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'I'll Do Whatever It Takes to Be a Mother'; in an Exclusive Photo Shoot for Night & Day, Jennifer Lopez Reveals Her New Image, and in Her Only UK Interview She Talks about Marriage, Motherhood and Saying Goodbye to Her Alter Ego, J-Lo.

January 2, 2005

The last time I met Jennifer Lopez, it was her first day off in seven weeks and she wanted me to go shopping with her to Louis Vuitton. I was a bit nervous about refusing but my copy deadline meant there really wasn't time.

She took the news reasonably well, sat down on the sofa and stared at my shoes, tan suede mules.

'Where did you get them?' 'Er, New Look.' She tried to get them on but they were too small. She called out to her assistant to write down the name and the price, which was [pounds sterling]15.99, although she had a problem with the price. 'Is that [pounds sterling]1,599 or [pounds sterling]15,999?' Before that, in May 2000, we had met in her hotel suite in Toronto, where she was making the police thriller Angel Eyes. It was the height of J-Lo mania, the gossip columns were full of stories about her tantrums and demands.

Everything seemed to be spinning out of control. Months previously, she and Sean 'Puff Daddy' Combs had been arrested after a shooting at a nightclub, and rumour had it she was going to drop him, yet neither Combs nor Jennifer had said a thing to the press.

She wanted to show me a video she kept in her room.

The big white bed was half-covered by a huge, soft toy dog.

'Scooby sleeps with me when Sean isn't around,' she said.

That was four years and many dozens of pairs of shoes ago - and several husbands. My memory of her was sitting hugging a cushion in that glitzy hotel suite. She told me then that when she wanted to feel happy she thought about dressing up in her mother's nighties with her sister. I remember thinking of a little girl who wanted to be famous and now just wanted to be safe.

Back to 2004 and it's a freezing cold day in New York and the venue for the interview can hardly be described as glamorous. The Sony recording studios are exactly that: studios complete with sound rooms, assorted denim-clad engineers, dim lights and a dark, fuggy smell of beer and cigarettes.

Jennifer's new album booms out of the speakers.

The mood is upbeat. Jennifer's new manager, Simon Fields, arrives to say that Ms Lopez is here. Bang on time, ready and waiting to talk.

Down a couple of corridors, double-doors open on to a larger room with the same fuggy smell, masked only by a large bowl of lilies and a couple of Jo Malone grapefruit-scented candles. Jennifer is standing talking to her assistant. She looks taller than usual in a pair of dizzyingly high-heeled vintage boots, and her honey-coloured hair is long and straight, adding to the lean effect.

From behind you get the best view of the famous bottom, hugged by tight denim jeans. It's biggish but not that big (on a bad day she's a size 12), definitely more pear than apple and artfully highlighted by a green shirt under a red hoodie top that stops short of her waist. She swings around with a wide smile, puts out her hand and puckers up her mouth for a kiss. Close up she smells really clean, like she's just stepped out of the shower. Her hands are warm although she immediately rubs them and you get a blurry flash of a large gold wedding ring. 'How are you doing?' she says. 'It's been a long time.' She's in a great mood.

She fixes me with her brown eyes. Her whole face is glowing (she swears it's not a pregnancy glow - 'I wish').

'Practically every day I have my mother on the phone asking me if there's any news,' she says. 'I'm like "Mom- give me a chance". What can you do?

'I sooo want to be pregnant. I'm ready, I'm waiting and I want it to happen as soon as it possibly can. I know it would be the best thing in the world right now. I'm so happy and I just know it's the right time. You just know when you're ready, don't you?' If you don't know Jennifer Lopez, you have to believe this is the real deal. Forget everything you've read or heard before because, in person, what you get is not a diva or a bling-bling, triple-X ego but a funny, sweet Latino girl who knows what everyone thinks of her but is determined to get what she wants - whatever the cost.

To fill you in on the Jennifer Lopez story so far, it goes something like this. Born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents, she dreamed only of being a famous dancer. After years spent hoofing around Manhattan working as a backing dancer for the likes of Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul, she finally got a break as a sassy fly girl on the US TV show In Living Color. Quickly she learnt that the key to success was diversification. She put herself up for movies and got small parts in Money Train and Blood and Wine. In 1997 came the unexpected hit Out of Sight with George Clooney.

In a bid to create a new screen sex symbol, Clooney had been paired with Michelle Pfeiffer and Nicole Kidman in blockbusters but both had failed to ignite a spark. Then along came the unknown Latino with the body of a young Sophia Loren and the face of an angel.

Hollywood (and Clooney) rediscovered old-fashioned sex appeal. The effect was dynamite.

