In Lady Gaga’s Wake

New York City, September 11, 2011: Cynthia Germanotta opens the door to the apartment in the beautiful building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side where Lady Gaga—born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta—grew up. It was here that Stefani got dressed in her school uniform every day to attend the Convent of the Sacred Heart, practiced piano, and dreamed of stardom. And it is where—despite having a suite at a nearby hotel—Lady Gaga is sleeping this weekend, on an air mattress on the floor of her old bedroom. No journalist has ever visited the Germanottas’ home before, but the last time Gaga and I talked, she described the apartment to me, and when I expressed surprise that she said it had several floors, she told me her parents got a “deal” when they bought it, 18 years ago. She suggested that I see it. She also decided she wanted to cook a meal for me. I never really believed all the stuff about how she likes to cook any more than I believed that she really hung out with her old friends at dive bars on the Lower East Side. But, having done the Lower East Side bar trip with her the day before (more about that later), I was looking forward to seeing Lady Gaga at home with her family.

Lady Gaga’s parents are in their mid-50s and have been married for 30 years. They’re savvy and proud and protective of their famous daughter. They’re involved with her business. It is apparent, seeing them all together, that Gaga’s relationship with her family—as well as with her very tight management team—keeps her levelheaded. Cynthia Germanotta, originally from West Virginia, is a graceful blonde. Forget such inspirations as David Bowie or Marilyn Monroe—it is obvious where Gaga got her sense of style. Today, Cynthia is wearing black-rimmed eyeglasses, a lacy black sweater, and black pants. She looks about 10 years younger than her age. (We discuss plastic surgery and she says, “I always tell my daughters it doesn’t make you look younger. It just looks like you’ve had work done.”) Also present are the family’s two dogs—Alice, a 14-year-old beagle, and Lilu, a 3-year-old dachshund. When I arrive, Gaga’s father, Joe Germanotta, is downstairs in the basement. He’s from New Jersey and is the likely owner of the Bruce Springsteen Darkness on the Edge of Town CD boxed set on the windowsill next to the black baby-grand piano that dominates the living room. In the entrance hallway, there’s a frame with photos of Gaga with Springsteen, Elton John, and Sting, at last year’s Rainforest concert at Carnegie Hall. The apartment is a cozy triplex, with a large beige sofa and many framed family photos on the piano. There is a dining table by the open kitchen, a garden off the living room where Cynthia grows fennel, arugula, Italian parsley, rosemary, and oregano, and where there are small fig, olive, and lemon trees. And, at the kitchen counter by the sink, chopping cherry tomatoes in half for a spaghetti sauce she prepares from scratch, is Lady Gaga. She is wearing a black lace Chanel dress, extra-high Louboutin stiletto heels, glass earrings, full makeup, and a Daphne Guinness-inspired black-and-white wig. Just another Sunday afternoon at the Germanotta home.

Gaga removes the pink ribbon from the box of macarons I have brought from the newly opened Ladurée bakery, on Madison Avenue. She puts the Ladurée box on top of the Dunkin’ Donuts box already on the counter and ties the ribbon around her hairdo. She then proceeds to take me on a tour of the apartment. On the top floor are her parents’ bedroom and the bedroom she shared with her sister, Natali (who, now 19, attends art school in the city), where the red air mattress is on the floor. I note that there are no doors on the bedrooms—her parents could have heard everything she and her sister said growing up. “Yes,” she says, “and I heard them too.” (Later that evening, when we’re at the hotel for a lengthy chat, I ask, Why the air mattress on the floor instead of this suite with the room service, the marble bathrooms, the magnificent views of Central Park? “I’m in hotels all the time,” she says, “and they’re cold. None of this really matters to me. When I can, I’d much rather spend the time with my parents.”)

In the apartment, I watch Gaga prepare the tomato sauce. She adds fennel, rosemary, oregano, and leeks—“My secret ingredient”—and she and her mother discuss whether we should have whole-wheat pasta. She makes a salad. All this slicing and dicing while wearing the Chanel dress seems perfectly natural in the Gaga world. People always ask me what she’s really like. This is what she’s really like. When we talk later, she says she feels she owes it to her fans to always look this way. “I went to an all-girls school,” Gaga says, “and I was very much like my mother; she would do her hair every morning and get dressed nice. So, most of the time I would stay up all night, straightening my hair, and I would even put my makeup on before bed sometimes, so that when I woke up in the morning it would be ready for school. I just liked to be glamorous. It made me feel like a star.”

