Goddess: Inside Madonna (7 page)

“Evita is the poor girl who made good, just like me,” Madonna went on. “She came to Buenos Aires at fifteen to make a career in the movies. I came to New York at seventeen to make a career in music, and both of us had love affairs with men who helped us achieve our goals.”

Menem listened intently, his eyes boring into hers.

As uniformed butlers cleared the table for the next course, Madonna gathered momentum. She told the president how dedicated she was to keeping Evita’s memory unspoiled, how she felt as one with the woman, how she could relate to her suffering from adverse public opinion and unfounded rumors, how committed she felt about the project, unlike anything else she had ever done. Menem continued to listen in silence, his eyes never leaving hers.

Finally, as she neared the end of what was a monologue, she said in summation, “The bottom line is that we both achieved our objectives for ourselves and for others. Evita elevated the working class and the poor by offering them jobs and equal opportunity, while I gave women the courage to liberate themselves sexually.”

After dinner, Madonna asked the president if he would listen to a tape of her singing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” Menem was delighted. In the living room, seated on an overstuffed sofa upholstered in a blue-and-white flower motif, the president listened as Madonna’s voice filled the room. When the song ended, Menem stood and walked over to Madonna. He took her face in his hands and kissed her gently on each check, then held her at arm’s length and touched the tip of her nose.
“Suerte, niña!
” he said quietly.

As he turned to leave, he paused. Reaching into his pocket, he pressed a small icon into Madonna’s palm. It was an ebony African charm, a good-luck piece, he explained in halting English, carved in the image of the god of fertility. Without another word, he walked solemnly out of the room.

The audience was over. Without further delay, the two secret service men were at her side. She was rushed out of the living room and through the foyer to the landing pad on the front lawn. The blades of the helicopter were already turning in preparation for an immediate departure.

Several days later, Alan Parker received word that President Menem had granted him access to several government buildings that were key to the story, including the Casa Rosada, the official presidential residence where Eva Perón had addressed throngs of her admirers from the balcony. Parker was thrilled.
Evita
would be filmed in eighty-two chaotic days in three different countries—Argentina, England, and Hungary—for a cost of $60 million.

The girl from Bay City, Michigan, had succeeded in her mission.

A
s the story, which has now become a myth, goes, Madonna arrived at La Guardia Airport in New York City from Detroit’s Metro Airport on August 16, 1978, her twentieth birthday. It was her first time out of Michigan, and the only time in her life she had ever taken an airplane. Wearing a winter coat on that sweltering August day and carrying one small suitcase and a teddy bear, with only $35 in her pocket, she told the cabdriver to “drop me off in the middle of everything.” Armed with optimism, nerve, and a burning desire to be “more famous than God,” she found herself in the middle of Times Square with nowhere to live, no friends or family to turn to, and no job.

Even then, her attitude was that if she wasn’t prepared to be hurt and even die for what she wanted, she should give up, go back home, and meld into the oblivion of Middle America.
Failure
was not in her lexicon. From the moment she had been old enough to recognize her ambition, she had wanted out of her small Michigan hometown where God and wall-to-wall carpeting had dominated her middle-class existence. More than anything else, Madonna needed to prove to anyone who doubted her resolve to succeed that her decision to go out on her own was not capricious but rather proof of her strength and determination.

The irony was that the girl with such outward bravado who intimidated her classmates, fought with her sisters and brothers, and defied her father and stepmother was actually a sensitive and fragile person. Whenever she felt attacked, threatened, or frightened, she would get horrible stomach cramps and throw up. Alone in a strange and intimidating city, that was exactly how she felt. After several hours of walking back and forth on the same pavement, not daring to leave her suitcase unattended, Madonna finally got up the nerve to ask someone to direct her to the nearest YWCA. At least she knew she had enough money to pay for a room for one night. Years later, Madonna would forget the name of the man who was her first New York benefactor.

