Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

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  And then we go into the Johnsons—a small bar on Rivington. While Lane and Bobby go to the pool table in the back, Gaga, Bo, and I sit at the bar. I say it’s barely five p.m., perhaps a bit early to start drinking. “Are you kidding?,” Gaga says. “Back in the day, this would be late.” Bo and I order beer, and Gaga orders a shot of Jameson’s. For the next three hours, Bo, Gaga’s friend Breedlove (a musician who also does the makeup for the Broadway show Wicked), and Lady Starlight (née Colleen Martin) sit and talk with Gaga and me about their days on the Lower East Side and their friendships. Lady Starlight, who’s preparing to go on tour as the opening act for Judas Priest, gives Gaga a tie-dyed red velour dress and a velour jacket in various shades of gold. Breedlove talks about how they used to kill time in this very bar all day “waiting for Judy,” their code name for cocaine. Gaga talks about how she woke up one day on her tour bus and realized what an idiot she’d been and never touched the drug again. She says that Bo made her understand that, even after working for 17 hours, or after a flight to Tokyo—no matter how exhausted she is—if her phone rings in the middle of the night and it is her parents or Bo, she has to pick it up. Gaga recalls the first time she saw Lady Starlight go-go-dance on a bench in the corner at St. Jerome’s. “There was something . . . off about it,” Gaga says of Starlight’s performance, “something awkward and uncomfortable. But she was so unapologetic and interesting; I wanted to be like that.” About Gaga, Lady Starlight says, “She’s such an awesome person that you can’t not like her. We hung out, we started to perform together, and people thought we were sisters, or girlfriends—neither of which we ever denied. She has such positive energy; it’s so inspirational to me.” Gaga always credits Lady Starlight with influencing her, and Lady Starlight says, “First of all, no one else gives that kind of credit, but she always does. And I swear to you, everyone says when people get famous they don’t change, and it’s just not true. But she has not changed. [In those early days] I just tried to show her, Don’t be afraid of anything. Go to whatever lengths we need to go to to get people shocked. It was, like, live it and believe it.” Gaga talks about her next tour, and she talks about her fans. It always comes back to her fans. (Nicola Formichetti had told me that when he first met Gaga, three years ago, at a photo shoot early in the morning in Malibu, she showed up in full makeup, wig, heels—the whole bit. And then she took it all off and did it again for the shoot. “She always says to me, ‘I don’t want my fans to see me without my high heels on,’” Nicola recalls. “She says, ‘They’ll kill me. They need me to be like this.’ People always ask me what is she really like, and you know, this is who she is.”)

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  The Mandarin Oriental hotel, New York City, September 11, 2011: Following the afternoon at her parents’ apartment, over the course of three hours (and before she returns to the air mattress to sleep), Gaga talks to me about her work, her fans, her politics, and her private life. She tells me she is seeing someone new (who knows if her rumored romance with Vampire Diaries actor Taylor Kinney will stand the test of time), but she is notoriously private about her private life. “I can’t imagine that people sit and talk for hours about their marriages and their personal relationships,” she says. “It seems strange to me. I always try to be honest with my fans, because I feel like I’ve built this goodwill with them where they know that I’m telling them the truth. The only thing I’m not always forthright with [are] my relationships, because I think it’s not classy to exploit your relationships. I have a very giving heart. . . . I’m a lot like my mother. I just let people so far in. And with men, I tend to let them in so far in my heart and my soul because I’m emotionally available. The difference between being with your fans and being with a lover is that with my fans I know what I mean to them, and I will die protecting what we have. I only know the happiness of putting a smile on someone’s face from the stage. But I have never felt truly cherished by a lover. I have an inability to know what happiness feels like with a man. I have this effect on people where it starts out good. Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

  “Perhaps it’s a whose-dick-is-bigger contest. If I go to the piano and write a quick song and play it back, they are angry with how fast and effortless it is. That’s who I am, and I don’t apologize for it. But it’s a hideous place to be in when someone that you love has convinced you that you will never be good enough for anyone. I had a man say to me, ‘You will die alone in a house bigger than you know, with all your money and hit records, and you will die alone.’” I suggest that perhaps she’s picked the wrong men. “That’s what my mother says,” she admits. “And even though I know it sounds a bit Hallmark, whenever I [was] in that kind of stressful, worthless moment, I would think, I’ll show you. But it’s more than just saying, ‘Oh, they can’t handle a strong woman.’ ‘Oh, I’m intimidating.’ ‘Oh, it’s the money.’ I think what it really is, is that I date creative people. And I think that what intimidates them is not my purse; it’s my mind.” I suggest that she’s just going to have to find somebody more talented than she is. “Yes, please,” she says.

