If all this seems a far cry from the crotch-grabbing, man-eating persona Madonna was to invent for herself, it was nevertheless some distance from the conventional picture of her as a young girl, which portrays her as a sexual libertine-in-waiting. Yet the truth is that her physical self-awareness, even precocity, running around the schoolyard chasing boys of her age or younger, has all too often been confused with sexual promiscuity. In actuality, she was something of a paradox, her keen curiosity, fertile imagination and restless spirit balanced by the fact that, in childhood, she not only strove to conform, but actively enjoyed fitting in.
At all her schools, even at high school, she proved to be the quintessential all-American girl, effortlessly graduating from school-hall monitor and choirgirl to Camp Fire Girl and, later, teenage cheerleader, while at home she cheerfully moved on from Barbie dolls and bubblegum pop music to dressing up and experimenting with makeup. It was Madonna who told tales on her brothers and sisters or reported the misdeeds of her fellow students, who was first with her hand up in class, who regularly came home from school with good marks, thus earning a 50-cent reward from her father for every A grade she achieved. Indeed, her father’s ambition that she study law captured rather shrewdly the conventional character she then presented. Bright, articulate, well organized and argumentative, Madonna would undoubtedly have made an excellent attorney.
If anything, and despite all the received wisdom about ‘Madonna-the-bad-girl, ’ it was her siblings who were the rebels while she, in her own words, played ‘Miss Goody-Two-Shoes.’ As schoolboys, her elder brothers, Anthony and Martin, turned out to be real handfuls, not just for their harassed father, but for teachers and schoolmates alike. Lighting fires outside and other antisocial behavior was the norm. An innocent afternoon sketching the school buildings at Saint Andrew’s s
chool turned into a three-day suspension for fellow schoolboy Nick Twomey when Martin happened upon him. ‘I was minding my own business when Marty came around me,’ recalls Dr Twomey. ‘He was the school goofball. He was always being a clown and getting into trouble. Anyone around him normally got into trouble too. I can’t remember what happened, but the nun who was there took us to the Principal’s office and we were kicked out of [temporarily suspended from] school.’
While still at school, both brothers started dabbling in drugs and taking part in clandestine drinking sessions, eventually becoming, in effect, fully paid-up members of the ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ generation. The experience was not salutary. As a young adult, Anthony joined the Moonie cult, while Martin was to spend many months in private rehab clinics, often paid for by his younger sister. As for that sister herself, she stayed well clear of such diversions. As school counselor Nancy Ryan Mitchell remembers: ‘I counseled Madonna’s brothers and sisters much more than her.’
It is little wonder, then, that Madonna’s memories of her brothers’ behavior in adolescence are less than fond. They teased and tormented her mercilessly, while she loudly voiced her complaints about them to anyone who would listen; an American version of Violet Elizabeth in the Just William stories, who promised to ‘thcweam and thcweam and thcweam’ if she didn’t get her own way. ‘A bitch,’ is how brother Martin described her in one interview. For her part, Madonna recalls how they spat in her mouth after she ratted on them; she also tells a rather implausible story of how one day they used clothespins to hang their outraged, squirming, 50-pound sister from a washing line by her panties.
Whatever the indignities she suffered at her brothers’ hands, she gave as good as she got, the trio squabbling over everything from sharing the household chores to using the record player. An aficionada of mainstream pop, Madonna vividly remembers the day her brothers deliberately scratched her treasured Gary Puckett and the Union Gap single so that they could fill the house with the heavy psychedelic rock that they loved and she loathed.
In this scratchy, discordant household, Madonna’s younger brother and sisters, Christopher, Paula and Melanie, fared as well as they could. Never as pretty, popular or clever as Madonna, Paula perhaps had the toughest time, always living in her older sister’s shadow. She was the tomboy of the brood, and in consequence often sided with her elder brothers against her sharper and more articulate sister. Christopher, quiet, personable and artistic, was never a threat, while Melanie, who stood out physically because of a single blonde streak in her otherwise dark hair, was, as is common with the youngest in a family, the most indulged.
As is so often the case in large families, Tony Ciccone’s six children were competing – for space, for time and, particularly the girls, for their father’s attention. It was a competition Madonna needed to win, such was her longing for any crumbs of affection and approval. As she herself has said, ‘I just tried to be the apple of my father’s eye. I think that everyone else in my family was very aware of it. And I kind of stood out.’ If winning approval meant helping with the daily chores – her father pinned a list to the fridge most weeks – or following him to Mass at six in the morning, before school, or helping to look after the younger children, then that was, for her, a price worth paying.
She brought other factors into play, too, apart from mere helpfulness or ‘goodness.’ Aware of her physicality from an early age, she used all her childish guile to woo and win her father, staging impromptu dance shows on the kitchen table, à la Shirley Temple, or making sure she won the race to sit on her father’s lap, or to be the first to tell of the day’s events at school. In a statement that seems to be halfway between an admission and a boast, she once said, ‘I was my father’s favorite. I knew how to wrap him around my finger, I knew there was another way to go besides saying, “No, I’m not going to do it,” and I employed those techniques.’ No doubt at times her insistence on being the center of attention was as perplexing for her harassed father as it was irritating to her brothers and sisters.
