It's 10 A.M. on a Tuesday in April, and he is in this elegant Manhattan hotel suite -- a suite so heavy with antiques and pillows and drapes and tassels
that you fear if you stood still too long, brocade would begin to grow on your skin -- to deliver a cargo of breakfasts to Jennifer Lopez -- actress, singer,
dancer, It Girl of the '00s. Calmly, the waiter tries to move plate after plate of eggs, omelets, pancakes, fruit, and muffins from his cart onto the
dining table -- six complete breakfasts, sitting under their shiny silver warming hoods like a fleet of miniature spaceships, all ordered for Lopez because no
one knows what she'll be in the mood to eat. He can't get the job done, however. The table is already crowded with a monumental arrangement of cut
flowers, a separate spray of orchids, and a bottle of champagne (compliments of the management). Plus, three stylish women -- a publicist and two personal
assistants, members of the vast, ever-shifting cloud of friends-slash-employees who trail after Lopez like stardust keep flapping around him. This milk is not
hot enough, says the one in the high, pointy boots. You have to go back and get hotter milk. Her reflection in the polished table is ominous, but the waiter
doesn't seem to notice. I mean, scalding hot, she continues. I want to see steam when I life the lid, I want to see bubbles. The waiter nods, but continues
fanning out napkins and cutlery. The woman actually places herself between him and the table. You have to go back for hot milk right now, she says, in the tone
one would use to say, You have to get on this helicopter out of Saigon right now. Incredibly, the waiter still hesitates -- should he leave the not-hot enough
milk in case somebody else wants it? -- and for a moment, you fear for his life. Finally, the waiter exits. but not before whispering, Everyone seems very
concerned about the milk.
Oh, yes Everyone is very, very concerned about Ms. Lopez, 30, who has taken the zeitgeist and reshaped it in her own image, wrapping it around her famously curvy silhouette like spandex. half a dozen years ago, she was just another dancer with a dream, a middle-class Puerto Rican middle sister from the Bronx (her mother teaches kindergarten; her father programs computers), trying to get noticed in big, bad L.A. She became a Fly Girl on the comedy series "In Living Color" (short hair, big earrings, stompy dancing), then a bit player on TV shows no one saw. After a year the movies found her, and Lopez made sure they never let go. She was tough but charming in "Money Train", sweet and sunny in "My Family/Mi Familia" and "Selena", dangerously alluring in "Blood and Wine" and "U-Turn", a box office draw in "Anaconda", and a critical darling in "Out of Sight" -- smart, sophisticated, almost unbearably sexy. Each role was more expansive, less strictly ethnic than the last. With each she grew better, earned more attention. It was as if she were methodically packing a cannon with gunpowder. The first time we see Jennifer in "Mi Familia" says director Gregory Nava, It's through the eyes of the gardener she will marry. Then it cuts to her first close-up on film. And for it, I used a silent film technique: I put an iris around her -- you know, where there's a circle around her face and everything else is blacked out? In that one shot, everyone knew she was a movie star. In 1998 Lopez took a one-year hiatus from movies to cut an album, "On the 6" (named for the subway she rode from the Bronx to Manhattan for dance lessons). The songs were a cross-pollination of Latin soul, hip-hop, and dance pop. The videos featured maximum Jennifer in minimal clothing, frequently wet. And the whole enterprise lit the cannon fuse and shot her career to another level entirely, from talent to phenomenon. Instantly, she had a number-one single, a Grammy nomination, full-time bodyguards, angina-inducing personal appearances, and sold-out stadium concerts around the world. Her life became the equivalent of heavy rotation on MTV: You couldn't miss her. As "On the 6" was going double platinum, Lopez returned to movies with a vengeance, shooting three very different starring roles back-to-back. She plays a child therapist enlisted by an FBI agent (Vince Vaughn) to catch a serial killer (Vincent D'Onofrio), in this month's creepy thriller "The Cell"; a hyperorganized wedding planner who falls apart when she falls for a client (Matthew McConaughey), in this winter's romantic comedy "The Wedding Planner" (a Lopez cover of Evelyn "Champagne" King's "Love Come Down" will likely be on the soundtrack); and a closed-off cop intrigued by a secretive drifter (Jim Caviezel), in the romantic drama "Angel Eyes", which has just wrapped production in Toronto. By the end of "Angel Eyes", Lopez was already working on her next album, which she hopes will be out for Christmas. Jennifer is one of those people who prove that the more you do, the more you can do, Vaughn says. During "The Cell's" three-month shoot in L.A., Lopez was jetting off on the weekends to promote her record, but on the set, she never seemed stressed. She has so much energy and willpower, she's a force of nature. But she's able to focus it and use it productively. She is also, however, a one-woman