| by
Dennis Hensley
Using Marie
Claire’s Canon Powershot to document the Things She
Can’t Live Without (TSCLW) is going to be a breeze for
Jessica Alba. She owns the exact same camera. Or she used
to. “I just lost it,” the Dark Angel star laments,
before snapping a shot of the first TSCLW, the spectacular
view from the balcony of her French villa-style house in the
hills above L.A. “I’m so happy I had deleted the
naughty pictures.” Hold on a second. We’re five
minutes in and she’s already talking about naughty pictures?
“Not that naughty,” she says with a laugh. Were
the pictures of Alba and another person? “My boyfriend,”
reveals Alba, before confirming that she has been dating Cash
Warren, a Director of Development at a film production company,
since they began working together on the upcoming Fantastic
Four ten months ago. And with that, Alba snaps a shot herself
wearing the rose gold and diamond hoop earrings Warren gave
her for her 24th birthday just last week. “He knows
me very well,” says the honey-skinned actress. “Every
day I find an excuse to wear them.”
Alba leads
the way to her master bathroom. “That’s probably
the most decadent thing I have,” she says pointing to
the next TSCLW, her “big-ass” bathtub, which seats
at least two and has a flat-screen TV mounted above it. “I
take a bath almost every day,” she says. “Because
I work out, I usually put in a gallon of Epson salts. And
I light my Joya vanilla candles that smell like cupcakes.”
So just how long is she likely to soak for? “Well, we
took a two and a half hour bath like two days ago and watched
American Idol,” she says, giggling at the memory. “It’s
real romantic.”
“When
I got this place three years ago, it had lime green walls
and white Burber carpet everywhere,” she says, making
her way downstairs to the living room. “Everyone said,
(dismissively) ‘Oh, it’s a cute first house,’
and I was like, ‘Don’t worry. I know what I’m
doing.’ I wanted it to be beautiful and elegant but
warm and homey at the same time.” For Alba, a military
brat who attended 12 different schools before graduating at
16 and then spent several years working on TV series abroad—Flipper
in Australia, Dark Angel in Vancouver--it must be nice to
have a place to call home. “I finally have a place,
yeah,” she confirms. “I feel settled.”
Did she imagine
growing up that, at 21, she’d be able to buy a house
like this that was all hers? “On one hand, I absolutely
thought I would be in this place, but on the other hand, it’s
like, ‘Pinch me.’ I mean, do you have any idea
where I came from?”
Jessica Alba was born into an Air Force family in the L.A.
suburb of Pomona, CA. When she was an infant, the family moved
to Mississippi, then Texas, before returning to Pomona when
Jessica was nine. At 12, Alba became interested in acting
and started taking classes in Beverly Hills, over an hour
away from Pomona. An agent saw Alba perform in a showcase
and started sending her on auditions. She booked her first
job, the film Camp Nowhere, two months later. Team Alba was
all about tenacity. “I wasn’t lucky,” she
says. “We hustled.” Alba walks over to a shelf
of personal photographs. “My mom gave up working and
drove me around. And my dad put the ‘Never quit’
thing in my head. To this day, my work ethic is pretty on
point.”
Alba picks
up a favorite picture of her parents. “My dad is so
dark and my mom is so light,” says Alba, who is French-Danish
on her mother’s side and Mexican-Indian and Spanish
on her father’s. Did her mixed ethnicity ever come into
play in terms of casting? “It was definitely something
that made it a struggle at the beginning,” she admits,
“because I’m not the all-American blonde or the
typical Latin girl. I fell into the ‘We don’t
know what you are’ category. Now, it’s more open.”
Case in point: Alba’s role in Fantastic Four is Sue
Storm, a fair-skinned, blue-eyed, long-necked blonde. “I’m
playing a person that everyone said I could never play,”
marvels Alba who stayed out of the sun and wore blue contacts
for the role. “I think that’s way cool.”
And she welcomes the opportunity to be a role model to others
of mixed race. “I was never accepted into the Latin
community as a Latin girl and I was never accepted into the
white community as an all-American girl,” she reveals,
“so whatever place I fit is where I feel I can hopefully
be an example to other people that feel like outcasts.”
Before Fantastic
Four, Alba played a lasso-twirling exotic dancer in Sin City,
a hip-hop choreographer in Honey, and a scuba-diving shark
expert in the upcoming Into the Blue. Though Alba is the first
to admit she’s in a cutthroat business, she claims she
doesn’t spend a lot of time lamenting the parts that
got away. “If someone isn’t completely gung ho
about me doing the role, then I don’t want to waste
anybody’s time,” she says. “There are a
lot of lovely girls out there and I want women to be stars
in every movie, in all genres. As many Camerons and Drews
and girls like that, the better.”
Judging by
her “media room,” with the screen that descends
from the ceiling, Alba is as passionate about watching movies
as she is being in them. She shows off a stack of DVDs she
says she can’t live without, and she admits to enjoying
a few guilty pleasures in her media room as well, like Mariah
Carey’s Glitter (“It’s so wrong, it’s
right”) and the reality series America’s Next
Top Model. “The girls are just funny,” she says.
“And I love how ghetto Tyra gets. I have a hard time
missing that show.”
On a nearby shelf, Alba keeps a selection action figures from
Dark Angel. Though she can live without the toys themselves—“I
think they’re hilarious”—they represent
a pivotal time in her life. “I had told myself that
if I didn’t get something significant by the time I
turned 18, I was going to quit acting and go to college,”
she says. “I got Dark Angel when I was 17.” The
series, which was produced my Titanic director James Cameron,
changed the way Alba thought about the business. “Jim
allowed me to be a part the complete development of the show,”
marvels Alba, who has several scripts in development as a
producer. “I don’t know any man in this business
that would give a 17 year-old girl so much control. I was
absolutely terrified but also loving it. It was like, ‘Finally.
