Nicole Scherzinger: The Blow-Up Doll

Nicole Scherzinger hasn’t had a bite to eat in two whole days. Standing barefoot in the kitchen of her gated Hollywood home, clutching a big translucent jug filled with a yellow mixture of water, honey, lemon, maple syrup and cayenne that’s her sole nourishment right now, the Pussycat Dolls’ exotically pan-ethnic lead singer (part Russian-Hawaiian, part Filipino) passionately explains her rigor. This two-day master cleanse “will help me find my center,” she says, even as it “makes me look better in swimsuits” during the coming weekend’s video shoot for “Baby Love,” the second single from her debut solo album, Her Name Is Nicole.

At 29, Scherzinger is a battle-hardened showbiz veteran. Out of high school, she sang “What I Did for Love” in a Louisville, Kentucky, summer-stock production of A Chorus Line, left college in Ohio to sing backup with the grunge band Days of the New, won the top spot in the prefab girl group Eden’s Crush on the WB’s reality show Popstars in 2001, nabbed a couple of small acting roles in the movies Chasing Papi and Love Don’t Cost a Thing, then joined the Pussycat Dolls in 2003. And she knows that, a la American Idol, this is her now.

Freshly spray-tanned, wearing full makeup, in a light Indian-cotton shift, Scherzinger glances at a Romanian glass sculpture of Jesus across the room and declaims, “I need total focus, total concentration, total centering, because this album is everything I’ve been working for my whole life. You get one chance, and this is my chance” — and then, as if suddenly realizing that she sounds like a kid from Fame, Scherzinger rears back, takes a slug of the yellow stuff and reels it in, growling like a tough old broad: “So I’m master­cleansin’ it.”