Soon after her experience with Pearl Lang, Madonna was accepted for a brief workshop at the world-renowned Alvin Ailey Dance Company. However, despite this happy coup, it was becoming clear that all of the determination, desire and pizzazz she could muster would not immediately guarantee her a place in the highly competitive world of New York dance. Though completely dedicated to her craft — mind, body and soul into dancing — Madonna found herself once again counting out change behind the counter of a local doughnut shop in order to make ends meet. She also worked in the prestigious Russian Tea Room restaurant in Manhattan as a hatcheck girl.
Gregory Camillucci, former manager of the restaurant, recalls, “She was a frail girl, very thin. I often thought that the meals she had at the restaurant were probably the only meals she was eating. But she was upbeat, never rude, always on time. At the beginning of her short time there, I caught her staring at the customers. ‘I watch rich people eating and drinking,’ she explained, ‘so that when I can afford to, I can do it right.’ However, it wasn’t long before she became bored by rich people’s eating habits. You then had a sense that she wasn’t going to last long. ‘This is not what I came to New York to do,’ I once heard her grumble.
After Madonna had been in New York for several months, living in one of the East Village’s bleakest neighborhoods in her dilapidated walk-up apartment on Fourth Street and Avenue B, she was paid a visit by her father, Tony Ciccone.
“I didn’t want him to come,” Madonna remembered years later. “The apartment was crawling with cockroaches. There were winos in the hallway. The entire place smelled like stale beer.”
“What is going to happen if this fool’s dream of yours doesn’t work out?” Tony asked her, he recollected many years later. Father and daughter were sitting in an Italian restaurant on Eighty-first Street. Madonna was eating spaghetti and clams, and with such fervor it was as if she hadn’t enjoyed a good meal in many months. “Please come back home,” Tony said. “I miss you so much, Nonnie.”
“I love you, Dad,” Madonna said. “But I just can’t come home.”
“Look at how you’re living,” he told her, trying to reason with her. “In a roach motel. Like a bum, you’re livin’.”
“No,” she said, correcting him. “Like a dancer, Daddy. Like a dancer, I’m livin’. Now, just leave me alone.”
Cousin Gina Magnetti recalls, “Still today, when Tony talks about that visit, he gets tears in his eyes. I know his heart was aching. He cut the trip short, I remember. He said, ‘She’s so smart, why is she doing this? I don’t understand it.’ He begged her to go back to Michigan with him, telling her that he would never fight with her again, he would let her have her way, if she would just go back with him. ‘If you want me to have my way, let me do it my way,’ she told him. He tried to give her money before he left. She wouldn’t take it. The fact that she refused his help somehow seemed like she was punishing him.
“‘She never listens to me,’ Tony said when he got back to Michigan. ‘No, she wants to live like a pauper. She wants to starve herself so she can be a dancer. A dancer!’ He was always amazed that Madonna wanted to be a dancer, saying that there was no future in it.”
The hard fact, of course, was that dancing jobs were really scarce, even in — and maybe especially in — Manhattan. Competition was stiff from agile, talented dancers whose own intense hunger and drive most certainly matched Madonna’s.
“I’d go to Lincoln Center, sit by a fountain and just cry,” she once recalled. “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.”
“Oh, please, she never sat by a fountain and cried,” says her brother Martin. “She never wrote in some diary about her loneliness and pain. And she had loads of friends. She took those years, hard as they were — I mean, she had a lot of despair and I don’t want to say she didn’t, you know? But she later made it all just a part of the glamorous legend that is my sister. That’s what she does best, she creates legend.
“I remember that after my father visited her, he said, ‘Either she will be the greatest dancer who ever lived, or she will be the biggest fool.’ She turned out to be neither, of course.”
Busting Out
By the beginning of 1979, Madonna — who would turn twenty-one that year — realized that it could take five more years for her to be accepted into a major touring dance company. She knew that the solution to her dilemma was obvious: she would have to diversify, expand her horizons, maybe even change her vision if she was going to survive in New York.
Ever true to her character, Madonna would not waste much time strategizing her next move. She needed a vehicle that would showcase her extraordinary charisma. She needed a forum, a venue. In order to earn extra money, Madonna began posing in the nude for art classes. She had heard that it was an easy way to make money and, as she later recalled, “I was so broke and desperate, I would have done almost anything. And I thought it might give me a new thing, that maybe I might become a model. Who knows?”
Anthony Panzera, one of the artists for whom she posed, recalls that he was unhappy with Madonna’s appearance when she showed up at his studio on West Twenty-ninth Street in New York after having answered an advertisement.
“I was hoping for someone a little less boylike,” he said, as he got ready to send her on her way.
Perhaps sensing imminent rejection, Madonna unbuttoned her blouse and exposed her breasts. “Do boys have these?” she asked. Then, without hesitation, she slipped out of her jeans. Once naked, she blithely asked, “Now, just tell me where to pose.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Madonna.”
“No last name?”
“Do I look like I need a last name?” she said as she stood before him, unclothed. She grabbed her breasts and pushed them up, then out toward him.
“Her answer made no sense,” the artist now recalls, “but yet, somehow it made all the sense in the world.
