Madonna

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Five hours passed. It was eleven o’clock. The president took Madonna’s face in his hands and kissed her on both cheeks. “I wish you great luck with your film,” he told her, speaking in English.

  “But will you help me?” she asked.

  “As I said,” he answered, smiling, “anything is possible.” With old-world courtesy, he helped her to her feet. Then he stood at the front door and waved good-bye as Madonna and Constancio were driven away.

  Once at the airport, Constancio guided Madonna by the arm across the tarmac to a red-and-white helicopter whose rotor was already beginning to turn. Soon, they were heading back to the city.

  Madonna later said she felt swollen with pride over her accomplishment. “We flew away,” she later said, “and I was floating inside the cabin the whole way home. He had worked his magic on me. I only hoped I did the same.”

  Less than two weeks later, the Ministry of Culture contacted the film’s production company. A second meeting — this time formal and public — was organized and attended by President Menem, Madonna, Alan Parker and two other stars of the movie, Jonathan Pryce (the Tony award – winning actor from the musical Miss Saigon who had now been hired to portray Juan Perón) and Antonio Banderas (Ché, the film’s narrator). At that meeting, Menem gave his blessing to Evita by making available to the film all government buildings previously off limits — including Madonna’s cherished Casa Rosada.

  Restless Child

  Just who is this person so capable of charming the president of a country into doing something he had no intention of doing, and doing it her way? What is it about this woman — an entertainer who isn’t uncommonly beautiful and, while talented, perhaps not phenomenally so — that has kept her on the top rung of the show business ladder as the very symbol of success and glamour for the last fifteen years? Always comfortable and confident within her limitations, in her 1991 documentary film Truth or Dare she noted, “I know I’m not the best singer or dancer in the world. I know that. But I’m not interested in that, either. I’m interested in pushing buttons.”

  In the ensuing years since her original success in 1983, many journalists have gone back and explored her past, looking for keys to the mystery of Madonna. However, in her ordinary beginnings there was little to suggest what lay ahead for Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone.

  “I get nostalgic for a time in my life before I was an empire,” Madonna said in September 2000 during an on-line chat with customers of the Internet provider AOL. Like many people who become famous, before she was “an empire” Madonna just wanted to be a star. A driving, burning ambition to be famous seemed to be born within her, just a part of who she was at the core. When, in fact, she did realize her dream, one of her most celebrated remarks would be “I have the same goal I’ve had since I was a little girl. I want to rule the world.”

  Though half French Canadian, Madonna seems to most identify with the other half, her Italian heritage. “Io sono fiera di essere Italiana” (“I’m proud to be an Italian”) she told an audience of 65,000 fans at the Turin football stadium when she performed in Italy in the summer of 1987. Her Italian roots date back to the 1800s in the Abruzzi province of Pacentro. Her paternal great-grandfather, Nicola Pietro Ciccone, was born in Pacentro in 1867. At the age of twenty-six, he married Anna Maria Mancini, also from Pacentro. In 1901, they had a son, Gaetano, Madonna’s grandfather. Eighteen years later, Gaetano married a woman named Michelina (there seems to be no record of her surname), also from the local village. Shortly thereafter, the couple immigrated to the United States, settling in the Aliquippa suburb of Pittsburgh. Unable to speak English, they forged their way in their new country, Gaetano working in the steel mills of Pittsburgh. They had their first child, Mario, in 1930 and then, four years later, their second son, Silvio — nicknamed Tony — Madonna’s father. Four more children, all boys, would be born over the course of the next six years.

  Of all the boys, Silvio was the most aggressive, the most intelligent and the most determined to carve his own niche in life; he was the only child to graduate from college with a degree. After graduation, Silvio met and fell in love with a beautiful French Canadian woman from Bay City, Michigan, with the unusual name of Madonna Fortin. Though engaged to another man at the time, Madonna was attracted to Silvio’s strong charisma and dark good looks and soon she accepted his proposal of marriage. They married in 1955 at Bay City’s Visitation Church. After settling in a small brick home at 443 Thors Street in Pontiac, Michigan — twenty-five miles northwest of Detroit — Tony took a job as an engineer at Chrysler Automotive Corporation.

