Madonna

by Andrew Morton

  After Angie Smit left The Breakfast Club, Madonna appointed herself the band’s lead singer. However, her need to be the focus of the group led in part to the breakdown of her relationship with Dan Gilroy.

  Madonna and the Gilroy brothers, dressed all in white in the New Romantic style, play a gig at Bo’s Space in downtown New York.

  With the decision taken, and conscious that she would lose the scholarship money she depended on to live, Madonna started working nights and weekends, doing shifts at a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream parlor and waitressing regularly at Dooley’s bar. As well as bar work, she, Whitley and Linda earned an occasional $10 an hour posing as nude models for local art courses, their toned bodies and well-defined musculature ensuring that they were much in demand for life classes.

  Somehow, she began slowly to acquire the money she would need for her dramatic change of direction. On one occasion a college teacher asked students if they wanted to go to church to dance in a performance of the Stations of the Cross. Everyone declined until the lecturer mentioned that they would be paid $50 each. At once Madonna, Linda and Whitley volunteered. As a result, Linda and Whitley were to be privy to one of their friend’s earliest singing performances. When they arrived at the church, Madonna stood behind the pulpit and began to belt out a raucous version of the Little Richard hit, ‘Good Golly Miss Molly.’ ‘The teacher yelled at her to stop, saying that it was sacrilegious,’ recalls Linda. ‘It was priceless. But that was the only time I heard her sing.’

  Madonna carefully saved the $50 from that performance, as well as her bar tips, hiding the money, appropriately enough, inside a coffee-table book of Martha Swope’s photographs of the New York City Ballet. According to Linda, ‘She had hundreds of twenty-dollar bills squirreled away. I saw the size of her stash. It was way more than the thirty-five dollars she talked about, I can assure you of that. Even Madonna wasn’t ballsy enough to arrive in New York with just thirty-five dollars.’

  In spite of the opposition to her decision to quit the University of Michigan prematurely, Madonna was supremely optimistic when, in July 1977, at the end of her second year, she smilingly waved goodbye to her college friends and was driven from the campus to the airport by a beaming Christopher Flynn. As far as Flynn was concerned, their parting was full of sweet sorrow. Even though he had been instrumental in encouraging her to leave, he went into a deep depression, almost a period of mourning, after she had gone. ‘He loved her, he really did,’ Linda Alaniz believes. ‘He was so sad when she left.’

  Dance teacher to the core, however, he did remind her to attend the annual American Festival of Dance, held at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in July 1978, once she had got settled in New York. Madonna did as Flynn had advised, teaming up again with other University of Michigan dance students who had made the long bus journey south to take part in what proved to be a cultural orgy of experimentation and exploration. ‘A stream of images inspired by Surrealism,’ ran one New York Times headline, describing a work by a Chinese choreographer.

  Madonna was in her element at the festival, her enthusiasm matched only by her desire to excel. She was only one of hundreds of eager dancers from all over the country who had applied for a scholarship to pay for the six-week dance program, but her talent shone through at the auditions. Pearl Lang, who was choreographing one of the workshops at the festival, announced her name as one of the winners. When she walked to the table to collect her prize, she innocently told the choreographer that her dream was to work with the great Pearl Lang. ‘Her eyes popped out of her head when I told her that I was Pearl Lang,’ Ms Lang remembered, before dryly adding that she had worked with Madonna only a few months before at the University of Michigan.

  Yet although her attempt at ingratiation had been nothing if not transparent, Madonna was genuinely excited, mesmerized even, by Lang’s work. As a student, Madonna gravitated towards modern dance, inspired by this sophisticated, rather cerebral form of high art, a world away from her future pop persona or, for that matter, from what one might call the Swan Lake school of classical ballet. She described Lang’s approach as ‘painful, dark and guilt-ridden. Very Catholic,’ its very difficulty forming a part of the appeal for a young woman immersed in the creative process that formal dance training inspired in her. As a former pupil, and later a disciple, of the arch-priestess of modern dance, Martha Graham, Lang represented, for Madonna, a link with the highest reaches of that art.

