When we finally finished our fags and bid each other adieu, the moment Mr. Orangeio walked away, a woman, who looked on the verge of fainting, went “What’s he LIKE? I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WERE TALKING TO HIM!”
Turned out he was some bloke from Sex and the City who all the birds fancy. I didn’t have a clue. I hate that show like bum-plague. I thought he was the PR for Vaseline Intensive Care, which was sponsoring the awards. No wonder he looked confused when I asked him if he took his work home with him, and used it to keep his elbows moist.
Mind you, that was the same party where I talked to an old dear in a tiara for ten minutes, thinking she was the editor of Glamour’s mum—and it turned out to be Home Secretary Theresa May. I’m not so good with the faces.
COME PARTY WITH GAGA
There’s nothing quite like watching a plane take off without you to really focus your mind on how much you want to be on it. As flight BA987 knifes off the runway, and begins its journey to Berlin, I’m watching it through a window in the Departures Lounge—still holding the ticket for seat 12A in my hand.
Due to a frankly unlikely series of events, I got to Heathrow three minutes after the flight was closed. Although no missed flight ever comes as a joy, this one is a particular mellow-harsher because, in five hours, I’m supposed to be interviewing arguably the most famous woman in the world—Lady Gaga—in an exclusive that has taken months of phonecalls, jockeying and wrangling to set up.
It’s not so much that I am now almost certainly going to be fired. Since I found out how much the model Sophie Anderton earned as a high-class call-girl, my commitment to continuing as a writer at The Times has been touch and go anyway, to be honest.
It’s more that I am genuinely devastated to have blown it so spectacularly. Since I saw Gaga play Poker Face at Glastonbury Festival last year, I have been a properly, hawkishly devoted admirer.
Halfway through a forty-five-minute-set that had five costume changes, Gaga came on stage in a dress made entirely of see-through plastic bubbles, accompanied by her matching, see-through plastic bubble piano. You have to respect a woman who can match her outfit to her instrument. Although the single “Poker Face” is a punching, spasmodic, Euro-house stormer, Gaga took to her piano and started to play it as cat-house blues—all inverted chords and rolling fifths, with falling, heartbroken semitones on the left hand; wailing out like Bessie Smith sitting on the doorstep at 4 AM.
It was already incredible before she did the second half of the song standing on her piano stool, on one leg—like a tiny, transvestite ballerina.
Twenty minutes later, she ended her set literally bending over backwards to please—fireworks shooting from the nipples of her pointy bra, screaming, “I fancy you, Glastonbury—do you fancy me?” The audience went wholly, totally, dementedly nuts for her.
It caused me to have this—unprecedented—thought: “She’s making Madonna look a bit slack and unimaginative here. After all, when Madonna was twenty-three, she was still working a Dunkin’ Donuts in New York. She weren’t playing no rolling fifths.”
Since then, I have followed her career like boys follow sports teams. As a cultural icon, she does an incredible service for women: after all, it will be hard to oppress a generation who’ve been brought up on pop-stars with fire coming out of their tits.
She’s clearly smart and clearly hilarious—she pitched up at the Royal Variety Performance on a sixteen-foot-high piano, modelled on Dali’s spider-legged elephants—but has never ruined the fun by going, “Actually, I’m smart and hilarious” like, say, Bono would.
And, most importantly of all, she clearly couldn’t give a f*** what anyone says about her. When she appeared on The X Factor, it was the week after Simon Cowell had said that he was “Looking for the new Lady Gaga.” She performed Bad Romance in an eighteen-foot-long bathtub with six dancers—then played a piano solo on a keyboard hidden in a pretend sink, while sitting on a pretend toilet. Clearly, Simon Cowell would never sign up anything like that in million, billion years. It was very much in his face.
So yes. I am a Gaga supporter. I’m Team Gaga. She’s my girl. My pop Arsenal; my dance Red Sox; my fashion England.
