Jennifer Lopez: Chick off the block

As her fame has grown, so has her reputation as a demanding diva. So why does Jennifer Lopez insist she's still a simple girl from the Bronx? By Dotson Radar

Jennifer Lopez, 32, a daughter of immigrants, grew up in a tough Bronx neighbourhood and went on to command $12.5m a picture. Her new movie, Maid in Manhattan, co-starring Ralph Fiennes, is the Cinderella story of a young woman from the Bronx who, through a serendipitous misunderstanding, meets her Prince Charming.In the real world, however, Lopez has been involved in a series of flawed relationships, two of which resulted in brief marriages, and one that delivered gun violence, arrest and public scandal. It's not surprising that she is looking for stability.

'What I crave is to have a family, to find the right man who has the sensibilities to understand that,' she says. 'That will be my real happiness.'

Lopez and her fiancé, the actor Ben Affleck, are living together in Philadelphia, filming Jersey Girl, the second film they have made together this year. She made her way here from a working-class childhood in New York City. 'I really loved growing up in the Bronx,' Lopez recalls. 'We lived in a tenement until I was about six, and then moved into a building in the projects, until Mom and Dad bought a small house. It wasn't normal to live in a house in the Bronx then, but I remember how important it was that my dad was saving up for a house. It was about the American dream of opportunity. You have parents that come from Puerto Rico and they tell you about wearing clothes that don't fit and not being able to speak the language, and their hope that their children have a better life. It was all about my parents providing me with that opportunity and my taking advantage of it. I've worked hard to make something of my life. And that is what's staggering about America to me, its limitlessness.'

Lopez's parents, David, 60, and Guadalupe, 56, now divorced, emigrated from Puerto Rico and settled in the Castle Hill section of the Bronx, a struggling Hispanic barrio; poor, immigrant, Catholic, crime-ridden. Her parents were strict disciplinarians, fiercely ambitious for their three children, and deeply Christian. Her mother taught at the Holy Family School, the Bronx girls' school that Jennifer and her two sisters attended. Today, her older sister, Leslie, 34, teaches music at Westchester, New York. Lynda, 30, her younger sister, is a reporter for NBC in Manhattan.

David Lopez was a computer technician for an insurance firm. 'My dad worked nights, and in the summertime we'd wait up for him to get home and he'd bring us something from the candy store. It's a thing with little girls and their daddies that you so look up to them and worship them. Seeing him work so hard, I felt he was sacrificing part of his life to support us. I got my work ethic from him. Two years ago I made him retire early. Now he lives at my house in Los Angeles.

'My exuberance and love of music came from my mom. Home alone at night, she'd entertain us. She'd sing. We'd act out plays, watch musicals.

My mother loved the movie West Side Story and knew it by heart. I think maybe my mom is a frustrated entertainer and I'm living her dream.'

Today Jennifer Lopez, at 5ft 6in, looks every inch the movie star, although she is smaller, less fleshy, more delicate, and far prettier in person than she appears on camera. She has a broad face with high, prominent cheekbones, a small nose, a wide mouth, and soft brown, deeply expressive eyes. In person she is playful and teasing, certainly with Affleck, and is remarkably open for a public figure, unpretentious, eager to be liked. Her straightforward need of approval, almost childlike in its insistence, is as disarming as it is appealing. It is at odds with a media image that is rude; a controlling bitch/diva making hellish demands and throwing hissy fits on a humiliated entourage. In fact, she is well mannered, respected and liked by those she works with, and is remarkable for the longevity and loyalty of her friendships, including those with former boyfriends and ex-husbands.

'I always wanted everyone to be pleased with me,' she says. 'I went out of my way to be sweet and loving. It was a value that my family stressed.'

Lopez is speaking from her flat in Philadelphia. We meet in one of its sitting rooms - with its walk-in fireplace, lavish chandelier and park views. She leased the place at a reported cost of $17,000 a month, then furnished it in a breezy, expensive Miami Beach-villa sort of way for Affleck and herself. The day I visit, Affleck is barefoot, tousle-haired, unkempt. He had been working late on the movie the night before. Lopez, on the other hand, is fastidiously groomed, as she invariably is in public or private. Beautifully coiffed, she sports a large diamond ring and diamond stud earrings, and wears dress slippers and a brown velveteen jumpsuit bearing a large commercial signature, 'J.Lo' - the logo of her own clothing company.

