Poker Face

by Maureen Callahan

  “She said, ‘Isn’t that cool?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And I was dismissed.”

  The bubble-filled piano was a companion piece to the bubble dress she debuted on the opening night of her Fame Ball tour on March 12; she also wore it on the cover of Rolling Stone’s “Hot Issue” that May. It was a direct rip-off of a dress made by Hussein Chalayan for his spring 2007 collection—something she did not mention. In February 2010, when she debuted what she called “the living dress”—a long, architectural white gown, replete with a vertiginous headdress and expansive gossamer, fairy-godmother wings, that contracts and expands on its own—she did not repeat the mistake. In a tweet before the dress was unveiled at her show in Liverpool, she wrote, “2nite Haus of Gaga debuts ‘the living dress’ inspired by Hussein Chalayan, as a fashion moment to be performed in a ‘pop show’ at Monsterball.”

  Gaga’s biggest break yet in America came in April, when she was booked to perform on the results show for American Idol. She actually pretaped her appearance, doing three different versions, and the setups and technical issues between takes took so long that, after the second performance, the crowd was told they could leave if they wanted; half of them did. An EW.com reporter who’d been at the taping described the audience’s response to Gaga’s first performance, which paired “Bad Romance” with the far inferior “Alejandro” and involved an enormous water fountain, pyro, dry ice, Gaga in a lace bodysuit over a bra and thong, and tango-ing male dancers:

  “. . . The audience was left so silently agog by the spectacle that afterwards . . . the PAs had to remind everyone that they were on camera, too, and should, you know, appear excited to be there.”

  May was a huge month. Gaga played her now-famous show at Terminal 5 in New York City, drawing Madonna and her daughter Lourdes, and suddenly commanding the attention of the industry. She played four more shows, one in Austin, Texas, and the rest in California, including a set at an annual lesbian gathering known as the “Dinah Shore Weekend” in Palm Springs.

  “She wasn’t a gigantic star when I approached her,” says Mariah Hanson, who owns the venue known as Club Skirts, which presents the Dinah. But by the time Gaga performed at the event, “Poker Face” was climbing the charts, so Hanson was even more impressed when she saw how Gaga threw herself into it, “250 percent.”

  “She gave the audience—which was packed with gay men, which we don’t usually get—so much love and appreciation.” Also: She brought the bubble dress! “She joked around with her bisexuality, with the reasons behind writing the songs, and the audience just ate it up and became more effusive, and it just kind of fed on itself.”

  Hanson books lots of acts on the rise, and has often been underwhelmed: “For instance, we had Ke$ha this year,” she says. “She doesn’t have a great show. It’s not like she won’t eventually, but Lady Gaga was somehow born for this. She understands the importance of merging art and marketing. When we think of Lady Gaga, we think of Cher or Madonna, and she’s been on our radar screens for less than a year.”

  On May 28, her epic video for “Paparazzi,” directed by the gifted, idiosyncratic Jonas Åkerlund (Madonna, U2, the Smashing Pumpkins), was leaked. Or so she said on Twitter: “Stop leaking my motherfucking videos,” she wrote. The controversy, of course, just generated more interest in the clip, a seven-minute-plus-long narrative in which Gaga plays a star who is thrown off a balcony by her boyfriend (played by True Blood star Alexander Skarsgård, who generated even more controversy with his alleged comments about his displeasure in having to kiss her). She’s seen in a wheelchair, a neck brace, dancing, and making out with hair-metal boys on a couch, and then, finally, she kills her boyfriend.

  She got a typically effusive assist from Perez Hilton, who posted it to his site with a review: “The new Princess of Pop, Lady Gaga, has created a masterpiece!” he wrote. “It is her strongest work to date. It is a mini-film. It is art. It is visual pornography. It is satire. It is commentary. It is brilliant! And, we are NOT exaggerating.”

  It was her most sophisticated effort yet, a throwback to the lengthy, plot-driven mini-movies that acts like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Guns ’N Roses produced in the eighties and nineties. Among the pop-culture references: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the hair-metal band Warrant, and Minnie Mouse, whom Gaga was dressed like in the murder scene. Her high styling was due to Åkerlund’s wife, B. She built, among other things, the video’s infamous tricked-out wheelchair. Gaga hired her.

