Goddess: Inside Madonna (10 page)

In 1995, Tony and Joan Ciccone bought fifty acres of vineyard property in Suttons Bay in northern Michigan with a panoramic view of Grand Traverse Bay and the rolling hills of the Leelanau Peninsula. Situated near the northern Michigan resort town of Traverse City, an area that is also the summer residence of some of Chicago’s wealthiest families, the land cost the Ciccones approximately $40,000 an acre plus an additional $20,000 more per acre to cultivate it and make it suitable to yield grapes. Ironically, Tony and Joan used to camp out in the area when the children were small when Traverse City was famous for its cherry orchards. Back then, it was a mecca for the beer and T-shirt crowd and not the rich and famous. In the past few years, the region has been built up and gentrified, although, despite its trendy restaurants, luxurious summer homes, and the dozen or so vineyard properties that were in existence when the Ciccones moved in, Traverse City remains a small town. With the exception of the annual summer music festival at Interlochen, there is no cultural activity, which the second Mrs. Ciccone finds depressing. In fact, the only way she agreed to be transplanted from the city to a remote vineyard was if her husband agreed that she could travel downstate to Taylor, Michigan, twice a month to visit her widowed mother, several close girlfriends, and her biological daughter, Jennifer, who teaches school in the area. “Making the trip to Detroit or Taylor is my cultural and emotional fix,” Joan says. “Every three weeks or so, I go back to visit and shop and see an opera or a concert.”

When the time comes to harvest the grapes, Joan and Tony have plenty of company. Her brothers as well as some of their children along with several of the couple’s seven grandchildren all make the trip to Suttons Bay to help out.

Though this is his first attempt to market wine made from homegrown grapes, when they lived in Rochester Hills, Tony Ciccone had a small vineyard where he cultivated California grapes that produced enough wine for the family. The house in Rochester Hills where Madonna and her siblings grew up remains unsold. From time to time, Melanie, Tony’s youngest daughter with his first wife, goes there to prune and tidy up the vines. Tony believes, as his father did, that wine should remain natural and totally dependent on the earth without any artificial ingredients added to enhance either the quality of the grapes or the wine’s taste or color. “I grew up loving wine and with a basic knowledge that nature is responsible for a good wine,” he explains. In tribute to his parents, printed on every brochure for the Ciccone Vineyard are the following words: “Tony and his five brothers are forever grateful for their parents’ love of wine and their sacrifices.”

Operating a vineyard has proven to be a full-time job, although it takes approximately three years before it bears any grapes. The Ciccones have planted rosetto, cabernet, and merlot grapes as well as Pinot Grigio, chardonnay, and cabernet fond. For the first time last season, they submitted four of their wines at an international taster guild in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For the four wines entered, the Ciccones won four medals. Without any hesitation, Joan admits that she is proud of her husband’s accomplishment, although somewhat surprised that he has done so well with the vineyard in so short a time. “Tony even designed the labels,” Joan says. “He took photographs of the actual grapes on the vines with a digital camera and had them reproduced for the bottles. The only regret I have is that he should have started this when he retired eight years ago instead of waiting so long.” Despite the brutal winter climate, construction delays, hard work, and nature’s three-year time frame for producing grapes, neither Joan nor Tony regrets their decision. As far as they are concerned, producing wine is a wonderful way to spend the rest of their lives.

Every year, Tony and Joan visit Pacentro to keep in touch with his surviving relatives. In 1985, on their first trip, Tony made a point of preparing the Italian branch of the family for what they might eventually hear about his oldest daughter. When Madonna arrived in Turin in September 1987 for her Who’s That Girl concert, at the local sports stadium for sixty-five thousand people, Amelia Vitucci, a second cousin, traveled from Pacentro to meet her famous relative. After the concert, Vitucci took her family backstage. At the end of the visit, she gave Madonna a framed map of Pacentro, which is on display in the Ciccones’ living room. Many of the older relatives were too weak to make the pilgrimage to Turin, although Madonna’s eighty-two-year-old great-aunt, Bambina De Guilio, sent a note with Vitucci, which said that she regretted not being able to see her famous niece to “hug and kiss her.” More than a decade later, during a meeting with Mrs. De Guilio at her home in Pacentro, the elderly woman had a somewhat different opinion of her great-niece. “The girl is a singer,” Signora De Guilio said tersely, “just a singer. In my time, we didn’t behave like that.” Wandering around Pacentro and talking to the residents, one hears what has become the prevailing sentiment about Madonna. One of the clients at a local bar in the center of Pacentro explains, “That girl sings, dances, and shows her thighs. Is it any wonder that her elderly aunt considered her a
malafemmina!
”

