After a sheltered born-again childhood, Katy Perry turned herself into pop’s pantheistic princess—eager to experiment with herself, her art, and her marriage to the controversial British comedian Russell Brand. Finding the 26-year-old musician amid the cupcakes, cotton candy, and cleavage of her world tour, Lisa Robinson learns about the reason for last year’s super-secret wedding, the core beneath the cute-fest, and the belief that made Perry a multi-platinum star.
Los Angeles, February 10, 2011: The names of the stars residing at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Grammy weekend sound like a Monty Python version of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table: Prince, Lady Gaga, Sir Mick Jagger, and the staff of Sir Elton John. Across town at the Los Angeles Forum—which three decades ago hosted concerts by the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin—pop princess Katy Perry rehearses for her 41-city, nine-month California Dreams world tour. Tonight, three nights before the Grammys (Katy has four nominations, including the all-important album of the year), she’ll do a run-through of her show for “friends and family.” Backstage, in Katy’s wardrobe room, stylist Johnny Wujek oversees a medley of frothy, flimsy, girlie ensembles, all pink and turquoise and bright green and red. There are hearts and flowers and flirty polka dots and moonbeams, feathered concoctions, and a skirt made out of yummy-looking, multicolored, three-dimensional fabric cupcakes. “This is only the beginning,” Johnny tells me, “of a very long game of dress-up.” Among the “family” out front, waiting for the run-through, which will eventually start an hour late, are Katy’s 63-year-old parents—Mary and Keith Hudson—evangelical, traveling ministers who don’t look like any ministers I’ve ever seen. Mary, who claims she once dated Jimi Hendrix and whose brother was the late film director Frank Perry, wears jeans, makeup, and a cute leather jacket. She tells me she’s writing an autobiography. Keith, who hung out with Timothy Leary in the 1960s, is bald, wears a black leather jacket and black-rimmed eyeglasses, and is, as Katy tells me later, “just not what you’d expect [from] a Christian minister. He always has that kind of Harley-Davidson-biker, Mr. Clean look.” The couple found each other and religion around the same time and raised Katy, her older sister, Angela, and her younger brother, David, in a very sheltered, religious home; after moving seven times, they settled in Santa Barbara, California, where Katy grew up.
In front of the Forum stage, blowers pump out the smell of sticky, sweet cotton candy. Bubbles are also involved in this fantasy, Candyland, Wizard of Oz-theme production. In the last three years, Katy Perry has released two multi-platinum albums (One of the Boys, Teenage Dream) and sold more than 50 million digital downloads of radio-ready, catchy hit singles (including “Ur So Gay,” “Hot N Cold,” “I Kissed a Girl,” “California Gurls,” “Teenage Dream,” “Firework,” and “E.T.”). She has more than six million Twitter followers, and is the first female artist in more than 20 years to have four No. 1 singles from the same album. Later, she’ll describe her show to me as “candy on crack,” adding, “I’m really hamming it up on this tour. I’m just going for the kill on cuteness.” Indeed, it does look and feel like a girl’s version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
But after the pink, ruched satin curtain rises and Katy sings and dances through her show, it becomes clear that there is more here than the va-va-voom cartoon that first meets the eye. She does amusing acoustic versions of Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin’ ” and Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair.” She slows down “I Kissed a Girl,” performing it almost chanteuse-style. Should she ever want—or need—to, she could easily segue at some later date into cabaret or, quite possibly, belt out show tunes on Broadway. She’s got a greater range than what we hear on her hit singles with her high-register whispery vocals. She is, in a way, the Dolly Parton of pop; the cartoon exterior belies a smart, serious songwriter. And after struggling for a decade to Make It, this 26-year-old self-described “control freak” and “ballsy girl” feels she is just starting to prove what she can do.
