JENNIFER LOPEZ CAN'T BE STOPPED. A-LIST FILM CAREER? GOT IT. RECORDING CONTRACT? DONE. ENDORSEMENTS? PLENTY. NASTY GOSSIP COLUMN ITEMS? SURE. THIS SUMMER SHE BRINGS GEORGE CLOONEY TO HIS KNEES IN OUT OF SIGHT. DAVID HANDLEMAN MEETS UP WITH THE BRONX BOMBSHELL.

"Can you use a trampoline?" the director asked Jennifer Lopez. It was 1989, and Lopez, then a nineteen-year-old aspiring dancer from the Bronx, had just walked in to her first TV commercial audition, for a spot promoting the Olympics. Lopez knew the right answer, and didn't hesitate. She looked her inquisitor in the eye, lied - "Oh, yeah!" - and was hired.

The commercial never aired, and though Lopez would audition for others, "I sucked," the actress candidly assesses. She ultimately opted out of ad work, deciding, "I just can't be convincing. You have to believe in something."

What Lopez believed in, unflaggingly, was herself - a product she knew how to sell. Her manager, Eric Gold, first met her in 1991, when he was co-producing In Living Color and Lopez beat out thousands of applicants to become one of the libidinous Fly Girls who danced between sketches. "There was just an unshakable confidence about Jennifer," Gold recalls. "No doubt, no fear. The girl just had it."

In the intervening years, Lopez danced, acted, schmoozed, flirted, and toughed her way into a flurry of dramatic roles on TV and in movies, including the hits Money" Train and Anaconda, exuding a potent onscreen combination of va-va-va-voom and don't-mess-with-me street smarts. By last year, she was paid $1 million to play the title role in the biopic of slain Tejano singer Selena, making Lopez America's most visible Latina actress, and leading to a recording deal with Sony - despite the fact that she lip synced to the real Selena in the film.

These days, everybody wants to hitch themselves to her star. Clothing designers are after her to be seen at their shows and to show off their gowns (she wore Badgley Mischka to the last two Academy Awards shows, and Valentino to the Golden Globes) And earlier this year, the almighty Coca-Cola company approached her to be a celebrity endorser; Lopez finally made another commercial. Her ad is one of those soft-sell fin de siecle concoctions in which the product is never mentioned aloud; indeed, the overriding theme of the thirty-second spot is Jennifer Lopez, Movie Star. "It wasn't easy to find an open door," Lopez intones in the sappy voice-over, "to make my dreams come true. But here I am, working hard yesterday, working hard today."

Lopez shows up fifteen minutes late for our lunch in the lobby restaurant at New York's St. Regis hotel, because she's just come from a meeting about another prestigious endorsement deal, with L'Oreal. Several of the stylists were Latina, and one of them claimed to have suggested Lopez to the company when it was looking for someone to appeal to the Latin market. "She told me, 'My two daughters, they love you,' " Lopez relates.

So do a lot of A-list directors, actors, and studios, not to mention moviegoers. And now, at twenty-eight, Jennifer Lopez is having her moment. Hers is the new American Face, and her rise partly reflects Hollywood's growing awareness of cultural diversity as a selling tool, both domestically and abroad.

But all along, Lopez has been determined not to market herself as just a Latina actress. "My managers and agents and I realized that I'm not white," she says with a laugh, "so I've always wanted to show that I could play any kind of character. Not only a range of emotions, but also race-wise."

And she is talented enough to have pulled it off. She played a heroic Mexican matriarch in My Family/Mi Familia, the Cuban mistress of Jack Nicholson in Blood and Wine, and a Bronx cop love-triangulating between Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson in Money Train. But Francis Ford Coppola also chose her over Ashley Judd to play Robin Williams's schoolteacher in Jack; Oliver Stone selected her over Sharon Stone to play an incest victim in U-Turn; and Steven Soderbergh hired Lopez over Sandra Bullock to play a tough federal marshall kidnapped by escaped convict George Clooney for the just-released thriller Out of Sight.

Lopez's textured performance as Karen Sisco leaves no doubt that she has become one of our most appealing, empathedic leading ladies (and perhaps the only one who looks convincing wielding firearms). The serious heat she generates with Clooney - whether climbing, fully clothed, into his bathtub, or slowly undressing with him - finally provides him with the kind of big-screen chemistry that neither Michelle Pfeiffer nor Nicole Kidman could supply.

"It's not a question of, are people ready to see a Latina actress in big movies," Soderbergh says. "The point is, people are ready to see Jennifer in high-profile movies. She's sexy, intelligent, beautiful but not implausibly beautiful, and she's got both really good instincts and very good technical chops, which is rare."

Lopez knew she wanted to be a star as early as age four or five. Though there weren't many Hispanic role models in mainstream show biz - and many who were, like Rita Hayworth, had Caucasian makeovers - she watched West Side Story over and over, dreaming of being the next Rita Moreno.

As a teenager, Lopez first dressed "very Bronx, hip-hop, boyish" in tight jeans and boots. "Then Madonna came along," she says. "I always admired her, liked her music, her sense of style. I like that she changed all the time. I like doing that, too, I like changing for my movies."

