Madonna Badger: 'My whole life is in there'

STAMFORD -- Two years after separating from her husband of more than 15 years, Madonna Badger was looking for a change of scenery and a better life for her three girls.

She traded in the 2,000-square-foot, top-floor apartment in Greenwich Village for a picturesque 3,349-square-foot Victorian mansion overlooking Long Island Sound near the end of Shippan Point.

"She left here because she wanted a better school for her kids, and because it was time to buy a house. She had three kids, and it was time to have a bigger space," said her former building superintendent Trifu Penca as he reminisced earlier this week about his former tenant and her family.

In the week since a furious Christmas Day blaze consumed the daffodil-yellow house at 2267 Shippan Ave. killing Badger's three girls -- Lily, 9, and 7-year-old twins Sarah and Grace -- and both her parents, Lomer and Pauline Johnson, the advertising executive has gone from a vision of a highly successful businesswoman and doting mother to a caricature of community sympathy and overwhelming grief.

Badger, 47, survived the fire along with Michael Borcina, a contractor performing renovations on the 116-year-old home who was staying overnight.

Stamford fire officials determined that smoldering embers cleaned out of the fireplace from a Christmas Eve fire and placed by Borcina in a newly built mudroom or trash bin enclosure at the back of the house shortly after 3 a.m. likely sparked the blaze as the family slept.

A home monitoring smoke and motion alarm system had not been hooked up at the time of the fire, and it is unclear if there were any working smoke alarms in the home, according to fire official! s.

When firefighters arrived shortly before 5 a.m. last Sunday, they found Badger on scaffolding outside the second-story of the three-story home trying to rescue her three girls. As firefighters led her away to an ambulance, a neighbor heard her mumbling "My whole life is in there."

Prior to gaining notoriety in the tragedy, Badger was known as the woman who created some of the most iconic images in modern advertising and had been named to numerous lists of top New York executives. But acquaintances who knew her outside the workplace said she was a devoted mother with a generous heart and electric smile.

"Those girls, oh those girls were her whole life. Oh, she loved those girls so much," Penca said Tuesday morning as he sat in the basement of her previous residence in Manhattan. Badger and her family had lived in apartment 9B in that building for about 10 years before coming to Connecticut, he said.

"She used to take care of those kids and she just loved them so much," Penca said, noting that she walked them to school every morning at 8 a.m. while they lived in the city. It was because of the girls that she decided to leave New York, where she'd lived for more than two decades, he said.

The family moved to Stamford around Thanksgiving 2010 and soon after joined the Stamford Yacht Club where the girls could enjoy the large outdoor pool in the summer. Club Manager Alan Colabella said he never saw Badger without her three girls.

"She was on top of those girls. They were the most polite, cutest little kids you could ever meet. Very, very polite. Very well mannered. Just great kids," Colabella said. "They seemed like a close family. Every time I saw t! hem, the y were always together. I never saw them apart."

All three girls attended Windward School, a 209-student school in White Plains, N.Y., which focuses exclusively on students with language-based learning disabilities. The three will be buried together following a memorial service in New York this week. Their grandparents are to be cremated and their ashes returned near their former home in Louisville, Ky.

Badger first moved to New York City after graduating from Vanderbilt University in 1986. While the move wedged more than 700 miles between Badger and her parents, who still lived in her native Kentucky, it did not divide her family unit.

"She went home regularly to visit her parents and she talked on the phone to them a lot," said Mark Marvel who dated Badger in the late 1980s.

"She talked about them a lot, and she clearly cared a lot about her brother," he said. "I remember with her father, she was very close, and it was just one of those things. I think it's partly kind of a southern family thing -- they have a lot of camaraderie."

When Badger moved to Stamford, her parents soon followed, buying a home about an hour north in Southbury's Heritage Village.

Many of her former co-workers who worked with Badger during her time in the art departments of Esquire, Allure and Mirabella magazines said Badger was bright, full of ambition and natural talent. She had a magnetic personality, a penchant for red lipstick, and she knew how to put her mind to something. She began her career as t! he art d epartment secretary at Esquire, according to her former boss, Rip Georges.

"She didn't have a design background, but the thing I remember the most about Madonna is that she was really a quick study and very ambitious," Georges said. Georges brought Badger with him when he left Esquire to create a prototype for Allure magazine, and again when he left Allure for Mirabella.

"She was remarkably confident for someone in her mid-20s at that point," said Chris Raymond, who worked with Badger at Esquire.

"I didn't get the impression that she was outwardly ambitious. It wasn't right there on the surface, but I'm not surprised that she accomplished what she has accomplished," Raymond said Tuesday afternoon.

She launched her own advertising company while she was still in her 20s, and was named to numerous forty-under-forty and New York's top-50 lists in her early 30s, earning recognition for the Calvin Klein ad she created, which featured Marky Mark in a pair of white Calvin briefs and nothing else.

As her career took off, she started a family of her own. She married Matthew Badger while in her 20s, and they remained married for more than 15 years. Matthew Badger moved out of the family's Greenwich Village apartment about three years ago, Penca said. The couple is currently in the process of divorcing, and Matthew Badger's most recent addres! s is lis ted in Battery Park City.

Her star continued to rise through her 30s and 40s, as she scored major accounts for cosmetic and design companies. She created campaigns so hot people would steal the billboard art, like her 1995 campaign for Hot Sox, featuring model Rachel Johnson striking a sassy pose in a pair of tights.

But she did not compromise her southern upbringing, which taught her grace and generosity, even as she became a go-to executive for top-tier clients such as Style.com, Armani Exchange and Vera Wang.

"I think sometimes people have the picture of a successful New Yorker as a cold, steely, determined, success-at-all-costs person. But when you scratch the surface of that success, sometimes you find a nice girl who loves her family and wants to have fun," said Karen Mynatt who worked with Badger at Esquire in the early 1990s.

The pair had only known each other for a few months when Badger invited Mynatt to Thanksgiving dinner at her small apartment in the West Village after hearing Mynatt would not be able to head home to Tennessee for the holiday. Badger cooked a feast in her small starter apartment, which she served up for her parents as well as Mynatt and another Esquire "orphan." Later the entire party walked 5th Avenue to enjoy the holiday lights.

"I remember thinking this is so strange that this is like a nuclear family tradition, and these people had never met us until a few hours ago, and we were operating as this ad hoc family," said Mynatt who now lives in West Hartford. "To me, even all these years later, her spirit and her generosity, for her family to be so open and welcome and treating us like we were their second kids that night, ! I'll jus t never forget it. It's one of my sweetest New York memories."

The two became good friends during the time they worked together, bonding over a shared southern heritage and love of country music; Mynatt said she will never forget Badger's cat, Loretta, who was named for the country superstar Loretta Lynn.

"She's a good person, and I have no idea how she's going to deal with this loss," said Mynatt. "I don't know how anyone would."

Staff writer Maggie Gordon can be reached at maggie.gordon@scni.com or 203-964-2229.