At Heathrow, as I go through the rigmarole of booking the next available flight—which will get me to Berlin two hours after my appointed slot—I know what awaits me at the other end. Angry Americans. Very angry Americans from her management team.
Because in the year since Glastonbury, Gaga has taken on a semi-mythic air, like Prince, or Madonna. Since she has sold fifteen million albums and forty million singles, and has become a tabloid staple, she now rarely does interviews. The last one she did in the UK—with Q Magazine—ended with her leaving halfway through, in tears. Pap-pictures of her looking spindly—covered in scratches and bruises—have carried with them the inference of those most female of traits under stress: eating disorders, self-harm. There have been collapses: last minute cancellation of concerts in Indiana, West Lafeyette and Connecticut after irregular heartbeats and exhaustion; near-collapse onstage in Auckland.
When you’ve just been named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World,” this is, traditionally, where you are expected to start going a bit . . . Jackson.
It’s incredible I was ever granted access at all—and now I’ve, unbelievably, stood her up.
I will be genuinely, tearfully grateful if I get even a ten-minute Q&A from a piqued megastar pulling a gigantic huff, and answering all my questions with monosyllabic, “yes/no” binary tetchiness.
This is the worst day of my life that hasn’t involved an episiotomy.
“Hi!”
Gaga’s dressing room, backstage at the 02 World Arena in Berlin. With the walls and ceiling draped in black, it resembles a pop-gothic seraglio. But while scented candles burn churchishly, a gorgeous vintage record player on the floor—surrounded by piles of vinyl—and works of art hung on the wall give it a cheerful air. There is a table, laid with beautiful china. There are flowers, growing in the dark. And at the head of the tea table, amongst the flowers: Gaga.
Two things strike you about her immediately. Firstly, that she really isn’t dressed casually. In a breast-length, silver-gray wig, she has a black lace veil wound around her face, and sits, framed, in an immense, custom-made, one-off Alexander McQueen cloak. The effect is having been ushered into the presence of a very powerful fairytale queen: possibly one who has recently killed Aslan, on the Stone Table.
The second thing you notice is that she is being lovely. Absolutely lovely. Both literally and figuratively, what’s under the veil and the cloak is a diminutive, well brought up, New York Catholic girl from a wealthy middle-class family, with twinkly brown eyes, and a minxy sense of humor.
“So glad you finally made it!” she says, giving a huge, warm hug. “What a terrible day you’re having! Thank you so much for coming!”
Holding her for a moment, she feels—through the taffeta atmosphere of billowing McQueen—borderline Kylie Minogue-tiny, but warm, and robust. Like a slender, teenage cheerleader. This is some surprise, given the aforementioned presumption that she’s cracking up.
So when Gaga says, with warm good manners, “This tea is for you,” gesturing to a bone china cup hand-painted with violets, I can’t help myself from replying, uncouthly: “I know you’re tiny and must get knackered—but why do you keep collapsing?”
“My schedule is such that I don’t get very much time to eat,” Gaga says, holding her teacup daintily. I don’t think the teacup is her infamous “pet tea cup” that she took everywhere with her earlier in the year—including nightclubs. Perhaps it’s too famous to be merely drunk from now. Maybe it has its own dressing room.
“But I certainly don’t have an eating problem,” she continues. “A little MDMA once in a while never killed anybody, but I really don’t do drugs. I don’t touch cocaine anymore. I don’t smoke.
Well, maybe a single cigarette—with whisky—while I’m working, because it just frees my mind a little bit. But I care about my voice. The thrill of my voice being healthy on stage is really special. I take care of myself.”
Later on in the interview, Gaga takes off the McQueen cloak—perhaps pointedly, for the nosey journalist—and reveals that, underneath, she’s only wearing fishnets, knickers and a bra. As someone who is practically seeing her naked, from two feet away, her body seems non-scarred, healthy: sturdy. She is wiry, but not remotely bony. It’s a dancer’s body—not a victim’s.
