“We became closer after a few months. She was huggy, very touchy. I got used to it. After a while it became a part of the way we related to each other.”
In December at the Christmas break, Whitley Setrakian went to the Bahamas on a vacation with her boyfriend. Madonna spent the holiday alone at their apartment, pining for her. When Whitley returned from her trip, she found on her bed a six-page handwritten letter from Madonna. In it, Madonna wrote that she “missed the hell” out of her. “I’ve realized how much I’ve grown to depend on you as a listener, advice giver and taker and general all around most wonderful, intimate friend in the whole world,” she wrote. She mentioned that she and a female friend had gone to a bar and, because of the way they were dancing, were “verbally accused” of being lesbians. In fact, wrote Madonna, she wished that she had been dancing with Whitley, not Linda. She also indicated that her rent was due, that she didn’t have the money, and didn’t know what she would do about the problem. She was so poor, she wrote, that she had taken to rummaging through garbage cans for food. She would just continue dreaming of a career in show business, she concluded, and hope for the best.
Those who knew her best at this time agree that Madonna had already made up her mind to be famous for doing something and so, as a means to that end, she was completely focused on her dance curriculum. Her inborn instinct for what was right for her, and for finding people who not only believed in her but could also assist in bringing out the best in her, led her to dance professor Gay Delang’s “technique class.” Delang remembers her as a standout from the very beginning. “She had many qualities that young dancers desire. She was lean. She had a nice edge to her muscles. She was hungry. Great appetite. She was sassy, kid-like. Chewed gum. Lived on butterscotch candies. She was disciplined, hardworking. A pleasure to be with. She was young. Just a kid.”
“All these girls would come to class with black leotards and pink tights and their hair up in buns with little flowers in it,” Madonna has remembered of her days as a dance student. “So I cut my hair really short and I’d grease it so it would be sticking up, and I’d rip my tights so there were runs all over them. Anything to stand out from them and say, ‘I’m not like you. Okay? I’m taking dance classes and everything but I’m not stuck here like you.’”
In college, Madonna sometimes worked off campus (as in the ice-cream parlor) but, to her, survival meant getting by any way she could. Roommate Setrakian remembers: “She taught me how to shoplift. One of us would make a diversion at the counter and the other would place her dance bag under the counter. Then, you’d sort of lean casually over the counter and at the height of the diversion you’d sweep your arm over the counter. Finally, the item would be in your dance bag. We got a lot of cosmetics that way, and lots of food, too. Whatever we needed. She would say, ‘Who needs it more than we do? When we get famous, we’ll give a lot of money to charity to make up for stealing this stuff. It all balances out with God in the bigger picture, don’t worry.’”
During her year and a half at the University of Michigan, Madonna received decent grades; she was satisfied with her work. However, the notion of graduating soon became less important to her than the idea of finally launching her dance career. She had been studying dance intensely for five years and the response to her work had been positive. Having gone as far as the university could take her, she now yearned to go farther. Christopher Flynn’s enthusiastic encouragement, along with the admiration of her friends and roommates, served to validate her inner voice, the one that assured her that she had something special, unique, to offer. When she sensed that it was time to move on, she saw no reason to waste time finishing her formal studies. Whitley Setrakian remembers that Madonna “saw better things for herself if she moved on quickly, without so much as a glance back. She wanted to be a dancer. She wanted to go to New York and get into a good company,” she recalls. “It was time. She never said she wanted to be a cultural icon or anything like that. She just wanted to dance.”
From childhood, Madonna had wanted to be an actress or, to be clearer, a movie star. Now, according to what she would later explain, she reasoned that as a dancer she would eventually find an entrée into the world of dramatics. Of course, in making these decisions, she was working completely on gut instinct. Certainly, she could have migrated to the West Coast, to Hollywood — the so-called entertainment capital of the world. However, she sensed that her immediate opportunities would be found in New York, a city known for its frenetic energy and diverse cultures.
Predictably, her father, Tony, was most unhappy when Madonna told him that she was forsaking her scholarship to run off to New York and focus on a dancing career. “He was very, very upset,” says Madonna’s brother Martin. “Our stepmother backed him, of course. They both agreed that she was making a huge mistake, and they did everything they could think of to talk her out of it. There were some big battles, yes. I recall some pretty bad scenes.”
“You drop out of school, you’ll no longer be my daughter,” Tony told her one night over a family meal, according to a later recollection.
“Fine,” Madonna said, angrily. “But when I’m famous, will I be your daughter again? Is that how this works?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Tony countered. “If we ever come to it.”
“Oh, we’ll come to it, all right,” Madonna said.
Contrary to what has been reported in the past, however, Tony never discouraged Madonna’s show-business aspirations. Rather, he just wished for her to graduate from college first, and then, as he puts it now, “do whatever she wanted to do, but with an education.”
“He would never tell her she was untalented,” says Gina Magnetti, one of Madonna’s cousins. “He wasn’t the kind of father to do that. Italian parents, they generally don’t do that anyway, especially if they came from the Old Country. They support their kids’ ambitions.
