VIVA

    Portorykanka z Bronxu, │adna ale w sumie przeciΩtna ,mia│a minimalne szanse na £wiatow╣ karierΩ. A jednak. Dzi£ to ju┐ ôw│a£cicielka najpiΩkniejszej pupy £wiataö, a tak┐e najlepiej op│acana latynoska aktorka i - od niedawna - piosenkarka, kt≤rej przeb≤j okaza│ siΩ hitem tegorocznego lata. Jennifer mia│a i inny przyk│ad tak upragnionego przez ni╣ sukcesu. Gloria Stefan, c≤rka kuba±skich emigrant≤w, by rzuciµ AmerykΩ na kolana wcale nie musia│a ukrywaµ latynoskiego pochodzenia. Na GloriΩ zapatrzy│ siΩ ostatnio tak┐e Ricky Martin, kt≤ry do sp≤│ki z Jennifer wykreowa│ to, co media nazwa│y ôlatynoskim uderzeniem ko±ca XX wiekuö.

W│a£nie o czym£ takim marzy│a Jennifer Lopez . W≤wczas jeszcze mieszkanka ubogiej dzielnicy Nowego Jorku. Wychowywa│a siΩ w typowej portoryka±skiej rodzinie, w kt≤rej nigdy nie brakowa│o tylko muzyki, dzieci i fasoli. Jej rodzice pracowali bardzo ciΩ┐ko i - jak na swoje wyobra┐enia - osi╣gnΩli w Stanach ogromny sukces. Staµ ich by│o na przyk│ad na to , by 5-letni╣ c≤rkΩ posy│aµ na lekcje rytmiki.

Docenia│a to, ale jako nastolatka by│a ju┐ pewna ┐e nie chce , jak ojciec, pracowaµ w firmie ubezpieczeniowej ani, jak matka, byµ przedszkolank╣ w katolickim przedszkolu. Nie chcia│a codziennie zrywaµ siΩ przed sz≤st╣, mieµ ma│o czasu i wiecznie na wszystko oszczΩdzaµ. Oczyma wyobraƒni widzia│a siebie bogat╣, piΩkn╣, w centrum zainteresowania.

Teraz kiedy odwiedza rodzic≤w w Bronksie, s╣siedzi wychodz╣ przed domy, ┐eby j╣ zobaczyµ i przywitaµ. M│ode kobiety, jej r≤wie£niczki nie kryj╣ zazdro£ci, ale i dumy ôTo jedna z nas i proszΩ, jak╣ jest kr≤low╣ö. Jenniefr przemieszcza siΩ ju┐ nie metrem, a mercedesem cabrio, mieszka z cooker-spanielem o imieniu Boots w luksusowym apartamencie w zachodnim Hollywood. Ma sypialniΩ urz╣dzon╣ na bia│o i wielkie │o┐e z baldachimem. Jest prawdziw╣ gwiazd╣? Jeszcze nie ôJeszcze nieö, oponuje Lopez, ôale bΩdΩ. Wiem, ┐e trudno mnie por≤wnaµ z Michel Pfeiffer, ale je£li zale┐y mi na jakiej£ roli, je£li siΩ uprΩ, to j╣ zdobΩdΩ. PrzejdΩ przez wszystkie drzwi, pokonam wszystkie przeszkodyö, obiecuje.

Od Anakondy do MTV

     Zanim dosz│o do tego, ┐e za rolΩ w filmie mo┐e ┐╣daµ miliona dolar≤w, musia│a najpierw sporo nad sob╣ popracowaµ. Z tego co by│o przeszkod╣ do kariery - latynoskiego pochodzenia - uczyni│a sw≤j g│≤wny atut. Doda│a do niego determinacjΩ i konsekwencjΩ w d╣┐eniu do celu. A cel wytyczy│a sobie jasny - £piewaµ, ta±czyµ i graµ.

Najpierw d│ugo wystΩpowa│a w ch≤rkach i baletach. ôRobi│a t│oö w broadwayowskich musicalach. Szerokie drzwi do filmowej i telewizyjnej kariery otworzy│ przed ni╣ dopiero konkurs £piewu i ta±ca. Sals╣ i hip-hopem przekona│a juror≤w, ┐e jest lepsza od dw≤ch tysiΩcy pozosta│ych uczestnik≤w. Mia│a 16 lat, a jak za dotkniΩciem czarodziejskiej r≤┐d┐ki posypa│y siΩ propozycje pracy w rozmaitych serialach i filmach. Nie by│y to g│≤wne role, ale w og≤le by│y. Flirt z telewizj╣ zaczΩ│a w 1986 roku od filmu ômy little girlö Connie Kaisermana, w kt≤rym zagra│a epizodyczn╣ rolΩ Mary. A sko±czy│o siΩ na tym, ┐e sam Aaron Spelling zaanga┐owa│ j╣ do serialu Hotel Malibuö (1994). Stawa│a siΩ coraz popularniejsza. Rozpoznawano j╣ na ulicy. Coraz wiΩcej zarabia│a. Mog│a wie£µ ┐ycie telewizyjnej ulubienicy, gwiazdy tasiemcowych seriali... ale nie chcia│a. Z dnia na dzie± zerwa│a z telewizj╣ na rzecz kina. Marzy│a o ambitnych filmach i s│awnych re┐yserach. Na razie najwiΩkszy rozg│os przynios│a jej rola filmie ôSelenaö GregoryÆego Navy, w kt≤rym zagra│a zamordowan╣ przez wielbicielkΩ piosenkarkΩ z Meksyku, SelenΩ Quintanilla Perez. ôSelena mnie czego£ nauczy│aö, wyznawa│a Lopez, ôaby szanowaµ i lubiµ swoich fan≤wi zawsze mieµ czas na mi│╣ rozmowΩ z nimiö. Szybko przekona│a siΩ, ┐e ciep│y stosunek do publiczno£ci╣ rzeczywi£cie pop│aca. Czytelnicy magazynu ôPeopleö umie£cili j╣ na 16. Pozycji w rankingu najpiΩkniejszych ludzi £wiata

Kinowa publiczno£µ zaczΩ│a j╣ rozpoznawaµ po filmie ôAnakondaö, w kt≤rym ekipa naukowc≤w zmaga│a siΩ z gigantycznym wΩ┐em-morderc╣. Film nakrΩcono zaledwie dwa lata temu, ale Jennifer by│a jeszcze w≤wczas mi│a, biu£ciast╣ Latynosk╣, raczej úadniutk╣ ni┐ ol£niewaj╣c╣. Jak╣ wielk╣ pracΩ musia│a wykonaµ, by doj£µ do wizerunku z teledysku ôIf You Had My Loveö.

Teraz jest ju┐ w swoim typie doskona│a. Gazety £ledz╣ i komentuj╣ ka┐dy jej krok: co powiedzia│a, na jakim by│a przyjΩciu, w kim siΩ kocha, jak siΩ ubiera, czy jest szczΩ£liwa. A skoro tak, to za piΩkn╣ pann╣ Lopez pod╣┐aj╣ t│umy reporter≤w i fotograf≤w. I to oni w│a£nie poinformowali ca│a planetΩ, ┐e ponΩtna Latynoska cierpi z powodu samotno£ci. Jennifer wyda│a dziennikarzom: ôOdda│a bym wszystko za mi│ego, kochaj╣cego i wiernego ch│opakaö.

Z oczu i z serca

     Trudno w to uwierzyµ? Brytyjski ôThe Sunö w lipcu doni≤s│ czytelnikom, ┐e ôNajseksowniesza kobieta na naszej planecie jest smutna. Choµ powszechnie uwa┐a siΩ, ┐e kto jak kto, ale ona mo┐e przebieraµ w wielbicielach, Jennifer Lopez nie ma nikogo. We wszystkich dyskotekach £wiata s│ychaµ £piewany przez ni╣ przeb≤j ôIf you had my loveö, tymczasem odk╣d 18 miesiΩcy temu rozsta│a siΩ mΩ┐em, jej mi│o£ci nie mia│ niktö.

ôKa┐dej nocy, kiedy k│adΩ siΩ spaµ, my£lΩ o tym, ┐e jestem sama i chce mi siΩ p│akaµö, skar┐y│a siΩ na │amach Jennifer. Da│a te┐ diagnozΩ takiej sytuacji. Jej zdaniem ômΩ┐czyƒni boj╣ siΩ kobiet uznawanych za symbole seksu. Takich, na kt≤re wszyscy patrz╣ i podziwiaj╣ö. Czyli takich jak ona.

Image seksbomby okaza│ siΩ na tyle niewygodny, ┐e a┐ zniszczy│ ma│┐e±stwo aktorki z niejakim Ojanim Noa - m│odszym od niej o 5 lat aktorem i modelem(okazjonalnie) oraz kelnerem(codziennie). A wszystko zaczΩ│o siΩ tak romantycznie. On dorabia│ sobie w restauracji w Miami nale┐╣cej do idolki Jennifer, Glorii Estefan. Nic dziwnego , ┐e w│a£nie tam zapragnΩ│a zje£µ kolacjΩ.

Pojawi│ siΩ wiΩc w jej ┐yciu zupe│nie nieoczekiwanie, i do tego z talerzem w d│oni. Wystarczy│o kilka przeci╣g│ych spojrze±, by Jennifer zrozumia│a, ┐e ten kelner jest kim£ zupe│nie wyj╣tkowym. Wkr≤tce, bo w lutym 1997 roku, w obecno£ci dwunastu £wiadk≤w szeptali sobie sakramentalne ôtakö. Mi│o£µ mia│a trwaµ do grobowej deski. Potrwa│a rok. To Noa nie sprosta│. Nie umia│ opanowaµ zazdro£ci. Czu│ siΩ zagro┐ony, co mo┐ne jako£ zrozumieµ, bo w ko±cu ┐y│ z kobiet╣ , kt≤ra zarabia│a niepor≤wnywalnie wiΩcej i wci╣┐ wychodzi│a na spotkania w interesach. Podejrzeniami zatru│ jej ┐ycie na tyle skutecznie, ┐e wkr≤tce mia│a do£µ. Po filmie ôCo z oczu, to i z sercaö, w kt≤rym zagra│a u boku seksownego GeorgeÆa Clooneya, rozwiedli siΩ.

Na k│opoty - Puffy

     W maju reporterzy ôNew York Postö wytropili jej romans. Jennifer Lopez i ciemnosk≤ry raper Sean ôPuffyö Combs spΩdzili dwa upalne dni i dwie gor╣ce noce w hotelu South Beach na Miami. P│ywali w basenie i dzielili apartament ôPufföegoö. Nie dbali o dyskrecjΩ.ôNie obchodzi│o ich, ┐e kto£ mo┐e ich przy│apaµö, ze zgorszeniem relacjonowali reporterzy. Sk╣d ten niesmak? Ano st╣d, ┐e oblubieniec filmowej Seleny w│a£nie zosta│ tatusiem. Synka urodzi│a mu d│ugoletnia przyjaci≤│ka Kim Porter.

ôPrzy│apani na gor╣cym uczynkuö pocz╣tkowo mimo wszystko wypierali siΩ, ┐e │╣czy ich co£ wiΩcej ni┐ przyjaƒ±. Nie zmyli│o to czujno£ci prasy. Gruchaj╣c╣ parkΩ dziennikarze dopadli ponownie, tym razem w 29. Urodziny Jennifer. Aktorka urz╣dzi│a je w modnym nowojorskim klubie ôHaloö. Z tej okazji zata±czy│a z ôPuffymö namiΩtne boogie. Para nie mog│a oderwaµ od siebie r╣k. Ca│y wiecz≤r spΩdzili na przytulankach - wszyscy widzieli jak siΩ sob╣ ciesz╣.

Jennifer by│a ju┐ wtedy po rozwodzie, zakochany raper te┐ uwolni│ siΩ z krΩpuj╣cych go wiΩz≤w rodzinnych Oboje przestali siΩ ze swoj╣ mi│o£ci╣ ukrywaµ. Jennifer promienia│a Raz po raz pytana, jak tam jej sprawy sercowe, wyznawa│a wreszcie, ┐e uwielbia mΩ┐czyzn twardych na zewn╣trz, a w £rodku delikatnych i ┐e ôPuffyö w│a£nie taki jest.

Trzeba jednak wzi╣µ poprawkΩ na to, ┐e -jako zakochana- Lopez mo┐e siΩ odrobinΩ myliµ. ôPuffyö, co mo┐na przet│umaczyµ jako ônadΩtyö, raczej nie s│ynie z delikatno£ci. Niedawno aresztowano go, bo zaatakowa│ Stevena StouteÆa pracownika wytw≤rni muzycznej Universal Records. Rozw£cieczony raper usi│owa│ rozbiµ na jego g│owie najpierw krzes│o, a potem butelkΩ szampana. Grozi│o mu za to a┐ siedem lat wiΩzienia. Sprawa zako±czy│a siΩ jednak dla Combsa nad wyraz pomy£lnie: Stoute wycofa│ czΩ£µ oskar┐enia. A :PuffÆegoö s╣d skaza│ jedynie na udzia│ w jednodniowym programie edukacyjnym pomagaj╣cym obni┐yµ poziom agresji.

