Madonna (7 page)

While still at school, both brothers started dabbling in drugs and taking part in clandestine drinking sessions, eventually becoming, in effect, fully paid-up members of the ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ generation. The experience was not salutary. As a young adult, Anthony joined the Moonie cult, while Martin was to spend many months in private rehab clinics, often paid for by his younger sister. As for that sister herself, she stayed well clear of such diversions. As school counselor Nancy Ryan Mitchell remembers: ‘I counseled Madonna’s brothers and sisters much more than her.’

It is little wonder, then, that Madonna’s memories of her brothers’ behavior in adolescence are less than fond. They teased and tormented her mercilessly, while she loudly voiced her complaints about them to anyone who would listen; an American version of Violet Elizabeth in the
Just William
stories, who promised to ‘thcweam and thcweam and thcweam’ if she didn’t get her own way. ‘A bitch,’ is how brother Martin described her in one interview. For her part, Madonna recalls how they spat in her mouth after she ratted on them; she also tells a rather implausible story of how one day they used clothespins to hang their outraged, squirming, 50-pound sister from a washing line by her panties.

Whatever the indignities she suffered at her brothers’ hands, she gave as good as she got, the trio squabbling over everything from sharing the household chores to using the record player. An aficionada of mainstream pop, Madonna vividly remembers the day her brothers deliberately scratched her treasured Gary Puckett and the Union Gap single so that they could fill the house with the heavy psychedelic rock that they loved and she loathed.

In this scratchy, discordant household, Madonna’s younger brother and sisters, Christopher, Paula and Melanie, fared as well as they could. Never as pretty, popular or clever as Madonna, Paula perhaps had the toughest time, always living in her older sister’s shadow. She was the tomboy of the brood, and in consequence often sided with her elder brothers against her sharper and more articulate sister. Christopher, quiet, personable and artistic, was never a threat, while Melanie, who stood out physically because of a single blonde streak in her otherwise dark hair, was, as is common with the youngest in a family, the most indulged.

As is so often the case in large families, Tony Ciccone’s six children were competing – for space, for time and, particularly the girls, for their father’s attention. It was a competition Madonna needed to win, such was her longing for any crumbs of affection and approval. As she herself has said, ‘I just tried to be the apple of my father’s eye. I think that everyone else in my family was very aware of it. And I kind of stood out.’ If winning approval meant helping with the daily chores – her father pinned a list to the fridge most weeks – or following him to Mass at six in the morning, before school, or helping to look after the younger children, then that was, for her, a price worth paying.

She brought other factors into play, too, apart from mere helpfulness or ‘goodness.’ Aware of her physicality from an early age, she used all her childish guile to woo and win her father, staging impromptu dance shows on the kitchen table,
à la
Shirley Temple, or making sure she won the race to sit on her father’s lap, or to be the first to tell of the day’s events at school. In a statement that seems to be halfway between an admission and a boast, she once said, ‘I was my father’s favorite. I knew how to wrap him around my finger, I knew there was another way to go besides saying, “No, I’m not going to do it,” and I employed those techniques.’ No doubt at times her insistence on being the center of attention was as perplexing for her harassed father as it was irritating to her brothers and sisters.

That her father, a quiet, even diffident, man who worked long hours in order to provide for his six motherless children, could not or would not satisfy Madonna’s longing for his undivided attention was for many years a source of acrimony between them, an acrimony generated almost entirely by her. ‘More than anything I want my father’s approval whether I want to admit it or not,’ she has said, at the same time acknowledging that her father was ‘very affectionate’ towards her. Yet her need for love and recognition appears to have been so deeply ingrained that it is debatable whether, if she had lived, even her mother could have quenched Madonna’s seemingly insatiable thirst for affection, her fierce desire to be needed and noticed.

It would seem that she was born with this emotional hunger as an integral part of her personality, like her innate curiosity, which was then molded by her upbringing. ‘She is,’ as one of her close girlfriends pointed out, ‘an alpha-A female. She has to be the center of attention no matter what.’