  Then she laughs and says the weird thing is, after she’s left a few people, they’ve asked her to marry them. “How fuckin’ romantic, you asshole. Sure, pop a ring on my finger and make it all better. I can buy myself a fuckin’ ring.” She continues: “I say this honestly, and this is my new thing as of the past year: when I fight with someone I’m in a relationship with, I think, What would my fans think if they knew this was happening? How would they feel about my work and about me as a female if they knew I was allowing this to go on? And then I get out. [My fans] saved me from myself, because they would never allow it—the same way I would never allow anything to hurt them. And I have always picked the music first. If anything gets in music’s way, they’re gone. My work has always been primary. It’s not money and it’s not record sales and it’s not photographs. It’s this invisible thing. . . . I imagine all the artists I ever loved could smell that energy.”

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  One of the things that made Gaga more aware of how she was in relationships was the acting piece she did as “Jo Calderone” for the MTV awards. “I thought it would be an interesting cultural exercise to create someone [who’s] not me,” she says, “[someone] infinitely more relatable than me. A blue-collar Italian guy in a Brooks Brothers suit who just wants this girl to stay the hell home. It took a performance piece for me to understand things about who I am. And through doing this [with acting coach Larry Arancio] I learned about how I am in bed. I said, ‘Isn’t it strange that I feel less able to be private in private, and more able to be private in public?’ And Larry said, ‘Well, maybe that’s the problem.’ And I said, ‘That’s exactly the problem.’ When I’m onstage, I’m so giving and so open and myself. And when the spotlight goes off, I don’t know quite what to do with myself. As we were working, and talking this through, Larry told me to write everything down. And I had to get the prosthetic cock and balls hanging between my legs—how else could I walk like a guy? And I remember one of the things I said [when writing] was that I cover my face a lot when I have an orgasm. Like I’m ashamed or something.” And so, when she performed this onstage as “Jo” talking about Lady Gaga, she said, “When she comes, she covers her face, like she doesn’t want me to see, like she can’t stand to have an honest moment when nobody’s watching.” She also utilized “Jo” in her video for “You and I”: “It was a sweet and youthful moment in a cornfield where I could create what the most perfect relationship would be like,” she says. “It was a metaphor. I haven’t had it yet.”

  As the sun goes down and it starts to get dark in the suite, all the crudités, figs, and pomegranates are gone from the room-service tray—yes, we
ate even after that meal at her parents’. We sip some red wine and the conversation turns to politics. I ask Gaga what she cares about in regard to what’s happening in our country. “I care about gay marriage. I care about immigration. I care about education,” she says. “I care about families and what is taught in schools and what is taught at home. And I feel liberated by my ability to be political with no political affiliation.

  “I think that we’re the land of the free and the home of the brave and inviting people to come in and pursue the American Dream,” she continues. “And now we’re kicking everybody out and essentially making citizens explain for themselves why they should be as equal to the person sitting next to them. I don’t understand why anyone would interpret the Constitution as more relevant for one person over another, based on choices that have nothing to do with committing a crime.” We discuss, among other things, the current presidential candidates, the Tea Party, Fundamentalists, and a woman’s right to choose. “How can we create within society a sense of respect and leadership [when a woman is put in a position] where she’s so young and has to make a choice,” Gaga says. “The problem is not women being irresponsible. The problem is everyone being irresponsible. I talk to my sister about this a lot because she’s young. Maybe sex isn’t that big a deal anymore, but I don’t have sex without monogamy, and maybe that’s very old-fashioned. But still, the way men treat women in this society . . . How is it O.K. for a guy not to call a girl back after sex? And how can you deny a woman the right to choose [whether or not] to have a child? It’s completely outrageous.”

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  Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, Staten Island, New York, October 11, 2011: Lady Gaga is directing the video for her new single, “Marry the Night.” She wrote the treatment for it over a year ago and tells me it’s “autobiographical.” By the time you’re reading this story, the video will likely be out, and while she may not spell it out, she wants people to interpret the video for themselves. But on this night, while it’s being filmed on a closed set, what I see being filmed is a very, very personal story. There is footage of Gaga in a dance class, when she was just starting her career. There is a scene where she is lugging her keyboard up the flights of stairs in her old apartment building, with neighbors coming out of their apartments to stare at her. The director of photography is Darius Khondji, who did Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, and Gaga speaks to Darius in fairly fluent French. She laughs when she sees the playback of her falling down the stairs—very physical, Lucille Ball–style—with her keyboard. And then there are the two scenes that she says depict the worst day of her life.

