Happy Endings

Perhaps no one is as proud of the way Madonna has turned out as her father, Tony Ciccone. While he didn’t support her dream to be a dancer and had hoped she would go to college before beginning her career, he fully understood her wanting to, as he now puts it, “make something of herself, which she did — boy, did she ever!”

When Rocco was born sickly and prematurely, it was Tony who, by telephone from his northern Michigan vineyard, suggested that his daughter summon a priest to administer the last rites. Though Madonna is ambivalent about such sacraments, it’s a testament to the respect she feels for her traditional Italian-American father that she even considered the notion of last rites for little Rocco. As it happened, such a sacrament would not be necessary. When it was determined that the baby would be fine, Tony and his wife, Joan, tearfully collapsed into each other’s arms — and then toasted with a fine wine the new addition to the family, Tony’s eighth grandchild. “Sometimes I think I’m better as a grandfather than I probably was as a father,” he now says. “But, let’s face it, Madonna was a special case,” he adds. “I think anyone would sympathize with the father who had the job of raising Madonna.”

The day after Rocco’s birth, Tony Ciccone continued his hard labor on the structure of the Ciccone Vineyards and Winery, a vineyard which would open to the public a month later on a hilltop between the Grand Traverse Bay resort town of Sutton Bay and the hills of the Leelanau Peninsula. Tony founded his winery in 1994 after retiring from his job as a physicist and engineer at General Dynamics in Detroit. It is dedicated to his parents, Gaetano and Michelina, who immigrated from Pacentro, Italy, to the United States three years before he was born. The Ciccone Vineyards has been a joint project for Tony and his wife, Joan, the stepmother with whom Madonna never got along as a youngster but to whom she is now — thirty-three years later — quite close.

“It’s our life together,” he proudly says of the winery, one of twenty-five in the state of Michigan, “mine and my wife’s. We have Pinot Grigio, Dolcetto, Cabernet Franc and Chardonnay planted here. I think it keeps me and Joan close, even at this old age we’re in,” he says of the winery. “We raised vegetables in Rochester [Michigan] before owning the winery,” he adds. “My father was a vegetable farmer, too. Good, solid work. The Ciccones have always been solid workers.”

It was about ten years ago, Tony explains, when he first began cultivating grapes. As a surprise gift, Joan purchased an antique grape press for him. “He always wanted a winery,” she recalls. “It was his dream. We knew it would be hard work. But when the Sutton Bay property went up for sale, we also knew we had to buy it.” (The Ciccones will not say if Madonna contributed to the purchasing of the fifteen-acre property.)

Most of his neighbors are not even aware that Madonna is Tony’s daughter. “I don’t advertise it,” he says. “It’s not necessary. If they find out, they find out. I don’t tell them. Some know. But they don’t make a big deal out of it.”

Today, as an adult and a parent, Madonna seems to understand that Tony was doing his genuine best at the time he was raising her, and that his marrying Joan was not a betrayal of his first wife but his only alternative if he was to move on with his life — and give his children a mother.

Certainly, it can be argued that nothing matures a person more than becoming a parent. It seems that Madonna was now identifying with the parent role and not so much the child role, thereby putting her on the other side of the table for the first time. Perhaps she was finally able to see that she needed her father more than she needed her anger, and so she was finally able to give up some of that anger. Indeed, seeing things through a parent’s eyes was, for Madonna, a hopeful sign — it would allow for significant changes in her relationship with her father.

“I love my father,” she now says. “He is a say-what-you-mean-and-mean-what-you-say kind of guy. I’m the same way. Anyone who knows me knows that I am my father, at least in that way. He’s strict, like me. Loving, too, I hope like me. His work ethic is ingrained in me. Now that I have a family, I have so much respect for him and the way he tried to hold ours together, back when I was a bratty little kid. He didn’t have the privileges I have, either. It’s hard to see all of that until you have children.”

Some of Madonna’s siblings have not fared as well as she has in life, perhaps in some ways underscoring the difference in her personality and in her determination to meet the challenges of her circumstances. She has blamed the instability of the Ciccone children on the death of her mother. “I have a very large family who are all emotional cripples in one way or another. Emotionally, we’re all pretty needy because of my mother.” Whereas some of her siblings may have allowed the trauma they felt over their mother’s death to jeopardize their futures, Madonna somehow managed to put hers to work to enhance her life.

