Online Reporter
LOS ANGELES. − No-one wants to be alone, and no job is more isolating than being a pop star.
Just ask Lady Gaga.
Her rise to fame in 2009-10 was unlike anything we’d seen before. One of the first pop stars to harness the power of the internet, she seemed to exist in a permanent onslaught of TMZ photos and gossip blogs.
Their appetite was voracious.
She wore through so many looks and sounds in the space of three years that one critic wrote she was “speed-running Madonna’s entire career”.
And as her fame grew, the headlines became more unhinged. She staged a satanic ritual in a London hotel… She was secretly a hermaphrodite… She planned to saw her own leg off “for fashion”.
When she attended the 2010 MTV Awards in a dress made entirely of meat, nobody seemed to get the joke: Gaga was presenting herself as fodder for the tabloids, there to be consumed.
On stage, she was an object of worship for her fans, the Little Monsters. But anyone who isn’t a megalomaniac knows that that sort of adulation is a distant illusion.
“I’m alone, Brandon. Every night,” Gaga told her stylist in the 2017 documentary, Five Foot Two.
“I go from everyone touching me all day and talking at me all day to total silence.”
Now 38, and happily engaged to tech entrepreneur Michael Polansky, Gaga admits that those years of solitude scared her.
“I think my biggest fear was doing this by myself – doing life on my own,” she tells the BBC.
“And I think that the greatest gift has been meeting my partner, Michael, and being in the mayhem with him.”
The couple have been together since 2020, and revealed their engagement at the Venice Film Festival last September − where Gaga wore her million-dollar engagement ring in public for the first time.
In person, it’s dazzling, with a huge, oval-cut diamond set on a 18-karat white and rose gold diamond pavé band.
But on her other hand, Gaga sports a smaller, more understated ring, featuring a few blades of grass set in resin. It turns out that this is the really special one.
“Michael actually proposed to me with these blades of grass,” she reveals.
“A long time ago, we were in the back yard, and he asked me, ‘If I ever proposed to you, like, how do I do that?’
“And I just said, ‘Just get a blade of grass from the back yard and wrap it around my finger and that will make me so happy’.”
It was a deeply romantic gesture that came tinged with sadness. Gaga’s back yard in Malibu had previously played host to the wedding of her close friend, Sonja Durham, shortly before she died of cancer in 2017.
“There was so much loss, but this happy thing was happening for me,” she recalls of Polansky’s proposal.
“To get engaged at 38… I was thinking about what it took to get to this moment.”
Those feelings ultimately informed a song on her new album, Mayhem.
Called (naturally) Blade of Grass, it finds the star singing about a “lovers’ kiss in a garden made of thorns”, and the promise of love in a time of darkness.
She calls it a “thank you” to her partner. And fans might have a reason to thank him, too.
Mayhem marks Gaga’s full throttle return to pop, after a period where she’d been preoccupied with her film career, and spin-off albums that dabbled in jazz and the classic American songbook.
Speaking to Vogue last year, the singer revealed it was her fiancé who’d nudged her in that direction.
“He was like, ‘Babe. I love you. You need to make pop music’,” she said. − BBC
