Throughout her life, Madonna has frequently talked about having survivor’s guilt. Namely, when it comes to all the people she lost in the 1980s to the AIDS epidemic. And then, later on in life, as she pointed out somewhat “flexingly” during her 2016 Billboard Woman of the Year speech, her contemporaries started to die, too. Hence, her remark, “Michael is gone, Tupac is gone, Whitney is gone, Prince is gone, Amy Winehouse is gone, Bowie is gone…and I’m still standing.” Sure, Amy and Bowie weren’t her contemporaries (and Tupac was “just” a lover), but the message was clear: Madonna continued to have survivor’s guilt. Managing to outlive the majority of the musical artists she came up with, in addition to those who inspired her before and after she became famous.
As for the “before” part of being famous, her younger brother, Christopher Ciccone, was instrumental to this phase. Which is why, in the wake of his death—at just sixty-three years old—Madonna reflected, “He was the closest human to me for so long. It’s hard to explain our bond. But it grew out of an understanding that we were different and society was going to give us a hard time for not following the status quo. We took each other’s hands and we danced through the madness of our childhood. In fact, dance was a kind of superglue that held us together. Discovering dance in our small Midwestern town saved me and then my brother came along, and it saved him too. My ballet teacher, also named Christopher, created a safe space for my brother to be gay. A word that was not spoken or even whispered where we lived. When I finally got the courage to go to New York to become a dancer, my brother followed.”
Christopher tells it somewhat differently in his 2008 memoir (though more “tell-all”), Life With My Sister Madonna, noting that Madonna was the one to lure him, “siren”-style to the big city, insisting, “Come to New York, and you can stay with me in my apartment. I’ll introduce you to people. I’ll take [dance] classes with you. I’ll get you into a company.” Christopher then does as he’s told only to be greeted by Madonna bluntly telling him, “‘Hi Christopher, you can’t live here after all.’ Straight and to the point, with no sugarcoating. ‘What do you mean I can’t live here? I just gave up my life in Detroit. My apartment, my job, everything.’ Madonna shrugs, ‘Whatever…’ Seeing my crestfallen face, she relents slightly, ‘You can sleep on the floor for a couple of nights but that’s it.’”
Madonna’s reasons weren’t entirely callous, for Christopher later learns that the building owner supposedly found out about her intentions to have a permanent houseguest and put the kibosh on it. Or who knows? Maybe it was just Madonna’s fucked-up way of pushing her brother out of the Midwestern womb so that he could be born into his complete gay self. And, like professional dancing, Madonna was convinced New York was the only place to do that. Turns out, for Christopher, however, that it would be Canada, with an Ottawa-based company called Le Groupe de la Place Royale hiring him for three hundred dollars a week. A rather cush job (at least for a dancer) that Madonna ended up “siren-ing” him out of as well, promising him a gig as her backup dancer for the club performances she was planning to do around the state and nation in order to promote “Everybody” and her debut album, Madonna.
Naturally, after Christopher already gave up his steady dancing gig, Madonna told him the day he arrived back in New York that the position was actually filled. But, as he said, that time, she let him live with her—so that was a step up. For a while afterward, Christopher got a job as a “card counter” at a greeting card company before Madonna finally decided she did need him to accompany her on this mini tour. One gets the sense that, through all the shade about Madonna’s blasély cold comportment, Christopher was always looking to her as the catalyst for what to do next in his life. And being a catalyst or galvanizer is what any older sibling worth admiring tends to embody.
Still, that didn’t stop Christopher from a very pointed dedication at the beginning of the book that reads: “For my father, Silvio, and to Joan, who has always been a mother to me.” That latter part of the dedication was an automatic knife dig into Madonna, who never warmed all that much to Joan, painting her as the wicked stepmother early on in her career as she told stories of their housekeeper-turned-mother figure that depicted an oppressive portrait. Case in point, informing Carrie Fisher in a 1991 interview for Rolling Stone, “My stepmother told me I wasn’t allowed to wear tampons until I got married. Can you imagine?” Joan Gustafson (before she became Ciccone) also sewed the Ciccone daughters the same uniform clothing with no personality that Madonna despised. Prompting her to make distinct amendments in order to stand out. As she said in her 1985 interview with Time, “I really saw myself as the quintessential Cinderella. You know, I have this stepmother and I have all this work to do and it’s awful and I never go out and I don’t have pretty dresses. The thing I hated about my sisters most was my stepmother insisted on buying us the same dresses. I would do everything not to look like them. I would wear weird-colored knee socks or put bows in my hair or anything.”
But if Christopher’s dedication to Joan at the beginning of his book is an indication, perhaps he never felt as hostile toward their stepmother as Madonna did (or, again, the effusive nod was just a means to goad Madonna). Maybe, like Silvio Ciccone, he was simply grateful to have a maternal replacement. Madonna, however, would not forget her real mother, her namesake. And she was determined to free herself of both Michigan and Joan when the time came. Ultimately, her freedom would extend to breaking Christopher out of the Midwest as well, taking him along for her crazy ride in New York and then into the moated world of fame and fortune. It was his attraction to this world, he admits, that inspired him to withstand so much abuse. Like anyone would be, he was seduced by this realm of privilege and influence, especially as a formerly middle-class Midwesterner.
