Certain Sacrifices

In August 1979, three weeks after she returned home from Europe, Madonna and her friend Whitley Setrakian talked about her exciting journey overseas. “She was living in a real hellhole in New York,” recalls Whitley. “But she called it home, and so we laid on the floor on a futon and she told me this amazing story about how she had gone to Paris on the Concorde, how she hated it there, and turned around and came back. She was telling it to me in such a matter-of-fact manner, I was startled by it. To me, this was such a big deal. But she was nonchalant about it.

“I was so amazed that she was suddenly entering another world and was quite separated from the world that we once shared. However, she really saw it all as a natural evolution, and expected more trips to Europe, more opportunities to do more wonderful things. The trip may have been an unhappy one for her in some ways, but it did inject her with a new confidence, I think. She seemed even more self-assured when she returned from it. It was soon after I left New York during that visit that she saw another ad in Backstage for a film role that interested her.”

After having already auditioned for the movie Footloose and the television series Fame (and not being cast in either), the twenty-one-year-old Madonna sent her photographs and a handwritten letter/résumé to amateur filmmaker Stephen Jon Lewicki. She was responding to his advertisement in Backstage which said, in part, “Wanted: Woman for low-budget movie. Dominatrix type.”

Recalls Lewicki, “I was looking for a fiery, sexy, dominant girl in her early twenties who could act. I got about 300 responses, most of which were 8X10 glossy photos with résumés boasting of summer stock experience, and all of which were incredibly boring. And as I was getting completely discouraged by the process, I came across this one, last envelope.”

When Lewicki opened the envelope, he found Madonna’s résumé, two 3X5 color photographs, one black-and-white 8X10, as well as a handwritten three-page letter, which he still treasures. Madonna, who began by mentioning that she had just “returned from Europe,” further wrote, “I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, where I began my career in petulance and precociousness. When I was fifteen, I began taking ballet classes regularly, listening to baroque music, and slowly but surely developed a great dislike of my classmates, teachers and high school in general. There was one exception, and that was my drama class.”

He recalls, “Suddenly, here was a girl who I thought had some interesting possibilities.” He also noticed that they shared the same birthday, to the year. But it was more than just that particular coincidence — or, perhaps, omen — that interested him in her. Lewicki explained, “There was something about her photos that made me want to meet her. In them, she was sexy, but not lewd. I had received all kinds of pictures and letters from girls who looked like they were whores who wanted to be actresses, and actresses who wanted to be whores. However, Madonna’s photos were different. In one, she was putting on lipstick with her pinkie finger while sitting, I believe, in a bus station. There was something seductive about it, yet it had a certain fragility, an innocence that really fascinated me. I knew I had to meet her. So we set up a meeting in Washington Square Park.”

Madonna showed up in a tight red miniskirt, and with her cocky, self-assured attitude in tow. “You would have thought she had a great résumé with a lot of experience, judging from the way she acted,” Lewicki recalls with a smile. “She was tough.”

“Look, I’ll do your movie,” Madonna told Lewicki, nonchalantly. “But there’ll be no screwing.”

“Who said anything about screwing?” he asked.

She took out her compact and began applying a pink blush color to her lips with her pinkie finger, as she had been doing in the photograph that had so fascinated the producer. “Just know,” she said, seeming bored, “that you and I will not be screwing. Got it?”

“I didn’t realize it then, but now I think she was auditioning for me right then and there,” says Stephen Jon Lewicki. “I knew she was perfect for the role. She was doing the role.”

Lewicki hired Madonna for his low-budget, one-hour movie, the plot of which involved the strange goings-on between a downtown dominatrix named Bruna (Madonna) and her suburban, outcast boyfriend, Dashiel (Jeremy Pattnosh). When Bruna is raped in the bathroom of a diner, she and her boyfriend employ her “sex slaves” to perform a satanic human sacrifice on her rapist. “At no time did I ever ask her to take her clothes off,” recalls Lewicki. “It just evolved as she was doing the scene. She was very comfortable with her body, with nudity. Far from being pornographic, it’s very passionate and interesting,” he says. “We started the movie in October 1979, and we had a lot of fun, she was always up, had a lot of energy, able to improvise. I had a crush on her, actually. We cut each other down a lot, insulted each other. That’s sort of how you relate to Madonna. She insults you, you insult her back . . . then, she knows you love her.

