Read Goddess: Inside Madonna Online

Authors: Barbara Victor

Tags: #Singer, #Music, #Nonfiction, #Biography & Autobiography, #Madonna, #Retail

Goddess: Inside Madonna (8 page)

Each section of the small city is so self-contained and closed, with its own grocery stores, cemetery, bingo parlor, and bowling league, that people from one side of town can spend their entire life in Bay City without ever venturing outside a four-block radius either to shop or to socialize. And yet, regardless of which side of town people come from, they are considered newcomers if their family history does not go back as far as the end of the Second World War. Another indication of what constitutes the elite around Bay City has less to do with financial or social standing than it does with ethnic background, which in turn determines which Catholic church they belong to. Of all the different groups in Bay City, including German, Polish, Italian, and Irish, the French are considered the most select, and the French Catholic church is held in the highest esteem.

When Madonna became famous, one of the stories she told about herself was that she had grown up in a predominantly black neighborhood. The truth is that the majority of the residents in Rochester Hills, where she lived after her mother died and her father remarried, were middle-class whites. The basis for her claim stems from the fact that when Madonna visited her grandmother, she was aware that being Italian in Bay City was comparable to being black in Rochester Hills. On the one hand, it was a deliberate act of rebellion for Madonna to consider herself to be Italian like her father, rather than French like her mother’s family. On the other hand, she felt an enormous warmth and closeness to the Italian Catholics in Bay City. She loved their old-world habits, the heavy Gothic furniture in their homes, their passion, and their love of music that they blasted from their record players and radios through the open windows even during the chilly winter months. Madonna found the old women, widows and spinsters, to be loving and kind, accessible and almost mystical, dressed in all black right down to their heavy, opaque stockings and lace-up shoes. She enjoyed watching the men play boccie together every evening after work in the city’s main square. The Italian approach to religion also intrigued Madonna. With the exception of the old women, people only went to church to marry, baptize their children, and be buried. The French Catholics were more like the Irish. They went to mass every morning and were joyless in their unwavering faith.

There were other explanations for that invented biographical history. One is that Madonna’s first two hits were played primarily on black radio stations. It wasn’t until her third hit, which was also her first big-budget video, “Borderline,” that her public as well as the executives at the record company actually met her and realized that she was white.

Yet another reason is that years after Madonna left Pontiac and Rochester Hills, when her family still lived there, in the early 1980s, there were occasional race riots, looting, and police brutality. Whenever a black family moved into the neighborhood, two white families moved out. It never occurred to the Ciccone family to leave. More than a social statement, it was a pragmatic decision. Joan Ciccone, Madonna’s stepmother, had already made a name for herself as the owner of a reputable day-care center, which was housed in a new wing of the family home. Relocating would have meant that she would have had to start all over again in another neighborhood where the same ethnic changes would eventually have been made anyway. Selling their house and finding another they could afford was unrealistic since real estate prices in the community had gone way down.

Wandering around Bay City and talking to the people, it is obvious that local shopkeepers and merchants are very up-to-date when it comes to their most famous citizen. It is interesting to hear what they remember most about Madonna. Carl Jacobson, for instance, the former president of the Bay City Library Board, admits that when he thinks about Madonna, his first thought is
Sex
, the book, he is quick to add. Jacobson recalls that at the time
Sex
appeared in October 1992, the Library Board decided not to buy it. “If anyone requested it,” Jacobson explains, “library staffers would try to locate it. After all, what’s garbage to one person is prime rib to another.”

Devoted Madonna fans in Bay City were almost unanimously unimpressed by
Sex
. They saw it less as vulgar than as “crass commercialism.” One woman explains, “Madonna made the mistake of making her fantasies too visible by taking them from the abstract to the printed page. There’s something less appealing about a static image than when Madonna moves and plays and mocks and grimaces, something more ironic and less hard-core about her videos than an actual book. One of the biggest faults with
Sex
was that it failed to capture Madonna’s sense of irony and, instead, was perceived by some as ‘hard-core,’ and by others as merely childish.”

