Goddess: Inside Madonna (9 page)

These days, the octogenarian can be found sitting on her front porch and chatting with neighbors, who regularly stop by to see how she is. The local townspeople refer to her simply as “Grandma,” less for the distinction of having such a famous granddaughter than because she has always functioned as the grandmotherly sage of the neighborhood. Whenever anyone has a problem, whether it is marital discord or rebellious children, Elsie Fortin is the one whom people come to for counsel, and she offers it with her typical common good sense.

Tracey Horne is a large
woman with short, curly hair and glasses who not only went to high school with Madonna in Rochester Hills, but currently lives across the street from Elsie Fortin. Leaning against a 1966 silver Eldorado Cadillac that sits in her driveway, parked near a brand-new sport utility vehicle and an oversize camper that looks like a motel on wheels, Horne describes the last time she saw the singer. It was in 1990 when Madonna came to visit her grandmother.

“A big limousine pulled up in front of Grandma’s house,” she begins, “and naturally all the kids, including mine, went running toward it, because they never saw a car that big in their lives. The kids were really excited, and when Madonna got out, everyone started to talk to her and ask her for autographs. It really burned me up, because she had this big bodyguard who shoved the kids out of the way.” Horne pauses and finally decides to say what is on her mind: “Hell, this is my neighborhood and that big monster had no business pushing the kids around or stopping me from going over to Grandma’s house. I’m always over there, more than Madonna, so that really turned me off.” Horne thinks for a minute. “If you ask me, the only thing that changed after Madonna became famous was the money. If there’s one thing that sticks in my mind about her when we were kids, it’s that she always acted like a star.”

During all the years that
Madonna spent in Bay City with her maternal grandmother during vacations and weekends, she came to understand that while the entire Fortin family was well liked and respected, it was her mother, Madonna Louise, who was remembered with the greatest affection and looked upon almost as a saint. Invariably, people would tell Madonna what an unusually beautiful girl her mother had been, a young woman whose disposition fit her name. For as long as Madonna could remember, they had also told her how she was her mother’s perfect clone, an exact replica of the woman who had died so tragically and so young. As Madonna got older, the comments about her mother were more painful. Rumors spread that the Fortin girl had died so young because her Italian husband had made her pregnant so many times in so few years that her strength and resistance had been irreparably depleted. For the young Madonna that was painful to hear.

One of the women in charge of the office at St. Joseph’s went to high school with Madonna’s late mother, and according to her, all the boys were at one time or another “besotted” with the elder Fortin girl. “She was the most popular girl in school,” she recalls, “which is strange, because she was never part of the crowd. She was always considered different, sort of above the rest of us. There was a saintly or untouchable quality about her.” Another of Madonna Fortin’s classmates was Jim Brennan, who recently organized a multiclass reunion at St. Joseph’s in July 2000, in honor of the church’s 150th anniversary, which fell on March 18, 2000. He remembers Madonna’s mother as someone who never got into trouble and never made an enemy. “Madonna was definitely not one of the crowd,” Brennan says, “and yet no one ever teased her or picked on her for being different. We were all kind of in awe of her.” One local resident who dated Madonna is a much-loved merchant known around Bay City as “Mr. Wine.” Roy “Jay” Crete, now a balding man in his sixties with an effusive laugh and gregarious nature, has a package store where he sells everything from jawbreakers to local wines from north Michigan vineyards. He remembers Madonna’s mother fondly and claims that she was his first “real date” in high school. “A whole band of us walked to school every day together,” he says, “and as we approached St. Joseph’s, we would pick up kids along the way until about twenty of us would arrive at school at the same time. Madonna was Madonna, and she was perfect for her name. She was sweet, beautiful, kind, and lovely.”

Another local who claims to have been briefly engaged to Madonna Fortin has other recollections of the young woman. “I wouldn’t call her a saint,” the former fiancé maintains, “because we did all the usual things that young couples do. But I would say that she had an aura about her that was sort of like a movie star, like she was above everybody else without being snobby or anything. I wouldn’t call her saintly, because she laughed at off-color jokes and liked to dance, but she was very mature for her age and very womanly and extremely dignified for someone so young.” Their plans for a future together didn’t work out. “When you’re a kid and you live in a small town, you always imagine that your first girlfriend will end up being your wife and the mother of your children. That’s how I felt about Madonna. At the time, I remember really believing that this was it for me and that we would spend our lives together right here in Bay City.”

