There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  Gaga and Starlight talked about how they first met. Gaga recalled seeing Starlight go-go dance at St. Jerome’s. “There was just something . . . off about it,” Gaga said. “She had these awkward-on-purpose moves. It was uncomfortable. It was just so shocking in a completely natural way. She was so unapologetic and interesting. I wanted to be like that.” Starlight explained: “I guess what people liked about my performance was that it was kind of confrontational. It was meant to confuse people. Like I was in a bikini and supposed to be sexy, but I would actively do things that were not sexy. I’d be go-go dancing, then I’d just sort of freak. I’d fall on the ground, then go back to go-go dancing. It was a very aggressive, fuck you attitude.”

  *

  The following day, on September 11th, I went to Gaga’s parents’ apartment in a beautiful art deco building on the Upper West Side. Her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, an elegant blonde in her mid-fifties, opened the door to their triplex apartment. Cynthia was wearing all black, with black-rimmed eyeglasses and perfect makeup. It was obvious to me that she had been Gaga’s first style inspiration. Gaga was at the kitchen sink. She was wearing a black Chanel dress, a platinum Daphne Guinness–styled wig, sky-high Louboutin shoes, full makeup and glass earrings. She was chopping cherry tomatoes for a homemade pasta sauce. Kill Bill was on a computer monitor screen with the sound down. I brought the family a box of Ladurée macarons, which Cynthia put on top of a box of Dunkin’ Donuts. Gaga took the pink Ladurée ribbon off the box and wrapped it around her hair.

  There was a garden patio off the living room. Cynthia pointed out small fig and lemon trees, and the herbs she grew herself. Gaga gave me a tour of the apartment. She took me upstairs to show me her childhood bedroom, where she currently was sleeping on an air mattress. Why on earth, I asked, would she sleep here on the floor instead of a hotel suite? “I’m in hotels all the time,” she said. “When I can, I’d rather spend more time with my parents.” Her father Joe came upstairs from the basement. He wore a red polo shirt and blue jeans. “That’s a nice dress,” he said to Gaga. Joe Germanotta, from New Jersey, was a Bruce Springsteen fan (it’s the law). He was the owner of the Darkness on the Edge of Town boxed set on the windowsill next to the piano. Gaga told me that for her father’s fortieth birthday, he requested that she learn to play Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” on the piano. Gaga, Cynthia and I talked about how someone had tried to talk Gaga out of having saxophonist Clarence Clemons in her “Edge of Glory” video. Gaga said they wanted her to use a model, a “Clarence type” in the video. The director thought Clarence wasn’t sexy. We all agreed that Clarence was sexy.

  The living room had a beige sofa, some comfortable chairs, and was monopolized by a black grand piano covered with framed family photos. This piano was the same one Gaga had played as a child. At this time, I was the only journalist who had ever been in this house, or spent time with her parents. I watched Gaga make the sauce. She put leeks and spices and tomatoes in a big pot and stirred. She asked if I liked whole wheat pasta. She made a salad. In all of my years doing this job, and all of the people I’ve interviewed, I cannot remember one other musician who cooked me a meal. I’d been in other families’ houses—the Jacksons’ comes to mind—and I’ve had countless meals with bands backstage, and in restaurants and hotels all over the world. But this was a first.

  The basement was Joe Germanotta’s domain. It had wine-making equipment Gaga had bought for him, big leather chairs, a huge TV and boxed sets of The Sopranos. The walls were covered with Gaga’s gold and platinum albums, tour posters, and laminated backstage passes. Cynthia apologized for the “mess.” She said they had all of Gaga’s “stuff” because their daughter still had not purchased a place of her own. We discussed the reports of Gaga apartment-hunting in Manhattan and looking for a house in the Hamptons. “Gypsy queen couldn’t take the leap,” Gaga said. “I need an underground garage. I’m not going to pay ten million dollars for something. I’m not ready. I can’t commit to being an adult.”

