by Ian Halperin
SEX, BLOOD, AND LARA CROFT
Before anybody had a chance to catch their breath, the new couple seemed to be everywhere, professing their undying love for each other. “They were like Romeo and Juliet with tattoos,” gushed one paper. Indeed, Americans couldn’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about the new Hollywood lovers.
“I’m so alive,” declared Jolie to NBC. “All my life I’ve been thinking, I’m really just half alive. I thought I was crazy. Half the time I thought I was crazy. Then I met him, and I thought, maybe I’m crazy. But he is also. I’m so proud to be his wife; it’s everything that I am. I’ve always been very, very much alone, and sort of felt like I was surviving that way and was self-contained and had my secret world in my head, and nobody ever really connected to me. I met him, and I loved life. I met him, and suddenly everything that I wondered about made sense, and everything that I wanted in life and hoped life could be … were the things that were possible.”
Declaring Thornton her “soul mate,” Jolie told another inquiring reporter, “He is the most amazing person I have ever met. He is really a free spirit, bold, really strong and passionate and wild and all those things. But he is also a very kind person, a really good friend … I never felt grounded before in my life … Suddenly, I’m more content, more alive, and my life has taken on meaning. He is my strength. Now, being centered and safe, I feel more alive than ever and really free.” Calling Thornton the “sexiest fucking creature who ever lived,” she declared, “I am madly in love with this man till the day I die.”
It seemed they just couldn’t stop talking about their sex life. After Thornton told an interviewer that he had to restrain himself from squeezing his new wife to death while she slept, adding the sex is almost “too much” for them, Jolie shared her reaction. “You know how you love someone so much you can almost kill them? I was nearly killed last night, and it was the nicest thing anyone ever did to me,” she said.
There is a “sixth sense” to their lovemaking, Thornton eagerly told another reporter. “The other day we were mentioning how I needed to get one of those heart monitors on me, because I’m convinced I’m going to have a heart attack mid-thrust.” Jolie responded, “He kissed me the other day, and I nearly fainted. I swear on my family’s lives.”
As if sensing the unspoken cynicism, they both took every opportunity to publicly guarantee that their love would last. “The fact of the matter is that I can’t prove to you that we’re going to stay together forever, but we are. If I see you again in five years’ time, you will be able to say, ‘How’s everything going? How’s your wife?’ and I will say, ‘Great.’ The difference is that, in the past, I was never in the right spot.”
When words alone didn’t placate the cynics, they stepped it up with almost constant mention of their fabulous sex lives, including the occasional live demonstration. At the 2000 MTV Music awards, for example, they were stopped by a reporter on the red carpet and asked, “Billy Bob and Angelina! What’s the most exciting thing you guys have ever done in a car?” Thornton, stopped, thought about it a moment, then replied in his down home Arkansas drawl, “We just fucked in the car.”
When the New York Daily News noted that many people were waiting for their relationship to crash and burn, Jolie responded, “We might. But it’ll be from sex.” “He’s an amazing lover, and he knows my body,” Jolie offered. On another occasion, she complained to reporters about suffering from rug burns as the result of having sex on their pool table. To a British newspaper, she revealed that Thornton was such a stud in bed she couldn’t walk after sex. “Before I know it, I’m in a corner across the room breathing heavily,” she said, “and I don’t know what happened, and I’m trying to get back on the bed, but I can’t walk.”
Asked whether her new-found love meant that she had sworn off women, she responded, “When I was twenty, I fell in love with somebody who happened to be a woman. I wanted to be close to her because I had feelings for her. The reality is, I love people. If Billy was a woman, then I’d be a lesbian. Simple. If I was a man, we’d be a gay couple.”