Those who knew Madonna all agree that her idea of femininity was to act helpless and not particularly knowing. According to those same friends, she was much shrewder and smarter than she let on. Not only did she have a quick mind, but she could fix anything from a car to an electric outlet. What she loved to do most was to dance and sing, and many of her old friends all thought that she would eventually end up onstage. One close girlfriend describes the room that Madonna shared with her sister, Marilyn. “The one thing I remember is the dressing table she had with a flowered skirt and all the makeup and beauty lotions that Madonna collected. She loved to dress up and experiment with makeup.” Madonna’s former fiancé also recalls how her greatest pleasure was always looking different, changing her hair, dressing to fit an occasion or holiday by wearing all green on St. Patrick’s Day or little “Christmas tree earrings” for Christmas mass. “Sometimes we had these theme dances at school, and when it was Latin, Madonna would fix herself up as a flamenco dancer,” he says. “She had a lot of imagination.”

For Madonna, beauty meant everlasting happiness, and growing up meant falling in love, getting married, and having lots of children. She had no particular professional ambitions, although she worked briefly after finishing a local junior college. “She was the type of girl who hid her problems,” the former beau explains. “She never complained, and she didn’t like anyone who did. Life was for living and having fun.” On the surface, Madonna Louise Fortin was the ultimate good Catholic girl, who never considered crossing the line and causing her parents or priest to think poorly of her. “She was regal, in a sense,” the former boyfriend continues, “and extremely well behaved and polite. She didn’t say much, but she was a great listener.”

Underneath the surface, Madonna knew exactly how to be irresistible and at the same time unattainable. She knew what she wanted, and she recognized her attributes as realistically as she knew her weaknesses.

There are many similarities between Madonna and her late mother, especially when it comes to love. They shared the same optimism and a romantic belief in everlasting happiness that would cost the younger Madonna anguish after a series of broken relationships and the older Madonna guilt when she defied her family only one time in her life—for the sake of love. There are also fundamental differences between mother and daughter. While Madonna senior thought of herself as Cinderella in the sense that if she could just get to the ball, she would be noticed and win the handsome prince, her daughter thought of herself as Cinderella the victim of the wicked stepmother. Contrary to her mother, who longed for the handsome stranger on the white horse to carry her off, from the time that her father remarried and she was forced to care for her younger siblings, Madonna made up her mind that she was the only one who could change her destiny. Though Madonna Louise Fortin, the adored older daughter of caring parents, never had any emotional trauma to mar her childhood, her namesake and daughter lost her mother when she was only five. Madonna didn’t just believe that the world owed her some sort of recompense because she was a motherless child, but that God Himself owed her an explanation for taking her parent away. As a result, Madonna had no qualms about standing up for herself and fighting for her place in the family. It was less because of a lack of modesty than that instinct made her believe she was smarter than her stepmother, and she used that intelligence to survive and to thrive. In a moment of quiet reflection, Tony Ciccone admits that his oldest daughter has the same perseverance as his parents had when they uprooted their family to start a new life in America.

