Joking With the Real ‘It Boy’

It is like a dream, this moment: To be alone in a luxurious Beverly Hills hotel suite with Enrique Iglesias, the door’s “privacy” button engaged, all 6 feet, 2 inches of the 24-year-old superstar draped sensually over his chair.

OK, maybe he’s tired. He does spend only about four days a month at the Miami home he shares with a dog named Grammy. (Girrrl, he’s s-s-s-single!) But the delusional romantic in you prefers to think he’s probably just, you know, happy to see you.

He has sold more than 13 million albums worldwide in Spanish with his romantic pop-rock power ballads. He’s had a No. 1 single in English this year with the uncharacteristically upbeat “Bailamos,” and his English-language debut album “Enrique” entered the national sales chart this week at No. 42 (and No. 14 in L.A.) leading into the peak holiday-buying season. Critics and industry insiders expect the slick, versatile pop-rock album, which includes a duet with Whitney Houston, to sell at least 10 million copies worldwide, making Iglesias the only pop idol capable of making the nation howl a collective “Ricky who?”

By the way, Iglesias was voted the sexiest man in the world by People magazine’s Spanish-language edition last year, and at this moment half a dozen female fans ranging in age from 10 to 47 loiter in the plush lobby downstairs, trying to look natural.

And here you are, upstairs. He’s yours. All yours. In a couple of hours, Iglesias will perform downstairs for an Oscar De La Hoya Foundation benefit while inebriated celebrities eat ice cream shaped like boxing gloves. But for now, Iglesias stretches catlike, parts his full lips to speak, and you hold your breath. Yes, Enrique? What is it, mi amorrr?

“You know,” Iglesias purrs, low and intense. “I’ve only had diarrhea one time on stage, really bad.”

Huh?

“I was so sick.” He glances distractedly about the room, checks the clock. “Usually, if you have to pee, you know, you can hold it. If you need to scratch, you scratch. But that, huy--”

He sees the pain in your eyes, the disappointment. He appears delighted. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he says, perking up. Laughing. (At you, moron.) “I don’t mean diarrhea diarrhea, you know, from that end. It was more like diarrhea from the other end, how do you say it? Nausea?”

Splat. You have just crash-landed on Planet Enrique.

Yes, he’s pop music’s newest “It Boy.” But if you’re expecting him to be anything like that other “It Boy,” forget it.

Wearing Celebrity Like a Pair of Sweat Socks

Where Ricky Martin is all polite smiles, Enrique’s all about prank calls. Where Ricky dances on stage, Enrique stalks with the gangly gait of a middle school Dungeons and Dragons champion. Where Ricky chants and cheerleads to the audience in his carefully planned outfits, Enrique suffers and serenades in whatever he seems to have dragged from the wash pile. Born middle class, Martin strives to fit in with the upper class. Rich and famous even in utero, Iglesias wears celebrity like a pair of sweat socks.

During the recording of the new album, Iglesias repeatedly phoned producer Rhett Lawrence pretending to be someone else. “You could tell it was Enrique,” Lawrence says, rolling his eyes but smiling. Iglesias also tried to fool Lawrence by consistently referring to fast songs as “ballads”--just to see if the producer would have the “guts” (not the exact translation, by the way) to correct him.

Then there’s the magazine reporter Iglesias lied to for more than an hour, who cried when she realized what was going on. “I only lie to the ones I don’t like,” Iglesias says, flashing a wicked grin, “the ones who ask stupid questions.” Among those questions he considers stupid are those pertaining to his taste in food and women and anything other than music.

Singer’s Notorious Naughty Streak

During the $1-million video shoot for the new single “Rhythm Divine,” Iglesias poked the ribs of Interscope Records staff visitors on the set, then dodged out of sight like a clumsy puppy. “He’s sort of immature,” says Interscope product manager Michelle Thomas with a knowing grin, “but in a good way.”

Iglesias’ notorious naughty streak is probably the product of the singer’s unlikely hunger to be perceived as a regular guy.

“I’m very normal,” he stresses in the hotel interview. But it is obviously untrue.

For starters, his dad is Julio Iglesias, the Ricky Martin of his generation, known for that Don Juan ditty “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.”

Second, his mom is a Spanish socialite who cast him from Madrid at the age of 7, after his moneyed grandfather was kidnapped for ransom. Mom stayed behind with her daughter, while Enrique and his brother, Julio Jose, were raised by a nanny in Julio’s Miami home. (When Enrique went looking for a record deal, he insisted on being presented by his manager asan unknown guy from Central America. And when Enrique won his Grammy as best Latin pop artist in 1998, he did not call either parent to celebrate.) He dedicated his first album to the nanny.

Third, he’s gone from being a short and skinny high schooler who was twice rejected for theprom to being an international superstar.

Oh, and he inked a $40-million contract with Interscope this year,

after his contract with the Mexican label Fonovisa ran out.

Iglesias sips bottled water and nearly yawns at the mention of the Interscope deal.

“It wasn’t the biggest offer,” he says with a shrug. “But it was the best. That was the coolest part of the whole thing, that we went with a smaller label because it felt right.”

Sensing that he has just come across as, well, not normal, Iglesias backtracks.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he says as he sits forward in his chair, earnestness bursting from his eyes. “It’s a lot of money. A lot of money. I understand that. But I have a lot of expenses.”

One of the reasons Iglesias says he signed with Interscope was the company’s open-minded approach to him as an artist. They realized, he says, that he was a Spaniard, a European who sang pop rock and did not “dance salsa” and, frankly, never would.

“These idiots ask me to dance salsa,” he says of certain music video directors, waving his hand dismissively. “I don’t dance. I don’t sing ‘salsa.’ ” Almost as irritating, he says, is when American fans say things like, “Where’s Spain? Next to Colombia?”

Jimmy Iovine, co-chairman of Interscope, says he’d heard about Iglesias for a couple of years in that vague way folks in the music biz hear about things. But when he heard the superstar’s contract with Fonovisa had almost expired, he got himself to an Iglesias concert at the Universal Amphitheatre and left with just one thought: “I want to sign this guy.”

Iglesias and Iovine both say they simply clicked musically and personally. No surprise that Iovine cut his teeth in the business working with one of Iglesias’ strongest influences, the English band Dire Straits. Iovine also says he likes Iglesias’ playful demeanor and returns it in full when he can.

“I did a thing, I joke with him. We laugh all the time. I said, ‘If you’re really lucky, “Bailamos” is going to be No. 2.’ He was all upset, like, ‘No. 2? Why not No. 1?’ It was funny.”

The new album is filled with a variety of tempos and keys, showing that Iglesias has conquered the monotony polluting his Fonovisa works. The songwriting ranges from upbeat dance cuts such as “Rhythm Divine” to the more characteristic power ballads.

And the gags Iglesias is known for are not missing from the album, either. While his first two English singles (“Bailamos” and “Rhythm Divine”) were woven with the stereotypical Spanish sounds of castanets and flamencoguitars, these ethno-devices are brazenly absent on the rest of the album.

Fernan Martinez, Iglesias’ manager, says Iglesias planned to have a stereotypical “Latin” sound on his first English songs almost as a joke, in order to lure American listeners by the ropes of their own prejudices. Then, once they thought they knew him, he would spring his real stuff on them: straight pop rock. Among such cuts on the new album are a Whitney Houston duet and a version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Sad Eyes.”

A Singer ‘by Passion, Not by Technique’

“I grew up listening to singers like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, Billy Joel,” Iglesias explains. “There’s nothing Latin about my music except the language. The first CD I ever bought was Dire Straits when I was 7 or 8.”

Iglesias has a yelping, almost desperate quality to his voice and is the first to admit he’s not a gifted singer. But, he says, neither are many of his favorite singers. “I’m a singer by passion,” he says, “not by technique. But so is Bruce and Bob Dylan. You think Dylan was a beautiful singer? Psssh! You don’t have to be a great singer to be a great singer, know what I mean? You have to have heart.”

He’s also man enough to admit that his lyrics grow on the sappy tree and credits his popularity to this personality trait.

“I’ve written things that are so corny,” he says. “And I’ve got to admit it’s corny, but it’s from the heart. And that’s the stuff women want to hear, but that guys feel is too [wimpy]. Guys feel like, ‘Nah, I can’t say that,’ and that’s why I think women have respected my music so much.”

Whatever the reason, women flock to Iglesias. Only a nunnery or the Lilith Fair might draw a more exclusively female crowd than his concerts. And they show up everywhere he goes, in spite of efforts to throw them off by posting erroneous travel information on his official Web site.

“They try to trick us by putting the wrong day,” says Kennia Viera, 18, who found him at the video shoot and at the De La Hoya event. Eva Delgado, 22, president of one of hundreds of Iglesias fan clubs, says, “I learn where he’s going to be, no matter what.”

Does he feel like he’s being stalked? “No way,” he says. “I love my fans. I love my fans.” In addition, he’s confident he’ll draw some new fans with his new album, which he says is his best yet.

“In the same way that I try to be very modest about my career and down to earth with my people, I am also very, very, very faithful to my music. I mean, I believe a lot in my music. It’s my music. I mean, I write it, I do it or I sing it, and I have a lot of faith in it. And I’ve got to say that for me, this album is really good.”

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BE THERE

Enrique Iglesias’ album “Enrique” is now in record stores. He appears today on “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” at 3 p.m. on KNBC.

Holiday Shopping

* Enrique Iglesias’ album is one of countless that are out just in time for the holidays. Calendar’s Gift Guide pullout section in the center of this issue offers some help in choosing presents for entertainment lovers.

* While you shop you have to eat. But you don’t have to eat badly. Some timely tips for the best in shopping-adjacent grazing, Page 51.