All the hard work and my parents sacrificing and not having
money had paid off’.”
Alba heads
up to the kitchen where she finds another TSCLW, her bottle
of Glucosamine Chondroitin. “Anybody who works out should
take this stuff,” she says of the non-prescription supplement,
designed to support healthy joints, ligaments and other soft
tissues. She also can’t get enough water and has a bottle
of Evian or Fiji nearby at all times. “I get thirsty,”
she says with a shrug. Given that she’s in incredible
shape, one wonders if Alba is one of those people who just
lives to work out. We’re happy to report she’s
not. “It’s such a pain in the ass,” she
groans. “Running is suffering, I don’t care what
anybody says, but it always makes me feel good afterwards.”
The doorbell
rings. “Oh, Bille is here!” she says excitedly.
Bille Woodruff is Alba’s best friend and a definite
TSCLW. They hit it off instantly when Woodruff, the filmmaker
behind the recent hit Beauty Shop, directed Alba in Honey.
It was Woodruff who, in the aftermath of Alba’s breakup
from her Dark Angel co-star Michael Weatherly, bought her
the book The Art of the Seduction by Robert Green. The tart
and twisted relationships primer is definitely on Alba’s
TSCLW list.
BILLE:
Jessica didn’t need The Art of the Seduction. I just
thought she’d enjoy it. I wanted to remind her of the
diva that she is.
JESSICA:
He was like, “Don’t feel like you need to feel
bad about yourself and go out with guys that are lame,”
because I was depressed.
BILLE:
It was her first love. That was one of my ‘tough love’
things for her. I was like “Don’t let him call
you anymore!”
JESSICA:
It was bad.
BILLE:
She did not stop crying. She was like, “Nobody likes
me…”
JESSICA:
“How can anyone ever like me? Waaahh!” It was
the worst shit ever.
After bidding
farewell to Bille, Alba hops in her car to run some errands.
Before long it becomes clear that everyone knows and loves
her, starting with the clerk at the newsstand on Beverly Drive,
where Alba regularly gets her fix of such favorite titles
as The New Yorker, W, and, what a coincidence, Marie Claire.
Then it’s
onto Petco, where her two female pugs, Sid and Nancy, both
of whom she can’t live without, are being groomed for
a charity event Alba’s taking them to tonight called
the Lint Roller party. “It’s to support Best Friends
Animal Sanctuary which is a place that does pet adoption,”
explains Alba. “I’m getting them cute for the
red carpet.” Alba crouches down to greet her bowed and
beautified babies. They couldn’t be happier to see her.
“Oh
no, Nancy, NO! Shit!” Alba exclaims. It seems dogs will
be dogs, even when they’re owned by a celebrity. First
Nancy lets go with a number #2 on the store’s tile floor,
and then Sid promptly follows suit. “Oh Sid, what the
hell is wrong with you?” Alba shrieks. Thinking fast,
Alba grabs a package of wipes from a nearby shelf, wipes up
the mess, and puts everything in the trash. “You have
no idea how often this happens,” she admits. “Anytime
I’m in front of Louis Vitton, Gucci, Prada, anything
super nice, that’s a prime moment for them to let it
all out.”
Alba’s
last stop before heading home is her favorite java joint,
Euro Café. “I can’t do my day without coffee,”
she confesses.
The owner
knows what Alba wants before she can even order it: a three-shot
soy latte with sugar-free vanilla. While she waits for her
drink, two fellow customers, who claim to be movie producers
from France, start chatting her up. “What do you think
of life in Hollywood?” asks the more forward of the
two. “It’s a struggle,” Alba replies. “What
is?” asks the man, who by this point, is practically
undressing her with his eyes. “Not being objectified,”
says Alba pointedly.
“Men
are silly the way they approach women, and I know it’s
not just me,” she remarks a few minutes later back in
the car.
“As
if there were a chance in hell I’d ever want to go out
with someone with a line like that.”
It’s
a mute point anyway as Alba’s taken, and very happily
so. “When I met Cash, I knew I was going to know him
for the rest of my life,” she says as she turns up the
hill to head home. “If I would have met Cash when I
was with somebody else, it would have been bad, bad news for
that person. Because no matter what, I know he’s the
person I’m supposed to be with. He loves me, he’s
really smart, and he knows how to talk to me and put me in
my place without being cruel.”
Does she think
about getting married and starting a family? “My parents
have been married since they were 18 and 19,” she says.
“So I know about ‘through thick and thin’
and I know it’s possible to make it work if you want
to. I want to have a couple of kids. After my first one, I
may change my mind but I definitely want to have my first
one by the time I’m 30.”
In the meantime, Alba’s happy to spoil her fourteen
younger cousins and her godson, Wilson, who is at the house
when Alba returns. Wilson’s father, Chris Henze, has
been Alba’s manager since she was 12. “It’s
been a long, deliberate road,” he says, while Alba and
Wilson pose for a TSCLW photo. “Jessica decided long
ago what she was going to do and she’s been laser focused.
You can’t do it without that.”
Alba hands
Wilson to his mom, Veronica, then takes the digital camera
and looks back over the shots she’s taken of the things—and
people--she can’t live without. “I’m just
really grateful,” she says, when asked how she would
describe this time in her life. “Hard work pays off.
Honestly, I could never imagine my life being any different
than it is now.”
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