Madonna Time Tunnel: Flying back to New York City

Time Tunnel: Flying back to New York City

Madonna receives an offer in 1979 to go to Paris to be a back-up singer and dancer for a disco-singer called Patrick Hernandez, who scored one hit called Born To Be Alive. Madonna was given a flash appartment to live in, a maid, a voice coach and a proffesional career guidance.

But even with all this Madonna wasn't happy. They made me meet these awful French boys, Madonna says, and I would throw tantrums. They would just laugh and give me money to keep me happy. After spending six months in Paris she decides to fly back to New York City.

Back in New York City, Madonna shared an appartment with illustrator Martin Burgoyne [who later created the covers for her first singles] on the Lower East Side. She begins to writes again some songs with Dan Gilroy and his brother Ed. It was one of the happiest times in my life, she says, I really felt loved.

They found the band Breakfast Club, which performs in Lower East Side dives. She leaves the band after disagreements about their music. She and Steve Bray form a new band that is continually renamed: Madonna, The Millionaires, Modern Dance and Emmy. It breaks up again but Madonna and Bray continue to work together.

During this period of scuffling and struggling to find a way in to what she was convinced was destined to be a brilliant career, Madonna experimented with one or two slightly dodgy ways of making money.

She posed naked for photographs which turned up several years afterwards in men's magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse. As she pointed out, the money was a lot better than what you could earn working behind the counter at Burger King which had been just another of the part-time job's she had to take to earn herself a few dollars.

In order to survive finacially Madonna responds to an ad in 1980 and is given a role in John Lewicki's so-called soft-core sex film A Certain Sacrifice. Lewicki declared several years later that Madonna has more sensuality in her ear than most women have anywhere on their bodies.

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