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Movieline: February 1998
The Wow
By Stephen Rebello

BEAUTIFUL AND BODACIOUS JENNIFER LOPEZ IS FULL OF SURPRISES, NOT THE LEAST OF WHICH ARE RAGING TALENT AND A TWO-MILLION DOLLAR PRICE TAG. HERE, THE ACTRESS WHO SEEMS TO HAVE BURST OUT OF NOWHERE INTO STARDOM EXPLAINS WHY SHE GETS ROLES SANDRA BULLOCK DOESN'T, DESCRIBES HOW WESLEY SNIPES WOULDN'T GIVE IT A REST, AND REVEALS THAT OLIVER STONE SMELLS LIKE "SPICY LAVENDER."

Arriving exactly on time for my interview with Jennifer Lopez, I am escorted through the interior of a luxurious Beverly Hills mansion where she's staying, out onto a sun-drenched terrace. There, as if I had strolled onto the set of Imitation of Life, I find all 66 caramel-colored inches of Jennifer Lopez lying face down on a poolside chaise. Her bikini top is slightly loosened, her nether regions are towel-draped, and a masseuse is kneading oil into the precipitous peaks and valleys of her formidable body. Her skin glints as if it were flecked with 24-karat gold. I park myself on a nearby chaise, and Lopez greets me with the slow, languid smile and half-mast gaze of someone not entirely anxious to surface from a better-than-life dream. "Hi, Stephen," she says. "I'll be with you in a second." Then, responding to the masseuse's skillful ministrations, her lips part in sensual abandon, and she turns her head away, sending her hair cascading over the side of the chaise.

This classic Hollywood star tableau has, of course, been orchestrated by Lopez for my benefit. She knows that I know that she knows that I know the whole scene is deliberate, right down to the supporting players - assistants, various friends, family - arranged here and there around the pool, ready to do a star's bidding. Included in this artfully arranged backdrop is model and restaurateur Ojani Noa, Lopez's husband of roughly a year, who, in a muscle T-shirt and sunglasses, is splashing water into the pool from a garden hose. "Sweetie, Steve and I won't be able to hear each other," says Lopez, as she turns and finally begins to ready herself for something other than rubbing. Issuing one last, voluptuous "Mmmm," she rises slowly from her chaise, grins at me, adjusts her bikini top, tightens the towel around her midsection, rakes her fingers through her hair, and slides onto an adjacent lounge chair for our chat.

That Lopez has dared to try and pull off such a time-honored Hollywood gambit as Rising-Star-Interviewed-By-The-Pool is in keeping with her overall strategy of playing Big. Big is Jennifer Lopez's forte. In the flesh, this girl packs a startling, sloe-eyed, tawny, womanly allure reminiscent of vintage-era movie voluptuaries. Ava Gardner and Linda Darnell spring to mind. To match such visual opulence, Lopez comes diva-sized in style, self-regard and ambition - for which she makes no apologies.

Nor should she. Lopez is right this second popping Hollywood's thermometer like no other new girl in town. In the space of only two years, she muscled out of TV flicks and sitcoms and into showy feature roles with Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in Money Train, with Robin Williams in Francis Ford Coppola's Jack, and with Jack Nicholson in Blood and Wine. She chased those with a star turn in the title role of Selena, and came through with a big box-office success in Anaconda. Then she followed that up by taking the role Sharon Stone almost played in Oliver Stone's noir item, U-Turn, after which she landed the lead opposite George Clooney in Out of Sight, the upcoming sexy action thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh. As that picture wrapped, she was back in the news for winning the lead in Kiss the Girls director Gary Fleder's next project, Thieves.

"So, what's your theory about why you, why right now?" I ask her as an opening shot.

"Because I'm the best," Lopez declares, laughing in delight at her own chutzpah. "I feel I can do anything - any kind of role. I'm fearless." A fearless Hollywood actress? Can I actually be hearing right? "I work really hard," answers Lopez. "I'll just get better as I go along because I'm open to getting better. If you have the goods, there's nothing to be afraid of. If somebody doesn't have the goods, they're insecure. I don't have that problem. I'm not the best actress that ever lived, but I know I'm pretty good."

Lopez's theory of nothing-to-fear-but-fear itself is more elaborately worked out than it sounds on first hearing. "I have the 'stardom glow,"' she confides warmly. The what? "See, I grew up watching real movie stars - Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe. Glamorous women like those are why I wanted to get into the business. And from the time I first started off as an actress, each day I had an audition, I'd wake up, do my hair and my makeup, look at myself in the mirror and say, I have the stardom glow today.' A lot of people go into meetings and auditions all nervous. No! You've got to have WOW! I tell my actress friends this all the time. I walk into auditions going, 'What's gonna make me different from all the other girls here?' They're looking for the next star to walk into that room. It's about being alive, open, electric, confident. That's the 'wow.'

"My older sister and I both started out in musical theater," Lopez continues. "She has a great voice and she had more of a chance of making it than I did. But she couldn't take the rejection. You have to get up there and say, 'You like me? And if they say,'No,' it's like, 'OK. Fuck you! Next? How about you? Do you like me? Or you? Or you?' Eventually somebody will say 'Yes' and that's your opportunity to shine, to turn on the star glow."

Lopez is faster, funnier and prettier than Anthony Robbins, and she outdoes even him as a one-person self-motivation/fan club/cheering section. This bravura is quite charming in person, not to mention refreshing after all the false modesty that masks egomania in Hollywood. But the real reason Lopez can get away with her Bigness routine is that she is good. Self-styled, premeditated divadom is rarely accompanied by genuine acting ability, but Lopez brings talent, and more, to the party. She made an incandescent, heartbreakingly accessible Selena, and in U-Turn, she packed a volatile vulnerability and a jeez-what-will-she-do-next? jolt into her femme fatale, not to mention pitch perfect Apache cadences.

Oddly enough, Lopez did just about everything an actress could do to avoid taking a U-Turn. Bad blood left over from a casting session she'd had years ago for Stone's never-filmed Manuel Noriega project left her unwilling to talk to the director about any project. "The minute I began reading this long, four-page scene," she recounts of her earlier meeting with Stone, "he started walking around the room. Then he began rearranging the furniture. I'm like. 'What is he doing? This is so rude.' Well, he rearranged his entire office, and when I finished, the casting director said, 'Oliver?' and he turns and goes, 'Oh - um, OK. So you're a regular on that tv series?' And I go, 'Yeah.' And I left. I told my manager, 'I've never been treated like this and I never want to work for Oliver Stone." Flash forward to the set of Anaconda in Brazil. Lopez's agent called just after she'd learned she'd bagged the lead in Selena over some 22,000 other hopefuls. "I told him, 'You guys know I don't want to work with him.' Click!" Back in L.A. from Brazil, Lopez got another request from Stone. "I'm one of those people who usually sticks to something I've said, but I got to thinking, 'Well, he called himself and he wants to make amends. I have the upper hand here because I don't care about this movie. I've got Selena and I'm getting a million dollars for it.' That's the best way to deal with these bigwigs. I just went in there and and we hit it off and I flirted with him, got tough with him and he just loved it." By the time Lopez reached home, Stone had already phoned her agent, saying the role was virtually hers, adding, "Jennifer Lopez is like a tall drink of hot cocoa." Then Sharon Stone weighed in. Lopez recalls, "She was interested and so I heard they were going to play that out. But then she wanted a lot of money and they came back to me. With a triumphant grin, she adds, "The first day we were on the set, (Oliver) said, 'I'm sorry about the Sharon thing. When a major player calls, you have to play it out. But you were always my first choice.' He was just trying to make me feel better about it, like he wanted me to be really confident, and I thought it was nice of him to care. He's like that. He has a soft, vulnerable side.

Soft and vulnerable, huh? "What did you learn about Oliver Stone's sensitive side from being directed by him?" I ask. Letting out a hoot, Lopez observes, "That he's a wild man. He doesn't hide anything when it comes to sex in his life. He loves women, he has a lot of sex. He loves talking about how he sleeps with women. Like he'll come onto the set going, 'Aggghh, I was up fucking until four in the morning until I passed out.' Oliver is a great guy, highly sexual, and he was so good to me making the movie. Oh, and something else - I'm attracted to scent, and he smells really great, like spicy lavender. You know what those expensive purple candies smell like in your mouth? The ones nobody has here, but you can get in New York and Europe? That's what he smells like."

Lopez worked hard for the opportunity to follow up U-Turn by starring with George Clooney in director Steven Soderbergh's Out Of Sight, an edgy adaptation of Elmore Leonard's on-the-run action romance between a prison escapee and a female fed marshal. "I have this attitude - and it won't change no matter how big I get - that you have to fight for things you want," says Lopez in explaining how she won the role. "You can't expect things to be handed to you on a platter, even if you can fill theaters week in and week out. Because there's always somebody like me ready to kick down the door and steal the job right out from under you. One of the smart things George did was to screen-test everybody, because he knew he'd had trouble with the women in his movies, where maybe there wasn't as much chemistry as there could have been. Universal was pushing for Sandra Bullock because they said she'd put people in seats. George and the director met with her, but they were like, 'If Sandra really wants it, she's gonna have to test for it.' She wouldn't test, and her agent, who is also my agent, supported that. If I was Sandy, I'd say, 'Well, I'm gonna show them that I can do it. I'll read with them, make them offer me the part, then make them pay out the ass."

