Goddess: Inside Madonna (18 page)

Martin, the second-oldest child, escaped into alcohol, as did Joan’s own son, Mario, who had a moderate success as a male model for a while. He was an American version of a Fabio cover boy with his long blond hair, blue eyes, and muscles. His brushes with the law, and his use of cocaine, which also ravaged his looks, raised questions about Joan as the superior Ciccone mother. Melanie, the youngest of Madonna and Tony’s children, was the best adjusted. Only five when her father remarried, Melanie accepted Joan as her mother more readily than the others. The relationship between Melanie and Madonna was also close as the little girl brought out Madonna’s maternal instinct. The physical resemblance between the two sisters is startling, although Melanie is more delicate and fine-featured, the less glamorous and more pious version of their mother. Madonna was matron of honor when her sister married exactly ten years after Madonna married Sean Penn. When the couple decided to move from Michigan to California, Madonna got Melanie a job in the publicity department at Warner Brothers Records. At thirty-eight, Melanie Ciccone Henry is still married to the same man and lives in Los Angeles. She was the only sister who was invited to Madonna’s wedding in Scotland to Guy Ritchie.

Madonna has always had a special relationship with her younger brother Christopher. When they were little, she often protected him from his older siblings or schoolmates, who teased him because he wasn’t interested in sports or in girls. In fact, Chris’s artistic nature is the basis for the close relationship, both professionally and personally, that still exists between them today. For a time in the 1970s, Chris was one of Madonna’s backup dancers when she started performing club dates in New York. “I stopped,” Christopher Ciccone explains, “when she started touring.” Their collaboration took on a different form when Chris designed and decorated Madonna’s houses, including her Central Park West apartment in New York. He has also directed music videos for Tony Bennett and Dolly Parton, among others, and is perhaps best known for designing and directing his sister’s Girlie Show and Blond Ambition tours.

At forty years old, Chris Ciccone is a successful designer and decorator and, until recently, owned a trendy gourmet French/Chinese restaurant in New York. In the spring of 2000, the restaurant burned down. Recently, he launched a line of furniture for the upscale firm of Bernhardt that, in his description, is “simple and classic.” He is also trying to interest Hollywood in an original screenplay about a female bullfighter. He envisages Penélope Cruz and Sigourney Weaver in the lead roles.

When Madonna was little, she always sensed that Joan wasn’t interested in understanding her. She felt that though Joan always attended to her physical needs, there was never any thought to her inner problems. Joan’s simplistic approach to child-rearing frustrated and depressed Madonna. According to a former neighbor and friend of Madonna Fortin Ciccone’s, she once visited the family in Rochester Hills and remembers that Joan made several subtle comparisons between her prowess as a mother and that of her predecessor. “She said something like, ‘God knows how these kids would have grown up if I wasn’t their mother. At least I’m organized and have my feet on the ground so they get a good dose of reality.’” The former neighbor admits that Joan was left on her own a great deal, especially when the children got older and their father worked longer hours. “When she needed him the most,” she continues, “Tony not only had more responsibility at work, but the commute from the office was long. Often, he got home after the kids were already in bed. She really raised those kids as a single parent, which is kind of ironic.”

Tony was completely involved when it came to the children’s schoolwork. He expected good grades and would reward them with a quarter and later fifty cents for every A on a report card. Madonna usually collected the most money, which was yet another source of contention between her and her siblings. They resented her not so much because she had surpassed them at school, but because they were convinced that she was their father’s favorite. In response, Tony Ciccone always insisted that Madonna got straight A’s because she has an IQ of over 140 and not to gain his affection. “I should know how I felt,” Madonna argues, “and I know I would have done anything to be his favorite.”

The truth was that while Tony was pleased with her work at school, he was extremely displeased with her relationship with his wife: “The good grades didn’t make me feel any better about their constant fighting.” In fact, Tony maintains that because of all the trouble she caused, Madonna was far from being his favorite child: “Actually, when the kids were small, Madonna gave me more trouble than the others. Years later, after Madonna became ‘Madonna,’ I continued to be equally interested in all my children’s careers, problems, and progress and probably was closer to the others because I saw them more often.”

