Singing and dancing in a billowing Regency ballgown, Jennifer Lopez seemed a picture of delight last month as she celebrated her 55th birthday with a Bridgerton-themed extravaganza in the Hamptons.
The abundant photos and footage she later posted online were full of JLo’s customary look-at-me exuberance in full flush.
Yet, hidden beneath the glitz and glamour, lay an unmistakable air of desperation.
Singing and dancing in a billowing Regency ballgown, Jennifer Lopez seemed a picture of delight last month as she celebrated her 55th birthday with a Bridgerton-themed extravaganza in the Hamptons.
The abundant photos and footage she later posted online were full of JLo’s customary look-at-me exuberance in full flush.
Yet, hidden beneath the glitz and glamour, lay an unmistakable air of desperation.
Bridgerton has a strong flavor of Jane Austen romance about it, of course. But the theme might have been more fitting had JLo taken her cue from Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham, who spends the rest of her life in a decaying wedding dress after being jilted at the altar.
For there was one glaring absence at the lavish birthday bash – namely JLo’s husband, Ben Affleck.
He’d been spotted the very same day on the other side of America, no longer even bothering with the charade of wearing his wedding ring.
We now know from their divorce papers – finally filed in Los Angeles on Tuesday by Lopez – that the couple once known so cozily as ‘Bennifer’ had been living separately since April.
In January, Lopez posted a brief video for her nearly 17 million YouTube subscribers titled ‘JLOVERS… 2024 is our year.’
Seven months later, and that hoped-for year of triumph has all but disintegrated.
By the time of Tuesday’s divorce announcement, you’d have been hard pressed to find a tribesman in the remotest part of the Amazon who’d have been surprised by the news. Or felt particularly sympathetic about it, really, given the wealth of evidence that both parties should have seen this coming
Far from being an annus mirabilis for JLo, 2024 must surely rank as among her worst so far – a year dominated by the drip-drip-drip of humiliating claims from the Affleck camp that Lopez was driving him to distraction with her endless craving for attention.
But the formal collapse of the marriage is just the icing on the 55th birthday cake when it comes to her recent setbacks.
Driven by a burning ambition that has propelled her to a stardom that some say greatly exceeds her actual talents, Lopez has never been one to neglect her work.
Following the rekindling of the Bennifer romance in 2022, and their swift Las Vegas marriage that summer, she has ensured that her professional projects have remained inextricably entangled with her private life.
As such, the first act in an exhaustingly narcissistic four-pronged $20 million public tribute to their enduring ‘love story’ (album, film, documentary and tour) was released in February.
‘This Is Me… Now’ was her first studio album in a decade but received a lackluster response from both fans and critics, not least because of Lopez’s endless self-absorbed harping-on about Affleck.
New songs included the likes of ‘Dear Ben Pt II’, ‘Rebound’, ‘Greatest Love Story Never Told’ and ‘Mad In Love’, surely the most honestly titled among them.
Entering at No.38 on the Billboard 200 (the first of her studio albums not to break into the Top 20) the record quickly vanished from relevance – selling a mere 14,000 copies in its debut week.
‘This Is Me… Now’ was accompanied by a musical film.
The bizarre if visually-dazzling movie was a heavily-stylized fictional retelling of her various failed romances which JLo – now said to be worth $400 million – financed herself.
In the film, Lopez’s character says that when people would ask what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would answer: ‘I want to be in love.’
Told she’s a ‘relationship addict’, she goes into rehab.
The film features a cameo by Affleck and was billed gushingly as an ‘unflinching’ 20-year ‘journey to self-discovery’ and a ‘vulnerable portrait of an icon who put it all on the line and discovered a newfound determination in self-acceptance and love’.
Reports that the buttoned-up Affleck couldn’t cope with Lopez’s relentless desire to share everything were confirmed by the film’s director, Dave Meyers, at a press conference.
He confided that Affleck had reservations about ‘all their personal stuff [being] out there’.
If the film wasn’t enough sharing, there was also an attendant documentary for Amazon Prime, ‘The Greatest Love Story Never Told’, in which Affleck admits on-screen to confronting Lopez, telling her bluntly that ‘one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media’.
Fair enough – though some were quick to point out that Artists Equity, a production company co-owned by Affleck, had paid for the documentary and produced it.
Again, critics determined the film was – at best – of limited interest to anyone but hardcore JLo fans.
And then there was the overly ambitious planned arena tour, on the back of the new album, with 30 dates scheduled across the US and Canada.
Reports soon emerged that JLo was struggling to fill stadiums, with industry insiders accusing her of woefully over-estimating her current commercial appeal.
Initially, Lopez responded to slow sales by cancelling a few dates.
By the end of May, she’d cancelled the tour entirely, with ‘friends’ insisting that she’d only done so because she needed to devote time to saving her marriage – which, by then, was under intense press focus.
‘Jennifer is taking time off to be with her children, family and close friends,’ an announcement read.
2024 has been a bad year for her non-Affleck-affiliated ventures, too.
Atlas, a $100 million sci-fi action movie about the threat from artificial intelligence, in which Lopez starred as the lead, was panned by the critics.
The film, which she co-produced for Netflix and which came out in May, has a pitiful 19 percent approval rating on review website Rotten Tomatoes.
The movie’s reputation took a further battering when Ukraine’s Kiev Post reported that Netflix had – disturbingly – used real-life footage of fighting in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol (where hundreds have died in the Russian invasion) in a scene depicting robots attacking people.
Meanwhile, Lopez’s cosmetics range, ‘JLo Beauty’, is no longer so fragrant.
She was informed late last year that major beauty retailer Sephora wants her products out of its stores by the end of 2024 due to weak sales.
Selina Gomez’s ‘Rare Beauty’ range, for instance, notches up more than five times her sales.
Pop music expert Louis Mandelbaum put it bluntly: ‘Jennifer Lopez remains a super celebrity, but she has not been a relevant hit maker in a long time. There’s a dissonance between her fame and how much currency she has as a pop star in 2024.’
There was also a fatal ‘dissonance’ between what Lopez claimed about her unconquerable love with Affleck when they married in 2022 and the sort of thing that her soon-to-be-ex is now reportedly saying.
By the Spring, the language coming from the Affleck camp couldn’t have been less romantic, with one friendly insider even claiming that Ben had been ‘temporarily insane’ when he married JLo, and that their short marriage had been a ‘fever dream’.
Affleck, it was said, had grown tired of his wife’s starry extravagance and hunger for self-publicity and, in May, had moved out of their $60 million marital home, into a $100,000 Brentwood rental.
Stung by the one-sidedness of the rumors coming out about the marriage, and as JLo holidayed alone in Italy – caught by paparazzi taking selfies on a yacht off Positano – her camp hit back.
Friends of Lopez suggested that Affleck, a recovering alcoholic, was ‘very difficult to live with’.
He is ‘not easy… he has a lot of demons’, one insider claimed. Some even suggested he might be drinking again.
A pal of JLo confided to the Mail that ‘she has been taking the blame for the end of the tour and the marriage, and the mockery of the world – it is all the opposite of the truth.’
Whatever that truth may be, it’s hard not to feel she bears at least some share of responsibility for the breakdown of a marriage that everyone else appeared to know was never going to work.
On Wednesday, it was reported that even some of her friends are ‘fed up’ with the four-times married star and her endlessly chaotic love life.
In some sense, 2024 really has been JLo’s year – but hardly in the way she’ll want to remember.