 

Lopez herself made them pay when she landed the role. The flat-out outrageous $5 million she asked for ended up to be an only fairly outrageous reported $2 million. "I want to make as much or more than Demi Moore when it's my time," she declares. "I think George Clooney's getting $10 million for this movie. (Universal) thought they were going to get me cheap from the beginning, but I kept telling my agent, 'No, no, no! Keep asking!" When my agent called me saying 'What should we say to them' I said, 'Say, Who's going to break their ass promoting this movie while George is on "ER"? Say, Anaconda is now over $100 million worldwide and why do you think girls between the ages of 18 and 25 went to see it more than any other action movies - because of Ice Cube?' The head of Universal called my manager saying, 'You guys are not looking at the long run.' You know whatever excuse they can give to keep another dollar in their pocket. I don't take it personally, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to fight for what I feel. We are looking at the long run, they're not. Eventually, they're going to pay. People don't believe it yet, but right now I'm very underpaid."

Now that Lopez has edged up to what she calls "the bottom of the A-list of actresses." how does she view the women with whom she's been in contention for roles? Like, say, Salma Hayek? "We're in two different realms. She's a sexy bombshell and those are the kinds of roles she does. I do all kinds of different things. It makes me laugh when she says she got offered Selena, which was an outright lie. If that's what she does to get herself publicity, then that's her thing. Columbia offered me the choice of Fools Rush In or Anaconda, but I chose the fun B-movie because the Fools script wasn't strong enough." Cameron Diaz? "A lucky model who's been given a lot of opportunities I just wish she would have done more with. She's beautiful and has a great presence, though, and in My Best Friend's Wedding, I thought, 'When directed, she can be good.'" Gwyneth Paltrow? "Tell me what she's been in? I swear to God, I don't remember anything she was in. Some people get hot by association. I heard more about her and Brad Pitt than I ever heard about her work." Claire Danes? "A good actress. Her emotional and inner life are available to her, which is a good start. But I feel like I see a lot of the same thing with every character she does. She's not that way in U-Turn, though." Winona Ryder? "I was never a big fan of hers. In Hollywood she's revered, she gets nominated for Oscars, but I've never heard anyone in the public or among my friends say, 'Oh, I love her.' She's cute and talented, though, and I'd like her just for looking like my older sister, Leslie." Madonna? "Do I think she's a great performer? Yeah. Do I think she's a great actress? No. Acting is what I do, so I'm harder on people when they say, 'Oh, I can do that - I can act.' I'm like, 'Hey, don't spit on my craft."'

Because Lopez in person, is, if possible, more alluring and yet more delicate than on-screen, I can't help but say, "Looking the way you do, I'm guessing certain directors and costars must have been more than casually attracted to you. Who's made the clumsiest pass yet?" Without the slightest hesitation, she answers, "That would have to be a tie between Woody and Wesley [her Money Train costars]. Woody was more playful, but if I'd have gone for it, he totally would have. I'd say, 'Hey, Woody, how are you doing?' He'd, like, stick out his tongue and flick it at me very nasty." Mimicking Harrelson as the world's homiest anteater, she continues, "He was really funny about it. But Wesley - even though I had a boyfriend at the time - went full court press. He was flirting with me - you always flirt with your costars, its harmless - then he just started getting a little more serious. He would invite us all out together and then at the end of the night, he'd drop me off last and try to kiss me. I'd be like, 'Wesley, please, I'm not interested in you like that.' He got really upset about it. His ego was totally bruised. He wouldn't talk to me for two months. I was like, 'What an asshole.' Actors are used to getting their way and to treating women like objects. They're so used to hearing the word 'Yes.' Now, I suppose Wesley will call me going, 'You bitch! How dare you? I didn't like you."' Lopez raucously laughs, "Its time for the truth to come out!"

Lopez says she also blocked a pass made by Stephen Dorff, with whom she made Blood and Wine. What went down? "I thought he was really charming," she recalls. "He said, 'You're the most beautiful girl I've ever worked with,' and I was like, 'Oh, that's so sweet.' And he kept on staring and then he told me, 'Seriously, you're the most beautiful. . . ,' on and on. There was an attraction there, definitely, but not something I wanted to take further. I would flirt with him a little, but I just wasn't into him that way. He got really upset and, toward the end of filming, I said, 'Oh, what, are you not talking to me now? Look, I'm just not interested at this point in my life, but don't pull a Wesley on me!' because I had told him that whole story. He was, like, 'All right, let it go."'

Lopez refers to Jack Nicholson, with whom she also worked on Blood and Wine, as "a legend in his own time and in his own mind - like the rest of us are peons." And how did things work out with her mercurial U-Turn leading man. Sean Penn? "He has a tot of strength and we got along great, actually," she says, sounding genuinely respectful. "He could tell right away I wasn't intimidated to be there with him and Oliver. I remember asking him, 'Why do we always see pictures of you looking like you're ready to hit somebody?' and he goes, 'Because in those pictures, I'm never with my friends.' Working with Sean and Nick Nolte, too, who is a truly amazing, great actor whom I respect so much - that was top of the line. I could never work with better actors." When I ask, "Which of your costars, in a parallel universe, say, would you have a 'thing' with?" she looks up from beneath her thick lashes and says, grinning, "Should I get myself in trouble with my husband? OK, in a parallel universe, Sean. I was engaged when we were shooting U-Turn, and one day he said, If I weren't married and you weren't engaged, would this have been a very different movie?' And I go, 'Yeah! Very different.' So we kind of. . . well, we both had our own lives, so that made a real difference." Given that Lopez has no doubt recalled only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the come-ons she's gotten in Hollywood, I ask her, "What one thing should any woman in Hollywood never be without?" On cue, she deadpans, "Mace."

At 27, Lopez has, clearly, spent years honing the fine art of the tease, the shoot-down and the snappy comeback. Born and raised in the tough-as-nails Bronx by a kindergarten teacher and a businessman, she hails from a whole house of lookers, including two sisters. "When did you first notice guys being attracted to you?" I ask. "I had a very voluptuous body from the time I was 11," she says. "My mother used to say, I'm so worried about Jennifer because she's so sexy. I'm afraid she's going to get pregnant.' The taste in my neighborhood was for voluptuous women, see? I knew guys liked me. Back then, in the third, fourth grade, there were girls who already had tits and boyfriends, they were always kissing in the school closet. Not me. I was more of a late bloomer, like I didn't get into it until seventh grade, 12 years old."

Her first boyfriend, David Cruz, was to become much more than just her neighborhood Romeo. "We started dating when I was 15 and dated only each other for nine years. We were very careful. I'm not saying we weren't having sex, because we were. We lived in the same neighborhood and he'd see me in, like, a weird hat, wearing something I'd cut together from a picture I'd seen in a magazine and I'd be just going to the track to run. I was creating my own style. Everybody would look at me, like I was a nerd, 'What is she doing? What is she wearing?' Because people didn't do that in my neighborhood. People didn't work out or take care of their bodies. If people see you striving for things, it threatens them. I was into, "This two-bit town isn't big enough for me.' My boyfriend would say, 'Jennifer has bigger plans.'"

Plans that, once Lopez got hired in 1991 as a Fly Girl on "In Living Color," began winning roles on short-lived TV series like "Second Chances," "South Central" and "Hotel Malibu," and finally landed Gregory Nava's My Family, didn't feature a nice guy from the old hood? She reflects, "He came out here with me and was here with me the whole time when I first started doing television and breaking into movies. Career-wise, we weren't in the same place. He just didn't know what he wanted to do. But I had a fire under my ass, I was so fast. I was like a rocket, he was like a rock." She laughs at her own turn of phrase, but its obvious that talking about Cruz opens something raw in her, and with that remark, she doses the book on the subject.

Lopez surprised the people around her by hitching herself in 1996 to the striking Ojani Noa a year after she first saw him waiting tables at Gloria Estefan's hip Cuban restaurant in Miami Beach while she was there shooting Blood and Wine. They began dating seriously and, during the wrap party for Selena, Noa popped the question on the dance floor. Now, with her movie star mojo working overtime, does Lopez harbor the slightest regret at getting married when she did? "A lot of people in my personal life said that I shouldn't have gotten married so fast," she admits quietly. "This business is tougher on women who are doing better than men because men are raised to be the supporters. We still live with those sensibilities. Its tough for me because the men I'm attracted to, for some reason, haven't gotten it together. Even my husband, I feel, has a lot of potential but he's not at the point where. . . I mean, even though he has lots of contacts, even though he's doing his own thing, opening a club and restaurant here, whatever business he gets in, he's not gonna make as much money as me. That's something he has to deal with and to live with, which is tough for someone like him. And, see, I'm not a good example because I'm not normal. I sure wasn't normal at 23, when I was on television and making more than my mom and dad. It's hard for me to find normal contemporaries and it's hard for men to deal with. The man I've married is Latin and they, more than any other type of man, are very macho. I always joke with him, because he's like, 'You can see through that dress!' or 'Is there going to be a love scene in that next movie? You're my wife. I don't want anybody to think of you in that way.' Its just a sweet thing. But I go, 'Look, the love scenes, the see-through dresses - all that stuff is good. As long as people like you, they're going to keep coming to see your movies. Do you want that house in Miami - yes or no?' I mean, this is what it's going to be, its part of the business."

I remark to Lopez, "But there's a long, nasty history of husbands and lovers of sexy Hollywood stars who decided that if that stuff is part of the business, they want no part of that business."

"Ojani gets it, though," she persists. "But, I have to say, if you asked him right now, he'd rather have me home washing dishes, with us living in a small apartment, with him making the money rather than me making millions of dollars a year, living in a house that I mostly pay for. It's tough for me to try and show him that even though I make a lot of money I feel I still need him." She's struggling with this one. Her feeling for her husband and awareness of the inequities of their situation are palpable.

