Authors: Maureen Callahan
Poker Face (5 page)
Looking like a cross between a Japanese anime heroine and a 1970s disco queen, Lady Gaga performs at Perez Hilton’s 2008 CMJ bash at New York City’s Highline Ballroom.
Hal Horowitz/www.halhorowitz.com
Another heavily sourced icon: The late Brit eccentric and McQueen muse Isabella Blow, infamous for her outrageous clothes and love of bizarre headgear.
Phil Poynter/Art-Dept.com/trunkarchive.com
Gaga in a gorgeous, cloud-like Issy-inspired mask/headdress at Universal Records’ Brit Awards party in London, February 2010. (Designer Alexander McQueen, for whom Blow and Gaga were muses, had committed suicide the week before, and Gaga paid homage to him during her performance.)
© Planet Photos/ZUMApress.com
Face paint is half the battle: Lady Gaga, in an undated photo, applies her makeup with an uncharacteristically light hand.
Aaron Fallon/JBG Photo
The post-post-modern glamour of a true 21st-century pop star: The Lady reclines with BlackBerry, fresh coffee, costume jewelry, cash, and an art journal—all the necessities—in a tub in Paris, 2009.
© Francois Berthier/Corbis
In a hat designed by architect Frank Gehry and a dress by Miuccia Prada, Lady Gaga performs at the 30th anniversary celebration of MOCA (the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles). Her piano (not seen here) was designed by famed artist Damien Hirst.
© Mario Anzuoni/Reuters/Corbis
S
ullivan and Gaga wound up working together,
mainly due to the proximity effect. “I was DJing in the bar, her boyfriend was the bartender, he had a bunch of terrible bands that never went anywhere that I’d book at different shows . . . and she was just part of that,” he says. “We couldn’t help but hang out every single day.” Her clique was formed out of equal parts affinity and necessity: Starland was helping with Fusari and a future record deal; Starlight was giving her a crash course in performance art and Lower East Side hipster-ism; Sullivan was a skilled, popular DJ who could help her with bookings.
And soon enough, Gaga was go-go dancing, under Starlight’s tutelage, while Sullivan DJ’d at spots like St. Jerome’s, Don Hill’s, and Luke & Leroy’s, three of the most popular bars for the disheveled and disaffected. Once in a while, Gaga would sing; for a friend’s birthday party at the Beauty Bar on 14th Street, another cool-kids hangout retrofitted with 1950s-style cone-shaped hairdryers and manicure stations, she popped out of a cake and sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” à la Marilyn Monroe. Even then, her friends sensed she was going to make it.
“I used to walk down the street like I was a fucking star,” she has said. “I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be—and then to fight so hard for it every day that the lie becomes the truth.”
“The difference” with Gaga, says Sullivan: “She’s, like, four-eleven. She’s got a really tiny voice. She was not the cutest girl when she was younger. She’s used to people ignoring her, basically. But when she gets up on a stage and has a microphone in her hand, she feels for the first time like she’s interacting with people in a different way. Rather than people stooping over to listen to her, people are craning their heads forward to see her better. And that’s what we talk about when we talk about ‘the fame.’ ”
Lady Starlight was the one who schooled Stefani in burlesque
, the downtown bar scene, and how to light fires with hairspray. She took Stefani to her favorite underground party, Frock ’n’ Roll in Long Island City, thirty minutes away by train, in Queens. Long Island City has, in recent years, become the new Williamsburg, which for a while was the new Lower East Side. Long Island City is home to this generation’s starving artists, but it’s also home to the more experimental Museum of Modern Art offshoot P.S.1. Matthew Barney has his studio here.
Stefani’s assimilation into the scene wasn’t going well. She didn’t look the part, didn’t get all the esoteric references. “You know how it is in those kinds of artsy circles,” Starlight told the
New York Post.
“People are a little snooty.”
But Stefani kept at it. She auditioned for a burlesque spot at the Slipper Room, a bordello-ish bar/performance space on Orchard and Stanton streets on the Lower East Side.
“I thought she was just a nice crazy girl from Jersey,” says proprietor James Habacker, who hired her on the spot after her first audition in 2007. (He, like many of downtown New York’s nightlife denizens, has trouble recalling exact dates.) Gaga’s day look, he says, was “kind of slutty.” He laughs. Habacker, who cuts a dandyish figure in an expertly tailored olive green overcoat and wavy hair chopped to his cheekbones, is sitting in a back room in the basement of his venue; there are two facing sofas, a wet bar, and a huge silver plate on the coffee table sprinkled with cigarette ashes. He remembers her as always being “super-nice to me,” very career-minded, very mature. And not a little off.
“She would do some grinding, get down to pasties and a G-string. She was bringing in some interesting and odd elements—I remember some kind of plushie thing,” he says, before trailing off. (Plushies are members of a subculture devoted to the pursuit of sex acts with stuffed animals.)
