Poker Face (12 page)

She was also a lonely young woman who’d spent the better part of the year on the road with almost no days off. What little downtime she had was spent in a tanning booth or watching monster movies or
Family Guy,
one of her favorite TV shows. She couldn’t be on her own, not for a minute, not even to take a shower or a nap. The aversion to solitude witnessed by Wendy Starland eighteen months earlier had become exponentially worse. Gaga had recruited David Ciemny’s wife, Angela, to work as her personal assistant, with the promise that she’d be “really nice” to work for. Angela says she was reluctant; she’d wanted David off the tour so she could conceive. Gaga convinced her: “She said, ‘Angela, if you come on tour with me, I’ll let you sleep with David so you can get pregnant.’ And she would tell me, every night, ‘OK, Ange, you and Dave can go in the back of the bus from ten o’clock to midnight.’ ”

In reality, says Angela, she wound up sleeping with Gaga more often than her own husband. She says there was nothing sexual about it; Gaga couldn’t sleep without someone next to her in bed. Around the time Angela had been hired, Gaga and Matt Williams, who she’d begun dating not long after she’d hired him, had broken up, and he began dating another stylist, Erin Hirsh. Within months Hirsh was pregnant with Williams’s baby, and Gaga would alternate between laughing it off or, in more vulnerable moments, confessing her hurt. She also still very much missed Lüc, thought about him and talked about him all the time. She was a young woman who’d grown up with parents who were always there for her, who had a very privileged, sheltered existence in Manhattan, who had friends who were at home being twenty-two, going to school and parties and hooking up with boys and nursing hangovers and cramming for finals. Average stuff. She didn’t want to be average, but it was harder than she’d expected to be out on the road all the time, surrounded by a crew of people who were very nice to her but were nonetheless on the payroll. They weren’t real friends.

She kept Williams on her team, though, and kept things as professional as possible, impressive for someone so adrift and who’d just lost one of her few confidants. At worst, she’d ask a member of her staff to act as an intermediary, to call Matt and relay a message.

For the most part, she struggled.

Angela tried to help. She says she assumed an “older sister” role with Gaga, and rhapsodizes about fifteen-minute trips to the tanning salon together as evidence of their bond. Whatever other downtime Gaga had was spent either monitoring her media coverage online or looking through the handmade notes and tributes fans had given her, which she carried in her handbag. “We literally . . . we would do our makeup together every morning and get ready for bed together at night,” Angela says. They’d also take showers together, she says, because they’d have so little time to get out the door in the morning. But it was also, she says, a way to bond.

The few times Angela would start to go back to her and David’s room at the end of a day, she says, Gaga would spiral. “I would say, ‘Gaga, I have a husband to go home to. I’ll be in the room next door.’ And she’d call and text me: ‘I miss you, Ange, can you come back?’ And she would tell Dave, ‘Can your wife please stay with me tonight?’ [So] I would sleep in her room, because what’s the point of going to my own room with David when I have to wake up in an hour and be here?”

How to reconcile this account of loneliness and neediness with the same fearless performer who declares herself “a free bitch!” show after show? “It’s funny,” says a source. “She’s just always had this incredible strength, and yet, at the same time, she’s very needy privately.”

Somehow, Angela wound up getting pregnant on the road, and says that her relationship with Gaga and her manager, Troy Carter, began to suffer. “The second month, I started having morning sickness really bad and it put a strain, I think, on our relationship. I would say, ‘I’m not going to do the five
A.M.
call, because I’m going to be throwing up, so I’ll see you at eight
a.m.
instead. But I already have your bags packed.’ ” That would be okay until Gaga began prepping for her show later in the day. “It would not be good for her, because guess what, she’d get [to the venue] and start getting ready and she’d be like, ‘Ange packed this stuff, and I don’t know where anything is and I gotta be onstage in fifteen minutes and I can’t find my eyelashes!’ Or whatever.”

Not long after, Angela forgot to pack fresh panty hose for a morning show appearance. She says she knew then that she had to quit, that this mistake was too big. “Troy just looks at me, like, ‘Angela, are you kidding?’ He said, ‘She needs stockings without holes in them.’ And I was like, ‘I’m really sorry, it’ll never happen again, you don’t even need to tell me.’ ”

Not long after, Angela told Gaga that she was leaving.

