“What are you?” I ask.
“I’m a Buddhist-Baptist. My training is Baptist. And I can still relate to the Ten Commandments and to the Ten Worlds. It’s all very close, as long as you contact the subconscious mind. That’s where the coin of the Almighty is.” Every morning and evening, Tina Turner, who keeps a Buddhist shrine in her house, prays and chants. “I don’t care what they feel about me and my tight pants onstage, and my lips and my hair. I am a chanter. And everyone who knows anything about chanting knows you correct everything in your life by chanting every day,” she says. “People look at me and wonder, ‘You look so great—what is it you do?’ What can I tell them except I changed my life?”
Just when stardom finally hit big with “Let’s Stay Together,” in 1984, Tina Turner was suddenly subject to frequent colds and coughing fits, even onstage. A friend in London recommended an Indian doctor who practiced holistic medicine. His diagnosis: she still had TB. Tina was sent to a special empty hospital in the country for three or four days of intravenous body-toxin purification every time she finished a stretch on the road. It was a “scary place,” she says. “I watch horror movies. Imagine that Frankenstein or somebody—a mummy—is coming through the door.” The doctor prescribed a special low-fat diet and made his own medicines “from gold-dust powder. It is all basically from the earth.” The results were dramatic. “After my second visit to the hospital, my eyes became clear. The whites of my eyes were never clear. They were always just not white. And I started to feel healthy. I had a glow, a light, about me.” Most important, she says, “I started to get energy, to feel strong, to enjoy my work more.”
People constantly ask Tina Turner if she will ever do any preaching or teaching. Yes, she says, but not yet. After the tour she is planning to put together a “life-style” cassette detailing her dance steps and holistic cures. Basically, it comes down to this: “I was a victim; I don’t dwell on it. I was hurt. I’m not proud of being hurt; I don’t need sympathy for it. Really, I’m very forgiving. I’m very analytical. I’m very patient. My endurance is very good. I learned a lot being there with that very sick man.” Like Ike, she wouldn’t change the past. “I am happy that I’m not like anybody else. Because I really do believe that if I was different I might not be where I am today,” Tina says. “You asked me if I ever stood up for anything. Yeah, I stood up for my life.”
She’d still rather act than sing. “I stepped into singing. It was hell. It’s still hell without Ike,” Tina says. “I’d like to make money some other kind of way than singing. Especially as an old woman. You can act as an old woman if you’re good enough. I’ll be damned if I’m going to go onstage as a gray old woman.”
But right now, singing is fine enough. “What excites me is not the lights; it’s that screaming thing, like when I walk onstage and they go crazy. That’s what happens with Bowie and Jagger, the times I’ve worked with them: they’ve walked on my stage, the whole place went crazy, and I thought, If I’m going to be here, I want that.”
(Ike Turner died in 2007, at age 76.)
LADY GAGA
IN LADY GAGA’S WAKE
By Lisa Robinson | January 2012
New York City, September 11, 2011: Cynthia Germanotta opens the door to the apartment in the beautiful building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side where Lady Gaga—born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta—grew up. It was here that Stefani got dressed in her school uniform every day to attend the Convent of the Sacred Heart, practiced piano, and dreamed of stardom. And it is where—despite having a suite at a nearby hotel—Lady Gaga is sleeping this weekend, on an air mattress on the floor of her old bedroom. No journalist has ever visited the Germanottas’ home before, but the last time Gaga and I talked, she described the apartment to me, and when I expressed surprise that she said it had several floors, she told me her parents got a “deal” when they bought it, 18 years ago. She suggested that I see it. She also decided she wanted to cook a meal for me. I never really believed all the stuff about how she likes to cook any more than I believed that she really hung out with her old friends at dive bars on the Lower East Side. But, having done the Lower East Side bar trip with her the day before (more about that later), I was looking forward to seeing Lady Gaga at home with her family.
Lady Gaga’s parents are in their mid-50s and have been married for 30 years. They’re savvy and proud and protective of their famous daughter. They’re involved with her business. It is apparent, seeing them all together, that Gaga’s relationship with her family—as well as with her very tight management team—keeps her levelheaded.
