Vogue magazine is a fashion magazine headquartered in the United States.
United Kingdom
October, 2009
Lady Gaga was featured in a UK edition of the magazine. The interview took place on July 5, 2009 in the UK.
Go Gaga
A self-styled "good Catholic girl" and "New York avant-garde fashion monster", Lady Gaga has stormed the charts and thrilled the tabloids. Hadley Freeman hangs out with pop's newest disco sensation, and talks fame, style - and Babybel cheese. Photographed by Josh Olins.
It is a summery Sunday night, and Lady Gaga, Dada (her ex-boyfriend and now her creative director, aka Matthew Williams), assorted entourage members and I are speeding across London to meet Madonna and see her perform. Gaga has just come off stage after supporting Take That at Wembley, and, after her fantastic, if also fantastically OTT, set at Glastonbury the week before — during which she appeared to shoot fire out of her breasts — it is hard to imagine anyone less likely to appeal to the mainstream Take That crowd than Gaga. “It was, like, all 35- to 40-year-old women, and I’m there, like, grabbing my vagina and they’re all, like, what?” she says. This is the sixth time she has said “vagina”, or a word for it, in 12 hours, which is fewer than I’d expected, but more perhaps than her PR would have liked.
But the future is looking good. Aside from the upcoming meeting with Madonna, and aside from Gaga’s recent successes (including “Poker Face”, which spent three weeks at number one in the UK single charts), Dada has just told Gaga that Karl Lagerfeld has asked to meet her. “Oh my God, Karl Lagerfeld! You’re serious?” she squeals, her husky New York monotone rising by several octaves. As chance would have it, Gaga is sporting a Chanel jacket, paired with fishnet tights, a leotard and Chanel ankle boots. (“It’s a very lady look,” she claims.) She leans back in her seat. “I can’t believe I have three hours free now,” she says. “Well, there are a lot of phone interviews I could ask you to do,” her PR interjects, only semi-joking. She mock scowls from beneath her heavy blonde fringe. “Don’t you dare,” she says, then, as if remembering who she is, quickly corrects herself: “Of course I’ll do them.” She leans sleepily against Dada’s arm. “I’ll do anything you want,” she trails off. It has been a long day.
Twelve hours earlier: “Oh my Gaaahhhd, that is so sick, that is fucked up, that is high fashion,” Gaga decrees when looking at herself in the mirror wearing some lacy Mickey Mouse-style ears by Maison Michel. (This is an expression of the highest approval.) It is about 10 am and she has had three hours’ sleep, “at most”, after a late-night gig at GAY. Predictably, though, she has more fizz and vim than anyone else at the Vogue shoot. She never walks, only scurries. “I looooove that,” she cries, dashing to another rail and pulling out a hot-pink tulle skirt, but then pauses. “Wait, I wore hot pink in my last [David] LaChapelle shoot, so we should probably do something different. Oh my God, that jacket is sick!”
At this point, Gaga is wearing the outfit she rolled out of bed into — a one-shoulder leotard, ribbed tights, Chanel boots and a pink and grey poncho-like garment, which may, or may not, be by Giles. “Yoo-hoo, where do you come from?” she halloos to the poncho, after I ask its provenance, and she whips it right off to find out. The poncho does not have a tag— nor does it reply. She is also, of course, in full make-up, replete with blonde wig (soon to be replaced by a softer; wavier version by Sam McKnight — a look she adopts after the shoot), and lashes so thick they act as mini visors. Gaga describes her look as “New York avant-garde fashion monster”, and, when asked who her style icons are, she replies in a snap, “Grace Jones and Jesus — I love loincloths.” She pauses for breath, then announces, to no one in particular, “I want some Babybel cheese!”
In a music year dominated by strong female debuts, Lady Gaga’s has been the most successful, by some distance. Her debut self-penned album, The Fame, bas sold more than 2.3 million copies and it kicked Ronan Keating off the number one spot in the UK album charts — which is reason enough to love her. She has already been profiled in the New Yorker magazine, which credited her with bringing disco back after the long dominance of R’n’B. The Haus of Gaga — a collective comprising the singer and her artistic friends
— has been, somewhat dubiously, compared to Andy Warhol’s Factor while Gaga bas been compared to Madonna. And the way she has used, shah we say, an eccentric fashion style to carve out an identity has put her in the aesthetic tradition of Gwen Stefani, Björk and, yes, Grace Jones. Gaga, however, describes herself as “just a good little Catholic girl”, and then looks down at her feet, shod in Louboutin ankle boots. “I could really fuck these shoes.”
Joanne Stefani Germanotta, as she was until four years ago, was born in New York in 1986. Although she makes repeated references to her current life in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she attended the Catholic girls’ school Convent of the Sacred Heart, which was also the alma mater of the Hilton sisters. Gaga was a talented musician and a smart student. “I dressed in this super-sexualised way — miniskirts, hooker boots. But because I got straight As, the teachers couldn’t do anything,” she smirks.
After a year at Tisch School of the Arts, she dropped out to write music and work as a go-go dancer. Her parents, she admits, were not thrilled. She also changed her name to Lady Gaga, in homage to Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga”. It may be opportune to mention at this point that she was taking “a lot” of drugs (“mainly cocaine, some other stuff—yeah, it was pretty bad”), before quitting for “my health and my father”. By now, she was signed as a songwriter to Interscope Records and writing songs for the Pussycat Dolls and Britney Spears, until her own performing potential was spotted. The Fame, her catchy disco paeon to the world of celebrity, came out last year.
Gaga causes a bit of a fuss whenever she comes to London. Last January the tabloids were delighted when she was photographed making a late-night visit to a fish-and-chip shop wearing a green leotard. In April, she cowed Jonathan Ross with her unflappable self-confidence and willingness to explain the meaning of her lyric, “bluffin’ with my muffin”, when she appeared on bis talk show. “I suddenly feel really old,” bleated Ross.
“Gaga has been relentless in selling herself,” says music critic Alexis Petridis. “If you walk around London in the middle of winter in your panties, it’s indicative of a certain insane drive, which seems to be on a different level to anyone else’s. But it’s not going to work if the songs aren’t there, and she writes really strong pop songs with big, hook-y choruses.”
She also has a 23-year-old’s tendency towards self-contradiction. Despite her often mentioned pride in her education, whenever someone says a vaguely sophisticated word, such as, say, “trajectory”, she and Dada collapse into giggles. “Trajectory!” she hoots. When asked about the comparisons between the Haus of Gaga and Warhol’s Factory, she flinches in irritation: “I wasn’t around then, so I don’t know. I’m just trying to be a real artist, and have real experiences, so I can tell real stories. “Yet she invites such comparisons, not least via the short film she shows before her Wembley gig called Who Shot Candy Warhol?, in which she stars as Warhol.
She is also an extremely good model, one who knows how to create a strong image, which comes from a real awareness of how she looks, coupled with a genuine love of fashion. Her features are of the oversized variety that photographs well, and her body is soft and small. Despite her lack of sleep, her big eyes are bright. “Oh, hello, old friend!” she coos, stepping into an Alexander McQueen gown. On the shoot, she poses with the practised art of someone who has gazed at fashion magazines for years. Nicola Formichetti, fashion director of Vogue Hommes Japan, often works with Gaga, and says, "Gaga is not like any other celebrity I've worked with," says Nicola Formichetti of Vogue Hommes Japans. "She would die for fashion."
"At school I dressed in this super-sexualised way - miniskirts, hooker boots," says Gaga. "But because I got straight A’s, the teachers couldn't do anything."
- Article by Hadley Freeman, photography by Josh Olins
December, 2021
“It’s Not An Imitation, It’s A Becoming”: Lady Gaga On The “Delicious Madness” Of Inhabiting Lady Gucci
In a windowless studio in Chelsea, Manhattan, the pink marabou trim on an ankle boot is fluttering expectantly in the breeze from an electric fan. “She’s 10 minutes out,” says a handsome security person, popping his head around the door, as a phalanx of assistants move silently about a fabulous, temporary, shimmering grotto of couture.
Freshly delivered from the shows in Paris and Venice, there are rails of Valentino silks in electric amethyst and fuchsia, inky black Schiaparelli velvet bracketed by gleaming gold, serious Chanel brocade, polar-white Louis Vuitton knits, headpieces fashioned from metal, leather and feathers, a hundred pairs of heels in every height, and table upon table of rainbow scarves, gloves and jewels. I even spot some Elizabethan-style ruffs. We are here for Lady Gaga’s Vogue fitting, of course. “Let’s start her in something fabulous,” says Edward Enninful, British Vogue’s editor-in-chief, as if there were any other option.
Naturally, 10 minutes comes and goes, but eventually, at an indeterminate point in superstar time, the door finally opens and through it emerges a 5ft 2in figure dressed in a long black summer-knit dress and impossibly high black leather platforms. It is a curious experience to encounter a pop culture legend giving you her most quintessential vibe, and Gaga has not disappointed. Already photographs taken moments ago of her short walk from her car into the building in 9in heels are pinging around the world. “Let’s make magic!” she says by way of hello.
With countless fashion moments, 12 Grammys, an Oscar and perhaps the most explosive rise to fame of the 21st century to her name, Stefani Germanotta has – for well over a decade now – been among the best-known people on the planet. And boy does she know how to play up to it. Having removed her sunglasses, she throws her tanned, tattooed arms around us in a series of warm hugs, then is on to the job in hand. “Whatever I wear,” she says to the assembled group, in that trademark up-all-night drawl, earnestness dusted with levity, “I will be serving painful Italian glamour from within.”
Of course. This month, the 35-year-old pop queen turned Oscar-nominated actor is set to appear in only her second-ever movie lead, in House of Gucci, director Ridley Scott’s 20-years-in-the-planning retelling of one of the late 20th century’s most notorious crime cases. To say expectations are high does not do things justice. Gaga – as anyone who has been on the internet in the past six months knows – will play Patrizia Reggiani, ex-wife of Maurizio Gucci and a socialite who, in 1998, was convicted of engaging the hitman who shot him dead as he entered his offices in Milan one morning in the spring of 1995.
The case featured so much money and original sin that it rocked Italy and the world, and sent shock waves through the fashion industry. Safe to say, the film’s trailer, which Gaga pulls up on her laptop to show us (it’s a few days before it’s released to the world, where it will go on to be viewed in excess of 10 million times), sets the tone. “Father, Son and House of Gucci,” intones Gaga as Reggiani, conker-coloured hair teased to the max, cigarette in hand, as she gestures the sign of the crucifix across a dress of large pink polka dots. She watches herself on the little screen, enjoying the coos of wonder from the assembled team. “I look super-different,” she says, intrigued by her own image.
A few weeks later, I video-call her at home on the West Coast. Never one to miss an opportunity to work her own myth, she pops up on my screen mid-song. “You’ve caught me singing!” she says, after she’s completed a couple more bars of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day”. It’s hard not to love the commitment of a showgirl – especially one who is seated in her pretty pink office, complete with piano and glamour station, and a floor-to-ceiling wall of stilettos behind her. “Well, you know, I have to put something on the walls,” she says, drily.
She’s wearing “a dusty rose T-shirt” she shrugs, from where precisely she cannot be sure, with black leggings. “This is a necklace from my boyfriend, from a beautiful artisanal shop in San Francisco, as well as these earrings,” she says. Her mother, Cynthia, is coming for tea later, and she’s in a mellow mid-afternoon mood. She’s pulled two long strands of honey-brunette hair from her bun, and they’re hanging over her exquisitely made-up face, the whole experience adding up to a sort of heightened drama-student effect. The artist in repose, if you will.
It makes sense. “It is three years since I started working on it,” she launches in on House of Gucci, “and I will be fully honest and transparent: I lived as her [Reggiani] for a year and a half. And I spoke with an accent for nine months of that.” Off camera, too? “Off camera,” she confirms, solemnly. “I never broke. I stayed with her.”
“It was nearly impossible for me to speak in the accent as a blonde,” she continues. “I instantly had to dye my hair, and I started to live in a way whereby anything that I looked at, anything that I touched, I started to take notice of where and when I could see money. I started to take photographs as well. I have no evidence that Patrizia was a photographer, but I thought as an exercise, and finding her interests in life, that I would become a photographer, so I took my point-and-shoot camera everywhere that I went. I noticed that Patrizia loved beautiful things. If something wasn’t beautiful, I deleted it.”
Gaga says that had life not gone the way of meat dresses and stadium tours, she might have liked to be a reporter, and it was an artist-cum-journalist’s approach that she took to piecing together Reggiani for herself. (Reggiani, it should be noted, is still very much alive, residing in Milan and perfectly capable of talking to the press herself. She is reportedly pleased such a marquee name is to play her, although – self-aggrandisement undimmed by having served 18 years of a 26-year prison sentence for having her ex-husband killed – told an Italian journalist earlier this summer, “I am quite annoyed by the fact that Lady Gaga is playing me in the new Ridley Scott film without even having the foresight and sensitivity to come and meet me.”)
So you haven’t even met her? I ask Gaga. “You know,” she replies, “I only felt that I could truly do this story justice if I approached it with the eye of a curious woman who was interested in possessing a journalistic spirit so that I could read between the lines of what was happening in the film’s scenes.” She seems keen to ensure she is being crystal clear. “Meaning that nobody was going to tell me who Patrizia Gucci was,” she says, flatly. “Not even Patrizia Gucci.”
Unusually this late in the game, the film itself remains blanketed in secrecy. When we meet, Ridley Scott has not even permitted Gaga to see a cut. She says she “trusts” him fully and out of “respect” doesn’t want to give away too much of its scope. Nevertheless, after some wheedling, I manage to ascertain that Gucci will likely pick up at the dawn of the 1970s, when Patrizia (who grew up poor in Vignola, Northern Italy, but whose fortunes changed thanks to a new stepfather’s money, made in the trucking industry), first met Maurizio Gucci on the Milanese party scene. Spurred on by her mother, Silvana Barbieri, Reggiani was on the make, and Maurizio had it all: fortune, looks, name. (“He fell madly in love with me,” Reggiani has said. “I was exciting and different.”)
No one doubts it was a wild romance. “She loved him too,” says Gaga. Although Maurizio’s father, Rodolfo – son of company founder Guccio Gucci – had plenty of misgivings about Reggiani’s rackety upbringing, the pair wed in 1972. (The bride wore Gucci, naturally, a high-necked, long-sleeved concoction that, from squinting at paparazzi shots from the new film’s set, seems to have been updated to something a little racier for Lady Gaga.)
During the 1970s and early ’80s, the young Guccis were it; gorgeous, charismatic newlyweds adrift on a sea of luxury. Two beautiful daughters, a famous yacht (the Creole) and a permanent spot on the guest list at Studio 54, this was life lived at the knife-edge of glamour. On top of the penthouse in New York’s Olympic Tower, the villa in Acapulco, the chalet in Saint Moritz and the farm in Connecticut, there was Patrizia’s £8,000 a month orchid habit, her friendship with Jackie Kennedy, her multimillion-pound jewellery collection, parties, palazzos and private number plates for the cars, emblazoned with the legend mauizia (in portmanteau terms at least, the couple was years ahead of Brangelina).
But, in 1983, the fantasy faltered. After the death of Rodolfo, Maurizio, his only child, took full control of his 50 per cent stake in the company (the remainder was owned by Rodolfo’s brother Aldo), and the family wars began in earnest. Reggiani, now fancying herself more Gucci than Gucci, was at loggerheads with her husband as often as she was with the cousins, and as the decade wore on the marriage fell apart – he walked out on her in 1985. She did not take this well: when Maurizio would no longer take her calls, she would record tapes of herself furiously railing at him and courier them over to his apartment on the Corso Venezia.
Life was no rosier at work. This was the era of Gucci’s famed, flawed licensing model, whereby everything from golf clubs to tea towels was farmed out to third-party manufacturers in a cash grab. Maurizio was determined to regain control, to reinstate the peerless quality of leather goods that the family had built its original fortune on, and sought new investment. But amid the tussles with Aldo (who ended up in prison for tax fraud) and cousins, the lustre of the once great house dimmed to a dangerous low.
Noted ambition aside, Maurizio’s plans were his undoing. He was unable to bring in enough cash to cover his lavish spending, and in 1993 he sold his entire share to Investcorp for $120 million – effectively ending more than 70 years of Gucci family ownership of their namesake brand. Patrizia, who had remained front and centre throughout the dramas, as well as legally his wife, lit up with what she herself has termed “rage”. It did not help matters that, three years earlier, he had begun a relationship with one-time model and later interior designer Paola Franchi, a friend from childhood who had attended his wedding to Patrizia. As divorce finally loomed, her husband, name, wealth and status – her very identity – were all slipping away. The situation was a tinderbox.
Gaga was riveted: “I became fascinated with the journey of this woman.” She spent more than a year poring over newspaper clippings and recordings of Reggiani, although, tellingly, she did not read Sara Gay Forden’s The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed, the 2000 book on which the film is based. “I did not want anything that had an opinion that would colour my thinking in any way.” Scott originally sent her the script shortly after A Star Is Born, her triumphant arrival as a Hollywood lead, was released, in 2018. Along with his wife and producing partner, Giannina Facio, he had taken a long safari with the project, been in and out as director himself, with Angelina Jolie, Penélope Cruz and Margot Robbie variously attached to play Reggiani along the way. But the stars aligned for Gaga: “What if I didn’t play some edgy, sexy, chancy, risky bitch?” she recalls thinking. “Some punky Italian gold digger?”
When Gucci’s producers settled on a somewhat retro-seeming plan to have the cast deliver their dialogue in English with thick Italian accents, Gaga knew nailing Reggiani’s voice would be key. She worked tirelessly at it. “I started with a specific dialect from Vignola, then I started to work in the higher class way of speaking that would have been more appropriate in places like Milan and Florence,” she explains. “In the movie, you’ll hear that my accent is a little different depending on who I’m speaking to.” The trailer has raised a few eyebrows in Italy, the worry being this may be another bunch of American actors talking a-like-a-this. Gaga, one of her nation’s best-known Italian-American citizens, is sensitive to the subject. “It was the experience of a lifetime making this film because every minute of every day I thought of my ancestors in Italy, and what they had to do so that I could have a better life. I just wanted to make them proud, which is why I made the decision to make the performance about a real woman and not about the idea of a bad woman.”
So she entered the mind of a murderer. The Guccis finally divorced in 1994, and as Maurizio made plans to wed Franchi, which would see Reggiani’s alimony halved to what she called “a bowl of lentils” ($860,000 a year), her taped rants became increasingly unhinged and threatening. In one, later played in court, she railed at him, “The inferno for you is yet to come.” Soon she sought the counsel of her best friend Pina Auriemma, a Neapolitan clairvoyant, who in turn hired hitman Benedetto Ceraulo, a pizzeria owner with money troubles. At 8.30 on a clear morning in late March 1995, Ceraulo carried out Reggiani’s instruction to murder the father of her children. He was 46. Reggiani was sentenced three years later and released on parole in 2016. Her daughters, Alessandra and Allegra Gucci, originally supported their mother, believing her behaviour was due to a benign brain tumour she’d had removed. But after many years, they reportedly no longer speak.
I mean, it’s a lot to take on, isn’t it, Gaga, I say. All this glitz, all this sadness. Were you not nervous about getting involved? As ever, she had to find the mission within. A purpose. “I wish not to glorify somebody that would commit murder,” she says. “But I do wish to pay respect to women throughout history who became experts at survival, and to the unfortunate consequences of hurt. I hope that women will watch this and remind themselves to think twice about the fact that hurt people hurt people. And it’s dangerous. What happens to somebody,” she asks, “when they’re pushed over the edge?”
It sounds like the shoot had the potential to answer that last question. Principal photography began in February this year in Rome, with the Gucci men played by a cast that includes Adam Driver as Maurizio, Jeremy Irons as Rodolfo, Al Pacino as uncle Aldo and Jared Leto as cousin Paolo. With Italy beset by lockdowns, and with paparazzi everywhere, Gaga, in thrall to the Susan Batson technique (her acting teacher, who was on set, was herself taught by Lee Strasberg), says she had gone so deep with the part she began to lose touch with reality. “I had some psychological difficulty at one point towards the end of filming,” she explains, taking care with her words. “I was either in my hotel room, living and speaking as Reggiani, or I was on set, living and speaking as her. I remember I went out into Italy one day with a hat on to take a walk. I hadn’t taken a walk in about two months and I panicked.” She could no longer compute the real world. “I thought I was on a movie set.”
“Delicious madness,” is how Salma Hayek – who plays Pina Auriemma – describes Gaga’s work process to me. “It’s very glamorous,” she says of the movie, “very glitzy, and very few times I have seen that level of passion with an actor,” she says, impressed. “She really committed.” Was it at all tricky to work with? “It was not a nightmare!” she tuts, laughing. “It was a fascinating thing. She was magical. A genius.”
Gaga is more self-effacing. “We were in between takes and Salma was like, ‘Oh, this f**king method actor is over here. You know, she’s not talking to me right now.’ Because I was doing sense memory work next to her, and she was making fun of me while I was sitting there doing it. And I didn’t even laugh. When the scene was over, I flipped at her and I said, ‘You’re ridiculous!’ and I started laughing and I kissed her. It was a wonderful set, but I’m very serious when I work.”
She’s really chuckling at the memory. Not to be a buzzkill, I say, but surely it must be hard on your family to lose you like this for so long? To watch their daughter, sister, girlfriend morph info a murderous Milanese socialite for months on end? She nods slowly. “There was some silence and some disconnect for a while,” she tells me.
She says she dropped the accent straight after filming wrapped, but other parts lingered. “You end up sounding and looking like them, yes, but it’s not an imitation, it’s a becoming. I remember when we started filming, I knew I had become – and I knew that the greater challenge was going to be unbecoming.” She feels the weight of it keenly. “That’s my own journey as an artist that I still reckon with, Giles. And I ask myself, ‘Is this healthy, the way that you do this?’” She shrugs; resigned, self-aware, perhaps a little proud. “I just don’t know any other way.”
