Goddess: Inside Madonna (21 page)

It is unlikely that Madonna consciously set out to imitate those other tortured Catholic artists but instead genuinely responded to the same stimuli within the Church as they did.

J. K. Huysmans is another example of a major nineteenth-century figure of literary decadence. In his book
À rebours
, translated as
Against the Grain
, he writes about Gilles de Rais, Joan of Arc’s military commander, who was both a hero as well as a devil worshiper and monster who slaughtered innocent people. Cynically, Huysmans makes the point that if a person is sufficiently educated, even if he has led a life of total debauchery and evil, he knows enough to repent on his deathbed. De Rais does exactly that, and as a result, the torturer goes to heaven.

In “Act of Contrition,” for which she was accused of being a “devil worshiper” and criticized by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church for dealing with such a sacred subject with irony and humor, Madonna addresses the issue of remorse. By flipping over the tape of “Like a Prayer” so that she can recite over it, she attempts to intone the Catholic Act of Contrition. It comes to a comic and abrupt end when Madonna repeats, “I resolve. I reserve. I have a reservation. What do you mean it’s not in the computer!!!” And in “Sanctuary” from her album
Bedtime Stories
, she enigmatically sings, using religious phrasing, “Whoever speaks to me in the right voice, Him will I follow.”

“There is really no difference between life and art in the Church,” Father Gary Siebert says. “Go back to the twelfth century and think about the Spaniards and then think about Madonna and her videos, and you’ll see how most of the Spanish statues are all pornographic, even if they have a halo. Almost all of them depict some form of sadomasochism at the same time that the priests preached celibacy.”

One of the best examples of Madonna’s typical struggle with good and evil and her attempt to make peace with her mother’s death is seen in her video “Bad Girl.” It is one of her best works artistically, and yet one of her least successful, perhaps because it was made for her
Erotica
album, which sparked such negative controversy throughout the world. The chorus of the song, “Bad Girl . . . drunk by six . . . kissing someone else’s lips . . . smoked too many cigarettes today . . . I’m not happy when I act this way.”

“Bad Girl” is about a woman named Louise Oriole (Louise is Madonna’s middle name, and Oriole is the name of a street where she lived as a child), who, despite all her power and success, is unhappy about the way she lives and acts, but can’t help herself since all she has known since she was “six” was how to be “bad.” The age is significant since Madonna was eight months short of six when her mother died. Highly derivative of the film
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
, starring Diane Keaton as the uptight Catholic girl by day who goes from bar to bar by night in search of a one-night stand,
Bad Girl
, aka Louise Oriole, does the same thing. “Bad Girl” tells the story of a woman filled with pain who rarely likes to look in the mirror because all she sees is sadness. In “Bad Girl,” Louise has a guardian angel who watches over her, although he does nothing to stop her self-destructive acts. We understand that he wants her to “learn the hard way.” The fate of the woman in
Mr. Goodbar
is a horrific final scene in her own bed when a man she has picked up and brought home murders her during sex. In “Bad Girl,” Madonna/Louise picks up the most ominous man in a bar and takes him home, but not before her guardian angel kisses her in what symbolizes the “kiss of a death.” Her fate is sealed. At the same moment that the audience realizes that the angel knows she is about to die, Madonna/Louise realizes it as well. Rather than resist, she is happy, finally at peace that she doesn’t have to live the way she has lived since she was six.

Both “Bad Girl” and “Oh Father” are Madonna’s attempts to make peace with her pain. In the former, the character’s monsters or traumas are self-inflicted, whether because of her lack of discipline or her promiscuity. In contrast, the implication in “Oh Father” is that her suffering was brought on by her father’s “abuse” when he remarried and replaced Madonna as the woman/wife/caretaker in his life after his wife died.