Joe Germanotta comes upstairs, wearing jeans and a red polo shirt. “That’s a nice dress,” he says, complimenting his daughter. We talk about the Yankees, and he tells me he purchased four seats from the old Yankee Stadium to put in the garden of the restaurant he’s currently renovating at 70 West 68th Street. The restaurant will be called Joanne, after his late sister, and there will be a double fireplace between the main room and the garden area; people will be able to sit outside and watch games on TV. Cynthia is in charge of the restaurant’s décor; she’s picked every tile, every lamp, every fabric, every painting; it’s easy to see where Gaga got her attention to detail. Joe’s been working with a crew for five months to get the restaurant ready, and the plan is for it to be open this month. Cynthia shows me three large U.P.S. boxes of fan mail in the living room that she gets for Gaga every week. I read aloud an e-mail a Gaga fan sent me—12-year-old Maddie P., from Maine. She wrote that Gaga inspired her to help a boy in her school who had been harshly bullied for being gay. Gaga held her mother’s hand while listening to this and tears rolled down her cheeks. Cynthia shows me a letter from the White House commending Gaga for her work on behalf of abolishing “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and then says that she’ll head up Gaga’s new Born This Way Foundation—a charity that will empower youth, with an emphasis on anti-bullying.

Joe and Cynthia take me downstairs to see the basement, which includes a space where Joe used to make his own wine. The basement is a large, wood-paneled room, with a big screen for watching TV shows, baseball games, and N.C.A.A. March Madness. All around the room, Cynthia points out, is “Gaga’s stuff”—as she still has no permanent home other than this one. And, Gaga says, despite all the rumors last year of house-hunting with her on-and-off boyfriend of six years, the bartender/writer Luc Carl, she has no plans to settle down. “Gypsy queen couldn’t take the leap,” she says. “I’m not going to pay millions of dollars for something. I can’t commit to being an adult—I’m not ready.” The basement walls are covered with Gaga’s framed platinum albums, posters from her concerts, and all-access backstage passes. Joe says being on the road is “a lonely life,” so one or both of her parents accompany Gaga on tour when they can. We sit down at the table to eat. In addition to Gaga and her parents, we are joined by Lane Bentley, Gaga’s day-to-day manager. She’s worked with Gaga for three years, has traveled with her since last June, and handles literally hundreds of e-mails daily regarding Gaga’s schedule. We all hold hands as Gaga says grace. And then we eat the whole-wheat spaghetti, with the delicious homemade sauce, and the salad, and drink a bottle of red wine. And, for the record, Gaga ate a lot. “You’ve got a hit,” her father told her about the sauce. After the meal, Gaga went to the piano to play us a new song she was working on about Princess Diana—a song about fame and celebrity death. Even in its rough stages, it has her trademark catchy chorus, and she sang the sad, slightly bitter lyrics in full voice. As I watched her parents listen to her, I could see years of such tableaux: the young Gaga at the piano, singing, her parents watching. “Oh yes,” Cynthia says when I ask if it had always been this way. “We didn’t push it. She was just determined. But we wouldn’t have encouraged her to pursue this if we didn’t think she had the talent.”

In the mere four years that she’s had a recording contract, Gaga, now 25, has become a global phenomenon. She was No. 11 on last year’s Forbes list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women, coming in ahead of Oprah Winfrey. She’s sold a total of 23 million albums and 63 million singles worldwide. Her net worth has been reported to be over $100 million. Her sophomore album, Born This Way, sold more than 1.1 million copies in its first week of release, last May. She performed for 2.4 million people in 202 shows in 28 countries on the year-and-a-half-long Monster Ball Tour. She has more than 44.5 million “Likes” on Facebook, and more than 15 million people follow her on Twitter. According to her manager, Troy Carter, initially she wasn’t an easy sell, because (hard to imagine now) at first, way back in 2008, her songs were considered “dance.” Radio stations wouldn’t play her music. Still, Carter says, “she walked into my office in 2007 wearing fishnet stockings, a leotard, big black sunglasses, and confidence. Too much confidence. She walked in as a superstar.” The producer Vincent Herbert, who has worked with Stevie Wonder, Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, Toni Braxton, and scores of others, signed Gaga to his own label at Interscope Records in 2007. “I’ve never met an artist so dedicated,” he says. “The first time I met her, she told me, ‘If you sign me, I’ll be the most loyal artist you’ll ever sign. I want to be the biggest pop star in the world. I want to sell 10 million albums.’ That was our first meeting. I knew immediately that she’d be our new superstar, our new Michael Jackson.”

