Goddess: Inside Madonna (17 page)

Immediately after becoming Mrs. Ciccone
, Joan, who is both compulsively organized and hopelessly scattered, decided that it would take a “will of iron” to control the children. Whatever her method, it was not an enviable task for anyone, and especially not for a twenty-three-year-old. To compensate for her age and that she was small and looked so young, Joan ran the household like an army drill sergeant, a style that did nothing to ingratiate her in the hearts of her stepchildren. She assigned chores to each child according to his or her age and abilities. Madonna, the oldest girl, was automatically expected to help her new stepmother care for the younger children. “I think I resented it more after my mother died,” Madonna has said, “since I felt that all my adolescence was spent taking care of babies, changing diapers and baby-sitting when all my friends were out playing. I think that’s when I really thought about getting away from all that.”

According to several neighborhood people who knew the family during those years and whose children went to school with the Ciccone children, Joan was a “nightmare of accusation,” someone who collected lists of grievances and injustices when it came to her stepchildren that she would pull out and exact payment for at any moment. One woman recalls that her attitude toward Madonna was especially harsh. “I used to watch Joan bringing the children to school, and sometimes we carpooled together with the other mothers in the neighborhood. There were times when I actually felt sorry for Madonna, because Joan would systematically make her sit in the back of the car, or she would buy treats for all the kids and not give any to Madonna. There was always a reason, like Madonna had disobeyed or misbehaved or sassed her, but she was the one who was always being punished.”

Madonna would never show how she felt even if she had been unfairly accused or picked on. Instead, she would stare arrogantly at Joan as if to challenge her for more. The relationship between the two became a test of wills, which almost always ended with Madonna as the winner. “Joan would go absolutely nuts,” the same friend recalls. “The more she kept piling it on, the more Madonna just refused to snap. It was really terrible, and after a while I began to feel sorry for Joan because she looked like an idiot in front of a child, the way she would reel out of control. Madonna was obviously stronger and more stubborn.”

Despite all the trouble that Madonna gave her, Joan does not hide her admiration for the child who became the most successful. When Joan Ciccone offers a tour of the vineyard, the first stop is her living room, where she guides her guest to the baby grand piano that sits in the middle of the floor. It is covered with an array of family photographs. The most prominent are of Madonna: Madonna and Lourdes, Madonna and Carlos Leon, the father of Lourdes, Madonna with Joan, Madonna with Sean Penn, Madonna with Warren Beatty, Madonna with the entire family, Lourdes on her own. During that same interview at the Ciccone vineyard, Joan is admittedly thrilled to visit Madonna in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, or London, where she and her husband stay at one of the singer’s lavish homes. Joan, however, like Tony, categorically denies that they ever accepted any expensive gifts or borrowed money to buy the vineyard. In fact, when Tony and Joan went to London for Madonna’s wedding to Guy Ritchie, they decided to visit a château in the Bordeaux region of France before going back to Michigan. Reservations were arranged and made by the Starr Travel Agency in Montreal. When asked if he wanted a deluxe or superior room, both of which came to under $100 per night, Tony opted for the cheaper accommodations.

Whatever Joan’s failings as a stepmother, Tony appreciated that he had a partner who took over all the physical responsibilities of the home. Despite his determination to distance himself from his cultural roots, his attitude toward his wife and daughters was that of a typical Italian Catholic male. Not only did he expect his wife to care for him, but he also expected his daughters to wait on him as well. “It was a little bit like he was the king in the house,” Madonna has said.