  “They hit it off, but she didn’t last very long,” says a source. Gaga mainly relied on Matt Williams. David and Angela Ciemny describe Gaga and Williams as “like two peas in a pod,” both interpersonally and creatively. (The other key member of her team, and the only one whose tenure is as long, is her choreographer Laurie Ann Gibson, whose most high-profile gig prior was working on P. Diddy’s MTV show Making the Band.)

  “Matt’s not the most social person, but he’s incredibly creative,” says Angela Ciemny. “He’s really passionate about vintage design in all aspects—technology, clothing, all that stuff.” They research together, she says, sourcing rare design books and old biographies, then sketching out modernized adaptations, tweaking elements, working out logistics. Though she says “Gaga shared a lot with me about all the people in her life, and he’s somebody that she really cares about,” Angela admits that she knows absolutely nothing about Williams.

  As with David Ciemny, Williams and Gaga were introduced by someone on Troy Carter’s management team, and that individual will say nothing else. People who knew Williams in New York and worked with him in L.A. say they know almost nothing about him. He’s from California. He wanted to work in fashion. He may or may not have interned at the design house Proenza Schouler. He rarely spoke. He disappeared one day and popped up in L.A., and began seriously dating Erin Hirsh, the stylist who worked for Kanye West. Hirsh had been approached by Lady Gaga to come work for her, but Hirsh had no interest. She recommended Matt Williams, who then dumped Hirsh and began dating Gaga. Williams told Gaga that Kanye was a fan, loved her style, and she’d get paranoid, warning Williams: “Don’t tell Kanye what I’m doing!”

  The one thing everyone does recall about Williams: He seemed to be an opportunist, and not a very subtle one.

  “He really was handsome beyond belief,” says one source who socialized with Williams in downtown New York in 2007, and who says that Williams was intent on breaking into his social circle, which included actors and designers and was led by Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough.

  According to one source, McCollough wanted nothing to do with Williams. He then wound up spending a lot of time with fashion designer Ben Cho, who was young, gifted, popular—the locus of the Lower East Side social scene. Cho was friends with downtown influencers in every subculture, connecting skate rats to starlets, starlets to photographers, photographers to artists and designers and musicians. He hung out with actresses Chloë Sevigny, Christina Ricci, and Natasha Lyonne; photographer Ryan McGinley and the late artist Dash Snow; singer-songwriter Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power). He’d give his friends tattoos, host them at his weekly Sunday-night Smiths-tribute party at a club called Sway. If you wanted to be in with the downtown art-scene A-list, Cho was the key.

  “From the minute we met Matt, we did not trust him,” says a friend of Cho’s. “Ben was in love with Matt, and Matt hung out with Ben 24/7. We just thought there was something very untrustworthy and shady about him. Everyone thought he was a social climber.”

  “He was always so calculating,” says another source. “I remember one night having dinner in the West Village with Matt and Ben. Ben was really enchanted with Matt, but it was, like, Matt was straight, of course. But he would always be sitting there [being] cute, and then he started talking and he was just kind of eager. . . . I don’t remember it being Oscar Wilde in the garden, you know?”

  “I remember Matt as young, eager,” says another acquaintance from this time. “He was super fashion-y. He hung out with Ben forever an
d with [rising] photographer David Sherry. He definitely wanted to be connected to [the right] people, but I actually got a really good impression of him.”

  This source, along with Brendan Sullivan, recalls Williams’s scene as mainly gay men who worked in fashion. When it came to men who were interested, this source says “he really wouldn’t go there. He’d bring it close to that—sleepovers, shit like that—but nothing weird.” One friend of Ben Cho’s remembers Cho introducing Williams around as his boyfriend, and another isn’t sure exactly what went on in that relationship. But Cho’s friend says she believes Williams and Cho were a couple, and that Williams didn’t care who he hurt, had no problem using people and tossing them aside when he was done.

