Goddess: Inside Madonna (14 page)

If Keshishian had made a video of the behind-the-scenes preparation of any one of Ms. Ciccone’s movies, the arrogance and self-indulgence that she displayed in
Truth or Dare
would be glaringly absent. Instead, her public would get a chance to see a humble Madonna who was always on time, cooperative, hardworking, and generous.

Underneath the brash facade and
often arrogant demeanor still lurks the motherless child, unsure of her place in the family and no longer the recipient of unconditional parental love.

After her mother’s death, Madonna went through a period during which she felt invisible. She had the impression that people couldn’t see her, that she had ceased to exist, since the one person who had given her unlimited attention was gone. One of the most difficult realities for her to accept was that her mother, the most important person in her life, would never know her after the age of five. That loss remains the motivating force for her ambition, her need to prove that she exists through the attention and accolades and even negative criticism that she receives from her public. If Madonna has anything in common with Eva Perón, it’s not that each lost a parent at a young age, but rather that each woman, notwithstanding her many accomplishments, had an insatiable craving to achieve stardom or be acknowledged in every area of life. Despite the millions that Madonna has made and the millions of people Evita seduced, even after her death, each longed to be recognized as a serious actress. Yet, while the two women are similar in their need to be noticed and appreciated, there are also very different in how they captured the attention of their adoring public. Evita’s public was entranced by the drama that the first lady projected. Her every speech and appearance was tantamount to an ongoing film, a welcome diversion to the reality of the dreary lives that the Argentine people endured. They knew who Eva Duarte was before she became Mrs. Juan Perón and were aware that her new incarnation as a grande dame was nothing less than a brilliant performance. Politics in the Perón era was theater, with plots and subplots that provided entertainment and at the same time made the people participants in their own destiny. Though the majority knew that Evita’s life story had been fabricated and exaggerated, they didn’t care. Madonna’s public, on the other hand, needs to believe that she is opening up her soul to them, that they are privy to her innermost secrets. If Madonna could act, she wouldn’t be Madonna. If her fans didn’t believe that all her lyrics were based on personal experiences and that every plot of each video was autobiographical, they would regard her as just another performer. In both cases, the public created the myths of Madonna and of Evita based on what they needed to be entertained. Living vicariously through movie stars and politicians was the only way that people could bear the horrendous poverty that was part of everyday life in Argentina in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the United States, from the 1980s until now, voyeurism, confessional television, the breaking down of the barriers of our celebrities’ private lives, unauthorized biographies, intimate details of the sexual behavior of our politicians, are the best ways to capture the public’s attention. The need to know in America as opposed to the need to believe in Argentina accounts for the differences between what Evita and Madonna each gave to her audience to achieve stardom.

Elsie Fortin remembers Madonna as
a “very pretty and very independent little girl,” and that “she craved attention and she usually got it. She was so appealing and so determined that it was hard not to give in to her.”

Other relatives from Bay City remember a photogenic little girl who liked to be taken to the Bay City State Park and Tony’s Amusement Park, where she dared to go on the most dangerous rides, but only if her relatives promised to “watch.” According to her uncle Earl, she was a “born performer” and instinctively played “to the crowd.” According to another uncle, she “came to life” in a crowded elevator or on a bus when she knew strangers were listening to her conversation. “That’s when the lights went on,” the uncle says, “and she suddenly got adorable, asking all these precocious questions that everyone would laugh at or compliment her on how bright she was.” Madonna came out of her difficult childhood with a mania for organization and detail. Her obsession with her mother’s death and that she could do nothing to prevent it accounts for her need to control every aspect of her career.

Don Davis, who played a coach in Penny Marshall’s film
A League of Their Own
, remembers how impressed he was by Madonna’s work ethic when she showed up on the set with her own personal baseball coach. “She worked harder than anyone else,” Davis says, “until she understood the game and learned how to hit. She absolutely immersed herself in her role.” During the filming, Madonna met Rosie O’Donnell, the actress and talk-show host, who also had a supporting role in the movie. The two women became immediate friends. At the time, rumors were that the basis of their closeness was sexual. The truth is that when Madonna discovered that O’Donnell had lost her own mother to breast cancer when she was ten, an instant and deep empathy developed between them. “When you lose a parent so young,” O’Donnell says, “you become literally starved for memories. Madonna and I talked about our mothers all the time, and it helped a lot. It makes us both feel that our mothers were still with us, and Madonna and I shared that.”

