Madonna (5 page)

Like many children who have to face the death of a parent, Madonna's mourning and sorrow were accompanied by a deep sense of guilt. “I haven't resolved my Elektra complex,” she recently admitted, referring to the psychological syndrome that defines those exact feelings.
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A cloud of guilt hangs over her head to this day because she acted cruelly toward her mother, though in reality Madonna's hurtful action was merely a childish outburst. Unfortunately, her mother's death left scars that not even time has healed.

One of her neighborhood girlfriends, Moira McFarland, recalls the death of Madonna, Sr., and its effect on the little girl. Says Moira, who lived two houses away from the Ciccones, “I remember feeling really bad when her mother died, but it probably made [Madonna] stronger because she hurt so bad.”
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After the funeral was over and the reality of the tragedy sank in, it was time for the family to deal with several changes that had to be made. Tony Ciccone still had to work to support his family, so for several weeks following the death of Madonna, Sr., the six children were farmed out to relatives.

Madonna has a lifelong knack for prospering, even in the face of tragedy or disaster. Instead of letting a negative situation defeat her, somehow it ends up making her stronger. At an early age she learned how to get special privileges. She was good at getting into situations where, say, she was the hall monitor and reported classmates who weren't behaving. Often the nuns would forgive her for misbehavior. Their rationalization was, “Well she doesn't have a mother and her father isn't there a lot.”
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Before long Tony found a solution to his housekeeping/child-raising dilemma. He began hiring housekeepers. Unfortunately the six rambunctious Ciccone kids proved quite a handful to look after, so they went through quite a few hired hands before they found a compatible and compassionate one.

After Madonna's mother's death, the little girl felt as if she was “the main female of the house.”
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Since there was no adult woman in the household, Madonna felt that she should naturally be the second in command.

Eventually Tony found a pretty, energetic, and exuberant woman named Joan who was able to corral the Ciccone clan and wasn't overwhelmed by them or the housework. The real surprise came when the six children discovered that their father was not only pleased with her cooking and cleaning proficiency—he had fallen in love with her. Madonna was especially dumbfounded by her father's announcement that Joan was going to be their new mother. Bruised feelings and emotional resentment were the children's initial response.

“My father's marriage was a surprise to us,” says Madonna, “because we all thought he was going to marry someone else who looked very much like our mother.” According to Madonna, Joan was “really gung-ho, very strict, a real disciplinarian.”
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Madonna, still embittered, recalls how difficult it was to accept her new stepmother, both as a figure of authority and as the most important female in her father's life. “My father wanted us to call her ‘Mom,' not her first name,” she said.
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The whole experience turned out to be a painful one. Madonna missed her mother, and took it out on her stepmother.

“I don't really want to talk about my stepmother,” is often how Madonna responds when she is asked about Joan Ciccone, in spite of the fact that her father's second marriage took place three decades ago.
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Madonna felt that her stature in the family as the oldest girl should buy her prestige and privilege. Instead she found herself saddled with responsibilities, like baby-sitting and diaper changing. Madonna resented the duties delegated to her as the oldest girl. While her friends and neighborhood children were out playing, she had to act responsibly. “I think that's when I really thought about how I wanted to do something else and get away from all that,” Madonna recalls.
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She viewed herself as Cinderella, burdened by a stepmother and lots of work. All she really wanted was to go out and wear pretty dresses.

She further complains, in her spoiled Catholic schoolgirl tone, “I didn't resent having to raise my brothers and sisters as much as I resented the fact that I didn't have my mother.”
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Madonna's picture-perfect vision of family life was ruined, and she and her brothers and sisters weren't very happy about it.

According to her, the thing that she hated the most about Joan was her taste in clothes she purchased for her young stepdaughters. “My stepmother had a thing about buying. She'd go out and buy us all the same thing—the same fucking outfits. Then I had to wear uniforms to school. I was dying for some individuality,” she proclaims like a petulant child.
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Madonna tried everything in an effort to look different than her brothers and sisters, from odd-colored socks to bows in her hair. This may well have been the beginning of the Madonna style.

