Authors: Andrew Morton
True to her own character, she only allowed herself a limited time for self-pity. If nothing else, Madonna is a fighter, picking herself up after every knockdown, squaring up to the world again more determined than ever. She used all her considerable willpower to push the incident to the back of her mind, trying to get on with her life, her steely inner resolution, her ‘Fortintude,’ refusing to buckle under the strain. Within her immediate circle, she was still the one telling the off-color stories, the craziest dancer, the girl with the look-at-me style.
‘Go Madonna, go!’ were the first words Norris Burroughs heard when he arrived at a party in Pearl Lang’s Central Park apartment just before Christmas 1978. There she was, dressed in leopard-skin tights, twirling and spinning at the vibrant center of a circle of dancers. ‘It was like a ritual’, he recalls, ‘as though she were dancing in a ring of fire.’ He immediately joined the group, but quickly realized that his standard disco moves couldn’t compete with the movements of the student dancers who surrounded him. But he made an impression of sorts on Madonna – even though he quickly saw that he faced stiff competition. The following day his friend Michael Kessler, who had first introduced him to Madonna, called to invite him over. As he was telling Norris that Madonna was with him, she grabbed the phone and shouted, ‘Get your gorgeous Brando body over here!’
They started dating, and before long she was spending two or three nights a week at his apartment. Their romance only lasted a matter of months, but even so Norris, an artist and son of the radio actor Eric Burroughs, gained a vivid insight into the direction of Madonna’s life, and the drive behind it. ‘The moment you laid eyes on her you knew that she was a person of destiny, a force of nature, an elemental being. When you are with someone like that you are immensely privileged and hang on for the ride. I felt like I had fallen down the rabbit hole and didn’t know where the adventure was leading.’
She maintained a determinedly Bohemian lifestyle, a young artist hungrily devouring Hemingway, absorbing Picasso, and savoring Browning – food for the soul, not the body. Nor did the daily cares of makeup, hairdressers or hot showers concern her. Style was what she woke up in. She wore Norris’s cast-offs, an old pair of jeans she tied with string to make them fit or a moth-eaten sweater. Here was someone who traveled light, unimpressed by the pretentious and self-conscious – an anti-material girl. To her lover of the moment, ‘Madonna struck me as a free spirit who was unwilling to be encumbered or tied down or pigeon-holed. I never tried to put a chain around her neck and that’s one of the reasons why our relationship lasted as long as it did. Everything I recall about her physically or sexually is misty and romantic. She brought out the tender and sensuous.’
Norris gathered early on, during their long rambling walks through Manhattan, visiting churches and art galleries, that she had one vision, to be a principal dancer with either the Alvin Ailey or the Pearl Lang company. Touched by that ambition, and the determination that lay behind it, one of the first presents he gave her was a biography of Nureyev. ‘I got a sense that she was going places but didn’t yet know how,’ Norris remembers. Curiously, though, in view of her later career, he also reflects that while she liked singing around the apartment or on their walks – Donna Summer’s ‘Hot Stuff,’ Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking,’ and songs by Blondie and Chrissie Hynde were favorites – there was never any feeling that she wanted to be a musician. Dance was her art and her ambition.
Yet just a few months after articulating her dream of becoming a principal dancer, Madonna walked away from dance for good. The reasons are many and various; and, as so often with Madonna’s history, it is not always easy to distinguish fact from legend. Clearly, though, something was wrong. The young dancer started complaining that Pearl Lang’s style was too old-fashioned, that she worked her dancers too hard, that there were too few opportunities. There was also the painful realization that there were many other dancers with similar, if not greater, talents than her own. The subtext is plain. Madonna craved acclaim, applause, even adulation, her individualism jarring upon other members of the troupe. Only now had it begun to dawn on her that it would take another three to five years of remorseless grind before she could even think of joining a major touring company. Then, if she did so, she would face fierce competition from dozens of other equally motivated and talented young dancers. The glittering prize of stage stardom, let alone that of being appointed principal dancer, seemed even more distant than at Ann Arbor, where at least she had appeared in two dance concerts a year.