While Jolie had gained a reputation for her penchant for unusual sex in previous relationships, she never spoke in detail about the sexual specifics and was not known for public displays of affection. She had also frequently expressed her discomfort at being portrayed as a sexpot. In February 2000, only three months before she married Thornton, she told Esquire magazine that she had cried at a Rolling Stone cover shoot because they tried to force her to wear a lacy camisole, which she considered to be “verging on lingerie.” Her “glammed up expression” in the final cover photo, she explained, was not the result of makeup, but tears. “The cover … I was totally red-faced from crying. Because I felt like a whore.” She had often expressed similar consternation at the media’s attempts to play up her sexual persona, even if she brought some of it on herself by openly admitting to S & M, bisexuality, and past use of knives during sex play.
Yet now at virtually every public appearance and media interview, she worked in the topic of her sex life with Thornton in graphic detail. She made sure to give almost each reporter and photographer a visual demonstration. “They kiss, and as they talk, discussing the day’s details, she absent-mindedly traces her index finger up and down the zipper of his pants,” one profile described about an evening at home with Thornton and Jolie.
At public events, the two were often all over each other, making sexually suggestive gestures or implying that they couldn’t wait to have sex. At the Golden Globes one year, the Los Angeles Daily News reported that the “couple smooched their way down the red carpet.” After they groped each other for reporters at the premiere of Gone in 60 Seconds, author Robin Gorman Newman, who is known as the “Love Coach,” was quoted by one newspaper disapprovingly: “I would think the ones really having great sex are not the ones doing that.” Newman may have known what she was talking about. After they broke up, Thornton gave an interview in which he implied that his sex life with Jolie wasn’t everything he had made it out to be at the time. “Sex doesn’t have to be with a model to be good,” he said shortly after Jolie was named Esquire magazine’s sexiest person in the world. “Sometimes with the model, the actress or ‘the sexiest person in the world,’ it may literally be like fucking the couch.”
At the time, however, one couldn’t have helped thinking that the pair was trying too hard to be the poster couple for amazing sex. “It just seemed so contrived,” said one entertainment reporter who followed Jolie off and on for years. “It’s like when the cameras, especially TV, were on, they’d put on this whole semi-pornographic show, but when they got inside, they practically ignored each other. There were literally pools among journalists about how long they would last.”
The paparazzi were thrilled about the colorful visuals but most of them wondered what was going on. “Jolie never gave us that kind of shot before with her husband. She was always quite dignified, especially considering her wild rep. And then suddenly she’s practically having intercourse with Billy Bob for our benefit,” said a freelance British photographer who covers Hollywood for a London-based newspaper. “You had to wonder what the hell was going on with those two. I suppose it’s possible he brought out the exhibitionist in her.”
Even if the Hollywood establishment was skeptical about the constant public sex play, it made good copy, and no one dared to express their doubts in print. In Britain, however, the media were a little more candid and were not afraid to mock the couple’s persistent public canoodling. “The more nauseatingly and insistently two stars proclaim their togetherness, the closer they are to coming apart,” wrote London’s Evening Standard. “Witness Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, Jennifer Lopez and Puffy, or America’s Sweetheart, Julia Roberts, who has declared her eternal devotion to everything that moves, and several things that don’t. Meanwhile, celebrity couples that evidence staying power, like Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, tend not to conduct interviews with their legs coiled around each other
’s heads.” The paper called Jolie and Thornton’s shenanigans “marriage as performance art.”
For good effect, the two occasionally threw in other bizarre tidbits to spice things up for reporters. First, Jolie revealed that Thornton often wore her panties to keep her close to him. He later confessed that some patrons caught him in her underwear while working out at the gym. Then the couple announced that they were wearing amulets containing each other’s blood around their necks. “We exchange each other’s blood all the time,” he confessed. “For my birthday she gave me a will with our grave plots next to each other. That’s pretty great, huh?” Jolie raised the stakes even higher: “And he signed a contract in blood with a notary public saying that we’d be together for eternity.” Then she added, “Some people think a big diamond is really pretty. My husband’s blood is the most beautiful thing in the world to me.”
At one point, Thornton even summoned a nurse to the Louisiana set of a film he was shooting, Behind the Sun, and asked her to draw two vials of his blood and mix it with an anti-clotting agent. He explained that he wanted to write Jolie a love letter using his own blood. “I’m not really one for jewelry, but I love his blood,” Jolie told reporters at another public event, fondling the glass globe pendant that contained her husband’s hemoglobin. “If I could drink his blood, if I could devour every part of him, I would. He’s my soul.”
