Poker Face (11 page)

In July 2008, FlyLife was lobbying to get Gaga booked for something called the Underwear Party, to be held in August at a gay resort on Fire Island. It was what it sounds like—gay men partying in their underwear. Daniel Nardicio, who’d originated the event back in 2003, remembers being surprised by the booking. “When she re-branded herself as Lady Gaga, her people came to me and said, ‘We’d really love for you to work with her—she’s hot, she’s great.’ And I was like, ‘Wait—is this Stefani Germanotta?’ She was great before, but she was a lot more Natalie Merchant–y.”

Nardicio knew her from Michael T.’s Motherfucker parties and from “the scene,” as he puts it, but he didn’t pay her much mind back then. “She was cute,” he says. “Brunette.” But he didn’t think she was special, and he didn’t think this new incarnation, whatever it was, would fly. “She’d had this whiny, Long Island–y quality,” he says. “There was nothing really super-spectacular about her.”

Still, Nardicio knew something was going on with Gaga; FlyLife had given him a copy of her single, and he’d been playing it on his show on East Village Radio. “ ‘Just Dance’ was such a great record,’ ” he says. “That song really generated interest and heat. I had people write me, like, ‘Who did that song?’ and ‘When’s it available?’ ” He called FlyLife. “I said, ‘You know what? I want to bring her to Fire Island and get a big audience and out-promote her.’ ”

FlyLife gave Nardicio a thousand copies of the single, which he put in every house he could on Fire Island. The week before the Underwear Party, Gaga had performed on
So You Think You Can Dance.
“Just Dance” was finally getting airplay on Top 40 radio, including New York’s huge mainstream station Z100. Gaga had been crisscrossing Europe, playing small clubs, and on Perez Hilton’s site she was now a recurring character, averaging a post a day. Suddenly, it seemed, she was breaking through the membrane of mainstream consciousness at a freakishly rapid pace. Nardicio panicked.

“I called her people and said, ‘Look, I know she’s going to cancel now. She’s getting big, I know. I’m only paying her $500. Just cancel it now so I’m not standing there, day of, with my dick in my hand.’ And they go, ‘As far as we know, she’s coming.’ ”

It was one of many very shrewd moves on her part—not only keeping her word, but keeping it with such good humor. It’s also a testament to both her work ethic and ambition that she performed at the Fire Island gig the same day she got off a plane from Europe.

Nearly one thousand people turned up—equaling the number of CDs Nardicio had distributed on the Island. “A sea of gay guys in their underwear,” as Nardicio puts it. “And she looks out in the audience at one point and is like, ‘I am fucking
living
for you right now.’ Because, I mean, they were really screaming for her. It was so exciting, as a promoter, because you get those moments where you knock the ball out of the park and you get the right person at the right time. I did that with Scissor Sisters, with Gaga, and of course, the Levi Johnston thing, which is in a different area.” (It’s fitting, given Gaga’s insistence that her existence is a meta-commentary on fame, that Nardicio would unironically equate the work he did for her with working as a handler for Sarah Palin’s daughter’s baby daddy, but there it is: Fame in America, circa 2010.) Gaga did three songs: “Just Dance,” “LoveGame,” and “Poker Face,” had two female backup dancers, and spoke very little in between.

“It was very early-stages Madonna,” Nardicio recalls, “like when she did
American Bandstand.
But it was professional; Gaga had been with Interscope for a while, so they brought logos to put behind her. They brought her imaging. But it was tight and bare-boned.” He remembers being impressed that she sang live.

After the gig, Nardicio took Gaga and her entourage to dinner at a local seafood restaurant called Jumping Jack’s. What he recalls of her look that night: wig, sunglasses, tights, shoulder pads. He did not acknowledge that he’d known her before, back when she was Stefani; nor did she. He noticed that she didn’t drink at dinner. He thought about asking if he could “be part of this circus,” but thought better of it. (At least at the time he thought that he thought better of it.) He liked her, but felt something was off.

“My first feeling about her was that she seemed a little bit entitled, a little bit of a privileged rich girl,” he says. “And I realized that she is, a little bit. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I felt like I wasn’t sure if this whole Andy Warhol thing was a little too, like . . . I guess I was a little skeptical. I thought it was a little high-concept for a pop song about being drunk at a club and dancing.”

