Poker Face

by Maureen Callahan

  “Who puts that in their mouth?” Stefani asks the waitress. “Would you put that in your mouth? It has shit all over it. Clearly you would, because you’re just fucked up.”

  Stefani lost; for keeping their cool, the other two won $100.

  In her high school yearbook, she claims to have been on The Sopranos. She spent her teen years auditioning for talent scouts, and tried out for Rent when it was still on Broadway. She says her mother kept telling her to slow down when she was in high school. “But,” Gaga says, “I was getting hungrier and hungrier.”

  She was a student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on East 91st Street. It’s an exclusive, all-girls Catholic school set in two converted mansions; alumni include Paris and Nicky Hilton, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Caroline Kennedy. Students begin learning French and Spanish in kindergarten; in eighth grade, they can take Mandarin. Tuition for the 2009–2010 school year is $33,985, and the school’s foremost goal, as stated on its website, is to “educate to a personal and active faith in God.”

  Of her time at Sacred Heart, Gaga has said that she felt like “a freak,” that she didn’t fit in. But photos from this time show a fresh-faced girl, perpetually smiling, surrounded by other, perpetually smiling young girls. They all look like they’re part of the same well-adjusted, uptown tribe: long groomed hair, age-appropriate makeup, jeans and T-shirts and sweaters for day, strapless gowns and pearl chokers at high school dances.

  “Stefani was always part of school plays and musicals,” said a former Sacred Heart classmate. “She had a core group of friends who she remains close with to this day. She was a good student and wore her uniform mostly to dress code. She liked boys a lot, but her singing and her passion for the arts was number one for her. You could pick Stefani’s voice out from others during Mass or a prize-day ceremony. She was always wanting to be an actress or a singer, and it was plain to see that she was going to be a star.”

  The few early, substantial clips of Stefani that exist on YouTube are performances. There’s a now-famous one of her at an NYU talent show, seated behind a piano in a strapless green dress with long, filmy white panels, barefoot. She’s singing two very earnest, Norah Jones–sounding ballads. There’s another, much earlier one, of her at the Bitter End, a deeply uncool space that evokes all the danger of a suburban rec room. Here, she’s a teenager with a little baby fat, in a one-shouldered sweatshirt, Flashdance-style, exposing a meridian of belly. She’s working out, with swagger and a smirk and smudgy black eyeliner, an early version of “Hollywood.” She introduces everyone on stage as “the Stefani Germanotta Band,” impatiently looks over at her noodling guitarist, and finally begins. She is probably all of sixteen. “Listen,” she growls, full of force and verve, “I’ve got the sickest ambition.”

  And another clip, shortly after she got her first record deal—“I didn’t sign with Sony, I signed with Island Def Jam,” she somewhat haughtily corrects the emcee—sitting behind the piano in a pink minidress and go-go boots. Here, too, she looks thoroughly pedestrian in her long black hair and thick bangs, but she has already started to go by Lady Gaga; this song, called “Wonderful,” is another ballad. Her vocals at this point are far more reminiscent of Christina Aguilera—she’s begun studying with Aguilera’s vocal coach—and this song, sonically and thematically, is very similar to Aguilera’s 2002 self-empowerment piano-ballad “Beautiful.” (“Wonderful” will eventually go to future American Idol contestant Adam Lambert, himself a performer given to high theatricality and heavy eye makeup.)

  These clips are evidence of Gaga’s undeniable talent; they prove that she’s the real deal when it comes to musicianship, vocal ability, and commanding stage presence. Maybe she allows them to live because she cannot legally take them down, but maybe she allows them to live to show that she’s nobody’s puppet: not a creature of Auto-Tune (the software that manipulates off-key vocals into soulless perfection); not a lip-synching glitter queen, but a true artist with a voice and a vision. Also, in that last clip, she does claim to own a blow-up doll. “And I make love to it every night,” she says. So there are glimmers of the witty provocateur she will become.

  To her devotees, however, there’s not much disconnect between the suburban-looking Stefani Germanotta and the dance-pop dominatrix Lady Gaga, and those who claim there is are quickly mocked for their overall naïveté. And this, too, is probably generational; her younger fans came of age when reality TV and DVD bonus tracks and the Internet exposed most of the sausage-making involved in attaining and retaining modern celebrity. There’s not much mystery left anymore, but Gaga, so far, is working both sides of that expertly.