She settles into a reflective mood. “Well, I’m 35 now,” she says, laughing. “You’re like, ‘Lady Gaga is 35! I feel old!’” Never too old for a fabulous press tour. For sheer Hollywood pizzazz, her A Star Is Born appearances were probably the best red carpet run of the past few years (all that periwinkle silk faille), and she’s ready to go again. “I love seeing everyone,” she says. “I appreciate so much how the public has adored me for almost two decades now. Whether I’m singing, acting or walking a red carpet, I love making the public smile.”
Certainly, she has retained her heady combination of sincerity and camp: “Although age is just a number, what I feel mostly is a lot of love for the artistic community, and the artistic collective,” she says, telling me I must deliver this message from her “to the world”. In January, she sang at Joe Biden’s inauguration. “That has to be one of the proudest days of my whole life. Like many people in America, I felt a deep fear when Trump was president, and ushering 45 out and 46 in is something I’ll be able to tell my children all about.” She smiles. “Singing in a Schiaparelli bulletproof dress. I don’t know if people know this about me, but if I weren’t who I am today, I would have been a combat journalist. That was one of my dreams. When I was at the Capitol, the day before the inauguration, I remember walking around and looking for evidence of the insurrection.”
Happiness, so often a stranger to her, has returned. “There was a long time when I didn’t think that I could heal from becoming famous at such a young age, and what it did to my brain,” she says. “But I feel ready to declare myself whole. We will never all be fully whole,” she self-corrects, “but it’s certainly enough. I have a lot of gratitude for joy.” Is this new? “It’s been pretty recent, yes. I would say over the past two years.” Gaga – a quintessential New Yorker – now lives mostly in Hollywood, with her boyfriend Michael Polansky, a Harvard-educated executive director of the philanthropic Parker Foundation, where his work focuses on science, public health and the arts. She dotes on her dogs and says they’re doing fine now, after they were dognapped and their walker shot (non-fatally) in a shocking series of events earlier this year. “Yes, they are OK,” she says, understandably still rattled. “Thank God.”
The pop star and film star schedule remains intense. On top of Gucci, in the past year she has performed jazz classics with Tony Bennett at Radio City Music Hall, and released Love for Sale, their second album of Cole Porter duets, to terrific reviews. She oversees her Born This Way Foundation, with its mission to support the mental wellbeing of young people and empower them to build a kinder world, and is absolutely smitten with Haus Laboratories, her vegan make-up line, with its pretty palettes and its much loved liquid eyeliner, that pulls in more than £100 million a year.
Then, of course, there was Chromatica, her barnstorming electro-fabulous 2020 album. A follow-up of remixes arrived earlier this year – Dawn of Chromatica – and a post-pandemic tour is on the cards. Naturally, as Chromatica’s prime demographic, I begin gushing about how much it meant to me in lockdown, and she attempts a smile before saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever been in more pain in my life than I was making that record. It’s very hard for me to listen to. It’s very hard for me to sing those songs, but it’s not because they’re not amazing, wonderful songs. It’s because they came from a very, very black hole in my heart.”
What place were you in when you were recording it? “I didn’t want to be me anymore,” she says, simply. “I didn’t have the ability to understand what I was capable of any longer as a person. I didn’t feel that I was worth just about anything. But I made it anyway. I said this to a friend the other day – whenever I go through hard times now, I always say with a laugh, ‘Yeah, this is hard. But it’s a lot harder when you want to kill yourself every day.’ So I pledge to always be somebody that speaks about mental health, that speaks about kindness, about compassion and validation. I believe wholeheartedly that the universe made this a part of my story so that I could be prepared to talk about it with the world.”
For a moment, the performance of fame drops. “I know it’s not the world,” she says. “The whole world doesn’t know what I do, and that’s not the point. It’s whoever’s listening. Whoever’s listening: I love you, and if you’re in pain, I promise you it will get better.”
Her mind, though, soon returns to Gucci-world. “This was something else that I was interested in: who killed Maurizio, meaning who did she hire?” she says, still fascinated. “It’s my belief that actually, she didn’t tell the truth about this.” Gaga would watch interviews on YouTube and say to herself, “‘You’re lying.’ In one interview, she said it was some ‘beagle boys’, meaning, I think, that it was one of the mafia. I wondered for a moment if it was the Camorra that had done it, which is the sort of mafia in Naples. So I made some, again secret, decisions about what I decided to believe while I was filming.”
Do you imagine that there will come a time – once the film is out, once you’re beyond the intensity of all this – where you might wish to meet Reggiani, I ask? At the very least, won’t curiosity get the better of you?
There follows a significant pause. “I’m not entirely sure. I think it requires a certain emotional quotient to be an actor,” she says, trying to explain her reticence. It also took her deep into a darkness she is ready to shake off. “The way I felt playing this character by the end, I realised that when you kill someone else, you really kill yourself.”
She goes quiet and seems for a moment to be lost in it all again. Slowly she blinks a few times, bringing herself back to Gaga’s reality, away from Patrizia’s. “Who I care the most for in this process are her children,” she says, carefully, “and I extend to them love and compassion that I’m sure this movie coming out is tremendously difficult or painful for them, potentially. And I wish nothing but peace for their hearts.” Her eyes are again full of worry. Then hope. “I did my very best to play the truth.”
- Article by Giles Hattersley, photography by Steven Meisel.
Life In Looks
British Vogue - Life In Looks
On November 8th, 2021, Lady Gaga announced about the release of "Life In Looks" video on British Vogue's YouTube channel via her social media accounts.
- Life In Looks Transcription
Hello, Vogue. This is Lady Gaga and I'm here to go through all my life in looks.
LIFE IN LOOKS
I'm kind of nervous about this. I believe this was 2008. I was backstage at MTV and I did TRL, Total Request Live. This is a leotard and a hood made by Muto-Little. And the glasses that I'm wearing are actually archive Versace. These were the same style of sunglasses that were worn by Biggie. I wore these everywhere. It was inspired by Grace Jones, obviously, with the hood. That hair on my head is a full wig that I had sewn to my head and never took off. Ever. I wore probably one of three different outfits for about five years straight because that’s what I could afford at the time and I wanted people always to recognize me. So, this was my initial iconic look. You can tell from the way that I’m standing there that I already felt like a star before anything came out, and I would say to anybody that’s young and watching that if you believe in yourself, you don’t need other people to tell you you’re great to know that you’re an artist on the inside already.
So, this was for the MuchMusic Awards. This was designed by Tom Talmon Studio. But I wanna be very specific, the jewelry that I'm wearing on this is what we called the “Fire Bra”. I wanted it to shoot fire from my breasts, but we decided it was safer to shoot sparks. So, essentially, what would happen is I had a remote control in my hand that once I pressed it, it triggered this fire bra to go off. And what would happen was a piece of steel would rub against, was essentially, like a flint, and it would spin very fast and the sparks would shoot off of me. And I used to joke and say I need my jewelry and then they would bring me my fire bra. And those are Pleaser boots that we had studded. I've worn the same stripper heels my entire career. They’re tried and true and they're worth it.
Oh, I love this one. This is Atsuko Kudo. This is when I was in England and I was meeting the Queen and I wanted to dress like a queen in a British fashion. And I also wanted to do it in my way. But we thought that we would give this look of a queen a modern twist by making it in latex. And, at the time, Atsuko Kudo was the only designers that I could think of that were actually, um, tailoring latex in this way. It's very difficult to tailor latex.
Well, this was a wonderful evening. This was my first ever Grammy Awards and Armani wanted to dress me. And I was actually very excited to be dressed by Armani because I knew that everything would be tailored perfectly and it would also be high fashion. So, this piece fit me absolutely perfect. What's also very funny is that these shoes were stolen backstage after the show. I think we found them later on eBay somewhere and we, we found out how to get them back. I just wanted to give a very specific shout-out also to Frederic Aspiras who designed this hair. He was the one who, for the first time, put, um, this idea of creating this piss-yellow hair color as a way of celebrating pop art in motion. So, if you think about Lichtenstein, for example, the way blondes were represented was with yellow hair. And this was a very special night. I had just won a Grammy before this happened, my first Grammy I won right before I wore this.
Okay, well, here's me and Beyoncé. This was created by Haus of Gaga and Perry Meek. Me and Beyoncé, really, in this video, we wanted there to be a balance between fashion and camp. So, we wanted to do a play on the American flag and a play on capitalism. The inspiration for the Americana vibe was that the song Telephone was about being inundated with phone calls. I was playing around, when I wrote that song, with this idea that we were, as a society, becoming more and more obsessed with interacting with each other in a way that was less real. And that led me to this the ingesting of capitalism in a way that's not healthy for us. So, it's a commentary on American culture.
So, the meat dress, it's actually Val Garland's idea, Val Garland, the makeup artist. Her and I worked together for a long time, and she shared a story with me where she had gone to a party wearing sausages, [laughs] and I thought this was quite funny. And I said, “Well, that's a great way to make sure that everybody leaves you alone at a party.” I was speaking with my artistic friends about if we wanted to make any statements while we were at the MTV Video Music Awards, and we did want to make a statement because at the time, they were trying to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. But we decided to do the meat dress because I thought to myself: if you were willing to die for your country, what does it matter how you identify? This was ultimately designed by Franc Fernández, but it was the brainchild of Haus of Gaga. And we were backstage with Brandon Maxwell, who was working as one of my stylists at the time. He was vegan also and still helping to sew all of these last bits of meat to me and making my meat hat and my meat purse, which was held by Cher. It smelled like meat. It was thrilling to wear. There's a corset under this, but the corset was sewn to the meat. So, this is actually a garment, they didn't just drape meat over me and cross their fingers.
This was the [Alexander] McQueen dress from his last collection that I wore. And we recreated the feathers, but I am wearing the Armadillo heels from Plato's Atlantis, which was the crescendo before we unfortunately lost him. I've always been inspired by Alexander McQueen. I think he's potentially the greatest designer of all time. This dress in particular, it does actually represent a lot of what I love about him, which is that, you know, this is a Bosch print and if you know anything about Bosch art, there's sort of these, this violence and these tiny little odd things that are happening that too many are grotesque and ugly and wrong. And, somehow, he found beauty in these things. And that was a piece of him and he celebrated women and he celebrated all types of women.
Okay, so this next piece, we would call this an outfit, everybody calls it “The Egg”, but it's actually a vessel that was designed by Hussein Chalayan. The outfits that are worn by the models and dancers that are around me that was created by Haus of Gaga. I was very particular about the way the fashion looked for this performance in so much as the night before the performance, I said, “The fashion’s wrong. We don't have it. We need it to be latex, we need nude latex.” And if you know anything about looking for latex, years ago, it was very difficult to find latex in any other place other than a sex shop or where we found this late tax was a bus company had latex that they were using to cover the seats of their busses. And we found the latex and we asked if we could buy it from them. So, everybody's fashion that's made here was made from the fabric of seats for a bus. I was in the egg for three days. To be honest, at award shows, especially during this time. I didn't like to talk to people. I always felt that it threw me off of my performance. So, this, in a lot of ways, is really representative of my devotion to my craft and that I really wanted to be with myself.
Okay, so, this is Jo Calderone. This is an alter ego that I made. And I wanted to be subversive and this was my way of creating a different type of statement for myself. At this time, I was actually going through a break-up, so I actually created this character that was my boyfriend. I inhabited this character, Jo Calderone. So, it was representative of relationship, representative of my father as well. But everything about this was just meant to be kind of a Jersey boy greaser. I'm always fully in character when I when I've been Jo. It's a feeling and I wanted him to be dirty. And I rehearsed a lot with the boys and I have little lifts in my shoes to keep me a little bit taller because I'm short.
Photographed by Nick Knight]
Okay. This is one of my favorite photo shoots that Nick and I ever did. Nick Knight and I, for this outfit, we had this idea of shooting me inside of what was essentially meant to be… placenta fluid. We created this artistic goo. And the goo artist was Bart Hess. And I am wearing high heels in it, I can see. They look like Givenchy, McQueen Givenchy. And I have this huge hat on that I believe is a Stephen Jones hat. But this goo that you see on me, it started out sort of in one way. And then as I performed for Nick for several hours, the goo started to take many different forms. This is a garment, but this is a moving garment.
Now, this is the American Music Awards and I wanted to do something fun and exciting and whimsical, and I thought: why not come to the American Music Awards as the actual ad for my Versace campaign with Donatella? So I wanted to arrive as this, you know, Italian goddess that she had turned me into for the campaign. If we'd like to include my accessories, for example, my purse this evening was a mechanical horse. We decided to wear the horse as a way to get onto the red carpet, but we wanted it to be exciting, so we painted her white. But guess what the horse is made out of? Chanel purses. So, that horse is my purse.
Okay, so this next look, I wore this in London. I believe I was leaving The Langham Hotel and it was during the promotion for my album, ARTPOP, which was a heavily scrutinised album. But I believed in putting art in the front and the whole record was about how art can mean anything to you. So, I often did my own takes on other artists as well as iconography throughout history. So, of course, I visited Picasso. I still have those ruffle socks to this day. They're about 2.99. And I'm wearing this jacket, it's really actually a sweatshirt from Dog in Tokyo. Dog is a really, really dope store in the Harajuku area. And then Frederic Aspiras did my hair and we were obsessed with this sort of odd combination of black and blonde at the same time. Tara Savelo was brilliant, my makeup artist. We used a technique in Harajuku makeup as a way to create anime eyes by creating the pupil on the eyelid. And often I'll do this with fashion, depending on what it is. I'll hold my face in a particular way in order to get the expression across that I find interesting. So, in order to look like a Picasso, I sort of have this sort of fractured look on my face and I have one eye closed to reveal the other eye. I don't think there's much that's-- that's more punk than this look. It represents a very dark time in my life, but, often, the darkest times in my life, you'll see the most joyful outfits.
This was created by Dayne Henderson and Vex Clothing. So, this is inflatable, it was very lightweight. If this was made in any other way, it would be quite heavy, but I was able to just run about the stage in this. And this is absolute Club Kid culture clothing, which was something that we really wanted to celebrate at the Artpop ball because it was all about celebrating art, celebrating music but also celebrating the way that those things come together underground.
This piece in particular was created on an aeroplane. We were flying to Greece and so much of ARTPOP was inspired by Greek sculptures. When I landed in Greece, I wanted to land as the Venus. So, we created this on an aeroplane. So I'm wearing stripper shoes. I'm wearing two metal seashells that we just had. And then I've got a thong underneath, and I believe that this is some sort of beach situation that I had with me because I was excited to get some sun in Greece. This was a performance art piece, so when we got off the plane, me and my entire group of dancers, we walked out to my song Venus and I was wearing this outfit. Got dressed on the plane.
So, this was created by Jack Irving. This is all made of Mylar, and I actually was wearing a ventilation system that was pumping air into these spikes, but I didn't let the spikes reveal themselves until I was standing in front of the paparazzi. So, when I got out of the car, it just looked like a Mylar cape. And then in the middle of the street, I pressed a button and I inflated the entire piece. I was very interested in inflatable fashion at this point. This was just simply to freak out the paparazzi.
This is a beautiful, beautiful dress made by Brandon Maxwell. I felt like a princess in it and I felt like a little girl. It was a very simple, beautifully made, black dress, and I won my first Oscar in that dress. I remember I also had to be in charge of taking care of that Tiffany's diamond that Audrey Hepburn wore. No one had worn it since she wore it for Breakfast at Tiffany's. So, I was the first person to wear it, and I remember I left the Oscars to go to a party and I left security behind and everybody was mad at me. [laughs] Sorry. Sorry, Tiffany's. I love you and you got your diamond back.
This is also Brandon Maxwell. Brandon dressed me for the Met Gala when the theme was camp by means of the definition by Susan Sontag, I found this to be very fun. This was an entire performance that we prepared for the carpet. I remember calling Anna and asking her for 15 to 20 minutes to be on the red carpet, and she was very kind to give us that time. You know, one of the things that I love about reading Susan Sontag's thoughts on camp was that things become camp over time. So, what we did with this, that what Brandon and I thought was really a genius to do was he took us all the way, sort of back to the Lower East Side by the end of me revealing all of these looks. And it was just me and fishnets with a sequined bra and pantie, which is the way that I used to perform. I used to call it “pop burlesque”, meaning our version of camp was the old me. And I think this is, in some ways, so indicative of the earlier things that we looked at. If I if I could just, for a moment, switch back to here. [shows a photo from 2008 MTV’s Total Request Live] To me, this really looks like an elevated modern progression of where I used to be.
Photographed by Norbert Schoerner]
And this is my album cover, Cecilio Castrillo Martinez is the designer. Another designer on this garment is Gasoline Glamour. And Gary Fay did the fingers and the hands. This was a creation of a glove, actually, that had articulation. So, as I move my fingers, there was extended fingers that had joints that moved like an alien. And I couldn't have possibly walked in these shoes. One of them, on the left side here, this was about a nine-inch knife, a real knife. And then this was a horn here on the other side, and the horn was longer than the shoe. This is an exercise in what I would love for people to understand is really creating art with fashion and it not being about it being functional for everyday life, but about it being functional for art. I love becoming art. That's something I've said throughout my whole career.
So, this is one of my favorite things I've ever worn. I wore this Schiaparelli design for the inauguration, and nobody knows this, but this is a bulletproof dress. When I saw that golden dove, I just knew that this was the right piece and I knew Schiaparelli being an Italian fashion house, it was something that I really, really wanted to do from my heritage as an Italian-American woman that would be singing for President 45 to be leaving and to invite President 46 into office. And I'll never forget speaking to this young man that I was with. And he was asking me if I was nervous and I said yes. But sometimes fashion really can give you wings. Like a dove.
Photographed by Steven Meisel]
And speaking of Schiaparelli, here we are again. This is from my most recent Vogue shoot with the incredible Steven Meisel that I have wanted to work with my entire career. I try to act while I'm modelling. When I saw this look, I thought it was whimsical and I thought it was beautiful. But when everything came together, I felt that this type of privilege and wealth was the epitome of evil. So, you can see it in my eyes in this picture that this, this woman has no soul. This being has no soul. But the soul, I believe, resides in the creation of this image and all the artists that were part of it.
[Writes on a blank page] “You… were… born… to… be… brave. Love.” Looking back at all my looks, it was actually very emotional. All of these moments in my life represent something very deep to me. I felt so misunderstood for so long that I was just the girl that loved to dress crazy. I was just the girl that loved fashion. And that's all that I was, and it felt really nice today to revisit all of these outfits and remember how particular I was about everything, and revisit also the artistic spirit of it. You know, I do believe in art for art's sake. I also believe in intentional art. And I believe that you can, if you choose, choose to live an artistic life where art is every moment of your being and every second of every day. People say all the time that they think I hid in fashion, but I was never hiding. I was screaming. Thank you, Vogue.
Screencaps
Paris
November No. 902 (2009)
- Editorial by Judith Benhamou-Huet, photography by Ben Duggan
United States
The Arts Issue (December, 2009)
Lady Gaga was in a Hansel and Gretel themed shoot and interviewed.
"I've always been an outspoken and extreme dresser," pronounces Lady Gaga, her embodying a Marc Jacobs-clad witch for Annie Leibovitz's Hansel and Gretel portfolio (inspired by Richard Jones's production of the 1893 Engelbert Humperdinck opera, opening this month at the Metropolitan Opera). To prove her point, Lady Gaga arrived at Vogue to discuss the shoot wearing a trailing white chiffon Galliano goddess gown with Philip Treacy headdress that spelled VOGUE in clipped white feathers. The following day, she came to see Creative Director Grace Coddington in a little black dress with a flaming-red wig, and later appeared on location, as Coddington recalls, "stark naked except for her rubber raincoat and some very, very high heels!" She then promptly threw herself in the mud at Leibowitz's feet. "gaga was so bubbly and chatty and enthusiastic and excited to be alive," says Coddington. "She was up for anything."
Gaga acknowledges that her art director, Matthew williams--"my Jean Paul Goude"--was "the inspiration that made the connection for me between the art world and the fashion world. He used to say things like 'If you want to make a shoulder pad, don't research jackets--research sculpture, mineral rocks, paintings.' he thinks in a different way; he is the designer of the future."
Fashion and art collide in Gaga's work, too. "We'd been thinking of innovative ways to premiere the music," she says about her decision to debut "Bad Romance" at Alexander McQueen's Plato's Atlantis show, which she found "not of this world." "When Magdalena was stomping her pretty little hooves down the runway." she says, "it was dreamlike." Meanwhile her ballad "Speechless" ("about my love for my father") was first performed in November in Los Angeles at MOCA's thirtieth-anniversary gala, as part of an installation by Francesco Vezzoli. For this she became, in her words, "a child of the Warhol of my time, among the most famous Pop Artists of our time--Damien Hirst made the piano!"
Lady Gaga's unique and winning blend of art, fashion, and music take to the road with her Monster Ball tour, kicking off November 27.
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- Article by Hamish Bowles, photography by Annie Leibovitz
Fall Fashion Preview (July 2010)
OPRAH GOES GAGA
AS COCHAIR OF THE COSTUME INSTITUTE'S BALL CELEBRATING ITS BLOCKBUSTER NEW EXHIBITION, "AMERICAN WOMAN," OPRAH GETS TO KNOW LADY GAGA AND HAS THE TIME OF HER LIFE.
THE DAY BEFORE
Like a proud but concerned mother, Oprah Winfrey is staring intently into Lady Gaga's powdery, pale, if not poker face. With one hand on Gaga's upper arm to steady her, Oprah, gorgeous in a midnight-blue Oscar de la Renta ball dress, carefully brushes several platinum-blonde wig hairs out of Lady Gaga's zombie eyes.
The most-famous-at-this-very-moment pop star in the world, on the cover of Time as we speak, is beyond exhausted. "I am hallucinating," Gaga says as she sips coffee through a straw. She has been up for more than 20 hours straight, shooting her latest video in Los Angeles, after which she boarded a private plane and flew directly to New York City to be photographed with Oprah not to mention perform at the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute gala the next evening for the party that kicks off and celebrates in splendid high style the institute's newest exhibition, "American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity" (through August 15).
