Goddess: Inside Madonna (29 page)

“Out of the fifteen hundred kids who showed up for the audition,” Muriel Van Lieu begins, “we intended to keep thirty to tour with Patrick throughout the United States, and out of the thirty, we wanted to keep twenty to bring back with us to Europe for television shows there.” With only four days to audition all the people who showed up, the idea was to choose a mixed racial group of male and female dancers and singers, some blond, others dark or brunet, a combination of short and tall, thin and voluptuous. Contrary to how most auditions were run and especially since there were so many people to see in so few days, Muriel Van Lieu insisted that she wanted to see one candidate at a time onstage, rather than viewing them in groups. “My choreographer asked each one to do free movement as well as a combination that he choreographed, and finally we wanted them to sing a song that they could choose,” she explains. “In my head, I was looking for someone who had a distinctive look, kids who were different-looking, who stood out from the crowd. I understood a little English, but I had an interpreter with me. In the beginning, I didn’t talk to the kids, because first I watched them perform, and then, if they were good, I wanted to talk to them to get an idea of their personality.”

On the second day of the auditions, Madonna walked onto the cavernous stage.

“For the first three days, there were only three of us sitting in the audience—me, the choreographer, and my manager—judging the audition,” she continues. “When Madonna walked onstage, she really shocked me because it was the first time I had ever seen anyone who looked like that. She was dressed in punk—torn T-shirt, hair chopped off in all different lengths all over her head—and with a really rebellious attitude.”

Patrick Hernandez remembers the first time he saw Madonna as well. “We chose random pieces from my album, and Madonna was supposed to make up her own combinations, cold, no rehearsal, just free and easy, because my album hadn’t come out yet in America so she wasn’t familiar with the music.” Muriel Van Lieu describes the scene that followed. “When my choreographer asked her to show us how she moved, I must admit, I was knocked out. She was fantastic, and to this day, I’m convinced that with all her videos and stage shows, she holds back, because I never saw anyone with a better dance technique. In fact, my choreographer was bothered. He came running down from the stage and whispered in my ear, ‘Listen, Muriel, excuse me, but I don’t think I have to bother giving her a combination to follow because she is absolutely elastic, like rubber, and she has already shown us that she can do ten times better than I would ask of her at this audition.’”

All that was left was to hear Madonna sing. But when Muriel Van Lieu asked her to sing something, she had her first glimpse into the star’s character. According to Van Lieu, Madonna refused, claiming that she did not do things if she could not do them better than anyone else. “I came here to pass a dance audition,” she told the startled woman, “and not to sing. I don’t sing. I’m a dancer, and you’ve seen what I’m capable of doing so that should be enough.” Muriel Van Lieu persisted since she was not willing to make an exception, especially in front of the hundreds of other hopefuls who were watching this exchange with alarm and interest. At the same time, she didn’t want to antagonize Madonna and take the chance that she might just stomp out. “I told her to sing anything, a tune she sings in the shower, and that my arranger would follow her,” Muriel Van Lieu says. Still, Madonna refused. “Look,” she said impatiently, “I don’t make a habit of putting myself out there to lose. For me, perfection is primary!”

The argument went on for several long minutes until, finally, Muriel Van Lieu managed to convince Madonna to sing “Happy Birthday.” Muriel shrugs. “How hard was that?” she asks rhetorically. “But even when she sang it, it was in this singsong voice without any expression and with an attitude that clearly said, ‘I lost this round, but you’ll lose the match!’ She had a nice, pleasant voice, nothing extraordinary, but at least I was assured that she could carry a tune.”

Patrick Hernandez realized something else after that incident that had nothing to do with Madonna’s talent or her character. “She seemed sadder and lonelier than the others were,” Hernandez says, “and at a much deeper level, not just depressed about not getting a callback after an audition or living in squalor. She had her priorities set from the beginning, and that made her stronger, light-years ahead of the others when it came to her determination to survive and, more than that, to be the best.” Years later, he would remember something that Madonna said to him while they were driving in his limousine from the airport in Tunisia to their hotel. “Take advantage of the fact that you’re number one, Patrick,” she told him, “because today it’s you, tomorrow it’s me!” Hernandez is still convinced that Madonna didn’t say it as an act of aggression, just simply as a fact that she knew absolutely would happen.

