Beyoncé: The Ice Princess

Beyoncé Knowles is tired, hungry and sick of acting crazy. For seven hours inside a cavernous hangar on the Brooklyn waterfront she’s been lip-synching histrionically, hurling into walls and generally behaving like a diva one Klonopin away from a breakdown. But she does look good. Her hair is tousled in an elegant pile, and she’s dressed like Sharon Stone in the notorious interrogation scene of Basic Instinct — white sleeveless turtleneck, white skirt slit up the sides. As her riotous new single “Ring the Alarm” blares, she pantomimes hysteria. Every twitch, snap of the neck and jerk of the hips dramatizes the theme of manic jealousy. Not that she’s enjoying temporary insanity. “I’m tired of acting so nutty — it’s hard,” she says between takes. Hanging her head, she seems to have shrunk by half since the cameras began to roll at 7:30 A.M.. A small village of bodyguards, production assistants, extras, ass wipers and her mom populate the set. When the director calls for another take, Beyoncé dutifully slams into the interrogation chair. She raises her head, rolls back her shoulders and rapidly crosses and uncrosses her legs — as Stone did while exposing her crotch to Michael Douglas in the most rewound moment in cinematic history. The song hits a climax and Beyoncé’s legs swing open, revealing to Blender a view of … skin-tone bicycle shorts. Beyoncé Knowles can grow tired. She can act crazy. And she can be one hell of a tease. But she is not the type to slip up. * * * “I don’t like being interviewed.” It’s not much of a conversation starter, but at least she says it with a disarming smile. Three days after the video shoot, Beyoncé is back in the Manhattan studio where she made B’Day, her dance-floor-targeting second solo album. Her long blond hair is swept back with a gold hair band, and her feet are strapped into gold sandals. Her voice is warm and deep, curling into sentences like a cat nestling into a blanket. Beyoncé Giselle Knowles is both a thoroughly modern star and an anachronism. She has a clothing line, a movie career and major endorsement contracts. She’s partial to space-age R&B beats and big-budget videos. So far, so twenty-first century. But female pop stars of her magnitude typically detonate in a fireball of Cheetos, nipple brooches and front-page divorces. They let camera crews trail them for “intimate” TV shows. From officially sanctioned Brangelina baby photos to VH1 celebreality to MySpace, this is a time of unprecedented pop-star exposure — and Beyoncé isn’t interested in exposing herself. It’s a neat trick: She’s become one of the world’s most visible women while building walls around herself. For the past four years, she’s dated kingpin rapper and Def Jam Recordings president and CEO Jay-Z, jetting from NBA games to the tropics with him (and her Shih Tzu, Munchy, who travels in a $1,500 Louis Vuitton doggie carrier). But Beyoncé has never even publicly acknowledged their relationship, which seems both coy and silly after the constant paparazzi photos of the couple sunbathing together on yachts.