AS she was finishing lunch at the R Lounge overlooking Times Square recently, La La Anthony craned her neck and motioned toward the back of the room, over the head of her lunch guest, projectile whispering, “Just give me one second, O.K.!”
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Damon Winter/The New York Times
At a Planet Hollywood event.
“Sorry,” she said, returning to her immediate company. “My financial guy is here for our meeting when you and I are done.”
“I’ll tell you a quick thing,” she added, leaning in conspiratorially, causing her vintage gold-hoop earrings to lurch forward. “He’s the one who got 50 Cent in that Vitaminwater deal. So any time he wants to meet with me, I’m like,” she clapped once and laughed, “I’m available!”
To be fair, Mrs. Anthony, the wife of the basketball player
Carmelo Anthony, is seemingly available for anything these days. Since her husband’s blockbuster trade to the
New York Knicks from the Denver Nuggets in February, the couple has been popping up everywhere: “The View,” “The Wendy Williams Show,” the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Every stage of their apartment hunt was reported by Page Six, as was Mr. Anthony’s recent helicopter ride to Southampton, N.Y., from Manhattan for dinner at Nobu.
Such is life as “the first couple of the N.B.A.,” a term Mrs. Anthony laughs off, though only after bringing it up.
Given their combined star power, good looks and obvious ambition, the question must be asked: Are Mr. and Mrs. Anthony campaigning to be the next Posh and Becks (Victoria and David Beckham)? Or perhaps a family-friendly version of Khloe Kardashian and Lamar Odom?
Mrs. Anthony, born Alani Vazquez, a beauty with large brown eyes, full cheeks and a girl-next-door sweetness, prefers another comparison.
“I love Will Smith and Jada Pinkett,” she said earlier in the lunch, sipping iced tea with lemon. “You see the love, and you can see the support, and they partner on things and produce together. But she has a life, and he has a life.”
IF the formula for power-couple success is fame times two plus business savvy, the Anthonys would seem to have the right answer. In 2008, the couple established Krossover Productions, the name suggesting a melding of their two careers. That same year, the company produced “Tyson,” the critically praised Mike Tyson documentary. It currently co-produces Mrs. Anthony’s reality show on VH1, known as
“La La’s Full Court Wedding,” in its first season. (It will become “La La’s Full Court Life” when it returns on Aug. 22.)
Other projects in the pipeline at Krossover include a movie with the director Brett Ratner (“Rush Hour,” “X-Men: The Last Stand”), more reality programming for VH1 and a children’s book about bullying.
But the record is spotty for New York sports couples trying to transcend their genres, particularly for the wives. For every Nancy Seaver — so beloved in New York after her husband, Tom, led the Mets to the World Series in 1969 that she appeared beside him in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and in commercials for Phillips 66 — there is at least one Joumana Kidd, whose hosting career (“Extra,” NBA Television) dissolved amid a messy divorce from the former New Jersey Nets point guard Jason Kidd. Then there was Anna Benson, the men’s magazine model whose bawdy attempts to stay in the spotlight helped get her husband, the pitcher Kris Benson, traded from the Mets in 2006.
Still, Mr. Anthony said, converting their marriage into a business partnership simply made sense. Both he and his wife are innately ambitious people who are not eager to let others hold the puppet or purse strings.
“I saw her wanting to go into movies and producing films and documentaries and reality shows,” Mr. Anthony said in a telephone interview, “so I said instead of letting somebody else come on board and produce all this stuff, we have the capabilities and the relationships, we can create our own production company and bring everything through that.” Asked whether the chance to build an off-court career figured into his plans to come to New York, Mr. Anthony, 27, a Brooklyn native, said he simply wanted to come home. “I’d always imagined playing as a New York Knick at the Garden,” he said.
For Mrs. Anthony, 32, controlling her own career becomes both easier and more complex as she is increasingly identified as her husband’s wife. She was previously best known as the host of MTV’s “TRL” from 2002 to 2007, as well as from her appearances on “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and “Flavor of Love” (as a host, not a contestant). Before that she was a radio D.J. in Atlanta and Los Angeles, a career she said she conned her way into during high school. “I lied about my age, because I was too young to do it at the time,” she said.
She was born in Brooklyn, like her husband, but raised in New Jersey and Atlanta. On this afternoon in May, she was looking feminine and tough in a Topshop blazer, cargo pants and Christian Louboutin Daffodil pumps.
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With her husband, Carmelo Anthony, in May.
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The couple in 2010.
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With their son, Kiyan, in 2010.
She narrowed her eyes, recounting the story of how Mr. Anthony first tried to woo her in a New York club, sending over a bottle of Moët & Chandon. “I thought it was so lame,” she said. “He was like, ‘What are you doing after the club?’ I’m like: ‘After the club? It’s 2 a.m. I’m going home. What are you doing after the club?’ ”
Stealing (or, at least, sharing) the spotlight comes naturally to Mrs. Anthony. As a teenage intern at Atlanta’s Hot 97.5 in the mid-1990s, she attracted the attention of the D.J.’s by being “young and in the demo,” referring to the demographic, as well as witty and quick with a comeback, said Ryan Cameron, then the host of the station’s morning show.
“La La just had
that kind of personality,” he said. “They would ask her questions” on the show, “and she became popular” with audiences. So popular, in fact, that the D.J.’s eventually implored Mr. Cameron to “make her stop talking.”
“It was an ego thing” for the D.J.’s, he said. “They gave her the rope, and she ran with it.”
When a fellow intern, Christopher Bridges (now known as the rapper Ludacris), was given his own show, the then-Ms. Vazquez was brought on as his female cohort. After Mr. Bridges left to start his rap career, she sent her audition tape to stations across the country, eventually landing at 100.3 The Beat in Los Angeles. Before long, MTV came calling.
For Mrs. Anthony, who married Mr. Anthony in July 2010, the role of an N.B.A. wife and mother (their son, Kiyan, is 4) has proved restraining at times. On “The Wendy Williams Show” in March, Mrs. Anthony jokingly complained that none of the Knicks wives had introduced themselves to her yet, eliciting cries of “get over yourself” from some gossip blogs. A YouTube video shows her
being angrily escorted out of a Mavericks game in 2009 after scrapping with rowdy fans who had heckled her.
Mrs. Anthony has learned, she said, not to express herself too frankly, or to cheer too loudly at other teams’ arenas. The tricky part is doing that without losing the spark that makes her La La.
“A lot of times with basketball players, their wives, and I’m not criticizing, but their life is just about the man,” she said, mostly ignoring four mini lobster rolls. “What time is he getting home, why hasn’t he called me?”
“But I’m so much more than” that, she said. “I’m a mom, I’m an actress, I’m a producer. Like, out of all that, I don’t want to just be called a basketball wife.” Hence, her refusal to appear alongside Shaunie O’Neal and Evelyn Lozada on the VH1 show “Basketball Wives,” she said.
“What I see in Will Smith and Jada Pinkett,” she said, returning to her role models, “is having your own, and I tell everyone that.”
Mr. Anthony isn’t so sure.
“Will and Jada have a tremendous relationship,” he said. “Jay-Z and Beyoncé have a tremendous relationship, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, they’re a couple we see that inspire us.
“But we want to be ourselves. We want people to say, ‘We want our relationship to be like Melo and La La.’ ”
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: (spotted 10 when 11 wins lol) 
