Twenty-odd years later, Jennifer Lopez is still shaking her mane and getting the lion's share of attention, capturing Hollywood arid the American pop-music scene in a single, sudden burst. Lopez, 30, became one of the highest-paid Latina actresses ever when she earned $2 million for proving to be George Clooney's romantic match in 1998's Out of Sight, and she will yank another $5 million to co-star with Vince Vaughn in her forthcoming thriller The Cell. Add to that lineup a lucrative contract as one of the new faces of L'Oréal. This summer, Lopez's smash single "If You Had My Love" muscled in on Britney Spears and Cher, hitting No. 1 for five weeks. The accompanying video earned her four nominations at the Sept. 9 MTV Video Music Awards, while her debut album, On the 6, has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. "Of all the actors and actresses who have tried to become recording artists," says Billboard director of charts Geoff Mayfield, "it's hard to think of one who has done quite as well. Potsie and Ralph Malph from Happy Days had recording contracts, and about the last you ever heard from them is when they announced they had recording contracts."
Lopez herself is hardly eager to make an announcement regarding one of the year's best-kept secrets. Is she or isn't she dating Sean "Puffy" Combs? The megarapper not only put her on the cover of Notorious, the multicultural magazine he copublishes, but reportedly gave her a $60,000 Franck Muller watch and produced and wrote a track on her album. Many a gossip column has chronicled Lopez's adventures with the music mogul, who in Notorious interviewed her in a style usually reserved for elementary school newspapers. "Do you like me?" asked Combs, 29. "Do you like me?" asked Lopez. "Yeah, I like you. Do you like me?" asked Combs. "Yeah, I like you," said Lopez.
Lopez no longer denies she's Combs's cream puff; now she simply refuses to comment at all. For his part, Puffy gets huffy when asked whether he and Lopez are an item. "People have tried to take it further and assume things," he says, "but we're friends." Combs does confirm he has broken up with Kim Porter, the mother of his son Christopher, 17 months.
If she and Puffy are an item, it'll be the first time Lopez has been attached to a financial equal. A few years ago she broke up with her Bronx beau David Cruz, her high school sweetheart. Stephanie Cozart Burton, Lopez's makeup artist on In Living Color, the early '90s comedy series on which Lopez appeared as a dancing Fly Girl, remembers Cruz well. "He seemed so sweet but not quite ready for prime time, like the high school boyfriend who was going to get left behind," recalls Burton. And in 1997, a few months after Lopez married Ojani Noa, whom she met while he was waiting tables at Gloria Estefan's Miami Beach restaurant, Larios on the Beach, she told Movieline magazine, "It's tough for me because the men I'm attracted to, for some reason, haven't gotten it together.... [Ojani] is never gonna make as much money as me." In 1998, she and Noa, now 25, divorced. "She wanted her career," Noa told the New York Post, "so everything with us went out the window."
Reports have also linked Lopez to Sony Music boss (and Mariah Carey's ex) Tommy Mottola, whose company released her album, but both deny they made anything but music together. "When I got the demo tape," says Mottola, "I listened to it and called her. She's not Aretha Franklin, but who is?"
Lopez's work ethic has won praise from her U-Turn director Oliver Stone ("She's a tough chick," he says. "She was barefoot for days with fake blood on her"), but some male fans are more interested in what's behind the music. "I have a curvaceous body, like many Latina girls," she told PEOPLE in 1997. Lately, though, she seems to have worked off her once-ballyhooed backside: She eats only egg whites before noon and works out up to four times a week. "I work really hard to have my body the way it is," she told Elle.
As a girl growing up in a middle-class Bronx family of Puerto Rican heritage—her father, David, 57, is a computer specialist for an insurance company in Manhattan, and her mother, Lupe, 53, teaches kindergarten in a suburban Catholic school—young Jennifer started taking dance lessons at age 5. She dreamed of becoming a star during her frequent trips into Manhattan on the No. 6 subway train—recalled in her album title On the 6—with Lynda, now 28 and a disc jockey for New York City radio station WKTU, and Leslie, now 31 and a music teacher. By age 16, Lopez was landing small acting parts; she would later dance in theatrical shows that toured overseas.
Her breakthrough came in a 1990 audition for In Living Color's choreographer Rosie Perez, in which Lopez beat out 2,000 other contenders to become one of the groovin' Fly Girls. Her first big movie role, as a Mexican immigrant in 1995's Mi Familia, led to her star-making title turn as the slain Tejano singer Selena two years later. Ironically, the film's producers made her lip-sync the part. Today, Lopez, who tools around in a Mercedes convertible, and her cocker spaniel, Boots, share an apartment in West Hollywood that features an all-white, gauze-draped bedroom. Still, she considers New York her real home and sometimes stays with her family.
While she has long since broken out of strictly Latin roles—she was an Italian-American in Out of Sight, an Apache in U-Turn and will play a non-Latina character opposite Brendan Fraser in next year's romantic comedy The Wedding Planner—Lopez is still muy caliente to her homegirls. "I feel like there's a pride in the Latin community about the fact that I'm out there," says Lopez. "My voice teacher told me he has a few Latin girls that come to him and say, 'We're so proud of her.' That's a beautiful thing for me."
Kyle Smith
Tom Cunneff and Champ Clark in Los Angeles. Bob Meadows and Natasha Stoynoff in New York City
- Contributors:
- Tom Cunneff,
- Champ Clark,
- Bob Meadows,
- Natasha Stoynoff.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
