The cult classic movie Madonna was the “very first” person to audition for
In each and every story about Madonna, one clear thing prevails: the woman is a go-getter with ambition and drive to rival absolutely anyone, and likely beat them.
It’s all too easy to just write her off as a pop star, but even calling her the leader of the pop world wouldn’t begin to merely scratch the surface of the life she’s led. Once you dive in, it’s a whole rabbit hole of different scenes, experiences and achievements, and each one only ever seems to prove that it was an inevitability that Madonna was always destined for absolute greatness and world-renowned fame.
She’s one of those people who just seems born with the sign of it. To quote Shakespeare: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them”, and in the case of Madonna, all three seem true. She was born for it, she achieved it and turn after turn, people recognised her magnetism, and thrust more greatness upon her. However, the most important lesson to learn from her life is that none of it came without asking. To quote another essential proverb, “Shy bairns get nowt”, and Madonna was never shy.
She wasn’t shy when she begged her father to let her study ballet, but refused to conform to the typical ballerina look, instead growing out her armpit hair and rejecting makeup. She wasn’t shy when she quit school and moved to New York, calling it the “bravest thing” she’s ever done. She wasn’t shy when she decided to evolve from her career as a dancer and start making music too, battling through the trauma caused by a violent sexual assault to stay out there, going from club to club at night to beg DJs to play her demo.
Then, through meeting Jean-Michel Basquiat and falling into the New York art scene to evolving from album to album, era to era for decades, Madonna has been unstoppable because she’s always refused to let herself be stopped. Here we have the ultimate example of a person who sees what they want and runs towards it, or sees an opportunity and grabs hold with both hands, and still, all that doesn’t even touch the surface. You might have thought that by now, everything possible to know about Madonna’s life and career would be known, but still, she turns up in surprising moments in history as even more proof to pile onto her voracious spirit.
Robert Greenhut, the producer of A League of Their Own, knew that spirit well as Madonna battled to get herself cast as ‘All the Way’ Mae Mordabito. Despite already being at the top of the game in music, she put in the work there, but when going through his archives one day, Greenhut was shocked to find her name elsewhere, appearing on a document years before she dropped the surname and became a star.
“Going back more than ten years earlier, before Madonna was an established singer, I was production manager on the musical film version of Hair,” Greenhut recalled. Taking the cult Broadway show that captured the spirit of the 1960s, the team now wanted to translate it to film, and they wanted a cast of complete unknowns. Thus, a plan was hatched, as he recalled, “We had open tryouts in New York City. You had to sing and dance. We took over a rehearsal studio in the theatre district, and we had announced the tryouts, and people started showing up like two days before.”
They simply hung a sign-up sheet outside of the studio, and performers from across the city flocked towards the opportunity. It was a mass of go-getters, but whose name was at the top?
“There were at least 1,000 names on it. And the very first name was Madonna Ciccone,” Greenhut recalled. First in the queue, Madonna clearly wanted it as the producer said, “She had to have gotten there like 40 hours before the audition”, adding as another voice to the ever-mounting pile, “That’s just a great example of her ambition”.
