Cover Story: A Woman Possessed

And she does talk about Jay, though not by name. She's very free with "we." Asked where she was during the blackout of 2003, she replies, "We were at the 40/40 Club," the Manhattan sports bar Jay-Z opened last year. There was a generator at the club, so the party never stopped. "At 4 a.m. we took a plane to Italy," she says. "We got to Rome, and they had a blackout there."

Beyonce and Jay's movements around the globe are well documented by the paparazzi. A recent photo from their New Year's vacation in St. Barth's shows Beyonce jumping into the water off the bridge of a three-story, 141-foot yacht while Jay captures the moment with a video camera. It was a long way down. "Yeah, it was," she says. "I don't know what's wrong with me. I looked at the picture and said, 'That's really dumb.' I do it every year. That's my jump. It's a ritual. That's my 'let go, start over, this is a vacation and I'm-a be free.' I have to jump off something so I can let go of everything that happened before the last vacation and start over. It's like bein' baptized.

(Excerpted from RS 943, March 4, 2004)