Katy Perry’s tastes are eclectic. She loves Chrissie Hynde, Miley Cyrus, Jonatha Brooke, Patty Griffin, Tom Waits, and Alison Krauss. She considers Beyoncé a “living legend.” She plays punk music before the start of her shows, and both Florence and the Machine’s Florence Welch and Brit sensation Adele have praised her songs. Movies such as the campy Showgirls and the 80s drag-queen documentary Paris Is Burning are among her favorites. She never watches TV, she says; it’s only on in her house when her husband, 36-year-old British actor-comedian Russell Brand, watches “football” (soccer). She’s undoubtedly made many millions of dollars and is alternately generous and careful with what she spends. She reportedly paid more than $15,000 for skywriting to inform Russell that she loved him, bought him one of Richard Branson’s $200,000 trips to outer space, brought all her family to New York City last Christmas, and flew everybody to India for her wedding. But she reinvests money in her concert production, thinks before chartering a private plane, and isn’t frivolous about buying clothes or the shoes she loves—she probably gets those for free.
She’s the voice of “Smurfette” in the upcoming Smurfs movie and says she’d love to play Wonder Woman in that long-gridlocked film. She’s best friends with Rihanna—they initially bonded two years ago over a Valentino handbag. She’s experimented only briefly with drugs and says they’re not a part of her life—“These days I’m too busy to even drink a glass of wine.” When she dies, she says in all seriousness, she wants her ashes put in a firework and shot over the Santa Barbara coast. She had Snoop Dogg on her “California Gurls” video, and Kanye West is on the remix and video of her single “E.T.,” directed by the in-demand video director and filmmaker Floria Sigismondi (The Runaways).
“Artists usually come to me when they’re ready to make a dramatic change,” says Sigismondi, who adds that the “E.T.” clip is about an extraterrestrial journey and DNA transformation. “Katy committed to making this the most extraordinary piece she had ever done. She has a great sense of humor, and I was drawn to her anthem-like energy. She has a real ability to capture her audience’s attention in a positive way.”
Katy Perry began her professional career at age 15 with a Meg Ryan haircut and her real last name of Hudson. (She changed it for the obvious reason.) She went with her mother to Nashville, where she was signed to a Christian label and recorded an album with songs like “Oh Happy Day” and “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” The album sold just a few hundred copies, the label went bankrupt, and Katy returned to Santa Barbara. At home, she had never been allowed to listen to “secular” music or watch MTV, but her “cool” friends would sneak CDs to her, and she grew up loving Shirley Manson, Gwen Stefani, Freddie Mercury (she says Queen’s “Killer Queen” changed her life), and Alanis Morissette. Because she loved Alanis Morissette, she sought out Alanis’s producer, Glen Ballard, who says, “I was [first] impressed by her musicality and taste. The [unusual] way she played guitar demonstrated that she was a seeker. Katy communicates fun and passion; her music sounds like a celebration, but it’s clear to me that there’s great intelligence behind it. Katy’s emotional range and stylistic range [are] enormous.”
The songs she recorded with Ballard never got released. She was rejected by a series of record labels but managed to keep writing songs and went to England to write with Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, who says, “People probably don’t realize how gifted she is—just singing alone, never mind her songwriting skills. She could be singing with an orchestra or a full-on rock band and pull it off with panache.”
Perry is the Dolly Parton of pop; THE CARTOON EXTERIOR belies a smart, serious songwriter.
Katy Perry is a quick-change artist. No, not just because she started in the Christian-music world then switched to pop songwriting then worked with a bunch of producers who wanted her to sound like Avril Lavigne or Kelly Clarkson or whoever was big in 2002. And no, not just because she went on the Warped Tour in 2008 and held her own with some heavy rockers (including her former boyfriend Gym Class Heroes’ Travis McCoy). Or because, in the midst of all the lollipops and kittens and cleavage, in October 2010, in a super-secret ceremony in Rajasthan, India, she married the professionally outrageous, admitted former heroin and sex addict Russell Brand. No, I mean a quick-change artist literally, as when she has a tube lowered over her onstage or walks through a box, and she emerges in a series of costumes: from a blue dress into a red-and-white polka-dot dress into a lemon-lime shift into a mint-chocolate-chip-inspired explosion to a pink dress with white hearts to a “Neapolitan-ice-cream dress” to a candy-cane gown—magic tricks developed with Johnny Wujek and illusionists David and Diana Maas.
