Poker Face (9 page)

All Gaga could really think about, however, was the shaky table and the record that kept skipping because of it. “She spoke to the direct head of her label, Vincent Herbert,” says Starland. “And Vincent said to her, ‘You know what you’ve got to do.’ And Laurent was gone the next day.”

So was Starlight, axed as DJ, though her firing was much gentler: Gaga framed it as a lateral move, to stylist. And that, says Sullivan, “was the beginning of her and me working together more. I knew automatically. I love Starlight to death, but as a DJ—I would never let a record skip. I was like, I would’ve seen that coming.”

One of the headliners at Lollapalooza 2010: Lady Gaga. Actually, with the announcement that her stage set was going to cost $150,000, she declared herself
the
headliner.

After Lollapalooza, it was back to writing, recording, and
attempting to streamline the Gaga image. She was still unable to divine a clear aesthetic, still working her heavy-metal-stripper look for lack of another idea. Gaga knew that she needed to look extreme, but right now she still looked like something out of
Vice
magazine’s “Don’t” pages—vicious street fashion commentary by New York City’s most acidic hipsters.

Her first priority, though, was getting herself on Jimmy Iovine’s radar. The fifty-seven-year-old Iovine is the head of Interscope, which he cofounded in 1990. He’d produced records for U2, Patti Smith, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers; he also coproduced
8 Mile,
the critically acclaimed hip-hopera starring Eminem and based on the rapper’s life.

“In his area—the creation of pop/hip-hop/R&B—he’s considered an expert,” says a veteran of the industry. “The conflict with Jimmy becomes—the guy who [worked with] John Lennon, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks—there’s this expectation that he’d be an ‘artist guy’ ”—the kind of exec that cultivates talent over the long term, who can help develop and sustain a body of work.

“But he’s not,” continues the source. “You’d think with that reputation that this is a guy who’d understand everything from Grizzly Bear to Beck, but in truth, this is a guy who’s all about the hit single.” When approached by Iovine about working with Akon, this source says he was reluctant to recommend the idea to his artist. But he did, and the project was successful. “I have no problem telling Jimmy, ‘That was all you,’ ” says the source. “We didn’t see it. But hey man, that was [Akon] completely, that launched our single and our tour. One hundred percent him. We didn’t see the depth in him as an artist, but Jimmy did.”

“Jimmy is the wizard behind the curtain for any act on Universal [Interscope’s parent company],” says Wendy Starland. “Every artist goes into a deal thinking they’re going to get the push, but the label really only has enough money to push a couple of artists [a year].”

One version of events has Iovine in his office on a Sunday afternoon, spinning stuff for Akon, soliciting his feedback. Iovine pops in “Boys, Boys, Boys” by Gaga, and Akon tells Iovine that he likes it. A lot. “So Jimmy Iovine calls her on a Sunday afternoon,” says a source, “and goes, ‘Stefani, Gaga, whatever—I just want you to know that we really like this song of yours, and we’re going to be behind you.’ And that was the moment they decided that all the money and all the resources would go towards pushing Lady Gaga. All because Akon”—who’d long believed in her potential—“said he liked it.”

Akon has called Lady Gaga his “franchise player.” He’s
said that she’s making it possible for him to consider retiring early, and upon hearing Gaga for the first time, he told Iovine, “Yo, I want to sign that right there. She needs to be under my umbrella”—Kon Live, the label he ran under Interscope. Iovine’s response, Akon has said, was “Yeah, whatever you want. Take her. Let’s get it done.”

In Gaga, they had an artist who, thanks to her ill-fated deal with Island Def Jam, had a good chunk of album-ready material in mastered form. But she still needed to write half a record, and the stuff that wasn’t working for her, or for Iovine and Akon, would go to other artists: the Pussycat Dolls, New Kids on the Block, and her teenage heroine Britney Spears, who recorded a track Gaga cowrote called “Quicksand.”

“They’d rejected so many songs and so many styles at that point—so much,” says Brendan Sullivan. “And she was writing for the Pussycat Dolls before that, but even then, they were disappointed in her and had rejected songs.”

It was, Gaga knew, another pivotal moment, akin to the pressure she felt when writing “The Fame” for Vincent Herbert. Her version of writing “Just Dance” is glamorous in its rock ’n’ roll decadence. She gets off a flight from New York to L.A., hungover from her going-away party on the Lower East Side the night before (she’s relocated to L.A. indefinitely) and heads straight to the recording studio where, minutes later, out pours the song, an ode to drinking and dancing, nothing more.

