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October 31, 2005, 11:00 PM
Jessica Biel Is the Sexiest Woman Alive
By A.J. Jacobs
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I know the body climbing out of that SUV alarmingly well. I know it better than the body of any other human being, with the possible exception of my wife's. I've been staring at photos of this body for weeks now -- thinking about it, scrutinizing it, asking lots of probing questions about it. For those who haven't been paying attention: In each of the last five issues, Esquire has unveiled a different body part of the Sexiest Woman Alive. We started at her toes in June and took you to her lower lip last month. Until now, her identity has been kept hidden even from our friends and family. Our readers have submitted a flurry of guesses: Angelina Jolie? Kirsten Dunst? Kay Bailey Hutchison?
It has been my job to phone this mystery woman every month and ask her about that issue's body part. (This is journalism, after all, not prurience.) The first time I spoke to the Sexiest Woman Alive, we had a fifteen-minute discussion about her feet. It was the kind of phone conversation that, under other circumstances, would have required the use of a credit card.
"What color are your toenails?"
"Red."
"What color red?"
"I'm not sure of the name."
"Um, do you like getting your feet massaged?"
"Yes."
"Hard or soft?"
"I like strong hands. Someone who really gets in there and gets the knots out."
"Can you pick up objects with your toes?"
"Yes, actually, I can."
"Like what? Pens?"
"Yes, I could probably pick up pens. Maybe a big marble."
"What about a stapler? Could you pick up a stapler?"
"Yes, I could probably pick up a stapler, too."
After several equally refined conversations, I have become planet Earth's greatest expert on this body. I know about the blue tattoo of a dove on her stomach and the scar on her left shin from slipping on a tractor. I know about her preference for shaving over waxing because waxing feels like a flyswatter on her skin. I know her thighs are strong from riding a big white horse in Prague this summer for the movie The Illusionist. I know she loved having pumped-up shoulders for her role as a vampire slayer in Blade: Trinity. I know her opinion about her breasts: "I feel comfortable with them. And, uh, I like them."
And now, finally, I am looking at the sexiest body in the world in three dimensions, live and unplugged.
Jessica Biel steps out of the SUV and jogs toward me. She's wearing tight jeans, a sparkly gold shirt tied at the waist, a low-cut white T-shirt underneath. No doubt about it: It's an impressive body. And I should probably stop staring. Right now. Or now. Okay, I've officially started to creep myself out.
Before I met Jessica, I decided we needed to elevate our relationship. So I asked her to meet me at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Can't get much more highbrow than that, right? I also brought along my wife and kid. This, I figured, would show Jessica that I'm not a John Wayne Gacy-like perv.
When Jessica meets my seventeen-month-old son, she leans in and says, "Hello, gorgeous." He smiles vacantly -- a common enough reaction by men. Her voice is husky like Lauren Bacall's. In fact, it's deeper than my voice (an observation she doesn't contradict, sadly). We start strolling into the Greek-statue section.
Jessica is hardly new to fame -- she started her career as a preacher's daughter on the WB drama 7th Heaven, battled an evil robotic plane with Jamie Foxx in Stealth, has a bunch of worshipful fan sites -- but at twenty-three she hasn't yet passed the threshold into surreal, fighting-off-the-paparazzi fame. And yet something about her sends off an invisible celebrity signal. Maybe it's the famous-person sunglasses. (Hers are reddish tinted.) Or maybe it's the star posture. She has the best posture I've ever seen. She could hold an apple between her shoulder blades.
The signal goes to work immediately, causing museum-goers to stop her every few feet. One of her admirers requests and gets a hug. Another, an oily teenager who looks as if he spends a lot of time searching for the secret sex scenes in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, manages to stop her twice -- once for an autograph, and minutes later for a picture.
We've been in the museum all of ten minutes when I decide we need a mission to stay focused. Naturally, I find myself taking the relationship right back into the gutter. "What if we tried to find the sexiest woman in the museum? You know, because you're the Sexiest Woman Alive?"
"Okay, sure. Sounds like fun."
Jessica starts scanning the crowd, sizing up the German tourist ladies waddling toward a sarcophagus.
"Oh, I actually meant the sexiest painting or statue."
I may not be Ted Koppel, but I'm not that crass.
She seems relieved. But you've got to love her for agreeing to critique the relative attractiveness of fat European tourists. This much is clear: She's a game girl.
We come to our first candidate, a frighteningly steatopygous Babylonian statue. "Well, a fertility goddess," she says. "You can't get much sexier than that."
Nevertheless, we decide to keep searching.
Jessica was a child actor, and when child actors get older, they seem to fall into two camps: They either self-destruct into liquor-store-robbing messes, or they become adults long before they should. Jessica falls into the second category. She seems far too poised and stable and directed for her age.