Zwi╣zkowi nie wr≤┐y dobrze to, ┐e ôPuffyö te┐ jest bardzo zazdrosny. Zd╣┐y│ ju┐ obwie£ciµ Lopez, ┐e nie ┐yczy sobie, ┐eby pokazywa│a siΩ w towarzystwie innych mΩ┐czyzn. Na razie Jennifer jest pos│uszna i pe│na dobrej woli. Jednak fotoreporterzy zauwa┐yli zn≤w co£, co niezmiernie zaniepokoi│o wielbicieli aktorki. Ot≤┐ s│yn╣ca z doskona│ej figury piΩkno£µ, kt≤rej kszta│ty por≤wnywano do gitary, zaczΩ│a chudn╣µ i mizernieµ. Wyzna│a, ┐e przed po│udniem jada tylko bia│ko z jajka, za£ po po│udniu µwiczy pod okiem tego samego trenera, z kt≤rym gimnastykuje siΩ podejrzewana o anoreksjΩ Calista Flockhart. Efekty tego trybu ┐ycia widaµ go│ym okiem.

Teraz £piewam

     Po £licznej buzi i kszta│tnych po£ladkach latynoska piΩkno£µ postanowi│a wyeksponowaµ sw≤j g│os. ôNa pr≤┐noö, bezlito£nie wyrokuj╣ krytycy muzyczni. Nie jest pierwsz╣ aktork╣, kt≤ra pr≤buje swoich siΩ przy mikrofonie. W studiu nagra± wcze£niej szczΩ£cia pr≤bowa│y miΩdzy innymi: Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Lewis i Gillian Anderson. »adnej z nich nie uda│o siΩ jednak dokonaµ tego, co w│a£nie Jennifer Lopez.

29- letnia aktorka swoim pierwszym singlem ô If you had my loveö zdoby│a szczyt ameryka±skiej listy przeboj≤w. Sukces ten zawdziΩcza po trosze zniewalaj╣cej urodzie, mistrzowskiej realizacji klipu i producenckiej opiece kompozytora, Rodneya Jerkinsa. Opr≤cz niego do pracy nad albumem pozyska│a miΩdzy innymi ôPuffyÆegoö i mΩ┐a Glorii Estefan, Emilio. ôC≤┐ z tegoö, ci╣gn╣ krytycy, :je£li ich wysi│ki z│o┐y│y siΩ na stylistyczny misz-masz , trudny do udƒwigniΩcia dla mizernych umiejΩtno£ci wokalnych aktorki. W mi│osnych balladach stara siΩ zabrzmieµ jak Celine Dion b╣dƒ jak czarnosk≤re soulowe wokalistki, ale na staraniach koniec.ö

Lopez nie przejmuje sie krytykami. ôWa┐ne, ┐e ludzie mnie lubi╣ö, powtarza. Sw≤j album nazwa│a ôOn the 6ö - na cze£µ lini metra z Bronxu, kt≤r╣ niegdy£ czΩsto jeƒdzi│a, marz╣c o lepszym ┐yciu. ôNagrywaj╣c ten album czu│am, ┐e spe│niaj╣ siΩ moje marzenia. Po prostu muszΩ £piewaµö, m≤wi Lopez. Mo┐e niekoniecznie musi, mo┐e s│uchanie jej nie daje takiej rozkoszy, ale patrzenie na jej taniec w MTV - na pewno tak.

 

Napisa│a:
MAGDA ROZMARYNOWSKA

Przepisa│:
SVIRU

WR╙╞ NA POCZÑTEK

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A tutaj mo┐ecie poczytaµ artyku│y o Jennifer Lopez po angielsku, pochodz╣ one z r≤┐nych zagranicznych pism.

Newsweek

5/31/99 Issue

Lovin' La Vida Loca

Hot commodities Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez are pop's triple threats: they can sing, they can dance and they don't look bad, either

By Veronica Chambers and John Leland

They looked so good, Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin, as only the truly beautiful can, and even then only by the genius of the hairdressers to the truly beautiful. Skintight, designer suedes and leathers gave way to lacy nothings and tighter leathers. A hand crept here, a hip dipped there. But even so, all was not right in the Manhattan photo studio. With each progressively slinkier outfit, Lopez stopped for a reaction from Sean (Puffy) Combs, who was along to offer support and direction. Lopez describes the rap impresario as just a friend. Now he demonstrated the range of his friendship. The earpiece from his mobile phone dangling from one ear, he approached Lopez, silently, palm extended. Everything froze. The actress parted her perfectly glossed lips and deposited her chewing gum in his hand. Jennifer and Ricky were now ready for their close-up.

 Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopezùdoes it get any hotter than this? His new album, "Ricky Martin,'' his first in English, debuts this week at No. 1 on the Billboard chart, and his in-store appearances have stopped traffic on both coasts. Lopezùstar of "Out of Sight" and "Selena''ùreleases her debut album, "On the 6," next week. Multiskilled, multilingual entertainers, Martin and Lopez are riding the first important demographic wave of the next millennium: by 2009, Latinos will pass African-Americans as the largest minority group in the United States. Sales of Latin music in the United States neared $600 million in 1998, and are up 46 percent so far this year. In her plush hotel suite in New York recently, Lopez made light of the timing. Hugging her knees to her chest, bare ankles peeking out from her tight Capri pants, she smiled mischievously. "It's always," she said, "a good time to be Latin."

 Before Ricky Martin began his English-language album, his managers called for an anthem in Spanglish: something Anglo audiences could rock to, with enough Spanish to gratify his core Latino base. "Also," says the veteran songwriter Desmond Child, "we wanted to write the millennium party song from hell." They came up with "Livin' La Vida Loca," a caffeinated rock number drenched in swing. Before the English-speaking public even knew his name, Martin, an alum of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo and later "General Hospital," had launched an enormously successful solo career. His previous four albums, all in Spanish, sold more than 15 million copies worldwide and scored No. 1 hits in 30 countries. "Livin' La Vida Loca" made it 31. After a decade of grunged- or thugged-out male pop stars, here was a wholesome, safe-sex symbol for all persuasions. "If you go to a concert of mine," he says appreciatively, "you can see the guy taking the girl, a bunch of guys alone, parents and grandparents. I want people to see that."

 In a luxe villa on Lake Como, Italy, Martin offers an Indian greeting called a namaste. The reverent bow, which also closes every performance, is a humble counterpoint to his global-size ambitions. He has come here to perform the English songs for the first time, small challenge for his European fans: they've already loved him in Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. He picked up the namaste on a recent trip to India, which he calls a spiritual awakening. "I felt a comfort I never felt before. If you listen to Hindi music, it connects to the Gypsy music from Spain, which connects back to Latin America." A volcanic live performer, in person he is soft-spoken and formal as few American pop stars are. After 15 years in the spotlight, he still seems to enjoy it. "I meditate every morning," he says. "The adrenaline you deal with every day can be fatal. Not to be dramatic, but there's a lot of people in the entertainment business who aren't [around] today."

 Martin's songs are less Latin workouts than frothy cocktails of global pop styles. "La Copa de la Vida," which he sang at the Grammy Awards, is vaguely Brazilian in rhythm and instrumentation. "Be Careful (Cuidado Con Mi Coraz≤n)" features Madonna, mother to the most famous Latina baby in America, singing in Spanish, while Ricky responds in English. "I play with cultures," says Martin, who was raised in Puerto Rico, where he discovered Journey and David Bowie before Tito Puente. "I can play with Anglo sounds, but in my blood, in my veins, it's Latin."

 Martin takes pains to assure his Latino audience that he isn't deserting them to sing in English. But his fans live a crossover existence: translating ideas and experiences from Spanish into English, then back again, every day. At a CD signing in Miami's South Beach, Leana Villareal, 21, a student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, is tired but eager after waiting in line since the night before. "I became Ricky's fan when he was on a Mexican soap opera called 'Alcanzar Una Estrella II'," she says. Villareal met her friend Maribel Alicia, 24, online at the Ricky Martin Web site. "I love the way he's always true to himself and true to Puerto Rico," says Alicia, who is half Chilean and half Cuban. "You've got to be proud of the way that he's broken down so many barriers."

 In the pantheon of Latina America, Lopez cuts a very different profile. "Jennifer's butt," says Nely Galan, the first female president of the Spanish-language TV network Telemundo, "is to die. [Latina] girls grow up with hourglass figures and big butts, and the women you see become movie stars are tall, thin and hipless, more like Gwyneth Paltrow. Now all these Latina girls are going, 'Good, my butt is hot'.

 At Sony recording studios in Manhattan, Lopez is feeling her roots. Today she is dressed in tight T shirt and jeans for an MTV interview in a subway station. The famous makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin and equally famous hairstylist OribΦ are on hand to perfect the look: Latina girl from the Bronx. It is an easy stretch. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of a Puerto Rican teacher and computer specialist, Lopez always wanted to be an entertainer, even back in Holy Family Catholic School. She got her first break as a dancing Fly Girl on TV's "In Living Color," and has simply added careers from there. "If I could describe myself in a few words," she says, " 'strong' would be one of them. I know what I want, and I'm willing to go after it." Her album, a slick mix of R & B and Latinish grooves, is a testimony to that ambition, a funky extension of the Lopez brand. Singing almost wholly in English, Lopez carries the songs simply, without much fuss. "Now," she says, "the world is starting to see what it's like to grow up in a Latin family: the flavor and the culture and the passion and the music. We're a very passionate people." She laughs about having jumped a subway turnstile at the MTV interview. "I've gotta work out," she gasps, patting her hip. "My ass!"

 Will Martin's success open the floodgates for other Latin musicians? Desmond Child is doubtful. "When people say the Latin music explosion, I beg to differ," he says. "There's been one artist, and his name is Ricky Martin." Celia Cruz, the queen of salsa music, says of the American audience, "Si no entiende, no atiende: if they don't understand, they don't pay attention. They'll play Gloria Estefan, and now Ricky Martin, who has recorded in English." But salsa legends like herself and Tito Puente, she says, still "don't get played. We've advanced, but we're not where we want to be."

 The salsa star Marc Anthony, who is recording his own English-language album in the studio next to Lopez's, stops in to say hello. Anthony sang a duet on Lopez's albumùall in the Sony family, under the eye of corporate impresario Tommy Mottolaùand he has just returned from a meeting at the label. "I went shopping today," he tells Lopez. "Oh, yeah," she asks. "For what?" "Money." This surely is where the real advances will be made, in the corporate suites. A decade ago Latin music was a niche business, as were rap, country and alternative. In the splintered new world order, says Mottola, "this is a core business for us." Timing, after all, is everything. Ricky and Jennifer are ready for their crossover.  

WR╙╞ NA POCZÑTEK

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In Style

June 1999

"She's All That"

Having Conquered Hollywood, Jennifer Lopez Kicks Her Career Up A Notch With Her Sizzling First Album.  How Does She Keep It Together? Workouts, Family, Prayer - And More Workouts

 

Jennifer Lopez is running hard, her strong legs kicking with a furious grace. That the 29-year-old movie star is on a treadmill in celebrity trainer Radu Teodorescu's Manhattan gym seems purely incidental; Lopez looks more like a marathoner hurtling toward the finish line. "I've never seen a girl like this," marvels Radu, who has also helped perfect Cindy Crawford's heavenly body. "She could do anything. Mother Nature, you know?"

 

Lopez's natural athleticism and sensuousness are no secret to fans of her film performances and her trademark bombshell ensembles. But this afternoon, as Radu leads her through a demanding succession of aerobic and weight exercises, the Bronx-born beauty is attracting attention more for her sporting chops than for her feminine curves.

 

Even her world-famous derriere - the subject of so many admiring quips that, at the mention of it, Lopez groans, "Enough already." - looks at taut as it does, well, womanly.

 

"I was always into sports," says Lopez, whose baby-smooth olive skin and obvious energy testify eloquently to her fitness. "I did gymnastics, competed nationally in track, and was on the school softball team." Clad in a white tank top and navy Adidas sweatpants, her honey-colored hair pulled back, Lopez smiles politely at some of the gym's patrons. But she doesn't solicit stares; like everyone else, she is here to work. She just makes it all look so easy.

 

Lopez has brought a similar mix of casual accessibility and dynamism to her work outside the gym. In films ranging from Money Train to Selena to the critically acclaimed romantic crime drama Out of Sight (in which she starred opposite George Clooney), she has convincingly played women who are feisty yet vulnerable, glamorous but insecure, both shrewd and naive - real women, like Lopez herself. Now, having shaken up Hollywood, Lopez, the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, wants to prove she's more than the actress du jour. She got her first big break as a fancy-footed Fly Girl on the Wayans brothers' In Living Color, but Lopez has always aspired to sing as well. This month that dream comes true when Work/Sony releases her debut album, On the 6. "I've always seen myself as doing all three things - acting, singing and dancing," says Lopez, unwinding after her workout. Indeed, the CD shows off her multifaceted talent; it includes three songs she co-wrote, and offers a buoyant mix of Latin, R&B, hip-hop, and pop rhythms and textures. In Lopez's view, performing music, like acting, is a uniquely intense form of personal expression. "You have to have heightened emotions," she says. "If you're really happy, angry, depressed or in love, you can write a good song."

