Madonna (15 page)

In the event, matters did not turn out as he had predicted, or as Madonna had hoped. Driven, disciplined and businesslike, she was very quickly to learn that not everyone shared her commitment. While she wanted to live her life on ‘fast forward,’ she soon discovered that her Belgian patrons had pushed the ‘pause’ button on their creative endeavors. She would spend hours on her dance routines, practicing her moves, eager and ready for action. By contrast, her genial hosts enjoyed long and lavish lunches, spent hours glad-handing Parisian socialites, and took their young New York friend to fashionable nightclubs like Régine and VIP.

The effect on Madonna was one of culture shock. While she was interested in advancing her career, her producers, as far as she was concerned, were keener on increasing their waistlines. ‘She called up a few times,’ recalls Dan, (complaining that all they did was sit around and eat. She kept feeling like, “Let’s go do it, let’s get something going.” It just wasn’t happening.’ The fact that she was living in the smart Parisian apartment of Jean-Claude Pellerin and his wife Daniele, had a new wardrobe and food and drink on tap, all without paying a cent herself, meant nothing to her. This girl wanted to see her name in lights, to be treated as an artiste, not as arm candy.

Even when the Hernandez troupe began rehearsals, Madonna felt distanced, even disconnected, from the creative process. She had become a cipher, a pretty puppet on a string, waiting for her cues and her moves. Moreover, although she had the gamine hairstyle and soulful eyes, her producers soon realized that she was not going to be the new Edith Piaf. Nor did she want to be. Madonna still saw herself as a dancer, not a singer. When she witnessed at first hand the adulation enjoyed by Hernandez, however, her earlier opposition began to crumble. For his part, the singer now says that Madonna was inspired to try singing because of the success he enjoyed.

Nonetheless, as the weeks passed it became clear to Madonna that the whole concept was artistically too middle-of-the-road and ‘hokey’ for her tastes. There were, too, other impulses at work. The two Belgian producers, like others before and after, discovered an essential Madonna characteristic, that she has a different sense of time from the rest of the world. For her, every moment is precious, every hour to be used productively. There is a kind of obsessiveness to this, as though she feels she is being chased through life by Time’s winged chariot. Whether this trait was inherited from her father’s insistence on using every minute constructively, or from her acute awareness that her mother had died in her early thirties, Madonna has an almost frenzied impatience, never knowingly or willingly wasting any time. It is a feature that occurs again and again throughout her career, and does much to explain why she abandoned dance.

When, after a matter of only weeks, it became clear to Madonna that the van Lieu/Pellerin production was not moving quickly enough for her, she decided to leave, telling Hernandez before she flew home in July, ‘Success is yours today, but it will be mine tomorrow.’ She returned to New York full of colorful stories: how she and Hernandez had had a romantic fling; how she had roared round the Parisian boulevards on the backs of motorcycles driven by Vietnamese punks; how two suitors had fought with knives over her; how she had flown to Tunisia with the singing star for a photocall, and how a simple cold had turned into life-threatening pneumonia. Other accounts allege that she amassed a portfolio of lovers during her brief French sojourn.

Yet as she approached her twenty-first birthday, the uncomfortable truth was that she was a penniless dropout who seemed to be going nowhere. Farfetched anecdotes, no matter how many, and however amusing, could not camouflage the fact that she had left college without graduating, had fallen out with Pearl Lang and ditched her chosen career, and had now run away from Paris. These bald facts did not tell the whole story, however. Madonna was searching for an artistic identity, a sense of self, and sometimes even a new name. At the same time, as her remark to Patrick Hernandez indicated, she had an unquenchable sense of her own destiny. Thus, despite the Paris fiasco, it was not long before the bubble of her creativity and ambition began inexorably to float to the surface once again.

For a time she lodged with a philosophy student in Manhattan, but began seeing Dan Gilroy more regularly, and before long had moved in to the synagogue in Queens he shared with his younger brother, Ed. ‘It was a comfortable place for her,’ Dan explains. ‘Here was this girl without work, bumming around, not knowing where to go. Here was a place with enough space to do her dancing. There was a washing machine and a dryer. Plus it was in an Italian neighborhood. What more could she want?’ he adds, with a smile.

