Losing Her Virginity

Though feeling almost smothered by a strict religious environment, Madonna’s talent still somehow managed to blossom and, on occasion, she would find imaginative ways to unleash it. For instance, in a fifth-grade talent show, the eleven-year-old scandalized the school audience when, clad only in a coat of fluorescent green paint and a revealing bikini, she did a knockout imitation of a go-go-dancing Goldie Hawn (à la Hawn’s early performances on the classic television program, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In). Madonna’s father smoldered at the sight of his pubescent daughter bumping and grinding for all to see. Afterward, he grounded her for two weeks. “I don’t know what she was thinking,” he says today. “Besides the fact that she wanted to shock everyone.”

Once in Rochester Adams High School, Madonna found various activities with which she could keep herself in the public eye. As a cheerleader, she got a taste of what it was like to be in front of enthusiastic crowds. She then had the opportunity to test some of the tricks she had used as a child in front of her appreciative family, but on a bigger, and maybe even more critical, audience.

Karen Craven, who was on the cheerleading squad with Madonna, recalls the day the squad was to form a typical “human pyramid” during a break in a game. Madonna “vaulted up to the top and did a little flip,” she remembers. A collective gasp erupted from the crowd when the teenager’s skirt flew up. Guidance counselor Nancy Ryan Mitchell recalls, “From a distance, it looked like she was nude. However, she was actually wearing a pair of flesh-colored tights. It was shocking, I must say. But that was Madonna.

“I remember that she would also dance vigorously during some of the plays she was in, using a lot of body movement. It was pretty controversial for the times. Her father wasn’t pleased. Anything she could do to shock people, that’s what she would do. But, to her credit, she was a bright student, involved in a Big Brother/Sister program, a thespian group. She was very positive thinking. She was taking dancing lessons after school when a lot of other kids were drinking Cokes. She worked hard.”

Madonna was also involved in the theater department, starring in productions such as My Fair Lady, Cinderella, The Wizard of Oz and Godspell. On the high school stage, she would learn what it was like to please an audience, to stand in the spotlight and accept a crowd’s warm applause. “She liked it,” says Clara Bonell, a former classmate. “I saw her in Godspell, and I remember that when the audience stood for the curtain call, she was crying. The sense of acceptance, I think now that this is what she most appreciated, most craved. I think she felt that she didn’t get it at home from her father, who was just not supportive at all, as I recall it. So, if she could get it from an audience, then that was good for her.”

Beverly Gibson, her drama teacher, adds, “When the spotlight came on her, she was pure magic. People paid attention to her; you couldn’t take your eyes off of her. You often hear about people who become famous being wallflowers. You hear their friends and teachers say, ‘Oh, I would never have expected her to become famous.’ Not so with Madonna. There was no way she could ever be anything other than famous at something. I would watch her on stage with that vibrant personality and charisma, and think to myself, ‘Oh, my, it is inevitable, isn’t it?’”

“In high school, Madonna was a nonconformist,” says her former classmate Tanis Rozelle. “Unlike the other girls, she didn’t shave her armpits, and neither did her sister Melanie. That was considered pretty weird. Both had thick tufts of hair growing out from underneath their armpits. It caused a minor controversy, but after a while people just accepted it. Madonna explained that she didn’t shave because she didn’t want to be a typical suburban American girl. She said she didn’t want to remove something from her body that was natural. It didn’t stop her from raising her arms high while cheering, even when she wore a sleeveless uniform,” recalls Tanis. “And it certainly didn’t stop her from being popular with the boys. She was very pretty and the guys really liked her.”

It was during her first year in high school, at the age of fifteen in December 1973, when Madonna lost her virginity to seventeen-year-old Russell Long. Actually, she says she had some sexual encounters prior to this time, when she was eight, but not intercourse. “All of my sexual experiences when I was young were with girls,” she says. “I mean, we didn’t have those sleepover parties for nothing. I think that’s really normal, same-sex experimentation. You get really curious and there’s your girlfriend, and she’s spending the night with you, and it happens.”

“She wanted her first time having real sex to be something special,” Russell Long now recalls. “We had a date — a movie and burgers — and afterward we drove my very cool, blue 1966 Caddy back to my parents’ place.”

While Long recalls being nervous about the signals he says Madonna was sending — it was clear that she wanted to be intimate with him — he didn’t have to worry about initiating anything. She was the aggressor. “Are we going to do it, or not?” she wanted to know as she removed her bra.

“I guess so,” Russell said, breathlessly.

“Well, then, c’mon,” she urged. “Do it!”

Years later, she would observe, “Even after I made love for the first time, I still felt like a virgin. I didn’t lose my virginity until I knew what I was doing.”

After that first time at the home of Long’s parents, he says, they chose the backseat of his Cadillac for future rendezvous. “My friends called it ‘the Passion Wagon,’” he recalls.

“She didn’t have a problem with people knowing we were having sex. Lots of girls of that age would have been embarrassed by it, or would at least not have wanted people to know. Not Madonna. She was proud of it, said that it had made her feel like a woman. She was comfortable with her body, didn’t mind being seen naked. She just seemed comfortable with all of it.”

“I liked my body when I was growing up,” Madonna once said in a press interview, “and I wasn’t ashamed of it. I liked boys and didn’t feel inhibited by them. Maybe it comes from having brothers and sharing a bathroom. The boys got the wrong impression of me at high school. They mistook forwardness for promiscuity. When they don’t get what they want, they turn on you. I went through a period when all the girls thought I was loose, and the boys thought I was a nymphomaniac. The first boy I ever slept with was my boyfriend and we’d been going out a long time.”

“She wasn’t like most other students,” Russell Long recalls. “There was a group of kids who were just the odd ones, the ones most of the students thought were sort of creepy. Madonna was in that bunch. She didn’t assimilate into the student body, rather she was one of those kids on the fringe, sort of on the sidelines smirking at everyone else.

“However, I found her to be quite sensitive,” he continues. “We had long talks about her mother, and how much she missed her. Also, we discussed the tension that existed between her and her father. By the time she was in high school she was rebelling against him in every way, she seemed so angry at him, though I didn’t understand why. She would say, ‘What do you think he’d do if he knew we were having sex? Do you think it would freak him out?’ And I would say, ‘Hell, yeah, it would freak him out.’ Then she would come back with, ‘Well, then, maybe I should tell him.’ I would say, ‘Madonna, no! He’ll kill me.’ But my safety, or her privacy, wasn’t on her mind. If she could blow his mind, shock him, she wanted to do it. Even more than that, if she could piss him off, she wanted to do it.” Long and Madonna continued their relationship for six months.

Russell Long, now a trucker for United Parcel Service, still lives in Michigan and is married with children. “I wonder if he still loves me,” Madonna once mused. Then, as if coming to her senses, she answered her own question. “Oh, of course he does!”

“Sure I do,” says Russell Long today. “Even if she had not become famous, there’s no way I would ever have forgotten her. She was one of a kind.”