While Sandra Bullock’s cheating husband was busy breaking her heart, the silver-screen sweetheart was keeping a stunning secret of her own — there was another “little man” in her life who was bringing her joy.
Bullock yesterday revealed that she’s in the process of adopting a 3½-month-old child she took into her home from New Orleans in January, whom she has named Louis Bardo Bullock.
She said she first intended to raise the tot with her bike-building husband, Jesse James, but she’ll divorce him in the wake of the cheating scandal and raise little Louie on her own.
“He is just perfect,” Bullock gushed to People magazine in an interview published yesterday. “One day, it was just a feeling that came that instead of bringing another life into this world, that we wanted to reach out and find our child in New Orleans.”
When she first laid eyes on Louis, “He was so small, so still . . . All I said when I met him was, ‘Oh, there you are,’ ” Bullock recalled. “I never imagined I would say the words, ‘my son.’ ”
The Tinseltown beauty — who won the Best Actress Oscar in March only to find out days later her husband was cheating — said she wanted to keep the adoption secret to shield the newborn from the Hollywood spotlight, and the scandal.
She feared the story would be particularly sensational because of the parallel to her character in her award-winning film “The Blind Side,” who also adopts an African-American youth.
“[I] didn’t want Louis pulled into the award-season energy. I wanted him all to myself,” she said, adding that she went to extremes to keep the adoption secret.
“I don’t know how we got away with it. We only told a handful of family and friends . . . I was being followed every day during the award season, so that anything we did with Louis had to be pre-planned like a CIA mission.”
As for her movie career, Bullock said it’s on hold.
“All I know is that I want to be able to enjoy being a mom,” she said. “The career will have to wait for a bit. I don’t want to step into that would until I can find what room I left my armor in.”
Bullock also spoke publicly for the first time about the end of her marriage, telling People, “Yes, I have filed for divorce. I don’t know what else to say. I’m sad, and I’m scared.”
On Friday, Bullock, 45, filed for a quickie divorce in Austin, Texas, claiming that the marriage “has become insupportable because of discord or conflict of personalities.”
She said now, the couple’s relationship is “a different one. A bittersweet one. One of new understanding. One of forgiveness. One of support for his recovery.”
PHOTOS: SANDRA BULLOCK AND JESSE JAMES IN HAPPIER TIMES
Originally, she and James had planned to raise the boy together. James won’t be the boy’s adoptive father.
“I will be adopting as a single parent,” she said. “Anything else [as far as James’ involvement] will be day by day.”
Under Louisiana adoption law, out-of-state parents typically take temporary custody of their kids before finalizing the adoption, a process that can take from six months to two years, experts said. Bullock said that, despite their breakup, she hopes that James may some day be a part of Louis’ life.
“I really don’t know how our paths will intersect in the future,” she added. “But the father I have known Jesse to be with all the kids is one that I hope Louis can experience one day, no matter how Jesse and I go on with our lives.”
In a companion piece to Bullock’s interview, James, 41, told People he wants the split to be amicable.
“The decision to let my wife end our marriage and continue the adoption of Louis on her own has been the hardest. The love I have for Louis cannot be put into words,” he said.
“Sandy is the love of my life. But considering the pain and devastation I have caused her, it would be selfish not to let her go. Right now, it is time for me to beat this addiction.
“I ask that you please do not judge Sandy for the things I have done. She has done no wrong,” he added.
Bullock told People she hadn’t known of James’ multiple affairs.
“I had no idea [of his cheating] when I got the call,” she said. “It seems like a thousand years ago when this happened. All I remember is thinking I need to get Louis out of here before the vultures descend. But never in a million years did I foresee something like this happening. I wish it hadn’t, and it still doesn’t seem real.
“I did the only thing I could do, and that was pack enough clothes to live on, get all of Louis’ things and get out of town. My main concern was Louis.”
She was also asked about photos of James cavorting in a German hat, giving a Nazi salute and making a Hitler-style mustache with his fingers.
“The photo shocked me and made me sad,” she said. “This is not the man I married. This was stupid. This was ignorant. Racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, anything Nazi and a boatload of other things have no place in my life. And the man I married felt the same way. I hope Jesse will address this one day.”
James’ Nazi antics were made doubly strange by another revelation in the interview — that he and Sandra gave Louis a Jewish circumcision ceremony featuring a mohel.
“A friend of ours helped arrange for a bris at the house, because we couldn’t go [to a hospital]. The mohel [a person trained to perform a bris] came to us. You have never seen adults more panicked about what was about to happen to their son.”
Bullock said that she named the tyke after jazz great Louis Armstrong, because his song “What a Wonderful World” was going through her head when she first saw him.