SHAPE SHIFTER

Who is Lady Gaga now? A Hollywood superstar, a pop innovator, and a much happier, more grounded creature altogether. But as Jonathan Van Meter discovers, she's still an ever-evolving puzzle all her own. Photographed by Ethan James Green.

The first four or five or six times I encountered Lady Gaga, in London or Paris or New York, backstage in Vegas or Madison Square Garden or the O2 arena, at the top of the Skytree in Tokyo or from inside a giant replica of her fragrance bottle at a party at the Guggenheim, or even when, six years ago, we hung out in her kitchen in Malibu and danced and cried while listening to music-"Like, real Italian style," she said-every single one of those times, in all of those places, she was both there and not there. She was viscerally present and accounted for but also somehow absent. This is not a complaint.

Costumes have a way of upstaging people. You can get so hung up on all the finery and camouflage that you fail to see the person wearing it.

A modern-day Marie Antoinette gown with a four-foot train, to take one example, doesn't just change the way a person moves; it changes the way she behaves. "I don't like the idea of you drinking wine out of a plastic cup," Lady Gaga said to me one time in one such getup-a baroness proffering stemware as she minced toward me. The first time I laid eyes on her in December 2010, she was barefoot, covered in fake blood, mascara running down her face, wearing a robe made of voluminous red feathers-like a cross between Alice Cooper and Big Bird, I wrote. She was dressed like a lunatic and you guessed it-behaving like one. On another occasion-in another astounding frock, hair in a Bride-of-Frankenstein updo-she had on shoes that made her feet look like they were screwed on backward and brought her up to nearly my height. To be clear: Gaga is tiny. But when I was still getting to know her she was acting like a woman who is six feet tall. To wit: She languidly draped her hand in mine so that I could examine her elaborately bejeweled dragon ring. "I'm going through an Elizabeth Taylor moment," she said.