Goddess: Inside Madonna (23 page)

Under Flynn’s tutelage, Madonna gradually
became aware that she was different from other girls her age, although she still didn’t understand what that meant or how it could be harnessed and defined. “Madonna always told me that she felt overwhelmed by how passionate her feelings were,” Kathy says. “Her biggest complaint was that people didn’t understand her, especially when she was young. There would be many occasions when she’d realize that she had just alienated someone and scared them away, a boy or a friend or whomever. She used to ask me what to do because their reactions to her were confusing. Either she’d get more arrogant and say, ‘I don’t need you,’ or she’d get upset and cry.”

Christopher Flynn was one of the first people Madonna met who made no secret of his homosexuality. Eventually, Madonna confided in Flynn about her relationship with Kathy. One of his former lovers, who watched Flynn suffer and eventually die from AIDS in 1990, recalls that Madonna and Flynn formed a duo that was focused and disciplined but also offbeat and unconventional. Kathy believes that Madonna began getting along better with her family when she finally made up her mind that her “emotional agenda was elsewhere.”

“She just decided that she wasn’t emotionally involved with them because her affections and priorities were focused on other things and other people,” Kathy explains. “She didn’t get hurt or angry anymore, or at least she learned how to control her outbursts and instead directed all her energy on improving herself. Between Chris and her dancing lessons and our relationship, which was still very, very private, Madonna found something that she excelled in, that was hers, a talent that she owned, and friends who became her family.”

As things seemed to be falling into place for Madonna, she began to question her own sexuality. After Madonna met Kathy, she spent almost all of her time with her and in dance class when she wasn’t in school, to the exclusion of anything else. Madonna had all but abandoned her old friends to spend her free time with Kathy when, at the end of her junior year of high school, she suddenly needed to know she could reenter their world. Perhaps she wanted to prove her own thesis, that someone was neither homosexual nor heterosexual but merely sexual.

In May 1976, Madonna decided that it was time to lose her virginity. Russell Long, who currently runs his own construction firm in the Detroit area, recalls how surprised he was when Madonna began making sexual overtures to him. To this day, he is convinced that her decision to seduce him was less a matter of youthful passion or physical attraction than that he was one of the few boys who had never manifested much interest in her. Curiously, Long’s analysis of what made him attractive to Madonna would be shared by many other men in the singer’s life who have claimed that she was usually attracted to the most unwilling target of her affections. After he succumbed, she would predictably discard him and go on to a new conquest.

Long, who was a year older than Madonna, was good-looking in the style of the Marlboro man with rugged all-American good looks, long hair, and an easy smile. A superb athlete and attractive to the girls, he nonetheless had a minimum of sexual experience. His affair with Madonna lasted only several weeks, and their sexual encounters took place in the backseat of his father’s car. Almost apologetically, Long admits to having limited memories of Madonna. Twenty-five years after the fact, what he does recall is that she was definitely the aggressor with a sexual personality that was more determined than sensual. “Having sex with Madonna,” Long says, “was more of an accomplishment for her than it was anywhere near making love.”

When rumors began to spread that Long and Madonna were having an affair, she did nothing to dispel them and, instead, encouraged them as a matter of pride. “She was her best PR person back then,” Long says, laughing. “I would be the one denying stuff, and she would just blurt out that everything people heard was true!” Not surprisingly, Kathy was hurt by Madonna’s affair with Long and had several serious discussions with her during which she threatened to end their liaison. Eventually, Kathy decided that it wasn’t worth breaking up over.

“Madonna told me that she intended to sleep with Russell before they even started dating,” Kathy says. “At the time, I was really hurt and angry, but we never stopped seeing each other.” She shrugs. “It was just something she felt she had to do, and I guess I understood it. There was a lot of pressure on both of us, and Madonna reacted in her way, while I reacted in mine. There was never any question that I would go out and find some guy to date just because Madonna did.”

As it turned out, Kathy had nothing to fear. After the affair ended with Russell Long and until she graduated high school, Madonna’s romantic interest remained focused solely on Kathy.

