Lady Gaga: The Unauthorized Biography

PART ONE:

BABY GAGA

Chapter 1:

A Pop Princess Is Born

Once upon a time, long before Simon Cowell had pound signs glimmering in his eyes and phone voting decided the fate of talented individuals, the world was a place where opportunities had to be worked for. Pop princes and princesses didn’t just materialize out of thin air via glossy reality TV shows, they had to graft for their glory and spend time to win over their loyal subjects. And in the spring of 1986, a baby girl was born who would one day become not just a princess of pop, but an undisputed queen of the airwaves . . .

It was the mid eighties, a time when people around the world were finally living the dream. After years of economic depression, spirits were high as President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher enthusiastically encouraged their citizens to embrace materialism and seize the day. This was the era of the ‘yuppie’ – the brash young upwardly mobile individuals who worked themselves to the bone to make as much money as they could (and make sure that everyone knew about it).

It was an affluent time in which new businesses flourished, groundbreaking technology was being introduced, and status symbols were not so much sought after as considered a necessity. Gleaming sports cars tore through the streets of cities like New York and London, driven by flashy young bucks with waxed hair, boasting loudly into their hi-tech supersized mobile phones about the big-money deals they’d secured. Women, too, were making a mark in business, power-dressing to success in sharp, brightly coloured fashions complete with boxy shoulder pads that gave them a masculine edge.

In TV-land, viewers were deluged with images of luxury. The conniving Ewings in Dallas proved that money could provide both glamour and power, while over in Denver, Colorado, the über-beautiful, super-rich characters in Dynasty shimmered across our screens. Each week, shoulder-padded superbitch Alexis Carrington would stride into boardrooms wearing the sleekest of furs and weighed down by sparkling jewels, spitting catty barbs at all who crossed her. Alexis was the moneyed anti-hero we all admired and aspired to be. She was independent, glamorous and totally without morals.

Elsewhere, the music charts were dominated by big-haired rockers like Bon Jovi, bouffant boybanders like Wham! and ambitious New Yorkers like Madonna. Ah, Madonna. A figure who will appear many times throughout the story of Lady Gaga. It’s interesting to note that as the Material Girl was fast becoming a global icon, with a handful of hits already under her belt, a certain Stefani Joanne Germanotta was conceived by two upwardly mobile techy types called Joe and Cynthia. This probably meant that for the nine months she was developing in her momma’s womb, baby Gaga would no doubt have experienced the muffled strains of hit tunes like ‘Into The Groove’, ‘Like A Virgin’ or ‘Holiday’. Who knows, perhaps she even sensed through Her Madgesty’s music the ambition and dogged determination of the young Madonna, who had worked her butt off for years to become the most talked-about woman on the planet. An admirable quality that Stefani herself would one day hone to perfection.

Born on 28 March 1986, baby Stefani was the icing on the Germanottas’ already rather tasty cake. For the past couple of years, Joe and Cynthia had been making their mark in the fast-growing telecommunications industry. In fact, they were becoming so successful that they decided to start their own company, which focused on developing ways of linking up computers so that people could communicate with each other – an early development of the technology that eventually led to the introduction of the World Wide Web.

At home, Joe, a lifelong music fan and frustrated rock star, and Cynthia, who had grown up in the parochial Midwest and studied theatre, embraced their whizz-kid lifestyle and worked hard to achieve success. It paid off: when Stefani was around five, the Germanottas were able to up sticks from Yonkers, New York and move their family – which by now included her sister Natali – across town to the rather more swish Upper West Side of Manhattan. Taking on a $370,000 mortgage, the young family moved into the exquisitely designed Pythian apartment block on West 70th Street, the perfect palace for a potential pop princess.

Built in 1927 and boasting a desirable blue and gold Egyptian façade, the building was once a meeting place for a secret society called the Order of the Knights Pythias. In 1984 it was renovated and converted into eighty-four apartments spread over its eleven floors. Each of the suites retained its ornate features and became much sought after – as they still are today. In fact, these days a two-bedroom apartment boasting two bathrooms sells for around $2 million (£1,260,000), while a one-bedroom flat could set you back $7,000 (£4,400)a month to rent.

