Poker Face

by Maureen Callahan

  “I just keep getting the impression she’s a glorified wannabe,” wrote one commenter. “A pastiche of every blonde pop singer we’ve ever known in recent times, not forgetting Donatella Versace. . . . She lacks genuine mystery and should stop calculating her every move. Will wearing Hussein Chalayan, exaggerated shoulder pads and wigs buy her genuine credibilty?”

  “I find it hard to like her because I don’t think she is a ‘bona fide eccentric,’ ” wrote another. “She’s trying too hard to come off that way, she wears stuff that’s all been done before (Christ, even someone as mainstream as Beyoncé wears ‘crazy’ metallic dresses) and the teacup-carrying bullshit is so self-consciously an attempt to get attention. In her interview with Jonathan Ross last week she actually tried to claim that lighting hairspray on fire as a ‘performance artist’ was in some way controversial.”

  A dissenter: “I like Lady Gaga. Her music videos are fun to watch when I’m on the elliptical. And I like her style, regardless of whether it’s calculated or coming from a completely organic place. If more pop stars and starlets made an effort to present themselves as unique and eccentric, pop culture would be more interesting.”

  And someone sure of how it would all end: “She’s from Yonkers with a fake Euro accent! She might have talent but she made herself into a gimmick as the girl who wears no pants and makes songs for me to dance to while I’m drunk in the club. The whole façade will die out in a year or two like the rest of them.”

  In 2008, newly signed to Island Def Jam, Gaga and Fusari took a trip to Miami to meet with Tom Lord-Alge, a Grammy-winning producer and mixer. They wanted him to mix “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich”—Gaga and Fusari both thought it had the potential to be her first single, but not as it was. Starland recalls being dubious, but once Lord-Alge got hold of it, she knew it was a contender. “He created breaks in the song that really made it a lot better than it was,” she says. “He did an awesome job.” As for Fusari and Gaga’s personal relationship, says Starland, “They were very, very tight at that point. So tight. They were so excited when they came back.”

  Not long after that, Island Def Jam dropped Gaga. “L.A. Reid heard ‘Disco Heaven’ and ‘Beautiful, Dirty, Rich’—he heard those tracks and made the slit-the-knife-across-the-throat motion and cut her loose,” says Brendan Sullivan.

  One source remains perplexed, to this day, by the decision to drop her: “When she would come into the office, it would buzz crazy for her.” Josh Sarubin was her biggest champion, pushing her in meetings. He was, according to Starland, left out of the loop about the decision to drop Gaga. “Josh was in a regular A&R meeting, and they were listing off acts they dropped that week, and they said, ‘. . . and Lady Gaga,’ ” says Starland. “He found out, in front of everyone at this meeting, that they had dropped her without L.A. Reid even telling him.”

  One source thinks that Reid didn’t understand who Lady Gaga’s audience was: “When you’re running a record label, you want to be very familiar with the audience you are selling your music to, and you want to be on the same level as what your artist is trying to convey,” says the source. “It would’ve been a disservice to keep her around and not know how to market her properly. If she had stayed on Island Def Jam with someone that didn’t really understand the vision, she might not have done so well.”

  Sullivan agrees; he says if she’d stayed signed to IDJ, she’d be a niche artist eking out a living. “I love La Roux”—the band led by an androgynous Brit singer whose sound is similar to Gaga’s, although her voice is wispier and sparser—“but she would basically have been like La Roux. She’d be playing the third-largest venue in lots of cities—like the Bowery Ballroom in New York. She wouldn’t be Lady Gaga, and her songs would have lacked the maturity that [she’s] going to get to, that make them so appealing.”

  Of course, to Gaga, it wasn’t easy to be that forward-thinking and philosophical. To her credit, she tried.

  Her personal life, too, was a mess.

  “Her relationship with Rob became very touch and go,” Starland recalls, “and she started to get involved with Lüc. He was very cute, and she used to get very nervous to see him. She’d say, ‘Oh my God, Wendy, you don’t understand how nervous I am, he’s a big deal, he’s a bartender down here, he’s ‘in the scene.’ ” She chuckles. “This was ‘in-the-scene’ Lüc.”

