She’s got legs; will the show?

The disco ball was spinning, the music was loud and the sold-out crowd at the El Rey Theatre was primed for an evening with that mouthy ex-model, the self-proclaimed inventor of excess, the fearless memoirist and gargantuan ego that is Janice Dickinson, to take over the room, spank them with the profanity-laden confessions of a diva and leave them wanting more.

What they got at the Tuesday night premiere of Dickinson’s one-woman show “What Would Janice Do?” was a considerably less confident performer. Gone was the bombast and cut-to-the-quick candor of the meanest judge on UPN’s “America’s Next Top Model,” the self-declared “world’s first supermodel” who so recently left viewers of VH-1’s “The Surreal Life” with their mouths agape.

Instead, Dickinson at the El Rey was a jittery amateur -- albeit a fabulously styled one, all legs and glitter and glossy pout, with a pose that elicited howls of delight from an adoring audience. She was so nervous she forgot her routine, reducing a one-hour show to what seemed like a 35-minute hallucination that loosely wove together Studio 54, Mick Jagger, death threats from Jerry Hall, pregnancy and botched oral sex at Carnegie Hall with a guy from her gym.

Oh, but what a frothy spectacle it was. As the theater filled, a skinny brunet named Caroline D’Amore, an actress/model whose father owns D’Amore’s Pizza, played DJ, cuing disco hits to accompany a series of clips projected on two large screens over the stage: Dickinson bleeding from a Botox injection; Dickinson doing a backbend on the roof of a white limo; Dickinson’s perfect backside encased in a tiny red bikini.

Once she hit the stage, Dickinson was clearly untethered. She opened with a fractured anecdote about bombing onstage at Studio 54 in 1982, a failed experiment as a pop singer. Things went downhill from there.

One moment Dickinson was preening for the audience, the next she was berating a photographer for leaving the show early. “Where are you going?” she asked him. At one point, she stopped mid-monologue to answer her cell phone.

*

Her big break

The idea for “What Would Janice Do?” emerged from Dickinson’s 20-minute performance in February as part of director Brian Howie’s 2003 off-Broadway show “Pieces (of Ass),” a raucous series of monologues performed by beautiful women on the perils of being beautiful. Dickinson got that gig after cold-calling Howie and convincing him to give her a shot. He said he was prepared for the worst. But Dickinson brought the house down with an off-the-cuff raunch-fest that involved the audience as much as it lampooned her diva persona.

“She told me, ‘It was the greatest professional experience I’ve ever had,’ ” he said. “The two-dimensional Janice is entertaining. Three-D Janice, live, or 4-D or 5-D really is so entertaining.”

Six weeks ago, Howie and Dickinson started writing “What Would Janice Do?” from excerpts of her two memoirs -- “No Lifeguard on Duty” (2002) and “Everything About Me Is Fake ... and I’m Perfect” (2004) -- and a third book due out in January, titled “Check Please: Dating, Mating and Extricating.” They started rehearsals two weeks ago. By Tuesday, they’d sold out the El Rey’s 400 seats.

Howie said he expected to extend the show’s L.A. run (it was scheduled to close Thursday night). He also said he’d been fielding calls from producers eager to bring the show to Las Vegas, Miami, New York, Paris and London.

“She’s more famous now than when she was famous,” he said.

*

Can she pull it off?

But Howie was shaken after Dickinson bombed her premiere, surprised at his star’s nerves, calling what happened onstage “humbling.” Perhaps this latest incarnation of the self-made Dickinson wouldn’t be so marketable. Yes, she’d survived an abusive childhood, the devastating glamour of high-stakes modeling, addiction and failed relationships, then remade herself with surgery, reality TV and shameless self-promotion into a kind of all-purpose celebrity. But did she have the chops for theater?

Howie stayed the course, held out hope, and by Wednesday night Dickinson seemed to have reclaimed her mojo. According to audience member Jen Danzi, Dickinson was confident and commanding, improvising, sparring with the audience. She pulled off her wig during one skit, saying “there goes $75 down the drain.” She poked fun at her onetime “America’s Next Top Model” nemesis Tyra Banks, who was there, calling her “my ex-boss whose name we won’t mention but who is sitting at the third table on the left.” There was a standing ovation.

“Janice finally had the arc of the show down enough to just be ‘Janice’ and it was great,” Howie wrote in an e-mail on Thursday. “She won’t hold anything back now.”

*

Back from the brink

At the end of Tuesday’s premiere, as a shower of white balloons and rose petals fell on the front rows and Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” filled the hall, Dickinson seemed confused by the audience’s enthusiastic applause.

“That’s it!” she shouted. “You guys! It’s over!”

She skipped around the stage, her lacy, thigh-high stockings draped around her ankles.

Almost immediately afterward, Dickinson’s tiny backstage dressing room was moist with adoration. They stood cheek-to-jowl -- her attorney, her agents, a giggly nurse midwife from Pomona who sneaked in, furniture designer Bobby Trendy, a young man wearing lip gloss and blue-tinted, butterfly-shaped sunglasses, entertainer Sheila E. -- all of them smiling encouragingly, conspicuously silent on the evening’s debacle.

“She’s the kind of person who can let loose on a submarine,” said reality TV producer Stuart Krasnow, who said he is developing a new Oxygen Network show for Dickinson. “You just wind her up and we follow.”

Dickinson sat at her dressing table announcing everyone as they arrived, her head attached to two professional groomers preparing her for the after-party.

No, the problem wasn’t that she was nervous, she said. Two weeks of rehearsal just went out the window, Dickinson said, when she spotted the parents of her children’s friends in the first few rows.

Yes, as puzzling as it seemed, this reality TV star, thrice divorced mother of two, recovering addict/alcoholic/narcissist, alleged ex-lover of 1970s icons, author of two bestselling tell-alls, was suddenly struck self-conscious. This development stunned everyone.

By Wednesday, Dickinson sounded truly humbled by the failure of her show’s premiere to rise to Dickinsonian heights. She’d been plagued by wardrobe malfunctions, she said. Those dreaded “PTA moms” threw her off. Vulnerability, she said, is “a different type of feeling” for her. “It’s like taking a scalpel and just cutting open your chest,” Dickinson said.

Even after her transcendent rebound Wednesday night, Dickinson held on to that humility. In a phone call Thursday morning, she was hoarse from celebrating but couldn’t help recalling some of her more successful bits.

“The nerves had just gone,” she said. “By the grace of God, they just split. I found my voice. It just felt so good.”