True Love Deluxe

by Jennifer Lopez

  So three years later, when the chance to do Idol came up, I welcomed the opportunity to reclaim some of my individuality. I needed to quiet all the voices in order to listen to my own, and to trust what I felt was right in order to make a decision. I followed my gut and jumped in.

  When I first began working on the show—several months before it started airing—I fell in love with Steven Tyler, Randy Jackson, and Ryan Seacrest. They were all very different, but each one was so caring and generous—they all really looked out for me. They were like the brothers I never had. When I’d come onto the set, Steven would say, “Jennifer! You look gorgeous—what do you use on your face?” He always wanted to know what makeup I was using, what hair products. He made me laugh so much, always saying, “You know I’m only asking because I’m so enamored with you; I’m very enamored with you, Jennifer,” with that wry smile on his face.

  Steven was nothing like what you’d think. People think he’s this skinny, crazy rocker, with that larger-than-life mouth and the wild clothes. But he’s so deep, so soulful. When you look into his eyes, he’s like a little wounded bird. He likes to lock eyes, in that un-self-conscious way of someone who loves to connect with people.

  He’d look at me, and I’d see a little bit of sadness in those eyes, a little bit of pain in a way that made me know, Yeah, that guy has lived. He had a soulfulness; he was good a person. You could see it.

  Those first few weeks, as we shot the auditions and met all these amazing young singers, who were fantastic, we got to know one another too. I loved working with the guys, and I felt good about what I was able to contribute.

  When I saw the clips from those first audition shows, I thought they looked great. Idol had been slumping a little bit in the last couple of seasons, but if everything went well, twenty million people would be tuning in to watch us. How could things get any better?

  STEPPING ONTO A BIG STAGE

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  It was the middle of the night, and Marc was asleep beside me in bed. I suddenly sat upright, my heart pounding. It was the night before my debut on the premiere of American Idol. I slipped out of bed and walked into the bathroom, and when I looked at myself in the mirror, I was as white as a ghost. All I could think was, Oh shit. Twenty million people. I was so nervous about the show airing the next day that I was completely freaking out.

  I came back to bed and said, “Marc! Wake up!” He was in a deep sleep, so he kind of grunted and rolled over. I said, “Papi! Wake up! I’m scared!” I grabbed his shoulder and tried to shake him awake. “You gotta wake up!”

  No matter what problems Marc and I had in our personal lives, we were always very in tune with each other when it came to work. When I was worried that my singing wasn’t as strong as other things I was able to do, he helped me find my best singing voice. I really credit him with that, because he always encouraged me, giving me tips and telling me I could do it. And he always had a really smart take on things when it came to business—he was a wonderful partner in that sense. So, if anyone could talk me down from this ledge, it was him.

  “Baby,” I said, “I am freaking out.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice groggy with sleep.

  “It’s this whole Idol thing,” I said. “It’s so big! Twenty million people are going to be watching, and I’ve never done TV like this, without a script or lyrics or anything . . . It’s only me out there, with the cameras and everybody watching!”

  I felt like I’d be exposed, vulnerable—like I’d be running down the street with no clothes on. It’s not that I was afraid of people seeing the real me. I knew who I was; I knew I was a good person. But this was new for me. When you’re an actress, you’re used to saying lines that someone has given you. You get to hide behind that mask. When you’re a singer, you have a song. The notion of getting up in front of everyone and being yourself is really terrifying. If someone criticizes your acting, they’re criticizing only one part of you. They don’t know anything about who you really are or what’s really important to you. If someone criticizes you on a show like Idol, though, they’re criticizing you.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “But that’s not so bad. Think about how you’d feel if it failed. What if no one was watching . . . ? That would be so much worse, right?”

  I thought about that for a second and then said, “Yeah, that would feel worse.”

  And with that, we both rolled over and went to sleep.

  I had to laugh, because Marc was right. Did it make sense to be scared because the show was potentially a huge success? No . . . But it was really just that number—twenty million people—that threw me off. With television, people can flip through channels, and then suddenly they see you sitting on that judging panel—and now you’re the one getting judged by every one of those people who’ve just happened to tune in. You’re being scrutinized on a whole different level. And that was a really overwhelming thought.

  But Marc knew exactly how to calm me down. He knew that what I feared more than any of those things was failure. “Listen, if the show failed, then you’d feel really shitty,” he said, and he was right. Because I know what it feels like to fail, to have something that you’ve worked really hard on, something that you care about, be judged a failure. Trust me, I have had that experience. And for me, there’s no worse feeling than putting something out there that people don’t respond to.

  But when the show started airing, something wonderful happened. The very thing I was afraid of turned out to be the best thing ever: For the first time, people were seeing the real me—not the “me” fabricated by tabloids and magazines—and they liked what they saw.