I also perceive that although the sassy, swaggering Lopez wants to soar higher, she does, like any other mortal, have her insecurities. What scares her? "I have fear about the weirdest things," she admits. "I've always had a huge fear of dying or becoming ill. The thing I'm most afraid of, though, is being alone, which I think a lot of performers fear. It's why we seek the limelight - so we're not alone, were adored. Were loved, so people want to be around us. The fear of being alone drives my life."

Growing more pensive and uncharacteristically still, Lopez mentions some of the new problems and limitations her growing fame has imposed. Demands on her time. A shrinking sphere of privacy. Being suspicious of people who suddenly want to get to know her. "I have to say that the kind of upbringing I had, getting beat up a little bit, growing up with all different kinds of different people, is the best upbringing for show business," she offers. "The people who grew up softer, who don't have what it takes to really survive in this business - that's why you find so many people on drugs here." Although she stresses that she's battled no such problem, she admits, "It gave me a lot of anxiety when I began to get so much more recognized. It was like, 'What the hell have I done? Have I made a deal with the devil here?' This stuff of people invading your life, like when you're eating at a restaurant or just walking around, it freaks you out. You're like, I don't want that person coming up to me to ask for an autograph.' But if you're stressed, you attract it even more. It's just easier not to fight things so much. Just fucking go with the flow. It's easier to just sign the autograph quick instead of turning it into a bigger thing. Now I step back and go, 'Hey, I'm from the Bronx, I'm tough and I'm not going to let this get to me."'

Other things have gotten to her, though. "Having your life judged in the press is a tough thing," she admits, alluding to the published reports, for instance, that had her contemplating divorce practically days after she and her husband exchanged vows. "It was in the paper and all over the Spanish news reports that he was throwing things at me, that I was throwing him out, that he was asking me for money. I was like, 'Where do these people get these stories from?' My husband's mother actually called from Cuba, where they don't even get news all the time, saying, 'What happened? Are you guys getting a divorce?' Dealing with these things is tough, but nobody sympathizes with you. And when I was on the other side, I didn't sympathize either, because I'd be like, 'What the hell is she complaining about with her Gucci shoes and her Dolce fur?'"

Riffing on how she's been treated by the press, Lopez declares, "There are certain people that are marked for death already. I have my little list of journalists that have treated me unfairly. Like, I was totally happy, totally confident with my work in Selena, but out of the 700 reviews - and I read every single one - I can quote the one who said, "The one thing you don't do when you walk out of this movie is say, 'Who's that girl?' I was like, 'You lying bitch!' When another person from that same magazine came up to me, the first thing I said to her was, 'You tell that other bitch that writes for your magazine that I'm never talking with her again.' I definitely have my list of people that are going to get their justice."

For all her love of playing the Diva, does Lopez ever take to the diva behaviors that make one loathed by costars? She shakes her head in a defiant no, observing, 'Just because I know my strengths doesn't mean I have a huge ego. The one thing I cannot tolerate in Hollywood is this trickle effect of every single person - from the top with your studio guys - pissing on whoever is below them. Nobody can say that I treat people like that ever. When it comes to my work, I am an ogre, because I want it to be so good. I won't do interviews, I don't want people bothering me. I need my time. But that's the only thing anyone can say about me."

When I ask about her career strategy, she says. "I've already started mapping that out. You've got to do your share of commercial movies - romantic comedies, action movies - the $100-million movies, because if you don't you're not going to have the power and Hollywood is not going to respect you. I would also do any small, independent movie that appeals to me dramatically, because it keeps everybody realizing that your acting chops are there. I think some actors are making a big mistake by doing one big commercial movie after another. It just looks like you're for sale. People want to know that you're selective."

Unable to say enough about how swell a time she had working with Oliver Stone, Lopez declares they're actively discussing a rematch. She adds that the director suggested she do a major stage revival of West Side Story with the hope that they could later pitch a movie musical remake. There's a hitch, though: "I would love to play Anita, but, since Maria is the star role, I would have to play her, too." She'd also like to play a character who's neither Anita nor Maria - someone who is, in other words, not Latina. "Oliver was talking with one of his coproducers on this new movie project he's preparing, and they mentioned an actor they think I'd make a great couple with. Oliver talked about the female role in the movie being perhaps for me and said, 'Maybe the character could be Latin,' and I said, 'Whatever you do, don't make the character Latin because you're thinking of me to play it.' When the other producer said, 'Lets make her Greek, let's make her Italian,' I said, 'You know I have the chops to do that, Oliver.' And he took a few minutes to get there, even after I played an Apache Indian in his movie. I've said I want to be the Latina actress, but I also want to go beyond all that. I want to change things. Or at least, I can start that change."

Lopez has no compunctions about admitting she's grasping for the highest rung of stardom she can possibly attain. I ask, "Had you been around in the old Hollywood days when stars were publicized by the studios as the 'It' Girl, the 'Oomph' Girl, and the 'Cherry Blonde,' what would you have named yourself?" "The first thing that came into my head was the 'Butt' Girl because that separates me from everyone else. I love my body. I really, really dig my curves. It's all me and men love it. Some guys like skinny girls, but they're missing out. When a dress is on a woman, it shouldn't look like it's on a coat hanger. So many girls here are so thin - in fact nobody else in Hollywood really has my type of body. My husband calls it 'La Guitarra,' like the shape of a guitar, which I love because that was always my ideal woman growing up. So, call me the 'Guitar Girl'!" Or maybe the Wow Girl.

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Touched by an Angel
Notorious Magazine Oct 1999
Puff Daddy interviews the celestial Jennifer Lopez.

There must be some kind of renaissance going on. As in da Vinci's era, many smart, talented people in our multi-media world are no longer content being good at just one thing. Witness Jennifer Lopez, actress, singer, song-writer. Having brought depth and sensuality to starring roles opposite George Clooney in Out of Sight and Sean Penn in U-Turn, the 29-year-old actress single--handedly expanded Hollywood's infamously closed mind about what a female lead should look like. Soon she'll give her comedic chops a try opposite Brendan Fraser in The Wedding Planner which starts filming this fall, and the upward arc of her acting career shows no sign of peaking any time soon. In addition, Lopez recently took a serious leap into pop music superstardom with her debut album, On the 6, which has already gone platinum. Every bit as diverse as her career, the disc fuses hip-hop, R&B, and salsa into a seamless whole, sewn tightly together by Lopez's strong, honeyed vocals. One of the producers of On the 6 is also the publisher of this magazine, and something of a renaissance man himself: Sean "Puffy" Combs. His resume is well-known: Rapper. Producer. Executive. And now, journalist. In the following conversation, Puffy gets the scoop from his homegirl, Ms. Lopez, on the stuff all the other magazines missed--digging particularly deep for a revelation about a certain romantic relationship.

 

PUFF DADDY: Hey, what's up.

JENNIFER LOPEZ: What's up, babe.

PD: How's the album coming?

JL: Everything's going well. It's had a lot of success, and that's been a pleasant surprise to me. Now I'm about to start a movie.

PD: What movie's that?

JL: It's called The Cell.

PD: What is it about and who's directing it?

JL: It's being directed by Tarsem. He was a video and commercial director who did R.E.M.'s 'Losing My religion' video. He won a bunch of awards for it.

PD: Is this his first movie?

JL: This is his first movie.

PD: So what made you take a chance with him?

JL: I just go with my gut. The movie's a psychological thriller, and the visuals are really important. So when I saw his reel, I thought he would be really perfect.

PD: As an actress, how do you choose your roles?

JL: You know, I choose them just like everything else--whatever moves me. Usually I know a script's right if it gets me a little scared and a little excited at the same time.

PD: This movie got you scared and excited?

JL: Yeah. I just felt like it was something that would stretch me and challenge me as an actress. And at the same time, it's a little bit unsettling to go to those places in your mind.

PD: Have you noticed any differences going from a movie star to a pop music star?

JL: I think the difference is that when you're a movie star, you're 30 feet big. People have to go out of their house to see you, and when they see you in person it's like 'Oh, my God!' but they're not so quick to approach you. But then, when you sing and do music, you're right there with them in their house, in their bathroom, in their bedroom. It's very personal for them. So when they see you, they're still like 'Oh, my God!' But they want to hug you and be next to you. It's just a different kind of energy.

PD: So, you've got hit movies. You got a hit album. And soon, it's gonna be a multi-platinum album. Are you happy right now?

JL: Yeah, I?m very happy.

PD: Is their a special person in your life?

JL: Yeah.

PD: Can we know his name?

JL: No.

PD: It's a secret?

JL: Yeah, my secret. My special little thing.

PD: Okay. Well, since we're on the subject of men, what is Jennifer Lopez's ideal man?

JL: What usually attracts me to someone is how I feel around him--if he can make me smile and laugh and feel at ease. But I think the first thing that gets me is someone who has a sense of confidence about him, but you can still tell that inside he's a good person. It's like a tough exterior, but inside he's real sweet. My ideal man would have to be honest. You know, honest and truthful. That's it. And sexy. Sexy's good, too.

PD: What's sexy to you?

JL: What's sexy to me? I don't know. It could be the way somebody moves. The way they carry themselves. That's usually what's sexy in a man to me. It's not so much that he has the perfect body or a great face. I'm not attracted to that type of look--the perfect look. I'm more attracted to the energy, like if he has a sense of confidence about him. And power. That turns me on.

PD: What turns you off about a man?

JL: I guess somebody who thinks that he's the man. That's just not cute to me. Like when a man approaches you and he talks to you all crazy, like 'Yo, what?s up!' You can?t get nowhere like that with me. A man has to have confidence, but it's gotta be a quiet confidence. Not in your face. I like sincere people.

PD: What type of things do you like to do with someone who you're in a relationship with?