  Madonna Fortin Ciccone gave birth to the couple’s first child, Anthony, on May 4, 1956. Another son, Martin, was born a year later, on August 9. While visiting her mother, Elsie Fortin, in Bay City, the again-expectant Madonna Fortin Ciccone gave birth, on August 16, 1958, to her first daughter, Madonna Louise (nicknamed “Nonnie” by her parents) at Bay City Mercy Hospital. She would give birth to three more children over the next three years, Paula, Christopher and Melanie.

  “I grew up in a really big family and in an environment where you had to get over it to be heard,” Madonna once recalled. “I was like the she-devil. It was like living in a zoo. You had to share everything. I slept in a bed for years — not even a double bed — with two sisters.” She also recalled, “I would even hurt myself, like burn my fingers deliberately, to get attention.”

  “She was spoiled from the very beginning,” recalls her brother Christopher. “She was the oldest girl, and was the one considered our parents’ favorite. That, combined with the fact that she was really aggressive and wanted her way, and got it, made her a spoiled kid. But she was good-hearted. She liked to take care of the bunch. She was also very bossy,” he says. “Very bossy.”

  While growing up, the young Madonna had always been a faithful fan of classic Hollywood and of its stars. At an early age, she somehow came to realize that many of the world’s greatest stars suffered through volatile early lives rife with mystery and drama. A melodramatic child, she seemed to understand the importance of legend. Years later, Madonna seemed to want to give the impression in interviews that she came from a lower-income family — perhaps hoping to capitalize on the “good copy” value of the so-called classic rags-to-riches story. While this was apparently the kind of history she wished to claim for herself — one in which she had to overcome great childhood traumas and obstacles before she could ever think of attaining success — it wasn’t true.

  In truth, her father Silvio was never out of work. He did well, even with the responsibility of so many children and the financial burden inherent in such a large family. Madonna always lived a healthy, middle-class existence.

  “Ours was a strict, old-fashioned family,” she has said. “When I was tiny, my grandmother used to beg me to go to church with her, to love Jesus and be a good girl. I grew up with two images of women: the virgin and the whore.”

  As a young girl, Madonna was particularly close to her mother. The two Madonnas shared an intense and special affection, and throughout her career daughter would always speak of mother with great tenderness. “She was beautiful,” Madonna once recalled, “and very loving and devoted to her children. Very children-oriented.” Her earliest childhood memories, she has said, are happy ones because they revolved around her mother, whom she has also called “forgiving and angelic.”

  “When I was four and younger, I remember not being able to sleep at night,” Madonna remembers. “I would walk to my parents’ bedroom and push the door open. They were both asleep in bed and I think I must have done this a lot, gone in there, because they both sat up in bed and said, ‘Oh no, not again!’ And I said, ‘Can I get into bed with you?’ My father was against me getting into bed with them. Yet, I remember getting into bed and rubbing against my mother’s really beautiful, red, silky nightgown . . . and going to sleep — just like that. I always went to sleep right away when I was with them. I felt really lonely and forlorn, even though my brother
s and sisters were in my room with me. So, I wanted to sleep with my parents. To me, that was heaven, to sleep in between my parents.”

  Madonna’s older brother Martin remembers her as a restless, rambunctious child. Though there was the usual sibling rivalry between them, little Nonnie never let her older brother intimidate her. If he spread Vaseline in her hair while she slept, or hung her on the clothesline by her underwear, she’d soon retaliate by snitching on him the next time he sneaked out of the house and went down to the corner store without permission. From an early age, Madonna didn’t like anyone getting the better of her, and — no surprise — also hated to be told what to do and how to behave, even by her parents. “When I was a child, I always thought that the world was mine,” she has explained, “that it was a stomping ground for me, full of opportunities. I always had the attitude that I was going to go out into the world and do all the things I wanted to do, whatever that was.”

