Best of Both Worlds

Marc Anthony says he feels amazing. As in blissfully giddy.

You can’t blame the guy, really.

One: He’s the top-selling salsa singer in the world.

Two: His new English-language pop album comes out Sept. 28 on Columbia Records, which signed him last year to a multi-record deal worth more than $30 million, and rescued him from an unhappy and ethically questionable contract with RMM Records. The first Columbia single, “I Need to Know,” has already been picked up by most mainstream pop radio stations and MTV.

Three: He just wound up shooting a Martin Scorsese film, “Bringing Out the Dead,” where he plays a miserable, crazy homeless guy.

Four: According to some very close sources, Anthony is once again dating former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres, whom he called again after his most recent girlfriend--none other than Jennifer Lopez--dumped him in favor of her own ex, a diamond-dripping Sean “Puffy” Combs.

Anthony neither confirms nor denies the relationships, though he admitted less than two weeks ago that he had a new girlfriend, who appeared at that time, through giggles and implication, to be Lopez.

When describing her, he sighed deeply and said things like “my princess,” “just beautiful” and “my best friend”--things no guy in his right mind would say about a woman not his girlfriend, right? He went on at length about all they had in common as Puerto Rican kids who grew up poor in New York City and are now rich actors and singers. An assistant confirmed then that Anthony kept his TriBeCa loft well-stocked with chocolate chip cookies, Lopez’s favorite, and he admitted with a satisfied purr that she cooked a mean arroz con habichuelas.

So even as Anthony, 31, celebrated his birthday Lopez-free in Los Angeles last week, almost everything seemed to be going his way.

Did we mention Anthony is happy?

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That said, don’t let Anthony’s slouchy posture and wiry frame fool you. Yes, his nickname is “El Flaco de la Salsa” (The Skinny Guy of Salsa). But trust us, he’s a sex symbol. It even surprises him when the panties come flying onto the stage, or when People En Espan~ol includes him in its Most Beautiful People issue. He doesn’t shimmy on stage. He boxes like a little girl. He doesn’t strut before his fans. He kneels in prayer, crucifix clutched in his hand.

“Basically, I’m a geek,” says Anthony, who shed a bit of the nerd image this year by scrapping his eyeglasses after laser eye surgery.

But still, he makes no excuses for his habitual cruising of Internet chat rooms (screen name “Bailabaila”) or for his consistent flossing. As a kid, Anthony used to take his computer apart, just so he could put it back together again, for fun. He used to serenade pretty girls from the street, only to have them slam shut their bedroom windows.

Plus, Anthony would also rather take a cab than a limo.

“I hate limos,” he says. And it’s not because when he won his Grammy this year he was stuck in one in traffic. “I despise limos. They draw so much attention. What the hell do I need space for 12 for? Know what I mean? I’ll take a cab.”

In part because he is so drippy, yet so sexually adored, and in part because he’s a monster singer, Paul Simon and a host of other people keep saying Anthony is the next Frank Sinatra. (Simon cast Anthony in his short-lived Broadway musical “The Capeman” in 1997.)

But did Frank wear Prada? Did he buy his pops a condo (and a dog) in Puerto Rico when he retired from his job as a hospital lunchroom worker? Did he drive a Land Rover? Did he once have a fan sink her teeth into his cheek so hard it took several guards and 10 minutes to pry her loose? Did Frank see an ocean of Puerto Rican flags billowing over the crowd at every show?

Sure, Anthony is a tremendous interpreter of songs. And he probably does have one of the best voices in the world, as Sony Music Entertainment Chairman Thomas D. Mottola says.

Even so, Anthony’s leap back into English pop (he started his career singing English-language house music) has many of his fans worried that he is abandoning them, in the name of the almighty “crossover.”

Crossover? Don’t get Anthony started.

“Oh, God,” he says with an exasperated sigh. “That whole ‘Latin crossover’ thing. I don’t understand it. I’m just as American as the next guy. I’m bicultural, yes, and I thank God for that. But what am I crossing over to? I was born and raised here. It is solely because I am bicultural that this tag has been put on me. It’s like, you know, ‘a Latin guy trying to come into this other world.’ What are they talking about? This [mainstream pop] world is as much mine as it is yours. Latin crossover would be if I took ‘Contra la Corriente’ [Anthony’s last salsa album] and the world accepted it on mainstream pop charts.

“I sing English pop music as an American. And I’ll keep singing salsa in Spanish as a Puerto Rican.” And he plans to alternate pop/English and salsa/Spanish albums.

That’s not crossover, Anthony says. That’s biculturalism.

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One of eight kids born to working-class parents in East Harlem, Anthony was born Marco Antonio Mun~iz, fatefully named for his dad’s favorite Spanish-language balladeer.

At night, his musician father held jam sessions in the kitchen of the family’s crowded apartment, often with tiny Marco on the table, mouth open, clear notes coming out, as the main attraction.

As salsa blared inside the house, disco and R&B; blasted outside. Anthony says he soaked it all up as normal, without a second thought.

Before he could write in cursive, little Marco had made his aunt cry by singing a ballad. He says he thought he’d done something wrong and apologized. Once she told him she was crying from the beauty of the song, though, he decided he would be a singer for the rest of his life.

In his teens, Anthony began recording in English, dance music. He recorded jingles for commercials and even wrote a few songs for pop groups, including Menudo, then featuring a short kid named Ricky Martin.

Even though his single “Ride the Rhythm” hit No. 1 on Billboard’s dance chart in 1991, Anthony was discouraged by what he saw as a bleak future in mainstream pop, thanks in part to a music industry reluctant to promote Latinos who sang in English.

Anthony joined forces with producer, arranger and composer Sergio George, and the two reinvented the salsa idiom in 1993 by infusing traditional sounds with R&B; and gospel vocal stylings.

Response to the new style was mixed, and Anthony was the target of ridicule by many tradition-minded soneros who criticized him for everything from his rudimentary Spanish to his abandonment of salsa’s strict rules of phrasing.

To top it off, Anthony performed in jeans, T-shirt, sneakers and baseball cap. He bounced around on tiptoes, arms outspread like some scrawny rock star. Even worse, his lyrics about fidelity and kindness and romance bordered on . . . feminism.

In a world of bragging salseros in bright suits, unbuttoned silk shirts and multiple gold chains, Anthony was simply scandalous.

In spite of the naysayers, however, Anthony’s music and image resonated with a new generation who, like him, had grown up hearing a multitude of sounds, bicultural folks from New Jersey to Havana and Bogota, who were as comfortable with Stevie Wonder as they were with Hector Lavoe.

Anthony’s fresh vision and fortitude put him on the Latin music map as more than a mere star: He is credited with forever changing salsa’s sound and style.

His reputation caught the attention of Simon, who cast him in the musical, and of Mottola, who watched Anthony’s performance in the play.

“I thought he was incredibly charismatic, very personable and sincere,” the Sony chief says. “You liked him immediately.”

In 1996, Anthony’s relationship with RMM began to deteriorate, starting with the bouncing of a check he wrote for his daughter Arianna, who is 5 and lives with her mother, a New York City police officer.

Anthony, who has sold more than 1 million albums for the label, was suspicious. He hired his brother, Bigram Zayas, as his manager. Zayas investigated, and, though he won’t share details, raised many concerns to Anthony about RMM’s handling of his career and finances, according to a close source.

Many advised Anthony against fighting RMM President and CEO Ralph Mercado, a powerful figure in the Latin music industry. Anthony hired several personal bodyguards and braced for battle.

Anthony refused to perform for Mercado unless he allowed Anthony to sign a separate contract for English recordings with Columbia. Mercado did.

But when Anthony asked out of his Spanish contract too, still owing multiple albums, Mercado did not budge.

Zayas responded by hiring private detectives to investigate Mercado’s business practices. He presented his findings to Mercado, who responded by filing a lawsuit against Anthony for breach of contract. The lawsuit, called “smoke and mirrors” by Anthony’s management, was withdrawn the following day.

Though details remain murky, Mercado eventually released Anthony completely to Columbia, though RMM retains the right to release a greatest-hits album.

Mercado’s office referred all calls to their lawyers, who said they had no comment on the Anthony situation.

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Anyway, here Anthony is in July, in a deep, cool chamber of a Hollywood area recording studio, curled into his seat, a lithe apostrophe of a man whose casual designer clothes smell of stale cigarette smoke.

It’s his biggest vice, he says later. Smoking. In fact, smoking is the only thing Anthony regrets in his entire life. Imagine. His entire life. Could Frank Sinatra say that?

His narrow fingers strum the arms of the chair. His feet tap through the silence as an assistant prepares to play an advance copy of the English-language album for some members of the press.

Yes, this is happening at the tail end of the Summer of Ricky Martin, and the two singers record for the same company. If he hadn’t been caught up in troubles with RMM, Anthony says, the album would have been out much sooner.

The renewed drive to record in English, Anthony says, comes not from a need for “validation,” as some of his fans, worried that he is “selling out,” have said, but rather from a need for self-expression.

The songs come pouring out of the speakers, shiny, neat musical grids, as safe and predictable as the producers who formed them.

Salsa legend Ruben Blades, Anthony’s mentor, predicts Anthony’s English album will be a commercial success, a prediction buoyed by radio playlists.

But Blades says he fears Anthony might have made the same mistake he made in 1988 when he recorded his own debut English album: out of insecurity and, more than that, out of respect, relinquishing artistic control of the project to his producers.

Specifically, Anthony gave a lot of control to Mottola, who chose all of the producers and some of the material for the album, and even “came into the studio and rolled up his sleeves,” producing some of the tracks himself, Anthony says.

Anthony’s enormous, glorious voice soars out of the speakers clean and sincere, the vibrato intense and steady, the notes more long than short, ranging from misty murmurs to thunderous cries.

This is vocally dramatic, heart-rendingly goose-bumpy material, more Barbra Streisand than Ricky Martin. Nonetheless, the change Blades feared is obvious to anyone who knows Anthony’s salsa music and history.

Where Anthony the salsero is credited with single-handedly reinventing the sound and direction of that genre, Anthony the popster seems little more than a great singer doing vocal pirouettes across what many listeners may see as mediocre material. It’s material he co-wrote, venturing into composition for the first time in nearly 10 years.

His English lyrics, which he says are his “most personal ever,” are filled with painful cliches, and repetitive, elementary rhymes.

This raises questions about how much of Anthony the salsa innovator was Anthony himself, and how much was producer, composer and arranger Sergio George--a man who continues to produce creative, groundbreaking salsa fusion acts such as DLG.

Anthony defends his new approach to music by saying, simply, “This is truly representative of what I wanted to do. Understand what I’m saying. I experimented in salsa because I think salsa needed it, and I don’t think pop needed it.”

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Question is, will fans agree with Anthony that pop doesn’t need the original direction he’s known for?

It’s a question that troubled Anthony a few weeks ago, when he performed songs from the English album for the first time before a live audience at the Mayan nightclub in downtown Los Angeles.

He opened the set for a sold-out crowd by singing well-known salsa hits. Then he prepared to dive off the deep end. Sweaty in his pale blue-gray suit, he stood on the lip of the stage, his head bowed prayerfully toward his clasped hands in a characteristic pose. His salsa band exited the stage, replaced by the pop band.

The audience stood still. A few appeared hurt, but most seemed simply curious.

Within seconds after he jumped into the first English song, bodies began to sway. People, especially younger ones, began to dance. Anthony peeked out at them. Seeing their smiling faces, he began to dance and bound across the stage.

Afterward, Anthony said the English performance was “the most nervous I’ve ever been, man,” and said he was relieved to know he’d been accepted.

Anthony says he plans to act in another film next year, but has yet to choose one from the stacks of scripts he gets each week. He says he’s glad to have the luxury of not making his living from film, which enables him to be picky about roles.

He also says he has no regrets about the Simon musical, which was panned by critics and closed early. The three years he spent working with Simon, Anthony says, were educational. And his performances caught the attention of many in the industry who’d not noticed him before, making much of what is happening now possible.

Now, Anthony says, he is devoting his time to simply resting.

“I don’t surround myself with pressure,” he says. “I guess you can [say] I’m really good at compartmentalizing. . . . I don’t know where my record is playing right now. I get general responses from fans, e-mails. But I’m not one to track a record. I don’t even want to know. I really don’t at all.”