Almost immediately after getting off the New Kids’ tour,
Gaga embarked on the Pussycat Dolls’ European tour as an opener. The reaction among the Dolls and their staff was not unlike the attitude the New Kids and their manager had: in short, confusion and disinterest.

“I believe it was Jimmy Iovine’s idea,” says Nicole Scherzinger, lead singer of the Dolls. She is speaking by phone early one morning before heading to rehearsal for
Dancing with the Stars,
where she is competing against, among others, reality TV villain Kate Gosselin and astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

“Keep in mind, Gaga wasn’t . . . I think she might’ve had one single out. ‘Just Dance,’ ” says Scherzinger. “No one had ever heard of her.”

How was it presented to the group? “[The label] said, ‘She’s going out on tour with you guys.’ We said, ‘She is?’ ” Scherzinger still sounds stunned and confused. She’d met Gaga once before, at an Interscope party at the Foxtail club on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. in mid-2008. “It was an event,” she says, meaning Gaga’s entrance, not the party. “I was in awe of what she was wearing. There must have been forty pounds of hair on her head. Lashes that weigh a ton, they’re falling off and she’s still talking and blinking, working her choreography like she’s in Jazzercize class. She’s this ball of energy, a real girl, a real chick from—I don’t know, is she from Long Island or something?”

New York City.

“She thinks fast, talks fast,” says Scherzinger. “She was just dynamic.”

In March, Lady Gaga began her own twenty-three-date headlining tour of the States, playing smaller venues like the House of Blues in Chicago and the 9:30 club in Washington, D.C. She called it “The Fame Ball,” and while on the road with the Pussycat Dolls, she and the Haus had worked out three different versions of the show to fit the varying sizes and scopes of the venues. She vetted and hired every member of the road crew herself. “She said, ‘I went to this rock show and it was one of the best I’ve ever seen,’ ” says David Ciemny, who can’t recall the band but says “it was one of those acts from England that all look the same and have guitars.” Anyway: “She said, ‘I went to this show and I’ll never forget the lighting. Find the guy who did that tour.’ ” So Ciemny tracked down the lighting designer—Martin Phillips, who’d designed the lighting for Nine Inch Nails and Daft Punk—and flew to meet with him in London, and hired him.

“Every show’s gonna be an ‘A’ show by the time I’m done screaming at everyone, ‘Hang it! Hang it! Find a place to hang it!’ ” Gaga told Billboard.com. “That’s gonna be my motto.”

As the tour was under way, “Just Dance” and “Poker Face” were in heavy rotation on the radio. If given two days off in a row, Gaga would take, at most, one, and spend the other either shooting new short films in a warehouse, or doing interviews, or brainstorming with Matt Williams about wardrobe, makeup, set design. Her look was becoming more sophisticated, although she was constrained by her budget. Her weave, for example, was an unyielding nightmare.

“For the first year I worked for her, her hair was a really big issue,” says David Ciemny. Gaga’s staff would worry about where they’d get the next batch from (mostly India), whether it was the right blond, whether they could get her an appointment with one of the few people who knew how to do a weave right. “It was really tough for her,” says a source. “When you have a weave, you can’t wash your hair.” Her scalp would get irritated, and she’d have to have the weave removed and replaced once every three weeks at a cost of $400–$700; it was a six-hour process that at times couldn’t begin until two in the morning.

“It was so painful that she’d be crying,” says the source. “It sounds silly, like she’s such a tough person she was willing to endure the weave. But she is a slave to her image. It’s what she lives for. So she endured.”

She was finally freed of the weave in December 2008. She was at home in New York City, staying with her parents, booked to perform at the Jingle Ball at Madison Square Garden, put on every year by Z100, one of the biggest FM stations in the country. She was also headlining the New Year’s Eve Ball at Webster Hall in the East Village (tickets started at $75; the club held 2,500 people). So the hair was important.

She got to the salon at six
A.M.
to have her weave removed, her hair dyed blond, again, and extensions put in. Angela Ciemny had flown in to see her perform, and she went with Gaga’s mother, Cynthia, and her younger sister, Natali, to pick her up at noon.

