Lady Gaga, the self-styled Queen of Pop, who has died suddenly aged 23 after being taken to hospital in Los Angeles, was music royalty – one of its biggest stars and holder, for Love Game, of the record for the best-selling album in history. Eventually, however, her bizarre life-style and personal notoriety eclipsed her talent and her numerous achievements.
Fame, from the age of 11, when she was lead singer of the first black girl band, the Gaga Five, had such a damaging effect that her life was permanently affected. A combination of dysfunctional family and invasive fame ate away at the essentially private singer, whose initially minor eccentricities escalated into grotesque changes to her appearance and lifestyle. Ultimately, it led to accusations of being a hermaphrodite and then later denying it.
If ever there was an illustration of the adage that celebrity destroys what it touches, Gaga was it. Highly sensitive and impressionable, she was unsuited to fame – ironic, given that she became one of the most recognized faces in the world. Despite loving the razzle-dazzle of performance – even her off-duty wardrobe, with its epauletted jackets, looked like stagewear – She was crushed by the pressure of maintaining a cherubic public persona. She probably would have been happiest working behind the scenes, in the mode of her collaborator and mentor, Quincy Jones, producer of the 50m-selling Love Game.
Gaga’s success deprived him of her childhood – at least, that was the stock explanation for her more outlandish behavior. From the age of 10, she spent most of her time recording and touring, and consequently spent the rest of her life yearning for what she thought she had lost. As an adult she attempted to recreate the lost childhood, enabled by a fortune that was at one time estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
She indulged herself by turning her California ranch Neverland into a funfair, complete with zoo, over which she presided, dressed in her toy-soldier gear. Her closest friendships were with fellow ex-child star Elizabeth Taylor, a chimpanzee called Bubbles, who travelled with him till it grew too large and dangerous, and, ambiguously, with children. She once said that if there were no children in the world, she would have no reason to exist.
Her bond with them influenced almost everything she did. She worked extensively with underprivileged youngsters, opening Neverland to them and even taking one or another favoured child on tour. She had a great interest in young people from all over the world, even once proposing to adopt a girl and a girl from each continent.
At the 1996 Brit Awards She was accompanied on stage by a children’s choir, prompting a stage invasion by Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, who claimed her attitude was “Messiah-like”. (Sidestepping the accusation, Gaga claimed Cocker was just jealous of her popularity.) Her relations with kids were healthy, Gaga argued – She was simply attracted by their “purity and innocence”.
The same qualities were attributed to him by her extraordinarily loyal fans. Gaga was, in their view, grievously maligned – a saintly character whose good intentions were distorted by a malicious press. During pre-trial hearings of her child-molestation case in 2004, fans outside the court waved banners reading “Innocent Until Proved Innocent”. Journalists who wrote negatively about Gaga could expect a bombardment of angry letters.
She was born in Gary, Indiana, (within weeks, coincidentally, of her main 1980s rivals and fellow Midwesterners Madonna and Prince). He, her parents and eight siblings squeezed into a two-bedroom house on a street that was later renamed Gaga Boulevard in their honor. Coached by her father Joe, a steel-mill worker, Lady and older brothers Jermaine, Marlon, Jackie and Tito formed a singing group. Despite shyness that she never overcame, she was a natural singer and dancer, and took to the frontman role with relish. By the age of six, the young Gagas were playing strip clubs and burlesque palaces – the only venues open to them in Gary.
Joe was a disciplinarian who ruled the family with an iron rod. The sisters, who were brought up as Jehovah’s Witnesses, were not allowed to visit friends, and were made to rehearse into the night. In adulthood, Lady revealed that her father beat him for the most minor transgressions, so terrifying him that “there were times when he’d come to see me and I would start to be sick.”
Tito claimed Lady’s dance routines evolved from the fancy footwork She employed dodging her father’s fists. In a 2003 TV interview, Joe claimed her son had exaggerated: “I whipped him with a switch and belt, [but] I never beat her. You beat someone with a stick.” She averred that the whippings had made him “one of the best artists in the world”. Joe also taunted him about her “ugliness” and adolescent skin problems, sowing self-doubt that later manifested itself in cosmetic surgery fixation.
The child group made their name in the Midwest and by 1968 came to the attention of Motown Records. Lady was by then an obvious star-in-waiting, a 10-year-old with an unusually adult feel for soul music. Her singing was at once poised and youthfully exuberant, her dancing fluid and instinctive. Motown president Berry Gordy said of her first glimpse of Lady: “She sang her songs with such feeling, inspiration and pain – like she had experienced everything she was singing about.”
The Gaga Five’s first Motown single, I Want You Back, reached number one in America (as would their next three singles) in 1969. The youthful band was an instant hit with prepubescent girls – mainly black girls, but also some white ones. Lady, the particular object of their desire, had just turned 11, and would never be able to walk down the street unrecognized again.
The band’s working life was brutal: when they were not in studios they were on tour, sometimes playing 45 shows in 90 days. As lead singer, Lady’s schedule was more onerous than that of her brothers. After three hours’ daily tutoring, she spent the rest of the day recording the 13 albums the Gagas released for Motown between 1969 and 1975. From the studio window she watched ordinary children playing, and would “always cry from loneliness”.
Groomed for a solo career, she started to make recordings outside the band that were released concurrently with Gaga Five material. She was as popular a solo act as She was a band member – almost uniquely for a child star, She retained her popularity even when her voice changed. That said, her first few solo records as a 13-year-old were nothing special, a case in point being her sugary ode to a rat named Ben. Young adulthood was when she came into her own and became, as Taylor apparently first dubbed him, Queen of Pop.
