Pop singer, actress and baby momma Jennifer Lopez graces the cover and pages of the April "Shape" special of Vogue magazine being described as "cunning wheeler-dealer" in a 6 page interview with the Puerto Rican American Idol judge.
It’s easy to see why they click. Like his superstar client, Medina is smart and charming and very funny. But there is also a cunning wheeler-dealer just below the surface. Fairly or not, he has often been blamed for the decadent excesses of the J.Lo enterprise: the private-plane travel requirements, the diva-level dressing-room demands.
I wrote about Lopez for Vogue in 2005, and when I remind her how we first met—at a Long Island recording studio where she showed up in a chauffeur-driven Bentley and sat in the parking lot listening to music, keeping me waiting for nearly an hour—she laughs, and I can see the video rewinding in her head. “I had just gotten married,” she says. “I was working on a record. I wasn’t with Benny. I was a little bit lost, trying to get my footing in a new life. That’s how I remember that time.”
J.Lo was not America’s Latina Sweetheart back then—far from it. At the time she was widely perceived as high-handed and aloof as she rubbed our noses in her nueva riqueza. (She dismissed all the diva talk then with a wisecrack worthy of Bette Davis: “Sometimes I think it’s just because I have a nice car and I’m not afraid to wear a big fur.”) The romance with Ben Affleck—and the smug “Jenny from the Block” video—had turned a lot of people off. I was not inclined to like her before we met but had been pleasantly surprised. She was engaging and very affectionate, always ready with a kiss, a hug, a wink, a “Hey, Papi”—just as she is today on American Idol. As the country can now see two nights a week in their living rooms, she’s genuine. She is Jenny from the block—a Puerto Rican Catholic schoolgirl from the Bronx who was raised up right. “I had such a reputation,” she says of that time. “And it was sad because I felt like it so didn’t represent who I really was.”
But as she herself will attest, in some ways the negativity came from within. “I think of myself on that day at the studio on Long Island and how insecure I was about my own talent. I just never really gave myself any credit. And because of that, nobody else did either. You mirror what the world mirrors to you.” She thanks Anthony for helping her believe in herself. “He always told me what a beautiful voice I have. He was like, ‘It’s in there; you just gotta let it out. It’s a confidence thing with you.’ Then all of a sudden one day I was like, I’m good at this!” Here she gets as worked up as I have ever seen her. “Oh, man! People are not giving me jobs because they feel sorry for me! I am an actress. I am a singer. I am a performer. That’s what I do! Once I started giving myself a little credit, the whole world opened up.”
Scoot over to vogue.com for the full "Jenny from the block" interview!
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