'When people ask me who I am,' she says, 'I just say, 'I'm a simple girl from the Bronx who worked really hard,' because that's what I feel like I am inside. In Catholic school they discipline you like crazy to live the right way, and these basic values stay with you as you get older - I still try to live by them. They were drummed into my head, 'Be good. Work hard. Do the right thing. Don't hurt anybody. God will look out for you.''

Lopez did well in school, earning high grades. She was also an outstanding athlete who played softball, excelled at gymnastics, and competed in track at the national high-school games. In her early teens, encouraged by her mother, she began taking dance classes. 'I always loved dance! I was always interested in performing. I have this need to create something that affects people. I was at the club every day after school. There was a great teacher there, Larry Maldonado, a dancer with Ballet Hispanico. He became the impetus for me to pursue dancing. I overheard him say to my mother, 'Jennifer's my best one. She has something special. She works harder and shines more. She gives more.' That encouraged me.'

Dance, like sports and school, was seen as a serious business, a ticket out of the barrio into mainstream American life. After all, her family had left home on a mission to find prosperity in the United States, and this compelling desire for material security imposed strict rules of conduct. By all accounts, Lopez was a dutiful child, obedient to her parents and equally ambitious. Nevertheless, at 15, a year after starting to dance at the Bronx club, her focus shifted when she fell in love with a boy her own age. 'It was all about the house and the family... then I fell in love, and it was all about sneaking away from the house.'

The boy was David Cruz, a teenager from the neighbourhood. Her family did not approve of him, thinking she could do much better. They worried about teenage sex and unwanted pregnancy. Lopez, with characteristic wilfulness, continued to see Cruz, sometimes climbing out of a window to secretly meet him. 'David Cruz was my first boyfriend,' she says quietly. 'He was my first love, my best friend, my intense introduction to love. We were together nine years. Dave was from the same small neighbourhood as I was. He was goodhearted and down to earth, loved his mom and family, took pleasure in small things.

I loved him dearly, passionately.'

In 1987, after graduating from high school, Lopez enrolled at college in Manhattan. 'I was going to be a lawyer,' she explains. 'But then one weekend I had a really vivid dream that I was supposed to be in show business. That exact day I decided to drop out of college. I told my mom. She was like, 'This is ridiculous!' But that dream was a turning point. I felt there was another path for me, a destiny, and as long as I didn't make any crazy moves, do anything stupid, things would happen in the way that they're supposed to.'

She left college after one term to try to make it as an entertainer. She took dance and voice lessons, auditioned, supporting herself with clerical work. 'I was working in a bank,' she recalls, 'and this lady said to me, 'Never forget you're two pay cheques away from being homeless.' That put the fear of God in me. Work hard, don't lose focus. There was always that fear. 'Am I going to get another job?' I still have that fear. I remember when I recorded my first album, thinking, 'I'm not that good at anything, so why am I here?' I didn't feel that I had anything more special than anyone else, but there I was.

I love singing, but I also knew my limitations. There's a part of you that's going, 'I can't do this, but also a fighter in you saying, 'No! I can!' The fear plays on you. You think, 'When are they going to pull the rug out from under me and take it all away?' That's why I work so hard. I always feel like I'm struggling. I talked to Ben about it - he was like, 'Aww, that's how I feel too.' You just have to offer it up and let go of the fear.'

Two years after high-school graduation, Lopez got a break when she was cast in Golden Musicals of Broadway, a travelling theatre revue. 'My first job,' she says. 'It was a triumph for my whole family. None of us had been to Europe, and I was touring Europe, singing and dancing, and getting paid!' Next she was hired for Synchronicity, a musical revue that toured Japan. In 1990, back in New York, she won a coveted spot as one of five 'fly girls' - dancers on Fox TV's comedy-sketch series In Living Color. It changed her life.

She moved to LA and rented a two-bedroom loft apartment. Increasingly homesick, she returned to New York every weekend. 'Dave and I had split up,' she recalls. 'I told him I wanted to pursue this as a career. LA was very lonely for me. It was so bad, I wasted all my money that first year on plane tickets. Then one day in New York, I was going to the store in my neighbourhood to get something quick before heading to the airport and I saw Dave. He said, 'I miss you.' I said I missed him. We hooked up again, to the point where I was sobbing because I didn't want to go back alone to LA again. He said, 'I'll come to LA.' And he did.'

