Goddess: Inside Madonna (11 page)

In 1955, Madonna Louise Fortin and Silvio Tony Ciccone were married at the Visitation Church in Bay City, Michigan. Her sister, Marilyn, was her matron of honor, and her brother Dale, who had introduced the couple, was Tony’s best man. Following the wedding, the young couple set out by car for Alexandria, Virginia, where Tony had been lent out by General Motors to work on another government defense project. On May 3, 1956, their first child, a boy they named Anthony, was born. When the baby was only three months old, Tony was recalled to Michigan, where he resumed his work at General Motors.

The Ciccones settled in a small brick bungalow at 443 Thors Street in the suburb of Pontiac, twenty miles northwest of Detroit. There, on August 9, 1957, their second child, Martin, was born. Four more children followed in quick succession: Madonna, born on August 16, 1958, followed by Paula barely a year later, then Christopher in 1960, and then Melanie in 1962. Tragedy struck when Melanie was barely six months old. During a routine gynecological examination, the doctor discovered a lump in Madonna’s breast. After more invasive examinations, it was diagnosed as breast cancer. Back then, the disease was an unspeakable horror with little or no chance of a cure. Madonna’s doctors advised her to begin radiation therapy right away, although they warned her that the treatment would seriously affect her ability to care for her newborn. Still nursing and with five small children and a husband who depended on her, Madonna decided to postpone treatment until she could wean the baby and make sure that the others would be properly cared for. Despite the torment that Tony went through and the realization there was little chance that his wife would survive, he, along with their priest, supported his wife’s decision. The doctors viewed their patient’s decision as a self-imposed death sentence. On several occasions, they warned the couple that given the normal increase of hormone activity while a new mother is nursing, the disease would advance more rapidly. The doctor’s battle was useless since the family priest had more influence on their patient than they did. Two months after the initial diagnosis, Madonna finally agreed to begin chemotherapy. By then, it was too late.

Tony Ciccone experienced a series
of devastating emotions that would forever mark his life as well as the lives of his six children. Madonna was the center of his life, the only woman he had ever loved, the person who shared his deep religious convictions and his sense of humor. For a man who was so determined to succeed in everything he did by sheer will, hard work, and deep religious faith, he was suddenly rendered impotent as he watched his wife slip away. Elsie Fortin, who could only endure the tragedy by means of her deep faith in God, tried her best to comfort her son-in-law and grandchildren, although she was physically and emotionally incapable of caring for them. Forced to hold down a full-time job, Tony Ciccone scattered the little ones with different relatives. Every evening after work, Tony would visit his wife in the hospital before making alternate visits to his children at various homes in the area.

Madonna spent approximately a year in Mercy Hospital in Bay City, wasting away and unable to withstand the painful chemotherapy, which the doctors eventually stopped, since it was doing more harm than good. From time to time, she would come home only to find that she was too weak to care for her husband and children. One of the most frequently reported stories was that little Madonna had supposedly once hit her mother on the back in frustration when the ailing woman was too sick to play with her. When Madonna saw her mother’s tears, she understood that her lethargy was not for lack of love but rather strength. From that moment on, Madonna understood that her mother’s enormous emotional strength and faith had kept her from wallowing in the tragedy of her situation. “My mother gave me an incredible lesson in life,” Madonna explains, “about how to put things in perspective and how to prioritize those things which are life-threatening, serious, or just annoying.”

Friends and family members who were around during those bleak days maintain that Madonna thrived in a way that she hadn’t when she was well. “She had a mission,” one friend remembers, “and she seemed determined that either she would beat it or she would maintain her dignity. She saw it as a challenge.” Another friend recalls that the cancer only made Madonna more religious and accepting of what she considered to be “God’s will.” “There was never ever a moment when she got angry or said that God was unfair,” the friend says. “If anything, Madonna took it as a sign that her children were special and resilient or God wouldn’t have given them this obstacle to surmount.”

