Yet, whatever Flynn’s part in the award, the scholarship was still a remarkable achievement for a teenager who had only taken up ballet seriously some three years earlier. Moreover, while her father may have harbored the hope that his eldest daughter would go into a more practical career like the law, there was no doubting the fact that he was proud of her success. Proud and excited, he made one stipulation before she set off for Ann Arbor – that she room in an all-girl dormitory.
When she arrived at the university, Madonna picked up where she had left off in Rochester, spending much of her time with Flynn, attending his classes, and going out dancing with him in the local gay clubs. It was apparent to other students that she was devoted to her mentor, slavishly following the wishes of this flamboyant Svengali, however perverse. Some of those wishes made sense, helping the young dancers to a greater understanding of their art, or otherwise improving their skills. Others were less healthy. One of the latter would bring Madonna – and others, no doubt – to the edge of illness. At the start of every class he would force students to weigh in. If the scale went over 110 to 115 pounds he would humiliate the errant performer, ordering them to get a grip on their eating. Madonna took him at his word, living off a diet of popcorn and ice-cream sundaes, and punishing her slender body with endless sit-ups that left her flesh dark with bruises. Her friend and fellow student Linda Alaniz remembers that: ‘She had a really unhealthy diet and I’m sure at that time she was borderline anorexic. But she desperately wanted to please Christopher.’
Like the other students, Madonna had a punishing schedule of two ninety-minute technique classes a day, with a further two hours of rehearsal for college performances at the Power Center for the Performing Arts. Even in that hothouse atmosphere she stood out, not just for her abilities as a dancer, but also because of the intelligent commitment she brought to her art. She had, it seems, given herself over to dance, body and soul, and her classmates found her enthusiasm infectious, as when she arrived one day raving about her African dance class and the Mujaji, a rain dance she had learned.
Professor Gay Delanghe, the head of the university Dance Department, remembers a ‘colt-like’ teenager who quickly developed a ‘fine dance facility’. ‘She had the dedication, commitment and energy to do so,’ she says. ‘She had both the body and the chops to be noticed by faculty, guest choreographers and her fellow students. She possessed the brain power to learn movement and make it look like something. Many are called but not all can do it. She can.
At the same time, that hunger for attention that had characterized her school career was soon all too apparent to fellow students, as Linda Alaniz remembers. ‘She would come into ballet class chewing gum and with a cutup leotard held together with safety pins. It was a punk look but really it was childish, a little girl desperate for attention.’ It seemed to be a case of ‘anything to be noticed.’ On one occasion, when the class were holding in their stomachs and keeping their heads still for a deep plié, Madonna let out a huge belch. Such adolescent attention-seeking took other, less obvious, forms, however. Another friend, Whitley Setrakian, who became her roommate in her second year, felt that behind the wisecracking exterior was a rather lost soul. ‘She was the most openly affectionate girl I had ever met. She was forever putting her arms around me. But you could sense it was a little bit of an act. She was needy and there was something a little fragile and sad about her.’
Like Mary-Ellen Beloat and Marilyn Fallows before her, Whitley was to experience at first hand that neediness, wrapped in endearing if earnest sentimentality. She returned from Christmas vacation to find a six-page letter from Madonna waiting for her. ‘I’ve realized how much I’ve grown to depend on you as a listener, advice giver and taker and general all around most wonderful, intimate friend in the whole world,’ she wrote.
Photographs of her at the time give a sense of the two sides to Madonna, one the serious-minded ballet student, the other the attention-seeking, exhibitionist teenager. Linda Alaniz, who was taking a photography minor as well as majoring in dance, asked Madonna to pose for her for a series of studies in her loft apartment during Halloween. Her black-and-white photographs show a poised and composed young woman, high-minded, sophisticated and elegant. She seems very feminine, the quintessential swanlike ballerina pursuing her art with single-minded purpose and dedication.
In other contemporary photographs, however, taken by hairdresser and one-time boyfriend Mark Dolengowski, the wisecracking, attention-grabbing party girl enters the picture. She mugs for the camera, blowing gum bubbles, pulling faces, striking street-punk poses, a far cry from the lithe, serious dancer of Linda’s artistic studies. Yet both sessions reflect fragments of Madonna’s personality, as confusing as it may be to reconcile the sassy, panty-parading show-off with the poised ballet dancer.
Indeed, the way she started dating Mark was vintage Madonna. He was working as a hairdresser on campus, she was one of his clients. One day during her first months at college, she passed by his salon, stuck her tongue out at him – and then, when he came over to talk to her, invited him to join her at Dooley’s, a college bar where she occasionally worked. He dutifully bought her a drink, and from then on they began dating. Mark took her dancing or out to dinner – he always paid, because she was permanently short of money – and before long they embarked upon a short-lived love affair. If anything, the end of the brief fling strengthened their friendship, the two of them staying in touch when they both eventually moved to New York. ‘She was very dedicated and disciplined with her dancing. Very focused,’ recalls Mark, who joined Christopher Flynn’s dance classes for a time. ‘Madonna was good fun when she let herself have fun.’
