Goddess: Inside Madonna (12 page)

Drawing upon the physical resemblance between Madonna as a child and the child actress portraying Evita was not the only technique that Parker used to create the impression that his star and the character she portrayed were one and the same. Using a child actress who resembled Madonna more than she resembled Eva Perón validated the premise that both were considered outsiders, children from the “wrong side of the tracks” who were on the periphery of society. The reality was, however, much different, both for Madonna and Evita.

While Eva Perón was illegitimate by birth, she and her three sisters and one brother not only carried the name of their father, Juan Duarte, a well-to-do landowner, but also enjoyed a close relationship with him. For the fifteen years that he was with Evita’s mother, until he died in a car accident in 1920, Duarte divided his time between his legal wife and three daughters and his illegitimate family. However, after his death, all support stopped. In the end, the only legacy that Duarte left his second family was the right to carry his name. From that point on, life was difficult for Eva, who never forgot how she was forced to work as a maid, along with her mother and sisters, in the homes of the local rich people. This was Eva Perón’s first exposure to the disparity between the upper and lower classes in Argentina, an experience that was supposed to have provided the incentive for her to do everything in her power to elevate the workers.

Madonna, after the loss of her mother, was never excluded by society and, in fact, was given preferential treatment by a large and loving extended family as well as by the nuns who taught her. All through elementary school, as Madonna progressed from grade to grade, her teachers would write on their evaluation sheets, “Be patient. Mother died.”

Alan Parker also draws subtle comparisons between Madonna’s life and that of Eva Perón in one of the last scenes in the film. Of all the transformations that Madonna makes in the movie to become Evita, the most touching and believable is in the deathbed scene, when the dying first lady of Argentina refuses to believe, or refuses to admit to her husband, that at thirty-three years old her body has failed her. The torment and the anguish that Madonna projects as a dying Evita, the tears and the willful denial that she is, indeed, loosing the battle to inoperable ovarian cancer, is one of the few times where the actress reaches deep within herself to become the character, rather than relying on mere physical resemblance to Eva Perón. It is a remarkable on-screen moment as Madonna conjures up memories and feelings and puts herself into her mother’s skin as she loses the battle at thirty-one to cancer. Once again, the reality for both dying women was quite different.

In Parker’s
Evita
, a grief-stricken Juan Perón, played by Jonathan Pryce, finally blurts out what both he and his wife have avoided putting into words: “You’re dying, Evita.” In the film, Juan Perón’s devotion to his wife during the last weeks of her life is heart-wrenching. The real Juan Perón, however, found it repulsive to enter his wife’s room as he equated the odors and sounds that surrounded her with impending death, which he found intolerable and revolting to his senses. When Madonna went to Buenos Aires to research Evita’s life, she also learned that Perón actually forbid the doctors to give her painkillers. Always the politician, he was thinking ahead and didn’t want to ruin the quality of Evita’s skin when she would be on display in the capitol’s rotunda.

For many years after her mother’s death, Madonna was under the impression that her father uttered similar words, forcing his wife to face that she was dying. When Madonna’s mother was on her deathbed at Mercy Hospital in Bay City and had a sudden craving for a hamburger, her husband and mother imagined a miracle or at least a temporary respite from the cancer. According to what Elsie Fortin told people at the time, it was her daughter who dashed any hope the family might have had when she sat straight up in her bed and said quite matter-of-factly, “I’m dying, and I want to see my children for the last time.”

