Life with My Sister Madonna (4 page)

Nanoo is quite liberal. Her sons smoke pot in the basement. She calls me Little Chris. I love going to her home because she loves us unconditionally and gives us all equal amounts of attention. When she finds out that my favorite candies are Circus Peanuts, orange marshmallows in the shape of peanuts, she starts keeping them for me in a chicken-shaped ceramic dish on her kitchen counter.

She lets us eat as many desserts as we want and cooks us our favorite foods: savory meat pie and chicken soup with thick noodles, a special recipe from northern France. To this day, I still make both recipes and always think of her. In fact, two months ago I spent a few days with her in Bay City.

Nanoo is ninety-eight in 2008, and the second part of her life has been sad: Her husband died before his time, and she lost four of her eight children when they were young adults. She also had to stand by and watch as many of her remaining children struggled with alcoholism—an ongoing problem with many of my aunts and uncles, one that continues to haunt our family—but she has always been incredibly stoic. A few years ago, she was hit by a car and needed two knee replacements. Now she is almost blind and living in reduced circumstances, and fifteen years ago she was forced to move into a smaller house.

Nanoo's home was a haven for us Ciccone children, a place where we were all equal and Madonna wasn't the star, the way she was at home. Nanoo's refusal to deify Madonna may, in part, be an explanation for the following scenario: When Madonna first became wealthy, I suggested she pay off Nanoo's house, buy her a car, and engage a full-time driver and cook for her, anything to make her life easier. After all, aren't rock stars who hit it big supposed to take care of their families? But my sister—who in 2008 is worth in excess of $600 million and who has reportedly donated an estimated $18 million to Kabbalah—opted at the time to send our grandmother just $500 a month and to pay her monthly household bills, for Madonna, a drop in the ocean. When I think of Madonna's wealth, I can't help but think she's being stingy with the grandmother who helped raise us.

Nanoo, however, doesn't think that way and is grateful to Madonna for helping her and would never for a moment expect or ask for anything more.

 

D
URING THE
K
OREAN
War, my father, Silvio—“Tony”—is stationed in Alaska. There, he serves with my mother's brother Dale, and they become fast friends. Soon after, my father is best man at Dale's wedding, where he meets my mother. They fall in love and on July 1, 1955, are married in Bay City, Michigan.

My parents move to Thors Street in Pontiac, a satellite city to Detroit. The neighborhood is opposite a large, empty field that will later become the site of the Pontiac Silverdome. Subsequently, Tony, Marty, Madonna, Paula, me, and Melanie are born in that order. Our parents have chosen to live on Thors Street because it is in a planned community that is one-third Mexican, one-third black, one-third Caucasian, and they hope that living in such a multi-racial community will foster racial tolerance in all of us children. Madonna's “Like a Prayer” video, featuring her kissing a black saint—which she conceived to highlight her belief in racial equality—is one of the many proofs that they succeeded.

Our backyard is right next to the train tracks, beside a big chain-link fence. Right near our house is also a massive electrical tower, which continually emits a buzzing noise that drives us crazy. Behind the tracks, a slope drops fifteen feet down into the sewers. When we are old enough, we climb down the manhole next to the tracks and follow the sewers wherever they go. This is our version of playtime.

Although our father isn't really allowed to tell us because his job is so top secret, he works in the defense industry, designing firing systems and laser optics, first at Chrysler Defense and then at General Dynamics. One day, when I am in high school, he comes home with a revolutionary night-vision telescope, plus a photograph of a tank. After he shows them to us, he warns us never to talk about it. We all promise not to. But now I know what my father does for a living, and I think his profession is cool.

He feels he can trust us to keep our word because, from the time that we were small, he has drilled us in the importance of honesty and ethics. The early loss of our mother may have put a combination of sorrow and iron into Madonna's soul—as it did in mine—and may well have contributed to her insatiable craving to be loved and admired by the entire world. That craving helped catapult her to stardom. But if the untimely loss of our mother indirectly drove Madonna to become a star, it is our father who instilled in her the tools that maintained her stardom: self-discipline, reliability, honor, and a certain stoicism.