That her father, a quiet, even diffident, man who worked long hours in order to provide for his six motherless children, could not or would not satisfy Madonna’s longing for his undivided attention was for many years a source of acrimony between them, an acrimony generated almost entirely by her. ‘More than anything I want my father’s approval whether I want to admit it or not,’ she has said, at the same time acknowledging that her father was ‘very affectionate’ towards her. Yet her need for love and recognition appears to have been so deeply ingrained that it is debatable whether, if she had lived, even her mother could have quenched Madonna’s seemingly insatiable thirst for affection, her fierce desire to be needed and noticed.
It would seem that she was born with this emotional hunger as an integral part of her personality, like her innate curiosity, which was then molded by her upbringing. ‘She is,’ as one of her close girlfriends pointed out, ‘an alpha-A female. She has to be the center of attention no matter what.’
Like that other Hollywood celebrity, Barbra Streisand, whose chutzpah and determination enabled her to overcome the formidable obstacles in her path to fame, Madonna seems to be a star who was born, not made. In short, divas are different. Nor do the parallels between the two stars end there. Like Madonna, Streisand lost a parent when young and spent her early childhood years clinging to her mother for support and love. Then her world was turned upside-down when her mother met and married another man. Barbra tried to win her stepfather’s approval, but he actively disliked her. In Madonna’s case it was the slim, blonde, upright figure of Joan Gustafson who usurped the eight-year-old’s place in her father’s affections. Joan joined the Ciccone family in 1966 as the latest in a series of housekeepers employed by Tony Ciccone. Six months later they were married.
Ever since his wife’s death three years earlier, Tony Ciccone had tried valiantly to juggle a demanding full-time job and life as a single parent of six children. Naturally other members of his family pitched in, the Ciccone children spending holidays with their grandparents in West Aliquippa or Bay City, or at the home of Tony’s brother-in-law and friend, Dale Fortin, and his family. As his elder brother Guy Ciccone remembers, ‘Silvio would bring the whole family to visit in the summers for vacation, or to weddings and family gatherings.’ Madonna would help her grandfather, Gaetano, in his vegetable garden, or show off her latest dance routine to the delight of the adults. ‘Madonna was such a pretty little girl and she always loved dancing,’ recalls her aunt, Betty Ciccone, adding, ‘Silvio was a pretty good dancer too.’
Yet even as the Fortin family was coming to terms with Madonna Senior’s premature death, tragedy struck once more. In 1966, Dale Fortin died of leukemia, leaving his wife Katherine to bring up seven children – three boys and four girls – on her own. ‘I just had to cope,’ she admits. ‘A strong will and an iron hand was what it took. It wasn’t easy, but in a way it was worse for Tony.’
Certainly Tony Ciccone followed the same course when disaster overtook him and his young family. A firm disciplinarian with a rigid sense of right and wrong, he did the best he could to bring his children up responsibly, but also within the tenets of his own moral code. His austere upbringing translated into ensuring that his children worked and played hard. Television was rationed, as were candies, while household chores were apportioned on a daily basis. In this necessarily regimented world, it did not escape his notice that what his children needed was not the instability and uncertainty of life with hired help – that succession of housekeepers – but someone who would be a fixed point in their lives. For although no one could replace Madonna Senior, he believed that another woman around the house would provide the nurturing and guidance to which he felt his children, particularly the girls, would respond. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Tony Ciccone needed a wife, his own emotional needs balanced by the pragmatic realities of what was best for his family and for family life.
He could not have been more wro
ng – at least, as far as eight-year-old Madonna was concerned. Ferociously self-absorbed and self-centered as only the young can be, in her eyes the deep, unresolved anger she felt over her mother’s death was now, at her father’s marriage, compounded by what she regarded as his callous betrayal of the love and attention she had showered upon him. Not only had he deserted her for another woman, but her new stepmother had usurped Madonna’s notional position as the ‘little lady’ of the household.
Whatever the reality, that was the truth as she saw it and she took action accordingly. Feeling, perhaps unconsciously, that if she couldn’t win her father’s attention by conforming then she would have to explore other avenues, she rapidly changed from childish coquette to ‘difficult,’ defiant daughter. As for her stepmother, Madonna viewed her from the first as the enemy, even refusing to honor her father’s wish that she should call Joan ‘Mom.’ The simmering resentment she felt towards Tony’s second wife has lasted to this day.
Within weeks of her marriage, Joan Ciccone became pregnant, giving birth to a daughter, Jennifer, in 1967, and the following year to a son, Mario. As though that were not enough, Tony Ciccone next decided that their house in Pontiac was way too small for a family that now numbered ten members. It was, he felt, time to make a break with the past, time to move from the down-at-heel, racially mixed neighborhood of Pontiac, where Madonna had happy memories of joining her black girlfriends in backyard dance sessions, to the nearby but infinitely more upscale – and exclusively white – suburb of Rochester. The family’s new home at 2036 Oklahoma Street was typical of the modest affluence of a still-sleepy country town; a two-story clapboard and red-brick Colonial-style house where today Joan Ciccone runs a children’s daycare center in a converted garage. just down the road was Saint Andrew’s, the Roman Catholic church that the family would now attend, with its own school to which the children would go, a brisk walk away for ten-year-old Madonna.
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