Another resident of Bay City who still buys all Madonna’s videos and music recalls her reaction when
Sex
appeared. “I was in my formative years when Madonna sprang onto the music scene, and to me, she represented someone who wasn’t afraid of her own sexuality and not afraid to flaunt it. You know, as a young girl, you’re taught to suppress that side of you. I guess she represented a new beginning, a reclaiming of your own sexuality and using it on your own terms. That’s when I really admired her. When
Sex
came out, it should have been written
$ex
, because
$ex
sells, and that’s what it was all about. The book had nothing to do with us, with the girls and women who were just learning how to express ourselves, thanks to Madonna. We weren’t interested in all those kinky things. We were just beginning to get it together with normal guy/girl sex, or with trying to find out if we liked sex with guys or with women. Madonna went too far too soon for us.”

A male fan believes that Madonna is “slightly off when it comes to sensuality.” He says, “Maybe because she doesn’t understand that sensual is not necessarily based on pornography.”

Other Bay City residents like Frank Whalen and Ron Vodlers remember when the singer appeared nude in
Penthouse
and
Playboy
magazines. Whalen, then the manager of the 7-Eleven store in Bay City, was inundated with phone calls from people who wanted to reserve copies, while Vodlers, who managed Unkle Milty’s Party Store, recalls how he sold “five
Penthouse
s and six
Playboy
s in the first day,” when usually only five or six are sold in a week. It isn’t surprising since, at the time,
Playboy
printed 5.9 million copies, 350,000 more than its normal run, while
Penthouse
shipped 5.2 million instead of the usual 4.9 million.

Despite Madonna’s more obvious exploits
, the majority of people in Bay City are less interested in her sexual escapades or her controversial songs and videos about the Catholic Church than they are about the comments she made on the
Today
show some fifteen years earlier. While the average Bay City resident may not have a sufficiently raised consciousness, he certainly has a long memory and a healthy appreciation for a local girl who made good.

On the wall of St. Joseph’s Church, the oldest Catholic church in the Saginaw Valley, a sign reads, “Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.” On the opposite wall of the church, facing the Eucharist chapel, is a list of parishioners according to the year that they joined, including a small cross next to the names of those who have since died. The longest list is that of the Fortin family, who were one of the first in the city to join the congregation, between the years 1949 and 1950. Next to the names of all the members, someone has written on the stone wall in black Magic Marker, “God loves Madonna.”

chapter six

E
lsie Fortin, Madonna’s maternal grandmother, is now eighty-nine years old and considered the matriarch of the family. Born in Standish, Michigan, a tiny hamlet about thirty miles to the north, Mrs. Fortin moved to Bay City in 1932 when she married one of its natives, an ambitious businessman who was more than fifteen years her senior. For the twenty-five years that they were together, until Williard Fortin’s death in 1957 at sixty-one years old, they were a devoted couple who were looked upon as an example that hard work and deep religious faith brought rewards not only in heaven but also on earth.

Shortly after their marriage, the newlyweds moved into an unassuming bungalow at 87 State Park in an area of Bay City known as Bangor Township. There, within the first ten years of their union, Elsie Fortin produced eight children: six boys—Dale, the firstborn, Michael or Mickey, David, Gary, Earl, and Carl—and two daughters, Marilyn and Elsie Fortin’s firstborn daughter, Madonna Louise. The family was devoutly Catholic, and Williard had a reputation as one of the rising stars in the Bay City business community. His first job was with the H. Hirschfield and Sons Scrap Metal Company, where he worked his way up the corporate ranks until he left to join Derocher’s Construction Company as an executive vice president. As a result, the Fortin children had everything that any middle-class family could buy back in those prewar years. They were the first family to have a washer and dryer, and Elsie took great pride that her brood never wore hand-me-downs. Every Sunday, she would parade them to church in brand-new store-bought outfits. By 1947, through wise investments in the stock market, Williard Fortin had made enough money to move his family to a better neighborhood and into a bigger house. The property that he chose, 1204 Smith Street, was in an area of town known as The Banks and had once belonged to one of the lumber barons. It had a half acre in the back, bordered by woods, and a quarter of an acre in the front. Instead of moving into the house, Williard decided to tear it down and build in its place a ranch house with all the modern conveniences of that postwar era. Designing the house himself to fit the needs of his large family, he built five bedrooms so that only two children shared a room, a large eat-in kitchen where the family could share casual dinners, a master suite, living room, dining room, a sunroom for his wife’s collection of plants, and a finished basement.