Joan and Tony insisted that they never had any report that the children were discipline problems in school. When it came to their behavior, they were never rewarded for being good but were punished for being bad, although Tony and Joan did not have the same concept of how to punish them. “There was never any difference between my sons and daughters. I knew the boys would grow up, get a job, and support a family,” Tony Ciccone explains. “If anything, I was more apt to encourage my daughters to think about having a profession, and I was prepared to offer them the same advantages of college and training as their brothers, but with the understanding that there would be the same consequences for them if they didn’t obey or do well in school.”

On more than one occasion, when the future rock star answered back or was stubborn, she was not spared Joan’s temper. On the way to church, when Madonna voiced her usual complaint about having to wear the same dress as her sisters, Joan hauled off and slapped her. When her nose bled all over the dress, Joan was forced to turn the car around and go home. Ironically, Madonna’s main complaint was not that she was treated more harshly than her sisters, but that there was a double standard in the house in favor of the boys. From the time she was old enough to express herself, she was a “freethinker” in a home and in a church where doctrine was the law. The unspoken understanding was that girls had to be protected and restricted more than boys, because girls could get pregnant. By the time she was ten years old, Madonna already had her period. According to a classmate, she would come to school once a month with a bulky plastic package filled with sanitary napkins. One of the teachers in Madonna’s elementary school remembers how embarrassed the little girl was when she was unprepared for her period, which had arrived several days early. When the teacher dismissed the class for recess, Madonna remained in her seat. Approaching her desk, the teacher asked if she wasn’t feeling well. “I remember how she just looked at me with those big, beautiful, blue eyes filled with tears.” The teacher smiles slightly. “I understood immediately that there was a problem, and she was terribly embarrassed. We wrapped my sweater around her, and somehow we made it to the teachers’ lounge, where I gave her what she needed. She was absolutely mortified, and I remember thinking that this was a child in a woman’s body.”

The same year that she got her period, Madonna also started getting interested in the opposite sex. Her favorite game was chasing the boys after school in the playground. While her brothers were allowed to roughhouse without being accused of breaking the rules of the Catholic Church, Madonna was expected to “play” like a lady. The reaction of the nuns and her father was the same. They all told Madonna that good Catholic girls didn’t behave like that. On her own, Madonna decided that confessing her sins to a priest as an intermediary instead of going directly to God made as little sense as not being allowed to wear jeans to church. When Madonna would ask her father why she couldn’t love God as much wearing pants, for example, or why she couldn’t play the same games as her brothers, he always had a stock reply: “Because I said so.”

Sister Mary Connolly taught Madonna at St. Andrew’s parochial school in Rochester Hills. One of her strongest recollections is that Madonna was always concerned about her father’s reaction to bad reports about her. “She was always terrified that her father would find out that she had misbehaved. But it wasn’t so much that she was afraid of him as she was upset that he would be disappointed in her or think less of her.”

According to a close friend of the family’s, Tony Ciccone had “little time to deal with a rebel within the ranks of eight children and a new wife.” One of the most telling comments that Madonna has made about her relationship with her father was when she said, “As a child, sometimes I wondered who I was worshiping, God or my father.” This conflict would appear and reappear in her songs and videos. One of her teachers in junior high school, the first secular school she attended, said, “The thing that made it hard for Madonna, as for any girl who comes from a strict Catholic family, is that she is brought up to keep a lid on everything sexual and emotional. So where’s all this energy going to go? In Madonna’s case, it came out in her work.”

I
n 1968 when Madonna was ten years old, Joan gave birth to a daughter, Jennifer, followed by a son, Mario, who was born in 1969. “Things just kept getting worse,” Madonna explains. “For the three years after my mother died, my father was alone, and I clung to him. It was like now you’re mine and you’re not going anywhere. Like all young girls, I was in love with my father and I didn’t want to lose him. At first, right after he got remarried and I stopped being the mother or the woman of the house, it was bad enough. But when Joan had her own children, that’s when I really made up my mind that no one was going to break my heart again. I was determined to stand on my own and be my own person and not belong to anyone.”

