Madonna by Andrew Morton Read Free Book Online Page B

aspiring young singer, a co-conspirator in the unspoken pact between those who crave celebrity, and those who have the power to offer it, to give them the canvas upon which to paint their dreams. ‘From the very start I was a bad girl,’ she gushed. The tape recorder mechanically recorded her words, but not the ironic gestures and knowing winks that accompanied them.
    ‘I hardly said a word,’ remembers Tennant. ‘I couldn’t stop her talking.’ Yet his second-choice interview made great copy, the result a major spread in Star Hits magazine in November 1983. It provided material which, together with other interviews Madonna gave at that time, has found its way into countless feature articles, films and biographies, so that now, like pebbles in a pocket, her anecdotes and vignettes from early interviews have grown smooth with overuse. When the efforts of her more excitable chroniclers, and especially those who have focused on the sexual and the sensational, are added to her own early propaganda, it is easy to see how the myth of Madonna was born: the ghetto childhood; the schoolgirl rebel; the flirty young Lolita who became a sexual athlete; the mistreated Cinderella, complete with Wicked Stepmother; the misunderstood artist.
    Inevitably, all this makes for a confusing narrative. For it seems that at one moment a nun who taught the little girl is beating her over the head with a stapler, and at the next another teacher is writing on her report card: ‘12/1/63 Mother died. Needs a great deal of love and attention.’ (Whether the kindergarten teacher in question wrote that assessment before she taped over Madonna’s foul young mouth, or after she forcibly washed it out with soap and water, remains unclear.) Then we have the picture of the precocious five-year-old tease who taught a young boy how to bump and grind to a Rolling Stones record, set alongside another of the pubescent girl horrified at the mention of the word ‘penis’ when her stepmother attempted to teach her the facts of life.
    For the biographer, it is difficult to find a path through the myths and half-truths and exaggerations, not all of them of Madonna’s creation. Yet by reflecting further upon her early life and chiseling out a few of the less worn pebbles of fact from her past, a different picture emerges, a history that is altogether more plausible, and at once both more complex and more compelling. It is a picture that also helps an understanding of the central theme of this book, namely, that Madonna is a considerable artist who has used both her sexuality and her social and sexual codes as her weapons of choice, her method of connecting with her audience; in short, that she is a long way from the popular conception of her as a sexual Amazon who happens to be a singer and occasional actress.
    Curiously, therefore, in any account of her youth, two competing and conflicting personal qualities are seen to dominate – her curiosity, and her conformity. As a child, she had a relentless and intelligent inquisitiveness about the world around her, as well as a self-absorbed fascination with her own physicality and, later, her nascent sexuality. But if the question ‘Why?’ was never far from her lips, neither was the question ‘Why not?’ – ‘Why can’t I wear pants to church, why can’t I go out and play, and if God is good why did he take my mother?’ At times, her insatiable curiosity could bring her pain. On one occasion, when she was riding in the car with her father, she refused to believe that the glowing, red-hot end of the cigarette lighter was hot. She put her finger on it to find out.
    Of enduring fascination were the nuns, serene, powerful yet seemingly semi-divine, who taught her at the three schools – Saint Frederick’s, Saint Andrew’s, and the Sacred Heart Academy – she attended. Curious to discover if these mysterious creatures were truly human, she and a friend scaled the convent wall to see if they could find out