Authors: Andrew Morton
Down the generations their jobs have ranged from steamboat captain to policeman, saloonkeeper to machinist. For the most part, though, the Fortins made their way in farming and lumber. Their lives revolved around the land, so it was entirely normal that when Elsie Fortin was born, on June 19, 1911, it should be in the upstairs bedroom of her grandfather Nazaire’s wooden farmhouse at Standish, Arenac County, in northern Michigan. She was brought up in Bay City where her father Guillaume Henri, a sometime shipyard laborer and farmhand, and her mother Marie-Louise had moved to in search of work. It was here she met and married Willard Fortin, the son of a lumberjack and later a successful manager in a Bay City construction company.
Staunch Catholics, Willard and Elsie sent their eight children, two girls and six boys, to the local Visitation Church school and later to Saint Joseph’s high school. It was here that their eldest son Dale first saw eight-year-old Katherine Gautier, the daughter of French-Canadian parents. He excitedly told the nuns at the school and his younger sister, Madonna, that one day he was going to marry the dark-haired schoolgirl. He was true to his word.
So it was that, in April 1951, Katherine Gautier and her mother, Dale’s mother – the indomitable Elsie Fortin – and his sister Madonna all crammed into the car of Dale’s friend and best man Leonard Beson for the long, dusty ride to Goodfellow airbase in Texas, where Dale, a veteran of the fighting in Korea with the rank of sergeant in the USAF, was stationed. There he had become friendly with Silvio Ciccone, now known as Tony, whom he invited to the marriage service. It was a fateful decision.
Tony, in his smart blue USAF uniform, watched the bride and groom intently as they took their vows before Chaplain Carlin in an intimate Roman Catholic service at the small chapel on the airbase. But he only had eyes for the maid of honor, seventeen-year-old Madonna Fortin, whose dark, radiant beauty was perfectly complemented by the pale yellow lace dress and matching organdy cape that she was wearing that day. ‘Oh, she was a real beauty,’ recalls Katherine. ‘He was the one who fell for her.’
Shortly afterwards, Dale was discharged from the service and returned to Bay City, where he set up home and took a job as a lumber salesman. Tony Ciccone visited as frequently as Air Force leave would allow, and it was clear to everyone that in Dale’s sister Madonna he had found the woman of his dreams. ‘They were both quiet,’ recalls Katherine. ‘She was attracted to him because he was a nice, decent man, very handsome, who treated her well.’ The fact that Madonna had been engaged for a few months to a besotted young man from Monroe, Michigan, proved no hindrance to the budding romance. Within weeks of meeting Tony she ended her other relationship, and for the next three years they conducted a long-distance courtship while he took up his studies at Geneva College in Pennsylvania and she started work as an X-ray technician for two Bay City radiologists.
They were married on July 1, 1955, by Pastor George Deguoy at the Visitation Church in Bay City, where the Fortin family regularly worshipped. This time Dale Fortin was the best man, Madonna’s lifelong friend Geraldine ‘Chicky’ Sanders her maid-of-honor. Naturally both sets of parents were present, and it is worth noting that on the marriage certificate Gaetano Ciccone was named as Guy. The gradual process of assimilation, re-creation and reinvention, which is at the heart of the American story, was finding, and would continue to find, its perfect expression in the Ciccone family.
The newly married couple seemed to represent the dreams and values of the Eisenhower years, an era of full employment, rigid convention and cultural conservatism, yet also of an unbounded optimism and unquestioning faith in the American dream. Not only had Tony shaken off his given name, but he had left behind the gritty blue-collar life of Aliquippa and had taken an office job as an optics and defense engineer with Chrysler. He was to spend his career in the defense industry, eventually earning a substantial six-figure salary with General Dynamics, working with the Hughes Corporation on tank design.