I hand Gaga a page torn from that day’s paper, which I read on the plane. It’s a story about her performance at the Met Ball in New York—one of the big events of the global celebrity calendar. In the report, it is claimed that Gaga “angered” organizers by “refusing” to walk the red carpet, and then suffered an attack of stage fright so severe she locked herself in her dressing room, and had to be “persuaded out” by “her close friend Oprah Winfrey.” It’s merely the latest of the “Gaga cracking up” stories in the press.
“Is this true?” I ask her.
She reads through the story—frowning slightly at first, eyes wide open by the end.
“I wasn’t nervous!” she says, witheringly. “To be honest with you? I don’t give a fuck about red carpets, and I never do them. I don’t like them. First of all—how could any of these outfits possibly look good with an ugly red carpet under them?”
For a moment, I recall some of Gaga’s more incredible rig-outs: the silver lobster fascinator. The red PVC Elizabethan farthingale. The tunic made of Kermit heads. The red lace outfit that covered her entire face, peaking in a two-foot-high crown. She has a point.
“It’s just visually horrid,” Gaga continues, in a merrily outraged way. Her manner is of your mate in the pub, slagging off the neon smock she’s been forced to wear working at Boots. “Hollywood is not what it used to be. I don’t want to be perceived as . . . one of the other bitches in a gown. I wasn’t nervous,” says the woman who appeared in her “Telephone” video dressed in nothing more than “POLICE: INCIDENT” tape, strategically placed across her nipples and crotch. “Don’t be SILLY!”
But still these rumors persist—of collapses, and neuroses. “You are, after all, a twenty-three-year-old woman coping with enormous fame, and media pressure, on your own. You are currently the one, crucial, irreplaceable element of a 161-date world tour. How do you keep depressive, or panicked, thoughts at bay?”
“Prescription medicine,” she says, cheerfully. “I can’t control my thoughts at all. I’m tortured. But I like that,” she laughs, cheerfully. “Lorca says it’s good to be tortured. The thoughts are unstoppable—but so is the music. It comes to me constantly. That’s why I got this tattoo,” she says, proffering a white arm through the black cloak-folds.
It is a quote from the poet and art critic Rainer Maria Rilke: “In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself: ‘Must I write?’ ”
“I think tattoos have power. I did it as a way to kind of . . . inject myself with a steadfastness about music. People say I should take a break, but I’m like, ‘Why should I take a break? What do you want me to do—go on vacation?’ ”
On stage, later that night—dripping in sweat, just after playing a version of “Bad Romance” where the chorus sounds even more tearfully euphoric and amazing than usual—Gaga shouts to the crowd, “I’d rather not die on a vacation, under a palm tree. I’d rather die on stage, with all my props, in front of my fans.”
Given that one of her props is a six-foot-high hybrid of a cello, keyboard and drum machine, with a golden skull nailed to the side of it—something that makes the “keytar” look like a mere castanet—you can see her point.
But it has to be said, for a twenty-three-year-old, death is a recurrent theme in her performances. The thematic arc for the Fame Monster tour was “The Apocalypse.” In the current “Monster Ball” tour, Gaga is eventually eaten by a gigantic angler fish—a creature she was terrified of as a child—only to be reborn as an angel. Her MTV Awards performance of “Paparazzi,” back in September, had her being crushed by a falling chandelier—amazing—before bleeding to death while singing.
“What’s the nearest you’ve ever come to death?” I ask her. “Do you have any recurring illnesses?”
She goes oddly still for a moment, and then says, “I have heart palpitations, and . . . things.”
“Recently?”
“Yes, but it’s okay. It’s just from fatigue and . . . other things,” she shrugs, before saying, very carefully, “I’m very connected to my aunt, Joanne, who died of lupus. It’s a very personal thing. I don’t want . . . my fans to be worried about me.”
Her eyes are very wide.
“Lupus. That’s genetic, isn’t it?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“And have you been tested?”
Again, the eyes are very wide and steady. “Yes.” Pause. “But I don’t want anyone to be worried.”