When Lionel Bishop met Madonna in the middle of Times Square, he lived in Manhattan Towers, a partially city-subsidized monster of a building that takes up the entire square block between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets on Tenth Avenue. The people who lived there were mostly in show business, from chorus kids to established performers like Theodore Bikel, Gower Champion, and Gwen Verdon, as well as welfare families and disabled elderly. At thirty-three, Bishop was an established dancer, although when he met Madonna, he was just recovering from an injured knee. To make ends meet, he was waiting tables at Curtain Up, a trendy restaurant that occupied the ground floor of Manhattan Towers. After he recovered, Bishop danced in the chorus of a number of Broadway shows including
Evita
from 1979, when it opened at the Broadway Theatre on September 25, until it closed in 1991. “When I saw Madonna that day in the middle of Times Square,” Bishop begins, “I was coming back from Actors Equity where I picked up a check. Because of my injury, I was walking with a cane and probably still limping. She approached me. Asked if I knew where she could rent a cheap room and then plowed right ahead asking a million questions about New York. There was just something about her. She was adorable and really ballsy.”

Bishop describes himself as somewhat shy and enough of a typical New Yorker not to open up to a total stranger. “She piqued my curiosity,” he continues, “and I found myself asking her what she was doing in New York, where she came from, you know, all the questions that I usually could care less about knowing. Don’t ask me why, but when she told me she had just arrived and wanted to be a dancer, I invited her to stay with me.” Bishop laughs. “She was desperate, but before she took me up on my offer, she looked at me really hard for a moment or two and suddenly blurted out, ‘You’re gay, aren’t you?’” Bishop laughs. “It would have probably been more relevant had she asked me if I was a serial killer.”

For the next two weeks, Lionel Bishop shared his one-bedroom apartment with Madonna. Though Madonna was grateful for a roof over her head, she had no intention of staying there indefinitely. She was anxious to get out on her own, and she wasted no time in finding a job and another place to live. “One day, she came home and announced that she was moving out,” Bishop explains. “She had found this hellhole on Fourth Street in the East Village and a job at the counter at Dunkin’ Donuts on West Fifty-seventh Street.” Bishop remembers that she started work the following day and moved out about a week later, taking all her worldly possessions with her. Since she didn’t have a telephone, she promised to call and keep in touch, to let him know how she was doing. He never heard from her again. “About two months later, I wandered into that Dunkin’ Donuts,” Bishop recalls, “hoping to see her, but she wasn’t working there anymore.” He shrugs. “The next time I saw her was on television in her video ‘Material Girl.’”

Twenty years after her arrival in New York, Madonna remains steeped in her middle-class, Middle American background.

In her most recent British incarnation, she lives in a lavish $10 million town house in London’s West End with her English husband, the director Guy Ritchie, and their son, Rocco, along with her daughter, Lourdes, from a prior relationship, a long way from the modest house in Bay City. It is there, in that small central Michigan town, approximately 110 miles from Detroit, where she and her late mother were born and where her maternal grandmother still lives, that she learned to transform all her anguish and anger after the death of her mother into the determination to succeed even far beyond her own imagination.

In the spring of 1986
, Madonna appeared on NBC’s
Today
show hosted by Jane Pauley. At the time, Madonna was at the height of her musical success, having just put out her album
True Blue
, the title chosen as a tribute to her husband, Sean Penn. Her single “Papa Don’t Preach” was number one on the music charts and became the subject of debate on teenage pregnancy among feminists and politicians. Though Madonna had predicted that the song would be taken the wrong way, she had no idea that her lyrics would be interpreted by some conservatives as a stand against abortion. As usual, Madonna had stirred up controversy. Pauley asked Madonna where she came from, to which Madonna replied, “I come from a stinky little town near Detroit.” Not surprisingly, her remark caused an outpouring of indignation among local community leaders and private citizens in the Detroit area, who called newspapers, radio talk shows, and television stations to voice their displeasure.

