Poker Face

by Maureen Callahan

  Stefani’s assimilation into the scene wasn’t going well. She didn’t look the part, didn’t get all the esoteric references. “You know how it is in those kinds of artsy circles,” Starlight told the New York Post. “People are a little snooty.”

  But Stefani kept at it. She auditioned for a burlesque spot at the Slipper Room, a bordello-ish bar/performance space on Orchard and Stanton streets on the Lower East Side.

  “I thought she was just a nice crazy girl from Jersey,” says proprietor James Habacker, who hired her on the spot after her first audition in 2007. (He, like many of downtown New York’s nightlife denizens, has trouble recalling exact dates.) Gaga’s day look, he says, was “kind of slutty.” He laughs. Habacker, who cuts a dandyish figure in an expertly tailored olive green overcoat and wavy hair chopped to his cheekbones, is sitting in a back room in the basement of his venue; there are two facing sofas, a wet bar, and a huge silver plate on the coffee table sprinkled with cigarette ashes. He remembers her as always being “super-nice to me,” very career-minded, very mature. And not a little off.

  “She would do some grinding, get down to pasties and a G-string. She was bringing in some interesting and odd elements—I remember some kind of plushie thing,” he says, before trailing off. (Plushies are members of a subculture devoted to the pursuit of sex acts with stuffed animals.)

  “I was never a stripper, never topless,” Gaga has said. “It was rock ’n’ roll burlesque.”

  Fusari thought the burlesque stuff was beneath her and a waste of her time. So, unsurprisingly, did her father.

  “It was a strip show,” Fusari has said. “I was like, anyone who came to that show didn’t come for the music. And it really started to bother her father. I think now he knows it’s part of the act, an extreme, ‘Alice in Wonderland’–type thing.”

  For Gaga, though, it was performance, a chance to learn how to lose herself, to push through her own comfort level, to see what worked and what didn’t and figure out ways to adjust accordingly, in the moment. It was, to her, art.

  “She was clearly smart and professional,” Habacker adds. “I thought she was great.” The other girls, however, did not. “There were complaints,” he says. “Like, ‘I don’t like her attitude,’ ‘She’s rude to me,’ ‘She’s a diva.’ She wasn’t mean, I think. She was just distant, and a little strange. But if you don’t fit in, it makes it difficult.”

  Though her act was inventive—Gaga performed with those stuffed animals, pasties, and pyro—Habacker, who only hired forty girls for eighty slots a month, let her go after one year. The rancor she engendered with the other girls—no matter who was at fault—was too disruptive. He was doubly impressed with the way she handled her firing. “You know, she didn’t fight me on it,” he says. “She was like, ‘Best of luck to you.’ And I think I might have said, ‘Don’t forget me if you ever get to be a big star.’ ” Which is what most every dancer at the Slipper Room thought she’d be.

  Stefani was commuting nearly every day, working with Fusari in suburban New Jersey and returning to the bacchanalian L.E.S. at night, attempting to penetrate the scene. Both were struggles, professionally and romantically.

  Within a month of working with Fusari, says a formerly close friend, Stefani began dating Fusari’s session musician, Tommy Kafafian. “He’s a very cute guy, a very good songwriter and musician,” says the friend. Fusari had produced a record for Kafafian, who was also playing on some of Stefani’s tracks. She really fell for him, says her friend. Kafafian felt differently.

  “I was the main squeeze at some point,” he says. He guesses they dated for “three or four or six months. It was definitely something I was attracted to. But it wasn’t like we were in love at all. It was more, like, we’d hang out hours and hours and days on end in the studio, and I’d drive her home to the city.”

  She spent nearly all her free time recording: “Nothing could take away from the studio,” says her friend. “There was a determination.”

  She was also in search of a new name—everyone agreed that Stefani Germanotta was far too ungainly and had to go. Despite the numerous origin stories—Fusari’s claim that it was the result of a misspelled text, Gaga’s claim that it was something Fusari said to her while she was playing a Queen B-side (“You’re so gaga!” which doesn’t sound like something anyone in a remotely cool profession would ever say)—Starland says the name arrived in a far more typical, pedestrian way: a marketing meeting.

