This article was published in the second issue of Vanity Fair in 2012, and today we offer it again to trace the changes in which Vanity has been a protagonist over the past 20 years. Here are all the articles we republish.
New York, September 11, 2011. Cynthia Germanotta opens the door to the apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where Lady Gaga, born Stefani Joan Angelina Germanotta, grew up. Here Stephanie practiced the piano and dreamed of becoming a star.. And it’s here, despite having a room at a nearby hotel, that Gaga is staying this weekend to sleep on an air mattress on the floor of her former room.
Before me, no journalist had visited Germanotta’s house, bought 18 years ago at a real “bargain price.” Gaga invited me and promised to cook for me. Lady Gaga’s parents are over fifty and have been married for 30 years. Cynthia Germanotta, originally from West Virginia, is a graceful blonde in black glasses, a black lace sweater and black pants. He looks ten years younger than his age. There are also two family dogs: Alice, a 14-year-old beagle, and Lulu, a 3-year-old dachshund. When I arrive, Gaga’s father, Joe Germanotta, is in the basement. Joe from New Jersey.
The apartment is cozy, three floors, with a large beige sofa and many family photos on the piano. The open kitchen has a dining table, and the living room opens onto the yard, where Cynthia grows fennel, arugula, parsley, rosemary and oregano. And on the kitchen counter, next to the sink, is Lady Gaga..
He’s chopping cherry tomatoes for spaghetti sauce. She wears a lace Chanel dress, high Louboutins, stilettos and crystal earrings; she is wearing makeup and a black and white wig on her head. A typical Sunday afternoon at Germanotta’s house.
Gaga takes me around the apartment. Upstairs is her parents’ bedroom and the bedroom she shared with her nineteen-year-old sister Natalie, with a red air mattress on the floor. (“I always live in hotels, it’s cold there. Whenever possible, I prefer to spend time with my parents.”) I watch Gaga make tomato sauce. She adds fennel, rosemary, oregano and leeks—“my secret ingredient”—and makes a salad. All that slicing and dicing in a Chanel dress feels natural to her. He tells me that always being like this is a duty to his fans. “I went to private school and acted like my mother. Every morning she did her hair and dressed in the best she could. So I would often stay up at night to fix my hair and put on makeup before bed so that I would be ready when I woke up in the morning. I liked being glamorous: I felt like a girlR”.
In the living room, Cynthia shows me the three boxes of fan mail she receives for Gaga every week. I read aloud an email sent to her from Maine by a fan, 12-year-old Maddie P. She writes that Gaga encouraged her to help a boy at her school who was being bullied for being gay. Gaga holds her mother’s hand as she listens to the story and cries. We go down to the basement. It is a large room with wood paneling and a large screen TV. Cynthia notes that everything in the room is “Gaga’s stuff” since she doesn’t have her own home, just this one. And Gaga tells me that she never had any intention of settling down, despite rumors swirling over the last year that she and her longtime “on-and-off”—and currently ex—boyfriend, bartender-writer Luke Karl, were looking for Houses.