Goddess: Inside Madonna (22 page)

When a job became available in a dress boutique, Madonna took that. Another salesgirl in the store who is now a wife and mother in Rochester Hills remembers that the singer had a knack for imitating the customers. “She always had an attitude with the customers,” she says. “She didn’t like picking up the clothes from the dressing room and hanging them up, so we ended up doing it for her, but only because she used to make us laugh all the time. Behind their backs, she would walk like the customers, and after they left, she would go into an act, catching every gesture and expression they used. It was hysterical, and we had a hard time controlling ourselves.” The woman also remembers that Madonna got along better with the men who came in the shop with their wives and girlfriends. “Sometimes the guys would pay too much attention to her, and we’d lose a sale. Actually, that was one of the reasons why she got fired.”

As the school year drew to a close and with it the dance program, Madonna decided that she had learned all she could in an nonprofessional setting. She wanted to find a school that would challenge her and put her in competition with students who were better than she. By then, Joan and Tony saw that she was committed to her classes and making progress, so that when Madonna broached the subject of going to a private dancing school, they agreed. Through one of her teachers, Madonna learned about a girl who was reputed to be a serious ballet student. From the moment they met, Madonna found herself instantly attracted to the aspiring ballerina.

Kathy was slight, small-boned, and graceful with dark hair pulled tightly back in a bun at the nape of her neck. She was different, a quiet girl who had a goal that was not part of the usual high school curriculum. It wasn’t the first time in her school career that Madonna had found herself attracted to someone who was not part of the crowd. She had always rejected the usual band of hippies, the boys with long hair who smoked dope. The rock-and-roll crowd, even the ones who had formed their own band, didn’t inspire her either, since they spent most of their time drunk on beer instead of playing or composing original music and sounds. As for the jocks and the cheerleaders, while Madonna found them appealing for a while, she eventually gave them up when she realized that her cheerleading girlfriends weren’t interested in anything except boys and sports. Instead, Madonna remained on the periphery of the “in” groups and was mostly friendly with those students whom the others considered to be nerds, boys who were physics majors or girls reputed to be bookworms rather than bombshells.

From the moment Madonna met the aspiring ballerina, the two girls became inseparable to the exclusion of everyone else.

From that point on, dance would play a pivotal part in Madonna’s destiny. In high school, her passion for dance was responsible for her attraction to Kathy, who became her first lesbian lover. The affair would last through high school, during the year that Madonna spent at the University of Michigan, and later, when she moved to New York. Kathy made regular visits to New York and shared Madonna’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

K
athy is forty-two years old today. Married to her second husband and the mother of two teenage children, she is slim and attractive with dark, short hair. Kathy has long since abandoned any notion of becoming a dancer. Before she married, she worked for a while as a model and in public relations. Her affair with Madonna lasted between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. According to Kathy, it was “a complete and total love affair that was not just based on sex.” They were best friends as well as lovers.

Seated in her comfortable living room, Kathy reminisces about her relationship with the star. “In the beginning,” she says, “we told ourselves that we were experimenting and practicing so that when we actually kissed a boy, we wouldn’t be so inexperienced.” Kathy smiles. “Believe me, we had no idea what sex was all about and certainly no idea what lesbian sex was all about. We learned. I remember Madonna bought a lesbian magazine, and we would read about all the different positions and places where a woman was sensitive, and we just experimented. There was no aggressor in our relationship.”

Despite the intensity of their relationship, Kathy claims that neither she nor Madonna ever considered themselves lesbians. Madonna’s philosophy was that there was no such thing as homosexual or heterosexual, and she unknowingly quoted Truman Capote when she would say that either a person is “sexed or not.” “When I came to New York to visit Madonna,” Kathy continues, “we used to talk about how we felt a lot and how we were both surprised that we were so turned on by each other.”

Adam Alter, one of Madonna’s benefactors when she first arrived in New York, who owned Gotham Music and groomed Madonna to become a recording star, said Madonna was a sexy, brash, talented young girl. “Was I attracted to her?” Alter asks rhetorically. “Everyone was, men and women, but nothing ever happened between us, because I wanted to keep our relationship professional.”

