Elimination Night - By Anonymous Page 0,14

Galactic Records, where he rose with similar speed to senior vice president, charged with overseeing the career of the nightclub owner/rapper/all-round hustler Bossman Toke—a.k.a. Bossy T. And it was Bossy T who introduced Teddy to Bibi: She was his girlfriend at the time, having just appeared as a thong-wearing, bare-nippled Queen Victoria in Bossy T’s music video for the multiplatinum hit “Kneel for the King.” In the extended ten-minute cut, which cost twenty-five million dollars to make, Bossy T plays a black English royal from the future who builds a time machine so he can sleep with every “smokin’ hot bitch queen since history began.” The video ends with him unzipping his fly in front of Cleopatra, allowing a solid gold asp to slither from his pants. It won Best Artistic Vision at that summer’s Cool Beatz Video Awards.

And why did Teddy and Bibi have so much in common? Well, Bibi had also been thrown out on the street at the age of sixteen, after refusing to accept a place at hospitality school. The Vasquezes lived in Middle Village, Queens: Bibi’s mother, a Dominican baby nurse, had come to America to work for a wealthy family in Manhattan; her father was a French Canadian dishwasher. Bibi took her mother’s surname on the advice of her manager: “Bibi Le Poupe” just didn’t have much of a ring to it.

Bibi’s parents yearned for their daughter to become a successful, independent American woman—and hospitality was something, the only thing, she seemed to be any good at. Or at least, when she waited tables at the French restaurant where her father worked, she earned more tips in a week than the manager made in a month… which she found out soon enough because she married him.

It lasted nine days. And still Bibi didn’t want to go to hospitality school. No, she wanted to be a dancer, an actress, a model… a singer. So she moved into a squat on the Lower East Side and auditioned every day. Eventually she got a two-week gig as a bikini-wearing pole dancer on a late night music TV show and wound up giving an onscreen lapdance to Bossy T, who by then had been profiled in Forbes thanks to his unexpectedly successful diversification into the plus-size underwear market.

I didn’t even need to Google the rest of this story when I was putting together my research file: Bibi’s breakthrough casting in Elsa, a movie about the tragic life of the narcocorrido singer Elsa Melindez; her first single, “My Love Goes Bang-Bang,” which spent four months at number one largely thanks to the publicity created when Bibi, Teddy, and Bossy T got into an argument in a Chelsea ice cream parlor, during which Mr. Tiddles let off three rounds from his gun. (Bibi and Bossy T were questioned but not charged. Mr. Tiddles spent the next three months on Rikers Island, saying nothing to nobody.)

The scandal was enough to end Bibi and Bossy T’s romance—but Bibi stuck with Teddy, who became her manager, publicist, charisma coach, agent, and business partner, taking a separate percentage for each. He quickly consolidated her image as an unsmiling, imperious diva with a white fur wardrobe and a Queens-girl toughness. Every woman in America wanted to be her. Every guy in America wanted to sleep with her. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic—it didn’t matter. The great irony being that Bibi achieved all this without even being able to sing.

That was hardly the point, of course: Bibi was a brand, an idea, an aspiration.

I can hardly even begin to imagine how many millions Bibi and Teddy made together. They opened a chain of nail salons (Mani Bibi), launched a perfume brand (Bibi Beautiful), and created a line of personal massage wands (Bibi Naughty). As for Bibi’s personal life: She became involved with her hairdresser, Tommy Stiles, who proposed within three weeks of their first date. Teddy was both the officiant at the wedding—he sang the vows—and the best man. He even joined the couple on their honeymoon at Bibi’s villa in Italy, where the staff expressed surprise to an undercover ShowBiz reporter that the groom was spending more time with Teddy than he was with his bride.

When they all got back home to LA, Bibi hired two lawyers: One to annul her marriage; the other to sue Teddy. Not long after that, Bibi’s new boyfriend, Logan Deckard—Oscar-winning actor, chairman of the Hollywood Actors Union, patron of multiple cancer charities, and presumed candidate for governor of California—had his