But Sullivan—who, like many friends, recalls a girl so driven she rarely indulged in alcohol, let alone drugs—suspects she applied herself with the same rigor and discipline when it came to penning a surefire hit, a song that would make Interscope move fast to make her a star.

Starland, meanwhile, was still hoping that Gaga would, as she saw it, do right by her. She’d spent Christmas 2007 with Gaga’s family on the Upper West Side; she says Gaga was upset that Rob Fusari, who’d promised to come, never showed up. Starland says Gaga told her she had a special gift for her, and presented her with a Chanel 2.55 bag worth several thousand dollars. It was understood, Starland says, that this also doubled as payment for Starland’s role in her career, for discovering her and introducing her to Fusari. Starland says she eventually worked up the nerve to confront Gaga over dinner one night at Tao, an expensive Asian fusion restaurant in midtown Manhattan. Gaga paid.

“I said, ‘Stefani, you only know how valuable a relationship or a contact is in someone’s life when it’s taken away.’ And she’s like, ‘Since I don’t have a lot of money right now, next time I won’t give you a bag, I’ll give you a vacation.’ And I just said to her, ‘Honestly, are you planning on screwing me over? Where would you be without all of this effort and development and connections?’ And she was like, ‘Wendy, our relationship is such that I would give you a vacation or whatever, but if you want to put this down with our lawyers, we will never talk again. Our friendship will be over.’ ” Starland opted not to sue—it’s not her style, she says—but the friendship remained distant and strained.

Not long after her dinner with Starland, on the Friday before Valentine’s Day, 2008, Gaga presented “Just Dance” to Interscope. “Jimmy Iovine is known for having these meetings—he’s like Steve Jobs—where he makes everyone sit and wait until he’s ready,” says Sullivan. “And it’s either because ‘None of you are doing your jobs, and I don’t know why I hired any of you people, and you people don’t even like music in the first place,’ blah blah blah, or he’s making them wait because he’s heard something and he wants them to get on it right away.”

On this day, according to Sullivan, it was the latter. “He heard ‘Just Dance,’ and he was like, ‘This is a hit record, and this is the one we’ve been waiting for since we signed her.’ ” Iovine brought Gaga into the office, into that meeting. “He said, ‘You did it, you did everything we asked you to do. We believed in you and we didn’t know why, and now we know why.’ And he played the song for the whole office, and she danced on the table. On the boardroom table.” Not long after, Iovine had her relocate to L.A. to finish the album.

As Sullivan later wrote in an essay for
Esquire
magazine’s May 2010 “Women” issue, Gaga had returned to New York for a visit and she and Sullivan were eating lunch in a Midtown deli when she got a call from Bert Padell, Madonna’s former business manager. He told her he wanted to step in and take over; she couldn’t believe it. He was one of the many high-level people she’d auditioned for as a teenager.

“Her dad’s a very savvy businessman,” says Sullivan. “He can basically get a meeting with anyone.” Her mother’s savvy as well; before the Padell audition she’d done her homework and learned that he wrote poetry, and at the audition she asked him about it. He gave her a copy of his book of poems. After Stefani performed, Padell said to her, ‘Well, you know, good luck with everything. We’ll call you.’ ” And he’d finally called. Stefani, now Gaga, said to him, “Actually, we have met. My mother still has your book of poetry.” She told Sullivan that it was “the best phone call of my entire life.”

Her boyfriend Lüc, however, was ever more unhappy. “Lüc never gave up on his rock ’n’ roll fantasy world, even though he’d never made it as a drummer,” says Sullivan. “He thought having a girlfriend with a record deal would be VIP shows and instant status. He didn’t know that music was an actual profession and that he would have a busy girl who was always out of town or on her BlackBerry.”

By that December, she’d had enough. After getting into a fight with Lüc one night over her needing to work and him complaining that she was neglecting him for the sake of her career, she told him: “I want you to get my self-tanner, my lipstick, and my disco ball, because you and I are through.”

Chapter Six
One Sequin at a Time

G
aga had been building a solid, substantial
fan base online, which sounds far easier than it actually is; if anything, the Internet fractures attention spans and creates split-second, evanescent phenomena. Far more rare is the artist or clip that originates on the Web and becomes massively impactful, that moves into the more traditional mediums of TV, magazines, newspapers, that becomes known even to those people who don’t have a computer.