It has never really been
clear why Flynn decided to entrust his dancing school in Rochester Hills to several assistants and take a visiting professorship at Ann Arbor. Several of Flynn’s friends swear that it was purely coincidental that he was offered the post at the same time as Madonna was preparing to enter her freshman year there. Others claim that he lobbied to get the job because he was determined to guide Madonna’s career. Joachim Navarro, one friend who studied with Flynn at Ballet Arts in New York, maintains that Chris was so sure that Madonna was destined to be a star that he didn’t want anyone teaching her technique that she would eventually have to unlearn. “There’s no doubt in my mind,” Navarro states, “that Chris went to Michigan to hover over her, and he would have stayed on if Madonna hadn’t decided to pack it in and leave for New York.”

Seducing Flynn, according to one of the teacher’s close friends, was not only unnecessary as far as cementing what was already an intense and close relationship between them, but an unfortunate example of Madonna’s need to introduce sex into every friendship or partnership as the final proof of commitment and intimacy. The affair between Madonna and Flynn lasted only several days. When it ended, neither ever referred to it again.

A
t the end of her senior year of high school and at Flynn’s urging, Madonna applied for a dance scholarship at the University of Michigan School of Music. After graduating a semester early, in the spring of 1976, she found out that she had been accepted as a scholarship student in Ann Arbor for the following September. Though she was thrilled to be leaving home, Madonna was suddenly apprehensive about committing herself to the time it would take to become a ballerina. She was in a hurry to make it. Ballet training took years of hard work and discipline.

When she arrived in Ann Arbor that September, Christopher Flynn was already there. The day she walked into her first ballet class, he was also there to offer moral support. Dancers are usually stick-thin and dressed in pink tights and black leotards with their hair tied back in chignons. Madonna looked like an escapee from a girlie show in Times Square. Her hair was cropped short in punk fashion and dyed blond with thick black roots, and she wore footless tights topped off by layers of cutoff T-shirts held together with safety pins. One of her teachers remembers a girl with natural talent but limited technique in classical dance, who nonetheless had amazing agility, rhythm, and grace. “When I first saw her dance, I thought immediately that she could be a wonderful jazz or modern dancer,” the teacher says, “and I told her that at one point, but she apparently didn’t want to change in midstream.”

The turning point in Madonna’s dancing career came several months later when Pearl Lang, a distinguished American dancer, choreographer, and teacher, was invited to Ann Arbor as a visiting professor. Miss Lang also had the distinction of having been a solo dancer with the Martha Graham dance company and the only person to whom the legendary dancer had entrusted seven of her own roles. In 1952, Lang formed her own dance company, which still exists today and for which she has created fifty-nine dance works. The initial meeting between Madonna and Pearl Lang in 1976 at Ann Arbor would be the first of several, ultimately resulting in Madonna’s performing in one of Lang’s dance companies. Today, Pearl Lang is eighty years old and still beautiful with all the gestures and grace of a dancer. She continues to be a force in the dance world and does all the choreography for her company. She is married to the stage and screen actor Joseph Wiseman, who is most famous for his role as Dr. No in the first James Bond movie. Lang remembers the “waiflike creature with the unusual name and fearless disposition.”

“A beautiful girl and a beautiful dancer named Christine Dugan, who graduated from the dance department at Ann Arbor, was a student of mine at the studio in New York that I opened with Alvin Ailey,” Miss Lang begins. “As it happened, Christine’s father was a professor of Chinese at the University of Michigan, and through him, the head of the department contacted me to come there as their artist in residence and choreographer for their graduate dance program. I was in residence at Ann Arbor for one year, but because of my professional commitments in New York, I set down several conditions.”

Lang promised she would be in Ann Arbor at least six times during the year as well as for the final performance in May, but she refused to spend the entire year in Michigan. “I arranged for Christine Dugan to take my place and teach when I was away,” she explains.

Madonna, an undergraduate at the time, never got the opportunity to take a class with Pearl Lang, although she came regularly to audit, always accompanied by Flynn. Not until the end of the year, after Madonna watched the May recital, did she make up her mind that one day she would dance for Pearl Lang.

When Christopher Flynn first arrived
in Ann Arbor in 1976, he was living in a motel off-campus while he was waiting for an apartment to become available. One evening, Madonna visited Flynn in his motel room and confessed how attracted she was to him, how she adored him, and how much she wanted to make love to him. According to another friend of Flynn’s, it was only three months after the brief affair ended that Flynn was diagnosed with thrush, a viral infection that is often one of the opportunistic diseases that appears as a result of HIV.