“It was basically seven dollars an hour in those days, and that was a lot for her. She needed the money, that’s for sure.
“What I most remember about her is that she never seemed to have a place to live that she could call her own. So if you wanted to find her, you’d have to call a series of numbers she had left. ‘In the morning,’ she said, ‘you can reach me here’ and she’d hand you one number scribbled on a piece of paper. ‘Then, at night, try this number,’ she’d say, and then stuff another piece of paper in your hand. ‘But sometimes, I’m staying here, and other times, there,’ and she’d hand you two more numbers. It was absolutely impossible to find her. She was a vagabond. But when you did find her, she was a good model, very cooperative, always willing to do energetic, enthusiastic poses.”
In order to continue making extra money, Madonna then decided to pose nude for photographers who had advertised in the magazines and newspapers she read to find work. Martin Schreiber, who was teaching a course for the New School in Greenwich Village at the time, paid her thirty dollars for ninety minutes on February 12, 1979, to pose naked. Upon her receiving her payment, she signed the release form with the name Madonna Louise. “What I recall of that session was that she really wasn’t into it,” says Schreiber. “Whereas some models come in and are raring to go, strip down and pose, I sensed that she was really just doing it for the money, that she really didn’t want to give it much thought, and wasn’t going to dwell on it. I thought to myself, after she leaves here she will never again think about these pictures.”
Meanwhile, Madonna’s combination of style, daring and charisma continued to draw influential people to her like a magnet. While at a party and spinning around in the middle of the dance floor, she was spotted by graffiti artist Norris Burroughs. “It was the winter of 1979,” Burroughs recalls. “I remember she had leopard tights on, and there were people all around her, but she was getting cent
er stage even though it was a house filled with dancers. It was like some kind of ritual, as if she was dancing in a ring of fire. So there we all were, me and my friends and everyone else, singing and dancing to the Village People’s ‘YMCA,’ and Madonna was in the middle of it all, holding center stage. She was this amazing and exciting-looking creature with wild hair and loads of sexual energy just waiting to bust out, to make an impression. I was completely taken aback. So I had to approach her.
“If I could rearrange the alphabet,” Burroughs told her, “I would put U and I together.”
“Screw you,” Madonna said, sizing him up. “You remind me of a guy on Fifth Avenue who tried to sell me his comb earlier today.” Then, having delivered her sharp dig, she began to walk away. After a beat, though, she turned around and asked, “Does that offer come with dinner?”
“It does.”
“Fine. But it’ll have to be Italian,” she said, “or the deal is off.”
Still, despite the tentative date, the two didn’t get together until a few weeks later after Burroughs finally telephoned Madonna. “You get your gorgeous Brando body over here,” Madonna told him.
“How could I resist?” Burroughs now asks. “It was then that our affair began.”
Though the tall and slim “dirty blond” Burroughs was not Madonna’s usual physical type — she preferred darker, more muscular types — she seemed happy in the relationship. He remembers her as a sexual being. “It was just an animal kind of sexuality,” Burroughs said. “She wasn’t coquettish, or shy, that’s for sure. It was all raw, but fun. Lots of disco dancing to Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive,’ her favorite song at the time. She was incredibly self-involved. Everything was all about her, her wants, her needs, her thoughts, her desires . . . but, still, you got swept away by it. She was just so fascinating to watch and to be around.
“During one lunch date, Madonna ordered an ice-cream sundae for dessert, with bananas and chocolate syrup. Then, she poured maple syrup over the whole thing. I was nauseated just watching her lick the bowl clean. Her whole chemistry was always on overdrive; she could never get fat with that metabolism of hers.
“She acted like she didn’t care at all about her looks, but I think now that it was all an act, that her whole thing was to make people think she didn’t care so that she could be as outrageous as possible,” Burroughs observes. “I remember giving her a pair of jeans with a thirty-four waist, way too big for her. She couldn’t wait to wear them. She had sweaters and shirts with holes in them, and she’d stick her thumbs through the holes, posturing and posing. She always looked cool. She always was cool.”
Burroughs says that during the time he dated Madonna there was always a sense of the temporary about the romance. “I knew it wasn’t going to last,” he said. “She never said it to me directly, but I sensed that she believed that she was going places . . . and that I wasn’t. I knew that she wasn’t going to be around very long.”
After one lovemaking session, Burroughs turned to Madonna and said, “In a year, we’ll look back on this time and appreciate it even more, won’t we?”
“Hmmm,” Madonna said in her most noncommittal tone. “Interesting,” she concluded with an evasive smile.
Burroughs lay quietly with his arms around her, knowing — he would later admit — that there would not be many more of these tender moments in the future.
So far, the momentum of Madonna’s career had been pushed along by a series of random circumstances that had exposed her to certain influential people who could help her achieve her goals. She eagerly took advantage of the opportunities that had been presented to her, then, without much apparent gratitude or sentimentality, she moved onward and upward, never once looking back. It was the way it had been up until now, and a pattern of her life that would continue for years to come. Though her relationship with Norris Burroughs lasted only three months, it did take Madonna to the next chapter of her life story. At a party at his home on May 1, 1979, Burroughs introduced her to friends Dan and Ed Gilroy, who had formed a band called the Breakfast Club.
