Other than living with mom and a growling stomach, she's perfect.....

Click My Love

by Chris Heath

#1: Daybreak

After a dream that involves a ham sandwich and a kilt, today Jennifer Love Hewitt rises at six. As soon as she leaves her bed in the Los Angeles home that the twenty-three-year-old shares with her mother, she makes it. She is particular like that, and in so many other ways.

Downstairs, she opens the wake-up Coca-Cola she has been drinking since she was twelve -- sipped, as she prefers, from the can. She sits for a while at the kitchen table with her mother, as is their custom, talking about the day ahead, watching the news shows.

On Hewitt's lap sits her Chihuahua, Mia. Before she leaves the house, Hewitt puts on the soundtrack to Dirty Dancing, a recent purchase, bought after she re-watched the movie a few days back, alone. "I'm a girl," she will say. "It's what we do." Just yesterday she watched Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles. "My whole life," she will say, "I've been sitting waiting for Jake Ryan from Sixteen Candles to pull up in a red Ferrari. To come and get me."

One Particular Day in the Life Of Jennifer Love Hewitt #2: Work

Even though the billboards of herself and Jackie Chan advertising their new movie, The Tuxedo, are already up over Los Angeles, the movie itself is still not finished. This morning she must rerecord some dialogue at a studio on the Fox lot. Many of the words her character speaks involve explaining the plot (some kind of terrorist threat against the water supply, it seems). "I'm info girl," she says.

Her last chore is to speak the line -- which shows her character's skepticism about an upscale party -- "Product launch, my ass." After she's said it a few times, she turns back to the director, Kevin Donovan, and tells him, "You guys are having me say naughty words -- I don't curse in real life."

"I've heard you say 'ass,' " he says.

She shakes her head. "No. I'm very good. I promised my grandmother I wouldn't, and I don't. Except in movies."

This is true. Afterward, she explains that when she feels like swearing, she invokes an eccentric bargain she has struck with her mother. "When I really need to curse and get it out, I'll let her do it for me. She'll just stand in front of me and say every one in the book. I feel so much better, and it keeps me from having to say it."

What does it say about you, I ask, that you would be so careful about all this? "I don't know. I tend to do things very much like an eighty-five-year-old woman. I don't have a huge social life. I like to stay at home and watch Golden Girls reruns." She further notes, "People are always making fun of me. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I've never done a drug in my entire life, I don't curse, really . . . so I'm the dork goody-two-shoes girl everybody picks on. But I like it. It makes me me. It makes me an individual."

As we talk, her cell phone rings constantly. "They worry about me all day," she says. She adds that she likes to leave the phone on in case it's her mother.

One Particular Day In The Life Of Jennifer Love Hewitt #3: Lunch

This is how Jennifer Love Hewitt eats chicken-and-vegetable soup: She takes a piece of chicken and places it on the rim of the plate so that it can wait at the head of the line, "putting it aside for when I want my next piece of chicken." (Just chicken, or whatever else she selects. She doesn't like to put two different foodstuffs in her mouth at one time.) When its time comes, she will first pick at the piece of chicken with spoon and finger, removing any parts she considers imperfect. "I have a weird thing about little pieces of fat on chicken," she says. "It's just the look of it makes me nervous."

Click My Love

"I guess so, but . . . I don't want to say I don't care, but it doesn't really weigh on my mind that people think it's weird. . . . I'm twenty-three, and most kids move out when they're eighteen. But my mom's and my situation is very different." She says they've lived and worked together for the past fourteen years, they're so like each other, and she feels safer with her mother around. They'll live apart when the time comes, but "I like the fact that my mom and I need each other, and I like the fact that I'm only going to get one life with her and I'll never have to look back and say, 'Gosh, I wish my mom and I could have done that.'"

I ask in what ways she is like her father. "I don't know," she says. "I know him only slightly. They divorced when I was six months old, so he's never been a huge part of my life." (Her brother, Todd, was eight years old at the time.) Sometimes, when out of boredom or irritation Hewitt tugs at her nose, her mother has told her that she's being like her father. He still lives in Texas and works in a hospital. Hewitt and her dad speak "every once in a while." I ask when she last saw him. "It's been years," she says. "The things I do know about my dad are that he's very proud and very funny, and I feel very lucky that he allowed me to be here in the world. The rest of it I've really just never been curious to know. I don't know why."

Sometimes she is serious like this, but there is a lot of clowning about and banter in a conversation with Hewitt -- she is much more spirited and in-the-world than you might assume from some of her stated positions on life. Throughout the day, Hewitt is forever sticking her tongue out at me. Sometimes she thrusts it forward, but she can also tilt it sideways in the direction of the insultee and -- her coup de grace, tongue-insult-wise -- she can also ripple it weirdly. "I can make it into a flower," she says, describing this third version, though it's far odder. Like a sea clam, or something like that.

Click My Love

One Particular Day In The Life Of Jennifer Love Hewitt #4: Massage

Before we take off our clothes and lie down next to each other, there is something Jennifer Love Hewitt feels I should know about her. There is something she needs to warn me about.

"I have a very loud stomach," she says apologetically. "Almost to the point that it's abnormal how loud it is. You know when you lay down, your stomach growls? I just wanted you to know before we get in there -- I have a loud stomach."

We are to have massages in a poolside cabana at the Four Seasons Hotel. It is her idea.

As her back is kneaded, she tells me about a nightmare. She was on a boat rather like the Titanic, and there was a little kid there who looked as Hewitt did when she was young. The kid kept bugging her to play: "Let's go and have some fun." She refused. "I was, 'Are you kidding me? I'm busy. I have things to do,' and I kept pushing her away." Finally the girl disappeared, and Hewitt realized that she had fallen overboard.

