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Something about Vivica A. Fox's spirit is as light as the foam on her caffe latte. She has slimmed down from a size eight to a four and shows up for lunch all in white, but it's not just about the flesh. Her buoyancy comes from her easy laughter and her liberal sprinkling of the word positive throughout our conversation. And she doesn't seem to be mouthing words. Her optimism is a warm pool you could float in all day.

This is not the stuff of a naive girl who has never known heartache. Fox has buried a few dreams, weathered a divorce, and then suffered what seemed at the time an almost unbearable public breakup with another celebrity. On top of that, she turned 40 last July and admitted it, in an industry where most folks start rolling back the clock in their late twenties.

Fox isn't afraid of the big 4-0, or of finger-waggers who may poke fun at her for acting younger than her years. Yes, she hopped on the stage unannounced at the MTV Video Music Awards last summer in short shorts and danced with rapper Lil Jon and crew, whose biggest hit had a hook about sweaty private parts. She went there because the group invited her and she thought it would be fun--and besides, the stunt landed her some TV hosting gigs to boot. "Don't put me in a box," she warns. "I'll bust out of it."

She says this while sitting at a patio table at The Ivy restaurant in Beverly Hills, enjoying the breeze as she leans forward in her white fedora and takes a bite of her healthy salad. Light dances off her earrings, her neck. Even her belt buckle and clear sandals are frosted.

Fox has appeared in dozens of movies--Soul Food, Kill Bill: Vols. 1 and 2, Independence Day--and has been praised for her onscreen authenticity in capturing the Black woman's emotional truth: that balance between loving you unconditionally and being willing to cuss your behind out--if the occasion requires.

These days Fox, who stars in the detective show Missing on the Lifetime network, is feeling pretty good about herself. She not only has plenty of work, but she's also careful about who plays with her in the sandbox: "When I'm around people who get me, it makes me a more positive person. You know what I mean?"

SHE'S THE BOSS

In her lead role on Missing, shot in Toronto, she's shrewd FBI agent Nicole Scott. Fox likes the part: "I kick butt, wear great clothes, my hair's always beautiful." Behind the scenes she holds down an equally important job as co-executive producer, involved with casting, wardrobe, script ideas and publicity.

Costar Mark Consuelos says that because her name's hanging on it, she takes the show "very seriously." But adds that Fox is "way too smooth to ever make us feel like she's our boss."

The "boss" saw herself on a billboard for Missing over New York's Long Island Expressway recently and felt a surge of pride and belonging. She was up there along with Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx and Halle Berry. That 20-foot version of Vivica is meant to be seen from a distance, but she looks great from inches away, as well. Pressed to assign her an age, you might guess 27. It's a hard call. Looking good is in her job description. She does it by working out nearly every day, staying hydrated--which includes lots of steam showers--and getting a little nip and tuck when needed.

"I would love to reveal my beauty secrets," she says, "but I can't because people would hold it against me." The last thing she wants is folks calling her plastic, which is something she is not. "I've learned to keep my mouth shut about my tune-ups," she adds. Whatever she's had done is certainly not obvious.

Named in 1997 to People magazine's list of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World, she feels she can't let herself slip. "I'm in the kind of business where it's all about fantasy. People want to go to the movies and look at you. 'Look at her clothes, her eyes, her shoes.' It's a very visual business and I just want to look like Vivica, to maintain the look."

BRING ON THE BREAD

Get a good look now, because in five or six years Fox intends to pack up her caboodle and move it behind the camera. She's already on her way there. She and manager, business partner and lawyer Lita Richardson have produced lower-budget movies like the popular romantic comedy Two Can Play That Game for several years now. Two more completed movies await distribution: a film about a beauty shop and another romantic comedy, Getting Played.

"Vivica likes being able to cast a project, fix a script and get it in the can in 30 days," says Richardson, who started off as Fox's attorney. "She's such a hard worker. She can do two or three things at a time. She's up at 5:00 A.M. every day."

Fox loves being fit and tries to stay extra slim when she's working, because then the camera is kinder to her. But she dreams about that day when she won't have to hate on carbs, when as a producer, she can sit in front of a young actress and sweat her to lose a few pounds. And she'll say to the waiter, "Yes, honey, bring that bread." Maybe then life will have slowed down enough for her to become a morn, possibly by adopting a couple of kids.

THE KILL BILL DIET

Fox is a size four in part because in 2002 she was divorced from husband Christopher "Sixx-Nine" Harvest, who "could throw down on the cooking," she says. Around the time of the breakup, she shot the grueling Kill Bill, for which director Quentin Tarantino sent the cast to China to learn the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon approach to kicking butt while defying gravity.

"That movie changed my lifestyle," she says. They worked out several hours a day and "I controlled what I ate." Fox dropped 30 pounds.

