Goddess: Inside Madonna (24 page)

When Flynn learned that the American Dance Festival, under the direction of Pearl Lang, had moved from Connecticut College to Duke University, he could finally offer Madonna a concrete suggestion as an alternative to school. After researching the project, he learned that Lang was scheduled to hold auditions that summer after the school year was over. She intended to choose twenty promising dancers, not only as students, but as potential new members for one of her dance companies. When Flynn told Madonna what he had learned, she didn’t hesitate. Not only did Flynn arrange for her to live in a Duke dormitory on-campus, but he also loaned her the bus fare for the trip from Detroit to Durham. When she arrived at Duke University and was settled, she finally mustered up the courage to call her father to tell him what she had done. It would be the first of several rifts between father and daughter. Tony Ciccone made it clear that she was on her own, financially and emotionally.

Steve Bray was a realist as well as an artist, someone who understood that both he and Madonna would do anything to further their careers. Though he was unhappy that Madonna had left, he was smart enough to realize that if he had tried to control her, he would have lost her forever. He also understood that he couldn’t help Madonna the way Flynn could since he had no connections in the world of dance. Bray knew that his girlfriend had talent, incredible energy, and sex appeal, but much to his disappointment, she had never expressed any interest in singing or songwriting. “If you can use the term
star quality
,” Bray said, “then that’s exactly what Madonna had, even at eighteen. She was absolutely irresistible!”

It wouldn’t be the only time that Madonna left a lover behind to further her career, although she has consistently denied that she has discarded people during her climb to the top, a claim that is shared by Bray. “Her boyfriends got as much or more from her as she got from them.”

Instead of being permanently discarded, Bray was merely temporarily misplaced. Perhaps Madonna put it best when she said, “You can’t succeed unless you move on, and you can’t take the whole world with you.”

Bray, a talented musician and songwriter, still collaborates with Madonna. In 1980, he showed up in New York and joined the band that she had put together with Dan Gilroy, her then boyfriend, which they called the Breakfast Club. At Bray’s urging, they abandoned hard rock and started composing and playing music that was more disco. She abandoned Bray after she got her first big break with Seymour Stein and Sire Records, when she used the talents of Reggie Lucas, a Warner Brothers producer, for her first album,
Madonna/The First Album
. She called upon Bray again, though, and used his songwriting skills to help her with her second album,
Like a Virgin
. Their friendship and artistic collaboration would endure for many years.

In June 1976, Pearl Lang
was in residence at Duke University, and auditions had already begun when Madonna arrived. “Six of us sat a long table,” Miss Lang begins, “where we could judge the dancers’ performances and choose the ones we felt were the most promising.” Twenty-five years later, Pearl Lang still remembers the “skinny, dark-haired girl” who was, in her words, “an absolutely beautiful dancer.” From where she was sitting, Lang couldn’t see the girl’s face, but she knew that she wanted her to be one of the twenty students to stay at Duke and to study with her. At the end of the audition, Madonna was one of the twenty dancers who were chosen. Suddenly, as everyone was preparing to leave, the same skinny girl with dark hair walked briskly up to the judges’ table.

“She was really brassy,” Lang says, smiling at the memory. “I recognized her right away as the same girl who had danced so spectacularly during the audition. She walked right up to me and told me that she came from Michigan and that she had once watched Pearl Lang dance there and give classes when she was artist in residence at Ann Arbor. Then, she looked right at me and said that the only way she would take that scholarship was if she could study with Pearl Lang.” Again Lang smiles. “I told her that I was Pearl Lang and that she could study with me for the summer.”

There have been several different versions of that story, one of which was told by someone who claims to have been one of the dancers who auditioned with Madonna. According to the dancer, Madonna knew in advance who Pearl Lang was and only pretended not to know in an effort to impress her. Lang disagrees. “She was honestly embarrassed when I told her who I was. She blushed, and she didn’t know what to say. Frankly, she didn’t have to go through an act. She already had been chosen as one of the twenty, so what was the point?”