What Nardicio missed—or what maybe wasn’t yet readily apparent—was Gaga’s sense of humor and her supreme self-awareness. She was a twenty-two-year-old girl who was smart enough to write about what she knew: cute boys and partying. As she said in 2008: “It might sound dumb because people like Bono are writing about world hunger. But I don’t know about those things yet, so I write about what I know.” It sounds like something Paris Hilton might say in earnest.

“She’s since had money and support to build [her show] up into a thing, but at the time it wasn’t very polished,” says Nardicio. “And certainly her wig wasn’t very polished. I mean, the girl was working on a budget. She looked a little more ratty, a little more raw.”

This was nothing that Gaga herself was unaware of. In fact, before the dinner was over, she had charmed Nardicio into helping, for free, to promote her CD release party, slated for NYC’s Highline Ballroom in October. And he was thrilled to be asked. “I said, ‘I’m not doing this for money. I just want to be involved.’ Because she’s awesome.”

In July, she performed at the San Francisco Gay Pride
parade, wearing a black-and-white bodysuit, a new wave–style black tuxedo jacket (hooded, of course), and black sunglasses. The performance was tailored to her audience; one of her female backup dancers grabbed Gaga’s crotch, and the disco stick featured prominently. She opened with “LoveGame,” then went into “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” and “Just Dance.” The stage was bare-bones, audio cables visibly snaking along the lip, adorned with a couple of tacked-up Lady Gaga posters. But she performed like she was playing a sold-out arena; the performance was fully choreographed, and she elicited her biggest cheer when she said, “Being here makes me so fucking proud!” In what was becoming her hallmark act of intimacy, she removed her sunglasses for the rest of the set.

When, at another performance for MTV in Malta, organizers told her that her set would have to end at a very specific time, she flipped and demanded that her tour manager, Ciemny, fix it. “I gotta hand it to her, she pushed me,” says Ciemny. “She said, ‘Don’t second-guess me. Just do it.’ ”

Her attitude took Ciemny a bit by surprise, though it was keeping in line with her demeanor when he’d interviewed with her just a couple of months before. He’d been brought in by someone on her manager’s team. “She came in with her Ray-Bans and was wearing this Halle Berry–like catsuit and these really tall boots with stiletto heels, like six or seven feet high,” he says. “All black. And a hoodie and a weave. She said, ‘I’m very serious about what I’m doing.’ ”

After a five-day tryout, Ciemny was hired. He watched as staffer after staffer was let go; before the end of his tenure, in October 2009, he’d watch her (not really her, but someone she’d delegated) fire about 150 people in all. “Everything had to be perfect,” he says. “If there was a technical error, she didn’t understand it. On occasion she’d break down in tears after a show. Her thing is this: No one can do it as good as [she can]. She’s very detail-oriented: ‘Tell me why this happened; tell me why this won’t happen again.’ She was twenty-two.”

Two weeks later, after San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade, Gaga performed “Just Dance” at her biggest, most unlikely venue yet: the fifty-seventh annual Miss Universe Pageant in Vietnam. She got the gig because someone at the label knew the organizers and was able to get “Just Dance” played during the swimsuit competition. The show’s hosts: Jerry Springer and former Spice Girl Mel B.

Gaga took the stage in the same costume she wore for the Logo awards, but her shoulder pads were at Tina Turner/
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
proportions—it was a new jacket, camel, with three-quarter-length sleeves. It softened up all the black PVC and the sharp cut of her platinum blond hair, bangs to the forehead, the rest stick-straight and long. Also, she was not wearing sunglasses: She wanted to make eye contact with the crowd and the camera. She not only had two backup dancers with her (again, in black bodysuits, plain except for the exaggerated shoulders), but she had the remaining fifteen Miss Universe contestants, in bikinis, dancing behind her, freestyle.

One stanza in, Jerry Springer announced, “We begin the swimsuit competition wiiiiithhhh . . . Venezuela!” Then Kosovo, Mexico, Vietnam—here Gaga struck her own pose, one arm out, head up—South Africa, Australia, Japan—Gaga remained immobile, unmoved—Dominican Republic. And then Gaga came back and took the stage for another stanza before she was interrupted by Italy, Colombia, Russia, Hungary, Czech Republic, USA, and Spain. Like Gaga, the entire thing was utterly ridiculous and secretly smart: Hardly anyone knew who she was, and she’d just gotten ten minutes of worldwide airtime for an extended remix of “Just Dance,” to say nothing of however many hits the swimsuit competition would generate online. And she got to break out her disco stick—which, by the way, she never let out of her sight. She wouldn’t even check it with the rest of her baggage at the airport; she carried it on the plane, every time, and got stopped by security, every time. She really didn’t mind.

