Authors: Maureen Callahan
Poker Face (10 page)
“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.
G
aga 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 not 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.
She was a genius when it came to the Web and knew she could control her message there. She was tweeting constantly. She solicited the friendship of controversial and snarky gossip blogger Perez Hilton, who has become a celebrity himself and who relentlessly promotes the people he likes. He can be equally tenacious when it comes to denigrating those he does not. Gaga quickly became not only a recurring character but a heroine, and he began calling her his “wife.”
“She saw him not only as a spokesman for the gay community, but as an ally to really help launch her career,” says David Ciemny. “So this was a calculated friendship and decision from Day One.” She invited him to dinner, talked to him on the phone; as her fame grew, she’d invite him to visit her on tour and take him out for mani-pedi dates, which he’d shoot and post to his site. For Halloween last year, he dressed up as Lady Gaga.
“She would send him videos and songs right after she finished them; she’d say, ‘This is going to Perez; I don’t want anyone else to have it,’ ” Ciemny says. “And he would give her good reviews; he would never bash Gaga.” His access, though, became exponentially less direct. “He would call me,” says Ciemny, “because he couldn’t get ahold of her.”
Hilton’s first Gaga post went up June 8, 2008; it was a link to her video for “Just Dance.” “Finally, a new artist that explodes onto the scene in America and embraces pop music, like old school Madonna!” he wrote. “ ‘Just Dance’ is the lead single off her new album and this shit be our summer anthem!!! You must CLICK HERE to check out the super stylin’ and ferosh video. It’s like LastNightsParty and The Cobrasnake come to life. The song is sooo damn catchy!”
“She had a very strong sense of how to use the Internet to market her record [before it] was on radio and video play and in public awareness,” says James Diener, CEO and president of A&M/Octone. “In 2008, she’s very mysterious. You’re not quite sure exactly what she looks like, where she is, what this is all about. What you have for her is at least a year of her starting to develop serious traction amongst a grassroots community via the Internet, clubs, DJs, various markets around the world before the United States. There’s very, very strong word-of-mouth buzzing about her in the blogosphere, the right people online saying something very important is coming. Then, when the records go on the radio, it’s like a match to kerosene—there’s so much enthusiasm it explodes immediately.”
By the end of June, she was making weekly, on-the-fly short films documenting her life on the road; she called the project
Transmission Gagavision
and uploaded them to her site. She kept up her MySpace page and Facebook wall. She cracked a code that’s ever-changing, specific to each person who tries: How to cut through the clutter of the Web and create an online presence that’s not just startling but that sticks, that keeps people coming back in ever-greater numbers, and that then translates into the real world, generating actual currency—be they votes for president or tickets to your rock show.
“With the Internet, everybody gets distribution, everybody gets eyeballed,” says MTV’s DiSanto. “But fame and stickiness? That depends on the content.” He points to the network’s most phenomenal success to date, the reality TV series
Jersey Shore.
“That was the fastest success rate we’ve ever seen,” he says. “After Episode One, it’s on
SNL
’s ‘Weekend Update.’ And people said, ‘Oh, it’s probably because of the controversy. Snooki”—the sozzled, Smurf-like guidette—“got punched and it’s all over the Internet.’ That’s gonna draw people, but the stickiness of the show and the content is what made people stay with it. In terms of [Gaga], there are a million artists and a million kids out there putting stuff up on YouTube every day, so it’s a lot easier to get seen, but it’s much harder to get famous. Because with this much choice, things get lost in the middle.”
DiSanto believes that the sheer volume of content that lives online demands that any emerging artist has to “go broad right off the bat” by, counterintuitive as it sounds, “super-serving a niche. If you’re making a feature film, a giant director like a J. J. Abrams or a James Cameron will go to Comic-Con [America’s biggest annual comic book convention] and super-serve those niche fans and get them to come along with you. Then you use your niche to be your root and blow up from there. I think she did a brilliant job of super-serving her niche, the gay fan base. You know, Logo [the gay-themed cable channel] was her first official TV appearance. She allowed that to be a real die-hard solid fan base that allowed her to go broad.”
That first TV appearance on Logo was a performance of
“Just Dance” during the channel’s NewNowNext Awards in May 2008. “Interscope was really pushing this girl,” says Logo’s Dave Mace, senior vice president of programming. He and his team didn’t know all that much about her. “She had the one video out, for ‘Just Dance,’ ” he says. Though it wasn’t getting much radio airplay, the clip was playing on Logo’s video countdown show. “At that point, we didn’t know if it was going to have any life beyond that, if it was a one-hit-wonder situation,” he says. “But we really liked her, and we felt it had the potential to be a hit song.” And she’d spent the better part of the year building a gay fan base. So they booked her.
“It was interesting when she came in to rehearse,” says Mace. “She was mysterious and in character, with the blond hair and the sunglasses and the cape over her head. And then, like, no pants. When she walked in, you were like, ‘Who is this girl? Who does she think she is?’ But not in a bad way. Kind of, like . . . interesting. For somebody her age, you wouldn’t expect that sort of thing. She reminded me of Grace Jones, that sort of mysteriousness.”
