Finally . . . New York City!

Whether it’s all true or not — and with the always imaginative Madonna one can never really be certain — the story, or legend, of Madonna’s arrival in New York City on that morning in July 1978 is a good one. Intent on her easily-salable image as a modern-day Cinderella, she has often recalled leaving Detroit Metropolitan Airport — her first flight — and arriving in the city with nothing but thirty-five dollars in her pocket, a winter coat on her back, a duffel bag full of ballet tights slung over her shoulder . . . and a determination to do something significant with her life, to succeed. “Ten summers ago,” she announced in 1988 to a cheering crowd at the premiere of her film Who’s That Girl?, “I made my first trip to New York. My first plane ride, my first cab ride. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know a soul. And I told the taxicab driver to drop me off in the middle of everything, so he dropped me off at Times Square. I was completely awestruck.”

Around the time Madonna arrived in New York City, the play Evita was making its initial impact on Broadway. The heroine of the show is an ambitious woman who, with unflappable self-confidence, leaves her hometown to make her first trip to the big city, in her case Buenos Aires. She doesn’t know anyone there. She is dropped off “in the middle of everything.” Then, she takes over . . .

One can somehow imagine the five-foot-four-and-a-half, nineteen-year-old Madonna (she would turn twenty in a month) clad in her out-of-season winter coat, walking past the porno theaters and peep shows in Times Square and stopping to admire the billboards and placards displayed in front of the theater featuring Evita, starring Patti LuPone. Did she ever imagine how closely her life would parallel the Argentinian icon’s? Certainly she never considered that she would one day play the leading role in the movie version of this same play, some fifteen years in the future. Or did she?

New York, one of the toughest, most unforgiving cities in the world, did not intimidate Madonna in the least. Always with an eye toward the future, Madonna would manage to survive on her wits. As legend has it, she roamed the strange, frenetic city on that first day until finally ending up at a street fair on Lexington Avenue, where she noticed a man following her. Instead of fleeing, as most young women in a new city might, Madonna greeted him. “Why are you wearing that coat?” he asked her, giving her a cue to launch into her “story.”

“Hi! I just arrived in town and I don’t have a place to stay,” she said. It was a story that had had some rehearsal time; she had already tried it on other disinterested strangers. Still, Madonna’s intensity must have made it seem compelling to this particular passerby because she ended up moving into his apartment and, according to her, sleeping on his couch. Home at last.

Madonna soon learned, however, that a young woman could not always be so trusting of people, particularly of men she might meet on the streets of New York. Years later, when she was famous for controversial anecdotes about herself, Madonna revealed that she had been attacked in New York at this time. “I have been raped and it is not an experience I would ever glamorize,” she revealed. The subject came up while she was discussing scenes from her controversial book of nude studies entitled Sex.

“I know there are a lot of women who have that fantasy of being overpowered by two men or a group of men.” One photograph in her book depicts Madonna dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform while being attacked by two boys. She insisted that the photograph, however, was pure fantasy. “It’s obviously completely consensual,” she said. “Everybody wants to do it.”

Madonna did not give any date or details of her own experience, saying only that, “It happened a long time ago, so over the years I’ve come to terms with it. In a way it was a real eye-opening experience. I’d only lived in New York for a year and I was very young, very trusting of people.”

“I remember her saying something about it,” her longtime friend Erica Bell recalls. “But it wasn’t something I felt she wanted to discuss openly. I think it was a date rape, meaning I think she knew the guy. It was someone who betrayed her confidence, her faith. It must have been devastating.”

Says another friend — a woman who still knows Madonna today and in whom she often confides — “The date rape was something she never wanted to talk about. But when it did come up, you could tell that she was deeply affected by whatever happened. She cried when she spoke of it, as if she had been traumatized. She said, ‘I wanted to call my father and tell him about it, maybe go home for a while. But he would have killed me.’ I felt that she needed her father at that time, but was afraid to turn to him. I know she could have used a mother, as well. These were lonely years.”

Her former manager Freddy DeMann adds, “I remember a time, long after her first taste of fame, when a girl in one of her audiences was being pushed around by some guys in front, trying to get closer to her [Madonna]. Suddenly, the girl went down, into the crowd. It was as if she was going to get stomped. Then, a couple of guys went down after her, and none of them came up. Madonna was watching the whole thing. She stopped the show, stopped singing, and called security out and told them to help that young girl. ‘I know what it’s like to feel powerless,’ she said from the stage. ‘And it doesn’t feel good.’ I’ll never forget that night. I felt that she had great empathy for that girl, and a certain amount of fear, too.”

“I don’t want to make it an issue,” Madonna has said about the rape incident. “I’ve had what a lot of people would consider to be horrific experiences in my life. But I don’t want people to feel sorry for me because I don’t.” Madonna said that the experience had made her “much more street smart and savvy. It was devastating at the time but it made me a survivor.”