Like that other Hollywood celebrity, Barbra Streisand, whose chutzpah and determination enabled her to overcome the formidable obstacles in her path to fame, Madonna seems to be a star who was born, not made. In short, divas are different. Nor do the parallels between the two stars end there. Like Madonna, Streisand lost a parent when young and spent her early childhood years clinging to her mother for support and love. Then her world was turned upside-down when her mother met and married another man. Barbra tried to win her stepfather’s approval, but he actively disliked her. In Madonna’s case it was the slim, blonde, upright figure of Joan Gustafson who usurped the eight-year-old’s place in her father’s affections. Joan joined the Ciccone family in 1966 as the latest in a series of housekeepers employed by Tony Ciccone. Six months later they were married.

Ever since his wife’s death three years earlier, Tony Ciccone had tried valiantly to juggle a demanding full-time job and life as a single parent of six children. Naturally other members of his family pitched in, the Ciccone children spending holidays with their grandparents in West Aliquippa or Bay City, or at the home of Tony’s brother-in-law and friend, Dale Fortin, and his family. As his elder brother Guy Ciccone remembers, ‘Silvio would bring the whole family to visit in the summers for vacation, or to weddings and family gatherings.’ Madonna would help her grandfather, Gaetano, in his vegetable garden, or show off her latest dance routine to the delight of the adults. ‘Madonna was such a pretty little girl and she always loved dancing,’ recalls her aunt, Betty Ciccone, adding, ‘Silvio was a pretty good dancer too.’

Yet even as the Fortin family was coming to terms with Madonna Senior’s premature death, tragedy struck once more. In 1966, Dale Fortin died of leukemia, leaving his wife Katherine to bring up seven children – three boys and four girls – on her own. ‘I just had to cope,’ she admits. ‘A strong will and an iron hand was what it took. It wasn’t easy, but in a way it was worse for Tony.’

Certainly Tony Ciccone followed the same course when disaster overtook him and his young family. A firm disciplinarian with a rigid sense of right and wrong, he did the best he could to bring his children up responsibly, but also within the tenets of his own moral code. His austere upbringing translated into ensuring that his children worked and played hard. Television was rationed, as were candies, while household chores were apportioned on a daily basis. In this necessarily regimented world, it did not escape his notice that what his children needed was not the instability and uncertainty of life with hired help – that succession of housekeepers – but someone who would be a fixed point in their lives. For although no one could replace Madonna Senior, he believed that another woman around the house would provide the nurturing and guidance to which he felt his children, particularly the girls, would respond. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Tony Ciccone needed a wife, his own emotional needs balanced by the pragmatic realities of what was best for his family and for family life.

He could not have been more wrong – at least, as far as eight-year-old Madonna was concerned. Ferociously self-absorbed and self-centered as only the young can be, in her eyes the deep, unresolved anger she felt over her mother’s death was now, at her father’s marriage, compounded by what she regarded as his callous betrayal of the love and attention she had showered upon him. Not only had he deserted her for another woman, but her new stepmother had usurped Madonna’s notional position as the ‘little lady’ of the household.

Whatever the reality, that was the truth as she saw it and she took action accordingly. Feeling, perhaps unconsciously, that if she couldn’t win her father’s attention by conforming then she would have to explore other avenues, she rapidly changed from childish coquette to ‘difficult,’ defiant daughter. As for her stepmother, Madonna viewed her from the first as the enemy, even refusing to honor her father’s wish that she should call Joan ‘Mom.’ The simmering resentment she felt towards Tony’s second wife has lasted to this day.

Within weeks of her marriage, Joan Ciccone became pregnant, giving birth to a daughter, Jennifer, in 1967, and the following year to a son, Mario. As though that were not enough, Tony Ciccone next decided that their house in Pontiac was way too small for a family that now numbered ten members. It was, he felt, time to make a break with the past, time to move from the down-at-heel, racially mixed neighborhood of Pontiac, where Madonna had happy memories of joining her black girlfriends in backyard dance sessions, to the nearby but infinitely more upscale – and exclusively white – suburb of Rochester. The family’s new home at 2036 Oklahoma Street was typical of the modest affluence of a still-sleepy country town; a two-story clapboard and red-brick Colonial-style house where today Joan Ciccone runs a children’s daycare center in a converted garage. just down the road was Saint Andrew’s, the Roman Catholic church that the family would now attend, with its own school to which the children would go, a brisk walk away for ten-year-old Madonna.