One of her trademark looks was whipped cream shooting out from her bra, which evolved from an idea she had for a bra with twirling lollipops. “The cutesy, sweet side of me is really fun,” Katy will tell me during a lengthy talk the night after her run-through. “It definitely represents a side of my personality. But I’m multi-dimensional, just like every woman. People didn’t think I had anything to offer except the one-trick pony of I Kissed a Girl,’ and then, especially with Firework,’ on this album, they saw a little bit more. I don’t have a time bomb ticking concerning my career, but I know exactly what my third and fourth records will sound like.” She seems unconcerned about personal criticism. Her taped performance with Elmo on Sesame Street this past year was never aired on public television—it was released only online—because some felt that her perfectly proper yellow prom dress showed too much cleavage for a children’s show. “They didn’t tell me there was a problem,” she says. “We had 15 outfits to choose from; I would have just gone and changed. I don’t care what people say about my relationship; I don’t care what they say about my boobs. People are buying my songs; I have a sold-out tour. I’m getting incredible feedback from my music.”
The girl is obsessed with dental hygiene. Over the four-day period I spend with Katy, except for when she’s on a red carpet or onstage, she has a portable electric toothbrush sticking out of her Chanel bag. She likes to brush her teeth often. She also has chosen this particular week, which she realizes in retrospect was poor timing, to give up coffee—“bad for the voice,” she says. But following her Grammy rehearsal at Staples Center, we adjourn to the Ritz-Carlton across the street, where she will talk for nearly three hours, pausing only to eat a salad and some onion soup, sip some tea, and coat her throat with vocal spray.
Katy is hot. No, not just the curvaceous, voluptuous body—although there is that—but she is actually hot, as in, she says, “shvitzing.” (How she, from the born-again family and with the Hindu-leaning husband, comes up with this Yiddish word attests to her life in showbiz.) She doesn’t like to go from hot to cold (the title of one of her early hits), so she almost always carries a pink, fleecy blanket. Is this a childhood treasure? “No,” she says, straight-faced. “I didn’t have a childhood.” She tells me her mother never read any children’s books to her—no Cat in the Hat or Alice in Wonderland. She discovered Eloise by herself because she liked the dress and the hotel. Her mother read only the Bible to her, and to this day Katy says she falls asleep when she tries to read (“although I read The Help and loved it”). Growing up, she literally wasn’t allowed to say “deviled eggs,” nor could they have a Dirt Devil at home. “It’s how I was raised,” she says. She was also brought up knowing how to “speak in tongues,” but refuses to give me a demonstration. She says that “it’s sort of like chanting” but that she hasn’t done it in five years. During our talk, her hair is pulled away from her face, most of her makeup has rubbed off, and she looks fabulous. Eventually, she’ll see that she doesn’t need all those hair extensions or the blue wig; she’s a great-looking girl. But, for someone who used to have bad acne—and did a Proactiv infomercial because she had tried everything else, it really worked, she felt it showed she was a normal person, and now she goes nowhere without it—and once weighed 145 pounds, it might take her a bit longer to feel comfortable in her own skin.
