Merry turned her face toward us again. “Okay, so, the letters?”

Excerpt from the beginning of VH1’s Behind the Music, episode “Gloss,” first aired September 2008

They began as a humdrum girl group on the West Coast; they exploded into a worldwide phenomenon seemingly overnight.

Black-and-white photographs pile in a montage; they include a shot of young Rose in a star-spangled outfit, waving a baseball cap, and another of a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl in jean shorts smiling from a tire swing on a playground.

The story of Gloss began in 1993. Eleven-year-old Rosalind McGill and her childhood best friend and neighbor, Vivian Ortiz, spent their days singing, dancing, and participating in church choir. When Rose decided she needed a bigger spotlight in 1997, she did something unusual: instead of ditching Vivian to try to make it as a solo act, she chose to expand their group, adding members Yumiko Otsuka and Meredith Warner, from outside of their small town in Northern California.

The group practiced relentlessly, covering popular songs and penning a few of their own. Finally, after two years of constant toil, touring in one of their mothers’ minivans up and down the California coast, they caught the attention of Marsha Campbell at Big Disc Records.

A clip of Marsha in 2008, her hair a bright blond: “I knew there was nothing like these girls in spirit and in sound. We had to sign them.”

There was a problem as soon as the girls signed with the company. Vivian, one of the founding members of Gloss, had to pull out for health reasons.

Marsha’s head again: “Vivian was extremely sick. It wasn’t just nerves.”

Another head, this time of a more mature-looking Meredith being interviewed: “We’d been working so hard to get to the signing stage, so I thought she was just exhausted from that. But it turned out to be far more serious.”

Vivian was out; now the group needed a replacement. Marsha, who had recently been a judge on the wildly popular TV program Sing It, America!, knew just the one: season-one runner-up Cassidy Holmes, who was the same age as the girls.

An audio clip plays the cassette-tape recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” from the girls’ first introduction to one another. A photo of the girls in their early days—a candid from their first tour bus, with Rose in the foreground sipping a can of Diet Coke, Cassidy and Yumi in the shadowed aisle behind her—is in sepia tone on the screen.

As soon as the girls heard Cassidy sing with them, they knew they had found the missing piece of the puzzle. The ensemble was complete. The girls quickly cut half of their debut album with producer Jake Jamz and embarked on a mall tour spanning more than forty cities.

Meredith, though not the eldest, often remarked that she felt like the mother of the group. She was loud and not afraid to speak up when something seemed out of line. A video clip of Merry in 2001: she is arguing with manager Peter Vincent on a sidewalk, one finger held aloft in a stabbing motion. The video is grainy, taken from across the street. There is no audio accompanying the video, but it’s obvious she’s having an argument with him.

Despite a few setbacks caused by Meredith and her diva antics, by the time Gloss had a full album ready in 2001, the girls were poised for stardom.

5.

September 2000

L.A.

Cassidy

When I blew out my candles on my seventh birthday, I wished I could be a ballerina. I coaxed my parents to sign me up for dance classes. On the first day of ballet, the girl next to me took an instant dislike to me and stomped on the back of my heel. I wish I could say that I moved to a different part of the room or transferred to a different class, but I didn’t; I told my parents that I didn’t want to take ballet, and they let me move to modern dance instead.

I have always been bad with confrontation. Which meant that Rose’s finger pointed in my face, her two-toned eyes bright with fury even in the dim glow of the recording studio lights, was very off-putting.

“This isn’t fair.” She glowered at Jake Jamz. “You’re giving her all the good lines!”

It was clear from the way that Yumiko and Meredith deferred to her judgment when I auditioned for the group that Rose had a temper, but although I’d spent all of August worrying that we would get into a fight, we’d been able to shrug off conflict in the apartment. I’d hoped that I wouldn’t be on the receiving end of Rose’s ire, but any fragile politeness ended when she realized our producer had chosen only two of us for the main verses. In the control room on the other side of a giant glass window, Jake furrowed his brow. His voice came over the intercom: “Cassidy’s voice is better suited for—”

“I don’t give a crap. I’m not singing backup. I started this group!”

“This is dumb,” Yumiko said. “Why aren’t you mad at Merry? She’s also singing lead here.”

“Merry has earned her place.” Rose spun around to glare at Yumiko. “She’s been a member of Gloss for longer than six weeks.”

Our new manager, Peter, leaning in next to Jake, clicked in. “Every minute in here costs you money. So I’d suggest recording the way Jake wants it and leave your bickering for later.”

Rose leaned into the microphone and growled, “No.”

I moved my gaze away from Rose, worried that any eye contact would set her off, and saw Peter rubbing his temple in the control room. I hoped he’d come into the studio to break up a fight if Rose decided to jump me.

Meredith snapped, “Stop being a child. So you’ll be background for this song. You won’t always be background on all songs.”

“Look, if the tables were turned and I was singing all the lead parts and you were stuck in the background, wouldn’t you be mad?”

“I am stuck in the background, and I’m not mad,” Yumi volunteered.

“I wasn’t asking you,” Rose said. “I didn’t come all the way over here just to be in the chorus of my own damn group.”

Meredith sighed. “This is one song and it’s not worth fighting over. I’m tired. You’re tired. It’s going to get even more tiring. We should save our energy for a bigger fight ahead.”

“What could be bigger than the sound of our first single?” Rose snapped. “The song that will introduce us to an audience? If you were in the background, and your mom listened to it and couldn’t hear your voice, what would you say then?”

“My mom wouldn’t be listening for me,” Yumi said quietly.

“Spare me your sob stories,” Rose bit back.

“It’s fine, I’ll sing backup,” I said quickly, not wanting to see what happened next. I brushed my lips hastily into the microphone. “Hear that? Jake? I’ll sing backup for this one.”

THE LABEL TOOK us under its wing, providing housing, a driver to take us to our appointments in a big blue Suburban, and Peter Vincent. Peter seemed like a nice enough guy. When he arrived at Big Disc for our initial meeting, Meredith had let her gaze roam up and down his body, silently assessing. He looked as clean-cut as a mid-century milkman, with bright blue eyes and sandy-blond hair. Although his voice was grating—“Seriously,” Meredith had said, “he has zero control of his voice. How do people live like that? Talking, without understanding what speech is supposed to sound like?”—people sat up and listened to him. When I mentioned it to Joanna, I could hear her shrug through the phone. “He’s a guy. People automatically listen to white men for some stupid-ass reason. At least it benefits you.”