Our father's stoicism comes to the fore when, on December 1, 1963, our mother dies at the age of only thirty. Madonna is old enough to remember our mother's death and has spoken to the media many times about the days before she died, her death, and the aftermath. “I knew she was sick for a long time with breast cancer, so she was very weak, but she would continue to go on and do the things she had to do. I knew she was very fragile and kept getting more fragile. I knew that, because she would stop during the day and just sit down on the couch. I wanted her to get up and play with me and do the things she did before,” Madonna remembered.

“I know she tried to keep her feelings inside, her fear inside, and not let us know. She never complained. I remember she was really sick and was sitting on the couch. I went up to her and I remember climbing on her back and saying, ‘Play with me, play with me,' and she wouldn't. She couldn't and she started crying.”

Our mother spent a year in the hospital, but, according to Madonna, strove to put a brave face on her suffering and never betrayed it to her children.

“I remember my mother was always cracking up and making jokes. She was really funny so it wasn't so awful to go and visit her there. I remember that right before she died she asked for a hamburger. She wanted to eat a hamburger because she couldn't eat anything for so long, and I thought that was very funny. I didn't actually watch her die. I left and then she died.”

Although I was only three when my mother was on her deathbed, I remember nestling in her warm and comforting arms. We are in a strange white room with hardly any furniture. My mother is lying in an iron bed, and my father and all my brothers and sisters are standing around the bed in front of us. They start to leave the room. I snuggle closer to my mother. My father lifts me gently out of her arms. I struggle against his strong grip. I don't want to leave my mother. I start wailing pitifully. The next thing I remember, we are in the car and I cry all the way home. I never see my mother again. Nor am I taken to her funeral.

I have few memories of my life in the first few years after my mother's death. All I remember is that afterward, a series of women look after us, and that Joan is one of our nannies.

Joan, our “wicked” stepmother—is the woman whom I now, of my own volition, call Mom. She's certainly earned the title. With the passing of time, I've grown to love her and, in retrospect, believe that only a slightly crazy woman, or an extremely romantic and brave one, would marry a man with six children.

But when she first comes into our lives, we all simply despise her. The seeds are sown by the Fortin side of our family, who—after our mother's untimely death—dream of our father marrying one of her close friends. He dates her for a while and then decides not to.

When our father marries our nanny Joan instead, the Fortins are incensed and forever after refer to her as the Maid. I prefer to think of Joan as the Sergeant Major, because as soon as she marries our father, she sets about organizing his unruly children according to a timetable, rules, and regulations. Rather like a five-star general. Ironically, although Madonna won't like the comparison, as she has grown older, the one person in our family whom she most resembles is Joan. Much as hearing this will drive her crazy, in recent years she has become more and more like Joan, insisting that everything has to be done her way, according to her timetable, and that life must be lived by her rules.

Whenever Madonna and I live together for any period of time, I am automatically subject to her stringent set of rules, which include banning me from smoking in the house, and her insistence on maintaining perfect tidiness. Sometimes, her decree that I stick to her rules leads to a battle of wills between us. The truth is that I sometimes feel the need to assert myself and rebel against the hold she has over me. Moreover, I am not fond of rules, and often tire of obeying the ones Madonna sets so stringently. I know that I'm being the little brother, kicking against my big sister's rules and regulations, but I cant't help it.

An example; I get up early for breakfast, make myself some sourdough toast, and leave the dishes in the sink because I intend to do them when I get home later in the day. I go upstairs, only to hear Madonna screeching, “Christopher, you didn't put the damn dishes in the dishwasher again.”

I am suddenly overcome with the sense that I am back home again and that Joan will rush out at any moment and chastise me.

“I'll do it when I get home,” I yell back.