When Katy was 17 and moved to L.A. to work with Glen Ballard, she sold her clothes at vintage stores to make rent money and/or get new clothes. She sang backup vocals and wrote songs for other people. She went to clubs but never experienced those falling-down-drunk periods characteristic of many of today’s young music stars. According to blogger Perez Hilton, an early Katy supporter, “I met Katy at my birthday party at the Roxy in 2007. I had several bands performing that night, including Beth Ditto and the Gossip, and Katy was at the very front of the stage rocking out. I loved that she loved the music so much. In many ways, Katy reminds me of a young Gwen Stefani. Gwen’s been away from the music scene for a while, doing the mommy thing and taking her time to make new music with No Doubt, and Katy has filled that void—much like Gaga has filled the Madonna void. Like Gwen, Katy is someone with music credibility who is also a bona fide pop star. She’s not some manufactured act. I love that she’s still opinionated and fun and the same warm girl I met four years ago.”
Katy’s 28-year-old sister, Angela Hudson, an event planner and V.I.P. coordinator on Katy’s tours, says, “She’s always had something about her—a determination, a spunk. When she walks into a room, everyone turns to stare. She always knew how to win the school talent shows or make heads turn when she walked into her sixth-grade classroom with her signature leopard-print jacket. She, our brother, and I would sleep in the same bedroom, and she would sing us to sleep every night. That’s why we call her Katy Bird’ to this day. I always knew she would make it.”
According to Katy, she persevered in the face of rejection because, she says, “I looked into what was out there and I didn’t see anyone like me … my style, my opinion I just believed that I had something to offer that no one else had brought to the marketplace. My career is like an artichoke. People might think that the leaves are tasty and buttered up and delicious, and they don’t even know that there’s something magical hidden at the base of it. I think that eventually, [with me,] you’ll see more layers. There’s a whole other side that people didn’t know existed.”
Rock and religion used to be in conflict. John Lennon caused an international brouhaha when he said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. It took years for U2 to live down their early claims that they were a Christian band. The Kings of Leon’s Followill brothers are sons of a Pentecostal preacher, but the band was renowned for their early drunken sprees. Today, many pop and rock stars (especially those who have embraced 12-step programs) claim to have God on their side. But despite her upbringing and a continuing faith, Katy says, “I have always been the kid who’s asked Why?’ In my faith, you’re just supposed to have faith. But I was always like … why? I was raised born-again, but then I went over to another church [because] people were O.K. with questions. I just didn’t understand certain things, like the heaven-and-hell situation. At this point, I’m just kind of a drifter. I’m open to possibility—I don’t feel anything is finite. My sponge is so big and wide and I’m soaking everything up and my mind has been radically expanded. Just being around different cultures and people and their opinions and perspectives. Just looking into the sky.”
She caused a bit of a kerfuffle with “I Kissed a Girl” and thinks the song worked because “finally someone was singing about something that existed. But it really was [meant to be] fun; there was no agenda.” She says she didn’t discuss it honestly at first because a couple of “sleazy” male journalists made her uncomfortable. “So I said no, I hadn’t experienced it, even though I had, because I didn’t like where the guys were taking the interviews.” She admits to having had sex as a teenager and was in a few monogamous relationships but says she’s really been involved with only five guys in her life. She went to, and believes in, Planned Parenthood, although, she says, “I was always scared I was going to get bombed when I was there. Growing up, seeing Planned Parenthood, it was considered like the abortion clinic. I didn’t know it was more than that, that it was for women and their needs. I didn’t have insurance, so I went there and I learned about birth control.
“I come from a very non-accepting family, but I’m very accepting. Russell is into Hinduism, and I’m not [really] involved in it. He meditates in the morning and the evening; I’m starting to do it more because it really centers me. [But] I just let him be him, and he lets me be me. [As for my parents,] I think sometimes when children grow up, their parents grow up. Mine grew up with me. We coexist. I don’t try to change them anymore, and I don’t think they try to change me. We agree to disagree. They’re excited about [my success]. They’re happy that things are going well for their three children and that they’re not on drugs. Or in prison.”