In her own mind, by remarrying, her father had somehow betrayed her. She recalls turning her animosity on him. “For years I resented him. You see, when my mother died, I attached myself to my father.”
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Madonna felt deserted, as though her stepmother had taken her father away.

Even among her siblings, Madonna felt like a loner. In large families distinctly different personalities often emerge. According to Madonna, some of her siblings were extroverts while others were very shy. As a child Madonna didn't feel close to anyone at home. As in most large families there is often competition between sisters and brothers, and in the Ciccone family, each child actively vied for the attention of their father. Madonna's method for winning his approval was through school: “I was a straight-A student, and they all hated me for it because I did it more for the position I was going to have in my father's eyes than for whatever I was going to learn by studying.”
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For the three years before her father remarried, Madonna virtually clung to him, emotionally and physically. She claims, “Like all young girls, I was in love with my father and I didn't want to lose him.”
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With the loss of her mother, it became more and more important for Madonna to know that her father was there for her. When Mr. Ciccone married her stepmother, Madonna, hurt by the lack of attention, realized she could get by without anyone. Unwilling to open herself to more heartbreak, at a young age she learned to stand confidently on her own.

Like a stranger in a strange land, Madonna felt as though her existence had been turned upside down after her mother's death. It looked as if her whole world had ended. And though it didn't, it would never be quite the same.

At the age of seven, Madonna and Moira McFarland dug Moira's mother's wedding dress out of the closet, and put on a play in the backyard. The girls fought over who would play the leading role. “She was the prettiest girl I ever knew,” says Moira.
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Naturally Madonna ended up with the starring role. The price of admission for the show was set at a competitive ten cents. This was to go on record as the most economical ticket in her performing career.

In 1966 she made her First Communion, and when she was confirmed, chose the name
Veronica
to add to her own birth name. She was now Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone.

According to Madonna, St. Veronica “wiped the face of Jesus and then carried around the cloth with his blood and sweat on it.”
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She was attracted to her strange passion. Like St. Veronica, Madonna was destined to become legendary for doing things that were both passionate and weird.

In order to keep his kids occupied and using their minds, Tony Ciccone insisted that they all learn to play a musical instrument. Madonna ended up taking piano lessons after school. She claims that she absolutely hated the lessons, so she came up with a plan. She convinced her father that dance lessons were a good idea and much more creative than piano.

There is a song from the Broadway show
A Chorus Line
called “At the Ballet.” In the song three girls sing about escaping painful childhood experiences by taking dance classes. The moral of the song is that in spite of unhappy home lives and traumatic realities, everything was somehow “beautiful” at the ballet. For Madonna, it was like this. She could forget about her stepmother, the nuns at school, her sibling rivalries, even the death of her mother, for hours at a time during her dance lessons.

The year 1967 was dubbed the “Summer of Love” in pop cultural terms. It was the year that Madonna first began developing her own musical taste. Her three favorite records—which she owned as 45 rpm singles—were the Strawberry Alarm Clock's “Incense & Peppermints,” Gary Puckett and the Union Gap's “Young Girl,” and the Box Tops' “The Letter.”

Imagine, if you will, the sight of Madonna and her two older brothers—Anthony and Martin—fighting over the use of the family turntable. Even at the age of eight Madonna was fighting a heated battle to control the stereo, insistent that
her
music get played.

