Poker Face

by Maureen Callahan

  “I remember she looked nice,” says Michael T. “Sort of like the heavy-metal stripper girl going for a fancy night out. She wore a long gown, I want to say maybe pink or salmon, with a low-cut back.”

  Even though Gaga didn’t seem of the downtown rock scene, Michael T. understood why she wanted to be in it. “Suddenly, something happened” in New York, he says. “Electroclash had been over and done with for a number of years.” But it would hugely inform Gaga’s music. Cult electroclash artists such as Felix Da Housecat and Miss Kittin ironically wrote about fame and paparazzi culture, playing with the idea of being superstars in a scene that would abide no such thing. Gaga was also influenced by their fuzzy, filthy syncopated beats, but she would clean them up, make them less challenging and more radio-friendly.

  Dance parties were replacing rock shows. Kids were gravitating toward stuff that felt under-the-radar, dirty, secret, elitist, and judgmental—even though, ostensibly, the downtown scene was about welcoming all freaks and misfits. It wasn’t, and never really has been; you had to be the right kind of misfit—cool, or cool enough. Or, in Gaga’s case, friends with people who were cool and would help you out, vouch for you, let you be their “+1,” in nightlife parlance.

  But everything was, and is, degrees, as it always has been in New York City. On the Lower East Side, knowing where the newest secret bar was located was good; having the number was better; knowing the owner and having unlimited access was enough to validate one’s self-worth for a good few weeks, till everyone figured it out and something else as supposedly secret and stupidly exclusive sprang up to replace it.

  Similarly, it wasn’t enough to just know about a secret rock show; you had to be on the list, know about not the official after-party but the after-after party, post pictures of you with the band to LastNightsParty. This was the era when actual superstars, high-profile Vogue magazine editors, and pristine uptown socialites began actively courting and taking cues from the kids behind the Motherfucker and MisShapes dance parties, and the cool kids, operating as rejects from the mainstream, were suddenly the gate-keepers.

  MisShapes was a weekly, Sunday-night gathering of hipsters celebrating themselves and their general level of street cred, DJ’d and overseen by suburban transplants Geordon Nicol, Leigh Lezark, and Greg Krelenstein. MisShapes was for the very young; if you were twenty-six you could easily feel like you’d aged out. Unlike the electroclash scene and Motherfucker parties, MisShapes was exclusive; it was very much about who you knew and what you looked like, and it was most definitely not open to all. It was their playlist that was the most radical thing about the parties: They embraced mainstream pop music, playing artists, such as Madonna, who would never be heard at a cool-kids gathering downtown unless it was done with the explicit understanding that this was mocking.

  The apotheosis of this came when Madonna asked if she could DJ (for a few minutes) at a MisShapes party in October 2005. The MisShapes went on to do national print ads for Eastport backpacks, and Lezark is now a front-row presence at New York and Paris fashion weeks—such is the wide-ranging currency of downtown New York cool in the early twenty-first century. These were the people Gaga wanted to get next to, impress, study. She may not have had good taste herself, but she knew who did and was determined to get it for herself.

  “She was definitely in the scene,” says Michael T., “and making those rounds.”

  During this time, Gaga had two confidantes. Lady Starlight was one. Wendy Starland was the other. Both were older than she was, both were in a position to assist her professionally, but neither ever felt exploited. They wanted to help, and they liked hanging out with her. She was fun and sweet, generous and generally bubbly, but unafraid to be vulnerable and needy when it came to her anxiety over boys and her career. She did love to talk about herself to the exclusion of most everything else.

  “We would go out all the time,” Starland says. “We’d go out to bars, to concerts. We went to see the Philharmonic. We spoke on the phone, like, three times a day. I’m spending Christmas with her family. She’d sleep at my house, come to me for advice on her personal affairs.” Starland says Gaga had difficulty being alone, hated it, that when she slept over she couldn’t even stay on the couch—that was too solitary. She’d crawl into bed with Starland, who says it was just for company, nothing more. “She was a night owl, but Rob had gotten her into being an early riser.” Often, Gaga would stop by Wendy’s in the morning, coffee and brown-bagged take-out breakfast in hand.

