The Italian Americans

by Maria Laurino

  The next time Italian-American singers became pop culture icons, two women created the phenomenon. By the late twentieth century, worldly cynicism had supplanted American promise. Third- and fourth-generation rebellion had replaced immigrant determination. Enter Madonna Louise Ciccone, born to an Italian-American father and French-Canadian mother, who in 1983 released her first album and in the following decades would sell over three hundred million—more than any other female singer.

  Madonna, raised in Bay City, Michigan, by her father after his wife, the mother of six children, died young of cancer, has said that Sinatra was an important influence while she was growing up. But Madonna was referring to Nancy, Frank’s daughter, whose 1966 hit, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” made a big impression on the eight-year-old Ciccone. Walking over someone with pastel-colored go-go boots—the image stuck with the future megastar Madonna, who made female power and sexuality prominent motifs in her songs and music videos.

  In the 1980s, Madonna’s signature style of dressing included lacy underwear and giant crosses, turning the sacred icon of her Catholic upbringing into mass-marketed jewelry for a vast female following. The Catholic hierarchy that had once protested the blending of the sacred and the profane during religious street processions was made apoplectic by Madonna’s use of religious symbols to promote her pop music. Her videos and stage performances, beginning with the 1984 recording of “Like a Virgin,” have included burning crosses, the use of stigmata, and even a crucifixion of her on stage during the Confessions Tour in 2006. Critics called her crass and attention-getting, while fans defended Madonna as brave and boundary-breaking.

  A similar desire to flaunt convention and turn Christian symbolism on its head became even more shocking in the work of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, known to the world as Lady Gaga (the stage name came from the song “Radio Ga Ga” by the group Queen). Madonna and Lady Gaga are frequently compared, and both are recognized more for their dance music and outré performances than their vocal range.

  Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, known to the world as Lady Gaga.

  Gaga, who attended the elite all-girls school Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York, determinedly broke free of her thirteen years there. Her music video “Judas” depicts the pop star riding on the back of a motorcycle driven by a man in a crown of thorns as she looks longingly at a biker wearing the name Judas on his leather jacket. In another scene, she cavorts in a tub reminiscent of a baptismal font with both men. The music video “Alejandro” includes scenes of sadomasochistic sex juxtaposed with Gaga dressed as a nun in a latex habit sucking and swallowing rosary beads.

  Since her debut single “Just Dance” in 2008, Lady Gaga has become an international superstar. Her third album, Born This Way, sold over one million copies in a week. Presenting herself as the friend and fellow traveler of outcasts, Lady Gaga has a huge following among the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community.

  Both Madonna and Lady Gaga grew up surrounded by Roman Catholic imagery, and they have made religious pageantry a central element of their performances. Both are part of a cultural inheritance that has never shied away from the baroque. As far back as the sixteenth century, Italy’s popular art shocked its more subdued European neighbors: a Neapolitan painting of the Madonna depicts her with lactating breasts delivering milk to souls in purgatory. Saints like the willowy Sebastian appeared as gender ambiguous as some of Lady Gaga’s fans. Both women have changed the nature of music and stagecraft by aggressively using these symbols and flaunting their own sexuality. They have made Frank Sinatra’s bad-boy behavior and the Rat Pack serenading a woman to spend the night because “baby, it’s cold outside” seem as tame as a glass of warm milk and cookies.

  I NOSTRI PAESANI

  Dion DiMucci

  Dion DiMucci helped introduce rock and roll in the 1950s, leading his doo-wop group Dion and the Belmonts and later singing solo. His chart-topping hits included “The Wanderer,” “Teenager in Love,” and “Runaround Sue.” Dion grew up in the Belmont section of the Bronx (hence the group’s name) and found his early inspiration not in Italian-American crooners, but in the blues guitar of Jimmy Reed and the country music of Hank Williams. Bruce Springsteen once remarked that Dion’s music was the bridge between Frank Sinatra and rock and roll.

  Q: What was it like growing up in the Bronx in the forties and fifties?

  DiMucci: It was great. All the tenement buildings were built by my relatives, and they were carving out marble for stairs. My grandmother would come down with a pot of hot water and soap and actually clean the stoops because the kids would sit on them. Everything revolved around the church. Mount Carmel Catholic Church was the hub of Little Italy in the Bronx. As a kid growing up in the forties, on those cold winter December nights, with the snow on the ground, and it’s silent and you walk into the church—there were the candles, the choir, the awe, the wonder, the majesty. It felt like you were home in the arms of God.

  Q: Did your extended family live nearby?

  DiMucci: I used to run out of my house to practically any apartment building and I had an aunt or an uncle who lived there with my cousins. As soon as you’d knock on the door, there’d be food on the table. I’d run over to my grandmother’s house, and she’d open the door, and she’d say, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, thank you for this lovely boy,” and she’d grab my cheeks and feed me oranges and provolone cheese. Oh, God, it was good. It was good.

  Q: You were always very aware of being Italian?

