Goddess: Inside Madonna (31 page)

Several months after she left
Paris, Madonna mailed a cassette of her first recorded song to Jean and Muriel Van Lieu, who responded instantly. “Fabulous,” they wrote, “really great! Go for it!” According to Muriel Van Lieu, her husband had always told her, after Madonna became famous, that he wasn’t certain that he could have achieved for her what she did on her own in the United States.

W
hen Madonna returned from Paris in December 1980, she went directly to her father’s house in Rochester Hills, Michigan, to celebrate Christmas. Nothing had changed when it came to the cool reception she got from her stepmother and the berating from her father, who was still angry at her for abandoning her studies. There were changes, however, subtle differences that made Madonna realize that she no longer belonged in the house from which she had been plotting her escape since childhood. Her siblings seemed to keep a wary distance, almost as if they had been warned not to get too close, as if rebellion were a contagious disease.

During the brief visit, Madonna was aware of the coded language the family used, expressions that perhaps she once understood and even spoke when she lived with them under one roof. Now she felt like an intruder, the orphaned child that she had come to believe she had been since her mother died. After two days, she announced that she was going to visit her grandmother in Bay City before returning to New York. The usual perfunctory promises were made to keep in touch. Though everyone hugged and kissed and expressed their sorrow at seeing her leaving, Madonna felt that it was a relief not only for her but for everyone else that she didn’t stay as long as planned.

Elsie Fortin hadn’t seen her favorite granddaughter for more than two years, since she had left Ann Arbor for New York and Paris. If anyone gave Madonna the feeling that she believed in her, it was Mrs. Fortin. Describing Paris to the woman who had never been farther east than Detroit delighted Madonna, and she embellished the characteristics of the French, imitating their accent when they spoke English, mocking them for the way they took their gastronomical delicacies so seriously.

“Madonna hadn’t changed at all,” Elsie Fortin said. “She was the same Madonna, full of life and fun except that she seemed thinner and more fragile physically, as if she wasn’t getting enough to eat.” There was no doubt in her mind that Madonna had the same determination to succeed, and although she was convinced that she would, she detected a sense of loneliness in her granddaughter that she had never seen before.

“She made me laugh when she talked about the French,” she says, “but then she said how difficult it was for her to be in a strange country without knowing the language or having any friends. I think she felt cut off from the rest of the world, because she couldn’t even pick up the phone to call people.”

As Madonna prepared to leave for the airport, Elsie Fortin, aware that Madonna’s father had made a point not to give her anything unless she went back to school, offered to give her some money. Madonna refused. “Before she left, I just slipped fifty dollars into her pocket without telling her,” Mrs. Fortin says.

Madonna returned to New York before the New Year and, unannounced, went directly to the abandoned synagogue in Queens where Dan and Ed Gilroy lived. When Dan opened the door and saw Madonna standing there, without any bags, holding only a piece of mistletoe over her head, he took her in his arms and kissed her. Her hair was dark and cut short in a gamine style, and she was thin, but other than that, she was the same direct young woman who had left him so abruptly nearly six months before. Before she even took off her denim jacket, she made it clear that she wanted things to be the way they had been when they were lovers and collaborators. She was back for good, and she expected to live with him, at least for a while, until she could learn enough to go out on her own. Admittedly, Dan was pleased to see her, although he knew that her presence presented a problem for his brother, Ed, who thought she would distract Dan and the others in the band. Out of loyalty, and because he still had feelings for Madonna, Dan persuaded his brother to let her stay with them, and to give her a chance to practice the drums and guitar while they were at work during the day, waiting tables. The only promise that Ed Gilroy extracted in return was that he wouldn’t let her join the band unless all the members agreed. The arrangement didn’t last long.

