There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  Nine

  On September 11, 2011, Lady Gaga and I were in a suite at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, sixty-five stories above New York’s Columbus Circle. Earlier that afternoon she had cooked me a pasta meal at her parents’ apartment, about ten blocks from the hotel. The previous day, we had spent the afternoon at a dive bar on the Lower East Side with some of her old friends. Now we were in the midst of a three-hour interview and we were talking about hanging out with celebrities. She said that Hollywood felt like a Kegel exercise. “It’s like my vagina inhales,” she said. “I get so nervous.” Nervous? “Not nervous,” she said, “just uncomfortable. You know when you’re speaking with someone and you just know they’re not listening to anything that you’re saying? They’re just waiting their turn to talk. I get very confused. It’s just not my style. I don’t like fake people. I don’t surround myself with people who just tell me what I want to hear all day. I work hard and I make records, and I’m passionate about music. It doesn’t get me off to have champagne with celebrities. It’s like a tribe; why would I gather with people that I don’t know? I have made some wonderful friends among the previous generations of music and I’ve been very lucky that they really love what I create. It’s always nice when you meet someone that you revered your whole life, and they are so wonderfully nice.” What happens, I asked, when you meet somebody you revered your whole life and they turn out to be horrible? “It’s devastating,” she said. “It’s absolutely devastating.”

  I knew she was referring to the M word—my nickname for Madonna—who, along with David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, John Lennon and Britney Spears, Gaga had loved as a child. Madonna had seemed especially petty about Gaga’s song “Born This Way,” claiming—and not quietly—that it sounded suspiciously like her own “Express Yourself.” I asked Gaga about this “controversy.” She was diplomatic. “What I have arrived at as a performer,” she said, “is that you must create what you know is your vision, and execute it exactly as you see it. If someone thinks it’s like another artist, or it reminds [them] of something they’ve seen before, then that’s what shall be. It’s not my responsibility to teach people how to excavate art and music. It’s my purpose to entertain.” You expected the comparison? I asked. “I anticipated that something might occur,” she said. “And I don’t give a shit. People will see what they choose to see. I have never questioned the integrity of my creations. I love what I have made. And to create a stir with a pop song is pretty fuckin’ exciting, if you ask me.”

  • • •

  Aside from the Italian heritage and the dyed blonde hair, Gaga was nothing like Madonna. Lady Gaga has a great voice. She can really play the piano. She writes hit songs with undeniably catchy choruses. She is connected to her audience. She is warm.

  One afternoon, way back in 1983, Madonna was at the East Side Manhattan apartment of fashion photographer Steven Meisel. Steven and I were friends at the time. He was going to take the photo for Madonna’s Like a Virgin album cover. He wanted me to talk to her. He put her on the phone. “I want to rule the world!” she squealed. Those literally were the first—and may have been the only—words out of her mouth that day. Later, we did one interview, on July 25, 1984, at the Warner Brothers Records offices at Rockefeller Plaza. We talked for almost two hours. I recently listened back to that tape, and my impression remains the same now as it was then: to me, she seemed humorless, a determined woman who decided music was the way to go. It would help her rule the world.

  Madonna was the only one in thousands of interviews that I did over four decades who gave me absolutely nothing. She talked for a long time. She told me her story. But it all sounded like boilerplate. She wanted to come to New York City ever since she was five years old. She had never been on a plane before. She came here with just $35 in her pocket. She felt too guilty to ask her father for money. She said she struggled for years. She came here wanting to conquer the city, and, now, she told me, “I feel like I own the joint.” Her personal life was topsy-turvy. Boyfriends always picked fights just before an audition or a big show, she said, and it fucked her up. “I’ve gone onstage with tears in my eyes.” Despite that sole heartfelt admission, it was a businesslike business conversation. No passion. She talked about album sales. She talked about her “image.” She said she knew she could sing (not the majority opinion) and ultimately, she wanted to be a great actress. She had a problem, she said, when radio programmers found out she was white. She said they thought she sounded black. (This was news to me.) Maybe she was in a bad mood. Maybe she just didn’t like me. At any rate, we just didn’t hit it off.

