There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  *

  Lady Gaga had been in rehearsals all day with director/photographer Steven Klein for her “Alejandro” video. She wanted to come to the bungalow, take a shower, eat something—in private—and then change. I assumed that meant into something more comfortable. Silly me. When she walked in, holding on to Dennis, who introduced us, she was tottering on ten-inch heel-less boots. She was covered from head to toe in black lace netting, and a transparent catsuit adorned with rhinestones. Her fame, by this time, was so much larger than life that it was bizarre to see that even with those boots, she was teensy. She seemed nothing like the woman who had been described in thousands of press clippings as outlandish, a drag queen, hermaphrodite, trashy, grotesque. She seemed like a cute girl in her twenties who had really good manners. “Hi, I’m Gaga,” she said, and we shook hands. She sat down. She stared at my tape recorders. I muttered my usual shtick about how once I interviewed John Lennon and the tape recorder didn’t work and he had me come back the next day to do the interview again. (I’m not even sure anymore if this ever happened or not. But it makes for a good story and an ice breaker.)

  We talked about New York. I said that I too, had grown up on the Upper West Side. I too, had been born at Lenox Hill Hospital—albeit many years prior to her birth. I sailed right into David Bowie and Freddie Mercury references and told her all the things I heard in her music. Within minutes, we had a connection. Gaga started to sip wine with the veil still over her face. I murmured that she should just take it off. She did. And we talked for close to three hours. Unveiled.

  She talked about her family and being a bad kid and sneaking out of the house to go down to clubs on the Lower East Side. She talked about relationships. She said at that time, she was semi-celibate, “Because,” she said, “if I sleep with someone, I feel like they’re going to take my creativity from me through my vagina. Like it would deplete the energy I could put into my next song.” I asked if it was possible for her to meet someone new and fall in love. “It’s not like when you’re younger and nobody knows who you are,” she said. “You’re in a bar and you meet a nice guy. Maybe a week goes by and you sleep with him, and it’s not a big deal. Now if you let somebody into your world . . .” she trailed off. I asked if she trusted anyone. “I don’t trust anybody,” she said. “I don’t trust that wine glass. And I don’t know if I ever will. But it’s okay. It’s the tradeoff.”

  She said she was always determined, but she’d had some horrible times, including “the worst day of her life.” On the worst day of her life, she said, her mother screamed into the phone and came to get her out of her Stanton Street apartment. They went to West Virginia to visit her grandmother—who let her cry for two days, then told her to go back to New York and “kick some ass.” She said that when she hadn’t had any money, she used to make clothes with sequins and a glue gun. She said she went to a school where the girls were all rich. But her parents had to work really hard to send her and her younger sister Natali to private school. She talked about how she had been “a theater girl,” and was made fun of for getting dressed up to go to school. “It was not an environment that fostered any kind of creative energy,” she said. Her mother would put curlers in her own hair every morning, she said, put lipstick on, and then pass the lipstick to Gaga. “She really taught me about my womanhood and femininity. I used to put my makeup on every night before I went to bed. It made me feel like a star. And I’d be ready for school the next morning. And I used to pray every night that God would make me crazy. I prayed that God would teach me something, that he would instill a lunacy in me—something that all the people I loved and respected had. I was very afraid, I had no courage, and it took me a long time to get to this. I had some very special moments when I lived alone. It was just me and a bed and my keyboard. I had a turntable next to the toaster. Somehow, this was where I started to know I would be okay. And I was fearless.”

  “My talent is twofold,” Gaga continued. “I’m very disciplined, and I’m gifted in music.” I asked her when she realized how famous she had become. She said it had been recently, on tour in Australia. “I got out of the car and the screams were so loud, it was a roar. Somehow, that night, there were more fans waiting for me after the show. It was insane. And I thought to myself, how can I be better for you? I want to say and sing the right things for you and I want to make that one melody that really saves your spirit one day. I know people say I’m pretentious, but this all really matters to me. I’m sitting here with you today as if I’ve sold no music and no one knows who I am. I’m hungry, starving, for more inspiration. For more music.”

