Madonna: Finally uncovered

0 Comments | Sunday Mirror, Feb 4, 2001

Dan taught her to play guitar and they formed a band called the Breakfast Club. She started on drums but was soon pushing herself to the front of the stage.

"Somebody told her that the camera loved Debbie Harry. That made a huge impression on her. I think she felt, yeah, the camera loves me, too. Something clicked then," says Dan.

Madonna says: "Once I learned to play the guitar and make chord changes there was no looking back. I remember writing my first song. It felt like something had possessed me.

"I called my father up and played it for him over the phone on one of those cheap little mono cassette recorders. I'm sure he couldn't even hear it and he was going, 'That's very nice, very nice Madonna'."

Her first attempt at making it came when producers Jean Claude Pellerin and Jean Van Lieu offered to fly her to Paris to record some songs. She arrived in the city in May 1979, billed as the next Edith Piaf.

But the big breakthrough never came and after a three-month whirl of parties and dates with French boys she headed back to New York feeling neglected, but still determined.

Madonna left Dan Gilroy and hooked up again with Stephen Bray, who'd arrived in New York from

Detroit looking for work. They formed a band, Emmy, a childhood nickname.

Stephen became her boyfriend again - but he was one of many. He says: "Someone would come to the door of the rehearsal room asking, 'Is Madonna here?' and I could just tell he wasn't looking for a position as a guitar player. I just learned it was best not to really count on her in that area."

Stephen worked part-time in a record store to earn money. Madonna, he says, had more mysterious ways of staying above water, like the flawed heroine of Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire.

He says: "Madonna always had relied on the comfort of strangers, as Blanche DuBois put it. She had benefactors. She had patrons. I don't know what was involved.

"But clearly it wasn't anything nefarious or anything because she would have had more money."

Madonna had a

Liberated attitude to sexual partners, says Stephen Bray. 'but at the same time she's

far too much of a

Hygiene freak

to be unhealthy'

Another friend, model Erica Bell, suggests that by the time fame beckoned, Madonna was less discriminating.

And the Latin boys she picked up in seedy Alphabet City on New York's Lower East side were nothing to do with improving her career, but purely lust objects.

Erica says: "We'd all get dressed up and drive in her limousine to Avenue D in the Puerto Rican quarter.

"When Madonna spotted some good-looking Puerto Rican boy, she'd order the driver to stop the car, roll down the window and call out, 'Hey cutie, want a ride?' She would invite the boy to join us - and they always obliged. She'd do whatever she wanted with him while we drove around New York.

"The windows were blacked out - nobody could see what was going on inside the car. We'd end up driving around with two or three guys at a time. Then we'd drop them off right where we found them. The boys were really young, the way she likes them."