Scarlett Johansson Is the Sexiest Woman Alive

We live in an age of specialization. Nothing is left whole. Everything is sliced and diced into its consituent parts. People are bisected, dissected, vivisected. Even the lovely Scarlett Johansson.

In Touch magazine recently did a scientific study and concluded that Scarlett owned the best pair of breasts [FIG. 1] in Hollywood, followed closely by Jessica Simpson and Salma Hayek.

"I'm sure my mom will be proud," says the honoree. "You work hard making independent films for fourteen years and you get voted best breasts."

According to another survey, Scarlett has the second-most-kissable lips in the world [FIG. 2], topped only by the epic mouth of Angelina Jolie [FIG. 3].

And a British poll found Scarlett to have the best female bum [FIG. 4]. "No!" she objects. "There are plenty of girls with nicer butts. There are plenty of girls who work harder for nicer butts."

She declines to name names.

"What about my brain?" she asks. "What about my heart? What about my kidneys and my gallbladder?"

There is, no doubt, a fetish Website devoted to Scarlett's gallbladder -- which, by the way, fellas, is all natural.

But, being a general-interest magazine, Esquire has been bold enough to look past the disconnected parts. We have taken in the totality, the gestalt, and we have concluded that Scarlett Johansson -- lips, butt, kidneys, and all -- is the sexiest woman alive.

I uncovered the tributes to Scarlett's anatomy while preparing for a little project we had planned: to surf the Internet together and have Scarlett critique all the worshipful and/or scary sites devoted to her (like the one that spells out Scarlett with an s for sappy, c for colorful, a for adaptable, et cetera). Well, actually, surfing the Internet was my plan. Scarlett said no.

That's one thing I learned early: Scarlett may be charming, but she knows what she wants. And she did not want to look at the Internet.

Instead we are playing pool at Corner Billiards in lower Manhattan. When I met her here, I took out my notebook. "Just don't write anything pervy," Scarlett advises me.

Which seems a little like Hillary telling a New Republic editor, "Don't write anything political."

Okay, I say, but maybe I could document our date with my digital camera? She agrees but adds, "Can I be art director?" It's a rhetorical question.

Her first art direction: Since she wasn't primped by professional hair and makeup people, she'd "rather" I avoided taking photos of her face. "Which is a polite way of saying no way in hell," she explains.

Her next art direction: She takes the camera and starts shooting her own pictures -- of things like the room [FIG. 5] and me holding a bowl of peanuts [FIG. 6].

We play pool [FIG. 7]. We play abysmally, but at least her form is a thing of beauty [FIG. 8]. She also chalked the stick with elan [FIG. 9], about which I won't say anything pervy.

Scarlett used to come to Corner Billiards when she was in high school. She grew up in New York, started acting here at age seven, got rejected from commercials because her voice was too smoky. (Everyone thought she had a sore throat.) She became famous at thirteen as the injured girl in The Horse Whisperer, and more famous at eighteen when she wore sheer underwear in Lost in Translation. More recently, she's become Woody Allen's muse; was ranked number one on FHM's list of the "100 Sexiest Women;" demanded and got a retraction from a tabloid that said she was seen kissing a woman; starred in The Black Dahlia, a Brian De Palma noir thriller, opposite her boyfriend, Josh Hartnett [FIG. 10]; and currently appears in another thriller, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige.

She's good at noir. I talked to her a few times on the phone over the last several months to ask her a series of admittedly inane questions (e.g., "Book you'd take to a desert island?" "How to Survive on a Desert Island"), and she was always smart and friendly. But at the same time, she's kind of...scary. She's so preternaturally confident and self-possessed, you feel as if she could be, at any moment, inwardly rolling her eyes at your dorkiness. Better men than I have said so.

Consider this DVD commentary from The Man Who Wasn't There, a great 2001 Coen brothers' movie starring Billy Bob Thornton and Scarlett as his piano-playing Lolita [FIG. 11]: "I think we were all a little intimidated by Scarlett," says Joel Coen. "Most people have self-doubt at some point in their lives or work." "Scarlett doesn't have that," says Billy Bob.

At one point, Joel suggested Scarlett eat sunflower seeds during a scene. "She said, 'Why would I eat sunflower seeds?'" recalls Billy Bob. "She looked at Joel like, You idiot. What are you talking about? Joel was like, 'I'm sorry.' And slinked out of the room."

I ask her about this while we play pool.

"What do you expect from a cocky fifteen-year-old?" she says.

And now that she's twenty-one? "Nowadays, I'm riddled with self-doubt, A. J."

She crumples to the floor, pretending to weep.

She is beautiful in person, even unprimped. Some actresses, I've noticed, look surprisingly androgynous offscreen, gangly and curveless. Put baseball caps on them and give them badges and they could be Eagle Scouts. Scarlett is different. She looks like a woman. She exudes womanness. Woody Allen famously called her "sexually overwhelming," which isn't too far off.