This dream freaked her out for days. She eventually consulted a dream dictionary and decided she needed a vacation: "When there's a little kid, that's you when you were a kid, that's your subconscious way of saying you need to take a break and relax and play a bit more."

Because, I ask, you'd murdered your inner child?

"Kind of."

So she went to Hawaii, and soon she felt better.

As her calves and feet are tended to, we talk about her new record. (It is called BareNaked, and I dread that she will somehow try to relate this to our current state, but she turns out to have more class.) It is the fourth album she has made, but the first as an adult, and the first where she's really been involved in the creative process. She co-wrote much of it with its producer, Meredith Brooks. "Before," she says, "I was mostly handed my songs the day I walked into the studio." She talks about her favorite artists: Janis Joplin, Bill Withers, Billie Holiday, Al Green ("Sometimes you can almost see the smile on his face, and sometimes you can almost hear him crying") and Journey. "I'm obsessed with Journey," she says. "I think their songs have so much passion." A lot of her album is, she says, about her insecurities. "I'm always doing embarrassing things," she says, then adds, "I was in the middle of talking to somebody today and I ran into a door."

The massage is over. "I feel kind of weak in the knees," she says. "I feel like Jell-O."

Her stomach, however, has behaved impeccably.

One Particular Day In The Life Of Jennifer Love Hewitt #5: Interview

There is a conversation that seemed inappropriate to initiate either before or during our massages, but just before dinner, sitting by the pool at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, its time comes. It is only in reading all the previous writing about Jennifer Love Hewitt that I have realized the depth and specificity of the fixation that surrounds her.

So I ask her: What percentage of articles about you do you think mention your breasts in great detail?

"Oh, about ninety-eight percent," she breezily replies.

It is in fact, I suggest, perhaps seventy percent, but this is nonetheless remarkable. I wonder what she makes of this.

Click My Love

I point out that this may be why people keep asking her: because she says things like that.

"Yes," she says. "I have good one-liners about my boobs. But basically I finally put my nose on it this year. I have been the size I am now since I was twelve, OK? They've always been that way, they're mine, whatever. They shouldn't even be talked about. But I was on Party of Five, a show that had pride in the fact that it was not about hair and makeup and wardrobe. But because they kept me so hidden, figurewise, when I came out in I Know What You Did Last Summer in a tiny top and tight jeans, where they have shots coming down the barrel of cleavage, people went, 'Oh, my God, what did she have done?'"

So, I ask, is it a compliment or an insult?

"It's not either. It's absolutely absurd. If they danced or they had lights on them or they could read poems or sing, perhaps, then I would be, 'Write some articles about these things -- they're phenomenal!' But they're not. They're just . . . whatever they are. And I'm not really sure why it has continued to be talked about, but I pray every day that they stop at some point."

Click My Love

Hewitt has booked a room at the Sunset Marquis so that she and three of her girlfriends can have a slumber party after dinner. I am invited to its early stages. She puts on a robe over the lace top she wore to dinner and orders desserts from room service. "This is pretty much it," she says. "Sit around, wait for the fattening food to get here, eat a little and go to sleep. Sometimes we talk about Sex and the City episodes . . . dates we've all been on . . . fashion . . . which parts of our thighs we'd like to shave off. . . . " It is at this point that one of her friends' phones rings. It is someone whom the friend has not spoken to for some time. He is unexpectedly in the area and would like to see her.

(She rebuffs him.)

What follows is a long and careful discussion of what constitutes a booty call. Hewitt wonders whether she has been blissfully unaware that such calls have been made to her. "That's what's wrong with my social life," she says. "I'm missing the booty calls because I'm thinking that they're calling me late, and I'm, 'Why are you waking me up?'" She sighs. "I don't get calls late at night, except crank calls that go, 'I know what you did last summer!' It's always at a party, and they always have me on speakerphone and hang up, laughing hysterically. Now is that a booty call? No. That is not a booty call." She makes a declaration: "The next time some kid calls up and goes, 'I know what you did last summer,' I'm going to be like, 'You want my booty?' They're going to be, 'Jennifer Love Hewitt is so nasty.'"

The girls eat on and giggle on, and it is a conversation about the possibility of ice cream coming out of one's nose that leads Hewitt to offer a rather poignant snapshot of her younger self. "I used to make myself so sick at night after school," she says, "trying to get milk to come out of my nose. Because kids who did that were popular, and I could never do it." That wasn't all. "They used to say that if your thumb could bend at the knuckle really far back that that meant you had a kind heart. I used to sit like this [she bends her thumb back to demonstrate] after school: 'Come on! Do it!' I almost broke my thumb one day. I was so convinced for the longest time that I didn't have a kind heart because my thumb didn't go that way. I was, 'You guys, it's cold as steel in there -- the thumb's not working.' And the kids were like, 'Go and believe in Santa Claus, sweetie, we'll talk to you later.' " She smiles. "And I wonder why I wasn't popular in school."

The conversation wanders back to the subject of booty calls, interrupted only by the ringing of Hewitt's cell phone.

"Oh!" she says. "Maybe I'm getting one."

She is not.

"Oh, hi, Mom," she says. "Well, we're sitting here having an interesting conversation. . . . " She explains in great and careful detail ("He wants to, yeah, do it. . . . ") the whole booty-call phenomenon. "Yeah, Mom," she says. "Think of how many booty calls we've missed out on."

Images & Story: © 2002 Rolling Stone Magazine. All Rights Reserved.