“When was the last time you called the emergency services?” I ask.
“The other day,” Gaga says, still talking very carefully. “In Tokyo. I was having trouble breathing. I had a little oxygen, then I went on stage. I was okay. But like I say—I don’t want anyone to worry.”
It’s a very odd moment. Gaga is staring at me calmly, but intently. Lupus is a connective tissue disease, where the immune system attacks the body. It can be fatal—although, as medicine advances, fatalities are becoming rarer. What it more commonly does is cause heart palpitations, shortness of breath, joint pain, and anemia, before spasmodically but recurrently driving a truck through your energy levels, so that you are often too fatigued to accomplish even the simplest of tasks.
Suddenly, all the “Gaga cracking up” stories revolve round 180 degrees, and turn into something completely different. After all, the woman before me seems about as far removed from someone on the verge of a fame-induced nervous breakdown as is possible to imagine. She’s being warm, candid, smart, amusing and supremely confident in her talent. She’s basically like some hot, giggly pop-nerd.
But if she were regularly running into physical difficulties because she has lupus—being delayed on stage, cancelling gigs, having to call the emergency services—you can see how a world press, desperate for stories about her, ignorant of any other possibility, would add these things up into a wholly different picture.
Gaga is certainly very affected by her aunt’s death: the date of her death, in 1976, is interwoven into her Rilke tattoo on her arm. When I ask her if she ever “dresses down,” she says the only thing remotely “dress down-y” she has is a pair of pink, cotton shorts—embroidered with flowers—that once belonged to her aunt.
“They’re nearly forty years old,” she says. “But I wear them when I want her to . . . protect me.”
The story that I thought I would find when I met Gaga—dark, otherworldly, borderline autistic diva-genius failing under the pressure of fame—just dissolves, like newsprint in the rain.
All that’s left is a mardy pop sex threat—the woman who put out three, Abba-level classic singles in one year, at the age of twenty-three, while wearing a lobster on her head. As Ali G. says at times like this, “Booyakasha.”
“What’s the best thing you’ve spent your money on so far?” I ask, in a far more cheerful mood.
“I bought my parents a car,” Gaga replies. She has often spoken of how close she is to her parents—particularly her father, whom she appears to borderline worship. Presumably, she sees herself in him—a self-made man, he started as a rock ’n’ roll bar musician, before making his fortune as an internet entrepreneur. By the time Gaga was thirteen, the family was rich enough to send her to the same school as heiress Paris Hilton.
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br /> Gaga is not faking her current outsiderness—even then, when she was still just Stefani Germanotta, she was the goth girl with dyed black hair, obsessed with Judy Garland, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie, and wearing her skirts really high.
“It’s a Rolls Royce,” she continues, sipping on her tea, daintily. She has lifted the veil now: she looks as casual as it is possible to in a wig and couture. “It’s black. My dad’s very Italian, so I wanted to get him a real Godfather car. I had it delivered on their anniversary.”
When Gaga rang her father and told him to “Go outside!”, he refused. “He thought I’d got him a dancing gorillagram,” she giggled.
The car had a huge bow on it, and the message “A car to last like a love like yours.” At first, Gaga’s parents thought they had it just for the day, to drive round in. When she told them it was theirs to keep, her father shouted “You’re crazy!” and burst into tears.
“You see, I don’t really spend money, and I don’t really like fame,” Gaga says. “I spend my money on my shows—but I don’t like buying things. I don’t buy diamonds, because I don’t know where they came from. I’ll spend it on fashion.” She hugs the McQueen cloak close.
“I miss Lee every time I get dressed,” she says, sadly. “But you know what I spend most of my money on? Disappearing. I hate the paparazzi. Because the truth is—no matter what people tell you—you can control it. If you put as much money into your security as you put into your cars or your diamonds or your jewellery, you can just . . . disappear. People who say they can’t get away are lying. They must just like the . . . big flashes.”
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