She says that her being open to possibilities happened before she met Russell Brand but he certainly made a difference in her life. After shooting a small, kissing cameo with him for the movie Get Him to the Greek, Katy chose to flirt with her future husband at the rehearsals for the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards by tossing an empty water bottle at his head. Intrigued, he came on to her. She insisted he take her to dinner, and shortly after, she took a big risk and invited this semi-stranger to join her on vacation in Phuket, Thailand. It could have been a disaster. It wasn’t. Their public courtship, which included a number of red-carpet appearances, preceded his marriage proposal on a trip to Jaipur, India. It took place New Year’s Eve 2009 under a blue moon, with an elephant, rose petals, and a ring she had already learned about on an online gossip site. After he blabbed about it loudly on various and sundry TV talk shows, they decided, emulating Jay-Z and Beyoncé, to not talk about their private life in public anymore, and had a top-secret wedding on a tiger reserve in Rajasthan, India. Good luck keeping this guy reticent, I tell her. (She wants to know what “reticent” means, but then, in all fairness, I actually thought a blue moon was really blue.) She tells me that Russell turned her on to Morrissey, Nick Cave, and meditation. She turned Russell—an admitted slut—on to monogamy. “He’s never lied to me once,” she says. “I trust him; there’s just a level of trust that we’ve built up.” As for trying to keep their private life private, “the press is just not your friend when it comes to a marriage,” she says. “That’s why we didn’t sell the pictures of our wedding, and we got offered millions of dollars for them, millions.” Why not take the money and give it to charity? “Well, I can always do that later for something else; maybe if I have a child. … But I’ve seen too much of it with other people—it’s the wrong kind of attention. It detracts from the reason why you exist. We wanted that moment to ourselves.”
(Of course, two days after she says this to me, she shows a snippet of super-8 footage from their wedding, projected behind her onstage while she sings “Not Like the Movies” to 27 million viewers on the Grammys telecast. I ask her, Why? “Because I felt the moment was right and not forced. Russell and I had time to savor our moment privately first and then share it with people when we were ready, and not for a paycheck. I loved the idea, because I thought it was beautiful and artistically accompanied the song I wrote for him. Plus, it was Valentine’s eve! But really, at the end of the day, I choose my own adventure. What’s right for me is right for me.”)
As for privacy, what about that photo he tweeted of her supposedly waking up in the morning without any makeup on? “We were just messing around,” she says, “taking pictures of each other, and he put that up on Twitter. I didn’t really care. I mean, when I go to rehearsals I look like that. I’m every woman. It takes a village to make me who I am. I don’t wake up looking [the way I look onstage]. That should actually give some encouragement to people that they can become this sort of person. You don’t have to wake up looking like, you know, Gisele. He was playing a practical joke. Never a dull moment.”
Sunday, February 13, Staples Center: Katy’s dressing room backstage at the Grammys is pink and red, with flowers, a brightly colored glass chandelier, and ceramic cupcakes on a table. An assistant is cutting false eyelashes; another is applying glitter and painting little red hearts on pink press-on nails. The night before, Katy attended Clive Davis’s party with her manager, Bradford Cobb (who has worked with the Go-Gos and B52s), wearing her own shoulder-length hair and a sparkly Nicolas Jebran gown. “I’m overdressed, but fuck it,” she told me as we watched R. Kelly perform and bring down the house. Now she’s wearing a pink-and-white bathrobe and terry-cloth slippers, eating potato chips, and getting done up for the walk on the red carpet; she’ll make another clothing change later for her performance. Russell, who hosted Saturday Night Live the night before, flew back to L.A. from New York that morning to be here and escort Katy’s 90-year-old grandmother, Ann Hudson (a former seamstress for showgirls in Las Vegas), onto the red carpet and into the audience. The Brands have a 1920s Art Deco house in L.A. in Los Feliz, where they live with their three cats (Kitty Purry, Morrissey, and Krusty—a combo of her name and his nickname Rusty). They also purchased a two-bedroom condo with a terrace in Tribeca, but Katy prefers L.A. because this winter, she says, New York has been too cold and too damp. Because of their busy schedules, they need to plan time to be together—like when Katy flew to New York for three days in between her European shows the week that Russell’s movie Arthur opened. When they’re at home, they watch movies, and Katy—even though they have a housekeeper—likes to “relax” by cleaning the house.