“I was never a stripper, never topless,” Gaga has said. “It was rock ’n’ roll burlesque.”
Fusari thought the burlesque stuff was beneath her and a waste of her time. So, unsurprisingly, did her father.
“It was a strip show,” Fusari has said. “I was like, anyone who came to that show didn’t come for the music. And it really started to bother her father. I think now he knows it’s part of the act, an extreme, ‘Alice in Wonderland’–type thing.”
For Gaga, though, it was performance, a chance to learn how to lose herself, to push through her own comfort level, to see what worked and what didn’t and figure out ways to adjust accordingly, in the moment. It was, to her, art.
“She was clearly smart and professional,” Habacker adds. “I thought she was great.” The other girls, however, did not. “There were complaints,” he says. “Like, ‘I don’t like her attitude,’ ‘She’s rude to me,’ ‘She’s a diva.’ She wasn’t mean, I think. She was just distant, and a little strange. But if you don’t fit in, it makes it difficult.”
Though her act was inventive—Gaga performed with those stuffed animals, pasties, and pyro—Habacker, who only hired forty girls for eighty slots a month, let her go after one year. The rancor she engendered with the other girls—no matter who was at fault—was too disruptive. He was doubly impressed with the way she handled her firing. “You know, she didn’t fight me on it,” he says. “She was like, ‘Best of luck to you.’ And I think I might have said, ‘Don’t forget me if you ever get to be a big star.’ ” Which is what most every dancer at the Slipper Room thought she’d be.
Stefani was commuting nearly every day, working with
Fusari in suburban New Jersey and returning to the bacchanalian L.E.S. at night, attempting to penetrate the scene. Both were struggles, professionally and romantically.
Within a month of working with Fusari, says a formerly close friend, Stefani began dating Fusari’s session musician, Tommy Kafafian. “He’s a very cute guy, a very good songwriter and musician,” says the friend. Fusari had produced a record for Kafafian, who was also playing on some of Stefani’s tracks. She really fell for him, says her friend. Kafafian felt differently.
“I was the main squeeze at some point,” he says. He guesses they dated for “three or four or six months. It was definitely something I was attracted to. But it wasn’t like we were in love at all. It was more, like, we’d hang out hours and hours and days on end in the studio, and I’d drive her home to the city.”
She spent nearly all her free time recording: “Nothing could take away from the studio,” says her friend. “There was a determination.”
She was also in search of a new name—everyone agreed that Stefani Germanotta was far too ungainly and had to go. Despite the numerous origin stories—Fusari’s claim that it was the result of a misspelled text, Gaga’s claim that it was something Fusari said to her while she was playing a Queen B-side (“You’re so gaga!” which doesn’t sound like something anyone in a remotely cool profession would ever say)—Starland says the name arrived in a far more typical, pedestrian way: a marketing meeting.
“It was a little bit of a group effort,” among her, Fusari, Kafafian, and a few others, Starland says. “It wasn’t around a table, but it was like, ‘Everybody, let’s think about what name is going to be marketable.’ ”
Queen was, in fact, the inspiration point, though Starland says she never knew Stefani to be a big fan. “We talked about Queen and ‘Radio Ga Ga,’ and someone came up with ‘Lady,’ and we put it together. Once ‘Lady Gaga’ came up, we were like, ‘If we tell this to Rob, he’s not going to even listen to any of the other names—he’s going to fall in love with it.”
As for Stefani: “She loved it.”
She was also very happy with Kafafian, who was around her age and, like her, a struggling musician. They kept their relationship quiet and assumed no one in the studio knew. But once Fusari found out what was going on, Kafafian, says the friend, was fired. Stefani couldn’t figure out why, and she was crushed when Kafafian dumped her shortly after.
“She came to me so upset about it, very distraught,” says the friend. “She was like, ‘I’m so hurt.’ I don’t think she realized what was happening at the time.” (Kafafian refuses to discuss the circumstances of his leaving and his breakup with Stefani or what role Fusari may have played in that.)
Stefani soon figured it out. Fusari, who, at thirty-six, was eighteen years Stefani’s senior, made his feelings known. That he had a live-in fiancée named Jane—who would often drive Stefani to and from the bus stop in Jersey—did not seem to concern him. (Complicating matters further: Fusari’s brother was married to Jane’s sister.)
Stefani was overwhelmed: She didn’t have strong feelings for him, if any. She wasn’t so much worried about what would happen if she got involved with him—she was worried what would happen if she didn’t.