In those early days, though, the college graduate was at the bottom of the white-collar ladder. After a short stay in Alexandria, Virginia, where Tony worked on a defense contract, the Ciccones moved into a cramped bungalow on 443 Thors Street in the suburb of Pontiac, Michigan, about twenty-five miles north-west of Detroit. They had barely unpacked the Catholic statuary, crucifixes, and other religious artifacts that had adorned their homes, when Madonna became pregnant. Anthony was born on May 3, 1956. Madonna and Tony took to heart the Old Testament injunction to be fruitful and multiply – for most of their marriage Madonna was either pregnant or recovering from childbirth. Their second child, Martin, was born on August 9, 1957, while their third, Madonna Louise, arrived into the world on the morning of August 16, 1958. Her heavily pregnant mother had traveled to the home of her parents, Elsie and Willard, in Bay City for a rest, and had given birth at the local Mercy Hospital. The family nicknamed the dark-haired baby ‘Little Nonni’ to distinguish her from her mother, who from now on was referred to as ‘Big Madonna.’
The baby Madonna may have been cooed over and cosseted as the first girl in the family, but her status did not last long. Another daughter, Paula, was born just a year later, followed by Christopher in 1960 and Melanie in 1962.
Yet Madonna stood out, her very name her badge of distinction. Unlike her siblings, who were given straightforward Anglo-Saxon Christian names, common and anonymous, Madonna’s name automatically made her different, the choice of the Virgin Mary as a Christian name as audacious as it was devout. For many years her Christian name was a curse rather than a blessing, a cross she had to bear. Not only did it distinguish her from her siblings, it stood her apart from her schoolfriends while, later, when she ventured into the cool New York scene, her name automatically defined her as Catholic, ethnic and regional – a girl from an unsophisticated working- or lower-middle-class family. In short, a hick from the sticks. In a sense, the tension between the way she has both accepted and denied her family and her ethnic roots, and the enduring conflict between her stern upbringing and her creative inner self, are laid bare in that simple yet iconic seven-letter word: Madonna.
Added to that equation is her rather melodramatic appreciation of her life, both as it was and as it is, which often obscures rather than illuminates the existing narrative of her career. For although events may have been true to her, they did not always constitute
the
truth, only
her
truth. Thus in the melodrama of her life, because Elvis Presley died on her birthday (her nineteenth, August 16, 1977), she has since felt a deep spiritual connection to him and his work, coming to see his persecution for daring to swing his hips to his brand of rock and roll as being similar to criticism of her own endeavors to push back sexual boundaries.
By all accounts she was a bright, articulate and very expressive little girl, with a vivid imagination. She loved her mother to read her bedtime stories, her favorite about a garden populated with talking vegetables and friendly rabbits. Like many toddlers, though, she was afraid of the dark, and her earliest memories are of snuggling into bed with her parents, the feel of her mother’s red silk nightgown invariably sending her off to sleep. ‘I wanted to be with the A team,’ she recalls. If her parents, in particular her mother, represented safety and security, her siblings were all too often a pain in the neck. Her elder brothers, Tony and Martin, relentlessly teased and tormented her, while the arrival of her younger sisters, Paula and Melanie, presented a threat of a different kind, focusing her mother’s attention on their needs, rather than her own. ‘She liked attention from the family and she usually got it,’ recalls her grandmother, Elsie Fortin. ‘I used to feel sorry for Paula.’ Like a fledgling in an overcrowded nest, she knew that the emotional nourishment she craved would only be provided if she squawked the loudest and the longest. Thus, her later compulsion to shock, her itch to rebel, might be traced back to that childhood need to belong, her unquenchable thirst for love and admiration.
Naturally, the primary object of her love was her mother, whom she remembers with fondness and regret. In memory, Madonna sees an ‘angelic, beautiful woman,’ patient and long-suffering, who scrubbed and cleaned, prayed and nurtured. But Big Madonna had also been an accomplished dancer, and had had a passion for classical music so strong that the Fortin family often wonder if, had she lived, her eldest daughter’s talents would have been channeled into the world of the classics rather than pop.
The other love of Madonna Senior’s short life was her religion. A member of the Roman Catholic Altar Society, her faith was bone deep, reflecting not just her own deep sense of devotion but also that of the Fortin family, particularly her mother Elsie. During Lent she would kneel on uncooked rice and sleep on coat hangers as penance, and is even said to have covered the many religious statues in her home when a friend who was wearing front-zipped jeans came to visit. This faith helped her to endure her terminal illness with fortitude. While she was pregnant with Melanie in 1962, she was diagnosed as suffering from breast cancer. As her friends and family absorbed the awful news, they blamed it on the fact that during her days as an X-ray technician the protective lead-lined apron, now obligatory, was rarely used.