These two very particular women one, the quintessential American Woman and cochair of the event; the other, a bizarre and brilliant and peculiarly American pastiche of seemingly every woman and a few men, most obviously Madonna, Cher, and Elton John are posing together for Mario Testino in a cocktail lounge at the Mark Hotel. It's the very same room where, in just 24 hours, Oprah will attend the decadent after-the-Met party, where she will be the one to carry on like a rock star till the wee hours while Gaga finally gets some sleep.
For now, the two are girlishly bonding despite being fussed over, with seven or eight hands in each of their faces. Oprah says to Gaga, "Didn't we have a time when you were on my show? That was a time. We had a moment." Gaga replies, "That was a really special day for me." Suddenly Testino, who has been hunched over a computer looking at the photos, shouts, "In-sane !" Gaga and Oprah scurry over to see...
- Article by Jonathan Van Meter, photography by Mario Testino
The Power Issue (March, 2011)
How appropriate—how accurate!—her name is. It is more of a title, really, one she bestowed upon herself mere moments before she became so insanely famous. The Gaga half makes immediate, intuitive sense, an utterance that sounds like an infant’s first word but is, in fact, French and means, essentially, to be utterly enthralled by something—excited to the point of being touched by madness. (That it describes both the pop star and her uniquely obsessed fans makes it even more perfect.) But it is the Lady part of her name that has gone underexplored.
Put aside for a moment that she often appears in public with no pants on, or that she performs part of her show covered in blood, or that she screams like Sam Kinison onstage, or that she says the F-word with metronomic consistency. In person, she is unfailingly polite and surprisingly dignified. She speaks in the clipped, proper diction that is often mistaken for a Madonna-like pretension but is in fact born of twelve years of attending Convent of the Sacred Heart, the oldest private girls’ school in Manhattan, where Gloria Vanderbilt matriculated, an institution known for turning out self-possessed young ladies who speak perfect French and have the vocabularies of William F. Buckley, Jr. Indeed, what surprises me most during the time I spend embedded with the pop star—inside the giant plastic bubble, so to speak—while she is on tour in London and Paris at the end of December is how effortlessly she switches back and forth between “lady” and “gaga.”
It is a few hours before the start of the Monster Ball, the last of five sold-out shows at London’s O2 arena, and I am sitting in an empty lounge backstage, waiting for Gaga to arrive. The room—the contents of which travel with the tour (28 trucks and fourteen buses; 140 people) from city to city—is outfitted like a VIP area in a nightclub: low black leather sectionals, silver floor lamps, a stocked bar, a huge stereo system, and little black cocktail tables set with bowls of miniature candy bars. She is an hour late. Suddenly the curtains part and Lady Gaga makes her entrance, mincing into the room holding a porcelain teacup and saucer in one hand and a wineglass for me in the other. (Like fainting on command or dropping a glove, the long-lost art of making an entrance, which Gaga seems to have single-handedly revived, is a remarkably effective way to shift the conversation.) “I don’t like the idea of you having to drink wine out of a plastic cup,” she says as she makes her way toward me, one tiny step at a time. She proffers her powdered cheeks for a kiss-kiss as a bottle of Sancerre is opened, which she insists on serving to me herself. “Pouring your own wine is bad luck,” she says.
She is still in her day look: a slinky black-and-white striped dress—a gown, really—with a four-foot train and shoes that—do I even need mention?—make her feet look as if they are screwed on backward. The heels bring her nearly up to my height of six feet. (She is five feet one.) She has a Bride of Frankenstein updo, with a brooch perched on top. Gaga glances down at the bowl of candy on the coffee table in front of us, shoots me a look over the top of her granny glasses, and deadpans, “What, the Mars bars aren’t doing it for you?” I have eaten three of them, I tell her, and she apologizes profusely for making me wait. She then asks an assistant to bring us a proper spread, which arrives moments later and consists of enough filet mignon to feed twelve people.
Lady Gaga may be behaving as if she were a member of Marie Antoinette’s coterie—the powdered wig, the binding costume, the impeccable courtliness—but it’s a far cry from what I witnessed the night before. After catching her performance, I was ushered backstage to her dressing room and found a scene that seemed entirely unhinged. Gaga herself looked like a lunatic: Barefoot, still covered in fake blood, mascara running down her face, she was careening around the room in a robe made of red feathers like a cross between Alice Cooper and Big Bird. There were dancers running in and out, mixing and spilling drinks, and a peanut gallery of strangely bedazzled gay men sitting on the sofas singing “Adelaide’s Lament,” from Guys and Dolls, which Gaga joined in on when she wasn’t bouncing off the walls.
Gaga stumbled up to me to say hello and then introduced me to the guy she was hanging all over: a tall, boyishly cute heavy metal–looking dude with a mullet, wearing a sleeveless black leather vest. “This is Luc,” she said proudly. “He’s my boyfriend.” He looked down at her for a moment, and a knowing grin crossed his face. “OK, Bette Midler,” he said. Moments later I was ushered out of the room by Wendi Morris, Gaga’s road manager—in an effort, it seemed to me, to protect Gaga from herself. As I was walking through the curtains I looked back, and Gaga was in Luc’s lap. “Jonathan, wait,” she whined like a teenage girl in need of attention. “Don’t you want to stay and ask me some questions?” Obvious to everyone but herself: not the time for an interview.
What a difference a day makes. Back in the arena not 24 hours later, she is serene, sober, and sipping tea out of her fancy cup. What did you do today? I ask, and the answer is probably not what her millions of adoring fans would expect. “I stayed in bed all day,” she says. “I do this very strange thing with my foot when I am feeling lonely. I rub my left foot with the right foot. Is that weird?”
No, I tell her. It’s called self-soothing. A lot of people do it.
“OK, then. So I soothed all day.” She pauses for a moment. “In this hair. Because I actually wore this hairpiece out last night and then I fell asleep in it.”
And then you just got up and went about your day?
“Well, no,” she says, batting her eyelashes. “She had to be fluffed up first.”
Gaga can be forgiven for being wiped out. She has been on tour for three years without a real break, and on the road with the Monster Ball since February 2009. “Let’s call a spade a spade here,” she says. “I am really fucking tired. I am at that last mile of the marathon when your fingers and your toes are numb and you can’t feel your body, and I am just going on adrenaline. But in the overarching objective of my life, I am really only at mile two. I try to keep that in mind.”
If you have not seen Lady Gaga live, you do not know from Lady Gaga. In an arena, her music, which has often been dismissed as run-of-the-mill Euro-pop—somehow not edgy or deep enough—takes flight. It is as if each song were written for the express purpose of being belted—roared—in front of 20,000 people on an extravagant stage set with ten dancers taking up the rear. She manages to go from insane, over-the-top rock opera to syncopated dance routine to intimate, boozy piano ballad and then back again, through thirteen costume changes, without ever losing her total command of the stage. The fact that she has a huge voice, plays the piano and the stand-up bass, and wrote every lyric and melody herself adds to the sense that you are in the presence of a true artist who has only just begun to show what she’s made of.
Of course she’s comfortable onstage. She has been playing the piano since she was four and by eleven was performing in big recitals. As she puts it, “I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.” Still showing no false modesty, Lady Gaga says of herself now, “Speaking purely from a musical standpoint, I think I am a great performer. I am a talented entertainer. I consider myself to have one of the greatest voices in the industry. I consider myself to be one of the greatest songwriters. I wouldn’t say that I am one of the greatest dancers, but I am really quite good at what I do.” Big words from someone who’s only been around for three years. “I think it’s OK to be confident in yourself,” she says.
Her fans couldn’t agree more. They hang on her every word, scream when she screams, and dance throughout the entire two-hour-long extravaganza. At one show, I stood in the wings and watched as at least a dozen women were pulled out of the crush in front of the barricades and taken away on stretchers because they were overcome and near collapse.
It is no secret that Lady Gaga has an especially intense relationship with her fans, whom she refers to as her “little monsters.” She has said more than once, “I see myself in them.” Why is that? “I was this really bad, rebellious misfit of a person—I still am—sneaking out, going to clubs, drugs, alcohol, older men, younger men. You imagine it, I did it. I was just a bad kid. And I look at them, and every show there’s a little more eyeliner, a little more freedom, and a little more ‘I don’t give a fuck about the bullies at my school.’ For some reason, the fans didn’t become more Top 40. They become even more of this cult following. It’s very strange and exciting.”
Unlike the chilly, hyperchoreographed seduction of Madonna, say, or the manufactured pop of Britney or Janet, Lady Gaga’s performance style is raw and emotional. “I am quite literally chest open, exposed, open-heart surgery every night on that stage, bleeding for my fans and my music. It’s so funny when people say, ‘It’s amazing to see how hard you work.’ We’re supposed to work hard! I have the world at my fingertips. I am not going to saunter around the stage doing pelvic thrusts and lip-synching. That’s not at all why I am in this. I don’t feel spiritually connected to anyone in Hollywood makeup and a gown with diamond earrings on. I am just a different breed. I want to be your cool older sister who you feel really connected with, who you feel understands you and refuses to judge anything about you because she’s been there.”
Her relationship with her fans occasionally seems to verge on unhealthy, as if both sides were overly invested in something that in the end is impossible. I bring up a YouTube video that got a lot of attention in late November, in which Gaga is crying in an arena in Poland as she talks to the audience. “Sometimes, being onstage is like having sex with my fans,” she explains. “They’re the only people on the planet who in an instant can make me just lose it.”
When she talks about her fans, one hears shades of messianic zeal. “I want for people in the universe, my fans and otherwise, to essentially use me as an escape,” she says. “I am the jester to the kingdom. I am the route out. I am the excuse to explore your identity. To be exactly who you are and to feel unafraid. To not judge yourself, to not hate yourself. Because, as funny as it is that I am on the cover of Vogue—and no one is laughing harder than I am—I was the girl in school who was most likely to walk down the hallway and get called a slut or a bitch or ugly or big nose or nerd or dyke. ‘Why are you in the chorus?’ ” (She’s more Glee than Gary Glitter in some ways.)
For Gaga, the stakes are high. “Because as an artist and as a performer, the person that they look up to to create this space of freedom and escapism, I want to give my fans nothing less than the greatest album of the decade. I don’t want to give them something trendy. I want to give them the future.”
Not everyone gets Gaga, of course, and no one is more aware of that fact than the singer herself. As she puts it, “What I do for a living is not a cheese sandwich. It’s not like, either good or bad. It’s much more complicated than that.”
What no one can deny is her uncanny ability to mine decades of avant-garde and pop-culture history and twine them together in a way that feels like the future. She is a human synthesizer, a style aggregator, the perfect Wiki-Google- YouTube–era pop star. Elton John calls her “the most adventurous and talented star of our age.”
Gaga herself is very open about her influences. “It’s not a secret that I have been inspired by tons of people,” she says, “David Bowie and Prince being the most paramount in terms of live performance.” She also seems to have made peace with the fact that she is compared to—or, less charitably, accused of ripping off—nearly every artist of the last 50 years. “I could go on and on about all of the people I have been compared to—from Madonna to Grace Jones to Debbie Harry to Elton John to Marilyn Manson to Yoko Ono—but at a certain point you have to realize that what they are saying is that I am cut from the cloth of performer, that I am like all of those people in spirit.” She takes a bite of filet mignon and says with her mouth full, “She was born this way.”
Lady Gaga’s new album, Born This Way, does not come out until May, but the first single, of the same name, is, by the time you are reading this, no doubt blaring from the radio. I first hear the song when Gaga, iPod in hand, gets up from the sectional where we have been sitting, walks over to the stereo, plugs it in, and then looks at me and says, “Are you ready? I don’t think you’re ready.” She turns it up to eleven. The song at first sounds suspiciously like a Madonna tune and then switches into something that feels a bit like a Bronski Beat hit and then finally transforms into its own thing: a Gaga original. Clearly an homage to the obscure underground disco record “I Was Born This Way”; it is an unbelievably great dance song, destined to be the anthem of every gay-pride event for the next 100 years.
She tells me that Elton John pronounced it the “gayest song” he had ever heard. “I wrote it in ten fucking minutes,” she says, “and it is a completely magical message song. And after I wrote it, the gates just opened, and the songs kept coming. It was like an immaculate conception.” She plays a few more songs and mentions a few others—with tantalizing titles like “Hair,” “Bad Kids,” and “Government Hooker.”
The second single to be released is called “Judas” and is, typically, a mash-up: The melody sounds like it was written for the Ronettes, but it is set to a sledgehammering dance beat and is about falling in love with backstabbing men of the biblical variety. Another song, “Americano,” which she describes as like “a big mariachi techno-house record, where I am singing about immigration law and gay marriage and all sorts of things that have to do with disenfranchised communities in America,” has a resounding Piafesque chorus. Turns out it was intentional. “It sounds like a pop record, but when I sing it, I see Edith Piaf in a spotlight with an old microphone.” (Piaf is an apt reference—they both evince a similar brand of heroic vulnerability.) But, she says, “there are some very rock-’n’-roll moments on the album, too: There’s a Bruce Springsteen vibe, there’s a Guns N’ Roses moment. It’s the anthemic nature of the melodies and the choruses.” She feels it’s different from—and better than—anything she’s done before. “It is much more vocally up to par with what I’ve always been capable of. It’s more electronic, but I have married a very theatrical vocal to it. It’s like a giant musical-opus theater piece.”
Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager, tells me that she recorded the entire album—all seventeen songs—on the road over the last year and a half, “which is not the ideal situation for most artists,” he says. “But for her it was great because she was able to tap into the emotions inside of those arenas. We would have a conversation backstage about something, and the next day she’d play me a song relating to the conversation that we just had! Watching the creative process with her is incredible.”
Carter’s partner, Vincent Herbert, whom Gaga credits with discovering her in 2007 on Myspace, has worked as a producer with Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. “She made songs that are going to touch people,” he says. “The song ‘Born This Way’ just takes your breath away. It’s like everybody from three to 103 can relate to that song. I think she made the Thriller of the twenty-first century.”
Gaga’s musical tastes are all over the map, which partly explains why she feels so comfortable in London. “Yes,” she says, “I have a very broad taste in music, and the English don’t differentiate the rock star from the pop star. It’s all the same thing.” But there is more to it. American music critics, for example, insist on defining her with dizzying numbers of pop-music references, but the fashion world sees something more precise: the influence of a very specific tribe of English eccentrics—Leigh Bowery, Isabella Blow, et al. “The fashion community in general got me much earlier than everyone else,” she says. “But actually, I felt truly embraced by this London cultural movement, that McQueen, Isabella, Daphne Guinness wing of the English crowd. I remember when I first started doing photo shoots, people would say, ‘My God, you look so much like Isabella Blow, it scares me.’ And McQueen used to say, ‘Oh, my God, your boobs!’ He actually grabbed both of them and said, ‘Even your boobs are like hers!’ ”
Like those style icons, Gaga demonstrates a commitment to outrageous self-presentation that makes every crazy costume worn by Elton or Cher or Madonna look like child’s play. (As Karl Lagerfeld once told me, “I hate average, and she is anything but average.”) But her determination to outdo them all, and herself, cuts both ways: She has been venerated and vilified for her fashion stunts. Some of her looks have been truly inspired (the red latex Elizabethan gown with sparkly red hearts covering her eyes to meet the queen), delightfully startling (the lace dress that crawled right across her face), downright silly (the Kermit cape), or simply mystifying (the meat dress). She clearly wants and expects a reaction. When she talks about her makeup for the “Born This Way” video, she says, “The whole world is going to hate it in the best kind of way.”
Picked up for a M.A.C. Cosmetics campaign early on in her career, Gaga has always worked both within and outside the fashion establishment, collaborating on the one hand with designers like Lagerfeld and Armani and Prada, and on the other with artists like Terence Koh and unknown up-and-comers. “I pay for a lot of fashion myself because I want to support young designers,” she says. All of her looks are filtered through the stylist Nicola Formichetti, who, along with the rest of her creative team, makes up the Haus of Gaga. Because Formichetti, who was recently appointed the creative director of Thierry Mugler, is in the midst of planning his first show for the house, I ask Gaga about it. “Our relationship does have some influence on the show, but I don’t want to take any credit for it. Nicola is fashion. He’s the most remarkable man.”
At the end of the day, the way she dresses is part of the entire performance-art aspect of her life. “It’s not about a choice,” she says. “It’s about a lifestyle that I live and breathe.” Does she sometimes feel misunderstood? At first she says no but then retracts it. “Well, yes, actually,” she says. “There is this assumption that women in music and pop culture are supposed to act a certain way, and because I’m just sort of middle fingers up, a-blazing, doing what my artistic vision tells me to do, that is what is misunderstood. People are like, ‘She dresses this way for attention.’ Or like, ‘Ugh, the meat dress.’ ” She rolls her eyes. “People just want to figure it out or explain it. The truth is, the mystery and the magic is my art. That is what I am good at. You are fascinated with precisely the thing that you are trying to analyze and undo.”
I am sitting in a vast suite in a very swank hotel in Place Vendôme in Paris, once again waiting for Gaga to make an entrance. Her road manager, Wendi Morris, is pacing around talking on her cell phone to Troy Carter. “I am not going to ask her that,” she says. “Not now.” Pause. “If you pay to have my head reattached to my body, I will ask her.” She laughs. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that Gaga is not always delightful. She is at the center of a complex multimillion-dollar enterprise that does not run smoothly at all times. Indeed, as an epic snowstorm was shutting down half of Europe, Gaga and her trucks and buses were trying to make their way to Paris. When the caravan got through the Channel Tunnel, the drivers were told that they would have to idle at a way station until the roads were passable. A couple of them decided to shove right on through anyway and were promptly pulled over, the drivers arrested. The quest to free the drivers—and, more important, the Monster Ball equipment they were ferrying—in time for the show to go on on Sunday night went all the way up to President Sarkozy. The answer came back: No. The Monster Ball would have to be canceled. Gaga, Morris tells me, was livid.
The door to the suite opens, and Gaga appears in a long-sleeved, high-neck nude-verging-on-lavender dress with a train, and a décolletage encrusted with what she describes as “pinky-pearly scales.” There is a diamond-shaped cutout at the cleavage, and her breasts—nipples covered with strips of white tape—occasionally make a surprise appearance. “You don’t even want to know what happened yesterday,” she says. “The wrath. It wasn’t cute. It’s not something I would want anyone to see.”
She seems a little on edge still, a bit cranky. “This is boring,” she says. “Let’s go get something to eat.” The security team is activated; the car is brought around. “I want to go out the front door,” she says to her security guys. “Say hello to the fans.” Are you sure? one of them asks. “Yeah, because they have been waiting. I think it’s good for them to know that I care.” She holds out her hand, which is nearly covered by a serpentine diamond ring. “I am going through an Elizabeth Taylor moment. Don’t judge me. They are all certified non-conflict diamonds.”
We head through the lobby, and I can see a barely contained mob of fans through the windows. “Awwww, see?” she says, as she approaches the entrance. “How could you go out the back when you have that waiting out front?” The doors swing open, and Gaga, surrounded by security, plunges in. “Gaga! Gaga! Gaga!” A teenage boy pushes to the front. “I am from Milano! Please! Please! Please!” They are all holding out a scrap of something to be signed or angling to get a picture. The crowd surges forward. A security guy yells, “One at a time! Take it easy!” There are girls with tears streaming down their faces. I almost get knocked over. Morris pulls me out of the maw and shoves me into the van, and the doors close behind us. But the fans do not give up. They are banging on the windows, pressing their faces against the glass. “They are so sweet,” Gaga says. Not exactly the word I would have chosen.
We pull away from the mob and head down the street, about a dozen paparazzi on motorcycles trailing close behind. “I don’t know if you knew this,” she says, “but the other night, in London, I had food poisoning. I was vomiting backstage during the changes.” I had no idea, I say. “Nobody knew,” she says. “I just Jedi mind-tricked my body. You will not vomit onstage. Because I was also thinking, If I do, they are going to think I’m drunk. And I don’t want them to think I am human, let alone drunk. I certainly wouldn’t want them to think I had something so ordinary as food poisoning.” She laughs.
We make our way to Chez André, and Gaga orders, in perfect French, escargot, steak tartare, and chicken. She likes her protein, this pop star. Moments earlier, when we walked into the restaurant, every person in the room stopped talking and stared, forks suspended in midair. Now, seated in a corner by the window, with a curtain that comes up right to the top of her beehive, I can see people outside on the street jumping up and down, trying to catch a glimpse. Let’s not forget that her first album is titled The Fame and the second The Fame Monster. “There is the fame monster, as you can see,” she says, gesturing outside, “but it also comes from within. It will only change you and affect you if you allow it to. You have to reject all the evils of it and try to turn all the positive things that you can use about fame into great things. Like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Gaga used her visibility, her unusual connection with her fans, and her social-media prowess to agitate for the repeal of the law, tweeting senators, making protest videos, and speaking at rallies. “That’s me turning my fame into something that is positive and makes me feel good about my life.”
I wonder out loud how her parents, Joe and Cynthia Germanotta, have handled all of this. “It was hard in the beginning, but we have wrestled fame to the ground together,” she says. Gaga’s father, who was very involved in her career early on, had heart surgery a few years ago. “I obsess about his health,” she says. “I’m very Italian. I call him every day. I ask my mother if he’s been smoking. They are in their 50s, and they still live in the same apartment on the Upper West Side. Nothing has changed since I have become a star. I am a real family girl. When it comes to love and loyalty, I am very old-fashioned. And I am quite down-to-earth for such an eccentric person.”
One of the most peculiar things about Gaga is that for all the ways she’s transformed the pop landscape, she herself romanticizes her early days as aspiring musician Stefani Germanotta: “It was grassroots, downtown New York, blood, sweat, and tears, dancing, music, whiskey, pummeling the streets, playing every venue I could get my hands on. It was the hustle and the grind and the traffic of New York that propelled me to where I am today. I don’t in any way associate my past with anything other than the hunger and the starvation for success that I still feel. It was the most beautiful time in my life. And funnily enough, I still live in the same apartment, hang out with the same friends, drink at the same bars, and I dance in the same studios with the same dancers. Really, nothing has changed.” (Is it a coincidence that astronomically successful 20-somethings Gaga and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have rejected much of the flash and bling of the boom years, live in relatively modest accommodations, and are very close to their families—or is there a new paradigm for dominators of the Zeitgeist?)