The age difference between Jennifer and Madonna made it difficult for the two to be close as children, although several family friends claim that Jennifer is similar in character to Madonna. She is a perfectionist, a tireless worker, and very much her own person. Of all the Ciccone sisters, Jennifer, because of her age and her personality, has never resented Madonna’s fame. Given the absence of conflict, it is a mystery why Jennifer wasn’t invited to Madonna’s wedding to Guy Ritchie. “Martin was in rehab,” one friend concludes, “so he couldn’t come, and there was no love lost between Anthony and Paula and Madonna, but Jennifer? Why she wasn’t invited or didn’t show, that’s a mystery!”

Anthony, the oldest Ciccone child, is currently forty-four years old and has been struggling to become an actor and a dancer. Named after his father and the one who looks most like him, Anthony was the son that his father could depend on to behave after his mother died, and he lived with a succession of relatives. Along with Madonna, Anthony was also expected to watch the others when a housekeeper was late or didn’t show up. According to another family friend, Anthony functioned as a “child in an adult’s skin.” The same friend explains, “Tony always considered Anthony as his ‘little man,’ and that’s what he’d call him. So right from the beginning, the kid never had an adult he could go to with his own problems. He kept everything inside and tried real hard to be the grown-up and take care of the other kids.”

As a boy, Martin, who is only eighteen months younger than Anthony, was close to him, although their relationship became strained during high school when Martin was heavily involved with alcohol. He was married at eighteen and then divorced, and his first child and the Ciccones’ first grandchild, a daughter named Adrien, is currently a student at Cornell University. Throughout the years, Madonna has always considered Martin the “loose cannon” of the group and has made no secret that she disapproves of his lack of discipline and his disloyalty. For long periods of time she has refused to speak to him because she has suspected that he has leaked stories about her to the press.

Shortly after Joan’s second child
was born in 1969, she decided, with Tony’s encouragement, to adopt his six children. It would be the most heart-wrenching moment for Madonna since the death of her mother, as well as for Elsie Fortin, who took it as the final separation between her daughter and her daughter’s children. Not surprisingly, the only child to whom Elsie expressed those feelings was Madonna. Years later, Elsie Fortin would say that had Joan and Tony Ciccone waited until the children were older to proceed with the adoption, she wasn’t convinced that all six would have given their consent.

Tony Ciccone felt that the decision to allow Joan to adopt the children was natural and expected. “Joan was a wonderful mother and felt absolutely no difference between my kids and our kids. It just seemed like the most logical culmination to the whole process of our marriage.”

According to Joan, adopting the children was not done when there was “an ex-wife somewhere competing for the kids’ affections . . . it wasn’t a question of custody or divorce. This was simply a matter of the heart. I felt like their mother, and I wanted to believe they felt that I was their mother, so why not make it legal?”

As a close friend of Joan’s explained it, “It wasn’t so much a legal thing as it was symbolic for Joan that she was the one and only Mrs. Ciccone, and the kids were hers. She didn’t want any history or baggage to interfere with her place as the woman of the house. That was the most important thing for her.”

When Anthony was thirteen, Martin, twelve, Madonna, eleven, Paula, ten, Christopher, nine, and Melanie, seven, the Ciccone family appeared in court to make the adoption official. Joan carried the infant, Mario, who was six months old, while Tony held Jennifer, who was not yet two. Anthony held tightly to Melanie’s hand, while Martin, with an expression on his face that would eventually become his characteristic sulk, stood awkwardly next to Paula. Madonna and Christopher lingered behind the others. Anyone who observed the family that day as they stood in the courtroom might have noticed that the two younger children, both fair like their mother, were the only ones who seemed happy. The others all looked like lost waifs.