“Lady Gaga is probably the greatest artist development story we’ve seen in memorable history,” says James Diener, CEO and president of A&M/Octone records. It wasn’t all her—she could not have broken through without the investment and support of a major label—but she worked harder than most.
The industry, Garland says, “should give her a big hug and tens of millions of dollars. You couldn’t ask for a better partner at this moment in the business.”
The next part of the prerelease strategy was establishing Gaga not only in the gay community but as of it—if she did break out, she would not only have a committed core of consumers with highly disposable income, but she’d have cred as an outsider artist, despite her highly commercial sound. Interscope hired FlyLife, a NYC-based public relations company specializing in the gay marketplace, to book Gaga into the right nightclubs, get DJs to spin her record, hook her up with the right people. “They were definitely, really specifically trying to push her toward a gay audience,” says the rapper Cazwell, who was outsourced by FlyLife to perform with her.
Iovine had also decided he was going to book Gaga at Miami’s dance-centric Winter Music Conference, March 25–29, 2008, and that she’d perform whether or not he could secure the proper permits from the city. Sullivan recalls the exact circumstances; he consults his electronic diary for the date and time.
“On March 1, yeah on March 1 at 2:43 P.M., I text her, saying, ‘Are you going to be home for your birthday?’ ” he recalls. “And she calls me back right away and goes, ‘No, I don’t think we’re going to be home for my birthday. Jimmy wants to push us forward so we can go to the Winter Music Conference and meet all the DJs and industry people and have them hear our new record, and if that goes well we’re going to go directly to Los Angeles and film the video for ‘Just Dance.’ ”
Gaga was calm; this was what she had been working for, toward, what she expected. Sullivan was shocked. “I was like, ‘Holy shit, OK!’ We’d just gone from nobody coming to our shows unless we texted them to getting flown to Miami.”
It was a microcosmic version of Gaga’s ultimate trajectory: seemingly going nowhere one minute, suddenly everywhere.
Despite playing to such a tech-savvy crowd, there’s not much of Gaga’s WMC performance online, just a quick, grainy clip with low sound quality, and a ten-minute interview that looks like it was done for cable access. She is wearing what she calls “disco panties”—they look as if they were constructed from the mirrored tiles of a disco ball—a billowing white pirate top, and sunglasses. Her newly blond hair is frizzy and flyaway; she struggles constantly to keep her bangs matted to her forehead. Gaga is telling the interviewer about her label head Jimmy Iovine’s love for her.
“I’m the kind of girl he takes to the prom,” she says. “I’m quirky, I’m from Brooklyn”—that’s a lie—“I’m Italian.” She is also charming, explaining her raison d’être: “Changing the world, one sequin at a time.” She is compact, throaty, and with her New York dialect—soft Ts and slightly drawn-out vowels—she very much looks and sounds, incredibly, like the relentlessly chipper TV chef Rachael Ray.
The first show Gaga played at WMC was during the day, on the roof of the Raleigh Hotel, a swank four-star owned by the hotelier Andre Balazs, himself a huge nightlife fixture and gossip-column staple in New York (best known, perhaps, for his one-time engagement to Uma Thurman). It was a bit thrown together. “We didn’t have money for costumes,” says Sullivan. “The backup dancers each got about one hundred bucks per show. None of us made any money.” Still, they did what they could: They had smoke machines, lights, and disco balls. “We lit hairspray on fire,” he recalls. “We had fun.”
Interscope had hired Coalition Media Group to promote Gaga; Coalition had also helped break the Scissor Sisters, booking them into gay parties and clubs. “They booked us into a gay club called Score in the middle of Miami, and the gay dudes just loved us,” Sullivan says. “We’d done the hipster shoe-gaze, eye-roll downtown scene, and we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to play in the gay market, the kind of big, crazy clubs where they would accept us. And that was pretty much our biggest show; we just nailed it that night. And then we went back to our hotel, showered, and flew to L.A. to film the video for ‘Just Dance.’ ”
This, too, was ultra-low-budget. “We had to park at Martin Luther King and Crenshaw Boulevard, which sounds like a Chris Rock joke,” says Sullivan. “We rented this guy’s terribly tacky house for the video. It looks like somebody’s ‘my-parents-are-out-of-town’ party in Jersey or something.” Sullivan recalls the shoot as chaotic and thoroughly unglamorous. “We’re, like, throwing champagne on the shag carpet, jumping on the furniture, and walking on the coffee table,” he says. “And then they’d be like, ‘CUT!’ and we’d sit down and breathe for a second, and this weird guy would come from around the corner and be like, ‘Don’t sit on the arm of the sofa; it’s not good for it.’ Ha ha.”