Madonna made no attempt to apologize until more than a year later, on August 7, 1987, when she appeared at the Silverdome in Detroit during her Who’s That Girl world tour. There, in front of forty-two thousand people, including family, friends, and many local political officials, she offered an explanation. “I said Bay City stinks,” Madonna said somewhat awkwardly to the audience, “but all I meant to say is Bay City smells. I didn’t mean the people of Bay City stink. The Dow Chemical plant was right near my grandma’s house so I should know.” In fact, when Madonna was growing up, not only was the Dow Chemical plant spewing polluted fumes, but a beet refinery and sugar plant was also in town. Between the two, it was a “stinky little town.” She then proceeded to sing her next song, aptly entitled “Causing a Commotion,” but the damage was already done.

Timothy Sullivan, then mayor of Bay City, is a roly-poly politician whose vocal stand against abortion contradicted his claim that he was “Bay City’s champion of women’s rights.” After the concert, he announced that he was taking back his offer to give Madonna the key to the city. According to Elsie Fortin, the star’s maternal grandmother, despite his purported outrage Sullivan called her at home at least “seven or eight times a day” for months to persuade her to convince Madonna to give a concert that would benefit the town. The idea was that the singer would transform the city into a rock-and-roll shrine and do for Bay City what Elvis had done for Tupelo, Mississippi.

From the turn of the century until 1960, Bay City was important for its lumber and shipyards. During those boom years, Midwest lumber barons settled there and built Georgian- and Victorian-style mansions that still stand today. In 1952, the first presidential yacht was designed and built in Bay City for the newly elected Republican president, Dwight David Eisenhower. In 1960, the craft was shipped back to be refitted and refurbished under the direction of Joseph Kennedy, who had purchased it for his son John F. Kennedy, rechristening it the
HoneyFitz
.

For almost two decades, from 1960 until 1978, Bay City slipped back into oblivion and was once again just another small Midwestern town in the heartland of the automotive industry, where the winters were brutal, the summers sweltering, and the annual income for an average family of four was $15,000.

In 1978, Bay City was back in the news when a rock group composed of four Scotsmen named themselves the Bay City Rollers. Considered to be Britain’s first “boy band,” the group was famous for their short tartan trousers and simplistic songs such as “Sha La La” and “Shang-a-Lang.” The truth was that the four crooners had never been to Bay City, but while looking for a catchy name, one of the four had thrown a dart on a map that landed there. Only when Madonna emerged on the music scene in 1984 was Bay City legitimately represented by a young woman whom the local journalists would call “Bay City’s queen of sensuous funk.”

For all the change that has occurred in the world since the end of the last world war, Bay City remains frozen in a 1950s time capsule. The atmosphere around town and the mentality of the residents reflect the mores and values found in the television programs of that era. Those were the days when sitcom mothers were wise and forgiving, saving their men from their stubborn blunders without making them feel like complete fools. In Bay City 2001, the men who frequent the diners or luncheonettes still call waitresses “honey” and often pat them affectionately on their well-padded backsides as they go off to place their orders. Rather than taking offense, the attitude of the women remains “boys will be boys.” They seem less concerned about what is politically correct and more content that they are in charge of the house and the children as well as the finances. Most of the men are on a weekly allowance.

The streets are wide with oak trees that cast shadows on small wood-frame and fieldstone houses, most of which are built in typical Cape Cod saltbox style. In the more affluent areas, wings have been added to the existing structures, although even in the upscale neighborhoods there are still detached garages that open and close with a key, or carports made of aluminum siding. The lumber barons are long gone, and their grand homes have mostly been turned into garden apartments or boardinghouses.

The small front lawns on the west side of town, considered to be more fashionable, have pink flamingos or statues of jockeys placed along the uneven rows of cobblestones leading to quaint covered porches. There are few street-lamps, and the only light comes from ersatz brass lanterns hanging from wood beams next to strips of flypaper on the porches. During the Christmas season, the atmosphere is festive with flickering colored lights that encircle the houses and store-bought fake snow that is sprayed on the windows, while plastic Santas and reindeer appear on many of the rooftops.