“She talked a lot about her life, the death of her mother and how it had affected her,” he recalls. “I knew that she felt she had to take care of herself because she would never allow anyone else to do so for fear that she would depend on that person, and that he would leave. So, I understood her brash nature. Also, she had a father who she believed disapproved of her. There was a certain scene in the film which was racy, and I remember her saying, ‘Oh my God, my father will freak out when he sees this.’ I asked her, ‘You’ll let your father see this?’ And she said, ‘Oh, absolutely.’ I had the feeling that she wanted to be rebellious just for the sake of rebellion, that she wanted him to see that she had a mind of her own. She was driven by this need, she had to prove she was independent of everyone, her deceased mother, her disapproving father.”

The first low-budget films made by many actresses are seldom memorable, and Madonna’s is no different, with its finale featuring a human sacrifice. The script is muddled, the sound mediocre and the acting by everyone, including Madonna, overwrought and amateurish, though perhaps unintentionally prophetic (“Do you think for once that any lover of mine could be tame?” she asks at one point. “It’s not possible.”) Still, the movie is well-intentioned.

Despite the low-budget nature of what she was doing, leading lady Madonna — with her natural brunette hair cut in a close-cropped style — was already acting like the star she would become in just a few short years. Co-star Russell Lome, who appeared in a steamy love scene with Madonna, was struck by the novice actress’s brimming self-confidence. “She was acting as if she had a makeup person, a wardrobe person and a whole entourage — yet there was no entourage,” Lome remembers. “She was this attractive, unknown young woman who seemed to command a great deal of attention. She had already adopted the practice of using one name, thinking of how the great stars of yesterday would become known by a single name at the height of their fame. Marilyn, Dietrich, Gable, Garbo, Liz, Brando. I guess Madonna wanted her name added to the list of one-name legends.”²

*

By the beginning of 1980, Madonna’s instincts were telling her that her future was most definitely not in film, at least not yet, and not in dance, either. At this time, she realigned herself with her ex-boyfriend Dan Gilroy, who couldn’t resist taking her back . . . into his life, and also into the Breakfast Club. However, before long, her growing ambition caused conflicts with both Gilroy brothers. While they viewed her as just a group member, she saw herself as the main attraction and thus wanted to sing more leads — especially after another female (Angie Smits) was added to the group as a bass player. Though she liked Angie, she couldn’t help but think of her as competition; she didn’t like sharing the stage with another woman. As weeks turned into months, Dan became frustrated by Madonna’s constant habit of upstaging him and the other band members. “You’re all naked ambition with no talent,” he told her during one particularly bitter argument in front of the band.

“Oh yeah?” she countered. “Well, screw you, Dan. Screw you.”

“That’s when she quit the band. It was pretty tough being her boyfriend, to say the least,” said Dan Gilroy in what seems like a great understatement, “mostly because you knew there was no way she was going to be faithful. She always had a lot of other guys lined up, and each one had a purpose in her life. When she was done with me that time, well, she was done with me for good.”

Again, it seemed time for Madonna to move on. From Dan Gilroy she had been given a place to live, the security of being in a relationship with someone who truly loved her, knowledge of certain musical instruments as well as a sense of what it was like to sing in front of an audience accompanied by a backup band. She now had the idea to start her own band, develop her own sound, and promote her own persona . . . and without Dan Gilroy.