In her retelling, Gaga was characteristically hyperbolic, comparing it, in one interview, to “being on a Martin Scorsese set.” But she did have a manicure that gave her nails the appearance of being sheathed in fishnet, which was a stroke of genius.
She was now living full-time in L.A., trying to finish the album, but it was around the time of the “Just Dance” video shoot that she met a New York–based photographer named Warwick Saint, who shot her for potential album artwork. He was brought in by Gaga’s new manager, Troy Carter, whom she hired when she signed to Interscope. An African-American powerhouse, Carter is actually quite tiny, maybe a little over five feet. He kept a low public profile; his other clients included Freeway and Eve.
Gaga and Saint had their first meeting over a beer one night at the House of Blues. “She was quite sexy,” he says. “But it wasn’t out-there in terms of clothes.” Gaga was, he says, wearing jeans, a loose T-shirt, and reading glasses. He found her highly mature for her age: “Super-smart, super-bright, super-creative,” he says. “She often spoke about her family and her dad.” She seemed, he says, “to have a good relationship with her father.”
The label had set up a shoot at a downtown L.A. spot called the Bordello bar; it was to go from six in the morning till four in the afternoon. He recalls being underwhelmed by her stylist, whose work for Gaga he found “costume-y,” and he recommended a friend named Martina Nilsson to Carter and Gaga; Nilsson soon took over. “After the meeting,” he says, “Gaga was like, ‘Of course. She just, like, totally gets me.’ And Martina was on the job straightaway.”
From the moment the shoot began (with her own music on the sound system), Gaga was in complete command, which Saint says is unusual. “Some artists you put in front of the camera—it’s like trying to suck blood from a stone,” he says. “Lady Gaga was a performer from the get-go, which, for a photographer, is a dream. She would, like, flip upside down and do these cool body positions. She loved being in front of the camera. She loved being the center of attention.”
After the shoot, Saint invited Gaga to come look at the images: “I was like, ‘It’s a good idea for you to see what you’re like in front of the camera.’ ” For all her bravado on the set, he says “she had a bit of a complex about her nose. She was considering having it done, but I told her not to.”
Aliya Naumoff, who was hired to shoot the first performance Lady Gaga did for Interscope execs (it’s known as a showcase, and in this instance it was so that others in corporate would know what they were selling), recalls seeing no outward signs of insecurity on Gaga’s part, and thinking how unusual that was. The show was on a rooftop in midtown Manhattan; Gaga had two backup dancers and didn’t seem too familiar with them, but “she was full of confidence; I was kind of blown away,” Naumoff says. “I was like, ‘That one is gonna be the next combination of Madonna and Britney.’ ”
A few nights later, Naumoff went to see Gaga perform at the downtown club Mansion, a low-ceilinged space that’s divided into two small rooms. “The club was maybe one-tenth full,” Naumoff says.
During her set, “everyone was like, ‘What is that?’ No one was really paying attention.” After the performance, Naumoff, who’d had a pleasant working experience with Gaga at that Interscope showcase, went up to Gaga to say hi and congratulations.
“She blew me off; she didn’t care,” Naumoff says, laughing. “She just didn’t give a fuck. I wasn’t insulted. I was like, ‘She’s in it to win it. She’s unstoppable.’ ”
“Just Dance” was released, to little reaction, on April 8. It finally reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in January 2009. As for Saint, he stayed in sporadic contact with Gaga via text messages: “I’d say, ‘Cheers Gaga, I just saw you on . . .’ And she’d be like, ‘Hey, I got played on the radio in Canada!’ ” As with her other friends and acquaintances, most exchanges were all about her. “And as she was getting more and more famous, her responses would become less and less frequent,” he says.
