As a 3-year-old, she killed. When Lana Del Rey tried out for a part in an upstate community theater’s production of “Annie,” she shone like the top of the Chrysler Building.
“Auditions for ‘Annie’ are always pretty awful — you have to listen to one after another horrible rendition of ‘The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow,’ ’’ says Del Rey’s former choir teacher, Kimberly Weems. “But even then, she was remarkable. I cast her as my youngest orphan.”
Del Rey, born Lizzy Grant, was also a bit of a diva, says Weems. “She used to walk to the edge of the stage and wave at her friends in the audience during performances.”
Del Rey could have used a little bit of diva-dom last weekend, when she gave a lackluster performance on “Saturday Night Live” that induced cringes from odd corners; even NBC anchorman Brian Williams called her set one of “worst outings in ‘SNL’ history” in an e-mail that quickly went viral.
WATCH LANA DEL REY’S ‘SNL’ PERFORMANCES:
BLUE JEAN
VIDEO GAMES
But Williams’ online missive wasn’t the first bad press this 25-year-old from Lake Placid, NY, has withstood — not by a long shot. Since her homemade YouTube clip for her song “Video Games” was posted last summer, she’s become an unsuspecting proxy for a raging online debate about authenticity.
Is she indie or mainstream? Why did she change her name and who chose it for her? Does she write her own music? Did her rich daddy buy her a record deal? Who dresses her? And what’s up with those bee-stung lips?
Ah, the Internet. That magical place that grants a small-town girl with a pretty voice and a cool video a record deal, then threatens to drown her in a tsunami of vitriol. The onslaught is only bound to grow as Del Rey’s second album, “Born to Die,” arrives in stores Jan. 31.
“I find the whole thing really weird,” Ben Mawson, her manager, tells The Post. “It’s weird that she polarizes opinion so much, that people make so much effort to hate her.”
For “Video Games,” a gauzy torch song about an infatuation with an older boy who drives fast cars, smells like beer and watches her undress while playing video games, Del Rey pieced together a clip cut with grainy footage of kids swimming and skateboarding. It was enigmatic and dreamy, drawing half a million views and a deal with Interscope Records.
At first, the blogosphere was thrilled, but curiosity about Del Rey soon dredged up old photos of Lizzy Grant, a pretty girl with bleached hair, unremarkable style and distinctly thinner lips. (Mawson insists she hasn’t had her lips done, but the photos are persuasive.)
“Meet Lizzy Grant. She had blond hair, didn’t look very ‘alt sexy.’ Sorta like a girl from my high school who was a part-time hostess at Chili’s,” wrote “Carles,” the blogger behind Hipster Runoff, which has dedicated its Lana Del Report to “LDR News, Memes, Buzz, Opinions and Hate Coverage.”
Before she was Del Rey the chanteuse, she was Lizzy Grant the popular girl. Her father, Rob Grant, made a mint as a real estate agent who branched out into buying and selling domain names. Lizzy, the oldest of three, sang “just beautifully” as a child in the church choir, says Lisa Reid, who volunteers at a local elementary school. But she grew into a wild child who liked to write poetry in a back booth of the local Aroma Round coffee shop.
After her freshman year, Lizzy was shipped off to boarding school. “We smoked pot and drank a lot,” says childhood friend Bryce Stanton. “A bunch of us were arrested a few times. Her parents saw her going in a bad direction.”
At the Kent School, in Kent, Conn., she found life “difficult,” she told GQ. Boarding school made her different, Stanton says. “She was weirder. I think she had finally found a way to express what was going on inside.” Afterward, she didn’t gel with the scene at Fordham University, either. Instead, she wrote songs and read and played in clubs in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side.
She signed with NYC indie label 5 Points, which paired her with veteran producer David Kahne, who had worked with everyone from Paul McCartney and Tony Bennett to the Strokes. But the resulting EP, “Kill Kill,” and a subsequent album “Lana Del Ray a k a Lizzy Grant” (before she settled on the alternate spelling “Del Rey”) received scant attention.
She also worked with NYC rapper and producer Princess Superstar, who is baffled by the backlash. “It makes me so angry,” says Superstar. “She’s always had that old movie star thing going on. We would go to Harlem together and get our nails done and she would add this ’50s movie star-ish thing to it. Even through our studio sessions, she had bouffant hair and fake eyelashes. She was rocking that style for sure.”
Superstar introduced Del Rey to Mawson, who has worked with her for the past two and a half years. “[She kind of] has a curse,” he says. “People don’t believe there’s someone who’s apparently so perfect. She’s got this incredible voice combined with the looks of a model and sort of Gaga’s fashion appeal.”
Mawson insists Del Rey is exactly who she says she is. “She writes her own songs. She made her own video. She picks her own clothes. And she came up with the name Lana Del Rey.” (But in 2010, Del Rey fueled gossip when she told Web site Repeat Fanzine, “Lana Del Rey came from a series of managers and lawyers . . . who wanted a name that they thought better fit the sound of the music.” Her publicist says she was misquoted.)
With label money behind her, this winter she issued a slick video for “Born to Die.” Like “Video Games,” the song finds her chasing a bad boy — but this time she’s sitting in a throne with a crown of roses and flanked by a pair of live tigers. Her DIY vibe was gone and her “SNL” appearance only hammered home the notion that she wasn’t an artist in the mold of Feist or the Black Keys, who worked for years before getting a shot on national TV.
Mawson says that “SNL” may have been a misstep. “To be honest, maybe we should have waited,” he says. “But you get offered ‘Saturday Night Live,’ you don’t say no.”
In the wake of the “SNL” backlash, Del Rey defended herself. “My intention was never to transform into a different person,” she told Billboard. “What other people think of me is none of my business. Sometimes, it hurts my feelings. But I have to just keep going.”
scohen@nypost.com