  “It was a little bit of a group effort,” among her, Fusari, Kafafian, and a few others, Starland says. “It wasn’t around a table, but it was like, ‘Everybody, let’s think about what name is going to be marketable.’ ”

  Queen was, in fact, the inspiration point, though Starland says she never knew Stefani to be a big fan. “We talked about Queen and ‘Radio Ga Ga,’ and someone came up with ‘Lady,’ and we put it together. Once ‘Lady Gaga’ came up, we were like, ‘If we tell this to Rob, he’s not going to even listen to any of the other names—he’s going to fall in love with it.”

  As for Stefani: “She loved it.”

  She was also very happy with Kafafian, who was around her age and, like her, a struggling musician. They kept their relationship quiet and assumed no one in the studio knew. But once Fusari found out what was going on, Kafafian, says the friend, was fired. Stefani couldn’t figure out why, and she was crushed when Kafafian dumped her shortly after.

  “She came to me so upset about it, very distraught,” says the friend. “She was like, ‘I’m so hurt.’ I don’t think she realized what was happening at the time.” (Kafafian refuses to discuss the circumstances of his leaving and his breakup with Stefani or what role Fusari may have played in that.)

  Stefani soon figured it out. Fusari, who, at thirty-six, was eighteen years Stefani’s senior, made his feelings known. That he had a live-in fiancée named Jane—who would often drive Stefani to and from the bus stop in Jersey—did not seem to concern him. (Complicating matters further: Fusari’s brother was married to Jane’s sister.)

  Stefani was overwhelmed: She didn’t have strong feelings for him, if any. She wasn’t so much worried about what would happen if she got involved with him—she was worried what would happen if she didn’t.

  “Basically, she really wanted [to make] her record,” the friend says. In much the same way that, at first, “she wasn’t even into this style of music, dance—it was not what came from her heart—she was like, ‘OK, I’ll try it out. And after trying it out for a while, she got the hang of it. I think she approached the relationship with Rob in a similar way: ‘I may have signed up for a Tom, but . . .’ ” The friend pauses. “She really wanted to become famous and successful, and she worked really hard. And she was worried that if she didn’t go through with it . . .”

  So she went through with it.

  It was a rough time. Her high school friends didn’t like what she was doing with Fusari; they made it clear that they judged her for it, and their judgment wounded her. She was still upset about Kafafian, who says he had no idea what was going on. It’s a plausible claim, given his propensity for statements such as “It’s just about relishing the love. . . . I’m here because I’m here. Because there’s no place you’re not supposed to be.”

  Anyway: Kafafian says that, in his recollection, he left to go on tour with “this band” for three months, but that every time he tried to come back, or talk to Stefani or Fusari on the phone, he couldn’t get through. He felt like he was getting frozen out. “They kind of forgot about me,” he says, “even though I was trying to better myself.”

  Unlike Fusari, who later filed a $30.5 million lawsuit against Gaga that claimed she was attempting to cheat him out of monies owed, Kafafian says he’s never considered going after payment for his work on tracks—including, he says, writing guitar parts and lyrics—that wound up on The Fame.

  “I played my ass off on ‘Beautiful, Dirty, Rich’ and ‘Brown Eyes,’ ” he says today. He finds the theme of The Fame highl
y ironic, given how used and left behind he feels. “Perhaps I was naïve,” he says. “Sometimes you have to go through the craps to see the traps, as they say. Right now I know what I want, and I don’t have to cut anyone down to get there. I don’t really care. In my heart, I know what the truth is. But shame on them.”

  Stefani, meanwhile, was booking herself gigs wherever she could, sometimes as a dancer, sometimes as a musician, calling up clubs like the Bitter End—where she’d performed as an NYU student with the Stefani Germanotta Band—pretending to be her own publicist, talking up this new girl. That the guys who owned the Bitter End knew her from her days performing with the Stefani Germanotta Band didn’t stop her. “The venue guys watched me grow up musically in the clubs,” she said.

  She booked herself into Arlene’s Grocery, a small club on Stanton Street that was just a few doors down from the Slipper Room. Like most of the venues on the Lower East Side, Arlene’s primarily booked rock acts. “But we booked her because she said she could bring fifty people to the show,” says Julia Dee, who was the club’s booker back then. “And she did.”