There are an awful lot of people trying to get in on Gaga’s creation myth. A mean-spirited book came out in September; an ex-lover and songwriting partner filed a $30 million lawsuit against her (later dismissed); and every bartender she ever kissed on the Lower East Side has a story. When I ask her about her life before she was discovered and signed to Interscope Records, she says, “My ride through the industry was an interesting one because people loved me but there was a very big raised eyebrow about me. I mean, a big one. So people were kind of like, well, I’m involved but not really. And as soon as I took off, it was like, I invented her, I made her, I wrote the music. When, in reality, I am completely self-invented.”
We finish lunch and head back through the scrum of paparazzi and into the car for the drive to the arena. She has a show tonight and another tomorrow, the makeup show for the cancellation the night before. Despite the fact that it is just two nights before Christmas Eve, she cannot bear to leave Paris without giving her fans what they have waited so long for. Her cell phone rings. “Hi, Mom! . . . Well, I’m, you know, I’m tired, Mommy. . . . Luc’s just kind of being a baby. . . . Were you able to find his earring? . . . OK, thanks, Mommy. . . . No, I’m OK. . . . I love you. . . . All right. . . . I love you.” She hangs up and falls silent. I check my BlackBerry, and when I look up, she is sound asleep. A few miles later, her eyes open, and I tease her. “My friends tell me that I recharge like a robot,” she says. “Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Interscope, actually laughs at me: Whenever I have ridden on a plane with him I have fallen asleep, and apparently I don’t move. I sit in my clothes, perfectly still, head straight up, and I just sleep. And then I open my eyes and he’s like, ‘You scare me the way you sleep.’ ”
It’s so perfect, I say, for someone who likes to be. . . .
“Poised? As much as possible?”
Back in New York a week later, I call Iovine, and when he gets on the phone he just starts laughing. “Isn’t she amazing?” he says. “Did she take you for a ride? Isn’t that a great train to be on, being on tour with her?” And then he says this: “Artists like her are very rare. Artists that have that many facets of their career in line and can do that many things. She can write like Carole King, produce, sing like that, work-work-work like that. She gets her point of view across; she has the fashion, the performance—the entire vision. It’s very, very rare.” What does the future hold for Lady Gaga? “Only she can imagine it,” he says. “I don’t have that good of an imagination like she does. But she’s the real thing. She will go as long as she wants to or physically can. Her talent will take her as far as she wants to take it. Most artists of this caliber, if they can stay healthy, there’s no limitation. None.”
- Editorial by Jonathan Van Meter, photography by Mario Testino
Special Anniversary Issue (September, 2012)
Dream Girl
Whether touring the globe with a ground breaking extravaganza or launching on out-of-this-world fragrance, Lady Gaga is meeting the future on her own wildly inventive terms.
It's well past midnight at the Park Hyatt in Tokyo, the sleek skyscraper hotel made famous by the film Lost in Translation, and at this hour, it seems there are more staff than guests. I'm just coming back from a night out when suddenly there's a commotion in the formal, hush-hush lobby. A young, handsome guy appears and begins signaling to someone around the corner whom I cannot see. Then he says, in a loud whisper, "The coast is clear!" At that, a woman pushing a wheelchair comes around the corner and scurries across the lobby to the elevator. The person in the wheelchair is listing to the side, as if drunk, and is covered by a shroud, or what appears to be an oversize Hermes scarf (Could be Versace. Hard to say. They are moving very quickly.) And then—whoosh—just like that, all three sweep into an open elevator and are whisked up, up, and away.
Had to be Gaga. She's staying here for a three-night stand with the Born This Way Ball at the Saitama Super Arena. When I finally meet up with her in a suite at the hotel a few days later, it's the first thing I bring up. Gaga is in exaggerated-tacky mode, wearing a plasticky shift that she bought in Harajuku earlier today. It is the color of a trash bag and is quilted, with a big Chanel logo across the chest; but it is so obviously fake that it asks you to laugh and not worry about its provenance. She is also wearing so much "gold" jewelry—bangles and necklaces and giant hoop earrings—that even the tiniest of movements creates a symphony of jingle-jangle. Her hair (or wig) is dyed two shades-blonde and a coppery color she calls "fox"-and has been swept up into a high ponytail on the right side of her head. ("I love my side pony," she says. "It instantly makes me feel like I am four and three-quarters.") When I get to the part about the seemingly incapacitated woman covered by a giant, chic scarf being wheeled through the lobby, she narrows her eyes and says, breathlessly, "Fabulous."Then she abruptly shakes her head: Nope. Sorry to disappoint. Wasn't me.
It so could have been you, I argue.
"Yes, it could have... " she says as she sits up straight, perhaps recognizing an opportunity to sow a bit of mischief. "I should just say, 'Yes, it was me.' "
That I just assumed it was Gaga says an awful lot about how deeply her brand of high jinks has seeped into our subconscious. The fashiony shroud . . . the tragicomic wheelchair .. . the public "drunkenness"- all plays from the Lady's handbook. And the fact that I still don't know whether it was Gaga or not is exactly the point. She doesn't care whether it's "true" or "false," as there is more frisson- more zest, more fun- in the wondering.
Gaga has always had a peculiar relationship with the truth. She has said many times onstage, "I hate the truth so much that I would prefer a giant dose of bullshit any day." (Even the veracity of that statement is in question.) This playful slipperiness is one of the many reasons the people of Japan have taken such a shine to her. When she performs here, many of her exceptionally devoted Japanese fans rise to the occasion by wearing magnificent contraptions of their own. Over the next week, some of them will camp outside the hotel for hours, days, sometimes in the pouring rain, waiting to see Mother Monster's mini-motorcade come and go. Occasionally, she will ask her driver to stop, the van's door will slide open, and the eerily ruly mob will gently surge forward, reach for her, sob, but otherwise remain almost entirely silent. As Lady Gaga herself puts it, "I think some of it has to do with the obsession with fantasy. The blurring of fantasy and reality is something that the Japanese herald in their life, in their day-today commercialism. In a way, I think I sort of just fit right in over here."
Come to think of it, there is something Japanese about the DNA of the entire Gaga enterprise. The obsession with monsters; the one-part scary, one-part cute aspect to the Lady herself (think Godzilla, think Mothra); the powdered-geisha vibe; the Murakami-like magical realism. She is even the subject of a Nobuyoshi Araki exhibit large-format black and-white photos of her tied up and naked- that is being mounted in a pop-up gallery in a giant shopping mall not far from our hotel: She is the only non-Japanese woman he has photographed for his scandalous bondage series. As one Japanese record executive tells me, "Everyone loves her here, even grandmothers who have never heard her music." Gaga was one of the first to donate more than $1 million for relief after the earthquake and tsunami, and she has been to the country many times, before and since that terrible tragedy. In some ways, she is like an adopted national hero, the ultimate Japanese mascot- a cartoonish human plush toy.
There's also the fact that the spirit of the Club Kid, that early-nineties New York City invention (a moment that clearly left a mark on LG), has never died in Tokyo. Young people in this city routinely dress as if they are heading to a costume ball--or as if they are five years old. In fact, six such women --Miki, Mio, Lisa, Junko, Meg, and Kaoru--come backstage to say hello after Gaga's show one night, which happens to fall on Mother's Day. She is dressed in a hooded, full-length, loose-fitting silky robe covered in a Gothy pattern of roses and tiny skeletons, which was designed by Donatella Versace (as were many of the costumes for the tour).
"I miiiiisssss yoooooou," says Gaga in that sleepy whine of hers. A girly hugfest ensues. Calling them by their first names, Gaga asks about their lives. They tell her that they all traveled to New York City together and went to her parent's restaurant, Joanne. "Did you meet my mom?" she says.. Someone whips out a cell phone and hands it to Gaga. She turns to show me the picture: "Look how cute they are. They all have Little Monster jackets on" It is hard to imagine any other star of this magnitude being so intimate with her fans. Later Gaga will tell me, "I love them. I've seen them every single year when I come to Tokyo and they travel all around the world to come see me. They are just so special and wonderful and sweet!"
Hovering nearby filming all of this is the photographer Terry Richardson, who followed Gaga during the Monster Ball for last fall's photo book Lady Gaga x Terry Richardson and is now back, capturing her every move for what may become a documentary or, one hopes, something weirder. As Richardson's camera is rolling, the girls announce that they have rehearsed a little show. What follows is simply beyond description, but suffice it to say that with its stilted dialogue peppered with self-consciously naughty language, it is one of the most awkwardly poignant moments I have ever witnessed. As the skit comes to an end, Miki announces that they have an "award" for Lady Gaga. She rolls out a five-foot-long piece of red fabric on the floor as one of the other girls sets an elaborate box at one end. "Is this the red carpet?" asks Gaga beginning to laugh. "Yes!" they say, in unison. She takes two tiny steps on it, gets down on her knees, and opens the box - Encased in glass is a replica of the now-familiar Lady Gaga "paw"-- a clawed hand that looks like it is trying to dig its way out of a shallow grave, but covered in jewels. Gaga sucks in a breath. "I love it!" she says. "Did you have this made?"
"We made it."
"You made this?" she says. "I'm going to take care of it forever." She seems almost embarrassed by the extravagance of the gesture. "You know girls." she says a moment later. "You don't have to bring me any presents. I am always just happy yo see you. Take care of each other, OK?" (Later, I exchanged mails with Miki: "We work so hard n save money to go the show n to meet her b/c she made our life sparkling!')
Lady Gaga is best experienced live. Her music, her voice, her shtick, her costumes; all better live. As Marla Weinhoff, who art-directed the sets for Gaga's new show, says to me, "I mean, it's a Judy or a Barbra. I've never seen her miss her mark. I've never seen her sing a bad note. I have seen the technology fail her, but she has never let us down." But it's not just her showmanship, it's the presentation of her ideas on the stage -- clever, often brilliant, occasionally sublime- that puts Gaga in a category of her own.
At the end of 2010, I watched Lady Gaga perform four sold-out arena shows in Europe for a piece for this magazine and while Gaga herself was mesmerizing, the staging was a little hokey- the too-literal monster dominating the set, fine allusions to The Wizard of Oz. That tour had started out in relatively small venues, but in the middle of it, she gained millions of new fans, and the Monster Ball had to be on the fly. In other words, she was not entirely in control.
The Born This Way Ball, however, is her dream tour, conceived by her from start to finish as a preposterously extravagant spectacle designed for massive arenas all over the world. (After wending its way through Asia and Australia, the tour will head to Europe, arriving in the States early next year.) When I tell her that the show has a kind of spooky feeling to it, that it feels more grown-up, she lets out a yelp. "Yes, it was intentional for this show to be more sophisticated and more elegant--a little cleaner. Sometimes I think that there's a fine line between impressionistic and messy. So we tried to make this more French Impressionistic and less like a child's finger painting." She laughs. "I really wanted to break the mold of what modem touring is right now. The most important thing to me was that there be no video screens. What if we just really simplified all of that so that you just have to watch me and the dancers the whole time?
The set itself is what she calls a "fortress, or a kingdom," and when Gaga suddenly appears at the top of it, in a turret, dancing 50 feet above the audience, the proceedings take on an air of dread and danger: Tosca on steroids. (The fact that she suffered a concussion a few weeks later only points out how real that danger is.) "No matter how much you rehearse on that stage, once you add 30,000 screaming people with flashing cameras into the equation, it's pretty intense."
I attended their eighth performance—and Gaga had stayed up the whole night prior rethinking several elements. "I get these cyclical rushes of creativity that are really exciting," she says. "The day you saw the show, I'd actually changed a lot of things. We had to create new outfits; the Haus of Gaga was sewing all day long—just taking something that's already great and making it really great."
There are some truly disturbing and thrilling moments--like when Gaga floats across the stage in a long white dress wearing a helmet that makes her look like a fabulous alien bug; or when Gaga rolls out into the arena as a human motorcycle, her arms and head draped across the handlebars; or when she and her troupe of dancers do a lengthy homage to Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" to the Gaga song "Scheiße,"which opens with the line "I don't speak German, but I can if you like." (Scheiße means "bullshit" in German.) But oddly enough, the set piece in the show that startled and moved me the most was based on the meat dress. When the number first began, I recoiled: Why bring it back? But Gaga took the meat-dress concept, expanded on it, set the whole idea to her Edith Piaf-esque song about immigration, "Americano," and something amazing happened.
Nothing on the stage is made of actual meat, mind you, but it all looks as if it is from afar. And her strapless little bell-skirt meat dress, it must be said, is adorable. When I tell her how cute she looked in it, she nearly jumps out of her seat. "That was precisely the conversation we had when we made it: Let's take the grotesqueness out of it and make it tailored and sweet." But there is much more going on: Gaga entering stage right, hanging from a meat hook next to huge slabs of beef; male dancers dressed as border agents; female dancers in meat bikinis; a giant meat grinder, quilted and with gold accents, as if it were made by Chanel, that Gaga gets fed into at the end.
"We were talking about putting the show together," she tells me, And I said, OK, what if I was someone's grandma and I was going to a concert tonight. How would I know that it was a Gaga show? And we all just sort of looked at each other and said, 'The meat dress. ' We talked a lot about the original intention, which was to create an outfit that is indicative of the fact that underneath all of our different skin colors and religions and beliefs, we are all made of flesh and bone. And then this instant image came to my mind, which was from the late seventies, of the woman being put into a meat grinder on the cover of Hustler magazine, which really terrified me when I was a child. So I tried to spin all that into a space of humor and politics and sexuality onstage...
Trust me: It works. A famous folksinger once toLd me, "Rock 'n' roll is a lot of things, but it's rarely ever funny. It takes itself very seriously." If that is the case, then Lady Gaga is performing one of the great magic tricks of the twenty-first century): She's making rock 'n' roll hilarious. And it's not B-52s funny. It's Marina Abramovic funny. You are laughing while you are being awed. When I tell her this, she says, "What's wonderful is that when the show's over and I meet fourteenyear-olds backstage and I say, 'What was your favorite part?' they go, "The meat dreeeesssss!!!!'" She giggles. "So it serves two purposes: You had a transcendent moment, and my fourteen-year-old fans just really like the meat dress."
After a show one night, I watch as Gaga spontaneously joins the jazz-pop trio performing at the New York Bar at the top of the Park Hyatt. Wearing a black, shiny custom Atelier Versace dress, thigh-high custom Giorgio Armani boots, and fingerless black leather gloves, she perches on a stool between the piano and the bass and growls and scats her way through a rollicking version of the 1950s standard "Orange Colored Sky." In the middle of the song, a tipsy American tourist in the audience says, way too loudly, "I love her now! I never really liked her before now!"
Gaga's musical abilities are fairly well documented at this point, but there are still great swaths of people who can•see past the freaky costumes, dismissing her as a lightweight or a carnival sideshow~somehow not the genuine article.. When I bring up this gentleman's revelation (it was captured on YouTube), Lady Gaga surprises me with her equanimity. "Well, in his defense ..." she laughs. "My records don't always lend themselves to me enchanting you with my vocals stylings or my jazz chops. So you can't be upset about people not knowing about things that you don't make available to them." Gaga's songs sound, for the most part, like party music designed for the dance floor. "I don't really make records for people to listen and go, 'Wow, she's a genius.' I'd really like for you to order another drink, maybe kiss the person who yon came with that evening, or rediscover something about your past that makes you feel more brave."
"Born This Way," the single, was the fastest -selling single in iTunes history, but Born This Way, the album, despite getting enthusiastically mixed reviews, was considered something of a disappointment. When I ask Gaga if she was pleased with its reception, she says, with a somewhat forced blase air, "Sure. I really couldn't ask for anything more. The tour is sold out. We sold eight million records." And then she says, "Everything is great," which makes me think that there must have been some days when everything was not so great.
Some of the letdown probably had to do with the fact that Born This Way happened to come out the same season as Adele's juggernaut, 21, which shot to number one, won every award on planet Earth, and refuses to cede its spot at the top of the charts. The freak-of-nature success of that album has led to all manner of comparison: Adele, not Gaga, is the voice of their generation; acoustic music, soul music, real music-not Gaga's wall of electronic sound-is what people yearn to hear.
Despite the fact that electronic music has, at long last, ascended into the mainstream, it's still not always taken seriously. When I bring this up, Gaga says, "Well, I think we both know that acoustic music isn't better than electronic music. Electronic music requires a tremendous amount of technical expertise- really knowing the mathematics and beauty of music. At the risk of sounding like a snob, if you don't really understand how to make electronic music, it might be much easier for you to write it off as low-brow."
But Lady Gaga gets to have it both ways. Adele appeals to multiple generations, partly because she admires the sound of an earlier era, music that tugs at the heartstrings of people who still buy CDs. Gaga, on the other hand, courts controversy, not easy listeners. She's like a one-woman generation gap, an iconoclast who agitates for social and political change (witness her Born This Way Foundation). At the same time, she is a nimble-enough musician that she can re-orchestrate her songs and sing them live in every style imaginable, as she did last year when she rewrote her song "You and I" for Bill and Hillary at the president's sixty-fifth-birthday celebration at the Hollywood Bowl.
She is also nimble enough, technologically speaking, to pivot from being one of the most "liked" people on Facebook- and the undisputed Queen of Twitter (with more than 27 million followers}-to being the first celebrity to create her very own social network, littlemonsters.com, which debuted in mid-July. (Why should Zuckerberg get all the traffic?) Short of asking fans to perform in her stead, it's the next logical step for an artist who claims she "will continue to become whatever it is they would like for me to be."
"I'm not the beginning anymore." she says. "I don't really see myself anymore as the center. They're the center. I'm the atmosphere around it." She is also careful not to view her fans around the world as one undifferentiated mass. "I try to find ways to get to know the fan bases individually and then bring them together through the music. That's the challenge."
Indeed, her biggest worry while we are in Tokyo is her upcoming performance in Indonesia. She had scheduled her show there to take place in the 52,000-seat Bung Karno Stadium, the biggest venue in Jakarta (which was one of the fastest-selling dates on the tour). "Everyone's telling me we may not be able to go, and that's making me very upset. Because for me, that's precisely why we need to go: because there are extremist groups there that are violent, and that's where the message of Born This Way is most needed. It has nothing to do with the way that I dress or how I sound; it has everything to do with the power of the message and the mobilization of youth." You have them worried, I say. "Yes, as if I'm coming in with my homosexual laser-beam gun and making everybody gay." (The show was ultimately canceled after threats of violence.)
When it comes to criticism and controversy, you seem tougher than most chicks, I say.
"I am tougher than most chicks. I would say that I am tougher than most people. I am rarely truly shaken to my core in an ego-driven way. Of course things can catch me off guard, but for the most part I'm pretty focused on the work, and that sort of saves me from all the noise." She looks down for a moment and fiddles with her bracelets. "It's easy when you become successful to feel that shallow pool of water pulling you closer and closer. So you just have to remind yourself: That's not me, remember? And it only takes a second."
Most people who spend time in Gaga's orbit come away from the experience in a state of stunned amazement. As Terry Richardson puts it, "The girl just knows how things go together, what works. Everybody invited into that energy feels it-just bubbles, it moves." This is exactly what I felt when I followed her for a week in 2010. But I also came away feeling something else: concern. She was manic at times, occasionally verging on unhinged, and she seemed exhausted, to the point where she fell asleep in the middle of one of our talks. How is she going to keep this up? How can an artist reinvent herself so elaborately every day and not get lost?
But now, in Tokyo, Gaga seems not only calmer and more focused but also more mature. Perhaps she's fully embraced the fact that she's in control of an enterprise with a lot of moving parts, including more than 100 people and a multimillion-dollar stage set that travels the world in three 747s. One night backstage I see her get into a heated conversation with her choreographer, Richy Jackson, about moving the band to the top of the castle. Richy disagrees with her. "It's just hard for the band," he says. "But I will dance around them up there," says Gaga. "I am only up there twice." Long pause. "Richy, just trust me." He lets out a big sigh and says, "Ohhhhh-kay. We'll move them." As Jackson walks away, Gaga says, "Love you!"
With the Haus of Gaga, she's surrounded herself with people she loves and admires. "The Haus has become this intensely wonderful group of friends of mine who are just so gifted," she says. "And when you watch your friends become even greater at what they do, you just feel proud. Because, look, I'm not the only thing they're ever going to work on. I'm just sort of the vehicle right now for all of their creativity."
Marla Weinhoff, who worked with Richard Avedon for many years and first met Gaga when she was hired to do the production design for the "Born This Way" video, is now the art director of the Haus of Gaga. "My cynical friends in fashion don't believe me when I tell them that all of the ideas come from her, but it's true. It all comes from her head, her dreams. Avedon was the first photographer I ever worked with, and I felt so inspired creating these images that I knew would last forever. The process was unbelievable. And I feel like I really have that with her and her team." But, she adds, "You can't come with a huge ego. If you can somehow feel her world and feel what she's trying to say and do, then it's amazing."
This, not surprisingly, is exactly what happened with the folks at Coty, the perfume company that partnered with Gaga to develop Fame, her first fragrance; after some resistance, they fell under Gaga's spell. "She only wants to have a very high-end creative collaboration with people she trusts," says Yael Tuil, the vice president of global marketing at Coty, "so we have been working with Nick Knight, who designed the bottle, and Steven Klein on the campaign."
At the very first meeting, Gaga told the Coty executives that she had an idea. She wanted the fragrance in the bottle to be black but, when sprayed, to become clear. "I was pregnant at that time," says Tuil, who speaks in a thick French accent. "I started to sweat on my forehead. I said, 'My God! That's impossible! How can we do that?' "But Gaga insisted: She would not sign a contract unless they could figure it out. So Coty set the R&D scientists to work, and they eventually came out of the lab with a liquid that did exactly that. Voila! Now Coty has a patent pending for this opaque-to-clear technology. "She was really behind the most important innovation in the fragrance industry in the last 20 years," says Tuil. "She is really pushing boundaries."
