Poker Face

by Maureen Callahan

  Gaga had also invited several of her old friends along, and Lepore remembers thinking how interesting it was that she wasn’t running with a fabulous New York crowd: “They were very, like, Jersey Shore,” she says, “with the fake tans . . . One of the boyfriends had, like, tweezed eyebrows and shaved body hair.”

  Most shocking, says Lepore, was that Gaga cooked dinner for the whole group: spaghetti. It surprised them all but was very much in keeping with the Catholic girl from the nice Italian family on the Upper West Side, who says that a part of her really wants to find a nice man to marry and serve him dinner each night. When Angela and David Ciemny visited Gaga at her new home in L.A. in October 2009, she ushered them into the kitchen, where she was making dinner for Matt Williams; they’d been back together for nearly a year. She was in high heels, tight pants, and a black bra.

  In Australia, Gaga’s profile was rising; “LoveGame,” released as a single there, had hit nineteen on the charts in April, and her video had been banned, in part because she wasn’t wearing any pants. (What seemed outré back when the video was shot was, by the summer of 2009, a full-on urban trend; in New York City, girls took to wearing belted Oxford shirts, shoes, and nothing else—to work.) In mid-May Gaga appeared on the Australian talk show Rove wearing a simple white V-neck dress and an eighteen-inch pyramid of braided hair atop her head. She looked like one of the SNL Coneheads.

  Her speaking voice had lost its New York outer-borough roughness; she was speaking in that higher, far more girlish pitch, regional accent buffed and puffed away, network news anchor–style. She had also begun to perfect the art of seeming remarkably humble while actually congratulating herself:

  “Since we last had you on the show,” says host Rove McManus, “you haven’t stopped touring, and it’s been nearly twelve months.”

  “It’s been exactly twelve months, I think,” Gaga replies.

  “How’s it all been for you?” Rove asks.

  “It’s been really amazing. I just am so grateful and I can’t believe it. I just played in New Zealand yesterday and”—she takes a breath—“twelve thousand people are singing my lyrics.”

  She also appeared on Sunrise, Australia’s equivalent of The Today Show, and caught a lot of flak in the press for lip-synching. Ciemny says it was not unlike the disparagement suffered by Ashlee Simpson when she was caught lip-synching on Saturday Night Live.

  “Australia does not, will not, tolerate track acts,” he says. “It just won’t do it.” Gaga, he says, had played a gig the night before, gotten just three hours of rest, and woke up to almost no voice.

  She was suffering from lack of sleep, perpetual jet lag, and a rigorous, self-imposed diet. “She’d say, ‘I can’t have that, I can’t have that,’ ” David Ciemny says. “She always wanted salads, deli meat and cheese, and hummus and chicken—that was her big thing, hummus and grilled chicken. If she had something fried, she’d say, ‘I totally splurged.’ ”

  Like just about every other famous young girl, Gaga had to keep her weight at a ridiculously low level. “From the first time we met her and measured her and checked her for the final [ensembles], she’d lost twenty pounds,” says a costumer who worked with her last year. “She self-proclaimed that she didn’t eat for weeks to fit into the clothes.”

  Her schedule had, if possible, gotten more intense. Or maybe it just felt that way. Ciemny says that, during his time with her, he had to take her to the hospital at least half a dozen times in various countries; sometimes people would tell her she had to go, sometimes she would call from her room and say she needed to go.

  “Her promotion schedule was ridiculous,” says David Ciemny. “When I say she was sick, I mean physically and mentally. It was all exhaustion from lack of sleep, too many shows. There was this point of breaking down in tears, just so exhausted. The doctor would say, ‘You need three days with nothing but sleep; cancel everything.’ And we’d cancel everything. For twelve hours.”

  “She was just completely depleted,” says David’s wife Angela. “You know, I would call David and say, ‘You need to call her manager and tell him she can’t perform, or she can’t get up at five in the morning.’ And it would always be like, ‘Ange, get her to do it. Get her to eat, get her to sleep right now, she doesn’t need to take her makeup off, she doesn’t need to shower.’ ” Angela thinks Gaga’s only escape was the hospital: “I think these were times when it was, like, ‘I can’t be pushed. I need to check out.’ ”

  The usual course of treatment, David says, was an IV bag filled with saline and electrolytes and a B-12 shot for energy. On those rare occasions that he called Gaga’s parents to let them know their daughter was in the hospital, he’d catch it from her management.