  Both sources say Cho was devastated when Williams suddenly picked up and left for California. No one knew why he was leaving or what he planned to do there, and then, months later, they heard he was working for Lady Gaga.

  Photographic Insert B

  A knockout performance in a knockout dress at the Wiltern in L.A., March 2009.

  Michael Buckner/Getty Images

  Performing in her beloved bubble dress at her even more beloved bubble-filled piano at Philadelphia’s Electric Factory, May 2009.

  Scott Weiner/Retna Ltd.

  A Rubicon has been crossed: Gaga’s bra explodes at the 2009 MuchMusic Video Awards in Canada.

  © The Toronto Star/ZUMA Press

  The bow made of hair accents the architecture of the dress, and the eye makeup keys off the color palette: Lady Gaga toasts the crowd at Skylight Studios, NYC, December 2008.

  Theo Wargo/Getty Images for VEVO

  Distinctly referencing another influence, androgynous shock-rock star Marilyn Manson, at the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards in L.A., January 2010.

  Michael Caulfield/WireImage

  Like a cross between a Roman bathhouse warrior and Tina Turner in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome: Gaga onstage at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, January 2010.

  Sonia Moskowitz/Globe Photos

  Gaga at the opening of the European leg of her “Monster Ball” in Odyssey Arena, Dublin, 2010.

  WENN

  As a vaguely suicidal red-leather dominatrix with impressive abs: Gaga performing at Capital FM’s Jingle Ball in London, 2009.

  Yui Mok/PA Wire/Press Association Images

  Part Sally Field as “The Flying Nun,” part Madonna

  in her Church-baiting days: fishnets, nipple bandages, and a see-through habit make the standby nun costume thoroughly Gaga.

  Splash News

  In the stunning, ethereal “mechanical dress” that folded out and opened on its own, on Britain’s Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, March 2010.

  Brian J. Ritchie/Hotsauce/Rex/Rex USA

  In full-on beleaguered star mode at the Marc Jacobs Spring 2010 show, New York City, September 2009.

  Jeremy Kost/WireImage

  With fellow misfit Kermit the Frog at the MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall, 2009.

  Kevin Mazur/WireImage

  A pearl-encrusted Gaga performs at amfAR’s New York Gala at Cipriani 42nd Street to mark the beginning of Fashion Week, February 2010.

  Larry Busacca/Getty Images

  Working her skyscraper chic with her favorite accessory, her pink teacup, at the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, January 2010.

  Kevin Mazur/WireImage

  The telephone hat must have seemed the only logical follow-up to the mechanical dress: Gaga after her performance on the same broadcast of Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, March 2010.

  Brian J. Ritchie/Hotsauce/Rex/Rex USA

  Channeling Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter, a 1974 curio about a former concentration camp victim who, years later, falls in love with her Nazi tormentor. For some reason, fashion people love this movie.

  Rennio Maifredi/trunkarchive.com, 2009

  Chapter Nine

  Offended Anatomy

  Back to May 2009 and back to L.A., where Gaga appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in her now-famous rotating orbital headpiece. “It’s my barrier,” she told Ellen. “It’s my Gaga barrier.” Then she performed “Poker Face,” starting it off as a lounge lizard/cabaret number before going into full-on dance mode, spheres spinning. The same day she had a shoot with Rolling Stone magazine from five-thirty P.M. to midnight, for the cover of their annual “Hot Issue,” to be shot by famed photographer David LaChapelle, and then she had a live performance the next night, May 12, on Dancing with the Stars. The following night, she was on a plane to Australia to rejoin the Pussycat Dolls on tour. By now she was the only act on the bill anyone was talking about.

  “We’d go into catering and there’d be the local papers and reviews, and the leads would say, ‘Gaga dominated,’ ” says Ciemny. “And the Dolls were sitting right there. It was embarrassing.”

  Lead Pussycat Doll Scherzinger says she’d study Gaga from the side of the stage every night. “I remember watching her perform, her eyes,” Scherzinger says. “I looked at her and said, ‘I’m afraid of her.’ As an artist, there are things I want to be fearless enough to communicate, but I limit myself sometimes. She had no boundaries, no fear, and did it in such a creative, theatrical way, she inspired me to be like, ‘Wow, you can do this.’ She’s got so many costumes, so many new ideas, the most amazing art creations on her head.”

