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In fact, Madonna is a talented, practiced comedian, who has been wising off constantly since grade school. And in the title role of Susan she proves it, playing a calamitous neo-hippy who clunks in and out of people's lives, and whose total self-absorption amounts to innocence. She dresses weirdly too; in one scene she parades through the streets wearing what appears to be men's boxer shorts, over which she has rigged a white garter belt, which holds up white lace stockings, which disappear into rhinestone boots. Madonna admits that Susan, except for her four-second attention span, is to some extent a self-caricature, and it remains to be seen what she could do with a role that required her to wear grown-ups' clothes. The guess here is that she would be very good. It does not take much imagination to see her in the Judy Holliday role in Born Yesterday, beating Broderick Crawford at gin rummy.
Hollywood thinks so too. Director Herbert Ross, who did Funny Girl and Footloose, is considering her, he says, for the lead in a movie about Stripper Blaze Starr. Producer Ray Stark has talked with her about starring in a film about Libby Holman, the '20s and '30s torch singer. "Considering" and "talking with" do not cost much, of course, but Madonna's considering is moving in the same direction. "I don't think of myself as a rock star," she tells an interviewer as she cools out in her hotel room after her concert two weeks ago in New Orleans. The comment is not a gesture at modesty; Madonna is not modest. Nor, for that matter, is she puffed up with self-importance. She has a very clear, cold view of her strengths and weaknesses, and those of the wide world too. She got her first training as a dancer (she won a scholarship in dance at the University of Michigan, but she stayed only 1 1/2 years). She became a fairly good rock drummer and guitarist during her knockabout years as a musician in New York City, then turned to rock singing because she realized she wasn't going anywhere in the dance world. She says that she might do another rock tour, if her manager Freddy DeMann "puts a gun to my head," but clearly it is almost time for another career change.
She travels, just now, with a light load of baggage (see following story). Her physical possessions, she says, amount to not much more than the ragbag of goofy clothes that serve as her professional and private wardrobe, a ten-speed bicycle stored in New York and a Chinese rug in Los Angeles. No house, no apartment, no car, no rich-at-last jewels or stereo system. She seems to have passed through the lives of a lot of people and to have remained in not many. She sees her father and stepmother only rarely.