  BACK TO THE REAL ME

  The truth about reality TV is that you can’t hide who you are. When you’re sitting up there on a panel, reacting to the performers you see in front of you, the camera catches everything. If you start laughing, if you shed tears, if you make a face—it’s all right there for the world to see. When people started watching that season of American Idol, they were seeing something they weren’t expecting to see. People were looking for a diva, but they found the mama instead.

  Of all the good things I thought might come out of being on Idol, this one I hadn’t expected—and it turned out to be the biggest, most important thing of all. It had been so long since I’d felt like just . . . Jennifer.

  Before Idol started, I was hanging out with my friend Leah. She’s my bestie, we have real love for each other, we connected instantly, from the first day we met. It doesn’t matter what I say or how out there I think it is, she always gets it. We get each other. I remember saying to her, “I feel like I’m about to have a baby. Like, I’m pregnant and I’m pushing, and I’m feeling the pain, but it’s not quite out yet. But there’s this beautiful baby coming . . .” It was strange, but that’s how I felt it at the time . . . like I was on the precipice of something amazing. I could feel it coming, even if I wasn’t totally sure of what it was.

  So many exciting things were starting to happen. People were loving the show. I had a new album coming out, and when “On the Floor,” the first single, leaked right before Idol aired, it shot up the charts. It seemed like every day something great and new came along. I felt an amazing new energy in my life and career, the kind of energy I hadn’t felt in a long time.

  In so many ways, Idol was like a reinvention, a reintroduction into the public eye for me. I was finding my own voice, my own power again—I had something to say, and people were listening. It was the first time in a long time that I felt good about just being me. And the response to being me, not only from Steven and Randy and Ryan and everyone at Idol, but also from the audience watching the show, was so warm and embracing that I felt protected and loved. It got me back in touch with myself.

  The truth about reality TV is that you can’t hide who you are.

  That was a really big deal for me. It gave
me back a little bit of the self-confidence I had lost over time, a little bit of the grounding I had been lacking since the Big Hollywood whirlwind took over my life. I hadn’t even realized how much self-confidence I’d lost until it finally started coming back.

  All of this happened gradually, over the course of that first American Idol season. It wasn’t a “Eureka!” kind of moment—it was the slow realization that the parts of me that had been empty were starting to fill up again. Yet, as gradual as this all was, there was one surreal moment that crystallized it for me—one moment where I suddenly understood what Idol meant to people and what it was doing for me.

  It happened during Oscar season, when the show had been on the air for about a month. I had been invited to a party celebrating one of the movies up for Best Picture, and so I got dressed up and went out to do that Hollywood thing. There are always lots of big stars at these parties—actors and directors and heads of studios, the people who make things happen in this town. I pretty much expected to blend in and have a good time, but when I walked into the party, people started swarming all around me, asking about American Idol.

  It was unreal . . . People were coming up, saying things like, “Oh my God! I love you on that show!” And “Who do you think is going to win? Come on. Tell the truth!” And, “What’s it really like behind the scenes? What’s the scoop?” I couldn’t believe that in this room full of the most successful, creative people in Hollywood, everyone wanted to talk about Idol. I mean, even Steven Spielberg came up to me to tell me about how he and his family all watch the show together. Steven Spielberg!

  Wow. The power of TV.

  At that moment, I realized how much people liked the show, how happy it made them feel, and how much it was changing the perception of who I was. People were saying they liked me, which made me realize how many years I’d spent thinking they didn’t, and that affected how I felt about myself. That was the beginning of the beginning—the time when I started to feel like myself again. I had found that taking risks, being true to myself, and making decisions with good intentions can exceed even my own expectations.

  DEFINING MOMENTS

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  x That February, things couldn’t have been going better for me professionally: People magazine named me its first Most Beautiful Woman in the World. My record was number one, my video was number one, and I was on the number-one television show in America. I felt like I was on top of the world.

  In the midst of all this excitement and outpouring of appreciation and love, the bubble was burst with three simple words: “I’m not happy.” Marc was in the middle of venting to me about things between us that had been bothering him, and I was sitting there trying to figure out where he was going with it. Then he said it again: “I’m not happy. I’m here because we have a family, because we’re trying to keep it together. But I’m not happy.”

  It was another moment where a crack appeared in yet another wall that I had built, and when the light came shining through, I immediately thought: If you’re not happy, then what am I? I started crying. I really thought I had done everything I could to satisfy him in every way that I could—as a wife, as a partner, and as a mother to his children. But the truth was, I had never even stopped to think about whether I was happy.

  It was like a light bulb finally turned on in my head: What sense did it make to keep suppressing my own feelings of what was missing in the relationship? How long did I need to keep trying to make someone happy who was telling me flat-out that he wasn’t?

