Madonna (10 page)

Regularly, Madonna would receive letters from Dan Gilroy. “His letters were so funny,” she recalls. “He really made me feel good… he was my saving grace.”
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As soon as she got off the plane from Paris, Madonna headed back to Dan Gilroy and the synagogue. She was anxious to resume her affair with him, and she was determined to move full speed ahead toward becoming a musician, singer, actress—or all of the above.

In her absence, the brothers Gilroy had been forging ahead with their synagogue-based, experimental rock and roll band. Dan began teaching Madonna how to play a myriad of musical instruments. Retooling her dreams of stardom, Madonna began to fantasize about becoming a singer. Together, she and Dan and Ed, plus an ex-dancer named Angie Smit, worked at creating a group and a sound. Madonna fondly refers to this period of creative development as “my intensive musical training” and one of the happiest of her life. While doting on her, Dan Gilroy made Madonna feel special and loved.

Ultimately the group featured Angie on bass, Ed on guitar, with Madonna and Dan switching back and forth on the drums and vocals. While alternating roles in the band, eventually everyone tried everything in a futile effort to find any real musical success as a unit.

While the band was polishing its repertoire, Madonna got busy on the phone, trying to get the group some work. She would begin early in the morning, coffee in hand, calling everyone from the record stores to potential managers.

She had left town just six months ago as a wannabe dancer and part-time nude model; now Madonna was suddenly set on becoming a musician, singer, and songwriter. Gilroy recalls how hard she worked, practicing the drums up to five hours a day. “She was a dancer and she had a sense of the beat.”
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Ambitious Madonna dove right in and took control of the group's future. She spotted Dan's band as a possible vehicle for her own aspirations. “I was just a lot more goal-oriented and commercial-minded than they were. I wanted to know everything they knew, because I knew I could make it work to my benefit,” Madonna recalls.
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For immediate money, Madonna got back into modeling nude for various artists and photographers. One of her steadiest employers was Anthony Panzera, an artist and painter who also teaches art in Manhattan. He would regularly employ nude models for his classes, as well as for his own paintings. At the time he had his own studio in a loft on West 29th Street. It was in an area of town known as the flower district, due to the heavy concentration of plant and flower shops. From the summer of 1979 to the fall of 1980, Panzera employed Madonna as his model on an ongoing weekly basis, paying her the standard seven-dollars-per-hour rate. Their year of working together as artist and model yielded dozens of nude sketches and drawings, and one grand masterpiece.

“I did a whole series of drawings on her, and a painting,” explains Panzera. “I teach figure drawing at Hunter College, and so I get models up there all the time, and at the time I also had my studio in New York. I had a small group that would meet every Thursday night, and then another group that came on Friday mornings. So, the man who was booking models for me—Robert Speller, a model booker for Parsons School of Design—sent Madonna to me. I liked her, we got along well, and we proceeded to work on these projects. She worked for me for about a year—almost every Friday.”
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Panzera really enjoyed the work they did together. “The thing that impressed me most,” he says, “was the fact that she was working very hard. She was involved with one or two little bands that she had going, and she would work hard at practicing. She would practice in the evenings, sometimes late at night, and she managed to get to work for me the next morning at nine and be just as energetic. She had a lot of energy, I thought.”
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After he had sketched her for several weeks, Panzera was inspired to tackle a larger project. “I did one painting of her which took us a couple of months,” he recalls. “It's a classic nude pose. It's based on a painting by the French nineteenth-century painter, Ingres. She has this turban on her head. I got the idea to do the painting from a series of drawings we did. I did a series of sibyl drawings—the five sibyls from the Sistine [Chapel] ceiling—because her face was so flexible. She'd take a pose, and she'd look completely different. The next time she'd change positions. So that suggested these sibyl drawings, and there were five of those.”
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He explains, “The sibyls were prophets that were basically in the classical world—Greece or Italy. They are spread out on the Sistine ceiling—the sibyls and the prophets juxtapose each other. What made me think of them was a famous drawing called ‘The Libyan Sibyl' by Michelangelo. It's kind of a back view of a figure holding up a book, and you see the face in profile, and that figure is wearing a turban. When we were playing around with these, I had this bolt of cloth that she was wearing around her waist, and around her head, it suggested this series of drawings.”
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While she was posing as a sibyl, Madonna would talk to Anthony about her aspirations for Breakfast Club. He remembers that she pinned a lot of hopes on the band. “She invited me to a couple of little gigs,” says Panzera. “There were some bars along Sixth Avenue that she worked at, and she basically was working hard at trying to put something together, to get a record out.”
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As the months went on, Madonna felt more and more comfortable with Panzera—and in time, in their conversations, she would open up to him, talking honestly and directly about the path she wanted her life to take. “She would have been in a vulnerable state,” he recalls of his ambitious young model. “One is vulnerable when one is sitting there stark naked. So it sounded more like her ambitions and her dreams of what she wanted to do with her life were in the forefront of her mind. I could sense that there was a real determination there.”
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Stoked by her Parisian fling, and determined to leave no stone unturned in her desperate quest for artistic fame, Madonna continued scouring
Show Business, Backstage
, and
Variety
for casting calls. Three weeks after she returned to America she spotted one that looked interesting, and she promptly wrote a reply on a lined yellow legal pad.