In Katy’s Grammy dressing room, perhaps because his wife’s family was around, or because I was a constant presence, or because he was exhausted (“knackered,” as he put it), or perhaps because he really is the quiet, polite guy offstage that everyone who knows him says he is, Russell couldn’t have been more delightful. No yelling. Nice manners. “How’re you doing, sweetheart?” he quietly asked his wife as she was getting those hair extensions put in. Wearing a silver suit, black shirt, and black tie, Russell was color-coordinated by Armani along with the rest of the family: Katy’s mother wore a silver dress, Dad wore a silver suit, and Grandma wore a silver gown and carried a Swarovski-crystal-covered cane. Katy’s red-carpet look: a shiny white Armani Privé gown with silver-sequined bra, topped by white, feathered Mother Plucker-designed angel wings.
If you’ve never been on one of those red carpets at a major awards show, let me tell you, it is hysteria incarnate. First of all, it’s much smaller than it looks on TV. All the various entertainment shows and media outlets are crammed into individual two-by-four spaces that resemble tiny horse stalls. The fans and paparazzi are screaming their heads off. It would be disconcerting, to say the least, to the most seasoned pro; surely, to Katy’s grandmother, it must be a bit of culture shock. But she takes it in her stride. She tells Extra host Mario Lopez that she loves his dimples. She says she wants to meet George Clooney. “Make it happen!,” Katy instructs Lopez. A journalist asks Grandma if Katy really is an angel, and she says, “Yes. In disguise.” Grandma says hello to Justin Bieber. I ask Katy’s mother if she’s proud of her daughter’s success. “Yes,” she says. “The Lord told us when I was pregnant with her that she would do this.” The screaming is intense. Is this what it’s like with the paparazzi outside your L.A. house?, I ask Russell. “This is what it’s like inside the house,” he replies.
Following the show, which featured performances by Lady Gaga, Sir Mick, Eminem, Bob Dylan, and Cee-Lo—and Nicole Kidman caught on-camera in the audience singing along to Katy’s performance of “Teenage Dream”—we re-assemble in Katy’s dressing room. She didn’t win any of the four Grammys she was nominated for, and I remark that she appears very Zen. “I cried when you left the room,” she says, then laughs. She tells me that she’s happy “to just be in the club.” In the hallway as we leave the venue, Lady Gaga comes up to her and congratulates her on her wedding and says some supportive, girl-to-girl, star-to-star stuff. (These are girls who just several years ago could walk around alone anywhere; now they need eight people each just to get them into their cars.) In the car on the way to the EMI Records after-party, Katy takes off her press-on nails to type on her BlackBerry, turns to me, and says, “Smoke and mirrors.” Then she notes that the Twitter Nation is not happy that Justin Bieber lost for best new artist.
“You know,” she says, “I don’t take anything for granted. There are so many different talents out there just waiting to be found. There are 500 other girls right behind me. And I know that, because I was one of them. I remember what it’s like to be someone who’s always trying to get there—sending out tons of e-mails, looking [for jobs] in newspapers, making phone calls, following up, trying to connect with some person who could connect me with some other person. And I wouldn’t be working at this pace now if I didn’t truly know that fame is fleeting. But if the core, the honesty, my story, isn’t working, then all those bells and whistles aren’t going to work, either. Sometimes I can be distracted by the glamour and the fabulousness. But my husband always reminds me to keep the core intact, because that’s what matters. I just think I have to appreciate every day, every opportunity, work hard, and continue to evolve as an artist. I already know my future evolution, where I’m going to go. I mean, I’m touring in fucking Indonesia, for crying out loud.”