  After the twin disappointments of getting dropped by her label and realizing that Fusari was not an option, Lüc was a good distraction. She’d had a traumatic confrontation with Fusari’s fiancée, who had point-blank asked the two if she could trust them to be alone together. They both replied, “No.” Jane told Gaga, “You’re not a friend.” Fusari began sleeping on the couch in his studio, talked about moving in with Stefani in New York. Starland thinks that Fusari’s situation suddenly seemed too complicated and heavy for Stefani; Sullivan thinks she really wanted nothing more to do with him. “You see the age difference between her and Fusari,” he says. “You can understand what’s going on there.”

  Lüc, by comparison, was hot, popular, and he chose her. It boosted her ego, even if he often didn’t treat her so well.

  Gaga’s friends during this time period say that although Lüc and Gaga were definitely a couple, Lüc wasn’t faithful. He’d also put her down, mocking her taste in music, telling her she was way too driven. His unappealing behavior would inspire some of the most amusing—and biggest—singles on The Fame. Most of them didn’t get written till after their breakup, and even then Gaga had to be pushed. At first, says Sullivan, she was afraid to: “She said, ‘I can’t. It’ll be like sealing the envelope. Writing about my breakup with Lüc will just make it real.’ ”

  Once she started, she couldn’t stop. “Poker Face,” says Sullivan, is not, as she has said, about her fantasizing about a woman while having sex with a man. It’s far more prosaic: After they broke up, still tormented, Gaga asked Sullivan if he thought she should go down to the bar where Lüc worked and try to talk to him. “I’m telling her she should just be cool, be seen all over town being totally fine without him,” he says. “I’m telling her, ‘You don’t understand how it works with a guy like Lüc. You’ve got to show him your poker face.’ She laughs a little bit. I go, ‘What?’ She goes, ‘Nothing. Nothing.’ ”

  “Summer Boy,” says Sullivan, was Gaga ruminating about the chances of a future with Lüc, and realizing: no. He was good for sex and fun and driving around town in his El Camino, but even though she loved him, it was a lost cause. “Boys Boys Boys,” says Sullivan, “is about her date with Lüc Carl on March 23, 2007, to go see the Killers at Madison Square Garden.”

  Lüc had very specific tastes. Some might call them limited. “Lüc didn’t like pop music, so Lüc basically didn’t respect anything she did,” Sullivan says. “He just liked hair metal. It was the only thing he wanted to play. Anyway, this is her first big date with Lüc—they’ve been dating for about three months at this point, but this is the first time they have a night out together. They get dressed up, they go uptown to see the Killers, Lüc gets these awful seats way up in the bleachers.”

  Gaga writes about going to see that show—leaving out the part about the surly boyfriend—in “Boys Boys Boys.”

  “I went in wanting to write the girl version of Mötley Crüe’s ‘Girls, Girls, Girls,’ ” she said. “I wanted it to sound like AC/DC’s ‘T.N.T’ ”—with its refrain, “Oi! Oi! Oi!”—“but with my pop twist. I wanted to write a pop song that this guy I liked, who was a metalhead, would like.”

  She also references the after-party that Sullivan DJ’d at the Lower East Side’s Motor City Bar, a heavy-metal dive with tires for tables, black paint on the walls, and one of the most expansive selections of cheap beer south of 14th Street. “That was really funny, because this one girl showed up literally with a brick of blow, like it’s wrapped in tinfoil,” he says. “A friend of mine goes in for it, and it’s completely fake, like a brick of baking soda!” He says Gaga went nowhere near it.

&nb
sp; “Stef didn’t do drugs at that time because Lüc . . . he doesn’t do drugs, he doesn’t have tattoos, and he told her flat-out when they started dating, ‘I’m not going to date you if you’re a cokehead.’ So she kind of left her Upper West Side NYU dropout friends and completely stopped doing blow. And started dating Lüc Carl. That was her life.”

  Gaga, way later, would admit that she knew she was in love with someone who wasn’t supportive of her career and ambition. She has described “Paparazzi” as about her fear that she could have love or a successful career, but not both. She and Lüc would eventually break up and make up several times, and every time they broke up, Sullivan says, he’d take her to some dive bar on the Lower East Side and get her drunk. “She’d, like, slam her beer down after listing, like, ten things about how he doesn’t understand anything,” says Sullivan. “Like, ‘That fucking guy!’