Lopez dropped out of Baruch College in New York City after one semester to devote herself to being a dancer. She studied jazz and ballet, and aspired to dance on Broadway, but then, she says, "Hammer came out with 'U Can't Touch This,' and all the auditions started becoming hip-hop auditions. I was good at it, and they were like, 'Ooh, a lightskinned girl who can do that. Great, let's hire her!' " "You have to be so committed," she says of those early days as a dancer, mainly in rap videos. "People say you need something just to fall back on; I don't believe in that. If you're gonna make it in this business, you need the kind of personality that, you have to do it or die, there's no alternative." She won the In Living Color gig from an open call, and when Fox aired a special about the Fly Girls, one of the dancer's husbands saw it and plucked Lopez for a TV pilot he was producing, South Central. The show didn't last, but it lead to some other pilots and to her first film role, in Gregory Nava's multigenerational epic Mi familia. Like any good manager, Eric Gold is convinced he can turn her into an international superstar, as he did with her fellow In Living Color alumnus Jim Carrey. Jeff Ayeroff, who signed Lopez to his Sony label, the Work Group, and who has worked with Madonna, Paula Abdul, and Janet Jackson, is also a true believer: "Jennifer's got all the tools," he says. "She's got the drive, the personality, she can dance unbelievably - and she's gorgeous."

All this bragging is fine from others, but Lopez made the mistake of doing it herself recently to Movieline magazine, trash-talking much as her idol Madonna did in her early days. She touted herself as having "the stardom glow"; described Money Train co-stars Snipes and Harrelson as hitting on her constantly; and dissed almost every actress her age. (Gwyneth Paltrow? "I swear to God, I don't remember anything she was in." Winona Ryder? "I've never heard anyone in the public or among my friends say, 'Oh, I love her.' " Cameron Diaz? "A lucky model who's been given a lot of opportunities,") Embarrassed, Lopez drafted an apology letter to everyone she'd offended. "I didn't want those girls to think I was trying to trash them or anything," she says. "And I was sorry about the way it came off, I really was, I really lost sleep over it, so I wanted them to know that."

But if Paltrow and Ryder, who are close friends, compared notes, they would surely have realized that they'd gotten a form letter from Lopez, which would have only dug a deeper hole for her. Lopez admits that she followed up with more personal notes, but she has yet to hear back from anyone.

"You know, I am ambitious and I am confident," she says, "but who isn't in this business? And that article depicted me in a diva sort of way, like I'm not a nice person, and that was disturbing to me."

Meanwhile, her stardom has mushroomed into the kind that feeds the hungry tabloids. Lopez has been in the gossip columns for allegedly stealing a Versace dress she'd been lent (she denies this - "I need to steal a dress? What am I gonna do, wear a $20,000 gown around the house?") and for dating the CEO of her label, Mariah Carey's ex-husband, Tommy Mottola. ("We're not seeing each other," she says sternly. "Never were.") There have also been items linking Lopez to Puff Daddy - they were spotted frolicking in the pool at Miami's Delano Hotel, and, during the shoot for his Godzilla video, crew members were forbidden from filming her-but she dismisses the notion of a romance as "rumors." She also tries to put the kibosh on discussing why she dumped her husband, Ojani Noa, after a year of marriage: "I promised that I'm not talking about my personal life anymore," Lopez says. "I just feel like something has to be sacred.

"When I fall in love," she continues, "it's so sick, I just can't deal. . . . I am a seeker of love."

Noa, for his part, is reluctant to talk about Lopez, because, as he puts it, "I don't want to put my hand in fire, I don't want to get in trouble. Me, her, we married, whatever. She's doing her thing, and I'm doing my thing. Everything is, you know, separate."

For now, Lopez is concentrating on finishing her debut album before starting her next movie, Thieves, with Kiss the Girls director Gary Fleder, so the record can be released next January.

It's a career move with few respectable antecedents; most stars who both sing and act (Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Whitney Houston) first established themselves as pop stars. On the flip side, record bins are littered with crappy cash-in releases by the likes of Bruce Willis and Don Johnson. But Lopez shows no sign of worry. "Yeah, it's always hard to cross from one thing to another. But as with getting a part that people don't think you can do, everything goes away if the product is good, if you do a good job." At this year's Oscar ceremony, Lopez was one of the only young actresses asked to be a presenter who comported herself as if she actually belonged onstage. Afterward, she walked back to the greenroom where other celebrities were hanging out. "It was packed," she recalls. "Alec Baldwin, Robert De Niro, Whoopi Goldberg, Sharon Stone, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson. When I first walked in, I walked back out - I was like, Oh my God, that is a room right there! I composed myself and walked back in."

Yet within a few seconds, she had taken out her cellular phone and begun dialing. Warren Beatty, whom she'd met briefly, looked over incredulously: Lopez was the only one backstage at the Oscars with the gumption to take out her phone. Beatty had to know - who was she calling?

Lopez told him: Her mother.

She asked her mother, "Did you see me?"

"Yes, I loved your hair, I loved your dress," Guadalupe Lopez responded. Beatty took the phone to say hello. "Warren who?" her mother asked. "Warren Beatty," he said.

"It is not," Mrs. Lopez told him. "Put Jennifer back on the phone." Warren, meet the new Madonna.


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