 

"Jennifer has tremendous attitude - and I say that in a positive way - and it comes across onscreen and in person, and she puts that into her singing," says Tommy Mottola, the chairman and CEO of Sony Music. "She's really committed," adds Emilio Estefan, singer Gloria Estefan's husband and a contributing producer of On the 6. "Her kind of success doesn't come easy." In fact, for all her strength, Lopez says she sometimes feels overwhelmed by the lightning pace of her career, a problem exacerbated by her having "no home base - I've lived in hotels for the past year." To stay grounded, she maintains a tight inner circle of family and friends. "My parents still live in the neighborhood where I grew up, and I go back all the time," she says; her two sisters live nearby in New York City. Lopez also keeps herself strong by incorporating spiritual elements into her life. "I do light meditation to calm myself down when I'm anxious, breathing exercises and stuff like that. And God is a very big part of my life. I went to Catholic school for 12, years, so I pray a lot: 'Lord, move me in the right direction, give me courage.' I can only do so much, but I know I'm being guided."

 

She may trust her spirit to a higher authority, but when it comes to the flesh, Lopez relies on an iron will and the guidance of top trainers. The fitness team of Nancy Kennedy and Bobby Strom helped her get in shape for Out of Sight with weights, boxing, and water aerobics. Kennedy also prepared high-protein, low-fat meals to maintain, not alter, Lopez's shapely figure. "Jen is a great role model," says Kennedy. "I'm glad she has gotten publicity for being a voluptuous woman rather than a woman people are whispering about, wondering if she's anorexic." At 5 feet 6 inches and 120 pounds, Lopez obviously isn't a candidate for Weight Watchers. Still, she says, "I've seen articles where they had me grouped in with larger women.'... But I don't take it as an insult, because they're identifying me as a real person. If that helps other people's self esteem, good! It helps mine too!" Clearly proud of her body, Lopez scrupulously watches her diet: "I'll have egg whites in the morning, carbs for lunch, and a salad for dinner. I don't like nasty food - stuff that's really greasy." When she does indulge, it's with buttered bread or chocolate-chip cookies. "Cookies with coffee - that makes me feel good," she says wistfully.

 

To flatter her form, Lopez generally opts for "feminine clothes - things that make me feel sexy." Favorite designers include Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and John Bartlett. As for makeup, she favors a clean, natural look. "I like shiny lips and skin that glows. I use an eyelash curler and mascara, pearly lip gloss, and if I have a spot to cover up, sheer foundation with a lot of moisturizer." Her taste in fragrance, though, is a secret: "I wear an oil, but I never tell anybody what it is!"

 

If Lopez plays up her earthy sexuality, she doesn't give of herself easily. "People equate sexy with promiscuous," she says. "They think that because I'm shaped this way, I must be scandalous - like running around and bringing men into my hotel room. But it's just the opposite."

 

Although Lopez is single - she was briefly married to club manager Ojani Noa in 1997 - she still has hopes of being as lucky in love as she has been in her professional life. She wants to marry again and have children, and dreams of buying a house and settling down in Miami. She knows domestic life won't be easy, given her schedule: This year alone, she will perform to promote her album and is planning to make two movies (yet to be decided). But Lopez insists, "I would hate to be 50 years old and think, I should have done that back then," she says. No need to worry about that - this ex-Fly Girl is already shooting for the moon.

 

WR╙╞ NA POCZÑTEK

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OCEAN DRIVE

Jennifer Lopez and the Rhythm Method

The screen diva On the 6, mixes hip-hop, Latin and pop in a sexy stew worthy of the world

BY JORDAN LEVIN

 

    ITÆS 12:30 IN THE AFTERNOON and Jennifer Lopez sounds like she just woke up, which in fact she has. Her voice is soft and breathy, curling languidly through the phone like a 1950s sex kitten luxuriating in bed, interspersed with easy giggles and homegiri-accented ôYou know what I mean?ö But solid Bronx concrete is underneathùthe girl donÆt take no dis. Told she seems different from the flippant starlet she comes across as in interviews, Lopez quietly shoots back, ôWhyùyou thought IÆd be dumb?ö

 

     No. Just not quite as cool and collectedly sure of herself. Lopez will need that confidence as On the 6 (The WORK Group), her much-heralded debut album, comes out this month. A mix of R&B ballads, hip-hop, Latin pop and dance, On the 6 hits directly at the center of the æ90s urban pop soundscapeùrhythm, sabor, sex, attitude and romance. It sounds just like a record that a Puerto Rican girl who was a teenager in the 1980s boogie-down Bronx would make (the title refers to the subway train Lopez took into Manhattan).

 

     Lopez has already broken cultural ground by becoming not just a Latina movie star (the highest paid, tooùshe was the first Latina actress to get more than $1 million, for 1997Æs Selena; she received $2 million for Out of Sight, and her current fee has been reported to be as high as $5 million), but the first Latina to achieve pop iconhood. ItÆs attributable not only to her recent movie roles: as a tough-babe Miami cop in Out of Sight, a treacherous seductress in Oliver StoneÆs U- Turn, Jack NicholsonÆs Cuban mistress in Blood and Wine. She has also been the most ubiquitous magazine cover girl of the year, and the first to make butt transcend breasts as the center of sexual gravity for white America (other resident cultures have always been hip to the rear view). WeÆve had African-American divas aplenty: Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston. But Lopez is the first to transform street-wise Latin sensuality and flavor into mainstream divadom. (Gloria Estefan is undeniably a star, but her fame came mostly from her music, not her image.) With Latin crossover the buzz of the music biz and Latinidad bubbling up on the Zeitgeist meter, LopezÆs album comes at just the right time.

 

     ôThereÆs definitely more of an open attitude to what weÆre about,ö Lopez, 28, says. ôPeople are becoming more hip to the fact that this is a passionate culture that has something different to offer. ItÆs infectious. We just havenÆt had our time to shine, and this is the time.

     And Lopez is the girl. SheÆs a classic all-American success story: Working-class girl achieves stardom on sheer drive, sex appeal and talent. Her now familiar bio starts in the Bronx, where she went to Catholic school and started raking dance classes as a child. By her late teens she was dancing in hip-hop videos, and her first big break came in 1991 when she was picked from an open-call audition to become a Fly Girl, the supercool dancers on In Living Color. That lasted two years and led to acting stints on television; in 1995, she landed a role in Mi Familia/My Family, and then appeared with Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in Money Train.

 

     But playing Selena, the Tejano superstar murdered at 23 as she was poised for crossover success, in Gregory NavaÆs film gave Lopez her star breakthrough. She was cast after a nationwide searchùthe emblematic Latina actress playing an emblematic Latina pop star.

     Now Lopez would like to combine the two in one packageùhers. She has always, she says, wanted to do it all. When she was younger her idols were stars such as Bette Midler, Diana Ross, Barbra Streisand, Turner and Rita Moreno, whom she used to watch over and over in West Side Story.

     ôI knew that I wanted to sing, dance and actùthat was my dream. I just felt like it was all in me. I started with singing and dancing, then the acting career really took off, but that was just how it happened. When I was doing Selena I thought, æGod, I really miss singing and dancing and sharing that with the public.Æ

     Jeff Ayeroff, co-president of The WORK Group, a Sony subsidiary that is Fiona Apple and JamiroquaiÆs label, remembers Lopez from when he was chairman of Virgin Records in the early æ90s and talking to the Fly Girls about a possible deal. It fell through, and Lopez became one of Janet JacksonÆs dancers, but quit a week before a tour. ôShe pissed all of us off,ö Ayeroff remembers. ôShe said she was going to New York to be an actress. Then a few years later I saw she had been signed to play Selena. I called her lawyer and said if she ever wants to make a record, IÆm ready.ö

 

     Ayeroff says Lopez had a demo that made it clear she could sing. But that wasnÆt why he introduced her to Tommy Mottolaùthe head of Sony, under whose aegis the label is releasing the English debuts of Latin stars Ricky Martin and Marc Anthonyùand got into a bidding war with two other labels. Ayeroff had worked with Madonna, Jackson and Paula Abdul, and saw the same kind of charisma in Lopez. ôYou can find singers who can sing æcause God gave them that gift, but theyÆre not magical onstage. This girl has it all: vibe, talent, sex appeal and the ability to use the sex appeal. Black people identify with her; white people identify with her. Some women cross all boundaries, and Jennifer is one of them.ö

     Maybe itÆs because Lopez is so comfortable with who she isùexuding a sexual confidence that might come off as arrogance if it werenÆt so natural. ôPeople know this is the way I am and IÆm okay with it, and people relate to that. IÆm very proud of everything that I am, being the size and shape I am. I grew up with a very positive image, æcause I felt that all the women in my family were beautiful and I looked like them. To me that was the ideal. Yeah, I saw People magazine, but that wasnÆt real to me. What was real to me were my mother, aunt and grandmother, and they were the most beautiful things in the world.ö

     If sex has gotten her attention, so be it. ôIt doesnÆt really bother me. I just feel like itÆs only one aspect of me. Sometimes the media play on one thing just so theyÆll have something to write.

 

     LopezÆs stardom gave her the clout to do something besides a Mariah Carey-style straight pop record. ôI told them I wanted to combine pop, R&B and Latin, with some hip-hop wound in, and they were kinda like, æWell okay.Æ But they believed in me.ö She giggles. ôI donÆt know why.ö

     Recorded over the last year, On the 6 uses a stylistic smorgasbord of producers. Grammy winner Rodney Jerkins (Brandy, Michael Jackson) produced the first single, the smooth hip-hop ballad ôIf You Had My Love.ö Star hip-hop producer Sean ôPuffyö Combs produced the easy funk ride of ôFeelinÆ So Goodö (sampling the æ80s Latin hip-hop hit ôSet It Offö). ThereÆs Latin freestyle with ôWaiting for Tonight,ö and sugar-sweet pop balladry in ôPromise Me YouÆll Tryö and ôShouldÆve Never.ö Three songs were produced by MiamiÆs Emilio Estefan at Crescent Moon Studios, including the Caribbean funk party anthem ôLetÆs Get Loud,ö co-written by Gloria Estefan, and the tropical version of ôNo Me Amesö (DonÆt Love Me) with salsa superstar Marc Anthony. (Lopez appeared in the telenovelaish video for AnthonyÆs hit ôNo Me Conoces,ö and he returned the favor in a similar clip for ôNo Me Ames.ö)

 

     ItÆs a combination that should appeal to a generation that grew up with a rhythm-intensive mix of hip-hop and merengue, reggae and R&B, salsa and house, in cities like New York, L.A. and Miami. ôWeÆre a different generation. We didnÆt grow up in the countries that weÆre fromùwe grew up here,ö says Lopez, whose favorite music is salsa and hip-hop. ôItÆs more American-influenced. I had a very Puerto Rican upbringing. But then growing up in the Bronx around all different kinds of people, African-American and Italian and Irish, forms a different kind of person, and I felt my music should be reflective of that.ö

     Lopez says working with the Estefans was stimulating in more ways than one. ôTheyÆre incredible artists, but theyÆre also amazing people. It really inspired me in terms debuts of what I want my life to be, with a strong sense of family, and the stuff you just canÆt buy, like waking up happy and being appreciative of what you have. I loved coming to Miamiùit was probably the most fun part of making the album.ö Lopez is currently a long way from the family-clan empire that the Estefans have created here; her itinerant schedule has her living in hotels. ôI aspire to live some-where,ö she says, jokingly. ôI aspire to have a home.ö In fact, she has been looking for a house on Miami Beach. ôI love the weather, being near the water, and the Latin culture that Miami and South Beach have. It has a lot of flavor.ö Almost like Puerto Rican New York, but without the cold. ôYeah,ö Lopez says.

 

     Besides high-class vagrancy, stardom has other prices. Lopez has been major gossip fodder for being temperamental and impoliticly outspoken, as when she was quoted saying unflattering things about actresses such as Cameron Diaz and Gwyneth Paltrow in Movieline, or missed a Today show appearance.

     ôIÆve had a really stressful couple of years,ö Lopez says. ôI feel like itÆs been a growing period for me, just like for anyone, but I had to do it in the public eye.ö

     The media have been particularly interested in her romantic life: Since the breakup of her yearlong marriage to Ojani Noa, whom she met while he was a waiter at Larios, Lopez has been linked romantically to Anthony, Mottola and especially Puffy, who showed up on the photo shoot for her album in Miami last spring. ôI canÆt have a male friend or else IÆm with him,ö Lopez says.