Susan Boyle, who became a global phenomenon months before Gaga herself did, is that similar, rare example: Her performance on Simon Cowell’s UK show,
Britain’s Got Talent
, shot around the Web at warp speed, and a confluence of factors—Boyle’s personal story, the production values of the clip, the meta-narrative of a homely spinster singing a song about daring to dream, charming a skeptical audience and the famously cruel Cowell—has turned her, eighteen months later, into a multimillionaire.

Gaga had none of these known quantities: She wasn’t framed by an existing structure, such as
American Idol
. Her presentation was deliberately confusing and a bit menacing; Boyle was a middle-aged woman who lived alone with her cat and said she’d never been in love. Gaga, unlike Boyle, had no machine behind her, no context. Though Boyle seemed, too, to be an overnight sensation, the clip from
Britain’s Got Talent
that made her a superstar played like a mini-movie, the quintessential underdog story told in about seven minutes. Gaga was selling a first single that, without visuals, was utterly indistinguishable from the bulk of preexisting, slickly produced, Auto-Tuned pop; she was trying to carve an identity for herself in a super-cluttered landscape. (Fittingly, Boyle and Gaga have expressed an interest in collaborating.)

And yet, this is Gaga’s genius: “She’s struck this difficult balance; she’s both intimate and enigmatic with her fan base,” says Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne.com. “Technologies like Twitter and Facebook and MySpace have created these platforms for ‘mass intimacy,’ but mostly it doesn’t work very well, mostly because you know that I’m not talking to
you
—if I wanted to talk to you, I’d call or e-mail. When you’re speaking to ten million ‘friends,’ you don’t have that intimacy. But some artists can make that happen—like in live performances, where people in the cheap seats feel like they’re having a command performance. An artist like Lady Gaga feels like she’s doing that, on the Internet, in real time. That’s very difficult.”

In May 2010, a YouTube clip of a twelve-year-old boy performing an astonishing cover of Gaga’s “Paparazzi” became a viral phenomenon, generating more than eighteen million views. Within days, sixth-grader Grayson Chance was on
The Ellen DeGeneres Show
, where he took a call from Lady Gaga herself, who gushed over his abilities and then helped him secure a record deal. Full circle.

Like every other arm of old media—network television, radio, publishing—the record industry has been grappling with maintaining both pop-cultural relevance and profit margins in the Internet age, and though a company like Interscope has the infrastructure to create a Lady Gaga, that alone is no longer enough.

“The process of breaking a star has become very difficult,” says an unnamed source familiar with Interscope’s Gaga strategy. “We used to have a very push-through relationship with the music consumer, where you got it on the radio and the radio pounded it one hundred times a day, and the kids said, ‘It must be a hit,’ and went out and bought it. The consumer now, kids thirteen to twenty-two years old, they’re much more savvy. They have many more sources of information. They don’t just listen to the radio and say, ‘If Ryan Seacrest says it’s a hit, it’s got to be a hit.’ They’re forming their own judgments. To break an artist today, there’s got to be some grist for the presentation. Enter Lady Gaga.”

“Lady Gaga is probably the greatest artist development story we’ve seen in memorable history,” says James Diener, CEO and president of A&M/Octone records. It wasn’t all her—she could not have broken through without the investment and support of a major label—but she worked harder than most.

The industry, Garland says, “should give her a big hug and tens of millions of dollars. You couldn’t ask for a better partner at this moment in the business.”

The next part of the prerelease strategy was establishing
Gaga not only in the gay community but as
of
it—if she did break out, she would not only have a committed core of consumers with highly disposable income, but she’d have cred as an outsider artist, despite her highly commercial sound. Interscope hired FlyLife, a NYC-based public relations company specializing in the gay marketplace, to book Gaga into the right nightclubs, get DJs to spin her record, hook her up with the right people. “They were definitely, really specifically trying to push her toward a gay audience,” says the rapper Cazwell, who was outsourced by FlyLife to perform with her.

Iovine had also decided he was going to book Gaga at Miami’s dance-centric Winter Music Conference, March 25–29, 2008, and that she’d perform whether or not he could secure the proper permits from the city. Sullivan recalls the exact circumstances; he consults his electronic diary for the date and time.