  So it came about that, only a few days into the course, she approached the choreographer and asked if there was any chance of a place in Lang’s company in New York. The older woman was ambivalent. While she was impressed by her ‘talent and determination,’ she wondered whether the girl knew anyone in the city, and how she would live. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll manage,’ came the confident reply. In the end Pearl Lang relented, and offered her a provisional place with the company, starting in November that year.

  When, late in the summer of 1978, Madonna arrived in New York for good – the time of the $35-in-her-pocket legend – she was half in love with the romantic idea of the misunderstood artist starving in a garret, but wholly in thrall to her ambition to become a professional dancer. She realized it was going to be tough. ‘I knew I was going to suffer, I knew it was going to be hard,’ she told the writer Ingrid Sischy. ‘But I was not going back and that’s how it was, period.’ Even when, shortly after she had arrived, her father made an unexpected visit to her apartment in the run-down Lower East Side to try to make her see sense and come home to Michigan, back to comfort and security, she refused to abandon her dream. Her memory of that encounter is that he was appalled by the squalor in which she was now living, the cockroaches in her bedroom, and the smell of stale beer in the communal hallway where homeless drunks bedded down. He left empty-handed, understandably horrified. This may be, however, yet another story that has burnished the Madonna myth, the old tale of the misunderstood runaway defiantly suffering for her art and her vision.

  In fact, others who knew her at that time remember that she initially roomed with a college friend at Columbia University before moving to an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, on the west side of New York. Yet, whatever the truth of her own version of events, what is clear is that within a matter of months the dream Madonna had cherished had turned to dust, leaving her just another starry-eyed hopeful broken on the wheel of aspiration. The journey to New York was a personal odyssey that had begun with such shining hope, but which ended in rejection, disillusion and even horror.

  In the first few months, though, it seemed that her gamble to leave Ann Arbor had paid off handsomely. After joining Pearl Lang’s company, she was cast as a dancer in a piece entitled I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a work about the Holocaust. Lang felt that Madonna, thin, dark and hungry-looking, perfectly fitted the role of a Jewish ghetto child. Even so, she ordered her pupil to lose a further 10 pounds, prompting a return to her now famous diet of popcorn and the occasional butterscotch sundae. However, the image that stayed most strongly in the choreographer’s mind was a pose Madonna struck while dancing in a modern ballet entitled La Rosa en Flores. ‘Madonna did it beautifully,’ Lang remembered, praising the dancer’s sensitive interpretation of her choreography.

  There were, too, other qualities that marked Madonna out as special in her teacher’s eyes. ‘I was fond of her for her arrogance, her hunger and her spunk,’ Lang continued. ‘Nothing fazed her. She was going to do something and nothing was going to get in her way.’ Even the fact that she turned up to rehearsals in her by then trademark ripped leotard and safety pins did nothing to alter Lang’s opinion: ‘When she started to work she was quite wonderful.’

  Knowing that Madonna was looking for a job to fund her studies, Lang even found her a part-time job as a hatcheck girl at the Russian Tea Room, near Carnegie Hall. She held the $4.50-an-hour job for a couple of months before manager Gregory Camillucci fired her. She worked longer at the Russian Tea Room than she managed in most of her jobs, however. She was fi
red from Dunkin’ Donuts after a single day, allegedly for squirting filling over a customer, while menial jobs at Burger King and other fast-food restaurants lasted little longer. ‘It was simply that she couldn’t stand them,’ recalls Mark Dolengowski, who moved to New York a few months after Madonna.

  She quickly fell back on the work which had paid so well in Ann Arbor – nude modeling. This time the going rate at the local art school, the Art Students’ League, was $7, although during the winter of 1978 she supplemented her income with nude-modeling sessions with two ‘art’ photographers, Bill Stone and Martin S. Schreiber. Although some of these photographs were to come back to haunt her, both men remember her as professional, at ease with her body but quiet to the point of being taciturn.