  At the kitchen table, Cynthia read me a letter she got from the White House praising Gaga’s efforts fighting the “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy. She showed me boxes of Gaga’s fan mail that came to their house. I read them an email I’d received from a sister of a friend, a twelve-year-old girl named Maddie Polkinghorn. She wanted me to tell Gaga that there was a boy in school who had been bullied because the kids thought he was gay. Gaga had inspired her to act. She told the school director, the school devoted a day to anti-bullying, the bullying subsided, and Maddie’s mother told her: “Gaga would be very proud.” Gaga sat and held her mother’s hand while I read this email aloud. She cried. She’s either a truly wonderful actress or this really matters to her. Or both. I would like to think that this matters to her. I’d occasionally like to believe that not everyone is a phony. Cynthia told me about the Born This Way Foundation she and Gaga had formed to try to combat bullying. I saw such a sense of parental pride and love here that it was hard to imagine the “bad kid” who infuriated her parents when she dated much older guys. Or the girl whose father talked her out of taking cocaine by telling her of the dangers of the drug. Of course, I wasn’t born yesterday. For all I know, the entire family might have had a huge screaming fight before I arrived. But I saw not one hint of discord.

  Eventually, we sat down at the table, held hands, and Gaga said grace. (Later, knowing my atheist tendencies, she told me, “I’m sorry I made you pray today.”) We all had second helpings of the pasta. “You’ve got a hit,” her father said to her about the sauce. Joe and I talked about how it was a lonely life on the road and how either he or Cynthia try to go with Gaga when they can. He told me about the restaurant he planned to open, named after his late sister Joanne. We talked about (college basketball) March Madness and the Yankees. Joe told me he was purchasing four seats from the old Yankee Stadium to put in the garden of his restaurant. Following lunch, Gaga went to the piano to play us a half-finished new song called “Princess Die” about celebrity deaths. Her parents stood and watched her. I asked if it had always been this way—the two of them standing at the piano, watching her play. Always, they said. “We didn’t push it,” Cynthia said. “She was determined. But we wouldn’t have encouraged her to pursue this if we didn’t think she had the talent.”

  • • •

  “We haven’t had one of these since Eminem,” Interscope Records’ chief Jimmy Iovine told me about Gaga. “Someone who moves the culture.” Over the course of that September 2011, I talked to a lot of people in Gaga’s life. Both Vincent Herbert—who signed her to his record label at Interscope—and her manager Troy Carter have backgrounds in R&B, rap, and what the business calls “urban” music. Troy is a thin man who looks about eighteen (I was shocked to discover he had a son about to go to college). He said at first, “People would walk by me and talk to the security guard. Maybe they thought I was a production assistant on the set. But the bottom line is that Gaga was just looking for someone who cared. She didn’t care that I had worked with [only] rappers before. It was me showing up with a plan. I think we’ve been able to break boundaries. There are no limits to music. Whether you’re doing pop or rap or electronic music, it’s all about the soul behind it.”

  Troy told me that Vincent had called him up and said he had a girl he wanted him to see. “She walked into my office wearing fishnet stockings, no pants, and sunglasses,” Troy said. “She had dark hair. She walked in a superstar. She had too much confidence. She just needed somebody to protect that vision for her. She was very, very specific about what she wanted everything to look like, to sound like, and it felt very original. But at the same time, it was scary, because it wasn’t what pop music was supposed to sound like. Top 40 radio told us we should just try to get played on the dance stations. I knew she was going to be big, but I had no idea it would get this big, or that it would happen so quickly. When she started, she didn’t sound like anything on the radio. The key to her is that her music never
fit the fashion.”

  Vincent Herbert said that the minute he met her, he knew Gaga was a star. “She told me she wanted to be the biggest pop star in the world,” he said. “She wanted to sell ten million albums and she would be the most loyal artist I would ever work with. And that was ‘hello.’ I knew she’d be the Michael Jackson of this generation.” When I asked Troy if Gaga got antsy after three days on vacation, he laughed. “Three days? Or three hours?”