  By now she’d had a few glasses of wine. She reached for her white Hermès Birkin purse. Japanese fans had written all over it (shades of Stephen Sprouse and those Marc Jacobs/Louis Vuitton graffiti bags). She wanted to show me its contents: a plastic bottle of water, a wig, Chanel “Gardénia” perfume, a Chanel sleep mask, seven pairs of sunglasses, a tiny Michelangelo “David,” and some talisman that was blessed in a Buddhist temple to keep her healthy. (I was reminded of Patti Smith in her bedroom, over thirty years ago, showing me various items blessed by assorted saints and shamans and whatnot.) Gaga produced some acid reflux medication and Xanax—which she took, she said, for anxiety. “I was placing some in my hand this morning and I said to Steven Klein, ‘I just knew this day would come.’” We discussed some of the crazy rumors about her—for example, that she was actually a man. “Well,” she said, “there was this video from the Glastonbury Festival and it did actually look like I had a penis. What’s funny about it is that people have come to my show and they still don’t know . . . the beauty of it is that nobody gives a shit. They say, ‘I don’t care what she is. I like her.’” Eventually, we wrapped up the interview. It was dark outside, and we had been talking for close to three hours. After she left, I did what musicians call an “idiot check”: I looked around all the rooms in the bungalow to see if anything was left behind. In one of the bathrooms, some metal-studded underwear and a G-string contraption lay on the floor. I took it and put it in the Beverly Hills Hotel pink plastic laundry bag. The next morning, I brought it to the photo shoot and handed it to Gaga, who shrieked with pleasure. “My favorite!! I wondered where I left that.”

  • • •

  Photo shoots, along with recording sessions, were fun at first. Now, after having been at hundreds of them, the thrill is gone. With women, the hair and the makeup takes hours. There are racks and racks of clothes. In the 1960s, musicians like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix had style, not stylists. In the 1970s, Mick Jagger and David Bowie wore designer clothes and had makeup artists on tour. But other than those two, and maybe Elton John in the 1970s and Duran Duran in the 1980s, musicians simply looked the way they looked. Well, the New York Dolls wore makeup. But they did it themselves and it was funky—but chic. The photo shoots I oversaw in the 1970s for Rock Scene were casual, often spontaneous. I’d tell the New York Dolls to pose in front of Frederick’s of Hollywood’s lingerie emporium on Hollywood Boulevard. Bob Gruen took pictures. I lined Led Zeppelin up alongside the wing of their private jet at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Bob Gruen took pictures. I find it hilarious that these photos—done on the fly in ten minutes—are now considered “iconic.” At the end of the 20th century, when I became involved with Vanity Fair photo shoots, I likened my job to that of a fluffer on a porn set. I chatted up the musician. We talked about music. We gossipped. It was a warmup. It created a more comfy atmosphere. It is a role that continues to this day.

  *

  The photographer for the Gaga Vanity Fair cover shoot that morning was Nick Knight, who had worked on the videos for her live show. “Gaga was on my radar,” Nick said. “She just seemed to have a lot of energy and a huge love of life—you don’t often see that.” Nick and I talked about how antiquated fashion shows had become—especially those tents in New York and Paris. Nick’s website SHOWstudio featured a live stream of Alexander McQueen’s 2010 fashion show. The
finale of that show was the “premiere” of Gaga’s song “Bad Romance,” and, Nick said, “When we did the McQueen show online, it really caught how things are changing. The show—conceived by McQueen—was brilliant. His clothes were brilliant. And then the Lady Gaga moment happened. I didn’t even know there was going to be a Lady Gaga moment. I thought we were having some other music at the end of the show. It wound up being like inviting 10,000 people to something, 100,000 people showed up, and all of them tried to get in the door. The site crashed. I knew that Gaga had a massive following, but basically, because of her, Alexander McQueen’s clothes were put in front of two and a half million people. It was that kind of fashion moment turning point,” he said. “Fashion will never be the same again.” But of course, fashion will be the same again. It always is.