media centrifuge; she shows up and stories swirl. It's hard to pin down how much Lopez contributes to the hype, both wittingly and unwittingly, and how it spreads exponentially on its own. Her 1997 marriage to Ojani Noa, a Miami-based model and waiter, dissolved after a year; her two-year relationship with rap star and record mogul Sean "Puffy" Combs is rife with good girl-bad boy speculation. After gunfire broke out last December at a Manhattan nightclub where she and Combs were partying, the two fled the scene, running 11 red lights in a gray Lincoln Navigator before being arrested and handcuffed; some stories described how Lopez cried for 14 hours, while others had her sending a policeman out for cuticle cream. (Combs was eventually charged with illegal possession of a firearm; the case is still pending.) Then there are Lopez's early interviews, in which she spoke a little too frankly about other actresses -- among them Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Cameron Diaz. And for Grammy Awards in February, Lopez opted to wear a green tropical-print Versace dress so diaphanous, so open, and so revealing of the gloriously fleshy-yet-taut, tawny body beneath that it became an instant icon, right up there with the sequined gown Marilyn Monroe was sewn into to serenade President Kennedy. Rumors abound of Lopez's outrageous demands -- how on the road she must have sheets with at least a 250-thread count, she must have five-feet-tall standing fans to blow-dry her shimmering hair, she must have Cristal champagne chilling nearby.
At first, today's lavish sutie, six breakfasts, and superheated milk seem to confirm this reputation -- coupled with the fact that she spends the first half hour of a scheduled interview in the shower. The hissing water is audible through the wall. Suddenly, silently, Lopez -- the actual person, not the image -- appears. Her wet hair is pulled up in a tight ponytail atop her head, a la Pebbles Flinstone; her face is shiny and makeup-free. A white terry-cloth robe, belted snugly at the waist, covers her down to her feet. She looks innocent. She has a French manicure on her finger-and-toenails, and she smells like a night-blooming garden. Oh, I never tell anybody what I use [on my skin], she says with a Mona Lisa smile. David Letterman always says that, too: You smell so good. What are you wearing? I never tell him either. She sits on the couch, draws her knees up, and speaks so softly that one has to lean forward to hear her. She answers every question, even the ones that make her sigh. She fiddles with a thin gold anklet on her left ankle until the clasp breaks. When she becomes animated, the robe slips and a bit of her calf peeks out -- and so smooth, golden, exfoliated, and moisturized is her skin that it's like some kind of exotic dessert -- but only for a second before, ladylike, she reties her robe. Lopez says she's always been a good girl. Growing up, she would go to school, then run track, go to dance class, come home, do her homework, be prepared for the next day. I liked that. I still am [a good girl]. She would rather stay home than go out -- have a girlfriend over, order food and eat in bed, call up friends and pass the phone back and forth. I'm all right with that, she says. That's a good night for me. She like hip-hop, but she loves musicals -- "Funny Girl", "Gigi", "The Sound of Music", "West Side Story". Especially "West Side Story". She wants to remake it someday. I'd play Maria [Natalie Wood, the sweet one], Lopez says, but I'd have to play Anita too [Rita Moreno, the pepper pot], because I loved her so much growing up.
She doesn't drink, smoke, do drugs, or anything else bad, she insists. I try to live my life right. I believe in that. I believe in doing the right thing; I believe there's certain responsibility for your actions. She calls Combs just a regular guy who works as much as I do. I think people miss that because of his videos; they see him dressed up and flamboyant and all that. Yeah, when we go out, that's part of our style, from where we grew up. but that's not who he is. He doesn't walk around the house in leather suits and chains. Because he raps doesn't mean he's a gangster. He's a hard-working guy. I admire him, I respect him. He built up from nothing something of substance. I think we both have. People don't realize how much we have in common that way, how much our dreams and hopes are the same, things we want to accomplish. About the Versace dress, which neatly deflected attention away from comb's arrest? It wasn't anything premeditated, Lopez insists.We just wanted to go to the Grammy's and celebrate our nominations, have a good time, like everybody else. I wore it because it was just a nice dress. she even considered cutting off the long sleeves, because they looked to conservative. My life is definitely a circus, Lopez continues, but I'm not the ringmaster. I guess I'm the main attraction, where everybody's kind of pulling at you, wanting you for something. But I'm still the same person I always was. I have the same people that I've always had around me, my family, close friends. I realize it's just a job, and what comes along with it is fleeting and not important. I haven't turned into something else.
