Not About Madonna

Not About Madonna Not About Madonna: My Little Pre-Icon Roommate and Other Memoirs Whit Hill H Heliotrope Books New York Copyright © 2011 Whit Hill All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by an information storage or retrieval system now known or heretoafter invented — except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper — without permission in writing from the publisher. Heliotrope Books LLC c/o SB Design 125 East 4th Street New York, NY 10003 Cover Photograph by Peter Kentes Author Photograph on Back by Robin Dodd Designed and Typeset by Naomi Rosenblatt with AJ&J Design For Dad, who has always been there. For Helen, who stepped in, so gracefully. For Al, who makes me dance and sing. Contents Author’s Note 6 Part One 11 New Girl 13 Ballet 29 The Rube 41 Party Time 51 Star Trek Child 55 Snow Day 61 Candle 79 The Christmas Letter 83 Boppers 107 Little Slugger 121 Al Pacino/Mississippi 123 Diploma 141 Part Two 161 Soho 163 Cape Cod 185 Michelle 201 Truth or Dare 217 The Value of Their Hard Work 233 VH1 241 Calumet 263 Acknowledgments 281 8 I Not About Madonna Author’s Note In the fall of 1977, when I came to Ann Arbor to study dance at the University of Michigan, I thought I knew a thing or two. I had acted professionally in New York City, my hometown. I had posed nude for art classes. I had smoked marijuana. I had done “the bump” at a disco. My birth control device was always within easy reach. My mother had raised me to be a confident, smart woman in control of her own destiny, in control of herself. I was polite, assertive, and outgoing. I got good grades. I dieted. I was a very modern girl. When I met Madonna Ciccone, my initial assessment, even as I watched her leg soaring into an effortless front extension, was that I had little to learn from any young whippersnapper from Michigan, safety-pinned earlobes or no. I felt no instant flush of warmth and trust the day we met, no recognition of a kindred spirit—in fact, all I recall feeling was an almost seismic wariness. But somehow, a few days later, she was my roommate. She moved into apartment 10A of University Towers, an ugly 60s-era monolith right on campus, and took the bed on the other side of a Formica partition. I never knew what hit me. My new roommate was thin, quick, funny, irreverent, and very crafty. She was sexy on the dance floor and sexless at night in her socks as she complained about how boring Michigan was. And she saw in me, or purported to, things she lacked and wanted: serenity, New York City roots, a doting mommy. And so for that school year, we “studied” each other. I, in particular, felt as if I were her secret project. Any reluctance to play along was met with those half- narrowed eyes, a soft fluttering of kiss on my cheek, protestations of love and encouragement mixed with a tinge of whine. With her I climbed fire-escape ladders and clambered around on rooftops. With her I catwalked down steep railroad embankments to the Huron River where we swam naked with strangers. With her I flirted and hitchhiked and told lies and smoked pot and raced my heart stealing candy and magazines. Madonna, dare I say it, liberated my inner child. And that child was a juvenile delinquent. Author’s Note I 9 On the flip side, she seemed fascinated with my life—my status as a pampered only child of divorced parents, raised in New York, well-schooled, and well-traveled. It seemed to blow her mind that my father, a respected actor and member of the Actor’s Studio, played poker with Al Pacino every week. Sometimes, when my mother called, I sensed that Madonna was listening carefully to every word I said, trying to puzzle the errant justice that had taken her mother but spared mine. If there was an occasional edge of competitiveness in our friendship—we were dancers after all, staring in mirrors all day, being judged for our thinness, artistry, and fearlessness—there was just as much support. There were many, many long and convoluted conversations in which we strove to build each other up, and to figure out men and life and dance and selves. And like college girls everywhere, I wrote it all down in a red, Pen-Tab notebook. When she left for New York, I was quietly relieved. Knowing Madonna and loving her (for we had grown to be close friends) was a lot of work. For all our bonding, I never really trusted her. I drifted back to my old ways: dating wide-eyed college students who immediately made plans to marry and sequester me; sucking up to teachers; cultivating friendships with nice, interesting, normal women who did not straddle me on the dance floor. Madonna went on to New York, her goal to rule the world tucked safely in her bosom, her legendary $13 jammed in a fist that let nothing and no one get in her way. Cool. If she hadn’t gone all famous, I believe we would have kept in touch. I think about that sometimes, about the times I would have called her if I could have. When my first child was born, I wanted to tell her about it, but I didn’t know where she was. When she married Sean Penn, it would have been nice to send her a chafing dish. A picture frame. I don’t know. Maybe not. It is kind of strange though, knowing that any attempt at communication with her might now be perceived as having some kind of agenda. Whoa. No thanks. Knowing Madonna didn’t really change my life in any substantive way, but the reality of what she has become—that has been rather weirdly inescapable. She comes upon me at the oddest times: I turn my head in the checkout line and thar she blows, all blonde and shiny, 10 I Not About Madonna and I peer into the face searching for the girl I knew. I stand on a street corner and her voice croons at me from a passing car. I listen for a memory of some ordinary thing she said: “Hey, Whitto, I’m gonna wear your scarf, OK?” Sometimes a person at a party gets that look and shyly asks me, “So … is it true? What I heard about you? You were Madonna’s roommate?” Sometimes I lie, just to get back to the onion dip in peace, to remain in the present. If pressed, I’ll tell a few things: about what we did together, how different we were, her loneliness, her smartassness, her smile. That yes, she was a very good dancer, that she worked harder than anyone I’d ever known. That no, I am not surprised a bit at what happened. That, no, I do not long for reunification but that I do wish her every happiness. My knowing Madonna has been like the world’s largest, most persistent mosquito, or like a dissertation you were supposed to hand in years ago and just can’t quite wrap your head around. Some years ago, I was driving back from a music festival with a guy I was in the process of breaking up with. It was one of those mutual things, so the mood was not too bleak. We were talking about Madonna—she was in the news for something or other and people were asking me about her again—and he suddenly said, “You should write a book.” Well, that seemed like an idea. I wrote a few chapters and got bored, ambivalent, and busy. There were children to raise and rehearsals to run; I have been a performing artist my whole life. Plus, it seemed that in order to write about the Madonna “back then” I’d have to actually care about the Madonna she had become, to be somehow invested and amazed by her many accomplishments. And—how to put this—while I am interested in some facets of American pop culture, Madonna’s particular niche never has really steeped my tea. After a long hiatus, I gave it another go. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the story of my knowing her has a lot to do with some themes I actually am interested in: women artists in America, fame versus nonfame, life versus life onscreen, and all the ways you can lose your mom. As I wrote, I made every effort to be as accurate as possible while creating something people would actually want to read. My journals from my college years were enormously helpful to me, despite being Author’s Note I 11 mortifyingly boring and embarrassing. At times, the journals are quoted verbatim; other times, I have taken short, cursory entries and expanded them to tell a story with richer detail. Sometimes, for the sake of fluidity, I have changed the chronology of some minor events. I have also changed some, but not all, names. Conversations, of course, are recreated, except for those that I wrote down, or remember vividly. The Christmas Letter is included almost in its entirety, including Madonna’s occasional misspellings and flights of punctuation.

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