Madonna and Me (20 page)

Before long, I was dousing my baggy jeans with bleach for the “splatter” effect, ripping holes in my shirts and lining them with safety pins, and dyeing my hair every possible shade of red or black. I did it because I couldn’t tolerate the small, close-minded town I was living in, and because my dad had been diagnosed with cancer. The color of my hair seemed to be the only thing I could control.

In my early twenties, I cared for my dad in our home along with the help of hospice. After battling various types of cancer for five years, he had a stroke and was partially paralyzed. I would occasionally leave the house to attend college classes part-time or work at a hair salon at the mall, but I rarely left his bedside. Although it felt like I was serving a prison term in a tiny town where everyone was on lockdown for life, I stayed in that house until my dad didn’t need me anymore. When he died, I ran as fast as I could from that place with a population of less than two thousand, and I never looked back—“quicker than a ray of light.”

I graduated from undergrad and moved to Chicago. Although it’s been ten years since I left home, I still cry every time I hear “Ray of Light.” Not tears of sadness, but tears for the good memories of my parents that I packed into a suitcase to schlep along with me. I felt free for the first time in my life. I wonder if that’s how Madonna felt when she left Detroit?

I wonder how she felt when she lost her mom.

My mom had been fed up with my dad’s affairs. He was sleeping with so many women in our small town when I was a kid that the neighbors didn’t make eye contact when Mom and I went to the grocery store. I remember answering the rotary dial phone in the kitchen only to be hung up on, time and time again, by the woman of the week. I can only imagine how mortifying the ordeal was for my mom.

When she told Dad to get out of the house because she wanted a divorce, he refused to give her one, but he did move out. Mom had no idea that he would cut her off financially during their separation—no assistance with the mortgage, the bills, the expenses of raising two kids. How would she raise us on her meager secretary’s salary? Mom called her parents in California to ask if she could move us to the West Coast, but they told her to “stick out her marriage.”

She didn’t last a week after that.

She committed suicide instead.

In those days, women didn’t have the means to achieve financial independence as easily as we do today. And her heart was broken. And then rebroken. Over and over.

I was standing in a crowded Chicago bar the first time I heard Madonna’s “What It Feels Like For a Girl” in 2001. I was starting a master’s degree program, and I loved living in the city. As the song played, I listened to the lyrics. I thought of my mom, who wore a perfect poker face for me and my brother while my dad publicly humiliated her. I didn’t know what that felt like. I thought about her cry for help to her family—a cry that fell on deaf ears. I didn’t know what that felt like. I thought of how she felt so trapped that death seemed like the only way out. I didn’t know what that felt like.

But I did know how it felt to be loved by her. The eight years that I shared with her taught me that I can do whatever I want. I can be whomever I want. Just like Madonna. Who lost her mom, too, and she turned out okay, right?

“I won’t be happy ’til I’m as famous as God.”

Cintra Wilson

 

 

 

 

 

AT THE PEAK of the enormous popularity of the show
Britain’s Got Talent,
when frowzy Susan Boyle temporarily wowed the world with her big unvarnished singing voice, Mike Luckovich, the great political cartoonist, drew a panel. On the left side was a caricature of Madonna: eyes blackened, face grimly determined, her body hard and stringy with over-exercised muscle, cramping under the squeeze of her cone-bra corset.

“Time to reinvent myself again,” says Madonna’s joyless thought-balloon.

On the right side of the panel was a depiction of Susan Boyle, warbling freely with her caterpillar eyebrows and dishtowel house dress:
“Li-ii-ike a vir-gin . . .”

The subtext of this cartoon? That Susan Boyle is genuine and Madonna is fake—“Look how the innocent singing talent of Boyle so effortlessly outclasses the high-tech, overwrought fraud Madonna,
whose only real talent is for fabulously overcompensating for the fact that she has no talent,” he seems to be saying.

Apparently, Luckovich hasn’t watched Madonna closely enough to get the point of Madonna, but then most people don’t, and it doesn’t matter. In the final tally, Madonna “got” Mike Luckovich. There she was, coexisting in a panel with Susan Boyle, at the zenith of Boyle’s popularity, in Luckovich’s mind. After some twenty-five years, Madonna is still at the forefront of our cultural consciousness, and that
,
as well as I can guess, is the point of Madonna: She always wins.

For all the criticisms one might make about her, it is unfair to say that Madonna has never legitimately revealed herself (apart from occasional bouts of artistic nudity). On the contrary: In an almost grotesque
commedia dell’arte
style, Madonna has overshared every phase of her own psychic development throughout her career, by exploding it outward into large spectacle. We have known exactly what her big, unsubtle feelings have been at nearly every phase—all of her joys and disappointments (marriages, births, divorces), her failures (acting), her voyages of self-discovery (S&M, bisexuality), her psychological breakthroughs, and even her embrace of religion. Madonna has always been the star of her own ongoing opera, and she has always compulsively performed it for us.

