Madonna (9 page)

Madonna found the largely black, multiracial dance company a fascinating experience. For once she found herself in a room full of people as aggressive as she was herself. “Everyone was Hispanic or black, and EVERYONE wanted to be a star!”
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Throughout her first months in New York City, she literally lived from hand to mouth. She somehow knew that she was destined to go places—she just wasn't certain where those places were. “I wasn't worried about not getting anywhere as a dancer,” she claims. “I knew I was a decent dancer. It was great.”
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She moved from one apartment to another, eating popcorn for sustenance because it was cheap and filling.

For money, Madonna found herself spinning around town in a veritable revolving door of menial positions. “I was working at all sorts of stupid jobs,” she says. “I worked at Dunkin' Donuts, I worked at Burger King, I worked at an Amy's [Greek fast food restaurant]. I had a lot of jobs that lasted one day. I always talked back to people, and they'd fire me. I was a coat-check girl at the Russian Tea Room for a long time. I worked at a health club once for a week.”
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Concerned for his daughter's well-being, Tony Ciccone paid Madonna a visit once she had gotten herself settled. At the time she was studying with the Ailey company, earning money by selling Dunkin' Donuts, and living alone in a rundown, fleabag walk-up apartment in the East Village on Fourth Street and Avenue B, one of the worst neighborhoods in New York.

When Mr. Ciccone came to visit, he was naturally appalled by his eldest daughter's living arrangements. “The place was crawling with cockroaches. There were winos in the hallway, and the entire place smelled like stale beer,” she recalls.
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After several months in the Alvin Ailey scholarship program, Madonna won her much sought-after audition with the Pearl Lang company. Lang, a former Martha Graham dancer, had gone off on her own to emulate her slightly darker vision of modern dance. Madonna was disillusioned, however, and found Lang's style to be filled with “a lot of pain and angst.”
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Again, Madonna would go off on her rebellion trip, just to set herself apart from the other dancers. She felt as if she had seen the world compared to the other ballerinas who spent most of their lives in dance class. “They came from really rich families and bored me,” she says.
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Unlike the nurturing atmosphere of a progressive Michigan college campus, New York City is the original asphalt jungle. The highs can be glitteringly fabulous, but the emotional lows can be devastating. Madonna soon found that the dance world wasn't exactly sitting around waiting for the arrival of a hopeful waif in ripped-up safety-pinned leotards.

Madonna's first few years in New York weren't easy. No money, no friends, and little work can make the city intimidating. “I'd go to Lincoln Center, sit by a fountain and just cry. I'd write in my little journal and pray to have even one friend. I had been used to being the big fish in the little pond and all of a sudden I was nobody. But never once did it ever occur to me to go back. Never!”
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The person she most closely identified with was the character Holly Golightly, whom Audrey Hepburn portrayed in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
.

Loneliness was not her biggest problem, however. Lack of money was. No one who knew Madonna at this time was advised to write her address and phone number in their phone book in ink, as she seemed to move every month. She learned not to have too many belongings—no more than she could carry to wherever it was that she would end up next. Her lack of funds turned her into a virtual nomad during this era of her life.

One of the few material possessions that she dragged around from place to place was a photograph of her mother riding a horse as a young girl. “It's a lovely picture. I stole it from my father when I left home.”
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From place to place, she always carried that photograph with her. Today the photo sits on her dresser in her Hollywood house. It was—and is—her good luck charm.

It was during this same period that she first started taking her clothes off for money, as a model. “I used to model a lot for an art school—the Art Students League,” she explains. “At that time I was dancing, too, so I would dance all day, and go to these drawing classes at night—just walk in and strip.”
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She learned to have few qualms about having to resort to nude modeling. “You have to remove yourself from everyone looking at you,” she reflectively rationalizes. “It's a job. But I knew that those people were not just looking at me esthetically.”
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In late 1978 Madonna landed a gig posing for Bill Stone at his studio on West 27th Street. Looking at the photos in Stone's studio, Madonna was impressed to find that in the late 1930s he had photographed dancers from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Far from pornographic, his photos of nude women were inspired by classic paintings of Botticelli, Titian, and Modigliani.

