Goddess: Inside Madonna by Barbara Victor

Author:Barbara Victor [Victor, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Singer, Music, Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Madonna, Retail
ISBN: 9780062306906
Google: XLWquBKci9IC
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

Muriel Van Lieu was eight months pregnant with her daughter when her husband put her in charge of the New York audition. With the help of her producers and a choreographer, she put ads in all the professional magazines and newspapers, calling for young men and women, dancers and singers, who would eventually be chosen as a backup group for an internationally famous singer. Tall, blond, and attractive, Muriel Van Lieu dresses in designer clothes and comes to Paris once a month from her home near the French/Belgian border to take care of copyright business and to shop. Along with her daughter, who is now twenty-one, she runs a discotheque, H2O, which during an average weekend entertains more than four thousand people. Recently widowed, she remembers with absolute precision that time more than twenty-one years ago when she first met Madonna.

“Out of the fifteen hundred kids who showed up for the audition,” Muriel Van Lieu begins, “we intended to keep thirty to tour with Patrick throughout the United States, and out of the thirty, we wanted to keep twenty to bring back with us to Europe for television shows there.” With only four days to audition all the people who showed up, the idea was to choose a mixed racial group of male and female dancers and singers, some blond, others dark or brunet, a combination of short and tall, thin and voluptuous. Contrary to how most auditions were run and especially since there were so many people to see in so few days, Muriel Van Lieu insisted that she wanted to see one candidate at a time onstage, rather than viewing them in groups. “My choreographer asked each one to do free movement as well as a combination that he choreographed, and finally we wanted them to sing a song that they could choose,” she explains. “In my head, I was looking for someone who had a distinctive look, kids who were different-looking, who stood out from the crowd. I understood a little English, but I had an interpreter with me. In the beginning, I didn’t talk to the kids, because first I watched them perform, and then, if they were good, I wanted to talk to them to get an idea of their personality.”

On the second day of the auditions, Madonna walked onto the cavernous stage.

“For the first three days, there were only three of us sitting in the audience—me, the choreographer, and my manager—judging the audition,” she continues. “When Madonna walked onstage, she really shocked me because it was the first time I had ever seen anyone who looked like that. She was dressed in punk—torn T-shirt, hair chopped off in all different lengths all over her head—and with a really rebellious attitude.”

Patrick Hernandez remembers the first time he saw Madonna as well. “We chose random pieces from my album, and Madonna was supposed to make up her own combinations, cold, no rehearsal, just free and easy, because my album hadn’t come out yet in America so she wasn’t familiar with the music.

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