G
iven the lifelong obsession she has had with her mother, it is not surprising that Madonna’s ideal woman became forever captured in the typical American housewife of the 1950s that her mother personified. While her mother’s sense of fulfillment was founded in her relationship with her husband and God, both of which typified the 1950s woman, Madonna added another dimension, a harder edge that was more sexual than flirtatious.

Throughout her career, during each of her incarnations, from the “material girl” to Marilyn, from Dita the Dominatrix to the Russian peasant with the gold-capped front tooth, to a variety of her on-screen and onstage roles where she has been everything from a missionary
(Shanghai Surprise)
to a woman who uses her body as a lethal weapon
(Body of Evidence)
, from a spunky, low-class, heart-of-gold baseball player
(League of Their Own)
to a mousy secretary in David Mamet’s
Speed-the-Plow
, from a gun moll in
Dick Tracy
to
Evita
, and finally to Madonna’s current real-life mutation as the first nursing mother to turn the breast pump into a fashion accessory, sex is the most blatant component of her images. More than just to shock, Madonna has addressed the issue of female sexuality, a subject that somehow got lost in the shuffle when women were fighting for other areas of equal rights.

If Madonna has made any major contribution to feminism, she has given voice to those women who have been ignored and excluded by the mainstream movement. She is the patron saint of the trailer-park feminist. By validating those women who are dissatisfied with who they are, how they live, and with whom, women who are not struggling for professional or academic equality, but rather just trying to live without brutality and harassment, women in trailer parks, tract houses, bungalows, and subsidized apartments, women who frequent malls, dress in Kmart fashions, or who follow recipes on the back of cereal boxes, Madonna has paid homage to her mother by immortalizing the typical 1950s American housewife.

Pat McPherson is a feminist writer who cowrote a paper along with Michelle Fine, a professor of women’s studies at City University of New York (CUNY), entitled “Hungry for an Us: Adolescent Girls and Adult Women Negotiating Territories of Race, Gender, Class, and Difference.” McPherson’s main area of expertise is the critical analysis of heterosexuality in the movies, and she is currently at work on a book that covers the subject from the 1930s until today. According to her, Madonna offers the homebound housewife an outlet to stretch her imagination and feel empowered. “I have always assumed,” McPherson says, “that white women are Madonna’s major audience, women who have come of age, who are not career women but mostly blue- or pink-collar, working middle-class women. Madonna proved that she could reach those women who were excluded by academic feminists, and in fact, when Madonna reached the apex of her popularity, it was at a time when academic feminism was at its most vocal and strongest. She offered another way to be a feminist for those women who came from blue-collar homes, who were neither intellectuals nor interested in abstract theories.”

A friend and neighbor of
Madonna Fortin Ciccone’s remembers that the young wife and mother “always put on makeup and combed her hair before Tony came home.” She says, “Sometimes I’d watch the kids so Madonna could pull herself together for him. It was a ritual. She was the picture-perfect wife, waiting at the door, surrounded by her kids, who were bathed and clean for their good-night kiss with their dad. She never had any problem about making the transition from mother to wife. She used to tell me that when she went to bed, she always wore a sexy nightgown and would never let her husband see her with pin curls in her hair like the rest of us.” She pauses. “Maybe that’s why Madonna and Tony had a great sex life, at least that’s what she told me.”

Elsie Fortin confirms that her daughter and son-in-law had a wonderful marriage. “They were always very warm and loving in front of the children,” she says. “My son-in-law was proud of the way my daughter looked and kept the house and children. He never expected that she would go out and earn a living.”

Another woman who knew the Ciccones and still lives in Pontiac, in the same neighborhood where Madonna and Tony Ciccone lived, remembers that Madonna was “hooked” on magazines that offered the average housewife advice on how to be more attractive, sexy, and seductive for her mate. “It was like we lived on another planet back then,” she says, “when women weren’t afraid to be subservient to their men and lived just to please them. I remember one article that Madonna and I read together about how to tell if your husband was having an affair. Madonna said that even without reading it, she knew that Tony would never stray. When I asked her how she could be so sure, she told me that she knew how to be a lady in the living room and a whore in the bedroom.”