  The scenesters who worked at Arlene’s were typically underwhelmed, as per the neighborhood’s code of conduct. “I remember the staff members were [like], ‘Hot body, can’t sing,’ ” Dee says. “She was in bikini bottoms, playing the keyboard. We thought that was pretty out there.” Dee dropped her after a second booking drew only eight people. “The music was cheesy, dated pop with an R&B feel to it,” she says, the “same kind of stuff she’s doing now.” This sentiment is typical of the Lower East Side’s too-cool-for-school circular logic: Back then, Lady Gaga wasn’t cool enough to play in a venue that hosted unknowns night after night after night, and now that she’s become a critically acclaimed international pop star, they still think she’s not good enough.

  Everyone at the Bitter End, however, thought she was gifted: “It was an easy booking,” says Bitter End co-owner Paul Rizzo. “She is an incredible talent.” That didn’t mean they thought she would make it: “There is a lot more involved than talent,” says Rizzo. “And she was good, but I see so many people come through that don’t go anywhere. The ones that do—it’s very hard to figure out. There’s no formula to it.”

  Rizzo says that Stefani played her first gig at the Bitter End as Gaga on July 28, 2006. He still has a poster downstairs from that gig, he says: Gaga in green hot pants, arms thrown back—“disco ball included,” he adds dryly. And no Gaga anecdote would be complete without an accounting of what she was wearing that night—it struck him, he says, because it was so different from her earlier days: “She was just a little more . . . in a different-type outfit,” he says diplomatically. “I think she was wearing, like, a yellow-and-black one-piece. And some sort of hat.”

  Gaga recalled the Bitter End as her first real show, but recalled the outfit a bit differently: She was in an American Apparel one-piece, she said. “I had a white skirt on, giant white, with a fucking flower in my hair. I looked like such a loser. I had an Amy Winehouse beehive—before she came out.”

  If there’s one thing Gaga can’t stand, it’s the idea that she’s aggressively copied someone else’s look. Because she so obviously, inarguably has, her outrage is almost funny. Just a year later at Lollapalooza, where she’d been booked for one of the lesser stages, she found herself hounded by paparazzi as well as regular people who wanted her picture. They thought she was Amy Winehouse. It was, at the very least, a fortuitous bit of confusion. She didn’t like it, but she played along, telling a fan who’d mistaken her for Winehouse to “fuck off!” The girl scooted away, thrilled that her idol had just cursed her.

  Her songwriting was going well. Surprisingly, says Starland, her relationship with Fusari deepened. She found herself involved, even though she’d embarked on the relationship not even halfheartedly—quarter-heartedly?—and even though Fusari still had a fiancée. Starland recalls asking him why he would jeopardize his current relationship; he told her that the prospect of the money and the fame “was a rush.” Both, she says, were addicted to the melodrama that was their relationship, what each could do for the other.

  Fusari was also inspiring some of her writing, including the aforementioned “Brown Eyes,” a song that, in concert, she now often ends by raging at the song’s subject, calling him “motherfucker!!!!” and mocking “your bullshit brown eyes.”

  “I was dating somebody that I couldn’t be with,” Gaga has said. “I wrote that at three A.M., crying in front of the piano. Wailing in front of a Yamaha.”

  “Blueberry Kisses,” Starland says, is also about Rob: “They used to have blueberry pancakes in the morning,” she says. “They had a serious connection.” They also had very similar personalities: volatile, dramatic, contentious. “The highs were really high, and the lows were really low,” says Starland. “They were both going crazy.” At one of the lowest points in her relationship with Fusari, Gaga called her mother to come out to New Jersey for moral support.

  At her most tired and tormented, she doubted whether she had the fortitude or the ability to see the demo through. “She’d say, ‘I don’t know if I can finish this record,’ ” says Starland.

