The night Jessica Alba and I got smashed together-after what I now dimly recall as our seventh glass of wine-she turned to me and said, “Now that you’ve gotten me good and drunk, you probably want to know about that stripping thing.”
Now, right off, I feel the need to defend Ms. Alba, who, at least in my dealings with her, does not immediately associate alcohol consumption with the removal of clothing. She will happily substitute food.
For instance: The day before the actress and I were to meet for dinner in L.A. to talk about Frank Miller’s Sin City which she plays an imperiled stripper, and for which she spent untold nights in strip clubs across America learning the ?ne art of garment removal, she reached me on the phone from New York.
“I just wanted you to know,” Alba told me, sounding hungry and decidedly sober, “that I’m half-naked right now and eating chocolate cake.”
“Don’t ?ll up,” I replied. “It’s going to be more of the same tomorrow night.”
“Except then,” Alba corrected, “I’ll keep my clothes on.”
The next evening, over our dessert-a brown-butter quince tart paired with a panna cotta flapjack-Alba made sure to clear up any lingering ambiguity from our phone conversation.
“I was not totally naked when we spoke,” she con?ded, slipping a gob of panna cotta onto her tongue. “I had on leather chaps.”
In the actress’s hand sat a glass of Madeira Malvasia, vintage 1900, which the restaurant’s sommelier had recently uncorked. Alba wore a slinky, luminescent blouse that revealed her slender mocha-hued shoulders, and her natural-brown hair was dyed a cinematic blond. I cannot begin to tell you how good 105-year-old wine tastes, so will instead defer to the phraseology she employed in describing it: “very nice”; “lovely”; “beautiful”; “holy shit!”; and “stupid,” by which she meant brilliant. We sat on the patio of the West Hollywood restaurant Bastide, beneath olive trees strung with tiny lights, near a table that included Denzel Washington and Johnnie Cochran. Alba made an off-color joke about lawyers, and she glowed: Her skin glowed, her hair glowed, her lips glowed. Where once her carnal features-lips, breasts, posterior-seemed preternaturally swollen, as if in a dead-heat race to burst from her skinny, teenage frame, now Alba and her twenty-three-year-old body have settled into delicacy and grace and balance while still drawing chat-room catcalls like “Damn! Shortie got back!”
“Plus,” Alba continued, determinedly resurrecting the subject of the phone call, “I was not alone. Rosario Dawson was there, and we were dressed up like S&M big-time: leather chaps, red lips, and chains. Me and Rosario were naked, sexed up, crazed!”
Have I mentioned how good 105-year-old wine tastes?
Alba knows something about wine. “I’ve had an appreciation of it since I was 12,” she tells me over a glass of Collioure Domaine du Mas Blanc. “My parents were young and liberal and knew I was going to drink anyway, so they let me do it at home.” She took her teenage drinking years more seriously than most, developing a palate beyond Boone’s Farm and Bartles & Jaymes. She can sense the Pyrenees in a minerally bottle of Spanish Garnacha Blanca or divine the difference between an Austrian and an Australian Riesling. When necessary, she can be critical. For example, she describes the sommelier at a popular celebrity-owned restaurant as “a fucking moron who has no palate for wine at all and will sell you anything fucking expensive.” While such profanity may seem crass or mean-spirited, from her the expletives are somehow winning. When the actress says “fucking moron,” it sounds like anyone else saying “strawberry pie”; when she calls someone a “little shit-eating bastard,” she might as well be describing him as a “cute little koala bear.”
She likes big wines, fruity wines, Italian reds, and Cabernets but once went through an unfortunate Merlot period, in which she discovered a fondness for Francis Ford Coppola’s label. “I had it at James Cameron’s house,” Alba recalls. “We ate this amazing steak and Cameron brought out this Merlot and was like, ‘Ten dollars, Trader Joe’s-the best wine!’” In between Cameron’s Titanic becoming the highest-grossing movie in history and his discovery of the great $10 Merlot, he came up with the idea of a sci-? TV series called Dark Angel and chose the 19-year-old Alba from a thousand or so hopefuls to play the protofeminist asskicker Max Guevara. The character had genetically enhanced superpowers and a taste for skimpy dresses as she scrapped with evil scientists in a terrible future where terrible things happened to almost everyone but Max Guevara. The series made Alba an instant ?xture in the realm of worshipful Web sites and the unabashedly puerile corner of the newsstand, and it gave the young actress her ?rst mature romance-with costar Michael Weatherly, who played her mentor and protector. But in 2002, two years after its overheated debut, the show was canceled.
Her relationship with Weatherly, thirteen years her senior, lasted a year longer than the series did-right up to the day she discovered just how dull a 35-year-old man can be. “He hated going out,” says Alba, “and he made me feel bad if I ever wanted to go out dancing. When I ?nally broke up with him, I could go out and dance and not feel bad about it.” So Alba spent a year dancing, toasting her newfound liberation, and hanging out with the kinds of guys-Derek Jeter, Mark Wahlberg-you hang with when you’re cutting loose. One could argue that she stayed on the dance floor too long, throwing herself into the ill-conceived dance ?lm Honey and giving Jesica Alba fan-site regulars cause for concern. A pause like that in a young actress’s career after a splashy debut, a failed series, and a ho-hum ?lm can be terrifying. One could vanish forever or die a slow death in workout-video projects or a cable reality series.
