Madonna (8 page)

After Madonna had gotten a taste of the exciting outside world, she really knew that she could be somebody. Stoked by the new awareness that she could make positive changes in her life, she also saw that she had the ability within herself to set her dreams in motion. Dancing truly liberated her creative energy. From that point on she made certain she kept her goals lofty. What she really wanted was to be a star. She really wasn't too concerned about what it was that she was going to star in—she could work out those details along the way.

“I wanted to be a movie star,” she recalls, “but when you grow up in some hick town in Michigan, there's nothing you can do that will make you feel like you're going to be a movie star.”
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Perhaps it was dancing that would be the vehicle to take her out of Pontiac. Complete with a painter's palette of goals, Madonna took careful inventory of her options.

“I was always the lead in every musical and every play in high school. When I graduated I got the Thespian Award. That's my claim to fame,” she says, summing up her high school years. On the other side of the coin, she admits that, “I was a rebel in school. I didn't really fit in. I hung out with all the misfits and freaks that nobody wanted to hang out with.”
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When Madonna began dancing, the crowd she spent time with was much older. “I felt superior,” she says.
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She belonged in a special world, unlike in high school when she played the outcast. It was obviously time for Madonna to move on, and, she decided, it was dance that was going to be the catalyst to her next step.

Her choir teacher, Tim Lentz, distinctly remembers Madonna. According to him, “She dared to be different.”
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Nancy Ryan Mitchell was Madonna's counselor at Rochester Adams High, and she recommended that Madonna should apply for a scholarship at the University of Michigan because she was bright and very mature. The counselor's recommendation on Madonna's application utilized the adjectives “extremely talented, dedicated, motivated, sparkling personality.”
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Because of her academic grades, and her moxie, she was indeed offered a scholarship to study dance at “U of M” in Ann Arbor. This proved to be her launching pad out of Michigan and the trajectory to her ultimate target: multimedia stardom.

Mitchell recalls Madonna's drive by explaining, “She knew she was good and wanted to be famous and would work hard to make it.”
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While Madonna moved on toward her ultimate metamorphosis, what became of her childhood friends? Colin McGregor's family moved to Scotland when he was sixteen. Today he is a successful businessman in London. Moira McFarland is now Moira Messina and is a housewife living with her husband and children in Pinehurst, North Carolina. Mark Brooky is a disc jockey and lives with his wife in Florida. Carol Belanger still lives in the Pontiac area. Of all her friends from the past, Carol and Moira are the only ones with whom Madonna maintains occasional contact.

Russell Long, who was Madonna's first lover, is now married and has children. Russell drives a truck for United Parcel Service. “I wonder if he still loves me,” Madonna wonders. “He probably does.”
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According to her, “Ever since I was small I wanted to be the girl who stole everybody's heart.”
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She was like that in high school, and to this day Madonna remains obsessed with an ever-thirsty desire for adulation. By the end of her senior year in high school, the thing she was most excited about was getting her life further down the path toward her dreams.

I act out

of instinet

just like an animal.
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—Madonna

 

I
t was the beginning of 1976, and seventeen-year-old, academically accelerated Madonna Ciccone was graduating from Rochester Adams High School a semester early. Continuing her dance classes with Christopher Flynn, a path quickly laid itself out before her like Dorothy's yellow brick road. Almost simultaneously with Flynn's announcement that he was leaving his studio to become an instructor in the dance department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Madonna was granted her scholarship to the same college. Like Merlin and young King Arthur, the student and her mentor uprooted themselves for their creative reign in a new kingdom.

The move to college killed several birds with a single stone. Besides providing her with valuable training, attending the university pleased Madonna's father and allowed her to leave her hometown and her family behind her. Escaping from a life under her father's thumb excited her, yet she had the security of having Flynn along to challenge, guide, and direct her.

Mr. Ciccone placed a lot of stress on the importance of his children's schoolwork. He wanted them to use their intelligence to get the most out of their lives. As Madonna reflects, “My father never brought me up to get married and have kids. We utilized our intelligence.”
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Not only did her scholarship represent a fantastic opportunity, it also afforded her the freedom to make several new choices about what she wanted to do with her life. The first thing she eliminated from her existence was the repressive influence of religion. Although Madonna missed her family, leaving home—and Sunday morning church services—wasn't difficult.

In the fall of 1976 Madonna resided in a dormitory room at the U of M's Stockwell Hall. She quickly made friends with several of the other girls in her dance classes, and in order to have spending money she landed a job at Miller's Ice Cream Parlor. She became fast friends with another dance student who scooped ice cream at Miller's, Whitley Setrakian. Also during that year, Madonna became friends with another girl from her dance classes, Linda Alaniz, and took a job as a bar waitress at a local college hangout called Dooley's.

Madonna and Linda would study classical dance by day, and by night they would dance their butts off at Ann Arbor clubs, including the Blue Frogge and the Ruvia. Linda recalls, “We'd dance six hours at school, then go home and eat, then dance another four hours at night. The woman just loved to dance!”
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The University of Michigan is known as a party school, and Madonna immediately got into the swing of things. When she got out on the dance floor of a local club, people cleared out of her way as though she were a whirling dervish.

One night while she was boogieing at the Blue Frogge, Madonna spotted a black waiter who looked as if he was more fun than the rest of the patrons. “He was real cute,” she recalls, “someone all soulful and funky looking you couldn't help but notice. First time in my life I asked a guy to buy me a drink.”
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The man's name was Steve Bray, and at the time he was also the drummer in a local band.

Madonna didn't realize it at the time, but in Bray she had just met someone who was destined to become a lifelong friend and cohort in music. Footloose and brazen Madonna and even-tempered Bray were destined to become lovers.

