Madonna

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “I remember that she would also dance vigorously during some of the plays she was in, using a lot of body movement. It was pretty controversial for the times. Her father wasn’t pleased. Anything she could do to shock people, that’s what she would do. But, to her credit, she was a bright student, involved in a Big Brother/Sister program, a thespian group. She was very positive thinking. She was taking dancing lessons after school when a lot of other kids were drinking Cokes. She worked hard.”

  Madonna was also involved in the theater department, starring in productions such as My Fair Lady, Cinderella, The Wizard of Oz and Godspell. On the high school stage, she would learn what it was like to please an audience, to stand in the spotlight and accept a crowd’s warm applause. “She liked it,” says Clara Bonell, a former classmate. “I saw her in Godspell, and I remember that when the audience stood for the curtain call, she was crying. The sense of acceptance, I think now that this is what she most appreciated, most craved. I think she felt that she didn’t get it at home from her father, who was just not supportive at all, as I recall it. So, if she could get it from an audience, then that was good for her.”

  Beverly Gibson, her drama teacher, adds, “When the spotlight came on her, she was pure magic. People paid attention to her; you couldn’t take your eyes off of her. You often hear about people who become famous being wallflowers. You hear their friends and teachers say, ‘Oh, I would never have expected her to become famous.’ Not so with Madonna. There was no way she could ever be anything other than famous at something. I would watch her on stage with that vibrant personality and charisma, and think to myself, ‘Oh, my, it is inevitable, isn’t it?’”

  “In high school, Madonna was a nonconformist,” says her former classmate Tanis Rozelle. “Unlike the other girls, she didn’t shave her armpits, and neither did her sister Melanie. That was considered pretty weird. Both had thick tufts of hair growing out from underneath their armpits. It caused a minor controversy, but after a while people just accepted it. Madonna explained that she didn’t shave because she didn’t want to be a typical suburban American girl. She said she didn’t want to remove something from her body that was natural. It didn’t stop her from raising her arms high while cheering, even when she wore a sleeveless uniform,” recalls Tanis. “And it certainly didn’t stop her from being popular with the boys. She was very pretty and the guys really liked her.”

  It was during her first year in high school, at the age of fifteen in December 1973, when Madonna lost her virginity to seventeen-year-old Russell Long. Actually, she says she had some sexual encounters prior to this time, when she was eight, but not intercourse. “All of my sexual experiences when I was young were with girls,” she says. “I mean, we didn’t have those sleepover parties for nothing. I think that’s really normal, same-sex experimentation. You get really curious and there’s your girlfriend, and she’s spending the night with you, and it happens.”

  “She wanted her first time having real sex to be something special,” Russell Long now recalls. “We had a date — a movie and burgers — and afterward we drove my very cool, blue 1966 Caddy back to my parents’ place.”

  While Long recalls being nervous about the signals he says Madonna was sending — it was clear that she wanted to be intimate with him — he didn’t have to worry about initiating anything. She was the aggressor. “Are we going to do it, or not?” she wanted to know as she removed her bra.

  “I guess so,” Russell said, breathlessly.

  “Well, then, c’mon,” she urged. “Do it!”

  Years later, she would observe, “Even after I made love for the first time, I still felt like a virgin. I didn’t lose my virginity until I knew what I was doing.”

  After that first time at the home of Long’s parents, he says, they chose the backseat of his Cadillac for future rendezvous. “My friends called it ‘the Passion Wagon,’” he recalls.

  “She didn’t have a problem with people knowing we were having sex. Lots of girls of that age would have been embarrassed by it, or would at least not have wanted people to know. Not Madonna. She was proud of it, said that it had made her feel like a woman. She was comfortable with her body, didn’t mind being seen naked. She just seemed comfortable with all of it.”

  “I liked my body when I was growing up,” Madonna once said in a press interview, “and I wasn’t ashamed of it. I liked boys and didn’t feel inhibited by them. Maybe it comes from having brothers and sharing a bathroom. The boys got the wrong impression of me at high school. They mistook forwardness for promiscuity. When they don’t get what they want, they turn on you. I went through a period when all the girls thought I was loose, and the boys thought I was a nymphomaniac. The first boy I ever slept with was my boyfriend and we’d been going out a long time.”

  “She wasn’t like most other students,” Russell Long recalls. “There was a group of kids who were just the odd ones, the ones most of the students thought were sort of creepy. Madonna was in that bunch. She didn’t assimilate into the student body, rather she was one of those kids on the fringe, sort of on the sidelines smirking at everyone else.

  “However, I found her to be quite sensitive,” he continues. “We had long talks about her mother, and how much she missed her. Also, we discussed the tension that existed between her and her father. By the time she was in high school she was rebelling against him in every way, she seemed so angry at him, though I didn’t understand why. She would say, ‘What do you think he’d do if he knew we were having sex? Do you think it would freak him out?’ And I would say, ‘Hell, yeah, it would freak him out.’ Then she would come back with, ‘Well, then, maybe I should tell him.’ I would say, ‘Madonna, no! He’ll kill me.’ But my safety, or her privacy, wasn’t on her mind. If she could blow his mind, shock him, she wanted to do it. Even more than that, if she could piss him off, she wanted to do it.” Long and Madonna continued their relationship for six months.