  Fusari, however, didn’t fully approve of the friendship: “He didn’t like it when the two of us would go out,” says Starland. “He feared we’d get a lot of attention from boys or whatever.” Still, he’d also ask Starland for advice about his relationship with Gaga.

  Whether out of perversion, revenge, or cowardice, sometimes Rob would bring Jane to meet the girls for dinner. “Tension started brewing around that time,” Starland says. “I think Jane started to suspect, and I think she started checking his phone for texts.”

  Gaga would also check Fusari’s phone for texts from Jane—if he stepped out of the studio for a moment, she’d scurry over and scroll through his log, and if she found a message from Jane, she’d blow up. Then she’d eventually calm down and realize the absurdity of the situation and apologize to Fusari.

  Another friend of Gaga’s from this time period is loath to talk about Fusari: “It honestly doesn’t matter what I tell you about what happened with her and Rob, [because] it’s gonna look bad,” she says. “But she didn’t do anything wrong.”

  At the same time, Fusari and Starland wanted Laurent Besencon, who managed Fusari, to take on Gaga as a client. He said no. Her look was a problem. She and Fusari pressed on. They posted finished versions of “Paparazzi” and “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” on MySpace. Gaga also did a “media buy”—basically, she bought space to be featured prominently for a couple of weeks—at PureVolume.com. It was an interesting choice; the site is mainly devoted to emo, which, without diminishing it, is a genre mainly devoted to lodging complaints: at the world, at one’s parents, at romantic interests that are largely unrequited, at one’s friends, at oneself. Gaga’s Euro-inflected, get-fucked-up-and-dance aesthetic was at utter odds with the site’s: It was the prom queen playing Dungeons & Dragons on a Friday night in some geek’s moldy suburban basement, or the social outcast daring to sit with the cool kids in the back of the bus, depending on your worldview.

  “I was very confused as to why she would be doing such a huge push on PureVolume,” says Sarah Lewitinn, who, at the time, worked in A&R at Island/Def Jam. “I thought she had a good voice, but it was hard to tell what was going on. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to go for a Michelle Branch, Paramore angle or what. She had a very different look to her than anything you would see on PureVolume. It didn’t really show any of the David-Bowie-meets-Madonna-meets-Britney-Spears angles that she eventually transformed into.”

  Gaga was still trying to decode her own artistic DNA: She knew that she—like all musical acts—needed a look that was a distinct image that would become a marketable, readily identifiable brand. But she had no idea what it should be.

  For all her later talk about being an artsy misfit outsider, she was really just a nice Catholic girl from the Upper West Side who was never a big reader, who shopped at expensive, generically tasteful boutiques like Olive and Bette’s, who just wanted everyone to like her.

  “I was the girl,” she told her label’s biographer, “with [Britney’s] name written all over my face, crying at TRL because I saw her hand.” Her vocal coach, at sixteen, was Don Lawrence, who’d also worked with Mick Jagger, Bono, and Christina Aguilera. “Gaga’s parents always had her connected with the best people,” says Sullivan. “She worked with [Don] always.” To this day, she travels with a recording of Lawrence’s vocal exercises.

  Lawrence introduced the young Stefani to execs at the Disney Channel and suggested she audition to replace the lead singer of a sugary teen girl group called
No Secrets, who appear on their album cover in matching white jeans and unfortunate two-tone hoodies. They got their start in 2001, in the Fordlândia teenage factory that produced the ’N Sync/Britney/Christina Aguilera/Backstreet Boys teen-pop explosion of the nineties, first singing backup for Backstreet Boy Nick Carter’s scrawny, abrasive little brother, Aaron, on the unfortunately titled songs “Oh Aaron” and “Stride (Jump on the Fizzy).”

  “It gave me a taste of the record industry,” Gaga said of making the teen-pop-factory rounds. “I thought I was about to become Whitney Houston. But you don’t realize what that takes until later.”

  While shopping around for a record deal, Gaga continued booking as many live shows as she could, now sometimes performing as the Plastic Gaga Band. “I played in every club in New York City,” she said. “I bombed in every club, and then I killed it in every club. I did it the way you are supposed to: You go and you play and pay your dues and work hard.” Around this time, Besencon was convinced to see her live; he did, and he finally signed on to manage her.