Coming of age as a female during the reign of Madonna was like pushing through the earth as a shoot from a seed, and at the completion of this terrible labor, shaking the dirt out of your eyes only to find yourself standing under a Stalin-sized statue of the Jolly Green Giantess. In some ways, she’s a dirty joke we never got over. In other ways, she has always been God—a terrorizing example of everything a girl could be, if insatiably possessed by a drive toward enormity. She has exerted an old-school totalitarian command over my consciousness since adolescence. When you have lived your life under
such dominant image-leadership, its pressures put a certain invisible English on the cue ball of your development: It influences all of your ideas about who you should be, all the ways in which you become yourself.

On a subconscious level, Madonna became a constant tension in my personal plotline. Her all-pervasive example (at least for a teenage bottle-blonde like me) simultaneously embodied a combination of hero, goal, and obstacle. She was infuriating, awe-inspiring, depressing, appalling, beguiling—and ultimately irresistible. She always got you in the end, whether you liked it or not. Madonna was never your friend—more like a bullying older sister whose moral character you questioned and whose opinions you despised for being too cynical—but who was always right.

As a teen, I saw concert footage of Madonna performing a forgettable song called “Gambler.” I had been in dance classes for most of my life, so I could more or less intelligently judge that Madonna’s cardiovascular stamina was near-superhuman. Her dance moves weren’t difficult, but there were millions of them during a ninety-minute performance. They required impressive flexibility, and minute-blocking (spatial) intricacies. Plus, she had to sing at the same time (her voice was so imperfect, you knew she wasn’t faking it.) I had sung and danced onstage, at a sub-microscopic suburban level, as a kid in musical theater performances, and I knew that there were weird energies you couldn’t control during a performance. If you became too nervous or overexcited, you couldn’t breathe normally. Irregular oxygen intake could be disorienting; it was easy to either botch the singing or forget the choreography, or even to just look sweaty, uncomfortable, and winded.

Madonna’s mental game, however, was too tough for these variables, even at a stadium level. I realized that she must have a NASA-LEVEL of mechanical control over her own inner dashboard—reliable control switches for a staggering amount of physical and emotional factors—and undoubtedly four or five extra lungs.

I was once hired by local musicians to impersonate Madonna for a Naval Fleet Week gig. While doing my homework for this—learning how to mimic Madonna’s pronunciation in “Material Girl”—I realized her sped-up voice was baby-talking and pouting through the whole track, like a three-year-old throwing a cute tantrum for daddy: “Coz evuh-boddy’s living . . . in a materi-uhl wuhld/and I yum a mahteer-iuhl gull . . .”

I found it stunningly manipulative on a psychological-operations level, the only possible winning comeback being “Yes, baby, here’s your diamonds.” But then, she was playing to win the battle of the sexes, and there was a certain brazen ruthlessness about this that nobody seemed to mind. Brattiness, after all, is Madonna at her best: “nyah nyah nyah-nyah nyah,” kicking walls in her pumps, rolling around looking sexily anguished, and seeking revenge for untold mistreatments by spray-painting guys’ cars.

Madonna once described her daily routine as something like this: Three hours workout. Three hours business/phone calls. Three hours of “being creative.” Then she allowed herself the rest of the evening for “goofing off.”

(Embarrassing confession: This quote was the primary motivating factor behind the fact that I have always worked out. Gyms, yoga, running, dance classes—whatever that bitch said she did to keep fit, I did too—and I owe my habit of regular exercise to her fearful example.)

Sir Laurence Olivier once credited physical strength as his most important asset as an actor. It is safe to say that strength has been a primary tool of Madonna’s Will to Power, too. She’s never been a real singer or a great dancer, but these deficits became invisible as she vastly overcompensated with outlandish personal style, a canny use of controversy, and the dedicated gym time of an Olympic contender . . . And this strategy
worked
.

“She does back-to back aerobic classes, with weights,” said a friend of mine, a singer and fellow bleach-blonde who had actually witnessed Madonna’s regimen in an L.A. fitness studio in the ’90s. “It made me realize I could never
be
her,” she sighed.

There is a special tar pit in my mind that has always been involuntarily designated to retain select unattributable fragments of worthless Madonna information. The impressions these little media droppings made are indelible, and fresh as the day they fell in.

Example 1: “I act out by being productive,” Madonna once said in an interview, somewhere.

Example 2: In an article about her home in L.A., Madonna spoke with the interviewer about a Frida Kahlo painting in her foyer. She half-jokingly said that the painting was a litmus test for her: “If you don’t like this painting, you can’t be my friend.” It was a relatively scary work of Kahlo’s—a self-portrait of the artist giving birth to herself.

In his interview with Madonna for
Esquire
in 1994, Norman Mailer wrote:

Mailer was always a sensible kind of jerk, but Madonna is no mere run-of-the-mill celebrity narcissist. Over the years, we’ve watched her walk straight into the looking glass, which yielded in concentric circles as a still pool yields to a diver, and we have witnessed her transformation into myth. Then, periodically, she gets sick of being a myth, and she wades back into reality and tries to put on a normal-looking human
face—her stint as a children’s author, for example. But she always goes back to the music and the mirror, and her own irresistible cycle: reality /vanity/myth/vanity/reality/vanity/myth.