Cynthia Germanotta, originally from West Virginia, is a graceful blonde. Forget such inspirations as David Bowie or Marilyn Monroe—it is obvious where Gaga got her sense of style. Today, Cynthia is wearing black-rimmed eyeglasses, a lacy black sweater, and black pants. She looks about 10 years younger than her age. (We discuss plastic surgery and she says, “I always tell my daughters it doesn’t make you look younger. It just looks like you’ve had work done.”) Also present are the family’s two dogs—Alice, a 14-year-old beagle, and Lilu, a 3-year-old dachshund. When I arrive, Gaga’s father, Joe Germanotta, is downstairs in the basement. He’s from New Jersey and is the likely owner of the Bruce Springsteen Darkness on the Edge of Town CD boxed set on the windowsill next to the black baby-grand piano that dominates the living room. In the entrance hallway, there’s a frame with photos of Gaga with Springsteen, Elton John, and Sting, at last year’s Rainforest concert at Carnegie Hall. The apartment is a cozy triplex, with a large beige sofa and many framed family photos on the piano. There is a dining table by the open kitchen, a garden off the living room where Cynthia grows fennel, arugula, Italian parsley, rosemary, and oregano, and where there are small fig, olive, and lemon trees. And, at the kitchen counter by the sink, chopping cherry tomatoes in half for a spaghetti sauce she prepares from scratch, is Lady Gaga. She is wearing a black lace Chanel dress, extra-high Louboutin stiletto heels, glass earrings, full makeup, and a Daphne Guinness–inspired black-and-white wig. Just another Sunday afternoon at the Germanotta home.
Gaga removes the pink ribbon from the box of macarons I have brought from the newly opened Ladurée bakery, on Madison Avenue. She puts the Ladurée box on top of the Dunkin’ Donuts box already on the counter and ties the ribbon around her hairdo. She then proceeds to take me on a tour of the apartment. On the top floor are her parents’ bedroom and the bedroom she shared with her sister, Natali (who, now 19, attends art school in the city), where the red air mattress is on the floor. I note that there are no doors on the bedrooms—her parents could have heard everything she and her sister said growing up. “Yes,” she says, “and I heard them, too.” (Later that evening, when we’re at the hotel for a lengthy chat, I ask, Why the air mattress on the floor instead of this suite with the room service, the marble bathrooms, the magnificent views of Central Park? “I’m in hotels all the time,” she says, “and they’re cold. None of this really matters to me. When I can, I’d much rather spend the time with my parents.”)
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In the apartment, I watch Gaga prepare the tomato sauce. She adds fennel, rosemary, oregano, and leeks—“My secret ingredient”—and she and her mother discuss whether we should have whole-wheat pasta. She makes a salad. All this slicing and dicing while wearing the Chanel dress seems perfectly natural in the Gaga world. People always ask me what she’s really like. This is what she’s really like. When we talk later, she says she feels she owes it to her fans to always look this way. “I went to an all-girls school,” Gaga says, “and I was very much like my mother; she would do her hair every morning and get dressed nice. So, most of the time I would stay up all night, straightening my hair, and I would even put my makeup on before bed sometimes, so that when I woke up in the morning it would be ready for school. I just liked to be glamorous. It made me feel like a star.”
Joe Germanotta comes upstairs, wearing jeans and
a red polo shirt. “That’s a nice dress,” he says, complimenting his daughter. We talk about the Yankees, and he tells me he purchased four seats from the old Yankee Stadium to put in the garden of the restaurant he’s currently renovating at 70 West 68th Street. The restaurant will be called Joanne, after his late sister, and there will be a double fireplace between the main room and the garden area; people will be able to sit outside and watch games on TV. Cynthia is in charge of the restaurant’s décor; she’s picked every tile, every lamp, every fabric, every painting; it’s easy to see where Gaga got her attention to detail. Joe’s been working with a crew for five months to get the restaurant ready, and the plan is for it to be open this month. Cynthia shows me three large U.P.S. boxes of fan mail in the living room that she gets for Gaga every week. I read aloud an e-mail a Gaga fan sent me—12-year-old Maddie P., from Maine. She wrote that Gaga inspired her to help a boy in her school who had been harshly bullied for being gay. Gaga held her mother’s hand while listening to this and tears rolled down her cheeks. Cynthia shows me a letter from the White House commending Gaga for her work on behalf of abolishing “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and then says that she’ll head up Gaga’s new Born This Way Foundation—a charity that will empower youth, with an emphasis on anti-bullying.