Since 1995 when they bought the vineyard property, Tony and Joan Ciccone’s visits to Pacentro are also geared to learning more about the old techniques of wine growing in the Abruzzi region of Italy. “When he sets his mind to something,” Joan says of her husband, “there is no stopping him. He has to learn everything so he can do it all perfectly!”

Apparently, Madonna not only inherited her father’s blue-green eyes and heavy eyebrows, but also his determination from an early age to make something out of his life.

When Gaetano and Michelina Ciccone
left Pacentro, their goal was to reach Pittsburgh, where rumor had it that jobs were available in the steel mills. Landing in New York, the family traveled to Pennsylvania and eventually settled in an overcrowded tenement in predominantly Italian Aliquippa, a steel-mill town, a suburb of Pittsburgh. It was a tough life, but they never complained. For them, America was a land of opportunity where there was always enough money to have a decent roof over their heads, to put food on the table, and to have warm clothes for the harsh Pittsburgh winters.

Although Gaetano and Michelina Ciccone died within months of each other in 1968, Madonna remembers her paternal grandparents as a very “present and important force throughout my childhood.” She recalls, “They barely spoke English and I didn’t speak Italian, but I have only loving memories of them and of very warm and noisy family reunions. If I had to compare my father’s mother, Michelina, to my mother’s mother, Elsie, I would say that one was the typical old-world Italian grandmother, while the other had views on life and love that were much more pragmatic.” When Madonna was having violent arguments with Sean Penn, Elsie Fortin, her more pragmatic grandmother, called Madonna to advise her. “I told her that life is too short,” Mrs. Fortin says with a slight smile, “and that she should do something about the situation and not prolong the agony.”

Years later, Tony Ciccone would
lament his father’s decision to settle in Pennsylvania. “Given his love of wine and his ability to cultivate grapes,” he says, “he should have kept right on going until he landed in California. Maybe life would have been different for them.” Notwithstanding the harsh winters in Pittsburgh, and difficult conditions of the soil, Gaetano Ciccone still managed to cultivate a small vineyard in his Aliquippa backyard.

The Ciccones were only one of hundreds of immigrant families who had made the journey across the ocean in search of a better life and settled in that steel-mill town. They, unlike the other recent arrivals, held on to their old-world customs as a matter of pride and never made much effort to integrate themselves into their new surroundings or to learn English.

Perhaps because he was the youngest, born after his parents had already spent several years in America, Tony was the only child who was not forced to quit school to help support the family. From the time he was old enough to go to school, Tony was determined to make something of himself. He instinctively knew that the only way to rid himself of the stigma of poverty and to become integrated into society was to get a college degree. As Madonna explains, “My father wasn’t ashamed of his parents, he just wanted better for his own children. He was the only one who had a college education, and the only one who aspired toward that typical upwardly mobile American way of life.”

After graduating from high school, Tony Ciccone did odd jobs to get through college at Pennsylvania State University, where he majored in engineering. Just as rumor had it in Pacentro that the steel mills in Pittsburgh were hiring immigrant workers, rumor had it in the fifties that young men with degrees in engineering were being hired for higher than normal starting salaries in the automotive business in Detroit. After finishing university, Tony had no trouble finding work as an optics and design engineer in the car industry. His first job was in a missile and tank plant in Warren, Michigan, where he worked mostly on defense contracts that General Motors had with the government. With the compulsory draft still in effect, Tony, who was settled in his new job and for the first time in his life was confident about his future, was not anxious to be shipped overseas. His older brothers, all of whom had been drafted and served in the Korean War, suggested that he fulfill his military obligation by volunteering for the Air Force Reserve. It was a logical way for him to serve his country while studying more advanced techniques related to his chosen profession. Within days of signing up, Tony Ciccone was shipped off to Alaska and then to Texas. In Texas he became close friends with a fellow serviceman named Dale Fortin, who hailed from Bay City, Michigan. When Dale announced his intention to marry a local Texas girl and asked Tony to serve as his best man, the event forever changed the young Ciccone’s life.