JL: I like to do simple things. I like to stay at home and spend the

whole day in bed on the weekends. Go out later in the evening.

PD: Is sex an important part of a relationship to you?

JL: Yeah, chemistry's very important. Sex is important. Absolutely.

PD: I'm not trying to be vulgar or anything, but what kind of sex do

you like?

JL: Very few people in the world will ever know that.

PD: Good answer. I feel that. Do you believe in love at first sight?

JL: Yeah. Absolutely.

PD: Have you ever seen somebody and fallen in love with him at first

sight?

JL: Yeah, I have.

PD: Can we know who?

JL: No.

PD: Do I know who?

JL: I don't know.

PD: Maybe I know?

JL: Maybe you do know.

PD: Do you have any fetishes? I have a foot fetish, you know what I'm saying? It's not like I like feet or nothin'. But, if a woman doesn't have pretty feet then I can't really @#%$ with her. Is there something in a man you look for, his feet, his hands? Is their something that's just gotta be right on a man?

JL: His mouth.

PD: His mouth?

JL: Yeah.

PD: If a man's teeth is @#%$ up, he's over?

JL: Yeah, he's gotta have a nice smile and a nice mouth in general.

PD: Why, do you like to kiss?

JL: Yeah, I love to kiss.

PD: What kind of kisser are you? Wet kisser? Soft kisser?

JL: I've been told I'm a good kisser.

PD: You've been told? By who?

JL: People I kiss.

PD: Do you kiss a lot of people?

JL: No.

PD: Could you ever see yourself giving me a kiss?

JL: [Laughs]

PD: I'm saying. We've been friends for a long time. We've been linked together in the papers and in magazines. I can't front. It's crossed my mind. What if everything they were saying was true? So, I'm just wondering have you ever thought about giving me a kiss?

JL: [Long pause] Um, yeah.

PD: Okay, back to the interview now. Let me see. I don't know--it's hard for me to concentrate right now, you know, now that Jennifer Lopez says she's thought about giving me a kiss.

JL: [Long pause] You're crazy.

PD: So the next time I see you can I have a kiss? I'm dead ass serious.

JL: Let's move on!

PD: You're not gonna answer that one?

JL: [Laughs] No.

PD: I mean they're writing about us in the papers. We might as well have a kiss.

JL: I don't kiss anybody I'm not serious with.

PD: But the next time you're in New York, can I have a taste test?

JL: No.

PD: We would have to get serious?

JL: Yup.

PD: Do you want to get serious with me?

JL: You're crazy.

PD: Airight. What was your most romantic moment?

JL: One time I was with someone and he gave me a gift. But, it wasn't that he just gave me a gift, it was when he gave it to me.

PD: When did he give it to you?

JL: It was a private moment.

PD: Oh, so the person gave you the gift, while y'all were makin' love.

JL: [Laughs] I didn't say that.

PD: Okay. Okay. Who's the sexiest man alive?

JL: Oh, that's tough. There's a lot of sexy men out there. Who's the sexiest woman alive?

PD: You're the sexiest woman alive.

JL: [Laughs] See, you're one of those guys.

PD: I'm one of those guys what?

JL: You got all the lines. You got all the answers.

PD: Who's the sexiest woman alive beside yourself?

JL: I saw Sophia Loren at the Oscars and she was so classy and sexy that she just blew me away. She?s older now but she's really maintained herself. And the way she carries herself is so admirable. Confidence is sexy in a woman, too. In this business it's always hard, because there's always that next fly, young thing coming up.

PD: How has your love life changed since you've become famous?

JL: It's changed a little bit. You have to protect yourself more, and be private, because so many people want to know about it. You've gotta keep sacred some things that are not to be shared with the world.

PD: How old were you when you lost your virginity?

JL: Read Details magazine.

PD: @#%$ Details. How old were you when you lost your virginity? This is Notorious, we want to know.

JL: I was 17.

PD: That's a good age.

JL: It was fine for me.

PD: Where do you feel the most comfortable, in the Bronx, Manhattan, L.A. or Miami?

JL: I feel most comfortable in the Bronx. But I like being in Miami.

PD: Have you ever been a victim of racism?

JL: Growing up in New York, I didn't really experience it that much, to tell you the truth. It's been good like that. The only times were when I was working in Miami, before I started acting and stuff, and I'd go into certain shops where people would look at you like you didn't belong in there. Those were the only times that I ever experienced it. I never had any really bad incidents that I can remember.

PD: Have you ever found yourself stereotyped in Hollywood?

JL: People try to pigeonhole you. But I've always been very conscious of that when making choices. Even when I did television, I chose different types of roles, so they wouldn't be able to sterotype me. I realized that I had to fight that because I'm Latin.

PD: What's your social world like in Hollywood?

JL: I'll go to a premiere if it's my movie or if a friend's in it. I don't hang out with other celebrities and go to parties like that. That's not really my style. It's never been. Maybe it's because I just don't have time. When I do have time off, I'd just rather be at home or hanging out with the people I love and people who have been my friends for a long time. I have my little group of girls, they just don't happen to be actresses.

PD: You've changed physically from Fly Girl to now, how have you changed inside?

JL: I don't feel I have changed inside. I feel like I'm the same person who grew up in the Bronx. And who had the same kind of dreams that I had back then. Im still driven in that way and have things that I want to accomplish. But I don't feel like I've changed. I don't take anything for granted. I realize that this could all go away tomorrow.

PD: What if it did all go away tomorrow? What would you do?

JL: If it did, I would probably just keep trying. That's my attitude. It's not like I would just take it lying down. I'd keep on plugging away at it and struggling to do the things I want to do.

PD: A lot of the magazine articles that have been written about you paint you as very ambitious. Do you think ambition can be a bad thing?

JL: No, I don't think ambition is a bad thing. But I think sometimes people try to make it sound like it's unattractive to be ambitious and be a woman. But, for me, it's like I had a lot of dreams that I wanted to fulfill, and things that I wanted to go after. And just because I do that, and I have tunnel vision when I'm doing it, it doesn't mean that I'm a bad person. If a guy does that, it's like, 'he's great, he's focused.' But when it's a woman, it's a different story. And I just think that's unfair.

PD: Do you think that your ambition has been intimidating to men?

JL: I don't know. I guess what I do for a living could be intimidating to men. But I don?t see it as a bad thing. I see it as passion for what I do.

PD: Describe a vulnerable side of yourself that you don't think anyone would ever imagine or believe.

JL: I'm very sensitive to other people's feelings. It really bothers me to see anybody freaking out. People might be surprised at that, but it's very true.

PD: What's something about you that's less than angelic?

JL: I don't let people push me around. I don't let people take advantage of me or think that because of who I am or where I'm from that I'm not as intelligent as other people, or that because I'm a woman they can take advantage of me. I can be a little bit strong sometimes.

PD: What's in the future for Jennifer Lopez? Where do you see yourself in ten years?

JL: Making movies and doing my music and having a family.

PD: You're ready to have kids?

JL: Yeah.

PD: This guy that you mentioned earlier who you're with right now.. .do you think he's the guy you want to have kids with?

JL: [Pause] Yeah.

PD: Are you ready to get married again?

JL: Um, I don't know if I want to get married right away, but...

PD: Soon? Eventually?

JL: Absolutely. I would get married before I had kids.

PD: The guy that you're with right now, do you think you could ever marry him?

JL: If things worked out good, yeah.

PD: We gotta find out who this guy is....What about your last marriage. What did you learn from getting married and then divorced so soon afterwards?

JL: That love isn't everything, It takes compromise and honesty and trust. Those are the most important things. If you don't have them, you don't have a relationship.

PD: Name three things a guy could do to win you over?

JL: Um, that's a tough question, because there isn't a thing that someone can do to win your heart. It takes time.

PD: So, time could be one of them. What's another thing?

JL: It's a tough one to answer. What three things could a woman do to win you over?

PD: She could make me feel like she loves me for me. You know when you can tell just by the way someone looks at you that they love you. It ain't about if you got a hit record, or if you're right or wrong, or whatever, it's just, that they love you. You really only meet one person like that in your life who just... really loves you. You know what I'm saying? Another thing is that a woman could catch me off guard by doing something romantic. Usually it's the guy's job to do the romantic thing. And number three is by giving me a challenge, not making it where it's that easy for me.

JL: Where it's easy?

PD: Yeah, make it where I gotta wait a minute.

JL: So, you don't like to hit it on the first night?

PD: Nah, I don't like it when I get to hit it on the first night.

JL: But you will hit it on the first night.

PD: I have hit it on the first night. Have you ever hit it on the first night?

JL: No.

PD: You never had a one night stand?

JL: No. But you?re a guy so it's different, I guess.

PD: Do you find me attractive?

JL: What? Yeah, you're very attractive.

PD: No, are you attracted to me though? You might find Kevin Costner attractive, but you might never @#%$ with him, Do you find me attractive?

JL: I said yes. How much more plain can I be?

PD: Airight. You know, you're very difficult.

JL: [Laughs] Yeah, I know I'm a tough interview.

PD: Yeah, you're a tough inteview. I just want to say, you have a beautiful ass.

JL: [Laughs] You're an idiot.

PD: I know you hate when people bring that up, but for real, you do have a beautiful ass.

JL: How would you know?

PD: I mean I've looked at it like every other man in America has looked at it. It's really not that big though. You know what I'm saying. It just fits your body perfectly. It's the perfect ass.

JL: Thank you.

PD: Oh, you're welcome... Handcuffs or whipped cream?

JL: It depends on what kind of mood I'm in.

PD: Missionary or doggy style?

JL: None of your business.

