janetjacksonhomepage.jpgJanet doesn't play with Bush (double entendre alert!). With her trademark pearly whites flashing at Los Angeles' Alley Kat dance studios, Ms. J, 40, has been blindsided by a question about Dubya's Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "Do you think Condi is sexually submissive or a bedroom bully?" After two seconds of nauseating silence, Janet's smile remains, but there's no more joy in Jacksonville. Her handler, a dead ringer for Ari Gold's assistant, jump-starts this stall. "Let's move on," he says kindly. Regretfully, KING's follow-up question - "Do you think G.W.'s down-ass chick keeps those black boots on during late-night trysts?" - never sees the light of day.

Double J's sense of humor hasn't gone south. She's just not willing to speculate on other people's sexual deviances when she can just as well chatter about her own. She has enough juicy stories and opinions ("I don't think that there should be rules [about threesomes]") to make a Jehovah's Witness congregation stage an intervention. We start at the beginning: pre-teen Janet getting in touch with her inner boogies at New York's famed Studio 54. Yeah, that '70's sex den notorious for cocaine and cunnilingus.

KING: You've been to Studio 54, arguably the most sexually explicit nightclub in the history of the U.S., and you weren't even a teenager yet. Do you remember that experience?

Janet: That's probably what started it all with me [laughs]. I remember [Studio 54 co-owner] Steve Rubell very well. I can see his face right now. I was just a baby: 10, 11 years old. I went there a couple of times. I remember seeing Liza [Minelli], Truman Capote - but I didn't know who he was at the time. I'd been to parties with my family and we'd dance, but I'd never really gotten into a club before. People were getting really raunchy on the steps. I think the most vivid thing that comes to mind is not understanding why people were putting flour up their nose [laughs] ... I was too busy dancing.

It's interesting that you call it flour, because people were getting baked

I didn't think twice about it. Not until - I wonder if Michae remembers this - Mike and I went walking to Tower Records and...two kids pulled up in a red Ferrari and handed Michael an envelope. Mike opened it, and once again it was some white flour. I said, "What's that?" And he said, "It's some drugs. it's stupid." You know those parking blocks make out of cement? I remember Michael dumping it, pouring it down in there. It was in one of those tiny envelopes.

Continue reading this story in the November ‘06 issue of KING (#37)

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