While Madonna was practicing her
music, she was also writing songs. “When I got back to New York, for a year I locked myself away in Dan’s studio and taught myself to play drums, guitar, and piano so that I had enough knowledge to write music. And then the songs just started coming like crazy. I didn’t want to go in a rock vein back then, which was what ultimately caused the schism between my manager back then [Camille Barbone] and myself. I was really being influenced by the urban radio stuff that was starting to be everywhere, on the streets and in the clubs. I loved to dance in clubs, and I loved all the music they played. It made me really want to dance, because it was so soulful. I thought, why can’t I do that? I wanted to make music I would want to dance to when I was out at the clubs.”

Along with writing and practicing her music, often at night, when Dan and Ed Gilroy were either sleeping or rehearsing with their band, Madonna went out. Taking the subway into Manhattan, she discovered the downtown club scene. “Up until then,” Madonna admits, “I had no idea that downtown even existed.” At the time, in 1981, the Latinos who hung around the dance clubs like Danceteria or My Father’s Place had a style of their own, which Madonna promptly appropriated as her own. She wore studded bracelets all the way up her arms, Adidas sneakers with different-colored laces, nylon tracksuits in iridescent pinks, greens, and yellows, and leather caps. The trend was also to have a made-up moniker on a belt buckle that served as a calling card. Madonna came up with the name Boy Toy, which has often been misinterpreted to mean that she was the boy toy or the toy that boys played with. In reality, Madonna chose that name to describe how she toyed with men or picked up boys, using them before she discarded them. “Eventually, I invented my own style, which was a combination of the dance ragamuffin and the Puerto Rican street style,” Madonna recalls.

It came as no surprise to the Gilroy brothers that Madonna finally launched a one-woman offensive to persuade them to let her join their band. While both brothers realized she had a talent for composing songs, as long as one of them could translate her tunes into real musical notes, and a natural ability to write lyrics that were touching and catchy, and while they admitted that she had become quite proficient on the drums, they were reluctant to include her because of her penchant for taking over and her need to be in control. Eventually, Dan Gilroy convinced his brother to give her a chance. He agreed, and before long, Madonna became the force behind the group, the member who pushed them to rehearse all night and often into the early-morning hours, the one who mocked them when they pleaded exhaustion and wanted to take a break. Appropriately, the band was named the Breakfast Club since everyone usually ended up having breakfast in a local diner after all-night sessions. Acting as the principal singer and drummer, Madonna also became the band’s manager. Her perseverance and ability to convince club owners to give them a chance resulted in work for the band on the Lower East Side at such nightspots as UK, My Father’s Place, and Botany Talk House. Not surprisingly, the audiences noticed Madonna, who would regularly get up from her seat behind the drums to take the microphone and belt out the songs at the front of the stage. To the dismay of the others, eventually people considered the Breakfast Club to be nothing more than her backup group.

Madonna kept pushing the band to demand more money and better working conditions, and she would often spend her days phoning management agencies and club owners at random to try to get dates and representation. As Norris Burroughs remarked at the time, Dan and Ed Gilroy were “laidback and in no particular rush to become stars.” Burroughs says, “They had their own sense of reality when it came to their talent, and they believed they were pretty aware of all the obstacles and competition they’d be facing if they tried to take that extra step forward. Madonna was in a hurry, because she was so sure that she had as much or more than the singers who were doing much better than Dan’s group.”

Madonna finally realized that the group not only didn’t appreciate her aggressive efforts to get proper management but actually resented her for the way she drove them to rehearse. The time had come for her to move on, and she told Dan exactly that without rancor or excuses. She simply felt that she could accomplish more on her own by forming her own band rather than wasting her time and energy trying to convince the Breakfast Club that they were stuck in a rut of their own making. According to Dan Gilroy, who was upset at the time that she was abandoning them to start her own group, he admitted that Madonna was a “demanding collaborator.” “There is no one who has worked with her who doesn’t agree that she has limitless energy and stamina and little tolerance for musicians, directors, crew, or other performers who insist upon taking the usual breaks. She was absolutely single-minded in her goal, and it was nothing personal against any of us.”

Through contacts and new friends she had made in the downtown clubs, Madonna returned to live on the Lower East Side, moving from one abandoned loft to another or borrowing a studio for a night before picking up all her possessions and sleeping at a friend’s apartment while he or she was out of town.