 

     Which should fuel interpretations of two songs for which Lopez co-wrote the lyrics. In ôShouldÆve Never,ö she breathily regrets falling in love or opening up her heart, and in ôToo Lateö she tells a lover itÆs time to move on. ôItÆs about some personal experiences that IÆve been through, about those times when you think, æItÆs too late, I canÆt go on with this, I just gotta move on.Æ Sometimes in love you lose yourself along the way and suddenly realize, æWait a minute, I have some incredible things to offer and if IÆm gonna be losing them in this relationship then I gotta go on.

     Plenty of women will identify with that. ôWomen in general believe in love,ö Lopez says. ôI donÆt see it as a weakness; I just see it as part of our makeup. We believe in love and people. ItÆs the nurturer, the mother in us. Because of that sometimes we sacrifice ourselves, then pull back and say thatÆs not right. ThatÆs something IÆve seen a lot of my friends go through. People think they can control everything, but the one thing you canÆt control is your emotions.ö

     But the third song Lopez co-wrote, ôFeelinÆ So Good,ö is just as revealing: ôI was in a little bit of a rut. IÆd been making the album and it seemed like it was taking forever. I woke up one morning and just went, æDamn, what do I have to be mad about? Everything in my life is so good. IÆm making the album, I have movies IÆm going to make, IÆm healthy, I have my family, so what is it? So I wanted to write a song that would cold-crush that, a happy song about waking up and the sun is shining on your face and you go, æDamn! IÆm alive and itÆs okay.Æö

     Maybe sheÆs getting the hang of stardom. ôI feel like IÆve gotten my rhythm and know where IÆm going, what I want, the person I want to be.ö Which means itÆs a good time for Jennifer Lopez.

 

WR╙╞ NA POCZÑTEK

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Vibe Magazine Article

August 1999

"Boomin' System"

Dancing, acting, singing, butt-kicking.  Bombshell supreme Jennifer Lopez is the biggest explosion outta the Bronx since the birth of Hip Hop.

Dream Hampton finds out why Hollywood's hottest hottie is just a round-the-way girl at heart.

 

    She is the kind of intoxicating pretty we could stare at for the next century or so. She has a celebrated, strong dancer's body, and white America has discovered in her the beauty of the Big Butt. If celebrity is this country's religion then Jennifer Lopez has, in the past two years, emerged a most seductive deity. She is a mammoth star who has yet to make a blockbuster. She has consistently offered nuanced, pitch-perfect performances opposite such heavyweight actors as Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, and Jack Nicholson. In June, she dropped her The Work Group/ Sony debut, On the 6 (in homage to the Bronx-bound No. 6 subway train that took her home to her Castle Hill neighborhood), a mélange of Latin grooves, hip hop, and dance pop.

     As much as people want to get to know celebrities, Jennifer Lopez assures me, "They never will." Lopez is doing a good job working her chopsticks in the West Hollywood health-food bistro she's chosen for our meeting. And it's a good thing-every customer in the joint is watching her eat while they pretend not to watch her eat. "You can't let people in that much," she says, "'cause what do you have left for you?" Losing privacy, negotiating celebrity, learning exactly what to say in interviews and how to be in public are part of the star package that one cannot be prepared for. They are the hard lessons Jennifer Lopez has been learning lately.

    "When I first started doing television years ago, it was like nobody cared. I was very open and free. Then you become famous and people care about every little thing you do, every aspect of your life. They become intrigued, I guess." She shrugs her shoulders then gives the couple next to us a closed-mouth smile while she chews her broccoli.

     "They want to know who you are. It's flattering at first..."

    Here's what you already may have read about Jennifer Lopez (let's just get this out of the way): She's been known to do interviews in bathrobes and diamond crosses. She reportedly married Ojani Noa after a whirlwind romance (they met at a restaurant where he was a waiter while Lopez was shooting Blood and Wine (20th Century Fox, 1997), then they divorced quickly and quietly in 1998. She's been spotted poolside in Palm Beach with Puff Daddy, in Paris with Puff Daddy, at a Miramax after-Oscars bash with Puff Daddy. (Lopez on Puff: "Friends." Puff on Lopez: "I swear to God, my name better not even be in honey's article.") She is a 21st-century, unstoppable screen queen. Her favorite flick ever is West Side Story (United Artists, 1961).

     Lopez has joined the upper echelon of sensational celebrities (think Julia Roberts) whose every grocery-store purchase requires documentation. But alas, it is a conundrum that doesn't evoke much sympathy. First of all, most people don't just become famous. They work very hard at it. They show up on red carpets wearing Valentino or Badgley Mischka body-clingers (or tulle, jeweled princess numbers). They steal the scene from blonder, more "luminous" award winners. They pose on magazine covers topless-or close to it-legs apart, or better yet, with their backs to the cameras.

     "Yeah," says Lopez, and then, jacking a quote from another celebrity, says, "Never complain, never explain."

    What's interesting about Lopez is that even as she embodies what being a glamorous Hollywood star is all about, she is so not.  First of all, she's all Castle Hill.  When her label mate and friend Marc Anthony, the Spanish Harlem Latin singing sensation, hits her on her cell, she's all "What's up, Nigga?"  She may rock Fred Leighton on Oscar night, but on Tuesdays she's all baguette cluster creations by Jacob the Jeweler in midtown Manhattan (he who designs icy baubles for your favorite rap stars).   She pushes a drop-top platinum Benz, which is equal parts ghetto fabulous and Hollywood hot thing.  But make no mistake, she'll roll down her window and curse you out if you: a) cut her off, b) even look like you're gonna tap her whip, or c) don't let her over two lanes to make a left from the right lane.

   She is indeed ambitious one-woman franchise-a certified film star, an emerging pop-music pricess, and a high-priced pitchwoman for L'Oreal-yet she is decidedly free of an entourage (except for her personal assistant, Arlene, who's also her best friend from the Bronx since she was seven).  And the two of them are all "You are so retarded" to each other all day long.  She greets you-even though you're a reporter, and whoa is she skeptical of the whole "media" thing-with a warm "Hi, Mommy!" and a hug.  Her body is smaller and her face is softer than in photographs.  Makeup is all about a little lip gloss, and that's it.

    When Shawn, part of her extended L.A. homegirl crew that does not, thank you, include other actresses or Hollywood types, starts complaining in jest about last night's date-"Girl, I'm ovulating, he could've got it but he's frontin' 'cause I went out once with his roomate"-Lopez, jokingly, is all "Girl, send him my way.  He's a hottie."  Her way would be a top-floor West Hollywood apartment.  Her bedroom is this all-white, willowy shrine draped with gauzy material.  She is, and I'm surprised to learn this given her press, a real girl's girl.  The kind of loyal, down-for-whatever girlfriend-"Who  wants to go to Miami Friday night?  I need a tan for the Oscars!"-that we're all better for having on our team.

    "My Everyday thing is so nothing," Lopez says apologetically, as she weaves in and out of traffic in between appointments.  "If me and my girls go out for dinner, that's a big deal.  We're all calling each other all day like, 'What are you going to wear? Where should we go? Who's driving?"

    Indeed, a day with Ms. Lopez is hardly Page Six material, but it does confirm her reputation as a hard-working self-invention.  There's dance rehearsal for her upcomming music video with Janet Jackson's choreographer, Tina Landon.  Meetings at Sony-the art department needs her approval on the album art work.  All day long there are conference calls with management and label execs about the first single-The Puff-produced "Feelin' So Good" with Fat Joe and Big Pun is caliente, hot, hot.  But the sweet "If You Had My Love" is equally upbeat, and the vocals are strong.  She'll poll anyone with ears for their opinion, but it's clear the last word will be hers.  In Cream sweats and a matching Tommy Hilfiger sweater, she's no less sexy than she is in a backless, mesh Versace gown.  It's just that in Air Maxes she can move a lot faster.

    Making an album has meant putting her film career on hold for at least a year. The last movie she did was Out of Sight (Universal, 1998). "This album was exciting and scary to make," she says. "With every script I read I'm like, Is this gonna stretch me? Is it gonna make me a little crazy? 'Cause if it is then I'm doing the right thing. That's how it was with the album. It was a lot of work. I can't try to be Whitney or Faith. I do something different, I have something else to offer to anybody who'll want to, you know, fucking get down."

    "When I heard she was comming out," says rapper Fat Joe, via phone, of Lopez's recorded material, "I was like, Jennifer Lopez? Maybe she's getting [a record deal] on the strength [of who she is]. But," he says firmly, "she could sing. I think it's gonna blow up. I don't know if [she's] like Mariah Carey, but I think she could sell some mills."

    "Jennifer represents all the things that we [Latinos] are: beautiful, voluptuous, intelligent, proud," chimes rapper Big Pun. "When I was young, she used to do plays at the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club. Always acting and dancing. She was doing something right."

    Occupying a position in the constellation is about timing and capturing the collective popular imagination as much as it's about sheer will. Jennifer Lopez is immensely talented at a time when the Spanish-speaking population is expanding at an exponential rate. Slowly, Latin actors like Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek and singers like Shakira, Marc Anthony, and bringin'-down-the-house-on-Grammy-night Ricky Martin are making their way into the pop lexicon. These stars shine without being asked to sacrifice too much of their culture the way a Rita Moreno or Margarita Carmen Cansino (a.k.a. Rita Hayworth) had to do, or acting as ambassadors/caricatures like a Lucy-loving Ricky Ricardo.

     In her film career she's played an Italian (Out of Sight), a Native-American (U Turn, Sony, 1997), a Chicana (Selena, Warner Bros., 1997), and a Cuban (Blood and Wine). But radio programming is possibly the last frontier to be diversified, and it's not as flexible. Sony has simultaneously released two singles from On the 6: "If You Had My Love" and "No Me Ames," a Spanish ballad with Marc Anthony.

     "Unfortunately, it's very segregated," says her label copresident, Jeff Ayeroff, of radio programming. "But we're marketing this as a pop album by a major diva, which is what it is."

    Growing up in a working-class section of the Bronx during hip hop's first days, Lopez's musical memories are mixed. "The hot shit was the Sugarhill Gang," she recalls. "We were really into hip hop. And on the holidays and at home I'd have salsa and merengue with my family. At school it was R&B and pop and hip hop again. Hip hop was a big influence in my life. But salsa is what gets me going. It's what I put on around the house."

    Her big showbiz break came when she won an audition to be a Fly Girl on Keenan Ivory Wayans's In Living Color back in 1990. "That was a real break for me, I mean I moved away from New York. I was on my own, I was independent." Then came an audition for the Janet Jackson tour. Rene Elizondo Jr., Jackson's then beau, and Jackson loved her. But the weekend before the tour was about to start, she called Elizondo and told him she won a role in an upcoming pilot, CBS's South Central. She couldn't begin the tour, but she hoped to join them on the road later. Elizondo told her she had to make a choice, and for Lopez there wasn't one.

    "The Janet tour is a major job for a dancer. It's a year and a half of work," says Landon, Lopez's dance coach for the day. "But she knew. Other dancers, they say they want to do this and that, but they never leave [dancing]. Jennifer was just certain."

    "I would have just died if I didn't go for it," Lopez says of the television spot. "I would have literally died." (The show was killed after only one season.)

    It was her showing in Selena that made Lopez bankable, raising her per-movie salary to a reported $2 million mark. She says her vulnerable performance of the slain Tej no star is her favorite. But it's in smaller, darker films that she has developed range and depth.  In Blood and Wine, a noir suspense drama starring Jack Nicholson, Lopez transformed what could have been a marginal, stereotypically hot-blooded character into a complicated, unpredictable woman with real purpose.

     As Grace, the fated, deeply damaged female lead in Oliver Stone's U Turn, Lopez faced an emotional dilemma. She didn't want to travel the dark, twisted road taken by her character. She found herself panicking the night before a major shoot. "I have the most wonderful father, youknowwhatimean? I didn't want to think about fathers molesting their daughters or killing their wives," she says. "I had to call my acting coach and he faxed me this article on Meryl Streep, where she was talking about going to difficult places. It's about not being afraid to go there. And at the end of the day it's a job. I'm getting paid to go there."

    And then there is her body. Her butt, in particular, has overshadowed her formidable acting abil- ity. It is written about, photographed lovingly (with her cooperation, of course). It is used as an example, in teen mags for girls and grown women's fashion tomes, of a changing body ideal.

     "I know," she says. "It's like this whole other person." Mind you, she has a very healthy, "I look at it in a positive way...women out there who are shaped like me are not ashamed of it 'cause I'm representin'" kind of attitude about the whole thing. Women like her-namely black women-haven't exactly had issues of shame when it comes to that particular body part. In most sectors of our community, the bigger the better.

    Positive attitude aside, the objectification of Ms. Lopez's most beautiful body part has everything to do with white America's gaze on ethnic bodies. It is almost cliché to fetishize the hypermasculine, topless black male body (usually drenched in sweat from the hard labor, you see) of a Michael Jordan or a Tupac Shakur or a D'Angelo. The objectification of black (and brown) women's bodies is complicated not only by the history of slavery (yes, slavery existed in Puerto Rico) and those bodies as property, but also by rape.