“Basically, she really wanted [to make] her record,” the friend says. In much the same way that, at first, “she wasn’t even into this style of music, dance—it was not what came from her heart—she was like, ‘OK, I’ll try it out. And after trying it out for a while, she got the hang of it. I think she approached the relationship with Rob in a similar way: ‘I may have signed up for a Tom, but . . .’ ” The friend pauses. “She really wanted to become famous and successful, and she worked really hard. And she was worried that if she didn’t go through with it . . .”
So she went through with it.
It was a rough time. Her high school friends didn’t like what
she was doing with Fusari; they made it clear that they judged her for it, and their judgment wounded her. She was still upset about Kafafian, who says he had no idea what was going on. It’s a plausible claim, given his propensity for statements such as “It’s just about relishing the love. . . . I’m here because I’m here. Because there’s no place you’re not supposed to be.”
Anyway: Kafafian says that, in his recollection, he left to go on tour with “this band” for three months, but that every time he tried to come back, or talk to Stefani or Fusari on the phone, he couldn’t get through. He felt like he was getting frozen out. “They kind of forgot about me,” he says, “even though I was trying to better myself.”
Unlike Fusari, who later filed a $30.5 million lawsuit against Gaga that claimed she was attempting to cheat him out of monies owed, Kafafian says he’s never considered going after payment for his work on tracks—including, he says, writing guitar parts and lyrics—that wound up on
The Fame.
“I played my ass off on ‘Beautiful, Dirty, Rich’ and ‘Brown Eyes,’ ” he says today. He finds the theme of
The Fame
highly ironic, given how used and left behind he feels. “Perhaps I was naïve,” he says. “Sometimes you have to go through the craps to see the traps, as they say. Right now I know what I want, and I don’t have to cut anyone down to get there. I don’t really care. In my heart, I know what the truth is. But shame on them.”
Stefani, meanwhile, was booking herself gigs wherever she could, sometimes as a dancer, sometimes as a musician, calling up clubs like the Bitter End—where she’d performed as an NYU student with the Stefani Germanotta Band—pretending to be her own publicist, talking up this new girl. That the guys who owned the Bitter End knew her from her days performing with the Stefani Germanotta Band didn’t stop her. “The venue guys watched me grow up musically in the clubs,” she said.
She booked herself into Arlene’s Grocery, a small club on Stanton Street that was just a few doors down from the Slipper Room. Like most of the venues on the Lower East Side, Arlene’s primarily booked rock acts. “But we booked her because she said she could bring fifty people to the show,” says Julia Dee, who was the club’s booker back then. “And she did.”
The scenesters who worked at Arlene’s were typically underwhelmed, as per the neighborhood’s code of conduct. “I remember the staff members were [like], ‘Hot body, can’t sing,’ ” Dee says. “She was in bikini bottoms, playing the keyboard. We thought that was pretty out there.” Dee dropped her after a second booking drew only eight people. “The music was cheesy, dated pop with an R&B feel to it,” she says, the “same kind of stuff she’s doing now.” This sentiment is typical of the Lower East Side’s too-cool-for-school circular logic: Back then, Lady Gaga wasn’t cool enough to play in a venue that hosted unknowns night after night after night, and now that she’s become a critically acclaimed international pop star, they still think she’s not good enough.
Everyone at the Bitter End, however, thought she was gifted: “It was an easy booking,” says Bitter End co-owner Paul Rizzo. “She is an incredible talent.” That didn’t mean they thought she would make it: “There is a lot more involved than talent,” says Rizzo. “And she was good, but I see so many people come through that don’t go anywhere. The ones that do—it’s very hard to figure out. There’s no formula to it.”
Rizzo says that Stefani played her first gig at the Bitter End as Gaga on July 28, 2006. He still has a poster downstairs from that gig, he says: Gaga in green hot pants, arms thrown back—“disco ball included,” he adds dryly. And no Gaga anecdote would be complete without an accounting of what she was wearing that night—it struck him, he says, because it was so different from her earlier days: “She was just a little more . . . in a different-type outfit,” he says diplomatically. “I think she was wearing, like, a yellow-and-black one-piece. And some sort of hat.”
Gaga recalled the Bitter End as her first real show, but recalled the outfit a bit differently: She was in an American Apparel one-piece, she said. “I had a white skirt on, giant white, with a fucking flower in my hair. I looked like such a loser. I had an Amy Winehouse beehive—before she came out.”
If there’s one thing Gaga can’t stand, it’s the idea that she’s aggressively copied someone else’s look. Because she so obviously, inarguably
has,
her outrage is almost funny. Just a year later at Lollapalooza, where she’d been booked for one of the lesser stages, she found herself hounded by paparazzi as well as regular people who wanted her picture. They thought she was Amy Winehouse. It was, at the very least, a fortuitous bit of confusion. She didn’t like it, but she played along, telling a fan who’d mistaken her for Winehouse to “fuck off!” The girl scooted away, thrilled that her idol had just cursed her.