  Over a year and a half ago, when she talked to me about “the worst day of my life,” she said she had never talked about it before. But all she would reveal at that time was that she called her mother, who screamed into the phone and went to get her at her Stanton Street apartment, and that she was dropped by her first record label, Island Def Jam, on the same day. Soon afterward, she and her mother went to visit her grandmother in West Virginia. Now, in this video, she says, she is reliving “the worst day of my life.” In one scene, Gaga, with obvious bruises on her body, looks completely drugged and out of it as she is wheeled on a gurney into a hospital—which, she pointedly tells me, is a “women’s clinic.” (Although, she says, laughing, in this video “the nurses are wearing Calvin Klein ‘uniforms’ and Yves Saint Laurent shoes.”) Following the hospital scene, a woman playing the part of her best friend, Bo, takes her back to her Stanton Street apartment, where Gaga undresses and gets into bed. And then, after she’s in bed, she gets a phone call informing her that she’s been dropped by her record label. Prior to filming this scene, Gaga asks the few of us assembled in her trailer how far she should go with this. She decides to go all the way. “It’s chaotic,” she says, “and sad. But I don’t want it to be safe.”

  Outside the set made to look like her original apartment—with a mattress on the floor, dirty dishes in the sink, a hot plate, open cereal boxes, a leather jacket draped over a chair, a keyboard—she prepares to film the scene. She has a short dark wig on and is wearing a Stéphane Rolland dress that has latex blood along the hem. She and “Bo” are wearing gloves and heels. “We look like we just came from church,” she says, joking, then takes a sip out of a bottle of Jameson’s. I mutter something about how the Catholic Church will view this. “What, as if I’m their pinup girl to begin with?” she says. Clearly, this was a traumatic day; now this video is a cathartic experience for her. The soundtrack comes on; she tells me it’s the Beethoven sonata Pathétique. As she prepares to film the scene, she starts to cry, and hugs her choreographer, Richie Jackson. She’s the director and the actress, and, she says, with those two jobs “I have to get my bearings.” Then she adds, “I’m getting ready to relive the worst day of my life.” Tears roll down her face, and she turns to me. But, I say, you won. You won.

  The following night, motor homes and trucks are lined up on 126th Street in Harlem. Gaga is filming another scene for the “Marry the Night” video, this time on the rooftop of a parking garage. Joe Germanotta is there; Cynthia had been there earlier. Joe and I talk about how pissed off we are about the Yankees’ loss in the playoffs and Alex Rodriguez in particular. Everyone is given earplugs because cars are about to be exploded. The pyrotechnic guys are wearing what look like protective fireproof suits. They set fire to three cars. The explosions are loud; it’s like an action movie. Gaga, wearing a short blond wig, a skimpy black leather outfit, and thigh-high black leather boots, says in a determined voice, “I’m going in.” And as the cars burst into flames and we all hold our collective breath, Gaga walks—no, she struts—fearlessly, up to the fire.

  (Lady Gaga would go on to win two Golden Globes and nine Grammys, earning three Academy Award nominations, including a 2018 Oscar for best original song.)

  THE HOUSE OF WINDSOR

  QUEEN ELIZABETH II

  LOVE AND MAJESTY

  By Sally Bedell Smith | January 2012

  There was a whole battalion of lively young men,” recalled Lady Anne Glenconner, whose family were friends and neighbors of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Sandringham, their estate in Norfolk. But Princess Elizabeth, the heiress presumptive to the British throne, “realized her destiny and luckily set her heart on Prince Philip at an early age. He was ideal—good-looking and a foreign prince.”

  Her choice was in some respects traditional, because the princess and Philip were relatives, but not too close to raise eyebrows. They were third cousins, sharing the same great-great-grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Philip was in fact more royal than Elizabeth, whose mother was mere British nobility (with distant links to English and Scottish kings), while his parents were Princess Alice of Battenberg (a great-grandchild of Queen Victoria) and Prince Andrew of Greece, the descendant of a Danish prince recruited for the Greek throne in the mid-19th century. Elizabeth and Philip were both connected to most of Europe’s reigning families, where consanguinity had been common for centuries. Queen Victoria and her husband had been even closer: first cousins who shared the same grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg.

  In other ways, Philip was an outlier with a decidedly unconventional background. Queen Elizabeth had made no secret of her preference for one of her daughter’s aristocratic English friends from a family similar to her own English-Scottish Strathmores—the future Dukes of Grafton, Rutland, and Buccleuch, or Henry Porchester, the future Earl of Carnarvon. Philip could boast none of their extensive landholdings, and in fact had very little money.

  Although he was born on June 10, 1921, on the isle of Corfu, Philip spent scarcely a year in Greece before the entire royal family was expelled in a coup. His parents took him, along with his four older sisters, to Paris, where they lived rent-free in a house owned by wealthy relatives. A proud professional soldier with an extroverted personality and a quick wit, Prince Andrew found himself at loose ends,
while Alice (properly known as Princess Andrew of Greece after her wedding) had difficulty managing a large family, not least because she was congenitally deaf.

  After Philip’s parents sent him at the age of eight to Cheam, a boarding school in England, his mother had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanitarium for several years, which precipitated his parents’ permanent separation. She eventually moved to Athens and established a Greek Orthodox order of nuns.