I
n 1988, an Italian-American sculptor, Walter Pugni, created a thirteen-foot statue of Madonna clad in a small bikini and affecting a sensual, bent-over pose that she has used many times onstage. He offered the statue to Pacentro, a small Italian village near Rome, in the Abruzzi region of Italy, on the condition that the local officials place it prominently in the center of the town square. Initially, the townspeople, including some of Madonna’s surviving relatives, signed a petition rejecting Pugni’s offer. Acting more out of pragmatism than emotion, Raphaele Santini, the mayor of Pacentro, launched a campaign to change their minds. Santini imagined that the statue would attract hordes of tourists. While the townspeople were reconsidering their decision, Mayor Santini was contacted by Bay City commissioner Thomas E. Bock, who informed him that if Pacentro didn’t want the statue as an homage to Madonna’s
paternal
grandparents, Bay City would be honored to have it in tribute to her
maternal
grandparents. As calculating as Mayor Santini was about the Pugni Madonna, so was Commissioner Bock, who imagined that it would bring tourists from all over the world to Bay City. Bay City residents, unlike the citizens of Pacentro, were in favor of the statue, and in fact, Bock had even chosen the site where it would stand. He intended to put Pugni’s Madonna on one side of the entrance to the Sage Library where a statue of General Black Jack Pershing already stood. In the end, the citizens of Pacentro relented, and the statue was accepted and placed in the middle of the Piazza San Marcelo, in a direct line with the altar of the San Marcelo Church and right beneath the window of the mayor’s office in Pacentro’s city hall. Though that was the end of the odyssey concerning the bikini-clad Madonna, officials in both Pacentro and Bay City have been trying, from 1988 until today, to gain support to link the cities as “twins.” So far, officials in Michigan and local potentates in the Abruzzi region of Italy have refused the request.

In 1928, Gaetano Ciccone, a
laborer from Pacentro, along with his wife, Michelina, and their five sons, sailed from Italy for America. Their youngest son, Silvio, whom everybody called Tony and whose older brothers would later nickname Sucho after they came back from Korea, was the only child born after the family arrived, on June 1, 1931.

At the time the Ciccone family sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, Pacentro was one of the most beautiful fifteenth-century Italian cities, with impressive landscapes and structures made of ancient white marble. Religious monuments, statues, and such famous churches as the Santa Maria Maggiore, San Marcello, and the Immacolata still stand and bear evidence to the important religious influence that the small city once enjoyed. For the Ciccone family, Pacentro was a city where the surrounding peaks and bad winters presented the constant threat of being cut off from the rest of the world. The winters were bitter cold, food and warm clothing were scarce, and work for Gaetano was a day’s donkey ride away over dangerous mountain roads. Today, Pacentro is one of the most important manufacturing centers for winter sports equipment and is the site of some of the most impressive and beautiful ski resorts in Italy. Tourists from all over Europe flock to several of the more famous mountain peaks, which include Mount Corvo, Pizzo Interme, Corno Grande, Mount San Franco, Mount Ienca, Pizzo di Camarda, and Mount Pratello.

Tony Ciccone, at seventy, looks
younger than his years. Still vigorous and attractive, he is tall, muscular, and slightly bow-legged with bushy eyebrows and thinning hair that is slowly turning gray. The expression in his green-blue eyes is both receptive and suspicious, and even with his easy smile and impeccable manners, he projects a wariness about what he has come to believe is the superficiality of the world around him. As the father of an international and controversial star, he is forever forced into the unpleasant position of questioning the true motives of friends and casual acquaintances and tends to assume the worst, which, he claims, leaves no room for disappointments. Over the years, he has been the victim of cunning paparazzi who have gained access to his house using a number of different disguises and ruses.

His relationship with Joan, his second wife of more than thirty years, is tender and leads people to speculate that his quick temper has calmed and that he has mellowed over time. Recently, while Tony and Joan rode their tractors around their vineyard property in northern Michigan, picking up twigs and pieces of fallen trees, Joan drove into a hanging branch, barely missing her eye and leaving a nasty mark on her cheek. Several minutes later, when Tony saw his wife coming out of the kitchen, holding an ice pack against her face, his reaction was a combination of humor and concern. “My wife is an urban orchid,” he explained, smiling. “Nature is her natural enemy.”

Before Tony retired more than eight years ago from his job as an optics and design engineer with Chrysler, he had already decided to fulfill his lifelong dream to become a vintner. At first, he wanted to buy property in northern California, near the Napa Valley area, since it was tried-and-tested wine country and also because four of his children lived out there. When he discovered the price per acre as well as the cost of labor, he changed his mind and began looking in northern Michigan. Contrary to several articles in local Michigan newspapers, Madonna never invested any money in her father’s vineyard property. A proud man, Tony has consistently refused to accept the luxury cars and other expensive gifts that his daughter has had delivered on birthdays and Christmas. Throughout his life, he has lived within his means and instilled that ethic in his children, insisting that they spend only on essentials.