Authors: Andrew Morton
Drawing on his experiences that fateful Easter Sunday, he produced the outline for one of the most successful stage musicals of all time.
Godspell
gave a contemporary twist to a traditional theme, the last seven days of Christ. In performance, Jesus sported clownish makeup and wore a Superman costume with a large ‘S’ on the front, while His disciples were dressed as hippies and flower children. Although more conventional Christians were dismayed, and fundamentalist Christians outraged, by what they considered to be this outrageous treatment of the Gospels, the show, an imaginative rather than an irreverent interpretation, seemed to capture the changing mood of the times. It played to packed houses around the world, running for more than 2,700 performances on and off Broadway.
When the Adams High Thespian Society, which Madonna had helped to found, decided to put on a version of the show, Madonna was deemed perfect for the role of Sonia. The show’s lyricist, Stephen Schwartz, describes her character as ‘sassy and slightly cynical, the most urban of the group. Also the sexy one, but her sexiness contains a large element of put-on, in the manner of Mae West.’ Madonna had already played a creditable Morticia in the school’s production of
The Addams Family
and had taken leading roles in
My Fair Lady
and
Cinderella
. The part of Sonia was tailor-made for her talents. So when, a few weeks later, the school announced a talent show, Madonna decided to perform a solo song-and-dance routine to the
Godspell
song ‘Turn Back, O Man.’ For weeks she was Sonia, endlessly practicing her moves and rehearsing the words of the song. Her hard work paid off, for when she was announced before an audience of fellow students and staff gathered in the school gymnasium, she had the words, notes and steps down perfectly. Dressed in dark satin pants and a grey satin blouse, her performance, polished, confident and sexy, mesmerized students and teachers alike. As she finished her act, the hall erupted into a cacophony of whistling, catcalls and whooping, the audience rising as one in a spontaneous standing ovation.
‘I will never forget it,’ recalls Carol Stier. ‘We [Madonna’s friends] were both shocked and impressed because we were not aware that she had this talent. Teenagers are pretty hard to impress and they would much rather make fun of a peer than see them succeed. So to get that kind of reaction shows just what a standout performance it was.’ Others were equally impressed. According to Nick Twomey, ‘It was a breakout event for Madonna. She pretty much seduced the entire gymnasium, myself and the teachers included. It wasn’t wildly erotic, but Madonna was Madonna even back then, and she knew how to work the crowd.’
As she took her bows, Madonna was in tears, the nervous tension of the performance mingling with the thrill of being the undeniable center of attention. Once the applause and congratulations had faded she felt somehow changed. She found it difficult to put that feeling into words, but later reflected that it was akin to ‘coming home.’
The all-American girl was about to follow her destiny, and her dream.
Destined to Be a Dancer
C
HRISTOPHER FLYNN made a very unlikely Professor Higgins. A master of caustic sarcasm, and capable of being brutal to the point of sadism, he was in every respect a caricature of the frustrated former ballet dancer. The man who had once danced with the Joffrey Ballet and harbored dreams of stardom now found himself, in his early forties, teaching evening class to a bunch of gawky, giggling teenage girls in a dusty second-floor studio in an obscure Midwest town.
What this flamboyant homosexual, who at times seemed to take an almost perverse delight in hurting and humiliating his young charges, thought when a rather meek, gamine fifteen-year-old walked into his class at 404 Main Street in Rochester, clutching a two-foot-high, curly-blonde-haired china doll, is anyone’s guess. Certainly not that she would soon become his protégée, his Eliza Doolittle, nor that, one day, he would weep bitterly when she left him.
The very fact that Madonna looked so fey and lost may have stilled Flynn’s initial impulse – reflex, even – to indulge in sarcasm. Nervously, she explained that she wanted to study ballet with him, like her schoolfriend and fellow cheerleader Mary-Ellen Beloat. A simple enough request, but it had taken all her courage to walk through the studio door. Not only had the ballet teacher’s reputation gone before him, but Madonna was taking a huge personal risk. While she had studied tap and jazz dancing and taken part in local dance contests, this was a true challenge. Ballet training demands a remorseless physical discipline that can, and does, daunt even the most talented and determined. For Madonna there was one overriding concern – would her talent and physical ability and talent match her self-belief and ambition? In taking that chance, she had to steel herself to face her deepest fear, the fear of failure.