  DiMucci: My grandfather came to this country in 1907 when he was sixteen. He didn’t have any money. He educated himself. He had eight children. My mother was the oldest. My mother always said, “I left school at fourteen to work and help my family, and I was so proud when I could help them.” Today, you’d get arrested for that. My grandfather Tony would take me to a theater called Windsor in the Bronx. In the forties they had the operas there—La Boheme, La Traviata, Pagliacci. We would sit in the balcony. I’d say, “What does that all mean?” He’d explain to me the clown in Pagliacci. The clown made its way into some of my rock-and-roll songs.

  Q: The Italian-American crooners of the time were on the top of the charts. But you were playing Hank Williams.

  DiMucci: Yeah, I was into something totally different. I ran home from school just to catch maybe twenty minutes of the Don Larkin show that came out of Newark, New Jersey. He played country music. I wasn’t into the Italian singer.

  Q: You’ve said that Hank Williams brought you beyond your neighborhood. As you grew older, did the nurturing aspect of your neighborhood feel at all suffocating?

  DiMucci: I think some of my friends got threatened that my world was opening up. There was maybe a fear of the outside world—just stay close—but I was breaking out of that. That’s what rock and roll was all about: expressing your individuality and your freedom.

  Q: Why do you think there were so many Italian-American singers in the fifties?

  DiMucci: I think in the culture, there’s a rhythm. It’s like there’s a rhythm in the way they talk and the way they express themselves. It’s very demonstrative. I think there was a rhythm of the city, the rhythm of Italians, the church, the music. Music was part of the fabric of being Italian and part of growing up.

  City Lights, cofounded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin (the son of anarchist Carlo Tresca), helped establish the careers of the Beats by printing their early work.

  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a few radical voices heralded a call about the dangers of a too complacent and self-satisfied America. In the literary world, counterculture writers riffed on paper like jazz artists improvising on stage, and on university campuses dissent movements blossomed, sending students from the ivory tower to the streets. Poet Gregory Corso and student activist Mario Savio played leading roles in these movements, and their voices against conformity and injustice recalled those of early-twentieth-century radical paesani.

  Along with his pals Allen Ginsb
erg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso formed a group of hipster poets known as the Beats, who experimented with drugs, declared free love, and decried capitalism and materialism. When Corso’s book of poetry titled Gasoline was published in 1958, Jack Kerouac described him as “a tough young kid from the Lower East Side who rose like an angel over the rooftops and sang Italian songs as sweet as Caruso and Sinatra, but in words.” Yet this sugarcoated description seemed off-note for the in-your-face Beat, who was closer in spirit to the Italian anarchist than to the crooner.

  The worldview of anarchist forebears had its corollary in the Beats’ rejection of authority and search for transcendence from a tainted world. And in the lyrical symmetry of history, the son of an Italian-American anarchist made the publication of Gasoline possible. Peter Martin—who cofounded the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco with another free-spirited half Italian, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti—was Carlo Tresca’s son. (Martin was the progeny of an affair between Tresca and Bina Flynn, the sister of Tresca’s longtime lover, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Elizabeth had become Tresca’s partner after the two met in Lawrence, Massachusetts, rallying striking millworkers.) City Lights helped establish the career of the Beats by printing their work under its publishing wing, City Lights Books.

  Corso’s poetry was rooted in the hardship and squalor of his youth, wounds carried from parental abandonment and teenage imprisonment. Born Nunzio Corso at 190 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village on March 26, 1930, he was the son of Italian immigrants—sixteen-year-old Michelina Colonna Corso and seventeen-year-old Fortunato Samuel Corso (known as “Sam”). Michelina left Sam when Nunzio was an infant, depositing her son on the doorsteps of Catholic Charities. The boy bounced from foundling hospital to foster homes. Sam Corso eventually remarried, but Nunzio, who later went by his confirmation name Gregory, had a difficult relationship with his father and stepmother. Forced by Sam to leave school in the sixth grade, Gregory ran away at the age of twelve, and after spending time on the streets, he was placed in a boys’ home.

  At thirteen, Gregory was arrested for stealing a radio and spent five months in the notorious Manhattan prison known as the Tombs, the first stop on a horrid childhood odyssey. He was also sent to Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward for three months. At seventeen, he stole a used suit, worth less than fifty dollars, to wear on a date. The crime earned him a three-year sentence at Clinton State Prison in Dannemora, New York, near the Canadian border—the same facility that had housed mafia boss Lucky Luciano in the 1940s.

  Corso dedicated Gasoline to “the angels of Clinton Prison who, in my seventeenth year, handed me, from all the cells surrounding me, books of illumination.” Corso told the story, which might be one of the poet’s elaborate yarns, of Lucky Luciano donating money for a library at Clinton State after he left the facility, which provided young Gregory with the education he’d never had. The poet also liked to talk about a high-level mob figure who helped protect him in prison. (In one of Corso’s collected letters, he railed against, after seeing the movie Goodfellas, “wop mafia ignorant Ginszo pain hurt and hard-headedness, true to such false life,” adding, “Glad when I left prison I made friends with Bohemians, not hoods. Can’t bear dumb talk. Even in prison, the hoods I knew were the head guys, with the smarts.”)