In August 1989, when Madonna turned thirty-one, the age of her mother when she died, it was a turning point in her life and in her career. While others might have had a sudden awareness that they had arrived at the same age as their deceased parent, Madonna had a different awareness. For her, the natural course of life was out of sync. She found herself suddenly too old to be her mother’s daughter and her mother forever too young to be the grandmother to the children the singer hoped to have someday. That was the year that she dedicated her album
Like a Prayer
to her mother with the words, “This album is for my mother who taught me how to pray.” The songs are more autobiographical than ever before and are considered by many to be her best. Coproduced and cowritten by Madonna with Patrick Leonard, Stephen Bray, and Prince,
Like a Prayer
not only addresses such issues as love, loss, death of a parent, and rebellion, but is also one of the best examples of Madonna’s musical ability to maintain a consistent tone and dance beat while experimenting with different style tunes and sophisticated piano ballads. There is something for everyone in that album, and as she has said, she “offers up an image that can be either misconstrued or embraced by all sides of the religious, political, or social spectrum.” In fact,
Like a Prayer
could have been written in response to a questionnaire sent out by Madonna to a cross-section of teenage girls and women. Not only did Madonna insert her own anguish into the lyrics, but each subject of every song is instantly recognizable to her public as all the cuts touch on emotional dilemmas and traumas to which everyone could relate, even if they have not had the same experiences. Rather than just changing her image, Madonna sings each song with different intonations and expressions. In “Oh Father,” there is a tear in her voice when she confesses to her father how she had felt unloved as a child after her mother’s death. In “Keep It Together,” she sings about the importance of family, while “Cherish,” an optimistic fifties love song, and “Till Death Do Us Part” tell the story of her failed marriage to Sean Penn. The most touching song, however, is “Promise to Try.”

Madonna is realistic enough to realize the tendency to give someone who is gone attributes he or she never possessed. “I have to be careful sometimes,” Madonna has said, “because when someone dies and the years go by, you tend to make them into something they’re not.” “Promise to Try” is both a moving homage to her mother as well as a plea that she makes to herself to stop grieving. It is about letting go, about Madonna yearning to have a mother and, at the same time, forcing herself to accept that she is gone forever, about Madonna’s struggle between the reality and the fantasy of her memories.

“Don’t let memory play games with your mind / she’s a faded smile frozen in time,” she sings.

Madonna admits that she often talks to her mother even if she will never know if she hears her or not. According to the star, she tells her things that a “girl can only say to her mother. Private things.”

From that point in her professional life, Madonna transformed the stage into her private confessional. Through her music, she has not only come to terms with her own demons but has also created an unusual intimacy with her fans.

Christmas 1963 was a season
for mourning for the Fortin and Ciccone families. During those first few weeks after Madonna died, Elsie Fortin was inconsolable. It was inconceivable to her that God had taken her vibrant daughter at a time when her six small children needed her so much. Ten years earlier, Elsie had buried her son Gary, who also died of cancer. With every ounce of strength that she had left, Mrs. Fortin prayed that she would not lose the faith that had sustained her throughout her life. It was a difficult task, and on many occasions, she confessed to her priest that she was not certain she would resist. Her faith would be tested yet again, when almost three years to the day after her daughter died, her oldest son, Dale, who had introduced Madonna and Tony at his Texas wedding, would die of cancer as well. These three of Elsie Fortin’s children are all buried at the Calvary Cemetery in Bay City.

In 1968, when Rose Kennedy buried her fourth child, Robert Kennedy, people around Bay City began comparing Elsie Fortin to the matriarch of the Kennedy clan.

After her mother died, Madonna’s
close relationship with her grandmother was based on her obsession to know everything about her mother. Elsie Fortin recalls how she and her granddaughter would spend hours together with Madonna posing countless questions. “I would try and answer them as best I could,” Mrs. Fortin said. “The last thing I wanted was to give my granddaughter the slightest misinformation or wrong impression about my daughter.” Though it was extremely painful to constantly conjure up images of her late daughter, it did make the child she had lost seem always present. “Madonna has her mother’s mouth and nose,” Mrs. Fortin maintains, “and her mother’s smile, her mother’s bone structure, petite and delicate. She also moves the way her mother did, and as she matures, her facial expressions become so much like her mother’s that it’s like a part of my daughter is always with me.” Elsie Fortin also insists that Madonna’s musical talent comes from her mother: “My daughter loved to sing and dance, and I can still see the two of them dancing and singing along with records or the radio. Whenever little Madonna did something on her own, her mother would applaud and encourage her to continue.”

