Goddess: Inside Madonna (25 page)

Young, sensual, and adventurous during those difficult years in New York, Madonna had sex when she felt like it, although she always insisted that she never slept with anyone to get ahead. If she did happen to make love with people who were in a position to help, it was a happy bonus.

When she began to form her professional image of uninhibited sexuality, she drew almost entirely from her personal experiences. If her mother went to her grave without imparting the mystery of her life to her five-year-old daughter, Madonna was determined to give the world the plot and motivation of her own life. This is one star who never had to make a comeback because she was never gone. When she felt her time was waning and she had nothing new to offer her public, she branched out or pulled inward, made a movie, got pregnant, used her publicity apparatus to focus on her sexual preference of the month whether it was Sandra or Sean, Ingrid or Rosie, Carlos or Warren.

Even as a novice in a New York filled with the hip and the savvy, she knew that the secret of rock and roll was no longer about staying young forever, about dreams and heroes. It was about staying a step ahead of the trends, mixing them up with the social drift, tapping into what girls need to feel secure, boys need to fantasize, men need to dream, and women need to remember. Most of all, Madonna’s music and onstage persona was a recipe about how to feel good without feeling guilty.

Sometimes, feeling good caused other consequences that had nothing to do with guilt.

After Madonna moved out of
Lionel Bishop’s apartment in Manhattan Towers, she went to live in a dismal studio at 242 East Fourth Street in the heart of the East Village, one of the most drug-infested areas of the city. Every day on her way back from work at Dunkin’ Donuts on West Fifty-seventh Street, she was terrified of getting raped or mugged when she walked from the subway to her apartment. Some time during the first week that she was living in that East Fourth Street tenement, Madonna attracted the attention of a band of young Hispanic teenagers. Dressed in her unusual, provocative style, she had a childish sexuality that appealed to everyone regardless of age or gender. As she headed from the subway to her apartment, the band of boys followed her, whistling, making clucking noises, and shouting suggestive Spanish words. Turning around only when she had reached the safety of her building, her gaze settled on the tallest boy in the group. Darkly handsome with long hair, the sinewy adolescent with high, wide cheekbones and an odd hint of silver in his eyes stared back at her without flinching. The attraction between the fifteen-year-old with the sexual maturity of an experienced Latin lover and the twenty-year-old girl from Bay City, an interloper in that solidly Spanish neighborhood, was palpable. After several moments, Madonna turned back around and walked slowly through the door and upstairs to her apartment. At ten o’clock that night, there was a knock on her door. If she didn’t sense who was there, it was extremely imprudent for her to have opened the door without hesitating. The boy had waited until his parents were asleep before he slipped out of his apartment to “take a chance.” Armed with two Percodans and a gram of coke, the new chic drug that was in all the trendy bars and nightclubs, he entered Madonna’s apartment. What happened between them was instantaneous, although Madonna made it clear that she wasn’t interested in any of his ice-breaking tokens of friendship. According to the boy, who is now married and the father of a little girl, Madonna was willing to take risks, but only if she knew she would garner the rewards. “I brought the drugs because I thought she was into that kind of stuff, but she wasn’t. She didn’t need anything to turn her on.” He pauses. “Except me.”

The repercussions were predictable. Word of the teenager’s success with the offbeat young woman spread throughout the neighborhood, until his parents, the owners of a local bodega, found out what everyone else already knew. The couple had a more severe view of the relationship than their neighbors, yet were smart enough to realize that had they forbid their son from seeing Madonna, they might as well have tried to stop him from breathing. They took the only logical alternative. They confronted Madonna and threatened to turn her over to the police for impairing the morals of a minor if she didn’t get out of the neighborhood.

Years later, Madonna would see the irony in the situation when her audience, mostly adolescents, would be the ones who made her concerts sold-out successes. Ten thousand bodies would breathe in unison, sitting on the edge of their seats as Madonna gave them an evening’s entertainment that promised to fulfill their fantasies. She was ageless when it came to the adoration of her fans, even if she was already well into her twenties and thirties by the time she was selling out throughout the world. From that first night on East Fourth Street, when the affair began, her teenage lover would tell everyone that Madonna was ageless.

