Free Madonna by Andrew Morton Page B

go wild but, more important, the senior cheerleading squad was left feeling deeply envious.
    Thus it came to be accepted by her contemporaries that Madonna had a certain edge, that she always tried a little harder to stand out. Another of her fellow cheerleaders, Carol Stier, remembers that when the two of them went shopping in the Rochester malls, Madonna always chose jeans and other clothes that were in some way unusual. Not conforming, it seems, was part and parcel of her personality. To Carol, it was clear that ‘it was important for her to be in the public eye. She did a very good job of being the one who people would talk to and about.’
    Nonetheless, on the surface she was a typical Midwest teenager, joining the other girls in the school bathrooms as they tried on each other’s makeup, gossiping about boys, hanging out at Las Pumas, a doughnut-and-coffee shop, or the local McDonald’s. She even won the annual hula-hoop contest. And, like the other cheerleaders, she was becoming more interested in those strange yet fascinating creatures known as boys. ‘Her interests? Like the rest of us – boys,’ remembers Lucinda Axler. As for boyfriends, ‘She had her share. If Madonna wanted a guy she got their attention. She could capture their hearts.’
    Her former school sweetheart Nick Twomey, whom she singled out as her top choice when she made a list of the boys she found most attractive, noticed the changes in Madonna when he arrived at Adams High after spending his early teens at a different school. ‘I remember seeing her again and she was flirtatious off the charts,’ he says. ‘She did what she had to do to get recognized by the boys but I don’t think she was running around sleeping with everybody. That’s more myth.’
    On one occasion she arranged to stay over at her friend Ruth Dupack’s house, the two of them planning to spend the night in a tent in the backyard. It wasn’t long before Madonna and Ruth sneaked off and walked a mile to a party at a boy’s house. ‘I was pretty nervous but it seemed to have been planned by her,’ Ruth remembers. ‘She and I once dated the same boy. But boyfriends never lasted long, she went from one to another.’
    Her vitality and physical awareness, her need to attract attention and her lengthening list of admirers soon inspired rumors about her sexual behavior. ‘Madonna always had a reputation of being one of those girls, you know, kinda fast,’ recalls Lia Gaggino, the class valedictorian and now a pediatrician. Her reputation as a ‘nympho’ was one Madonna was well aware of at the time, and resents to this day. ‘I was necking with boys like everybody else,’ she says. ‘So I didn’t understand where it all came from. I would hear words like “slut” that I hear now.’ Once she was confronted outside school by a girl student who, after a few harsh words, slapped her full in the face. The jealous teenager, doubtless mindful of the other girl’s reputation, however ill founded, had thought Madonna was making moves on her boyfriend.
    In fact her first serious sexual experience was as conventional as it was prosaic: cheerleader makes out with football jock in the back of his car (a blue 1966 Cadillac, for the curious). After dating for six months, Madonna, then fifteen, and her boyfriend, school sports hero Russell Long, went all the way at his parents’ house. ‘I was so nervous I couldn’t get her bra strap undone,’ recalls the gallant Mr Long, now a trucker for UPS. They continued dating for several months afterwards, Madonna sometimes worrying her boyfriend by wondering aloud whether she should tell her father just what she had been getting up to.
    Although still obsessed with winning her father’s favor, Madonna had changed. No longer was she the little girl eager to please, but a questioning, irreverent teenager. Tony Ciccone’s stern authority no longer commanded her as once it had. Neither, for that matter did the Catholic Church. It