She took out her frustrations in a series of confrontations with Pearl Lang, on one occasion banging her head against the studio wall in anger when she couldn’t perform a difficult dance step to the veteran choreographer’s liking. It heralded the parting of the ways, the recognition that Madonna’s individualism would never fit with the somewhat collegiate world of a dance troupe. Pearl Lang remembers the day she quit. ‘One day she said: “You know this dancing is difficult,” and I said: “I know it’s difficult,” and she said: “I have pains in my back.” I replied: “Everybody has pains in their back. It comes with the territory.”
‘Then she said: “I think I’m going to be a rock star.” She left and I never saw her again.’
At that stage in her life, Madonna had never sung a song or played a chord on a public stage, other than at school. It was a convenient fiction for both sides, a way of avoiding the cruel reality that in the world of dance, as her dance professor at the University of Michigan remarked, many are called but very few are chosen. For months afterwards the pain of the parting was almost tangible. Indeed, for a long while she talked about getting into this or that troupe, the reality becoming ever more distant. But she remained very much the party animal, loving to dance, out clubbing every night. Tellingly, though, the one thing she hated, passionately, was when a young girl in a nightclub would watch her move to the music and then come over and ask, perfectly innocently, ‘Are you a professional dancer?’ Madonna’s face would become a frozen mask, her manner icy cold as she briefly answered in the negative. The reason is not difficult to find, for the question forced her to confront her failure, to reflect for a few cruel moments upon what might have been.
A few minutes later, though, and she would be on the dance floor again, swirling, whirling and spinning to the song that was to become her personal anthem, Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive.’
The ‘Lost’ First Songs
T
HE SEARCH FOR LOST RECORDINGS of a pop star’s early songs is not, perhaps, an activity likely to excite most archeologists. Nonetheless, in terms of the archeology of pop the site yields treasures as priceless as anything lifted from the Valley of the Kings. True, the ‘dig’ takes place in the basement of a converted synagogue in Queens, New York, rather than among the royal tombs of ancient Egypt, and the guide, Ed Gilroy, wears a white baseball cap rather than the sun helmet or panama hat favored by the stereotypical archeologist of popular legend, but even so the thrill of discovery is palpable.
There is even a green parrot – imaginatively named ‘Birdie’ – squawking in the background as Gilroy makes his way down the spiral staircase into the gloom of the building’s extensive basement. He swings his flashlight around until its beam picks out a nondescript white plastic bag nestling among several paintings his artist brother Dan had left stacked against a wall – landscapes, flower studies, and figures in a glade, one of them a youthful Madonna running through the long grass. Ed Gilroy rifles through the plastic bag until, with a smile of satisfaction, he pulls out a spool-to-spool four-track tape with an almost indecipherable label stuck to its center. Closer scrutiny of the hieroglyphics scrawled on the label in black ink yields the curious words: ‘Bkfst Club Set – Work Percuss 2 End’.
He carefully places the spool on a dusty thirty-year-old tape recorder, threads its free end on to the machine’s reel, and then shines his flashlight on the counter to line up the tape correctly. Satisfied, he presses the ‘Play’ button and, almost unbelievably, the ancient spools begin to turn. Instantly we travel back in time, to the summer of 1979, the days of punk rock and New Wave. Through the headphones can be heard the muddy but driving sound of the drums and two guitars, pounding out a rock beat. The voice belting out the lyrics is young, energetic, rather nasal, yet altogether unmistakable. This is Madonna, recording the first song she ever wrote.
The song, which runs for about three minutes, has simple pop lyrics, describing, appropriately enough, her belief that that she was born to dance and how she enjoys moving her body to the sound of the music inside her. As it reaches a crescendo her voice becomes slightly hoarse, straining for the higher notes, especially when she yells her words in the final chorus. Yet that very rawness gives the song a sharper edge and a greater sense of excitement. As Ed, who played lead guitar on the track, observes, ‘The quality of her voice is so pure. It just comes out, totally uninhibited. Nowadays studios would hack out the struggle in her voice but that’s too bad. It’s almost like a window into her soul.’