Her new classmates at Saint Andrew’s were impressed by the bright and lively youngster, a darkly pretty girl who always seemed to have a way of standing out from the crowd. The Ciccones had arrived in Rochester at the same time as the Twomey family, and ten-year-old Nick, another new student at Saint Andrew’s, immediately struck up a friendship with Madonna. He was the budding jock athlete to her flashy cheerleader, and they became childhood sweethearts, chasing each other round the schoolyard and joshing each other in class. Like her, Nick was the middle child in a large family, and so realized instinctively what made Madonna tick. As he says: ‘We were both narcissistic souls with an insatiable need to be noticed. When you are in a large family and life is busy and everyone is competing for attention you do what you have to to rise above the crowd. She is like everyone else, there is this huge gap in her soul to be loved and noticed.’ Energetic and voluble, both were seen as leaders by their classmates, Nick by virtue of his athletic prowess, Madonna because of her manner in class. ‘She was bright and always verbal,’ remembers Nick, ‘and when she had to give a report it was never just about the material – it was always about how she could say this in such a way to get her noticed or to get a laugh.’

Given her own extrovert nature, and her friendship with the equally outgoing Nick Twomey, it is perhaps surprising that one of Madonna’s best friends at that time was Ruth Dupack (now Ruth Dupack Young), a shy, diffident youngster who was often so tongue-tied at school that the nuns at Saint Andrew’s would sometimes call her parents to ask if there was a problem. Being almost a complete opposite in character, Ruth was no competition to Madonna, but rather the bashful foil to her extrovert personality. ‘She was a happy girl,’ recalls Ruth, ‘never moody. She was pretty bold and confident about the things she said and did, more willing to take a chance at things.’ The two girls enjoyed sleepovers at each other’s houses, played Ruth’s latest Tamla Motown records – Madonna preferred dance to music, Ruth remembers – gossiped, shopped and hung out like countless other teenage girls.

As she came to know the Ciccone family, Ruth realized that Madonna not only stood out from her classmates, but also from the rest of her family. Her outsize personality, her compulsive need to be noticed, were at variance to the characters of her father, stepmother and brothers and sisters. One aspect of that ‘apartness’ was only too glaringly obvious, however – Madonna’s treatment of her stepmother.

Ruth, and others in her circle like Carol Belanger, were well aware of the animosity Madonna displayed towards Joan. ‘I felt sorry for her stepmother,’ Ruth confesses. ‘It was tough for her. She always encouraged Madonna, she never complained about her. But you could see what was going on when you saw them together, fighting and bickering. Madonna would totally ride her, acting like a little kid. It was a big rebellion, a long running conflict.’

One particular battle was over makeup and what was or was not considered to be appropriate dress – not altogether surprisingly, since it is a battlefield familiar to most parents of girls. Joan did not want her oldest stepdaughter to use makeup, and, reacting to yet another act of defiance, ordered her to wear clothes that were suitable for school, rather than for a nightclub. So every day Madonna would leave for school dressed as her stepmother had decreed. As soon as she reached school, however, she would head for the bathroom, and there swap her ‘sensible’ clothes for a short skirt or skimpy top she had smuggled out of the house in a brown paper bag. Having changed, she would proceed to apply her warpaint. At the end of the school day she would change back again, wipe off the makeup and walk home.

The atmosphere in the Ciccone household came to be tainted all too often by Madonna’s antipathy towards Joan. On another occasion, in 1972, she clashed with her stepmother when she returned home, feeling very grown up, after a summer break spent at her grandmother’s home in Bay City. While there she had learned to smoke cigarettes, had worn tight jeans and makeup, and had watched her uncle Carl’s amateur rock band, which used to rehearse in her grandmother’s garage. Her changed appearance did not amuse Joan Ciccone, who was especially concerned that her father would be horrified if he saw his eldest daughter dressed like a ‘floozy.’ Rather than toe the line, however, Madonna and her friends deliberately dressed as ‘floozies,’ padding out their bras, wearing tight sweaters and daubing their faces with heavy makeup and lipstick.