    When I relate to Lopez the mythologically proportioned but true-and I might add, pretty relevant-story of Hottentot Venus, the 19th-century South African girl who was taken around Europe in a cage and put on display naked, like an animal, the attraction being her "shelf-like" derriere, she responds appropriately, I guess. "That's disgusting."

     It's not really her responsibility to contextualize other people's fetishes (or some ancient girl's containment). When a miscellaneous white-boy late-night-talk-show host makes comments bordering on lewd but meant to be complimentary about her ass, why not smile and work it? When she says, kind of finally, "I glorify in the fact that my mother bore me and I came out with her body," I'm certainly ready to throw a prideful fist in the air. But there is always reason to be suspicious when objectification gets tangled with celebration and your very cultural body part damn near requires its own publicist. "I would love to read an article where it's not even mentioned," she sighs. Sorry.

    And since we're in feminist mode, I ask her about this notion of ambition being a dirty word when attached to women. One journalist I know, who, as he puts it, falls in love with all his female profilees, resisted Lopez's charms because "she's just so ambitious. I've never met anyone that ambitious before." Again, Lopez has a healthy unawareness of the charge. "Why? Is [ambition], like, a bad thing with women?" she asks rhetorically.

    "I mean, yeah," she continues, "I'm ambitious, but so is everybody-men, women. Where I'm from, if you see somebody who stays home, it's like that's dirty too. I want something, you want something; you should do whatever makes you happy. If going after things and accomplishing things makes you happy, then fine. If staying home and baby-sitting makes you happy, that's cool." She takes a breath. And then with a dismissive wave of the hand and a little neck roll: "I don't look at things like that, what society says. It means nothing to me."

     Convention seemed to have been cast to the wind when, within months, she fell in love with and married Noa. I don't ask her about her marriage because while she is warm she is also clearly guarded. But I do ask her about her own obvious passion (this is no Latin cliché I'm employing, it is her high intensity) and the struggle to keep it in check. "Being a passionate person, sometimes it's hard to exercise control," she says. "But you have to learn, you have to." It's as if she's talking herself into some new frame of mind. "Half the time you're like, 'God, I'm really stupid right now!'" She throws her head back and laughs. "But emotions are a very strong thing. It's harder for me now, 'cause I'm so self-aware. It's hard for me to let go, to be free like that."

    And what of pain? It is not the deepest thing. Folks should know the moment they connect with Lopez that she will move on, that she will be fine, that besides her very close family and maybe Arlene, she doesn't exactly need anybody. She means it when she says of love, "I love love. Giving love, that's one of my biggest joys, youknowwhatimean?" But understand that Lopez is not only driven but guided. She was put on this planet to be this very big thing-her very aura glows-to be a star and shimmer in as many ways that light is refracted.

     She has a better-than-decent singing voice, and her album is a winner.  I admit I never took the Fly Girls too seriously as dancers, but watching her warm up with Landon is a workout in itself. And she comes alive when she dances. She literally lights up, throws that hair around, works that body.  But it's on the big screen, on which movements are necessarily smaller, that she is, in my mind, her most artful. She buries vanity for the material. She makes intelligent choices, she selects great material, and more important, her instincts are honest once she's inhabited the characters she has chosen to give souls.

     "I always try and make [characters] real," she says in earnest. "Not necessarily me. Just true to themselves." And you know that it is this kind of selflessness that will have us tracking her long after this album has stacked up smash singles, long after she has taught the world how to salsa. We will be talking about Jennifer Lopez well into her second and third Oscar wins. You just watch. 

 

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People Magazine

StyczΩ± 2000

"GUNS AND LOVERS: THE ROLLICKING ROMANCE OF POP STAR JENNIFER LOPEZ AND RAPPER PUFF DADDY HITS A LOW WITH A NIGHTCLUB SHOOTING"

It was the kind of gritty scene that Jennifer Lopez, A-list actress, would normally kill to play: two days after Christmas, a beautiful young woman gets hauled into a Manhattan police precinct in the dead of night, where she is grilled by cops and handcuffed to a bench. She is also fingerprinted and detained for hours. Shaken, she sobs uncontrollably, her makeup smeared by tears.

Unfortunately for the 29-year-old superstar, this wasn't a script, and her December 27 trauma was painfully real. The film and recording sensation - pop culture's reigning It Girl and a driving force behind the boom in Latin entertainers - was arrested along with her boyfriend, rap impresario Sean "Puffy" Combs, 30, after a shooting at the packed city hot spot Club New York, in which three people - a bouncer and two bystanders - were wounded, none critically. Lopez and Combs, along with his chauffeur Wardel Fenderson, 41, and bodyguard Anthony Jones, 34, both of whom were also arrested, fled the midtown club in a gray 1999 Lincoln Navigator and according to police ran at least 11 red lights before they were finally pulled over. Cops spotted a 9-mm pistol, later found to be loaded and stolen, on the floor next to the passenger seat. "The cops were saying, 'Why didn't you stop' and she said, 'I didn't know they were trying to pull us over," says a police source about Lopez's long and contentious interrogation. "They said, 'We know why you didn't want to stop - you knew the gun (was in the car).' She kept saying 'I didn't know, I never saw it before.'" Police eventually cuffed Lopez to a bench outside the holding cell because male prisoners were then in the cell. "Once they stopped talking to her and cuffed her, she cried for hours," says the police source.

"At first she was mad at the cops. Then she turned from angry to crying."

Following 14 very unmerry hours, Lopez was cleared of any involvement; she was released that afternoon. Combs wasn't as lucky; his two gun-possession charges stuck. (Released on $10,000 bail the same day, he faces up to 15 years in jail if convicted. He's due back in court on Feb. 14, Valentine's Day.) The rapper is no stranger to run-ins with the law. Most recently, he was nabbed for reportedly attacking a record executive with a champagne bottle in April. Last week he again found himself in the wrong place. According to a police report, witnesses say that an unidentified man at Club New York threw a wad of cash at Combs, prompting aspiring rapper Jamal "Shyne" Barrow, 21, Puffy's protΘgΘ and part of his 30-strong entourage that night, to pull out a semiautomatic pistol and fire several shots. Barrow allegedly hit three victims, two of whom were hospitalized with shoulder and face injuries. At least one witness told police Combs pulled out a gun as well, though Combs denied all. "Under no circumstances whatsoever did I have anything to do with a shooting," he insisted at a Dec. 28 press conference. "I do not own a gun nor did I have possession of a gun that night."

After both he and Lopez were released by police, the exhausted couple holed up at Manhattan's posh Peninsula hotel, where they comforted each other and called attorneys. Says a close friend of Combs's: "Puffy's not a shooter. He's a bright guy and a workaholic. He's a guy who has gotten caught up in the image of what a street hip-hop guy should be, and it's not really him. It's an immaturity." He also doesn't want to look like a bad guy. "He has lots of friends from when he was a nobody, and many are bad guys and he won't get rid of them," adds his pal. "The question is, when does loyalty end and stupidity begin?" 
The ugly incident has prompted many Lopez fans to ask another question: What's a nice girl like her doing with a bad boy like Puffy? On the cusp of full-blown superstardom and already one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood (she earned $5 million for her next film, The Cell, costarring Vince Vaughn), Lopez is on a white-hot streak, dazzling critics with her flirty performance opposite George Clooney in the 1998 crime caper Out of Sight and stunning the music industry with a double-platinum-selling debut collection of dance songs, On the 6, last year. She is also under a lucrative contract to be the face of L'Oreal cosmetics.

Yet her reputation might not stay as unblemished as that celebrated face, thanks to the shooting. "This kind of drama will cross people's minds" when casting her, says public relations expert Terrie Williams, who has handled Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock in her 12-year career. "There could be some producers that Jennifer might want to work with who may have issues with Sean." And while it's true that the tough-talking, Bronx-born Lopez is hardly the beauty to Puffy's beast - she hit an early career snag after trashing actresses Winona Ryder and Gwyneth Paltrow in a 1998 interview - this scandal suggests her roller-coaster relationship with Combs is at odds with the mainstream success she craves. "I feel really bad for Jen because she's not part of that hardcore scene," says Louis Canales, a Miami Beach nightclub fixture who has known Lopez for years. "But she's in love with the man."

It sounds like a segment on the Jerry Springer Show: "Help, My Boyfriend Is a Thug." In many ways, though, Combs, the self-proclaimed "black Sinatra," and Lopez, who dressed up as Marilyn Monroe to warble "Happy Birthday" to her beau last November, are not such an unlikely match. Friends for years (he produced a track for On the 6), they have been a rumored item since 1998. That was around the time Lopez divorced her husband, club manager Ojani Noa, now 25, after less than two years of marriage. Since then, Combs and Lopez have become regulars on the party circuit. With a flamboyant flair they made a splash in matching white outfits at Puff's elaborate Labor Day party at his mansion in East Hampton, N.Y., where he has been embraced by such tony Hamptonites as Martha Stewart. The couple also openly bussed at the MTV Video Music Awards show after party last September. "I've never had anyone love me the way [Jennifer] loves me," Combs said at his birthday bash at Manhattan's trendy Orient. "I love her, and hopefully one day I'll be able to marry her." 

Whispers of an imminent wedding - some predicted millennium weekend - should come as no surprise to the couple's friends. "They've always had a deep-rooted respect for one another," says Jason Binn, publisher of Florida's Ocean Drive magazine and a Puffy pal since 1994. "They've watched each other grow." Indeed, Combs and Lopez come from similar humble, Catholic backgrounds. Lopez, who is Puerto Rican, was born in a working class Bronx neighborhood, the second oldest of three daughters of David, a computer specialist, now 58, and Lupe, 54, a kindergarten teacher. (Her parents are divorced.) Combs, a former altar boy who grew up in Harlem and later in suburban Mt. Vernon, N.Y., was raised by his mother, Janice, now 59 and a former schoolteacher. Sean's father, Melvin, a drug dealer, was killed when Combs was 3. "I've been with them when everyone in the room was born rich," friend and well-known rap mogul Russell Simmons recently said. "They have a different kind of privileged attitude. They both struggled for what they got." 

The couple are also known for their extraordinary drive. Combs was a business administration student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., when he landed an internship at the R&B label Uptown Records in 1990. By age 23 he launched Bad Boy Records and went on to produce best-selling albums by hip-hop artists Mase and the late Biggie Smalls as well as his own hit 1997 CD No Way Out. (The two-time Grammy winner earned a reported $54 million in 1998.) Lopez, meanwhile, turned a 1990 gig as a dancing Fly Girl on the FOX comedy show In Living Color into a breakthrough role as the late Latina singing sensation Selena in the 1997 movie of the same name. "She had ambition written all over her," actor Brian Kerwin, her costar in 1996's Jack, once said. "She looked like a person who intended to make the most of her talents."

That ambition, Lopez has said, can get in the way of romance. "For some men," she told London's The Sunday Times in October, "it's hard to handle the fact that work can come first." Similarly, Combs told PEOPLE last year that his hectic schedule makes having a normal relationship "really not possible. . . . And I can understand now why sometimes entertainers get together with each other." Christy Haubegger, president and publisher of Latina magazine, believes the two megastars are suited to each other. "I don't think people say, 'What's she doing with him?' " she says. "Who else is qualified to date her? It's a fairly short list."

Perhaps their most common bond is a shared interest in livin' la vida loca. "I fire up very easily," Lopez told The Sunday Times. "I like excitement. I don't drink or do drugs or even smoke, but I'm still the one who will get up on a table and dance. . . . I definitely have a wild side." Still, she is hardly any match for her honey Combs. "I'm not afraid of anything," he told PEOPLE. "I don't fear dying, I don't fear living, I don't fear pain." He certainly doesn't fear the inside of a police station, as his history of transgressions suggests. Combs first tipped the scandal meter in 1991 when a concert he co hosted in New York City resulted in a stampede that killed nine people (no charges were brought against him). In 1996 he was convicted of attempted criminal mischief after an altercation with a photographer.

Then, last April, Combs, upset over a music video he appeared in, stormed into the Manhattan office of Interscope Records executive Steven Stoute and, along with two bodyguards, allegedly bashed him with a champagne bottle, chair and telephone. He was charged with second degree assault but later pleaded guilty to harassment and was ordered to take an anger-management class. "I handled myself inappropriately," Combs later admitted. "I made the wrong decision." Yet Combs, who reportedly dotes on his two kids, Justin, 6, and Christopher 20 months, by two different former girlfriends, and who founded the Harlem-based Daddy's House, a charity for underprivileged kids, has a softer side. He has admitted to crying for three hours after watching Love Story and also aspires to be a role model - something that won't be any easier for him after this latest incident. "He's trying very hard to do that," Arista records president and friend Clive Davis said last year, "to the extent he admits he's capable of making mistakes."

