Poker Face Read online

  Gaga remembered that night much the same way: “Wendy Starland came up to me and says, ‘Holy fucking shit, you have elephant balls for a chick!’ She sinks her fingers into my arm and pulls me outside and looks me dead in the eye and says, ‘I’m about to change your life.’ And she calls up Rob and says, ‘I’ve found her.’ ”

  “This is 2006, the year record sales were tanking,” says Brendan Sullivan, a New York City DJ who would befriend Gaga a few months later. “This is the year when no one wanted to hear anything ‘still’—it’s the Strokes and Interpol and everything is really fuzzed out, and the Killers are so big. Everything has a funk pedal. But when you hear Gaga, the notes are crystal clear. She really stood out. It was refreshing to hear her.”

  Fusari, meanwhile, had been roused from a sound sleep. “He said, ‘Why are you waking me up?’ ” says Starland. “And I said, ‘I found the girl. Trust me. We’re gonna change her style, we’re gonna write all new songs, we’re gonna get a whole new band, and produce her totally differently.’ ”

  Fusari went to Stefani’s website, took a look and a listen while Starland held the line, and got further incensed. “He said, ‘Wendy, this is not going to happen. Don’t waste my time.’ And I said, ‘Don’t listen to these recordings, it’s about who she is live.’ Then, according to Starland, Fusari expressed concern about Stefani’s look; Starland kept pushing. “Stefani’s standing right there,” she says. “She hears this.” Throughout all the criticism, the future Gaga remained unfazed. “She just wants to get to Rob.”

  Wendy put Stefani on the phone.

  “That,” she says, “was my first mistake.” Had she only gotten something in writing, she says, that established herself as more than a freelance talent scout, she would have had so much more leverage down the line, when she found herself no longer needed.

  At Starland’s urging, Fusari checked out Stefani’s next gig a few weeks later. “It was some shitty little club on First or Second Avenue, some hole in the wall, same sucky band,” Starland says. After the set, Fusari called Starland. “Wendy,” he said, “honestly, are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Stefani didn’t speak to Fusari at all that night, but she saw him leave right after the set and knew what that meant. Stefani called Starland “incessantly,” she says. “I was like, ‘Don’t worry.’ She’s panicked. Very concerned.” Starland says that Stefani had the absolute right reaction. “She wasn’t crazy at all. It was 100 percent slipping out of her grasp.”

  Stefani was also running out of time: Nine months prior, her father had allowed her to drop out of college to pursue a record deal, and if it didn’t happen within his time frame, back to college she went. She’d gotten a tiny, three-hundred-square-foot apartment on the Lower East Side, a clear downgrade from her parents’ luxurious apartment in a doorman building on the Upper West Side. She was living alone, but she hated to be alone. The façade of her parents’ building is nothing special; it looks like an anonymous, bland, cream-colored postwar structure. Those who have been inside say the apartment is warm but lavish, with two or possibly three floors. Stefani and her sister, Natali, had their own bedrooms upstairs. The focal point of the living room was an oil painting of the family, done when the girls were very young, that hung over the mantel. From her parents’ place on a very quiet uptown sidestreet, Stefani was within walking distance of Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Central Park, in a neighborhood where everything was very clean, very orderly, very expensive, and very safe.

  She’d left that homogeneous safety zone for life eighty blocks downtown, which doesn’t sound so far away but is the polar opposite of uptown. Downtown New York City is a mash-up of cultures, the very rich and the very poor, the corporate and the counterculture. She was toggling two different worlds and was increasingly at loose ends. She’d sometimes spend the night sleeping in her old bedroom uptown, where, unlike on the dirty, sketchy Lower East Side, there was little crime and no street noise. She could regress and retreat.

  Two weeks after the gig, Fusari agreed to have one meeting with Stefani.

  Chapter Two

  Becoming Gaga

  In early 2006, Stephani took the bus from New York’s Port Authority out to Parsippany, New Jersey, where Fusari lives and works; his tiny studio is on the same property as his house and has an open-plan feel; he tends to leave it unlocked, so musicians can come and go as they please. It’s tricked out with modernist furniture, has a very sixties mod vibe. As Fusari was approaching the bus stop where he’d agreed to pick Stefani up, he saw a small, chunky girl in a pizza place. She looked like she was asking for directions.

