Free Poker Face by Maureen Callahan Page B

looking at her ass.”
    After her mini-set, she turned around to face Reid, and this part of the story actually aligns with the myth. Says the source: “L.A. just goes, ‘I want you to march downstairs to Business Affairs and we’re going to offer you a deal. Don’t leave the building till you sign.’ ”
    Gaga met with the label’s lawyer, and when she got hold of her own attorney, he asked her who over at the label was handling the deal. Her lawyer told her that the Island Def Jam deal was going to be big—the label had tasked one of their best lawyers with handling it.
    “She would say, ‘I’ll be with this lawyer for the rest of my life; that will never change,’ ” says Starland. “Her lawyer is no longer her lawyer anymore. That will be a common theme.”
    Her contract, according to Gaga, was huge: She told friends that Island Def Jam signed her to an $850,000 deal. Jim Guerinot, who manages, among others, Nine Inch Nails, No Doubt, and the Offspring, says there’s no way Gaga signed a deal worth anything near $850,000.
    “I don’t believe it,” he says. “That’s how ridiculous it is. To give an unknown that much money and a distribution deal . . . Huh? Highly successful artists can occasionally get deals of that nature. It’s absolutely unheard of for new artists.”
    One person who was in the room for the signing and saw the contract insists that $850,000 was the exact figure, and it was Fusari’s very recent, very huge successes with Destiny’s Child and Jessica Simpson that secured Gaga such a huge deal. But another industry veteran says he, too, finds this deal highly, highly unlikely.
    “Rarely in the last ten years were artists getting a check for anything north of $500,000,” he says. “It’s so hard to believe that one artist is getting $850,000 for one album. I don’t know the terms—there are so many factors. It could’ve been a five-album deal.” Fusari’s involvement might have been a help, he says, but even the producer’s reputation would not have translated into that much money. “But you know,” he adds, “I’ve seen crazy shit. There are some bulldog New York attorneys who may get that money.”
    Whatever money she was making had to be divided up. She, Joe, and Fusari had formed a production company together, and it was the company, not Gaga, that was technically signed to Island Def Jam.
    In addition to her 80-20 deal with Fusari, her new manager Besencon was getting a 20 percent cut of everything. Starland, who’d discovered Gaga and was cowriting songs with her, had only a verbal agreement that she, too, would get a cut of any future deal, and she was not pleased when Gaga offered to give her just publishing rights; Starland would only be able to collect if anything she wrote wound up on the record. Starland says Gaga also offered to pay her a $10,000 flat fee.
    “I was like, ‘That’s nice, but given that Laurent’s been in the picture a very, very short time and I’ve been doing this development, I feel I deserve at least half of what Laurent makes—10 percent, and some publishing on two of the songs,’ ” Starland recalls. “And she was like, ‘That’s totally fair.’ ”
    A few days later, Starland says she sat down with Gaga and Fusari at a restaurant on the Upper West Side to go over the terms of the deal. “He said, ‘Wendy, we will all work out something fair and equitable—this would not be happening without you,’ ” she says. “And I was like, ‘Great, so can my lawyer be in touch?’ and he said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”
    Now that she had a deal, Gaga had to hone her stagecraft and her image as fast as possible. She couldn’t afford a stylist and didn’t really have an eye, so she was still relying on the hipster porno-chic of American Apparel. But it only made her appear overtly, plainly sexual, not edgy or outré.
    So she started to experiment with stage looks, which mainly meant performing in her bra or a bikini top. She was young