Madonna (7 page)

One of the photos of the Junior Varsity cheerleaders shows Madonna and the girls greeting the cheerleading squad from nearby Groves High School. Another shot shows the octet of Adams cheerleaders in a pyramid formation. There in the top row stands Madonna Veronica Louise Ciccone with her flowing, shoulder-length brunette hair. The photos depict a parade of pleated skirts and pom-poms.

She also remembers the little cliques in which high school kids congregate. Madonna didn't identify with any one particular group. The hippies were too lazy, and although Madonna was a cheerleader for a little while, she quickly realized that high school athletes' only interests were sports, drinking, and chasing girls. Somehow it just wasn't Madonna's scene.

That same year she made one of her initial stage appearances, in the “Homecoming” assembly. Whenever there was an opportunity to perform, Madonna participated.
“Cinderella
and
The Wizard of Oz
and
Godspell
and
My Fair Lady
—the ingenue role was always mine.”
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Although she also admits that if there were a need for a bad girl, all eyes would turn to her.

Talent shows represented Madonna's chance to really show people what she was all about: high drama and theatrics. They were also a great outlet for her energy. She would plan the event from concept to costumes. “I would try to get other girls involved, so I could tell everybody what to do and push them around… I've always been a control freak,” she says.

While she was expanding her creative horizons, the ever-present titillation of the final taboo—sex—loomed overhead. It was at the age of fifteen in her first year of high school, on a cold, windy night in December of 1973, that she went “all the way” with a handsome seventeen-year-old classmate named Russell Long. Madonna liked him because he was older and more mature. He even smoked marijuana. He had longish brown hair and a broad smile, and he drove a light blue 1966 Cadillac, which she loved.

The car, however, was not the scene of the main event. Since, according to Russell, “Madonna wanted her first time to be special,” they waited until a particular night when his parents had left town for the weekend.
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That fateful night the high school couple went to the movies and to a local Rochester burger joint. After finishing their hamburgers, they sat in the eatery finishing their Coca-Colas and stared longingly into each other's eyes. Long confesses that he was wondering how he was going to maneuver getting his date home and into bed.

But he didn't have to maneuver at all because Madonna, always the aggressive one, suggested the two head back to his place. “I was so nervous I couldn't get her bra strap undone,” says Russell. But that wasn't a problem either. Madonna undid the strap and helped Russell find what he was looking for. Then, according to Russell, Madonna said, “Do you want to do it or not?”—as though she had decided in advance that this would be the day on which she would lose her virginity.
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After that night at Russell Long's parents' house, Madonna would meet her young Lothario with his eight-cylinder steed. According to Long, of all the places that the two of them made love the backseat of his Cadillac was her favorite place.

Shielded from the outside by the steamed-up windows of the Cadillac, Madonna was not inhibited about quickly taking off all her clothes—except her bra and panties. Then she'd curl up in the backseat while Russell took off his shoes and pants. Then the two would talk, cuddle, and, according to Long, write their initials in the steam on the windows. Madonna would talk about how difficult her home life was. How her mother had died at the age of thirty, and how she worried that her brothers and sisters didn't like her.

“She was always saying how she was going to show them—she was going to show everyone. I guess that's why she threw herself into everything at school—cheerleading, dancing, acting, school choir,” surmises Long.
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Years later, after her song “Like a Virgin” hit Number One, an obvious question Madonna was frequently asked concerned whether or not she mourned the loss of her own virginity. She flippantly replied, “Oh, no. I thought of it as a career move.”
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Meanwhile, back at Rochester Adams High School, news of Madonna's affair with Russell worked its way through the gossip grapevine. Madonna and Russell's classmates referred to his Cadillac as the “passion wagon.

Another schoolmate, Mark Brooky, remembers that Madonna had “a reputation” around school. “I remember seeing her go up and down the hall,” says Brooky—who would avidly watch her. “We used to have a rating system for all the girls, and we had a Top Ten,' all of us guys. I think she got a nine out of a possible ten!”
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In addition to observing her between classes, Mark recalls catching one of Madonna's early performances. Every year, Rochester Adams High School held what they called Winter Carnival Week. Among the other festivities, the school put on a talent show, in which Madonna participated.

Showing off his yearbook, Brooky explains, “There's a picture of her in one of these where she's dancing. She's got a white thing on, and black knickers, and she's dancing. It has a dumb little caption on it. It was a talent show. I think she sang, and it didn't seem like anyone was impressed. She didn't bomb out, but I don't think that anyone was real impressed. We didn't know that she was going to sell a million records!”
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The photo shows Madonna doing a dance onstage in the high school gym. She was wearing black satin knickers, white socks, and on her feet are a pair of Mary Jane dance shoes. The caption that accompanies the photo reads: “Honest, it's really me… cross my heart.”
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The much-talked-about romance between Madonna and Russell didn't last beyond his high school graduation the following spring. However, her passion for performing only grew further. She liked having all eyes centered on her, and she quickly discovered that the more outrageously she behaved or dressed, the more attention she received.

During the same school year she made some decisions about her future. While she enjoyed the dance class she was taking, she realized that she had outgrown it, and needed to get involved with a more challenging and more professional dance program. “When I was in the tenth grade I knew a girl who was a serious ballet dancer,” Madonna explains.
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Always looking for a way to the next break, Madonna attached herself to the girl, who took her to a ballet class at the Christopher Ballet studio in Rochester. It was there that she would meet the man who was to become her mentor. His name was Christopher Flynn, and he was responsible for shaping Madonna from an ambitious but uncertain girl with raw talent into a uniquely confident performer.

“That's where I met Christopher Flynn, who saved me from my high school turmoil,” says Madonna.
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Flynn's ballet school catered to more serious dancers. At this point, Madonna had only studied jazz, so in order to keep up she had to work twice as hard. Flynn was impressed with her disciplined work ethic.