Of course, Alba wasn’t worried. She was too busy. From somewhere in the stony depths of his Texas fortress, the director Robert Rodriguez had chosen Alba to lead the cast of his new ?lm, Sin City, a bleak urban wasteland where more terrible things (beheadings, electrocutions, cannibalism, maudlin male monologues) happen with alarming frequency. Oh, and because it’s derived from a graphic novel tailored to the priapic needs of teenage boys, a lot of women take their clothes off, too.
“Jesica has a dark side to her personality,” says Rodriguez. “She’s kind of quiet and mysterious, but when she does a performance she’s great at making it accessible.” Rodriguez enlisted Frank Miller, the creator of the Sin City comic franchise, to assist in casting the movie’s stripper. “The character dances in the movie,” Rodriguez explains, “so Frank asked her, ‘You can dance, right?’ Jessika gave him this sly smile and said, ‘Oh, I can dance.’ I wish I had that on tape. It was like, ‘What a dumb question!’ ”
Alba is now in the midst of a rare early-career comeback; she has three ?lms coming out in the next four months. After Sin City comes Into the Blue, where Alba’s diver character rarely wears more than a swimsuit. Alba will also play Sue Storm in Fantastic Four, based on the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby comic book. And so, she has been noticeably more visible lately, priming the public for her return at a recent New Year’s Eve party hosted by Lindsay Lohan and Eva Longoria, a cameo on HBO’s Entourage, and a series of paparazzi pictures of a swimsuit-clad Alba flaunting the amazing powers of bikini-bottom elasticity.
Which naturally brings us back to stripping.
“Well, technically,” says Alba, sipping her Madeira and clearing up a misconception, “Texas was only one of the places I learned to strip. I also learned in New York, L.A., and Miami. But my character wears a cowboy hat and a lasso and boots, and I didn’t want to do a bad job for Robert Rodriguez, so I went to a club in Austin.”
“She didn’t do anything like the dancers,” Rodriguez says. “Her dancing was so much sexier-sensual and con?dent and not very showy.”
The pole dancing held little intrigue for Alba. “It’s all about getting tips and showing the punani and simulating masturbation and sex acts,” she contends. “It’s not interesting.”
“Not as interesting as this wine?” I cough, fumbling for a debonair response.
Alba sinks deep into her chair and purrs, “Mmmmmmmmmmm. This wine is so interesting, I don’t think you could even have real sex after it.”
Alba has been intimate with the workings of sin since early childhood. “My parents weren’t religious,” she says. “But at 12, I started asking, ‘Why am I here? What’s the point of living?’ ” Alba was a military brat who clocked time in Mississippi and Texas before moving with her family to Pomona, California, which is famous for its low-rider cruising scene, the Hughes brothers, the annual strawberry crop, and not much else. Things were pretty much quiet until she ran into a few local born-again Christians.
It was all over after that. “I started going to church three days a week,” says Alba. “Stopped watching secular television-I couldn’t even watch Davey and Goliath.” Every day at 5 a.m., Alba woke up to pray; every time she stubbed her toe, she made sure she exclaimed, “Oh, darn!” While her parents dismissed her conversion as typical teen rebellion, she was memorizing the taxonomies of wickedness, the rankings of transgression, the phyla of the profane.
And then one day her body rebelled against God. Her teenage breasts bloomed; her buttocks began straining against her dungarees. “I would go to the beach,” says Alba, “and my born-again friends would be like, ‘Your jeans are too tight! You’re tempting me!’ ” In church, her youth pastor forced Alba to wrap a sweater around her swelling posterior to hide her sin as he read from the Bible; soon the only stories she could relate to were those of Bathsheba and Jezebel. Then two things happened. At 13 she decided to give acting a try and immediately found herself cast in an episode of the TV series Chicago Hope, playing a teenage girl who contracts gonorrhea of the throat from her 30-year-old boyfriend. Imagine explaining that to your pastor. Next, at 16, she joined the Atlantic Theater Company Acting School in Vermont, founded by David Mamet and William H. Macy, where she was drilled in contrapositive Pygmalion fashion, on the intonation of lines like, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” “I was suddenly around all these different kinds of people who were going to hell according to my church,” says Alba. “And I just thought that the god I am praying to is a failed god if these people are damned. What about people in Africa? Asia? People not aware of my religion? They’re going to hell, too? That’s bullshit!” She also fell in love with a transvestite ballerina. “He was beautiful,” she says.