Much was made of the Lopez curves, a figure that flew in the face of the Hollywood vogue for skin-and-bones stars. 'La Guitarra', as the Latinos called her, was a true Venus woman with boobs, hips and a bum that could fill - and spill out of - a pair of jeans. 'They knew my butt before they knew my name,' she shrugs. 'I was like, "the butt girl".' I first met Jennifer in 1998, in a room above a West End club. Lying across a cream settee, she barely looked up from her magazine to acknowledge my presence. It was her first interview with a British magazine, but she wasn't turning on the smiles or the charm for anyone. She didn't do small talk, she hadn't a clue about how to treat the press, except with the deepest - and undisguised - suspicion. Her one-year marriage to the waiter Ojani Noa had disintegrated with the success of Out of Sight.

Arms crossed, knees drawn under chin, she looked unhappy and disillusioned.

She didn't even pretend to trust me. She shrugged a lot, talked to other people in the room, but she made me laugh out loud when I asked her about being named the sexiest woman on the planet by FHM magazine. Jennifer looked at me right in the eyes and said: 'I am sexy. I've got a great body. I've got curves and that's why men like me, because I'm a real woman.' I was struck by the way she said it, her shameless unapologetic confidence.

Three months later, we met again, in a dressing-room trailer outside London Weekend Television. Jennifer's debut album, On the 6, was a massive hit all over the world.

By now she was dating Puff Daddy, and had been officially rechristened J-Lo.

There was a lot of hanging around that day, urgent mobile-phone calls between Jennifer's assistants and, for me, tension, as time was running out.

Finally, I was let into the trailer. Wearing a tiny white top, a pair of white knickers, her trademark silver hoop earrings and her hair va-va-voomed into Farrah Fawcett waves, she was like the most popular girl in the class surrounded by her girlfriends, all squashed and squawking around a small table.

J-Lo was the Bronx girl with her posse, that bit happier, that bit more in control. The shrugs were replaced by giggles, and it was still impossible to get her full attention.

She shouted out to her friends throughout the interview, wiggling into a white miniskirt as she talked. Any mention of Combs made her smile, laugh or blush; she didn't hide any of it behind a sophisticated front. You could imagine her writing his name with hearts around it. 'I'm a romantic. I love him and he loves me,' she said.

Crucially for Jennifer, she was the first Puerto Rican actress to retain her real name (Rita Hayworth, born Margarita Carmen Cansino, and Raquel Welch, originally Jo Tejada, both changed theirs to suit Hollywood), and the first to be paid $5 million ([pounds sterling]2.5 million) per movie.

Men's magazines fell over themselves to put her sensual image on their covers.

It was at this point that the mercurial supermanager, Benny Medina, stepped in to reinvent Jennifer.

By 1999, J-Lo the diva was born and she was the hottest property in Hollywood. The infamous stories about her demands for Egyptian cotton sheets and white flowers flew like confetti, and life in the fast lane really began.

'It was all a bit mad,' she says now, pulling her hoodie top down over her jeans. She talks slowly and carefully. 'I'm not saying I didn't enjoy myself, because for a girl like me wearing gorgeous clothes and having all this attention was just amazing. It was like being a princess. But it didn't take me long to realise that that sort of fame can be scary. The more the circus builds up around you, the more you start to lose all those intentions that got you there in the first place.

'I was always about being a good performer and working hard, doing movies, making music, but that started to get lost in all the crazy stuff.

'It started to feel out of control. I felt like I was the same person on the inside but the outside was so different. All that diva stuff was just so unreal. I never made demands like that. I would never ask for rooms to be painted white.

'Sometimes you can get stuck in a world and you don't know how to get out because it's all so crazy. But you learn - boy do you learn. Hey, you're not talking to someone who makes a few mistakes. You're talking to the queen of making mistakes. I've had so many crashes over the past few years. But what I've come to realise about myself is that I'm good at picking myself up. If I wasn't, I don't think I'd be sitting here right now.

The first crash came after the incident at the New York nightclub with Combs. Within a matter of months her affair with the multimillionaire rapper was over, and in September 2001 she rushed into a peaches-and-cream wedding to her quiet, pretty backing dancer, Cris Judd.

Of course, they all said it would never last - and it didn't. The humble Judd just wasn't enough for his super-successful wife. Within the year it was over (although again they have remained on good terms) and Jennifer threw herself into work. On the set of her first post-Judd movie, Gigli, she went full pelt into a ridiculously glamorous relationship with Ben Affleck, a romance marked by pink diamonds (her), gooey appearances in a pop video (him), a Ferrari Spider (her) and a fling with a lap dancer (him), which somewhat wrecked the plans for a fantastically ostentatious wedding.

Then, five months after splitting from Affleck, in the privacy of her Beverly Hills home, she walked out into her garden wearing a Vera Wang dress and $7 millionworth of Neil Lane diamonds and married her ex-boyfriend, the Latino singer Marc Anthony.

Jennifer is aware how all this makes her look. She has only a few options in making the best of her public image. She can tell all and weep and cry about her mistakes and bleat on about how wonderful Anthony is, or she can just hold her head up, get on with her life. At 35, this is the route she has decided to take.

