‘DON’T PROMISE ME FOOOREVER! Don’t promise me the sun and the sky! Don’t pretend to know, you’ll never make meee cry. Uh huh…"

Eyes closed and notes soaring, Jennifer Lopez is singing passionately in a Manhattan recording studio. Her fists are clenched as though she’s holding on to a romance that’s doomed to end before it’s really begun.

"The me—can you try it with a little less vibrato?" asks producer Ric Wake. A tall, beefy presence with shaggy blond, rock-guitarist hair and a silver cross dangling from his neck, Wake, best known for his work with Celine Dion, is listening intently to every melodic nuance. "Try it with more air in your lungs, stronger." Lopez doesn’t seem to mind the direction. Before she was an actress or a singer, she was a dancer. And the rule among dancers is that your choreographer always knows best.

"Don’t pretend to know, you’ll never make meee cry. Uh huh. Just hold me now, and promise me you’ll try." A single candle illuminates her side of the isolation glass, giving her an ethereal glow, like a firefly captured in a mason jar.

"With everything that you do, yoou bring a piece of yourself," she says moments later. Her back is turned on the New York Knicks—Miami Heat game that dominates the television monitor on the other side of Sony Recording Studios A. "People are going to read into the lyrics and say, "Oh, I bet this song is really about this…’" Lopez rolls her dark brown eyes. She’s referring to her split from Ojani Noa after little more than a year of marriage. She met the handsome Cuban model-restaurateur while she was in Miami filming her role as the ambitious Cuban tempress in Bob Rafelson’s Blood and Wine. Noa proposed to her on the dance floor during the wrap party for Selena (in which she plays the slain Tejano singing sensation). The two were married soon after Lopez completed her role as the seductively lethal Grace in Oliver Stone’s U-Turn. Now, shortly after Selena hit HBO and as Lopez’s latest film, Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, hits theaters, she and Noa are getting divorced.

"What I’m going through makes m sing it in a different way," she continues, with sudden poignancy. "I bring something to it that is a personal experience, even if I didn’t write the song, you know what I mean?"

Tommy Mottola walks through the door of Studio A as if he runs the place. He does. The Sony Music CEO, fresh from dinner with the Black Crowes, has passed up courtside seats at the Knicks game for what is to him an even hotter ticket—a studio session with Lopez, whose first album he’ll be releasing through the WORK Group, a Sony label. (Fiona Apple and Jamiroquai are among the label’s other artists.) "Picture this song with a visual," he says, closing his eyes as "Baila" fills the air, blaring with electric guitars and an insistent conga rhythm. He taps his thoousand-dollar black leather Versace shoes on the carpeted floor, keeping pace. The song is caliente—hot, hot, hot.

"One shot. Just have the camera going around in a circle. Just her, nothing else," Mottola screams over lighting up. "We’ll just have you in Fuggedaboutit! It’s all over." Everyone in the room laughs appreciatively.

"Have anything to say about your fellow actresses?" mottola asks with a smile, his eyebrows arched at a sarcastic angle. He’s making a sly reference to a recent magazine piece in which Lopez offered frighteningly frank viewpoints about Cameron Diaz ("A lucky model who’s been given a lot of opportunities I just wish she would have done more with") and Gwyneth Paltrow ("I swear to God, I don’t remember anything she was in. Some people get hot by association’), among others.

"We talked about everything," Lopez says, digging right back. She’s referring to the rumblings that she and Mottola, Mariah Carey’s ex-husband, are romantically involved. It frustrates her that some have dismissed her talent by implying she might be sleeping with the boss. Of course, the rumors about the newly single star are flying in all directions; she has also been linked to Bad Boy Entertainment CEO Sean "Puffy" Combs. Her success—which is about to take another giant leap with her tough, sexy, intelligent turn as a federal marshal who matches wits with master thief George Clooney in Out of Sight—and her judicious candor have made her a high-profile target. About the shots she herself has taken at her peers, Lopez, who maintains she was quoted out of context, says, "You try to explain, but it sounds like a sob story. It bothered me that I could have a hand in making somebody feel bad. And right now I publicly apologize to all of [the actresses]. Because it’s not something that I intended to do, and I’m not a malicious woman-hater. I have so much great stuff going on, why would I want to do that?"

"WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, I’D BE WALKING DOWN THE STREET AND MEN WOULD SAY STUFF. ONCE I GOT OLDER, I WAS LIKE, IT’S MY BODY, AND I DON’T CARE. AND YOU WANT BOYS TO LIKE YOU."

Jennifer Lopez has a way of getting under your skin. "When I screened Mi Familia [My Family] for Francis Ford Coppola," recalls director Gregory Nava, who worked with Lopez on both that film and Selena, "the first thing he said was, ‘Who was that actress? My God, she’s so gorgeous.’ And of course he immediately cast her in Jack." Reactions are no different when Lopez glides through the lobby of Manhattan’s tony St. Regis hotel, toward the cafИ. Powerful old men wearing rep ties turn their heads. Matronly women in Donna Karan suits and pearls shorten their conversations. Some-how the live harp-playing in the background doesn’t set the proper mood. Lopez is the personification of a Carlos Santana guitar solo: hypnotizing with her flair, yet remarkably simple and straightforward with her approach.

"I’ve always had a curvaceous body," the 28-year-old says, getting right down to business. "But I’ve always had a big butt."

She laughs, leaning back in her patio chair. She’s wearing diamond earrings, a skintight turquoise top with dark blue lycra pants, and scant makeup. "When I was eleven, I’d be walking down the street and grown men would say stuff, and after they got the back view, they’d say even more," she continues with a sheepish smile. "At first, when you’re a little girl, you’re like, Oh God, what are they looking at? But once I got older, I was like, It’s my body, and I don’t care. And you want boys to like you after a certain point."

The middle child of three girls, Lopez grew up in the Castle Hill section of the Bronx, a family-oriented yet very rough neighborhood. Her father, a computer-operations manager, and her mother, a kindergarten teacher, sheltered their little girls from the horrors found just a few blocks from their apartment building.

"I remember not realizing that my neighborhood was as bad as it was," Lopez says. "But was there anything else? Manhattan was a different world, and a visit to my father’s job in the city felt like a summer excursion. Of course there were drugs in my neighborhood, but I didn’t understand anything about it. I thank my parents for that. And once I started getting older, I was always involved in dance classes. My mother was careful with that whole boyfriend thing. She would always say to other people, ‘Oh, Jennifer. With that body?! She’s going to get pregnant.’"

But Lopez wasn’t going to end up pushing a baby stroller down the street at fifteen. "I remember sitting in the movie theatre so many times and seeing a trailer, like Terminator 2 or something, and being like, ‘One day, that’s going to be me,’" she says. "I had to do it, or I’d kill myself. It’s that extreme."

By 1993 Lopez had spent a couple of years on the TV series In Living Color as one of the Fly Girls, a multicultural dance troupe known as much for their aggressive hip-hop routines as for their sexy good looks. The girls, who were choreographed by Rosie Perez, became so popular that they sought to have their own series. They approached veteran producer Ralph Farquhar, who had a deal at Fox Television, about cremating a pilot based on their lives.

"I wasn’t interested, but who could turn down a meeting with the Fly Girls?" Farquhar remembers with a boisterous laugh. "And as I was leaving, Jennifer pulled me aside and said, ‘I don’t know about this other thing, but I really want to try my hand at acting. I know you’re doing this pilot [for South Central] with Michael Weithorn; please consider me for that.’ "

They did, and at the first studio run-through, Lopez caught the eye of then-CBS Television president Jeff Sagansky. "I think she had one line, maybe two," Sagansky recalls. "I turned to the person who was in charge of our casting and said after that one line, ‘Sign that girl. She’s a star.’ It was that clear." Before talking to either of the South Central co-creators, Sagansky made a beeline for Lopez. "This guy with red hair and glasses walked up to me and said, "You’re really good,’ and I said "Thanks,’ and walked away," Lopez says, laughing. "And then everybody was like, ‘Do you know who that was?’ And I said, ‘No, obviously.’ The next day, my phone was ringing off the hook."