  “The parents would call the manager saying, ‘Why are you letting there be a schedule like this for my daughter? Are you crazy? What are you thinking?’ And then management would call me and say, ‘What are you thinking? Why would you call the parents and make them all worried?’ ”

  After the Pussycat Dolls tour, Gaga was off to Asia to do promotion from June 1 to 13; on June 26, she embarked on a two-month-long tour of Europe. In between, she went on that vacation she’d been telling Scherzinger about, with her boyfriend Speedy. They stayed at David LaChapelle’s house. It was here that she finally heard back from Kanye West about an idea for the two to co-headline a tour later that year.

  West flew down to Hawaii the next day, and LaChappelle photographed them for the tour, a Tarzan-and-Jane theme. “The whole Kanye tour . . . a lot of people [on her team] thought it was a bad idea,” says David Ciemny. “Because Kanye’s a disaster; he’s just a mess. We all knew it was a train wreck waiting to happen. And actually it was Anthony Randall, her production guy, who basically said, ‘Really, if you’re doing Kanye, I’m out, I’m done.’ She didn’t care. Their relationship went downhill really quickly. He didn’t last very long.”

  West and Gaga announced tour dates for their co-headlining “Fame Kills” tour on September 15, 2009. “I saw the concept book for it,” says a Kanye source. “It was a really complicated, high-concept collaboration—it wasn’t like, opening act/main act. It was this whole intricate, creative, never-before-seen kind of thing, with a lot of duets and a few new songs, this elaborate stage . . . it seemed intense, a lot for a new artist that’s blowing up at that second to go off and do this other thing.”

  On October 1, the tour was canceled. The causal link was assumed to be West’s hijacking of teenage newcomer Taylor Swift’s VMA acceptance speech for Best Female Video, proclaiming that Beyoncé deserved it. But that, according to sources, was only part of it, and good timing for a classy bow out; he was public enemy number one, his record sales tanked, Donald Trump called for a Kanye boycott. . . . Gaga, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly famous, morphing from an object of curiosity and fascination to a star who was well liked in the industry and who was generating an increasingly rabid fan base.

  “I know there was creative infighting before [they canceled the tour]; he told me that,” says the Kanye source, adding that Gaga and West also had a “strained” personal relationship. “But someone else who’d worked with him told me that if it hadn’t been the VMAs thing, it would’ve been something else, because he was just trying to get the whole thing shut down. It was just some fucked-up way of trying to get off the road.”

  “That turned out to be a good thing for her,” says Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of the trade publication Pollstar. “You kind of got the sense that she was driving that tour; now she’s going on, headlining, and she is the star of the show.” (According to Pollstar, from October 8, 2008, through March 14, 2010, Lady Gaga grossed $12.8 million on tour.)

  That summer, she was booked into two of England’s biggest festivals: Glastonbury and T in the Park. Glastonbury was especially telling: Here she was, playing an outdoor festival in the daytime just two years after she’d had such a disastrous experience at Lollapalooza. She did five costume changes over an hour-long set, incl
uding a space-age disco minidress (a look she’d directly ripped off from Missing Persons’ Dale Bozzio). She had three male dancers behind her. The choreography was tight; she had a new backing band; she was performing before a sea of people, fifty thousand in all, girls with lightning bolts painted over one eye in tribute to her.

  Out in the crowd, a fan was wrapped in a head-to-toe pink body stocking; it looked like a human wrapped in a giant condom. Most everyone knew all the words, and she ended her performance of “LoveGame” with what would later become a midway punctuation point in her 2010 arena tour: She thrust her disco stick in the air and jumped up and down, and suddenly the crowd was doing the same, in perfect time. She also broke out her pyrotechnic bra, sparks shooting from her breasts, to the crowd’s amazement and awe.

  “Pop madness/brilliance from a performer at home in front of the huge crowds,” said Will Dean in the Guardian.

  “Wacky pop diva Lady Gaga wowed the crowd with a stage show like something you’d see in a glitzy arena rather than a dirty festival,” said Nadia Mendoza in the Sun.