  It was just another job as far as she was concerned, a way of getting by. So when Schreiber offered to take her on a date, her thoughts were of a free meal rather than romance. In fact, she was becoming quite adept at freeloading, using her charm and growing street wisdom to get what she wanted. Her old college friend Linda Alaniz remembers with a wry smile how, when she visited her in New York, Madonna persuaded her to pay for dinner at an expensive restaurant, even though neither had that sort of money to spare. Knowing her friend’s wheedling ways and modest diet, Linda takes with a pinch of salt her story, frequently repeated in books and articles, that she had picked food out of garbage cans in order to survive in the city.

  To her sorrow, Linda Alaniz was equally dismissive when Madonna confided to her that, in the fall of 1978, she had been sexually assaulted at knifepoint on the rooftop of a tenement building. Tragically, this time the story was true, as Linda later realized, the experience inevitably leaving a deep psychological scar on its victim. At the time, Madonna was living a precarious existence, still trying to find her feet in the city, still learning to be streetwise. Trouble came out of the blue one day when she was outside a run-down tenement building. As she herself recounted the story, a well-built black man approached her in the street. Trustingly, she let him come close, noticing too late that he was holding a knife. Pressing the blade to her throat, he spun her round and forced her into the entrance of the tenement. Then, with the knife held to her back, he made her walk up the stairs to the rooftop. As they slowly climbed the steps – the tenement did not have an elevator – Madonna was paralyzed with fear, terrified that she was going to die. Thoughts raced through her head: was he going to cut her throat? Mutilate her? Throw her off the roof? Her abductor gave not the slightest indication of his intentions, and because he did not speak, she was unable to guess even what sort of man he was, or his mood. Dragging her feet up the steps, one after the other, she decided that she would do anything he asked in order to survive.

  When they reached the rooftop, the attacker forced Madonna at knife-point to perform oral sex on him. Almost paralyzed with fear, she obeyed, not knowing whether she was going to live or die. When it was over, and still without a word, her assailant left as abruptly as he had appeared, leaving her alone in a state of utter shock. She sat there for a long time, convulsed with tears, her emotions churning with fear, relief and horrified humiliation in equal measure, and too terrified to retrace her steps in case the sinister knife-man was waiting for her in the stairwell. When she finally plucked up the courage to make her way nervously back down to the street, the whole awful experience seemed to have almost a surreal quality to it, even as vile and grotesque as it had been. Shattered, she made her way home, there to begin the long process of trying to come to terms with her ordeal.

  For a long time she tried to shrug the whole incident off. When she told a few friends, as she did Linda Alaniz, it was as though she were recounting one of her crazy anecdotes, no doubt her own way of coping with the trauma. Later she consulted and confided in a therapist, before very publicly telling the world about her ordeal. ‘I have been raped and it’s not an experience I would ever glamorize,’ she said in an interview, adding that the trauma had made her a stronger person, even though it had put her off oral sex for good. Years later, during the filming of Dangerous Game in the early 1990s, she recounted the ordeal in character for the cameras almost exactly as it had happened, although she added that the attacker had cried afterwards. The film’s director, Abel Ferrara, has observed that the irony about her screen admission and description of the assault was that no one believed that it was true. ‘It did happen, but then nobody believes it because she made it unbelievable. It was a very heavy sequence. I didn’t know she was going to tell that story’, he added.

  Like so many victims of sex attacks, at the time she felt violated, embarrassed and ashamed, which undoubtedly increased her sense of isolation and loneliness – years later she would recall the day she sat weeping by the fountain at Lincoln Center. She would often confide her sadness and pain to a journal she kept, writing an entry every day without fail. It is a lifelong habit, and one that has frequently been the source of the raw emotional material for many of her lyrics. That, however, was on the days when she felt sorry for herself.

