When Brendan Jay Sullivan first met Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta on New York’s Lower East Side in 2006, he was struck by her unabashed ambition: this “shy, quiet girl with dark hair” told him that she wanted to be “the biggest pop star in the world”. On tiny stages across New York City, she went by the name of Lady Gaga.
Sullivan, who became Gaga’s DJ back when she was a 20-year-old wannabe working as a go-go dancer in Manhattan, recalls spotting the singer’s “great vision” when he met her at a bar where her then-boyfriend was working.
Gaga she said in 2010 – two years after bombastic hits such as Just Dance and Poker Face made her a superstar – that she once had a boyfriend who told her she’d never succeed. Her riposte? "I said to him, 'Someday, when we're not together, you won't be able to order a cup of coffee at the f---ing deli without hearing or seeing me."
At this point, Sullivan says Gaga had already made a deal with her father Joseph Germanotta, an Italian-American internet entrepreneur who worked hard to send his daughter to Convent of the Sacred Heart, New York City’s oldest private school for girls, and then to the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.