Over the next few months she characteristically buckled down to the stern routine, dancing for two hours each night. Sometimes she would end a session with her feet bleeding. ‘Classes could be quite brutal,’ recalls Mary-Ellen. ‘If you did something wrong, Christopher would hit you with the stick he used to point at things.’ During one ballet exercise, in which the girls swung their legs to the side, he would pinch the tender flesh of their inner thighs to force them to stretch higher and wider. A favorite form of torture, often used on Madonna, was to place a sharpened pencil vertically between a dancer’s throat and her chin to make sure she kept her head straight while dancing.
His chief weapon remained his tongue, however. To his sarcasm was added the unlovely, sexually colored imagery he employed to illustrate particular points. ‘Imagine as you lower yourself in a plié that there is a radio antenna beneath you and it must slide straight inside you,’ was advice he often repeated. A deeply disappointed, even frustrated, man, he would regularly reduce his students to tears with his tirades and withering invective. ‘He used to shout at us that dancing always had to come first, before anything else,’ Mary-Ellen adds. If Madonna and her colleagues left a session with nothing worse than bruises and blood blisters then they considered themselves fortunate.
Yet, fierce as he could be, Flynn was always entertaining, his enthusiasm for dance inspiring those who were willing to place their talent in his care, and their trust in his skills. Certainly Madonna, the girl who railed at her father and stepmother at the slightest provocation, proved an eager disciple. She willingly accepted his harshest admonitions, and masochistically came back for more. Starved – at least as she saw it – of her father’s love and attention, she looked for scraps of compliments and praise wherever she could. Flynn the tormentor could also be a flatterer, his approval all the sweeter because his standards were so exacting, and his soul so stern. She remembers to this day the moment when Flynn looked at her after a class and told her that she was beautiful, with a face like that of an ancient Roman statue. For a girl who described herself as looking like a ‘dog,’ and gave herself the nickname ‘Mudd,’ it was a compliment to treasure. ‘No one had ever said that to me before,’ she remarked years later. ‘He told me I was special, and he taught me to appreciate beauty – not beauty in the conventional sense, but really about beauty of the spirit.’
In the cause of instilling that sense of beauty, he took his eager disciple on a kind of miniature, contemporary American version of the Grand Tour, the two of them going to Detroit to visit museums, art galleries and concerts. They discussed poetry, books and art, Christopher happy to pass on his knowledge and insights, Madonna an eager and inquisitive pupil. As his dance classes explored the physical limits of her coltish body, so their daytime excursions – Detroit is only a few miles to the south of Rochester – proved, for her, an exhilarating voyage of artistic discovery, pushing back the boundaries of her intellect and sensibilities. At that time her taste was that of a sensitive, rather intense teenager: the Romantic poets, the Pre-Raphaelite painters, the novels of Steinbeck and Scott Fitzgerald, tragic poets like Sylvia Plath, the films of James Dean.
Under Flynn’s guidance, however, her horizons broadened. Just as the Modernist movement placed the artist outside or on the periphery of society – the artist as anti-hero – so Madonna, like thousands of angst-ridden teenagers before her, found in the Modernists’ work a lush expression of her thoughts and impulses. Her introduction to the Humanist tradition, the celebration of the individual within society, and of humankind as responsible intellectual beings, neatly dovetailed with her exasperation with the Catholic Church, which teaches the submission of Man to the will of the Almighty, as well as with her increasing involvement in the world of dance, a discipline which revels in the physical self.