In April, Wendy Starland—herself newly relocated to L.A.—got a surprise phone call from Gaga. “She said, ‘All I want to do is hang out with you. I’m dating this guy, he’s my stylist. . . .’ ” This was Matt Williams, who was Gaga’s age and who had recently relocated from New York City. “She’s like, ‘He’s an entrepreneur, too, and people are jealous of him, too, because he’s so successful, just like me. I thought I’d give him a shot to do all my styling.’ ” Gaga told Starland she’d just done an interview with Rolling Stone and had given Starland credit for her discovery, and then the topic turned to whether Starland deserved further remuneration for connecting Gaga and Fusari.
According to Starland, Gaga said that the idea of getting paid for introducing one artist to another was a bit much. “She said, ‘Someone must have introduced you to Moby’ ”—whom Starland had worked with on his 2008 album Last Night, singing the lead vocal on his single “I’m in Love.” Starland countered that, in fact, Moby had found her on MySpace, and that without her help, Gaga might never have made it. The girls never spoke again.
Though she has no problem exerting control, the confrontation with Starland is uncharacteristic; Gaga does not like to cut people out of her life or fire them. In the case of the former, she’ll do the slow fade, leaving it to the left-behind party to figure out what’s up. In the case of the latter, she’ll leave it to someone else to do the firing, or claim no knowledge of what’s going on. David Ciemny, who worked as her tour manager for about a year and a half beginning in spring 2008, and took a leave of absence in the fall of ’09, says he was confused by her response when he broached the idea of going back out on the road.
“I said, ‘I’m ready to go,’ but she told me, ‘You look different. You’re not ready to go back out.’ And I’d go, ‘Yeah, yeah, I am.’ And she’d say, ‘I don’t think you’re ready.’ Maybe she’d made up in her mind that she was progressing to a new level. . . .”
After a few months passed, he eventually sent her an e-mail: “I was like, ‘You know, Gaga, I don’t know if it’s you or your manager, but I don’t have a job anymore, and my paycheck stopped.’ ” (She’d kept him on the payroll for three months after he left the tour.) He asked her if he’d been fired, if there was a chance he was going out on her tour in two weeks, where he stood.
She replied quickly, via e-mail. “She said, ‘You always have a job with me. I didn’t know about this. Let me get on this. Hugs and kisses, Gagaloo.’ But that was where it kind of ended. I didn’t hear back from her.”
Starland wasn’t the only problematic person from Gaga’s past. After nearly eighteen months of silent estrangement, Rob Fusari filed a $30.5 million lawsuit against Gaga on March 17, 2010. It was a scathing and highly emotional document that revealed the extent of the romantic relationship between the two.
The first page of the suit has a highly unusual “Introduction,” marked as such. It opens with a footnoted passage from William Congreve’s poem “The Mourning Bride”:
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
Fusari follows that up with an explanatory note: “All business is personal,” he writes. “When these personal relationships evolve into romantic entanglements, any corresponding business relationship usually follows the same trajectory so that when one crashes they all burn. That is what happened here.” He went on to allege that he’d only received two royalty checks from Lady Gaga, one for $203,000 and one for $394,965. On the latter, he said, was a note on the back that read, “endorsed in accord and satisfaction of all sums due to undersigned”—meaning that had he signed the check, he would have been signing away all rights to future monies.
On March 19, Gaga filed a countersuit. Meanwhile, Fusari’s original lawyer, Robert Meloni, wound up bowing out of the case, subbing in another lawyer from his firm. Gaga’s contention was that Fusari was acting as both her agent and manager, which, says a high-profile entertainment lawyer who’s gone up against Meloni, violates employment statutes. But what this attorney, who asked to remain unnamed, finds most interesting is that Fusari, the industry veteran, is essentially claiming that this very young girl exploited him.
“Typically, the artist says, ‘This guy took advantage of me and shoved this agreement down my throat,’ ” the attorney says. “It’s a little different twist here, where he’s saying, ‘I would have done this typical deal, [but she and her father] took me down this path and now they’re saying, ‘Screw you.’ ”
The overall intent on both sides, she says, was to attract as much media attention as possible—Fusari with the maudlin opening to his complaint, exposing their romantic relationship, and Gaga with her high-profile, immediate countersuit.