“She was an accomplished dancer and was very helpful in improvising poses. I was thinking Matisse, the odalisques [female slaves], but she was posing herself, really,” Stone distinctly recalls of the twenty-year-old Madonna. “I saw that she was special.”
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When she signed his model release, she wrote, “Madonna.” When Stone asked her about a last name, she replied that Madonna would be just fine.

Always obsessed with how people perceived her, Madonna asked the veteran photographer what he thought of her potential as a star. He assured her that she had the bare essentials to possibly make it. Stone can't recall whether he paid her $25 or $50, but he remembers that she was astounded with the kind of money she received. She informed him that she was usually only paid $7 an hour and was pleased to receive more than she expected. Stone expressed interest in possibly photographing her again and inquired what the girl's address was. “Here and there,” she replied.
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Stone didn't see her again, but he never forgot how lovely she was.

The winter of 1978—1979 was typically cold in New York City, and Madonna was in need of money. On February 12 and 14 of 1979 she landed additional nude modeling jobs. This time around she arrived at the studio of Martin H. Schrieber, who taught a course for The New School in Greenwich Village. Calling herself “Madonna Louise,” she posed for Schrieber's students, insisting that she be paid in cash, as she didn't have a bank account of her own in which to clear checks. “There was no hesitation on her part—'Here I am. It's no big deal'—that's the way she was. I was fascinated by her,” Schreiber recalls.
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At the time, Madonna was dating a T-shirt designer named Norris Burroughs. Although they had a fun fling, they realized that neither was the love of their life. One night Norris threw a party to mix all his eclectic friends together. In the back of his head, Norris thought that Madonna might hit it off with a close friend of his named Dan Gilroy. Like most matchmakers, he found that the pairing he put together didn't exactly result in love at first sight, so he decided to give Cupid a bit of a shove.

It seems that Dan wasn't as enthralled with Madonna as Norris had hoped, so mid-party he queried Dan for his opinion of Ms. Ciccone. According to Dan, “She was wearing these clothes that looked like a clown outfit, [and] she seemed sort of draggy, like depressed or something.”
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Later in the evening, the ever-confrontational Madonna looked into Gilroy's eyes and asked him if he were going to kiss her. From that point on things began to change, and a long-shot chance blossomed into romance. Only a few weeks later, Madonna moved into Dan's place. This wasn't just your run-of-the-mill apartment, as Dan lived with his brother Ed in an abandoned synagogue in the borough of Queens, in an area known as Corona. The Gilroys and Madonna slept in the basement, using the synagogue's meeting place as rehearsal space and recording studio.

Dan and Ed were struggling musicians and sometime comedians. They had a stand-up comedy act they called “The Bil and Gil Show” and a band that eventually became known as “Breakfast Club.” It was Dan who was responsible for transforming Madonna from a dancer into a singer/musician. It was also Dan who was to become the first in Madonna's long line of “useful boyfriends.” Without him, the whole Madonna phenomenon might never have occurred.

Dan introduced Madonna to the guitar, which may have marked the beginning of the end of her professional dancing career, which didn't seem to be taking off, at least not from a financial standpoint. She began to consider music as a new branch of her directionless fascination with stardom.

Gilroy distinctly remembers Madonna's frustration that she made more money doing nude modeling than anything else she did. She modeled strictly for money and would often complain about it or describe how some painters or photographers would make a pass at her.

Through the Art Students League, Madonna found that one modeling job led to another, and at one point she was getting a couple of jobs a week. Some of the photo sessions yielded shots that she was quite happy with—she even presented a collection of them to Dan and composed a poem to go along. The poem spoke about Chinese women, how some had bound feet and some had feet that were free. “Maybe it was her way of saying that she was free and liberated,” Gilroy surmises.
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Madonna and Dan's relationship was just taking off when a major hiatus interrupted. Madonna was forever scouring the trade papers—
Show Business, Backstage
, and
Variety
—for the casting notices. One day in early 1979 an advertisement caught her eye.