The “Erotica” video, made in 1992, imitates the murky lighting of amateur film and video by including the unsteadiness of a handheld camera. Within the stylistic imitations, the material itself is absolutely accurate, evoking pornographic iconography from the 1920s and combining it with erotic images taken from mainstream design. Madonna appears as an androgynous cabaret performer in a 1930s Nazi-era Berlin club, similar to how Joel Grey portrayed his character in the film and Broadway production of
Cabaret
. She has slicked-back hair and carries a toy monkey with a painted mask recalling those created by Wladyslas Benda for the Ziegfeld Follies and for photographers like Edward Steichen, who used those images in fashion magazines in the 1930s. In the video are also brief shots from what might be a gay New York club from the 1980s, the Anvil or the Mine Shaft, with a biker fetishist sitting under a sign saying “New York Strap and Paddle.” There are also shots of Madonna with a dog whip in the throes of some S&M act, crawling sex slaves attached to the leash of a dominatrix, and a lesbian couple, similar to Man Ray’s pictures of Nusch Éluard and Meret Oppenheim, while other poses are right out of a Helmut Newton photograph. The video ends with a shot of a nude Madonna hitching a ride on a Hollywood street. The only problem is that one has difficulty remembering the song, but that hardly matters.

A
fter graduating from junior high school in 1972, Madonna spent the summer before she entered high school at Elsie Fortin’s house in Bay City, accompanied by Moira McPharlin. At the time, one of Madonna’s uncles, Carl, had formed his own rock band and was only too happy to take his fourteen-year-old niece, who looked years older, around town. Dressed in tight jeans and T-shirts with her face covered with too much makeup, Madonna tried cigarettes and cocktails that summer and behaved like a vamp. Throughout the visit, Elsie Fortin was serene about Madonna’s provocative image and convinced that, deep down, her granddaughter was a decent girl who was just going through the normal stages of adolescent rebellion. “I wasn’t worried,” Mrs. Fortin says. “I believed times had changed since my own daughter was a teenager, and it just seemed so obvious that Madonna was letting off steam. Her stepmother and father were too strict with the kids back home.”

Madonna may have dressed and acted provocatively, but Elsie Fortin was not wrong when she judged her granddaughter to be far more responsible than the image she projected. Madonna already had a highly developed sense of survival and a need to be in control. Drugs were not the way to achieve what she wanted—fame, money, international acclaim—and clearly not the way to get out of Rochester Hills.

If Madonna expected her stepmother
and father to indulge her newly acquired grown-up, sexy look as her grandmother had, she was disappointed. When she returned from vacation, Joan told her that she looked like a “slut,” and Tony forbade her to wear makeup and revealing clothes. The relationship with her siblings became increasingly tense; Paula and Martin sided with their parents and, on one occasion, cut up all of Madonna’s halter tops and dungarees. According to a source close to Martin, he was embarrassed because his friends would make suggestive remarks about his sister. That same source claims that for Martin, Madonna was not a star when they were kids growing up. She was just his kid sister.

Another friend of Madonna’s recalls that she had one of the worst reputations in school. According to the former classmate, Madonna seemed to relish it and did nothing to dispel any of the rumors. In fact, Madonna has admitted that she always had a sensuality that boys “misunderstood,” and that made girls “wary” of being seen in her company. “The girls didn’t want to hang out with me because I had this reputation,” Madonna explains, “and the boys didn’t want to go out with me because they were embarrassed to be seen with the so-called slut of the school. It was so dumb because I was called slut when I was still a virgin.”

Camille Paglia, the feminist writer and academic, has always admired Madonna more as a feminist than as a performer. “In the 1950s,” Paglia explains, “girls had to be virgins. In the 1960s, pressure was on girls and women to put out. Madonna’s greatest contribution to the feminist movement was to challenge that message by telling women and girls that they could say
no
and still keep the guys interested.”

Just as Madonna became the patron saint of the trailer-park feminist, she is also the poster girl for the high school coed with the bad reputation, the so-called class slut who has gotten her bad name only because she acts and dresses to titillate and tantalize. “I’ve been called a tramp, a harlot, a slut,” Madonna has said, “the kind of girl that always ends up in the backseat of a car. If people can’t get past that superficial level of what I’m about, too bad for them!” And yet, as connected as she is to her teenage fans, she has always rejected the idea that she is a role model. “It’s their choice to imitate me and not my duty to bring them up,” Madonna has said. “My only responsibility is to be true to myself and to promote a life-affirming point of view.”

When she first entered high school, Madonna kept company with the local bikers. On a dare, she attended mass naked underneath a long coat. Her choice of friends and her rebellious behavior did nothing to help her reputation around school. In reality, Madonna was surprisingly careful about having a sexual relationship and was one of the few girls who made it clear to everyone that she was never going to be forced into doing things that she didn’t want to do. If
failure
was not in her lexicon, neither was
peer pressure
. In France there’s a line of bodysuits called Anti-Flirt, an accurate name since they snap shut at the crotch, providing fabric barriers against advanced foreplay. When Madonna was a girl, she went to the usual parties along with her friends but always wore a turtlenecked bodysuit to protect her virginity.