Veteran entertainment lawyer Josh Grier believes that, no matter the merits of Fusari’s complaint—and he thinks it’s reasonable—Gaga will outlast him by sheer dint of her financial resources, even though he thinks her counterclaim is exceptionally weak: “Just denying everything is not enough,” he says. That said, she can keep him in litigation longer, cost him more money than he can afford to spend, force him to back down.
“It looks like gamesmanship to me,” Grier says. “The game of litigation in the music business—nobody ever goes to trial.” He estimates that Fusari spent $25,000 just to file the complaint. “Does he really have the money to [pursue] it?” asks the lawyer. “These litigators are real mercenaries. I expect at some point it’ll be settled and you’ll go, ‘What’s the settlement?’ and they’ll go, ‘Sorry, it’s confidential.’ It’s like reading a book, and somebody’s torn out the last chapter.”
Rob Fusari, at the time of this writing, was still with his fiancée.
Chapter Seven
“I Am Living for you Right Now”
Gaga spent May 2009 playing small gigs in gay clubs, blogging, giving interviews to anyone who asked or answered. She told HX magazine that “When I play at gay clubs, it’s like playing for my friends; they get it and understand what I’m trying to say.” She would later say that she was bisexual and had had relationships with women, but had only ever been in love with men.
“I had a lot of gay friends growing up,” she told MTV. “I went to a lot of gay clubs.”
That’s not true, according to the account she gave in an unpublished interview. She was going to school, to voice lessons, to auditions, and to TRL to see Britney.
“I think her whole image as a sort of gay ambassador and gay icon . . . I think she always wants to leave that kind of open,” says David Ciemny, her former tour manager. “You know, we all know that she’s a girl, she likes guys, that’s about all there is to it. Her close girlfriends from high school, they’re not lesbians. But, you know, artists who are more mysterious are more appealing anyway.”
Later, as she was breaking in the States and drawing comparisons to pop star Katy Perry, who’d just scored a hit with “I Kissed a Girl,” Gaga deftly depicted herself as the real thing and Perry as a poseur. “I’m not trying to use my gay fans to get a fan base. I really, genuinely love them. . . . I do no
t want to make anyone feel used.”
One of the first performers Gaga hired, via FlyLife, was the rapper-songwriter–nightlife presence Cazwell, whose outsized sensibility was ideal: He was known, in his scene, for hilariously titled singles such as “All Over Your Face” and “I Seen Beyoncé at Burger King.” (His current press photo is Gaga-esque, with blood coming from his nose, smeared all over his chin.)
Cazwell often performed with Amanda Lepore, the subculture’s superstar—still, he’d been warned by a FlyLife staffer not to mess up. “They said, ‘Lady Gaga, just so you know, she’s extremely professional, so be there on time.’ ” He was hired to rap on a remix of “Just Dance” and to perform with Gaga at a couple of local gigs—one at a now-defunct club on Avenue C and another at a club called Boysroom.
“There were stickers all over [the club] that said, ‘Lady Gaga, taking over the world, one sequin at a time,’ ” says Cazwell. He remembers a nice, polite girl who was nonetheless deadly serious. “We were performing on a stage the size of a door,” he says, “but she still had sound check, and she was really specific about the opening and the choreography. She’s like, ‘At the end of your rap, I want to push you down on your knees and then I’m going to get on top of you,’ and she’s like, riding me, you know?” He was impressed by her professionalism and decisiveness.
The crowd, Cazwell says, was a combination of “Brooklyn hipsters and downtown gays,” and they were not as impressed. “They were like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ Everyone was just watching with arms crossed. No one bum-rushed her, no one said anything.”
Gaga was stalling out a bit: She wasn’t getting all that much traction even on the fringes of the mainstream. Alternative publications that would’ve been natural fits, such as Nylon, Paper, and V magazine, weren’t interested. MTV only played a few hours of music videos a day, in the morning. Interscope was thinking of booking her as an opening act for New Kids on the Block, and whereas another artist who was cultivating an outré persona might have scoffed, she was smart enough to take every opportunity.
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