  From this prison library, Corso read the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Arthur Rimbaud, along with Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. He devoured the poetry and prose, as well as the contents of a 1905 dictionary, and left prison knowing that he would become a poet. Shortly thereafter, Corso met Allen Ginsberg in Greenwich Village and shared with him his writing.

  Corso also became friends with a poet named Violet (“Bunny”) Lang, who took him with her to Cambridge, Massachusetts. She put him up in housing for five dollars a week, but when the deal fell through, Lang approached a Harvard student named Peter Sourian and asked if he could lodge Corso in his dorm room. Sourian and his five roommates at Eliot House took Corso in, cordoning off a space in their living room with tie-dyed sheets. Corso sat in on Harvard classes, and the college boys pilfered food from the dining hall for their yearlong stowaway. Sourian, a former professor at Bard College, remembers Corso as a considerate roommate, careful not to wear out his welcome, who recited reams of Shelley’s poetry with a near-photographic memory. The Harvard students admired Corso’s verse and helped him publish his first collection, written between 1954 and 1955, The Vestal Lady on Brattle.

  Corso’s poetry, which combines the dark and the sublime, can matter-of-factly describe a woman who eats children or the suicide of an unnamed girl in Greenwich Village. Yet a playful humor, surprising imagery, and gratitude toward the beauty and wonder surrounding him also suggest transcendence from a brutal world. Unlike the other Beats, all of whom were Ivy League educated, Corso had acquired his hipster lingo from genuine street credentials.

  Corso joined his fellow Beats in poking fun at conformity and societal expectations, perhaps best illustrated in the often anthologized poem “Marriage.” The protagonist asks if he should get married and be good, knowing that he is the type to take a date not to the movies, but to cemeteries to tell “about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets.” He imagines trembling before the priest, and not knowing “what to say say Pie Glue!” (The lengthy poem so charmed actor Ethan Hawke that when he was a teenager, he memorized it to recite on dates.)

  Gregory Corso seeking the Muse in Greece. Corso’s poetry combined the dark and the sublime.

  After the fame of the Beat movement faded, Corso struggled to support himself, his difficulties compounded by drug and alcohol addiction. Despite his personal battles, he always remained steadfast in his vision of the poet as societal seer. In the late 1990s, documentary filmmaker Gustave Reininger was working on a film about the poet and the Beat movement. Knowing that Corso’s life had been defined by his early abandonment, Reininger hired a detective to try to track down his mother. Sam Corso had told Gregory that Michelina went back to Italy, so the filmmaker first looked for her there. But he found her instead in Trenton, New Jersey, a middle-class housewife with a family of her own. Reininger reunited mother and son, and Michelina explained that she had been badly beaten and abused by Corso’s father, who knocked out her teeth, and the scared and impoverished sixteen-year-old had fled. In 2001, Gregory Corso would succumb to prostate cancer, but the discovery closed the circle that had haunted him. One of the leaders of America’s counterculture movement finally found some personal peace discovering his Italian mamma.

  “Blessed be the revolutionaries of the Spirit!” Corso wrote about those who “boot tyrannical values” without spilling blood. He was referring to the role of the poet, but surely he would have approved of the student leading a campus sit-in.

  On December 2, 1964, at the University of California at Berkeley, Mario Savio took the microphone to protest the administration’s decision to suppress political activity and shut down a free-speech area on campus grounds. The twenty-one-year-old had become a known figure on campus, standing in his socks on top of police cars and addressing a student body increasingly frustrated with the actions of the administration. That day, he spoke with an originality and power to move people into action reminiscent of Arturo Giovannitti, the gifted leftist orator who had roused Lawrence millworkers in 1912 and persuaded a jury of his innocence. Savio famously proclaimed:

  There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

  Those words launched a thousand students to occupy Sproul Hall, Berkeley’s main administrative building, in a massive sit-in. Most of the students, including Savio, remained there until they
were dragged away by police. Their actions represented the largest act of civil disobedience ever to take place at an American university. A week later, UC Berkeley president Clark Kerr gave in to the students’ demands and allowed political activity on campus.

  Gifted orator Mario Savio helped to start the Free Speech Movement on college campuses.

  Savio, receiving much of the credit for the administration turnaround, helped create what became known as the Free Speech Movement on college campuses, which strongly influenced student activism later in the decade against the Vietnam War. His speech dazzled students and professors alike; most amazing was that Savio had spent much of his young life battling a terrible stutter.

  Mario Savio came to Berkeley by way of Queens, New York, where he was raised in an immigrant working-class Italian household. Although Savio spoke Italian fluidly with his parents, Joseph and Dora, in English he struggled with a debilitating stutter. Political battles were also not new to him; he had grown up listening to heated and frequent arguments between his grandfather, a Mussolini supporter, and his father, a machine punch operator and FDR Democrat.

  Until college, Savio was known as “Bob” after a priest made fun of the name Mario in class. The incident so upset his parents that they decided to call him by his middle name, Robert. Savio later observed that the episode had taught him that “to be an American” meant “to hide your Italian-ness.”