To her, fun was dancing, either in class or in clubs. She regularly went out with Linda, Whitley and another friend, Janice Galloway, and danced the night away. It was during one of these forays that Madonna met a young man who was to have a profound influence on her future. She spotted Stephen Bray in the Blue Frogge bar, and for the first time in her life asked a man to buy her a drink. Soulful, quietly spoken and gentle, the black waiter embodied many of the same qualities of the men who would come to matter in her life. She discovered that he was a drummer in a local band, and for the next few months she and, as often as not, Linda, Whitley and Janice, would go along to dance at their gigs.
For the most part, when Madonna and her girlfriends went out on the town their primary aim was to enjoy themselves dancing, not to pick up any of the girl-hungry young men who frequented the clubs. Madonna and Linda laughed off accusations from would-be suitors that they were lesbians because they danced with each other, and spurned the advances of local guys. For that reason they often frequented the gay clubs, reveling in the energy, abandon and freedom of that scene, aware that they could enjoy the music and the dance for their own sake. ‘We had a blast,’ Linda says, although their presence on the gay scene inevitably increased the gossip about their ‘lesbianism.’
It was at this time, however, that Linda first noticed a quality about her friend that became more evident the closer the young dancer came to the seductive glow of fame. In the choreography of her life, Madonna’s sense of fun, even her outrageous behavior, came strictly second to her driving ambition. As far as she was concerned, her dance career was her passport to stardom. As Linda puts it, ‘We would get home late but she was incredibly disciplined. She would always be ready for the dance class at eight in the morning. She never missed one.’
Clearly, Madonna sensed that she was destined for bigger things – and, as far as she was concerned, the sooner the better. Moreover, if dance was her passport to fame, then New York was the utopia in which she would realize her dreams. It was not long before she started railing against the slow pace of life in Ann Arbor, seeing her future further east. In a letter to a friend she wrote: ‘I just gotta get to New York. I also realize that the chances of me making it dancing are extremely slight and I gotta prove something to myself.’
Like her Cinderella childhood, th
e story of her arrival in New York has become part of the Madonna myth. According to her version of events, in the summer of 1978 she bought a one-way air ticket to New York, arriving with just $35 in her pocket and a burning desire to find fame and fortune. Hailing a cab, she confidently told the startled driver, ‘Take me to the center of everything.’ He promptly dropped her off in Times Square where, dressed in a heavy winter coat on a warm summer’s day, she dragged her suitcase around looking for a place to stay. A kindly stranger, said to be an out-of-work ballet-dancer, took pity on her, and she slept on his couch for a couple of weeks until she found her own place.
Sadly, as with the legend behind the naming of Ann Arbor, the truth is less romantic. In fact, her first trip to New York had been more than a year earlier, in February 1977, courtesy of her boyfriend Mark Dolengowski. She had applied for a scholarship to dance with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre at their six-week summer workshop in New York. An audition was arranged and Mark, borrowing her father’s car, gallantly drove more than 600 miles through the night from Ann Arbor to Manhattan so that Madonna could keep her appointment. She duly performed for the audition panel and, after grabbing a quick bite to eat, the young couple headed back to Ann Arbor. In all they were in New York for less than twenty-four hours, leaving on the Friday and arriving back at college that Sunday so that Madonna would not miss her Monday-morning class. ‘I remember it was a sixteen-hour round trip,’ says Mark, ‘and I did all the driving.’
The trip proved to have been well worth the effort. She won her scholarship, and at the end of that term, spent an exhausting but fulfilling summer in New York, staying with friends on the Upper East Side. On a couple of occasions Mark visited her, concerned about her safety. It was the summer of the ‘Son of Sam’ killings, when the whole of New York was living in fear of a serial killer; he was later arrested and identified as David Berkowitz. ‘Everyone was freaked out and I was worried about her,’ he recalls. ‘We went to a concert in Central Park but she was often too tired to go dancing. Her classes were really hard work.’
To Madonna, nineteen that August, passionate about, and wholly dedicated to, her dancing, the experience was almost as intimidating as it was exhilarating. For the first time in her life she had mixed with young dancers who were as voluble, aggressive and ambitious as she was. ‘I thought I was in a production of Fame,’ she once said in an interview for Rolling Stone magazine (although Fame did not in fact appear until 1980). ‘Everybody wanted to be a star.’ Nevertheless, her appetite whetted by the experience, she returned to college for her sophomore year even more focused, if that were possible, on her dream of becoming a professional dancer.
That dream reached a turning point when the noted ballet choreographer Pearl Lang – a former lead soloist with Martha Graham’s modern dance troupe, founder of the Pearl Lang Company and co-founder with Alvin Ailey of the American Dance Center in New York – visited Ann Arbor as artist-in-residence. While there, she created a work for the students based on music by the Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi. Madonna was one of the dancers who performed the new work at the Power Arts Center, impressing Lang with her talent and sensibilities, and her dance professor, Gay Delanghe, with both her increased assurance and the way in which she had developed artistically. Clearly Madonna, who was inspired and impressed by Lang’s work, was growing in stature and poise. While by no means the finished article, it was obvious that she was a credit to her college, and more than justified her award of a scholarship.
