OTTAWA — You oughta know Ottawa’s Alanis Morissette got married — and the nuptials were a closely-kept secret for 16 days.

Only those in Morissette’s inner circle knew the singer and actress got hitched until Monday, when a representative said Morissette married the relatively unknown rapper Mario Treadway, a.k.a. Souleye, in an intimate ceremony in her Los Angeles home on May 22.

Bret Michaels fans were stunned when he performed the 80s Poison classic "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" on Wednesday's American Idol finale.

So were his doctors.

"The doctors, I didn't tell them I was going to do this," he told UsMagazine.com. "I never told them I was coming here. They're going to find out in a few minutes!" As for his family, "I may not have told them, either," he added.

Fergie is Elles' May cover girl...

"Toaster, please! Stand by for the toaster,” booms a voice over the loudspeaker of Los Angeles’ cavernous Staples Center, just as four Black Eyed Peas shoot out of the floor and pounce, catlike, at center stage. It’s two days before January’s Grammy Awards, and the Peas—whose albumThe E.N.D. is up for six awards—have about 20 minutes to block their performance, including mastering the hydraulic “toaster” that launches them into it. Lights flash, robot-armed dancers stomp and gyrate, and the flamboyantly dressed male Peas—Will.i.am, Apl.de.ap, and Taboo—practice mugging for the TV cameras. Not that anyone’s watching them. All eyes are on a surprisingly small figure in full rock-star regalia (bejeweled jacket; loose, dark hair; windshield-size shades) who’s filling out a pair of jeans like she was born to wear them.

“Imma be shakin’ my hips,” Fergie threatens, drawing the word out long and low—heeeeups—as she swivels the area in question. “Imma be lickin’ your liiips.” At this, even the been-there, done-that roadies in the audience shift perceptibly in their seats.

Maybe other singers’ stagey sexuality is part of the act, something that gets shelved as soon as the makeup is wiped off, but Fergie is different. Even in rehearsal, with her performance simmering on low, there’s something raw, arresting about her—something that makes men, as Will.i.am puts it, “get all mouthwatery.”

But of course, we know this—and so does she. This is, after all, the woman whose 2006 solo album, The Dutchess, added a new word to the lexicon: Fergalicious. (Her lyrics even provided the definition: “Make them boys go loco. They want my treasure so they get their pleasures from my photo.”) “She’s a little fearless, a little crazy. It comes through really well onstage—that’s really who she is,” says choreographer Fatima Robinson, the creative director of the Peas’ current tour. “Some people turn into another persona onstage. Fergie is just kind of like that all the time.”

But the day after this rehearsal, ensconced in an enormous suite at the Beverly Hilton, where the band is gathering for the evening’s performance at Clive Davis’ annual Grammy party, Fergie seems, if not exactly prim, anything but “crazy.” If the camera (or the stage, for that matter) adds pounds to most women, it adds a tough vampy-ness to her. In person, wearing a crisp, beaded white Etro blouse and expensively shredded Dolce jeans—“my bohorocker look,” she says—the 35-year-old’s bold sex appeal turns to a sweeter kind of prettiness.

Even that body, though voluptuous, seems more delicate, less Jessica Rabbity than it appears on-screen. Fergie has always been refreshingly candid about how hard she works to maintain her famous physique. She lives on bottles of Skinny Water and delivery meals from the L.A. company Diet Designs, stocks her dressing room with fruit platters and roasted chicken, and runs and lifts weights with a trainer for an hour to an hour and a half four times a week. Discipline pays off but seems a shame, really, for a woman who clearly has strong appetites. “I’m not going to lie: There are times I play mind tricks on myself, like that the french fries are poison,” she says. “With desserts, I’ll let myself have just one bite, but I’ll look like a freak when I’m eating it, like when I did Duncan Hines commercials as a kid, just savoring every morsel.”

Gaining 17 pounds—enough to swamp her 5'4" frame—to play Saraghina, the lusty, busty prostitute in Rob Marshall’s movie version of Nine, provided a break from all that. “When you’re in that group of actors [Kidman, Cruz, Cotillard, Hudson, Dench], you really want to respect the character, and my character was about living and sex and music and eating everything you want,” she says, with evident empathy. “As soon as I got the part, I started eating all the fried things, fast foods, that I usually don’t allow myself. I’d order this French cheese when I got home from work, watch old films, and eat the whole thing and let it sit in my system overnight with a nice cabernet.”

Though getting back in shape wasn’t quite so fun—“it was very hard; I didn’t just snap back”—she insists that being a little less perfect than her usual wasn’t all bad. Hunky husband Josh Duhamel “loved it,” she laughs. “We had fun.”

Still, when it comes to her looks, her wardrobe, and her weight, she’s had to learn to tune out the peanut gallery. Perez Hilton, for one, has been merciless about the Peas, Fergie in particular, attacking her “busted face.” In fact, when we met, the Peas’ manager had just settled a lawsuit with the blogger. (He’d slugged Hilton in the face one night during a confrontation over his poison pen.) “It has hurt me in the past when people say things like how ‘fugly’ I am or how horrible I look,” she says. “I’ve had to learn not to give it such a high priority in life…. Look, when you’re trying to juggle all of this in your life, sometimes you’re not going to look perfect. I don’t have time to get a facial every couple of days.”

Anyway, gossipmongers are not going to get in the way of something Stacy Ferguson has been building since grade school. “I’m one of those lucky people who knew what they wanted to do from a very early age and actually got to do it,” she says. Her fouryears- younger sister, Dana, who happens to drop by the Staples Center rehearsal, remembers her sibling singing constantly. “She would make up songs about whatever she saw—chocolate cake, straws—or make up words to a melody that she did a tap dance to,” Dana says. “I can still recite those songs!”