According to Elsie Fortin, her daughter imparted a sense of unconditional love to all her children, but especially to her oldest girl and namesake, with whom she was the closest. “There were times when I would tell her that she was too involved with Madonna,” Mrs. Fortin insists, “because I felt the other kids were excluded.” If Madonna was indeed the favorite child, her mother was nonetheless patient and nurturing to all the children. Rather than disciplining them when they misbehaved, she would hug and kiss them. “She once told me that she felt she had so little time with them as kids,” Elsie Fortin claims, “that she didn’t want to waste one minute being angry or seeing her kids cry.”

Throughout the years, Madonna has said that her mother’s death gave her the impetus to succeed in life. Melanie Klein, the eminent child psychologist, believed that the quality of love and care that a child gets from her mother rather than her father during the first crucial five and a half years of life molds her character and her sense of self-worth. Klein’s theory of the “good breast” and “bad breast” describes how a mother can treat each of her own children differently, nurturing one while ignoring or deprecating another, and how the child who was given the “good breast” naturally has a much more highly developed sense of self-confidence.

Not all motherless or cherished children go on to great success in life. An actress who worked with Madonna on
The Next Best Thing
is less generous when she quotes Somerset Maugham: “Madonna is in the ‘front rank of the second-rate.’ Her mother may have given her the confidence that contributes to star quality, but she certainly didn’t give her that other important ingredient—talent!”

Obviously, talent, discipline, luck, and timing count as much as or more than parental love. But Madonna had something else. After her mother died, she responded by taking charge of her own destiny. Later on, she became her own stage mother, the parent she had never had who pushed her to achieve in ways that her mother might never have done. If her mother had lived, perhaps Madonna would have become complacent rather than ambitious.

I
n her book
The Psycho-Analysis of Children
, Melanie Klein writes that “the importance which the girl’s mother image has for her as a ‘helping’ figure and the strength of her attachment to her mother are very great. . . . She needs good things to protect her against the bad ones and to establish a certain equilibrium inside her. In her fantasy her mother’s body is therefore a kind of storehouse which contains the means of satisfying all her desires and of allaying all her fears.”

Klein also writes of the importance for a child to develop another figure in his life in addition to his parents to give support against the outside world. “Other persons,” Klein says, “such as a kindly nurse or brother or sister or grandparent or an aunt or uncle can, in certain circumstances, take over the role of the ‘good mother’ or the ‘good father.’”

As Madonna approached puberty, the scars that remained from the loss of her mother manifested themselves in ways that confused her and made her feel guilty. Claude Delay Tubiana is a prominent French psychiatrist who is an expert in the field of the sexual development in children and the author of
Chanel Solitaire
, an intimate portrait of Coco Chanel. Dr. Tubiana was an intimate friend of the famous designer and recounts the secret heartache, traumas, and tragedies that she encountered throughout her life and that she overcame to become a star in the world of Parisian haute couture. Not unlike Madonna, Coco Chanel had many influential lovers who helped her achieve her enormous success, and she also had a difficult childhood. As a psychiatrist and writer, Dr. Tubiana draws certain similarities between the two women. “A young girl’s relationship to her mother,” Dr. Tubiana explains, “is never exclusive and is bound up with Oedipus impulses. Her anxiety and sense of guilt in relation to her mother also affect the course of those Oedipus impulses. If a girl is frightened of her mother or, in the case of Madonna, loses her mother before the age of thirteen, she is deprived of something very basic as it concerns her attachment to her father, something is fundamentally affected by the quality and the length of time she is attached to her mother. In Madonna’s case, the normal course of development was interrupted prematurely, which not only played havoc with her natural oedipal instincts but also her eventual sexual development.”

Under ordinary circumstances, a young girl’s healthy oedipal relationship with her father grows out of a powerful and drawn-out connection to her mother. In Madonna’s case, that relationship ended prematurely when her mother died. As Madonna got older, she was aware that her father had suddenly adopted a more careful and measured response to her seductive ploys and feminine wiles. The behavior that Tony had once thought adorable when Madonna was a toddler and a little girl he suddenly considered inappropriate. On more than one occasion, when his oldest daughter crawled on his lap or wandered into his bed in the middle of the night, he was embarrassed and uncomfortable. As a result, he became stricter, cooler, and more distant with Madonna than with the other girls.