In the past year alone, Gaga has appeared on numerous television shows including Saturday Night Live, where she performed in skits and displayed a real comedic flair; she could easily host the show if she ever had the time. She had her own HBO special: the Monster Ball concert, live from Madison Square Garden. She appeared on the red carpet at last year’s Grammys inside a “vessel”—a semi-transparent egg designed by Hussein Chalayan. At the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, she wore a dress made of actual meat (which was chemically treated and then enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame). And this past year, she opened the MTV V.M.A.’s dressed as her alter ego, a guy named “Jo Calderone,” who resembled either Ralph Macchio or Marlon Brando, depending on your age or point of view (more about that later, too). Wearing a man’s Brooks Brothers suit (and prosthetic male genitalia inside her trousers), smoking a cigarette, and guzzling a bottle of beer, she shocked the audience and instantly made every female star in attendance who had pink hair or wore a contraption on her head look dated.

Since Lady Gaga’s album Born This Way hit the charts last May, she has promoted it all over the world. She recorded “The Lady Is a Tramp” with Tony Bennett for his Duets II album, prompting Bennett to rave that she’s one of the greatest talents he’s ever seen. When she performed for the Robin Hood Foundation benefit in New York City last May, according to David Saltzman, executive director of the charity, she was one of the very few artists to ever refuse the usual high-six-figure fee, insisting instead that the money go back to help anti-poverty programs in the city. She sang at President Clinton’s 65th-birthday concert at the Hollywood Bowl. She met President Obama, who said that in her 10-inch-high heels she was “intimidating,” and she implored him to do something about bullying. (“Nothing with her is small,” says Bobby Campbell, the head of marketing for her management company. “So if she’s going to be in a room with Obama, she’s going to have to talk about what she wants to achieve in the world.”) And by the time this magazine is on sale, she will have published a book in collaboration with photographer Terry Richardson (Lady Gaga X Terry Richardson) and released the DVD of the HBO special as well as the album Born This Way: The Remix. She headlined an ABC-TV special the night of Thanksgiving, where she performed and cooked with Art Smith (who will be the executive chef of her parents’ restaurant). She and Nicola Formichetti, her close collaborator for her every outfit and every look and the fashion director of her Haus of Gaga, created “Gaga’s Workshop”—a full floor of holiday items selected or inspired by her—at Barneys on Madison Avenue. (A percentage of the profits from all that stuff will benefit the Born This Way Foundation.) She’ll perform in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. She continues her work as a spokesman for Viva Glam and creative director for Polaroid, and is developing a fragrance which is scheduled to debut in 2012. And she is eager to start a Born This Way tour, which could begin sometime in 2012 and will last well into 2013. When I asked Troy Carter if, after three weeks of vacation, Gaga gets antsy and wants to work, he laughed and said, “Three weeks? Or three hours?” When I suggested to Gaga that maybe she works too hard, does too many TV shows, she said, “I love to sing. I love to dance. I love show business. I need it. It’s like breath.” I asked her if she worries about overexposure, or backlash. She said, “I’ve already had the backlash.” But, I said, you don’t want to wind up some crazy casualty. “If I’m supposed to end up like some crazy casualty,” she said, “then that’s my destiny.”