Cal Townsend, who once had dreams of joining the Hell’s Angels and who currently owns a hardware store near Detroit, where he is also a member of the Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs, remembers Madonna from her “wild days” in high school. “She was always very theatrical,” Townsend says, “and a tease. I think our crowd, the bikers, were the only guys who really knew that she wasn’t fast, because we all tried to get somewhere with her and failed. The preppy kids were too dumb to realize that she was all talk. They judged her on her behavior, which was kind of wild, but basically, she was a good girl who was scared of her dad.”

While other girls dreamed of
movie stars and rock-and-roll heartthrobs, Madonna was already a complex young teenager who found herself deeply touched by what she described as the “courage and determination” of Eva Perón, whom she had heard about on the radio during her freshman year of high school. Her Argentine idol had once been a young girl much like herself who preferred to be alone than with a group of teenagers, to concentrate on her goal of getting out of her hometown and reaching Buenos Aires, where she was determined to make a name for herself. One of the facts that intrigued Madonna about Eva Perón was that in October 1933 she was given a small part in a school play, an emotional patriotic melodrama, that would serve as her inspiration to become an actress and leave the poverty of her hometown of Junín.

Consumed by Eva’s story, one night at the dinner table Madonna began describing Evita for her family. Tony immediately encouraged his daughter to go to the library and study the political climate in Argentina that accounted for the rise of Juan Perón along with his wife. To her credit she listened to him and scoured the library for every book that would give her more insight into Evita and life in Argentina during the 1940s and 1950s. Her determination to learn about things that interested her was typical of her attitude to study everything until she knew it perfectly. And yet, when she dropped out of university after her first year and decided to go to New York to become a star, she ignored her father’s pleas to continue studying dance and drama in an academic setting. His concern was that she was not ready and was only setting herself up for failure and disappointment. Madonna argued that the only way to know if she had what it took to become a star meant risking defeat.

In 1973, Madonna decided that the best way out of Rochester Hills was to become an actress. When she found out that her school didn’t have a drama club, she created one, naming it The Thespians, and eventually had leading roles in several of its more successful productions, including
Godspell, My Fair Lady
, and
The Wizard of Oz
.

Madonna was resolute about not letting friction with her parents and siblings at home interfere with her progress at school. Although she has admitted on several occasions that she had problems with self-doubt and self-loathing, what saved her from the all-too-usual fate of a teenager with a self-destructive streak was her determination to overcome anything in her character that she considered a weakness. Drugs were never an option. When her brother Martin became involved with alcohol, she made no secret of her disapproval. Over the years, she would pay for his many stays at rehabilitation centers throughout the United States.

Madonna joined the cheerleading squad, the French Club, sang in the choir, and followed all the current rock stars. Living in a suburb of Detroit where the Motown sound was the major musical influence, her favorite singers were Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and the Jackson 5. The Motown sound eventually influenced Madonna when she gravitated toward all those “innocent little pop songs” in the early 1980s in New York and rejected anything that was heavy metal or soul.

Just as he had insisted that the older children study a musical instrument in junior high school, Tony Ciccone insisted that they find after-school jobs. He also made it clear that he expected them to donate a percentage of their time or their salary to charity. Madonna volunteered her time to an organization called Help A Kid, where children from under-privileged and one-parent homes could have a one-on-one relationship with a teenager. Always more comfortable around children, Madonna was one of the most popular counselors and always in great demand. She could be counted on to give advice and affection to children who were left mostly to fend for themselves. During the summer holidays, she continued working with children as a paid lifeguard at the smart Avon Hills Swim Club in Rochester Hills. To earn money, her brothers had paper routes or packed groceries in the local supermarket, while Paula and Melanie did baby-sitting and waited tables. Madonna found a job as a salesclerk at a stationery store. According to the man who hired her, she was organized, responsible, and meticulous when it came to classifying his paper stock, and she flirted with the customers. “She was real pretty and the guys loved to kid around with her,” he says, “which didn’t hurt business.”