Authors: Andrew Morton
Instinctively loving and maternal, qualities often overlooked in any analysis of her personality, Madonna bustled round her younger brother and sisters, particularly baby Melanie, caring for them as she had seen her mother do. But they could never fill the gap left by her namesake’s death. For a sensitive little girl who had already demonstrated her deep-seated need for love and affection, the loss of the one person who gave her patient, unconditional love changed for ever her relationship to the outside world, making her stronger and more self-reliant, yet with an insatiable need for love matched by fear of commitment. She had given her love once to someone she had completely trusted, and that person had gone from her life. It would be many years before she could utterly pledge herself to another. Indeed, her quest for love without strings would define her behavior, in public and in private, and provide the momentum behind the relentless ambition and craving for attention that has propelled her to universal fame.
Years later, when she was in her early twenties and on the threshold of a music career, she was lying in bed in the New York home she shared with her then boyfriend, artist and musician Dan Gilroy. It was in the days when her personality was her performance and her performance was her personality. She was indulging in an early-morning reverie, talking into a tape recorder about a Korean woman she had befriended who had wanted to adopt her. That encounter clearly stirred the deep well of memory about her mother.
In a voice needy and plaintive, she said: ‘I need a mother, I want a mother. I look for my mother all the time and she never shows up anywhere. I want a mother to hug.’
Clearly close to tears she repeats a slang phrase about being cheated: ‘I got gypped, I got gypped, I got gypped …’
‘This Used to Be My Playground’
I
N A WAY, it was all the fault – if fault is the right word – of the 1980s pop group, A Flock of Seagulls. Back when he was a music journalist in New York, Neil Tennant, now of the Pet Shop Boys, had an appointment to interview the one-hit wonders. They failed to show. Peeved, Tennant fell back on his contingency plan and called a young singer named Madonna, arranging to meet her for coffee in a downtown café. At that time she had a couple of singles released, but stardom was neither assured, nor swift in coming.
She arrived on time, eager to make an impression, knowing that good publicity would help the climb up the greasy pole to fame and fortune. Of course, striking publicity could only be achieved by ensuring she gave great copy, and that in turn depended on entertaining stories about her life – especially her sex life. If that meant a little embroidery and embellishment around the edges, so be it. After all, she was just another aspiring young singer, a co-conspirator in the unspoken pact between those who crave celebrity, and those who have the power to offer it, to give them the canvas upon which to paint their dreams. ‘From the very start I was a bad girl,’ she gushed. The tape recorder mechanically recorded her words, but not the ironic gestures and knowing winks that accompanied them.
‘I hardly said a word,’ remembers Tennant. ‘I couldn’t stop her talking.’ Yet his second-choice interview made great copy, the result a major spread in
Star Hits
magazine in November 1983. It provided material which, together with other interviews Madonna gave at that time, has found its way into countless feature articles, films and biographies, so that now, like pebbles in a pocket, her anecdotes and vignettes from early interviews have grown smooth with overuse. When the efforts of her more excitable chroniclers, and especially those who have focused on the sexual and the sensational, are added to her own early propaganda, it is easy to see how the myth of Madonna was born: the ghetto childhood; the schoolgirl rebel; the flirty young Lolita who became a sexual athlete; the mistreated Cinderella, complete with Wicked Stepmother; the misunderstood artist.
Inevitably, all this makes for a confusing narrative. For it seems that at one moment a nun who taught the little girl is beating her over the head with a stapler, and at the next another teacher is writing on her report card: ‘12/1/63 Mother died. Needs a great deal of love and attention.’ (Whether the kindergarten teacher in question wrote that assessment before she taped over Madonna’s foul young mouth, or after she forcibly washed it out with soap and water, remains unclear.) Then we have the picture of the precocious five-year-old tease who taught a young boy how to bump and grind to a Rolling Stones record, set alongside another of the pubescent girl horrified at the mention of the word ‘penis’ when her stepmother attempted to teach her the facts of life.