Chapter Eight
The Fame

T
he Fame
was released on August 19, 2008, to largely
good reviews.
Entertainment Weekly
gave it a B-, noting that “in this economy . . . her high-times escapism has its charms,” and even her future nemesis at the UK’s
Guardian,
Alexis Petridis, wrote “virtually everything sounds like another hit single.” “The full-length
The Fame,
” said
Billboard,
“proves she’s more than one hit and a bag of stage tricks.”

Gaga spent the summer and fall in buses and on planes, flying coach, crisscrossing the United States, poaching the full-sized pillow from every hotel room she stayed in for a more comfortable ride to the next stop. (Ciemny would always offer to pay for it; sometimes the hotels would let her take it as a gift.) Her schedule was crushing: up at seven
A.M.
at the latest, out doing promotion at radio stations all day, lunches and dinners with record company reps, playing clubs at night, back to the hotel, up early again, right on the next flight to the next town, straight off the plane to another radio station . . . wash, rinse, repeat. This went on for six months straight, with Gaga sometimes getting four hours of sleep a night if lucky.

She was playing at hip-hop spots, Top 40 clubs, gay parties, and shit-kicker cowboy hangouts—doing the same three songs: “Just Dance,” “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,” and “LoveGame.” She also played the kinds of venues familiar to most baby bands but always left off the résumé: amusement parks and high schools. She never complained, would never so much as suggest that any of these gigs were beneath her, not cool enough for such an avant-garde show.

David Ciemny called his wife, Angela, to a gig in Southern California to meet Gaga.

Angela recalls being surprised by the venue: “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s performing at Raging Waters?’ Because it’s, like, a bunch of water slides and kids.”

Gaga took the stage at three in the afternoon, in patent leather stiletto boots and a black catsuit. It was about 102 degrees. The crowd was unsure what to make of her. “People were laughing, going, like, ‘What is this girl doing? What the heck?’ ” Angela thought she was great.

“I went backstage with David,” she says, “and he’s introducing me to her, and as I’m talking to her she starts taking off this catsuit right in front of me. And I’m like, ‘Don’t you have anything else to perform in that’s not so hot?’ And she’s like, ‘No, this is the look. It doesn’t matter to me how hot it is.’ ”

In October 2008, Gaga was booked as the opening act for the New Kids on the Block tour. “I’ll take zero credit for her success,” says New Kids manager Jared Paul, who says he invited her to be on the tour but was most likely told by Interscope that it was happening no matter what he thought.

“I remember sitting with my staff at a meeting and saying, ‘We have no interest in this girl, but she’s going to be a big star,’ ” he says. “It was pretty obvious the label was developing her, so it was a win-win for everyone.” (As with most people, Paul remembers what she was wearing when they first met. “It was August, a hundred degrees,” he says, “and she had a headdress on and gloves that went up to her elbows and was kinda like, ‘Hi, I’m Gaga.’ ” His immediate reaction, he says: “What’s up with that?”)

Again, Gaga was just happy to be there. But she also had a very specific vision for the kind of show she wanted to put on, and it involved several LED screens that would scroll “moving video,” or what she called
The Crevette Films,
or
The Candy Warhol Films
—raw, creepy little shorts with expert product placement (which she would later elevate to a near art form in her “Telephone” video). They were unusual for an unknown artist playing to such mainstream crowds, but it was their very oddness—who is this blond girl combing her hair and staring at the camera and talking about God knows what?—that got the crowd’s attention. Gaga shot these initial installments on her few days off, on the fly, in a warehouse in L.A.

The idea for the short films actually came from Ray Woodbury, who she hired as her creative director for the New Kids tour. He took his first meeting with her at a small dance studio in North Hollywood. “She wasn’t costumed or anything,” he says. “We took a few minutes to shoot the shit. I had come up with this concept of the moving video, where you could pull it apart and piece it together and it sort of came together as her backdrop. It was totally a new idea for anyone who was an opening act. We showed it to her and she loved it and understood it; the guy who was doing content with me, it was a good mix. She made herself very available; she took time out to videotape stuff in a warehouse just to get it on screen. Everything was hitting on all cylinders.”