Perhaps because they had originally eloped, depriving reporters a chance to hear about their impending honeymoon night, they decided to get married again, this time at the Beverly Hills home they purchased for $3.8 million from the Guns n’ Roses guitarist, Slash. “We want to get married in different countries, in different ways, different customs,” Jolie told the L.A. Times. “We love getting married,” Thornton chimed in.
Reporters were especially eager to know if Jon Voight approved of his daughter’s new mate, who he had co-starred with in the 1997 Oliver Stone film, U-Turn. “My dad likes him,” Jolie said. “I wasn’t sure how it would work out. I mean, they are fellow actors. But my dad loves me so much, and he’s never seen me so happy, so of course he likes him. They worked together, you know? I think it’s funny that they both did U-Turn and they were so damn weird in it. We joke about that. ‘Yeah, that’s my family in that movie, the two strangest people!’”
More than one skeptical member of the media wanted to know whether Thornton could make a marriage work, considering his four previous divorces. “In terms of relationships, this may be the first time in my life that I haven’t failed,” he responded. “Angelina is everything to me as a human being, as an artist and as a partner.”
But even early in the marriage there were whispers, true or false, that not all was as it appeared on the surface. As early as the summer of 2000, the New York Daily News reported that Jolie and Thornton were already talking divorce. At the same time, the paper cited a witness who saw Jolie emerging from the S & M club, Hellfire, which she and Jenny Shimizu had been known to frequent at the height of their affair.
Meanwhile, Jolie had been signed to appear in an action-film adaptation of a popular video game, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, playing the title role. According to one apocryphal account, it was Lara Croft who had come between Jolie and her first husband, Jonny Lee Miller. The story had it that he had become so addicted to Tomb Raider on his Sony Playstation that he never spent any quality time with his wife. “When they called me about [playing] Lara Croft, I said, ‘Oh God, not her,’” Jolie recalled. And even though video games likely had very little to do with the breakup of her first marriage, it can be argued that it was indeed Lara Croft who led to the end of her second.
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When Jolie was in the fifth grade and attending El Rodeo Elementary School in Beverly Hills, the school faced a budgetary crisis and announced it was forced to lay off nine teachers. One of those on the chopping block was Angelina’s favorite phys ed. teacher, Coach Bill Smith. Jon Voight later described the campaign organized by his ten- year-old daughter to overturn the school board’s decision. “Angie’s friends and Angie got together and decided they would fight for him and they started this campaign ‘Save Our Smith,’” recalls Voight.
Smith himself also remembers Angelina’s role very well. “She’s picketing, she’s walking down the street with her sign,” he recalled. “They came up with the idea for a bake sale where they could sell cookies and cakes and stuff to raise money for my salary. They really were like a little army. They were very focused on doing something good for somebody.” The crusade worked. Of the nine teachers facing layoffs, only Smith kept his job.
“I think that was maybe the beginning of something for her so that she felt she could affect things, she could make a difference,” said Voight, who was himself actively involved in a number of political causes, including the rights of American Indians and Vietnam veterans.
Jolie arrived in Cambodia in the fall of 2000 to do the location shots for Tomb Raider. But what might otherwise have been a simple romp in a tropical paradise ended up exposing her to what she later called the “horrifying depths of human suffering.” When she returned to Hollywood, she would find it difficult to look at her life the same way again. She had, as she would soon declare, now “found purpose.”
BRAD AND JENNIFER
As the sex life of Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie was splashed all over the papers throughout 2000, another high-profile celebrity couple was also making headlines, albeit in a decidedly more dignified manner. In July, just two months after Jolie eloped to Las Vegas with her new soul mate and pledged to be with him “forever,” Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston tied the knot in Malibu. The lavish ceremony overlooking the Pacific Ocean reportedly cost more than a million dollars to stage. “Great location, great script, terrific casting,” noted People magazine, declaring that the wedding had all the elements of a Hollywood production.