For the biographer, it is difficult to find a path through the myths and half-truths and exaggerations, not all of them of Madonna’s creation. Yet by reflecting further upon her early life and chiseling out a few of the less worn pebbles of fact from her past, a different picture emerges, a history that is altogether more plausible, and at once both more complex and more compelling. It is a picture that also helps an understanding of the central theme of this book, namely, that Madonna is a considerable artist who has used both her sexuality and her social and sexual codes as her weapons of choice, her method of connecting with her audience; in short, that she is a long way from the popular conception of her as a sexual Amazon who happens to be a singer and occasional actress.
Curiously, therefore, in any account of her youth, two competing and conflicting personal qualities are seen to dominate – her curiosity, and her conformity. As a child, she had a relentless and intelligent inquisitiveness about the world around her, as well as a self-absorbed fascination with her own physicality and, later, her nascent sexuality. But if the question ‘Why?’ was never far from her lips, neither was the question ‘Why not?’ – ‘Why can’t I wear pants to church, why can’t I go out and play, and if God is good why did he take my mother?’ At times, her insatiable curiosity could bring her pain. On one occasion, when she was riding in the car with her father, she refused to believe that the glowing, red-hot end of the cigarette lighter was hot. She put her finger on it to find out.
Of enduring fascination were the nuns, serene, powerful yet seemingly semi-divine, who taught her at the three schools – Saint Frederick’s, Saint Andrew’s, and the Sacred Heart Academy – she attended. Curious to discover if these mysterious creatures were truly human, she and a friend scaled the convent wall to see if they could find out what the sisters wore under their habits. They returned from their mission breathlessly discussing the extraordinary fact that beneath their wimples nuns had hair. Yet despite their apparent oddity, like many Catholic girls before her Madonna flirted with the notion of joining these ethereal beings – although probably not for long.
For all her later disenchantment with the outdated and essentially sexist practices of the Roman Catholic Church, the magical reality of the Catholic faith, its sonorous liturgy and baroque rituals, its teachings of fall and redemption, guilt and confession, and of the certainty of an afterlife, captivated and provoked a young imagination that was at times as melodramatic as it was morbid. ‘I was very conscious of God watching everything I did,’ she told
Time
magazine in 1985. ‘Until I was eleven or twelve, I believed the Devil was in my basement and I would run up the stairway fast so he wouldn’t grab my ankles.’ If such a belief is little different from the ‘bogeyman-under-the-stairs’ terrors of less religious children, there is no doubt that Madonna’s early upbringing in a deeply Catholic tradition profoundly affected her. Such was her fascination that at her Confirmation she chose the name Veronica to add to her own given names, because it was Saint Veronica who wiped the face of Jesus on the Cross and then carried the cloth with His blood and sweat on it.
Death and its gruesome yet fascinating consequences were never far from her thoughts. A favorite childhood rhyme, and one that she delighted in reciting to adult audiences, went as follows:
Worms crawl in, worms crawl out
The ant plays pinochle in your snout,
Your eyes cave in, your teeth decay,
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
Children, and especially religious children, have always been both repelled and attracted by the mystery of death, as they are by anything that smacks of horror and decay. By the age of five, however, Madonna had already experienced it at first hand. Still emotionally raw and angry after her mother’s death, she once told her father that if he died, she wanted to be buried with him, while on other occasions she daydreamed of life as an orphan, with both her parents killed in a car crash. These childish thoughts crowded into her nightmares, dreams of death and the process of dying that have haunted her into her adult life.
She admits that one of her recurrent nightmares is about the horror of being buried alive, of lying, trapped and helpless underground in a constricting coffin, unable to move as insects, rats and other creatures nibble her flesh. The enduring personal symbolism of this frequent night-time visitation is fueled not only by her fear of death, but also by an equally powerful dread of being constrained. This is not simply physical claustrophobia, but the sense that she is a genuine free spirit who has constantly chafed against anything that might bind her, ties that have included everything from her father’s rules, the edicts of the Roman Catholic Church, or what she considered to be the constricting dynamics of her personal relations, whether sexual, social, professional or emotional.