In Tokyo, I tell Lady Gaga that I was skeptical at first of her having a celebrity fragrance. But after seeing the eggshaped bottle (inspired by the sculptor Constantin Brancusi) with the black "juice" sloshing around inside of it, the outrageous ad campaign, I came around. When I almost apologize to Gaga for doubting her, she says, "No! I think it's good that you doubted me. It's a fragrance! You have to raise an eyebrow. I appreciate that. I raised an eyebrow. I didn't really want to do it at first. But I wanted to create a fragrance that somebody who makes fragrances says, 'Well, how did they do that?' And of course, once it smelled so good everyone said, 'Can't we just make it clear so we don't have to explain to people that it won't get on your clothes?' And I said, no. The fragrance is called Fame; it must be black. It must smell enticing. You must want to lick and touch and feel it, but the look of it must terrify you."
Gaga eventually came to view the entire project, but especially the ad campaign, as a kind of punk-rock experiment: "We thought, Let's just make the most epic fragrance campaign of all time and let's not care at all about whether they can even print it or show it on TV Let's just do everything we ever dreamed of. We basically did this purely for the pleasure of working together. We were just sort of sitting in the comer going, 'I can't believe they are letting us do this!'"
One evening, we pile into a couple of vans and drive in the pouring rain for nearly an hour to Sumida, an industrial neighborhood at the watery edges of Tokyo, to attend a sort of ceremonial opening of the Tokyo Skytree, a broadcast tower with a restaurant and observation deck at the top-the tallest tower in the world. Before leaving the hotel, Gaga is tom about what to wear. "Should I change?" she says to no one in particular, and I can feel her team holding their breath. (Gaga changing outfits, as one can imagine, is akin to launching the space shuttle.) Yes, it is decided. She will change. She slips into her hotel suite and, a very long while later, reappears wearing a plastic star in her hair and the craziest little dress in Japan. It is made out of hundreds of tiny plastic mirrors that have been sewn together into origami-like boxes. "It was just lying in front of my door one morning," she tells me, "with no note, no name. I have no idea where it came from." She has decided to take it for a spin, knowing that it will be photographed by every news outlet in the country, in the hope that the designer will come forward.
As we pull out of the underground garage, we stop to say hello to the couple dozen soaking-wet Japanese kids who are waiting, as always, to catch a glimpse of her. I wonder out loud about the reality of living with so much fame.• "It's definitely much more difficult for me to go take a walk," she says. "I can't really do those sorts of things anymore. Yesterday, I went out in Harajuku and bought some $10 bustiers and had an ice-cream cone. So I got to do normal New York- girl stuff for a moment in Tokyo." Did you go unbothered? "No," she says, "There were a thousand people following me down the street. But I love all those people, so it's OK."
Can she ever enjoy a private moment outside? "I'm a complete free spirit, so, even though you don't see it, I still find time to have sex at night on the beach when no one's around. Or roll into a bar and get fucked up and dance with my top off. It's just that no one ever sees that, because I have great, real friends who never let me do it when I would get caught. Or, I shouldn't say that. I don't worry about people seeing any of those things; it's just that I'm less inclined to do them if there's tons of people around. I like to have private moments, but in public! "Where I can feel a little irresponsible and act like I am nineteen."
This seems like a fine time to inquire about her love life Lady Gaga has finally moved on from her on-again, off-again relationship with Luc Carl. Lately, she has been photographed looking smitten with the hunky Vampire Diaries actor Taylor Kinney. "I'm just having a really good time performing. Making music, flying around the world to see so-and-so ..." She shoots me a sly, knowing smile. "Look, I'm 26, and I want to make records and party and screw around and wear fake Chanel and do what every other 26-year-old girl wants to do. I don't want to settle down and live in a house yet or anything I just want to keep riding this rainbow."
When we finally arrive at the Skytree, there is, as promised, a huge press serum, and seemingly hundreds of Japanese officials all dressed exactly alike, who follow us as we traipse around the upper floors searching for a view in vain; we can see nothing but a thick, gray soup. But fortunately Lady Gaga is here, ready to be photographed. She steps up to a microphone and says a few words about "this beautiful country." When she finishes, we head to another floor, where she is presented with some sort of plaque and a big bag of gifts. She reaches into the bag and pulls out a little plush toy: it is Sorakarachan, the Skytree mascot, a cute little cartoony character whose hair is shaped like a star. "It's you," I say. "She has a star for a head." "I know!" she says, and walks away laughing.
"Just the other day," Lady Gaga tells me later, "someone asked a very good friend of mine what I'm like. And I said, 'Well, what did you say?' And he said, 'I want you to imagine every creative idea you've ever had in your brain. Then I would like you to imagine that those ideas never stop-they come all the time. And then I would like you to imagine that you create every single one of them. That's how I would describe her. It's like there's no little star that doesn't get through her galaxy. She catches every single one and puts it in the sky, and she the most important star that ever existed."
- Editorial by Jonathan Van Meter, photography by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott
October, 2018
Lady Gaga’s house in Malibu is on a relatively nondescript road just off the Pacific Coast Highway, situated in what feels (for Malibu) like a normal suburban neighborhood. When the gates to her compound swing open, you head down a long gravel driveway that threads through the multi-acre property, past the fenced-in ring where she rides her horse, Arabella, past the barns and the stables and the giant barking dogs, Grandpa and Ronnie—and pull up to a house made of fieldstone that looks, at first glance, as if it belongs in the South of France. A cheerful young fellow greets you at your car, explains that he is the head of security, and asks you to sign an NDA. There are at least a dozen other cars parked around, most of them belonging to people who are doing some kind of work here—taking care of the property or the lady in residence in one capacity or another. The whole setup is both grand and yet, somehow, unassuming (for a rock star’s house in Malibu).
When Gaga comes down the stairs and makes her entrance on this hot, do-nothing August afternoon, she is wearing a diaphanous periwinkle robe with ruffled edges that sweeps the floor, nothing underneath but a matching bra and thong—along with nude kitten heels and Liz Taylor–worthy diamond jewelry. Having just returned yesterday from a long, restful vacation on some remote tropical island with her boyfriend, she is uncharacteristically tan, and as she leads me out through the French doors into the garden, I can see nearly every one of her tattoos—and her shapely behind—through the robe. There are roses trembling in the breeze, and a long, sloping, grassy lawn that leads down to a pool and the Pacific Ocean beyond, flickering in the high afternoon sun. “This is my sanctuary,” she says. “My oasis of peace. I call it my ‘gypsy palace.’ ”
She bought this palace about four years ago, when she was going through a rough patch—both physically and mentally—and has been spending more and more time here lately. “I just got rid of my place in New York—it was too hectic every day outside on the street,” she says. As we stand there looking out at the ocean, I ask if she’s happy. “Yes—I’m focusing on the things that I believe in. I’m challenging myself. I’m embarking on new territory—with some nerves and some overjoyment.” (Gaga has a funny habit of making up words that always make perfect sense.) “It’s an interesting time in my life. It’s a transition, for sure. It’s been a decade.”
In April, Gaga noted on her Instagram that it was the tenth anniversary of her first single, “Just Dance.” It was the song of the summer of 2008—the final hours of the golden years, just before the economy imploded and the Great Recession took hold—and almost immediately, she became the biggest pop star in the world, haunting our dreams—and nightmares—with monsters, meat dresses, and some of the stickiest melodies ever written (GAAAA-GA OOOH-LA-LA!). When I ask her what has changed for her over these last ten years, Gaga, who’s 32, says, “A galaxy,” and laughs. “There has been a galaxy of change.” She pauses for a moment. “I would just say that it’s been a nonstop whirlwind. And when I am in an imaginative or creative mode, it sort of grabs me like a sleigh with a thousand horses and pulls me away and I just don’t stop working.” Another pause. “You . . . make friends, you lose friends, you build tighter bonds with people you’ve known for your whole life. But there’s a lot of emotional pain, and you can’t really understand what it all means until ten years has gone by.”
On October 5, Warner Bros. Pictures will release the fourth iteration of the tragi-musical love story A Star Is Born, starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. The first version came out in 1937, starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, followed by Judy Garland and James Mason in 1954 and Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in 1976. Gaga thinks of it less as a remake than as a “traveling legacy.” Directed by Cooper, in his debut, the film is remarkably assured, deeply engaging, and works on several levels: as a romance, a drama, a musical, and something else entirely, almost as if you’re watching something live, or documentary footage of a good old-fashioned rock-’n’-roll concert movie. “I wanted to tell a love story,” says Cooper, “and to me there’s no better way than through music. With music, it’s impossible to hide. Every fiber of your body becomes alive when you sing.” As Sean Penn said, after seeing the film more than once, “It’s the best, most important commercial film I’ve seen in so many years,” and he described the stars as “miracles.” Cooper and Gaga, and the film itself, are likely to be nominated for all manner of awards.
Cooper is a revelation, having utterly transformed himself into a booze-and-pills-besotted rock star: He learned how to play guitar, worked with a vocal coach and a piano teacher for a year and a half, and wrote three of the songs. “All because of Gaga,” he says. “She really gave me the confidence.” His singing is astonishingly good. Gaga, whose only acting experience is in some of her early videos (Google the long-form versions of “Telephone” and “Marry the Night” if you want to see the early promise), various episodes of American Horror Story, and a couple of cameos in Robert Rodriguez films, not only holds her own with Cooper but somehow manages to make you completely forget that she is Lady Gaga—no small feat. But what really makes this film sing, as it were, is the impeccable chemistry between the two stars, particularly their early scenes of meeting cute and falling in love, which are some of the most touchingly real and tender moments between two actors I’ve ever seen.
Gaga and I have moved inside and taken up spots on the boho-chic sofas in the sitting room off her kitchen. She opens a bottle of rosé. There are candles flickering, cut flowers on the table. Gaga first met Cooper at Saturday Night Live about five years ago, but only briefly, and then one day in 2016—having signed on to make A Star Is Born and in the early stages of figuring out who could play Ally to his Jackson Maine—he went to a cancer benefit in Sean Parker’s backyard in L.A. “She had her hair slicked back,” says Cooper, “and she sang ‘La Vie en Rose,’ and I was just . . . levitating. It shot like a diamond through my brain. I loved the way she moved, the sound of her voice.” He called her agent and, the next day, drove to Malibu. “The second that I saw him,” says Gaga, “I was like, Have I known you my whole life? It was an instant connection, instant understanding of one another.” Cooper: “She came down the stairs and we went out to her patio and I saw her eyes, and honestly, it clicked and I went, Wow.” He pretty much offered her the part on the spot. “She said, ‘Are you hungry?’ and I said, ‘I’m starving,’ and we went into her kitchen for spaghetti and meatballs.”
Gaga: “Before I knew it, I was making him lunch and we were talking. And then he said, ‘I want to see if we can sing this song together.’ ” Cooper: “She was kind of laughing at me that I would be suggesting this, but I said, ‘The truth is, it’s only going to work if we can sing together.’ And she said, ‘Well, what song?’ And I said, ‘ “Midnight Special,” ’ this old folk song.” Gaga: “I printed out the sheet music, and he had the lyrics on his phone, and I sat down at the piano and started to play, and then Bradley started to sing and I stopped: ‘Oh, my God, Bradley, you have a tremendous voice.’ ” Cooper: “She said, ‘Has anyone ever heard you sing before?’ and I said no.” Gaga: “He sings from his gut, from the nectar! I knew instantly: This guy could play a rock star. And I don’t think there are a lot of people in Hollywood who can. That was the moment I knew this film could be something truly special.”
Cooper: “And she said, ‘We should film this.’ So I turned on my phone and we did the song. It was crazy. It kind of just worked. And that video is one of the things I showed to Warner Bros. to get the movie green-lit.”
Weirdly enough, the film was originally to be directed by Clint Eastwood—at one point, starring Beyoncé—and Eastwood offered Cooper the part of Jackson. “I was 38 then, and I just knew I couldn’t do it,” says Cooper, now 43. “But then I did American Sniper with Clint and The Elephant Man for a year on Broadway and I thought, I’m old enough now.” Pop stardom seems to befall mostly the very young these days, but this is a story about grown-ups. “I would often say to Lady Gaga, ‘This is a movie about what would have happened if you didn’t make it until you were 31 instead of 21. We talked a lot about where she started on the Lower East Side, and she told me about this drag bar where she used to hang, and I thought, Oh, this is just ripe for the story.”
Indeed, one of the best scenes in the film comes right at the beginning, when Jack, desperate for a drink, stumbles into a gay bar on drag night. Ally is the only woman the queens let perform on their stage, and as she sings “La Vie en Rose,” Jack falls hard. Gaga says that the chemistry between her and Cooper is so good on film because it’s real. But she also thinks that Cooper “nailed” the complicated voodoo that happens when love and fame get intertwined. “They’re both very complex, layered things, with a lot of emotional depth, and he captured that. This is what I think makes the film so successful: that it was so real. And I’ve lived it, so I can testify to that.” (Another thing that gives the film its authenticity: Cooper cast a few drag queens he knew from Philly, as well as Gaga’s actual dancers, choreographer, and hair and makeup artists, who appear in a few scenes.)
Last December, I went to Cooper’s house in Los Angeles to watch some early footage, and as we sat in the screening room he built in his garage, surrounded by guitars and an old piano, his editor cued up scenes. What struck me immediately was how intensely visceral the musical sequences are. Cooper explained that at Gaga’s insistence, they were all shot live. “All the music is as real as you can get it,” he said to me that day. They shot some of the concert scenes at the Stagecoach country-music festival in Indio, California, and more at the Glastonbury Festival in England. “At Stagecoach, four minutes before Willie Nelson went on, we hopped onstage,” says Cooper. “That was real. At Glastonbury, I got onstage in front of 80,000 people. It was nuts. But Lady Gaga is so good that if the world I’d created wasn’t authentic, it would stand out in a second. Everything had to be raised to her level.”
One bit of history that’s gotten lost in the Gaga saga is that while she started playing piano at four and writing songs by eleven, she wanted to be an actress before she wanted to be a singer. When she was twelve, she began taking Method-acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute and later at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. “I loved it so much,” she says, “but I was terrible at auditioning—I would get too nervous and just couldn’t be myself.” So she decided to make a go of it as a musician—and had a record deal within a year. Was she nervous making a movie? “Of course—but I knew I had it in me, in my heart, to give an authentic performance.”
The biggest challenge for Lady Gaga was creating a musical character that was not like . . . Lady Gaga. “I wanted the audience to be immersed in something completely different,” she says. “And it’s almost hard to speak about, because I just sort of became Ally.” For as good as the Garland and Streisand versions are, you do sometimes sort of feel like you’re watching movies about . . . Garland and Streisand. That being said, there may be no more perfect person to take up this franchise than Gaga. “It’s so humbling,” she says. “Judy Garland is by far my favorite actress of all time. I used to watch her in A Star Is Born, and it’s devastating. She’s so real, so right there. Her eyes would get glassy, and you could just see the passion and the emotion and hear the grit in her voice.” Streisand came to the set one day. “It was a magical moment. She really made me feel like she passed the torch.” When I mention Streisand’s voice, she says, “The singing is beyond, but what is even more beyond is how involved she was in everything she did. She was a part of creating that film. That made me feel good, too, that we approached making this film the right way.”
The soundtrack will be released the same day as the movie, and because this is a Lady Gaga production, she has had a big hand in it. There were many writers and producers who worked on different songs, but the brain trust was Gaga and Cooper, working closely with the blues-oriented producer and songwriter Ben Rice and Lukas Nelson, who’s Willie’s son. “She’s a fan of my dad’s, but she’s got a tattoo of David Bowie, and Bowie was my hero as well,” says Nelson. “I tend to gravitate toward rockers who were kind and stood for change and the right to be who you are—to be a freak and be proud of it. And I think a lot of people have turned to Gaga in that realm—as a sort of beacon of hope: I can do whatever I want. She invented herself.”
It was Gaga’s idea to thread bits of dialogue throughout the record, and there are a few songs that are not in the movie—“treats,” as she calls them. She asks if I want to hear some music, and we head into a tiny vestibule off the kitchen, a kind of office with a desk, computer, and two very loud speakers. She plugs in her phone and cues up a jaunty, mid-tempo piano banger called “Look What I Found,” and as it begins to play, Gaga dances and sings along, at full volume, about two feet from my face. Suddenly I feel a bit like James Corden in a new segment: Kitchen Karaoke. I cannot resist, and start dancing too. “Our own little discotheque,” says Gaga.
She cues up another song—a huge, soaring, sad ballad called “Before I Cry,” with a full orchestra. It is the first song for which Gaga composed the string arrangements—and conducted the orchestra in the studio—and it was inspired by a harrowing scene in the film when Jack has fallen off the wagon and picks a fight with Ally while she’s taking a bath. On the soundtrack, it begins with this bit of dialogue:
Ally: “Why don’t you have another drink and we can just get fucking drunk until we just fucking disappear? Hey! Do you got those pills in your pocket?”
Jack: “You’re just fuckin’ ugly, that’s all.”
Ally: “I’m what?”
Jack: “You’re just fuckin’ ugly.”
As the song plays, we stand facing each other in the little cubicle, and before it’s halfway through, we both have tears in our eyes. She hugs me and, as we head into the kitchen for more wine, says, almost to herself, “I love that we’re dancing and crying. Like, real Italian style.” That’s my natural state, I say: dancing and crying. “Me, too,” she says.
One of the many things about Lady Gaga that go underappreciated is that she doesn’t tell us everything. For example, we know very little about her new boyfriend, Christian Carino—other than that he’s a 48-year-old CAA agent—because she doesn’t talk about him. She doesn’t want to talk at all about the new music she’s working on for a future album, or the scripts that are suddenly rolling in. She understands more than most that a little bit of mystery and magic go a long way in this world of too much. She has sort of inverse boundaries: She won’t tell you, for example, where she just went on vacation, but she’s totally open about having been sexually assaulted when she was a teenager.
Her 2015 song “ Til it Happens to You,” which she wrote with Diane Warren for the sexual-assault documentary The Hunting Ground, was nominated for an Academy Award. When she performed it at the Oscars in 2016 on a stage full of 50 other assault victims, it eerily presaged the #MeToo movement that unfolded a year later, much to Gaga’s surprise. “I feel like I’ve been an advocate but also a shocked audience member, watching #MeToo happen,” she says. “I’m still in disbelief. And I’ve never come forward and said who molested me, but I think every person has their own relationship with that kind of trauma.”
She was still Stefani Germanotta when she was raped at nineteen by a music producer. She told no one. “It took years,” she says. “No one else knew. It was almost like I tried to erase it from my brain. And when it finally came out, it was like a big, ugly monster. And you have to face the monster to heal.” In late 2016, Gaga revealed in a Today interview that she suffers from PTSD because of the assault. “For me, with my mental-health issues, half of the battle in the beginning was, I felt like I was lying to the world because I was feeling so much pain but nobody knew. So that’s why I came out and said that I have PTSD, because I don’t want to hide—any more than I already have to.” When I ask her to describe how she experiences the symptoms, she says, “I feel stunned. Or stunted. You know that feeling when you’re on a roller coaster and you’re just about to go down the really steep slope? That fear and the drop in your stomach? My diaphragm seizes up. Then I have a hard time breathing, and my whole body goes into a spasm. And I begin to cry. That’s what it feels like for trauma victims every day, and it’s... miserable. I always say that trauma has a brain. And it works its way into everything that you do.”
In September 2017, Gaga announced on Twitter that she suffers from extreme nerve pain caused by fibromyalgia, a complex and still-misunderstood syndrome she believes was brought on by the sexual assault and that then became worse over time, exacerbated by the rigors of touring and the weight of her fame. (Earlier this year, she had to cut her European tour short by ten shows because of it.) In the Netflix documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two, which aired that same month, Gaga allowed cameras to document her suffering to shed light on the syndrome. “I get so irritated with people who don’t believe fibromyalgia is real. For me, and I think for many others, it’s really a cyclone of anxiety, depression, PTSD, trauma, and panic disorder, all of which sends the nervous system into overdrive, and then you have nerve pain as a result. People need to be more compassionate. Chronic pain is no joke. And it’s every day waking up not knowing how you’re going to feel.”
Today, Lady Gaga is the picture of health: bright-eyed, sun-kissed, fit as a fiddle. “It’s getting better every day,” she says, “because now I have fantastic doctors who take care of me and are getting me show-ready.” Speaking of shows, she recently signed a $100 million contract with MGM Resorts International to do a Las Vegas residency at a 5,300-seat theater. It will be called Lady Gaga Enigma, and beginning on December 28 she will perform 74 shows spread out over two years—a reasonable pace that will allow her to take better care of herself and make more movies. “I’ve always hated the stigma around Las Vegas—that it’s where you go when you’re on the last leg of your career,” she says. “Being a Las Vegas girl is an absolute dream for me. It’s really what I’ve always wanted to do.”
As she sits before me on our respective couches—in her periwinkle chiffon, dripping in diamonds—Gaga and Vegas make perfect sense. She has always been a master at swirling together the nostalgic with the startlingly modern and coming up with something that feels entirely new. Creating the shows for Lady Gaga Enigma, of course, has brought back together the Haus of Gaga—her team of stylists and monster-conjurers, including Nicola Formichetti. “We’re plowing away, making something brand-new, but still with the iconography that we’ve already created—and making sure fans leave with the feeling that they went home for a bit with their community.”