Madonna is closest to younger brother Christopher, who accompanied her on a number of concert tours before establishing his own restaurant. Out of her seven siblings, Christopher is the most loyal to her, despite some acrimony that resulted when, in 1991, she discussed his homosexuality with a gay magazine without his permission. Christopher has since traveled with his sister, working with her as artistic director on her concert tours. (People in her employ used to refer to him as “the pope” because of his powerful position in the organization.) He has also designed the interior of some of her homes. “She has her own vision,” he explains. “I offer her a different way of looking at things. Other people do, too. But it’s different with us. We fight a lot, and either she wins or I win, but we don’t let up. Neither of us is afraid to be direct, and Madonna has always known what she wants.”

An enterprising businessman, as well as owning the restaurant Orient in New York, he also has an interest in the popular restaurant Atlantic, in Los Angeles, which Madonna frequents. He says, “Our father spent most of his time preparing us for the rest of our lives. Things I learned from him were honesty, loyalty and the value of truth. He taught us discipline. We went to church every day. Our sense of art, drama — and decadence — all that came from him.”

While Madonna is close to Christopher, she remains estranged from two other brothers. Martin is a recovering alcoholic who has suffered significant instability in his life and career. He’s worked as a disc jockey in the Detroit area and has also been employed as a building contractor. In the early nineties, during Madonna’s “Blonde Ambition” tour, Martin had a well-publicized setback in his recovery just a day after being released from a rehabilitation center (paid for by his famous sister). Perhaps somewhat unfairly, he is seen in his sister’s Truth or Dare video apparently incoherent and irresponsible, and either too inebriated or too disoriented to attend her concert and visit her afterward. The way the scenes are framed, it is as if Madonna is let down by his behavior — making her the victim, as opposed to the more sympathetic notion that the troubled, heavily scrutinized Martin may be a victim of Madonna’s celebrity. After his third arrest for drunk driving and a warning from the judge that he could be jailed, Madonna lost patience with Martin. In 1994, he told a U.S. newspaper: “Madonna won’t lift a finger to help me.” The two have not been particularly close since that time. “This is not the sister I grew up with, who mothered me, who was so full of compassion,” he says. “I guess fame really changes people.” (In December 2000, Martin was a patient at the Chabad Rehabilitation Center in Los Angeles, being treated for an addiction.)

Of Martin, Madonna has countered: “He’s very tortured. I’ve had to get him out of the habit of calling me whenever he needed something from me. I have to feel that Martin loves me for just me and not my money.”

Her half-brother, Mario, is a former cocaine addict who has also had a number of problems in life. At one point, he faced a ten-year prison sentence on a burglary charge. His salvation came only after Madonna hired a high-powered legal team to defend him on charges that he had broken into a florist’s in Rochester, Michigan, and absconded with about $2,000. At the time, he was already on parole with a three-month suspended jail sentence for allegedly assaulting his then girlfriend. It had been his third conviction in six months, after he also allegedly battered a motorist and fractured a police officer’s nose. “My big sister can’t tame me,” he has said. “I am what I am and she has no right to lecture me. I don’t even like her music.”

Of Madonna’s other siblings, Anthony and Paula are both television producers, and Melanie is a musicians’ manager in Los Angeles. Madonna has a cordial, yet distant relationship with her half-siblings Jennifer and Mario.

“We’ve had a hard time, but the family tries to stay strong,” says Tony. “They grow up. They lead their own lives. I lead mine.

“Nonnie has said things about me in the past, probably all true,” observes Tony, reverting to the affectionate diminutive of his daughter’s childhood. “So maybe I wasn’t the greatest father in the world, but life wasn’t easy for any of us.” He says that he has never felt a need to address anything Madonna or any of his other children have ever said about him, “Because we’re Italian-Americans. In our hearts, we know that we love each other. That is all that matters. Sometimes you can’t be close. But life is long and there is always another day.

“But, Madonna and I have been closer than people know,” he concludes. “There’s a peacefulness about her now that she has Lourdes and Rocco to look after. Why, look at how things have changed for her,” he marvels. “If you were writing a book, this is how it would end. It would have a happy ending. Everyone loves a happy ending . . .”