  Certainly no child likes to be given rules but, repeatedly, people from Madonna’s past remark on her particularly rebellious nature as a child. She herself often talks about the defiant personality she possessed from an early age. She started out, and would remain, outspoken about people and matters that rubbed her the wrong way — even well-meaning children. For instance, one of Madonna’s earliest memories is of sitting in her parents’ front yard in Michigan, punished by her father as a result of some youthful misdeed. A two-year-old neighbor, wanting to befriend the adorable little girl, waddled up to Madonna and presented her with a dandelion she had picked. Madonna’s response was to stand up, face the child, and then push her to the ground. “My first instinct,” Madonna said years later, “was to lash out at someone who was more helpless than I. I saw in her innocent eyes the chance to get back at authority.” The fact that the young visitor offered a dandelion apparently did not help matters for her. The adult Madonna would go on to explain that she detested dandelions because “they’re weeds that run rampant and I like things that are cultivated.”

  Even though she was the third of six children, Madonna soon learned how to keep a certain amount of attention focused upon her. For instance, she would use tricks inspired by the movies she voraciously watched on television in order to remain the focal point in a busy household — such as jumping on top of a table at a moment’s notice and performing a Shirley Temple – type number. At the end of her impromptu act, she would add “a personal touch” — she would lift up her dress and flash her panties. This bit of naughtiness was always a success, delighting everyone, young and old. The youngster seemed to be learning that a little flash, mixed with a bit of exhibitionism, could go a long way toward pleasing people. Of course, years later, the adult Madonna would combine these talents to great effect in her professional career.

  *

  Almost certainly, the defining moment of Madonna’s childhood — the one that would have the most influence in shaping her into the woman she would become — was the tragic and untimely death of her beloved mother at just thirty years of age.

  After her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, little Nonnie and her siblings watched as she slowly wasted away over a period of about a year. Many months before her mother would die, however, five-year-old Nonnie began to notice changes in her behavior and personality, although she didn’t understand the serious reasons for such changes. Her mother had always been greatly attentive to detail as a homemaker, but after her diagnosis she grew tired easily and was unable to keep up with housework she had previously maintained with such diligence. Madonna has remembered her mother sitting exhausted on the couch in the middle of the afternoon. The young girl, wanting to play with her parent, just as she always had in the past, would jump on her back; her mother, too tired to move, would be dismissive. The little girl — sensing that something frightening was in the offing — would respond by pounding angrily on her mother’s back and sobbing, “Why are you doing this? Stop being this way! Be who you used to be. Play with me!”

  Madonna’s mother was, no doubt, at a loss to explain to her frightened daughter the reality of her dire medical condition. Probably scared and feeling helpless, she would just begin to cry, at which point her daughter would respond by wrapping her arms around her tenderly. “I remember feeling stronger than she was,” Madonna recalled. “I was so little and yet I felt like she was the child. I stopped tormenting her after that. I think it made me grow up fast.”

  Eventually Madonna’s mother had to be moved to a hospital. Once there, she attempted to maintain a cheery demeanor, always appearing upbeat for her visiting children and cracking jokes for them. Though she knew she was dying, she didn’t want her offspring to realize it. “I remember that right before she died she asked for a hamburger,” Madonna has said. “She wanted to eat a hamburger because she couldn’t eat anything for so long. I thought that [she chose a hamburger for her meal] was very funny.” Later that day, though, Madonna’s father broke the news to her that her mother was dead. At first, she couldn’t comprehend the enormity of the tragedy that had occurred and, as she put it, “I kept waiting for her to come back. We [she and her father] never really sat down and talked about it. I guess we should have.”

  Madonna was just five when her mother died on December 1, 1963, and the impact this loss had on her is almost certainly immeasurable. She lost her mother at a time when, as a young girl, she was forming her personality, her ideals. She needed a mother then, and she would need her evermore.

  One theory about childhood loss is that the earlier the age the more profound the influence and the longer lasting the impact. Five is a formative age. A child of five could easily feel victimized by events, and maybe even think that he or she should have been able to influence them in some way. Certainly, the anger Madonna would feel at losing her mother would be extremely difficult for a five-year-old to handle. Some people never reconcile themselves to such a loss at so early an age, at least not without a great deal of therapy.

