It was just one of those things where you feel compelled to do something you wouldn’t normally do,” says Jennifer Lopez, explaining how she and retired Yankee superstar Alex Rodriguez, who made their red-carpet debut as a couple last spring at the Met Gala, came to be a modern Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio—that is, if Monroe and DiMaggio had been happy, highly functional fortysomethings who had apparently done battle with their demons and emerged the victors.
.
It was last winter as she was having lunch in Beverly Hills that she saw Rodriguez walk by. “I almost yelled out ‘Alex,’ but I am the shyest person when it comes to things like that,” she says. When she went outside, he was still there, facing away from her. “I could literally just have walked away,” she says. “But I walk over and tap him on the shoulder and say ‘Hey.’.“I had just come from a promo for my show, Shades of Blue [in which she plays N.Y.P.D. detective Harlee Santos], so I’m dressed like my character, like a boy—Timberlands, jeans, curly short hair. He looks at me. I say, ‘It’s Jennifer.’ He says, ‘You look so beautiful.’ ”
She and I are sitting on a stone patio at Lopez’s new house in Bel Air, overlooking an infinity pool and a lush green lawn with a double-size swing, which she points out is perfect for her nine-year-old twins, Emme and Max. The house is light-filled, sprawling, and warm, with wood-beamed ceilings, stone walls, plush low-slung sofas, big pillows, bowls filled with cut roses, and artwork by collagist Peter Tunney. “GRATTITUDƎ,” one piece spells out. It’s a portmanteau of “gratitude” and “attitude” that could define Lopez. Wearing a cropped turtleneck sweater, skinny jeans, high Christian Louboutin boots, and impressive diamond earrings, she is as startlingly beautiful at 48 as she was at 28—if not more so. “We walked into this house, and I said, ‘This is where I want my kids to grow up,’ ” she says. “You have to imagine your life, and what you want to be in it, and I imagined we would be very happy here no matter what.”.Happy, naturally, has turned out differently from what she imagined. Just hours after Rodriguez met her in Beverly Hills, he called her, and they agreed to have dinner a few nights later. She told him that she remembered meeting him on a baseball diamond, 12 years earlier. Her then husband, Marc Anthony, had thrown out the first pitch of a New York Mets game, but the cameras captured Lopez and Rodriguez shaking hands and locking eyes. “You don’t have to say you remember if you don’t,” she told him. “Shea Stadium, during a subway series,” he responded.
Just then, Rodriguez walks out of the house to join us on the patio. “I was telling her about the tap,” she says to him. “But there were two taps,” he says. She turns to me. “There was another very significant tap on the shoulder,” she says.
Before we get to that tap, we talk about their first date, when they met for dinner at the Hotel Bel Air. “He was sitting there in his white shirt, very confident and manly, but then he was just so talkative!” she says. “I think he thought I was going to be this loud person, but I’m not. I just listen. So he’s talking, talking about his plans, about how he had just retired from baseball, about how he saw himself getting married again, all these things you wouldn’t normally talk about on a first date. I don’t know if he thought it was a date. I thought it was a date. Then I knew he was nervous because he asked me if I wanted a drink. I said, ‘No, I don’t drink,’ and he asked if I minded if he had one. He was nervous, and it was really cute.”.“I didn’t know if it was a date,” Rodriguez says. “Maybe we were seeing each other at night because of her work schedule. I went in uneasy, not knowing her situation.”.He continues: “It would be incredibly productive for me to sit with one of the smartest, greatest women in the world, especially for a guy like me who is coming through tough times, rehabbing himself, re-establishing himself to folks out there. I thought it would be a win-win no matter what.”.Then: “She told me around the third or fourth inning that she was single,” he says. “I had to get up and go re-adjust my thoughts. I went to the bathroom and got enough courage to send her a text.”.“So I’m sitting there and he’s walking back, and I get a text,” Lopez continues. “It says . . . ” She looks significantly at Rodriguez. “You can tell her!” he says. “ ‘You look sexy AF,’ ” she tells me. They both laugh. “And then it took a turn,” Lopez says. “The fire alarm went off, and we had to evacuate.” I laugh, thinking she’s being metaphorical. “No, really,” she says. “The fire alarm went off!”.But about that other tap. This one was metaphorical. In August 2016, when Rodriguez announced his retirement from baseball, with his mother and his daughters Natasha and Ella in the stands, four runs short of 700 home runs, he said, “Baseball has a funny way of tapping you on the shoulder when you least expect it and telling you that it’s the end.” It’s a year later, and now, he says, “I’m thinking about one door closing and another opening, and if that first door doesn’t close, well, there isn’t that second tap.”.Rodriguez’s story about the tap is a poignant reminder that this isn’t just another love story. It’s the story of two people with rich and at times tumultuous pasts, which are part of the reason they have a present as a couple. “We are very much twins,” he says. “We’re both Leos; we’re both from New York; we’re both Latino and about 20 other things.”.“I understand him in a way that I don’t think anyone else could, and he understands me in a way that no one else could ever,” she says. “In his 20s, he came into big success with the biggest baseball contract [at the time]. I had a No. 1 movie and a No. 1 album and made history. We both had ups and downs and challenges in our 30s, and by our 40s we’d both been through so much. And more importantly than anything, we had both done a lot of work on ourselves.”.Lopez, whose parents came from Puerto Rico, grew up in the Bronx, where she shared a bedroom with her two sisters. She famously left home at 18 to make it as a dancer, and burst on the scene in 1991 as one of the Fly Girls on Fox’s In Living Color, the hit comedy series. She quickly parlayed her luminous beauty, talent, and sheer workaholism into a series of starring roles, including Marisa in Maid in Manhattan, which grossed more than $150 million worldwide.More photos below.
Comments
Post a Comment