If anyone deserves to gloat about their leap to A-list solo stardom, it’s former kids’-TV also-ran, girl-group flop and “Humps” punch line Fergie. So why is Blender’s Woman of the Year … crying?
Blender’s night with Fergie has only begun. The first bottle of wine has not been uncorked, nor has the first insult. We’ve asked our first question, and it’s an innocuous one, the investigative equivalent of a hello handshake.But, already, we’ve made Fergie cry.
So, how do you feel about being named Blender’s Woman of the Year?
It feels like such an accomplishment. I’ve been working in this industry since I was 7, and I’m finally being commended for those years. And — [sniffles] I can’t believe you made me cry. I’m so embarrassed. And I’m fucking up my eyeliner.
It’s the one time Blender will make Fergie cry — though we will come close a second time, before we say good-bye — but it’s only the start of the drama. There will be teasing, more swearing, shouting, violations of California’s open-container laws, taxicab-level confessions, even some making out (unfortunately, not with Blender).
Which could make you wonder if our Woman of the Year also deserves to be crowned Total Freaking Wingnut. Before 2007, she just seemed like a highly styled cheerleader who’d carelessly overbronzed. Sure, the Black Eyed Peas were huge; Will.i.am, the Pea brain, cowrote and produced the songs, and Fergie was the humps. And humps don’t get much respect.
Then her solo album, The Dutchess, came out in September 2006 and launched a giddy No. 1 hit (“London Bridge”), followed by another (“Fergalicious”), followed by another (“Glamorous”). In July 2007, she released “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” which was like the moment in a movie when the librarian takes off her glasses and turns out to be sexy, only in reverse: It’s the kind of earnest ballad that wins Grammy credibility, and Fergie proved the seriousness of her intent by not S-P-E-double-L-I-N-G a single W-O-R-to-the-D.
So she’s entitled to be emotional beyond what would seem normal. Stacy Ann Ferguson became a solo star the year she turned 32, but she’s more like 86 in showbiz years. Drugs, rejection, desperation, children’s TV — all manifest as lines on her face, and every hit single feels like validation to her. She’s excitable, quickly familiar, the I’m-crying-because-I’m-so-happy type. She’s the stray who wins the Westminster Kennel award: No matter how many records she sells, she’ll always feel like an underdog.
“I might not be the most talented person in the world,” she explains. “I might not have the best voice. I might not be the prettiest or the best dancer. But I’ve worked very hard, and I’ve gone through humiliation. That’s why winning an award means so much more to me than it does to other people.” And she wipes away tears.
We’re in a private dining room at a restaurant in Hollywood, a few hours before Fergie flies to Mexico City to resume a worldwide Black Eyed Peas tour that includes South America, Africa and Asia. An assistant has told her there’s a surprise waiting outside after dinner. “What is the surprise?” Fergie asks girlishly, impatiently. “Am I being Punk’d?”
“I’m trying to be healthy,” she tells the waitress, but soon, the table is crowded with plates: curry burgers, garlic fries, mashed potatoes. “You are bad,” she chides Blender. “But you’re a fun date.” It’s flattering, but to be honest, it isn’t hard to persuade Stacy Ferguson to yield to temptation.
If you look online, you can find photos from a 2005 concert where she turned into a Black Eyed Pee, pissing herself onstage and leaving a telltale crotch stain on her tan clam-diggers, and YouTube clips from her childhood stint on Kids Incorporated, when she sang a Lionel Richie song to a clown or chirped “We Built This City” while wearing a red space suit.
66fergie_article03.jpgDo you ever wish you’d been a star in the days before the Internet destroyed celebrity mystique?
At this point, no. People put celebrities on a pedestal and act like they’re perfect. But I’m more like the people’s artist — the same way Diana was “the people’s princess.” I’m a little more human than other artists. I’m not afraid to show my flaws and have a laugh about it.
So people can relate to you. They see what you’ve been through, and they think, Oh, I’ve had a bad day like that, too.
You have?
Well, no, I haven’t peed myself onstage.