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Joe and Cynthia take me downstairs to see the basement, which includes a space where Joe used to make his own wine. The basement is a large, wood-paneled room, with a big screen for watching TV shows, baseball games, and N.C.A.A. March Madness. All around the room, Cynthia points out, is “Gaga’s stuff”—as she still has no permanent home other than this one. And, Gaga says, despite all the rumors last year of house-hunting with her on-and-off boyfriend of six years, the bartender/writer Luc Carl, she has no plans to settle down. “Gypsy queen couldn’t take the leap,” she says. “I’m not going to pay millions of dollars for something. I can’t commit to being an adult—I’m not ready.” The basement walls are covered with Gaga’s framed platinum albums, posters from her concerts, and all-access backstage passes. Joe says being on the road is “a lonely life,” so one or both of her parents accompany Gaga on tour when they can. We sit down at the table to eat. In addition to Gaga and her parents, we are joined by Lane Bentley, Gaga’s day-to-day manager. She’s worked with Gaga for three years, has traveled with her since last June, and handles literally hundreds of e-mails daily regarding Gaga’s schedule. We all hold hands as Gaga says grace. And then we eat the whole-wheat spaghetti, with the delicious homemade sauce, and the salad, and drink a bottle of red wine. And, for the record, Gaga ate a lot. “You’ve got a hit,” her father told her about the sauce. After the meal, Gaga went to the piano to play us a new song she was working on about Princess Diana—a song about fame and celebrity death. Even in its rough stages, it has her trademark catchy chorus, and she sang the sad, slightly bitter lyrics in full voice. As I watched her parents listen to her, I could see years of such tableaux: the young Gaga at the piano, singing, her parents watching. “Oh yes,” Cynthia says when I ask if it had always been this way. “We didn’t push it. She was just determined. But we wouldn’t have encouraged her to pursue this if we didn’t think she had the talent.”
In the mere four years that she’s had a recording contract, Gaga, now 25, has become a global phenomenon. She was No. 11 on last year’s Forbes list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women, coming in ahead of Oprah Winfrey. She’s sold a total of 23 million albums and 63 million singles worldwide. Her net worth has been reported to be over $100 million. Her sophomore album, Born This Way, sold more than 1.1 million copies in its first week of release, last May. She performed for 2.4 million people in 202 shows in 28 countries on the year-and-a-half-long Monster Ball Tour. She has more than 44.5 million “Likes” on Facebook, and more than 15 million people follow her on Twitter. According to her manager, Troy Carter, initially she wasn’t an easy sell, because (hard to imagine now) at first, way back in 2008, her songs were considered “dance.” Radio stations wouldn’t play her music. Still, Carter says, “she walked into my office in 2007 wearing fishnet stockings, a leotard, big black sunglasses, and confidence. Too much confidence. She walked in as a superstar.” The producer Vincent Herbert, who has worked with Stevie Wonder, Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, Toni Braxton, and scores of others, signed Gaga to his own label at Interscope Records in 2007. “I’ve never met an artist so dedicated,” he says. “The first time I met her, she told me, ‘If you sign me, I’ll be the most loyal artist you’ll ever sign. I want to be the biggest pop star in the world. I want to sell 10 million albums.’ That was our first meeting. I knew immediately that she’d be our new superstar, our new Michael Jackson.”
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In the past year alone, Gaga has appeared on numerous television shows including Saturday Night Live, where she performed in skits and displayed a real comedic flair; she could easily host the show if she ever had the time. [She would host the show in November 2013.] She had her own HBO special: the Monster Ball concert, live from Madison Square Garden. She appeared on the red carpet at last year’s Grammys inside a “vessel”—a semi-transparent egg designed by Hussein Chalayan. At the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, she wore a dress made of actual meat (which was chemically treated and then enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame). And this past year, she opened the MTV V.M.A.’s dressed as her alter ego, a guy named “Jo Calderone,” who resembled either Ralph Macchio or Marlon Brando, depending on your age or point of view (more about that later, too). Wearing a man’s Brooks Brothers suit (and prosthetic male genitalia inside her trousers), smoking a cigarette, and guzzling a bottle of beer, she shocked the audience and instantly made every female star in attendance who had pink hair or wore a contraption on her head look dated.