  *

  I went back to St. Jerome’s to look at the room, and then had a long talk with Lady Starlight. The “stage” where she had danced was a tiny bench in the back of the bar. “How hilarious is that stage?” she said. “Gaga and I never did an actual show there together, but occasionally, she would get up and go-go dance with me. I think a big part of why my go-go dancing was unique was my knowledge of and love for the music. It’s like hearing a vinyl album instead of an MP3. The audience doesn’t always consciously pick up on it, but they feel the difference. I made myself look ugly sometimes. I guess when you think about it, it’s very similar to Gaga, except that she knew how to conform in a certain way to make people accept the message. I was in the sexy bikini, but when I got onstage, I wasn’t just a girl up there grinding and trying to get tips.”

  When she and Gaga started to perform together, Starlight said, “I influenced her not to be afraid of anything. Go to whatever lengths we need to go to make people shocked and upset. I would have worked with her no matter what her music sounded like, because I just liked her. She has this positive energy and a can-do attitude about everything that is so inspirational to me. And she has not changed. A lot of pop stars just want to be pop stars because they want to be famous. She wanted that, but her main goal was to be able to sing and write music and just be an artist. I always knew Gaga would be famous and successful because of her voice and her drive. But I thought her talent could be a disadvantage. I didn’t think it was possible—not just for her, but for our culture—to ever get excited again the way they have for her. I thought people were so jaded that no one would ever care about anything enough. Isn’t it funny that we have to be surprised that someone with actual talent becomes a celebrity? It should be a given.”

  *

  The words “performance art” have, for years, caused me to roll my eyes. Yoko Ono, the naked cellist Charlotte Moorman and all that 1960s avant-garde self-seriousness was never my cup of tea. However, once, I went to a show at the experimental Living Theater, where founders Julian Beck and Judith Malina encouraged the audience to come up and roll around on the stage. Many in the audience did, including me. Many in the audience got naked. I did not. But I remember Abbie Hoffman being there, and there was something liberating and fun about it. Of course, what that all got watered down to was the Broadway musical Hair.

  I recently saw a documentary on HBO about the performance artist Marina Abramovic. She said, “When you perform and you have a knife, it’s your blood. When you’re acting, you don’t cut yourself. It’s ketchup.” At the 2009 MTV Awards, Gaga sang “Paparazzi,” and, at the end of the number, she was “killed.” (She told me that she thought it would be interesting to see what she looked like dead.) She was dragged up to the top of the stage by a rope. She was “bleeding.” Ketchup. Of course there is no way that Gaga would—or should—actually cut herself with a knife and bleed onstage. But even with that ketchup, she made enough of a point that it actually shocked some people in that crowd. As she did two years later with the Jo Calderone performance. Most performance artists are considered freaks. Until they get older. Especially the women. Now that Yoko Ono, Patti Smith and Marina Abramovic are too old to be thought of as sexual in this culture, they get respect. The Marina Abramovic film documented her history and her 2010, three-month-long show at the Museum of Modern Art. One at a time, 750,000 people lined up to sit across from her and stare into her eyes for a few minutes. In the film, someone said, “The audience is her lover.” Marina Abramovic said she hears their pain, their loneliness, their fears. Without saying a word, just looking at the person in front of her, she made very moving connections. After seeing this, I emailed Starlight, who was on tour with Gaga in Eastern Europe. I knew that Gaga had been inspired by Marina Abramovic, and I assumed that Starlight had been too—I told her I saw a direct line here. Granted, Gaga throws in the commercial songs and the big pop production numbers. Still, some of this gets out to the world.