  *

  Several months after I’d seen Gaga at the Beverly Hills Hotel, we had a chat on the phone. She had recently caused tabloid sensations: attending a New York Mets baseball game wearing only underwear and giving the finger to the paparazzi, wearing a beekeeper’s hat at her sister’s high school graduation, and supposedly fondling her breasts at Yankee Stadium when she met the team after a game. She called me from the Brooklyn apartment of her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Luc Carl. She told me he’d gone out to get her some food. She reported this in a breathless, little girl voice. It reminded me of Patti Smith on the phone with her then-boyfriend Fred “Sonic” Smith, over thirty years ago.

  Luc returned and she put him on the phone to say hello. He said hello. I said hello. She got back on the phone. We discussed her latest press coverage. She said she’d been ambushed by photographers at the Mets game. All she’d wanted to do, she said, was go to a game with some friends for one of their birthdays. “Of course I was drunk when I went to Yankee Stadium, I was with my girlfriends. But everyone was so nice and sweet. I have no idea where that thing about fondling my tits came from. People want to make me out to look like I’m a slutty Italian girl—which I am—but I wasn’t doing that after the game. Why would I rub my tits in front of Yankees? I’m not interested in dating any ballplayers.” She continued, “Look, I’m not an idiot. I know I’m a public figure and I’m going to be recognized if I wear a bikini or a potato sack. They’re going to write the story they want to write. But the tradeoff is I get to go and see the Yankees. And what the Yankees mean to me in my soul as a young person from New York is more important to me than my reputation in the tabloids. My real fans know who I really am. My music and my performance is what really speaks.” We talked about how her idea of a great day off was to get trashed in some dive bar. I have to see this, I said. She said she would take me. She talked about her parents’ apartment and mentioned that they had several floors. I said that sounded like they were rich. “They got a deal,” she said. “You should come see it.” Most people say this stuff to journalists and they never follow through. She did.

  • • •

  On August 28, 2011, Gaga performed on the MTV Video Music Awards dressed as a guy—her alter ego, Jo Calderone. Depending on your age and point of view, she resembled either the Karate Kid actor Ralph Macchio or Marlon Brando. She did a remarkable acting “performance” with her hair slicked back, a Brooks Brothers suit and a plain white shirt. She wore prosthetic male genitalia under her trousers. She smoked a cigarette—the thing that seems to cause the most shock these days—and swigged from a bottle of beer. Jo was, undoubtedly, the type of guy Gaga knew well. “He” was a combination of many of the men in her life. I was amused by the totally befuddled looks on the faces in the audience, most notably on Justin Bieber, Katy Perry and Britney Spears. With this performance, Gaga instantly made Katy—who wore a yellow block on her head—and the pink-haired Nicki Minaj, look dated.

  Two weeks after the MTV Awards, I asked Gaga why she created Jo Calderone. “When I first invented Jo,” she said, “it was an exploration in gender identity. I thought that whatever the reason, there is something about my aesthetic as an artist that is unrelatable. I am continuously poked about who the hell I really am—when I am truly being myself. So I thought, wouldn’t it be an interesting cultural exercise to create someone that’s not me, that’s infinitely more relatable than me. A blue-collar Italian guy in a Brooks Brothers suit who just wants this girl to stay the hell home. Jo is so easy to have a beer with. So easy to talk to. I remember when I was writing the script, working with my acting teacher Larry [Arancio], I said to him that one of the things I do a lot is cover my face when I have an orgasm. Like I’m ashamed or something. It took a performance art piece for me to understand all the things about who I am. I learned about how I am in bed. I learned about how I’m less able to be private in private, and more able to be private in public. When I’m onstage, I’m so open and giving and so myself. And when the spotlight goes off, I don’t know what to do with myself.”

  *

  Earlier that year, Gaga and I had talked about what we could do to make yet another magazine story about her interesting. I was tired of reading the same stuff about how devoted she was to her fans. I wanted to see her parents’ apartment and her Lower East Side hangouts. I knew that to some degree it would be staged. But I still wanted to meet some of those so-called old friends she claimed she still saw when she was in New York. She suggested that she cook a meal for me. We agreed to both the bar hangout and a home-cooked meal at her parents’ apartment. Then of course, it took almost four months to get this together.

