Jennifer the Conqueror
The Red Cube is red, small and boxy and hot. It is London’s newest club, and it is also ear-shreddingly loud and stuffed to the gills with swilling Brits. Jennifer Lopez and her crew flow through the crowd, escorted by a man in a suit to a private room just off the dance floor. The walls of the room are black glass; there are zebra-print couches and a large screen airing looped bits of such Seventies classics as The Exorcist, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Dirty Harry spliced with subliminally fast flashes of girl-on-girl porn. It is soon turned off. There is sushi no one eats and a bar full of Cristal, booze and beer. Servers are taking orders, repeatedly crisscrossing the narrow room. Jennifer Lopez sits between her manager and her dancers, wearing a pink-and-white halter with matching jeans, methodically surveying the scene.
Aside from a friend of a friend who sits with his head in his hands, the people in the room are Lopez’s second family. She spends more time with these dancers, managers, stylists and publicists than with her folks back in the Bronx or even with her boyfriend, Sean “Puffy” Combs. “No matter where she’s at,” says producer Cory Rooney, Lopez’s principal musical collaborator, “she’s got her crew who rolls with her — and they party.” Says Lopez, “I need them around me. We love each other, we work really hard, and we play really hard together.” Not only that, “they’re great at what they do.” Champagne seems to be the drink of choice, but Jennifer Lopez sips naught. She doesn’t smoke or do drugs, either. “Sometimes I’ll have some champagne when somebody makes a toast,” she says. “But I’ll never finish it. I just never really got into drinking. And now I don’t have the time. I don’t have the three minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette!”
Lopez does, however, dance, and the maitre d’ is soon called in to remove the glass coffee table. Lopez hops from her couch perch and shrieks with glee as the DJ plays “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” by Brit dance act Modjo. When she rises, the entire room rises, too. Lopez exudes a benevolent control over her surroundings; when she’s not demanding that everyone do as she does, everyone just seems to want to.
The room grooves hard to Madonna’s “Vogue” and Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” and when the DJ slips on a bit of Chic’s “Good Times,” Lopez, her dancers and her stylists re-create the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” continuing on after the song is gone. Lopez shimmies around the room — so much so that she breaks a strap on her top, a situation speedily remedied by two stylists and a Band-Aid. The party gets looser as even the misanthrope gives it a go. He suddenly rises and begins break dancing, while Lopez and her dancers circle around him, a body-popping B-boy in an Oxford shirt.
Not long after, Jennifer Lopez bids her friends adieu and is escorted away by her bodyguard B.O.B. (sure, it spells Bob, but ask, and the Lopez crew will simply explain that it is pronounced B-O-B). The rest of her posse parties on, working up the hangovers that Lopez affectionately giggles at the next morning. Jennifer Lopez doesn’t have time to waste on late nights. She may have two simultaneously successful careers in film and music, but she’s far from done. And until she is, there isn’t much she’ll let get in the way.
Jennifer Lopez is the highest-paid Latina in Hollywood history, commanding $9 million a picture. Her debut album, On the 6, sold 8 million copies worldwide. J.Lo, her far-superior second effort, will make her more ubiquitous than that nearly nude Versace dress she wore to the Grammys. Her last movie, The Cell, made an impressive $60 million, and she has two new movies: the just-released romantic comedy The Wedding Planner, and the upcoming supernatural thriller Angel Eyes, with three more scheduled to follow.
“I get my work ethic from my parents,” she says, lounging the next day in London’s swank Metropolitan Hotel. “I feel like I haven’t even started yet. I’m looking forward to the ninth album, the thirtieth movie. I want to write more songs, tour, find the right roles, have my own family. That’s why I have so much energy. I know what lies ahead.”
