Real Dolls
 See more photos of the Pussycat Dolls |
Nicole sits nearby, quietly communing with her BlackBerry. She’s just back from two days off in Santa Barbara with her boyfriend, British race-car driver Lewis Hamilton, who lives in Switzerland. There is a small cut on her lip—a tiny flaw in an otherwise perfect canvas, as her makeup artist calls her face. “I always feel guilty when I take a day off,” is all she’ll say about her trip. When asked to confirm her age, she begrudgingly admits to recently turning 30. “I should say I’m 27,” she sighs. (The Dolls Web site is equally conflicted—on one page, Nicole is 28; on another, she’s 30.)
In the next room, blond BFFs Ashley, 27, and Kimberly, 26, are trying to figure out just how many red roses were at the party last night. “I think, like, 75,000,” Ashley says. “There were some peach ones, too,” adds Melody, 24, as she starts to blow dry her hair. The Dolls play private gigs several times a month. On the low end are corporations with a liberal interpretation of the phrase “team-building exercise.” On the high-end are multimillionaires who can afford to fly an international pop sensation overseas to entertain a roomful of their closest friends. The money is good (sometimes $1 million for 40 minutes of work), and the group enjoys ruthless pampering. “At these parties,” Melody says, “the pool will be filled with Evian. Over there is the princess of … I forget … Libya? Huge rocks everywhere—you know they’re not fake. And you might get a Cartier watch at the end.”
On the small of her back, Melody is wearing something that’s not very sexy, so it’s not very PCD: two round Band-Aids. She’s been getting shots of antibiotics and vitamins to try to knock out a virus. There isn’t a lot of time in Pussycat Doll world for illness, and if the girls have a struggle, it’s trying to balance the demands of the ever-expanding PCD empire with their own lives: to be both Doll and human, to get those Cartier watches and find husbands, to satisfy their desire for fame and their desire for spiritual fulfillment (really—more on that shortly). It isn’t simple, which is why a few days earlier Melody had dark circles under her eyes, a woman trying to ward off disease through force of will. “If you get sick, it’s easy to feel sorry for yourself,” she says. “Depression is prevalent in this industry.”
The Russian trophy wife is only the latest in a long line of Pussycat Doll stage-crashers. Back when PCD were an L.A. burlesque troupe with residencies at the Viper Room and the Roxy, Carmen Electra, Pam Anderson and Christina Applegate—who used to room with the group’s founder, Robin Antin—took on gigs as honorary Dolls. In 2002, Gwen Stefani brought Interscope Records honchos Jimmy Iovine and Ron Fair to a show and, soon after, the label signed them, shaking up the personnel and re-envisioning PCD as a pop sextet. Their 2005 debut melded slithery, contemporary R&B to the sort of single entendres a housewife might say to her pool boy in a soft-core porno. It went on to sell 7 million copies worldwide.
The question eternally on Antin’s mind is how to keep “growing the brand.” There’s still a PCD troupe that dances at the Pussycat Dolls lounge at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas; a new lounge opens in late September in West Hollywood. “I want to get Victoria Beckham to perform at the opening, people are so fascinated with her,” Antin says. She oversees all things PCD, so she’s here at the photo studio. A lingerie line, a denim line, a CW reality show, lounges—those have come easy, too. But here’s a taller order: Each of the girls wants to go solo. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for,” Kimberly says. “We all want individual success.”