This particular want ad had been placed in the newspaper by an aspiring young filmmaker by the name of Stephen Jon Lewicki. He had decided to take his Super-8 movie camera, round up an unpaid cast, and make an experimental avant-garde movie—on a shoestring budget. Ultimately it became the underground film entitled
A Certain Sacrifice
. Of his original plot concept and the resulting finished project Lewicki recalls, “I started off with the idea of human sacrifice, and worked back to Madonna!”
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Sound bizarre? It was.

Describing the ad that he placed in the papers, Lewicki explains, “I do remember I was looking for a dark-haired woman, ‘dominatrix-type.' I think I said it, I don't remember exactly, but I was at least hinting at that if I didn't say exactly ‘dominatrix.' Plus, exotic dancers and miscellaneous other characters and a middle-aged man. Madonna sent me a letter and photographs.”
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The letter, written in July of 1979 read in part:

She was truthful about being a megalomaniac and an egotist, but she conveniently fibbed about her age and birthdate—by one year. In the letter, Madonna enclosed three photographs of herself. Two of the photos were standard 3 × 5-inch color prints. One of these depicted Madonna in a pink-striped leotard with her arms raised as though she were doing a dance routine. Another was an 8 × 10 black and white full body shot of Madonna as an innocent twenty-year-old brunette with short-cropped brown hair. It was the second 3X5 color snapshot, however, that clinched the deal, hands down. The color shot was of Madonna sitting on the seat of a New York City public transport bus, applying bright red liquid lipstick with one of her fingers. The way her finger teasingly brushed across her pursed lips aroused Lewicki's curiosity. He found it sexually suggestive without being lewd.

He says, “The picture of her, where she's putting lipstick on on the bus, really grabbed my attention. I took one look at it—and I had seen literally two hundred trashy eight-by-tens, so-called ‘professional' headshots—and they were, like, girls from New Jersey trying to be actresses, who, just by looking at the photographs, had absolutely no talent. Or, if they did, it was not apparent.”
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While sorting through the package from Ciccone, Lewicki recalls, “I took one look at the picture of Madonna, and then I read the letter, which was a very revealing, very vulnerable kind of letter, and it was the most personable communication that I got from anybody. She gave me her life story in two pages, handwritten, which is pretty amazing! It just seemed like it was a fated kind of thing. She must have been pretty curious to have written a two-page letter that was that revealing.”
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Ironically, the mention of her birthday also piqued his interest in the would-be actress, as his birthday was also August 16th.

With that, he telephoned her and arranged for a meeting in Washington Square Park, which was to become one of the locations for the film. The aspiring actress he met that afternoon had never acted before, with the exception of having appeared in talent shows and high school plays back in Michigan. Yet, she had a snotty and self-confident attitude about who she was.

“Madonna thinks that everybody's impressed with her,” Lewicki contends, recalling his first observations that day in 1979. “Her impression of the world is—'The world is impressed with me!' And that's how she views things. On one hand, I was impressed with her. I was looking for something very specific, and she was exactly what I was looking for, this kind of nasty, sexually charged—at the same time vulnerable—female. On one hand, it was kind of a fantasy that I had at the time. At the same time I immediately got the impression from Madonna that there was a lot more trouble to that than meets the eye.”
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Lewicki immediately decided to cast her in the role of Bruna, the vengeful dominatrix. The movie was filmed in October of 1979, and again in November of 1981. Those two months, and the two-year gap that separated them, represent the periods when Lewicki had enough spare cash to invest in the film. Although he had the central plot down, the script was written as he went along.

Another aspiring actor, Jeremy Pattnosh, played the lead character, Dashiel. His role was that of a misfit who came from a hostile family and found it impossible to get along with anyone in the preppy Ivy League college he attended. Hitchhiking to New York City, frustrated, Dashiel wanders into Washington Square Park, where he meets and instantly falls in love with Bruna.

In her first frames in the film, Madonna is seen frolicking in a fountain in the park, looking as if she is giving the camera her impression of Martha Graham entering a wet T-shirt competition. Clad in a red T-shirt, her wet brown hair hangs in a stringy fashion, and in the sequence that unfolds, she and Pattnosh make out while the dirty New York City fountain water spills down on them.

The next scene, which is set in a seedy diner, introduces the viewer to the villain of the film, the bigoted Raymond Hall, played by Charles Kurtz. The scene, which establishes the obnoxious personality of Raymond Hall, seems to go on forever. Several scenes that follow feature much too much dialogue and far too little action.

The hour-long film's most interesting scene is some sort of bizarre theater rehearsal/sex orgy in which a man, a woman, and a drag queen physically seduce an innocent young girl. Guess who plays the innocent young girl? Madonna—naturally. In the course of the scene she bares her breasts and achieves multiple orgasms with her proclaimed “family of lovers.” The scene itself mainly consists of a lot of groping and heavy breathing (which is far less sexual than Madonna's controversial 1990 “Justify My Love” video).

After her multiple-orgasm spectacular, we find Madonna trying to explain to Jeremy that she is in love with him. The dilemma this entails is having to explain her infatuation to her family of lovers.

“They idolize me…” Madonna confesses. “… I can't get out [of the group sex scene].” Madonna's best line in the whole film comes when she asks, “Do you think for once that any lover of mine could be tame? It's not possible!” She adds, explaining of her family of lovers, “They're like irritated hornets, and they want to sting!” It's a remarkably subtle scene, as Madonna plays a warm, vulnerable role with a degree of candid honesty. Odd to think that later in her film career, as the stakes grew higher, she often appeared on camera as more awkward and stiff.