Speaking of Gaga iconography! I have somehow failed to notice that for the past couple of hours I’ve been sitting next to a half-mannequin with a heavy metal harness wrapped around it that resembles a sort of human/reptilian rib cage and spinal column. It was made by Shaun Leane, a jewelry designer who worked regularly with Alexander McQueen. Gaga picks up another piece, a kind of metal orbiting fascinator, also designed by Leane, that was part of the “Savage Beauty” exhibition at the Met, and gently sets it on her head. “I bought it at an auction,” she says, batting her eyelashes. And now she wants to show me something else, and goes in search of a key. She finds it in the kitchen, and then along the way to wherever we’re going I get a quick tour. In her ballroom-size living room there is a grand piano and a giant modern pink blob sofa, and an even bigger pink rug. “I like pink,” she says. “It’s a relaxing color.” There’s her Golden Globe (for American Horror Story, in 2016) and a framed photograph of Patti Smith, along with pictures of Elton John and David Furnish’s boys, Zachary and Elijah, Gaga’s godchildren. Resting on the mantel is a framed letter from David Bowie (“Dear Lady, Unfortunately I will not be in NYC for a few months but many thanks for the cake”). On one wall is an enormous George Condo painting of a woman in a ball gown, her face obscured by smears and smudges. “Reminds me of myself,” she says with a wink. “Beautiful but a little bit messy.”
Finally we arrive at the locked door. She turns the key and opens it to reveal . . . a room filled with fashion! Two rooms! “This is mostly Saint Laurent from Hedi Slimane’s work there,” she says. “I’m excited to see what he’ll be doing at Céline. Here’s a McQueen cape that was custom-made for me for the ‘Alejandro’ video. And then in here” —we move into yet another chamber, deeper into her fashion closet, racks upon racks of leather and feathers and sequins and a lot of black— “this is all Gianni Versace from the nineties. I wear some of it, but I mostly collect it to keep and preserve to give to a museum one day. Because I just love these designers.” Pause. “There’s my Joanne hat!” That is the pink fedora she wore in nearly every video and every performance from her Joanne album and tour, when she began presenting herself as... herself, mostly.
When did all of the crazy-brilliant obfuscating costumes fall away? “For me, fashion and art and music have always been a form of armor. I just kept creating more and more fantasies to escape into, new skins to shed. And every time I shed a skin, it was like taking a shower when you’re dirty: getting rid of, washing off, shedding all of the bad, and becoming something new.” I wonder aloud where all that began. “I just remember feeling so irritated at the thought that I had to conform to being ‘normal,’ or less of whatever I was already born as. And so I took such radical enjoyment in expressing who I am in the most grandiose of ways.” She laughs. “It was sort of like a very polite ‘Fuck off.’ It was never about looking perfect—it was always about just being myself. And I think that’s what it’s always been about for my fans, too. It was a form of protection, and a secret—like a wink from afar. I’m a monster, and you’re a monster too.”
She locks the door, and as we head back out to the living room to say goodbye, she picks up a glass vase filled with fresh-cut roses from her garden and hands it to me: “Just a little something,” she says. For all of Lady Gaga’s histrionics and grandiosity and obfuscation and mucking around with monsters—and despite the fact that she claims to have “concrete in her veins”—most people seem to get that she’s all heart. “I am not a brand,” she says. “I have my unique existence, just as everyone else does, and at the end of the day, it’s our humanity that connects us—our bodies and our biology. That’s what breeds compassion and empathy, and those are the things that I care the most about. Kindness!” She lets out a mordant chuckle. “It can drive you mad. Someone very important in my life says to me often, ‘You cannot stare at the carnage all day.’ And I think... you have to stare at the carnage to an extent because if not, you’re being ignorant and complacent—to not view injustice and want to be a part of advocating for others. But...” She pauses for a long time. “Once we just look each other in the eyes, if we can keep that contact, that contract, I think the world will be a better place.”
Suddenly we both notice the sound of music wafting in from somewhere, as if someone opened a little girl’s jewelry box. It’s a Mister Softee truck.
“It’s down by the beach,” she says, “but can you believe that? The sound travels all the way up here.”
The sound is a little creepy, I say.
“Or,” she says, “it just sounds like kids having ice cream at the beach.” We both laugh. It reminds me of something we talked about earlier: that while Gaga’s music is often funny —with a wink or a bit of camp— she herself is a serious person. This has been a very serious conversation, I say. “Yes, it has,” she says. “Isn’t that funny?”.
- Editorial by Jonathan Van Meter, photography by Inez and Vinoodh
73 Questions With Lady Gaga
Vogue - 73 Questions
The video 73 Questions With Lady Gaga was posted on Vogue's YouTube channel on September 13, 2018. On the eve of the release of her new film, "A Star Is Born," Lady Gaga invited Vogue to her Los Angeles home and answered 73 intriguing questions. While sitting outside, amongst perfectly placed potted plants and flowering ivy, Lady Gaga talked about her songwriting process, fashion, working with actor-turned-director Bradley Cooper, and her upcoming Vegas residency.
- 73 Questions With Lady Gaga Transcription
Interviewer: And here we are. Lady Gaga, how are you today?
Lady Gaga: I'm great, how are you?
Interviewer: I'm very excited to be here. And how do you prefer I call you? Lady..? Lady Gaga..?
Lady Gaga: Call me Lady.
Interviewer: Okay Lady. What's something unreal that's happened this month?
Lady Gaga: The trailer for A Star Is Born was released.
Interviewer: Okay, and what's something you're proud to say is now behind you?
Lady Gaga: You know, all the negative stuff that happens in your 20s.
Interviewer: It's a colorful patio. How do you start your day?
Lady Gaga: I start my day with a nice workout and then I take a shower or a long hot bath.
Interviewer: Lady, how many times have you been on the cover of Vogue? Two times, three times?
Lady Gaga: I have no idea. You should ask Vogue that question.
Interviewer: (laughing) What have you read in the press about yourself that made you laugh?
Lady Gaga: That I'm from Yonkers and not Manhattan?
Interviewer: What's the strangest rumor you've ever heard about yourself?
Lady Gaga: That I have a penis.
Interviewer: And what's the one thing you've read that is a hundred percent correct.
Lady Gaga: It is a hundred percent correct that I love authentic people.
Interviewer: Is it true you watch horror movies to relax?
Lady Gaga: True.
Interviewer: Where does inspration often strike for you?
Lady Gaga: Well, I find inspiration in all sorts of places, and the minute that I see it I grab it and I run for the piano or I run for my typewriter.
Interviewer: Is it difficult to write music at this moment?
Lady Gaga: No it's not, it's actually been fantastic writing music.
Interviewer: Do you have to be in love to write a good love song?
Lady Gaga: I would say that it is good to be in love to write a love song or have.. to have been in love at one point, but it's also interesting, there's a lot of music in history that was written by people that have never been in love.
Interviewer: Do the same rules apply for sad songs?
Lady Gaga: No, I think, I think that there's no rules when it comes to making music.
Interviewer: What's your most nostalgic memory from New York City?
Lady Gaga: My most nostalgic memory? Going to bars with my friends.
Interviewer: All right, can you describe New York City in three adjectives?
Lady Gaga: Gritty, fun, and bright.
Interviewer: What was the best year in that city?
Lady Gaga: The best year? Mmhm. For me? 2007 when I was 21.
Interviewer: What was the best night you've ever had there?
Lady Gaga: I couldn't name just one. I had too many great nights.
Interviewer: What's the best memory you have about Elton John?
Lady Gaga: My best memories with Elton are when I'm hanging out with him and my godchildren and David, his husband.
Interviewer: Is it true you wear a hat every day?
Lady Gaga: I do not wear a hat every single day. I did during the album cycle of Joanne.
Interviewer: What is the best advice you ever received?
Lady Gaga: From Tony Bennett through Duke Ellington, number one, never give up, number two, never, never... not listen to number one.
Interviewer: Very wise words. What would you like to be remembered for?
Lady Gaga: I would like to be remembered for the message behind Born This Way. I would like to be remembered for believing that people are equal. I would like to be remembered for being courageous and different.
Interviewer: Was there ever a moment where you really felt like you made it?
Lady Gaga: When I heard Just Dance on the radio for the first time in Canada.
Interviewer: Do you feel like there's pressure for you to constantly be on?
Lady Gaga: I don't know, I don't really know what "being on" means.
Interviewer: Lady, can you show me a hidden talent?
Lady Gaga: No.
Interviewer: What's your biggest pet peeve?
Lady Gaga: When people ask me what my hidden talents are. I'll show you when I'm ready.
Interviewer: Okay, fair enough. And where are my manners? Here I am standing here not giving you this gift.
Lady Gaga: Thank you, that's so kind of you.
Interviewer: You're a Bowie fan, right?
Lady Gaga: Yeah, I love David Bowie.
Interviewer: Great! I'm just gonna go back over here now.
Lady Gaga: Thank you so much, that's so nice.
Interviewer: You're welcome. Now what's a place in the world that always makes you feel safe?
Lady Gaga: The Lower Eastside in Manhattan.
Interviewer: What's your greatest inspiration?
Lady Gaga: (sighing) People.
Interviewer: Is there something you would still like to do?
Lady Gaga: There's so much I would still like to do. I just wanna keep on dreaming.
Interviewer: What set the Super Bowl apart for you as a performance?
Lady Gaga: It was a milestone performance for me. I felt it really marked the decade of the first ten years of my career. And it felt like the fans performed the Super Bowl, not me. It was really for them.
Interviewer: Now beyond the Super Bowl, what's a performance or a dream gig that you'd love to do?
Lady Gaga: I'm dreaming up playing in Vegas and I haven't done that yet, but I will be this coming winter.
Interviewer: What other duet would you love to do one day besides Tony?
Lady Gaga: More Tony, more Elton, and Stevie Wonder.
Interviewer: Is it true, you want Michael Jackson's Thriller jacket?
Lady Gaga: I do own one Thriller jacket.
Interviewer: How do you spend your downtime when you're on the road?
Lady Gaga: I like hanging out with my girlfriends.
Interviewer: What's your favorite song to cover?
Lady Gaga: Ahh, I love to cover so many different songs. Many from the Great American Songbook and also classics from now, so right now, I just recently covered Your Song by Elton John, and I loved that.
Interviewer: What's a song that you would love to cover?
Lady Gaga: I have sang it live, but I have never recorded What a Difference a Day Makes. It's a great song.
Interviewer: Okay, you're at karaoke, what are you gonna pick?
Lady Gaga: Andrea Bocelli and Céline Dion "The Prayer".
Interviewer: Do you prefer a crowd of 300 people or 30,000?
Lady Gaga: Both.
Interviewer: What would you say is the number one look you've had in your career?
Lady Gaga: The number one look in my career I would say at the MTV Music Awards when I wore Alexander McQueen from his very last collection before he died.
Interviewer: How much does a persona actually affect the musicality?
Lady Gaga: I don't really know what people mean by "persona" when they bring that up with me. I just change as I make art, so the music affects my personality and vice versa.
Interviewer: What is the first thing that you're drawn to in a look?
Lady Gaga: I don't know, I have a very immediate emotional reaction to fashion.
Interviewer: What excites you the most about fashion?
Lady Gaga: I like that fashion can both be a form of expression and a form of hiding.
Interviewer: How do you describe your personal style?
Lady Gaga: My personal style? Is Gaga!
Interviewer: Who is the most fashionable fictional character?
Lady Gaga: Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Interviewer: What's your go-to look right at this moment?
Lady Gaga: Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Interviewer: Laughs Can you reveal for me one of your beauty secrets?
Lady Gaga: Soon.
Interviewer: Strong lip or strong eye?
Lady Gaga: Both, strong lip and strong eye!
Interviewer: How do you usually unwind?
Lady Gaga: I unwind listening to jazz.
Interviewer: And what is Bradley Cooper like in person?
Lady Gaga: Bradley Cooper is an incredible actor, incredible director, and absolutely incredible friend all the way around. I'm so excited for people to see his talent.
Interviewer: What do you want your fans to take away from A Star Is Born?
Lady Gaga: I want them to take away the beautiful love story, the undertones of family dynamic with alcoholism and codependency, and also that the movie is a very, very strong expression of what it means to become a star, and that she, myself, Ally, does not really become one until the last frame of the movie.
Interviewer: Lady, do you consider yourself a feminist?
Lady Gaga: Yes.
Interviewer: What does feminism mean to you?
Lady Gaga: I think feminism is the fight for women's rights, for equality, and also to protect women as much as possible within rape culture.
Interviewer: What message do you wanna send to your young female fans?
Lady Gaga: To my young female fans I would say, your body belongs to you, your mind belongs to you, your emotions belong to you, and just always be true to yourself and exercise what you want to be all the time and if you don't feel comfortable doing something then don't do it. Stay true to who you are.
Interviewer: Do you think the way society views women is changing?
Lady Gaga: I think it is changing. I think that society is having a more protected view of women in some ways. But I think on the political side we still have a long way to go.
Interviewer: Is it true you could write a song in 10 minutes?
Lady Gaga: True.
Interviewer: Well it's also true in that we're fast approaching the end of this interview. So how about we finish this off with some rapid-fire answers? What do you think?
Lady Gaga: That sounds great.
Interviewer: So, where do you--
Lady Gaga: I have a gift for you.
Interviewer: Oh, Lady, you didn't have to. You bought me roses?
Lady Gaga: They're from my garden.
Interviewer: That's very nice of you, thank you.
Lady Gaga: You're very welcome.
Interviewer: Okay, where do you wanna be in nine years?
Lady Gaga: In nine years I'd like to be right here.
Interviewer: What real person in history would you love to portray on film?
Lady Gaga: Cleopatra.
Interviewer: What show are you hooked on right now?
Lady Gaga: This one.
Interviewer: I appreciate that. Favorite book?
Lady Gaga: Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.
Interviewer: Favorite movie musical?
Lady Gaga: Guys and Dolls.
Interviewer: What bar should everyone go to in New York City?
Lady Gaga: Welcome to the Johnsons.
Interviewer: Favorite place to view art?
Lady Gaga: Everywhere.
Interviewer: What's the best concert you've been to?
Lady Gaga: Radiohead.
Interviewer: Are both your parents really Italian?
Lady Gaga: Yes.
Interviewer: Favorite film you've seen this month?
Lady Gaga: A Star Is Born.
Interviewer: Favorite film growing up?
Lady Gaga: The Wizard of Oz.
Interviewer: What's a favorite thing you love to do with all your friends?
Lady Gaga: Go to bars with boys.
Interviewer: Was there ever a time you felt nervous performing?
Lady Gaga: Every time right before.
Interviewer: What are three things you cannot live without?
Lady Gaga: Family, friends, and freedom.
Interviewer: What music does a music icon play at a dinner party?
Lady Gaga: I play jazz.
Interviewer: And the last question I have for you, Lady, have you ever performed secretly on a street corner?
Lady Gaga: Of course.
Interviewer:And that concludes our interview. Thank you so much.
Lady Gaga: Thank you, bye.
Screencaps
- Credits
- Starring: Lady Gaga
- Created By: Joe Sabia
- Styled By: Taylor Angino
October, 2024
Lady Gaga on Joker: Folie à Deux, Getting Engaged, and the Joy of Making Pop Music Again
The first four or five or six times I encountered Lady Gaga, in London or Paris or New York, backstage in Vegas or Madison Square Garden or the O2 arena, at the top of the Skytree in Tokyo or from inside a giant replica of her fragrance bottle at a party at the Guggenheim, or even when, six years ago, we hung out in her kitchen in Malibu and danced and cried while listening to music—“Like, real Italian style,” she said—every single one of those times, in all of those places, she was both there and not there. She was viscerally present and accounted for but also somehow absent. This is not a complaint.
Costumes have a way of upstaging people. You can get so hung up on all the finery and camouflage that you fail to see the person wearing it. A modern-day Marie Antoinette gown with a four-foot train, to take one example, doesn’t just change the way a person moves; it changes the way she behaves. “I don’t like the idea of you drinking wine out of a plastic cup,” Lady Gaga said to me one time in one such getup—a baroness proffering stemware as she minced toward me. The first time I laid eyes on her in December 2010, she was barefoot, covered in fake blood, mascara running down her face, wearing a robe made of voluminous red feathers—like a cross between Alice Cooper and Big Bird, I wrote. She was dressed like a lunatic and—you guessed it—behaving like one. On another occasion—in another astounding frock, hair in a Bride-of-Frankenstein updo—she had on shoes that made her feet look like they were screwed on backward and brought her up to nearly my height. To be clear: Gaga is tiny. But when I was still getting to know her she was acting like a woman who is six feet tall. To wit: She languidly draped her hand in mine so that I could examine her elaborately bejeweled dragon ring. “I’m going through an Elizabeth Taylor moment,” she said. “Don’t judge me.”
There are pictures from these adventures. One in particular, from Tokyo, speaks volumes. She is wearing the girliest little dress imaginable, though one made out of mirrored plastic cubes, that a fan left in front of her hotel room door. Was it the dress that made her behave like we were at prom? What you cannot see in the photos are the hundreds of Japanese photographers and cameramen grunting and jockeying for position, Gaga at the center of what felt like a circular firing squad. Once, in Paris, we went out for a very late lunch to which she wore a faded lavender ball gown that swept the floor and exposed her breasts. It had the effect of making it seem like she might, at any moment, collapse. Or maybe the dress demanded she inhabit a kind of helplessness—the Victorian woman in peril, the fainting damsel. There are paparazzi pictures of us coming and going from the restaurant. Her bodyguard, a very handsome bald man, is holding on to her arm (she’s so weak!), and I look like her bodyguard’s lesser twin, perhaps a doctor carrying smelling salts, escorting a madwoman to the sanatorium. A description Gaga would have no doubt loved at the time!
I don’t think I’ve ever spent more hours with someone over so many years and in so many different venues without ever getting a complete picture of who they really are. I was too swept up in the thrill of it all, the presentation of various personae, the interview as performance art. We talked for hours, and I never got the sense that she wasn’t being real with me. But I almost always flew home worried. There were a few too many unsavory people in the outer rings of the inner circle, there was too much chaos swirling around her. And then: the drinking and the smoking. It just made me a little nervous.
So when one day in July she walks into Shangri-La, the Malibu recording studio owned by Rick Rubin, looking like a woman who just pulled a sweater over her sweaty tights after a spin class, I am a little taken aback. The only trace of prior Lady Gaga iterations, at least today, are her eyebrows—bleached white, which lend her face the permanent cheerful surprise of a humanoid. Shangri-La, just a few minutes from her house, is actually a midcentury dwelling that somehow became a place where rock-and-roll superstars camped out to make music. (Bob Dylan’s tour bus from the ’70s is still parked in the backyard.) Gaga recorded her country-tinged 2016 album, Joanne, here, as well as some of the music from the soundtrack to her first major film, 2018’s A Star Is Born. In fact, the place has that energy, a kind of stripped-down, Pacific Coast Highway soft rock vibe but tightened up and modernized with white walls and painted floors. Gaga has spent the better part of 2024 here, recording both a surprise project and a new pop record she has taken to calling LG7, which comes out in February. (She will release its first single in October.) As we step past the baby grand, standing alone in its own glassed-in room, and out onto the lawn, where you can smell the briny Pacific just on the other side of the hedge, she says, “I’ve developed a relationship with this place—almost like a person.”
This is a classic Gaga trope, perceiving an object as human. Which reminds me of something: I had recently learned the word hyperobject, from a book by the philosopher and English professor Timothy Morton, which, to be grossly reductive, refers to things like global warming or Mexico: too complicated and too massively distributed to wrap your head around all at once. I explain this to her and add that I have begun to think of certain people as hyperobjects. Like you, I say. “Thank you,” she says, like a 10-year-old who has just received a gold star. I present that as a compliment, I say. “I receive that as a compliment,” she says.
We eventually find ourselves in a windowless room in front of a mixing board. As has often been the case, she wants to play me some new music. It is, after all, her primary way of communicating who she is—not just to her fans but also to herself. “There’s a lot of pain associated with this adventure,” she says, “and when I start to explore that pain it can bring out another side to my artistry. When I’m here at this studio, I’m relaxed and I am able to face my demons and what’s remarkable is…that’s the music. I’m able to hear it back.”
But I also think that playing music during interviews allows her to wind down the clock a bit. This is partly to do with the fact that she is not entirely comfortable doing interviews. She treats them with a kind of studied formality: make an entrance; have a bit of a walk around; let’s tend to these questions of yours and be done with it. When the interview is over, you know. Her body language changes, her voice goes into the upper register of ladylike politesse. Did you get what you needed?
She is given to saying things like, “I’m really excited for you—and my fans—to get to know me more for the texture of my heart.” This might sound mawkish or grandiose, but I know exactly what she means. And it comes up again and again—not just the idea that there are missing pieces of the Lady Gaga puzzle, but that she feels like we don’t actually know something fundamental about her because she has, by design, obscured herself behind masks. And one of the reasons why this conversation feels particularly relevant today is because her new film, Joker: Folie à Deux, is, at its core, a story about a fan, played by Lady Gaga. Her character, Lee, an enigma herself, seems only interested in Joaquin Phoenix’s character’s persona, Joker. Not so much the actual person behind the mask, the failed clown and stand-up comedian Arthur Fleck.
At one point, we get into a conversation about her own recent fanaticism. She rattles off a list: Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish. “I mean, I really love them. I go on the internet and, like, cry. And I love Taylor Swift too. And Kesha. I watch it all, and I’m like: Yup. Go! Just Go.” Here, her voice cracks and her eyes well up with tears. “I’m not only cheering them on, I want them to know that my heart is in it with them. And I want them all to feel really happy.” I am strangely moved. “Sorry!” she shouts through a laugh as I hand her a tissue. I get it, I say. She stares at me for a second, blinks a couple of times, and says, “You and I getting together is really important.”
She pulls her legs up under herself and I notice that there is a sizable hole in the crotch of her gray leggings. “Being vulnerable is something that has changed, right?” she says. “Well, on the way over here I rushed home to change out of some of my gym clothes.” It is exactly one week before her performance at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Paris and she has just come from rehearsal. “But I was on the phone with the guy who’s mixing my new project and I was giving him notes and then I noticed that there’s a hole in my pants, but I ran over here anyway because I didn’t want to be late. Back in the day, I would have felt a ton of pressure to be in full glam for you and be prepared to…perform.”