Madonna spent six weeks at Duke University, taking classes every day with Pearl Lang. “She studied advanced technique,” Lang recalls, “and she worked with me in my repertory class. She was marvelous, and I put her in a rondel by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach which was very fast. She performed it beautifully.”

Lang recalls that one Saturday, after her enormous success onstage, Madonna walked into class with a sweater that was torn down the back and that had only one shoulder. “It was held together by a big safety pin,” Lang says. “I immediately told her to change because I was worried that when the male dancer lifted her, that pin could take out his eye.” Lang pauses. “But that was Madonna, she was always doing something to catch your eye, to get attention.” When she reprimanded her, Lang remembers Madonna’s reply. “She told me that she couldn’t help herself, because she lost her mother when she was very young and was used to doing crazy things to get attention.” Lang shrugs. “What could I say after that?”

The following Monday, Madonna marched into class, slightly less disheveled, and asked to talk to Lang privately. “She came right to the point,” Lang says, “and asked me if I might need anyone in my New York company. I told her that there was a possibility, but I knew she had no money. I pointed out that first she had to go back to Michigan before she could take off again for New York. I asked her how she was going to manage to get there, find a place to live, and have enough money to eat. Her answer was typically Madonna when she told me not to worry about it, that she would work it out.”

After the summer session ended at Duke University, Pearl Lang went back to New York, where, along with Alvin Ailey, she was the artistic director at the American Dance Center. In August 1978, the day after she arrived in New York, while Lang was teaching, Madonna appeared in the studio and announced, “Here I am. I made it!”

“Well, I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind, I never doubted it for a minute,” Lang admits, “although I was a little surprised to see her. That year, we were commissioned to do a series of Sephardic songs and a Vivaldi composition called
Piece of Grass
. I also had to choose a second cast for
I Never Saw Another Butterfly
, based on several poems written by children who had been interned and killed in Terezenstad concentration camp in Prague during the war. I needed someone who looked hungry and painfully thin. Madonna was perfect. I put her into the part and she was beautiful, absolutely perfect, and she toured with me that year and then spent two weeks at the Public Theater doing the piece with Joseph Papp.”

According to Pearl Lang, when Madonna was on tour with her company, she kept very much to herself. “She was a strange girl,” Lang recalls, “very private and not at all eager to become friends with any of the other dancers. I remember that she used to make a point of calling long distance on Sunday, when the rates were cheaper. She would have a handful of change and sit cross-legged on a chair, the receiver cradled between her chin and shoulder. I always presumed she called her friends or her family, but I never asked her, and she never volunteered any information about her personal life away from the troupe.”

Life imitates art. After the
tour ended, Miss Lang became increasingly concerned that Madonna was undernourished and had no visible means to support herself. According to Lang, she got in touch with a friend who was the manager of the Russian Tea Room, a restaurant right next door to Carnegie Hall on West Fifty-seventh Street. “My friend hired her to check coats,” Lang explains, “so at least I knew that they fed the staff one meal a day, so she wasn’t going to starve to death.”

At the end of the summer, Lang’s company needed a place to rehearse. Since Martha Graham was not going to be using her studio, she offered it to Lang. “And that’s the reason for the discrepancy that Madonna danced for Martha Graham,” Pearl Lang begins. “Madonna never danced for Martha, and the only time she ever saw her was once or twice when we first took over the studio to rehearse, and Martha wandered in to check that everything was in order. She may have met her later on, when she was already famous, but back then, I was her mentor.”

Pearl Lang had always chosen several promising dancers in her various companies and classes and worked with them more closely than the others. Madonna was one of those students Lang considered to have the talent to become a great dancer. “You know, certain dancers remain in my head,” she explains, “and every time I see a particular ballet or movement I automatically think of one of those dancers who worked with me. Madonna had the most gorgeous back, and I will always remember her dancing in
La Rosa en Flores
, which is a girl’s dance. I see her doing it all the time whenever I want to revive it. She just automatically comes into my head.”