Interscope, says Mace, “had clearly given her more money to work with than most developing artists. They’d been kind enough to pay for a bunch of dancers that Lady Gaga wanted with her,” he says, “to kind of take over the room. And she had worked out this amazing choreographed number.”
The performance was shot at MTV’s studios, the same space where the now-defunct after-school countdown show
TRL
was broadcast. The space was retrofitted to look like a nightclub, to little effect. The production values were low, and the studio was small—so small that the bulk of the audience had to leave so she’d have room to perform; there were maybe fifteen people in the crowd.
As Gaga was introduced, the camera tracked her with her geometrically cut blond bangs and long hair; thick, angular black sunglasses; and cowl-like black hood drawn over her head, marching toward the stage with an unintentionally hilarious sense of purpose. She had two female backup dancers in tow, made up and dressed as to be barely noticeable, yet Gaga—in her tight leather pants, S&M chain belt, and aerodynamic shoulder pads—looked like she was leading a miniature army dedicated to the forcible spread of fabulousness.
Christian Siriano, the fashion designer and winner of the fourth season of
Project Runway,
met Gaga at the Logo taping; he was presenting an award. “I thought she was this weird little tranny,” he says. “She had that persona, and she was wearing that hooded thing, and you’re like, ‘Who’s this girl? She’s a nobody. She needs to slow her roll.’ ”
He changed his mind after watching her perform. “She was amazing,” Siriano says. They bonded at the after-party; she was very complimentary of Siriano, who was just finishing up on
Project Runway.
“She said it was great to meet me; she was like, ‘Oh, I’m such a fan,’ ” he recalls. “It was a total little love moment.”
“The song was great, the number went amazingly well—but the rehearsal went better than the performance, and I think she was kind of disappointed,” says Mace. “It was because her disco stick”—her illuminated wand, already a favorite prop and a reference to her lyric “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick”—“didn’t light up when she wanted it to. If you go back and look at the video from the show, you’d probably notice it, that she’s struggling a little bit.” (It’s unnoticeable.) “But she was a perfectionist,” he continues. “She wanted to do it again, but, being an almost-live show, we couldn’t.”
Even before she asked for a do-over, Mace was struck by her level of commitment to the performance: When the song ended, she struck a pose onstage, gloved palms open on either side of her cheeks, elbows askew, face—what was visible of it—frozen, expressionless. And not just for a few seconds, for at least a minute—through the host’s closing announcements, the thank-you for watching, the plug for one of her former compatriots: “We’re done here, but the fun continues online at the aftershow, featuring Cazwell, performing his new song ‘I Seen Beyoncé at Burger King!’ ” “Thank you so much for watching,” the host’s blond female sidekick drawls, languidly stretching an arm right in front of Gaga, who’s so still she looks like she’s turned into a biblical pillar of salt.
“Chris [Wiley, a Logo publicist] and I were just looking at each other, like, ‘What is she doing?’ ” says Mace, laughing. “It speaks to her as a performer—she was in character, and she was very conscious of it. But it’s just really funny.”
She also appeared, very briefly, on an episode of the MTV reality soap
The Hills
in September 2008, performing at a launch party for a jeans line. According to fashion publicist and reality star Kelly Cutrone, she almost didn’t get the gig: “I mean, it’s L.A., it’s one hundred degrees,” she told MTV News. “But she’s in this Alice Cooper [look]. I was like, ‘I’m so not into it . . . this is way too Marilyn Manson for me.’ ” But the event’s promoter overruled Cutrone; the word was that everyone at Interscope knew that this girl was going to be huge.
Gaga, meanwhile, was assiduously tracking how much radio airplay she was getting. It wasn’t much, so after every show, from about two or three
A.M.
until seven
a.m.
, she’d go into a recording booth and rerecord the intro to “Just Dance” for about twenty radio stations, specifically singing out each one’s call letters until, finally, she’d recorded tailor-made singles for every radio outlet in the United States.
“She was very acutely aware of certain program directors,” ex–tour manager David Ciemny says. “And if they didn’t add the song, it was, ‘What do we do?’ She knew everyone at her label. If something wasn’t happening, she’d say, ‘Let me call that guy. What do I need to do? I’ll show up at the station, I’ll sing “Happy Birthday.” I’ll do whatever it takes.’ Because it wasn’t really happening in the States.”
She was equally on top of her momentum in other countries. “Someone could say, ‘Oh wow, ‘Poker Face’ is number one in ten countries across the board!’ but it would be like, ‘Well, we haven’t been to Japan yet, they don’t know who [I am]—let’s go to Japan.’ Or like, ‘You’re famous now, you’re on the cover of
Rolling Stone
’—[she’d say], ‘Well, I haven’t been on the cover of
Cosmopolitan
yet.’ ” (She achieved that goal with
Cosmo
’s April 2010 issue. By the end of that month, she was on the cover of
Time
magazine, next to Bill Clinton, named number one among their list of most influential artists.)