Of course, the fact that, once more, Madonna enjoyed what she has described as some of the best times of her life, was due in no small part to the creative, amusing and generous-spirited personalities of the Gilroy brothers. Born in New York, the sons of a former air force and civil pilot, Dan and Ed discovered music early on. Their first duet, played on their mother’s pots and pans, was an inspired ditty that ran:

Biccy, biccy, biccy, bongo,
That means ‘I love you’ in the Congo.

Over the years they had formed a variety of bands with friends, enrolling schoolfriends Gary Burke and Mike Monahan, as well as other friends like Madonna’s former lover Norris Burroughs. When Madonna came on the scene, the brothers, as ‘Bill and Gill’, were playing everything from small downtown clubs to Boy Scout troops, and even Bellevue mental hospital. When they weren’t making music, Dan, who had taught painting, sculpture and photography, was a partner in a fashionable Manhattan fabric outlet called Gossamer Wing, while Ed worked full-time counseling families of which a member was in the final stages of terminal illness.

For Madonna, the year she stayed with Dan and Ed Gilroy proved to be a turning point, both creatively and personally. She arrived with desire but no direction, with ambition but little ability, other than as a dancer. By the time she left, she was ready to take on the world. Like Christopher Flynn, Dan Gilroy, twelve years her senior, took on the mantle of her muse and mentor. Just as Flynn had expanded her horizons as a dancer, so Dan opened her eyes to the possibilities of music.

One day he took up his trusty Carlo Robelli acoustic guitar and showed her how to play the simplest chord, an open E. Almost at once she discovered that she was able to run her fingers up and down the frets and sing along to the music she made. ‘It was a real eye-opener for her,’ Dan recalls. ‘She was always impressed by people who write songs and then she realized, “Wow, it’s not hard.” I remember one night she played her first little thing on the guitar and from then on she just wrote lots of songs.’

Nevertheless, because she was a trained dancer and already had a superb sense of rhythm, Dan believed that it would be best for her to start her musical career on the drums. He showed her the basic techniques and after that she was away, practicing for hour after hour on the drum kit in the basement where she and Dan slept. As Ed Gilroy remarks, ‘Dan is like a muse, he brings it out of you. He’s a very nurturing, creative guy. When he showed her the drums you could see the light go on in her. She was thinking, “I can’t believe all this sound’s coming out of me.” Then someone joins you with a guitar and all of a sudden, Wow, man, you can create music and song. You’ve got an instant band.’

The transition from dance to music was not an overnight conversion, however. Madonna still went to dance class in Manhattan, she and Dan religiously running three miles around Flushing Meadows Park every morning before she continued in the studio with endless dance and stretching exercises. Yet something was changing. Under Dan’s tutelage, she was beginning to see another world of possibilities and opportunities, an easier way of gaining the applause and, ultimately, adulation she craved without the endless grind of dance rehearsal.

On one occasion they went to see a band called Get Wet run by a young man called Zecca and fronted by the improbably named Cherie Beachfront, a kind of sexy forerunner to Cyndi Lauper. As the singer strutted round the stage in her bustier and crinoline, Madonna watched her severely, arms folded across her chest in mute disapproval. Cherie’s voice was passable, her dance steps rudimentary, while the band was just about in tune. Yet for a while they were the talk of the local underground, predicted to be the next big thing. As she stood watching the band, Madonna’s thoughts were plain for all to see – ‘I can do that.’

A few months later, Zecca was walking through the East Village when he was startled out of his morning reverie by Madonna. Wagging a finger in his face, she yelled, ‘I’m going to be somebody and you’re going to be nobody.’ Then she stalked off leaving Zecca standing in the street, flabbergasted. Her prediction came true; the band’s only album bombed, Cherie Beachfront stopped making waves, went into therapy and then married her therapist. As a singer, she was last heard of playing gigs in Boston.