  “The concept she came up with,” he continues, “is that she’s working hard on her music to impress this guy, but the harder she works on the music, the more it will take her away from this guy. So she wins and loses either way.”

  Chapter Five

  Ditched

  All those problems with Lüc would transpire over the next few months. In March 2007, Gaga was still grappling with getting dropped from Island Def Jam. “I was one of the first people she spoke to when she got dropped,” says another old friend, who is no longer in contact with Gaga but retains great affection for her. “She was really sad. She felt totally defeated. But it was amazing, because at the same time, she was still just about keeping this composure, that this was just a bump in the road. She was really honest about how sad she was—it’s a blow to the ego, it makes you feel bad when people don’t think you’re great.”

  “She’s crying her eyes out, she’s more depressed than anything in her life,” says Sullivan. “It’s the worst thing that had ever happened to her. The second worst thing that ever happened to her.”

  What was the first?

  “Oh, her sister fell out of a tree when they were kids and broke her arm. They’re really close. Anyway, she’s twenty years old, and she has this deal with her father that if she doesn’t have a record deal by the time she’s twenty, she’ll give up. Now she’s twenty, and she doesn’t have her deal anymore. She’s really, really sad.”

  “It was the worst day of my life,” Gaga has said, adding that she drank and drugged her way through it. According to Sullivan, though, she and her father were all business. “In one of those rare but amazing dad moves, her father came downtown” after hearing how upset she was. “He starts to get very Italian about it, very, like, ‘Nobody does this to my daughter.’ So he says, ‘Let me see what I can do.’ ”

  In the end, Gaga took advantage of a loophole in her contract that required Island Def Jam to pay her if they did not release the record.

  “I remember thinking,” Sullivan says, “that it was the ‘Courtney Love Does the Math’ deal.”

  In May of 2000, Courtney Love gave a speech at the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference in New York City; it was a sensation and later ran, in its entirety, on Salon.com as an essay entitled “Courtney Love Does the Math.” In it, Love not only excoriated the record industry for its fear of the Internet and its refusal to embrace the future; she also called them glorified slave-owners for their financial exploitation of artists. It was the latter point that made headlines: She did the math, explaining how a band made up of four members, working with an advance of $1 million, would most likely, and through no fault of their own, wind up netting $45,000 each over the course of twelve months, while the label proportionally grossed $11 million and netted $6 million.

  “The system’s set up so almost nobody gets paid,” Love said. Lady Gaga, at twenty years old, was well aware.

  In the wake of the Island Def Jam fiasco, Fusari called his friend Vincent Herbert, who had his own label, Da Family, under the umbrella of Interscope Records; Herbert had given Fusari his first big break, hiring him to produce Destiny’s Child. His track record since had been unassailable.

  “Rob made just one call to Vincent,” says Starland. “He said, ‘I’ve got this artist; you’ve got to do this for me,’ ” she says. “It was like, ‘I scratch your back, you scratch mine.’ They were like, ‘OK.’ She got her masters back because of Rob, she got her publishing deal with Rob’s company, and she got her second record deal because of Rob.”

  Producer Martin Kierszenbaum, a then-thirty-five-year-old exec at Interscope who also goes by “Cherry Cherry Boom Boom,” auditioned her. He assigned Gaga a track to write to, to come up with lyrics and a hook. “All of a sudden, she’s visualizing her stardom like no other,” says Starland. “She knows she has to make this the song, because it would be in [Kierszenbaum’s] best interests to push it.”

  Gaga ran versions of the track she was working on for Kierszenbaum—which she knew was not just a test but the test—past family and friends, soliciting and incorporating feedback relentlessly. Starland was surprised when Gaga played the finished track for her. “The lyrics say, ‘Family, doing it for the family,’ ” she says. “And I go, ‘Isn’t that the name of your record label?’ ”

  The record label ended up with a new name: Streamline. The song Gaga worked on became “The Fame.” (Eventually, Gaga would be signed to three labels under the Interscope umbrella: Streamline, Cherrytree, and Kon Live, with the head of each label getting a piece of her profits.)

