Could This Be Love?
By Bob Morris
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."
By Bob Morris
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."