  It’s hard to think of a recent celebrity who seemed to emerge from nowhere, who’s captivated the attention of such wide swaths of people, and about whom next to nothing is known. Her backstory was intentionally limited; you didn’t know the details of her childhood, whether she suffered any traumatic domestic episodes, who she was dating, who her friends were. She’s not been shot stumbling out of a trendy nightclub or party filled with other young celebrities; she’s been able to credibly claim that she’s really not of that world, has no real celebrity friends, and has no interest in anything but her art. She’s posited herself as none of her peers have: a blank slate, a creature of self-invention, an object of emotional projection and wish-fulfillment. Prince pulled it off, Bowie, too, but both did it before the Internet, and both did it without the warmth Gaga has been able to exude; their mystery seemed born of an essential coldness, a disaffection with the human race. It was totally believable that both belonged to an alien species. Gaga’s seems born of genuinely feeling like the misfit she’s claimed to be. She seems human.

  So it’s no surprise that tracks from a 2009-released demo EP called “Red and Blue”—this one sounding like a cross between Avril Lavigne and Alanis Morrissette, more pissed-off mall rat than lovelorn poetess—elicit world-weary debate among the YouTube commentariat.

  For example:

  “omg this song is so . . . non-perverted!!!! WHAT HAPPENED LADY GAGA?????!!. . . . maybe she went down the wrong path somewhere.”

  “8kater, what makes the path she went down ‘wrong’? Had she kept down this path, she would never have been known.”

  “if she made the same songs with the stefani persona do you think she would of sold records? Nope.”

  “true these are really good, but what shes doing now is heard much more = more sales for the record companies.”

  “Gaga herself has said that she was bored with being this angry white girl crooning and would have walked out on her performances. So when she was doing this she was selling out because she didn’t really like it. I’m not sure if she is 100 percent happy with what she’s doing now, but I’m sure she’s happy that she’s being different.”

  Gaga’s own explanation for the yawning gap between then and now perfectly aligns with that last contention. “The way that I perform, people think it’s exhibitionist because it’s so theatrical,” she said in a previously unpublished interview. “But I tell you, there is something in me that I can’t help, and that is the girl who got made fun of all those years. And when I went to college, I got rid of her and I started to be something that I thought I was supposed to be. And when I went in with [my producer], he said, ‘I don’t know, why don’t you bring her out?’ Everything I tried to erase about myself, he loved. And so here we are.”

  Here’s where the creation myth begins to unravel.

  Her friends and fellow classmates at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, which Gaga attended for only a year, speak mainly to her laserlike focus. They don’t really remember who her friends were or what classes she took or which boys she dated or what parties she attended; they remember her working, performing, always hustling. Her NYU classmate Sheldrick recalls first meeting Stefani at the Alphabet Lounge in fall 2005, after his own set. Her opening line: “Hi, I’m Stefani. I’m trying to start a band. We need a guitar player.”

  Sheldrick was good friends wi
th Calvin Pia and Eli Silverman, already Stefani’s recruits. A few days later, on his way to audition for her band, he found himself at the address he’d been given, walking to a set of open sidewalk grates on the Lower East Side’s Ludlow Street, descending a metal staircase, then loping through a long, dirty, pipe-lined hallway until he reached a pocket of rooms in the back. He remembers thinking two things: that this below-ground rehearsal space was disgusting, and that they were probably all on the same page musically. He was into jam bands, as were Calvin and Eli. Stefani was conversant, if not proficient.

  “If you looked at her, you’d think she was a jam-band chick,” Sheldrick says. “She had a heady, grimy vibe to her. I remember we played Phish’s ‘Down with Disease.’ We did some jam on a one-four-five progression kind of thing, and then after playing Phish for like twenty minutes she was like, ‘Can we play some of my songs now?’ ”

  Sheldrick yielded. “I’m not the cool police, but I wasn’t really feeling it. I would characterize it as female Billy Joel, like, piano rock.” Sheldrick opted not to join the band, but would go to the gigs performed first as the Stefani Germanotta Band and then, for a time, as Stefani Live. “I always went to their shows,” he says. They were his friends; he wanted to be supportive. “However much I hate the Bitter End—that place blows—I went anyway.”

