Gwen Stefani: A Rock Goddess With Major Issues
The lobby of New York’s Mercer Hotel is a haven of downtown chic — all angular furniture in shades of eggplant, with oblong oversize lampshades atop carved wooden posts. A wall lined with bookshelves displays volumes on Toulouse-Lautrec, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol alongside studies of designers Vivienne Tam and Salvatore Ferragamo and anthologies on modernist architecture. The place is, as Gwen Stefani puts it, “super frickin’ trendy cool,” the kind of hotel where everyone pretends not to notice when Nicky Hilton saunters past the reception desk.
But someone has taken notice of Stefani, lounging inconspicuously on a leather cafe chair on this late December evening. Stefani is done up in the luxe street style that has made her an international fashion icon: dark-wash jeans from her own L.A.M.B. label (“They look good whether I’m a little fatter, or not,” she says), a L.A.M.B. wife-beater, suede Christian Dior clogs that add three and a half inches to her height and platinum-blond hair extensions bubbling out from under a blue knit ski cap. She slouches lower in her seat. “There’s this guy over there and he won’t stop staring at me,” she says.
I turn around and see a toddler — no more than a year old, big blue eyes, hair so fair it blends in almost completely with his scalp — gazing in our direction. Stefani giggles. “The little baby,” she says. “So cute.”
Stefani has always been the kind of songwriter who lives out her most private dilemmas in public. “Don’t Speak,” the song that put No Doubt over the top in 1996, was about the breakup of her seven-year relationship with bass player Tony Kanal. In 2000, after four years of dating Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, she made a video for No Doubt‘s “Simple Kind of Life,” where she ran wild in a wedding dress while singing, “I always thought I’d be a mom/Sometimes I wish for a mistake.” True to form, the first single from her recent solo debut, “What You Waiting For?,” chronicles her intense baby lust — the “tick-tock” refrain of the chorus, she says, was inspired in part by the sound of her biological clock.
During the three days I spend with her, her desire to have children is a continual theme, whether she’s talking about how she never planned on being a pop star (“Before that, all I ever did was, like, look at Tony and pray that God would let me have a baby with him”) or the joy of marrying Rossdale (“It’s such a beautiful, magical feeling, I can’t explain it. It’s like having a baby. I can imagine what it might be like. But that love I’ve never experienced”) or her plans for the future (“I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ve always wanted to do the family thing”).
And like any successful woman on the mommy track, she worries about the conflicts of career and family, although most women don’t have to stress about the demands of dressing as fairy-tale characters in music videos. “At a certain point I’m going to want to have a family,” Stefani says, “and I’m not going to have time to be running around the world doing this shit and being greedy the way I have been. I can always write songs. But can I always wear an Alice in Wonderland costume? I probably shouldn’t. I can at home. I was thinking that when I have children, that I should always dress as a character for them, so they think their mom is Alice in Wonderland or Cinderella. It would be totally messed up!”
“I hope she chooses to do both things,” says Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Stefani’s label, Interscope, of the star’s career and family ambitions. “She can handle both. I think she would really miss not fulfilling her potential as an artist, and she’d regret that. But her potential as a mom is equally as powerful.”
“This is the first time in a long time that I actually don’t know what’s gonna happen next,” Stefani finally says. “You think about it as a famous person. You think about how you’re gonna end it. How you’re gonna get away and have a normal life. I imagine my children are going to save me from my vanity and be my passion and fill whatever fears I have of the amazing time I’m having right now being gone. I don’t want to drop off and not be on the radio or not be able to talk about myself for hours. I don’t want it to go away. But at the same time, I never expected to be here in the first place.”
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