The Madonna Move: A Special Report

IT WAS THE kind of story most journalists only dream of getting. E. D. Stein, a contributing editor of D, was munching steak and eggs in the Pitt Grill on North Central when he became convinced that a woman sitting a few stools down was a very famous, very un-Dallas celebrity. Stein contained his curiosity until he heard the woman absent-mindedly humming a familiar tune as she tapped time on the counter with a fork: da da dah-da. . . Then, when he asked her to pass the ketchup, face and song jelled as one. There, cheeseburger in hand, was Madonna, the brazenly provocative, outrageously garbed pop idol who has dazzled the music world with monster hits such as “Like A Virgin,” “Material Girl,” and “Lucky Star.”



AT A DINER in Dallas, we find Madonna? Unthinkable. Sexy, sassy Madonna hits high harmony in Los Angeles, the City of Angels with Come-Hither Pouts; she scarcely raises eyebrows in New York, the City that Never Sleeps. But Dallas, the City that Always Banks? Had the Material Girl taken her own lyrics to heart and moved to the city with more millionaires per zip code than anywhere else in the world?

Striking up a conversation with the songstress, Stein learned that Madonna, against the advice of her management and new husband Sean Penn, had rented a nondescript two-bedroom house in East Dallas as a base of operations for an ambitious new project: she was getting to know the city for a sequel to Desperately Seeking Susan in which the heroine, burned out by the hustle-or-be-hustled mean streets of the Big Apple, seeks a new life in Big D. Fans of Susan will not be surprised to learn that her schizzy existence takes a turn for the weirder in the sequel- which will not, Madonna assures us, be called Desperately Seeking Dallas. In the new flick, tentatively dubbed Sun Belt Diva, Susan cooks up zany PR gimmicks for a hot development firm by day; by night, she sings with a retrowave band called Metallic Blue and the Boomers.

Madonna would grant no exclusive interviews. She was here to work, not talk. But she was willing to make a deal to maintain her cover. After all, while scouting the locations for Sun Belt Diva, she needed to travel quietly. If D would promise to keep mum about her presence here until the research was done, she would then allow a photographer to tag along on the first weekend that she “went public.” Madonna further whetted our editorial appetite by revealing that, since the chemistry was right, she was considering making a permanent home in Landryland. Dallasites might better understand the seismic wallop of such a move by imagining that IBM and CitiCorp merged, then moved their corporate headquarters to NorthPark.



PERFECTLY AWARE of the boost Madonna’s relocation would give a city desperately seeking international status (see page 56), D editors readily agreed to the deal. The Madonna project would require the combined resources of D bureaus in New York and abroad, but the focus had to be on Dallas. Then, pledging each to secrecy, D asked a number of prominent Dallasites from different walks of life for their impressions and predictions: how will Madonna change Dallas? How will we change her? If their reactions are typical of this can-do city, Dallas is ready to embrace Madonna in a big way. With the far-reaching vision traditional among Dallasites, even those who disapprove of Madonna’s persona, popularity, and politics realize that she is much more than just another pretty navel.

When Madonna becomes a resident of Dallas, her influence will quickly be felt on the city’s struggling live music scene, which in recent years has seen the demise of talent showcases such as Nick’s Uptown, the Agora, and the Bamboo Room. David Card, owner of Poor David’s Pub and a veteran of almost two decades in the Dallas music biz, believes that a star of Madonna’s magnitude can’t help but brighten up the scene.



REALLY, THIS has got to be a tacit recognition that Dallas is a hotbed of live music entertainment,” Card says. “She has a tremendous marketing potential behind her.” With her worldwide appeal and the resulting tourist trade. Card says, Madonna will provide a shot in the arm for all of Dallas’ live music clubs. As for the continued rivalry between Greenville Avenue clubs such as Fast and Cool and Redux, Card, an East Dallas loyalist, says he doubts Madonna will become the exclusive house act of any one club. “She’ll be a boost for the whole strip-and I’m assuming she’ll settle in the Lower Greenville area. After all, what else is there?”

Card’s own laid-back nightclub features mostly blues and folk music, with occasional forays into rock with show bands like Vince Vance and the Valiants. For that reason, he has hesitated to offer Madonna a gig during her stay in Dallas. “Madonna as we know her is not what Poor David’s is all about,” Card says diplomatically. “But who knows? There could be another side of her that needs a for a more serious kind of music.”