New York City, September 10, 2011: Gaga is taking me to some of her old hangouts, where, she tells me, she grew up. “This is really where I got my education,” she says about the Lower East Side neighborhood where she lived alone in a walk-up apartment at 176 Stanton Street from May 2005 to May 2007, after dropping out of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. This is where she slept on a mattress on the floor, and where, she says, “I wore the same outfit every day. I never did laundry—I stank.” It’s also where she took drugs, wrote songs, and lugged her keyboard up and down several flights of stairs to do club shows. I told her that, even though she’s always said she avoids celebrity parties and prefers to spend time with old friends when she’s in New York, I wasn’t sure I bought it. (“I don’t understand that whole thing of … gathering … in tribes,” she says. “Like a club of famous people. Why would I want to have champagne with celebrities?”) So today she’s called some of her pals to join us on an expedition. She’s just finished a photo shoot, she is spray-tanned and wearing sunglasses, a Lever Couture black lace see-through dress, black underwear, very high heels, and a black lace cape that has been dipped in latex. She rides downtown in a large S.U.V. and insists on sitting in the front seat, with her legs splayed across the dashboard, “because,” she says, “I don’t like to feel cramped.” At East Houston and Avenue B she wants to get out and walk. This foray is not like her appearance on 60 Minutes; no camera crew follows us and no crowd gathers. With her security team a few paces behind us, we walk with Bo O’Connor—her best friend since she was four years old—Lane Bentley, and Bobby Campbell. People on the street occasionally stop and stare, say hello, or ask to take a picture with her. (She says yes every time.) But we manage to walk around fairly hassle-free. She’s showing me some of the landmarks from when she lived in the area. She’s upset that a favorite Mexican restaurant, on Rivington Street between Essex and Norfolk, went out of business. So has a beauty-supply store that she loved. We walk into a T-shirt store owned by a friend of hers. She points out various bars—St. Jerome’s on Rivington, where her former boyfriend worked and where her friend Lady Starlight D.J.’d and go-go-danced, and 151, which some people in the neighborhood refer to as “the cave.” There’s a biker bar where, she says, “I used to stand outside and do drugs.” We walk by a park where Dominican families hang out and listen to music and where, she says, “the rats that ran across that street were huge.” She shows me the liquor store across the street from her old apartment and says, “If I was really fucked up, I would call them to deliver.” She had money for liquor delivery? “Well,” she says, “a $4 bottle of wine.”

And then we go into the Johnsons—a small bar on Rivington. While Lane and Bobby go to the pool table in the back, Gaga, Bo, and I sit at the bar. I say it’s barely five P.M., perhaps a bit early to start drinking. “Are you kidding?,” Gaga says. “Back in the day, this would be late.” Bo and I order beer, and Gaga orders a shot of Jameson’s. For the next three hours, Bo, Gaga’s friend Breedlove (a musician who also does the makeup for the Broadway show Wicked), and Lady Starlight (née Colleen Martin) sit and talk with Gaga and me about their days on the Lower East Side and their friendships. Lady Starlight, who’s preparing to go on tour as the opening act for Judas Priest, gives Gaga a tie-dyed red velour dress and a velour jacket in various shades of gold. Breedlove talks about how they used to kill time in this very bar all day “waiting for Judy,” their code name for cocaine. Gaga talks about how she woke up one day on her tour bus and realized what an idiot she’d been and never touched the drug again. She says that Bo made her understand that, even after working for 17 hours, or after a flight to Tokyo—no matter how exhausted she is—if her phone rings in the middle of the night and it is her parents or Bo, she has to pick it up. Gaga recalls the first time she saw Lady Starlight go-go-dance on a bench in the corner at St. Jerome’s. “There was something ... off about it,” Gaga says of Starlight’s performance, “something awkward and uncomfortable. But she was so unapologetic and interesting; I wanted to be like that.” About Gaga, Lady Starlight says, “She’s such an awesome person that you can’t not like her. We hung out, we started to perform together, and people thought we were sisters, or girlfriends—neither of which we ever denied. She has such positive energy; it’s so inspirational to me.” Gaga always credits Lady Starlight with influencing her, and Lady Starlight says, “First of all, no one else gives that kind of credit, but she always does. And I swear to you, everyone says when people get famous they don’t change, and it’s just not true. But she has not changed. [In those early days] I just tried to show her, Don’t be afraid of anything. Go to whatever lengths we need to go to to get people shocked. It was, like, live it and believe it.” Gaga talks about her next tour, and she talks about her fans. It always comes back to her fans. (Nicola Formichetti had told me that when he first met Gaga, three years ago, at a photo shoot early in the morning in Malibu, she showed up in full makeup, wig, heels—the whole bit. And then she took it all off and did it again for the shoot. “She always says to me, ‘I don’t want my fans to see me without my high heels on,’ ” Nicola recalls. “She says, ‘They’ll kill me. They need me to be like this.’ People always ask me what is she really like, and you know, this is who she is.”)