  It was apparent to Interscope execs that Gaga was special: She could sing, play, write. But her presentation was still a problem. Unless and until that was resolved, she was best kept in the background as a songwriter.

  “Interscope is a long, long road which actually involves a lot of people thinking she’s great to have around, but not pretty enough to be a pop star,” says Sullivan.

  “I can speak to this, having sat through many marketing meetings where this project was discussed,” says an industry source who wishes to remain unnamed. He was familiar with what he calls “her coffeehouse schtick,” via the YouTube clips of her early performances at the Bitter End and her NYU talent competition.

  She was conscripted to write songs for other artists, most especially the Pussycat Dolls, for whom she also had to provide reference vocals—basically, she’d have to sing the song so they’d know how to do it themselves. “Gaga doesn’t take the Pussycat Dolls very seriously,” says her friend Sullivan.

  She was cranky. She got into a fight with Lüc, who was angry that this new assignment was cutting into their vacation time. According to Sullivan, Lüc had saved up money to take her on this romantic trip she’d wanted, and now she was, he thought, capriciously cutting it short because her label called with an assignment, and when they called, she went running. Lüc thought she was a spoiled rich girl with no respect for how hard he had to work, and she thought he was an underachiever who didn’t understand her drive and didn’t support her ambition. This is when she famously told him, “Someday, when we’re not together, you won’t be able to order a cup of coffee at the fucking deli without hearing or seeing me.”

  At this point, says the exec, her look was still a detriment. “She had the bikini or the G-string,” he says. He’s convinced that having been signed by Vincent Herbert was a key factor in the label’s decision to start throwing money and muscle behind her.

  “Not only does Vincent have a real good ear,” he says, “but he has a sense of creating a lane for her—not being excessive in terms of spending millions and millions of dollars on videos, just making sure that she has the [resources] to be what she wants to be.”

  Note that he says “what” and not “who.” It’s always been about what Gaga wanted to be: the biggest star in the world. Who she would become—this avant-garde freak show who would work for days on end crafting the perfect dance song despite wanting to be taken seriously as a singer-songwriter—was, she saw, merely a vessel to get her to the what.

  She used her fight with Lüc over the aborted vac
ation as material for her Pussycat Dolls assignment. She wound up writing “Money Honey,” in which she’s telling her boyfriend that the only currency that matters to her is love. Sullivan remembers the first time she played it for him. “I said, ‘That’s [the name of] an Elvis song.’ ” She didn’t seem to know what he was talking about: “She said, ‘Whatever.’ ”

  Then, Sullivan says, Akon—one of Interscope’s best-selling artists with his own imprint, a Senegalese singer-songwriter-producer who broke through in 2004 with his debut single “Locked Up”—heard “Money Honey.”

  “And he realizes,” says Sullivan, “there’s no reason to buy this song and have the Pussycat Dolls sing it when it’s definitely her song and she’d be fantastic at it. That’s when he starts pushing her forward as an artist.”

  At Interscope, her manager Besencon got Gaga a slot at 2007’s Lollapalooza. It was at this point, according to Fusari’s lawsuit, that he began to get frozen out by Besencon and Gaga. “This is such a music industry thing,” says Josh Grier, an entertainment lawyer who represents Wilco and Ryan Adams. “The part that rings really true” about Fusari’s lawsuit, Grier says, is the allegation that “Fusari’s manager [Besencon] sees where the real talent is, so he goes and fucks his own artist. He gets in bed with her figuratively and makes a separate deal with her and throws Fusari under the bus. That’s the part I believe completely.”

  The Lollapooza booking did not rattle Gaga; if anything, she thought she’d emerge as one of the most buzzed-about new acts on the bill. Once the biggest, most influential rock festival in the country—if not the Western world—Lollapalooza was a nationwide tour founded by Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell in 1991, as alternative music was cresting and taking over the mainstream. The idea was to mash up genres—hip-hop, electronica, industrial, and post-punk acts were all on the bill—and offer downtime activities, like tattooing and body-piercing, on the grounds. But by 1997, Lollapalooza had lost all relevance; Kurt Cobain was long-dead; alternative culture had become so mainstream as to be nullified; and the charts were dominated by boy-bands (’N Sync, Backstreet Boys) and tween-age Disney-bred acts (Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Mandy Moore).