Crucially, treatment was delayed until after she had given birth to Melanie. By then doctors were fighting a losing battle. While Madonna Senior was in and out of the hospital undergoing painful and debilitating radiotherapy, the children, bewildered if unsuspecting, were frequently farmed out to relatives, Madonna, then four, often staying in Bay City with her maternal grandmother. During their regular early-morning visits to church, prayers were offered more fervently, the rosary whispered with real urgency and passion. Everyone was praying for a miracle.
Still nursing baby Melanie, Madonna Senior gamely attempted to run a home and minister to her children. All too often she slumped exhausted on a sofa in the sitting room as her children climbed all over her, wanting her to play or tearfully asking her to resolve disputes, or simply wanting a cuddle. Interpreting her mother’s listlessness as rejection, little Madonna redoubled her efforts for attention, on one occasion drumming her fists into her mother’s back in frustration when she was too tired to play with her. She vividly remembers the time her mother burst into tears and how she impulsively put her arms round her in a childlike gesture of comfort and support. Little Nonni recalls feeling stronger than her mother, that she was the one consoling her. ‘I think that made me grow up fast,’ she has said.
As Madonna Senior’s condition deteriorated she spent more time in the hospital, her children seeing the forced cheerfulness and wan smiles, their father’s quiet desperation – Madonna remembers him crying just once – and the relentless optimism of the adults around them. Yet they recall, too, how their mother was always laughing and joking with them, so that they looked forward to their hospital visits. Even when, in the final weeks, she was visibly wasting away because she could no longer keep down solid food, she remained cheerful, her faith and her inherited ‘Fortintude’ a comfort and source of strength in the face of the inevitable. On her last night, December 1, 1963, Madonna Senior, her six children gathered around her bed, brightly asked for a hamburger, such was her determination to keep up appearances. An hour after the children were led from her room, she was dead.
This comforting tableau of saint-like stoicism and carefree courage is now part of family folklore, the almost biblical imagery of her last supper – particularly her final request for that ubiquitous, all-American dish – helping to fix and burnish her memory. In a way this story, often told in the family, disguises as much as it reveals, the matter-of-fact, almost jolly, manner of her parting smothering the relentless tragedy of the death of a young woman, only thirty, saying her final goodbyes to six young children – one still just a baby, the eldest not yet eight – ironically at the start of the Christmas season, but also when the whole of America was in deep mourning for the death of President John F. Kennedy, assassinated nine days earlier in Dallas, Texas. The awful confluence of these tragedies, one national, the other family, was almost overwhelming for the Fortins and Ciccones. For all concerned it marked the passing of an era of innocence, the end of an American dream.
Yet in the immediate aftermath of Madonna Senior’s death, so much was suppressed, so much left unsaid, so many untangled and unresolved emotions, of remorse, guilt, loss, anger and confusion, that in the atmosphere of resolute normality, it is little wonder that Madonna, then five, could not properly grasp the concept of her mother dying. It was only at her funeral at the Visitation Church in Bay City – the church where Madonna Senior had married eight years earlier – that her eldest daughter started truly to absorb the enormous and permanent change in her family life. The service of High Mass was deeply emotional, weeping and wailing a continual counterpoint to the hymns and prayers. It is not hard to see that, for little Madonna, a sensitive and imaginative child, this wave of suffocating emotion was both terrifying and traumatic.
She could see her mother, looking very beautiful and lying as if she were asleep in an open casket. Then she noticed that her mother’s mouth, in her words, ‘looked funny.’ It took her some time to realize that it had been sewn up. In that awful moment she began to understand what she had lost for ever. That final image of her mother, at once peaceful yet grotesque, is one she carries with her to this day.
The Ciccone children reacted to their loss in different ways. Martin and Tony, the older brothers, expressed their anger by becoming rowdier than normal, throwing rocks around the place, lighting illicit fires or just making general nuisances of themselves in the neighborhood. By contrast, Madonna withdrew into herself, vomiting if she left her home for any length of time. Home was a sanctuary and a security blanket, a haven of safety and protection in a mixed-up world. Her sleep was often interrupted by nightmares and, as she shared a bed with her younger sister Paula, she regularly ended up sleeping in her father’s bed, not only for comfort but also so that her younger sister could get some rest.