On the last day of auditions
, when the choice had been narrowed down to fifty people and then again to twenty-five, Jean-Claude Pellerin joined Muriel Van Lieu to make the final choice. “We had each of the twenty-five do a short song-and-dance sequence,” Muriel Van Lieu explains, “and when Jean-Claude saw Madonna perform, he decided immediately that she was exceptional and that my husband should see her as well.” According to Muriel Van Lieu, she called her husband and insisted that he join them at the audition because there was one dancer who was extraordinary. “My husband came racing downtown and we asked Madonna to perform alone on the stage,” Muriel Van Lieu recalls. “When he saw her, he understood why we had been so excited. She was absolutely exceptional. Along with us, he decided that she was too good to waste as part of the chorus. He wanted to bring her over to Paris and make her a star.”

At the beginning of her video “Material Girl,” in a scene in a screening room, a cigar-smoking movie mogul watches the rushes of a film in which Madonna, playing a new discovery, is performing. “She’s fantastic,” the mogul raves. “I knew she’d be a star!” One of his lackeys who is with him in the screening room replies, “She could be! She could be great! She could be a major star!” The mogul turns his head and says in a disgusted tone of voice, “She is a star, the biggest star in the universe, right now as we speak.”

When Jean Van Lieu and Jean-Claude Pellerin watched Madonna on that final day of auditions, they had almost the same conversation.

The next day, the Van Lieus, Pellerin and his wife, Danièle, and Patrick Hernandez invited Madonna to the Pierre Hotel for lunch in their suite. They told her that they were prepared to bring her over to Paris, support her, pay for dancing and singing lessons, and sign her to an exclusive contract until, eventually, they would manage her career. “We told her,” Muriel Van Lieu says, “that we were convinced that she could be a big star in her own right.” Without any hesitation, Madonna agreed. Within two months, while Patrick Hernandez stayed behind to finish his American tour, Madonna left for Paris with Jean-Claude and Danièle Pellerin.

P
arc Monceau is an oasis of manicured green lawns, flowers, and sculpted trees in the center of Paris surrounded by an elaborate black iron fence trimmed in gold leaf. The area itself, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, the outdoor flower market at the Place de Wagram, and several pedestrian streets filled with fruit and vegetable stands, begins in the Eighth Arrondissement and continues into the Seventeenth. Along with the Sixteenth, where the fabled Avenue Foch continues up from L’Étoile to the Bois de Boulogne, and the Seventh Arrondissement, where the gold-domed Napoléon’s tomb, the Hôtel Matignon, the residence of the prime minister, and other government ministries are located, Parc Monceau is considered one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Paris.

Danièle and Jean-Claude Pellerin rented an entire floor of a four-story building that had once been a
hôtel particulier
, or private home, of one of the leading French aristocratic families, who found that high taxes and heating costs forced them to transform the structure into an apartment house. The architecture of the buildings in that area is Haussmann in style, typical of the nineteenth-century designs built during the Second Empire of Napoleon III, ornate stone buildings with intricately carved sculptures decorating the facades and friezes of acrobats or gargoyles in bas-relief running the width of the structures. Heavy wood-and-iron doors lead to cobblestone courtyards where horses and carriages were once kept, and where now, those residents who have been there the longest enjoy the privilege of parking their cars. The elevators still are often the charming turn-of-the-century, classic glass cages that climb slowly and precariously, or they have been transformed into metal boxes the size of a coffin, suitable for one or two slim occupants who don’t suffer from claustrophobia.

The Pellerins’ apartment was on the Rue de Courcelles with views of the park. They had taken the ten-room, three-hundred-square-meter flat with the intention of making it their home as well as the Paris base of Patrick Hernandez when he came back periodically from his European, North African, and American tours. When Danièle Pellerin arrived there from New York, along with her two children, maid, cook, and nurse, she realized that she had been lucky to have found such a large space, since there would now be another person living with them indefinitely, a young woman whom they would come to consider a member of their family.