When it came to his sons, he didn’t tolerate laziness and tried to instill in them the same work ethic he had learned from his own father. He expected them to do the “heavy work” around the house and yard. He made no distinction between his children as it concerned their ability to “express themselves properly” and insisted that they not only use good grammar but also make sure that when they offered an opinion, they knew what they were talking about. He had no patience for “I think” or “I’m not sure” and would consistently send a child from the dinner table to look up a word in the dictionary or check the meaning of something in the encyclopedia if he or she faltered during a discussion. One family friend recalls that Joan often had a difficult time following Tony’s example. When the kids got older, she would often be the target of their ridicule. “When their father wasn’t around,” the friend says, “they would purposely ask Joan to spell something, and she would inevitably spell it wrong. Later on, when Tony checked their homework and came across a misspelled word, they would tell him that Joan was the one who told them how to spell it. Naturally, all hell broke loose. Most of the time, Tony blamed the kids for not going directly to the dictionary, although there were occasions when he got mad at Joan.” Another friend maintains that Tony was not the ideal mate: “He had a short temper and would really lay into his kids verbally if they annoyed him. But he would also yell at Joan if she was sloppy or said something that he considered dumb.”

Another family friend and former
neighbor compares the two women who were Tony Ciccone’s wives. The friend claims that the differences between them reflect how Tony had changed over the years. When Tony and Madonna married, they were optimistic and inexperienced. Their relationship was based not only on building a life, moving to a new city, far from the Fortin family, and starting their own family, but also on their mutual discovery of sex. Each child was a source of enormous pleasure to them and proof of their love for one another.

Joan Ciccone obviously had a more difficult time. She had married a man whose view of life was no longer optimistic. He had deep scars that would never heal. Though he loved his children, he had even looked upon them as a burden during the three years he was forced to care for them alone. When he married Joan, he not only expected her to care for the children, but also to make up for all he had endured as a single parent. In a way, they had struck a deal. In return for the organization that she brought to the family, which allowed Tony to concentrate on his job, he would provide the upper-middle-class suburban life that she craved. During the years following the marriage, Tony advanced rapidly at General Motors, and Joan added a wing onto the house that eventually became her day-care center.

Joan learned quickly that Tony expected a drink waiting when he walked in the door, dinner on the table, and the kids quiet. According to one of the children, the television screen had to be wiped clean of dust or greasy fingerprints when he sat down to watch the nightly news, and “God help any one of us if we made any noise.” The Ciccone offspring recalls, “Joan had her hands full.” After the broadcast ended, he would question his children, the youngest first, to hear about their day. “Every evening,” a son recalls, “we were expected to tell him one thing we learned, either in school or at church.”

A daughter has the distinct memory of a home that was run with as much precision as the trains ran in Italy under Mussolini. “Everything happened on time, and there were no deviations. If we were late for dinner, Joan would take away the dessert. If we got one of our outfits dirty that we wore to church, we had to wear it like that the following week. There was a mutual love of order that they both had that went beyond any kind of affection or emotion, at least that’s the impression I had.” Another Ciccone child recalls with amusement that every Sunday after church, her father and Joan would retire to their bedroom, only to reappear about an hour later to have lunch with the family. “We assumed it was their once-a-week lovemaking session,” she says.

Madonna’s memory of her mother’s house was one of constant disorder with toys and clothes strewn everywhere, babies crying, and not much discipline. With six small children, the first Mrs. Ciccone spent less time worrying about order and more time running after her toddlers. While Joan’s conventional style was a direct affront to Madonna’s determination to be different, it was also proof that Joan had successfully replaced her stepdaughter’s role as surrogate mother. Joan Ciccone still recalls the moments when she literally wanted to run away, when Madonna and her siblings drove her to tears. Those were the times when she was comforted by her friends rather than by her husband. “Tony had too much on his mind,” she says. “The last thing he needed when he came home at night was my complaining about the children. Fortunately, I had very good girlfriends who had children about the same ages as mine. They would tell me that their own biological children were just as impossible, which made me feel that I wasn’t a total failure as a mother.”

As the only daughter growing up in a lower-middle-class, strict Lutheran home where there were few luxuries, little time for frivolity, and an unwavering work ethic, Joan had been given the same household chores and responsibilities that she eventually thrust upon her stepdaughter Madonna. That she was the most appealing and original of all the children, the one with the most talent and personality, made Madonna’s life more difficult. Even more unlucky for Madonna was that everyone constantly told Joan how Madonna was the “spitting image of her mother.”