Even after she lost all her hair and was reduced to helpless gestures and often disjointed words, she made a pretense at charm and good humor, valiantly carrying on as if nothing were wrong. On one occasion when she was at home with neighborhood visitors, they all watched the children scrambling around the floor, playing and laughing. With tears in her eyes, she turned to her guests and said, “We make beautiful babies, don’t we? At least no one can ever take that away from me.”

On her last visit home, before she was transported back to the hospital for the final stay, she insisted that someone pack all her cosmetics in a small train case along with a camera. Once back in her hospital bed, she asked the nurse to watch carefully while she applied her makeup. When the nurse asked her why she was “fussing” like that, Madonna answered, “I want you to take a picture of me so the undertakers will know how to make me up for my funeral.”

On November 22, 1963, as the country mourned the assassination of President John Kennedy, the Ciccone family sat in vigil at Madonna’s deathbed at Mercy Hospital. On the morning of November 30, 1963, the doctors advised the family that the situation had become critical. Miraculously, on the last day of her life, when her husband and mother were visiting, Madonna rallied. Sitting up in bed and laughing with her family, she suddenly announced that she had a craving for a hamburger. Tony and Elsie were delighted by her transformation and actually believed that she was going into some kind of remission. Unfortunately, they told the children that their mother seemed to be getting better.

That night when she went to bed, little Madonna had a vision in which her mother was well and had actually come into her room to tuck her in and kiss her good-night. Years later when Madonna was reminded of that incident, she would say that, deep down, she knew that her mother was dying. “I think children are a lot smarter about death than adults think they are,” she said.

In the early-morning hours of December 1, 1963, with her husband at her side, holding her hand, Madonna Louise Fortin Ciccone slipped into a coma. Several hours later, she was dead.

When little Madonna awoke that morning, she wandered into the kitchen and found her grandmother, aunts, and uncles all sitting around the kitchen table weeping. Her first reaction was bewilderment. Why were they so upset when her mother had recovered? There had been no miracle, Madonna was told. Her mother was with God in heaven. As she was passed around from relative to relative to be hugged and comforted, she started to argue until her words became heart-wrenching screams. They were lying, the little girl cried, they were wrong, her mother was fine! Wriggling out of their embraces, she raced around the house, searching for her mother, slamming doors, looking under beds. It was all a game, she thought fleetingly, or maybe another dream, a nightmare. Eventually, she collapsed from exhaustion, feeling completely alone, lost, and confused and, for a long time afterward, never really able to grasp that her mother was no longer there. “Martin and Anthony suffered a lot, I think,” one relative recalled, “because as boys, they were taught to keep their emotions in check. They held everything inside, and it doesn’t surprise me that Martin had the biggest problems with alcohol.” According to the same uncle, Melanie, Paula, and Christopher, who were too little to understand the implications of their mother’s death, all accepted the notion that their mother was safely in heaven. “That made them feel better,” he continues, “although Christopher wasn’t buying that kind of happy ending.” All the relatives agree that Christopher had always been an extremely sensitive child, prone to tears and generally fearful. “He had a deep fear of being alone,” a teacher from Christopher’s elementary school recalls. “I don’t think he was as close to his mother the way Madonna was, but he was generally fearful after she died that there would be no one to take care of him.”

According to her other relatives, Madonna was always the smartest and most verbal of all the children and also the one who was the closest to her mother. “It really turned her life around,” they all agree. “Of all the kids, she was the one who resented her father getting married again. I don’t think she ever got over that. In a way that was almost as traumatic for her as her mother’s death.” Unlike Christopher, who feared for his own survival, Madonna made up her mind that she didn’t need anyone to care for her. From then on, she became her own parent.

The death of their mother produced a ferocious anger within all the Ciccone children with the exception of the baby, Melanie, that came out in different ways. Madonna responded to the loss with a fury that was fueled by her resolve never to let anything hurt her ever again. Forced to function as a child much older than her years, Madonna took on the household tasks and acted as a surrogate mother to her younger siblings.