  True to her own character, she only allowed herself a limited time for self-pity. If nothing else, Madonna is a fighter, picking herself up after every knockdown, squaring up to the world again more determined than ever. She used all her considerable willpower to push the incident to the back of her mind, trying to get on with her life, her steely inner resolution, her ‘Fortintude,’ refusing to buckle under the strain. Within her immediate circle, she was still the one telling the off-color stories, the craziest dancer, the girl with the look-at-me style.

  ‘Go Madonna, go!’ were the first words Norris Burroughs heard when he arrived at a party in Pearl Lang’s Central Park apartment just before Christmas 1978. There she was, dressed in leopard-skin tights, twirling and spinning at the vibrant center of a circle of dancers. ‘It was like a ritual’, he recalls, ‘as though she were dancing in a ring of fire.’ He immediately joined the group, but quickly realized that his standard disco moves couldn’t compete with the movements of the student dancers who surrounded him. But he made an impression of sorts on Madonna – even though he quickly saw that he faced stiff competition. The following day his friend Michael Kessler, who had first introduced him to Madonna, called to invite him over. As he was telling Norris that Madonna was with him, she grabbed the phone and shouted, ‘Get your gorgeous Brando body over here!’

  They started dating, and before long she was spending two or three nights a week at his apartment. Their romance only lasted a matter of months, but even so Norris, an artist and son of the radio actor Eric Burroughs, gained a vivid insight into the direction of Madonna’s life, and the drive behind it. ‘The moment you laid eyes on her you knew that she was a person of destiny, a force of nature, an elemental being. When you are with someone like that you are immensely privileged and hang on for the ride. I felt like I had fallen down the rabbit hole and didn’t know where the adventure was leading.’

  She maintained a determinedly Bohemian lifestyle, a young artist hungrily devouring Hemingway, absorbing Picasso, and savoring Browning – food for the soul, not the body. Nor did the daily cares of makeup, hairdressers or hot showers concern her. Style was what she woke up in. She wore Norris’s cast-offs, an old pair of jeans she tied with string to make them fit or a moth-eaten sweater. Here was someone who traveled light, unimpressed by the pretentious and self-conscious – an anti-material girl. To her lover of the moment, ‘Madonna struck me as a free spirit who was unwilling to be encumbered or tied down or pigeon-holed. I never tried to put a chain around her neck and that’s one of the reasons why our relationship lasted as long as it did. Everything I recall about her physically or sexually is misty and romantic. She brought out the tender and sensuous.’

  Norris gathered early on, during their long rambling walks through Manhattan, visiting churches and art galleries, that she had one vision, to be a principal dancer with either the Alvin Ailey or the Pearl Lang company. Touched by that ambition, and the determination that lay behind it, on
e of the first presents he gave her was a biography of Nureyev. ‘I got a sense that she was going places but didn’t yet know how,’ Norris remembers. Curiously, though, in view of her later career, he also reflects that while she liked singing around the apartment or on their walks – Donna Summer’s ‘Hot Stuff,’ Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking,’ and songs by Blondie and Chrissie Hynde were favorites – there was never any feeling that she wanted to be a musician. Dance was her art and her ambition.

  Yet just a few months after articulating her dream of becoming a principal dancer, Madonna walked away from dance for good. The reasons are many and various; and, as so often with Madonna’s history, it is not always easy to distinguish fact from legend. Clearly, though, something was wrong. The young dancer started complaining that Pearl Lang’s style was too old-fashioned, that she worked her dancers too hard, that there were too few opportunities. There was also the painful realization that there were many other dancers with similar, if not greater, talents than her own. The subtext is plain. Madonna craved acclaim, applause, even adulation, her individualism jarring upon other members of the troupe. Only now had it begun to dawn on her that it would take another three to five years of remorseless grind before she could even think of joining a major touring company. Then, if she did so, she would face fierce competition from dozens of other equally motivated and talented young dancers. The glittering prize of stage stardom, let alone that of being appointed principal dancer, seemed even more distant than at Ann Arbor, where at least she had appeared in two dance concerts a year.