The Mandarin Oriental hotel, New York City, September 11, 2011: Following the afternoon at her parents’ apartment, over the course of three hours (and before she returns to the air mattress to sleep), Gaga talks to me about her work, her fans, her politics, and her private life. She tells me she is seeing someone new (who knows if her rumored romance with Vampire Diaries actor Taylor Kinney will stand the test of time), but she is notoriously private about her private life. “I can’t imagine that people sit and talk for hours about their marriages and their personal relationships,” she says. “It seems strange to me. I always try to be honest with my fans, because I feel like I’ve built this goodwill with them where they know that I’m telling them the truth. The only thing I’m not always forthright with [are] my relationships, because I think it’s not classy to exploit your relationships. I have a very giving heart I’m a lot like my mother. I just let people so far in. And with men, I tend to let them in so far in my heart and my soul because I’m emotionally available. The difference between being with your fans and being with a lover is that with my fans I know what I mean to them, and I will die protecting what we have. I only know the happiness of putting a smile on someone’s face from the stage. But I have never felt truly cherished by a lover. I have an inability to know what happiness feels like with a man. I have this effect on people where it starts out good. Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

“Perhaps it’s a whose-dick-is-bigger contest. If I go to the piano and write a quick song and play it back, they are angry with how fast and effortless it is. That’s who I am, and I don’t apologize for it. But it’s a hideous place to be in when someone that you love has convinced you that you will never be good enough for anyone. I had a man say to me, ‘You will die alone in a house bigger than you know, with all your money and hit records, and you will die alone.’ ” I suggest that perhaps she’s picked the wrong men. “That’s what my mother says,” she admits. “And even though I know it sounds a bit Hallmark, whenever I [was] in that kind of stressful, worthless moment, I would think, I’ll show you. But it’s more than just saying, ‘Oh, they can’t handle a strong woman.’ ‘Oh, I’m intimidating.’ ‘Oh, it’s the money.’ I think what it really is, is that I date creative people. And I think that what intimidates them is not my purse; it’s my mind.” I suggest that she’s just going to have to find somebody more talented than she is. “Yes, please,” she says.

Then she laughs and says the weird thing is, after she’s left a few people, they’ve asked her to marry them. “How fuckin’ romantic, you asshole. Sure, pop a ring on my finger and make it all better. I can buy myself a fuckin’ ring.” She continues: “I say this honestly, and this is my new thing as of the past year: when I fight with someone I’m in a relationship with, I think, What would my fans think if they knew this was happening? How would they feel about my work and about me as a female if they knew I was allowing this to go on? And then I get out. [My fans] saved me from myself, because they would never allow it—the same way I would never allow anything to hurt them. And I have always picked the music first. If anything gets in music’s way, they’re gone. My work has always been primary. It’s not money and it’s not record sales and it’s not photographs. It’s this invisible thing I imagine all the artists I ever loved could smell that energy.”

One of the things that made Gaga more aware of how she was in relationships was the acting piece she did as “Jo Calderone” for the MTV awards. “I thought it would be an interesting cultural exercise to create someone [who’s] not me,” she says, “[someone] infinitely more relatable than me. A blue-collar Italian guy in a Brooks Brothers suit who just wants this girl to stay the hell home. It took a performance piece for me to understand things about who I am. And through doing this [with acting coach Larry Arancio] I learned about how I am in bed. I said, ‘Isn’t it strange that I feel less able to be private in private, and more able to be private in public?’ And Larry said, ‘Well, maybe that’s the problem.’ And I said, ‘That’s exactly the problem.’ When I’m onstage, I’m so giving and so open and myself. And when the spotlight goes off, I don’t know quite what to do with myself. As we were working, and talking this through, Larry told me to write everything down. And I had to get the prosthetic cock and balls hanging between my legs—how else could I walk like a guy? And I remember one of the things I said [when writing] was that I cover my face a lot when I have an orgasm. Like I’m ashamed or something.” And so, when she performed this onstage as “Jo” talking about Lady Gaga, she said, “When she comes, she covers her face, like she doesn’t want me to see, like she can’t stand to have an honest moment when nobody’s watching.” She also utilized “Jo” in her video for “You and I”: “It was a sweet and youthful moment in a cornfield where I could create what the most perfect relationship would be like,” she says. “It was a metaphor. I haven’t had it yet.”

As the sun goes down and it starts to get dark in the suite, all the crudités, figs, and pomegranates are gone from the room-service tray—yes, we ate even after that meal at her parents’. We sip some red wine and the conversation turns to politics. I ask Gaga what she cares about in regard to what’s happening in our country. “I care about gay marriage. I care about immigration. I care about education,” she says. “I care about families and what is taught in schools and what is taught at home. And I feel liberated by my ability to be political with no political affiliation.

