J.LO GETS RIGHT

After seven tumultuous years in the spotlight, Jennifer Lopez talks about finding a good place, some good movies, a good man, and a new beginning. By Joseph Hooper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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