Authors: Andrew Morton
It was at Christopher Flynn’s urgings that, in 1976, the seventeen-year-old Madonna decided to leave school a semester early and try for a place in the dance program at the University of Michigan. That Flynn had won a teaching post there was a source of mutual encouragement and, for Flynn, not a little self-interest. In spite of the age gap he found his young pupil spirited, eager and quick to learn, and he enjoyed her company as well as her adulation. For all his sardonic cynicism, he was becoming quite attached to Ms Ciccone. With his enthusiastic support, she applied for and gained a scholarship, both an indication of her talent and potential, and a source of great satisfaction. Her belief in herself had been triumphantly vindicated.
Yet despite her artistic and intellectual pretensions, and for all Flynn’s teachings, at heart she remained unsophisticated and quite naïve. To look at photographs of her at that time is to be reminded that, at seventeen, she was not the young woman whose knowing and aggressive sexuality would define a generation, but a youthful ingénue whose carefully constructed carapace of self-conscious indifference to the world around her belied a deep sense of insecurity and uncertainty.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in her dealings with her friends and contemporaries. In showing her private feelings, her façade of cynical worldliness and indifference easily gave way to sentiments as gauche as they were generous-hearted. In one note in the 1974 Adams High yearbook, a juvenile Madonna wrote to Mary-Ellen Beloat: ‘You are the craziest person I know. I love you.’ A couple of years later, when she graduated in 1976, she expressed herself in a similar vein to her favorite teacher, Marilyn Fallows. ‘Mrs Fallows,’ she gushed, ‘I can’t begin to tell you how I feel about you, and how I will always treasure your words of encouragement. Sometimes I think you might explode with so much energy inside of you. I think you are crazy and I am really in love with your craziness, and of course, you.’
Nevertheless, for all her sentimental musings, after Madonna left Adams High School she never once went back.
According to romantic legend, in the early days of the American colony a young Frenchwoman named Ann d’Arbeur led a group of settlers lost in the wilderness surrounding the Huron River to a place of safety where they could rest and recuperate. The hamlet they established there, Ann Arbor, a settlement of some 640 acres forested with burr oaks, was named after her in appreciation of her courage, leadership and navigational skills.
So much for legend. More prosaically, the village was actually founded in 1824 by John Allen of Virginia and Elisha Rumsey of New York, and named after Allen’s wife, Ann. She was the sole inspiration for the name, preferring ‘Annarbour’
(arbor
is the Latin for tree) to her husband’s choice of Allensville or Annapolis.
With the opening of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1841, the town, which had started life with a population of fifty, established itself as the education capital of the Midwest. White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, its citizens adopted a high moral tone, in 1916 voting for Prohibition before the rest of America (it became law in 1919), reserving their strongest criticism for saloons which, before the nationwide ban on alcohol was enacted, pandered to students. What the founding fathers would have made of modern-day Ann Arbor, with its Queer Aquatic Club ‘dedicated to gay, lesbian and bisexual swimmers,’ or the downtown Aut Bar, which boasts a ‘leather night’ on the last Friday in every month, or the activities of the local Grizzly Peak Brewing Company, or Vivienne, resident ‘female mystic imbued with the DNA of past clairvoyants,’ is not hard to guess.
Certainly, when Madonna arrived in the fall of 1976 she found Ann Arbor, with its well-established arts festival and gay and underground scenes, an eye-opening change from the suburban life she had led in Rochester. For all Flynn’s guidance in art and literature, and for all their forays into the world of gay clubs, she remained a high-school student beneath the veneer of sophistication. It was, however, the support and encouragement of teachers from her former high school that had given her the chance to move on. Marilyn Fallows wrote to the Music Department of the University of Michigan in April 1976, stating that she found Madonna to be ‘an intelligent, sensitive, and creative young woman,’ while her counselor, Nancy Ryan Mitchell, was equally effusive, telling the university authorities that the young dancer was ‘extremely talented, motivated, experienced, open to improvement’ and possessed of a ‘sparkling personality.’ Naturally Christopher Flynn, now Professor of Dance on the university faculty, also helped smooth the path to a full scholarship.