  The Daily Mail, meanwhile, made note of how much Lily Allen—the Brit pop singer Gaga had once said she needed to “keep my eye on”—was dressed and made up like Gaga. Allen wore a shoulder-length platinum blond wig offstage and a lilac one on, along with generous half crescents of pink glitter under her eyes, a purple jumpsuit with a plunging neckline, and one white glove, in tribute to Michael Jackson, who’d died the day before, June 25.

  “On our last rehearsal day, the day before Glastonbury, I heard [about Jackson’s death], so I went over to where they were rehearsing and I was like, ‘Gaga, Michael Jackson just died,’ ” David Ciemny recalls. “And she was like, ‘Shut up, David, I don’t even want to hear that. No. Don’t tell me that. Don’t even joke about it, like, seriously, shut up.’ ” So he left the room, and an hour later, she realized it was true.

  “She was really shaken up,” he says. She’d always loved Michael Jackson, and, he says, “I think she had just found out that Michael was a fan.”

  She was also jarred by the rumors spreading on the Internet that she was a hermaphrodite, or a man. Video taken by a fan caught her at a weird angle, with her micro-skirt having ridden up and something fuzzy underneath, and that image whipped around online along with an alleged quote from Gaga on the subject: “It’s not something I’m ashamed of; it’s just not something I go around telling everyone.”

  She let the controversy and rumors swirl for weeks before addressing the issue, saying, “I’m not offended; my vagina is offended.” (Speculation on blogs followed that Gaga was such a genius at generating publicity through controversy that she’d planned the whole hoax; sources close to her say that’s not true.)

  Gaga herself noted that the really important thing here was that she’d sold 4 million records in the span of six months, and she offered an astute theory as to why the rumor had gained traction: “The idea that we equate strength with men, and a penis is a symbol of male strength, you know—it is what it is.”

  Chapter Ten

  Makeover

  She continued to tour Europe in July, and it was during this time that she met Nicola Formichetti, who was styling her for a shoot for V magazine, a niche, semi-outré American fashion book. The thirty-three-year-old Formichetti is half-Italian and half-Japanese and is roundly considered the most talented stylist of his generation. He’s on the mastheads of Vogue Hommes Japan, V, V Man, AnOther, and AnOther Man, and is the creative director of the UK’s Dazed & Confused. He’s worked with designers and brands as disparate as Prada, Levi’s, Missoni, H&M, Max Mara, and Alexander McQueen, whose work Gaga began to frequently reference and in some cases reproduce wholesale. These looks, however, read as homages rather than rip-offs; as talented as Williams was, and as brilliantly as he elevated her look, Formichetti is considered the true genius. Before Nicola, she could not get in with high-end designers; no one would loan her anything. He took her from a costume-y, gimmicky look to high-fashion eccentricity, and today designers fight for the honor of dressing her.

  “[Nicola] is responsible for her hard-edge glamour look,” says an industry source. “He definitely has an elegance or finesse that it sometimes seems she’d really be lacking, because she’d be wearing so many things at the same time, or the hair would just be so weird with the rest of the shit. I hear there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen over there. But he’s done a good job with her. Her train-wreck look seems to be getting less . . . train-wreck. That’s his influence.”

  The costumer who fitted Gaga for one of her tours agrees that, prior to Formicetti, there seemed to be no top-down decision-making regarding her aesthetic.

  “It seemed like [her fame] exploded so fast that no one was really ready for it,” says the source. “There was so much going on that it was hard for her—for it to seem like anyone was in control. It just seemed like, ‘Make it happen, do the best you can, get it done.’ ”

  At the V magazine shoot—like the early one she did with Warwick Saint in L.A.—her music was on the sound system. The call time was nine A.M., at Splashlight Studios in downtown New York; she’d just flown in from Canada and was wearing last night’s makeup. Gaga asked for sushi, says an assistant who worked on that shoot, who recalls that as her only unusual request. “She hadn’t slept and was still wearing her costume,” says the assistant. “But she had a great, positive energy to her; she was open to everything.”