  On September 10, 2011, we were in New York City, in an SUV on our way downtown. Gaga was in the front passenger seat with her legs akimbo, up on the dashboard. She always sat like this in cars, she said, so she didn’t feel “cramped” or “trapped.” We stopped on East Houston and Avenue B. She said she wanted to get out and walk. She teased her two security guards for wearing suits and being “too conspicuous.” Meanwhile, she was decked out in a black lace, see-through dress with black bra and bikini underpants. Long blonde wig, sunglasses, full makeup, and a black latex cape. Mile-high, black Louboutin pumps, a boxy pocketbook and long glass earrings. We walked down Clinton Street to 176 Stanton Street. This was the building where she had lived in the one-room apartment with the bed, the toaster and the turntable. She pointed out the liquor store across the street where, she said, when she was really fucked up she would order in a bottle of wine. She told me she never did laundry when she lived down here, she wore the same t-shirt every day, and she stank. We walked past a park where Dominican families hung out. She told me the rats that scurried across the street had been huge. She pointed out various landmarks: a beauty supply store that had closed, a Mexican restaurant that had closed, a biker bar where she used to stand in the doorway and take drugs. She conducted this “tour” with a certain degree of affection, possessiveness and pride. “This is where I really got my education,” she said.

  When people recognized her and asked if they could take a picture or get an autograph, she said yes every time. But we were not mobbed. “People are too cool,” she said. We peered into St. Jerome’s at 155 Rivington Street, but it wasn’t open yet. At four in the afternoon we wound up at The Johnsons, a dive bar on Rivington Street. It was fairly packed. We took seats at the bar. I said perhaps it was a bit early to start drinking. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “Back in the day, this would be late.” Waiting for Gaga at the bar was her friend Breedlove, a musician who also did the makeup for the Broadway show Wicked. The two of them reminisced about the days when they hung out in this bar “waiting for Judy,” their code name for cocaine. Also with us was Bo O’Conner, Gaga’s best friend since she was four years old (and the only person who called Gaga “Stefani” in all the time I spent with her). I ordered a beer. Gaga ordered the first of what would be several shots of Jameson’s. Breedlove left to go do the makeup for that evening’s performance of Wicked. And then Gaga’s friend Lady Starlight—a tall brunette whose real name is Colleen Martin—showed up. For the next few hours, Gaga, Starlight and I talked about perfor
mance art and rock and roll. No one bothered us. Occasionally someone would come over and ask if they could take a photo with their phone. A few paparazzi gathered outside. If this was central casting, Gaga had done a good job. It really did seem like just another Saturday afternoon in a local bar. At no point did Gaga complain that she couldn’t go out in public or have any semblance of a “normal” life. The other patrons were busy with their own conversations. It appeared as if they couldn’t have cared less that sitting at the bar was one of the most famous women in the world.

  Gaga went outside to smoke a few times. I muttered how I couldn’t believe these girls had to grow up in a city where you couldn’t smoke in a bar. Frank Sinatra, I said, is rolling over in his grave. Gaga and Starlight did some head banging to the AC/DC, Iron Maiden and Slayer songs played on the jukebox. They told me about an Australian band they loved called Airbourne who had a fake Aerosmith logo and sounded like AC/DC. We talked about Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Led Zeppelin, Florence and the Machine, Blondie, Kanye, Beyoncé, and Michael Jackson. And, as Michael Jackson had decades earlier, the two of them asked me more questions than I asked them. Once again, my “history” gave me a particular passport. I knew David Bowie. Gaga, who idolized Bowie, had never met him. She asked me what he was really like. I said he was really like what he seemed. Just like you, I said. She told me she couldn’t believe I had traveled with Led Zeppelin and Van Halen and I had never wanted to sleep with any of those boys. I told her she wouldn’t have wanted to either. That David Lee Roth used to have roadies pull girls out of the audience to give him blow jobs. “He could have pulled me out of the audience,” she said, joking. I think. Obviously, we were sitting in that bar because I was doing a story about her. I was getting what is known in journalism as “color.” But after a few beers and no tape recorder, it turned into more like just an afternoon with three women of different generations talking about their love of rock and roll. This tends to be a universal language.