Yet, whatever Flynn’s part in the award, the scholarship was still a remarkable achievement for a teenager who had only taken up ballet seriously some three years earlier. Moreover, while her father may have harbored the hope that his eldest daughter would go into a more practical career like the law, there was no doubting the fact that he was proud of her success. Proud and excited, he made one stipulation before she set off for Ann Arbor – that she room in an all-girl dormitory.
When she arrived at the university, Madonna picked up where she had left off in Rochester, spending much of her time with Flynn, attending his classes, and going out dancing with him in the local gay clubs. It was apparent to other students that she was devoted to her mentor, slavishly following the wishes of this flamboyant Svengali, however perverse. Some of those wishes made sense, helping the young dancers to a greater understanding of their art, or otherwise improving their skills. Others were less healthy. One of the latter would bring Madonna – and others, no doubt – to the edge of illness. At the start of every class he would force students to weigh in. If the scale went over 110 to 115 pounds he would humiliate the errant performer, ordering them to get a grip on their eating. Madonna took him at his word, living off a diet of popcorn and ice-cream sundaes, and punishing her slender body with endless sit-ups that left her flesh dark with bruises. Her friend and fellow student Linda Alaniz remembers that: ‘She had a really unhealthy diet and I’m sure at that time she was borderline anorexic. But she desperately wanted to please Christopher.’
Like the other students, Madonna had a punishing schedule of two ninety-minute technique classes a day, with a further two hours of rehearsal for college performances at the Power Center for the Performing Arts. Even in that hothouse atmosphere she stood out, not just for her abilities as a dancer, but also because of the intelligent commitment she brought to her art. She had, it seems, given herself over to dance, body and soul, and her classmates found her enthusiasm infectious, as when she arrived one day raving about her African dance class and the Mujaji, a rain dance she had learned.
Professor Gay Delanghe, the head of the university Dance Department, remembers a ‘colt-like’ teenager who quickly developed a ‘fine dance facility’. ‘She had the dedication, commitment and energy to do so,’ she says. ‘She had both the body and the chops to be noticed by faculty, guest choreographers and her fellow students. She possessed the brain power to learn movement and make it look like something. Many are called but not all can do it. She can.
At the same time, that hunger for attention that had characterized her school career was soon all too apparent to fellow students, as Linda Alaniz remembers. ‘She would come into ballet class chewing gum and with a cutup leotard held together with safety pins. It was a punk look but really it was childish, a little girl desperate for attention.’ It seemed to be a case of ‘anything to be noticed.’ On one occasion, when the class were holding in their stomachs and keeping their heads still for a deep plié, Madonna let out a huge belch. Such adolescent attention-seeking took other, less obvious, forms, however. Another friend, Whitley Setrakian, who became her roommate in her second year, felt that behind the wisecracking exterior was a rather lost soul. ‘She was the most openly affectionate girl I had ever met. She was forever putting her arms around me. But you could sense it was a little bit of an act. She was needy and there was something a little fragile and sad about her.’
Like Mary-Ellen Beloat and Marilyn Fallows before her, Whitley was to experience at first hand that neediness, wrapped in endearing if earnest sentimentality. She returned from Christmas vacation to find a six-page letter from Madonna waiting for 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.
Photographs of her at the time give a sense of the two sides to Madonna, one the serious-minded ballet student, the other the attention-seeking, exhibitionist teenager. Linda Alaniz, who was taking a photography minor as well as majoring in dance, asked Madonna to pose for her for a series of studies in her loft apartment during Halloween. Her black-and-white photographs show a poised and composed young woman, high-minded, sophisticated and elegant. She seems very feminine, the quintessential swanlike ballerina pursuing her art with single-minded purpose and dedication.
In other contemporary photographs, however, taken by hairdresser and one-time boyfriend Mark Dolengowski, the wisecracking, attention-grabbing party girl enters the picture. She mugs for the camera, blowing gum bubbles, pulling faces, striking street-punk poses, a far cry from the lithe, serious dancer of Linda’s artistic studies. Yet both sessions reflect fragments of Madonna’s personality, as confusing as it may be to reconcile the sassy, panty-parading show-off with the poised ballet dancer.