“I know he was pretty brokenhearted,” says Norris Burroughs, the man responsible for introducing Dan to Madonna. “He wasn’t the type of guy who invested in relationships heavily, but Madonna did a number on him. There was a sense of destiny about them, the way she went off to Paris and you thought it was over, then she was back and you realized that it wasn’t over at all, that maybe it had just begun again. I don’t know if she was using him, or not. Only she would know that. But at the time, it all seemed very star-crossed to me.”³

Soon after moving out of the Gilroys’ synagogue/studio/living quarters, Madonna partnered with her Michigan boyfriend, drummer Steve Bray. The two had met at the University of Michigan in 1976; at the time, Bray was a waiter at the Blue Frogge club on Church Street in Ann Arbor, which was frequented by many of the university’s students. He was also a drummer for an R&B band and, says Madonna of the dashing African-American Bray, “the first guy I ever allowed to buy me a drink [a gin and tonic]. He was irresistibly handsome.” After becoming romantically involved with her, Bray allowed Madonna to travel with him across Michigan as he and his band performed in small clubs. When the romance ended, they remained friends. Bray then moved to New York. (In years to come, Steve Bray would write, co-write and produce many of Madonna’s greatest hits, including “Express Yourself,” “True Blue,” “Into the Groove,” “Papa Don’t Preach” and “Causing a Commotion.”)

Now that Madonna had determined that she would have a musical career in New York, she wanted to be immersed in that business twenty-four hours a day. Feeling herself bursting at the seams with imagination and creativity, she would spend the next year writing songs and performing locally around New York with a small backup band, which included Steve Bray on drums. Because Bray also needed a place to live, the two agreed to move into a West Side Manhattan conglomerate of offices and rehearsal studios on Eighth Avenue called the Music Building, and simply sleep in the studios of any of the tenants there who would agree to such a thing — and some actually did. “The Music Building,” Bray explains, “was near Port Authority Bus Terminal. There were a lot of singers and bands working in rehearsal halls and studios there, just trying to figure out their music. It was a good place, very artistic. You could just taste the creativity there. We loved it, just being in the atmosphere was intoxicating. Our band was hot, and getting hotter all the time.”

There were some problems, though, not the least of which was the solution to a disagreement involving the group’s name. Bray recalls, “We had a lot of names. First, we came up with ‘Emmy’, meaning ‘M’ for Madonna. Emmy was also my nickname for Madonna. Then, we were ‘the Millionaires.’ Then, ‘Modern Dance.’” (It should be noted that, in a separate interview, Steven Bray recalled that the name “Emmy” was actually short for “Emanon,” “no name” spelled backwards.)

Despite the uncertainty of the group’s name, Madonna’s self-confidence and outlook for its future remained unshakable. However, for someone who was not a known performer, she had already developed the ego of a major — and, in some ways, difficult — star. Bray continues, “She wanted to call the band ‘Madonna.’ Well, I thought that was just too much.”

“But it makes a lot of sense,” Madonna told Steve Bray during lunch at Howard Johnson’s in Times Square. “See, there’s this group that was called Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles. And when they reinvented themselves, they called themselves Labelle, after the leader of the group.”

Bray digested this piece of information. “So, what are you saying?” he asked her. “That you’re the leader of this band?”

“Why, no, not at all,” Madonna answered, her tone sweet. “You’re the brains, Steve. You’re the musical genius. Me? Why, I’m just the star.”

“Forget it, Emmy,” he told her. “It sounds too Catholic, anyway. ‘Madonna?’ No, I don’t think so.”

Even today, Madonna has to admit that she was perplexed by the group’s reluctance to be named for her. Why didn’t her colleagues recognize the clear reality — at least her reality — that she was their meal ticket? While she may have felt she had their best interests at heart as well as her own, it didn’t appear that way to the rest of the band, who thought she was just being selfish. In the end, the group did settle on the name “Emmy,” with Dan and Ed Gilroy as front men, Madonna on lead vocals, former Breakfast Club member Gary Burke on bass, Brian Syms on lead guitar and Steve Bray on drums. Madonna recalls, “We played, we sang, we went all over New York just trying to make money, which never happened. It got to be less fun than I had hoped.”

Frustrated, Madonna decided that the restrictions of being a member of a band had begun to erode her true identity as a performer, anyway. “It was too confining,” she would later recall. “I had ideas. In a band, you can’t have ideas. Without being able to express myself, I felt, well, why bother?”⁴