Joan tried to get pregnant from the moment she and Tony married, and much to her disappointment, it took almost two years before she did. When she finally was expecting a child, the impending birth was a victory in more ways than one. Finally, she would be on an equal basis with her predecessor, the legitimate heir to the deceased queen.

M
adonna always felt she was a victim of her stepmother’s sense of Lutheran duty that made her such a meticulous and exacting parent. Her idea of being a good mother meant having strict rules about cleanliness, organization, a balanced diet, regular bowel movements, and bedtimes. Another friend who knew the Ciccone family well during the years that the children were growing up believes that Joan was basically a decent and responsible person. “Unfortunately,” he explains, “everything went by the book. She was a black-and-white person, which meant that if the kids behaved, they were happy. If they acted out, they were spoiled. There was never any room in Joan’s mind for them to have bad memories or traumas or psychological problems. As far as she was concerned, they had everything. She cooked, cleaned, sewed their clothes, and signed their report cards. They lived in a pretty house and had enough food. In her mind, they wanted for nothing.”

When Madonna approached adolescence, Joan decided it was time to tell her the facts of life. As usual, her style was matter-of-fact. She began the discussion without warning while she and Madonna were doing the dishes one evening. Madonna was less uncomfortable with the contents of the lecture than she was with Joan’s approach to the subject. There was no talk about love or foreplay, emotions or hormones, that would be the basis for more discussion about adolescent sex. The words she used could have been found in the directions that came with an Erector set, they were so devoid of any human feeling.

Joan’s sense of order when it came to dressing her brood was as direct and regimented as everything else she did. She bought bolts of fabric on sale at the local sewing store and, with her sewing machine, made the same dress for Madonna, Paula, and Melanie, and later on for Jennifer, her own daughter. Forced to wear exactly the same clothes as her siblings was perhaps more painful to Madonna than having to care for them. It didn’t help her budding sense of individuality that she was required to wear the drab Catholic school uniform every day. Determined to be different and despite the meager choice of clothes, she would rebel by wearing two different-colored socks and floppy bows in her hair. She would also wear red or green underwear and hang upside down on the jungle gym so everyone would notice. Later on in high school, when she briefly joined the cheerleading squad, Madonna would do cartwheels wearing either no underwear or transparent lace panties. Madonna’s refusal to look like the others challenged Joan’s imagination. Eventually, she came up with the idea of buying everything for the kids in red, white, and blue so that when Madonna asserted herself, at least everything would match.

Although Tony was not particularly adept at expressing emotions or handing out compliments, when it came to venting his anger, there were no double messages or hidden meanings. In contrast, Joan had a penchant for elusive patterns of address, which left all the children with a sense of frustration and impotence. Years after she had already become a star, Madonna once commented that all her siblings, in one way or another, were “basket cases” who had been demoralized by Joan’s litany of “You’re not living up to your potential” or “You’re doomed to be a failure.” Unlike the others, Madonna turned that daily criticism into a compulsion to be the best and to realize her every potential. She could bear anything as long as she knew that she was one day closer to escaping her home and family.

Paula, the sister closest in age to Madonna, was often the recipient of Joan’s remarks—for example, “I wish I had a pretty daughter.” Paula suffered the most under Joan’s constant harangue, basically because she always felt that she was less attractive, dynamic, and talented than her older sister. For all the years that they were growing up, Paula lived in Madonna’s shadow. Madonna was prettier. Madonna had bigger breasts. Madonna sang and danced better. Madonna made the cheerleading squad. Madonna got the good grades. As an adult, Paula lived in New York for a while and tried to become a model. Briefly represented by the Ferrari Agency, her hopes were eventually dashed when the agency dropped her because she was too short for runway work and not photogenic enough for print. As her sister became more and more successful, Paula became more disturbed. There was an ugly moment in a powder room in Malibu at the wedding of Madonna and Sean Penn when Paula stood at the sink and wept. “I was supposed to be the famous one,” she cried in the presence of two startled guests. “That was supposed to be me marrying a movie star, me making albums and starring in movies, me, not Madonna!”