The back seat of a stretch limo making a tight turn is no place to stick a pencil in your eye, but Queen Latifah didn’t flinch. En route to a meeting at Cover Girl, where she is the face — and the name — of its Queen Collection (makeup for women of color), she did a quick touch-up. Peering into the mirror she had pulled down from the car’s ceiling, she stretched her lower lid and, as the car swerved to the left, drew a perfect line inside it. I squinted at the pencil.
“Is that Cover Girl?” I asked.
“Yup,” she said, without moving her eye from the mirror. “As far as you’re concerned.” I laughed as she dropped it quickly into her bag and pulled out a thick orange tube of Lash Blast mascara instead. “This is Cover Girl,” she said.
With or without makeup, Latifah’s face is at the center of her fortune. With her almond-shaped eyes and sweeping cheekbones, she could have been painted by Gauguin, though her beauty is recognizably her own, animated by a warmth, humor and innate self-confidence most women would kill for. Her stardom, in movies and television, has come from her gifts at playing the underdog or the outsider, the thick girl in body only, whose heart and brain are her best defense against the villainously rich, skinny and cutthroat. You can’t help rooting for her.
During the two days I spent with Latifah, I watched people respond to that distinctive face with the inevitable double-takes — on the street, on the train, in the office — with their own yelps of excitement and delight. Hers is a story many of them know well.
Dana Owens of Newark was raised Baptist and named herself Latifah as a child, after learning it was Arabic for “delicate, sensitive and kind.” At 38, she has already had numerous careers. She released her first album, “All Hail the Queen,” at 19, which, with its hit single, “Ladies First,” established her as rap music’s top female artist, proclaiming a message of self-respect and female empowerment in a genre famous for its misogyny. She won a Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance in 1994 and was nominated six other times, including for the jazz-vocal “Dana Owens Album,” which went gold. In December she will release a new rap CD produced by Cool and Dre.
Since 1991, when she appeared in a small role in Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever,” Latifah has made nearly 30 feature films and earned an Oscar nomination for her role as Mama Morton, the prison matron in “Chicago.” On television, she hosted her own talk show for two years and was featured in the Fox series “Living Single.” Last year, for HBO, she starred in the film “Life Support,” for which she won a Golden Globe award and an Emmy nomination. She was also one of its executive producers, as she is for many of her projects. With her mother, Rita Owens, and her childhood friend, Shakim Compere, she founded Flavor Unit Entertainment, a management-and-production company, when she was 20. With Compere’s help, Latifah still manages her own career; Flavor Unit represents the actor Terrence Howard and the rapper Eve, among others.
She returned from a monthlong vacation — Egypt, Mykonos, Barcelona, Ibiza, London — the day after Labor Day, and the following morning we headed to Cover Girl. She had barely 48 hours before leaving for Toronto, where her newest film, “The Secret Life of Bees,” would have its premiere at the city’s film festival. The movie is based on the best-selling novel by Sue Monk Kidd and also stars Dakota Fanning, Sophie Okonedo, Alicia Keys and Jennifer Hudson. It opens Oct. 17.
We met on the Acela Express to Baltimore. Traveling with her were Compere and Jarrod Moses, a branding-and-marketing executive who helps manage Queen Latifah’s business with Cover Girl. Compere, along with the William Morris Agency, arranged her participation in Jenny Craig’s Ideal Size campaign, during which she reached her goal of dropping 5 to 10 percent of her body weight — not to preen in a bikini but to lower her cholesterol (she did, by 20 points) and improve her overall health. As Latifah settled into her seat, I worried out loud about submitting a first-class train ticket on my expense report. She held out her arms. “You traveling with the Queen,” she said, laughing. “You had to follow the story.” She took off her Tom Ford sunglasses and put them in her silver quilted Tod’s bag. Then she showed me the gold cartouche she bought in Egypt, with her name in hieroglyphics, on a thick gold chain. “They know how to lounge in the Middle East,” she said. “It’s hot, I get it. They smoke some shisha and lounge. Life is good.”
The Queen (she chose that honorific as a teenager, convinced that all women should feel like queens, even those in humble circumstances) is an expert at chitchat. The ride flew by.
She became obsessed on her vacation with what she called “the muh-JONG game,” meaning mah-jongg, which she discovered on iPod Touch. When Moses and I reminisced about grandmothers who played and agreed that the tiles sounded comforting, like knitting needles, she was genuinely tickled. “They got real tiles?” she said. “I got to get that.”
In Baltimore, we headed to a private dining room at the Capital Grille. Moses talked about plans for a Queen Latifah fragrance and a clothing line. He has been in business with her and Compere for 10 years. “They’re very loyal people,” he told me. “They don’t waver.”
Also at the table was Keith Sheppard, Queen Latifah’s main security guard, whom she has known since they were 12. He is a massive man with a big smile and a warm heart, but when he positions himself between the Queen and an overly eager fan, he can make your blood run cold.
Latifah ordered an Arnold Palmer (half iced tea, half lemonade) and a bowl of New England clam chowder. Moses had preordered some appetizers and salads for the table, and as they were served, Latifah bowed her head, almost imperceptibly, to say a silent grace. She asked for hot sauce for her chowder. She doesn’t like Tabasco, so the waiter brought a dish of something green, filled with seeds, from the kitchen. She tasted it. Her eyes flew open, and she waved her hand in front of her mouth. “That’s exciting,” she panted. “May I have a glass of milk with ice, please?” He hovered as she sipped it. “It made it perfect,” she reassured him.
He looked relieved, but he needn’t have worried. Queen Latifah is no foot-stamping diva. Her manners toward anyone working in service or support — whether an Amtrak conductor, a waiter, a limo driver, a secretary at Cover Girl or an assistant at Flavor Unit — were impeccable. While she seems to have learned how to tune out the well-meaning fans who invariably end up being intrusive (even after she says hello, they won’t go away, which is where Sheppard comes in), to every working person she encountered she was completely present and unfailingly polite. via
