Time of her life

Fergie with her 'clean-cut' husband of one year, Josh Duhamel. Photo / Getty

Is Stacy Ann Ferguson the most famous woman on earth we know next to nothing about? With her group the Black Eyed Peas, she has spent a record-breaking consecutive 26 weeks at the top of the US singles chart. This month she's singing the showstopper in Nine, the Oscar-bait musical co-starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman and Sophia Loren, after the producer Harvey Weinstein personally earmarked her for the role. Then there's her clothing line, her film-star husband and a solo album that has shifted several million copies. In fact, she has every cliched accoutrement of modern fame going, yet mention her to people and they only ever recall two facts about the woman we have come to know as "the other Fergie". One, she used to be addicted to crystal meth. Two, she once wet herself on stage.

Both bits of data turn out to be true - and her crystal-meth days were far from a hoot. It got dark. Really dark. When, a couple of years ago, she was asked to confirm if it was true that she once got so out of her tree that she spent eight hours talking to a hamster, Fergie replied solemnly: "It wasn't a hamster. It was a hamper."

Though it's been 10 years since she last used (she was only drugging heavily for a year), at 34 she's still plagued by gossip mags who delight in publishing pictures of her looking rough - or, to use their preferred term, "meth-faced". Mean-spirited, but you can understand the fascination. In the squeaky-clean world of noughties pop, can you think of anyone other than Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown who's confessed to being on intimate terms with a crack pipe?

Add to this Fergie's Catholic upbringing, the years she spent as a child star on American TV, a wanton interest in her own sex, and that lackadaisical bladder, and it makes her a fascinating subject. But interviewing the biggest-selling pop phenomenon of the year is not easy - when you're that big, your schedule fills up fast. It takes four changes of date and three changes of city to pin her down. We end up meeting in Aspen, Colorado, on a crisp, autumn afternoon, at a hotel perched on a cliff. Fergie is in town to perform with the Peas at an open-air music festival. I'm standing in the hotel's dingy ballroom when she arrives with a modest entourage. My first thought on spying her is: "Bloody hell!" Fergie is sporting a black leather and spandex catsuit, 10cm heels, false eyelashes that would do Daisy the Cow proud, and makeup that appears to have been applied with a paintgun. She looks like a Bratz doll brought to life.

Thankfully, it turns out this is actually her stage slap for the show, but there's no doubting she screams sex. One of the most googled questions about Fergie is how she got her body, which she confesses to "sculpting" in the gym because she loves the erotic charge it gives her. Fair enough. It's Teutonic, and Fergie wields it like a weapon. Her physical confidence is off the chart. She has worked hard in the past few months to get rid of the 17 pounds she had to gain for her role as a curvy prostitute in Nine (she gorged herself on "everything fried and full of fat and salty" to put on the weight needed) and the hours spent in the gym since show.

She slinks over and places a strategic hand on my forearm, squeezing just so. "Well, hello," she says, her voice a throaty half-octave below that of your average pop princess. "Shall we begin?" It takes all my willpower not to blush.

Escorting her through the bustling hotel, I begin to appreciate how Richard Gere must have felt squiring a thigh-booted Julia Roberts across the hotel lobby in Pretty Woman. The tourists stare slack-jawed as her spandexed form struts past. She smiles and waves naughtily, eliciting more than a few gasps, before we find a quiet table on a veranda with a spectacular view of the Rockies. Then, just as I'm thinking how licentious she looks against this backdrop of wholesome beauty, she begins to talk, revealing something quite unexpected: Fergie has a brain.

