Poker Face (6 page)

Her songwriting was going well. Surprisingly, says Starland, her relationship with Fusari deepened. She found herself involved, even though she’d embarked on the relationship not even halfheartedly—quarter-heartedly?—and even though Fusari still had a fiancée. Starland recalls asking him why he would jeopardize his current relationship; he told her that the prospect of the money and the fame “was a rush.” Both, she says, were addicted to the melodrama that was their relationship, what each could do for the other.

Fusari was also inspiring some of her writing, including the aforementioned “Brown Eyes,” a song that, in concert, she now often ends by raging at the song’s subject, calling him “motherfucker!!!!” and mocking “your bullshit brown eyes.”

“I was dating somebody that I couldn’t be with,” Gaga has said. “I wrote that at three
A.M.
, crying in front of the piano. Wailing in front of a Yamaha.”

“Blueberry Kisses,” Starland says, is also about Rob: “They used to have blueberry pancakes in the morning,” she says. “They had a serious connection.” They also had very similar personalities: volatile, dramatic, contentious. “The highs were really high, and the lows were really low,” says Starland. “They were both going crazy.” At one of the lowest points in her relationship with Fusari, Gaga called her mother to come out to New Jersey for moral support.

At her most tired and tormented, she doubted whether she had the fortitude or the ability to see the demo through. “She’d say, ‘I don’t know if I can finish this record,’ ” says Starland.

And what would Starland tell her friend? “You’re a professional. I didn’t fucking spend all this time and energy and work writing these songs and creating a vision with you, putting all this together, dealing with every facet of drama for you to say, ‘I don’t know if I can deal with it.’ ”

Meanwhile, Stefani was still struggling to break into the upper
echelons of the Lower East Side scene. She’d been dancing with Starlight at St. Jerome’s and had gotten herself booked at the Slipper Room, but, ever the overachiever, she wanted promoters Michael T. and Justine D.—two of downtown’s biggest stars, who conceived of and threw parties on their own and for clubs and other clients—to hire her for their Motherfucker events.

A series of roaming, dissolute, debauched parties held on the nights before major holidays, Motherfucker events—not unlike the DJ collective and weekly party known as MisShapes—dominated downtown nightlife from 2003 to 2008, eventually attracting thousands of partygoers, among them the “bridge-and-tunnelers” who commuted from suburban Long Island or New Jersey. (Bridge-and-tunnelers, who are usually identified by their suburban styling and overreliance on hair product, are considered complete undesirables among the city’s self-styled fabulous, who themselves often come from suburban Long Island or New Jersey.)

The Motherfucker parties would traditionally close with Diana Ross’s 1976 disco hit “Love Hangover,” in tribute to Studio 54, and access was granted by one of the scene’s toughest, most infamous doormen, Thomas Onorato. As Glenn Belverio, author of
Confessions from the Velvet Ropes,
put it in a 2006 blog post: “Remember: Motherfucker is a dictatorship at the door and a democracy on the dance floor—so work a look or New York’s #1 doorman, Thomas Onorato, will send you straight to the New Year’s gulag.” But Motherfucker wasn’t really a dictatorship—all you had to do was pay to get in. The threat of rejection, though, is always a great selling point.

Lady Starlight, it turned out, knew Michael T., who knew her by her real name, Colleen Martin. At the time, Martin was working as a makeup artist at a M.A.C store by day and, in addition to her own gigs, had often been hired to dance by Michael T. for Motherfucker and another party he did called Rated X. Martin began bringing Gaga around to Motherfucker bashes in 2007.

“Certainly her look was completely eighties stripper rock trash,” says Michael T. “She looked like something out of 1987.” He was perplexed by just what bonded the two girls, but noted that Martin’s younger friend was unabashedly aping her look.

“Colleen, at that point, was also looking really heavy-metal trashy,” he says. “She had a grown-out shag—dark on top and literally fried blond at the tips. She did it on purpose; it was definitely funny.” Stefani’s look, by contrast, seemed earnest; she appeared to have put herself together that way because she genuinely thought it looked good. She’d not yet picked up that esoteric trick of telegraphing irony and wit through carefully cultivated bad taste.

