Madonna (3 page)

Underneath the bleached blonde hair, the missile-cone breasts, the bustier, the crucifixes, and the spoiled attitude, several questions remain unanswered: Who is Madonna? What does she want? What is the secret of her control and calculating self-confidence? Now that she has it all, is it lonely at the top? And, more important, why do we all care so damn much? Like a cleverly constructed piece of origami art, the mystery of Madonna has just begun to unfold….

From the start

I was a very bad girl.
⁵

—Madonna

 

W
hen Madonna first arrived on the popular music scene in the early eighties, her songs were delivered from a stance of playful partying (“Everybody”), heated sex (“Burning Up”), greed (“Material Girl”), and narcissism (“Think of Me”). Single-mindedly her underlying message was the command “Look at me.” However, as time went by, piece by piece she began to reveal different aspects of her complex personality and the deeply ingrained obsessions that were left by strict parental authority and a devout Catholic upbringing.

Madonna's initial image was more a case of style than of substance. But once she'd achieved objective number one, fame itself, and the public spotlight was focused on her, she began exorcising childhood demons with her pen. There were songs of sibling rivalry (“Keep It Together”), paternal rebellion (“Papa Don't Preach”), resentment of religious authority (“Like a Prayer”), and feelings of desertion (“Promise to Try”).

Her aggressiveness is probably the single key element of her success, and this is clearly traceable to Madonna's childhood. She admits, “Coming from a big family had something to do with it. There's that competitiveness that you have when there's a whole bunch of you and you want your parents' attention, and you don't want the hand-me-down clothes. You wanna stand out, you wanna be treated special. And then also my mother dying when I was six and a half, I think that had a lot to do with me saying—after I got over my heartache—'Well, I'm gonna be really strong and if I can't have a mother to take care of me, then I'm gonna take care of myself.' “
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Taking care of herself has since proven more of a lifelong plan than a simple goal.

Looking back on her childhood, Madonna explains, “I had a very middle-, lower-middle class sort of upbringing, but I identify with people who've had, at some point in their lives, to struggle to survive. It adds another color to your character.”
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Another touchstone of identification in Madonna's life is her ethnic makeup. While she is half Italian and half French Canadian, it is her attachment to her family roots in Italy that she most often speaks of. In the New York music circles where she first gained notoriety, one of the most asked questions was, “Where on earth did she come from?” Indeed, to comprehend what Madonna is all about is to understand her struggles within her family, her willfulness, her childhood scars, and her need to distance herself from pain.

Madonna's Italian ancestry dates back to the 1800s in Pacentro, in the province of Abruzzi. The village of Pacentro has a population of less than 1,600 people and is located about eighty miles from Rome. It was here that her paternal great-grandfather, Nicola Pietro Ciccone, was born in 1867. According to those who remember him, he was a tall, handsome, well-built man who learned to read and write at an early age. In 1893, at the age of twenty-six, he married a local girl named Anna Maria Mancini, and rarely ever strayed far from his hometown.

Nicola and Anna Maria had a son named Gaetano, who was born in 1901 and became Madonna's grandfather. Since Pacentro was a small village with little opportunity for upward mobility, Nicola was insistent that his young son go to school to learn to read and write so that he could improve his lot in life.

Madonna's great-grandmother Anna Maria had a best girlfriend named Concetta, with whom she had grown up. Concetta had two daughters, Bambina and Michelina. As children, Gaetano, Bambina, and Michelina would play together in the sunny streets of Pacentro. When the three children grew up to be teenagers, love blossomed between Michelina and Gaetano. Fearing that their parents would disapprove, the couple kept their affection a secret for a long time. Finally, unable to mask their love, they announced their adoration for each other to their families. While their respective parents found no objection, there was the question of how they would support themselves if they indeed intended on getting married. The advent of World War I only further complicated the situation.