Several people who knew Madonna
when she was preparing for her role in
Desperately Seeking Susan
remember how she watched reruns of situation comedies from the 1950s. “She studied them for hours,” one old friend claims, “looking for something she could take and make her own, a gesture, a style of clothes, an expression. It was not so much her character that she needed to understand but rather Roberta, the part that Rosanna Arquette played, which was actually her alter ego.”

In
Desperately Seeking Susan
, Rosanna Arquette portrayed an unfulfilled and frustrated housewife who looks for ways to escape from her humdrum life. Another movie that addressed a similar subject was Frank Perry’s 1970 film,
Diary of a Mad Housewife
, starring Carrie Snodgress. Perry’s film portrays a bored housewife, married to an insufferable social-climbing husband, who takes a lover only to find that her marital problems are not solved. Susan Seidelman, the director of
Desperately Seeking Susan
, created a more complicated, almost Shakespearean scenario that connected the two main female characters on a much deeper level. Rather than simply taking a lover, Arquette’s character lives vicariously through Susan, the young street urchin that Madonna portrays. The emotions of the relationship between Arquette and Madonna in the film surpass those of the eventual affair between Arquette and the man she takes as her lover, played by Aidan Quinn. Madonna is perceived as a savior of the trapped middle-class wife. She not only offers her permission to be a little less conventional as a heterosexual but also offers the possibility to be a little bisexual as well.

Watching the reruns of the 1950s situation comedies, Madonna realized that every female character fell into two distinct categories. She was either idealized as the comic side of the typical housewife, as in
I Love Lucy
, or as the wholesome side, as in
Father Knows Best
or
Leave It to Beaver
. What was missing was the erotic potential that these women possessed. In
Desperately Seeking Susan
, the combination of a subtle script and Madonna’s clever interpretation of the role sent out the message that women can act out their fantasies without necessarily changing or jeopardizing their social situation. This theme would appear in her music and videos and would turn Madonna into a symbol of hope for the typical homebound woman. Another friend who knew Madonna when she was researching the role says, “Eventually, Rosanna’s character became what Madonna’s mother might have been if she had lived. It sounds bizarre, but it was something Madonna hit upon when she was making the movie and it just stayed with her.”

For Madonna, a liberated woman has power without sacrificing her femininity and has sexual pleasure without paying a price. She has made a concerted effort, in her music and videos, to dispel the myth that, for women, sex is synonymous with love. “The biggest mistake that the feminists made,” Madonna has said, “was that they felt they had to dress like men and behave like men to get anywhere. They were convinced that in order to be respected and be in control they had to act like men. Women always had the power, they just never understood that you can be just as powerful being feminine.” Madonna has also said that she prefers men who are “in touch with their feminine side.” “They are the strongest men,” she has stated, “in the same way that my father was in love with my mother and desired her but wasn’t afraid to show his emotions. He didn’t consider it a weakness to be sensitive to my mother’s needs.”

The video “Express Yourself” is another example of Madonna’s belief that feminism is nothing more than freedom of choice for women. In the video, Madonna is seen chained to a bed, a scene that provoked criticism by Andrea Dworkin, one of the most vocal and militant antipornography feminists. In response, Madonna claimed that she was not only in full artistic control but also paid out of her own pocket to produce the video. The atmosphere in the video is surrealistic, inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1926 film,
Metropolis
. It tells the story of a lonely sophisticated woman who, despite her money and success, is not happy. In one sequence in a parody of female domination, she imagines herself as a queen who reigns over fifty men who work in abysmal conditions. If there is any message to be sent about deplorable working conditions for the lower class or women’s liberation at the expense of men, Madonna ignores it and, instead, inserts a sexual slant. The female character in “Express Yourself” invites one of her blue-collar employees to her penthouse. As the pair begin romping around her satin sheets, there are fleeting images of S&M with Madonna wearing a black rubber dress. Coproduced by Steven Bray, who also cowrote the song with Madonna, the video sends out the message that nothing can ever go wrong during an S&M romp if the participants are in total control. “I think the world would be a better place,” Madonna has said, “if people just let go of their inhibitions.”