Gaga also had her disco stick and a special pair of video-vision shades—huge black sunglasses that played her videos. She hired a NASA engineer to build both at a cost of $15,000 each. (She also had a sunglasses fetish, and traveled with a case of 150 vintage pairs.) These sunglasses were dreamed up by the “Haus of Gaga,” which Gaga has compared to Andy Warhol’s Factory and about which she will reveal little: when it was founded, who, aside from stylist Matt Williams, the key members are. She will say that everyone who works for her in any capacity is a member, and that the Haus is all about helping to conceive and execute her creative vision.

Aside from dumping all her advance money into her wardrobe and show budget, Gaga would play club dates after each New Kids gig to earn extra income to fund ever more gadgetry, even though Interscope had given her more leeway than most developing artists. Her budget, Woodbury says, “was more than normal” for an opening act. “But I think they said, ‘We definitely got a hit here; there’s no reason to fuck around.’ ”

Gaga was signed to what is known as a “360 deal.” In the wake of the hit the record industry took from both the digitization of music and the recession, labels began pushing these contracts. In short, an artist gets a heavier investment from a label than under a traditional record deal (thereby having a higher chance of making it). The label, however, gets a cut of the artist’s profit from
everything
—licensing, downloads, endorsements, T-shirt sales. Gaga’s deal with Polaroid, M•A•C, and any other company? The label gets a cut.

“When Interscope finally determined they should go for it [with Lady Gaga], they committed to spending a lot of money,” says an unnamed source. He says that he heard someone ask an executive at Universal, Interscope’s parent company, “How’d you guys break Lady Gaga?” And the executive said, “We threw the building at it.”

“They did a lot of things to get her exposure,” the source says. “They attached her video to other people’s videos on YouTube so it came up automatically. She’s one of those overnight sensations that didn’t really happen overnight. A lot of hard work and long hours went into it.”

Such deals, though, are a catch-22: Without the investment, the artists have less chance of success, but with the amount of money the label can recoup
plus
the cuts they take, the artists can find themselves barely breaking even, or broke. The kicker: Just 20 percent of an artist’s product typically generates 80 percent of the profit.

Courtney Love Does the Math.

“This girl [Gaga] has been spending money at a multi-platinum level,” says one high-level music-business source. “When you see a Gwen [Stefani] or a Fergie walk the red carpet, you say, ‘Wow, they’re superstars.’ This girl came out of the chute like that. Her costuming is expensive—we’re talking $100,000 an appearance, and that’s without the band.”

The cost of her 2010 worldwide arena tour, estimates this source, is likely in the range of $800,000 a week. “Every one of her revenue sources is paying for that,” he says. “And I guarantee you [the label] is tacking this onto her publishing sales, her merchandise sales, everything. Guarantee you.”

This source, as did others, predicted that Gaga would eventually be able to leverage a new deal, one more financially advantageous to herself, and on May 1, reports broke that she and her manager Troy Carter were planning to renegotiate her contract with Interscope before her second album’s release.

“I think [the label] realizes they’re playing with her money at the moment,” the source says, “so they could care less if she blows it.”

“I know she’s running into some issues on the amount of money she’s spending on the road,” says another industry veteran. “She’s [got] Roy Bennett, one of the top designers—he’s worked with Madonna, Nine Inch Nails. She really wants to make the experience mind-blowing; she wants people to walk out of the arena and say, ‘There’s nobody like Gaga.’ You’ve got to applaud her for that, [though] it may not be the most fiscally responsible thing in the world.”

Gaga, on the other hand, has thought, from the beginning, that it was riskier not to spend the money. Back in 2008, she said she knew exactly what she was doing: “People frown upon the major label system,” she said. “I, on the other hand, am using it to my advantage. I want to create something huge and amazing, and I want to resuscitate the music industry, bring back the true superstar, the true artist. I want to create the super-fan again. I want my website to be Perez Hilton, but for Lady Gaga. I want people to feel part of this lifestyle.”

Her willingness to spend freely—on set design, short films, costumes, stylists, makeup artists, dancers, business- and first-class tickets for herself—has caused, according to a source, fights between her and her father, who is her fifty-fifty business partner in Mermaid Music. This arrangement, too, is highly unusual.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like that,” says Adam Ritholz, the entertainment lawyer who represented ’N Sync in their suit against former manager Lou Pearlman, which was settled in 1999. “I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, [but] I have not come across a situation where a parent takes 50 percent of a child’s income.” Ritholz says that the parent of a minor who is in the entertainment industry will take a 15–20 percent cut if he or she is working as that child’s manager.