Who knew? I suppose, given the boobalicious nature of her day job (standard Black Eyed Peas lyric: "My hump, my hump, my lovely lady lumps"), it's easy to miss the fact that when she graduated from her high school in Hacienda Heights, an LA suburb, Fergie could have gone to Harvard if she'd fancied it. But as she begins to reminisce about growing up as the daughter of two schoolteachers, it all comes gushing out: the straight As, the stint as president of her student council, and the fact she was a leading light in her local girl-scout troupe. All the while, she was holding down a full career as a child actress. Talk about over-achieving. She says people are routinely flummoxed to discover she was a whiz. She puts it down to her devoted parents and a mystical work ethic buried deep in her Irish/Mexican/Native American blood. "We went to church every week and it was all about positive reinforcement. If I wanted to get my own phone line, or go to a slumber party, it was about the grades." So how come you didn't go to university? She looks startled at the question. "I got a record deal when I was 17 with Wild Orchid [a defunct girl group], so I moved right out to Hollywood to pursue my career."

How were your folks about it? "They were fine, of course. I was making money, I was an adult - why would they want to convince me otherwise when I was becoming successful at the exact thing that I wanted? They knew my drive, they knew my hunger for it all."

Her face hardens into the weathered expression of a survivor. Suddenly, she seems less like the glorified go-go dancer I'd imagined, more a bullish product of the American dream. In fact, it sounds like her ambition bordered on scary, and I don't think it came just from Mum and Dad. Apparently, she was so driven as a tot that, in the second grade, her teacher pulled her mother aside and demanded that young Stacy be put on Ritalin to calm her down. Mum refused, thank God. Fergie has an addictive personality (more of which later), though back then the only thing she was addicted to was showbiz.

"It started out with my mum taking me to the local theatre," she explains. "We'd watch a lot of musicals - The King and I, West Side Story, Peter Pan. That's what really influenced me. I saw girls up there my age doing Annie, so I said, 'Mum, I wanna do this.' I started with a local theatre group for kids and the leader of that helped me get an agent. After school, I'd go to the front office to see if I had any auditions that day, get my script, then into the car on the way to Hollywood doing my homework, look at my lines, then straight to dance class after some fast food - that's how I lived as a child. She adds, "I had a social security number at age seven," meaning she has been paying tax since she was a child.

Sounds borderline cruel to me, but cute, confident Fergie loved it, working in commercials until she got her break in the children's sitcom Kids Incorporated, aged nine. Filming it knocked out all her summer holidays for five years. She ploughed on, but was happy when she outgrew the show and, after dating fellow kidult Justin Timberlake and discovering gangsta rap, formed the girl group Wild Orchid with a former co-star. And lo, trouble brewed. With the same crushing naivety that has dogged every sleb prodigy from Shirley Temple to Lindsay Lohan, Fergie imagined her transition from child to adult star would be seamless. To be fair, it started out okay. "I left home and moved in with one of the girls in the group, Stephanie. It was great times. I bleached my hair platinum-blonde. It was fun." Fun until she came home with a drug habit. By her mid-20s, Wild Orchid was tanking.

"I thought it would be disloyal if I left, but I wasn't happy any more with the music we were doing," she says. "I really internalised it and found my outlet in the underground club scene and the raves." It didn't help that she developed a predilection for Hispanic "Cholo" gang members (she has a thing for guns). Was her clubbing escapist? "No, it was a creative outlet. It was all, 'Let's experiment with dance, let's experiment with colour.' You know?" I look bemused. "I'd be the girl up on the stage with the glow stick," she laughs. "I had a blast, but those things can only last for so long. I'm actually lucky that I hit it as hard as I did because it took me to a place where I knew I never wanted to do it again."

It's a coup that she's willing to talk about this. These days, pop stars are so well schooled in the blah-blah art of question-dodging they'll scarcely express a preference for Coke or Pepsi. Fergie is different, a curious mix of hard and soft: one moment she'll be effusing about the restorative powers of hypnotherapy, the next be somewhat blase about the perils of life as an addict.

She gives a wry smile. "Sometimes publicists get really mad with me for talking about stuff like that - but I don't care." She cocks her head. "For me, it's something I went through. It's an epidemic, and it's important to talk about it because it's a very, very hard thing to stop."