“I think that we’re the land of the free and the home of the brave and inviting people to come in and pursue the American Dream,” she continues. “And now we’re kicking everybody out and essentially making citizens explain for themselves why they should be as equal to the person sitting next to them. I don’t understand why anyone would interpret the Constitution as more relevant for one person over another, based on choices that have nothing to do with committing a crime.” We discuss, among other things, the current presidential candidates, the Tea Party, Fundamentalists, and a woman’s right to choose. “How can we create within society a sense of respect and leadership [when a woman is put in a position] where she’s so young and has to make a choice,” Gaga says. “The problem is not women being irresponsible. The problem is everyone being irresponsible. I talk to my sister about this a lot because she’s young. Maybe sex isn’t that big a deal anymore, but I don’t have sex without monogamy, and maybe that’s very old-fashioned. But still, the way men treat women in this society … How is it O.K. for a guy not to call a girl back after sex? And how can you deny a woman the right to choose [whether or not] to have a child? It’s completely outrageous.”

Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, Staten Island, New York, October 11, 2011: Lady Gaga is directing the video for her new single, “Marry the Night.” She wrote the treatment for it over a year ago and tells me it’s “autobiographical.” By the time you’re reading this story, the video will likely be out, and while she may not spell it out, she wants people to interpret the video for themselves. But on this night, while it’s being filmed on a closed set, what I see being filmed is a very, very personal story. There is footage of Gaga in a dance class, when she was just starting her career. There is a scene where she is lugging her keyboard up the flights of stairs in her old apartment building, with neighbors coming out of their apartments to stare at her. The director of photography is Darius Khondji, who did Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, and Gaga speaks to Darius in fairly fluent French. She laughs when she sees the playback of her falling down the stairs—very physical, Lucille Ball-style—with her keyboard. And then there are the two scenes that she says depict the worst day of her life.

Over a year and a half ago, when she talked to me about “the worst day of my life,” she said she had never talked about it before. But all she would reveal at that time was that she called her mother, who screamed into the phone and went to get her at her Stanton Street apartment, and that she was dropped by her first record label, Island Def Jam, on the same day. Soon afterward, she and her mother went to visit her grandmother in West Virginia. Now, in this video, she says, she is reliving “the worst day of my life.” In one scene, Gaga, with obvious bruises on her body, looks completely drugged and out of it as she is wheeled on a gurney into a hospital—which, she pointedly tells me, is a “women’s clinic.” (Although, she says, laughing, in this video “the nurses are wearing Calvin Klein ‘uniforms’ and Yves Saint Laurent shoes.”) Following the hospital scene, a woman playing the part of her best friend, Bo, takes her back to her Stanton Street apartment, where Gaga undresses and gets into bed. And then, after she’s in bed, she gets a phone call informing her that she’s been dropped by her record label. Prior to filming this scene, Gaga asks the few of us assembled in her trailer how far she should go with this. She decides to go all the way. “It’s chaotic,” she says, “and sad. But I don’t want it to be safe.”

Outside the set made to look like her original apartment—with a mattress on the floor, dirty dishes in the sink, a hot plate, open cereal boxes, a leather jacket draped over a chair, a keyboard—she prepares to film the scene. She has a short dark wig on and is wearing a Stéphane Rolland dress that has latex blood along the hem. She and “Bo” are wearing gloves and heels. “We look like we just came from church,” she says, joking, then takes a sip out of a bottle of Jameson’s. I mutter something about how the Catholic Church will view this. “What, as if I’m their pinup girl to begin with?” she says. Clearly, this was a traumatic day; now this video is a cathartic experience for her. The soundtrack comes on; she tells me it’s the Beethoven sonata Pathétique. As she prepares to film the scene, she starts to cry, and hugs her choreographer, Richie Jackson. She’s the director and the actress, and, she says, with those two jobs “I have to get my bearings.” Then she adds, “I’m getting ready to relive the worst day of my life.” Tears roll down her face, and she turns to me. But, I say, you won. You won.

The following night, motor homes and trucks are lined up on 126th Street in Harlem. Gaga is filming another scene for the “Marry the Night” video, this time on the rooftop of a parking garage. Joe Germanotta is there; Cynthia had been there earlier. Joe and I talk about how pissed off we are about the Yankees’ loss in the playoffs and Alex Rodriguez in particular. Everyone is given earplugs because cars are about to be exploded. The pyrotechnic guys are wearing what look like protective fireproof suits. They set fire to three cars. The explosions are loud; it’s like an action movie. Gaga, wearing a short blond wig, a skimpy black leather outfit, and thigh-high black leather boots, says in a determined voice, “I’m going in.” And as the cars burst into flames and we all hold our collective breath, Gaga walks—no, she struts—fearlessly, up to the fire.