Incidentally, I have a theory on why she's the perfect woman for Woody Allen and other conflicted Jewish men: She speaks Yiddish and plays British. In other words, since she's half-Jewish, from her mother, she's got a sarcastic, fast-talking Jewish sensibility. But since she's half-Scandinavian, from her Danish father, she looks like...

"An Aryan?" she offers.

"Yes. An Aryan."

Hence, the Jewish man's ideal. "Thanks! You'd make my grandpa proud."

We leave Corner Billiards and walk downtown to the restaurant of her choice. It's an underground Japanese place -- literally [FIG. 12] -- that she discovered after her stint filming Lost in Translation in Tokyo.

She stops at the bathroom and suggests that I take a photo of the outside of the ladies'-room door [FIG. 13], which seems a little pervy, but who am I to question?

We sit down and get the menus [FIG. 14] from the waiter, whom she calls "honey." She dances in her seat, doing a funky little shoulder shimmy.

Esquire's mystery woman of the last five months (posing alluringly in a series of enigmatic trailer-park tableaus) is in fact a bit of a mystery. Director Christopher Nolan describes it as an "ambiguity...a shielded quality." De Palma puts it this way: "You don't know what's going on behind those eyeballs. She's on some wavelength that you don't have a clue about."

As opposed to, say, Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan, with whom you know exactly what's going on behind those eyeballs. Or Britney Spears, whose belch-filled home videos have their own kind of inscrutability.

Scarlett has more of an aloof, studio-era, Rita Hayworth vibe. Perhaps it's this remoteness that makes us want to fill the void with lurid stories. She's been the subject of more than her fair share. There's the famous shtupping-Benicio-Del-Toro-in-an-elevator story, which she denies and blames on a creepy, possibly vengeful reporter who asked her for a ride home.

Or there's the story of her demanding to be naked on the set of Michael Bay's The Island. Bay -- who in his own DVD commentary calls Scarlett a "pain in the ass to work with, but I mean that in the best way" -- says he went to her trailer because she wouldn't come out. "Scarlett said, 'I'm not wearing this [bleeping] bra. I'm not wearing this [bleeping] ghetto-ass [bleeping] bra.... I'm going naked.' I'm like, 'Scarlett, you can't go naked. This is PG-13.'"

Scarlett shakes her head: "That story's been twisted and turned. They wanted to make me wear this bra when I woke up in the morning. And I was like, Why don't they just have a sheet draped over me? Nobody sleeps in bras, except maybe French women" [FIG. 15].

Not that she's opposed to nudity -- as long as it's on her own terms. For instance, the Vanity Fair cover [FIG. 16]. "It was surprisingly comfortable," she says, biting on edamame. Though she and Keira Knightley were originally going to wear thongs, she says the stylist snipped them off. "Everyone was so busy working or loading film. Here I am, Keira and I, and we're totally naked, and some guy is on his BlackBerry. But I guess it's better than if they were all looking at me."

She decides I've been taking too many notes, asking too many questions, not properly feeding myself.

"Eat, eat!" Scarlett says.

Besides, she'd rather be the one in control. She reaches across the table, grabs my notebook, and proceeds to grill me with questions. Very personal questions.

"How old were you when you lost your virginity?"

I tell her.

"Have you ever had a venereal disease?"

No. Well, there was that one frightening phone call from an ex, but it turned out to be a false alarm.

"How many girls would you say you've slept with?"

She makes the "I'm impressed" face, which is nice of her, since the number is pretty low, about 2 percent of Hartnett levels, I'm guessing.

When I get my notebook back, I ask her about her STD history and sex partners.

"None of your beezness," she says.

She likes her boundaries. If you want to see her face light up, ask her about her methods of evading the paparazzi -- the time her friend's limo blocked the street in a James Bond-style swerve, or the time her driver steered all around Manhattan, exhausting a bike-bound paparazzo.

She once held up a sign that read, THE PERSON TAKING THIS PICTURE IS HARRASSING ME.

"Apparently I spelled harass wrong. It was horrible. I couldn't remember whether it was one r or two, and I asked like four people, and they said two."

She also didn't appreciate Isaac Mizrahi, who, while interviewing her on the red carpet at the Golden Globes, reached out and fondled her award-winning breasts: "I know he doesn't bat on my team, but still."

Before we get the check, I ask her about her twenty-first birthday, and she tells me some story about ordering in White Castle burgers and pizza and a keg of beer.

A couple of weeks later, I watch her on Letterman talking about how she went to a strip club on her twenty-first birthday and got a lap dance from a bony "Amazonian" dancer.

Puzzling. It makes you wonder what other secrets lurk in that sly brain, beyond those seductive kidneys, behind those second-most-kissable lips in the world [FIG. 17].



Source : http://www.esquire.com/women/the-sexiest-woman-alive/scarlett-johansson-pics