Many wonder if he'll keep making them. "It seems like there's been a whole lot of wrong times and wrong places in Puffy's life," says Alan Light, editor-in-chief of Spin magazine. "At a certain point you have to learn to be smart about that sort of thing." Some might offer Lopez the same advice. "I know her parents always tell her to watch her back," says Ojani Noa. "Her father thinks [Puffy] seems like a nice guy, but he knows what is in the media." Others aren't worried that the incident - or her association with Combs - will tarnish Lopez's shining star. "She's dating a bad boy, she's got a tough image, and that's actually part of her appeal," says Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Company, a box office tracking firm. "She isn't necessarily Miss Goody Two-shoes."

How she is perceived might be the least of her concerns right now. "She feels fortunate that she's out of this mess," a close associate says of Lopez, who by last Tuesday had retreated to the protection of family and friends. "Terrified, I think, is the most appropriate adjective. I think she's just happy to be alive right now. "

WR╙╞ NA POCZÑTEK

HONEY

Marzec 2000

"Happy Birthday, Mr. Puff Daddy," croons Jennifer Lopez.  She is sashaying around in a dress made of huggy white satin and she's wearing a wig like a dollop of meringue, completing the transformation from Puerto Rican homegirl to blonde bombshell.  Inside a dark club, up on a movie screen, she's doing her best Marilyn impression for her man; a man they call Puffy 'cause he's got a tendency to get mad.  Marilyn knew men like that, too, and conspiracy theorists say that one of them might have killed her.

The crowd oohs and ahs.  And get this, Jennifer isn't even here in New York, she's in L.A. filming a thriller with Vince Vaughn called "The Cell."  Tonight, the crowd at Manhattan's Club Orient reacts to the sight of Jennifer on the movie screen with the same excitement and intensity with which they used to react to, well, Puffy himself.  And this isn't just any crowd, it's Puff Daddy's 30th birthday party, and all the ranks of the "hiphoperati" are here, Russell Simmons, Lil' Kirn, Busta Rhymes and Mary J. Blige.  The hottest star around, however, appears as a mere celluloid image, blowing kisses and shimmying her hot body to the beat.

"Happy Birthday, Mr. Puff Daddy," Lopez sings in a whispery purr.  The crowd goes wild.

"On the real I ain't never had nobody love me the way she loves me," Puffy says when the lights come up, raising a glass of champagne.  He's dressed casually (for him) in a white tank top and five pounds of gold chains.  "It's really real right now," he says.  "Hopefully one day I'll be able to marry her.  I'ma ride with her to the end!" The crowd goes crazy.  That was November.

But Jennifer and Puffy took a very different kind of ride on the night of December 27, 1999.  They ran at least one red light after peeling out in a Lincoln Navigator from a party at Club New York, where there had just been a shooting that left three people badly wounded.  A fight reportedly broke out when a patron insulted Puffy, throwing bills in his face and snarling, "You're not the only one who has money."  Then, 19-year-old Jamal "Shyne" Barrow, one of Puffy's Bad Boy rappers, allegedly pulled a gun.

Or was it Puffy who pulled the gun, as at least one witness contended?  And who owned the stolen 9mm gun police found inside the hip-hop mogul's car?  Was it Puffy's?  Shyne's?  It couldn't be Jennifer's, could it?

Lopez was released from jail after a long, tearful night of questioning (and a comforting bottle of cuticle cream bought for her by an unusually obliging New York City policeman).  Combs was charged with criminal possession of a handgun, a rap that could earn him an uncomfortable bid, and Barrow was charged with attempted murder.

As the press coverage reached a frenzy ("Her High-Risk Romance," read the cover of People) there was still this question to be answered: What was a woman like Lopez doing with a guy like the increasingly trouble-prone Puffy?

In the past year, Lopez, former Fly Girl for Fox's now defunct variety show "In Living Colour," has vaulted into the dizzying realm of international stardom.  Her debut album, On The Six, stayed at No. 1 on the Billboard charts for five straight weeks.  Her No. 1 single "If You Had My Love," produced by Rodney Jerkins, wafted out of radios from the barrios to the 'burbs.  She looked slinky in the song's video, which is to be expected of a woman who is presently being touted as the sexiest woman in America, a groundbreaking triumph for a beautifully brown-skinned Latina.

"Jennifer exudes sex appeal," says Tommy Mottola, the powerful head of Sony Records (Lopez affectionately nicknamed him "Don Tomasso").  It was rumored that Mottola and Lopez were linked at one time, although he becomes somewhat irate at the mention of it: "You don't know who you're talking to," he protests!

"Jennifer exudes charm, she's disarming.  Jennifer has a lot going on," Mottola says.

Lopez now commands roughly $9 million per movie, the highest fee ever paid to a Latina actress.  From her electric portrayal of slain Tejano singer, Selena Quantanilla Perez, in "Selena," to her breakthrough role as a sultry federal marshal in last year's "Out of Sight" with George Clooney, she's more than proven her star power.  In an era when Hollywood's standard fare is blondes who seem to spend a lot of time thinking about shoes, she's a welcome and long overdue breath of fresh air, Jennifer Lopez is a full-blown, complicated, intelligent and passionate woman.

"I think there's a tremendous fascination with Jennifer," says Benny Medina, Lopez's manager (and formerly, Puffy's).  "When she goes somewhere and there are other celebrities, she's the one the paparazzi flock to.  She can't go anywhere anymore without being mobbed."

So, back to the question: What's a woman on top of the world doing with a guy who seems determined to make Central Booking his second home?  Don't forget, Puffy was also arrested last year for beating Interscope Records executive Steve Stoute.  The ordeal cost the record executive $500,000 in a settlement to Stoute and one day of a court-ordered "anger management" class.  Is this Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee all over again?  Kate Moss and Johnny Depp?  Hill and Bill?  Why do good women always fall for bad boys?

Friends of Puffy and Jennifer's say that the couple's relationship never fit into an easy paradigm.  The word is that, despite appearances, they have a mature romance whose basis is that they have a great deal in common and support each other's aspirations.  Uptown Records founder Andre Harrell, the man who gave Puffy his start, says, "Puffy and Jennifer are an ideal couple in an industry as tough as this.  They complement each other professionally because she is a big star, but he is a big star as well.  Do you know how comforting it is to have someone who understands what you do in life?"

"Jennifer is standing by her man," Harrell goes on, "and, as a friend of Puffy's, I can honestly say that I have seen the loving way they look at each other when they're in a room together.  If Jennifer wanted to use somebody, then she could have anyone in the industry."  Good point.  So, the question remains unanswered.  Why would she pick a guy whose idea of a Saturday night date means dodging bullets?

"My impression has always been that these two are genuinely in love," says another close friend of the couple's who's known Puffy since he was an intern at Uptown Records.  "They have a lot in common: They're both the same age [Lopez is 29 and Combs is 30] they're both from uptown, they're both former dancers, they're both into hiphop, they're both really ambitious, ruthless in fact...how you gonna be a Puerto Rican from the Bronx and emerge as America's number one sex symbol, with that body type, if you weren't willing to do what you got to do?" he adds.

What she had to do was work hard and push herself every day from the time she was a little girl.  Lopez shared all of this in a recent phone interview.  She didn't talk about anything like guns or shootings but admitted to a certain amount of hardcore ambition.  The kind of ambition that is necessary to make it in an industry dominated by people who don't look like her or come from where she comes from.

"I was dancing probably out of the womb," she laughs in her sweet, sleepy voice.  "I remember being 14, 15, and wanting so bad to be a better dancer and wanting to learn more, more, more. I remember telling my teacher, I just want to be better.' [He had asked Lopez if she was melancholy over a boyfriend.] And he goes, 'You will.'"

"My parents said that I could do anything even though we were from where we were from and we were who we were as far as nationality went," Lopez says. "They taught me that none of that mattered, you know, that we were just as beautiful and smart and intelligent and could accomplish the same things as anybody else in this country."  Jennifer's parents are David, a computer specialist, and Guadalupe, a kindergarten teacher.

She started off dancing in local shows at the Kips Bay Boys Club.  "The Kips Bay Bad Boys and Girls Club," quips rapper Big Pun, a friend who remembers Jennifer from the 'hood.  "I remember her once in 'My Fair Lady.'  She played a hobo or a bum, a poor kid, wearing little knickers," says Arlene Rodriguez, Lopez's best friend from second grade who is now her personal assistant and constant companion.  "She wasn't the star but she was the one who stood out.  She was always good at everything."

In her late teens, against the protests of her protective parents, Lopez took off for Europe to dance in a traveling Broadway variety show.  A few years later, she became a Fly Girl on the Wayans Brothers' comedy series when Rosie Perez, then a choreographer, noticed Jennifer out of 2,000 applicants.  Next came the big screen.  Her first role in a critically acclaimed film was in Gregory Nava's "Mi Familia" in 1995.  Her first major Hollywood movie break came in the same year when she landed the role of a curvaceous subway cop in "Money Train" with Wesley Snipes.  Now, barely five years later, she's the most talked about actress (not just Latina actress, mind you) in the country.  "I just have a dream, you know?" Lopez says.

But did her dream ever include the kind of man who would get her name into the tabloids as a gun moll?  "Look at the trouble you got me into," Lopez reportedly sobbed at Puffy when they were taken down to the station that night in December.  "Puffy is extremely influential in Jennifer's life," says SW Network's gossip columnist, Flo Anthony.  "Puffy plays a big part in everything she does.  For example, if she asks him whether she should wear a black dress or a white dress to the Grammys and he says trash the white one, Jennifer is wearing that black dress."

"They've both seen adversity," Anthony adds, "and just because she hasn't been through everything that he's been through in terms of dealings with the law, doesn't mean that they both aren't from the hood."

Will Jennifer Lopez, homegirl, weather this storm?  "There's a bigger purpose to my success," Lopez says confidently, "I know what I represent, and things still have to get better, and I'm not going to stop working. All in due time."

WR╙╞ NA POCZÑTEK

Talk Magazine

Marzec 2000

"Could this be love?"

Jennifer Lopez transformed herself from Bronx-born fly girl into a Hollywood diva with double-platinum sales and a billion-dollar body. Why would she risk it all?

It was well past dark, the end of a long day just a week before Christmas. Five hours, four outfits, endless requests to Crawl around on your knees! Swivel your hips! Lean over! and the day for Jennifer Lopez was finally winding down. Twenty-four hours earlier she'd flown into New York on the Concorde from Europe after a grueling tour promoting her debut CD, On the 6, in order to arrive at Madison Square Garden in time for a group concert. Later she'd be heading into interviews with Latin journalists , MTV, and Black Entertainment Television. Lean in! More! Step to the left! She'd strained a muscle in her back the night before, but played along. Look over here Jennifer! Smile! More! Walking into the bright photos lights in a cowboy hat, she looked done in. Then she smiled, faced the camera, and cocked her finger like a gun. Bang.

Ten days later, of course, the pose would seem strangely prescient, and by now the tale of her high speed escape with boyfriend Sean "Puffy" Combs from a nightclub after a shooting is an established part of the Jennifer Lopez biography: She spent 14 hours in jail, where it was reported that after fits of hysteria she sent a cop out for cuticle cream, testified at a grand jury hearing that she neither saw nor felt a gun on Combs, and after he was indicted issued a statement expressing surprise and sadness at the news. The next day Combs flew out to LA. to be alone with her. Throughout it all, dressed for public appearances in a long cream-colored coat with a fur collar, she stood unequivocally by her boyfriend's side.

The press, which had previously been speculating about a wedding on New Year's Eve, immediately started predicting the couple's demise. "Lopez Had Puffy Huff," declared the New York Daily News, following up with "On the Highway of Love, Couple's Stuck at a Red Light." "She's Hanging with the Wrong Crowd," wrote the New York Post, which subsequently wondered, "Are Puffy and Lopez at War?" "Arrested Development," sniffed Time magazine. Even The New York Times ran a story reporting that female court officers said that if Lopez had any brains she would dump Combs. But according to those closest to the couple, there is only one thing anyone needs to understand: This is a love story.

It's early December and Jennifer Lopez is drinking champagne on a private jet leased by Sony. She's on her second European promotional tour for her double-platinum CD On the 6. Leaning back in a lounge area away from the 26 other people who make up her company, she's wearing a red fox-fur coat, pink-tinted sunglasses, and spiked Gucci boots as she pages through Elle magazine marking up pictures of clothes she'd like her stylists to know about. "It's my favorite thing to do," she tells me in her soft and girlish Bronx accent, "to find looks and have someone get, them for me." She has just come from a mobbed CD-signing in: an Amsterdam shopping mall, where a giant cardboard poster fell within feet of her head and a fight broke out that made the police so nervous they shut the event down. "What's your greatest fear?" a fan yelled out to her. "I'm not afraid of anything," she shot back. "You can't live your life like that." Then, before boarding the jet, she asked her makeup stylist if he could get a closed Body Shop to open up after hours. She needed Body Butter for her flight.