“When I was growing up, my older brothers were into hard rock and I hated it,” Madonna says. “They would purposely scratch the needle across my pop records, like my ‘Incense and Peppermints' record, and my Gary Puckett ‘Young Girl (Get Out of My Mind)' record.”
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Then the fights would start. “My brothers listened to heavy metal all the time,” she recalls, “and weird fusion jazz—Mahavishnu Orchestra. I hated that!”
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“A lot of Motown,” is what she remembers on the airwaves. “All the AM stations in Detroit, that's all they played. I heard it all the time.”
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It was impossible to grow up in the Detroit area in the sixties without being touched by the sound of Motown music. Local AM radio stations like CKLW and WXYZ played the sounds of “the Motor City” almost nonstop in those days. According to her, “I grew up loving innocent child voices like Diana Ross, while she was with The Supremes, and Stevie Wonder when he was young.”
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Another of her musical influences was Frankie Lyman of the Teenagers. She especially liked the distinctively high-pitched sound of his voice. It was an adolescent pop quality she would later mimic on record. As far as the trashy girl-gone-bad stance that some of her music would later take, Madonna claims that this is attributed to another of her idols from the sixties: Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes.

It was also during the summer of 1967, while Madonna was eight years old, that the Detroit and Pontiac race riots took place. For anyone living in the area, they were frightening occurrences never forgotten. The sounds of sirens, breaking glass, and gunfire—in usually docile Pontiac—were especially terrifying for children to witness and hear. The Ciccones were one of the few Caucasian families in a racially mixed neighborhood. During the 1967 riots Madonna recalls that the streets were pretty rough. In the midsixties, several more black families had moved into the same neighborhood, and many white families left. Ma donna's was one of the white families who didn't move. However, Madonna survived that ordeal unscathed, and time marched on.

“I discovered boys when I was about nine,” She recalls, despite the fact that her father told her to stay away from them.
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Not content just to flirt coyly, Madonna took a more aggressive stance when it came to the opposite sex: “I remember I wanted to chase after boys on the playground, and the nuns told me I couldn't, that good Catholic girls didn't chase boys.”
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Madonna didn't take the nuns' warnings too seriously and often wound up being punished for her flirtatious behavior.

Recalling the first object of her prepubescent affections, she confesses, “The first boy I ever loved was Ronny Howard in my fifth-grade class. He had real white-blond hair and sky-blue eyes. He was so beautiful, I wrote his name all over my sneakers and on the playground I used to take off the top part of my uniform and chase him around!”
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Obviously, little Nonnie was coming out of her shell—in a big way.

There was also a boy named Tommy, who she recalls running after on the playground. For added speed, Madonna first removed her blazer and blouse. The nuns grabbed her and informed her that good Catholic girls don't take off their clothes in public and chase boys. “He had terrible teeth, but I wanted him,” she remembers about Tommy.
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The following day she and Tommy sneaked into the convent and it was there that she received her first kiss—which to this day she remembers as being “incredible.”
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Other girls didn't care for Madonna because her direct approach with boys was quite different than what they expected. “I didn't play the cat-and-mouse game,” she recalls with pride.
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Meanwhile, on the home front, her father's second marriage brought about several changes, including two more children in the family to compete with. When Madonna was nine, her stepmother gave birth to Jennifer, and the next year, gave birth to Mario. As the family competition for attention grew stronger, Madonna learned to escape more and more into her own rebellious world.

Things just weren't going according to her plans. Never one to suffer in silence, Madonna began to protest openly against school, church, and her parents' authority. This phase coincided with her discovery of boys. “It was at the same time that I started to rebel against religion, to be conscious of what I consider to be the injustices of my religious upbringing.”
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She adds, “I certainly wanted really badly either to find out my parents weren't my real parents—so I could be an orphan and feel sorry for myself—or wanted everyone to die in a car accident so I wouldn't have parents.”
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Often punished for her behavior, Madonna would throw temper tantrums, slamming her door and muttering under her breath that she hated her father. She claims that had her mother not died while she was still a young girl, she might have grown up to become an entirely different person. Watching her young mother suddenly disappear from her life, she realized how short life really was: too short to settle for anything less than everything you desire. Had her childhood taken a different path, she might never have blossomed into the high-priestess of rebellious self-expression that we have come to know as Madonna.