They lived together in Hollywood where Cruz found work as a production assistant, and Lopez was noticed as a new talent in In Living Color. Soon she landed roles on TV pilots such as South Central and the 1993 CBS made-for-TV movie Nurses on the Line: the Crash of Flight 7. In 1994 she had two short-lived TV series on CBS: Second Chances and Hotel Malibu. The next year she grabbed her first feature movie role in My Family/Mi Familia, then a co-starring role with Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson in Money Train. She was on her way.'I was passionate about singing, dancing and acting,' she says. 'I wanted to do it so badly.

I wanted to be considered an actress where people saw me in different parts. I fought with agents and managers. I wouldn't go in on certain auditions and I turned down a couple of things. Dave would be, like, 'Jen, come on!' I'd say, 'No! I don't want to do that.' I would wait and I would be hungry and we'd be late on the rent payments, but I believed in myself. I believed there was a bigger plan. I knew I'd pursue it until the day I died.'If I didn't have the breaks I've had, would I have kept going? Yes, I'd be doing it somewhere,' she says. 'It's what I have to do. If I wasn't getting the jobs I'm getting now, I would be singing somewhere, whether it was in a small steakhouse in the middle of Mexico or on a little soapbox in the street with a guy playing guitar next to me.'

But in romance, her luck failed. After five years in LA, Cruz returned to New York without her, although they have remained friends. The relationship with Cruz was the first of her affairs broken by ambition, its end setting a pattern of disharmony between career and romance. 'It's hard to get over that first love. I'm not a big dater, it's never been my style, but I dated other people in LA, though it wasn't the same thing any more. I did get over David. It ran its course.'

Her career continued to flourish with films such as Francis Ford Coppola's Jack, Blood and Wine with Jack Nicholson, Oliver Stone's U Turn, and Anaconda. In 1997, Lopez won the lead role in the biopic Selena; a year later she signed a contract with Epic records and made her first album, On the 6 (after the subway train she rode between the Bronx and Manhattan), beginning her successful singing career. In 1997, she also found time to marry the Cuban-American Ojani Noa.

When they met, Noa was a model and waiter working in Miami at the singer Gloria Estefan's Cuban eatery, Larios. The marriage lasted 13 months, Lopez saying after the divorce that she had been too young and naive at the time, and that there may have been tensions with her career because Noa was 'a bit macho and would sooner have me home'. She thought that the differences in their career status might have contributed to the union's failure.For his part, Noa has said: 'She wanted her career, so everything with us went out the window.' Today Noa manages Lopez's Cuban restaurant, Madre's, in Pasadena, California.

After her marriage to Noa collapsed, she began a very public affair with Sean 'Puffy' Combs, then 29. Their relationship excited attention and brought her unwanted notoriety and danger. Sean Combs, the son of a street hustler who was murdered when Combs was two, went to Howard University, but dropped out after a year to work at Uptown Records in New York City. There, nine young people were crushed to death and 29 others injured during a stampede at an oversold charity basketball game and rap concert that he and Dwight 'Heavy D' Myers organised. A civil lawsuit ruled that Combs and Myers had 'proximately caused' injuries and deaths. In 1995, Combs pleaded guilty to criminal mischief after a confrontation with a newspaper photographer. In 1997, Christopher 'Notorious B.I.G.' Wallace, a close friend and rap star of Combs's company, Bad Boy Entertainment, was murdered. Two years later, Combs was charged with disorderly conduct for attacking Steve Stoute, a record producer, with a champagne bottle, a chair and a telephone.

Combs's relationship with Lopez effectively ended on December 27, 1999, following the shooting by his protégé, Jamal 'Shyne' Barrow, of three patrons at Club New York, a Manhattan rap hang-out to which Combs had taken Lopez. Lopez was arrested as a material witness and Combs was collared for illegal possession of a handgun. The charge against Lopez was dropped, and in March 2001 Combs was acquitted.It was thought that Combs had been using Lopez to ameliorate his thuggish image. Lopez is embraced by many people of colour as a dream princess, the good girl from the ghetto who made it big. One only has to see the near hysteria in the crowds that greet her to understand the hold she has on the young in minority communities. Her friendship with 'Puffy' Combs made him welcome among New York's rich celebrity set. When I ask why she allowed herself to be associated with someone of Combs's reputation, Lopez says: 'We loved each other.' When pressed to expand, she reacts with astonishment and dismay, repeatedly offering 'love' as explanation, as if love redeems poor judgment.

