Read an Excerpt
Madonna: Like an Icon
Chapter One
The Death of Madonna
Just north of Detroit is the suburb of Pontiac. Now a depressed area, back in Madonna's day it was a thriving manufacturing town servicing Detroit's huge automobile industry. Rising up by the highway is a cavernous bubble-shaped structure called the Silverdome. It was built in 1970s for Detroit's football team, but since the Lions moved downtown in 2002, it's been more or less abandoned. In its heyday, it hosted the NBA All-Star games and welcomed such rock bands as Led Zeppelin and The Who. In January 1987, Pope John Paul II celebrated a mass there.
Just across the road from the Silverdome is a small working-class neighborhood. Here Madonna spent her early childhood, at 443 Thors Street, in a modest, pale green single-story house. When I arrived there in 2006, it had a worn, dilapidated air, as if the ghosts hadn't quite left the building. Back in the early 1960s it would have been filled with children. It was Madonna's parents' first house, the place where they started their married life and where their eldest daughter first hatched her adventurous dreams.
"My grandparents came from Italy on the boat . . . [they] spoke no English at all. They weren't very educated, and I think in a way they represented an old lifestyle that my father really didn't want to have anything to do with," Madonna once said. Her grandfather Gaetano Ciccone came from Pacentro, a small village in the Abruzzo region of Italy. He came from a family of peasant farmers, but was encouraged to go to school and broaden his opportunities. In 1920, there was no work for this ambitious teenager, so he leftfor America, and made his way to Aliquippa, a steel town just outside Pittsburgh. After finding a job working on the blast furnace floor, he brought from Italy his young wife, Michelina di Ulio. They lived in a rented one-bedroom house near the steel mill, and raised six sons, five of whom worked at the mill. The youngest, Madonna's father, Silvio (also known as Tony), was the only one fortunate enough to go to college.
The Ciccones found being an immigrant family tough: there was considerable prejudice against the new wave of European immigrants, particularly Italians, who often came from impoverished backgrounds and were vulnerable to exploitation in the non-unionized mills.
Gaetano worked hard and got into politics. Spurred on by the historic National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which recognized unions, he helped organize a brief but crippling strike at the Aliquippa mill in the summer of 1937, which led to an improvement in the lives of the workers. Madonna later inherited that sense of justice with her inclusive politics and her open support of the Democratic Party. In the early 1990s, for instance, she filmed a public service announcement for the U.S. Rock the Vote campaign, a movement cofounded by MTV, which led to a 20 percent increase in youth turnout in the 1992 election that ushered in President Clinton. And in the wake of the 2003 Iraq War, Madonna was vocal in her opposition to George Bush, urging her fans to go and see Michael Moore's controversial documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. In 2004 she endorsed Wesley Clark's Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidential election with the impassioned statement: "The future I wish for my children is at risk." Then, two years later, she expressed support for Hillary Clinton's campaign for the presidency.
Though she hasn't been as politically active as other major artists, such as Bono or Peter Gabriel, Madonna has campaigned for years on issues like safe sex and AIDS awareness, and has always opposed discrimination, whether on the grounds of race or sex. As a daughter of second-generation immigrants, she was keenly aware of social marginalization.
Her grandfather Gaetano was a strong disciplinarian, who managed to provide for his large family, but daily life was a struggle. The strain showed in his addiction to drink, a habit that took hold after he began making his own homemade wine. Madonna has said that both her paternal grandparents were alcoholics, a factor that played a part in her more abstemious attitude toward drink and drugs. Although the Italian community in Aliquippa was close-knit, it was also restrictive, with women expected to be little more than mothers and homemakers. And higher education, with its threat to traditional values, was treated with a degree of suspicion.
Studious and devout, Tony decided to break free from the restraints of his background. "He wanted to be upwardly mobile and go into the educated, prosperous America," Madonna once told Time magazine writer Denise Worrell. "I think he wanted us to have a better life than he did when he was growing up." After a stint of military service in Texas in the U.S. Air Force, in 1952, he returned home to Pennsylvania to get a degree in engineering at Geneva College, a Catholic institution in Beaver Falls. He had a long-term plan. The previous year he had met Madonna Fortin, the younger sister of his air force friend Dale Fortin. Tony was invited to Dale's wedding at a small chapel on the Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas, where they worked. The seventeen-year-old Madonna was maid of honor. A quiet beauty with wry wit and a gentle smile, she descended from pioneering French-Canadian stock—generations of farmers and lumberjacks who worked the land with a pragmatic, determined outlook. Her father, Willard Fortin, was a top manager in a Bay City construction company, and together with her mother, Elsie, raised their eight children to be pious Catholics. "She was very beautiful," remembered Madonna. "I look like her. I have my father's eyes but I have my mother's smile and a lot of her facial structure."
It wasn't just Madonna Sr.'s beauty that attracted Tony to her, but the fact that she came from a similar hardworking ethnic Catholic background. Both had high ideals and a strong attachment to family. . . .
Madonna: Like an Icon. Copyright © by Lucy O'Brien. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