“Silvio — Uncle Tony — he wanted the best for her, big things. And, to him, that meant a college degree. Then, after that, she could have done whatever she wanted. She didn’t see it that way, however. So they fought. Madonna was so angry all the time.
“I was at their home one night when, right in the middle of dinner, she threw a plate of spaghetti across the room. ‘Stop trying to run my life,’ she screamed at him. The plate smashed against the wall, spaghetti and meatballs dripping down all over the floor. Everyone was shocked. Martin was there. I remember his eyes were wide, like saucers.
“I thought Uncle Tony would have a stroke. His face got red, his blood pressure shot up and he looked like he was being stricken. Madonna got scared and ran to him.
“Down on her knees in front of him, she started crying and apologizing. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she kept saying. ‘I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it.’ An apology to her father? Why, that was a major concession on her part.
“And then he started crying, patting her head, and saying, ‘No, I’m sorry. I’m the one who’s sorry.’
There was always big drama between them, and she was the one who always instigated it. It was as if she felt that she and her father had to have these big scenes in order to validate their love for one another.”
Finally . . . New York City!
Whether it’s all true or not — and with the always imaginative Madonna one can never really be certain — the story, or legend, of Madonna’s arrival in New York City on that morning in July 1978 is a good one. Intent on her easily-salable image as a modern-day Cinderella, she has often recalled leaving Detroit Metropolitan Airport — her first flight — and arriving in the city with nothing but thirty-five dollars in her pocket, a winter coat on her back, a duffel bag full of ballet tights slung over her shoulder . . . and a determination to do something significant with her life, to succeed. “Ten summers ago,” she announced in 1988 to a cheering crowd at the premiere of her film Who’s That Girl?, “I made my first trip to New York. My first plane ride, my first cab ride. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’
t know a soul. And I told the taxicab driver to drop me off in the middle of everything, so he dropped me off at Times Square. I was completely awestruck.”
Around the time Madonna arrived in New York City, the play Evita was making its initial impact on Broadway. The heroine of the show is an ambitious woman who, with unflappable self-confidence, leaves her hometown to make her first trip to the big city, in her case Buenos Aires. She doesn’t know anyone there. She is dropped off “in the middle of everything.” Then, she takes over . . .
One can somehow imagine the five-foot-four-and-a-half, nineteen-year-old Madonna (she would turn twenty in a month) clad in her out-of-season winter coat, walking past the porno theaters and peep shows in Times Square and stopping to admire the billboards and placards displayed in front of the theater featuring Evita, starring Patti LuPone. Did she ever imagine how closely her life would parallel the Argentinian icon’s? Certainly she never considered that she would one day play the leading role in the movie version of this same play, some fifteen years in the future. Or did she?
New York, one of the toughest, most unforgiving cities in the world, did not intimidate Madonna in the least. Always with an eye toward the future, Madonna would manage to survive on her wits. As legend has it, she roamed the strange, frenetic city on that first day until finally ending up at a street fair on Lexington Avenue, where she noticed a man following her. Instead of fleeing, as most young women in a new city might, Madonna greeted him. “Why are you wearing that coat?” he asked her, giving her a cue to launch into her “story.”
“Hi! I just arrived in town and I don’t have a place to stay,” she said. It was a story that had had some rehearsal time; she had already tried it on other disinterested strangers. Still, Madonna’s intensity must have made it seem compelling to this particular passerby because she ended up moving into his apartment and, according to her, sleeping on his couch. Home at last.
Madonna soon learned, however, that a young woman could not always be so trusting of people, particularly of men she might meet on the streets of New York. Years later, when she was famous for controversial anecdotes about herself, Madonna revealed that she had been attacked in New York at this time. “I have been raped and it is not an experience I would ever glamorize,” she revealed. The subject came up while she was discussing scenes from her controversial book of nude studies entitled Sex.
“I know there are a lot of women who have that fantasy of being overpowered by two men or a group of men.” One photograph in her book depicts Madonna dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform while being attacked by two boys. She insisted that the photograph, however, was pure fantasy. “It’s obviously completely consensual,” she said. “Everybody wants to do it.”
Madonna did not give any date or details of her own experience, saying only that, “It happened a long time ago, so over the years I’ve come to terms with it. In a way it was a real eye-opening experience. I’d only lived in New York for a year and I was very young, very trusting of people.”
“I remember her saying something about it,” her longtime friend Erica Bell recalls. “But it wasn’t something I felt she wanted to discuss openly. I think it was a date rape, meaning I think she knew the guy. It was someone who betrayed her confidence, her faith. It must have been devastating.”
Says another friend — a woman who still knows Madonna today and in whom she often confides — “The date rape was something she never wanted to talk about. But when it did come up, you could tell that she was deeply affected by whatever happened. She cried when she spoke of it, as if she had been traumatized. She said, ‘I wanted to call my father and tell him about it, maybe go home for a while. But he would have killed me.’ I felt that she needed her father at that time, but was afraid to turn to him. I know she could have used a mother, as well. These were lonely years.”