She didn't mind gaining weight during her marriage. It was comfortable at the time. While she describes her twenties as a decade of "superficial validation through the clubs and boys," a decade later she wanted to settle down. In December 1996, she met Harvest in an L.A. club. He bought 20 roses, giving them to her one by one. But he lived in Atlanta, and theirs was a phone relationship until he moved to L.A. to be with her. They wed two years to the day after they met.

"We were inseparable," she recalls. "He was my best friend. We had a lot in common: sports, music, sense of humor. I liked everything about him." But her career was taking off, and his was not. She was the successful actress; he was the unsuccessful rapper. The tension around traditional expectations of what a man should provide got the best of them.

"Things changed to where I was the sole breadwinner," she says. "The relationship deteriorated." But she still feels glad for the experience. "1 had my Cinderella story. It was a beautiful wedding." And yet, she admits she may have bowed to peer pressure. She was in her mid-thirties, and all her girlfriends were jumping brooms as if it were a new Olympic sport. "Maybe I should have taken more time."

SHE ADORED 50 CENT

After she divorced, she found it was the "young bucks who come a-knocking." One of them was megasuccessful rapper 50 Cent. She was 12 years older, but who cared? It was a high point when he took a moment at a shout-out: "I want to thank Ms. Vivica Fox for wearing that dress," he said from the stage. For a few months they had a ball. She remembers their discussing plans to work on movies and sound tracks, and who knows what all. But then the cream began to curdle, and he broke up with her on shock jock Howard Stern's show after three months.

He later told Playboy magazine that she was exploiting their relationship. "I agreed to take photographs with her for King magazine," 50 said, "and unused photos from the same shoot were put on the cover of Today's Black Woman magazine, which I didn't agree to. I guess her management was looking to use it for publicity for Vivica, even if it was at my expense."

For months Fox held her tongue, but finally commented on his version of the split. "The hardest thing I've ever done was not to fight back about it. But I've learned, with maturity, it's not the right way. I now realize that there's a thin line between love and hate." The affair, more than a year ago, was brief, but Fox still feels the hurt.

"That was the most painful period in my life," she recalls. "l absolutely adored him. I thought he was amazing, and then I got betrayed. I never ever had a man speak badly of me in public, and why, I still don't know. What bothers me the most is that we haven't had a chance to talk. My door is always open. My number hasn't changed."

In those postbreakup weeks, her dad, William Fox, helped push her back to strength. "I'm glad I had a positive male to combat such a negative experience," Fox says. "I love you, Daddy. Thank you so much for being there." He was her rock, but she can take it from here. That's why one of her 13 tattoos is a series of Japanese characters stacked on her shoulder: They spell strength, courage and wisdom, from the India. Arie song. She got them coming off the 50 drama. At one point in our conversation at the restaurant, she starts singing the tune, softly, with no self-consciousness.

"MY CAREER HAS BECOME MY MAN"

While her daddy always lent her his shoulder, her mother, Everlyena Fox, gave the actress her work ethic. Fox grew up in Indianapolis, where her mom held down two jobs while raising four kids. The youngest, Fox listened to her mother stress the importance of independence: "If you wanna go and do what you wanna do, you gotta work."

Missing provides a nice paycheck, but initial]y Fox didn't want to do the show. She'd been in a handful of TV projects--City of Angels and Arsenio among them--that either let her go or crashed and burned. She did not want to be associated with another failure. But the Lifetime people courted her. The original lead on the show, Gloria Reuben, left after a year, then Lifetime created the role of Nicole Scott for Fox.

"She was the first name in all our heads," says the show's executive producer Debra Martin Chase. "She's savvy, she gets it, she's comfortable in her own skin." Fox realized that she "would have been a fool to say, 'Naw, baby, I'm a movie star.' I'm glad I decided to get out of my own way."

Robi Reed, the casting director, admires the way the actress-producer is steering her career. "Doing the TV show is a smart move. Her versatility and her talent as an actress give her the ability to come across on both screens, large and small."

She doesn't pretend that she's mastering the work-life balancing act. While financially her future is set, she also admits, "My career has become my man, something to nurture and take care of and answer to." But she doesn't want it to be that way forever, She likes romance and marriage too. Yet she has to find someone who understands who she is and can handle the attention she gets. "I'm a whole lotta woman, and I need a man who's not going to get insecure and say, 'You're not all that.' If I find him, cool. If I don't, that's cool too. I'm okay with being Vivica." That's when she eases the napkin off her lap, reaches into her purse for a fistful of dollars, and hands them to the valet. Then she hops into her pearlescent white Caddy and heads toward the next adventure.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CARLO DALLA CHIESA

Pamela K. Johnson is an ESSENCE contributing writer in Los Angeles.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

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