  And what would Starland tell her friend? “You’re a professional. I didn’t fucking spend all this time and energy and work writing these songs and creating a vision with you, putting all this together, dealing with every facet of drama for you to say, ‘I don’t know if I can deal with it.’ ”

  Meanwhile, Stefani was still struggling to break into the upper echelons of the Lower East Side scene. She’d been dancing with Starlight at St. Jerome’s and had gotten herself booked at the Slipper Room, but, ever the overachiever, she wanted promoters Michael T. and Justine D.—two of downtown’s biggest stars, who conceived of and threw parties on their own and for clubs and other clients—to hire her for their Motherfucker events.

  A series of roaming, dissolute, debauched parties held on the nights before major holidays, Motherfucker events—not unlike the DJ collective and weekly party known as MisShapes—dominated downtown nightlife from 2003 to 2008, eventually attracting thousands of partygoers, among them the “bridge-and-tunnelers” who commuted from suburban Long Island or New Jersey. (Bridge-and-tunnelers, who are usually identified by their suburban styling and overreliance on hair product, are considered complete undesirables among the city’s self-styled fabulous, who themselves often come from suburban Long Island or New Jersey.)

  The Motherfucker parties would traditionally close with Diana Ross’s 1976 disco hit “Love Hangover,” in tribute to Studio 54, and access was granted by one of the scene’s toughest, most infamous doormen, Thomas Onorato. As Glenn Belverio, author of Confessions from the Velvet Ropes, put it in a 2006 blog post: “Remember: Motherfucker is a dictatorship at the door and a democracy on the dance floor—so work a look or New York’s #1 doorman, Thomas Onorato, will send you straight to the New Year’s gulag.” But Motherfucker wasn’t really a dictatorship—all you had to do was pay to get in. The threat of rejection, though, is always a great selling point.

  Lady Starlight, it turned out, knew Michael T., who knew her by her real name, Colleen Martin. At the time, Martin was working as a makeup artist at a M.A.C store by day and, in addition to her own gigs, had often been hired to dance by Michael T. for Motherfucker and another party he did called Rated X. Martin began bringing Gaga around to Motherfucker bashes in 2007.

  “Certainly her look was completely eighties stripper rock trash,” says Michael T. “She looked like something out of 1987.” He was perplexed by just what bonded the two girls, but noted that Martin’s younger friend was unabashedly aping her look.

  “Colleen, at that point, was also looking really heavy-metal trashy,” he says. “She had a grown-out shag—dark on top and literally fried blond at the tips. She did it on purpose; it was definitely funny.” Stefani’s look, by contrast, seemed earnest; she appeared to have put herself together that way because she genuinely thought it looked good. She�
�d not yet picked up that esoteric trick of telegraphing irony and wit through carefully cultivated bad taste.

  To Michael T., it seemed that Gaga had no personal, cohesive style: “I mean, I suppose, like anybody, she was probably taking a lot of what she was seeing from her friends,” he says. “But I can tell you that between Colleen’s Bowie impression and Lady Gaga’s—night and day. Colleen looked like a freak from 1973. Gaga looked like somebody had said, ‘Oh, let’s put a David Bowie lightning bolt on your face.’ ”

  Gaga wanted Michael T. to hire her to dance at his parties. She auditioned. “She was OK,” he says, laughing. “I wasn’t floored.” But he was friendly with Lüc the bartender, who Michael T. recalls as Gaga’s boyfriend by this time. (She was still involved with Fusari, but Lüc, by all accounts, had no idea they had anything other than a professional relationship.)

  “Colleen would tell me she was doing this act with her,” Michael T. says, “but just the way it was being described, I really did not take it seriously. Like, really? Like, live DJ, two dancers, and Lady Gaga looking like a heavy-metal queen?” The Gaga moniker barely registered with him, harking back as it did to the nineties club scene, when twenty-nine-year-old “club kids” ran around town with names like “Pebbles” and “Desi Monster.”

  Michael T. relented, hiring Gaga—with Lüc—to host a Motherfucker party DJ’d by Moby at the now-defunct, super-plush club Eugene on 24th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.

  The job description, according to him: “Look good, invite cute friends and bands, drink, work for about three hours.”

  She didn’t make much of an impression on doorman Thomas Onorato. “She was friends with my friend Lüc, who was also a host that night,” he says. “She was one of eight to ten promo-sexual hosts—that’s what we called them. She was brunette at that point. That’s really all I can tell you.”