As he reflects on those early days he is sitting on a worn cherrywood chair on castors that Madonna had used when she first auditioned the song before him to see if he thought it was good enough to include in the repertoire of their band, The Breakfast Club. Behind him is the same Carlo Robelli acoustic guitar on which she had learnt her first chords, the instrument she had used to pick out the melody as she had put together the words to her first song.
Ed Gilroy’s nod of approval for that first song meant an enormous amount to the would-be singer. For months Madonna had been floundering impatiently, almost obsessively seeking a new purpose and direction for her life. And it was in the unlikely setting of a converted synagogue that she found for a while a home and a haven, an opportunity to express herself, a chance to regroup and rethink after the collapse of her dance career and the frustrations of the past year.
It might all have been so different. A chance meeting with her former boyfriend Norris Burroughs in April 1979 changed her destiny for ever. While they had drifted apart as lovers, they remained friends and, after exchanging their news, he invited her to a May Day party at a friend’s downtown loft. Knowing her eagerness to make a name for herself, he promised that there would be lots of ‘scene makers’ at the party. She duly arrived, her hair up and dressed in two tee-shirts and a ballet tutu. ‘Very New York,’ observed Curtis Zale, an artist who spent some time chatting with his friend Dan Gilroy that night. ‘She was being fun and coy and loud, like the twenty-year-old kid she was. I wasn’t interested, but Dan was.’
Madonna and Dan Gilroy met up a few days later and took the bus uptown to the Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art housed in a series of buildings, modeled on five medieval French cloisters, in Fort Tryon Park, overlooking the Hudson River. During their day together she happily mugged for the camera, joining on to the end of a line of visiting nuns, posing by a fountain, and kneeling as if in prayer before a medieval altar cross. As they walked and talked Gilroy learned that she was about to embark on a new career in France. Indeed, a part of the reason for their visit to the Cloisters was to give Madonna, ever the professional, a feel for the country by immersing herself in the French paintings and artifacts on show, many brought over by Philip Lehman and his son Robert, who bequeathed the collection to the Metropolitan Museum in 1969.
A few weeks earlier, she had been auditioned by two somewhat larger-than-life Belgian TV producers, Jean van Lieu and Jean-Claude Pellerin, who were managing the European disco star Patrick Hernandez. His single, ‘Born To Be Alive,’ which had grossed $25 million, had made him an international star, and his two managers were looking for dancers to strut their stuff while he went through his routine. Since he did not have a strong voice there was talk of grooming a couple of dancers to double as backup singers in performances and to work with him on his second single, ‘Disco Queen.’ Madonna had been singled out from 1,500 other hopefuls as a possible candidate. Defiantly, she insisted that she would only be a dancer, initially refusing to sing at the final audition. In the end she gave a very grudging rendition of ‘Happy Birthday.’
The plan formulated by van Lieu and Pellerin was to develop, in Paris, a Las Vegas-style cabaret act around Hernandez, using jugglers, fire-eaters and comedians, including a talking dildo and a black dancer dressed only in a skimpy thong being dragged around the stage on a chain. Indeed, Dan Gilroy and Curtis Zale even suggested a stage name for Madonna, ‘Mademoiselle Bijoux,’ a sobriquet she took to using on postcards and letters home. A world away from Pearl Lang’s work,
The Patrick Hernandez Revue,
as it was billed, was hardly high art. Much of the concept was based on
Voideille,
a New York underground show in which Dan Gilroy and his brother Ed had featured. In it they had performed a musical-comedy act called ‘Bill and Gil’ and had, at one time, talked of auditioning for a place in the Hernandez cabaret routine.
While nothing ever materialized for the Gilroys, Madonna, after her audition, had become part of the Hernandez troupe and in late May 1979 had moved out of the apartment she then shared with the writer and dancer Susan Cohen on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, to the Gramercy Park Hotel, prior to flying to Paris. Even though her Belgian patrons’ largesse was becoming legendary in underground New York, she herself was still chronically short of money. Before she left, in June, she borrowed $15 from Dan Gilroy to tide her over, carefully writing out a check in return. That, Dan thought, was that – he would not be seeing her again for a good while. ‘I imagined that she wanted to come back to New York a huge success,’ he remembers.