  After she became famous, Madonna would say, “We are all wounded in one way or another by something in our lives, and then we spend the rest of our lives reacting to it or dealing with it or trying to turn it into something else.” For Madonna, the anguish of losing her mother “left me with a certain kind of loneliness and an incredible longing for something.” She has also said, “If I hadn’t had that emptiness, I wouldn’t have been so driven. Her death had a lot to do with me saying — after I got over my heartache — I’m going to be really strong if I can’t have my mother. I’m going to take care of myself.”

  As they grew older, Madonna and her sisters would feel deep sadness as the vivid memory of their mother began drifting farther from them. They’d study pictures of her and would come to think that she resembled Anne Sexton, the 1960s Pulitzer Prize – winning poet who wrote about depression and suicide in books like To Bedlam and Part Way Back and Live or Die. This may have led to Madonna’s intense interest in poetry. (Madonna has also cited Sylvia Plath as a poet she admires — an intellectual reference that goes beyond most people’s image of Madonna as being shallow. Actually, many of her songs have roots in art, poetry, philosophy and different religions.)

  Not only did the young Madonna learn to take care of herself, she also cared for her brothers and sisters. As the oldest girl, she was happy to take on the maternal role with her siblings. In fact, her brother Martin remembers that Madonna not only fed the younger children but she always made sure that they were properly dressed for school. “I didn’t resent having to raise my brothers and sisters as much as I resented the fact that I didn’t have my mother,” Madonna confirmed. Actually, she didn’t have to raise her siblings alone since her father did hire a series of housekeepers . . . all of whom eventually ended up quitting rather than having to endure the behavior of the unruly Ciccone brood. Madonna and her siblings invariably rebelled against anyone brought into the home ostensibly to take the place of their beloved mother. If it meant she could keep other women out of her father’s life (and have him to hers
elf), Madonna was happy to continue in the role of surrogate mother. “Like all young girls,” Madonna would say, “I was in love with my father and I didn’t want to lose him. I lost my mother, but then I was my mother . . . and my father was mine.”

  “I see a very lonely girl who was searching for something,” she once said in an interview with Vanity Fair in describing her youth. “Looking for a mother figure. I wasn’t rebellious in a conventional way; I cared about being good at something. I didn’t shave under my arms and I didn’t wear makeup. But I studied hard and got good grades. Rarely smoked pot, though I’m sure I did from time to time. I was a paradox, an outsider and rebel who wanted to please my father and get straight As. I wanted to be somebody.”

  The death of her mother had left such deep emotional scars on her, the young Madonna was terrified that she would lose her father, too. As she had done a couple of years earlier with both her parents, she would now crawl into bed in the middle of the night with just her father. The young girl suffered constantly from recurring nightmares and it was only with the assurance that her father was with her could she fall soundly and safely asleep. In time, no doubt because of the devastation she felt, she would never again allow herself to feel as abandoned as she had felt when her mother died. Madonna would have to remain strong for herself because, from an early age, she feared weakness — particularly her own.

  Confusing Times

  In 1966, three years after the death of Madonna’s mother, Tony Ciccone became romantically involved with Joan Gustafson, one of the Ciccone’s many housekeepers. Much to Madonna’s resentment, the two were soon married. It was, perhaps, at this time that Madonna began to express unresolved feelings of anger toward her father that would last for decades.

  Repeatedly, biographies about Madonna have proffered the notion that, because of her mother’s death, Madonna has always yearned for her father’s approval, and that his apparent lack of approval had been the source of ongoing tension between father and daughter. It’s true that Tony Ciccone’s lack of understanding of Madonna’s artistic vision has certainly not enhanced their relationship over the years, and she has definitely sought his approval. However, a close study of Madonna’s life clearly shows that another factor in the instability of her emotional relationship with her father has to do with anger. Tony’s courage in moving on with his life after his wife died did nothing to elevate him in the eyes of a daughter who felt strongly that her mother could — and should — never be replaced. Or, as one close relative put it, “It was as if, as a young girl, she was so filled with rage because of her mother’s death and the way her father handled it, she had to direct it somewhere . . . and so she directed it at the one person she loved the most, her father.”