Eventually, through aspiring musicians that she had met on the club circuit, Madonna joined up with a drummer, Mike Monahan, and a bass guitarist, Gary Burke, to form her own band, which she named the Millionaires. Several weeks later, she changed the name to Emanon, or No Name spelled backward, until she finally settled on Emmy, a nickname that would stay with her for the next few years. Her new group also played in abysmal conditions in dreary basement rooms in tenements, not much different from the engagements she had had with Dan Gilroy, and never earned enough to live on. They seemed to be everywhere, and even when they weren’t performing, Madonna would be in the middle of things, talking up prospective agents and managers and pitching club owners to give them a chance. Before long Emmy had gathered a limited fan base that would follow them from club to club. Things might have continued like that if Mike Monahan, the drummer, hadn’t announced that he was leaving the group to get married. He needed to think about his future, which meant that he had to get a job that would allow him to support himself and a family.

Whether she was born under a lucky star or somewhere in the back of her mind had been planning the change all along, several days before Monahan quit, Madonna called her former boyfriend from the University of Michigan, Steve Bray, in an attempt to keep in touch and to find out how he was doing. To her surprise and delight, he told her that he was tired of playing in small restaurants in Ann Arbor and was thinking about coming to New York. Her response was immediate: “Get your ass here tomorrow because you’ve got yourself a job as the drummer in my band!”

Within days, Madonna and Steve Bray had resumed their relationship. They were not only working together but living together in an abandoned music studio in the Music Building, a run-down structure on Eighth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street, where the walls were painted an industrial gray and decorated with album covers in cheap wood frames. The building had eight floors of loft space and was home to several less prestigious recording studios and music managers as well as other down-and-out musicians who lived illegally in hallways and abandoned offices. Though Madonna’s life in that Parisian bourgeois apartment near Parc Monceau was a distant memory, Patrick Hernandez’s influence was very present.

Determined to make music that people could dance to, she listened to artists like Garry Puckett, Bobby Sherman, and the Turtles until she found what she considered to be her perfect sound. Scrounging around to get the money they needed to make a demo tape of a song that Madonna had written along with Bray for Emmy with Bray also on the drums, they finally got the recording made.

Carrying the tape, she went to the Danceteria at 31 West Twenty-first Street and persuaded Mark Kamins, one of the disc jockeys, to play it repeatedly one night. The crowd went wild. As inexperienced and naive as Madonna was, she instinctively knew how to use subliminal suggestion and even a variation of the Pavlovian theory of conditioning when it came to promoting herself and her music. While the music blasted over the speakers, Madonna danced alone in the middle of the club, moving suggestively to the beat and the sound of her own voice. Not only did she attract attention, but she also made sure that the crowd would identify the music with her uninhibited dance style. Before long, people were requesting the record and even imitating the way she danced.

After all these years without a word from the young girl he had taken to Paris to make her a star, and because her style is so similar to that of Patrick Hernandez, it is to his credit that he is not at all bitter. “I find my reaction interesting,” Hernandez muses so long after the fact, “when people tell me how lucky I was to have known Madonna, what an extraordinary chance I had to be with her before she became Madonna. Usually, I look at them and think to myself that I honestly don’t consider myself lucky at all. When I knew her, there were certain aspects of her character that were very childish. When she wanted something, she would act capricious or falsely tender to get her own way, like a little girl does with her father.”

Adam Alter would say the same thing about Madonna when he recalled her behavior at the time he was supporting her in New York. Back then, Madonna’s sense of entitlement ran deeper than her belief that, as a motherless child, the world and God owed her recompense.

When Alter, a self-described “sheep among the wolves” and the head of Gotham Music, the man who had groomed her for stardom, supported her, and fed her, faced financial demise after she left, she shrugged off the blame and chalked it up to choice. “He believed in me,” she said, “and he was right. He just wasn’t willing to go the limit.”