“I saw this ad in the newspaper for this French singing star, Patrick Hernandez. He had this record called ‘Born to Be Alive.' His record company [Columbia] was trying to put together an act to go on this world tour with him, and they wanted girls to sing backup vocals and dance. It was going to be this big gala performance. I thought this would be great, I'd be dancing and singing and travel around the world—I'd never been out of America. So, I went to the auditions, and after they were over they said they didn't want me for Patrick Hernandez, they wanted to bring me to Paris and make ME a star.”
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When she explained what was mapped out for her to Dan, she couldn't believe that someone had finally noticed her. Figuring that this was her big break, Madonna packed her bags and headed off to Paris with producers Jean Claude Pallerin and Jean Van Lieu. The plan they laid out for her seemed like a dream come true. “They promised me anything. They said, ‘Come to Paris, we'll give you everything you want. You'll live like a queen, we'll give you a vocal coach and you'll decide what direction you want to go in. I did live like a queen and they did give me anything I wanted. It was the only time I lived comfortably my entire life.”
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Instead of promising her the moon and delivering nothing, they made good on all their financial and material promises. They flew her to Paris, where she worked with a vocal coach and a dance teacher. She lived in an apartment they provided and was chauffeured from place to place. In a short period of time, Madonna went from struggling in New York City to living in the lap of luxury in Paris. Her life was like a dream.

However, the dream began to turn sour. In spite of the money she earned, the food she ate, the liquor she drank, and the security of having a cockroach-free roof over her head, she found that she was merely window-dressing for the Hernandez entourage. Madonna was given everything but what she desired the most: the center spotlight.

“I missed my friends and I missed struggling,” she explains. “I was used to really working hard and they wanted to spoil me and they wanted me to dress a certain way. So they dragged me to restaurants and no one would speak English to me. So once again I was playing the part of a rebel. I didn't want to do anything they wanted me to do. I gave my money away. I hung around with lowlifes, I rode around on motorcycles all the time. I did everything I could to be bad. I kept saying, ‘When are you going to do something with me?' And, they were busy with Patrick. Everytime I complained they gave me money.”
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While Patrick Hernandez ultimately turned out to be a one-hit wonder, disco was a huge international craze at the time, and the song “Born to Be Alive” was his entree to several top nightclub performances around the globe. Madonna accompanied the Hernandez troupe to Tunisia and to several hot spots in Europe, so the whole experience gave the naive girl from Pontiac, Michigan, a taste of what the world had to offer.

Thousands of struggling would-be actresses, singers, and models would have just given up the struggle right there. Not Madonna. She wanted fame
and
power, and she was determined to have it on her own terms. For her rebellion she pierced her ears and put safety pins in the holes. She ran all over town with a pack of hooligan Vietnamese boys, on the backs of their motorcycles.

For Madonna it was a fabulous adventure, but it wasn't long before she grew tired of it. “I never signed a contract, so I wasn't obligated to stay there. So I waited to see what would happen, and meanwhile I was starting to write a lot—lyrics and stuff, but I didn't really have an idea of what direction I was going to go in musically. I didn't know how to play an instrument,” she remembers.
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She was beginning to feel like a squashed cabbage leaf. She wasn't happy playing Eliza Doolittle to anyone's Henry Higgins.

After six months, she suddenly announced to Pallerin and Van Lieu that she was going home for a brief visit. They purchased a plane ticket for her and chauffeured her to the airport. To avoid suspician, she simply left everything she had behind—and never returned.

While in Paris she stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Jean Claude Pallerin. Mrs. Pallerin recalls, “Madonna wanted only one thing—to be a star.”
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