“Do it
now
!” she screams.

I don't. She does, with a great deal of clattering and complaining. She's irritated and I guess I don't blame her. I also understand why her behavior is sometimes a carbon copy of Joan's. For just as Dietrich was one of the major cinematic influences on Madonna, her family—Joan and my father—also played a big part in making my sister the legend she has become, as I, too, would down the line.

Thinking back to my childhood, I suppose Joan had little alternative than to rule us with a rod of iron. We were so wild, so willful, so set on undermining her at every turn. And I am sure that when she first married my father, she wasn't fully prepared for us pint-size saboteurs determined to make her life miserable.

Small, blond, Nordic, born in Taylor, Michigan, Joan, always in her green capri pants, with her love of antiques, “antiquing,” and freezer food, may well have started out in life as an archromantic. After all, she married our father the same year
The Sound of Music
—the tale of Maria, a governess to Captain Von Trapp's seven children, who ultimately married him, whereupon the whole family all lived blissfully ever after—was first released and probably thought we'd become a Midwestern version of the Von Trapps and she'd be Maria, warbling “Climb Every Mountain” while we all clung to her adoringly.

Instead, Marty and Anthony—probably deeply disturbed by the death of our mother—turn out to be the wildest kids in the neighborhood and sometimes make her life hell. Mostly, though, they take out their ire on us, their siblings. One time when Madonna isn't looking, they pour pine sap into her hair, and she can't remove it, so great chunks of her hair have to be chopped off, while she screams “My hair! My hair!” Then—when she sees her shorn image in the mirror—she bursts into tears. My brothers, however, remain unrepentant and continue to vent most of their aggression on her, and not on the rest of us, perhaps because she has always hogged our father's attention and they sense that he may love her best.

By now, the Ciccone family has moved away from Pontiac and settled down on Oklahoma Avenue in Rochester instead. Our new home is a two-story, redbrick colonial, with green aluminum siding and a wagon wheel embedded on the front lawn.

The move to Oklahoma Avenue is exciting. There is a little creek at the back of our house, and a massive old oak tree in the backyard that I love to climb, until I fall out of it and almost break my back.

The most glaring difference between Pontiac and Rochester is the alarming lack of people of color living in the neighborhood. Everyone is white, and I often wonder what happened to our multiracial little world.

On the other hand, life chez Ciccone is never dull or uneventful. One morning during the summer, Madonna and I are in the kitchen having breakfast when we hear Anthony and Marty yelling our names.

“Get out here, Madonna and Chris, we wanna see you right now!”

Just yesterday, our father—much against his better judgment, and only because they have promised him they will rid the yard of the scourge of squirrels currently swarming everywhere—bought Anthony and Marty BB guns.

Madonna and I exchange glances, then sneak out the side door and into the garden. Petrified that Marty, stocky and terrifying even without the BB gun, and Anthony, tall and intimidating, will start firing at us, we run as fast as we can.

We get to the slimy green swamp behind our house and start wading, not caring that we both end up looking like understudies for Elphaba in
Wicked
. Fortunately for us, Anthony and Martin turn out not to be so intrepid. They prowl the edge of the swamp, fire the guns at us, and cast around for a way of catching us without getting all slimed up as well. Meanwhile, Madonna and I are halfway to Hitchman's Haven—an old, boarded-up Victorian mansion, set on sixty acres with a large pond, surrounded by massive weeping willows and ancient oak trees—where we hide out for the rest of the morning until we know Marty and Anthony are safely inside the house scoffing their lunch.

According to local lore, Hitchman's is a former asylum where Judy Garland was once an inmate. Unlike ex-child-star Judy, Madonna neither sings nor dances as a child. But when it comes to cozying up to our father and grabbing all his attention, she definitely upstages the rest of us—not because she is in training for a future career as an actress, but because she is clearly suffering from some type of Electra complex—the female version of the Oedipus complex.