  *

  Twenty-five years later, in 2008, Madonna was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was the same year that Leonard Cohen finally got in. Lou Reed inducted Leonard. Following Lou’s introduction and Leonard’s acceptance speech, Leonard, Lou and I walked backstage to the kitchen in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel ballroom. Madonna was standing inside the swinging door, getting a makeup touch-up before she was inducted by Justin Timberlake. We wanted to see Damien Rice’s performance of Leonard’s gorgeous song “Hallelujah” on the TV monitor. The three of us were immediately stopped by Madonna’s bodyguards. Just as I was about to flip out, Madonna’s manager Guy Oseary—to his credit—told them to leave us alone. We stood and watched the TV. Madonna stood behind us, talking loudly and chewing gum.

  *

  After Madonna’s 2012 Super Bowl appearance, one prominent music journalist who shall remain nameless (Jim Farber) told me, “Well of course she lip-synched. And thank god. Can you imagine if she actually sang??” And he likes her. Adores. Madonna did little to conceal her ire over the success of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” As she reportedly lip-synched her way around the world on tour, she performed a version of “Express Yourself,” then segued right into Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” was, Madonna told Cynthia McFadden on 20/20, “reductive.” Then she smirked and added, “Look it up.” And despite her gay fans, one gay superstar (Elton John) told me, “Madonna has never done anything for the gay community except take their money.” Elton had been particularly catty, but on point, about Madonna when he compared her to a “fairground stripper.” When she started out, in the 1980s, Madonna took a little bit from the Paradise Garage gay disco scene, a little bit from the Beastie Boys, and a lot from Steven Meisel—and mixed it all up into a watered-down, commercial stew.

  • • •

  Every success story has an influential mentor, or a scene. Often, it’s someone, or something, that happened years before. “New” things happen by osmosis, insidious influence, obvious imitation, or all of the above. In the early 1980s, at the same time that AIDS started to appear in New York City, there was a small scene that was a pale imitation of the 1960s Andy Warhol Factory scene. It grew out of the wittier, smarter, Max’s Kansas City crowd and the New York Dolls and David Bowie. It wasn’t about money. It was to some degree, about fame—but an extremely limited and underground fame. As is often the case with anything original, it was too outrageous for the general public. This was Steven Meisel and his crowd. The circle of people around Meisel at that time was tiny. It consisted of a few fashion professionals, models, music insiders and drag queens. It included the platinum blonde transsexual “model” Teri Toye, her platinum blonde sister Tami, pianist Richard Sohl, designers Stephen Sprouse and Anna Sui (years before they were famous), makeup artists Way Bandy, Francois Nars (when he was just starting out), Kevyn Aucoin (when he was just starting out), hairdresser Oribe (when he was just starting out), and various others. It took place between Meisel’s photography studio on Park Avenue South, Ricky Sohl and Teri Toye’s fifth-floor walk-up on West 85th Street, and Sprouse’s West 57th Street workroom. “Events” were held just for fun, and captured by a home video recorder. These situations were created simply as excuses to dress up and to do hair and makeup. But it was all taken very seriously, yet not seriously enough. There were Christmas “s
pecials” and, most importantly, Halloween specials. Everyone would scream and pose and perform. For hours. I recently watched some of the tapes we recorded during that time. Half the people in them are currently dead. But I still remember the energy. And I remember the smell of the inks Sprouse used for the graffiti he sprayed on his early clothes. Everyone wore black. This was years before the salespeople in Barneys, or hairdressers in high-priced salons wore mandatory black. Some of the men wore wigs and headbands. Sprouse had been an assistant to Halston, but also made clothes for his Bowery neighbor Debbie Harry during the CBGB’s days. By the 1980s, he was making black clothes, but also did minidresses and matching graffiti tights in the brightest neons—hot pink, chartreuse and orange.

  At that time, the straight New York art scene included the painters David Salle, Francesco Clemente, Robert Longo, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel. Andy Warhol was still alive. So was Keith Haring. The Odeon restaurant, owned by brothers Brian and Keith McNally and in the middle of nowhere—currently Tribeca—was considered the height of something “new.” It was one of the first restaurants, as opposed to a bar or club, to be considered a happening spot. But the next twenty-five years of fashion and music were changed by the more underground, and ultimately more insidiously influential scene going on with Meisel and his acolytes. Steven anointed hairdressers Oribe and Odile, makeup artists Francois Nars and Kevyn Aucoin, and young models Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell. (Do not think that the very young Beyoncé wasn’t practicing Naomi Campbell poses in front of her mirror in Houston.) If you weren’t involved in this, you probably weren’t aware of it. Or aware of how it seeped in and created change.

