Surviving Hurricane Jennifer

Affleck says he doesn't know why their union caused such a hostile reaction. "Hopefully I can get far enough away from it in time to be able to get a better sense of it," he says, although he suspects the hostility "had something to do with race and class. That pushed a button. This is a country that flew into a gigantic uproar about Janet Jackson's breast. There's still a heavy-duty puritan influence going on, and we still hold ourselves to a pretty chaste ideal, which includes, buried within it, the tradition of people being with people like them. We were thought of as two different kinds of people, not just racially but culturally." Perhaps that's why the tabloids have gone easier on Lopez dating singer Marc Anthony. Affleck lights another of his menthol Marlboro Lights. "Basically, it just came down to, 'Wow, I never thought those two would get together.' "

Affleck and lopez met on the set of Gigli in December 2001, when she was still married to dancer Cris Judd, but it was during the filming of Jersey Girl, the following summer, that they fell in love. As did the public: This reporter was present on the last night of filming on Park Avenue in New York, when the frenzy was just cresting. On that day, the two were on the front page of both the Daily News and the New York Post, and a hundred-strong mob of rambunctious paparazzi was gathered at the edge of the set, hoping for more shots.

Suddenly the two appeared -- he in sharp suit, she looking lusciously beautiful in a fur coat, towering high heels and bare, tanned legs. The crowd went berserk. They shot a scene, over and over, in which they chitchat for a moment and then he kisses her. Their make-outs continued after Smith yelled, "cut," and were so intense that it felt invasive to watch.

The day before was even more frenetic, when Smith filmed in Central Park for a scene in a horse-drawn carriage. "It was bizarre," says Smith. "These were just guys in guerrilla-warfare outfits, snapping photos like we were in the DMZ. As soon as we would yell cut, voom, they would just descend like a cloud of locusts. I was like, 'Jesus Christ, why? Like two famous people have never fucked before?' "

The film was shot mostly in Philadelphia, where the pair shared an apartment. Affleck recalls it as a "great, wonderful time."

"They'd come to the set together, they'd get made up together, they'd be in their trailer together," says Smith. "If you found one, you'd find the other. If we had any problem with the movie, it was that you'd want to go get them, but the trailer was rocking. So you'd just let them be."

The couple announced their engagement in November 2002, but signs of strain appeared by next summer. The tabloids reported that Affleck, in Vancouver to film Paycheck, had frolicked with strippers at Brandi's Exotic Nightclub, although he dismisses reports of hanky-panky. "There have been plain, baldfaced lies people have told about me for money," he says.

Then Gigli was fricasseed, making just $3.8 million on its opening weekend. A few days before their scheduled September wedding in Santa Barbara, California, the pair issued a statement saying the nuptials were postponed due to media scrutiny. "That really was the truth," Affleck says. From there, the relationship seemed to limp along, finally ending in January.

"It was weird," says Smith. "In the course of time from Jersey Girl's wrap up until now, it was watching the entire life cycle of the public's fascination, then revulsion and the fallout."

Did the two fan the flames of interest? There's no need to read between the lines of Lopez's song "To Ben," for instance: "I think God made you for me/A mix of passionate fidelities/Baby, you're so complete /I write this song to let you know /That you will always be to me /My lust, my love, my man, my child, my friend and my king. . . ."