Jesica was born to play a superheroine-the prototypical social outcast who discovers her power by trial and accident. As a kid, she knew “that from an early age I never really ?t in with one certain race.” Students of Alba’s genealogy-and such devoted fans do exist-will point to lines of French, Mexican, and Danish descent, but early on she manifested strengths that set her apart from any one group. Sin City and Fantastic Four have launched Alba into the center of one of the more obsessive and little-known realms of American pop culture, the comic-book-fan-boy universe where out?ts, superpowers, breast size, hairstyle, and kung fu chops are sifted, scrutinized, and then argued over, ad in?nitum, mostly by white males between the ages of 14 and 35. Within the coming year, more than any other actress in America, Alba’s image will hover over comic-book conventions, bookstores, and chat rooms, a muse for the lonely and the acne scarred.
But controversy has raged virus-like across the Internet over her roles in the ?lm versions of these comics. Alba’s problem is that she’s half Mexican, which might be okay for her stripper role in Sin City, but Fantastic Four’s Sue Storm is the very picture of the American Heartland Wasp, a mother, a scientist, a pillar of a vanished country. So strong had enmity against her grown that at a recent comics convention, she arrived with a support team for backup.
“Everyone thought I was going to get horribly booed by the fan boys when I walked out on that convention stage,” Alba recalls, taking a sip of her Corton Les Grandes Lolieres. “All the producers and the director of Fantastic Four were there, and they were readying me for the mean treatment I was about to get. They were like, ‘Don’t worry. We’re going to handle this. We know how to deal with a fan backlash this size. We have answers for their every question.’ ”
All across the Net that day were postings by Fantastic Four fans who claimed they would not venture into a theater where a half-Mexican actress played Sue Storm. In the wings of the convention hall stood Alba, waiting nervously for the video-store clerks and IT professionals to take their seats, expecting to be shouted offstage like a cheap vaudeville act.
Alba heard her name over the PA system and took a shaky step forward onto center stage.
“When I ?nally took the stage, they applauded,” Alba says, dipping a bite of her “Pepsi” Poularde into its accompanying whiskey foam. “The whole auditorium cheered for me. It was gratifying. There’s a loyal audience there, I guess, and at the end of the day I’d like to entertain them as long as I can.”
Alba is the first to admit that she lives in a bubble. It is one of her own making. “My bubble is very wooden and very positive,” she says, “and everyone who ?ts there does so because of my choices in life.”
Mostly, Alba’s bubble--which in my estimation resembles her four-level house in Hollywood, her friends, her management team, and all her life choices-exists to protect her from Hollywood, which rests, she claims, just a few steps over hell, rife with sycophants, players, wannabes, horndogs, and producers trying to live a Robert Evans life. “Movies are the shadiest business in the world,” Alba says, sampling her blue?n tuna. “Arms dealers and dentists ?nancing ?lms, making the decisions, doing all kinds of fucked-up things to get shit done.” She makes a motion like she is about to throw up her hands and the plated ?sh in despair. “Oh, my God! What people do here is insane!”
In Sin City, Alba says, she plays “a totally innocent and doe-eyed stripper who doesn’t think of what she does as a bad thing, just a way to make money. She is like an angel in a world of darkness-exactly like being in Hollywood. She is the only one who is completely forthright and noble and true and honest, and she believes in love and soul mates.” It may be wishful thinking on Alba’s part to equate her own complicated (and rewarding) relationship with Hollywood with her virtuous-stripper role. She’s always walking a ?ne line between self-protection and self-exploitation. Certainly, Alba is the rare young actress who insists on some of the more conservative contracts in Hollywood, like the no-nudity clause inserted for her work in Into the Blue. But that can be a tough posture to defend when your day job ?nds you-as Alba’s does in Sin City-bound, gagged, and underdressed, being whipped by some grimy yellow freak.
Alba picks a creamy cow and a strong goat from the cheese cart, and then an extra helping of bread. The night is winding down. Denzel Washington has already left, and the patio chatter has subsided to a murmur. She sips at her Château Pichon Comtesse. Who knows what thoughts are in her head about her impending hookup with her boyfriend? She has yet to taste the 105-year-old Madeira, and so is ignorant of the fact that real sex will be impossible tonight.
Someday, Alba would like to open her own café and her own restaurant, where she will cook her famous enchiladas and allow dogs at the table. She will also own a vineyard. “I will live at the winery and have my garden, and the wine will go to my restaurant and my family,” she says. In this youthful wish she strikes you as someone living just this side of Making It Really Big, where, through the twinkle lens of imminent success, the future seems to stretch out like an uninterrupted eight-course dinner, and all anxieties over career dissolution and the death-march fame campaign are lost like thoughts on an endless summer day spent in the garden of your winery.
“But I don’t feel the need to be famous,” Alba protests. “It’s all bullshit, anyway.” She calmly regards her creamy cow, then says, “I don’t put weight on fame, and having people around me just because I am famous makes me feel really bad about myself. So I give 10 percent to my agent to do the fame thing, and I go focus on whatever I love.”
“And what is that?” I ask.
A quiet moan rises from Alba’s lips. “Mmmmmmmm,” she hums. “Well, at the moment, I really love this cheese.”
Dave Gardetta is a senior writer at Los Angeles magazine.