Later on in her career, as Madonna brought lesbian sexuality into the mainstream, she offered an unrealistic image that all lesbians are beautiful, successful, and feminine. According to Adam Alter, his partner, the woman who would briefly become Madonna’s manager, Camille Barbone, was admittedly bisexual and let her feelings for Madonna get in the way of their professional relationship. Barbone, a small, wiry woman with short-cropped hair and glasses, came from a middle-class family in Queens, the daughter of a policeman. When their association was over and Madonna went on to become a star, Barbone claimed it was Madonna who had tried to seduce her.

In 1987, Kathy was married to her first husband and Madonna was already a star. She remembers that her former lover sent her a book written by Shere Hite entitled
Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress: The Hite Report
. “There was a section in the book on gay women which said everything in a much more intellectual way that Madonna had said years before.” That book caused Kathy’s first divorce. “When I showed it to my husband at the time,” Kathy recalls, “I decided to tell him all about my relationship with Madonna. He just freaked out. To be honest, the marriage wasn’t all that great, but that really did it. Things just got worse and worse until we eventually split.”

Madonna’s passion for Kathy when they were teenagers did nothing to get in the way of her determination to become a star. In fact, through her lover she eventually found the kind of ballet school that she knew she needed. Shortly after they met, Kathy introduced Madonna to the Rochester School of Ballet, where she was studying, and to the man who would prove to be the most influential person in Madonna’s young life and career: Christopher Flynn.

When Madonna met Christopher Flynn, he was forty-two and she was fifteen. The meeting and the age difference conjured up more similarities between Madonna and Eva Perón.

After the death of her
father, life did not improve for Eva Duarte, especially after her mother found another “father” for her brood when her daughter was only ten years old. The Duarte children, along with their mother and new stepfather, moved from the dismal town of Los Toldos to the equally depressing town of Junín, the sole attraction of which was a movie theater. As an adolescent in Junín, Eva kept mostly to herself. As the youngest and unmarried daughter, she was expected to help her mother run the boardinghouse that the family bought to support themselves. In 1933, when Eva was fifteen, she went to see a tango singer appearing onstage at the movie theater. A weak and narcissistic parody of a Latin lover, Agustín Maguldi was forty-two years old with an inflated opinion of his talent and his charm. When he finished his performance and returned to his dressing room, he found the teenager waiting for him. They became lovers, and the next evening Eva was riding in his car on her way to Buenos Aires.

Christopher Flynn, an attractive man
, had studied in New York at Ballet Arts under Vladimir Dokoudovski. Although Flynn was dedicated and devoted to classical dance and had excellent training, he did not fare well in the competitive ballet world. Flynn had the perseverance but not the strength necessary to lift the ballerinas above his shoulders or to endure a rigorous two-hour performance.

Kathy and Madonna were both fifteen, but Madonna was way behind her friend in terms of years of practice and the quality of her prior lessons. Her determination to succeed and her discipline not only enabled her to catch up but also impressed Flynn and created a relationship between them that went beyond that of teacher and pupil. Almost immediately, he sensed something unusual about Madonna, and from the moment Madonna entered Christopher Flynn’s life, both she and he claimed that their “world had changed.”

According to a close friend of the teacher’s, Flynn felt that Madonna had enormous potential. “Chris told me from the beginning,” Flynn’s friend says, “that he could sense that Madonna was just hungering for information and knowledge. It was obvious to him that she possessed an innate intelligence that had never been exploited. He knew without ever meeting her family that Madonna lacked any cultural or intellectual background, and yet he was certain that all she needed was someone to take her under his wing.”

In addition to teaching her movement and dance, Flynn gave Madonna self-confidence. He told her she was beautiful, interesting, and had a magnetic personality. Flynn was the first artistic person she knew, someone with whom she could be free and who appreciated that she was different without attributing her uniqueness to a behavior problem. It would be the first time in Madonna’s young life that someone in a position of authority didn’t consider her a rebel because she made a point of not following the usual fads. Instead, Flynn encouraged what he considered to be her “artistic eccentricity.”