  “That could be her,” he remembers thinking. “But I hope it’s not.”

  He vividly remembers what she was wearing: “It was, like, a mix of three different eras,” he says. “She had on leggings and some strange cut-up shirt and a hat that looked like it was right out of Prince’s Purple Rain.” Fusari’s vision was to find a modern-day Chrissie Hynde: a girl who, in his words, was “pretty, but not really pretty,” skinny and tough, possessed of a swaggering sexuality that would read as traditionally male but be subversively female.

  To him, Stefani was a mess. He was afraid the outward appearance reflected inner chaos: that this was a girl with no taste, no vision, no talent. She presented as just another delusional girl with a dream. Good manners stopped him from telling her to turn around and go home.

  “In my mind,” he says today, “I was done.”

  Tommy Kafafian, a kind, if spacey, twenty-six-year-old studio musician who was working with Fusari, had tagged along, and says they only ever stopped in the pizza place because he was starving and begged Fusari to let him grab a slice. He remembers seeing Stefani and thinking to himself, Wow! In a good way.

  “There was this cute chick with long black hair and white stockings,” he says today, on the phone from Atlanta, Georgia, where he’s “in the best rock ’n’ roll band of all time,” hoping to tour the moon: “I want to be the first.”

  Back to his meeting with Stefani: “I went in for a slice of pizza, and that’s where I met her. [On] Planet Earth. She just manifested into my reality.” Fusari was waiting in the car; Stefani was skittish. Here was this trippy kid telling her to come with him, he was her ride, the guy she was really meeting was waiting for her outside in a car.

  “She kind of looked a little weird, like she was afraid,” Kafafian recalls. “I go, ‘Don’t be scared, it’s cool.’ She got in the car, and we went to the studio.”

  Fusari could not get over her appearance. “She looked like something out of GoodFellas,” he says. “She was a little overweight. She looked like she was ready to make pasta at any minute.” They made small talk, he says, “the usual BS.” He’d heard some of her stuff on MySpace: “It sounded like a Gwen Stefani cover band.” He was unimpressed. He asked her to play something.

  “I got, like—I tell you, it was ten seconds in, she was playing ‘Hollywood’ ”—that faux-blues-y song from her Bitter End days, in which she sang about having “the sickest ambition”—“and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ I’m thinking to myself, ‘If I don’t get this, I’m going to be so disappointed. My mind went right to business; I couldn’t even hear the song. I’m sitting in back of her and I’m texting my management, like, ‘I need a contract. Immediately.’ ”

  Starland, though she was not in the studio that day, recalls Fusari’s reaction differently. “Once he heard her live in the studio, he and I conversed a lot more about whether he was going to do this,” she says. “He said to me, ‘It’s good, but . . .’ The amount of work it takes to start from scratch is inordinate. So even though he says to the newspapers now, ‘I knew within five seconds’—not true.”

  Stefani, meanwhile, told Fusari she was a complete novice, had no knowledge of the way the music industry worked. “I found out, later, that she really had shopped to most labels,” he says. She had left out the numerous auditions she’d been on as a teenager, ones w
ith major industry players, arranged by her father. “It was just funny, you know, to start uncovering the real story.”

  Once Fusari agreed to sign Stefani to a production deal, he got a clearer idea of who he was dealing with. Stefani was demanding an 80-20 deal: 80 percent of the monies would go to her, 20 percent to Fusari. It was beyond ballsy, especially given that this was a nineteen-year-old unknown who very badly needed a producer like Fusari, with his résumé and connections. The negotiations were so contentious that Fusari began reconsidering the entire signing; maybe it would be easier to find someone else, cut ties now.

  “She was freaking out,” says Starland, “very nervous that it wouldn’t go through. When it comes to negotiating, Rob is very emotional. He did not like the structure of the deal. He felt he was bringing more to the table and tried to take a really big percentage. That’s when her father stepped in.”