Since Lady Gaga’s album Born This Way hit the charts last May, she has promoted it all over the world. She recorded “The Lady Is a Tramp” with Tony Bennett for his Duets II album, prompting Bennett to rave that she’s one of the greatest talents he’s ever seen. When she performed for the Robin Hood Foundation benefit in New York City last May, according to David Saltzman, executive director of the charity, she was one of the very few artists to ever refuse the usual high-six-figure fee, insisting instead that the money go back to help anti-poverty programs in the city. She sang at President Clinton’s 65th-birthday concert at the Hollywood Bowl. She met President Obama, who said that in her 10-inch-high heels she was “intimidating,” and she implored him to do something about bullying. (“Nothing with her is small,” says Bobby Campbell, the head of marketing for her management company. “So if she’s going to be in a room with Obama, she’s going to have to talk about what she wants to achieve in the world.”) And by the time this magazine is on sale, she will have published a book in collaboration with photographer Terry Richardson (Lady Gaga X Terry Richardson) and released the DVD of the HBO special as well as the album Born This Way: The Remix. She headlined an ABC-TV special the night of Thanksgiving, where she performed and cooked with Art Smith (who will be the executive chef of her parents’ restaurant). She and Nicola Formichetti, her close collaborator for her every outfit and every look and the fashion director of her Haus of Gaga, created “Gaga’s Workshop”—a full floor of holiday items selected or inspired by her—at Barneys on Madison Avenue. (A percentage of the profits from all that stuff will benefit the Born This Way Foundation.) She’ll perform in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. She continues her work as a spokesman for Viva Glam and creative director for Polaroid, and is developing a fragrance which is scheduled to debut in 2012. And she is eager to start a Born This Way tour, which could begin sometime in 2012 and will last well into 2013. When I asked Troy Carter if, after three weeks of vacation, Gaga gets antsy and wants to work, he laughed and said, “Three weeks? Or three hours?” When I suggested to Gaga that maybe she works too hard, does too many TV shows, she said, “I love to sing. I love to dance. I love show business. I need it. I
t’s like breath.” I asked her if she worries about overexposure, or backlash. She said, “I’ve already had the backlash.” But, I said, you don’t want to wind up some crazy casualty. “If I’m supposed to end up like some crazy casualty,” she said, “then that’s my destiny.”
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New York City, September 10, 2011: Gaga is taking me to some of her old hangouts, where, she tells me, she grew up. “This is really where I got my education,” she says about the Lower East Side neighborhood where she lived alone in a walk-up apartment at 176 Stanton Street from May 2005 to May 2007, after dropping out of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. This is where she slept on a mattress on the floor, and where, she says, “I wore the same outfit every day. I never did laundry—I stank.” It’s also where she took drugs, wrote songs, and lugged her keyboard up and down several flights of stairs to do club shows. I told her that, even though she’s always said she avoids celebrity parties and prefers to spend time with old friends when she’s in New York, I wasn’t sure I bought it. (“I don’t understand that whole thing of . . . gathering . . . in tribes,” she says. “Like a club of famous people. Why would I want to have champagne with celebrities?”) So today she’s called some of her pals to join us on an expedition. She’s just finished a photo shoot, she is spray-tanned and wearing sunglasses, a Lever Couture black lace seethrough dress, black underwear, very high heels, and a black lace cape that has been dipped in latex. She rides downtown in a large S.U.V. and insists on sitting in the front seat, with her legs splayed across the dashboard, “because,” she says, “I don’t like to feel cramped.” At East Houston and Avenue B she wants to get out and walk. This foray is not like her appearance on 60 Minutes; no camera crew follows us and no crowd gathers. With her security team a few paces behind us, we walk with Bo O’Connor—her best friend since she was four years old—Lane Bentley, and Bobby Campbell. People on the street occasionally stop and stare, say hello, or ask to take a picture with her. (She says yes every time.) But we manage to walk around fairly hassle-free. She’s showing me some of the landmarks from when she lived in the area. She’s upset that a favorite Mexican restaurant, on Rivington Street between Essex and Norfolk, went out of business. So has a beauty-supply store that she loved. We walk into a T-shirt store owned by a friend of hers. She points out various bars—St. Jerome’s on Rivington, where her former boyfriend worked and where her friend Lady Starlight D.J.’d and go-go-danced, and 151, which some people in the neighborhood refer to as “the cave.” There’s a biker bar where, she says, “I used to stand outside and do drugs.” We walk by a park where Dominican families hang out and listen to music and where, she says, “the rats that ran across that street were huge.” She shows me the liquor store across the street from her old apartment and says, “If I was really fucked up, I would call them to deliver.” She had money for liquor delivery? “Well,” she says, “a $4 bottle of wine.”
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