Madonna hit it off immediately with Dan Gilroy. As the evening wound down, she asked him, “Well, aren’t you going to kiss me?” While he pondered the question, she grabbed him by the tie, pulled him close and kissed him fully on the lips. Then, she smacked him lightly, twice and on the same cheek. After winking at him, she walked away.
Years later, Norris Burroughs would say, “Before I knew it, she was done with me and was with Dan. Immediately, Dan began teaching her how to play instruments. She learned to play the guitar, she learned to play organ. They put her behind the drums for a while . . . but eventually she wanted to sing.”
Soon, Madonna was living with Dan and his brother in a rundown and boarded-up synagogue in Corona, Queens, which they would use as a rehearsal hall as well as a living space — for she was now a member of the Breakfast Club. Says Whitley Setrakian, “I remember walking for a long time through what seemed like a bombed-out area of Queens until I finally came to a crumbling synagogue. And I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is where she is living now?’ But when I met with her, I saw further evolution in her personality, more self-confidence about her decisions. I heard the band she and Dan were trying to form, and it was good. It was loud, but it was good. She had the microphone firmly in hand and gyrated a lot. I sat in one of the chairs of the synagogue and watched her and saw that she was really in her element. I knew that she was finished with dancing, even though she never said it. I could tell that she loved this side of performing, as a singer, an entertainer. She and Dan had become romantically involved, and they seemed happy.”
Dan was fascinated by Madonna. “You make love like a man,” he told her, according to a later recollection. “You’re so aggressive. Uninhibited.”
“Does that scare you?” she asked him.
“No,” he told her. “It turns me on.”
“I always wanted to be a guy,” she confided. “I want to just take my shirt off in the middle of the street, like a construction worker. I like the freedom.”
“I like you,” he told her.
“I know,” she said as she kissed him.
“Dan and Eddie both sang and sometimes she sang, and then they would sing behind her,” Norris Burroughs recalls. “Eventually she wanted to sing more. She had pretty much given up the idea of dance, I think, once she got into the band, once she got involved with Dan. She just wanted to do less as a dancer and more with the band. She soaked it all up, learning everything Dan could teach her about rock music, about playing it and singing it. She just wanted more . . .”
“More” was something Madonna always wanted “more” of, and it now seemed that she was beginning to wonder if singing was not the way to get it. Producer Steve Bray, who had known Madonna in Michigan and met up with her again in Manhattan at around this time, recalls, “With the Breakfast Club, she found her muse medium, she found the best vessel for her drive as a rock performer. She played guitar and fronted the band. I always thought she could have had a great career as a rhythm guitarist. She’d dance on the tabletops and break things all around her. She’d pour champagne all over herself. She was just a fabulous, wild child.
“Dan taught her a lot. He loved her. I thought they got along great. But I knew it would just be temporary.”
Each week, Madonna continued to scour the pages of industry publications such as Backstage, Show Business and Variety for job opportunities. She told a writer for Playboy(in September 1985): “I saw an ad in the newspaper for this French singing star, Patrick Hernandez. He had this record called ‘Born to Be Alive.’ His record company [Columbia Records] was trying to put together an act to go on a world tour with him, and they wanted girls to sing backup vocals and dance. It was going to be a big gala performance. I thought it would be great; I’d be dancing and singing and traveling 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 disco star.”
“But you hate disco,” Dan Gilroy told her when she told him the news.
“Who cares?” Madonna said, packing her bags. “This could be my big break.”
“But you’re a dancer,” he argued.
“Since when?” she asked. “When was the last time I danced?”
Dan didn’t want her to leave Queens. Not only was he afraid of what trouble she might get into in Europe, he didn’t trust the people financing her trip . . . and was also nervous that she wouldn’t come back to him. He cared about her deeply.
“Well, now I’m a dancer who sings,” Madonna said, flatly, “if that’s what I gotta do to make it in this damn business.”
Madonna explained that she hated to leave Dan so suddenly, and said that he had been one of the most generous men she’d ever known. “I learned a lot from you, Dan,” she said. “However, it’s time for me to go. And if that makes me a bitch, then I’m a bitch,” she concluded. Hurt, Dan readily agreed with her self-assessment: yes, she was a bitch, he said. He loved her, he would later admit, and thought they had “somethin’ goin’ on.” He couldn’t fathom that she would leave him, “especially after all we shared.”
In May 1979, twenty-year-old Madonna was off to Paris with producers Jean Vanloo and Jean-Claude Pallerin, who had promised to treat her well, feed her “fabulous foods,” and “get me a vocal coach.” To one reporter, she recalled, “They did all of that. It was a blast. I had a great apartment. I never had it so good. I was chauffeured all over. They were going to develop my talent, find a vehicle for me.”
To another reporter, she changed the story a bit: “They took me to Paris and introduced me to awful French boys, took me to expensive restaurants and dragged me round to show their friends what they had found in the gutters of New York. I would throw tantrums and they’d give me money to keep me happy. I felt miserable.”
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