“On March 1, yeah on March 1 at 2:43
P.M.
, I text her, saying, ‘Are you going to be home for your birthday?’ ” he recalls. “And she calls me back right away and goes, ‘No, I don’t think we’re going to be home for my birthday. Jimmy wants to push us forward so we can go to the Winter Music Conference and meet all the DJs and industry people and have them hear our new record, and if that goes well we’re going to go directly to Los Angeles and film the video for ‘Just Dance.’ ”

Gaga was calm; this was what she had been working for, toward, what she expected. Sullivan was shocked. “I was like, ‘Holy shit, OK!’ We’d just gone from nobody coming to our shows unless we texted them to getting flown to Miami.”

It was a microcosmic version of Gaga’s ultimate trajectory: seemingly going nowhere one minute, suddenly everywhere.

Despite playing to such a tech-savvy crowd, there’s not
much of Gaga’s WMC performance online, just a quick, grainy clip with low sound quality, and a ten-minute interview that looks like it was done for cable access. She is wearing what she calls “disco panties”—they look as if they were constructed from the mirrored tiles of a disco ball—a billowing white pirate top, and sunglasses. Her newly blond hair is frizzy and flyaway; she struggles constantly to keep her bangs matted to her forehead. Gaga is telling the interviewer about her label head Jimmy Iovine’s love for her.

“I’m the kind of girl he takes to the prom,” she says. “I’m quirky, I’m from Brooklyn”—that’s a lie—“I’m Italian.” She is also charming, explaining her raison d’être: “Changing the world, one sequin at a time.” She is compact, throaty, and with her New York dialect—soft Ts and slightly drawn-out vowels—she very much looks and sounds, incredibly, like the relentlessly chipper TV chef Rachael Ray.

The first show Gaga played at WMC was during the day, on the roof of the Raleigh Hotel, a swank four-star owned by the hotelier Andre Balazs, himself a huge nightlife fixture and gossip-column staple in New York (best known, perhaps, for his one-time engagement to Uma Thurman). It was a bit thrown together. “We didn’t have money for costumes,” says Sullivan. “The backup dancers each got about one hundred bucks per show. None of us made any money.” Still, they did what they could: They had smoke machines, lights, and disco balls. “We lit hairspray on fire,” he recalls. “We had fun.”

Interscope had hired Coalition Media Group to promote Gaga; Coalition had also helped break the Scissor Sisters, booking them into gay parties and clubs. “They booked us into a gay club called Score in the middle of Miami, and the gay dudes just loved us,” Sullivan says. “We’d done the hipster shoe-gaze, eye-roll downtown scene, and we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to play in the gay market, the kind of big, crazy clubs where they would accept us. And that was pretty much our biggest show; we just nailed it that night. And then we went back to our hotel, showered, and flew to L.A. to film the video for ‘Just Dance.’ ”

This, too, was ultra-low-budget. “We had to park at Martin Luther King and Crenshaw Boulevard, which sounds like a Chris Rock joke,” says Sullivan. “We rented this guy’s terribly tacky house for the video. It looks like somebody’s ‘my-parents-are-out-of-town’ party in Jersey or something.” Sullivan recalls the shoot as chaotic and thoroughly unglamorous. “We’re, like, throwing champagne on the shag carpet, jumping on the furniture, and walking on the coffee table,” he says. “And then they’d be like, ‘CUT!’ and we’d sit down and breathe for a second, and this weird guy would come from around the corner and be like, ‘Don’t sit on the arm of the sofa; it’s not good for it.’ Ha ha.”

In her retelling, Gaga was characteristically hyperbolic, comparing it, in one interview, to “being on a Martin Scorsese set.” But she did have a manicure that gave her nails the appearance of being sheathed in fishnet, which was a stroke of genius.

She was now living full-time in L.A., trying to finish the album, but it was around the time of the “Just Dance” video shoot that she met a New York–based photographer named Warwick Saint, who shot her for potential album artwork. He was brought in by Gaga’s new manager, Troy Carter, whom she hired when she signed to Interscope. An African-American powerhouse, Carter is actually quite tiny, maybe a little over five feet. He kept a low public profile; his other clients included Freeway and Eve.

Gaga and Saint had their first meeting over a beer one night at the House of Blues. “She was quite sexy,” he says. “But it wasn’t out-there in terms of clothes.” Gaga was, he says, wearing jeans, a loose T-shirt, and reading glasses. He found her highly mature for her age: “Super-smart, super-bright, super-creative,” he says. “She often spoke about her family and her dad.” She seemed, he says, “to have a good relationship with her father.”