This was a fairytale lifestyle that only a handful of people ever get to experience first hand, so the particular pop princess at the heart of our story was hardly a modern-day Cinderella. In fact, she enjoyed something of a regal life, and a very Italian one to boot. Mom would serve up delicious and hearty traditional food like meatballs and spaghetti, while Dad would spin tunes by Andrea Bocelli or classic stars of old like Frank Sinatra as the family sat down to eat. Every once in a while the Germanottas would travel across town to see both sets of Stefani’s much-loved grandparents.

Even now Gaga looks back and pays tribute to the family elders who she says helped shape her to become the woman she is today. ‘My mother’s side and my father’s side, they are so strong, they’ve been through so much and they both came from nothing,’ she told the fashion website SHOWstudio.com. ‘They are just the strongest, most irreplaceable women, so deeply loved by their husbands as well. To be such a strong woman and to find a man that will love you without making himself feel insecure – impossible. Both my grandmothers and my mother have done that. I suppose the three – the trinity of women in my life – have been the most interesting. I suppose they’re also the reason I’m a feminist.’

Another close family member who made a strong impression on the young Stefani was her aunt Joanne – even though they never actually met. Joanne was Joe’s sister, an unpublished poet and artist who had tragically died from lupus before Stefani was born. Stefani felt a definite connection with her dead aunt, and whenever she would visit her paternal grandparents’ home she would be mesmerized by Joanne’s paintings that adorned the walls. ‘She died when she was nineteen and [my dad] was sixteen. And when my mother was engaged to marry my father, they were staying in his house, where he grew up, and a light came into the room and touched her stomach and went away,’ she told Vanity Fair magazine. ‘[My mother] believes that Joanne came into the room and sort of OK’d her for my dad and that Joanne transferred her spirit into my mom. So, when I was born, it’s almost as if I was her unfinished business. She was a poet and a real Renaissance woman, pure of heart – just a beautiful person. She died a virgin. And one of my guides told me he can feel I have two hearts in my chest, and I believe that about myself.’ Years later, she surprised her father by publishing one of Joanne’s poems in the sleeve notes for The Fame, telling her dad that she may have died an unpublished poet but now she no longer was.

Back home, Joe and Cynthia soon began to notice that their daughter had a musical ear. ‘I don’t know exactly where my affinity for music comes from, but it is the thing that comes easiest to me,’ she said in her 2011 MTV documentary, Lady Gaga: Inside the Outside. Many nights she’d sit with her father at the record player and sing along to classic tunes from legendary stars like Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Even at a tender age Stefani was entranced by these artists. ‘The first CDs my parents bought me were Stevie Wonder’s Signed, Sealed, Delivered and The Beatles,’ she revealed in Inside the Outside. ‘They got me two CDs and they were given to me with a little boom box for Christmas when I was young. They could have chosen anything – but Stevie Wonder and The Beatles? It’s totally their fault. Don’t spoon-feed me Stevie Wonder and The Beatles and Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin and Elton John and not expect me to turn out this way!’

Her interest in the piano also started at an early age. At just two, Stefani would prop herself up against the instrument and bang the keys above her head, despite being too short to see what she was doing.

Keen to develop their daughter’s love of music, Cynthia decided that it might be a good idea for Stefani to take some piano lessons. She reckoned not only would she enjoy learning an instrument but it would also stand her in good stead for the future by instilling in her a sense of discipline as she mastered it.

But Cynthia was disappointed when Stefani didn’t appear all that interested in her lessons. In fact, when her mother sat her at the piano with her teacher, her sullen daughter would stubbornly fold her arms and refuse to take part. However, Cynthia was clever. Instead of scolding her daughter, she would merely tell her that whether she played the piano or not, she would have to sit at the instrument for the full hour. A frustrated Stef would screw up her face and smash her hands down on the keys, making an almighty racket – but eventually Cynthia’s cunning tactic worked. Sitting sullenly at the piano for several days eventually led to Stefani caving in and trying it out. And the result – well, let’s just say the future path of Lady Gaga was well and truly clear.