You haven’t had to go straight onstage after being late for a show, then jumped up and down while singing “Let’s Get Retarded.” OK, motherfucker? I was late, so I didn’t go to the restroom before I went onstage. It was horrible. But, whatever. It happened.
She refers to “London Bridge” as “dumb” and “stupid,” and it’s clear she means those insults as endorsements. Its less intelligent cousin, “My Humps,” has been mocked more than any hit single since “Macarena,” mostly for its lack of lyrical sophistication.
“I thought it was brilliant, hilarious,” Fergie says. “My whole inspiration for that song was [’80s rapper] Roxanne Shanté and the way she bragged. Obviously, I don’t have the biggest ass in the world.”
Her crackling hit singles — audacious and absurd, silly and sentimental — nearly bust with an adoration of early hip-hop: The car-bomb beats, the playground hooks, the unabashed boasts and taunts all evoke rap’s carefree childhood. When she sings, “A girl like me don’t stay single for long” and gloats that men “get their pleasures from my photo,” it can seem like she’s full of herself. To her, it’s a comedic role. “You know, I’m not really feeling myself all that much,” she says, laughing. “Those songs are about my persona, the larger-than-life Fergalicious. It’s a part of me, but expanded. It’s very sexual, and I am a very sexual person, behind closed doors. I’m a freak. That’s the part of my personality I’m playing with in those songs: flirty, sexual, but not promiscuous. I’m basically a tease — take it or leave it.”
“She’s a girl — she cries at Grey’s Anatomy,” says bandmate Will.i.am. “Offstage, she’s got a vagina, but onstage, she transforms. She’s grown balls — she had to. She’s got bigger balls than a dude.”
Not everyone shares Fergie’s (or Blender’s) regard for the audacious and silly, and all through the year Internet message boards filled up with vows of hatred for her. Even her own father said “London Bridge” was “the worst song he’d ever heard in his life.” Thanks, Dad! “People either love me or hate me,” Fergie muses. “I’d like to meet the people who really hate me — I bet we’d get along if we hung out.”
“My Humps” was covered with mock somberness by Alanis Morissette, but it was sung more memorably by Will Ferrell while on a treadmill in Blades of Glory. “I think he did it better than I do,” Fergie chirps. “I think people are starting to get the joke now. ‘Oh, she’s kidding.’ Yes, I’m kidding!”
She and her boyfriend, actor Josh Duhamel, watched Blades of Glory at their home in Brentwood, California. “That is the type of movie we rent all the time. We, uh, get our munchies and watch comedies. We have a blast.”
“Munchies” is a word often associated with drug use, and Blender recalls a song on The Dutchess called “Mary Jane Shoes,” a musical hint that Fergie likes to smoke weed. But she won’t move beyond the hint.
“We like to watch very funny movies with a lot of snacks. We watch Family Guy a lot,” she says, laughing. It’s time for a direct approach: Fergie, you’re a stoner, aren’t you?
“Speculation, my friend. I’m not admitting anything.”
Most rappers pride themselves on being adored by “the streets,” but the Black Eyed Peas also appeal to the boulevards, the piazzas and the strasses — no other hip-hop group has had as much international success or toured so many exotic places. “It’s so much fun,” Fergie chortles. “It’s insanity.”
On a stint in Israel, she says, she put a wish inside a crack in the Wailing Wall.
Did you wish that Josh would marry you?
We’re practically married, anyway. I’m madly in love with him. He understands how to treat a woman and give me respect. And I’m gonna miss him on tour. [Her eyes start to drip, and then she turns mean.] Here I go again. Don’t make me cry, you fucker.66fergie_article02.jpg
You do a lot of spelling in your songs. We know you can spell tasty and Fergie and glamorous. Let’s try a few other words. Can you spell integer?
I-N-T-E-G-E-R.
Good! Here’s a more difficult one —
That was a difficult one! Why do you want to make me look stupid? If you make me look stupid in this damn interview, I will kill you.
Spell Ecuador.