PD: Rough or passionate?

JL: Passionate.

PD: Ten minutes of passion or an hour of love?

JL: I?m a love creature.

PD: Have you ever had a manage a trois?

JL: No.

PD: Would you ever?

JL: Yeah, maybe on Valentine's Day with my husband.

PD: Would it be with two men or another woman?

JL: On Valentine's Day it would be with another woman, so my husband could enjoy it.

PD: What do you think about right before you have an orgasm?

JL: I hope he does not stop moving.

PD: [Laughs]. Name a time when you wished you could have been invisible.

JL: Every time they write about me in 'Page Six.'

PD: They've written a lot about us in the papers. Do you think the stuff in the papers about me and you could be true one day?

JL: I guess, it's possible.

PD: Do you like me?

JL: Laughs

PD: Answer the question!

JL: Do you like me?

PD: Yeah, I like you. Do you like me?

JL: Yeah, I like you.

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Premiere Magazine
August 2000

The Room Service Waiter is Bemused

It's 10 A.M. on a Tuesday in April, and he is in this elegant Manhattan hotel suite -- a suite so heavy with antiques and pillows and drapes and tassels that you fear if you stood still too long, brocade would begin to grow on your skin -- to deliver a cargo of breakfasts to Jennifer Lopez -- actress, singer, dancer, It Girl of the '00s. Calmly, the waiter tries to move plate after plate of eggs, omelets, pancakes, fruit, and muffins from his cart onto the dining table -- six complete breakfasts, sitting under their shiny silver warming hoods like a fleet of miniature spaceships, all ordered for Lopez because no one knows what she'll be in the mood to eat. He can't get the job done, however. The table is already crowded with a monumental arrangement of cut flowers, a separate spray of orchids, and a bottle of champagne (compliments of the management). Plus, three stylish women -- a publicist and two personal assistants, members of the vast, ever-shifting cloud of friends-slash-employees who trail after Lopez like stardust keep flapping around him. This milk is not hot enough, says the one in the high, pointy boots. You have to go back and get hotter milk. Her reflection in the polished table is ominous, but the waiter doesn't seem to notice. I mean, scalding hot, she continues. I want to see steam when I life the lid, I want to see bubbles. The waiter nods, but continues fanning out napkins and cutlery. The woman actually places herself between him and the table. You have to go back for hot milk right now, she says, in the tone one would use to say, You have to get on this helicopter out of Saigon right now. Incredibly, the waiter still hesitates -- should he leave the not-hot enough milk in case somebody else wants it? -- and for a moment, you fear for his life. Finally, the waiter exits. but not before whispering, Everyone seems very concerned about the milk.

Oh, yes Everyone is very, very concerned about Ms. Lopez, 30, who has taken the zeitgeist and reshaped it in her own image, wrapping it around her famously curvy silhouette like spandex. half a dozen years ago, she was just another dancer with a dream, a middle-class Puerto Rican middle sister from the Bronx (her mother teaches kindergarten; her father programs computers), trying to get noticed in big, bad L.A. She became a Fly Girl on the comedy series "In Living Color" (short hair, big earrings, stompy dancing), then a bit player on TV shows no one saw. After a year the movies found her, and Lopez made sure they never let go. She was tough but charming in "Money Train", sweet and sunny in "My Family/Mi Familia" and "Selena", dangerously alluring in "Blood and Wine" and "U-Turn", a box office draw in "Anaconda", and a critical darling in "Out of Sight" -- smart, sophisticated, almost unbearably sexy. Each role was more expansive, less strictly ethnic than the last. With each she grew better, earned more attention. It was as if she were methodically packing a cannon with gunpowder. The first time we see Jennifer in "Mi Familia" says director Gregory Nava, It's through the eyes of the gardener she will marry. Then it cuts to her first close-up on film. And for it, I used a silent film technique: I put an iris around her -- you know, where there's a circle around her face and everything else is blacked out? In that one shot, everyone knew she was a movie star. In 1998 Lopez took a one-year hiatus from movies to cut an album, "On the 6" (named for the subway she rode from the Bronx to Manhattan for dance lessons). The songs were a cross-pollination of Latin soul, hip-hop, and dance pop. The videos featured maximum Jennifer in minimal clothing, frequently wet. And the whole enterprise lit the cannon fuse and shot her career to another level entirely, from talent to phenomenon. Instantly, she had a number-one single, a Grammy nomination, full-time bodyguards, angina-inducing personal appearances, and sold-out stadium concerts around the world. Her life became the equivalent of heavy rotation on MTV: You couldn't miss her. As "On the 6" was going double platinum, Lopez returned to movies with a vengeance, shooting three very different starring roles back-to-back. She plays a child therapist enlisted by an FBI agent (Vince Vaughn) to catch a serial killer (Vincent D'Onofrio), in this month's creepy thriller "The Cell"; a hyperorganized wedding planner who falls apart when she falls for a client (Matthew McConaughey), in this winter's romantic comedy "The Wedding Planner" (a Lopez cover of Evelyn "Champagne" King's "Love Come Down" will likely be on the soundtrack); and a closed-off cop intrigued by a secretive drifter (Jim Caviezel), in the romantic drama "Angel Eyes", which has just wrapped production in Toronto. By the end of "Angel Eyes", Lopez was already working on her next album, which she hopes will be out for Christmas. Jennifer is one of those people who prove that the more you do, the more you can do, Vaughn says. During "The Cell's" three-month shoot in L.A., Lopez was jetting off on the weekends to promote her record, but on the set, she never seemed stressed. She has so much energy and willpower, she's a force of nature. But she's able to focus it and use it productively. She is also, however, a one-woman media centrifuge; she shows up and stories swirl. It's hard to pin down how much Lopez contributes to the hype, both wittingly and unwittingly, and how it spreads exponentially on its own. Her 1997 marriage to Ojani Noa, a Miami-based model and waiter, dissolved after a year; her two-year relationship with rap star and record mogul Sean "Puffy" Combs is rife with good girl-bad boy speculation. After gunfire broke out last December at a Manhattan nightclub where she and Combs were partying, the two fled the scene, running 11 red lights in a gray Lincoln Navigator before being arrested and handcuffed; some stories described how Lopez cried for 14 hours, while others had her sending a policeman out for cuticle cream. (Combs was eventually charged with illegal possession of a firearm; the case is still pending.) Then there are Lopez's early interviews, in which she spoke a little too frankly about other actresses -- among them Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Cameron Diaz. And for Grammy Awards in February, Lopez opted to wear a green tropical-print Versace dress so diaphanous, so open, and so revealing of the gloriously fleshy-yet-taut, tawny body beneath that it became an instant icon, right up there with the sequined gown Marilyn Monroe was sewn into to serenade President Kennedy. Rumors abound of Lopez's outrageous demands -- how on the road she must have sheets with at least a 250-thread count, she must have five-feet-tall standing fans to blow-dry her shimmering hair, she must have Cristal champagne chilling nearby.

At first, today's lavish sutie, six breakfasts, and superheated milk seem to confirm this reputation -- coupled with the fact that she spends the first half hour of a scheduled interview in the shower. The hissing water is audible through the wall. Suddenly, silently, Lopez -- the actual person, not the image -- appears. Her wet hair is pulled up in a tight ponytail atop her head, a la Pebbles Flinstone; her face is shiny and makeup-free. A white terry-cloth robe, belted snugly at the waist, covers her down to her feet. She looks innocent. She has a French manicure on her finger-and-toenails, and she smells like a night-blooming garden. Oh, I never tell anybody what I use [on my skin], she says with a Mona Lisa smile. David Letterman always says that, too: You smell so good. What are you wearing? I never tell him either. She sits on the couch, draws her knees up, and speaks so softly that one has to lean forward to hear her. She answers every question, even the ones that make her sigh. She fiddles with a thin gold anklet on her left ankle until the clasp breaks. When she becomes animated, the robe slips and a bit of her calf peeks out -- and so smooth, golden, exfoliated, and moisturized is her skin that it's like some kind of exotic dessert -- but only for a second before, ladylike, she reties her robe. Lopez says she's always been a good girl. Growing up, she would go to school, then run track, go to dance class, come home, do her homework, be prepared for the next day. I liked that. I still am [a good girl]. She would rather stay home than go out -- have a girlfriend over, order food and eat in bed, call up friends and pass the phone back and forth. I'm all right with that, she says. That's a good night for me. She like hip-hop, but she loves musicals -- "Funny Girl", "Gigi", "The Sound of Music", "West Side Story". Especially "West Side Story". She wants to remake it someday. I'd play Maria [Natalie Wood, the sweet one], Lopez says, but I'd have to play Anita too [Rita Moreno, the pepper pot], because I loved her so much growing up.

She doesn't drink, smoke, do drugs, or anything else bad, she insists. I try to live my life right. I believe in that. I believe in doing the right thing; I believe there's certain responsibility for your actions. She calls Combs just a regular guy who works as much as I do. I think people miss that because of his videos; they see him dressed up and flamboyant and all that. Yeah, when we go out, that's part of our style, from where we grew up. but that's not who he is. He doesn't walk around the house in leather suits and chains. Because he raps doesn't mean he's a gangster. He's a hard-working guy. I admire him, I respect him. He built up from nothing something of substance. I think we both have. People don't realize how much we have in common that way, how much our dreams and hopes are the same, things we want to accomplish. About the Versace dress, which neatly deflected attention away from comb's arrest? It wasn't anything premeditated, Lopez insists.We just wanted to go to the Grammy's and celebrate our nominations, have a good time, like everybody else. I wore it because it was just a nice dress. she even considered cutting off the long sleeves, because they looked to conservative. My life is definitely a circus, Lopez continues, but I'm not the ringmaster. I guess I'm the main attraction, where everybody's kind of pulling at you, wanting you for something. But I'm still the same person I always was. I have the same people that I've always had around me, my family, close friends. I realize it's just a job, and what comes along with it is fleeting and not important. I haven't turned into something else.

