Madonna by Andrew Morton Read Free Book Online Page A

traumatic.
    She could see her mother, looking very beautiful and lying as if she were asleep in an open casket. Then she noticed that her mother’s mouth, in her words, ‘looked funny.’ It took her some time to realize that it had been sewn up. In that awful moment she began to understand what she had lost for ever. That final image of her mother, at once peaceful yet grotesque, is one she carries with her to this day.
    The Ciccone children reacted to their loss in different ways. Martin and Tony, the older brothers, expressed their anger by becoming rowdier than normal, throwing rocks around the place, lighting illicit fires or just making general nuisances of themselves in the neighborhood. By contrast, Madonna withdrew into herself, vomiting if she left her home for any length of time. Home was a sanctuary and a security blanket, a haven of safety and protection in a mixed-up world. Her sleep was often interrupted by nightmares and, as she shared a bed with her younger sister Paula, she regularly ended up sleeping in her father’s bed, not only for comfort but also so that her younger sister could get some rest.
    Instinctively loving and maternal, qualities often overlooked in any analysis of her personality, Madonna bustled round her younger brother and sisters, particularly baby Melanie, caring for them as she had seen her mother do. But they could never fill the gap left by her namesake’s death. For a sensitive little girl who had already demonstrated her deep-seated need for love and affection, the loss of the one person who gave her patient, unconditional love changed for ever her relationship to the outside world, making her stronger and more self-reliant, yet with an insatiable need for love matched by fear of commitment. She had given her love once to someone she had completely trusted, and that person had gone from her life. It would be many years before she could utterly pledge herself to another. Indeed, her quest for love without strings would define her behavior, in public and in private, and provide the momentum behind the relentless ambition and craving for attention that has propelled her to universal fame.
     
    Years later, when she was in her early twenties and on the threshold of a music career, she was lying in bed in the New York home she shared with her then boyfriend, artist and musician Dan Gilroy. It was in the days when her personality was her performance and her performance was her personality. She was indulging in an early-morning reverie, talking into a tape recorder about a Korean woman she had befriended who had wanted to adopt her. That encounter clearly stirred the deep well of memory about her mother.
    In a voice needy and plaintive, she said: ‘I need a mother, I want a mother. I look for my mother all the time and she never shows up anywhere. I want a mother to hug.’
    Clearly close to tears she repeats a slang phrase about being cheated: ‘I got gypped, I got gypped, I got gypped …’

Chapter Three
    ‘This Used to Be My Playground’
    I N A WAY, it was all the fault – if fault is the right word – of the 1980s pop group, A Flock of Seagulls. Back when he was a music journalist in New York, Neil Tennant, now of the Pet Shop Boys, had an appointment to interview the one-hit wonders. They failed to show. Peeved, Tennant fell back on his contingency plan and called a young singer named Madonna, arranging to meet her for coffee in a downtown café. At that time she had a couple of singles released, but stardom was neither assured, nor swift in coming.
    She arrived on time, eager to make an impression, knowing that good publicity would help the climb up the greasy pole to fame and fortune. Of course, striking publicity could only be achieved by ensuring she gave great copy, and that in turn depended on entertaining stories about her life – especially her sex life. If that meant a little embroidery and embellishment around the edges, so be it. After all, she was just another