It’s as if she has been steadied; fixed in place; trued, in the carpentry sense—level. You seem different, I say. “I hope that’s good,” she says, cocking a bleached eyebrow. So, what’s changed? “The missing piece in my life was having real love,” she says. Did I mention the extra-sparkly diamond on her left hand? You can’t unsee it. It’s Wilma Flintstone–size, a cartoon diamond, but it suits her. She and Michael Polansky, her companion of nearly five years, got engaged in April after a day of rock climbing.
They met in 2019 through Gaga’s mother, Cynthia Germanotta, who runs the Born This Way Foundation, a nonprofit focused primarily on supporting young people’s mental health that Gaga and her mother set up in 2012. Cynthia met Polansky through philanthropic overlap; Polansky, who went to Harvard in the Zuckerberg era, is a longtime associate of Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster and founding president of Facebook. “My mom met him and she said to me, ‘I think I just met your husband,’ and I said, ‘I’m not ready to meet my husband!’ I could never have imagined that my mom…found the most perfect person for me?” Flash forward to December 2019: Parker’s 40th birthday party at his house in Los Angeles where Stevie Nicks performed. “I got invited and I said, ‘I wonder if Michael is going to be there,’ and my mom said yes, and so I went to the party and I kept asking for him and he finally came over to me and we talked for three hours. We had the most amazing conversation.” Polansky tells me that he didn’t make it three steps into the party before someone told him that Lady Gaga was looking for him. “I didn’t know much about her and honestly wasn’t sure what to expect,” he says. “I was struck immediately by her warmth and openness—she was so genuinely curious about what my life was like growing up in Minnesota.”
They talked on the phone for weeks, “and then we went on our first date,” says Gaga, “and just fell in love. And then COVID hit.” Polansky had been living in San Francisco, but during the pandemic they shacked up together at her Malibu house for well over a year. I remember seeing photos of the two of them in those eerie days in early 2020: Gaga and her scruffy new boyfriend in their soft pants, picking up a pizza and a bottle of wine—relatable content! “It was really kind of special,” she says. “I’d been so focused on my career since I was a teenager. And the gift of that time was that I got to completely focus on my relationship. I met this totally supportive, loving human being who wanted to get to know me—outside of Lady Gaga.”
“We had this amazing chapter of a weird kind of normalcy,” says Polansky, “that’s essential for any relationship to develop in a real way—taking walks, making coffee, hanging out with the dogs, reading books together….” He adds, “The pandemic was easier on her than you might think. She’s used to being isolated because of her fame and was able to take so much of it in stride. I think she loved the chance to slow down. She’s been operating at an unfathomable level of intensity for years and it’s no secret it had caught up to her.”
It is always awkward to talk about the upside of a pandemic. “It was very painful to see how deeply it affected the world,” she says. “Not only how sick people got, so many people died, but also so many people were alone. I feel very grateful that I wasn’t alone. I had never met anyone like Michael. He’s so smart and so kind. And his life and my life are very different. He’s a very private guy and he’s not with me for any other reason than that we are right for each other. But I think what I want my fans to know is that I’m just, like, so happy. I’m healthy. I feel like the last time they heard from me—in this way—was Chromatica, and that album was about an absolutely horrible time for me with my mental health. I was in a really dark place. I struggled for, like, many years before that. But everything started to change. Because I had a real friend who saw the ways in which I was unhappy and why. And he wasn’t afraid to truly hold my hand. And get to know me. On a very deep level.”
“She’s someone who is happiest when she’s creating. It’s one of the qualities I love most about her,” Polansky says. “But I see her enjoying it so much more than she did when I met her back in 2019.”
When Gaga talks about how they organize their lives, how they make decisions as a couple, their shared interests (“music, science, and art”), she uses the word family again and again. “Being on the same page is essential to keeping a family all together,” she says. It is no secret that she wants children. She’s said as much in interviews before—in 2013 (“at least three”) and then again, in 2020, when she was dating Polansky.
“My mom met Michael and she said to me, ‘I think I just met your husband,’ and I said, ‘I’m not ready to meet my husband!’ ”
This is a far cry from how things looked 15 years ago. That December night in 2010, when Gaga was covered in fake blood and red feathers, she was bouncing off the walls, spilling drinks, and singing show tunes with a bunch of club kids backstage at the O2 arena. At one point, she stumbled up to me with her on-again-off-again boyfriend Lüc Carl. He was a manager of a Lower East Side bar, the “cool Nebraska guy” in her song “Yoü and I,” and the inspiration for many of the tracks on her first album, The Fame. “This is Lüc,” she said proudly. “He’s my boyfriend.” A smirk crossed his face. “Okay, Bette Midler,” he said. Sure, it was funny; but it was also cruel.
Lady Gaga has been engaged twice before: to actor Taylor Kinney in 2015, and to talent agent Christian Carino in 2018. She clearly has been looking for—and failing to find—the right guy. When I remind her of this she says, “I kind of thought I was going to have to do this all by myself—forever. And that was really scary. Because it’s a big life. And I don’t think anyone really knows what it feels like unless you’re in it.” Her voice drops into a softer tone. “And I don’t have to do this alone anymore.”
There is a scene in Joker: Folie à Deux in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character, Arthur Fleck—or perhaps Joker, it’s anybody’s guess—is doing a televised interview from prison, the goal of which is to improve public opinion ahead of his trial for murder. He insists that he has changed since the night when he blew a talk show host’s brains out on live television. What’s changed? asks the interviewer. “Well, I’ll tell you what’s changed,” says Arthur/Joker. “I’m not alone anymore.”
This is just one of the many uncanny echoes of not just my interview with Lady Gaga but of the absolutely bonkers nature of life these days. I saw the film less than 48 hours after watching an unhappy loner try to assassinate Donald Trump on live television. Failed clown attempts to murder talk show host could have almost been the headline on that bit of breaking news. It’s so close! All of which is to say that this very clever, wildly entertaining Joker sequel, anchored by touching performances, is perfectly calibrated for our times—which are so comically dark some days that no one would be even a little surprised if we all started to behave like lunatics loosed from the asylum. That is its vibe: a world gone mad. Let’s put on a show! The movie is essentially a courtroom drama, but then the characters also sing songs, mostly standards.
Gaga insists that it is not a musical. She recently learned the term meta-modern to describe certain films in which everything comes at you all at once. There is no differentiating thrillers from comedies from musicals; genres are melting into one another. Meta-modernism is a romantic impulse, a sincere reaction to darkness; or as the writer James MacDowell puts it, “ironic detachment with sincere engagement.” Bingo. That is what Folie à Deux gets at. Which also happens to be a perfectly fine description of Lady Gaga’s entire project.
There are other ways Lady Gaga fits nicely into the comic-tragic world that director Todd Phillips, screenwriter Scott Silver, and Joaquin Phoenix built for the 2019 blockbuster Joker, which grossed over $1 billion, the first R-rated movie to reach that benchmark. Both Joker films are loosely based on DC Comics characters, so we are in “Gotham City” in the early 1980s. But it can sometimes feel like we are also in the 1940s, particularly the scenes in so-called Arkham State Hospital, where the prison guards talk like Jimmy Cagney. You also catch whiffs of the modern world run amok, like in mid-’90s Los Angeles or early-2000s Manhattan when a mushroom cloud of debris from an explosion billows through downtown Gotham. And that is also very Gaga, a performer who can decade-switch like no other, paying homage to Julie Andrews on the Oscars telecast, touring with Tony Bennett, and then breathing new life into heavy metal, punk, and disco in any number of her original songs. Like her character in Joker, she has a timeless, unplaceable quality. And the musical moments in the film are perfectly suited to her: The standards are of the Sinatra/Garland variety, with a Burt Bacharach tune here, a Stevie Wonder song there. Who else could have pulled all of that off while also breaking your heart in tight close-up?
Todd Phillips was a producer on A Star Is Born, which is how he met Gaga. “She’s sort of touched, in a way,” he says. “She can be really hard on herself as a performer. She takes it seriously. But she’s magic, which sounds so simple, but that is actually the only way to describe her abilities.” When there was a script, Phillips sent it to Gaga’s agent, and before long Phillips was at Lady Gaga’s house in Malibu overlooking the Pacific drinking wine. A few weeks later, he returned with Joaquin Phoenix, whom Gaga had never met. “That was really kind of wonderful,” Phillips says. They hung out for hours, and, “as we were driving to dinner, Joaquin said, ‘We should invite her, don’t you think?’ And I was like, ‘Of course, but I don’t think she’s gonna come.’ You know, for some reason, Joaquin is just…a guy, but she’s Lady Gaga. So I called her and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna go to Nobu, do you want to come?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I’ll be five minutes behind you.’ She is the most uncomplicated-complicated person I’ve ever met. And that is her beauty as an artist, too.”
The lion’s share of the movie was filmed on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank during the first three months of 2023. “We’d very often meet in Joaquin’s trailer and sometimes we would just tear the script up and start all over,” says Gaga. “It was a really cool, liberating process.” When I run this by Phillips he says, “My line about Joaquin is that he’s the tunnel at the end of the light.” He laughs. “You think, Okay, this scene works, let’s just go shoot it. And Joaquin’s like, ‘No, no, no, let’s just have a quick meeting about it,’ and it’s three hours later and you’re rewriting it on a napkin. What’s great about Lady Gaga is that she really holds her own both off camera when we’re in the trailer tearing things apart—which she probably spent the night before learning—but also on camera. It was not a small feat.”
Keep in mind: This is only Lady Gaga’s third leading role—and “the biggest movie I’ve ever been a part of,” she says. She is just six years into her movie-star era and yet it somehow feels like she’s been at it forever. “She puts herself around very powerful people,” says Phillips. “I mean, Bradley Cooper, to be across from him out of the gate. To be across from Adam Driver [in House of Gucci], who is a beast, and Joaquin who’s a beast. She’s in it—she went full in.”
And then, of course, she “brought” the music. “I wrote a waltz for the movie,” says Gaga. “And I had a live piano player, Alex Smith, whom I asked to be with me for my scenes. There are moments in the film where I’m playing an adult woman who sings like a little girl. And she’s moving through the world with this kind of immaturity, which I thought was interesting.” The images accompanying this story were partly inspired, Gaga says, “by the genius of Arianne Phillips”—Folie à Deux’s costume designer. “I had this vision: that my mom gave me my grandma’s dresses when I was a little girl and that they still fit me as an adult because I never really grew out of them. And my relationship with music in this film is like the way a child discovers music—as the ultimate form of happiness.”
There is one particularly affecting moment where Gaga as Lee is putting on Harley Quinn’s makeup in the mirror and singing “I’ve Got the World on a String” to herself, like any of us might when we’re alone—but better. The trick for Lady Gaga was learning how to sing like an ordinary citizen. “Yeah. I worked really hard on that, kind of trying to undo all my technique. I mean, Ally Maine in A Star Is Born is a singer and it’s a movie about people who make music,” she says. “That is not what this film is about at all.”
Phoenix, who sang most memorably as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, says that Lady Gaga “encouraged me to sing live” in their scenes. “And I encouraged her to sing poorly. I remember asking her to sing without her vibrato. She has a beautiful vibrato—too beautiful. I think she felt naked without it. But as soon as she moved away from technique she unlocked her character’s voice.”
The film mucks around in fame and fans and mental illness and monsters—Lady Gaga themes, all. When I ask her how the film, or the character, relates to her own life, she surprises me with this eloquent bit of introspection: “Harley Quinn is a character people know from the ether of pop culture. I had a different experience creating her, namely my experience with mania and chaos inside—for me, it creates a quietness. Sometimes women are labeled as these overly emotional creatures and when we are overwhelmed we are erratic or unhinged. But I wonder if when things become so broken from reality, when we get pushed too far in life, what if it makes you…quiet?”
Her voice cracks again and she takes a moment. “I would say that I worked from a sense-memory perspective: What does it feel like to walk through the world and be…braced, in an intense way. And what happens when you cover up all of the complexities beneath the surface?”
She does eventually play music for me. One song, which was about to be released in a few weeks, is the sublime duet with Bruno Mars “Die With a Smile.” Gaga was in Malibu putting the final touches on her own record when Bruno called out of the blue. “He asked me to come to his studio to hear something,” says Gaga. “It was around midnight when I got there and I was blown away. We stayed up all night finishing the song.” She turns it all the way up. “Bruno and I think the world needs to hear this song,” she says. “It’s some real shit. It’s a real conversation. And it’s about love.”
She queues up a song from her new pop record. It’s intense and ominous—an old-school Gaga banger, unsettling but also buoyant. She does not want to say too much about the new record other than to tell me that it was her fiancé’s idea. “Michael is the person who told me to make a new pop record. He was like, ‘Babe. I love you. You need to make pop music.’ ” Says Polansky: “Like anyone would do for the person they love, I encouraged her to lean in to the joy of it. On the Chromatica tour, I saw a fire in her; I wanted to help her keep that alive all the time and just start making music that made her happy.”
Chromatica, Gaga’s last pop album, came out in May 2020, right after the world locked down and “Stupid Love” and “Rain on Me” became the soundtrack to that terrible moment. “When I went on the Chromatica Ball tour in 2022,” she says, “that was the first time I’ve performed not in pain in…I don’t even remember.”
Lady Gaga fractured her hip during her Born This Way Ball tour a decade before, which set in motion years of pain from fibromyalgia, a chronic disorder that manifests as widespread muscle pain, her agony documented in the 2017 Netflix film Gaga: Five Foot Two.
The Chromatica tour was an epiphany. “Michael and I did that tour together,” she says. “I did it pain-free! I haven’t smoked pot in years. I’ve, like, changed.” She laughs. “A lot. I feel like this new album, in a lot of ways, is about that time but from a place of happiness instead of misery. And now, Michael and I are really excited to organize our lives—and our marriage—around our creative output as a couple.” She shoots me a look. “Which is really different than, like, doing what other people want you to do.”
By other people she means the music industry—the whole management, record label, touring infrastructure that she’s been living with for nearly 20 years. “For a long time, for most of my career,” she says, “my life was controlled by this business: what people wanted from me; what they hoped I could achieve; how to keep me going. And that can be a lot of pressure and it’s scary. But I feel like I’m finally coming out on the other side.”
I had always assumed it was she who was at the helm, steering the ship. Who else if not Lady Gaga? “When it comes to my artistry, that is true,” she says. “I signed my first deal when I was 19. And I wouldn’t say I marched into my career knowing how to navigate the business of it all. I think a lot of pop stars get really overwhelmed by this industry. And sometimes we don’t make it into our 30s.” A quick look of self-satisfaction: “I’ve already made it pretty far.”
Don’t call me Gaga. That is the opening line of the song “Monster” on Lady Gaga’s 2009 EP, The Fame Monster. Every time I hear it I laugh because that is exactly what I call her: Gaga. I don’t know her well enough to call her Stefani. Never. I bring this up because it’s a question that is hovering over this interview, partly because of all this Joker talk: Is it all fantasy? Is Lady Gaga…a persona?
“Man.” She shakes her head. “That’s a big question.” She takes a deep breath. “You know it’s not a persona. It’s not. I am all of these things. The person that I am when I’m onstage in front of 85,000 people? That is also me. That’s like one of the freedoms of my relationship with Michael. It feels really nice to have someone value you whether there’s 85,000 people watching or…the dogs. To see the whole you. And Lady Gaga is the whole me.
“There was a time in my career when I…. Look….”—she cocks an eyebrow and slips into a self mocking tone—“where I spoke in an accent in interviews or told lies, but I was performing. Now, it’s a much more palatable mixture of authenticity and imagination. I feel like the world, to a fault, operates in these binaries: You’re either real or you’re fake; you’re authentic or you’re shallow. But for me, I played a lot with artifice. I was fascinated with artifice, really, truly fascinated with it as an artistic tool. I still am. But my relationship to myself as an artist now is more empowered: This is me. This. Is. Me. It’s too…complicated to split yourself in two and have to turn it off and on. It’s so much more empowering to be like, I’m a woman and I’m super complex. Michael said to me once, ‘I will know that you’re really feeling great when you know that you have you.’ I used to always be like, But who’s gonna have my back?! And now I’m like, I’ve got my back.”
- Editorial by Jonathan Van Meter, photography by Ethan James Green.
Italia
November, 2021
“Sul set di House of Gucci pensavo ai miei antenati italiani”: Lady Gaga si racconta in un'intervista esclusiva a Vogue
In uno studio senza finestre a Chelsea, Manhattan, il marabù rosa che decora un paio di stivaletti sembra fremere nell’attesa, fluttuando nell’aria prodotta da un ventilatore. «Arriva fra dieci minuti», ci informa un bel ragazzo della sicurezza, facendo capolino dalla porta, mentre un esercito di assistenti si muove silenzioso in un abbagliante, favoloso ed effimero antro delle meraviglie couture.
Appena arrivati dopo le sfilate di Parigi e Venezia, ci sono gli stender con gli abiti in seta ametista e fucsia di Valentino, i velluti nero inchiostro con dettagli in oro scintillante di Schiaparelli, gli austeri broccati Chanel, i candidi capi di maglia Louis Vuitton, i copricapo in metallo, pelle e piume, un centinaio di paia di scarpe con i tacchi di tutte le altezze, e una miriade di foulard, guanti e gioielli in ogni sfumatura di colore possibile e immaginabile. Noto anche delle ruches in stile elisabettiano. Ci troviamo qui per il fitting di Lady Gaga per lo shooting di Vogue. «Facciamole subito indossare qualcosa di favoloso», dice Edward Enninful, direttore di Vogue UK e European Editorial Director di Vogue – come se si potesse fare diversamente.
Naturalmente i dieci minuti passano, ma alla fine, in un momento imprecisato (sono le tempistiche di una superstar), la porta finalmente si apre e appare una figura alta un metro e 55 con indosso un lungo abito estivo in maglia nera e scarpe con plateau in pelle nera dall’altezza vertiginosa. È sempre un’esperienza singolare incontrare una leggenda della pop culture che emana la sua vera quintessenza, e Lady Gaga non delude certo le aspettative. Le foto scattate qualche minuto fa, quando ha percorso il breve tratto fra l’automobile e l’edificio, indossando le sue scarpe tacco 20 stanno già facendo il giro del mondo. «Oggi facciamo magia!», dice entrando, a mo’ di saluto.
Con i suoi tanti outfit spettacolari, 12 Grammy, un Oscar, e quella che è forse l’ascesa alla fama più esplosiva del XXI secolo, Stefani Germanotta da più di dieci anni a questa parte è una delle persone più famose del pianeta. E sa bene come giocarci, con questa fama. Prima si toglie gli occhiali da sole, poi ci butta le braccia abbronzate e tatuate al collo e ci stringe con affetto, e subito dopo si concentra su quello che c’è da fare. «Qualunque cosa indosserò», dice rivolta al team, con quella sua famosa parlata strascicata da nottambula, che è sincerità con una spruzzata di frivolezza, «quello che vi offro è l’autentico glamour italiano che ho dentro».
Ovviamente. La regina del pop, 35 anni, attrice già nominata agli Oscar, apparirà nel suo secondo film con il suo secondo ruolo da protagonista: House of Gucci, la pellicola di Ridley Scott che ha richiesto vent’anni di preparazione, e che racconta uno dei crimini più famigerati del XX secolo. Dire che le aspettative sono alte non rende giustizia alla cosa. Gaga – come sa chiunque sia stato su Internet negli ultimi sei mesi – sarà Patrizia Reggiani, socialite ed ex moglie di Maurizio Gucci che, nel 1998, è stata condannata per aver assoldato il sicario che ha ucciso l’imprenditore in una mattina di primavera del 1995, mentre entrava nei suoi uffici a Milano.
Un caso in cui era protagonista il denaro, tantissimo, e il peccato originale, un crimine che aveva scosso l’Italia e il mondo intero, e che aveva avuto ripercussioni in tutta la fashion industry. Il trailer del film, che Lady Gaga ci mostra dal suo laptop, a pochi giorni dall’uscita in tutto il mondo (sarà poi visto più di 10 milioni di volte), ci dà già un’idea di quello che vedremo nel lungometraggio. «Father, Son and House of Gucci», dice Gaga-Patrizia Reggiani, capelli castani super cotonati e sigaretta fra le dita, mentre si fa il segno della croce da un vestito a grandi pois rosa. L’attrice si rivede sul piccolo schermo del computer, godendosi gli urletti adoranti del team lì riunito. «Sono diversissima qui», dice, affascinata dalla sua stessa immagine.
Qualche settimana più tardi, le faccio una videochiamata a casa sua, sulla West Coast. Lei, che non perde mai occasione per assecondare il proprio mito, appare sul mio schermo, e sta cantando una canzone. «Mi hai beccato a cantare!», dice, dopo aver finito un altro paio di battute di Night and Day di Cole Porter. È difficile non lasciarsi conquistare dalla dedizione di una showgirl – in particolare di una che se ne sta seduta nel suo grazioso ufficio rosa, con tanto di pianoforte e postazione beauty, la parete alle sue spalle interamente ricoperta di scarpe con tacco a stiletto. «Be’, vedi, dovevo pur metterci qualcosa su queste pareti», esclama, sardonica.
Indossa «una T-shirt rosa antico» – e, facendo spallucce, dice di non ricordare il brand – e un paio di leggings neri. «Questa collana me l’ha regalata il mio ragazzo, l’ha presa in un bellissimo negozio di artigianato a San Francisco, come questi orecchini», spiega. Sua madre, Cynthia, viene più tardi a prendere il tè, e Lady Gaga è in un mood rilassato da metà pomeriggio. Ha lasciato fuori dal suo chignon due ciuffi di capelli castano miele, che adesso le incorniciano il volto perfettamente truccato, e il tutto enfatizza l’effetto finale, una sorta di look da studentessa di recitazione. L’artista a riposo, se vogliamo. E ha senso. «Ho iniziato a lavorarci tre anni fa», dice lanciandosi a parlare di House of Gucci, «e sarò completamente sincera e trasparente: ho vissuto come lei (come Reggiani, ndr) per un anno e mezzo. E ho parlato con il suo accento per nove mesi». Anche fuori dal set? «Anche fuori dal set», conferma, con tono solenne. «Non ho mai staccato. Sono stata sempre con lei».