Fuckin’ bitch! Is there a C involved? Shit, I don’t know. We performed in Ecuador, but I only saw the hotel gym. My first instinct was E-Q-U-A-D-O-R. Is there a C involved?
Yes.
Fuck! Fuck you! OK, how many glasses of wine have I had? I challenge you to a game of Scrabble, for 500 bucks. I know all the two-letter words.
Big deal. You made 500 bucks in royalties while you were saying the words 500 bucks.
Do not fucking do this to me when I drink wine, you asshole. I know this is gonna be in the interview: “Fergie starts swearing when she gets pissed.”
Well, she does. At this point, although plenty of food remains on the table, an assistant tells Fergie she has to leave right away for the airport.
Just let us pay the bill first.
Let me pay.
No, we’re paying.
You know, usually the more dominant one in the relationship, the one who is more controlling, likes to be dominated in bed.
Who talks that way to people they don’t really know? Freaks do.
Outside, in the chauffeured black SUV, waits Fergie’s surprise: six-foot-three, bristly haired boyfriend Josh Duhamel (pronounced doo-MELL), handsome star of TV’s Las Vegas and Hollywood’s Transformers, ex-college-football player, former Male Model of the Year and Cosmopolitan magazine’s Fun Fearless Male of the Year. Fergie slips into the SUV and slides shut the door. Cooing, baby voices and kisses are heard. It would not be surprising if the car began rocking side to side.
They met in September 2004, on the set of Las Vegas, during a Black Eyed Peas guest spot. Duhamel had a crush on her and announced that he’d dreamed about her. She brazenly asked him how the dream was. “I was single,” she says, “so who cares? I’m flirty. Then he’s like, ‘You’re hot.’ It worked.” He calls her Fergs and Sugarbooty.
Duhamel reluctantly vacates the SUV, shouting his devotion as he retreats down the street, and the car heads toward Los Angeles International Airport. The driver plays The Dutchess. Fergie asks him to turn it off. To enliven our journey, we share a second bottle of wine. We alternate swigs, as Fergie chews on a piece of gum.
Blender takes out an iPod, cues it up and offers her the earbuds. The song is “At Night I Pray,” a ballad she wrote and sang on Wild Orchid’s 1996 debut. It’s half fake Mariah Carey, half fake Anita Baker.
“Oh, my gosh, I know what this is,” Fergie says. “Do I really have to keep listening to it?” After 45 seconds she turns it off. “That wasn’t really me. Was I praying at night that love would come along? No, I was out cheating on my boyfriends. Are you kidding me? I was the biggest cheater on the planet. So alone and the room feels cold. You think my shit was alone? I was having fun.”
There were two low points in Fergie’s life. The first was a career low: the day Wild Orchid, a trio she spent 11 years in, played a fair in the Midwest, next to a barn full of pigs. “We were glammed up for the show, and I think there were three people watching us. The pigs cared more than the people.” She laughs at the horror of it. “It was really sad. We all know the story after that, yada yada.”
For “yada yada,” read drug addiction, the low point in Fergie’s personal life. “Voodoo Doll,” a song on The Dutchess, describes the twitchy anguish of meth addiction. It’s a sordid story she’s told before and will probably tell again the next time someone asks about it. “Hey, it’s the Fergalicious Fergie,” one YouTube parody begins. “I used to be addicted to crystal meth.”
“It’s like there’s one or two things the public knows about every famous person,” she says. “With Ashlee Simpson, everyone knows she had a nose job. With me, everyone knows I wet my pants onstage and had a crystal-meth addiction; that sucks. You have to laugh.”
And she does laugh, recalling the night she spent eight hours talking to her hamper: “I was paranoid, and I thought somebody was inside, spying on me.” But that wasn’t the worst of it. “No, here’s a new one for you: I was outside my apartment, wearing some strange getup, looking through the window to see if there were cameras inside. I weighed 90 pounds, because on crystal meth you don’t eat. So a guy comes by and goes, ‘Here, honey, I know you’re hungry,’ and he hands me this package of muffins. When somebody thinks you’re homeless, that’s kind of a low point, wouldn’t you say?”