To Michael T., it seemed that Gaga had no personal, cohesive style: “I mean, I suppose, like anybody, she was probably taking a lot of what she was seeing from her friends,” he says. “But I can tell you that between Colleen’s Bowie impression and Lady Gaga’s—night and day. Colleen looked like a freak from 1973. Gaga looked like somebody had said, ‘Oh, let’s put a David Bowie lightning bolt on your face.’ ”

Gaga wanted Michael T. to hire her to dance at his parties. She auditioned. “She was OK,” he says, laughing. “I wasn’t floored.” But he was friendly with Lüc the bartender, who Michael T. recalls as Gaga’s boyfriend by this time. (She was still involved with Fusari, but Lüc, by all accounts, had no idea they had anything other than a professional relationship.)

“Colleen would tell me she was doing this act with her,” Michael T. says, “but just the way it was being described, I really did not take it seriously. Like, really? Like, live DJ, two dancers, and Lady Gaga looking like a heavy-metal queen?” The Gaga moniker barely registered with him, harking back as it did to the nineties club scene, when twenty-nine-year-old “club kids” ran around town with names like “Pebbles” and “Desi Monster.”

Michael T. relented, hiring Gaga—with Lüc—to host a Motherfucker party DJ’d by Moby at the now-defunct, super-plush club Eugene on 24th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.

The job description, according to him: “Look good, invite cute friends and bands, drink, work for about three hours.”

She didn’t make much of an impression on doorman Thomas Onorato. “She was friends with my friend Lüc, who was also a host that night,” he says. “She was one of eight to ten promo-sexual hosts—that’s what we called them. She was brunette at that point. That’s really all I can tell you.”

“I remember she looked nice,” says Michael T. “Sort of like the heavy-metal stripper girl going for a fancy night out. She wore a long gown, I want to say maybe pink or salmon, with a low-cut back.”

Even though Gaga didn’t seem
of
the downtown rock scene, Michael T. understood why she wanted to be in it. “Suddenly, something happened” in New York, he says. “Electroclash had been over and done with for a number of years.” But it would hugely inform Gaga’s music. Cult electroclash artists such as Felix Da Housecat and Miss Kittin ironically wrote about fame and paparazzi culture, playing with the idea of being superstars in a scene that would abide no such thing. Gaga was also influenced by their fuzzy, filthy syncopated beats, but she would clean them up, make them less challenging and more radio-friendly.

Dance parties were replacing rock shows. Kids were gravitating toward stuff that felt under-the-radar, dirty, secret, elitist, and judgmental—even though, ostensibly, the downtown scene was about welcoming all freaks and misfits. It wasn’t, and never really has been; you had to be the right kind of misfit—cool, or cool enough. Or, in Gaga’s case, friends with people who were cool and would help you out, vouch for you, let you be their “+1,” in nightlife parlance.

But everything was, and is, degrees, as it always has been in New York City. On the Lower East Side, knowing where the newest secret bar was located was good; having the number was better; knowing the owner and having unlimited access was enough to validate one’s self-worth for a good few weeks, till everyone figured it out and something else as supposedly secret and stupidly exclusive sprang up to replace it.

Similarly, it wasn’t enough to just know about a secret rock show; you had to be on the list, know about not the official after-party but the
after
-after party, post pictures of you with the band to LastNightsParty. This was the era when actual superstars, high-profile
Vogue
magazine editors, and pristine uptown socialites began actively courting and taking cues from the kids behind the Motherfucker and MisShapes dance parties, and the cool kids, operating as rejects from the mainstream, were suddenly the gate-keepers.

MisShapes was a weekly, Sunday-night gathering of hipsters celebrating themselves and their general level of street cred, DJ’d and overseen by suburban transplants Geordon Nicol, Leigh Lezark, and Greg Krelenstein. MisShapes was for the very young; if you were twenty-six you could easily feel like you’d aged out. Unlike the electroclash scene and Motherfucker parties, MisShapes was exclusive; it was very much about who you knew and what you looked like, and it was most definitely not open to all. It was their playlist that was the most radical thing about the parties:
T
hey embraced mainstream pop music, playing artists, such as Madonna, who would never be heard at a cool-kids gathering downtown unless it was done with the explicit understanding that this was mocking.

The apotheosis of this came when Madonna asked if she could DJ (for a few minutes) at a MisShapes party in October 2005. The MisShapes went on to do national print ads for Eastport backpacks, and Lezark is now a front-row presence at New York and Paris fashion weeks—such is the wide-ranging currency of downtown New York cool in the early twenty-first century. These were the people Gaga wanted to get next to, impress, study. She may not have had good taste herself, but she knew who did and was determined to get it for herself.