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Magazine: Esquire, July/August 2003
by Mike Sager
May 20th, 2003

Today, I went back to work on the film I'm doing with Robert Redford, An Unfinished Life. We'll be up here in Kamloops, in British Columbia, for another couple of months. I won't be back home until next April. At which point, I guess, we'll figure out exactly where home is. Anyway, I went back to work today, and Robert asked me, "What did you do with your time off? I heard you went to New York." And I was like "Yeah, for the day."

See, we left on Friday night after work, Ben and I.[Her new movie with boyfriend Ben Affleck, Gigli, opens at the end of July.] He's also doing a movie up here. We flew to L.A. for, I forget what, something work-related on Saturday. On Sunday, we went to the Lakers Game. Our agency has those seats. Right on the floor. Of course, I'm a Knicks fan; Ben is die-hard Celtics. But they're like, "You wanna see the game?" And I'm like "Hell, yeah!"

That night, we flew back to Vancouver, 'cause Ben had to be at work on Monday, and I had two meetings there. And I was rehearsing for my next film. It's called Shall We Dance? I had to start learning some ballroom dance steps. Richard Gere is also learning the choreography, but he's in New York. So he's over there learning his part, and I'm out here learning mine.

Monday night, we flew back to New York. On Tuesday, I had a meeting with HBO about this documentary that I want to produce. Then we went to the upfronts for NBC and made an announcement about a deal with Telemundo to do some programming for them. Then I flew back to Vancouver so I could be at rehearsal the next morning with the choreographer. That was Wednesday. Thursday, I had a magazine shootfrom nine in the morning till seven at night.

Friday, the choreographer again. Friday night, we flew to Savannah. Ben just bought a house there. And by the way, it's a grossly exaggerated rumor about how much it cost. That's a whole nother issue: how it feels to be lied about all the time. The messed-up thing is, you just feel like people are so getting the wrong idea about who you are. And that, I think, is the hardest thing about what it feels like. It feels like constantly being misunderstood. But you kind of get used to it, you know what I'm sayin'? Nobody wants to hear a celebrity complain.

We get to Savannah, have our meeting, and then we go to see The Matrix. We're in the theater, and all of the sudden my tooth starts throbbing. It had been kind of a dull pain for a while, but right then it just kind of kicked into high gear. I think I bit down wrong on a piece of popcorn. It was, like, eeooooooow! Like a knife in my brain. And I was like- I just started crying right there in the movie theater. I pulled my hat way down and Ben was like "What's wrong?" And I'm like, "I can't take it. It hurts too much!"

So Sunday I had a root canal. Tell people you had a root canal and everybody feels sorry for you! Monday, I fly back up here to Kamloops. And Tuesday, today, I'm back at work.

People always ask me, "Have you changed from what you were?" And I'm always like, "No way!" And they find it so hard to believe. And I go, "Look, I'm not saying my life hasn't changed. But I am still the person I started off as." Has it affected me? Do things get weird? Yes. But I am still Jennifer. I did grow up poor, and I did, you know, wear holey sneakers and hand-me-downs. I did sleep in the bed with my two sisters. And now it's different. It's different because I worked hard to get here. And I never take it for granted. I really do realize, like, oh my gosh, I wanted to do this my whole life and now I'm able to do it. It feels amazing, you know what I mean? I'm just worried someone's gonna wake me.

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“It’s Hard To Be Me”
But It’s Good
by David Keeps
Marie Claire (September 2004) [thanks Carolina for typing this!!]

Whether she’s making movies or music, has just broken up or just wed, JENNIFER LOPEZ is a headline waiting to happen. With her marriage to Marc Anthony, a new film, and an album on the way, she has no intention of sitting anything out. But don’t take our word for it. Let her tell you

When I woke up on the morning of June 6, I was still buzzing from the two-hour breakfast I’d had with Jennifer Lopez the week before. We feasted on bagels with lox, cream cheese, and red onions, and for dessert, thick slices of French toast slathered with banana cream. The setting, the garden outside the famed Polo Lounge in The Beverly Hills Hotel, reeked of Hollywood glamour in the best possible way (Dylan McDermott was in the next canopied booth), and eating with Ms. Lopez felt just right. Then I turned on my television, and the headline hit me: “Jennifer Lopez Weds Marc Anthony, Baby May Be On Board.”

Certainly it’s possible that the self-professed “Queen of Multitaskers” was running through a mental checklist of wedding preparations the entire time she talked to me. Buttercream wedding cake? Check. 2000 blush roses? Check. $7 million worth of diamonds from Neil Lane? Triple check. And perhaps she inhaled her food not because she was hungry, but because she was fighting pre-wedding jitters – or even eating for two. It hardly matters. The Jennifer Lopez that sat across from me was relaxed, focused, and intent on talking about her life at this moment (or at that moment).
This fall, Lopez will hit the big screen in Shall We Dance, in which she plays a ballroom teacher who reignites the passion in the life of a middle-class man played by Richard Gere. It was a script that resonated deeply with her. “It’s about a woman who doesn’t want to deal with her emotions, so she shuts down. And it’s such a metaphor for where I am in my life. I just want to keep everybody back and say, ‘Hold on, give me some space, let me figure put what all of this means.’ I feel like I need to develop a whole new approach because of everything I’ve been through.”
But as guarded as she says she intends to be, Lopez has to fight her natural tendency to bubble over. Whether she’s talking about making movies or making music, shopping for fashion or archiving it for posterity, connecting with her past or banking on the future, Lopez is not one to hold back. She’d like to be taken at her word. And she’d also like a little more cream cheese for that bagel.

Q: You were born in New York and work in Los Angeles. So why do you call Miami home?
A: I did a movie there years ago, and after I was there three days, I knew I was going to live there. I just felt like home. I love the culture of that town – it’s very Latino. I love the sunshine and the humidity. I love being that close to the water, and I love that beachy feeling. For me, the hotter the better. Everybody will tell you that. If you come into my trailer, it’s like a steam room. Cold is the most miserable thing in the whole world to me. My worst memory of growing up in New York was getting up in the winter and putting my little feet down on the cold floor every morning.

Q: Singer, dancer, actress, designer, restaurateur – you are the ultimate Hollywood hyphenate. In what priority do you put things?
A: These questions are really making me think! I hate that, especially on a Sunday! Definitely actress and singer are my top priorities. All the other things I’ve ventured off into have just been passion projects. Since I was very young, fashion has been a great love of mine, so designing clothes is really fun. The restaurant happened because I wanted to do something with my dad, and I was really proud of it because I did it all by myself. I didn’t have investors or partners or anything.

Q: What drives you?
A: Wanting to be creative, to literally create things. I love to be involved with something from the beginning and then see people enjoy it.

Q: What if they don’t? Does it matter if it fails or succeeds?
A: Not so long as you make something that you’re proud of. That is always the intention going in. Whether it’s a film or a song or a restaurant or a piece of clothing, you want to see it on the street, and you want people to like it. At the end of the day, though, success doesn’t gauge the artist. You just hope you’re successful so that you can continue doing what you want to do. And even if you’re not, you can still do what you want on a different level. Me, I’m never going to stop the creative process.

Q: Do you have to do so many things?
A: Yes. It’s just part of who I am, and I don’t try to fight that. It feels natural to me to have a lot going on. It’s stimulating. It’s as if I feel, from someplace deep inside me, that I have to do it. But at the same time, it is a balancing act, because it’s a lot to juggle at once.

Q: You have a great attitude about your body. How did you learn to love it?
A: I grew up in the Bronx, and the women there are voluptuous, heavier – you know, much heavier than what’s considered normal within the culture of Hollywood – and also very beautiful. And so my impression of what was beautiful was what I saw in my own neighborhood. And once I went through puberty, I looked more like everyone around me, so I felt normal, not big. And certainly the men loved that – they didn’t thing I was flabby or nasty or too big. So I just always had that positive kind of outlook on it. I still do.

Q: Where did all your drive come from?
A: I remember watching a dance recital when I was, like, 6 years old. The girls were performing for a crowd, and I was too young to be in the show, and I remember being so upset about it. So I turned to my friend, and I said, “Don’t you look at that and want to do it, too?” And she said, “No.” I was baffled! Like, doesn’t everybody want to do that? But it’ something that you’re born with, I think.
Well, that’s how it was for me.

Q: Do you think people expect you to act like a star?
A: I think so. I think so. I don’t know, I think it’s fun for people to imagine that I live some crazy, glamorous life. But I think sometimes they expect me to be difficult, or to act like a “star”. It’s a mystery to me, because I see myself only focused, prepared, and professional. When I’m working, I’m there to deliver. To be taken seriously. And as a woman in this business, it’s important to be that way, because it’s so easy to get labeled as a difficult or bitchy, when I’m not that at all.

Q: Let’s talk about movies. Are there any roles that you wish you had gotten that slipped through your fingers?
A: Yeah, yeah, sure…

Q: Such as?
A: I remember when I was doing Blood & Wine in Miami, and I got a call about a script called Jerry Maguire. My manager at the time said, “It’s genius! It’s written by Cameron Crowe!” I was so excited, because Say Anything was my favorite movie – and still is. I just said, “Oh my God, get me in there, get me in there!” But he said, “No, no, no, it’s not for you.” And then it turned out to be the best movie, and I was like, Ugh! But Renée Zellweger was perfect for it. Fantastic. I think movies are all about casting, and you’ve got to pick the right people for things. If something is meant for you, then it’s for you, and if it’s not for you, then it’s not for you.