In many ways, Madonna seemed to “choose” Christopher as the lone member of her family to join her in this embarkment upon success precisely because he seemed so “malleable,” so willing to go with the flow. Alas, Madonna had another thing coming if she didn’t think Christopher, a Sagittarius cusping Scorpio the day before his birthday (November 22—also JFK’s assassination day), wasn’t going to say something eventually. Though perhaps she didn’t imagine it would be as public and immortal as a book.
Whatever catty ills he speaks of her in Life With My Sister Madonna, though, he knows, in the end, that he would not “exist” without Madonna, his “maker,” of sorts. So it is that he states, “I finally understand and accept that one aspect of my life will never change: I was born my mother’s son, but I will die my sister’s brother.” Eerily prescient words considering headlines like, “Christopher Ciccone, artist and Madonna’s brother, dies at age 63,” “Madonna’s brother, Christopher Ciccone, has died at 63” and “Madonna’s Brother Christopher Ciccone Dies at 63, Less Than 2 Years After Brother Anthony’s Death at 66.” Indeed, Anthony Ciccone was the eldest of the brood, and, like Christopher, portrayed by the media as having a highly contentious relationship with his sister—that is, if and when they ever spoke at all.
Around 2014, Anthony lashed out by telling the media, that his sister “doesn’t give a shit if I’m dead or alive. She lives in her own world. I never loved her in the first place, she never loved me. We never loved each other.” Harsh words, and something of an ultimate betrayal with regard to the Italian-American view of family as sacrosanct. At least Christopher had the decency to mention at the outset of his memoir, “…when all is said and done and written, I am truly proud that Madonna is my sister and always will be.” Just as Madonna will be of him, regardless of the rift they endured starting at the end of the 90s, just as Madonna was taking up with Guy Ritchie, a man Christopher has no problem mocking in the memoir and, in turn, his sister’s egregious mistake in marrying him. As Madonna put it in her “Instagram obituary,” alluding to the memoir, “I admired him. He had impeccable taste. And a sharp tongue, which he sometimes used against me but I always forgave him.” Even if it might have taken Christopher getting prostate cancer for her to do so.
In another part of the book, Christopher corroborates Madonna’s contempt for her stepmother by illuminating some of Joan’s harshness toward the eldest female Ciccone in an anecdote that details her telling M, “Shut up and put it on” of the aforementioned banal dress she sewed from the same Butterick pattern for all the sisters. Even with Joan’s recent death of cancer at the age of eighty-one, it’s difficult to imagine Madonna forgiving her for that sartorial slight. No matter that it probably subliminally helped pushed her to be the style queen she is today. With Joan’s death occurring just weeks before Christopher’s, the tectonic shifts in Madonna’s family of origin are palpable.
And while Madonna has endured a triple wallop of familial loss in the past two years, it is Christopher’s death that has undeniably affected her the most—thereby leaving her with that nagging sense of survivor’s guilt she’s long been known to possess. Further compounded by Christopher being her younger brother. His death before hers defies the “natural” order—even if Madonna has every intention of living until at least a hundred. Something her father is also hopefully poised to do, now currently ninety-three. Because, in truth, Silvio’s death anytime soon would be an emotional blow Madonna might not be able to take on the heels of all this loss.
Whatever ill will this brother and sister duo had, Madonna was quick to commemorate Christopher’s life by additionally remarking, “We soared the highest heights together. And floundered in the lowest lows. Somehow, we always found each other again and we held hands and we kept dancing. The last few years have not been easy. We did not speak for some time but when my brother got sick we found our way back to each other. I did my best to keep him alive as long as possible. He was in so much pain towards the end.” This description evokes the image of 80s-era Madonna at the bedsides of her gay friends dying of AIDS, all while she funneled funds into keeping them alive (or at least comfortable) for as long as she could. Mercifully, Christopher was not lost to that epidemic—though Madonna’s ex, Sean Penn was sure to make him feel dirty anyway when he asked him if he had AIDS years after the two had apparently done a “blood brothers pact” at the behest of Sean.
In some regards, the ire Christopher had for both of Madonna’s husbands was a sign of his fueled-by-protectiveness jealousy. After all, he himself once noted that their relationship oftentimes felt like a marriage—complete with all the bickering and fights that one entails. And maybe, in some sense, Christopher was the only man who ever could be “married” to her. For, to quote a Vietnamese proverb used in Christopher’s book, “Brothers and sisters are closer than hands and feet.” Christopher, indeed, always acknowledged his position as the “feet” a.k.a. “humble servant” to his big sister while working in such wide-ranging roles as dresser (during The Virgin Tour), tour director and set designer. Not to mention his interior design efforts on multiple Madonna abodes. And with each “auxiliary” role, he excelled as only someone who knows another person so well could. Maybe too well, hence Madonna eventually getting spooked by their closeness and pushing him out (as he also posits in his memoir). Only to let him back in when it was at the “too late” stage.
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