Excerpts: Part 3

I have just spent 55 LONG minutes sequestered in my bedroom, sitting inches from my television set with the volume turned low so that my landlord, who is caulking tiles in my roommate's bathroom, will not think I'm a big shifty pervert because I'm sitting at home in the middle of the day watching a little curio titled Playboy's Best Kept Secrets and claiming it's for work. This video is less tantalizing than caulking bathroom tiles.

Feb. 11, 2000 Candy Apples, after much puttering, finally finds the earrings she took out of her nipples; she wants to stretch her earlobes with them. Then it's off to Newport Tattoo on the Balboa Peninsula. Next door to the tattoo parlor, people are hanging around outside a bar, smoking. A truck is parked out front; two boxers sit quietly inside, waiting for their master. After the piercer, a friend of theirs whom they haven't seen for a while, stretches Candy's ears and puts new balls on Bill's earrings, Bill hands him a $20. He always carries the money, although Candy is the one who makes it, and I think to myself that she's smart. She'll never let him feel like less of a man. He is lover, chauffeur and baby-sitter in one. She pays the bills and likes anal. In the year they've been together, they've spent three days apart: when Keith Richards, "who is a really big fan," flew her to Vegas for a Stones video shoot. How often do Candy and Bill have sex? Every day. "I pout if I don't get it every day," Bill says, laughing. "He wakes me up at 5:30 in the morning," Candy grumbles good-naturedly. But she loves him, and aside from her job and those 742 men, she sleeps only with him.

Feb. 25, 2000 Three small orange trees grow along the curb in front of her stately mansion in an old-money neighborhood above Los Angeles, and the bleft pink that has replaced brassy platinum as her hot new hair color glows all the way down to her scalp. No, Gwen Stefani has not forgotten her roots. But it's going on five years since No Doubt, one of Orange County's most enduring and identifiably local bands, experienced its overnight international sensation. Since then has come the 15 million-selling CD, the sold-out global tour, the fanzines and websites and MTV awards, the weekly photographic updates in Rolling Stone on every change of clothes, boyfriend or party itinerary—all of it laced with just enough rags-to-riches pathos and angst to green light an upcoming VH-1 Behind the Music special, which will be synergistically broadcast in April to coincide with the release of the band's new album. By now, Stefani has been a bona fide pop Tinkerbell for so long that it's sometimes hard to believe she was ever that just-a-girl who grew up near Disneyland. Her faithful little doggie—a 15-year-old Lhasa apso named Maggen that is one year older than the band—is still at her side, Toto-and-Dorothy-style. But the Oz they inhabit clearly isn't Anaheim anymore. When No Doubt's tour stopped for two nights at the Pond a couple of years ago, Stefani's parents visited her in a hotel. "Something happens to you when you travel the world and embrace everything," Stefani acknowledges. "Suddenly, you realize that the small, little back yard you came from is such a . . . like . . . Anaheim is such a weird place to come from."

March 31, 2000 No. 1:That new airport smell.