  • • •

  After we left her parents’ apartment on September 11th, Gaga and I went to the suite at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. When we got there, I reiterated that I myself, would have been perfectly happy not only to spend the night there, but to permanently move in. “Not if you had to spend most of your life in hotels,” she said. She added that she planned to return to her parents’ apartment that night to sleep. We ordered wine, the usual waters, and a plate of crudités and assorted fruits and nuts. We picked at the fruit and the crudités. We took our shoes off and drank the wine. We finished all the food. She showed me photos on her phone of her new boyfriend, the actor Taylor Kinney. And then, we talked for close to three hours.

  I asked her about every single tabloid rumor I’d heard about her. No, she said, she wasn’t using Rogaine. Yes, she said, she had been to a sex club in Berlin where there were paper towels and toilet paper hanging on the walls and beds everywhere. She and her friends had had a great time. I asked if she took advantage of the sexual opportunities. “No,” she said, “that would have been very difficult for me.” I brought up her past references to abusive relationships. Had a boyfriend actually ever beaten her up? “No,” she said, “but mentally and emotionally . . .” she trailed off. I asked if her relationships were always monogamous. “Yes,” she said. “I don’t really believe in having sex without monogamy. I don’t enjoy it. That’s just my personal belief. The trouble with men is that some of them are really bad. I mean I could put some people in jail, is all I want to say. The damage that was done to me at such a young age was irrevocable. Psychological, mental, emotional. And the inability to even know what happiness feels like with a man. I only know the happiness of putting a smile on someone’s face from the stage.” She started to cry. I don’t know if it was the wine, or we were two women talking about emotional stuff, or what. (I remember Stevie Nicks burst into tears sometime in the 1970s during an interview, when I asked her if Fleetwood Mac was breaking up. But I attributed that at the time to cocaine.)

  I asked Gaga if she would give back all the fame, all the love from the fans, if she could find happiness with a man. No, she said. I asked what if she had no fans, no money, no fame. Would she still want to make music? Yes, she said. She did not, like Eminem, say she wanted less of all this. “Of course I want this,” she said. “It’s not about what my fans give to me. It’s what I think I can be for them. The difference between being with a fan and a lover is that with my fans, I know what I mean to them. But I have never felt cherished by a lover. It starts out good. And then the guys, they get really crazy.” Maybe you’re picking the wrong guys, I said. “That’s what my mother says,” she said. “Look, I’m very loyal. I’ve seen my parents married now for almost thirty years. And my grandparents on one side for sixty years, and fifty on the other side. I just believe it’s a woman’s duty to stick it out no matter what.” Duty? Stick it out? She said she saw her parents fight a lot when she was a kid, especially when she was dating older men. She said she doesn’t know how she got through some of the things she got through; there were times when her parents looked at each other and said, what did we do wrong with her? “My mother might tell you no,” she said, “but my mother is just so lovely, so optimistic. She’s sunshine, my mother.”

  I asked her if she got all girly and submissive in relationships. She said, girly yes, submissive no. She liked to do certain things for men—like cook. “But let’s not overgild the lily,” she said. “I’m not a pushover. And even though I’m from New York and I can see you coming from a mil
e away, I try to find the most beautiful thing about you. It’s just the way I am. If I let someone into my life, I will cherish them and take care of them. I’m a very loving person.” She said she was attracted to “creative types” who were jealous of her effortless ability to create. “What intimidates them is not my purse, it’s my mind. I once had a man say to me that I would die alone, in a house bigger than I know, with all my money and hit records, and I will die alone. He said, ‘I will be the last person who will love you for who you really are.’” She continued: “But even when something bad was happening, even in that very stressful, worthless moment, when I felt I had nothing to offer anyone, I always thought, I’ll show you. And now, when I fight with someone in a relationship, I think, how would my fans feel if they saw me, as a female, allowing this to go on? And then I get out. Then,” she laughed, “after I leave, they want to marry me.” I thought about all of the female musicians I’d talked to over the years—Sheryl Crow and Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt and Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith and Debbie Harry, Joni Mitchell and Tina Turner, Jennifer Lopez and Gaga and Katy Perry and so many others. None of them had an easy time with love. All of them were victims of bad romance.