  *

  To be in a scene in New York then—or at any time for that matter—was completely different than if you came to New York, wrote about a scene, and thought you were in that scene. It was not unlike CBGB’s when writers from New York magazine came down (and it was definitely considered down) to do a story. Those writers were tourists. And it was a different world at that time. Those 1980s nights were not planned. There were no red carpets. No events were manned by a team of clipboard-bearing publicists. No one was hawking a fragrance. Those nights were born out of fun, passion, sex and ambition. One night in 1984, I left Area around three a.m. with the makeup artist Way Bandy. Area was a club all the way downtown in the middle of nowhere on Hudson Street—currently Tribeca. The club featured “performance art” spaces behind big glass windows in the hallway. Way was a famous makeup artist who could actually paint a completely new face on someone’s face. He was Southern, very tall, very grand, very good looking. Of an indeterminate age, he had dark hair and perfectly smooth skin. He wore makeup. He always wore black. Occasionally, Way would dress in drag and assume his alter ego “Margo George”—“the owner of the first, and most prestigious, modeling agency.” On camera as Margo for those little home videos, Way wore a black shift dress, a short black wig, and earrings. He held a live chihuahua in his lap. And, in a tone of voice akin to Gloria Swanson’s in Sunset Boulevard, he would tell tales about Mae West’s funeral. This all was happening almost a generation after Andy Warhol and Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis and their “real” movies. There were maybe thirty people in this scene. Still. One night, Way and I—accompanied by the often-shirtless model Attila, who had waist-length hair and was the boy of that minute (and I mean literally that minute)—went to an all-night coffeeshop (now it would be called a diner) on Sixth Avenue. It was in the West 50s, around the corner from Way’s apartment. We walked into the place and the waiter took us to Way’s regular booth. The waiter said to Way, “Mr. Bandy, is everything all right?” Way raised his arm, twisted a lightbulb that was shining too brightly above the booth, took the bulb out of the socket, and said, “Now it is.”

  *

  With the onslaught of MTV, the visuals became as important as the music. The fashion world merged with the music world. Paula Greif, an art director who worked a lot with Steven Meisel—particularly on Madonna’s Like a Virgin album cover—directed one of the first videos for MTV. It was the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?”—done with eight millimeter film, utilizing very fast cuts. I always told Paula that all of the videos that followed over the next two decades were her fault. Of course, she didn’t get any of the credit. Or the blame.

  Richard Sohl, who played piano for Patti Smith, had his own drag alter ego: a Swedish model named Astrid. “She” was famous for her poses: “The Prayer,” “The Search.” I interviewed “Astrid” for Interview magazine. Many readers thought she was a real Swedish model. The fledgling photographer David LaChapelle dressed up like Steven Meisel on Halloween and knelt at Steven’s feet at Area. There would be no Steven Klein today had there not been Steven Meisel then. (Of course, Richard Avedon had famously remarked that looking at Meisel’s photographs was like drowning, and watching his entire life pass before his eyes.) In the 1980s, Steven and Francois Nars collaborated on what is referred to as a “story” in fashion magazines: a series of pictures for Italian Vogue of women who appeared to be in the post-operative stages of plastic surgery. They had bandages all over their faces. Fast forward to Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” video. Most Gaga fans don’t know much—if anything—about any of this. They may not know about the British performance artist Leigh Bowery, or the theatrical German musician Klaus Nomi. Or Paris Is Burning—the movie about drag queens “vogueing.” They might not be familiar with Peter Hujar’s photo of Candy Darling in full makeup, dying, in the hospital (although Antony of Antony and the Johnsons used the picture for an album cover). But it all comes from the same seed. On May 1, 1984, “street” fashion and underground music merged at Stephen Sprouse’s fashion show at the Ritz, on East 11th Street. Teri Toye sashayed down the runway in day-glo sequin minidresses to hysterical cheers from a packed house—and screams of “Necrophilia!” from the poet Rene Ricard. All of this was accompanied by hardcore punk music that I compiled for the show’s soundtrack. It was one of those moments when it felt like a real change was in the air and fashion would never be the same. Of course, that didn’t happen.