  In the end, after a month of negotiations between lawyers, both parties came to terms: 40 percent went to Stefani, 40 percent to her father, and 20 percent to Fusari under the banner of a limited liability company called “Team Love Child.”

  “Gaga’s dad, with his history in telecom—he knows not to get into a contract you can’t get out of,” says her friend Brendan Sullivan. “I think that’s why the Team Love Child split is how it is. The example I would give is the iPhone: If you want the iPhone, you have to get into a contract with AT&T, but you don’t have to get into a lifetime contract with AT&T. I think if Rob Fusari were her producer forever, we wouldn’t have great music. With Rob, she came out with some of the least exciting singles on The Fame: ‘Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,’ ‘Disco Heaven,’ which was a B-side, ‘Boys Boys Boys.’ You have to wonder what [she went] through to write what came afterwards.”

  Stefani has spoken of her father’s approval meaning so much to her that, even if his is the lone voice, it’s enough to cause dramatic shifts in her behavior. She’s famously said that the only comment he ever made about her partying—“You’re fucking up, kid”—was the catalyst for her to stop using cocaine. “He is my hero,” she told the journalist Touré during an interview with Fuse in 2009.

  Her mother, Cynthia, is described by those who know her as a beautiful, cultured, kind woman. She is short and a natural brunette, like her daughter. She was a huge influence on the young Stefani’s tastes. “My mom would have fashion-fun with me,” Gaga has said. “She’d dress me in neon leggings and oversized shirts. I had this killer visor—like a casino-green vinyl visor—with lights that would flash. I wore it to a roller-skating party once.” She also said she used to get overdressed for school: “I would do Marilyn Monroe curls,” she recalled. “To be honest, I thought I looked great. But I got made fun of. I used to wear really tight everything under my school uniform—I’d get in trouble for V-necks and hooker boots. I look back now at photos and laugh.”

  Though she’s given equal weight to both parents, and has said that she “worships” them, of the two, her father seems to be the dominant force in her life. In the January 2010 issue of Elle, she told journalist Miranda Purves that she didn’t have a boyfriend at the moment, but that it was OK: “I’m married to my dad.”

  Paul Rizzo, who is the co-owner of the Bitter End and had been booking Stefani since she was a teenager, recalls Joe “always, always” accompanying his daughter to gigs. “Because she was young,” Rizzo says. “He might have even been driving her down at the time. He was carrying her keyboards for her. He was very supportive. Even when she changed into Lady Gaga—I don’t even think he got it at first, but he was never against it. They fed the talent. She had a good strong family unit.”

  Later, when she had her first major New York gig at Terminal 5, Rizzo recalls Joe reaching out to another co-owner of the Bitter End, Kenny Gorka, for “certain advice about the business.” Joe has largely quit working in the tech sector to become a full-time music manager; aside from his daughter, he has two other clients, in another company formed with Gaga, Mermaid Music, LLC, in which both are equal business partners.

  “I was at her parents’ house [in February 2008] and Gaga was giving her dad shit—he hadn’t done a bunch of things,” says Brendan Sullivan. “She was like, ‘What the hell have you been doing?’ He goes”—jokingly, says Sullivan—“ ‘Look, I’m a big-time record producer now, I’ve got three acts I’m working with here!’ ”

  She is, however, her father’s daughter, stubborn and tough, and she’s never followed a dictate she herself did not agree with. One friend remembers Stefani hanging out at her place before a meeting with Sony, wearing tights with her underpants on the outside. Her dad, Stefani said, told her that she looked like “a fucking slut!” and she laughed that off, though it seemed she was actually hurt. She acted as though she was more alarmed to realize that she’d forgotten to shave her knees.

  On Joe’s end, it’s possible he was equally afraid that his daughter’s appearance would undermine her credibility. “Their relationship definitely improved as she made more money,” says a source. “That helped substantially. She’s always been trying to get his approval. I don’t know that it’s healthy. As soon as she started earning money, he said something to her like ‘What man wouldn’t want you now that you’re becoming so successful?’ ”

  Of late, his daughter has taken to telling interviewers that she will always put her career before a man, because a career won’t roll over in bed one morning and tell you it doesn’t love you anymore.