  These performances were unadorned and straightforward. “It was all very normal, very singer-songwriter-y,” says her NYU friend Kallen, who played on several bills with her yet, with apology, says he doesn’t remember all that much. “It was just the Stefani Germanotta Band; she’d have her piano standing up. The band, to be honest—they weren’t that great. I always thought she was talented. I’m sure she realized, ‘I gotta do something unique.’ ”

  At the same time, her father had asked Joe Vulpis, a producer and engineer who’d worked with Lindsay Lohan, if he’d do his daughter’s first demo, which was part of her audition to get into NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts—her childhood dream. The two men were friends who’d met through their membership in an Italian-American organization in Manhattan: “It’s a private club, like a country club–type place,” Vulpis says. “Giuliani’s a member. It’s real high-class.”

  Her parents not only encouraged their daughter’s ambition, but were so actively involved in her burgeoning career that they seem to be among the first generation of “helicopter parents.” The term was introduced in 1990, and refers to parents who are overly invested, very protective. Joe would use his business connections to get his teenage daughter auditions with executives in the music industry; her mom, Cynthia, would escort young Stefani to nightclubs, beseeching them to allow her underage daughter to perform; they’d carry her gear, call upon extended family to show up for gigs. They knew she had a shot, was very gifted, though the self-generated myth that she’d learned to play the piano at age four—by ear—is another fabrication, as she told one of the very first people to interview her. (That person wishes to go unnamed.)

  “When I was four, my mom sent me to a piano teacher—she came to the house—[and] I really hated it,” Gaga said. “I didn’t want to learn how to read music, or practice.” Her mother, she recalled, “wanted me to be a cultured young woman. She would make me sit at the piano for two hours. So I could just sit there, or I could play.”

  Gaga did go on to say that she then learned largely by ear, because that was the way she wanted to, and that she was a born exhibitionist who demanded constant attention: “We’d be at dinner at a nice restaurant and I would be at the table dancing and using the breadsticks as a baton,” she said. “For babysitter interviews, I’d stand between the couches and strip and then I’d jump out naked. At, like, nine. Too old to be doing it.”

  She thought about acting, too, and as she got older, her parents allowed her to pursue it on the weekends. But music was really her thing.

  “I wrote my first song when I was thirteen,” Gaga said. “It was called ‘To Love Again.’ What a thirteen-year-old knows about love is hilarious.” She was fourteen when she began playing in downtown nightclubs. (Her six-years-younger sister, Natali, also expressed an interest in music; Gaga’s former producer, Rob Fusari, remembers being at dinners at the Germanottas’ massive apartment on the Upper West Side and picking up on tension between the two siblings. “I could tell that itch was starting,” Fusari says. “Her little sister would sit at the piano and want to show Stefani some of the things she was playing, and Stef would be like, ‘This is my thing. Don’t invade my territory.’ ”)

  Vulpis, Joe Germonatta’s producer friend, had seen the Stefani Germanotta Band perform. He was dubious: “The band,” he says, “I wasn’t too fond of. But, you know, that’s what we—that’s what we were gifted with.” Plus, he liked Joe and thought Stefani had some talent. He and Stefani worked together for five or six months.

  “She really wanted to be the bad girl rocker,” Vulpis says. They’d do “stripped-down rock, bad-girl rock, big power ballads, jazz standards.” She covered torch songs like “Someone to Watch Over Me” and Nat King Cole’s “Orange Colored Sky.”

  When playing live with the band, Stefani tended toward the jammier stuff. She often performed a song called “Purple Monkey,” which, she said, was about “smoking weed, taking toke and hallucinating.” An olive branch to her Phish-loving cohorts, perhaps? None of her bandmates remembers her as a drug-user or heavy drinker; she was too ambitious for that.

  “It had a really bluesy chorus,” she said, “and I’d beat on the piano and everyone would go crazy.” Columbia Records had people at that show, she said, scouting her. They were perplexed.

  The problem, they told her: “ ‘We get the voice, but we don’t get the music.’ ” She added, “I had no fucking idea who I was. I had no clue.”