Several days after the scandal became neighborhood fodder, Madonna was at Dunkin’ Donuts when one of her coworkers, another recent émigré from the Midwest, casually announced that she was looking for a roommate. It seemed that one of the people who was sharing her apartment on Morningside Drive on the Upper West Side was leaving to get married. The offer could not have come at a better time. Without even asking how much or any other relevant details concerning the apartment, Madonna jumped at the chance to rent a room. Less than a week later, she once again gathered up all her worldly possessions and took the bus from the Lower East Side to her new home on the Upper West Side.

In late 1979, Pearl Lang
invited Madonna to a party at her Central Park West apartment where the guest list was the usual New York eclectic gathering of established performers and those who were still waiting tables while they waited for their big break. Dressed in her usual tattered punk garb, Madonna wandered around the room, catching fragments of erudite conversation that was right out of a Woody Allen movie. At twenty-one, she was high on her own ambition and hadn’t yet developed any complexes about what she didn’t know. Her curiosity and guilelessness charmed the cynical and the jaded, while her tough facade intimidated the gullible and insecure. In her naïveté, she also didn’t yet understand that creativity, ambition, and a healthy libido were considered threatening traits for a woman to possess. At Lang’s party, Madonna met a young artist and musician named Norris Burroughs. The meeting would be serendipitous. More than just becoming her lover, he would eventually introduce her to Dan Gilroy, a musician and songwriter who would teach her how to play the guitar and encourage her to compose her own music.

Burroughs had heard about the party through one of the regulars at the now defunct restaurant and nightclub Max’s Kansas City. According to him, Madonna stuck out in the crowd of bohemian artists, established art-gallery owners, and New York intellectuals. “She was wearing an old sweater with ragged sleeves, and she put her fingers through the holes as we talked,” he says. “She had the most incredible eyes and lips, although what completely mesmerized me was the way her whole body spoke when she moved or talked. It was uncanny how she lapsed in and out of various accents, depending upon the cadence of speech of the person she was talking to. I must admit she didn’t sound like someone who came from Detroit.”

Burroughs recalls that she had an endearing quality about her that was a combination of tough and vulnerable. “It was interesting because at the time she didn’t seem very vain at all. She was colorful and very savvy and street smart for someone who had just arrived in New York. Almost immediately, she told me that she wanted to be a dancer and that she was living like a gypsy. She really didn’t know anyone in New York, but instead of being terrified in a strange city, she was aggressive and determined to make it.”

Rail-thin with an angular jaw, ramrod posture, short-cropped hair, and pea-green eyes, Norris Burroughs was born in July 1952, the year of the dragon according to the Chinese calendar and a Cancer in astrological terms, both references that he immediately describes as, for him, they are pivotal to his existence. “If you correlate Western astrology with Chinese astrology,” he says intently, “a Cancer born in the year of the dragon actually lives in the castles he builds in the air. I’m ruled by muses and inspiration. I’m interested in knowing things and absorbing things and then incorporating them into my work, and I expect people to take the time to read into those meanings to understand what I’m trying to say. Ideally, when you’re right on and hitting a bull’s-eye, there’s no separation between an artist and his art.”

If Madonna considered Christopher Flynn to be the first artist whom she met, she judged Norris Burroughs to be the first intellectual.

Burroughs, whose mother is a descendant from a
Mayflower
family and whose father was an African-American Shakespearean actor, was born in Harlem. When he was five, his family moved to the north Bronx. After graduating from the High School of Music and Art, where he studied painting, illustrating, and design, he briefly attended the Parsons School in New York. In retrospect, he believes that while Madonna was sexually attracted to him, she was also aware that he was a source of artistic energy for her.

“There’s no doubt that we were immediately attracted to each other,” he begins. “She used to say to me, ‘Get your gorgeous Brando body over here . . .’ Basically, Madonna was attracted to anybody who was sensual and who understood sensuality. She felt an instant kinship with eccentric or bohemian artists. In the late seventies in New York, there was a romantic, liberal artist environment where the heroes of the moment were the Beatles, the Stones, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. I felt comfortable in that element because I already had that kind of romantic sensibility from my family.”