Madonna was enchanted by the apartment. She had never seen so many wood-burning fireplaces, one in each bedroom as well as in the double living room and dining room. There were parquet floors and high ceilings with moldings of grapevines and ornate birthday-cake designs made of white plaster from which chandeliers hung that bathed the rooms in soft light. The floor-to-ceiling windows were really French doors, which opened onto a small garden in the back of the building, and Madonna’s room faced a fountain of cherubs that spewed water into a marble basin.

Jean-Claude and Danièle Pellerin, both born in Tunisia, had decorated the flat with modern furniture, including glass-and-chrome tables, leather-and-steel chairs, but had added colorful rugs, ceramic vases, and native art that they had brought back from North Africa. The result was a cheerful and sunny apartment that was unlike the usual bourgeois style, which included heavy velvet draperies, thick wall-to-wall carpeting, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French provincial furniture that made the atmosphere dreary and dim. Madonna’s room had a wicker dresser, futon bed, and a floor-to-ceiling mirror, which she danced and exercised in front of every morning from six until eight.

Ironically, she wasn’t the only future star who lived in that four-story mansion on the Rue de Courcelles. Professor Hamburger, an eminent research scientist, and his wife, a piano teacher, had lived directly across the hall for more than two decades, along with their son, Michel. Years later, the young musical genius would change his name to Michel Berger and go on to become one of the most famous singer-songwriters in Europe. Along with Jean-Jacques Goldmann, Berger would compose the hit musical
Starmania
, which continues to play to sold-out audiences throughout Europe. In 1992, already married to the popular French singer France Gall and the father of two small children, Michel Berger collapsed and died on the tennis court at their country house near Paris at the age of forty-four.

From the first day that Madonna arrived in Paris, she made it clear to Danièle Pellerin that she wanted to continue her dancing lessons and insisted that Danièle find her a suitable school. The problem was that Jean-Claude Pellerin and Jean Van Lieu had returned to the United States to oversee Patrick Hernandez’s American tour, while Muriel Van Lieu, having just given birth, had recently moved into her own apartment and was trying to get settled before her husband returned. Danièle Pellerin assured Madonna that as soon as the others got back to Paris, they would focus their attention on her and organize a definite schedule that would include concrete plans for her career. In the meantime, she suggested that Madonna study French with a young student whom she had arranged to come to the house twice a week, and to acquaint herself with the city.

Madonna was housed in a beautiful apartment, fed, and given enough pocket money for her personal needs. After she exercised for two hours every morning, she found herself with nothing to do. Danièle Pellerin was busy with her children, the others were still in the States, and Madonna, left to her own devices, would head to the flea markets in Montreuil or Montmartre, combing the stands for outrageous outfits and cheap jewelry. Eventually, she discovered the Gare du Nord, one of the six large railroad stations in the city, where bands of Vietnamese and North African boys hung out, trying to make a few dollars a day as porters. Riding around on the back of their motorcycles, tagging along to inexpensive Arab restaurants, staying out all night, hopping from bar to bar in the demimonde district of St.-Denis where drug dealers and prostitutes spent their leisure hours, Madonna amused herself while she waited for her new life to begin. It was not exactly the glamorous existence that she had read about when she envisioned the creative atmosphere that Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald had lived in Paris as expatriates. In her own limited circle, far from the intellectual salons she had imagined, Madonna was nonetheless considered an exotic bird by her new friends, a woman who came from a country where they still believed the streets were “paved with gold.” She had a lot of success, especially with the North African boys. An incident in one of the bars could have been the theme of a French apache dance or an Argentine tango.

Pierre Trenet tended bar at the Zaf Zaf, which was near the St.-Denis arch, the eighteenth-century port of entry to that section of Paris. According to Trenet, Madonna had arrived with her boyfriend of the moment, a recent arrival from Algeria, who was doing odd jobs, painting and refinishing furniture. During the evening, Madonna apparently focused her attention on another young man, an Algerian as well, who suddenly found himself with a knife at his throat. The fight between the two suitors ended when Trenet called the police and they were hauled off to the local precinct. “She had no money to get home, and I lent her the cab fare,” Trenet says, “because she was shaken up and it was too late.” Trenet admits that he was surprised when Madonna reappeared the following evening with her original Algerian escort. “She was wearing lace gloves without the fingers, and she reached into a beaded evening bag and gave me back the several francs I had lent her.”