  The viral success of the two singles she’d posted online became her leverage with record labels; she was a best seller in cyberspace, so why wouldn’t they take a meeting with her?

  “She is perfectly, almost genetically engineered to be a twenty-first-century pop star,” says Eric Garland. As CEO of BigChampagne.com, Garland is an expert in the consumption of music online; his company tracks data, including peer-to-peer file sharing, for all the major labels.

  Gaga, he says, “is an incredibly social animal in the new definition of social. She’s sort of promiscuous. And I don’t mean promiscuous in the Ke$ha sense—I mean socially promiscuous online.” (Ke$ha is the pop singer who styles herself as the avant-gardist of the trailer park, who does what she can to draw comparisons to Gaga.) But it was Gaga’s innate understanding of creating and cultivating an online identity—and a sense of community with those who responded—that would, as much as major-label backing, catapult her into global consciousness. She would later actively cultivate the support of gossip blogger Perez Hilton, whose site, as of April 2010, was ranked 192 in most-trafficked websites in the United States and 517th globally.

  As for the brick-and-mortar music business, the earthbound major labels: Gaga got a lot of no’s. They would say she didn’t have the right look, that they didn’t hear any hits in the material. She didn’t stop trying. She tried to get a publishing deal—basically, a contract to write songs that could be sold to other artists—with Irwin Robinson, her old boss at Famous Music. He said no. She tried to get a publishing deal with Sony/ATV; they said no. Her meeting at Sony/ATV, according to a source, was with Danny Goldberg, who had managed Nirvana and had run three major labels. She was there with Fusari, which should have conferred a level of respect, but Gaga felt Goldberg wasn’t listening to a thing she was saying, that he couldn’t have made his disinterest clearer. She left the meeting in a rage, yelling at Fusari that she would never sign to Sony/ATV. Then she took her act up to the Island Def Jam offices in midtown Manhattan to audition for a deal in late 2006.

  An Island Def Jam employee remembers seeing Gaga coming down the hall: “She reminded me of Julia Roberts [in] Pretty Woman,” she says. “But in American Apparel.”

  What happened that afternoon at Island Def Jam has become part of the Gaga myth, and even one of her closest friends from this time—who was not present but heard about the audition from Gaga immediately afterward—tells it the same way: Gaga sang and played piano for a gaggle of execs. She saw one, out of the corner of her eye, get up and leave; she panicked, but you’d never have been able to tell by looking at her. She kept going and, when she was done, looked up to see label head Antonio “L.A.” Reid in the doorway. He said, “See legal on your way out”—industry-speak for “We’re signing you.”

  It didn’t really go down that way, according to someone who was in the room. For one thing, her appointment that day was with Reid himself: “She walked into L.A.’s office,” says the source. “A couple of minutes later, someone asked me if I would go watch Gaga do a showcase in L.A.’s office.”

  Also in the room: Gaga’s future artist and repertoire person Josh Sarubin; senior VP Karen Kwak, also known as Reid’s right-hand woman; and a few others. Reid had a tiny room off his office, maybe ten feet by ten feet, outfitted with an upright piano; this is where Gaga auditioned.

  “She sat down at the piano and introduced herself,” says the source. “Then she started playing—she did ‘Beautiful, Dirty, Rich’ and a few other songs. She was amazing. There was no doubt about it—the minute you saw her behind her instrument, you knew she was special. But the thing is—and I know I’m not the only person who thinks this—I don’t remember anything about the songs, because the whole time we could not take our eyes off her ass. She was in this tight little skirt or tube dress. She moved back and forth and you could just see her ass cheeks running up and down, like on a seesaw almost. Everyone was looking around the room with these giant smiles, looking at her ass.”

  After her mini-set, she turned around to face Reid, and this part of the story actually aligns with the myth. Says the source: “L.A. just goes, ‘I want you to march downstairs to Business Affairs and we’re going to offer you a deal. Don’t leave the building till you sign.’ ”

  Gaga met with the label’s lawyer, and when she got hold of her own attorney, he asked her who over at the label was handling the deal. Her lawyer told her that the Island Def Jam deal was going to be big—the label had tasked one of their best lawyers with handling it.

