Madonna (11 page)

As the plot progresses, the villain Raymond Hall maliciously derides Dashiel, causing Dashiel to lose his apartment. He is then reduced to residing on a park bench. In a confrontational scene in the scuzzy diner we find Madonna as Bruna, making out with Dashiel, while Raymond Hall argues with the waitress behind the counter. When Bruna excuses herself and goes into the diner's bathroom she is cornered and raped by Raymond. Crying and screaming hysterically, Bruna/Madonna emerges from the bathroom, her face smeared with theatrical blood. Dashiel vows with vengeance, “He will pay.”

Enlisting the aid of Bruna's family of lovers, Bruna and Dashiel hijack a black Cadillac stretch limousine and proceed to track down Raymond Hall. Cornering Hall in the doorway of a sleezy porno theater, Madonna ad-libs the line “He's scummier than any scum!” Kidnapping Hall, the vigilantes proceed to the Brooklyn Bridge for the grand finale to the film: a human sacrifice musical number. While dismembering Raymond Hall, the family of lovers, Bruna, and Dashiel sing the rock and roll sacrifice song, “Raymond Hall Must Die Today.”

According to Lewicki, Madonna's band partner from Breakfast Club, Angie Smit, was featured in the dismemberment sequence. “Angie came with Madonna,” he recalls. “She played one of the sex slaves. Madonna and Angie had a really intense relationship, almost like sisters/mother-daughter/lover or something. It was a very complicated relationship, very tight. They would walk together and chew gum at the same time! There was just a real closeness, intensity, about the relationship, and I don't know anything about what was going on. They were doing the Breakfast Club thing while I was doing this movie. As a matter of fact, I went to see Madonna a couple of times at different venues. That's when she was playing with Angie, and Dan Gilroy, and his brother Ed.”
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The aspiring filmmaker says there was a nice sense of camaraderie on the set of the film, which was a big experiment for everyone involved. It was kind of like one of those Judy Garland—Mickey Rooney “I've got a barn, let's put on a show!” situations. “There was no attitude around the set,” recalls Lewicki. “We just did this thing, got out the Super-8 camera and filmed it, and the batteries would go, and I wouldn't have any extra batteries, and Madonna would shout, ‘Goddamn it, Stephen, can't you keep extra batteries!?!'”
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Through it all, Lewicki knew instinctively that he had struck gold when he signed Madonna for the female lead. He says, “She had energy; she had charisma. She's got these sparkling eyes. At the time she had this dark brunette hair that was very attractive. She was a very appealing, very sexual person. She works well on film, and I knew that instantly. It was just an immediate thing.”
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Lewicki had an obvious crush on Madonna, but they behaved like friendly adversaries more than friends. He recalls with fondness an afternoon in Battery Park, eating blueberry yogurt out of Madonna's ear. “That woman has more sensuality in her ear than most women have anywhere on their bodies.” Of her acting talent and their sparring friendship, he explains, “She was totally undeveloped, and I was totally undeveloped, so we kind of had this sort of pissy attitude toward each other. We'd kind of insult each other a little bit along the way.”
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Stephen had enough money to shoot most of the movie in October of 1979, but midway into the filming, his bank account fell to the empty mark. The most important scene that was missing was the sequence in which Bruna is raped in the diner bathroom. Since none of the actors had been paid for their initial work on the film, the company just dispersed for the time being as Lewicki struggled to scrape together enough cash to finish his dream film project. This wasn't the end of Lewicki's interaction with Madonna, it was merely a pause in the friendship.

Meanwhile, back at the synagogue, work continued on the development of the band Breakfast Club and Madonna's music. Madonna knew from an early age that she wanted to perform, but never specifically in what form. That was quite evident during this developmental period. Increasingly, in this her second year since dropping out of college, her interests began to focus more and more on music.

