As with most things Lady Gaga, this latest controversy is swathed in mystery. Did she really cancel a performance last Thursday night just to go on “Oprah” the next day? Or was she deathly ill, as she claimed? Or, as her opening act, Jason Derulo, implied on a radio show Tuesday morning, was Gaga so sick that she had to take steroids to make the “Oprah” appearance? Or, as her publicist said, is there no truth to that?
In other words: Gaga can’t just be sick. Nor can she simply postpone a show. Everything with Gaga — a native New Yorker who kicked off a four-night, sold-out stint at Radio City Music Hall last night — is a spectacle designed to elicit the maximum reaction possible. It’s not a technique she pioneered, but it’s propelled her from an unremarkable-looking Upper West Side teenager with the ungainly name Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta to an androgynous, mysterious, global pop icon named Lady Gaga.
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“She was always,” says her old friend Hollie Simmons, “going to be No. 1.”
In the 15 months since she’s become a superstar, Gaga has had five No. 1 singles and sold 8 million records. She’s sold 35 million singles worldwide. Her bizarre appearance — face almost always obscured, hair and makeup overdone, archly futuristic clothing that reveals a lot of skin but is never sexy — has been reinterpreted by such designers as Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci and Jean Paul Gaultier. Fellow pop stars, including Rihanna and Beyoncé, have aped her space-age chic. She has met the Queen.
Like any worthy performance artist, Lady Gaga actively encourages debate and speculation about who she is: Bisexual? A transvestite? A hermaphrodite? Of this planet?
Or could her secret be even darker?
Born and raised in New York City to a wealthy couple named Joseph and Cynthia Germanotta, the young Stefani — who claims to be 23, though some believe she’s older — was a well-adjusted kid, despite her claims of a misfit, misspent youth. She did, however, look out of place even then, not so much an uptown, posh, sophisticated kid — à la a Spence-era Gwyneth — but more like a refugee from “Jersey Shore”: big black hair, heavy eye makeup and tight, revealing clothes. That said, she was popular.
“Stefani was always part of school plays and musicals,” recalls a former high school classmate. “She had a core group of friends; she was a good student. She liked boys a lot, but singing was No. 1.”
Germanotta was a student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, the same high school Caroline Kennedy attended. (Germanotta has fueled rumors about her age by speaking of classmate Paris Hilton, who is pushing 30.) She studied with Christina Aguilera’s vocal coach, then went to NYU’s Tisch School. She was popular there, too.
“She was a very suburban, preppy, friendly, social party girl,” says a former dorm-mate, who was friends with the boys in Germanotta’s then-jam band. “There was nothing that would tip you off that she had this Warhol-esque, ‘new art’ extremism.”
“Her ‘crazy’ outfit,” recalls another pal, “was putting suspenders on her jeans.”
A large part of Gaga’s appeal is, as with her forebears, her myth. Like Madonna, from whom she has borrowed most heavily, Gaga has retained tight control of her narrative, even in a digital age. (The most damning clip one can find is a 2005 appearance on MTV’s practical-joke reality show “Boiling Points.”) Her origin story, too, hews closely to Madonna’s: a rebellious Catholic schoolgirl-turned-starving- artist of the Lower East Side, discovered and celebrated for her weirdness.
Sort of, but not quite.
Germanotta’s goal was always to get a record deal, and her family was largely supportive. After dropping out of NYU, Germanotta befriended Wendy Starland, who just happened to be scouting bands for Rob Fusari, who’d produced Whitney Houston and Destiny’s Child.
“Rob said to me, ‘I want you to find a girl under 25 who could be the lead singer of the Strokes,’ ” Starland says. “I looked high and low.” Then she randomly caught Germanotta at the Cutting Room. At the end of the set, Starland grabbed Germanotta and speed-dialed her boss.
“Rob was like, ‘Why are you waking me up?’ And I said, ‘I found the girl!’ ” Fusari agreed to a meeting. He was, to put it mildly, underwhelmed.
“She was a little overweight,” he recalls.
“She looked like something out of ‘GoodFellas,’ like she was ready to make pasta any minute. She had on leggings and some strange cut-up shirt, a hat that looked like it was out of Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ — I remember thinking, ‘That could be her. But I hope it’s not.’ ”
Then Germanotta sang for him. “I’m telling you, it was, like, 10 seconds in and I’m texting my management. I’m like, I need a contract — immediately.”
