Poker Face by Maureen Callahan Read Free Book Online Page B

anniversary celebration of MOCA (the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles). Her piano (not seen here) was designed by famed artist Damien Hirst.
© Mario Anzuoni/Reuters/Corbis

Chapter Three
Queen of the Scene
    S ullivan and Gaga wound up working together, mainly due to the proximity effect. “I was DJing in the bar, her boyfriend was the bartender, he had a bunch of terrible bands that never went anywhere that I’d book at different shows . . . and she was just part of that,” he says. “We couldn’t help but hang out every single day.” Her clique was formed out of equal parts affinity and necessity: Starland was helping with Fusari and a future record deal; Starlight was giving her a crash course in performance art and Lower East Side hipster-ism; Sullivan was a skilled, popular DJ who could help her with bookings.
    And soon enough, Gaga was go-go dancing, under Starlight’s tutelage, while Sullivan DJ’d at spots like St. Jerome’s, Don Hill’s, and Luke & Leroy’s, three of the most popular bars for the disheveled and disaffected. Once in a while, Gaga would sing; for a friend’s birthday party at the Beauty Bar on 14th Street, another cool-kids hangout retrofitted with 1950s-style cone-shaped hairdryers and manicure stations, she popped out of a cake and sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” à la Marilyn Monroe. Even then, her friends sensed she was going to make it.
    “I used to walk down the street like I was a fucking star,” she has said. “I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be—and then to fight so hard for it every day that the lie becomes the truth.”
    “The difference” with Gaga, says Sullivan: “She’s, like, four-eleven. She’s got a really tiny voice. She was not the cutest girl when she was younger. She’s used to people ignoring her, basically. But when she gets up on a stage and has a microphone in her hand, she feels for the first time like she’s interacting with people in a different way. Rather than people stooping over to listen to her, people are craning their heads forward to see her better. And that’s what we talk about when we talk about ‘the fame.’ ”
    Lady Starlight was the one who schooled Stefani in burlesque , the downtown bar scene, and how to light fires with hairspray. She took Stefani to her favorite underground party, Frock ’n’ Roll in Long Island City, thirty minutes away by train, in Queens. Long Island City has, in recent years, become the new Williamsburg, which for a while was the new Lower East Side. Long Island City is home to this generation’s starving artists, but it’s also home to the more experimental Museum of Modern Art offshoot P.S.1. Matthew Barney has his studio here.
    Stefani’s assimilation into the scene wasn’t going well. She didn’t look the part, didn’t get all the esoteric references. “You know how it is in those kinds of artsy circles,” Starlight told the New York Post. “People are a little snooty.”
    But Stefani kept at it. She auditioned for a burlesque spot at the Slipper Room, a bordello-ish bar/performance space on Orchard and Stanton streets on the Lower East Side.
    “I thought she was just a nice crazy girl from Jersey,” says proprietor James Habacker, who hired her on the spot after her first audition in 2007. (He, like many of downtown New York’s nightlife denizens, has trouble recalling exact dates.) Gaga’s day look, he says, was “kind of slutty.” He laughs. Habacker, who cuts a dandyish figure in an expertly tailored olive green overcoat and wavy hair chopped to his cheekbones, is sitting in a back room in the basement of his venue; there are two facing sofas, a wet bar, and a huge silver plate on the coffee table sprinkled with cigarette ashes. He remembers her as always being “super-nice to me,” very career-minded, very mature. And not a little off.
    “She would do some grinding, get down to pasties and a G-string. She was bringing in some