  By April 2006, Stefani and Fusari had fully set to work on crafting a sound. Stefani was committed to being a serious singer-songwriter. Fusari thought that idea wasn’t of-the-moment, let alone forward-thinking. He’d just read a piece in the New York Times, “talking about women in rock, and how it was getting very difficult for women to break through in that genre, how Nelly Furtado had moved into more of a dance thing.”

  He told Stefani that this was the future, the way to go. “I was like, ‘Look, I think we might not be going in the right direction.’ This wasn’t something kids could relate to. And she was like, ‘No, I like what I’m doing. I’m not changing.’ ”

  “She was really more earthy and hippie and stuff,” says Kafafian, who was writing with her at the time. “She was kind of into the jam band scene. She wrote cool songs and it was kind of like Bob Dylan.” “Brown Eyes” and “Blueberry Kisses” were among the fifty written during this time, he says. They were inspired, says Starland, by Fusari.

  “Rob wanted to do a more modern sound,” Kafafian says. “He didn’t want to make an organic record, like I wanted. Everybody’s fighting. They’re eating each other.”

  Fusari insisted on dance music—according to him and Kafafian. Another source says the stuff they were recording at this time sounded like her high school and college material, like Michelle Branch and Avril Lavigne, half piano-driven balladry, half bratty teen-girl complaint-rock. Fusari won: Stefani would be working toward a more sugary, dance-oriented sound—the airy confections that were the hallmark of Euro-pop superproducer-songwriters such as Max Martin, the thirty-nine-year-old Swede behind some of the catchiest, most ear-wormy songs of the past fifteen years, including the Backstreet Boys’ “As Long as You Love Me” and Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.”

  Stefani—a huge fan of Britney Spears, for whom Martin had written “. . . Baby One More Time,” Britney’s first-ever hit—was vociferously against the idea. She may not have known what was cool, but she knew what wasn’t, even if she’d once cried outside of TRL after seeing Britney in person as a high schooler. And she was genuinely a fan of serious artists who wrote their own stuff: She’d been raised on Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, the Beatles. She wanted to be earnest and heartfelt.

  Still, there was another problem, one that was far more sensitive: Stefani didn’t have the ready-made looks of an American pop star in waiting. Fusari and Starland didn’t think she could pull off the girl-at-a-piano thing, because, as Starland explains, not a bit uncharitably, you have to be very, very pre
tty to do that (think Norah Jones, Fiona Apple, Tori Amos).

  These discussions, Starland says, happened openly among the three of them. Stefani remained stoic and practical. She would avoid hanging out at Starland’s place: “I know that the pressure on her to [lose weight] was very high,” Starland says. “She’d come over to my house all the time, and I had Pringles and Hostess cupcakes—I eat very poorly—and she’d be like, ‘Oh God, I don’t want to deal with this. This is the worst place for me to be.’ ” But she’d eat that stuff anyway. Her father bought her a membership at the Reebok Sports Club on the Upper West Side and she started hitting the gym regularly. She dropped fifteen pounds.

  “I was saying, ‘We can do something theatrical so it’s not the attention on her looks,’ ” Starland recalls. “She talked about it on her own, too. She was actively involved; she was like, ‘I know that my look is untraditional, and that I’m not the classic beauty, so we have to do other things.’ Really pragmatic. That wasn’t a process where I felt like she was hurt in any way. She was going to do whatever it took to become famous.”

  So dance music became the obvious route, but the idea was to sound a bit more sophisticated and European discotheque-y, a hybrid of hot and cold, like Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” or Goldfrapp’s slinky, synth-y “Number 1”: the contrast of breathy, detached vocals over sexed-up, syncopated beats. “I said, ‘I’ll sit at the drum machine, you sit at the piano,’ ” Fusari says of their initial experiment. “What the hell? We don’t have to use it.”