Will it all pay off for McPhee?
On a recent afternoon, Katharine McPhee was sashaying through an L.A. coffee shop in a red crystal-covered mini-dress, knocking her hips from side to side theatrically
“I feel like I’m doing what Beyonce does,” she giggled, adding, to boyfriend Nick Cokas: “Baby, if I’m going to be wearing this – I’m going to have to get to the gym.”
McPhee may be famous as a reality star – the winsome runner-up from last season’s “American Idol” – but she’s not yet a rock star.
Her self-titled debut album, released last week, will largely determine whether McPhee ascends into the winner’s circle of Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood or joins the crew of “Idol” has-beens like Justin Guarini.
The daughter of a vocal coach and a TV producer, McPhee, 22, has been performing since she was 7, when she sang “Jingle Bell Rock” at her mom’s church.
She did some starving-actress years, living at home with her parents, failing on auditions and making money by singing in local musical-theater productions.
So often on “Idol,” McPhee seemed a beautiful girl with a beautiful voice in search of an identity.
“I think the hardest thing about that show is finding who you are in front of everybody else in the whole world,” she says.
Especially for her because, “and I don’t mean this egotistically. I am a little bit versatile. I can sound like the singer who sings jazz. I could do my little R&B, so it made it difficult for people to pinpoint me.”
With the new album, recorded after the “Idol” tour ended last summer, her image and sound have gone a little more sultry.
The cover features McPhee in a loose but clingy gold-and-black striped sweater dress, her legs provocatively splayed and encased in foreboding, thigh-high black leather boots.
She admits to being rattled by nerves as “Idol” went on:
“When I got into the top five is when I really started to lose it. I did the best that I could, but it was the best I could do in that moment. I don’t think it was necessarily my best.”
It’s clear as she talks that McPhee isn’t the simple ingenue she so often appeared to be onscreen. She went further to crush that image when the contest was over, revealing that she had been a bulimic for five years.
Before the Hollywood round of last season’s “Idol” auditions began, she enrolled at a treatment center and spent three months undergoing group and individual therapy, six days a week.
McPhee says she decided to go public because she felt a responsibility to the little girls looking up to her.
As for the current season’s crop of “Idol” hopefuls, she offers some advice:
“Don’t trust anybody, because the producers have their agenda. I personally would just stick to your own guns and do what you think is right in your gut.”
The birthday bunch
Actor David Selby (“Dark Shadows,” “Falcon Crest”) is 66. Actress Charlotte Rampling is 61. Actress Barbara Hershey is 59. Actor-director-comedian Christopher Guest is 59. Actor-comedian Tim Meadows (“Saturday Night Live”) is 46. Actress Jennifer Jason Leigh is 45. Actress Laura Linney is 43. Singer Bobby Brown is 38. Country singer Sara Evans is 36. Actor Jeremy Sumpter (“Peter Pan”) is 18.