At the wedding in Dallas, Tony met his friend’s younger sister, a beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with an angelic smile who had the unusual name of Madonna. It was love at first sight for Tony, who was devastated to learn that she was engaged to someone back home in Bay City. Despite his sister’s commitment to another man, Dale Fortin convinced her to go out with Tony at least while they were all in Texas celebrating his marriage. For the entire week that Tony was on leave and Madonna was visiting, the couple spent almost every minute together. According to Elsie Fortin, when her daughter finally returned home, she began a correspondence with the young engineer she had met in Texas. “There was no doubt in my mind that Madonna was in love with Tony,” Elsie Fortin recalls. “It didn’t surprise me that Tony was madly in love with her. She was a beautiful girl. Everyone who knew her loved her. She could have had any boy she wanted.”

From the very beginning, Elsie Fortin judged that there was a cultural chasm between the Ciccones and the Fortins. With the exception of the grandchildren that they eventually shared, she believed they had nothing in common. It didn’t matter that the elder Ciccones had an innate knowledge of music and opera or had lived with nineteenth-century Italian painting and sculpture. Elsie Fortin had more practical ambitions for her daughter that did not include marriage to the son of penniless immigrants. Her idea of success was that Madonna would re-create the life that Williard had briefly given Elsie before he died—the split-level ranch with under-the-cupboard lighting in the kitchen. Fortunately for the young couple, Elsie Fortin was also wise enough to realize that the very things that she found unacceptable about Tony were exactly what her daughter found attractive.

For Madonna, Tony was someone between that prince on a white horse and a day laborer, the dusky immigrant on a scaffold who, despite the grime and dirt, carries centuries of culture and mystery within his soul. He was different from the boys in Bay City, someone who had obviously not had an easy life. She found his smoldering energy and sexuality exciting. A part of this kind, loving daughter was a woman who craved someone who made her feel alive, a man who was slightly on the edge and dangerous. Deep down, she had always fantasized about bringing an Italian home to her family in Bay City. Tony was ideal. He was a scrapper, a street fighter who had learned to turn his aggression into ambition and his anger into energy. He was someone who, despite his sense of humor and love of a good time, was focused on achieving professional and monetary success. As soon as he met Madonna, he knew that she was a big part of his dream.

She was the typical American girl who was secure enough to follow her husband anywhere necessary for him to advance in his career. She had no complexes or hesitation about fitting in or making new friends. Madonna Fortin was Tony Ciccone’s ticket out of not belonging, his guarantee that he would never again be betrayed by a country that purported to welcome immigrants but that, in reality, made fun of them behind their backs. He loved her simplicity. Madonna, who died at thirty-one, before she achieved anything more than producing six children in six years, was the kind of woman who “hummed while she did the ironing.” By the time they married, Tony was already an upwardly mobile first-generation American, determined to expunge all tradition out of his life. He wanted nothing that was old, nothing ethnic, nothing that wasn’t 100 percent American. He wanted a wife who hummed while she ironed.

At the time that they
met, Madonna Fortin had just finished a brief semester at a local junior college and was working as a technician for two Bay City radiologists, G. L. Heaelshaw and A. L. Ziliac. As was the custom back in the 1950s, dental and medical assistants were trained by the individual doctors who hired them and were not required to get a diploma at a technical school. Years later, when Madonna was searching for an explanation for her mother’s breast cancer, she made it her business to locate the seven other women who had worked in that same office and had been exposed to daily doses of radiation. Madonna’s inquiries revealed that none of the women, who all still lived in the Bay City area—Joan Behrman, Betty Vil, Kitty White, Marlene Alavie, Nina Dajet Suanton, Marian Harris, and Carol Rupp—had suffered any cancer. Six months after Madonna Fortin Ciccone died, her closest friend, Jane Fournier, who lived next door, also died of breast cancer.