For all the years they were married, Williard Fortin controlled the family’s finances and never thought to explain to his wife how to handle things when he was no longer around. Elsie Fortin was so sheltered and protected by her husband that throughout the years they were together, she was unaware of her husband’s assets and barely knew how to write a check. When Williard died in 1957, he left his forty-six-year-old widow unprepared to manage the family’s finances. Because of a series of bad investments. Elsie Fortin found herself unsure financially. In 1975, at sixty-four years old, when life should have been easy for the widow, she was forced to sell the Smith Street house and move into a small two-story structure at 404 North Dean Street. It was an easy sell, and the new owners, Jerry and Grace Trojan, who bought the property for $42,000, were thrilled. “The house was like a mansion to me,” Grace Trojan says. “The rooms were huge and there were lots of unique details and little features, like under-the-cupboard recessed lighting in the kitchen and lights that came on in the closets when you opened the doors.”

When the Trojans relocated to New Mexico in 1977, they sold the property for $52,000 to the Przygockis family, who lived there for the next nineteen years. “When Madonna became popular,” Mrs. Przygockis recalls, “people were constantly coming to the door to get a tour of the house and to take photographs. They came from as far away as Japan and Germany.” During the time that the Przygockises lived there, Robin Leach featured the house on his television program
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
when he did a segment on Madonna. In 1996, the house was sold for $115,000 to Michelle Campau, who turned it into a senior citizens’ residence.

For more than a quarter of a century, despite her famous granddaughter’s many offers to relocate her to a more luxurious home, Elsie Fortin has lived alone in that small but impeccably tidy two-story house on Dean Street. Much to her dismay, she can’t stop the monthly checks that have automatically been transferred by her granddaughter into her Bay City bank account for the past fifteen years. “I try not to spend it,” Mrs. Fortin says, “so when I die, everything will go to my grandchildren.”

In the carpeted living room with a view on a small but equally tidy backyard, several statues of the Madonna are on a black-brick fireplace, and a white ceramic Madonna hangs on the wall to the right of the kitchen. There is a curious absence of any family photographs, most notably of her famous granddaughter. According to Mrs. Fortin, when they were on display in the living room, they would invariably disappear along with certain people who came to visit. “It happened a few times,” Mrs. Fortin explains, “so I just decided to keep all the family photos hidden away. I look at them when I’m alone and then put them back in their boxes.”

The living room is set up for convenience rather than style. A recliner chair upholstered in brown tweed is next to a table on which is a sturdy telephone with several lines and a hold button and an amplifier built into the receiver. On the opposite wall is a state-of-the-art flat-screen television with a VHS, both gifts from her granddaughter.

One of Mrs. Fortin’s great pleasures is listening to Madonna’s music and watching her videos and concerts. “When they play,” Mrs. Fortin says, “it’s hard to believe she’s my granddaughter. I’ve got to give her a lot of credit. She really came up the hard way.”

On the subject of some of the contents of those videos and concerts, Mrs. Fortin admits that she finds the sexy image hard to cope with. “I have always prayed,” she says, “that her antics would not mar her beautiful name.” On the other hand, Elsie Fortin claims that the idea of her granddaughter as the personification of sex is more a “marketing ploy,” and not a reflection of her true personality. “I think she purposely wants that bad-girl image. She gives that impression, but I never felt she was like that.”

The 1988 Buick that sits inside Elsie Fortin’s unattached garage is rarely used. In the spring of 2000, the most famous grandmother in Michigan had a second hip replacement and no longer drives. When she needs to go shopping or to the local hospital for physical therapy or to church where she attends mass every morning at seven, she is always accompanied. Although most of her thirty-three grandchildren are scattered throughout the United States, from Colorado to California, from Nevada to New York, and currently as far away as London, Mrs. Fortin’s five surviving children are all in the area. Her youngest son, Carl, makes the trip from his home in Detroit to Bay City twice a month to spend the weekend, while his son, Andrew, the only grandchild who actually lives in Bay City, helps with the household errands. Another of Mrs. Fortin’s sons, Earl, lives across town and chauffeurs her around, and two more sons, David and Mickey, and the only surviving daughter, Marilyn, all alternate having their mother visit them on holidays and weekends. Until several years ago, Mrs. Fortin spent a great deal of time with her cousin and closest friend, Carolyn Davis, who lived directly across the street. In June 2000, Carolyn Davis died.

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