'Say what you want about my relationship with Mr Combs, but there was a lot of love there. He will tell you that. I can only speak for myself. For me it was not a healthy relationship. There was a lot of dishonesty, which led to its demise. Any love, when it's mistreated, deteriorates. And for me, it really deteriorated!'

In 2001, Lopez launched her own clothing line, released her second album, founded a film company, Nuyorican Productions, and married again, this time to Cris Judd, 29, a dancer from Niceville, Florida. She described their wedding on a mountain top in Calabasas, California, as 'magical'. The clothing company is promising, the album has sold more than 8m copies, the production company is doing well - but the marriage died after 10 months.

She met Judd when he danced for her music video Love Don't Cost a Thing, in LA in 2000. After they wed, Lopez made a real effort to include him in her career. They wrote a song together, Alive, for her film Enough. She let him direct her in another music video, Ain't It Funny (Remix), then let him choreograph her NBC TV special, Jennifer Lopez in Concert from Puerto Rico. It wasn't enough. Their divorce becomes final in California on January 26, 2003, and she will be free to marry again.

'I've been through the marriage ceremony two times,' Lopez noted, 'but I've never felt like I have been in a real marriage. We had a lot of love for each other, and a lot of hope it was going to last for ever. You know, it didn't last a year. To have a real marriage you have to do it right, become a family.'

Jennifer Lopez's attitude toward marriage was formed by her Catholic faith, by her family's conservative social values, and by her strong desire to have children. She is unwilling to bear children out of wedlock. Much of that can be credited to her view of marriage as an equal partnership - she is not one to let fathers off the hook. 'I want to have a proper family.' she says. 'I've been in a lot of relationships that haven't worked out. I don't want to have a baby and not be with the father.'

Lopez's relationships seem further burdened by a dreamy romanticism about love and marriage, the idea that there is the perfect man out there somewhere. 'Marriage has a funny dynamic,' she says. 'All of a sudden things change, and you expect something different from the person you married. All this stuff comes into play, and it is not simply about loving someone. Things have to come into sync, you have to be on the same page.

'You get so wrapped up in this business that you think it's all that is important,' she says. 'I don't see it that way. I know what will fill my soul is to have my own family. I can't wait to have kids!'

So what makes her relationship with Affleck different? Now engaged, the two have been a couple since last spring when they met on the set of their movie Gigli, a gangster comedy in which she plays a lesbian assassin-for-hire.

'I always knew I would find my partner one day,' she declares, smiling. 'A person on my level who would not feel jealous, who would root for me and I for him. Someone who would love me unconditionally, in a way I didn't think I could be loved, and that I would feel the same love for him.'

Ben Affleck, 30, was raised in a working-class neighbourhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of a school janitor and elementary school teacher who later divorced. He started acting when he was nine. He dropped out of college and headed to Hollywood where he wrote the script of Good Will Hunting with his best friend, the actor Matt Damon - and won an Oscar for it.

Affleck, unlike Lopez, is a political activist. He has campaigned for Al Gore, speaks out in defence of striking workers and environmental causes. He is known for his intelligence, humour, loyalty and generosity - he has given Lopez a blue Bentley convertible, a diamond bracelet and a diamond solitaire ring, among other pricey presents.

To be with them in private is to witness the delight they take in one another. They touch hands, they nuzzle. They have reached a point where they can speak wordlessly, with a glance. But will this relationship last despite the pressures of their separate careers? 'People change and grow,' Lopez replies. 'For the first time, I feel a real need to find the balance in my life. This business can be so crazy and, as wonderful as it can be, it just doesn't fill your soul.'

They have not yet announced a date for their wedding, although the fact that they will marry is assumed and welcomed by their families. This time Lopez may have a real shot at making it work. The two stars are relatively equal in earning power, age and status, and both are veterans of celebrity. They know the rules, and little about the game surprises them any more.

'I'm motherly. Ben calls me 'Ma'. I take care of everybody. It's a responsibility, and Ben and I talk about it a lot because he has the same thing in his life - taking care of people. It's wonderful when you finally get somebody who wants to lift some of the load for you, and you want to carry some of that load for him, instead of each of us carrying it alone.'Are you happy? I ask. 'Happy?' she replies. 'With Ben? Yes.'

Thanks to Claire (EuroMAFan) for the heads up!