  Vulpis’s recollection is different: “Stefani always knew what she wanted—maybe not right away, but she knew if she didn’t like something, to fix it,” he says. “She was definitely in charge.”

  Kallen remembers Calvin Pia coming up to him with an interesting bit of news. “He said, ‘We all got kicked out of the Stefani Germanotta Band because she wants to do this new thing. She’s Lady Gaga.’ ”

  Musician Wendy Starland first met Gaga, then Stefani, back in 2006, when Stefani was working as an intern for the renowned producer Irwin Robinson at Famous Music Publishing, which was a subsidiary of MTV’s parent company Viacom (in 2007, Sony/ATV Music Publishing bought the company, then ranked among the industry’s Top 10). Famous Music was located in a Midtown office building, on Broadway, not far from the famed Brill Building, home to Phil Spector, Carole King, Burt Bacharach, and many other American pop powerhouses. Starland was in the office all the time; Stefani was Robinson’s coffee fetcher and phone answerer.

  Stefani, Wendy says, would compliment her profusely, raving about her songwriting abilities as she put Starland’s press packets together. “There was a song of mine called ‘Stolen Love,’ ” Starland recalls, “and she said, ‘I play it over and over again; it meant a lot to me.’ Like, ‘I love your music.’ She’s very smart. She knows about people; she knows how to handle people. She’s great at getting her way.”

  Starland is sitting in a booth at the upscale-yet-casual Coffee Shop on Union Square, where she has been taking meetings with producers for the past five hours. A well-groomed girl with fair skin, no makeup, and long, wavy black hair, she looks like a more conventionally pretty Minnie Driver. She is dressed very conservatively, in a cream-colored Talbots-style V-neck sweater and plain, pale pink pants. To look at her, you would never guess that she was in the music industry. She seems more like a banker, or a real estate broker. She ejects herself from the booth about three times over five hours in order to go to the bathroom and calm down; talking about Gaga, even now, makes her very uneasy. “I’m so nervous,” she says. “[But] this is all the truth.”

  When she met Stefani at Famous Music, Starland—whose own poppy, romantic sound is reminiscent of Natasha Bedingfield—was also workin
g as a scout for the New Jersey–based producer Fusari, who’d produced number one hits for Will Smith, Destiny’s Child, Whitney Houston, and Jessica Simpson. Fusari had made enough money for enough people that he was now in a rare position: If he could discover someone, mold and shape them and sell them to a label, he stood to make a substantial profit off his discovery.

  Fusari had tasked Starland with finding a girl who was twenty-five years old or younger, who, in his words, “could be the lead singer of the Strokes”—a female version of that band’s rumpled, woozy front man Julian Casablancas. Stefani was not that. But when Starland shared a bill with her in June of 2006 at another generic, un–rock ’n’ roll venue called the Cutting Room, on 24th Street in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, she knew that Stefani definitely had something, which was Fusari’s number one criterion.

  “He said, ‘She doesn’t have to be drop-dead gorgeous, she doesn’t have to even have the best talent in the world,’ ” Starland recalls. “ ‘The necessary requirements are: You can’t take your eyes off of her.’ ”

  For her part, Stefani made sure that Starland would see her performance: “I got to the venue early to sound check,” Starland recalls, “and she came up to me and was like, ‘You remember me, Stefani? I was the intern for Irwin Robinson? We’re going to be performing tonight, you should come check it out.’ ”

  Starland remembers her train of thought while watching Stefani at the piano: The songs need polishing. The band has to go. She sounds way too much like Fiona Apple. What is this girl wearing? She looks like she’s ready to Jazzercize. This performance is beautiful. This girl has guts.

  “After the show,” says Starland, “I took her by the wrist and said to her, ‘I’m about to change your life.’ It was that cinematic.”

  The girls went outside and Starland dialed Fusari; Stefani’s bandmate/boyfriend was around somewhere, but Starland says he was so nondescript she can’t recall much about him. “Stefani wore the pants in that relationship,” says Starland. “I was like, ‘Your girlfriend has huge balls and she’s really got something,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, she does.’ ” A few minutes after that exchange, Starland told Stefani she’d have to ditch the band, which meant ditching the boyfriend. “She doesn’t bat an eye,” Starland says. “Trust me, the boyfriend was gone a week later.”