At first Madonna found Flynn to be very strict, compared to the dance lessons she had been taking. “He was very Catholic and disciplined,” is how she describes him.
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After several weeks of hard work, however, she realized that it was going to pay off, and she could successfully compete with the other aspiring profesionals in the group.

Flynn claims that he was genuinely impressed by her drive and discipline. He also recalls that she had an indefinable quality that set her apart from the rest of his students. According to Flynn, Madonna was one of the best students he ever taught. “A very worldly sort of woman even as a child.”
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“I really loved him,” says Madonna. Flynn was the first person she'd met who embodied what she thought was an artistic spirit. He complimented her beauty, which few had done before. “I knew I was voluptuous for my age, but I'd never had a sense of myself being beautiful until he told me,” she says.
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Prior to her dance training, Madonna recalls feeling awkward physically. She simply wasn't comfortable with her body. As she really worked at perfecting her craft, she not only found that her body was in better shape, but that her self-esteem was improving as well. “Before I started feeling devoted to dancing, I didn't really like myself very much,” she confesses. “When I started having a dream, working toward that goal, having a sense of discipline, I started to really like myself for the first time.”
¹³

Her attitude toward, and relationship with, her siblings suddenly ceased to be strained. She was finally enjoying something that she was doing—immensely. At first it was merely a pressure release for her to let off steam. Then, suddenly her outlook and her perspective changed. She grew closer to her brothers (her younger brother even attended dance class with her) although she was still quite competitive with her sisters.

This is not at all to say that Madonna had begun to conform. Quite the contrary. This is the point where she began growing, experimenting, and finding her own signature style—in what she did, how she looked, how she carried herself, and how she dressed. Her high school classmate Mary Conley Belote remembers Madonna's sudden change from varsity cheerleader to artistically temperamented dancer.

In high school everything is measured in popularity. Recalling Madonna's ranking in that department, Mark Brooky says, “As the years progressed there, from a cheerleader as a sophomore, she seemed to be more popular. By senior year, she seemed to be less popular. She cut her hair, and seemed to be more withdrawn.”
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What she was doing was withdrawing from the high school social circle and entering into a whole new dimension of expression that most of her classmates didn't even know existed. Madonna mellowed as high school progressed. She had a goal, and despite the pressures of family, friends, and church, it seemed much more important than anything as superficial as high school popularity. She recalls, “There's a lot of pressure to fit into the group.”
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She didn't give a damn if she fit into any of her high school peer groups. She was too busy plotting her own personal lifestyle renovation.

Even among her ballet classmates, she was blossoming into a unique creation. Most students would wear the standard black leotards and white tights to class, but not Madonna. She had short hair while most girls wore their hair long. She would rip her tights and cut and safety pin her leotard. “Anything to stand out from them and say ‘I'm not like you, OK?”
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As a junior, Madonna helped to found Rochester Adams High School's Thespian Society. She acted in several skits, and she had a starring role in the troupe's production of
Dark of the Moon
. She was also a member of the “Help-a-Kid” program to tutor younger children. She made sure that she always had a project to throw herself into.

When Madonna turned sixteen, she got her driver's license and her first car—a red Mustang convertible, which her father bought for her. This opened up all sorts of new avenues of opportunity for the continuing misadventures of Madonna and Carol Belanger. “Sometimes I'd literally put my hand over her mouth to shut her up,” says Carol, remembering the day the pair drove over to a nearby lake in Madonna's racy new car. When a group of rough-looking bikers began hurling firecrackers at them, Madonna opened her smart mouth and yelled at them to knock it off. “The next thing I knew one of the biker girls came down and started hitting her in the mouth,” says Carol.
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Madonna went home with a black eye and a sore cheek.

Another one of Madonna's routines involved announcing on Sunday mornings that she and Carol were on their way to church. She would pick up Carol, and they
would
drive to the church—just to grab a church bulletin as evidence that they had been there. They would then proceed to spend the next hour in the local donut shop.

Madonna also remembers journeying to dangerous downtown Detroit to see her first rock concert—David Bowie at Cobo Hall. “Oh, it was the most marvelous thing I'd ever done in my life,” she recalls.
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But when she returned home, she was punished.

Another awakening came via Christopher Flynn, with whom she had become fast friends and who was exposing her to a more sophisticated world. At first it was just to cultural events. “He educated me; he took me to museums and told me about art. He was my mentor, my father, my imaginative lover, my brother, everything, because he understood me,” she says.
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As they got to know and trust each other, Flynn told her he was gay, then began to show her a whole new underground world that fascinated her. She was introduced to the gay discos of Detroit. “Men were doing poppers [amyl nitrate] and going crazy. They were all dressed really well and were more free about themselves.”
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Madonna had such a presence at the discos that people would simply stand and watch her dance.

“She was always trying to be better, always positive, always filled with urgency, always making the most of it, and she had this tremendous thirst for everything, insatiable,” says Flynn.
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On one of their trips to downtown Detroit to boogie, Madonna entertained Flynn with a nonstop barrage of “knock-knock” jokes. “I was so caught up I missed my exit, which meant miles and miles of more knock-knock jokes.”
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Among the gay clubs they would frequent were Menjo's and Bookie's on Six Mile Road.

After the clubs, somehow high school dances were never quite the same. French teacher Carol Lintz remembers seeing Madonna in the middle of the dance floor, without a partner. “She'd be in the front of the cafeteria, just really letting loose,” says Lintz. “The other kids would walk up to me and say, ‘Who's Madonna dancing with?'”
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When the music would start, Madonna didn't mind dancing alone because it was the music that was important to her, not the social aspect of the dance.