CREDIT:
COURTESY OF KENNY MEISELAS & BETH KATZ MEISELAS
The 2000 Grammy Awards will forever
be remembered as the night Jennifer Lopez slinked
her way down the red carpet in a heart-stopping, low-plunging, tropical-print
green Versace dress. But for Kenny Meiselas and
wife Beth Katz Meiselas, it was also the weekend then-couple Lopez and Sean
“Diddy” Combs, aka Puff Daddy, played matchmaker to the pair.
“We kind of celebrate the Grammys as
our anniversary,” says Katz Meiselas, a publicist whose client list has
included the likes of Lopez, Diana Krall,
Joni Mitchell and Laurence Fishburne. “Our love story is forever immortalized
in the ‘E! True Hollywood Story’ about J.Lo. If you look at footage of her
walking the red carpet Grammy night in that famous dress, you can see me and
Kenny, who was with Puff, in the background.”
As luck would have it, all their
respective clients were staying at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills.
With an eye on having Meiselas successfully woo Katz and the Clive Davis’
pre-Grammy gala on tap for that weekend, Combs insisted on taking his lawyer
shopping for the star-studded event.
“He said to me, ‘Before your first
date, if you want to go out with Beth Katz, you need to step up your game,’ ”
Meiselas recalls with a laugh. “So he took me over to Rodeo Drive, and we went
into Versace and he picked up two suits. Then we went across the street to
Cartier and he made me try on 50 pairs of sunglasses. Puff said to me, ‘If you
want to step it up, you need to buy 20 pairs.’ I said, ‘I’m going to buy two
pairs.’”
But Katz was “stuck at Grammy
rehearsals” with Krall, who was nominated for album of the year, and she never
made it to Davis’ party. “Puff was like, ‘Forget her,’” says Meiselas. Still,
the Jersey girl (Katz grew up in East Brunswick), had a back-up plan.
As Katz recounts: “I felt really bad
about missing the Clive thing. So I asked him to join me the following night
for MusiCares. I had Pharrell [Williams] and Joni Mitchell and Diana Krall there. I remember coming to this
party and there were thousands of people trying to get in. And Kenny came with
me. And at one point, J. Lo turns to me and says, ‘See? He’s so cute! I knew
you’d like him.’”
Married since 2004, and with four
children between them — they have one daughter together and he has three sons
from a previous marriage — Meiselas credits their mutual passion for music and
the entertainment industry for helping to keep their relationship growing
strong.
“I think the fact that we share a
common interest and that we both love music is a factor,” he says. “We have the
same clients, we overlap. We’ve been through crises together, we’ve been
through amazing moments together. And we talk.”
