From Mouseketeer to Mother: Christina Aguilera Christina Aguilera’s bodyguard and driver are quietly playing pool along the corridor from the presidential suite of the Philippe Starck-designed SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, where the singer/songwriter awaits me on a white sofa in her latest incarnation as a peachy-skinned Hollywood goddess. Judging by the traffic-stopping ruby-red lipstick and the sprayed-on black velvet halterneck dress with the built-in balcony bra, I’m guessing that she’s already in character for her movie debut in the film Burlesque, which she’s about to start shooting.
Every waking moment, it seems, is accounted for by this shrewd operator, who has sold more than 37 million albums worldwide, won five Grammy Awards and long since proved that she’s Madonna’s natural heir when it comes to reinventing her femininity. Her friend and sometime collaborator Elton John even paid tribute to Christina’s focus by dubbing her an ‘old soul’ – and she’s still only 28.
One of her favourite stores is the LA branch of the erotic boutique Coco de Mer, which knows just how to drape (or undrape) the womanly shape. You won’t ever find her aspiring to be a stick insect: even the bottle of her third and latest fragrance emulates the curves of the female body with a vampish black lace design on the glass.
She may have started out as a child star, but – unlike some LA celebrities – Christina Aguilera has never wanted to stay child-sized. ‘Diet is not a word in my vocabulary – I don’t like depriving myself of things,’ admits this self-confessed junk-food fan, giggling like a rebellious schoolgirl.
‘I make healthy choices when I can, because it’s very important for me to have moments where I can let go, have a great dinner and not care so much about the carbs. I work out five days a week – and I hate working out in the moment, I truly do,’ she adds frankly. ‘But the aftermath is so great, and it helps you feel good – not only physically, but mentally.’
And Christina certainly seems to be in great shape since becoming a mother, back in January 2008, with the birth of her son Max Liron (whose Latin and Hebrew names mean ‘our greatest song’). It’s ironic that her deliciously musky after-hours perfume, Christina Aguilera By Night, has been launched at the time in her life when she has had to become a morning person.
‘Yes, now I’m a mother, I am getting up earlier,’ she concedes with a smile. ‘It’s 6am every day…but I’m a night owl regardless, which means that, for me, going to bed early means trying to get to sleep by 12.30am. My bedtime before I had my child was 3 or 4am, but that’s because I love the night, when everything shuts up and I have a moment to be creative. It’s definitely a balancing act to make time now, but that’s why it’s even more important for me to find those moments in the evening when I can just really pamper myself. And smelling good helps me feel good, so I usually spray on the fragrance before I go to sleep at night.’
‘It’s even more important to me now to find those moments when I can really pamper myself’
When I remind her how Marilyn Monroe, on being asked what she wore in bed, famously replied, ‘Chanel No 5’, Christina giggles again and says, ‘Smart lady!’ Having already confided (on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2007) that she and her husband, entrepreneur and music marketer Jordan Bratman, 32, have ‘naked Sundays’ where they parade around in the buff at home (home being the Osbournes’ old hacienda-style mansion in Beverly Hills), she now slyly fills me in further: ‘Naked apart from the fragrance.’
Trust this style queen to make ‘settling down’ sound so subversively sexy. I ask if Jordan, whom she met in 2001 and married in 2005, is a better kisser than Madonna, whom Christina and Britney Spears both kissed full on the lips when the three of them performed at the 2003 MTV Music Video Awards.
She bursts out laughing. ‘Absolutely! My favourite times with him are when we are just cosying up in bed together. I love my bed, I eat in bed, and if it were up to me I would do everything from my bed.’ Christina adds enthusiastically: ‘I love just looking at my son’s face and finding more peace within my life, because that’s what I want to surround Max with.’
And you can see why, with her dramatic family history. The story of Christina Aguilera’s rise to fame is one of drive and determination, seeking refuge in music to escape an early childhood dominated by her violent, Ecuador-born US army-sergeant father Fausto. Her Irish mother Shelly, a teacher of Spanish, divorced the abusive Fausto when Christina was seven and moved Christina and her sister Rachel from their home in Staten Island, New York, to live with the girls’ grandmother in Pittsburgh.
That was where Christina learned to love her granny’s favourite singers, Etta James and Billie Holiday: her third studio album, 2006’s Back to Basics, was a tribute to their jazz and blues influence on her pop and R & B songs. ‘My grandma passed away a couple of years ago, but I’m sure she is proud of me,’ says Christina, adding that she also ‘enjoys pampering’ her mother: ‘I give her everything.’
