Poker Face by Maureen Callahan Read Free Book Online

celebrity in the scene, a sweet girl who worked a tough, heavy-metal look, who had gigs at all the right bars and knew all the right kids and could get into all the right parties. Gaga wanted to be Starlight’s friend.
    “She was, and is, incredibly focused and motivated about succeeding,” says Starlight, who, back in 2007, with her long black hair, heavy bangs, and misguided dress sense, looked like Stefani’s twin. (In pictures taken of the two of them, it’s hard to figure out who’s who.) She vividly recalls their first meeting, back around 2006: “She tipped me,” Starlight says. “In my panties.”
    Stefani got Starlight’s number from Lüc and, just as she’d successfully done with Wendy Starland, began courting her as a best friend. “You couldn’t help but notice her,” says Starlight, who explains that this was not necessarily the best thing. Starlight, who claims to have been born in 1980 but may be ten years older, says that Stefani looked “abrupt and out of place” among the neighborhood’s hipster squad. “She wore spandex, some kind of unitard.”
    Fusari also remembers Stefani working out her look during this time. He was shocked at both its unadulterated poor taste and Stefani’s disregard for what anyone else thought. “It started to evolve into this thing. . . . I don’t want to say I started to question it, but I would keep my fingers crossed when she’d show up to meetings,” Fusari says. “I could never tell what she’d wear. The color schemes would be really tight leopard-print pants with one-foot-tall red pumps. I was like, ‘Is this The Rocky Horror Picture Show ?’ Walking down the street with her, honestly, no exaggeration, 90 percent of people would stop in their tracks. You don’t expect that in New York City. I’d be like, ‘Stef, you gotta walk a little bit ahead of me. People are gonna say I might be with a prostitute. Or a transsexual prostitute.’ It wouldn’t even faze her.”
    A friend who met Stefani not long after has a similar recollection: “People would stare,” she says. “She [didn’t look] as insane as she does now, but she was definitely not the average person walking down the street. She would wear these leotards from American Apparel—it was almost like she had her underwear on over her clothes.”
    “The big outfit was fishnets and a backless leotard with a chain belt,” says her friend Sullivan, who first met Stefani at St. Jerome’s, where Lüc bartended, in December 2006. “She’d wear that and high heels and a leather jacket. That was her jam.” He recalls her introducing herself as a singer; Sullivan was often spinning at St. Jerome’s. Stefani had just begun dating Lüc; Sullivan says Lüc was extremely possessive.
    That night, Sullivan was paying more attention to Stefani than to his date, who he knew Lüc also had a crush on. Sullivan found that amusing. He and Stefani were bonding over music and performing, and they decided to exchange numbers. That was enough, Sullivan says, to set Lüc off, which he still finds really funny.
    First, Sullivan says, he was putting her name in his phone, but she told him not to punch in “Stefani.” She told him to use “Gaga.” Lüc was already agitated, and then she got a call. “Lüc goes, ‘Who’s calling you at eleven at night?’ and she goes, ‘My producer,’ ” says Sullivan, laughing. Frustrated, Lüc then turned to Sullivan and yelled, ‘Stop talking to my girlfriend, man!’ ”
    He and Lüc got into a bit of a typically pathetic Lower East Side pissing match over who was cooler, more connected, had the more desirable partner. At least, Sullivan says, he had the dignity not to brag that his date had once been involved with Moby, and that Moby hated Sullivan, and how cool was it that an internationally famous musician not only knew who he was but actively disliked him.
    Lüc, Sullivan thought, had not yet mastered the difficult, necessary downtown art of seeming not to