Without doubt, this personal quest for knowledge and understanding, familiar to intellectuals and artists through the ages, significantly altered her relationship with others. In the same way that she had come to see herself as an outsider within her family, so, as she went into her senior year at Adams High school, she viewed herself as remote and aloof from the concerns and priorities of her fellow pupils. Christopher Flynn had provided the key that had unlocked the door into a world of art and artistic endeavor. This is not a fanciful notion, for Madonna herself is on record as saying: ‘He was my mentor, my father, my imaginative lover, my brother, everything. He understood me.’ For her friends, however, the changes in her behavior were as striking as they were unnerving. The key, and the door it opened, were not, it seems, for sharing. Carol Stier remembers her shock on first encountering the ‘new’ Madonna. ‘I remember walking into English class on the first day of term and seeing this person and thinking, “We’ve got a new kid in class.” She had a bandanna with bold print wrapped around her short hair and was wearing blue jean overalls and ankle-high combat boots. She had no make up on but was still pretty. Then I realized it was Madonna. I was shocked. It was a big change. She no longer bothered talking to us, not interested in being friends any more. During class she was quiet and studious. The wisecracks were out.’
As it happened, Madonna was not the only one among her circle to go through a personal metamorphosis. After a period in which he dabbled with drugs, Nick Twomey, her one-time sweetheart, had found religion. His conversion was so profound that he zealously turned every conversation, whether with members of the faculty or fellow students, to the subject of Christianity. Now an evangelical pastor in nearby Traverse City, Twomey recalls the changes in the girl he had once chased around the playground. ‘I went through this dramatic spiritual conversion and as my life zigged hers zagged, so that she became almost like a gypsy. She broke away from the group of kids we hung out with and when we met I was trying to ram Jesus down her throat. She was never rude or offensive, but I remember her asking me to dial down the intensity, to chill out.’
The change in Madonna, however, was not merely intellectual or spiritual. As part of her new Bohemian look, she no longer shaved her legs or her armpits, or bothered to pluck her eyebrows. ‘My younger sister Morisa was really scared of her because Madonna took her for swimming lessons and didn’t shave under her armpits,’ recalls Lia Gaggino. ‘She wasn’t afraid to be different, and at that age it’s hard to be different without worrying what other people think of you.’
In the first semester of her senior year, which proved to be her last at Adams High, she no longer tried to be the center of attention, content to spend time on her own. The girl who once lined up with her friends at McDonald’s and shared her makeup in the bathroom was now a vegetarian who lived a simple, even ascetic life. Her friend Ruth Dupack thought, ‘It was a major flip-flop. People were thinking: “What is with it with her?” In the end I didn’t understand Madonna but I was happy for her.’ In a telling aside, however, Ruth adds, ‘I found it easier to talk to her stepmother than her.’
Faced with this reconstructed, aloof, austere Madonna, the gossips had a field day, and rumors were soon flying round the school that she was having an affair with her dance teacher. Whether or not she and Flynn enjoyed a brief flirtation, what was certain was that she spent almost every spare moment she could with him. For his part, he introduced her to the gay clubs of downtown Detroit, a world away from the coffee shops and school dances a girl of her age was used to. Here disco ruled supreme, the atmosphere – an equal mixture of energy and
joie de vivre –
pungently exciting. As one of the few girls among hundreds of sweating, gyrating gay men, Madonna felt free of all the sexual baggage normally associated with dancing. This was dancing for the sheer love of movement, rather than a clumsy courtship ritual. Years later, Christopher Flynn was to tell the writer Chris Andersen: ‘She loved it and God, was she hot. She just cleared the floor and we just cut loose and everybody loved her. It’s not that she was showing off, she just thoroughly enjoyed dancing and it just sprang out of her.’
In spite of the drug-taking and the outrageous sexual behavior, to Madonna the men who peopled the gay clubs were unthreatening, entertaining and full of life. More than that, however, she considered them to be just like her, outsiders, sneered at by uptight, strait-laced, white Middle America. For her, of course there was also the little matter of her rebellion against her father. Before she began going with Flynn, the last time she had been in Detroit was on a trip to see David Bowie in concert at Cobo Hall. On her return Tony Ciccone had been furious, and had grounded her. To him, therefore, her apparent infatuation with a gay man who was literally as old as her father was now a further cause for concern, especially as she had encouraged her younger brother Christopher to join her in the regular dance classes in downtown Rochester. Indeed, ‘cause for concern’ is an understatement; in Madonna’s own words, her father was ‘weirded out’ by her friendship with a gay man.