INSIDE, ALAS’ musician community, there was mixed reaction to the advent of Madonna. Raul Jenkins, lead singer with Five Dogs From Hell, snorted with disgust when told the news. Jenkins, who has paid his dues in Dallas bands since the days of Ron Chapman’s “Sump’n Else’” dance show, dismisses Madonna as “just another piece of superficial drek that came out of MTV. Is she a musician or a belly dancer?” But Michael Finger, now a guitarist with the Briefcase Blues Band, goes back to the early days in New York when Madonna, then an aspiring dancer, made the leap from a job at the Dunkin’ Donuts across from Bloomingdale’s into the heart of New York’s Lower East Side punk scene. He remembers that Madonna, musically illiterate as late as 1978, transformed herself almost overnight into a competent player on several instruments. One night, while Finger was playing Cafe Rebozo with a band called Beechy Knows, Madonna showed up and cajoled her way onto the stage. “I’d seen her around,” recalls Finger. “I knew she was some kind of dancer [with the Pearl Lang company], but when she said she wanted to sing, I thought it was a joke.” It wasn’t, he quickly learned. “We didn’t know any of her tunes, of course, but she had some charts and the sax player could read, so off we went. All of a sudden the place went crazy. I mean, she was wailing, you know?”

If there is anything certain about Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, it is this: beneath the beguiling simplicity of lyrics like “Everybody, come on, dance and sing. Everybody, get up and do your thing,” lie depths upon depths. Dallas academics, D quickly discovered, have been among the nation’s leaders in the newly born specialty of Madonna scholarship; these days, an article analyzing Madonna’s debt to Faulkner or Flaubert is as likely to pop up in Harper’s or The New Republic as it is in Rolling Stone.



LISTEN, FOR EXAMPLE, to Dr. Karl Podhoretz of the University of Dallas’ McPhatter Institute of Popular Culture, who has written two books and a score of articles on Madonna, whom he calls “a revolutionary voice who has altered the very meaning of sound in our time.” In one weighty tome (From Melanie to Madonna: Mass Culture Revisited), Podhoretz traces Madonna’s musical roots to the German romanticism of Richard Wagner and even earlier sources. He finds Madonna’s “Burning Up,” for instance, to be a new wave retelling of Satan’s fall from heaven according to Milton. “The metaphorical patterning in this rune is eerily reminiscent of Paradise Lost,” Podhoretz says. “And the deliberate redundancies and repetitions produce an almost tangibly neo-medieval effect.”

Naturally, in this age of the psychobiography. Madonna’s life has not escaped the scrutiny given her music. Case in point: like hens on June bugs, scholars and reporters have pounced upon the fact that two different dates are given for Madonna’s birth. The Virgin’s birth question has received a going-over that makes the media search for Gary Hart’s lost year seem almost timid. Is V-Day August 16, 1959, as some biographers maintain, or August 16, 1960?

Madonnaphiles find symbolic weight in either date. Dr. Roland Alport of SMU’s Sam Perkins School of Theology, a leading proponent of the Younger Girl theory, puts it this way: “The earlier date most definitely reveals Madonna’s wish, whether she consciously knows it or not, to repress the loud, sexually aggressive side of her nature and submerge her identity in the ’silent generation’ of the Fifties.” Au contraire, says Ana-toly Woodstein, Wilson Pickett Professor of Music at the University of Texas at Dallas. Woodstein dismisses rival theories as “obviously motivated by an obsession with mathematical purity” and embraces what has become known as the Last Date theory. According to Woodstein, Madonna’s birth just over the “borderline” of the Sixties makes her a legitimate if somewhat minor member of the protest music school of Peter, Paul, and Mary, Pete Seeger, and Blind Boy Chitlin.

Dallas’ large lunatic fringe, of course, has its own view of Madonna and the birthdate squabble. According to the Domino Society, a group dedicated to rewriting all musical compositions using just three chords-preferably C, F, and G-the woman we know as “Madonna” was created through genetic engineering from a blubbery shred of Elvis Presley’s skin found under the fingernail of a middle-aged fan. The bizarre experiment took place, they ciaim, on the day the King died-August 16 (that date again), 1977. Such absurdities belong with the apocryphal legends that spring up around any major personage; previously, Madonna has been forced to deny that she is the daughter of exiled Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitzyn and that she was once married to Texas Ranger catcher Darrell Porter.

A performer of her stature, Madonna has learned, is held accountable for every word that comes out of her mouth, whether in song or not. Her participation in the Live Aid concert last year drew fire from conservatives like Bradley Miller, columnist and editorial writer for The Dallas Morning News. “If Ms. Ciccone wishes to chirp among the songbirds of the Kremlin, that is her privilege,1’ says Miller, who believes that the benefit concert, though well inten-tioned, actually had the effect of propping up the failing Marxist government of Ethiopia. “But it is sad to think of the millions who follow such intellectual colossi as herself.” Miller recalls being “infatuated” with Madonna when he heard “Material Girl,” which he thought jibed perfectly with the philosophy of his National Capitalist Workers Party, a group of self-styled “secular hawks” who advocate a huge military buildup, lower taxes, and forced busing to end age segregation in singles bars. But after a lengthy interview with Madonna in Toynbee’s, a Los Angeles disco. Miller announced that he had been “brainwashed” by her image-makers. “Despite those inspiring lyrics, this woman has no more economic savvy than so many Sandinistas, for whose overthrow she has yet to lift a finger,’1 he wrote. And, he added, “Her vaunted liberation from the spiritual superstitions of the age, trumpeted so cocksurely in her songs, is more apparent than real.”