Her former manager Freddy DeMann adds, “I remember a time, long after her first taste of fame, when a girl in one of her audiences was being pushed around by some guys in front, trying to get closer to her [Madonna]. Suddenly, the girl went down, into the crowd. It was as if she was going to get stomped. Then, a couple of guys went down after her, and none of them came up. Madonna was watching the whole thing. She stopped the show, stopped singing, and called security out and told them to help that young girl. ‘I know what it’s like to feel powerless,’ she said from the stage. ‘And it doesn’t feel good.’ I’ll never forget that night. I felt that she had great empathy for that girl, and a certain amount of fear, too.”
“I don’t want to make it an issue,” Madonna has said about the rape incident. “I’ve had what a lot of people would consider to be horrific experiences in my life. But I don’t want people to feel sorry for me because I don’t.” Madonna said that the experience had made her “much more street smart and savvy. It was devastating at the time but it made me a survivor.”
Pearl
After a few weeks, Madonna moved out of her benefactor’s home — for reasons as unknown now as her destination was then — and she was on her own, again. She moved into a dilapidated fourth-floor walk-up at 232 East Fourth Street between Avenues A and B, truly just barely fit for human occupation. “I moved here from the Congo,” she told one neighbor, very seriously. “I’ve been studying the collective behavior of apes for the last year. I’m just now reacquainting myself with civilization. Do you have any money you can loan me?”
She survived by taking any odd job available, such as working in a series of fast food chains, or simply by taking the easy way out: asking her friends for handouts. Later she would tell the press that she ate from garbage cans, though some close to her at the time have disputed this memory. Food did not concern her, anyway. She preferred to eat at irregular hours, a banana for breakfast, an apple for lunch, perhaps some yogurt as a snack. Any hardships she experienced at this time were, in her view, just annoying distractions. After all, as she would explain it, she was in New York to dance — not eat. She didn’t waste time on unrealistic planning ahead, or optimistic dreaming, either. She had a goal, and she went after it.
In November of 1978, Madonna auditioned for the highly respected Pearl Lang Dance Company. On that day, she brought with her the emerging “Madonna persona.” Immediately, Pearl Lang — a former dance soloist with Martha Graham — recognized her as being unique. “She came in wearing this T-shirt that was torn all the way down the back,” Lang recalls. “And she had this enormous safety pin — it must have been a foot long — holding it together. I thought if she doesn’t poke her partner’s eye out, she’ll do something with her dancing one day.”
Madonna was one of several people chosen from those who had auditioned for Lang’s company. Her freestyle dance was impressive simply by virtue of its wild abandon. After the audition, Lang recalls walking over to Madonna until her face was just inches away from the young girl’s. It was as if the instructor wanted to get a closer look. Then, studying her carefully, she stroked Madonna’s face: “My dear, you have something special,” she whispered to her, taking her hand.
“I know,” Madonna replied.
As Madonna pulled away, Pearl relinquished her hold unwillingly, as if she wanted another moment to study the young woman before her.
“She was an exceptional dancer,” Pearl Lang recalled. “Many dancers can kick and exhibit acrobatic body control, but that is just run-of-the-mill, taken for granted. Madonna had the power, the intensity to go beyond mere physical performance into something far more exciting. That intensity is the first thing I look for in a dancer, and Madonna had it.”
Clearly, Madonna had won over choreographer Lang just as she had already won over others — such as Christopher Flynn — who would assist her in shaping her talent, guiding her toward her goal and becoming her mentors. As her skills broadened, she became an assistant to Lang. “I actually started to rely on her quite a bit,” says Lang. “She was organized, professional and very serious, at first. But then, after a few weeks, I noticed that she was feeling stifled
by the regimen of my teachings. She was annoyed when I pushed her for more.”
One day, after Madonna completed a complex dance routine, which she performed to jazz music played by a frantic pianist, Lang stood before her, looking unhappy. Clapping her hands once, she ordered, “A-gain .” (“Again,” but with pretentious upper-crust enunciation.)
Madonna danced until the routine was over.
“A-gain!”
More dancing.
“A-gain! And don’t land in position, Madonna,” the teacher said, impatiently. “Now,” she added, clapping her hands loudly, “a-gain!”
More dancing.
“A-gain!”
More dancing.
“A-gain! And move it along, Madonna,” she said, her tone sarcastic. “I’m in my late fifties, you know?”
Suddenly, Madonna bolted toward Pearl Lang. “I can’t do it a-gain,” she said, almost in tears. “Stop pushing me. Why are you being so mean?” Going into her bag, she rummaged through its contents and took out a pill — perhaps an aspirin, but maybe something stronger — and washed it down with a sip from a plastic water bottle. Afterward, she pitched the bottle to the floor, uttered an expletive and glared at her instructor.
“That’s when we had our, shall I say, little scene,” Pearl Lang remembers. “When I accused her of not wanting to work hard, she lashed out at me. I knew she would have trouble being a dancer in any troupe because she was such an individual. It wasn’t really a matter of working hard; she worked hard. But not in a way that gave me hope that she could blend with others.
“When she continued questioning me, well, that was it, really. At one point, after I gave her some advice, she curtsied and, in the most spiteful tone I had ever heard from a student, said, ‘Why thank you ever so, Lady Hateful.’ I believe it was then that I asked her — told her — to leave.”
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