Looking back, Gaga has only good memories of her early flirtation with music and is particularly fond of her first teacher. ‘This woman was amazing, she was a great friend,’ she remembers. ‘I didn’t know this at the time, but she was a stripper. I remember I used to say to her, Why do you have such long nails, don’t you ever cut them? And she said, Some day you will understand why I have long nails. And now I do.’ (Inside the Outside)

From that moment on, Stefani couldn’t get enough of the piano and would spend hours running her fingers across the keys. And thanks to years of listening to music with her father, she discovered that she had the amazing ability to play music by ear.

Such was her talent that, aged four, she wrote her first ever song, called ‘Dollar Bills’, which she says was inspired by a classic Pink Floyd track. ‘I still remember the first song I ever wrote,’ she recalled on a now defunct, pre-Lady Gaga website. ‘My dad was listening to a song – what I now know was Pink Floyd’s Money – and understanding only the sounds of the cash register in the intro, I wrote a song called Dollar Bills on my Mickey Mouse staff paper!’

As her love of the piano grew she eventually gave in to her mother and began to take her practice seriously, opening up her heart and ears to the classical sounds of Mozart and Bach. Although she may not have appreciated it fully at the time, her early tuition would become useful years down the line. ‘Bach and the classical stuff that I played when I was younger – the chord progression is the same as pop music,’ Gaga said to Clayton Perry in his conversations with the 2009 Grammy nominees. ‘It’s ingrained in your sensibility about structure and discipline.’

Although she showed an early flair for the piano, she admitted that her teachers had their work cut out for them. ‘When I would play I would be floppy with my hands because I was so theatrical and I‘d really get into it and get emotional when I’d play classical pieces,’ she recalled on Inside the Outside. ‘I had a teacher who tied a string to my wrist and made me play Hanon exercises, which are fast scales up and down the piano. Then she would rest the neck of this Pink Panther action figure on the string and I would have to play really evenly so he wouldn’t fall off the string. I was really good at piano, so my first instinct was to work so hard at [it]. I might not have been a natural dancer but I am a natural musician.’

Stefani’s love of the piano developed further as she got older. Every so often her father would take her to Arthur’s Café where they would watch a singer called Frankie do his set, which included Prince’s saucy song ‘Sexy MotherF***er’. Gaga remembers that every time he’d sing it, she’d feel so embarrassed that her father was hearing these naughty words.

But watching Frankie and the many other artists who appeared at the cafés and listening to her father’s rock and roll at home began to inspire Stefani to take her music in another direction. ‘The only music I knew how to play was classical – Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Rachmaninoff. That’s all I knew. Then my father gave me for Christmas a Bruce Springsteen songbook for the piano. And in it was Thunder Road, which is my favourite Bruce Springsteen song. He said if you learn how to play this song we will take out a loan to buy a baby grand piano. It was the hardest thing for me. I was used to playing these huge pieces that were fifteen pages long and then [by contrast] there were these Bruce Springsteen songs. I opened up the book and there were all these guitar chords on it. It was so confusing so I just started to read it. And eventually I got it down. I knew what the song sounded like because [my dad] played it every day since I was a kid and he would cry every time. He’d say, Baby, I just imagine when you’re eighteen and you leave me for another man. Bruce represents my youth.’ (Inside the Outside)

Whether she was performing music or acting or just plain fooling around, Stefani seemed to be a born entertainer, and whenever she found an opportunity she’d put on a show for anyone who cared to watch. When her parents took her out to restaurants, she would quite happily dance around the table using breadsticks as drumsticks. When she was home she’d record herself singing along to her favourite songs by Michael Jackson or Cyndi Lauper, and would sit transfixed by music award shows on TV, emulating the glamorous red carpet stars by wrapping a big Afghan blanket around her as if it were a designer gown. Then, with a bucket of popcorn clutched in her little hands, she’d parade around the house as if she were attending the big event. Even then the fledgling star was showing early signs of the design ingenuity that she would use years later as one of the greatest pop artists in the world.