FATHER STEPHEN SWAN, rector and headmaster of the Episcopal School of Dallas, became aware of Madonna when he noticed one of her posters decorating the locker of a sixth-grade student. Swan, whose own musical taste runs to the Everly Brothers, is no fan of the carnal crooner’s. “She doesn’t fit into any manger scene I ever saw in Dallas,” he says. But Swan does not share the views of the Parents’ Music Resource Center, which advocates labeling records to warn parents of “explicit” lyrics. Even though Madonna’s lyrics rate, at worst, a naughty PG when compared to bondage blasters like Motley Crüe, such critics lump her with the libidinous termites gnawing away at the moral fiber of our American youth.

“Are there cultic ramifications in what she does?” Swan asks. “I don’t know. I suppose anytime you have a large fan following that’s a possibility. Really, this is something the more fundamentalist groups are worried about, We’re not out to get her spiritual scalp, to tell you the truth.”

OUR LADY of the midriff began to feel at home in Dallas after she met Joe Bob Briggs, the pseudonymous redneck drive-in movie critic. After all, being insulted by Joe Bob is as much a part of the Dallas experience as cheering for the Cowboys or chugging a Mickey Finn after a night at Studebaker’s. “At first I didn’t want Madonna’s hairdo any where near this state,” Briggs admits. “We already got enough petrochemicals we can’t sell to anybody. But then I found out you can take the woman’s head and actually stick it directly in your gas tank and get twenty-seven miles to the gallon, thirty-three on the highway.” Briggs claims to have tried the unorthodox conservation measure several times on a recent vacation. “Every time I’d say, ’Madonna! Baby, you’re the greatest!’ and she’d just say ’blurbl.’ I would have kept it up all the way to El Paso, but Sean Penn said if I didn’t stop he was gonna make another movie with Timothy Hutton. I know a bomb threat when I hear one,” Briggs says.

The business of Dallas, of course, is business. In this Eden for entrepreneurs, it was inevitable that someone would try to strike it rich through marketing Madonna. By early March, people were starting to spot the singing seductress here and there-at the Junior League ball, the Kennedy assassination site, the Starck Club-and the rumors began to fly: Madonna would endorse Fletcher’s Corny Dogs; she was about to shoot several steamy Dr Pepper commercials a la Dr. Ruth Westheimer; she was joining actor Wilford Brimley in Braniff’s “dance with the one who brung you” spots. The most farfetched scenario had Roger Staubach huddling with Madonna to sign her as a spokesperson for his real estate brokerage firm; the outlandish tale actually sprang from a brief encounter between Staubach and Madonna, a rabid round ball fan, at a Dallas Mavericks game. Jack Beckman, manager of Reunion Arena, had tipped off the former Cowboy star that America’s Virgin would attend that night. Staubach showed up like any fan, bringing his teen-aged son to glimpse the celebrity. The Dodger and Madonna only exchanged waves, not business cards.

If Madonna’s history of involvement in charitable and civic causes is any indication, she will refuse to join the dreary procession of pop singers who have allowed their songs to be used in hawking products. Not for Madonna the path of Carly Simon, whose “Anticipation” became the Heinz ketchup theme, or The Beach Boys, those aging shills for Sunkist. More likely, she’ll lend her sultry sneer and bangled body to non-commercial causes. At least that’s the hope of Arvin Carr, chairman of the Mayor’s Task Force on Celebrity Development. Carr says that he is “close, in fact, unbelievably close,” to corralling Madonna as an image consultant and part-time “symbol” of the city.



OBVIOUSLY, I’VE got nothing against Larry Hagman or ’Dallas,’” says Carr, “but Pat Duffy quit and Jock [actor Jim Davis] is dead. I mean, that show could go any minute, and then where are we?” Carr believes that Madonna has the vitality and exuberance to represent “a city that has always kept the dirt flying, even though we didn’t have a seaport or oil wells or any reason to exist.” He refused to comment on reports that Madonna’s face would soon adorn DART buses and billboards promoting compliance with the city’s new anti-smoking ordinance. However, Max Goldblatt, former city councilman and constant critic of DART, met with Madonna to discuss a number of civic problems, including transportation. Skeptical at first (“Who the hell is Madonna?”), Goldblart emerged favorably impressed.