Q: Which is more fun, romantic comedies or wearing a leather jacket and kicking ass?
A: There’s something about doing a romantic comedy, about playing that fantasy feminine role, that’s just fun. It’s great to create something that’s so inspirational that it comes across as a fairy tale. And when you’re doing a romantic comedy, let’s face it, it’s just a more enjoyable way to spend the day.

Q: OK, I have to ask. Are you archiving all your fabulous fashions?
A: I try to, but I’m ghetto! I have a small storage closet where I have a lot of my performance outfits, but nothing is labeled or put in any order or anything. I remember everything, though – what it is and when I wore it and all that. Looking through that stuff is like going down memory lane.

Q: What are your favorite things in your closet at the moment?
A: I think Marc Jacobs is just on fire right now. Anything Marc Jacobs – shoes, dresses, jackets. What he does for Louis Vuitton and what he does for his own line just blows my mind. All of it has that same feminine, flirty thing that I’m really feeling right now. I also have these beautiful pink Christian Louboutin shoes that look ballerina-ish but have little steel tips on the stiletto heels.

Q: Just the thing for stomping on the paparazii?
A: Just in case. Does anyone ever write anything nice about me?

Q: Oh, let the pity partly begin! It’s so hard being you, right?
A: Yeah, it’s hard sometimes! It gets ugly and horrible at times, but I’m not going to complain about it. It’s also good. I’m grateful that I get to do what I love, but I do feel that I have to protect myself at times. I’m not going to blame anyone for the things I’ve done through in my life, though. I have to look at myself and say, OK, what have I done to contribute to this?

Q: Tell the truth: What do you want that you don’t have?
A: I’d like to have more peace of mind. Does that sound funny? Maybe only to me. It’s just…there are so many things going on, like all the things that I’m involved in and responsible for. I just think it would be nice to switch off my head for a while. To turn in off and go, OK.

Q: Have you ever thought that all this just isn’t worth it?
A: It’s a fleeting thought. Success is great, but it comes with its own set of problems that are very difficult for other people to understand. I feel like everybody else does; there are great things about my life, and then there are things about it that are tough. Those feelings are universal.

Q: With great power comes great responsibility, as they say in Spider-Man.
A: Yes, I am Spider-Man-like! When you’re young and idealistic, it’s all beautiful and exciting. Because of who I am and what I do, part of that energy comes from being open to experiences and unafraid and uninhibited. Then you realize those things have repercussions that are profound.

Q: I get the feeling that anything you don’t like, you either change or work on changing.
A: That’s true. If sometimes feels uncomfortable to me, no matter how much it hurts or how difficult or confrontational it will be, I’ll change it. I’m not afraid o anything once I’ve really gone over it in my head and feel like it’s the right thing to do. I believe in the philosophy or the present - in living right now; not worrying about the future so much, and not worrying about the past so much, and just not missing the moment at hand.

Q: So who is Jennifer at this moment?
A: A little more private, I think. A little more…intimate. My world is becoming a little bit smaller, because for a minute there, it felt way too far out of my reach. I’m choosing to kind of bring it in and let people into my world in a different way than I did before. And maybe it will be more fulfilling for me. I’m starting from the beginning, and I think it’s going to be a whole new set of experiences and a whole new approach to what I do.

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J.Lo Gets Right
After seven tumultuous years in the spotlight, Jennifer Lopez talks about finding a good place, some good movies, a good man, and a new beginning.
By Joseph Hooper
Elle September 2005 Issue

Jennifer Lopez methodically eats a noontime bowl of crunchy breakfast cereal, the spoon going clink, clink against the bowl. She is sitting on a couch, her back to an enormous window view of Central Park, her legs crossed yoga style. Wearing sweatpants and a pale green formfitting T-shirt with poufy sleeves that says soy de… (“I'm from…”), she is the picture of aloof calm, as if the Bennifer madness of the past two years was burned away in a burst of meditative concentration. She looks like Jennifer Lopez, only smaller, her hair pulled back severely in an upswept ponytail that nicely exposes her petite, perfect features. As has been observed in scores of music videos and films good (Out of Sight), bad (Monster-in-Law), and indifferent (Maid in Manhattan), her moist, unlined skin shines like cocoa butter. This delicate-looking young woman rules the world. But of course, the world has lately exacted more than its pound of flesh in return.

“You mind that I'm eating?” she asks in that reedy little-girl's voice that takes some getting used to. Not at all. And by the way, you smell good, very vanilla-lemony, I add (recalling the nice line—and there are some—that Lopez uses to talk her way into Ben Affleck's apartment at the beginning of Gigli: “I'll only leave a faint scent.”) “It's after I take a bath,” she explains helpfully. “Before I put on my perfume, my Glow, I put on my oil, and I think it's very strong. That's what my hairdresser says or the people who style for me or the girls around the office: 'You left and it still smells like you.'” Lopez's wildly successful scent, Glow, has just recently spawned Miami Glow, a beachier blend of coconut water and passion and orange flowers. Together with her two hugely successful clothing lines, Jlo and Sweetface, the perfumes may earn her more than she brings in from her music and movies. (According to published reports, her fragrances earned her $150 million last year while the clothing lines grossed $400 million.)

When you're a one-woman brand, product placement must come naturally. But if the performances that created the J.Lo persona that created the brand fail to entirely satisfy (and she is a woman who can unself-consciously refer to herself as an artist), how sweet can success really smell? In the past year Lopez has shaken up her management team. She reportedly almost rehired her longtime manager, Benny Medina—whom she fired in 2003—then changed her mind and retained Jeff Kwatinetz of the Firm. She also switched music labels and put out a new album, Rebirth. The record has yet to launch a “Waiting for Tonight”-style megasingle, but its title drives home her current project of self-transformation: a life lived less in the tabloids and more at home, in marriage, to singer Marc Anthony, and in work that comes from the heart. So how's the rebirthing going? Is it still an in utero thing, or is she fighting her way through the birth canal?

“No, no, I'm out and I'm cool,” she says. “I'm an infant, but I feel like I'm in a good place. The past couple of years were very transitional, supertransitional for me. A lot of things happened professionally that shook me up. And then you say, Something weird is happening, and you step back and take a minute and you start over.”

As Oscar Levant once said of Doris Day, we remember Lopez before she was a virgin: as the tender but tough U.S. marshall who put a bullet in George Clooney's thigh as a mark of true love (duty would have required her to kill him) in Steven Soderbergh's 1998 romantic thriller, Out of Sight; and from the year before as the reincarnation of slain Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, in Selena, and as the incestuous sex harpy in Oliver Stone's demented desert noir, U Turn. For fans of the early Lopez, this rebirth thing isn't going to wash until we see the evidence on-screen.

Exhibit A will be An Unfinished Life, which opens September 7, directed by Lasse Hallström, a Hollywood outsider known for quirky films like What's Eating Gilbert Grape? and My Life as a Dog. Lopez plays a down-and-out young widow and mother who moves back in with her father-in-law on his defunct cattle ranch because she has nowhere else to go. “It's a small, beautiful, intimate story about forgiveness,” Lopez says. “About how the things that rip people apart somehow bring them together.”

The movie has aroused curiosity on several fronts. First there's the unlikely pairing of Lopez and the leathery '70s icon who plays the ornery father-in-law: Robert Redford. “I think Jennifer was starstruck working with Redford,” Hallström recalls. “We all were. But Jennifer had the weight of her mother adoring Redford, and she came to visit the set [in Kamloops, British Columbia] for days.” Then there's the matter of the timing: An Unfinished Life got stuck in the release gridlock occasioned by the Miramax-Disney divorce. While the film marks Lopez's redebut as a serious actress, it was actually filmed two years ago, in the midst of the Ben-and-Jen maelstrom that sucked in even Hallström, the ironical Swede. “I still don't know what to do with the glass vase I bought as a wedding present,” he says. “Maybe I'll give it to her at the opening of the film.”

As for the film itself, its long gestation has fueled rumors that cut both ways: that it's so good it was held back in part to improve the timing for a possible Oscar nomination for Lopez or that it's so bad it required extra editing to salvage Lopez's problematic performance. Hallström, one of the few people who has actually seen the finished cut, pronounces himself well pleased with it and with his female lead's performance. The one neutral party I came across, a journalist who had wangled a look at an early version, complained in print that Lopez was “terribly miscast”; when I relate that to her, she gives a little hard-luck laugh. “Emotionally I wasn't miscast!” she shoots back. “Having been hurt by things in my life, I know what it is to pull yourself out of that and to keep going because that's more my real personality. I also know how easy it is to let life and the circumstances drag you down and let your life take a course that you never imagined. You know what I mean?”

It was a little more than two years ago that the granitic Stone Phillips signed off the special Bennifer edition of Dateline with these time-capsule words: “No doubt their fans will be rooting for Jen and Ben and Gigli when it opens later this month because as everyone in Hollywood knows, we all love a happy ending.”

But we'll settle for a really, really messy one. Now that the world has turned its attention to the other Jen and to Brad and Angelina, the damage can be dispassionately assessed: Affleck's evening in a Vancouver strip club (the same night the Dateline episode aired: innocent night out with the boys or semideliberate relationship suicide by tabloid?), the increasingly strained Ben-Jen moments captured by paparazzi lenses, Affleck's sartorial descent from Jen-inspired Armani back to Massachusetts homeboy. Finally l'affair Affleck was over—one for the tabloid history books, his name inscribed after that of first husband waiter Ojani Noa, of bad-boy boyfriend Sean Combs, and of second husband dancer Cris Judd. After Affleck there is only Anthony, the old New York pal to whom Lopez turned for solace, now husband number three and the man whose Manhattan office she's borrowed for this conversation. What was it like to have your romantic life etched into the national consciousness? (One wag wondered in print whether she was becoming “the Elizabeth Taylor of the hip-hop generation.”)