“She was definitely in the scene,” says Michael T., “and making those rounds.”

During this time, Gaga had two confidantes. Lady Starlight
was one. Wendy Starland was the other. Both were older than she was, both were in a position to assist her professionally, but neither ever felt exploited. They wanted to help, and they liked hanging out with her. She was fun and sweet, generous and generally bubbly, but unafraid to be vulnerable and needy when it came to her anxiety over boys and her career. She did love to talk about herself to the exclusion of most everything else.

“We would go out all the time,” Starland says. “We’d go out to bars, to concerts. We went to see the Philharmonic. We spoke on the phone, like, three times a day. I’m spending Christmas with her family. She’d sleep at my house, come to me for advice on her personal affairs.” Starland says Gaga had difficulty being alone, hated it, that when she slept over she couldn’t even stay on the couch—that was too solitary. She’d crawl into bed with Starland, who says it was just for company, nothing more. “She was a night owl, but Rob had gotten her into being an early riser.” Often, Gaga would stop by Wendy’s in the morning, coffee and brown-bagged take-out breakfast in hand.

Fusari, however, didn’t fully approve of the friendship: “He didn’t like it when the two of us would go out,” says Starland. “He feared we’d get a lot of attention from boys or whatever.” Still, he’d also ask Starland for advice about his relationship with Gaga.

Whether out of perversion, revenge, or cowardice, sometimes Rob would bring Jane to meet the girls for dinner. “Tension started brewing around that time,” Starland says. “I think Jane started to suspect, and I think she started checking his phone for texts.”

Gaga would also check Fusari’s phone for texts from Jane—if he stepped out of the studio for a moment, she’d scurry over and scroll through his log, and if she found a message from Jane, she’d blow up. Then she’d eventually calm down and realize the absurdity of the situation and apologize to Fusari.

Another friend of Gaga’s from this time period is loath to talk about Fusari: “It honestly doesn’t matter what I tell you about what happened with her and Rob, [because] it’s gonna look bad,” she says. “But she didn’t do anything wrong.”

At the same time, Fusari and Starland wanted Laurent
Besencon, who managed Fusari, to take on Gaga as a client. He said no. Her look was a problem. She and Fusari pressed on. They posted finished versions of “Paparazzi” and “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” on MySpace. Gaga also did a “media buy”—basically, she bought space to be featured prominently for a couple of weeks—at PureVolume.com. It was an interesting choice; the site is mainly devoted to emo, which, without diminishing it, is a genre mainly devoted to lodging complaints: at the world, at one’s parents, at romantic interests that are largely unrequited, at one’s friends, at oneself. Gaga’s Euro-inflected, get-fucked-up-and-dance aesthetic was at utter odds with the site’s: It was the prom queen playing Dungeons & Dragons on a Friday night in some geek’s moldy suburban basement, or the social outcast daring to sit with the cool kids in the back of the bus, depending on your worldview.

“I was very confused as to why she would be doing such a huge push on PureVolume,” says Sarah Lewitinn, who, at the time, worked in A&R at Island/Def Jam. “I thought she had a good voice, but it was hard to tell what was going on. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to go for a Michelle Branch, Paramore angle or what. She had a very different look to her than anything you would see on PureVolume. It didn’t really show any of the David-Bowie-meets-Madonna-meets-Britney-Spears angles that she eventually transformed into.”

Gaga was still trying to decode her own artistic DNA: She knew that she—like all musical acts—needed a look that was a distinct image that would become a marketable, readily identifiable brand. But she had no idea what it should be.

For all her later talk about being an artsy misfit outsider, she was really just a nice Catholic girl from the Upper West Side who was never a big reader, who shopped at expensive, generically tasteful boutiques like Olive and Bette’s, who just wanted everyone to like her.

“I was the girl,” she told her label’s biographer, “with [Britney’s] name written all over my face, crying at
TRL
because I saw her hand.” Her vocal coach, at sixteen, was Don Lawrence, who’d also worked with Mick Jagger, Bono, and Christina Aguilera. “Gaga’s parents always had her connected with the best people,” says Sullivan. “She worked with [Don] always.” To this day, she travels with a recording of Lawrence’s vocal exercises.