Madonna continued to do occasional modeling, while Dan and Ed both held down day jobs. “They would go to work every day, and I would stay there. I lived like a hermit for a year, I didn't leave Queens. I'd play drums for four hours. They taught me basic chord progressions on piano. As soon as I learned to play guitar a little bit, songs came out of me. I don't know where they came from, it was like magic. I'd write a song every day. I said, ‘Wow, I must be meant to do this.' I stopped taking dance classes.”
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Madonna claims that once she got into a song-writing mode, the music started pouring out of her like crazy.

She began to become obsessed with the idea of writing and performing her own songs. With what little musical knowledge she had, she found that she thirsted for more. As she understood more and more about music, she wrote more and more songs. “I played the first things that came out of me,” she recalls.
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During the year that Madonna spent living with the Gilroys, it was back to her old ways of pinching pennies. Having sampled what it was like to be wined and dined in Paris didn't erase her basic survival instinct. “One time we were on our hands and knees, looking for loose change to buy a few potatoes,” recalls Dan.
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Living from hand to mouth never seemed to dampen her spirits, it only served to make her stronger.

The Gilroys, Madonna, and Angie rehearsed and rehearsed, and eventually, through their mutal contacts, landed a couple of scattered engagements. However, they couldn't seem to get constant work. The band members felt they were playing pretty well, but the gigs were few and far between. When they did have paying jobs, they had to split the money four ways, so it never amounted to much.

For a while, Madonna's relationship with Dan went along nicely. Dan recalls that they had fun together, and that Madonna loved to go out to the dance clubs. For Madonna, Dan represented boyfriend, lover, teacher, and mentor. However, like all of her relationships with “useful boyfriends,” the relationship was not destined to last.

Within the structure of the group, Madonna's main competition came from Angie, who—by virtue of her blonde hair and her appearance—garnered a great deal of the on-stage attention. “When we would play our gigs,” Dan explains, “Angie always dressed really sexy with see-through clothes, and she moved sensuously onstage.”
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Madonna took note of the attention Angie garnered with her blonde hair and sexy moves, eventually imitating her style.

Although Angie was a lousy bass player, more people stared at her from the audience than those who focused on Madonna. This began to piss her off, as she wanted to be the center of attention. One of Angie's most famous outfits consisted of strings of beads strung together like a section of chain-link fence. Madonna, still ensconced behind the drums, felt driven to do something to get more attention. To keep harmony in the group, Dan devised a plan. Madonna would play drums for most of the set, and then she would come out front and belt a couple of songs of her own. She wanted to sing more often, but the band vetoed this. So Madonna walked out the door, leaving Dan and the band behind her.

Madonna had gotten a taste of what it was like to sing lead vocals on the stage of a loud rock club, and something seemed to click. She knew exactly what she had to do—she had to start a band of her own. The only difference was that this time around, she had to be the undisputed star.

All my boyfriends have turned out to be very

helpful to my career, even if that's not the

only reason I stayed with them.
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—Madonna

 

K
nowing when to leave is an instinct Madonna learned to employ with masterful aplomb. It is an intuitive reflex that she would exercise again and again. Case in point: her relationship with Dan Gilroy. When the romance was over, and she had learned all she could from him, it was time to move on to bigger stakes.

“I missed her very much,” recalls Gilroy.
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But he knew that someone with her drive would eventually make it.

During this era of her life, as an unknown commodity in New York City, circa 1980—1981, she spent much of her time crashing on friends' sofas. “I lived off the good graces of other people,” is how she described this particular period of literally sleeping around town.
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At one point she befriended the celebrated graffiti artist Keith Haring. His living room was one of the places in which Madonna occasionally took refuge. Andy Warhol reported in his infamous diary, “Keith said that when Madonna was staying at his apartment, sleeping on his couch, the
stories
he could write about the people she had sex with.”
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She continued to keep her weekly appointments with Anthony Panzera, posing nude for him every Friday at his studio on West 29th Street. In his appointment book and on model release forms, he has records of Madonna's changing addresses and notations of the seven-dollars-per-hour rate for which she posed.