“I have seen one scenario where a father financed the setup of a business for his artist/child. That’s a situation where the parent invested very, very significant amounts of money and hired professionals and had a marketing and promotional staff and the whole thing.” In Gaga’s scenario, “there would have to be something that’s not apparent to me going on here to justify giving half her income to her father,” Ritholz says. “But I will tell you: If I was representing her, I think I would have a problem with that.”

Her label, meanwhile, made her a top priority, due in no
small part to her insanely strong work ethic. “Her commitment to her performance was really what did it,” Woodbury says. “We all did stuff above and beyond the financial aspect of it because you had an artist who was willing to do it, who was willing to get her hands dirty. When you have this really confident approach, very much ‘This is who I am, this is what I’m about, I’m going to be number one’—everything came together.”

She was careful to cater to the New Kids’ demographic, domesticated thirty-something women on a nostalgia trip. Before the show, says Ciemny, she’d say, “ ‘We’re gonna give these bitches something to dance to!’ ” He says it was done with affection on Gaga’s part, with the realization that a lot of these women were probably married with children and on a rare night out.

Gaga’s elaborate, extravagant vision did not go over well with the New Kids or their camp, even though she had a good relationship with New Kid Donnie Wahlberg; she had cowritten a couple of songs for their album
The Block
and done a duet with Wahlberg. “The New Kids, they’re pretty nice, but they were like, ‘You guys are an opening act. This is too much,’ ” says a source who was there. “It’s, like, ‘Sorry, this is our show.’ ”

And this did not go over well with Gaga. “She literally would say, ‘Go back and make this happen,’ ” says Ciemny. “And they’d say, ‘You have eight feet of stage to work with. [You] can’t do the screens tonight,’ or something. And she wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

“She wanted to have a bigger presence onstage than what was enabled through the production,” Woodbury says. “She kind of pushed some things a little too far; she didn’t take no for an answer too easy. If you can take no for an answer with an understanding . . . maybe that’s a bit of the blurry line there.”

With the exception of Donnie, the rest of the New Kids didn’t fraternize with Gaga. Every night, she’d ask if she could perform one of the songs she’d written for the band with them, and every night she’d get the word: “Yes, just wait in the wings and they’ll call you onstage.” That wound up happening only once.

“I’d have her on the side of the stage, ready to go with her monitors and her microphones on, and she’s ready to do it, and then it’s like, ‘Oh, I guess it’s not happening tonight,’ ” says Ciemny. “And I’d say to the New Kids’ manager, ‘What’s going on? We could’ve been sleeping right now instead of staying two hours later than we had to.’ And they’d just be like, ‘You know what? It’s up to them. We have no control.’ ”

Today, the New Kids’ manager Jared Paul says, as do many, that it was clear Gaga was going to be a big star no matter what internal discord was preventing her from doing the kind of show she wanted. He sensed that, in addition to whatever the label was giving her, “this woman invested a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of resources into her career. This girl’s playing to win. She was on top of things. And her manager Troy was right by her side and believed in her vision.”

It took months for
The Fame
to chart in America. It debuted at number seventeen on the Billboard 200 on November 15, 2008. She was on tour with the New Kids through January, and the brutal schedule began to wear on her physically and mentally. “It got very tough,” says David Ciemny. “Every couple of months it would catch up [to her] and we’d have to reset the dials.” Sometimes she’d be forced to cancel a show, and she hated it.

“Poker Face,” the album’s second single, debuted on
September 23, 2008. Gaga was steadily gaining traction in Europe and Australia, but her momentum in the States was still a lot slower. She shot the video for “Poker Face,” which had a bigger budget than “Just Dance”: She got to wear a gold prismatic face mask (which looked exactly like one worn first by Róisín Murphy), a metallic slash on her right cheek, a genius playing-card manicure, hair tied in a bow at the crown of her head. (The earliest known version of the hair bow was pioneered by the new wave group the B-52s in 1983, and was lifted by Karl Lagerfeld for his February 2010 Chanel runway show.) Gaga was also wearing no pants—a trend she set off for summer 2009—a cutout neon blue bodysuit, and heavy eyelashes. The plot involved her emerging from a swimming pool flanked by two
G
reat
d
anes, playing a game of strip poker that devolves into an orgy . . . and that’s about it. It took until April 2009 to hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in the U.S. By that time, she was huge in the UK.