A natural performer as soon as she could walk and talk, Christina first appeared on US TV in 1992 as a child contestant in the show Star Search. She then joined Britney, Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling as Mouseketeers on the Disney Channel’s New Mickey Mouse Club TV show from 1993 to 1994, before her song ‘Reflection’, for Disney’s film Mulan, led to a record deal with RCA in 1998. That soaring, four-octave voice enabled her to make the transition from child star to chart-topping diva at 18, when her first hit single, ‘Genie in a Bottle’, went straight to number one in the American charts and stayed there for five weeks.
And while Britney has been through divorce, rehab, an ugly custody battle with her former husband and a public breakdown in 2007, the highly organised Christina never seems to have put a foot wrong. ‘Women should embrace their sexuality, because it’s something we own, that men cannot do as well as we can’
Instead, she took charge of her career by sacking her manager, cutting loose from the bubblegum princess image of her debut album, 1999’s Christina Aguilera, and triumphantly relaunching herself as a grown-up artist with the confident, raunchy Stripped album in 2002.
As Christina once put it, ‘Britney is someone I used to hold hands with – we were silly little girls together.’ And when I ask if she ever gets tired of people contrasting her fortunes with Britney’s (comparisons have continued ever since they released their first singles within eight months of each other in 2000 – particularly with rumours of feuding after Britney caught her old flame Justin innocently kissing Christina backstage when they toured together), it’s the only time during our encounter that her mellow mood evaporates. ‘At this point, I think it’s irrelevant,’ she snaps crisply.
In Jordan Bratman, a Mark Ronson lookalike whom Christina has described as her ‘rock’, it sounds as if she has met her soul mate. ‘Jordan is pretty genius,’ she coos.
‘Although I’m the more creative one, he understands the music business and really helps me with my brand. I gravitated towards music because it was a release out of a very chaotic environment when I was growing up. I didn’t realise till many years
later that it was an escape, but obviously I had a passion for it and it grew into a career for me. I don’t have to do it at this point,’ adds the multimillionairess, ‘but I do it because I love it.’
Max, she says, already loves music. ‘I play him Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones,’ explains Christina, who has worked with the latter as well as such classic voices as Andrea Bocelli and Tony Bennett.
‘And if Max wanted to have a music career for the same reason, then I would say, “Go for it”. I am really into encouraging him as an individual – whether he wants to be a vet, a scientist or a garbage man. As long as he has a passion for it.’
She’s currently working on a new album to be released later this year, as well as fitting in Burlesque, the autobiographical-sounding story of a small-town girl who makes it big as a burlesque star. Motherhood, she tells me, has made her ‘feel even more sensual. But, ultimately, sexuality really stems from feeling good about yourself.’
Christina famously claimed her own sexuality by reinventing herself with the song ‘Dirrty’ from the album Stripped; its accompanying video reportedly shocked her grandmother. Yet Christina fully intends to show ‘Dirrty’ to her son one day. ‘He’ll see all my work, I’m sure,’ she says breezily.‘But I think that’s also part of what I want him to appreciate in women – the fact that sexuality is not something you should be ashamed of.
‘The more that you try to forbid something and keep it secret, the more it becomes this thing you should be fearful of,’ adds Christina. She’s not afraid to label herself a feminist, and the legacy of her long resistance to her bullying father (from whom she is now permanently estranged) can be seen in the way she criticises all attempts to dictate what women should wear or how they should behave.
‘I just feel that women should embrace their sexuality because it’s something we own – that men cannot do as well as we can,’ she explains. ‘I think men get jealous of that and want to keep our sexuality for themselves. But more than ever, women are coming out and owning their sexuality and feeling good about it. I want my son to grow up respecting that.’
And Christina is also clear that she doesn’t want to be anyone’s clone. ‘I do look up to Madonna as a businesswoman,’ she says, ‘but I would definitely not want to emulate exactly what she’s done. I enjoy looking back at the body of her work and the different changes. I love the fact that she’s been a risk-taker – and pretty fearless in some of her choices.’
She shakes my hand and says goodbye in a cloud of the headiest of her scents so far. Having made her name with ‘Genie in a Bottle’, it seems that now the ambitious Christina has set her sights on creating genius in a bottle. ‘Trying scents as you grow up is part of enjoying being a woman,’ she adds. ‘Women are beautiful beings and I love experimenting not just with hair and make-up and fashion, but with fragrances too – it’s like the icing on the cake.’
Christina Aguilera’s third fragrance, Christina By Night, from £19 for 30ml, is available nationwide
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