«Era praticamente impossibile per me parlare come lei restando bionda», aggiunge. «Ho dovuto subito tingermi i capelli, e ho cominciato a vivere in un modo per cui qualunque cosa vedessi, qualunque cosa toccassi, notavo dove e quando ci potessi vedere del denaro. E ho cominciato anche a fare foto. Non ho nessuna prova che Patrizia facesse foto, ma ho pensato che per esercitarmi, e per scoprire gli interessi che aveva nella vita, sarei diventata una fotografa, e così ho iniziato a portare con me la mia fotocamera compatta ovunque andassi. Ho notato che Patrizia amava le cose belle. E se una foto non era bella, la cancellavo».
La star dice che se la sua vita non avesse preso quella piega lì, fatta di abiti di carne e tournée negli stadi, forse le sarebbe piaciuto fare la reporter, e infatti ha iniziato a mettere insieme i pezzi del personaggio con un approccio fra l’artistico e il giornalistico. Patrizia Reggiani, va detto, è viva e vegeta, abita a Milano ed è perfettamente in grado di parlare con la stampa. A quanto si dice è contenta che sia un nome di così grande spicco a prestarle il volto, anche se – e qui la sua autocelebrazione non sembra offuscata dall’aver passato in carcere 18 dei 26 anni a cui era stata condannata come mandante dell’omicidio dell’ex marito – la scorsa estate ha dichiarato a una giornalista: «Sono alquanto infastidita dal fatto che Lady Gaga mi stia interpretando nel nuovo film di Ridley Scott senza neppure avere avuto l’accortezza e la sensibilità di venire a incontrarmi».
Quindi non l’hai mai incontrata? chiedo a Gaga. «Sai», risponde, «ho pensato che avrei potuto rendere giustizia a questa vicenda solo se mi ci fossi avvicinata con gli occhi di una donna curiosa, con uno spirito giornalistico, per poter leggere fra le righe di quello che accadeva nelle scene del film». Sembra tenerci molto a essere estremamente chiara. «E questo significa che nessuno mi avrebbe dovuto dire chi era Patrizia Gucci», dice, in tono piatto. «Nemmeno Patrizia Gucci».
La pellicola resta ancora avvolta nel mistero, e la cosa è piuttosto inusuale, visto che sta per uscire. Al momento dell’intervista con Lady Gaga, Ridley Scott non ha ancora permesso neppure a lei di vederne delle parti, e lei, che afferma di fidarsi di lui totalmente, per “rispetto” non vuole rivelare troppo. Nonostante ciò, facendo un po’ di moine riesco a capire che il film probabilmente parte all’inizio degli anni 70, quando Patrizia (cresciuta in povertà a Vignola, in Emilia Romagna, e la cui sorte era cambiata grazie al denaro del nuovo patrigno che lavorava nel settore degli autotrasporti) conosce Maurizio Gucci frequentando la vita notturna milanese.
Spinta dalla madre, Silvana Barbieri, Reggiani è a caccia di un marito, e Maurizio ha tutte le carte in regola: ricchezza, bellezza, e un nome. («Si innamorò follemente di me», ha dichiarato Reggiani. «Ero eccitante, e diversa»). È stata una storia molto passionale, senza dubbio. «Anche lei lo amava», dice Gaga. E anche se il padre di Maurizio, Rodolfo – il figlio del fondatore dell’azienda, Guccio Gucci – nutriva più di un dubbio sul passato un po’ ambiguo della Reggiani, i due si sposarono nel 1972. (La sposa era in Gucci, naturalmente, un abito accollato a maniche lunghe che, per quello che siamo riusciti a capire dagli scatti rubati dai paparazzi sul set del film, sembra essere stato modificato e reso un po’ più sexy per Lady Gaga).
Durante gli anni 70 e all’inizio degli ’80, i giovani Gucci erano una coppia di neosposi belli, carismatici e alla deriva in un mare di lusso. Due figlie bellissime, uno yacht maestoso (il fatale tre alberi Créole) e la presenza fissa nella guest list dello Studio 54, la loro era una vita vissuta sul filo del rasoio del glamour. Oltre all’attico all’Olympic Tower a New York, la villa ad Acapulco, lo chalet a Sankt Moritz e la fattoria nel Connecticut, c’era la passione di Patrizia per le orchidee (una mania da novemila euro al mese), l’amicizia con Jackie Kennedy, la sua collezione di gioielli multimilionaria, e poi le feste, i palazzi e le macchine di lusso con le targhe personalizzate con la scritta “mauizia” (in quanto a nomi composti, la coppia era avanti anni luce rispetto a Brangelina).
Nel 1983, però, il sogno cominciò a vacillare. Dopo la morte di Rodolfo, Maurizio, suo unico figlio, assunse il controllo totale sul suo 50 per cento dell’azienda (il resto era di proprietà del fratello di Rodolfo, Aldo), e in famiglia ebbe inizio una guerra senza riserve. Reggiani, che in quel momento si percepiva più Gucci dei Gucci, era ai ferri corti con il marito tanto quanto lo era con i cugini di lui, e con il passare degli anni il matrimonio andò in pezzi: lui la lasciò nel 1985. Lei non la prese molto bene: quando Maurizio iniziò a non rispondere più alle sue telefonate, lei registrava cassette in cui lo insultava con violenza, e poi gliele faceva consegnare da un corriere nel suo appartamento di corso Venezia.
La situazione in azienda non era certo più rosea. Era il periodo del famoso e imperfetto modello di licensing Gucci, per cui la produzione di qualunque oggetto, dalle mazze da golf ai canovacci, veniva appaltata ad aziende terze solo per fare un mucchio di soldi. Maurizio era invece deciso a riprendere il controllo, a riportare in auge la qualità impareggiabile degli articoli di pelletteria su cui la famiglia aveva in origine costruito la sua fortuna, e si mise a cercare nuovi investimenti. Ma fra le liti con Aldo (che poi fu arrestato per frode fiscale) e quelle con i cugini, la fama di una maison un tempo grandissima si appannò fino ad affondare pericolosamente.
Al di là della sua evidente ambizione, i piani di Maurizio furono la causa stessa della sua rovina. Non era in grado di guadagnare abbastanza denaro per coprire le sue spese stravaganti, e nel 1993 cedette tutta la sua quota alla Investcorp per 120 milioni di dollari, ponendo fine di fatto a più di 70 anni di proprietà del marchio da parte della famiglia Gucci. Patrizia, che nonostante gli eventi drammatici era rimasta sempre in prima linea, oltre a essere legalmente ancora sua moglie, si accese di rabbia, come ebbe a dire lei stessa. A peggiorare le cose era stato anche il fatto che, tre anni prima, Maurizio aveva iniziato una relazione con l’ex modella e poi interior designer Paola Franchi, un’amica d’infanzia che aveva anche presenziato al matrimonio con Patrizia. L’ombra del divorzio incombeva, e suo marito, il suo nome, la sua ricchezza, il suo status – la sua stessa identità – tutto precipitava. Una situazione esplosiva.
Lady Gaga è stata conquistata da questa vicenda – «Mi affascinava il percorso di questa donna» – e ha passato più di un anno a studiare articoli di giornali e registrazioni di Reggiani, anche se, cosa significativa, non ha mai letto La saga dei Gucci. Una storia avvincente di creatività, fascino, successo, follia, di Sara Gay Forden, il libro del 2000 su cui è basato il film. «Non volevo sentire nessuna opinione che potesse influenzare in alcun modo il mio pensiero». Scott le aveva mandato la sceneggiatura poco dopo l’uscita di A Star Is Born, la sua entrata trionfale a Hollywood con un ruolo da protagonista, nel 2018. Insieme alla moglie e socia produttrice, Giannina Facio, Scott aveva iniziato un lungo e difficile percorso per questo progetto, che ha visto susseguirsi diversi nomi, oltre al suo, alla regia, e con Angelina Jolie, Penélope Cruz e Margot Robbie come papabili per il ruolo di Patrizia Reggiani. Ma le stelle alla fine si sono allineate per Gaga: «Come potrei non interpretare una stronza così, grintosa, sexy, sconsiderata e audace?», ricorda di aver pensato in quel momento. «Una cacciatrice di dote, italiana, e ribelle?».
Quando i produttori del film si accordarono su un’idea in apparenza un po’ rétro, e cioè che il cast recitasse in inglese, ma con un forte accento italiano, lei intuì che era essenziale indovinare la voce di Reggiani. E si è messa a lavorare d’impegno. «Ho iniziato con un dialetto particolare che si parla a Vignola, poi ho lavorato sul modo di parlare delle classi sociali più alte, che sarebbe stato più appropriato in posti come Milano e Firenze», spiega. «Nel film noterai che il mio accento è leggermente diverso a seconda della persona con cui sto parlando». Il trailer ha destato qualche perplessità in Italia, la preoccupazione è che si tratti dell’ennesimo gruppo di attori americani che parla in inglese “broccolino”. Lady Gaga, fra gli italoamericani più famosi negli Usa, è molto sensibile sull’argomento. «Fare questo film è stata l’esperienza di una vita, perché ogni minuto, ogni giorno pensavo ai miei antenati in Italia, e quello che hanno dovuto fare per darmi una vita migliore. Volevo che fossero orgogliosi, e per questo motivo ho scelto di interpretare una donna vera, non l’idea di una donna cattiva».
E così è entrata nella mente di un’assassina. I Gucci alla fine divorziarono nel 1994, e mentre Maurizio progettava di sposare Franchi, cosa che lo avrebbe portato a dimezzare gli alimenti a Reggiani, fino a diventare quello che lei aveva definito “un piatto di lenticchie” (860.000 dollari l’anno), lei registra insulti sempre più instabili e minacciosi. In uno, poi ascoltato anche in tribunale, infierisce: «L’inferno per te deve ancora venire». Presto chiese aiuto alla sua migliore amica, Pina Auriemma, una chiaroveggente napoletana, che a sua volta assunse il sicario, Benedetto Ceraulo, proprietario di una pizzeria con problemi finanziari. Alle 8.30 di una limpida mattina di fine marzo del 1995, Ceraulo eseguì l’ordine di Patrizia Reggiani: uccidere il padre delle sue figlie. Maurizio Gucci aveva 46 anni. Reggiani è stata condannata tre anni dopo e poi rilasciata sulla parola nel 2016. Le figlie di Gucci, Alessandra e Allegra, in principio sostennero la madre, pensando che il suo comportamento fosse dovuto al tumore benigno al cervello che un intervento aveva poi rimosso. Dopo molti anni, pare che non si parlino più.
“Sono tante le cose da elaborare, vero, Gaga?”, le chiedo. Tutto questo sfarzo, tutta questa tristezza. Non era in ansia al pensiero di esserne coinvolta? Come al solito, lei doveva trovare la missione insita nel progetto. Uno scopo. «Non voglio celebrare una persona capace di commettere un omicidio», dice. «Ma desidero rendere omaggio alle donne che nel corso della storia hanno imparato a sopravvivere, e alle conseguenze più spiacevoli della sofferenza. Spero che le donne guardino il film, e che riflettano sul fatto che le persone ferite poi a loro volta feriscono gli altri. E questo è pericoloso. Cosa può succedere a una persona», si domanda, «quando viene portata al limite?».
Sembra che il film sia riuscito a dare una risposta a questa domanda. Le riprese principali sono iniziate nel febbraio di quest’anno a Roma, con gli uomini della famiglia Gucci interpretati da un cast che include Adam Driver nei panni di Maurizio, Jeremy Irons in quelli di Rodolfo, Al Pacino nel ruolo dello zio Aldo e Jared Leto in quello del cugino Paolo. Con l’Italia bloccata dal lockdown, e con i paparazzi ovunque, Gaga, sotto l’influsso della tecnica di Susan Batson (la sua insegnante di recitazione, che era presente sul set e che ha studiato a sua volta con Lee Strasberg), dice di essere andata così a fondo nel personaggio da aver cominciato a perdere il contatto con la realtà. «Ho avuto qualche difficoltà psicologica a un certo punto, verso la fine delle riprese», spiega, pesando bene le parole. «Che fossi nella mia stanza d’albergo, oppure sul set, vivevo e parlavo come lei. Ricordo che un giorno, in Italia, mi sono messa un cappello e sono uscita a fare una passeggiata. Non lo facevo da più o meno due mesi, e sono andata nel panico». Non riusciva più a riconoscere il mondo reale. «Pensavo di essere sul set di un film».
«Follia e delizia», è così che Salma Hayek, che nel film interpreta Pina Auriemma, mi descrive il metodo di lavoro di Gaga. «È molto glamorous», dice del film l’attrice di origine messicana, «molto fastoso, e pochissime volte ho visto un attore lavorare con così tanta passione», racconta, molto colpita. «Si è impegnata totalmente». È stato difficile lavorarci? «Non è stata proprio un’agonia, eh!», risponde, ironica, e poi ride. «Era qualcosa di affascinante. Era magica. Un genio».
Gaga è più schiva. «Una volta, tra una ripresa e l’altra, Salma fa: “Oh, questo ca**o di metodo Stanislavskij, eccolo qui. Vedi, adesso non mi parla proprio”. Io stavo facendo un lavoro sulla memoria sensoriale, ero accanto a lei, e lei mi prendeva in giro mentre ero seduta lì a fare questa cosa. E non ho nemmeno riso. Quando la scena è finita, le ho mostrato il dito medio e le ho detto: “Sei ridicola!”, sono scoppiata a ridere e le ho dato un bacio. È stato un set meraviglioso, ma quando lavoro sono molto seria».
Sta davvero ridacchiando, adesso che ci ripensa. Non per rovinare l’atmosfera idilliaca, dico, ma non deve essere stato facile per la sua famiglia “perderla” per così tanto tempo. Per vedere la loro figlia, sorella, fidanzata trasformarsi per mesi in una socialite omicida milanese. Annuisce lentamente. «Non ci siamo sentiti e siamo rimasti distanti per un po’», conferma.
Mi dice anche di aver perso l’accento subito dopo la fine delle riprese, mentre altri particolari le sono rimasti addosso. «Finisci per avere la sua stessa voce, per assomigliarle, sì, ma non è un’imitazione, è un divenire. Ricordo che quando abbiamo iniziato le riprese, sapevo di essere diventata lei – e sapevo che la sfida più grande sarebbe stata tornare a essere me stessa». Sente il peso di questo ruolo intensamente. «Questo è il mio viaggio come artista con cui faccio ancora i conti, e mi domando se sia sano il modo in cui lo faccio». Scrolla le spalle: rassegnata, consapevole, forse anche un po’ orgogliosa. «Semplicemente, è l’unico modo che conosco».
E a questo punto diventa riflessiva. «Beh, ho 35 anni», dice ridendo. «Della serie, Lady Gaga ha 35 anni! Mi sento vecchia!». Ma mai troppo vecchia per un fantastico press tour. In puro brio hollywoodiano, quelle per promuovere A Star Is Born sono state forse le migliori apparizioni sul red carpet degli ultimi anni (tutto quel faille di seta pervinca…), ed è pronta a ricominciare. «Amo moltissimo vedere tutte quelle persone», dice. «Mi piace davvero tanto il fatto che il pubblico mi adori ormai da quasi vent’anni. Che io canti, reciti o sfili su un tappeto rosso, amo far sorridere il pubblico».
Di sicuro Gaga non ha smarrito quel suo mix inebriante di sincerità e “camp”: «Anche se l’età è solo un numero, quello che sento più di ogni altra cosa è un grande affetto per la comunità artistica, per il collettivo artistico», afferma, e mi dice anche che devo recapitare “al mondo” questo suo messaggio. A gennaio ha cantato alla cerimonia di insediamento di Joe Biden. «Uno dei giorni in cui mi sono sentita più orgogliosa in tutta la mia vita. Come tanti in America, ero molto spaventata quando Trump era presidente, l’uscita del 45° presidente e l’arrivo del 46° è stata una cosa straordinaria, una cosa che potrò raccontare ai miei figli». Sorride. «Cantare con un vestito antiproiettile di Schiaparelli. Non so se le persone sanno questo di me, ma se non fossi quello che sono oggi, sarei diventata una reporter di guerra. Era uno dei miei sogni. Quando ero a Capitol Hill, il giorno prima dell’insediamento, ricordo di aver camminato un po’ lì intorno per cercare le prove della rivolta».
Ora si sente di nuovo felice, anche se questa sensazione le è stata spesso sconosciuta. «Per molto tempo ho pensato che non sarei riuscita a superare il fatto di essere diventata famosa così giovane, e tutte le conseguenze sulla mia mente. Ma ora sono pronta a dichiararmi guarita. Non saremo mai tutti del tutto sani», si corregge, «ma di sicuro ci basta. Sono molto riconoscente per la felicità che provo». È una sensazione nuova? «È una cosa piuttosto recente, sì. Direi di questi ultimi due anni». Gaga, la newyorkese par excellence, ora passa gran parte del tempo a Hollywood, con il fidanzato Michael Polansky, studi a Harvard e direttore esecutivo dell’organizzazione filantropica Parker Foundation, che si occupa di scienza, salute pubblica e arte. Stravede per i suoi cani, dice che ora stanno bene dopo la serie di eventi sconvolgenti accaduti all’inizio di quest’anno: il rapimento, e il ferimento del dogsitter (per fortuna senza gravi conseguenze). «Sì, stanno bene», dice, comprensibilmente ancora scossa. «Grazie a Dio».
La tabella di marcia della pop star e stella del cinema resta bella piena. Oltre al film su Gucci, in quest’ultimo anno ha interpretato i classici del jazz con Tony Bennett al Radio City Music Hall e ha pubblicato Love for Sale, il loro secondo album di duetti di Cole Porter, che ha avuto recensioni straordinarie. Dirige la sua Born This Way Foundation, la cui missione è prendersi cura dell’equilibrio psicologico dei giovani e dar loro gli strumenti per costruire un mondo migliore, ed è presissima da Haus Laboratories, la sua linea di make-up vegano dalle graziose palette e dall’amatissimo eyeliner liquido, che rende più di 140 milioni di dollari l’anno.
Poi, ovviamente, c’è stato Chromatica, il suo fantastico album elettronico, un successo strepitoso, uscito nel 2020. Sono seguiti alcuni remix all’inizio di quest’anno – Dawn of Chromatica – e sta pensando a una tournée post-pandemia. Naturalmente, come parte del segmento demografico principale tra i fan di Chromatica, la riempio di complimenti, le faccio capire quanto sia stato importante per me quel disco durante il lockdown, e lei accenna un sorriso prima di dirmi: «Non credo di aver mai sofferto tanto nella mia vita come quando ho fatto quel disco. È molto difficile per me ascoltarlo. Ed è molto difficile per me anche cantare quelle canzoni, ma non perché non siano stupende o meravigliose ma perché venivano da un buco nero, nerissimo, nel mio cuore».
Che tipo di situazione viveva durante la registrazione del disco? «Non volevo più essere me», dice semplicemente. «Non avevo più la capacità di capire cosa ero in grado di fare come persona. Sentivo di non valere quasi nulla. Ma ce l’ho fatta ugualmente. Ho detto a un amico l’altro giorno: ogni volta che vivo dei momenti difficili, mi ripeto sempre, ridendo: lo so, è dura. Ma è molto più dura quando vuoi farla finita ogni giorno. Quindi prometto di parlare sempre di equilibrio psicologico, di gentilezza, compassione e validazione. Credo sinceramente che l’universo mi abbia fatto vivere tutto questo perché fossi pronta a parlarne con il mondo». Per un momento, l’esibizione della fama si interrompe. «So che non è “il mondo”. Non è che il mondo intero sappia cosa faccio, e non è questo il punto. È chiunque stia ascoltando. A chiunque stia ascoltando: ti voglio bene, e se stai soffrendo, ti assicuro che andrà meglio».
La sua mente, però, ritorna presto sul mondo di Gucci. «Questa era un’altra cosa che mi interessava: chi ha ucciso Maurizio, cioè, lei chi aveva ingaggiato?», si chiede, e ne è ancora affascinata. «Sono convinta che in realtà non abbia detto la verità su questo aspetto». Gaga guardava le interviste su YouTube, e mormorava: «Stai mentendo». «In un’intervista, Reggiani ha detto che erano stati quelli della “banda Bassotti”, e credo volesse dire qualcuno della mafia. Mi sono chiesta per un attimo se sia stata la camorra. Quindi mentre si girava ho deciso, ancora una volta segretamente, quello a cui volevo credere».
Pensa che verrà un momento, una volta uscito il film, una volta superata l’intensità di tutto questo, in cui potrebbe voler incontrare Reggiani, chiedo. Per lo meno, la curiosità non potrebbe avere la meglio su di lei? Segue una pausa densa di significato. «Non ne sono del tutto convinta. Penso sia necessario un certo quoziente emotivo per fare l’attore», dice, cercando di spiegare la sua reticenza. Il film l’ha anche trascinata in fondo a un’oscurità che ora è pronta a scrollarsi di dosso. «Il modo in cui mi sono sentita mentre interpretavo questo ruolo... alla fine, mi sono resa conto che quando uccidi qualcuno, in realtà uccidi te stesso». Poi smette di parlare, e per un attimo sembra perdersi di nuovo in tutto quello che ha vissuto. Lentamente, sbatte le palpebre più volte, tornando alla realtà di Gaga, lontana da quella di Patrizia. «Le persone a cui ho tenuto di più in tutto questo percorso sono le sue figlie», dice, misurando le parole, «e a loro mando amore e compassione, perché sono certa che l’uscita di questo film potrebbe rivelarsi molto difficile e dolorosa per loro. E non desidero altro che pace per i loro cuori». I suoi occhi sono di nuovo pieni di apprensione. E poi di speranza. «Ho fatto del mio meglio per interpretare la verità».
- Article by Giles Hattersley, photography by Steven Meisel.
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October, 2020
- Photography by Arielle Bobb-Willis.
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- Photography by Arielle Bobb-Willis and Raul Romo.