  As for whether the other Dolls felt upstaged, as had been reported, Scherzinger says, “I don’t think they felt that. I think they thought she was a force to be reckoned with.”

  “It was a little awkward,” says David Ciemny. “There was a closed-door situation for a little bit.”

  At the time, Gaga had been dating a guy who went by the name Speedy (real name: Frank Lopera). She and Williams had broken up, and Williams had rekindled his relationship with Erin Hirsh. What exactly Speedy did for a living remained unclear: He’s alternately been described as a male model, an artist, and an energy drink entrepreneur. He was mentioned in the Rolling Stone article as a supporting character, along with Lüc, whom she described as her great lost love: “I was his Sandy, and he was my Danny, and I just broke,” she told the magazine. She also went on a bit about being bisexual, but how she didn’t really want to go on about being bisexual because that would be exploitative.

  The stuff about Lüc was telling; she’d broken up with him that past December, but anyone who was close to her knew she wasn’t over him.

  “I don’t think she’ll ever be over Lüc, you know?” says Angela Ciemny. David agrees: “She just has always had a thing for him that is beyond . . . and he knows it and he took advantage of it.” Later that year, in November, Lüc showed up for Gaga’s record release party at the now-defunct Virgin megastore in Manhattan’s Union Square. “I would equate it to a drug,” David says. “I mean, I talked to her for hours and hours about him. He came down to Virgin megastore and there’s hundreds of kids all lined up, and all she could think about is ‘Lüc’s coming, oh my God, Lüc’s coming.’ No matter what she was doing, or what guy she was with, when she went to New York, she was pretty much going to be with Lüc.”

  He also showed up, long after their breakup, at her record release party at the Highline Ballroom in New York City, where, according to a source, he proceeded to talk about how she was lip-syncing too much and how he was trying to make her stop it. No one understood what she saw in this guy; as Brendan Sullivan puts it, “Lüc. Fucking Lüc.”

  Back to Speedy: “She seemed really gaga over him,” says Scherzinger, seemingly unaware of the pun. “I remember her talking about going away on vacation with him.” (The two were shot on the beach in Hawaii in June, and these were the first U.S. paparazzi shots of Lady Gaga, since she had become Lady Gaga, without any makeup on. She’s wearing a black one-piece bathing suit and flip-flops; her eyebrows are dyed blond; and her real hair is damaged and coarse. Curiously, she seems to be aware of the photographers; in one shot, she’s making direct eye contact with the camera.)

  “Speedy was a friend of [p
hotographer] David LaChapelle,” says a source. “And David LaChapelle—Gaga put that guy on the highest pedestal ever, because of his art. Speedy . . . I don’t know what that guy does. He would come out on the road and it was like, ‘What are you working on?’ and he’d be like, ‘Uh . . .’ The guy was all talk. But his thing was, he was really well-endowed. That’s all she talked about. I would tell her, ‘TMI’ [too much information] all day long.”

  Amanda Lepore, the famous New York City transsexual icon and nightlife fixture, met Speedy and Gaga through her friend LaChapelle (she has been called his muse). She is also friendly with the rapper Cazwell, who produced parts of Lepore’s first record (sample title: “My Hair Looks Fierce”). Actually, she says, she’d known Speedy from the nightlife scene since he was about fifteen and working as a club promoter at a gay night called Beige at downtown’s Bowery Bar.

  LaChapelle invited Lepore and Cazwell to his office in New York for his meeting with Gaga about concepts for her Rolling Stone shoot. Gaga then invited all of them to dinner at Speedy’s parents’ house in Queens.

  “She was super-nice and down-to-earth,” Lepore says. Gaga was still in that day’s makeup, but was wearing leggings and flats. “She was talking about Lady Gaga in the third person, like, ‘Oh, Gaga would do this,’ ‘Gaga that.’ But not like it was her—like it was a third person. I think she’s really crossed that boundary.”