  “She would say, ‘I’ll be with this lawyer for the rest of my life; that will never change,’ ” says Starland. “Her lawyer is no longer her lawyer anymore. That will be a common theme.”

  Her contract, according to Gaga, was huge: She told friends that Island Def Jam signed her to an $850,000 deal. Jim Guerinot, who manages, among others, Nine Inch Nails, No Doubt, and the Offspring, says there’s no way Gaga signed a deal worth anything near $850,000.

  “I don’t believe it,” he says. “That’s how ridiculous it is. To give an unknown that much money and a distribution deal . . . Huh? Highly successful artists can occasionally get deals of that nature. It’s absolutely unheard of for new artists.”

  One person who was in the room for the signing and saw the contract insists that $850,000 was the exact figure, and it was Fusari’s very recent, very huge successes with Destiny’s Child and Jessica Simpson that secured Gaga such a huge deal. But another industry veteran says he, too, finds this deal highly, highly unlikely.

  “Rarely in the last ten years were artists getting a check for anything north of $500,000,” he says. “It’s so hard to believe that one artist is getting $850,000 for one album. I don’t know the terms—there are so many factors. It could’ve been a five-album deal.” Fusari’s involvement might have been a help, he says, but even the producer’s reputation would not have translated into that much money. “But you know,” he adds, “I’ve seen crazy shit. There are some bulldog New York attorneys who may get that money.”

  Whatever money she was making had to be divided up. She, Joe, and Fusari had formed a production company together, and it was the company, not Gaga, that was technically signed to Island Def Jam.

  In addition to her 80-20 deal with Fusari, her new manager Besencon was getting a 20 percent cut of everything. Starland, who’d discovered Gaga and was cowriting songs with her, had only a verbal agreement that she, too, would get a cut of any future deal, and she was not pleased when Gaga offered to give her just publishing rights; Starland would only be able to collect if anything she wrote wound up on the record. Starland says Gaga also offered to pay her a $10,000 flat fee.

  “I was like, ‘That’s nice, but given that Laurent’s been in the picture a very, very short time and I’ve been doing this development, I feel I deserve at least half of what Laurent makes—10 percent, and some publishing on two of the songs,’ ” Starland recalls. “And she was like, ‘That’s
totally fair.’ ”

  A few days later, Starland says she sat down with Gaga and Fusari at a restaurant on the Upper West Side to go over the terms of the deal. “He said, ‘Wendy, we will all work out something fair and equitable—this would not be happening without you,’ ” she says. “And I was like, ‘Great, so can my lawyer be in touch?’ and he said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”

  Now that she had a deal, Gaga had to hone her stagecraft and her image as fast as possible. She couldn’t afford a stylist and didn’t really have an eye, so she was still relying on the hipster porno-chic of American Apparel. But it only made her appear overtly, plainly sexual, not edgy or outré.

  So she started to experiment with stage looks, which mainly meant performing in her bra or a bikini top. She was young still, only twenty-one years old, and had not been properly introduced to the figures, mainstream and cult, she would later so successfully reappropriate. Gaga, though, has engaged in a bit of revisionist history, talking about her “underground New York following.”

  “The shows, at that time, were shock art,” she said. “I was like the Damien Hirst of pop music, doing something so offensive. In that neighborhood, it’s junkies and metalheads—how do I get them to come and listen to pop music? I take my clothes off, I use a lot of hairspray, and I write songs about oral sex.” It should be noted that in downtown New York City, in 2007, absolutely none of that behavior would have been considered shocking. Quaint, maybe. Or a nice try.

  Around this time, Gaga befriended a girl her age who doesn’t want to be identified; she worked for a small music publishing company and spent about six or seven months hanging out with Gaga constantly. “One night,” says the friend, “she was doing this show at the Bitter End, and she wanted to find a shirt and she literally took the subway to Queens for it. It was funny—she was wearing one of those wife-beater [tank tops], but as a dress. But it wasn’t American Apparel—it was, like, Hanes. And she ended up finding this piece of jewelry she was looking for. We were like, ‘Stefani, what are you doing?’ She almost missed the show. We were like, ‘This chick will go out to Queens to pick up a piece of jewelry.’ Everything about her was crazy and original.”