As a kid, she’d been precociously responsible, “a young adult.” She played Lucy in Peanuts TV specials and spent five seasons on Kids Incorporated, a Saturday-morning series where cheery sprites covered pop hits of the day.
Her hometown, Hacienda Heights, California, was full of Mexican 66fergie_article02.jpggang-bangers, and soon she was riding in their cars, listening to N.W.A. The videos for “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Glamorous” and “Clumsy” all show her affection for Mexican-American culture. “I had a lot of boyfriends, or whatever you call it — make-out partners — who were cholos. I’m part Mexican, even though I don’t really look it, and Native American on my dad’s side, as well. I’m just as American as you can get.
”Her parents, both teachers, worried about her blossoming rebellion. “I had a videotape of The Exorcist and Exorcist II,” she says. “And I got really into watching it. My mom thought I was going to become a Satan worshipper, so she taped over it. I got so mad at her.”
When Black Eyed Peas played in Russia, Fergie saw the ornate carriages Catherine the Great had used in the 18th century. She wanted to ride a carriage to the MTV Video Music Awards, but a pimped-out one: hydraulics, spinning rims, blasting hip-hop. “You can’t take the girl out of Hacienda Heights,” she shrugs. “I’m a little bit ghetto, a little bit redneck, a little bit snobby, all of it.”
Her cell goes off — the ring tone is the theme from The Exorcist, a touch of rebellion retained. It’s Duhamel, missing her already. She talks to him in a baby voice: “You came to supwise me. I wuv you.” She puts on lip gloss while they talk.
We hand her the second bottle of wine. “I should probably stop,” she says. But she doesn’t.
You’ve talked openly about having sexual experiences with women. Did you ever have a real relationship with one?
No, it was just fun.
When did that last happen?
[Smiles] In the hotel room, with channel 34. Me and a few bitches got down. That was my last lesbian experience.
The Black Eyed Peas had already made two albums before you joined in 2004. Did the guys put you through a period of hazing?
Oh, hell yeah. It sucked. I fought my way through it, punch by punch.
Did you actually hit anyone? It’s easy to picture you hitting a dude.
Only in bed. [Giggles] When you have sexual dominance and things like that, you have to have trust and understanding. And yes, I have been slapped, too, but it’s been consensual.
All right, Woman of the Year. How many times in the last 12 months have you cried?
Too many to count. At least once a week, because I cry watching Nip/Tuck.
How many times in the last 12 months have you been drunk?
Probably too many to count, as well. [Laughs] Not that I’m proud of it. But if I’m drinking too much, I’ll call my therapist and make sure I’m not going overboard. Because I never want to go back there.
How many times in the last 12 months have you seen your parents?
I see them all the time. My mom and my father split up when I was 17, and my mom remarried — they’re all friends; they watch football together. They stayed together for the kids, because I was a drama queen and used to run out screaming when they fought: “It’s my fault!” I knew exactly what I was doing — I was trying to keep them together. But at 17 I had my fake ID, I was cool with it. I was like, “Sure, split up if you guys want. Can I go out?” I had about five fake IDs.
Why were you so eager to get into clubs?
Dancing. Flirting. Older guys. Better than what was going on in my house. I started going out with a guy who had a teardrop tattoo on his cheek.
It’s surprising you didn’t get into more trouble.
How much more trouble could I have gotten into? My God!
The SUV has arrived at the airport, and there’s a delay before Fergie can head to the terminal. Instead of the casual, filthy banter we’ve enjoyed, she talks a bit now about “trying to give back” (she sold a Hummer she’d been given and donated the proceeds to Global Green USA) and explains how “the rewards make me even more driven.”
The solemnity doesn’t seem to suit her, but it’s the flip side of the tears that began the night. When she talks like this, it’s as though she’s reciting the membership oath of an exclusive club: the One-Named Superstar Club, or the I’ve Got a Hunky Boyfriend Club, maybe the I’m Flying Off to a Big Gig in Mexico City Club. She has spent 25 years waiting to be admitted.
Source: Blender.com
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