Several months later, Madonna walked into class and once again asked to speak to Pearl Lang privately. According to Lang, Madonna told her that the classes were beginning to hurt her back and that studying to become a dancer was much harder than she had ever imagined. “Of course it’s hard, I told her,” Lang says, “but so what? No one ever said that dancing was easy!” The next day Madonna didn’t show up for class. Before long, she was coming in infrequently. Several weeks later, Madonna announced that she had decided to give up dancing. She was going to become a rock singer.

“Later on I learned that a boyfriend from Michigan, a drummer, had arrived in New York and they were working together,” Miss Lang explains, and sighs. “So, with all that promise, she gave up dancing.” To this day, Lang still believes that Madonna could have been a great dancer. “The problem with her from the beginning was that she was never willing to see a discipline through to the end, at least one like dance that took enormous stamina.”

The next time that Pearl Lang saw Madonna was on the screen when she was starring in
Evita
. “She was wonderful,” she says, “really marvelous. If she had to give up dancing, this was the role that came naturally to her. It convinced me that she had enormous innate talent.” Lang pauses. “There’s no doubt that Madonna is Eva Perón!”

N
othing is riskier than going off alone to a strange city to make it as a performer. It was an astounding enterprise for a twenty-year-old girl who relied more on her charm than her talent and less on her training than on her wits. E. B. White once wrote that “no one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” But Madonna had more than luck. She had relentless energy and determination.

When she arrived in New York in 1978, Madonna was not even sure that she wanted to become a dancer. “When I was a little girl, the first thing I wanted to be was a movie star,” Madonna has said, “and then I wanted to be a singer. Then I got into dancing more and started concentrating on that. By the time I landed in New York, I knew I needed one particular skill to make it, and I had to arm myself since I didn’t know anyone and had never been there before. All I knew for sure was that once the public knew I existed, I wouldn’t have any problems.” When Pearl Lang said that Madonna didn’t have the discipline to become a dancer, she was wrong. What Madonna lacked was the patience to limit herself to one particular area of show business. In her mind, talent was an acquired trait. She was open to whatever medium claimed her first.

From the moment she arrived in New York, she found herself surrounded by talented young hopefuls who were poised on the edge of greatness as well as hopeless dreamers who were poised on the edge of oblivion. There were no future has-beens in her entourage. The people she met either made it and died, like so many in the Andy Warhol crowd, or never made it at all, or in the case of some, reached their creative peaks when Madonna knew them only to retreat into academia. Whether they had talent or not, Madonna listened to everything they had to say. Her mind was a computer. She memorized the names and numbers they offered, registered the advice, tips, and trends that struck her as worthwhile, and discarded those that seemed worthless. Some of the people who knew Madonna when she was struggling say that she inhaled everything around her, sucked everyone dry until she was satisfied that there was nothing left to take, before she moved on. She had no qualms about insinuating herself into a conversation whether or not she knew the people involved. She had the charming bravado of a child and the modesty of a stripper.

Others who met Madonna in the late 1970s and early 1980s would accuse her of disloyalty, of breaking promises, leaving debts owed for everything from studio time to dental work. Others would argue that there was no place for sentiment if she was going to get where she wanted to be. Above all, she was a businesswoman. She had a product to sell. That it happened to be herself—a product called Madonna—didn’t make her any less efficient. Surviving from day to day, hand to mouth, from audition to menial job, often took precedence over the values she had learned back home. Although she was basically honest, she bent the rules of friendship, extracting favors, breaking promises, and disregarding people’s feelings. She dumped her managers and mentors without the slightest hesitation when she realized that their promises of stardom were based more on psychobabble and self-help jargon than on firm appointments for an audition or concrete leads for a day job that made it easier to survive. Madonna may have disregarded her friends’ feelings or discarded the lovers who passed in and out of her bed, but she rarely lied. As far as she was concerned, it took too much energy to make up devious stories for the sake of being polite or to waste her time lying to make herself seem more important. Every minute was spent on achieving what she wanted—stardom.