  The assistant, who was “convinced after seeing her that she was at least twenty-eight,” was struck by Gaga’s Donatella Versace look, which came off in the resulting photo spread as high-fashion (and prescient: she was months ahead of the Jersey Shore curve). Angela Ciemny says Gaga would vacillate between pallid white and deeply tan on a whim, spray-tanning one day and scrubbing off the next, with no thought to what it might do to her skin, using tanning beds when she couldn’t afford to have fake tanner stain a costume. “It depended on the look she wanted,” says Angela.

  This look was not going over well with the fashion people on the V shoot. “She was severely spray-tanned,” says the assistant. “She’s really short and just, like, orange. She looked like a tiny Oompa-Loompa in a bodysuit.”

  Gaga kept her entourage in a back room, and the stylist doesn’t recall seeing Williams on the set. Gaga and Nicola didn’t really begin to talk until later in the day, and, according to the stylist, Gaga, in contrast to her usual, control-freak style, was very low-key.

  Another source who was on the set that day recalls being struck by “the fake tan, really bad hair, and like, really cheesy style. She was three sizes bigger than she is now. But she was really nice. Behind closed doors, she’s really normal.”

  This source—who also knows Matt Williams and Erin Hirsh, and is familiar with the back-and-forth relationships he’s had with Hirsh and Gaga—says that Formichetti is solely responsible for transforming Gaga into a style icon.

  When he was calling in clothes for the shoot, says the source, Formichetti didn’t tell the designers who he was shooting—he knew that if he did, they’d send nothing over. Gaga knew, says the source: “She totally got it.”

  She was the cover of the fall 2009 issue, face chestnut brown, hair almost white blond, pink sunglasses on some covers, blue on others. The headline: “It’s Lady Gaga’s World . . . We’re Just Living in It!”

  After that shoot, Gaga hired Nicola—or, in her parlance, invited him to join the Haus. As she did on that first shoot, she continued to give Formichetti “a lot of leeway,” says David Ciemny, who was also present that day. “When she really connects with a creative person, she gives them a lot of power.” She was still insecure, and was vocal about feeling uncomfortable with her looks. After the shoot hit the stands and she found herself embraced by the world of high-fashion, she was impressed that Formichetti refused to accept clothes from designers who had been mean or dismissive about dressing her. “The thing about Nicola,” says the source, “is that he’s social, he’s on the scene, b
ut he’s a very quiet person. He’s very closed; he doesn’t really open himself to a lot of people.” Gaga’s the same way, and they quickly identified each other as a fellow traveler.

  They began exchanging ideas via phone and e-mail mostly, with Formichetti flying in for TV appearances or high-profile events. “Most stylists would say, head-to-toe, here’s a look,” says Ciemny. “But he gave her the tools. She would put the puzzle together from the pieces he’d give, and then add. She’d say, ‘OK, I love all of this, but now let me take some bondage tape and put some Xs on my nipples and then we’re good.’ ”

  “As far as I know,” says a designer who’s worked with Gaga, “[her team] is Nicola and Matt. She does talk about everything being her idea, though.”

  She also wound up getting back together with Williams, who now had a baby son with his stylist girlfriend. There was, apparently, some overlap. “He went after [Gaga] big-time, hard,” says a source, who views Williams as a bit of an opportunist. “He tried really, really hard, and he was around while she was with other guys. But why wouldn’t he try to get her back? This girl is the biggest star in the world, he already had a relationship with her. . . . He’d be stupid [not to] want to go to the next level.”

  It’s hard to identify the tipping point for Gaga, the point at which she went from being unknown to an entity in the ether to a celebrity to a superstar, but it’s likely her performance of “Paparazzi” at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards on September 13 was it. She showed up with Kermit the Frog, but left him in the limo, and sat with her dad during the ceremony. Hers was the first performance, which began as pop frippery, Gaga in white lying across the stage, an homage to Madonna’s breakthrough performance of “Like a Virgin” at the VMAs in 1984. Halfway through she took to a white piano, dementedly shaking her bewigged head, one foot propped on the edge of the keys. There was a cutaway to P. Diddy in the audience; he looked confused. Then she was back center stage, suddenly dripping in blood, smearing it across her face, collapsing, obscured by her dancers, then lifted by rope above the stage, her pop-culture suicide for fame complete. She even managed to make the white of her right eye look like it was bleeding. That’s commitment.