CBS passed on South Central but signed Lopez. She performed on two hour-long dramas, Hotel Malibu and Second Chances. Within a year, she made the transition to the big screen, in Mi Familia. She then played an undercover cop opposite Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes, in Joseph Ruben's sub-terranean action-drama, Money Train.

"Jennifer had a huge edge because she was so right as a New York street cop," Ruben says. "She comes from the background that a lot of cops come from. Jennifer doesn't take shit from anybody."

But chemistry and sex appeal can be double-edged swords, as Lopez is discovering. "You work so hard to prove what you can do; you get your movies, your record deals, and then people act as if it's so easy as to sleep with someone to get it," Lopez says, alluding again to the gossip surrounding her Sony album. "I don't like the innuendo of it."

It's a notion that WORK Group copresident Jeff Ayeroff dismisses. Lopez was in negotiations for a recording contract years before she met Mottola, Ayeroff says. "We almost signed her when I was at Virgin and she was one of the Fly Girls." After Selena came out (though Lopez didn't sing in the movie), Ayeroff opened negotiations to sign her a s a solo artist. Capitol-EMI stepped up with an offer, and to push the money toward seven figures, both Ayeroff and Sean "Puffy" Combs insisted that Mottola meet with the star as well. "Because of the money, Tommy had to be involved. That's it. She's not dating Tommy, and she'll tell you," Ayeroff says. "That's a sexist, bullshit thing, a good thing to sell newspapers." A pause. "You can probably tell me, is she having a relationship with Puffy? There's stuff about that in the paper, too. She's very coy about it with us."

The Puffy rumors started when Lopez made a smoldering cameo in the rapper's "Been Around the World" video with Mase. Over a spicy Latin disco track, the duo heats up the screen with a sensual mambo. "To be honest, when we were doing the sequence, I was nervous; I was just trying to get it done," says Combs (who just had a baby with his longtime girlfriend, Kim Porter), phoning in from a Manhattan recording studio. "There wasn't any special chemistry jumping off. Her husband was there the whole time."

"This shit has my phone lighting up," Combs says. "If she was my girl, I would say, That's my girl.' She's my friend There was a whole bunch of us at the pool kicking it. The Delano's got a fly pool scene."

Will she appear in any future Combs videos? "I would definitely feature her in other videos," he says. "I had an idea for her to be in 'Senorita,' but I put a halt to that because the rumors came up, and I didn't want to add any more fuel to the fire. Sometimes it's just better to chill."

Chilly is the word for the ongoing reception to Lopez's uncharitable statements about colleagues in the press. A couple of people contacted for this article, for example, pointedly declined to be interviewed. Soderbergh, though, says he sympathizes with what Lopez is going through. "I had a similar thing happen to me when I started out," says the director (perhaps referring to a 1989 Rolling Stone story that quoted him as calling producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer "slime, just barely passing for humans"). "You're sort of babbling, tossing stuff off, and it's not said with any [malice]. The problem is, when you see it in print, it's a different story. No one prepares you for that."

"EN TU PECHO VIVE MIA…"

Would she compare her story more to Cinderella's or to Rocky Balboa's

"I guess, in a way, it's a mix of both," Lopez says, laughing. "But I don't see it so much as a fairy tale as it is the result of working hard and wanting something so badly. I don't take anything for granted; I don't sleep, and I always take on more. People ask me, 'You've got the movie thing going. Why do music?' I've go to do it. I just thank God I have the opportunity."

The airport draws nearer, and the signal on her cell phone grows weak, "All right, baby, I've got to get on this plane" is the last thing she has a chance to say before the line goes dead.