When Madonna met Burroughs, he was on the edge of the underground avant-garde art scene and worked with another avant-garde artist by the name of Spin, who was a close friend of Andy Warhol’s. Spin and Burroughs had a store in Greenwich Village called the Tee Shirt Gallery, at which they created custom-made T-shirts for their customers, air-brushing and hand-painting fantasies or personal messages on command. According to Burroughs, Spin had done several impressive designs with Peter Max and Salvador Dalí, as well as with Warhol.

“The whole idea was to create one-of-a-kind T-shirts,” Burroughs explains. “I’m really interested in knowing things and absorbing things and then incorporating them into my work. Basically, I’m a storyteller. When I do a piece of work or a painting, it has a subject and a theme, and obviously an artist wants his work to be seen, which is why I hooked up with Spin.”

On the night that they met, Madonna went home with Burroughs to his small flat on St. Marks Place in the East Village. Several weeks into the affair, he moved to Sixty-first Street and First Avenue. “We always met at my place,” Norris recalls, “mainly because I lived alone and she always had several roommates. We’d spend days and nights together, and then she’d disappear for weeks before she’d call me and we’d get together and have these intense lovemaking sessions that lasted for days.”

When the couple ventured out, neither had much money. They often went to Riverside Church in that section of Harlem called Sugar Hill. “She loved anything Greco-Roman,” Norris recalls, “anything that had old-world beauty.” According to Burroughs, her fascination for the Gothic and the baroque had less to do with religious connotation than it did with the mystery and ritual she found so appealing. “She used to talk about her Italian Catholic background and how she loved the theatrics of the Catholic Church. She also claimed that being Catholic had given her a moral core, and it was very apparent as I got to know her better that she responded well to stress and stayed balanced in the center of a hurricane.”

Burroughs remembers that Madonna talked about her mother’s death and admitted that it was because of all that she had gone through as a child that she had developed an “elaborate defense mechanism” against loss. He has never been surprised by her success, like Christopher Flynn and Steve Bray, and to a great extent attributes it to her charisma. “I don’t think I ever met anyone who believed in herself more than Madonna did. For her, life was all about primal instincts and passion. After she made it, a lot of people used to say that she wasn’t that talented or that good-looking, and I would always say that when you meet her or see her close up, it’s all about her energy and charisma.”

Despite all her appeal and charm, Burroughs also remembers a young woman who was completely uncompromising when it came to getting her own way. “When she wanted to do something and we didn’t see eye to eye, she would get this sort of look on her face that said that she was going to do what she wanted no matter what I thought.”

During one of their disagreements, Burroughs told Madonna that his guitar teacher had remarked that he was petulant. “She smiled when she heard that and said that people always used the word
petulant
to describe her, which wasn’t really negative or obnoxious but more like a charming spoiled brat.”

Contrary to many stories that Norris Burroughs claims were circulated after 1984, when “Material Girl” appeared and Madonna began her ascent to superstardom, he maintains that he was not the “only man to have dumped the star,” but after spending three or four months together, he decided to let her go. “I always had a lot of admiration for her will, so we didn’t spend a lot of time butting heads. Basically she was a good person, which is why I never felt used or abused by her. She never treated me badly.” After the relationship ended, because both were clever enough to realize that they were too self-involved for compromise to make a love affair work, they remained friends for a while.

One night remains vivid in Burroughs’s memory, an evening of lovemaking that was extremely sensual and sweet. “It was a romantic moment where we were really connected. I can’t remember actual details,” he says, “but we just blended.” The last time that Norris Burroughs saw Madonna was in 1982, when she was performing at the Ritz, a downtown club on Fourth Avenue and Eleventh Street. “She was just starting to break, and I think she had just signed with Sire Records and cut a couple of tracks that ended up on twelve-inch.” Though the meeting was brief, Burroughs has the impression that she was happy to see him, mainly because she evoked her own memory of that tender and connected evening they had spent making love. “I never saw her again, because I didn’t feel comfortable about keeping in touch. I was afraid she’d think that I wanted something, so I preferred to hang on to the memory of the time we spent together when we were both struggling.”