Alina Simone - Madonnaland: And Other Detours into Fame and Fandom

AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES

David Menconi, Editor

MADONNALAND

AND OTHER DETOURS INTO FAME AND FANDOM

ALINA SIMONE

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Copyright 2016 by Alina Simone

All rights reserved

First edition, 2016

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University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Simone, Alina, 1974, author.

Madonnaland : and other detours into fame and fandom / Alina Simone.

pages cm (American music series)

ISBN 978-0-292-75946-6 (paperback : alkaline paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-0890-5 (library e-book)

ISBN 978-1-4773-0891-2 (nonlibrary e-book)

1. Madonna, 1958 I. Title. II. Series: American music series

(Austin, Tex.)

ML420.M1387S46 2016

782.42166092dc23

2015028441

doi:10.7560/759466

If you dont like me and still watch everything I do. Bitch, youre a fan.

Madonnas Instagram, April 13, 2015

CONTENTS

ONE

CONSPIRACY IN BAY CITY, OR, WHY IS MADONNAS BIRTHPLACE THE LAST PLACE IN AMERICA WHERE SHE IS ACTIVELY CONTROVERSIAL?

The first thing you see as you enter Bay City, Michigan, heading down M-25 West, is a sign commemorating the 2008 state championship win of the All Saints High Schools bowling, baseball, and softball teams. Farther down M-25, beyond a historic district lined with the nineteenth-century homes of lumber barons, a sign celebrates the sister cities of Ansbach, Germany (capital of Middle Franconia), and Goderich, Ontario (home to the worlds largest undergound salt mine). Yet a third sign, located a few blocks north, announces Bay City as the hometown of Katie Lynn Laroche, Miss Michigan 2010. None of these signs are unusual for a quiet city of thirty-five thousand tucked between the Mitten States thumb and forefinger, but their subject matter does tell you a few things: that Bay City isnt above a little self-congratulation, that you dont have to be Helen Keller or Martin Luther King to have your name immortalized in painted metal on either end of M-25, and that Bay City doesnt necessarily have a surplus of sign-worthy things to say about itself. Insofar as the third point goes, that turns out not to be true. The top-selling female artist in history and one of the most famous women alive, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, was born in Bay City on August 16, 1958. A fact commemorated by the city exactly nowhere.

Id been commissioned to write a book about Madonna, a project Id taken on with enthusiasm, even bluster. After all, I still had my original copy of Like a Virgin on vinyl, an archive of back issues of Teen Beat magazine, and a Slinkys worth of calcified black rubber bracelets in my parents closet back home. Id spent more than half my life surfing the sine waves of Madonnas career and could rattle off frighteningly banal details about her sex life, her workout regime, and her stance on the gifting of hydrangeas, not to mention the unfortunate rodent problem shed experienced of late at her $32 million compound on East Eighty-First Street, where a rat had been glimpsed scurrying into the bathroom while she discussed the possibility of collaborating again with Britney Spears during a video chat with the online radio show Saturday Night with Romeo.

Looking back, these qualifications were perhaps less than PhD-strength.

The logistics of writing a new book about Madonna, I soon discovered, were crushing. Google Madonnas name and the mother of Jesus is nowhere in sight. There is just a tide of accomplishments and accompanying pop-culture analysis waterfalling endlessly through more than 34,100,000 websites, a nearly forty-page Wikipedia entry, thousands of magazine and newspaper articles, and a half-dozen biographies and documentary films to eventually ciphon through a vast network of social media sites, flooding your feeds and blocking your every social-media orifice until you find yourself scrambling for the lifeline of an unfollow or an unlike button lest you wake up one morning screaming with Madonna factoids oozing from the palms of your hands like weeping stigmata.in words, feels like trying to give the population of Indonesia a huga task further complicated by the fact that both are simultaneously growing.

Getting people close to Madonna to talk to me was also no easy task. She is a powerful woman and most of her friends would prefer to remain that way. (One potential interviewee right away stated bluntly: I am very expensive.) As for those who were willing to talk, the problem, I soon learned, was that they had been talking for a very, very long time, and their recollections had long since crystallized into sound bites that ricocheted dispiritingly through the web.

So I began my research in Bay City partly out of journalistic duty, partly out of desperation. Knowing one would basically need a DNA kit to link Madonna to her remaining kin in Bay City, I maintained hope of finding some tiny stone left unturned in the giant gravel pit of Madonna studies. Instead, I learned that I was just the latest in a long line of confused pilgrims to arrive here only to find no sign of Madonna. Not at her grandmothers former home on Smith Street, which attracts fans from as far away as Japan; not at the Calvary cemetery where Madonna famously treated her mothers grave like a yoga mat in her filmic tour diary Truth or Dare; nor at any of the other local landmarks carefully enumerated by sixty-nine-year-old retiree Edward Sierras when he went before the Bay City Commission to propose a Madonna museum and hometown bus tour back in 2008a proposal that was politely shelved.

The local media havent failed to notice the lack of Madonna signage, and have in fact made something of a beat out of its absence. In 2012, the Bay City Times published a story about an Argentine film crew who arrived to gather footage for a Madonna documentary but found so little to film that, in a kind of self-negating feedback loop, they ended up interviewing the very Bay City Times journalist assigned to cover them. Another story describes the local melee on Madonnas fiftieth birthday, when reporters from both Ukraines Inter TV and German public radio arrived in Bay City expecting a big celebration, but instead found two guys pounding out an acoustic cover of Like a Virgin in a local bar. The Bay City Times went so far as to dispatch a video crew to capture the German journalists doomed effort to scrape together a story: his awkward phone chat with Madonnas ninety-six-year-old grandmother, Elsie, during which Madonna was seemingly never mentioned; his live interview with Madonnas fourth cousin, who may or may not have ever shared a sofa with Madonna. The Times also recorded the Germans bewilderment over the fact that nothing had been done locally to commemorate the most famous female performer of all time. His interview with the Bay City Times eventually morphed into a mournful PSA addressed to the people of Bay City to please make more about the fact that she was from here.

Cruising down Smith Street, its easy to see what all the fuss isnt about. The former home of Madonnas grandmother, Elsie Fortin, has been converted into an eldercare center by its current owners, but aside from the addition of a wheelchair ramp, remains much the same; 1204 Smith Street gives off that woozy suburban ennui. I could practically feel the bored, endless tattoo of a basketball vibrating through the soles of my shoes. It is a single-story ranch house with a brown-shingled roof that sits on the corner of the most normal-looking street in America. I stare at it, trying to will Madonna to life. But of course, it wasnt Madonna who lived here, but Nonni Ciccone. And really she didnt live here all that much.