  • • •

  Much like I did with Eminem, I started to pay attention to Lady Gaga after she was already a huge star. After she had supposedly shocked the world. And after, because of some costume changes and so-called “re-invention,” she was compared to Madonna. I did not find her shocking. I thought she was hilarious. Costume changes were ho-hum. Thirty-five years earlier, David Bowie changed costumes. To say nothing of his own supposed “re-invention.” It’s certainly what Teri Toye and Richard Sohl would have done if they’d had the money. Granted, Gaga went to sartorial extremes. There were, at various times, the red lace gown, veil and crown combo, the rubber dress worn to meet the Queen of England, the underwear worn in public, the hat made of spinning metal rings, the dress with matching Damien Hirst–designed piano, and later on, that dress made out of raw meat. But Lady Gaga—born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, in 1986, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—was always more interesting than her wardrobe.

  When Gaga left home at eighteen, after she dropped out of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she moved to a one-room, walk-up apartment on Stanton Street. The area around Stanton and Rivington Streets wasn’t built up the way it is now. Gaga hung out in bars like St. Jerome’s—where she befriended the DJ/go-go dancer Lady Starlight. St. Jerome’s was also where her boyfriend, the bartender and heavy metal drummer Luc Carl held court. In earlier decades, before nearly every bartender was “really” a musician or an actor or model, bartenders were stars. Along with the wet, crumpled-up dollar bills in tips they took home every night, they got the girls. At St. Jerome’s, the bartender with the heavy metal hairdo was the king of the joint. And just like Eminem, who kept returning to his ex-wife Kim because she knew him before he was famous, it’s significant that well into her stardom, Gaga kept going back to Luc.

  *

  It took almost a year to set up an intervi
ew with Lady Gaga for Vanity Fair. Finally, we set a date for April 25, 2010, in Los Angeles. And since this was Los Angeles, it only made sense for us to talk at my favorite L.A. spot, the Beverly Hills Hotel. I like to plan things way in advance. The people in the Gaga camp never plan anything—except a tour—until it’s right in front of their faces. Interscope’s Dennis Dennehy, as he had with Eminem, had the thankless task of organizing this with me. So, after close to 1,000 emails, we decided that Bungalow 9 at the Beverly Hills Hotel would be a good setting. It was in between Bungalow 10, where Marilyn Monroe had an affair with Yves Montand in the 1950s, and Bungalow 8, where Elizabeth Taylor fought, got drunk and had sex with Richard Burton.

  Dennis and I planned the ambience of the bungalow’s living room: jasmine-scented candles for her, dimmed lights for me. Some food for her and a bottle of Pinot Noir for us both. Interviews are best done without food. The last thing I ever want is to transcribe someone talking with the sound of cutlery or clinking glasses in the background. Or worse, people talking with their mouths full of food. When I do interviews, water, which has become such a staple item of late, is usually the main course. Flat or sparkling, with or without flavors, or vitamins or electrolytes—whatever those are. Or Diet Coke—another current popular drug of choice. I’ve learned to never do an interview in a restaurant. I want as little distraction as possible. In a hotel, I don’t want the TV on in the room even if the sound is muted; people’s eyes wander. Especially rappers, who have ESPN on all the time. I won’t let anyone else in the room when I do an interview. (The sole exception was the first time I talked to the then sixteen-year-old Justin Bieber, who was required by law to have another adult present when he talked to a journalist.) Before the interview starts, I turn the air conditioning way up to make the room as cold as possible. Then I turn it off, lest the hum is heard on my tape. I try to organize a room with a conference table or a sofa, table, and chair that faces the sofa. I place three cassette recorders and external microphones in a strategic arrangement on a table. If one of these machines screws up, I still get a tape that works. Since so many people laughed at me when confronted by my old-school, analog equipment (Beyoncé and Kanye West in particular), I decided, for the Gaga interview, to add a small digital tape recorder to my arsenal. My husband Richard showed me how to use it. And, of course, after the hours that Gaga and I sat and talked, the cassettes from my Sony tape recorders were all fine. The digital one hadn’t worked at all.