Bambina, who was then a young girl of sixteen, recalls, “After the First World War, Nicola, seeing that there was no life for Gaetano in Pacentro, asked the local priest to write to America to his brothers—who were factory workers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—to find work for his son.”
⁸
Gaetano departed Italy for America, vowing to Michelina that he would return to marry her and bring her back with him. At the age of eighteen, two years later, he did return and fulfill his promise. They had an intimate family wedding in the small Pacentro church, then they both left for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Theirs was a storybook romance. Now married, the childhood sweethearts boarded a ship bound for America. They ventured across the Atlantic Ocean to live the life that Gaetano had set up for them. Immigrating to the United States, as so many Europeans were doing during that same era, they looked forward to their new life together in the land of opportunity.

Today, Madonna's great aunt Bambina and her family still live in Pacentro. Bambina, who corresponded regularly with her sister, to this day recalls that Michelina had her first child, Mario, in 1930. Four years later she gave birth to Silvio, Madonna's father. In the next six years, Michelina and Gaetano had four other children—all boys.

“My grandparents came from Italy on the boat,” says Madonna. “They went to Pennsylvania, a town right outside of Pittsburgh, because the steel mills are there and there was a lot of work.”
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They lived in an all-Italian neighborhood, and her grandfather found a job in one of the steel mills. When Michelina and Gaetano arrived in America, they spoke no English. When Madonna was young she saw them frequently. To her they represented an old lifestyle that her father wasn't interested in. He wanted to assimilate his family. He went on to college where he received an engineering degree. He eventually moved to Michigan to work in the automotive industry.

Silvio, whose nickname is Tony, was the only one among his brothers who obtained a college degree. He was grateful for the rewards and security that his formal education afforded him. It became an important point to him, and he in turn was very insistent that his children take advantage of the opportunities that schooling brought.

“He was in the air force,” says Madonna of her father, “and one of his best friends was my mother's oldest brother.“
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He fell in love with her immediately. She was French Canadian and a native of Bay City, Michigan. Not only was she unforgettably beautiful, but she had a unique first name. It was “Madonna.”

Explaining her mother's unusual name, the vogueing rock star we now know by that moniker says, “My mother is the only other person I have ever heard of named Madonna.”
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When the young singer first became involved in the music industry, everyone assumed that she had taken it as a stage name.

Silvio “Tony” Ciccone and the attractive young woman named Madonna Fortin married and settled in Pontiac, Michigan, in the heart of automotive country U.S.A. Tony worked as an engineer, holding down a job at the nearby Chrysler Corporation, working on defense systems. Eager to start a family, the young couple soon had two sons, Anthony and Martin, who were born a year apart.

Early the following year, Madonna Ciccone discovered that she was again pregnant and expecting her third child in late summer. In August of that year the family was vacationing in Bay City when the expectant mother suddenly went into labor. On August 16, 1958, she gave birth to her first daughter, whom she and Tony gave her own unique name: Madonna Louise Ciccone.

“The reason I was born in Bay City is that we were at my grandmother's house,” the singing star explains.
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According to Madonna, her given name is special. “It means virgin, mother, mother of Earth, someone who is very pure and innocent, but someone who's very strong.”
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Speaking disparagingly of her birthplace has gotten her into some hot water in the past. In 1987, after she became the famous singing sensation she is now, Madonna told Jane Pauley on NBC's “Today” show that Bay City was a “smelly little town in northern Michigan.”
¹⁰
Bay City was not amused by its most famous daughter's remark on national television, and she was blasted by the local paper—only weeks before a scheduled Michigan concert appearance. From the stage of the Pontiac Silverdome she apologized to the crowd, explaining that her remark referred to the Dow Chemical plant near her grandmother's house, not the people of Bay City.