Still, she is in her early twenties. She gushes about a drink she pounded in Prague: lick coffee grounds off hand, take a shot of vodka, finish with a lime. Her friend named it "the molester." And on her twenty-first birthday, she tells me, she downed "about fifteen shots in fifteen minutes," went to the bathroom, vomited, then rode in a mechanical-bull competition and won.
But that aside, she seems far older than a girl who still can't rent a car. She doesn't uptalk or giggle. There aren't a lot of likes or ums in her conversation. She actually asks questions about other people -- bizarre for a celebrity. And she has a healthy lack of pretension about her status as an actress. During interviews for the military movie Stealth, journalists kept asking her opinion about the latest weapons. "Sometimes I'd say, 'I am totally in favor of unmanned combat-aerial vehicles during wartime.' And the next time I'd be absolutely against it. I'd change it up to keep myself from getting bored. Because my opinion on a subject like that doesn't really matter."
My wife points out a Paolo Veronese portrait of Venus squeezing a stream of milk from her breast. Sexy? Well, there are Websites devoted to those who would say yes. But Jessica deems it "too functional." She does like the size of the painting, though. It's huge. "I went to the Louvre," she says, "and I was a little disappointed by how small the Mona Lisa was."
I didn't know she had been to Paris. It's one of the few facts I didn't know. In addition to my monthly interrogations of Jessica about her body parts, I wrote the clues to her identity we gave each month. Which means I read far too many Jessica Biel profiles. So now I know that she started out doing Pringles commercials. And that the pilot of the WB's Christian-themed 7th Heaven featured a scene of her being taught how to kiss by her onscreen brother -- a plotline that was wisely deemed too weird. I know that her friends call her Jesse. And that she dates actor Chris Evans (the Human Torch from Fantastic Four), who spread rose petals all over her apartment on her twenty-first birthday -- presumably before the vomiting incident.
I know she grew up in Boulder, Colorado. That her dad is a former business consultant, and her mom used to do "spiritual healing."
I know she attended Tufts University for a year and that the Tufts mascot is Jumbo the elephant. (In fact, the only friend of hers who guessed she was the mystery woman was a Tufts alum who decoded the elephant clue.) I know swordfish is one of her favorite foods. I know that she's starring in Elizabethtown, Cameron Crowe's comedy, which opens this month and in which she plays Orlando Bloom's bitch of a girlfriend.
I also know that Jessica does not do nudity. She's made that clear in interview after interview. She'll do sex scenes, like the one with James Van Der Beek in The Rules of Attraction, but she won't bare anything naughty. In fact, a good part of that scene was a close-up of Jessica's face. She says that Van Der Beek wasn't even on the bed with her. So: no nudity. The reason, not surprisingly, has a lot to do with a quasi-infamous photo shoot for Gear magazine.
Back in 2000, when she was starring as a good Christian girl on 7th Heaven, Jessica posed for a series of topless photos. They weren't completely topless, mind you -- there was a carefully placed arm covering her breasts -- but close enough. She was seventeen. Aaron Spelling, the show's producer, was pissed; Stephen Collins, the actor who played her father on the show, called the pictures "child pornography"; and her role on the show was chopped down to guest appearances.
"A lot of people said to me, That was the bravest thing I've ever seen anybody do," she says. "But I was miserable. It was horrible. I was humiliated. I just wanted my family to forgive me....I was taken advantage of in many different ways. Now I can look at the pictures and not be disgusted, and I don't have to cry about it. I look at it as a learning experience."
Which makes it all the more remarkable that she agreed to pose for our project, a life-size, multipart, heart-stopping photograph revealing her as the Sexiest Woman Alive. While wearing nothing but a scarf wrapped around her privates. "The shooting of that photo was very hard," she admits. "I felt all the emotions coming back from four or five years ago. I went home after the day was done, I called my mom and cried to her on the phone. But actually, it was almost cathartic in a way. And I feel really happy with the outcome."
In fact, she says, she might not be opposed to baring herself for the camera in the future. I know it's a cheap question to ask, but we happen to be within spitting distance of some very naked Rubens women. "I don't know how I'll feel in two years, five years, ten years," she says. "I heard about an actress -- someone I admired -- who said she wished she had done more nudity when she was twenty-something, since now she's older and it ain't pretty anymore."
Finally, we come upon one more candidate, a painting of a beautiful biblical heroine draped in robes. Jessica thinks she looks a bit like Juliette Binoche. Though the scene is a little incongruous, Jessica wants me to know that the woman is definitely sexy. "It's not because of her great body, either," she says. "It's because she's hardcore and confident. That's instantly sexy."
I have decided to ask no more impertinent questions. We are standing in front of Massimo Stanzione's portrait of Judith gripping the decapitated head of Holofernes, her oppressor.
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