Nicole Scherzinger: The Blow-Up Doll

Or are we?

Off the coast of Long Beach, in a cove on Catalina Island, Scherzinger is fooling around between shots for the “Baby Love” video. Her skin looks as soft as melted brown sugar, and her bone-snappingly perfect curves swell from a brown bandeau bikini. She hula dances for the hell of it, conferring little eyelash-batting, two-second licks of lip-syncing seduction on flustered men who stand around the set.

Then the cameras crowd in as she lies on the sand, a shirtless South African hunk straddling her and caressing her with one hand, holding a camcorder above her with the other. She sits up, the features of her face drift forward, and she kisses the air, the empty space that hangs between the lens and her lips.

In this scene, her demeanor is softer and gentler than her dancing with the Dolls or in the video for “Whatever U Like.” But it’s still provocative enough that you might come away thinking that Nicole is just another celebrity fembot, like one of the mechanical girls in Austin Powers movies whose only purpose is to give pleasure.

When Blender asks, straight up, Are you a fembot? (and then explains what a fembot is), she answers, “No,” in a brisk, hard voice. “But I can play that role really well.”

What’s fun about playing that role?

“There are,” she avers, “a lot funner roles.”

That remark might be the best insight into how much of Scherzinger’s on-camera come-on is real, and how much is a role she’s playing. What may at first seem like ambivalence about her sexual image may just be the honest vagueness of pop stardom — a job that requires a person to present herself as a screen onto which fans project their fantasies. Even when she’s dancing like a guttersnipe in heat, Nicole Scherzinger is not thinking about turning you on. She is thinking about doing her job, which is selling records, and becoming a star; and she believes that her job is her destiny.

“Baby Love,” which she cowrote, is “a song that feels like summertime, like when you meet a new person, a new love,” she says. “The video is going to be a side of me that no one’s ever seen. What I’m like behind closed doors with my boyfriend. Just two normal people enjoying love and life.” Then she catches herself: “Normal people — on a yacht. In really expensive beachwear.” Voice breathy, speech screwball, twisting up and up, she ends with a goofy laugh: “And sunglasses: Really expensive sunglasses. And the bigger the sunglasses, the better. Because the bigger the sunglasses, the bigger the star.”