After the birth of little “Nonnie”—as Madonna was called as a child—the family returned to their home off Featherstone Road, not far from where the Pontiac Silverdome stands today. Even at the height of the city's popularity, Pontiac was never very glamorous, but it was a hub of activity from the thirties to the fifties. With several lakes in the vicinity, the area is a haven for both winter and summer sports. Located just north of Detroit in Oakland County, Pontiac is rich in history. In the eighteenth century Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa tribe was based in the vicinity, and later the city—and the car that is manufactured there—took his name. During the twenties people flocked to Pontiac to work in the automotive plants: Pontiac Motors, Fisher Body, and General Motors Truck & Coach. However, by the late fifties Pontiac saw its downtown area begin to disintegrate. When the Pontiac Mall stole the need for a traditional Main Street—type of urban shopping district and the county courthouse moved to an outlying area, the once bustling Pontiac downtown began to resemble a crime-ridden ghost town. Attempts were made to revitalize the Pike Street area, but the parade of time simply passed Pontiac by; all of the major stores have long since relocated to suburban shopping centers.

Madonna's childhood was nothing out of the ordinary. She played with her dolls, fought with her two older brothers, and learned how to vie for attention in her growing family. Becoming the center attraction was a justifiable goal in the Ciccone family, because every year for the next three years, almost like clockwork, Madonna Ciccone, Sr., gave birth to another baby. In rapid succession came Paula, Christopher, and Melanie to give little Nonnie some competition in the attention department.

It wasn't long before Nonnie learned how to succeed at drawing all eyes to herself. “From when I was very young, I just knew that being a girl and being charming in a feminine sort of way could get me a lot of things, and I milked it for everything I could,”
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she explains. “I was always very precocious as a child, extremely flirtatious.”
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“I grew up in a really big family and in an environment where you had to get over it to be heard. I was like the she-devil!” says Madonna. “It was like living in a zoo, kind of. You have to share everything. I slept in a bed for years—not even a double bed—with two sisters.”
¹

Madonna remembers that she would go to any extreme to get all of the attention in the family. She brazenly proclaims that, “I would even hurt myself, like burn my fingers deliberately, just to get attention.”
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According to Madonna, her earliest memories go back to when she was about four or five years old. They're mainly memories of her beautiful mother. She remembers not being able to sleep at night. So she would go into her parents' bedroom and climb into bed with them. She laughingly proclaims, “I wanted to sleep with ‘the A-Team.'”
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Madonna says that her second memory conjures feelings of regret. It was the first time she was deliberately cruel to someone else. She recalls sitting on the driveway to her house, when a young neighborhood girl came waddling up to her with her diapers on. She looked up at Madonna, handed her a dandelion, and Madonna promptly pushed her down. Madonna recalled being mad because she was being punished at the time and her first instinct was to lash out at someone who was more helpless. “I saw in her innocent eyes the chance to get back at some authority,” says Madonna.
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She claims that the dandelion enraged her as well because they're weeds that grow out of control in people's yards. She professes only to like things that are cultivated. From an early age she had already learned to be the obsessive control freak that she is today.

When she was a child she always thought that the world was hers. It's not that her views have changed since she was a child, it's just that the world that was her realm has grown and expanded beyond the confines of Pontiac, Michigan.

Some of Madonna's adult role-playing manifested itself at an early age. In her play world, Madonna's Barbie doll set the record straight with her Ken doll from the very start. No one was going to set up rules for Barbie to live by, and in later years Madonna would follow the doll's lead. “I played with my Barbie dolls all the time,” she recalls. “I definitely lived out my fantasies with them. I dressed them up in sarongs and miniskirts and stuff. They were sexy, having sex all the time. I rubbed her and Ken together a lot. And man, Barbie was
mean
”
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From a very young age, one of Madonna's playmates was a neighborhood girl, Carol Belanger. To this day Carol remembers how she and Madonna got into trouble with Carol's mother one afternoon. It seems that Madonna and Carol had stripped the dolls' clothes off and placed them on top of each other in Barbie's bed. Carol's mother was quite
un-
amused at finding Ken attempting to have sex with Barbie with their frustratingly anatomically incorrect plastic bodies.