As it turned out, however, her mentor, Christopher Flynn, had other ideas for his charge than completing a dance major at a Midwestern university. Even though she was not yet halfway through her four-year course, Flynn told her to listen to her heart and seek her fortune in New York. ‘There can be something thrilling about academic dance,’ he would later remark. ‘But it has its limits. Madonna was just so much bigger than that – I could see it even if she couldn’t. There were just so many more things for her to explore and they were all in New York. Stop wasting your time in the sticks. Take your little behind to New York. Go! Finally she did.’
In spite of her earlier impatience with college life, Madonna hesitated, knowing that she would automatically lose her scholarship as well as forgo any chance of a college degree. She knew, too, that abandoning her course would be viewed with disfavor at home, where her father, reasonably enough, stood by the pragmatic view that she should first earn her diploma before heading for the bright lights, where the potential risks were at least as great as the rewards.
Tony Ciccone was not alone in that opinion. Madonna’s college professors all expressed their concern, arguing that her artistic development would best be served by staying at college. With strongly implied criticism of Flynn, Professor Delanghe remembers that ‘We all gave her the usual “NYC will still be there waiting for you when you have more maturity and more to offer artistically” but some are driven to leave despite adult recommendations. I always got the impression that she didn’t have much direction or support at home. Madonna had a parent in Flynn and he told her to follow her heart.’ To which she added, ’She was young, naive and without good advice, would be my view of it.’
While it is true that Flynn may have been trying to fufill his own thwarted dance ambitions through his protégée, it is to his lasting credit that he appreciated the essential restlessness of her spirit, her unwillingness to be pinned down by anyone or anything, as well as the special talent that was beginning to glow inside her. Indeed, it was her free-spirited nature that made her so ideally suited to the physical expressiveness, continual movement and acute sensitivity of her chosen discipline. In the end, and even though she appreciated the risks, Madonna, then nineteen, was so much in thrall to Flynn – and still distanced from her father – that any doubts she may have had were cast aside. Beyond those considerations, however, her experience the previous summer had whetted her appetite for the Big Apple and a chance to fulfill her own ambitions there.
Madonna Louise Ciccone dressed for her First Communion.
Silvio Patrick Ciccone, pictured here in his graduation photograph, June 1955. Just over three weeks later he was married. Madonna’s relationship with her father has been a complicated one; while wanting his approval, her unconventional behavior has often upset staunchly conservative ‘Tony’ Ciccone.
‘Little Nonni’ (left) is held by her adored mother, Madonna Louise, née Fortin, who died of breast cancer when her eldest daughter was only five.
Madonna, age nine, the year she appeared ‘practically naked’ in a talent-show performance; and age twelve.
Madonna (center) as a high-school cheerleader in 1973 – her second year at Adams High in Rochester, Michigan.
Madonna always took the lead in school theatricals, which drew her the applause she craved, including a standing ovation for her role in Godspell.
As a gangster’s moll at a costume party at her high school in Rochester, Michigan. Contrary to her claims that she grew up in a black neighborhood, there was only one black pupil at the school.
Madonna in 1976, posing for fellow University of Michigan student Linda Alaniz. Dressed here in conventional dancewear, she would attend her classes in ripped-up leotards held together with safety pins. Her slim physique was due to a diet of popcorn and ice-cream sundaes.
The eighteen-year-old Madonna poses for Peter Kentes, a graduate student in dance at the University of Michigan. Her pencil-thin physique and erratic eating habits at this time caused alarm among her friends.
Two more of Linda Alaniz’s photographs of Madonna during her time as a dance student at the University of Michigan.
Madonna has always enjoyed showing off – especially her underwear. Here she poses for her then boyfriend, Mark Dolengowski.
Madonna in 1978 with her dance coach, friend and mentor Christopher Flynn, the man who would first push her on to the path to stardom. Here, having convinced her that she should leave college and pursue her dreams in New York, Flynn drives Mad
onna to the airport.
In New York Madonna auditioned for, and was accepted by, the highly respected Pearl Lang Dance Company. As well as pushing herself to the limit in the punishing classes, Madonna ran three miles every day.
Madonna in May 1979, posing before a medieval cross in the Cloisters, a branch of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The photograph shows that her use of religious iconography began long before ‘Like A Prayer.’
Madonna in the summer of 1979, on the roof of the converted synagogue where she lived with her boyfriend, musician Dan Gilroy.
Realizing that she was but one among many talented dancers in New York, Madonna turned her back on the world of professional dance and redirected her energies into a music career, guided by Dan Gilroy. The photo shows her first band, The Breakfast Club: Angie Smit, Ed Gilroy, Dan Gilroy and Madonna.
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