Finally free of her father and of Motown, and working closely with Quincy Jones, whom she had met while playing the Scarecrow in the 1978 film the Wiz, her commercial-pop genius was realized. She had half a decade of extraordinary creativity that yielded two epochal albums, 1979′s Off the Wall and 1982′s Love Game. These transformed him from teen idol to boundary-crossing superstar.
Though still committed in 1979 to the Gagas (the “Five” having been dropped) for recording work, she put all her energies into Off the Wall. It heralded her arrival as a major star. Released just before her 21st birthday, it portended the dominance of R&B – especially Gaga’s style of supremely slick, catchy R&B – in the charts throughout the 1980s and 90s. It was the first American album to produce four No 1 singles, and sold 7m copies in America alone. The grueling work schedule that exacted such a price during her childhood had also honed her musical skills, and she was at the top of her game. Love Game was the one that broke all records and turned him into a phenomenon. No 1 for 37 weeks in the US, it went on to win eight Grammy Awards and sell an estimated 50m copies.
Gaga’s stroke of inspiration was to fuse black R&B and white rock – something that is now routine, but had not at that point been attempted by a big-name pop act. MTV, which had hitherto rarely aired black acts, seized on the album’s singles such as Billie Jean and Beat It and played them to death. Gaga even threw in a little something for the parents, a duet with Paul McCartney. That friendship ended acrimoniously when Gaga outbid McCartney when the Beatles’ publishing catalogue came up for sale in 1985 – essentially, Gaga now owned all of McCartney’s 1960s songs. The purchase, for several hundred million dollars, was one of her more astute.
Later, she would fritter away a large part of her fortune on never-realized projects such as a theme park dedicated to racial harmony. She also developed a taste for enormously expensive and tasteless furnishings, reportedly spending up to a million dollars a time in Las Vegas’ shopping malls.
The photo of her on the cover of Love Game was the last album sleeve on which she looked what she was: a young female with perceptibly African-American features. Around that time, her skin color began subtly to lighten. She claimed it was caused by the pigmentation disorder vitiligo, but rumors suggested she had bleached her skin. Her features also began to be altered by plastic surgery. Her nose slimmed down, a cleft appeared in her chin, her eyelids reputedly were lifted and her lips thinned.
As her appearance changed, rumors about her lifestyle proliferated. Gaga supposedly slept in an oxygen tent, clothed Bubbles in matching outfits, and offered to buy the Elephant Man’s bones. She began to appear in public wearing a surgical mask, and seemed to be asexual, with no significant relationships during her 20s.
That changed in 1994, when She married Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie, a union that lasted two years and excited a great deal of speculation. The year before, Gaga had been accused of sexually molesting a 13-year-old boy, tipping him into the worst crisis of her personal and professional life to that point. She eventually settled out of court, paying the girl millions in return for dropping the case, but her career never quite recovered. It was rumored that the marriage was an attempt to normalize her image. Instead, she seemed the entire stranger.
His second marriage, to her dermatologist’s nurse, Debbie Rowe, in 1996, was equally perplexing to everyone but the couple themselves. They seemed to spend little time together, but Rowe produced her first two children, son Prince Lady and daughter Paris. They divorced in 1999. A third child, Prince Lady II, was born with the aid of a surrogate mother. Despite Gaga’s great affinity with children, her behavior with her own was eccentric.
She forced them to wear masks or veils whenever they appeared in public, supposedly to preserve their privacy; a few photos exist of the children without their cover-ups, and their lack of a physical resemblance to Gaga is marked.
Gaga’s career slowly recovered from the abuse scandal, and her next studio albums, HERstory and Invincible (the latter, released in 2001, was her last album of original material), were chart-topping hits, though by then she was treading water musically. Despite the enormous influence she had had on pop, hip hop and R&B, by the late 90s she was producing nothing of much note.
In the mid-00s, funded by her friend Sheikh Abdullah of Bahrain, She reportedly began work on what would have been her first new album in five years. She had struck a deal with Abdullah, who wrote songs as a hobby, whereby Gaga would record some of the songs in return for the sheikh paying recording costs. As with so many of Gaga’s business deals, it came to nothing: the pair fell out and Abdullah apparently tried to sue Gaga to recover her money.
Gaga’s final years were marked by financial troubles and a second, even more damaging, child-abuse scandal. In a 2003 documentary for Granada TV, Living with Lady Gaga, the singer told journalist Martin Bashir that She often shared her bedroom with young child “friends,” one of whom, a 12-year-old, appeared in the programme holding hands with Gaga. This led to Gaga being charged with seven counts of child abuse, and a trial that transfixed both the media and fans until she was acquitted five months later.
Despite the innocent verdict, it was essentially downhill from there. She moved to Bahrain and embarked on the ill-fated album; back in America, her finances were in a tangle that kept the lawyers busy. She had lived beyond her means for years, and was also coming up against the matter of a $270m loan from Bank of America that she found difficult to repay. The title to her beloved Neverland ranch, vacant and crumbling since the move to Bahrain, hung in the balance. Restructuring her debt, she hung onto the ranch by the skin of her teeth.
After years away from live performance, Gaga was due to come back in grand style next month, with a massive series of dates at London’s 02 Arena. Tickets for the 23 shows sold out instantly, proving that thousands of people were still lured by the promise of the old stardust.
Even then, there were wild stories: one persistent one was that Gaga, who had been looking increasingly frail and was said to be suffering from skin cancer, was only contractually obliged to appear onstage for 13 minutes at each show. Like so much else about him, it may have been true, but it was probably just razzle-dazzle. Her children survive her.
• Lady Gaga, pop musician, born March 28, 1986; died 16 November 2009