It has taken her almost 10 years, but Jennifer Lopez has managed to transform herself from an In Living Color Fly Girl into one of the highest-paid actresses - and the highest-paid non-Caucasian actress - working today. And she takes her elevated status seriously. When traveling, she requires that she sleep on sheets with a minimum thread count of 250 and that she be driven in a black Mercedes with a male driver. Currently, she is traveling with eight trunks of clothes. Although Lopez is unafraid to ask for anything she wants, there are ways in which her fearlessness has cost her. She is still being snubbed in certain circles for cynical comments she made two years ago about the acting talents of Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Cameron Diaz, and Hollywood insiders question her move to become a pop star as her acting career is exploding. Then there's the slightly sneering suggestion that she's a novelty act. As one L.A. producer puts it: "One false move, and she's Charo."

But thousands of feet in the air, as Lopez flips through fashion magazines, a precipitous fall seems out of the question. "It's the American dream," she says proudly of what she's accomplished, "and I'm living it." If she's still slightly wide-eyed about the glamorous trappings of her outsize lifestyle, she's also aware of its downside. "It's hard to deal with being criticized every time you walk out of your house," she tells me. "Sometimes you don't know who's listening or who you're talking to. But you learn from experience. You learn to be more guarded. But you don't want to hide who you are either." In reaction to the more troubling aspects of fame, Lopez has made a conscious effort to merge her old world with her new one. "When I first got famous, my reaction was to gather everyone together who was real and close to me, like my family and my oldest friend, Arlene," she says. "The people I have around me want to be here and they want to live the dream with me. We're working on this together, doing something positive. It's a large group, but I want to be sure that everybody in it feels taken care of. I run things like a democracy, not a dictatorship. This is my family now; it's a second family, but it's a nice one."

Her manager, Benny Medina, is sitting across from her. A muscular and rakish Los Angeles native with two diamond earrings and a taste for Versace, it was Medina who guided the ascent of Babyface, and - until recently - Puffy. He also jump-started Will Smith's acting career by getting the rapper cast in a sitcom based on Medina's own life, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. At the moment, he is thinking of getting the producers of the Jingle Ball at Madison Square Garden to change Lopez's place in their concert lineup, regardless of the logistics. She needs to be on earlier because she's going to be jet-lagged.

"Benny," she tells him, "you have to make sure my family gets good seats tomorrow night at the Garden. My father didn't like "his seat last time and his home video didn't come out good. I heard about it for days."

Now one of her dancers appears from the rear of the plane. He's carrying a box of chocolates with a note attached. They've spent a week together, but he's as worshipful as a fan meeting her for the first time. She seems embarrassed too. "Ooh," she coos as he hands over the box. "Thank you!" The dancer returns to the back and Jennifer shakes her head. "It's a little like junior high around here," she says. "This is a simple crew of kids. Just like me." Lopez grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in the Bronx, not far from the Castle Hill housing project. Her mother taught kindergarten and still does.
Her father is a computer specialist. Puerto Rican immigrants who cared about education, they encouraged their three daughters to be confident and independent in a tough, macho neighborhood, where watching your back was part of the drill and being successful didn't mean having extravagant goals. "Where I come from, you got a job as a bank teller and got married, and being driven didn't mean wanting to be a star," she says. "It meant wanting to be a lawyer instead of a secretary."

Both her sisters, Leslie and Lynda, went to college, and her parents, who recently divorced, were angry when Jennifer chose instead to follow in the path of two of her idols, Rita Moreno and Madonna. She'd studied dance since she was a little girl - first at Ballet Hispanico, then at jazz studios in Manhattan - and devoted herself to it during high school, riding the subway for hours every day to go to dance class. "I was happy at the time, riding that train every day," she said. "To me, the struggle has always been the fun part." Phil Black, one of her longtime dance instructors, says she stood out as a student - something he does not say about some of his other alumni, like John Travolta and Madonna. "She worked hard in a very competitive environment," recalls Black. "I made it tough for her, but she stayed with it." When Lopez got her first touring job as a dancer, she sent him a thank-you letter from the road. "Dancing has always been my first love," she says. "Acting and singing are internal, but dancing is pure physical expression. For a long time I didn't understand why a dancer would want to become an actor."

She changed her mind, of course, and Eric Gold, a talent manager who took Lopez on as a client in 1992 after working with her on In Living Color, steered her through the transition. "She was always very determined. When she decided to try acting, I told her she'd have to lose weight. The very next day she had a trainer and was out jogging. She knew she had to or she'd be
a fat girl." After a few forgettable TV roles, Lopez moved to film. "She comes on screen and it's as good as a special effect," says Mike De Luca, president of production at New Line Cinema, which plans to release her next movie, The
Cell, in August. "Sexy, provocative, and visually spectacular," says Oliver Stone, who cast her in U-Turn opposite Sean
Penn. "She was this tough girl from the streets, a cunning young actress, who really wanted to work hard."

In addition to U-Turn, Lopez also starred in Anaconda and Money Train, but it was her role in Gregory Nava's 1997 Selena for
which she won the most recognition. It also made her the highest-paid Latina actor working at the time ($1 million). The following year she beat out Sandra Bullock for the lead opposite George Clooney in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight. By the time she released On the 6, produced with Combs and Emilio Estefan Jr., she was a bona fide movie star.

Despite her ambition and unflagging drive, Lopez didn't set her sights on high-powered boyfriends. She and her first sweetheart, David Cruz, split up in 1996 after 10 years together (in an unauthorized biography published last year she claimed he couldn't handle her on-screen love scenes), after which he went on to open a dry-cleaning business in the Bronx. Ojani Noa, a handsome Cuban whom Lopez fell for while he was waiting tables in Miami, proposed to her at the Selena wrap party. She accepted and was soon encouraging him in his modeling career. After one year, the marriage was foundering. Noa told Alerta magazine that Lopez needed a certain amount of peace to focus completely on her acting career. In another interview Lopez said that it's hard for a macho man to accept a woman who earns more money than he does. They divorced amicably in 1998. Noa now manages a club that Lopez co-owns in Los Angeles, called the Conga Room.

It was not until Combs that she found a peer with her level of ambition. In Puffy, "maybe she's found her match," says rap impresario Russell Simmons, who knows them both. "They're ambitious, directed people - they motivate each other. They could be the best motivating factors in each others' lives."

Lopez and Combs became friends a couple of years ago, when he started to help out with her music. But as recently as this past summer they were not publicly involved - for much of 1998 she was getting divorced from Noa, and he was working out a separation from Kim Porter, his girlfriend of three years and the mother of his youngest son. One of their first and most visible public events as a couple was last Labor Day, at Combs' annual party in East Hampton, where they appeared on his balcony dressed in white, waving down at his guests. Together they were welcomed as the embodiment of the new millennium, fashion's homecoming king and queen. Announcing Lopez's performance one night in early December, Combs, as cohost of the VH-1 Vogue Fashion Awards, extolled her taste in men. The next night they appeared together at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute Ball. ("Why does he call himself Fluffy?" Henry Kissinger is said to have asked.) The two embraced their new role as a public couple, and the attention they received seemed to bring them closer together. "Can you imagine what it's like to be thrown into the world they've been thrown into?" asks Simmons. "It's a dramatic culture shock." Simmons recollected seeing Combs and Lopez at a party at Ron Perelman's house in the Hamptons last summer. "Billy Joel was at the piano singing 'Piano Man,' I think - and Jennifer and Puffy were off by themselves together in their own little world. I saw that and thought, Wow, they could have a quiet moment together anywhere. They're like trip partners - you know, when you're a kid and take LSD with someone? That's what they're like. In the midst of all the celebrities and commitments, they are the grounding forces in each other's lives." Simmons paused, then added, "I think she makes Puffy feel at peace."

Before Lopez, Combs, who has two children by two different women, was not known for being a particularly devoted companion to anyone. "Puffy's always been restless with women and has had a lot around at one time," says one observer, "and I think this is as close to real love as he has ever come." At his last birthday party, Combs seemed unusually emotional. "I never had anyone love me the way she loves me," he said in November, after watching a video Lopez (who was away filming The Cell) had sent him of herself singing "Happy Birthday" dressed as Marilyn Monroe. "I love her and, hopefully, one day I will be able to marry her."

But friends of Lopez worry that the relationship is too intense, too insular. Lopez has said she's an idiot when she falls in love, and for an astute career woman - who might have disassociated herself from Combs after he was arrested last spring for assaulting a record company executive with a champagne bottle - someone who's seen the two together says she can seem strangely lost around him. "I watched her spend a lot of time waiting around for him when he was working in the studio," the observer says. "When he introduced her to me, he asked her to get him a glass of water, and I thought, That's Jennifer Lopez? She seemed like his assistant, she was so subordinate."

Eric Gold, who managed Lopez's career up until a year and a half ago, found it impossible to continue working with her after Combs entered her life. "When he's around, he's the manager," says Gold, who ended up being replaced by Combs' manager at the time, Benny Medina. "Whether she takes a movie or not becomes his decision. And when she's with him, she becomes entirely involved. I miss the Jennifer I used to know. But she's definitely in love. At the end of the day, she wants to be the mother of his kids."

Her family is said to be unhappy about the relationship too, and Jennifer's mother, who friends say is extremely dominant and judgmental, is particularly devastated. "It's not what she would want for her daughters," says a friend. The fact obviously weighs on Lopez. "The night she was locked up Jennifer was very concerned about her mother," says Ed Hayes, one of Combs' lawyers who was present the night she was detained. " 'My mothers going to be so upset,' I remember her saying. She was extremely worried about her."

Lopez is not the first powerful woman to give up some of herself in the presence of a questionable man, and others besides her family think she is in over her head. "She fought for dignity in that relationship as much as she fought for anything in her career," says a close friend. But Hayes scoffs at the idea of Lopez being anything but in control. "She's a capable person," he says. "And despite what was in the tabloids, she was not hysterical that night. When I was talking to her she had tremendous focus and charisma, and if she appeared to be a mess, it was only as a way to manipulate the cops. "Of course she cried," he adds. "But that does not mean she didn't have total control of the situation. I remember that we were surrounded by detectives and officers with their tongues hanging out, and before she turned to walk away from me, she gave them a little wiggle with her hips that made them smile. The woman is a giant." Simmons, who thinks Lopez is as smart a businesswoman as Madonna, agrees. But he also believes that Combs' troubles have intensified their bond: "They need each other right now. They're from the same place and now they're both lost. Both in a tailspin."

The nightclub shooting is still a couple of weeks away, and Lopez steps into a chauffeur-driven Mercedes waiting outside a Paris TV studio. Later, she'll be out with her adoring entourage, dancing with them until three in the morning. For the moment, after a long day, she's just relieved to be finished with the last of the many obligations of this tour. She'll
be back in New York tomorrow.

"I can't wait to be home," she says. "Wherever that is." Wrapped inside the red fox-fur coat and wearing sunglasses despite the darkness, she sounds like a sleepy child who needs a nap as she talks with pride about her scrappy childhood. "I'm still the same person I was when I had to get on that number 6 train every day growing up," she says. All she can think about now is home. She talks about her dad: "I can't wait for him to retire so I can buy him a house and a boat. I want him near me living the good life." She talks about her sisters and her personal assistants, Arlene and Tanya, who will be drawing her a bath at the Ritz in a few minutes: "The other night we were up all night in bed together talking about guys," she says. "Those girls have known me since I was little. They're my home base." Eventually, her thoughts turn away from career and family to the lovely house she has recently bought for herself in Los Angeles, and it makes her smile. "It's got a yard as big as a football field and a tennis court that Puffy wants to turn into a basketball court," she says. As she mentions his name, one of his songs, "Satisfy You," comes on the radio. "Hey, turn it up," she tells the driver. She knows every word and sings along softly, as though she's reciting a rosary,

Beneath the defenses erected by herself and her handlers there is someone surprisingly shy and even vulnerable in Jennifer Lopez - a person who doesn't like to drink and hates to make speeches, a person who is devoted to her family and loyal to her man. This is part of her allure for Combs, a close friend says, explaining how they complement each other: "He's in control on one level, but she's in control on another because he sees her as this symbol of goodness that he has to protect. But it's a little like Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder in Dracula, because even though he worships her and would hurt himself before he'd hurt her, he can't help but hurt her in the end."

Jennifer Lopez isn't worried about that right now as she relaxes against the Mercedes' black leather. After all, there have been no guns fired, no arrests yet. "Paris is so beautiful," she whispers as the car rolls through a city she's had no time to visit. "I'd love to go shopping and see some art next time I'm here. That would be cool." The car stops at a light. She stares out at a large corner building. Her tone is that of someone loosely but inexorably trapped, yearning to cut loose and run off for a while. "Look at the pretty windows," she says. "I wonder what dramas are going on behind them. I bet it's the same thing here as it is anywhere. Somebody's suffering because a loved one is sick. Somebody's happy because she found a $20 bill on the sidewalk. Somebody's in love with the wrong person. Shit like that."

WR╙╞ NA POCZÑTEK

FHM

Grudzie± 1999

On their painful rise towards stardom, would-be actors and actresses traditionally spend years honing their skills (Jim Carrey for example, talks of lonely years spent pulling faces in front of the bathroom mirror in order to become the worldÆs finest ôrubber facedö funny man), and even longer persuading the rest of us that we should spend our hard-earned lolly paying to watch them do it. Then as soon as theyÆve made it, they spend every waking breath telling us that they never actually wanted to be an actor in the first place and what they really wanted to be was a sportsman/politician/prophet.

