17楼
Dancing, diet pills, and one real meal a day was the way she finally
lost weight, according to a friend. �I was naked on a bar with money
hanging out of my tits and ass,� she says. (Gaga has been very open
about having taken cocaine during this period, but none of her friends
from this time recalls any drug use; they say that she told them she
only used cocaine when she was alone.) She and Starlight began opening
for the glam-rockers Semi Precious Weapons; they looked like hair-metal
groupies, running around the stage spraying Aqua Net on fire. �Gaga and I
used to go shopping together, too,� says Justin Tranter, lead singer of
SPW. �Any sex store where 99 percent of the store was made up of DVDs
and sex toys and 1 percent was actual clothing was our favorite place to
shop. Her mom came to my loft once to pick up one Lucite pump that she
left at the show the night before.�
Gaga was enjoying herself, and, as usual, she spread her positive
energy around. �She tried to make everyone feel good,� says Brendan
Sullivan, a.k.a. DJ VH1, who worked with her on some early shows. �I’d
go to her apartment with my unpublished novel, and she would tell me
that I was the most brilliant writer of my generation, the poet laureate
of the Lower East Side. No one else was doing that for me.� She wasn’t
talking much to Fusari�the romance was over�but he caught a show with
Starlight and was appalled. �It was Rocky Horror meets eighties band,
and I didn’t get it at all,� he says. �I told Stefani that I could get
her another D.J., but she was like, �I’m good.’�
But Fusari inserted himself back into the picture, in the spring of
2007, when he heard that his friend Vincent Herbert, a �hustler with a
capital H,� had landed a deal with Interscope to sign new artists.
Within a couple days, Herbert had them on a plane to Los Angeles to meet
Jimmy Iovine, the head of Interscope. Gaga came to the meeting in short
shorts, go-go boots, and a cutoff T-shirt, but Iovine didn’t show up;
they flew back to New York, then were summoned back two weeks later.
Iovine, an executive from Brooklyn who made his name on gangster rap
with Dr. Dre and later rode the wave of nineties soft metal, is known
for his good ears, and after listening to a few tracks in his office, he
stood up and said, �Let’s try this.�
Next: "One day, you’re not going to go into a deli without hearing
me."
Gaga was worried that the label didn’t think she was pretty enough
to be a performer�she was recording tracks with RedOne, a
Moroccan-Swedish producer, but they set her up as a songwriter for the
Pussycat Dolls and Britney Spears (Spears was running around Los Angeles
with a shaved head, so this wasn’t a plum assignment). Herbert even
spent his own money to send her to Lollapalooza over the summer, and he
started to think that her look was wrong�someone in the audience shouted
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18楼 out �Amy Winehouse,� and that made him nervous. �I told her that she
needed to dye her hair blonde, and she did it right away,� says Herbert.
�God bless that girl, she really does listen.�
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19楼 Artists were saying �Here’s my record and album cover,’ not talking
about putting screens on the stage.� She began wearing her crazy disco
outfits everywhere. �She was never out of uniform, if you will,� says
Kierszenbaum. She also took a personal plunge: The day that she shot the
video for �Just Dance� was the same day that she finally left Carl. Her
heart may have been broken, but this was her new life. (Friends say
that she has not been in love since, and the ritualistic killing of male
lovers in her last three videos is related to this breakup.)
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