Besides the changes in the direction of Madonna’s life, there was, too, the influence of her striking friend Angie Smit, a beautiful Dutch girl whom she had met at her dance class in Manhattan. Before long Madonna discovered that Angie played bass guitar and brought her back to the synagogue to join Ed and Dan in jamming sessions. The quartet coalesced, Angie’s presence and relative inexperience as a player giving Madonna more confidence to perform before two far more experienced musicians. So it came about that, in the late summer of 1979, The Breakfast Club was born, so named because they would often rehearse through the night and then go out for breakfast at Army’s, a local Italian diner.

The birth of the band, combined with Dan’s nurturing nature and the safety and freedom of her synagogue home, proved fertile soil for Madonna’s creative nature, which blossomed under these benign influences. They also gave her the security to reach back into herself, to explore and chart territory that was, in emotional terms, both difficult and painful for her. Those charts survive in her early songs.

On the surface she was loud, brash, gutsy and in-your-face. Full of wisecracks and off-color jokes, she seemed to be one of the guys. Favorite phrases at the time were ‘You wish’ and ‘Special titty.’ On one occasion Dan, Madonna, Ed and his Indian girlfriend, Sudha (now his wife), set out on a double date. During the drive into town, Ed reached over to fetch something from the glove compartment. ‘What are you looking for, condoms?’ Madonna quipped. The brash comment caused an embarrassed intake of breath among the other occupants of the car, the Gilroys acutely aware that Sudha came from a different continent and a different culture, where women did not behave in such a forward manner.

As Dan Gilroy observes of Madonna at this time, ‘She took on a tough persona, kind of a wiseguy, not someone who is delicate. But there was another side, very fragile, which she kept pretty much under wraps.’ He remembers one night when he awoke to the sound of her sobbing beside him in bed. ‘She started crying, a racking, guttural crying, so deep that I couldn’t even say, “What’s the matter?” She was so involved in the physical experience of crying and it went on for two minutes or more. Nothing was said, there seemed no point. I mean this was way bigger than “I’ve lost my paycheck.” It was, like, elemental.’

Tears were not for tough characters like Madonna, and she was careful to shed them in private. ‘When you cry, do you taste your tears?’ she once asked Dan. ‘I don’t want to cry when everyone’s looking at me. I can only cry alone because my face gets ugly when I cry. It gets all scringy like a newborn baby’s face.’ Her deep-seated longing for her mother, her distance from her father, her melodramatic sense of her loneliness and angst, all these fueled her fundamental insecurity, while at the same time feeding the creative processes lying dormant within her.

The lyrics she wrote at that time – raw, uncompromising and self-revelatory – give an insight into a personality much more vulnerable and uncertain than the aggressively exuberant young woman she liked to play for the world. For her, clearly, writing songs mirrored her performance of them; as she herself once said, ‘I think when you are singing a song, you are making yourself very vulnerable. It’s almost like crying in front of people.’ And that, of course, was something she never did.

She began that process of self revelation almost as soon as she had learned to tap out a rhythm on the drums. Dan gave her a masterclass in writing lyrics, using the sentiments from a letter she had sent him from Paris as the basis for one song, which became a staple of their punk repertoire. Like her performance, years earlier, of the
Godspell
song, song-writing proved another wondrous discovery for Madonna, bringing with it the realization that the everyday events of her life, the thoughts and feelings and memories that she recorded religiously in her diary each night, could form the basis for her lyrics. Struck with the wonder of it, a clutch of songs flowed from her pen and guitar. ‘I don’t know where they came from, it was like magic,’ she once observed. ‘I’d write a song every day. I said: “Wow, I must be meant to do this.” I played the first things that came out of me.’

Her first effort was swiftly followed by an angry rock song which expressed her sense of alienation from the world. Then came another up-tempo piece with lyrics that dealt with the eternal themes of a love gone wrong and the pain of parting. She co-wrote another song with Dan about a failed romance, this time featuring a strong woman who tries to convince her former lover to pull himself together, reassuring him that she is still his friend and that if he could only be open to her friendship, he would be less unhappy at the parting.

The three-verse song was the first she had written to a track, rather than thought up as she strummed the guitar. It was also the first time she had recorded a song with the backing track playing in her headphones. After she had listened to it being played back she told Ed, ‘It sounded good, didn’t it? Your voice sounds better in here than real life.’