In return, Madonna considered Flynn to be her primary teacher. She played Monroe to his Miller, Bacall to his Bogart, Hellman to his Hammett, eagerly soaking up everything that he offered, his show business experience as well as his cultural knowledge. She adored him, calling him “my mentor, my father, my imaginative lover, my brother, everything because he understood me.” As for being her “imaginary lover,” that would change briefly after Flynn followed Madonna to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he arranged to have a visiting professorship in the dance department for a semester. Long after he died, she would tell people that Flynn “took this hunk of unmolded clay and made it into a very definite style and shape . . . from that point on,” Madonna insists, “I was able to refine myself.”

As their relationship intensified, Flynn began taking Madonna into Detroit on weekends, where he introduced her to the world of museums, concerts, operas, art galleries, and fashion. He also took his star pupil to a variety of gay clubs and bars in Detroit, broadening her horizons into an exotic and sophisticated new world. The club scene in Detroit, before the AIDS virus made its deadly impact, was the meeting place for one-night stands or long-term affairs. At fifteen, Madonna was completely uninhibited and had no qualms about getting up and imitating dance steps. Everyone who met her liked her, not just because she had talent, but because she was so original. In fact, the music, movement, and attitude of the gay crowd would serve as the inspiration for some of her more risqué dance numbers and for her eventual androgynous style. With Flynn as her guide, she would wander around and watch the various couples off in corners or on velvet sofas making love. “Chris taught her to believe in herself,” Kathy explains, “which gave her the courage to dress and look so original. I think he also gave her the guts to include bisexuality in her act, although he used to tell us that not all gay women are lipstick lesbians.” Kathy recalls that Christopher Flynn taught Madonna that if she wasn’t as talented or ambitious as she was, she’d be a gross monstrosity. “After a while,” Kathy continues, “she was completely oblivious to what kids thought about her. She used to say that she didn’t care about anyone’s opinion who didn’t help her get ahead. It was a good lesson in life for both of us.”

Flynn also taught Madonna to be more sensitive to the frailties and weaknesses of her brothers. He made her conscious of the feminine side of the male and the masculine side of the female. When Madonna’s brother Christopher began coming to her dance classes, and Flynn had a chance to observe the boy, he realized why the others perceived him as “different.” Flynn decided to tell Madonna that her brother was gay and that she should be aware of how difficult it was for him to assert his sexuality as a teenager living in a small Midwestern town, the son of a staunch Catholic father. Years later, Madonna talked about her brother’s homosexuality during an interview that she gave to the
Advocate
, a gay magazine, in 1991. Christopher Ciccone was indignant. He accused Madonna of “outing” him. “It wasn’t her business,” he said at the time. “I was not happy about that—not because I have a problem with it, and it certainly wasn’t anything I ever hid, but because I don’t talk about the people I know, and I expect the same from them.”

Tony Ciccone’s reaction to his son’s homosexuality was predictable, although years later he would say that he had not been shocked. After Madonna and Christopher made peace following the appearance of the article in the gay publication, they used to joke that after having watched his daughter feign masturbation with a crucifix in front of millions, finding out that he had a gay son must have been almost anticlimactic for their father. “Nothing less than a relief,” said the brother and sister, laughing.

Not only did Christopher Flynn
encourage Madonna’s originality, but he also saw to it that she never forgot her goal to become a dancer. According to one of Flynn’s friends at the time, “Chris knew she had a crucial ingredient that even those who possessed more talent didn’t have—a kind of fearlessness that was unusual for a girl so young.”

According to Elsie Fortin, Madonna’s grandmother, one of the most meaningful comments about her granddaughter was made by Christopher Flynn. “He made more sense than anybody else,” Mrs. Fortin recalls. “He once said that all the articles about my granddaughter are deceptive because they make her out to be this kook who says things off the top of her head, when in reality, she is the most intelligent and hardworking student he ever had. She never missed a class. Come hell or high water, Madonna was always there.”