  Russell Long, now a trucker for United Parcel Service, still lives in Michigan and is married with children. “I wonder if he still loves me,” Madonna once mused. Then, as if coming to her senses, she answered her own question. “Oh, of course he does!”

  “Sure I do,” says Russell Long today. “Even if she had not become famous, there’s no way I would ever have forgotten her. She was one of a kind.”

  Christopher and Whitley

  In the ninth grade, Madonna joined a high school jazz-dance class. However, with determination and dedication uncommon for a fourteen-year-old, she soon outgrew it. A friend then recommended that she consider the Christopher Flynn Dance School at the Rochester School of Ballet. Once accepted as a student, she was quickly exposed to students who were serious about the art of classical dance, “which was a real turn-on for me,” she has said. In his studio Christopher Flynn stressed hard work and discipline, concepts Madonna had sometimes felt the need to rebel against in her home and at school, but which she now embraced as a dance student. “He was very Catholic and all about rules,” she recalls. Because she worked up to five hours a day in his class, Flynn was quickly impressed with his new student’s remarkable progress. Soon, she quit cheerleading, began to watch what she ate in order to trim her figure, and spoke of little more than her love of dance. Her enrollment at the Christopher Flynn Dance School was the first of several years of serious dance study.

  Flynn the dance instructor, thirty years Madonna’s senior, was one of the first people to notice the budding “star quality” in the teenage girl and, as a result, the first to push her in the direction of a career as a performer. His enthusiasm for Madonna quickly gave her a boost of self-confidence that even the most self-assured youngster needs at that age.

  Once, after a particularly grueling dance routine, a sweaty and exhausted Madonna wrapped a towel around her head “swami-style,” and then gazed moodily out of the window, deep in reflection. Flynn observed his student, so lost in thought. Years later, he would recall the moment with vivid clarity.

  “My G
od,” he said to her, “you really are beautiful.”

  “What?” Madonna asked, wide-eyed and perhaps wanting to hear it again.

  “You have an ancient-looking face,” he told her, “a face like an ancient Roman statue.”

  “Why would you say that to me?” she asked.

  “Because it’s true,” he answered. “It’s not physical beauty I’m talking about, it’s something deeper. Know it.”

  “I already know it,” she said, speaking frankly. “I just wasn’t sure anyone else did.”

  Years later, she would recall, “I was fourteen, maybe fifteen, and feeling horribly unattractive and unpopular and uninteresting and unfabulous. And Christopher said ‘God, you’re beautiful.’ Well, no one had ever said that to me before. He told me I was special. He taught me to appreciate beauty — not beauty in the conventional sense, but rather beauty of the spirit.”

  Actually, Christopher Flynn’s influence on Madonna’s life and career cannot be overstated. “My whole life changed,” Madonna has said. “Not just because studying dance with Christopher was so really important, but because he gave me a focus. He took me out of what I considered to be a humdrum existence.”

  Flynn was happy to help encourage Madonna to her next level of her growth as a performer. After she became a star he would say of her, “Madonna was a blank page, believe me, and she wanted desperately to be filled in. She knew nothing at all about art, classical music, sculpture, fashion, civilization — nothing about life, really. I mean, she was just a child. But she had a burning desire to learn, that girl. She had a thirst for learning that was insatiable. It was something that would not be denied. She was a very positive young girl, always focused on what she could do to be better. She had this tremendous thirst and, really, it was insatiable.”

  Christopher Flynn was also the first homosexual man with whom Madonna became close. Although she was still underage, he allowed her to accompany him to gay bars and clubs. It was there that her education began to expand beyond the scope of classical music, art and sculpture. With Flynn as her guide to the more provocative aspects of Michigan nightlife, Madonna learned a great deal in a short amount of time about eroticism and, as she later put it, “pushing the envelope to the point where it screams out: ‘stop!’” It was much more of an education than she could ever have acquired from her home life or at school. Because of her completely uninhibited way of expression through dance, Madonna won over crowds of gay men with her campy, sexy and energetic moves. Her appreciative “fans” filled her with a sense of self-confidence and energy, making her truly believe that her aspirations to be a dancer were not unwarranted.

  Her French teacher, Carol Lintz, recalls that Madonna was so influenced by her experiences at the gay bars, she no longer even needed a partner to dance. “Something happened to her at this time, and it caused her to no longer think of dance as a social act, but rather an artistic one. There she would be, in the middle of the dance floor at one of those teen dances, by herself, dancing. People would ask me with whom she was dancing. I would answer, no one. Herself. She was dancing with herself, just for the experience.

  “I started seeing technique. I started seeing showmanship. It was a fascinating evolution.

  “When she graduated, she was given the Thespian Award for her work in the many school plays she did — so many, I can’t even remember how many, and she was always the lead . . . she wouldn’t have it any other way. She was very proud of that award. I remember, she said, ‘I always knew I’d get this award one day,’ as though it was an Oscar. But I never thought of her as an actress. I thought of her as a dancer.”