Flynn’s friend is still visibly moved when he recalls the dance teacher’s account of the events that evening in his motel room. “He seemed genuinely amazed that someone who was so clearly gay and never had any doubts about his sexual preferences could be turned on by a woman, especially by someone who was almost like a sister or a niece. In the weeks before he died, he talked a lot about Madonna, and I think he felt proud that they had an affair. Actually, when I think about it, he was prouder that it didn’t interfere with their friendship. They remained close to the very end. We used to get fed up with Chris bragging how he actually got it up for her, but I guess it just proved that she was really something special. Even at eighteen, Madonna had a sensuality that went beyond gender.”

That first year at Ann
Arbor was a lonely time for Madonna, who spent most of the time alone in her room, reading and studying. As she had done for most of her life, she relied on herself more than on her professors. College was a place to grow and to learn as much as she could by her own instincts and keen observation. Gradually, she discovered Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as the German writer Rainer Maria Rilke, whom she was delighted to learn had been a lover of Marlene Dietrich’s. She devoured James Agee and Charles Bukowski, whom she found funny and raunchy for the way he always “put himself down.” She read James Joyce, J. D. Salinger, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Françoise Sagan, and Marguerite Duras. She also enjoyed Milan Kundera, Jack Kerouac, and Kurt Vonnegut. When she wasn’t alone in her room reading, Madonna would go to the library and listen to the works of Vivaldi, Bach, Pachelbel, and Handel’s
Water Music
. Eventually, baroque music became her favorite because she liked the “feminine” quality in the compositions.

Under Christopher Flynn’s guidance, Madonna also developed an interest in art and, through her teacher, discovered Corot, James Brown, and Francesco Clemente. Although young and unsophisticated, her taste was already developing to the extent that she decided on her own that she liked only certain periods of Picasso. Rejecting modernism, cubism, and postmodernism, she was intrigued by Keith Haring, whose art interested her less than his ability to capitalize on his paintings the way rock stars promoted their records. Another artist she admired both for his style and accessibility to the public was Jean-Michel Basquiat, who would become her lover when she moved to New York. Reckless, extravagant, and generous, Basquiat gave Madonna a great number of his canvases. When she aborted his baby in the fall of 1979, he took back everything except for one small painting, which she still owns today and which hangs in the guest bathroom in her New York apartment.

Madonna had old-fashioned tastes in music. Her favorite artists were Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, vintage Sinatra, and Sam Cooke, and she admired the current hits by Joe Williams and B. B. King, Chaka Khan, and Aretha Franklin. Chrissie Hynde, who sang with the Pretenders in the seventies and eighties, would serve as her inspiration, and Debbie Harry, from the rock group Blondie, would be a singer whom Madonna would admire long after she became famous.

One evening, Chris Flynn suggested that she accompany him to a local bar near the university called the Blue Frogge. Concerned that his favorite student was spending too much time alone, Flynn decided that it would be easier to talk to her and find out how she was feeling about her studies and her dancing courses in a more relaxed atmosphere.

Steve Bray is intelligent, talented
, and attractive, an African-American who back then played drums with a local rock-and-blues group that had club dates in the Ann Arbor area. To earn money to survive, Bray waited tables at the Blue Frogge, where Madonna met him. Four years older than Madonna, Bray became her lover and would remain her on-again, off-again lover for the rest of the school year. Occasionally, Madonna would even accompany Bray on his club dates, which were usually in the lounges of local motels or small chain restaurants like Howard Johnson. During her relationship with Bray, Kathy was still very much a part of her life, and when Kathy visited, Madonna would disappear and spend the weekend alone with her. During the weekends when Madonna was with Steve Bray, they would often head over to Christopher Flynn’s off-campus apartment to discuss their respective dreams in the world of music and dance. Eventually, Madonna turned those abstract discussions into very real plans, and she began expressing doubts about remaining in school. According to Steve Bray, Flynn encouraged her, telling her that if she didn’t take that step, she would never know if she had what it took to become a star.