Grown-up Janet Jackson talks about racism, sensuality and the Jackson family - Cover Story

Ebony, Sept, 1993 by Lynn Norment

While enjoying her grilled vegetables, Jackson explains that she stopped eating meat when she was 10. "At that time everyone in my family stopped," she says. "That's when Michael became a true vegetarian. Only vegetables. it's been a year since I stopped eating chicken."

Jackson is slim and petite, her skin taut, her muscles toned. Just shy of 5 feet 4 inches, she weighs 110 pounds. It's hard to imagine that she once battled the bulge. "My grandmother used to say, |Leave her alone; that's only baby fat,'" she recalls of those years. "But it was never baby fat; fat is what it was. Just fat. Yeah, I was heavy at one time. Just look at the video of When I Think Of You (1986). That's the biggest I've ever been. I weighed a lot."

When Jackson is shown the Janet. compact disc cover, on which her slim waist with sexy navel hovers provocatively above unzipped jeans, she smiles demurely. "A couple of [media] people said it could not have been my stomach because it was too toned," she exclaims. "That's really silly to me, because I've never shown my stomach before. I work out six days a week, for an hour and 40 minutes, every day. And I go straight from workouts to rehearsals and work out again for six or seven hours. You cannot help but be in shape."

Jackson is interrupted by her three dogs barking as they welcome home her longtime companion, Rene Elizondo, who directed the That's The Way Love Goes video. Elizondo, 30, a slim, attractive man who had a cameo role in Poetic Justice, warmly: greets Jackson.

Jackson and Elizondo have been "best friends" for 11 years, since they met when she was 16. "We were just like this," she says, intertwining two slender brown fingers. "When I first met him I was going through so much, and I would call him, and I would cry on the phone . . . . And he was going through some stuff, too, with his girlfriend. We were best friends. Then, when I was about 20, it was the strangest thing when we started being attracted to each other. I felt like I was sinning somehow or something. It might sound strange, but we were such good friends. But I think those are the best relationships, when you are friends first."

Is marriage on the horizon?

"Nope. No time soon at all," she says.

Though it is a subject she clearly does not care to discuss, Jackson acknowledges that her brief marriage to James DeBarge in 1984 when she was 18, was the most painful period of her life. This obviously is the personal trauma that Elizondo helped her endure.

"I went through a lot, from age 15 1/2 to about 19 years," she says. [During this time, Jackson also released her first two albums to less than critical acclaim.] "I was very young. I used to hurt so badly that I'd ask God why, what have I done to deserve any of this? I feel now He was preparing me for this, for the future. That's the way I see it."

These early experiences gave Jackson the confidence to ignore the naysayers who said an entertainer with her privileged background could never convincingly portray Justice. The character is a South Central L.A. hair stylist who grapples with the emotional trauma of losing her mother to suicide and her boyfriend to gang violence by writing poetry.