Madonna (11 page)

The trip proved to have been well worth the effort. She won her scholarship, and at the end of that term, spent an exhausting but fulfilling summer in New York, staying with friends on the Upper East Side. On a couple of occasions Mark visited her, concerned about her safety. It was the summer of the ‘Son of Sam’ killings, when the whole of New York was living in fear of a serial killer; he was later arrested and identified as David Berkowitz. ‘Everyone was freaked out and I was worried about her,’ he recalls. ‘We went to a concert in Central Park but she was often too tired to go dancing. Her classes were really hard work.’

To Madonna, nineteen that August, passionate about, and wholly dedicated to, her dancing, the experience was almost as intimidating as it was exhilarating. For the first time in her life she had mixed with young dancers who were as voluble, aggressive and ambitious as she was. ‘I thought I was in a production of
Fame
,’ she once said in an interview for
Rolling Stone
magazine (although
Fame
did not in fact appear until 1980). ‘Everybody wanted to be a star.’ Nevertheless, her appetite whetted by the experience, she returned to college for her sophomore year even more focused, if that were possible, on her dream of becoming a professional dancer.

That dream reached a turning point when the noted ballet choreographer Pearl Lang – a former lead soloist with Martha Graham’s modern dance troupe, founder of the Pearl Lang Company and co-founder with Alvin Ailey of the American Dance Center in New York – visited Ann Arbor as artist-in-residence. While there, she created a work for the students based on music by the Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi. Madonna was one of the dancers who performed the new work at the Power Arts Center, impressing Lang with her talent and sensibilities, and her dance professor, Gay Delanghe, with both her increased assurance and the way in which she had developed artistically. Clearly Madonna, who was inspired and impressed by Lang’s work, was growing in stature and poise. While by no means the finished article, it was obvious that she was a credit to her college, and more than justified her award of a scholarship.

As it turned out, however, her mentor, Christopher Flynn, had other ideas for his charge than completing a dance major at a Midwestern university. Even though she was not yet halfway through her four-year course, Flynn told her to listen to her heart and seek her fortune in New York. ‘There can be something thrilling about academic dance,’ he would later remark. ‘But it has its limits. Madonna was just so much bigger than that – I could see it even if she couldn’t. There were just so many more things for her to explore and they were all in New York. Stop wasting your time in the sticks. Take your little behind to New York. Go! Finally she did.’

In spite of her earlier impatience with college life, Madonna hesitated, knowing that she would automatically lose her scholarship as well as forgo any chance of a college degree. She knew, too, that abandoning her course would be viewed with disfavor at home, where her father, reasonably enough, stood by the pragmatic view that she should first earn her diploma before heading for the bright lights, where the potential risks were at least as great as the rewards.

Tony Ciccone was not alone in that opinion. Madonna’s college professors all expressed their concern, arguing that her artistic development would best be served by staying at college. With strongly implied criticism of Flynn, Professor Delanghe remembers that ‘We all gave her the usual “NYC will still be there waiting for you when you have more maturity and more to offer artistically” but some are driven to leave despite adult recommendations. I always got the impression that she didn’t have much direction or support at home. Madonna had a parent in Flynn and he told her to follow her heart.’ To which she added, ’She was young, naive and without good advice, would be my view of it.’

While it is true that Flynn may have been trying to fufill his own thwarted dance ambitions through his protégée, it is to his lasting credit that he appreciated the essential restlessness of her spirit, her unwillingness to be pinned down by anyone or anything, as well as the special talent that was beginning to glow inside her. Indeed, it was her free-spirited nature that made her so ideally suited to the physical expressiveness, continual movement and acute sensitivity of her chosen discipline. In the end, and even though she appreciated the risks, Madonna, then nineteen, was so much in thrall to Flynn – and still distanced from her father – that any doubts she may have had were cast aside. Beyond those considerations, however, her experience the previous summer had whetted her appetite for the Big Apple and a chance to fulfill her own ambitions there.

Madonna Louise Ciccone dressed for her First Communion.

Silvio Patrick Ciccone, pictured here in his graduation photograph, June 1955. Just over three weeks later he was married. Madonna’s relationship with her father has been a complicated one; while wanting his approval, her unconventional behavior has often upset staunchly conservative ‘Tony’ Ciccone.

‘Little Nonni’
(left)
is held by her adored mother, Madonna Louise, née Fortin, who died of breast cancer when her eldest daughter was only five.

Madonna, age nine, the year she appeared ‘practically naked’ in a talent-show performance; and age twelve.

Madonna
(center)
as a high-school cheerleader in 1973 – her second year at Adams High in Rochester, Michigan.

Madonna always took the lead in school theatricals, which drew her the applause she craved, including a standing ovation for her role in
Godspell.

As a gangster’s moll at a costume party at her high school in Rochester, Michigan. Contrary to her claims that she grew up in a black neighborhood, there was only one black pupil at the school.

Madonna in 1976, posing for fellow University of Michigan student Linda Alaniz. Dressed here in conventional dancewear, she would attend her classes in ripped-up leotards held together with safety pins. Her slim physique was due to a diet of popcorn and ice-cream sundaes.

The eighteen-year-old Madonna poses for Peter Kentes, a graduate student in dance at the University of Michigan. Her pencil-thin physique and erratic eating habits at this time caused alarm among her friends.