“At one point I was living in New York and eating out of garbage cans on the street,” she recalls of this particular period when she was “squatting” in vacant buildings like a common baglady.
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Surviving off the streets like a homeless waif only served to strengthen her determination to make her dreams come true. It was only months before that she was being wined and dined in Paris. As the winter of 1980 began, Madonna found herself searching for abandoned offices in which to huddle for warmth.

She found a commercial loft in the garment district that was normally used for offices or as a warehouse. “There was no hot water. There wasn't even a fucking shower!”
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Although Gilroy and Madonna had broken up, she would often visit his loft for conversation and a hot shower.

If she was going to position herself as a singing star, she first had to put together a band. Utilizing her unabashed bisexual charm and her flirtatious communication skills, Madonna got on the phone and pulled together her own musical group. One of the first calls she placed was to Michigan—to her old boyfriend Steve Bray. Pleasantly surprised to hear from her, Steve quickly discovered that the phone call from Madonna wasn't to tell him that she missed him and loved him—it was because she needed something from him. Madonna wanted Bray to take musical control of the band. She recognized that she wasn't an experienced enough musician to do the job. Bray left for New York the following week.

There is a converted building in New York City's garment district, not far from Macy's in Herald Square, known as the Music Building. At the time it consisted of twelve floors of studios, filled with musicians—literally trying to get their acts together. Beside Madonna were a host of other bands including the System, the Dance, and Nervus Rex. During the day, the building was a spawning ground of musical creativity.

Ever-observant Madonna had a good eye for spotting who was going to ultimately accomplish something, and who was not. While she felt affection for and camaraderie with the members of the other bands, she says, in a quick-to-judge fashion, “I thought they were all lazy.”
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Of the Music Building group, only Madonna and the System really accomplished anything major. The System scored with a late-eighties hit called “Don't Disturb This Groove,” and Madonna of course became the ultimate female pop icon. However, at that time she was still eyeing wastebaskets for uneaten pizza crusts.

According to Bray, she stood out from the crowd even then. This was both good and bad for Madonna personally. “I think there was a lot of resentment of someone who's obviously got that special something,” he says. “She had trouble making friends.”
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Like Madonna's address, the name of her band was ever-changing. At one point they were known as “The Millionaires,” and for a while they were called “Modern Dance.” According to Ms. Ciccone, “I wanted just ‘Madonna,' [but] Steve thought that was disgusting.”
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To avoid sacrilege, yet have her own personal moniker as the group's handle, she settled for “Emmy,” which was a nickname Dan Gilroy had given her.

“She was playing really raucus rock and roll,” remembers Bray, “really influenced by The Pretenders and The Police. She used to really belt.”
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The Music Building was a comfortable place to be. It was such a hotbed of potential creative energy that Madonna enjoyed being there. Little did she suspect that she would soon be spending more time there than she had bargained for. With no money for rent, eventually Madonna took up residence in one of the rehearsal rooms. She would hang out until everyone else left for home, and she would find a warm corner to curl up in. One cold winter's night, while squatting in one of the building's loft spaces, she accidently set it on fire.

In order to keep warm, she had plugged in electric space heaters around the piece of carpet on which she slept. When she woke up in the middle of the night, she was surrounded by fire. In an effort to squelch the flames, she poured water on the burning space heaters, which made the situation worse. In order to save herself from certain demise, she grabbed a few essentials and headed for the Music Building, where she set up yet another bed.

While Madonna and Steve, and their new band, Emmy, were playing dates at avant-garde rock clubs, they were virtually living hand-to-mouth. “We shared our rehearsal loft with another band, so they practically paid the rent for us…. Steve and I slept between amplifiers. We budgeted what little money we had to about one dollar a day…. With our dollar we'd get some yogurt and peanuts…. When we'd run out of money, I'd pass by the garbage can in the lobby of the Music Building, and if it smelled really good… I'd open it up, and if I was lucky, there would be french fries that hadn't been eaten.”
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