Here’s where the myths and the realities begin to meld.
Germanotta was, in some ways, the outsider she claimed to be. In the music industry and on the Lower East Side scene — where cool, like pornography, is hard to define but easy to recognize — Germanotta was not cool. The Gaga persona, however, was gestating. It would be a difficult birth.
“I wanted to bring [Germanotta] into my world,” says Lady Starlight, who met her while working as a go-go dancer at the LES bar St. Jerome’s in 2007. Starlight’s friends, too, were underwhelmed. “You know how it is in those kinds of artsy circles,” says Starlight. “People are a little snooty.”
Starlight gave Germanotta something of a tutorial in the downtown art scene, teaching her burlesque, and bringing her to the underground dance party Frock N Roll in Long Island City. By this point, Starlight says, the Gaga look was germinating: “She was wearing a version of it,” Starlight recalls. “Definitely spandex, for sure, some kind of unitard, but casual. She still looked abrupt and out of place.”
“The color schemes would be, like, really tight leopard-print pants with red pumps 1 foot tall,” says Fusari. “I’d say, ‘Stef, you gotta walk a little ahead of me, because people might think I’m with a transsexual prostitute.’ ”
“Men are a weird thing with Stef,” says her friend Simmons. “She likes really smart guys. I’ve never seen her not date a guy who’s in a tailored suit and has achieved something substantial. She’s not interested in wasters.”
As social as she was, Germanotta remained singularly focused on her burgeoning career. As far back as her now-famous NYU talent show, Germanotta looked and sounded more like Fiona Apple or Norah Jones than the Euro-pop, S&M dance master she is now. She was forever behind a piano or a keyboard, partially obscured by her long, black hair, singing earnest love songs with titles like “Captivated” and “Electric Kiss.” Fusari thought Germanotta’s whole vision was fatally off.
“I had read an article about women in rock,” he says, “and how it was getting very difficult for women to break through in the rock genre, how Nelly Furtado had moved into more of a dance thing.” He told Germanotta that they weren’t “going in the right direction. It wasn’t something kids could relate to.”
They tried something else: dancier, poppier, Euro-inflected, accessible.
“That was definitely a light bulb [moment],” says Fusari. “But we still didn’t have a name yet.”
“Lady Gaga,” according to Lady Gaga, was a nickname given by her LES compatriots (as she told Oprah), something Fusari mistakenly called her once in a text message (as she told Rolling Stone), an homage to Queen’s song “Radio Gaga” (general lore). Actually, it was the result of a marketing meeting.
“That was the name we decided on before we started shopping to the record labels,” says a former collaborator, who asked not to be named. Her glam-android aesthetic is largely the work of a team she calls “The Haus of Gaga,” but she also told an astonished Oprah that her look is mainly auto-generated: “This inspiration comes naturally,” Gaga said.
“She was, and is, incredibly focused and motivated about succeeding,” says Starlight.
“Her [new] label, Interscope, had me shoot her first performance as Lady Gaga for music execs,” says photographer Aliya Naumoff. After the show, Naumoff — who’d shot Gaga the day before — approached her to say hi and offer congratulations. “She blew me off, didn’t care,” says Naumoff, laughing. “She just didn’t give a f—. I was like, ‘She’s in it to win it.’”
A close friend from this era who, like Starlight, was left behind, is less forgiving: “She’s a really great manipulator,” she says. “It’s a long process to become a rock star, and she’s willing to crush anyone in her path to do it. She has zero ethics whatsoever. None.”
She says Gaga cheated her out of monies owed, giving her a Chanel 2.55 bag instead. “We used to speak every day,” she says. “It’s a gorgeous bag.”
As she sat with Oprah less than one week ago, men in disco-ball regalia and middle-aged housewives alike misted up as Gaga explained her raison d’etre.
Her small yet entire oeuvre, explained the girl who lived to be famous, was a commentary on “this horrific media world that we live in.” Her celebrity, her art, is not about her, she said. She is a vessel, an artist who exists only to let everyone else know that it’s OK to be weird, a freak, a misfit, that she has never fit in and never will.
“So the message of Gaga,” said Oprah, “is, ‘Be who you are.’ ” “Be yourself,” Gaga agreed. Whoever, in fact, that may actually be.