“It was actually kind of fun,” she answers. Excuse me? “Scary and fun. A beautiful time. With intense experiences and things that are hard to go through, you eventually look back and say, That was amazing. There was so much stuff there that is unexplainable, stuff that I'll never understand.” Um, weren't there some things you would have done differently? “I don't think I did anything wrong,” she says. “I was just running around, being myself, doing what I wanted, just living. But for some reason, some people seemed to think I was courting all that attention. That's not a fair assumption to make.”

The tabloid media has turned more voracious since then, but the trail to the Lopez bedroom has grown cold. Contrary to what she describes as her basic say-anything “girl” nature, Lopez has become circumspect and won't discuss her marriage with the press. I admit to her that I'm not unfamiliar with the ungenerous tab coverage of pretty much everything she's done, now that a taste for the tabs can almost pass for a sophisticated guilty pleasure. “Everyone I know gets them,” Lopez agrees. “They've made it more glamorous. It's like smoking in the '50s. And years later it'll be like, 'You know what, it'll kill ya.'” She laughs. Will the tabs eventually bury her? “Not if I can help it.”

I don't want to puncture this hard-won good-humored equanimity of hers, but I am willing to test it: How did she feel when she learned that Jennifer Garner was pregnant with Affleck's baby? Lopez colors only slightly and blurts out an autopilot answer with a few nervous You know's: “You know, I'm a married woman now and I just don't think it's right to keep commenting on past relationships. And you know, I hope that they're happy; you know, it's a beautiful thing. There are no hard feelings.”

And what about Lopez's recent movies? She's almost always crisp and charming in them, but when you think about Out of Sight, the delicious current running between her and George Clooney in that Detroit hotel room, then mentally fast-forward to Maid in Manhattan, to poor Ralph Fiennes' having to look into J.Lo's baby browns and utter, “If tonight is all we have, stay,” you are forced to agree with Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard: “It's the pictures that got small.”

“I watched Gigli the other night on DVD, and I didn't think it was so bad,” I offer, which I figure is the least I can say since the critics decided this movie about a cool lesbian hit woman (Lopez) falling for a dumb mook hit man (Affleck) was the worst movie ever made.

“I've seen a lot worse movies,” Lopez says with an appealing laugh. “It was like the media had a field day. Sometimes I think the media is like high school, like a clique: Sometimes they love this one popular girl, and then they hate her and make her the nerd. And then they love her again.

“Let me tell you how it really went,” she informs me in no uncertain terms. “In the beginning I was a blank slate. I got to work with all these great directors because I was just a girl who came in there and did well in the audition. Then I did Selena, and I became more popular. Then I made a record, and thank God people liked the music, and I was famous. I was being offered movies that I could star in, but that's all I'm being offered. This was a big surprise. When I think I should be seeing the big directors, they don't even consider me. They see me as a sexy singer, too much in the media, too this, too that.” I tell Lopez I'd assumed that her movie biz trajectory was just a matter of cautious corporate decision making over at J.Lo, Inc.: that stars should be in star vehicles.

“Well, hey, I take responsibility for everything that has happened in my career,” she says a touch unconvincingly. “They're choices I've made, of course, with help from others. It's like, 'You've got your first starring movie role, and it's this movie called Anaconda!'” (For the record, both Lopez and the snake acquitted themselves honorably.) “Going in as an actress, I know I can always bring my A game, and as for the rest, you have to hope for the best.” Which is why her latest thing is producing: controlling a project from top to bottom. “You come up with the idea,” she says with growing animation, “decide on a director, think about locations, the film stock. It's endless. I get goose bumps.” But then this is a woman so sure of her creative instincts that she recently told the German magazine Bravo that she'd like to become the first female president of the United States (and redecorate the White House in the bargain). In any event, her new production company already has its first TV-series venture, South Beach, a drama about living la vida loca in the club-and-model land that is Miami, familiar cultural anthropology for Lopez. The show debuts as a midseason replacement on the UPN network this fall.

Lopez describes herself as a die-hard connoisseur of romantic movies (comedies or bittersweet, take your pick) who travels with Love Me or Leave Me with James Cagney and Doris Day and The Way We Were, which has a special place in her heart thanks to Barbra Streisand, her great role model in the double-threat singing-acting department. When Lopez found herself spending time with Streisand's The Way We Were costar, Robert Redford, on the set of An Unfinished Life, she says, “I was going on and on about how many dynamics and levels there were in that movie, and he was like, 'It's sad for you kids. They don't make movies like that anymore for you to sink your teeth into.'”

Well, I tell her, if I and several editors at ELLE were in the habit of traveling with DVDs, Out of Sight would be on our short list. “And it wasn't even a hit,” she says with a chuckle.

So is that it? If it's not a hit it doesn't count? “No, not at all,” she replies. “[Good movies] just don't come around all the time. But we will be talking about Out of Sight for years to come, and it's made the money over time with DVDs and cable. In the end, great material will win out over anything else.” Now she's getting positively evangelical. “As an artist, that's what I believe in, it's what I'm passionate about—making good movies and telling good stories—and there was a time in my career when I was offered this, offered that, lots of money, blah blah blah! Who cares? Now I feel I'm in a different place where I'm much more picky.”

Next up is an indie movie project, Bordertown, directed by Gregory Nava, which has just wrapped filming. In it she plays a reporter who travels to Juarez, Mexico, to investigate a slew of unsolved murders, the fictionalization of an ongoing real-life tragedy. This is, she hopes, the sort of intense dramatic role that she can believably pull off now that her tabloid notoriety has cooled down. “I want to be a kind of clean slate again,” she says.

Nava, who directed Lopez in Selena, remembers her most fondly from their first film together, My Family, in which Lopez objected to a stuntwoman's swimming across a raging river for her, then jumped in the 39-degree water to do it right: “'Get her out of there—she's ruining my performance!'” Norma Desmond couldn't have said it better.

If the professional rebirthing seems to be proceeding apace, I'm still curious about Lopez's personal life—the current, nontabloid version, about which we have spoken little. I quote one of her movie lines to her, from U Turn—her character's attempt to size up Sean Penn's ability to help her ditch small-town life: “Everybody has a past. They have a pain and they have something they want. What do you want?”

“Are you asking me that question?” Lopez asks a little startled, but she gamely wades in. “I want…kids, one day, you know,” she says. “I want peace inside myself, which I'm still struggling with, but I'm better now. When it comes to balance in my life, between my professional life and my personal life, it's a slow learning curve for me. Because my life was about work for so long and only about work. I had relationships and stuff like that, but nothing was ever as important to me as the work. From the minute I left my house [as a teenager], I've been in pursuit of my dreams. And I'm fearless in that way. I'm not afraid to fail.”

Lopez's film career has taught her that you can't have everything all the time. So what about this elusive life balance? How do you pull off the acting, the singing, the brand-extending retail stuff and have a successful marriage and kids? I mention to Lopez that a woman I know who had downsized her high-profile journalism career to make room for kids recently passed on to me this hard-bitten truism: that a woman can have three things—marriage, kids, and a career—but the catch is, she can do only two of them well. Lopez does the math instantly: “So either you are going to be a bad mom and be a really good careerwoman and wife, or a good mom and careerwoman and a bad wife, or a good mom and a good wife and your career is gonna suck.” She lets that sink in for a moment, and then: “I want to get a T-shirt that says bullshit!” Lopez is laughing, but clearly you don't lightly tell her she can't do something.

“In America, there is all this guilt and pressure,” she says. “You're a bad person if you do this, if you don't do that. But I think you have to be fulfilled as an individual to be a good mom. And I'm not a mom. I'm sure moms out there will be saying, 'She doesn't know what she's talking about!' Fine. I'll figure it out in my own way. And I think if you are trying to have a balance of those three things, I'm sure it's easier when you have a good partner. But this is all theoretical, philosophical at this point. I do hope to put it to use one day. We'll see. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm a f--kin' idiot.”

And what of Marc Anthony, the man who would help Lopez suspend the normal laws of gravity and keep all those balls in the air? Given her history, she is wise to keep the media at arm's length here. I come up with a final movie quote to broach this sideways—lines spoken by Susan Sarandon in Shall We Dance? As soon as I begin to describe the scene, which happens to not include Lopez, she knows exactly what I'm going to say. “Witness,” she says. “It's the best part of the whole movie.” (God bless her, she does care about material!)

It goes like this: “There are a billion people on the planet. What does any life really mean, but in a marriage you're promising to care about everything—the good things, the bad things, terrible things, the mundane things—all of it, all the time. You're saying your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice. Your life will not go unwitnessed because I will be your witness.”

Lopez is one of those rare people whose life is witnessed in strange and artful and distorted ways by hundreds of millions of people. But intimacy seems to be what is required to finish the unfinished life. “Maybe because I had such a strong family growing up,” she says, “having a partner is very important to me. So in that belief, I've made certain moves to have that in my life.”

“Would the witness in your life be Marc Anthony?”

“Well, I'm sure you'll write that,” she says, laughing. “Like you said, we got into this sideways, and I think it would be a lot for me to open up about my life at this point. I've learned to be more careful.”

“You could say, 'Good, bad, terrible or mundane, my married life is none of your business.' Or you could just say, 'It's good.'”

Then (in the softest voice imaginable) she says: “It's good.”

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