Needless to say, at an early age fashion became an incredibly important aspect of young Stefani’s life. And her influences? Well, aside from the stars she idolized on TV, her biggest inspiration was a lot closer to home – her mother, Cynthia. As her daughter recalled it, Mrs Germanotta’s wardrobe was bursting with designer clothes, her outfits designed by the best in the business – Armani, Paloma Picasso, Valentino and Ferragamo. Young Stefani was so in awe of her mother’s stunning wardrobe that sometimes she’d simply lie on her bed and watch her getting dressed, describing it as a ‘marvelling experience’.

‘She always looked more pristine than the other mothers,’ Gaga recalled proudly fashion for the Canadian magazine Flare. ‘I have a lot of her in me. I went through periods where I was sexy, then I was a hippie girl with ripped jeans and then went into a tights-and-leotards phase. Fashion saved my life.’

Stefani’s love of dressing up eventually led to her becoming fascinated with theatre and at preschool she begged to take part in one of their productions, successfully landing the part of Big Billy Goat in a first-grade play of The Billy Goats Gruff. Not content with being given one of the leading roles – though that certainly wasn’t lost on the young girl, who knew even then that she wanted to be a star – she wanted to make sure she totally looked the part and set about creating her horns out of tin foil. Once again, Stefani was demonstrating at her young age an impressively creative mind.

But of course, there was still a long way to go before this young chrysalis became a fully fledged butterfly . . . First of all, like every little girl, she had to go to school. And there she would continue to lay down foundations for her amazing future career.

Chapter 2:

Sacred Heart Attack

Naturally enough for someone who lived in a luxury apartment on the Upper West Side, the young Gaga enjoyed an exclusive education. Stefani attended a girls’ private school, Sacred Heart, that looked more like a palace than a place of learning. Set in two elaborately designed mansions on the corner of East 91st and Fifth Avenue, the impressive and highly regarded school, founded in 1881, was like something you’d see in movies. On the outside, the building was adorned with cherubs, while inside were magnificent marble staircases, thick-piled carpets and polished wooden floors. Unsurprisingly, such an education didn’t exactly come cheap – the Germanottas had to fork out around $23,000 (£14,500) a year for the privilege. But to the proud parents, the sum was justified as they were assured that their children would come away with an education of merit. No doubt they were also influenced by the school’s stellar alumni, which included Gloria Vanderbilt, Caroline Kennedy and socialites Paris and Nicky Hilton.

While the curriculum in the school’s early days had focused very much on etiquette, teaching its young ladies social graces and appropriate behaviour, it had, over the years, moved with the times. So when Stefani entered Sacred Heart, while she could expect to study standard subjects like mathematics, English, history and French, she would also encounter a wider range of topics including economics, computing and sex education.

What excited Stefani most was the improved arts programme at the school, which meant she would be able to continue her piano studies as well developing her vocal and acting skills – three of her greatest passions.

But the Convent of the Sacred Heart was a Catholic school run by nuns, and Stefani would discover that the rules were strict, something that she would find restricting as time went on.

Under the eagle-eyed guidance of headmistress Sister Nancy Salisbury, the school was rather rigid in its outlook, with an emphasis on religion, morality and discipline. Ladylike behaviour wasn’t just encouraged, it was expected. Unsurprisingly, then, the nuns were also pretty particular about how the girls wore their uniforms which, in the lower school, were grey tunics under red-and-white-checked pinafores and, for the upper school, knee-length blue skirts in summer and kilts in winter. Underneath, the girls were advised always to wear blue shorts to protect their modesty. The nuns were so anxious about girls cheekily trying to raise the hem length of their skirts that some would carry a measuring stick to make sure they adhered to the rules.

While she was a pretty obedient student, Gaga has claimed that occasionally she was one of the rebellious few who did indeed dare to raise the skirt length. However, her best pal at the time, Christina Civetta, now a writer and fashion designer, remembers Stefani a little differently. ‘[She] was a straight-A student who wore her skirt to the knee, as we were supposed to, and knee-high socks. Stefani was a good girl, really sweet and normal.’

Despite this slight difference in recollection, Gaga is certainly not too cool to admit that while she was at Sacred Heart she happily toed the line and threw herself into her studies. ‘I went to a lovely school and I got an incredible education,’ she told the Guardian years later. ‘And I actually think my education is what really sets me apart,