'Of all the mistakes I've made, talking too much is one I'm going to stop now,' she says. 'I need to keep the really important things in my life private. If you let the whole world in you can lose the really precious parts.

There are pieces of my life I need to hold on to by myself.' But in fairness, she would like to fill in a few blanks.

She freely admits she has never learnt to listen to her brain before her heart.

'Look. I believe life is about loving and learning.

Those are the two most important things to me. I throw myself into love because I believe in it, but when things don't work you have to take responsibility.

'You all know things have gone wrong for me.

Everybody has laughed, everybody has had a knock at me. It hurts, it always does. There have been times when I didn't want to be me any more. From the outside looking in it may have appeared that it was a glamorous, exciting life, but I would have swapped places with anybody.

'It did really start to get to me, and the easy thing to do would be to walk away. But the bottom line is I'm a fighter. I decided I just had to learn from the bad times.

It's made me stronger, and I just hope it's made me wiser.' She pauses and sips coffee from a styrofoam cup.

'Part of me thinks I've become a very different person over the past year,' she says. 'But the reality is I've actually returned to who I was ten years ago, before all the fame and the celebrity happened. I'm not J-Lo, she's not a real person. She was just a bit of fun that got really crazy.

I've never been anyone but Jennifer.' She shakes her head. 'I had this really weird experience a few weeks ago, when I was sitting at home eating. I suddenly felt exactly like I did as a child. I was eating the same way, talking the same way. I felt like the me I always knew. It was this huge rush of feeling completely comfortable within my skin, the feeling that I'd come home.' She has decided - right this second in fact - that she's going to call her new album Rebirth.

She asks me to write the title down on a piece of paper and give it to her. She looks at the word and smiles. 'Yes,' she says, 'that's it.' 'I was going to title the album Call Me Jennifer because that would be my way of saying goodbye to the whole J-Lo thing. I'm back to being me, but Rebirth is perfect because it means so much more.' Later on she plays me six of the tracks on her album. Her producer Cory Rooney sits by her, and crouched by a speaker is a slim, good-looking, dark-haired guy in jeans and a cream jumper.

'You know who he is,' she grins. It's Marc.

The songs are a blistering mix of urban soul and big dramatic ballads, including one called This is Me..?, written and produced for her by her new husband.

Each track on the album gives away a little more about her state of mind (and marriage) than she herself would ever say. The supremely catchy I've Got U tells the story of a girl who realises that the love of her life has been in front of her all the time. (She and Anthony dated when they were in their twenties, remaining friends after they broke up. Both married twice before falling for each other all over again.) She sings about how people say it won't last but they don't know what the couple have between them. 'It's my favourite song on the whole album,' she admits softly.

Watching the dynamic between the two tells you even more about their relationship. Jennifer, ever the romantic, seems to need to have him by her side, but Anthony is far from an adoring gooeyeyed boy. He laughs at her as she dances, easily cracking jokes with her friends. His eyes, however, are never far from her. Whenever she speaks she looks at him, and after she finishes talking about her final song he winks at her and claps his hands.

To those who think she has, yet again, married a poor sap, 36-year-old Anthony is just about as big as you can get in the Hispanic world - a George Michael of the Latinos with a [pounds sterling]20 million fortune and a godlike status throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas.

As a father (he has three children, Arianna, 11, Ryan, three, and one-year-old Cristian), he has brought family responsibilities to his bride, and she clearly adores it. Most importantly, Anthony shares Jennifer's history. Her next venture is a Spanish album with him. The marriage clearly marks a return to her roots.

'Look, I'm happy,' she says simply. 'I've never known this sort of happiness. It's more a feeling of being completely comfortable. I feel so connected to who I am.

'I feel I'm doing really good work (her new movie, Shall We Dance, with Richard Gere has received the best reviews she's had since Out of Sight). I love my new album and I just feel everything's going right for me. I've got great stuff coming up, including a tour.' She pauses. I tell her this isn't quite going to fit in with becoming pregnant and she smiles again. 'Well, we just have to wait and see.' I ask her what happens if the waiting never ends.

What steps would she take then? She reaches out to touch the wooden table at her feet, then takes a breath and smiles. 'Honestly, I would do anything to get pregnant. Whatever it takes, I'll do it. I want to be a mother more than anything.

That's the important stuff of life. That's the real thing. All I can say is, please God, bring it on.' Here's hoping, Jen. * The single, 'Get Right', is out on February 14 on Sony BMG Music Entertainment. 'Rebirth' is out on February 28.

Byline: LOUISE GANNON

Article Title: 'I'll Do Whatever It Takes to Be a Mother'; in an Exclusive Photo Shoot for Night & Day, Jennifer Lopez Reveals Her New Image and in Her Only UK Interview She Talks about Marriage, Motherhood and Saying Goodbye to Her Alter Ego J-Lo. Newspaper Title: The Mail on Sunday. Publication Date: January 2, 2005. Page Number: 12. COPYRIGHT 2005 Solo Syndication Limited

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