The label had set up a shoot at a downtown L.A. spot called the Bordello bar; it was to go from six in the morning till four in the afternoon. He recalls being underwhelmed by her stylist, whose work for Gaga he found “costume-y,” and he recommended a friend named Martina Nilsson to Carter and Gaga; Nilsson soon took over. “After the meeting,” he says, “Gaga was like, ‘Of course. She just, like, totally gets me.’ And Martina was on the job straightaway.”

From the moment the shoot began (with her own music on the sound system), Gaga was in complete command, which Saint says is unusual. “Some artists you put in front of the camera—it’s like trying to suck blood from a stone,” he says. “Lady Gaga was a performer from the get-go, which, for a photographer, is a dream. She would, like, flip upside down and do these cool body positions. She loved being in front of the camera. She loved being the center of attention.”

After the shoot, Saint invited Gaga to come look at the images: “I was like, ‘It’s a good idea for you to see what you’re like in front of the camera.’ ” For all her bravado on the set, he says “she had a bit of a complex about her nose. She was considering having it done, but I told her not to.”

Aliya Naumoff, who was hired to shoot the first performance Lady Gaga did for Interscope execs (it’s known as a showcase, and in this instance it was so that others in corporate would know what they were selling), recalls seeing no outward signs of insecurity on Gaga’s part, and thinking how unusual that was. The show was on a rooftop in midtown Manhattan; Gaga had two backup dancers and didn’t seem too familiar with them, but “she was full of confidence; I was kind of blown away,” Naumoff says. “I was like, ‘That one is gonna be the next combination of Madonna and Britney.’ ”

A few nights later, Naumoff went to see Gaga perform at the downtown club Mansion, a low-ceilinged space that’s divided into two small rooms. “The club was maybe one-tenth full,” Naumoff says. During her set, “everyone was like, ‘What is that?’ No one was really paying attention.” After the performance, Naumoff, who’d had a pleasant working experience with Gaga at that Interscope showcase, went up to Gaga to say hi and congratulations.

“She blew me off; she didn’t care,” Naumoff says, laughing. “She just didn’t give a fuck. I wasn’t insulted. I was like, ‘She’s in it to win it. She’s unstoppable.’ ”

“Just Dance” was released, to little reaction, on April 8. It finally reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in January 2009. As for Saint, he stayed in sporadic contact with Gaga via text messages: “I’d say, ‘Cheers Gaga, I just saw you on . . .’ And she’d be like, ‘Hey, I got played on the radio in Canada!’ ” As with her other friends and acquaintances, most exchanges were all about her. “And as she was getting more and more famous, her responses would become less and less frequent,” he says.

In April, Wendy Starland—herself newly relocated to L.A.—got a surprise phone call from Gaga. “She said, ‘All I want to do is hang out with you. I’m dating this guy, he’s my stylist. . . .’ ” This was Matt Williams, who was Gaga’s age and who had recently relocated from New York City. “She’s like, ‘He’s an entrepreneur, too, and people are jealous of him, too, because he’s so successful, just like me. I thought I’d give him a shot to do all my styling.’ ” Gaga told Starland she’d just done an interview with
Rolling Stone
and had given Starland credit for her discovery, and then the topic turned to whether Starland deserved further remuneration for connecting Gaga and Fusari.

According to Starland, Gaga said that the idea of getting paid for introducing one artist to another was a bit much. “She said, ‘Someone must have introduced you to Moby’ ”—whom Starland had worked with on his 2008 album
Last Night,
singing the lead vocal on his single “I’m in Love.” Starland countered that, in fact, Moby had found her on MySpace, and that without her help, Gaga might never have made it. The girls never spoke again.

Though she has no problem exerting control, the confrontation with Starland is uncharacteristic; Gaga does not like to cut people out of her life or fire them. In the case of the former, she’ll do the slow fade, leaving it to the left-behind party to figure out what’s up. In the case of the latter, she’ll leave it to someone else to do the firing, or claim no knowledge of what’s going on. David Ciemny, who worked as her tour manager for about a year and a half beginning in spring 2008, and took a leave of absence in the fall of ’09, says he was confused by her response when he broached the idea of going back out on the road.