  The floodgates were open, and the tears wouldn’t stop. Marc tried to comfort me.

  “Come on. Why are you crying so much?” he asked.

  He now seemed completely fine—as if by getting it off his chest, everything was okay. To him it was some little argument, and now everything would go back to normal. I don’t think he had any idea of the powerful effect those words had had on me; Pandora’s box had been opened, and little did I know that, as much as I would try, there was no shutting it again.

  In the time leading up to that conversation, I had been regaining my sense of confidence and self-esteem, first as a mother and then through my work. Through the kids, I had started to understand more about love and what it was to truly give love and receive it. I learned that there are certain things it’s not okay to accept, and that was making me feel powerful and strong. But the thing is, in my relationship, I was still stuck in the same pattern I had been stuck in my entire life: My own happiness and sense of self-worth still depended on how happy he was. So when Marc stated so clearly that he wasn’t happy, it broke me down completely.

  For so many years I had managed to convince myself that if I worked at relationships hard enough, I could always fix everything, make things better. But now I was finally strong enough to identify not only that I couldn’t, but that that wasn’t the point. The point was that my happiness mattered too. I had reached a place where I looked at my personal life and said, You know what? This is not okay. No matter how great everything else was going in the rest of my life, this just wasn’t. And I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

  When I woke up that morning, I never expected that such a simple conversation would lead to such an earth-shattering realization and the seismic shift it would bring upon my life.

  ACT FOUR | QUÉ HICISTE

  SET LIST

  “Qué Hiciste”

  “Until It Beats No More”

  My hopes and dreams crumbled.

  It was as if something had been destroyed, something I’d worked so hard to build. Something beautiful was breaking that I’d once treasured.

  But in its painful destruction, I found freedom.

  QUÉ HICISTE

  A POWERFUL MESSAGE

  I’m wearing a flowing, fiery red dress while standing in front of the audience as the final notes of “If You Had My Love” play out, and I look out over everyone and say, “Sometimes love doesn’t go right. And when it doesn’t go right, I find that it helps to sing about it.” Then the opening guitar notes of “Qué Hiciste” start.

  Ayer los dos soñábamos con un mundo perfecto . . .

  (Yesterday, we were dreaming a perfect world . . .)

  —“QUÉ HICISTE”

  “Qué Hiciste” was the first single off Como Ama una Mujer—my first and only Spanish-language album. And five years later, when we were putting together the Dance Again tour, I knew I had to include the song . . . with a very important message at the end.

  Whenever it feels uncomfortable to tell the truth, that’s often the most important time to tell it.

  This song was very hard to choreograph, because we wanted to really portray what it was about—one partner mistreating the other and the physical and emotional toll of being in an abusive relationship. Liz Imperio, the brilliant choreographer who did some of the most powerful pieces in the show—the tone setters, including both the opening and closing numbers—set about trying to make the lyrics come alive.

  As I stand onstage in my red dress, a screen above me shows all kinds of explosive, fiery imagery. Lower down on the stage are two couples—one to my left and one to my right—and they’re dancing, but they’re also acting out the kind of abusive behavior described in the song. Liz decided that she wanted to do a beautiful fusion of hip-hop and tango. I loved it; it was a brilliant idea. It was street-hard and it was passionate, which is exactly what the emotion of the song called for.

  We wanted to portray the truth about abusive relationships, but not to paint men in a negative way, even though that’s how most people picture abuse. What I wanted to say is that abuse has no bias. It’s not gender specific; it’s just never okay. So of the two couples on the stage, one was a man being abusive to a woman and the other was a woman being abusive to a man.

  You can imagine how all that went over with the audiences during our shows in certain countries where women don’t n
ecessarily have the same rights as men. When I looked out over the crowds, I could see women crying, really feeling it. And I could see the men squirming uncomfortably at the suggestion of a woman abusing a man. In some of these traditionally macho cultures, our decision to portray a woman slapping, kicking, yelling at a man was playing it a little too close to the edge—but whenever it feels uncomfortable to tell the truth, that’s often the most important time to tell it.

  Pulling together this song was hard on everybody, especially Liz, who got very emotional while she was choreographing it. And I understood it—it was affecting me too. But the end result was beautiful and powerful and true. As I sang, the two couples kicked and slapped and fought, but as we reached the end of the song—“Con tus manos derrumbaste nuestra casa” (“With your own hands, you destroyed our home”)—the man and woman who had been the aggressors exited the stage, as the woman and man who had been abused turn and walk away from them. They come to meet me in the middle of the stage, right where I was standing. I turn to look at one . . . and then the other . . . and as I step forward toward the audience, they fall in line behind me and disappear. I wanted everyone to see that these people were just like me . . . even that they could be me.