But will Madonna be leering from the buses? “With all the emphasis on sex these days, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Goldblatt said. “At least the blind wouldn’t object, and it might bring in some revenue. They’re running out of excuses down there. No way they can pay for all therthings they’ve promised.”

But Goldblatt, known around town for his blunt manner and off-the-wall-antics, doubted whether his former colleagues on the Dallas City Council would welcome Madonna to Dallas. “I don’t think they even live in Dallas,” he said. “They’re in another world.”

Carr also dismisses the efforts of niggling critics from other Texas cities who insist that Dallas has snagged a fading Madonna on the rebound. Citing a recent Rolling Stone readers’ poll that named Madonna worst-dressed female (by 63 percent) and ranked her a distant second to Tina Turner for sexiest female and best female singer, Nick McGarraty of the Houston Inquirer posed this question: “Madonna does Dallas? Mmm-hmmm. Sounds to me like another attempt by the Dallas establishment to wipe out a haunting memory that has made them virtual pariahs in this country for a long time. Yeah, I’m talking about the Cowboys’ recent playoff destruction at the hands of shrimpish Deiter Brock and the Los Angeles Rams. If this is Dallas’ revenge on Tinseltown, I pity them.”

It may be too soon to speculate on whether the Madonna move (and the anticipated moves of her entourage, including husband Sean Penn) will have an appreciable effect on the much-lamented glut of empty office space in Dallas, but already the mere sniff of a lead of this magnitude has set off intense competition among developers. A high-placed source at the leasing office for the new Allied Banc Tower (né the Green Rocket) whispers that a certain bald cypress tree has been planted in that building’s plaza and affixed with a plaque honoring the Queen of Materialism. Rival developer Lewis Shaw, of The Jackson Shaw Company, when asked what his firm would offer to counteract such a bold lure, answered, “What would we do to land Madonna? What wouldn’t we do? Her wearing that cross may be causing the current spate of foreclosures on the Parkway. What a cross to bear.” She may not displace J. R. as the Dallas celebrity, but Madonna could reinvent the Dallas look in other ways. Craig Lid-ji of Lou Lattimore, a ritzy women’s specialty store, expects to ride the crest of the Madonna wave next fall. “She’s our news of the moment,” says Lidji. “We’ve commissioned Adolfo [designer to such notables as Nancy Reagan] to do his suits for the fall with cropped tops” Lidji adds that already, he has a massive supply of lace gloves stockpiled “in a warehouse outside of town.” Other Dallas fashion czars are more skeptical. Cristina Barboglio, who with sister Jan is gaining national attention in apparel design, doubts that the Boy Toy will have much effect on local dress. Quoth the maven: “I don’t think it will change anything. Have you seen how they’re dressing on Greenville lately?”



LIKE A Rolling stone tossed into a pond, the Madonna move sent ripples outward from the point of impact. Fort Worth, Dallas’ traditional rival to the West, scurried to match Big D’s publicity coup. Y’all Come, a hastily formed counterpart to the Mayor’s Task Force on Celebrity Development, fired off invitations to major stars such as Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, and Meryl Streep, asking each to visit Fort Worth and consider relocating there. All declined, as did the second tier of glitterati, which reportedly included Bette Midler and Mr. T. By week’s end the welcome mat was out for Bob Denver. He was said to be pondering the offer.



SURPRISINGLY, though she has lived in Dallas for only three months, Madonna has become the center of a tightly knit group of fiercely loyal friends. A favorite hangout for the clan is Dick’s Last Resort, the rowdy West End tavern run by Richard Chase, former tuna boat mechanic and movie producer. At first. Chase was concerned that packs of scoop-hungry journalists and underage idol-worshippers would follow Madonna, spoiling the camaraderie of his bar. “I mean, of all the thriving beer joints in all the revitalized entertainment meccas in all the world, she had to walk into mine,” he said in mid-February. But the two became close friends, and Chase is now protective of Madonna, sensing in her “something fragile, like a bright pink jellyfish washed up on the shore.” He returns a curt “no comment” to most questions about the singer, and he recently ejected a tipsy customer who shouted, “Hey, Where’s Sean Penn?” as he and Madonna shared a drink at the bar. “I probably shouldn’t even be tell- , ing you this,” Chase says, “but I want to clear up one thing. She does not wear the velcro ; panties with our logo on the front. She’s got j class. I mean, that lady has got some class.”

Is Madonna merely the first bodacious bellwether of a flock of celebs to come? Given the city’s success in football, business, and other activities, few highly placed Dallas watchers would bet against it. Big D should brace itself for a virtual exodus of the entertainment elite.