M
adonna’s rise to stardom was swift. Only five years elapsed from the time she arrived in New York in 1978 to the moment when she appeared on the international music scene in 1984, wearing a transparent wedding dress and singing “Like a Virgin.” After Madonna became a star, she implied that as she’d clawed her way up the ladder to success, she had been so poor that she often went hungry. “I worked my ass off to get where I am today,” she has said, “and even ate out of garbage cans to survive.” When she first arrived in New York, though she certainly struggled, worked at menial jobs, and squatted in an abandoned music studio on the Lower East Side, the choice was hers. She may not have grown up in a culturally sophisticated environment where good taste was inherent and price no object, but she was far from materially deprived. She dropped out of college to go to New York against her father’s wishes, with the understanding that he would not subsidize her. Contrary to her claims, her determination to succeed and her fight to survive have nothing to do with the typical Mildred Pierce syndrome about never being poor or hungry again, and everything to do with the promise that she had made to herself never to depend on anyone for anything ever again. Even then, there is a contradiction. During those tough early years, she always managed to find someone who either believed in her talent, was intrigued by her charm, or attracted to her sensuality and who was willing to pick up the bills until she became rich and famous.

Years later when she was lobbying for the movie role, she was even more convinced that she had been “born to play” Evita when she equated her struggle for stardom with that of the former Argentine first lady. Madonna believed that she, like Eva Perón, had suffered the same rejection from her peers and family, had used a succession of lovers to achieve her goals, and had finally managed to get out of a small town and into a big city without any money or promise of a job. In fact, in that pleading letter that Madonna wrote to Alan Parker, she cited the similarities between herself and Eva Perón. “Both of us evoke passionate sentiments from the people. Both of us are either loved or hated, perceived either as a saint or an opportunistic whore who relied on self-invention and publicity to achieve international acclaim.” In closing, she wrote, “It is my destiny to play her. I have a strange affinity for Latin culture, in my music, friends, the relationships I have, food and art.”

When Madonna finally landed the part, Alan Parker was clever enough to create two scenes that, subliminally at least, created the impression that Madonna and Eva had endured similar traumas in their lives.

One of the opening scenes of the film is a funeral procession in a rural Argentine town. The atmosphere is dark and dreary as the mourners make their way slowly toward a small church where the deceased is laid out in his coffin. The camera captures a child on the periphery of the crowd, dressed in tatters and clutching a pathetic bouquet of flowers. Suddenly, she breaks away from her mother and siblings and rushes toward the church. The implication is clear. The child and her family are not welcome at this funeral, although the emotion and the determination of the little girl makes it apparent that she knows the dead man and wants desperately to reach his coffin. Once inside the church, she flings herself over the body, smothering it with kisses and crying, “Papa!” As the crowd pulls her away, there are cries of “bastard child,” and the audience understands that she is the illegitimate daughter of a man who was a respected local potentate whose friends and legal family are gathered to mourn him.

To Parker’s credit, what makes this scene so wrenching, produces an outpouring of sympathy for the little girl, and sets the mood for the rest of the film is that the child bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Madonna with her dark hair and eyebrows, heart-shaped face, and scrappy determination.

The young actress who played Evita as a child, Marie Lujan Hidalgo, had an inordinately close relationship with the star during the making of the movie, sharing a “mutual and instant connection” to one another. “When we first met,” Hidalgo says, “Madonna wanted to know all about me and my family, whether I had a good relationship with my parents, how I became an actress, what my life was like. People told me that she had a completely different personality around me than around the other cast members.” Hidalgo also sensed that Madonna was so immersed in her role that she instinctively comforted Hidalgo for the loss of her father, as if those events had really taken place in Hildalgo’s life. “Madonna really believed that she was Evita and had lost her father, so she really believed that it was me, that child, who had suffered that loss.”