That weave, Angela says, “was, like, the hardest, most horrendous thing ever. It was so hard, for her and for me.” She says that, during the ride home from the salon, the relief felt by all was overwhelming. “All of us girls broke down in tears, just crying,” she says. “We were just so excited for her. She was, like, running her fingers through her natural hair, which she hadn’t touched in months. I’ll never forget it.”

Scherzinger, too, was struck by Gaga’s dedication to her aesthetic. “I remember once, on tour, we’re at the airport for a seven
A.M.
international flight, and she rolls through the airport in a pair of nude fishnets, a thong, a blazer not long enough to cover the thong, a bra, and the most ginormous heels ever. She lives Gaga. I think sometimes she sleeps in fishnets and heels.”

Unless she had the tiniest window between sleep and a crushingly early flight, Gaga would dress like any other young girl on a lazy weekend: jeans, T-shirts, no makeup. She enjoyed the relative ease with which she could be anonymous. But once the tabloid press in England—where she was far more famous—started shooting her without makeup, she refused to risk being caught undone. “It became even more work for her,” says Angela Ciemny.

In America, she got booked on
Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Tonight Show,
and
The View
. She had trouble ceding control, according to David Ciemny. “The only time she would really wig out and stress was before television,” he says. After each taping, she’d ask to see the footage before it went to air. “She’d say, ‘I want to talk to the director’—these thirty-year-veteran Hollywood producers and directors who are making $500 a minute, and the director’s like, ‘Who are you?’ ” Ciemny says. It’s an unusual request, but one that would almost always be granted.

She’d watch footage of her performance in much the same way athletes watch film of their game. “She’d say, ‘Oh my gosh, was I pitchy there? Is that cool? Is it livable?’ ” he says. Doing it over, he says, was often not an option, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t ask—just as she had done after her very first TV appearance, on the Logo awards. “You know what?” asks Ciemny. “Michael Jackson was the same way.”

In December 2008, “Just Dance” was nominated for a Grammy. In February 2009 she performed at the Brit Awards, singing with the Pet Shop Boys, dressed as a teacup. By April 2009 she was a major star in the UK:
H
er album had hit number one and she was a tabloid favorite. She also started carrying a purple teacup and saucer with her everywhere, which she called performance art. The teacup, by dint of its association with her, became a media sensation: People wanted to know where it came from, why she was carrying it, and if she wasn’t carrying it, why not?

“She hasn’t got a name but she’s quite famous now, so I made her stay in today,” Gaga said at the time. She brought the cup along—and held it up in the camera frame for ten minutes straight—when she appeared on the BBC’s popular talk show
Friday Night with Jonathan Ross.
The interview generated headlines in the wake of Ross asking her about rumors she was either a man or a hermaphrodite. (These were reignited after her appearance at the Glastonbury Festival a few weeks later.) She was unfazed: “I have a really big donkey dick,” she said, getting a huge laugh from the crowd. She juxtaposed her bravado with an imitation of Princess Diana, answering Ross’s questions in little-girl upspeak, tilting her chin down and peeking up at him through her long bangs, as though looking for approval.

Gaga has often said that
The Fame
and
The Fame Monster
are in part inspired by Diana and her death, following a high-speed paparazzi chase, in a tunnel in Paris in August 1997. (She would later say that her groundbreaking MTV VMA performance later that year was a commentary on Diana’s death, a loose association at best.) Her old friend the photographer Warwick Saint, who was with her that night in England, says Gaga actually loves being trailed by paparazzi. “We got into these minivans at the BBC and I look out the back window and there’s all these motorbikes,” he recalls. “And she just says, ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet, Warwick.’ I think she likes it. It’s her natural habitat; she takes to it like a fish to water. She would talk to her team in the car and be like, ‘Just make sure I look good.’ ”

After dinner at a swank Chinese restaurant in Soho called Hakkasan, the entourage headed to the exclusive Groucho Club. It doesn’t matter if what followed is true or not—that it made the papers and blogs was Gaga’s point: She goes to dinner after the show, gets in her car, is driven back to the hotel, goes up to her room, and realizes she left her teacup at the restaurant, and sends a car back to pick it up.

The
Sun
—possibly Britain’s trashiest tabloid—ran a dramatic account of this ridiculous pop star demand. The relevant portion: