She’s Ready (She Says)

Paulina Rubio takes an absent-minded bite of a glazed Krispy Kreme and gazes at her picture on the cover of Cosmopolitan en Espanol. The Mexican pop singer studies her image with the fascination of a storybook character wondering who’s the fairest of them all.

Here, backstage at the Shrine Auditorium where she’s about to rehearse a dance routine for her new English-language single, “Don’t Say Goodbye,” Rubio doesn’t look at all like the voluptuous sex kitten of her revealing, titillating celebrity photos. She’s surprisingly small and skinny, her jeans and white blouse fitting loosely on her bony frame.

The truth about her fleshy curves suddenly comes into focus: Paulina, the sexpot pinup adored by fans on a first-name basis, is largely a creation of camera angles.

In the Cosmo photo, Rubio assumes the lusty pose of a self-confident temptress, a hint of wildness in her tiger-striped blouse, her wraparound suede skirt with the cave-girl cut, and especially in her exotic, feline eyes. Her look says she knows what she wants, a statement punctuated by a tousled mound of hair cascading down her shoulders.

“I love this because this is my mom’s hair,” says the daughter of Mexican actress Susana Dosamantes. “Very Barbarella. Very ‘60s.”

Rubio laughs, then makes a motion like cracking a whip, relishing the role of Wonder Woman taming the savage beast.

She’s come a long way from the cute child star who was Mexico’s sweetheart in the 1980s. She sang of puppy love as part of the teeny-bopper group Timbiriche, a product of Televisa, then Mexico’s media monopoly. For almost a decade, from pre-adolescence to womanhood, Rubio and the group were like a Latin Brady Bunch for kids of that generation, who grew up along with their TV idol.

Even then, Rubio stood out for her bouncy energy on stage.

Since going solo in the early 1990s, Rubio has starred occasionally in Spanish soap operas but has struggled to find an adult audience for her music. In interviews, she repeatedly proclaims herself a citizen of the world with global concerns from littering to nuclear proliferation. Yet she sings mostly lightweight stuff made to fit radio formats, not fight for social change. She promotes herself as a liberated woman and committed feminist, yet brazenly sells herself as a sexual object.

“I was raised in an environment in which women were always the ones who pulled the family through,” says Rubio, who is scheduled to perform at Saturday’s Wango Tango concert at the Rose Bowl. “The stereotype of the Mexican woman as fragile, full of children and powerless has completely disappeared. I believe I am a woman with a strong character who knows the value of discipline and decisiveness.”

Those traits take on even more importance now as Rubio attempts to become the next Latin artist to crack the coveted crossover market in the U.S. Her new English-language album, “Border Girl,” is scheduled for release June 18, the day after her 31st birthday.

If she succeeds, Rubio will be the first Mexican performer to make the great leap into the English-language pop market. Most of her crossover colleagues--Marc Anthony, Enrique Iglesias, Gloria Estefan--have been East Coast Latinos with Caribbean or Iberian backgrounds.

Rubio, who last year had the biggest-selling Latin album in the U.S., “Paulina,” arrives in the wake of the astonishing success of Shakira, the Colombian spitfire who proved language was not a barrier to crossing musical boundaries. Unlike Marc Anthony or Iglesias, raised as bilingual Hispanic Americans, Shakira had to teach herself English before writing the songs for “Laundry Service,” her crossover album that has sold 2.4 million units in the U.S. alone.

The danger is that Shakira made it seem like a cinch.

Suddenly, it looked as if Latinos had a crossover road map. Get the backing of a multinational record label, assemble a team of seasoned producers and writers, hire a hotshot manager (Freddy DeMann of Madonna fame in Shakira’s case), get a powerhouse radio station like KIIS-FM to give your strategy a jump-start, make the talk-show rounds with your charming accent ... and voila, another Latino superstar climbs the Hot 100.

Of course, the hard part comes in making music that millions will want to buy. For a seasoned artist such as Rubio, crossing over can be like starting over.

“You walk a fine line,” says Jerry Blair, a former Columbia Records executive who’s working on Rubio’s team as a consultant to Universal. “You just want to broaden the artist’s appeal while still staying true to her fans who love her music that she’s made up until now.”

In the past few years, Rubio has taken all the steps to get ready for this moment.

In Mexico, she left her longtime label, EMI, where she had floundered during the past decade with four lackluster albums. Her move to Universal yielded the smash hit she needed to be seriously considered a crossover candidate. Released in 2000 after a four-year recording hiatus, “Paulina” was produced by the production company of super-hot songwriter Estefano and has sold more than 2 million worldwide, according to the label.

Rubio then parted company with the architect of that lucrative label deal, her longtime manager in Mexico, Dario de Leon, who urged her not to neglect old fans in favor of new ones. Less than a year ago, she jumped to the Puerto Rico-based management team of Angelo Medina and Ricardo Cordero, who helped shepherd Ricky Martin’s career.

“What makes her special?” asks Cordero. “Her spontaneity, her joyful spirit, her intelligence, her drive and her whole way of life--marked by perseverance, hard work and devotion to her vocation.”

Rubio will need all the motivation she can muster, says Cordero, as she tries to conquer new markets in the U.S. and Europe while tending to her existing base. Latin fans and Latin radio programmers could defect if they interpret Rubio’s quest for English acceptance as a cultural betrayal.

Some artists like Marc Anthony dismiss the very idea of crossover, arguing that they were born bicultural and perform naturally in both languages. But the record industry certainly believes in the concept, developing specific strategies to help artists “cross over” from one market to another, be it from country to pop or Spanish to English.

Rubio now faces the inevitable comparisons with Latin performers who preceded her on that crossover road. So how does she measure up?

Artistically, the Golden Girl pales against her competition.

She doesn’t have Marc Anthony’s powerful voice, Martin’s sensational dance moves or Shakira’s respected songwriting skills. She doesn’t have J. Lo’s body or the cosmopolitan appeal of Julio Iglesias.

So what does Rubio have going for her?

She’s got that fire in the belly, a relentless drive to succeed against the odds.

It’s an inner strength and conviction that have made survivors of the Dosamantes women, says Rubio, who was born in Mexico City and now has homes there, in Miami and Barcelona. Her role model is her grandmother, a strong, turn-of-the-20th century woman who, she recalls, was widowed at 17 yet emerged, after having sacrificed an opera career, as the provider for her eight younger siblings.

“That’s why she supported my mother’s career,” says Rubio, casually biting her fingernail. “And that’s why my mother supported me.”

Although she has not married and has no children, Rubio has maintained a longtime relationship with Ricardo Bofill Jr., ex-husband of Chabeli Iglesias, Enrique’s sister. Their relationship, started when the Spanish architect and aspiring filmmaker was still married, caused an international scandal.

“I don’t believe in marriage,” she told a Madrid celebrity magazine earlier this year. “My parents divorced very young, and I don’t want to fail in the same way.”

Rubio says her music has always been focused on her feminist message of independence aimed at young, modern women. But you wouldn’t know it from the new album’s sappy, lovesick songs with titles such as “I’ll Be Right Here (Sexual Lover)” and “Casanova” (“You’re the center of my obsession,” goes one line). Almost all the tunes, contributed by a variety of writers, project an old-fashioned, pre-liberated girl whose essence is tied up in getting or keeping a man.

In “Border Girl,” she sings:

I was lost, now I’m found

And baby in your arms I’m on solid ground....

Every step that I take is to you

I’d go anywhere you want me to.

Last year, at the height of her Latin album’s popularity, Rubio told an interviewer for the Spanish edition of Rolling Stone that she didn’t care what men thought of her because “men feel threatened by successful women, and that’s why we have machismo.” She hoped to create a sense of community with women through her music, she explained.

Yet that article was accompanied by overtly and aggressively sexual photographs of her, including a cover in which she’s wearing only the guitar on her back, and an inside spread of her topless, clutching her breasts and wearing red panties labeled “PUNK.”

In person, Rubio exhibits a sweeter seductiveness. During an interview in a dressing room at the Shrine, she sometimes cocks her head to the side, toying with her long, curly strands of dirty blond hair. Sometimes she intimately touches a questioner’s knee.

Rubio has the sort of worldly, pouty-lipped beauty of a Brigitte Bardot, but she’s no dumb blond. She’s quick-witted, switching between Spanish and English as she impatiently anticipates questions, a sharp-tongued defense always at the ready. Her Spanish can be coarse, peppered with the well-placed, rapid-fire profanities common to the street talk of Mexico City.

Rubio is an avowed admirer of Madonna and invites comparisons to the Material Girl’s daring sexual persona. But her concept of erotica is not always as complex as Madonna’s elaborate psychosexual dramas, with their sacrilegious images and Catholic bad-girl guilt.

For Rubio, sexuality on stage is sometimes simply a matter of being naughty and lifting up her skirt to show the audience her underwear, as she did during the “Navidad Con KLVE” show in December at the Wiltern Theatre.

“And you didn’t like it?” Rubio shoots back sharply before a question is even posed.

The problem is that it could be construed as a cheap thrill for her fans, designed to distract from her lip-synced vocals at that show.

“Well, maybe I’m cheap sometimes. I don’t care,” says Rubio, occasionally slouching in the couch, her sharply pointed boots on the table. “Whoever doesn’t like it, well too bad. I’m not going to change because of anyone. On stage, I feel free to do whatever I want to do ... I feel like a fish in water.”

She reconsiders. In fact, she doesn’t even believe in the word “cheap,” she says.

Then how would she characterize teasing the audience by exposing her underwear?

“Natural,” answers Rubio, without missing a beat.

Backstage at the Shrine, more magazines are circulating featuring Rubio on the cover. There’s Miami’s Ocean Drive and there’s People en Espanol, which dubbed her one of the world’s most beautiful Latinas.

“Cover girl, cover girl, cover girl!” exclaims Rubio’s publicity agent, holding up the magazines and delighting in the orgy of fresh press.

“Can we now have a Cover Girl contract?” asks Rubio, musing about her new cosmetic endorsement possibilities.

On a video monitor, she sees her dancers out on the stage, already rehearsing what is to be the opening number of the Alma Awards, a program honoring Latinos in the arts that aired earlier this month on ABC.

“Ay, ay, I need to be there,” she says, with the concern of a mother hen.

Rubio makes her way onto the stage, then down the steps into the theater where her staff and the show’s production crew occupy a few rows in the center. She soon makes a joking aside to her manager about the interview question that seems to have gotten under her skin. “He says I’m cheap because I show my panties,” Rubio kids, “but he doesn’t know how much they cost.”

No comment from the staff.

The star slouches in a seat, popping a Coke can and munching on Doritos. She flips through her magazine coverage and keeps one eye on the stage action.

The dance routine at one point calls for Rubio to come down into the audience and grab a muscular young man from the front row. He appears to be a hapless fan taken by the hand back to the stage, but he then goes into a dazzling breakdance bit. Rubio’s choreographer, filling in for her during the first run-throughs, uses only the steps on one side of the stage to go get the breakdancer and return.

Rubio sees a better way.

“I can make it more exciting,” whispers Rubio in Spanish to her manager. (“Yo la hago mas de emocion.”)

For the show, dressed in skimpy short-shorts and a revealing top, Rubio goes down the other side of the stage, then marches dramatically back across the entire front row like a tigress on the prowl. She stops to get her man, extending her arm on the beat with a commanding snap to her wrist, like cracking a whip.

It’s a simple change that makes a big difference in magnifying the impact of her performance, which could have been overshadowed by the male dancer.

“That was easy,” she says when asked about making the change.

Easy if you were born to be Barbarella.

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Agustin Gurza is a Times staff writer.