The two were first seen together in public on a dinner date over two years earlier, in March 1998. The event was brokered by their respective agents, which wasn’t all that unusual in Hollywood; most public dates in the town are designed by publicists to get their clients’ photos into the weeklies and generate mutually beneficial gossip. What was unusual was the that the two immediately hit it off. “He was just this sweet guy from Missouri,” Aniston later recalled.
Pitt then called Aniston the day before she was due to leave for London to shoot the Ross-Emily wedding episodes on Friends, in the first week in April. He left a message on the answering machine offering to help her pack and bring her coffee, but he didn’t hear back from her. “I was so nervous that I never called him back,” she told Oprah Winfrey. “I pretended I got the message too late. When I got back from England, we had a date.” After that first real date, when they hung out at Pitt’s bachelor digs in Los Feliz listening to music, Aniston claims she fell in love. “We both knew [right away] … it was weird,” she recalled. “The first time [he] kissed me, I stopped breathing. He literally took my breath away.”
They spent the next few months hanging out together, long before the media knew about their romance. They played poker, watched TV, and enjoyed each other’s company in what she would later describe as a “love nest.” “From the second date, we just huddled into this little house,” she recalled. “We wound up sitting on the couch and ordering in, having steak and mashed potatoes. That’s how it all began. It was one of those weird feelings where you just kind of know. You feel like you’re hanging out with your buddy. There was something very familiar about it. This was just very much meant to be.” Aniston also said that she first knew they were destined to be together because her dog, Norman, adored him.
It wasn’t until mid-June 1998 that the public got wind of their romance, when the two were seen kissing each other backstage at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in Washington, D.C. The next day, the Washington Post reported that the two were “all cuddly” together. And although their spokespeople insisted that they were just “good friends,” the Post said a more apt descri
ption would be “touchy-feely friends.”
With the cat out of the bag, the tabloids and entertainment weeklies had a field day contemplating a romance between the two A-listers. When Aniston finally confirmed the pairing, her breathless enthusiasm was like that of a teenager who had fallen in puppy love with the high- school quarterback. “Brad’s the cutest guy on earth, and he’s so deep and spiritual,” she reportedly told one reporter. “I love being in his arms. I want to have his baby.” It wasn’t long before the media were speculating on a wedding date. After filming Seven Years in Tibet, the story of an Austrian mountain climber who becomes close to the Dalai Lama, Pitt had immersed himself in Tibetan Buddhism, and there were reports that he wanted to be married in a Buddhist wedding ceremony. “He’d like to go the whole Tibetan nine yards, having the wedding high on a mountain top, in traditional robes, with the Dalai Lama looking on,” a friend of his told the Auckland, New Zealand, Sunday News.
Pitt finally proposed to Aniston in November 1999, and the two began planning a lavish summer wedding. Four months later, the couple attended the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party, where Joan Rivers approached the bride-to-be and loudly demanded to see the ring. Pitt held out Aniston’s hand, prompting Rivers to announce, “It doesn’t get any better.” A few feet away, Jon Voight looked over to see what all the commotion was about. Next to him stood his daughter Angelina Jolie, clutching the Oscar she had won earlier in the evening.
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Like Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston was born into a show business family of two actors. And like her future rival, her childhood was shaped by divorce and a womanizing father. Aniston was born in Sherman Oaks, a suburb of Los Angeles, in February 1969. Her father, born Yannis Anastassakis in Crete in 1933, had had his name changed to John Aniston when the family moved to the U.S. when he was two. He began his acting career on Broadway in the late 1950s. By 1962, he had moved to Hollywood, where his ethnic good looks got him roles. When he appeared as “Greek number 2” in a 1964 episode of the World War II drama Combat, he befriended another young actor of similar descent, Telly Savalas, who was a guest star on the episode. The future Kojak star and Aniston became best friends, and Savalas was named the godfather of baby Jennifer when she was born five years later.