Indeed, the way she started dating Mark was vintage Madonna. He was working as a hairdresser on campus, she was one of his clients. One day during her first months at college, she passed by his salon, stuck her tongue out at him – and then, when he came over to talk to her, invited him to join her at Dooley’s, a college bar where she occasionally worked. He dutifully bought her a drink, and from then on they began dating. Mark took her dancing or out to dinner – he always paid, because she was permanently short of money – and before long they embarked upon a short-lived love affair. If anything, the end of the brief fling strengthened their friendship, the two of them staying in touch when they both eventually moved to New York. ‘She was very dedicated and disciplined with her dancing. Very focused,’ recalls Mark, who joined Christopher Flynn’s dance classes for a time. ‘Madonna was good fun when she let herself have fun.’
To her, fun was dancing, either in class or in clubs. She regularly went out with Linda, Whitley and another friend, Janice Galloway, and danced the night away. It was during one of these forays that Madonna met a young man who was to have a profound influence on her future. She spotted Stephen Bray in the Blue Frogge bar, and for the first time in her life asked a man to buy her a drink. Soulful, quietly spoken and gentle, the black waiter embodied many of the same qualities of the men who would come to matter in her life. She discovered that he was a drummer in a local band, and for the next few months she and, as often as not, Linda, Whitley and Janice, would go along to dance at their gigs.
For the most part, when Madonna and her girlfriends went out on the town their primary aim was to enjoy themselves dancing, not to pick up any of the girl-hungry young men who frequented the clubs. Madonna and Linda laughed off accusations from would-be suitors that they were lesbians because they danced with each other, and spurned the advances of local guys. For that reason they often frequented the gay clubs, reveling in the energy, abandon and freedom of that scene, aware that they could enjoy the music and the dance for their own sake. ‘We had a blast,’ Linda says, although their presence on the gay scene inevitably increased the gossip about their ‘lesbianism.’
It was at this time, however, that Linda first noticed a quality about her friend that became more evident the closer the young dancer came to the seductive glow of fame. In the choreography of her life, Madonna’s sense of fun, even her outrageous behavior, came strictly second to her driving ambition. As far as she was concerned, her dance career was her passport to stardom. As Linda puts it, ‘We would get home late but she was incredibly disciplined. She would always be ready for the dance class at eight in the morning. She never missed one.’
Clearly, Madonna sensed that she was destined for bigger things – and, as far as she was concerned, the sooner the better. Moreover, if dance was her passport to fame, then New York was the utopia in which she would realize her dreams. It was not long before she started railing against the slow pace of life in Ann Arbor, seeing her future further east. In a letter to a friend she wrote: ‘I just gotta get to New York. I also realize that the chances of me making it dancing are extremely slight and I gotta prove something to myself.’
Like her Cinderella childhood, the story of her arrival in New York has become part of the Madonna myth. According to her version of events, in the summer of 1978 she bought a one-way air ticket to New York, arriving with just $35 in her pocket and a burning desire to find fame and fortune. Hailing a cab, she confidently told the startled driver, ‘Take me to the center of everything.’ He promptly dropped her off in Times Square where, dressed in a heavy winter coat on a warm summer’s day, she dragged her suitcase around looking for a place to stay. A kindly stranger, said to be an out-of-work ballet-dancer, took pity on her, and she slept on his couch for a couple of weeks until she found her own place.
Sadly, as with the legend behind the naming of Ann Arbor, the truth is less romantic. In fact, her first trip to New York had been more than a year earlier, in February 1977, courtesy of her boyfriend Mark Dolengowski. She had applied for a scholarship to dance with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre at their six-week summer workshop in New York. An audition was arranged and Mark, borrowing her father’s car, gallantly drove more than 600 miles through the night from Ann Arbor to Manhattan so that Madonna could keep her appointment. She duly performed for the audition panel and, after grabbing a quick bite to eat, the young couple headed back to Ann Arbor. In all they were in New York for less than twenty-four hours, leaving on the Friday and arriving back at college that Sunday so that Madonna would not miss her Monday-morning class. ‘I remember it was a sixteen-hour round trip,’ says Mark, ‘and I did all the driving.’