But nothing is likely to get the common manÆs alarm bells ringing louder and more insistently than an announcement from a thespian that they have always really wanted to be a singer and that an album of musical gems is on the way. Perhaps it is their way of getting revenge on the rest of us for not recognizing their talents earlier on, but the stream of actors releasing records seems unlikely to be stemmed by anything as trivial as good taste. Surely after the extravagant lunacy of William ShatnerÆs ludicrously melodramatic Seventies spoken word opus The Transformed Man and Don JohnsonÆs flatulent Eighties Heartbeat effort, some sort of bill should have been passed outlawing such sonic vandalism. Alas no, and the likes of Anita Dobson, Bill Tarmey, Su Pollard (who could forget Come To Meù I Am Woman?) Ian McShane (TVÆs lusty antiques dealer Lovejoy) and Laetitia Dean (Godsave us from Something Outa Nothing) have been allowed to inflict their miserable caterwauling on an unsuspecting public unchecked by legal recourse for years.

Yet in the last year, 29-year-old New Yorker Jennifer Lopez has single-handedly managed to smash the ôactor-turned-singerö stereotype by combining a career as one of the hottest actresses in Hollywood with being one of the most successful and credible singers on the planet. Her recent album, On The 6 (named after the train she would have to catch from her neighborhood into New York) surprised many by turning out not as some embarrassing, self-indulgent vanity project, but a credible and varied pop album that has already spawned a huge single in If You Had My Love. It is hard to put into perspective quite how ridiculously famous Jennifer Lopez is right now. She has sold more than two million copies of If You Had My Love while her album has made the top ten around the world. On top of that, her signature is one of the most eagerly sought by big-time movie producers. She is able to command around five million dollars to act in a movie, which makes her one of the highest paid female stars in the world.

Since appearing on FHMÆs cover last December she has been offered the front page of every major magazine in the world. Everyone from Vogue to Steam Railway Enthusiast wants her, yet FHMÆs exclusive 13-page feature is the only place you will see her until at least halfway through next year. After our first story on her (and her first cover anywhere outside of America) last December and being voted the sexiest woman in the world by the female readers of FHM, she has decided to come back for second helpings.

As we speak, she is filming science-fiction drama The Cell and after that wraps sheÆll star in The Wedding Planner.  Tonight she is set to appear at the MTV Awards in New York where sheÆs up for a brace of trophies.  By her own admission, her life right now is ôat an all time high of tornado-whirlwind-stormö proportions. ôBut I can handle it,ö she says, taking a break at FHM's Los Angeles cover shoot. ôIÆm a workaholic. I get anxious when I donÆt have something to do.ö

Jennifer Lopez has always wanted to be a success. In her late teens she dropped out of Baruch College in New York City after one term to devote herself to training to be a dancer. And although she studied jazz and ballet and hoped to one day make it to Broadway, she was actually more into break dancing. Serendipitously, MC Hammer ù an odd man in ludicrous trousers ù made a record called U Can't Touch This and suddenly every audition she went for turned into a hip hop audition. ôI was good at it and they were like, æOoh, a light skinned girl who can do that., Great, letÆs hire her!öÆ Numerous rap and pop video appearances (including one for a Janet Jackson song) led her into TV adverts. Though her resume proves she has a keen eye for the right kind of movie projects to take on, she admits that there are plenty of skeletons in her acting closet. ôI once went to an audition ù in 1989 I think ù for an advert to promote the Olympics and the director said, æCan you use a trampoline?Æ æYeah, of course,Æ I lied. I sucked in adverts,ö she laughs. ôI had to give up doing them because I just couldnÆt do them convincingly. I have to believe in what IÆm doing.ö

From there it was a short jump to her next project, as a ôFly Girlö ù a libidinous dancer in the short-lived America comedy In Living Color (which also featured Jim Carrey). Though the show tanked, Jennifer made a big enough impression to move on.  Brief appearances in forgettable afternoon TV fodder such as South Central, Second Chances and Malibu Road followed. She once appeared as ôRosieö in something called Nurses On The Line: The Crash Of Flight Seven. What on earth was that about?

ôI played a nurse,ö she laughs. ôThe plane crashes, the doctors are hurt and the nurses have to get them to safety. The worst line of my career was in that movie. It was, æThereÆs no way the plane can land!Æ And I think I delivered it as badly then as I just have!ö

Her dogged determination to get ahead lead to a steady stream of increasingly better roles in bigger movies (Selena, Money Train, Blood And Wine, Anaconda, Jack and U-Turn) culminating in her smoothly erotic, career-making performance as Karen Cisco in last yearÆs Out Of Sight.

Making a little room for a personal life, she met and married Cuban model and bar manager Ojani Noa in 1997. She bought him a bar as a wedding present. Little more than a year later they were awaiting a divorce ù citing the pressures of stardom (hers, presumably) as the motivating factor in their break¡up. SheÆs understandably reluctant to go into details, saying only, ôI was too open and honest about my private life in the past and IÆve been hurt as a result.ö Unfortunately this reticence to open up means that even though current boyfriend Puff Daddy has spoken about their relationship in American interviews (and they turn up everywhere together), she remains bafflingly tight-lipped about the affair.

These days she has a reputation ù and one that is only partially deservedùfor being something of a diva. And while sheÆs nowhere near as difficult as some might have you believe, she is certainly not the best timekeeper and a mobile phone junkie. She has her phone with her constantly and has a disconcerting habit of breaking off from whatever sheÆs doing (talking, being photographed/interviewed, eating) to answer its incessant bleeping. Her monthly mobile bill must surely exceed the gross national domestic product of many small nations. Yet apart from these minor quibbles, when she gets around to talking to you she is exceedingly charming, and strikingly attractive in the flesh ù which means she can get away with almost anything. Almost. Last year she felt the wrath of several Hollywood heavy-hitters by being remarkably outspoken in one of her first major cover interviews, for American Movieline magazine. In the piece she was unwisely candid about a number of Hollywood leading ladies, including calling Cameron Diaz, ôa lucky model whoÆs been given a lot of chancesö, dismissing of Gwyneth Paltrow: ôI swear to God I donÆt remember anything she was in,ö and saying of Winona Ryder: ôIÆve never heard anyone in public or among friends say, æOh I love herÆ.ö

Asked about it now Jennifer looks embarrassed, explaining that she was caught off-guard and has since apologized to all the right people. ôYou know, I am ambitious and confident but IÆm not a bad person. That article made me sound vindictive and IÆm not at all. I was really sorry about the way it came off. I really lost sleep over it. And now I absolutely watch what I say more. I make my point and I donÆt say much else.ö

In that same interview you were quoted as saying you had a mythical quality called ôthe stardom glowö. What was that about?

Okay, thatÆs something else that got blown out of proportion from that interview. It made me sound arrogant. The ôstardom glowö thing was just something that my mother and I used to say. ItÆs like when you go on an audition some days you feel better than others. Some days you feel that you just donÆt have it. On those days IÆd joke that standing in front of my mirror I had the ôstardom glowö. I would ask my mom, ôDo I have the stardom glow today mom? Are they going to give me the job?ö But it all got twisted around.

It made you sound rather vulgar...

It was horrible. It was really sad for me. One of the things IÆve always prided myself on is not being bitchy. This can be a very catty business and IÆve always tried to stay out of that. IÆve never been in competition with anybody else. IÆm not jealous and IÆve always been supportive of my friends. ItÆs a waste of energy and IÆm not that kind of girl. That one article made me out to be the opposite kind of person that I am. It hurt me deeply.

What else pisses you off about your career?

That people think itÆs not really a job. They donÆt appreciate the stress in this business. They donÆt realize that you sit there knowing that tomorrow it could all be gone. YouÆre open game for everybody. It takes a toll on you and you have to learn to deal with it. And all that people think is, ôThere she is in her beaded gown on the television ù her life must be fantastic.ö

Which it is.

Yeah, but I worked hard to get here. And I never wanted to be famous. I wanted to be an actress, a performer. IÆve sung and danced and acted since I was very young. ItÆs what IÆve always wanted to do. I never got into this business so that everybody would know who I was. I had no alternative. People ask me what IÆd be doing now if I hadnÆt made it as an actress and I say, ôIÆd still be trying.ö ItÆs what I do. And itÆs all that I can do.

Do boyfriends find your fame difficult to deal with?

Sometimes my career is difficult for people to deal with. I donÆt understand it because IÆm not a jealous person at all. IÆm a very secure person. But I do need a lot of attention, I tell you that! ThatÆs because I give a lot. After a while if IÆm with someone and IÆm not getting enough attention in return for mine I start to think, ôWell, what am I getting here?ö ThatÆs the problem with givers ù they give and give and give and give and then they realize that theyÆre not getting anything in return and freak out.

You recently went back to your old school for a photo shoot. What kind of kid were you?

I was popular at school. I wasnÆt the most popular girl or anything like that. I ran with the good crowd, but I was just one of the regular kids. I went to the Holy Family school. It was a catholic school.

When did boys start paying you attention?

I had a very voluptuous body from when I was about 11. My mother used to be really worried about me because she thought I was so sexy. She was afraid I was going to get pregnant. The taste in my neighborhood was for voluptuous women. So I knew guys liked me. Back then at school in the third or fourth grade there were girls who already had breasts and boyfriends!

So did you ever slip off for an illicit snog behind the bike sheds?

The bike what? Sheds? No way, man! Kids snuck off into the coat closet to kiss at my school. They were always kissing in the closet, but not me. I didnÆt kiss anyone at school until at least the seventh grade. I was definitely a late bloomer in that way!

When you return to The Bronx, how do people react?

ItÆs funny for them because no-one in the history of our family has been in the public eye. ItÆs nice for them, even though itÆs sometimes difficult for them to know how to react. Even in my neighborhood people thought I was crazy because they just didnÆt do that kind of thing. TheyÆd go to school, perhaps go to college if they set their sights high, and if not theyÆd end up working in a bank. People from The Bronx either do nine-to-five jobs or are putting themselves through school ù they donÆt get into Hollywood.

WhatÆs your new movie ù The Cell ù about?

ItÆs a psychological thriller. I play a doctor who has invented a dream therapy to try and help patients. She works in their dreams. The police come to her with a serial killer and she has to get inside his dreams. She has to find out where his last victim is from his dreams.

Sounds a bit like Nightmare On Elm Street.

No. ItÆs more like Silence Of The Lambs meets Flatliners. Vince Vaughn is the FBI detective who brings the serial killer to me. After this one IÆm signed to do a romantic comedy with Brendan Fraser called The Wedding Planner.

You have a dog called Boots. I bet sheÆs hideously spoiled.

Yeah! SheÆs a cocker spaniel. My ex-husbandÆs Rottweilers used to piss on her. Now sheÆs very spoiled. I wanted to send her to a doggie hotel when I travel but she gets thrown out of everywhere. She even got me evicted from my little apartment I finally got in LA because she barks too much! So now IÆve got to get a house.

You were 29 in July ù whatÆs the worst present youÆve ever been given ù bearing in mind that Pamela Anderson was once given a set of car mats by a dullard boyfriend.

ThatÆs fucked up! The worst thing IÆve had was a mug with a bottle of perfume in it ù all wrapped in see-through cellophane. It was from a really cheap store and smelled disgusting. I got that for Christmas.

Is it true that you wonÆt tell anyone what scent you wear?

Yes. ItÆs because itÆs my scent. ItÆs a special blend of oils. I really Love the smell of it and people are always asking me what it is. It mixes really well with my natural body scent. I found it in a little shop about six years ago and I havenÆt told anyone else where to get it from. Once in a while IÆll try some new perfume but it never works. I really like Faconnable on a man ù thatÆs good.

It's FHM's lingerie special this month.  Are you a fan of gossamer-like knickerage?

I wear lingerie.  Sometimes I buy my own and I've certainly had other people buy it for me.  I like stuff that's feminine and makes me feel sexy.

Is it true that women don't like stockings and suspenders, finding them tacky?

Well I wouldn't wear them everyday, but for a special occasion they're nice.  They can be a bit uncomfortable.  I like exotic lingerie that you can buy in Paris.  The kind where the lace is really special and different.  I've been very lucky though that I've never had anyone buy me any tacky lingerie.

Are you ticklish?

Yes.  Very.  In the regular spots like on my stomach and around my waist.  I'm only a little bit ticklish under my arm pits.

And finally, are you hoping you can snag the top spot in FHM's 100 sexiest Women In the World poll next year?

Oh man!  It was cool winning the women's vote this year.  I loved that!  I think is because I'm a real woman.  The ideal for women is a little high sometimes, you know, like a six foot tall blonde bombshell and I'm just a real woman.  But I think that's still attractive to a lot of people.  I think that's why women like me.  It was a really, really pleasant surprise and it made me very happy.  But next year?  It'd be nice..

WR╙╞ NA POCZÑTEK