Added to her thoughts and feelings about life, death and Catholicism, there is a sense that she was both fascinated and repelled by the untidiness – what she called the ‘ickiness’ – of life in general. One of her earliest memories is of an altercation with a little girl who gave her a dandelion. Madonna threw it away, explaining much later that she preferred things to be cultured and cultivated – in a word, controlled. Other handed down-versions of this story say that she attacked the girl, an extreme reaction which, if true, is the antithesis of any concept of ‘control.’
Nowhere was the moist, strident messiness of life made more apparent than in sexual relations. As the whole notion of sex and the physical differences between men and women began to dawn upon the young Madonna’s mind, she, like many of her girlfriends, found herself repelled rather than attracted. Given the teachings of the Church and the advice of her grandmother, Elsie Fortin, who warned of the dire consequences for girls who were not chaste, together with a confused understanding of the physical act, it is not surprising that the pubescent girl found the whole notion ‘icky.’ Glimpses of her brothers’ naked bodies revolted her. ‘I thought they were disgusting,’ she recalled, and was ‘horrified’ when she learned about the, to her, awful reality of sex. She remembers, too, a biology lesson in which she and a fellow pupil, a boy her age, had to dissect a mouse. The sight of the corpse, reeking of formaldehyde preservative, proved too much for her and she left the classroom. When she returned her partner had dissected most of the mouse, but had left the animal’s penis for her to deal with. She was appalled.
Far less threatening were the images of the men and women from the Bible. ‘I think my original feelings of sexuality and eroticism originated in going to church,’ she told the novelist Norman Mailer. If this was true, however, she clearly had a curious notion of eroticism and sexuality, for she admitted to feeling that there was an androgynous quality to Jesus and His disciples, with their long hair and flowing robes (and, presumably, despite their beards). To her mind they were the Barbie dolls of their time, asexual, unthreatening people who could have served as models from a jeans commercial.
If all this seems a far cry from the crotch-grabbing, man-eating persona Madonna was to invent for herself, it was nevertheless some distance from the conventional picture of her as a young girl, which portrays her as a sexual libertine-in-waiting. Yet the truth is that her physical self-awareness, even precocity, running around the schoolyard chasing boys of her age or younger, has all too often been confused with sexual promiscuity. In actuality, she was something of a paradox, her keen curiosity, fertile imagination and restless spirit balanced by the fact that, in childhood, she not only strove to conform, but actively enjoyed fitting in.
At all her schools, even at high school, she proved to be the quintessential all-American girl, effortlessly graduating from school-hall monitor and choirgirl to Camp Fire Girl and, later, teenage cheerleader, while at home she cheerfully moved on from Barbie dolls and bubblegum pop music to dressing up and experimenting with makeup. It was Madonna who told tales on her brothers and sisters or reported the misdeeds of her fellow students, who was first with her hand up in class, who regularly came home from school with good marks, thus earning a 50-cent reward from her father for every A grade she achieved. Indeed, her father’s ambition that she study law captured rather shrewdly the conventional character she then presented. Bright, articulate, well organized and argumentative, Madonna would undoubtedly have made an excellent attorney.
If anything, and despite all the received wisdom about ‘Madonna-the-bad-girl, ’ it was her siblings who were the rebels while she, in her own words, played ‘Miss Goody-Two-Shoes.’ As schoolboys, her elder brothers, Anthony and Martin, turned out to be real handfuls, not just for their harassed father, but for teachers and schoolmates alike. Lighting fires outside and other antisocial behavior was the norm. An innocent afternoon sketching the school buildings at Saint Andrew’s school turned into a three-day suspension for fellow schoolboy Nick Twomey when Martin happened upon him. ‘I was minding my own business when Marty came around me,’ recalls Dr Twomey. ‘He was the school goofball. He was always being a clown and getting into trouble. Anyone around him normally got into trouble too. I can’t remember what happened, but the nun who was there took us to the Principal’s office and we were kicked out of [temporarily suspended from] school.’