  Christopher Flynn once remembered another conversation he had with Madonna at his dance studio that, he says, “really clued me in on the kind of entertainer she was becoming.”

  While doing stretching exercises in her black leotard, she asked Flynn, “Why do you think you like men?”

  He answered the question by saying his sexuality was something that “just happened, nothing I can control.”

  “Well, I wish I understood it,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “So that I can tap into it,” she said. “Look at women like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. These women are gay favorites, aren’t they? I wish I knew what it is about them. Is it the glamour? Is it their behavior?”

  “I think it’s because they’re so tragic,” offered Flynn. “I think that’s what it is. You see them and you want to slit your wrists. Every gay man has wanted to slit his wrist at one time or another. So yes,” he decided, “it’s because they’re so tragic.”

  Madonna stopped stretching. “Well, then, forget it,” she said, looking at her dance teacher seriously. “I will never be tragic. If it takes being tragic to have gay fans, then fuck it. I’ll appeal only to straight people, I guess.”1

  *

  By the time seventeen-year-old Madonna graduated from Rochester Adams High School in 1976 — a half semester early due to her exceptional studies — Christopher Flynn had became a dance professor at the University of Michigan. Wanting to bring his young protégée with him to the new school, he agreed with Madonna’s high school guidance counselor, Nancy Ryan Mitchell, that she should audition for a scholarship there. She applied, she got it and so, in the fall of 1976, Madonna enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

  “Our dad was pretty damn proud,” says Martin Ciccone. “I’m not sure that Madonna knew it, though. Their relationship was strained. If she was in trouble, of course he would be there. But she was never one to admit when she was in trouble, and definitely she would not turn to our father. They argued a lot, there was such anger there from her. She was his daughter; he was an old-fashioned Italian-American man, and family meant a lot to him. But there was always this great divide between him and Madonna. He never understood her. ‘Break rules?’ he would say. ‘But why? What’s wrong with the rules?’ When it was time for her to go off to college, I think they were both ready for a break from each other.

  “Our father had always stressed education, though. He raised his kids to appreciate a good education. When Madonna went to college with that scholarship, we all knew she was going to really come into her own.”

  It was then, when she enrolled at the University of Michigan, that Madonna Louise Ciccone, middle child of a strict Catholic family, began her metamorphosis into “Madonna,” free-spirited artist.

  “I guess my immediate impression of her was a combination of fascination and intimidation,” says Whitley Setrakian, a young and aspiring choreographer who became Madonna’s first roommate at the University of Michigan’s Stockwell Hall, and then later at the University Towers. “She was beautiful. Articulate. Very, very thin. Her hair had been chopped off in a sort of odd way with little bits sticking out on the sides. She wore lots of heavy, dark eyeliner and interesting clothes, baggy T-shirts and tight pants. She was startlingly brilliant, with a quick, incisive type of mind. She was very spontaneous, driven and unafraid. She had a way of owning a room when she came into it. I’ve never met anyone quite like her. Also,” she adds with a laugh, “her front extensions [a dance technique] were very high, which meant a lot at the time. She was a good dancer with strong technique. She took chances. She was raw, but we were all raw then. However, if one dancer got a lot of attention and she didn’t, that made her angry and she would talk to me about it. ‘What does she have that I don’t have?’ she would ask. She would think it was unjust that anyone got more recognition than she got. It drove her crazy that others were as good, or better, as if there was a mad race to the finish.”

  Setrakian continues, “She worked well with Christopher Flynn, though a lot of other students didn’t. He was a delightful person, and yet scary in ballet class because if he thought you were lazy he would pinch you really hard and leave little blood blisters on you. I had some trepidation about that, but Madonna didn’t. She liked it, actually. He was flamboyant and sarcastic, like her.”

  Setrakian — who worked
at the same ice-cream parlor as Madonna to earn extra money — was struck by the way the seventeen-year-old Madonna gave her all to everything she did, whether it be partying or rehearsing: “She’d drag me out of bed. I couldn’t keep up with her,” says Madonna’s former roommate. “She was up in the morning and out the door, in class before everyone else, warming up. We’d go out dancing on Saturday nights, up all night dancing very late. She’d be up early warming up if she had a rehearsal on Sunday morning. She was not easy on herself. She lived hard and worked hard.

  “She embarked on what seemed to be a calculated campaign to be my friend,” Setrakian recalls. “I resisted it at first but she won me over. She was determined to break down whatever limits and boundaries I put up. I felt she was being real with me when she would reveal herself in vulnerable ways. But yet, in the back of my mind, I would always think, ‘Maybe not.’ I felt that there might be an element of exploitation going on, that she was using our friendship to meet her emotional needs. I felt there was something mercenary about it, but it was vague and unclear to me then. I just knew that she would expect a person to be there for her, unconditionally. However, if you had a problem and you needed her, well, she wasn’t always there.

  “We had many long talks about her mother,” Setrakian says, “and about how much she missed her. She envied the relationship I had with my own mother. My mother called a lot and, when I would speak to her on the telephone, I would be aware of Madonna standing around and listening. We also talked about her father, but not much. I sensed anger from her whenever I brought up the subject.