How did it start? "It started with ecstasy. I loved ecstasy. Loved it, loved it. It was great at first, then it just went ..." she mimes a crashing plane with her forearm. And crystal meth? "It ruins you." Some days she became insanely paranoid, blacking out the windows in her apartment, convinced she was under FBI surveillance. Others, the danger was more tangible, such as the time she went to buy marijuana in East LA and ended up with a dealer pointing a gun at her head. "Yeah, that was crazy. Don't mess with East LA. Thank the Lord, I'm here."

Was it a case of "child star hits the skids"?

"Definitely. What happens when you're a child professional is that you have to be, well, professional. You're taught not to have tantrums, to always people-please. That's part of how I got into [drugs] later."

Has she met the other casualties: Britney Spears, Drew Barrymore? "I've met Drew, she's a sweetheart. I just saw Britney the other day at the Teen Choice Awards." Is there a mutual understanding? "Sure. There are definitely things in common. It's making that change from being a [child performer], expected to do everything right, to adulthood, when you're going to have your rebellion phase." She laughs, hollowly. But it gets worse, as it's pushed back a few years? "Yeah, it does," she sighs.

Her life fell apart. She smoked away her savings, lost her mind (talking to hampers, etc) and ended up living at her parents' house. There is some speculation that Fergie is older than she lets on (seems unlikely; she grew up on TV), as her unquestionably sexy features can look a touch - how can I put this? - ravaged. But she beat it. "I don't hang out in circles where everyone is smoking crystal meth out of a pipe. That wouldn't be smart. You have to make good decisions. I always say I'm retired."

And she got over the gang fascination too?

"Oh yeah. It was very alluring, very romantic. Well, I romanticised it. I thought it was artistic." And the men? "I still think gangsters are cute," she says, coyly. Odd, then, that early in 2009 she married Josh Duhamel, star of Transformers and possibly the cleanest-cut man on the planet. "I know, isn't it crazy?" she laughs. "But a lot of what comes with the [Cholo] lifestyle is not what I wanted for my future. So I started becoming attracted to qualities that didn't involve guns and drugs and gangs. I changed my behaviour through therapy and started becoming attracted to things like integrity and loyalty. Who would be a good father? Who would be a good husband?"

Duhamel - a man so offensively healthy he could be the poster boy for broccoli - met Fergie when she appeared as herself on Las Vegas, the NBC drama he starred in, in 2004. The pair married last January in a ceremony so private that guests weren't informed of its Malibu location until the morning of the wedding.

"It just turned into a rock concert," she says gleefully, though she has maintained the same rigid privacy since. For all their success, the Black Eyed Peas are somewhat anonymous as personalities - and Fergie likes it this way.

Yet their success is unrivalled. In 2003, she was approached by the Peas (headed by super producer Will.i.am) who were looking for a female vocalist for their third album, Elephunk. She soon graduated to full-time member, reinvented herself as Fergie and, in their first year together, scored Britain's biggest-selling single with Where is the Love? Will.i.am dubbed her "the body" of the group (how very politically correct) and it's been hit after hit ever since.

Then her solo album, 2006's The Dutchess (a quirkily spelt nod to her flame-haired namesake), spawned three top 10 hits in the UK alone. She continued to shock with confessions of past lesbian affairs, and became so excited while on stage in San Diego in 2005 that her pelvic floor failed her during a performance of Let's Get it Started and ... well, you can guess the rest.

Marriage, she believes, has calmed her. So while she maintains she's "a very sexual person", these days the carnal-predator shtick is just for show. Drugs, gangsters, guns and girls are in the past - though she's resigned to the fact that she'll forever be judged for it all. "I'm trying to get a thicker skin. I like to be aware of people's perceptions of me, but when you put it as a priority, as a means to judging your worth, that's when it can be dangerous." At this, her heavily kohled eyes drift to some distant Rocky, giving her the look of the wisest pole dancer who ever lived. She gives a sigh. "There's no rule book on how to do this." No, there isn't. Though I'd bet good money Fergie could write a cracker one.

* Nine opens at cinemas on January 28. The Black Eyed Peas new single, Rock That Body, is out now.