During the first semester of her sophomore year, Whitley asked Madonna if she wanted to share an apartment in University Towers. “One of the first things I noticed,” says Setrakian of Madonna, “was she really said what was on her mind. We filled needs for each other. I felt like she just needed somebody to accept her, no questions asked.”
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After Madonna moved into the University Towers apartment with Whitley, they found that they shared a lot in common. They both loved dance, and both read poetry. Madonna was still amid her initial vegetarian kick, and she would live on granola and popcorn. Whitley had her own nickname for her nonconformist roommate. She would refer to her as “my little bowl of bear mush,”
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a name coined for Madonna's eating habits at the time.

In July 1978 Madonna was one of the students from the University of Michigan's dance department who traveled to Durham, North Carolina, to participate in the annual summer dance festival at Duke University's East Campus. During a break between performances, Madonna stepped outside the auditorium and sat munching granola she had mixed into a carton of Dannon lemon yogurt.

At the time, Richard Maschal was a thirty-four-year-old reporter with the
Charlotte Observer
. Covering the dance festival, he was eager to interview one of the dancers when he stumbled into nineteen-year-old Ms. Ciccone. According to Maschal, “She had a beautiful face, the image, I immediately thought, of a Renaissance madonna. As writers will do, I began composing a story in my head about a dancer as beautiful as a madonna. We sat on a bench, and I asked her name. ‘Madonna,' she said.” He found the girl to be “remarkably self-possessed for a teenager and incredibly self-absorbed.”
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“She spoke to me about wanting to quit school in Michigan, and heading for New York to audition for the Pearl Lang dance company,” Maschal recalls of his chance meeting with the future pop music siren. She complained to him about the lack of nightlife in Durham and described her tenure as a dance student as “pretty draining and demanding. You spend all your time dancing, every day—day in and day out.”
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Maschal says it was her facial features that most impressed him; he felt she had the kind of face that belonged in a fresco on a church ceiling: “Round eyes, arched eyebrows, finely drawn mouth—Da Vinci would have loved it.”
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After she returned to Ann Arbor following the Duke dance festival, Madonna began to formulate a new plan: she was going to blow off college, take the money she saved from her bar tips, and head for New York City to seek her fortune. This was not a plan she arrived at solely by herself; it grew out of seeds that Christopher Flynn had been constantly and consistently planting in her fertile young mind. “He encouraged me to go to New York,” Madonna recalls. “He made me push myself.”
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With Flynn's nurturing encouragement, that very summer Madonna put her ambitious new plan into action. The real stumbling block was her fear of her father's reaction. Could she really toss the scholarship aside and run off to New York City? “I was torn between taking the grant and going to New York,” she says, recalling her dilemma at the time. “University meant pleasing my parents and getting money and security.”
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Finally, she figured she had nothing to lose—and everything to gain.

With this new goal in mind, Madonna began to store up her tips from waitressing at Dooley's. She had a book about the New York Ballet Company, and in it she would stash her extra cash. Linda Alaniz remembers Madonna showing her the money she kept in the book for her eventual trip to New York.

After a year and half of college, Madonna announced her plan to her father and stepmother. Predictably, Tony Ciccone totally freaked out when he heard what his oldest daughter was planning. He wanted her to go to college. Dancing, in his mind, was a hobby, not a profession.

It was one of those now-or-never situations. In her mind, if she stuck around Ann Arbor until she graduated she was going to lose her momentum. When she danced, she felt as though she could conquer the world.

“Before I started dancing, I felt really physically awkward,” she proclaims, “not comfortable with my body.” Dancing satisfied two needs in her life: for mental and physical strength. “I feel superior. I feel like a warrior.”
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The warrior was about to take on Manhattan and the world of professional dance. Madonna recalls her college days with fondness, but when it was time to leave, she was more than ready to go. She had saved enough money to purchase a one-way ticket to New York City, and in spite of how much protesting her father did, she was going. In July 1978 Madonna boarded a plane at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and she has never regretted it for a moment. When she boarded the jet—for the first airplane ride of her life—she basically left Steve Bray and all her other school friends in the dust.

“Looking back,” says Madonna of Bray, “I think I probably did make him feel kind of bad, but I was really insensitive in those days. I was totally self-absorbed.”
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Although Steve Bray recognizes that Madonna is talented and a friend, he says, “With her, being polite and ladylike gets left behind.”
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Madonna departed from the Wolverine State: next stop Manhattan Island.

When she got off the plane, she hailed a taxi and instructed the driver to take her “to the middle of everything.”
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He gladly complied—and dropped her off in the center of Times Square: neon lights, Broadway theaters, pimps, hustlers, prostitutes, con men, and porno palaces. At the time, she had her life savings in her pocket: $35. How far did she think that amount of money would go?

Madonna was overwhelmed by the tall buildings. Wandering down Lexington Avenue in her winter coat, suitcase in hand, she met a man who offered to let her stay in his apartment. While most would hesitate before moving in with a stranger, Madonna stayed with him for two weeks. “He showed me where everything was, and he fed me breakfast. It was perfect.”
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Like Tennessee Williams's character Blanche DuBois, Madonna relied on the kindness of strangers. However, her streetcar was named “ambition,” not “desire.”

With no means of supporting herself but her looks and pushy charm—sometimes confused with moxie—Madonna set about looking for work.

The closest she could come to her much desired big break was when she auditioned for the prestigious Alvin Ailey Dance Theater. She didn't end up with a real paying gig, but she did land a work-scholarship, which basically meant that she could study dance with the third-string company without having to pay them. It sounds impressive, and was inarguably a foot in the door, but there remained one minor flaw: the matter of needing money to buy food with.