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 Angelina Jolie Interview Part 3Continue...
When she was nineteen, and her career was beginning to take off, Jolie's spirit plummeted. "I didn't know if I wanted to live because I just didn't know what I was living for," she says.
Would you really think about doing something about that to make it happen?
"Did I? Yeah."
Did you work out what you'd do?
"Yeah. I was in a New York hotel room," Jolie says. She was going to use a knife and sleeping pills. In preparation, she wrote a note for the housekeeper asking her to call the police, so that the housekeeper wouldn't have to suffer the distress of finding her body. Then Jolie spent the day walking around. She almost bought a kimono, then she realized how crazy that was. "I didn't know if I could pull the final thing across my wrists," she says. But it was the sleeping pill part of the equation that stopped her, at least on a practical level. Worried that she didn't have enough, she had asked her mother to mail her some more, and she realized that her mother would feel responsible. She realized something else, too: "That we can make that decision any time. And I kind of lay there with myself and thought, `You might as well live a lot, really hard, and not give a shit, because you can always walk through that door.' So I started to live as if I could die any day."
The next day, she went back and bought the kimono.
Did you ever feel that low about living again?
"Well, I had felt like that before. When I was thirteen or fifteen."
Did you ever feel like acting on it?
"Yeah. It's seems like there's always been times. This is going to sound so insane, but there was a time when I realized I was going to have to hire somebody to kill me. It comes from a place of ... With suicide comes the guilt of all the people around you thinking that they could have done something. With somebody being murdered, nobody takes some kind of guilty responsibility."
This was the time when Jolie was living in New York, attending college. She had given up acting, and she was alone. "I didn't have close friends anymore and the city just seemed cold and sad and strange, and the subway rides -- everything that was kind of romantic about New York just got very cold for me."
She met with a man, a friend of a friend, who she had been told could get this kind of killing job done. She had thought hard about it. Figuring that it would cost "tens of thousands of dollars," she had worked out how to put money aside bit by bit so no one could trace what she had done after she was dead. "It's so weird and so complicated and so completely ins-. . . so strange. And so like a fucking movie." She explained what she wanted. "This person said very sweetly to me, he made me think about it for a month. And by a month other things changed in my life and I was surviving again."
Let's pretend you didn't see my closet," Jolie says, though she leads me inside nonetheless. She points to the tutu. "I like costumes," she says. "Billy bought it for me. Along with the Red Riding Hood outfit." She shows me that, and also the nurse's uniform.
Thornton comes home from the dentist, where he had eight injections and listened to Pink Floyd's "Obscured by Clouds" as they worked on him. His face is frozen.
"Oh, muffin," consoles Jolie.
He attends to some business, and Jolie and I talk in the kitchen. Jolie keeps moving, so I ask her where she's going to settle, so I can put my tape recorder there. She laughs. "I don't really settle," she says.
I ask her about the detail in a recent Thornton interview that he, especially when they are apart, wears her pink underwear.
"Well, let me first clarify," she says, "because Jay Leno made some comment: How did he fit in my underwear? And let me just say for the record he has the most amazing body. No, I mean, if there's ever a question about how he fits ... When I first saw him naked... I still can't even talk about him. He's stunning. Fucking perfect... The fact is, I like to see him in every different way, and one of them being, yeah, in my underwear."
Just as he might like to see you in a nurse's uniform?
"Or just little white socks kind of thing. I tend to just walk around in nightgowns and little white socks."
Later, Jolie frets about the ways she's sometimes talked about. "I am fragile and fucked up. There are lots of things about my life in recent years that people don't know anything about," she says. "People assume . . . People have said things about me, they've said I've slept with my brother, they've said that I'm a drug addict and that all I do is get fucked up, and they've also made it seem like I'm some slut. I'm far from perfect as a person ..... She shakes her head.
Thornton comes in. He says his mother's on the line and wants to speak to me. (We've spoken before. She's charming and endlessly chatty; she is the Arkansas psychic on whom Thornton based the Cate Blanchett character in his script for The Gift.) We're still talking when Jolie goes to the front door to see her father, who is dropping by on the way to the airport, off to make a new movie of his own. "Everybody in my life is packing," Jolie says later. "Fucking actors." Thornton slips into the next door and listens to the Byrds' glorious, surreal hymn to yearning, "Chestnut Mare."
There are certain mysteries to the house that was once Slash's. They've heard talk of its role as a Prohibition fun palace in the 1920s; of secret tunnels. There's a door that they can't open, to an elevator that connects the first and second floors. "We met in an elevator," says Jolie, "and we're extremely corny and we'd like to get in a elevator and have sex, and we have one, so it's kind of perfect. We just have to figure out how to open it."
After Pushing Tin and making Thornton's acquaintance, Jolie says, "I knew that somebody exists that represents all the things that I stand for and believe in." To mark this conviction, she arranged for a tattoo artist to have Billy Bob's name tattooed in her groin area. It would be a year before the subject of her tattoo would know about it. "That was for me," she says. "It made me happy."
We are talking about all this when she comes out with the following odd sentence. "I went through a whole other thing with myself when I was in the mental institution and out of the mental institution... not the real one, the time I was in it for the film.. ."
The real one? I ask her. (I assume, correctly, that the other one is for her role in Girl, Interrupted.) "OK," she says, unsure whether to proceed. She stares at the table between us. "Now I'm looking at the tape recorder."
She tells me anyway. It was just before she and Thornton got married. She was sectioned for seventy-two hours at UCLA. "What happened," she says, "is we didn't know if we were going to be able to be together." She pauses. "I remember him driving somewhere and not knowing if he was OK.... We had wanted to get married and then for all these different reasons we thought we couldn't. We both were just ... are just, it's a beautiful kind of love, but it's also a little insane, and I for some reason thought something had happened to him and I lost the ability to ... I just went a little insane."
Where had he gone?
"I can't tell you and I can't explain it. All I can say is, it was not about other people. Neither one of us didn't love the other. All I can say is, it's just that life just explodes sometimes. Maybe part of me needed to shut down for a few days to process everything before; I don't know."
Jolie had been with Thornton in Nashville. Her mother picked her up at the airport in Los Angeles. "And I just couldn't stop crying," she says. "I don't know what it was." She started stuttering, and soon she was unable to speak. A doctor was called and she was taken to the hospital. (She makes a point of saying that nothing, prescription or otherwise, was in her system. "Whatever people assume I'm taking," she mutters.) They said that she was having some kind of episode as though someone close to her had died. "Basically I thought he was gone," she says. "So they took it as I was going through the actual trauma of having lost, like a woman who lost her husband. I couldn't really speak." Meanwhile she found herself in a hospital with other young people dealing with their own problems. And she had just won an Oscar for her portrayal of a mental patient. "Some of them were aware of me, some of them had seen Girl, Interrupted," she says. "In some weird way it's nice to know that everybody's insane."
What do you mean?
"I mean, to a lot of young girls, to all of us, there are these pictures in magazines of people that have their shit together where their lives are perfect. I think that somehow it was refreshing for these people that were struggling with the different things I've struggled with in my life to realize that it's not about... Certain things don't make it better, there isn't some other side of life, people aren't any different."
Against her daughter's wishes, Jolie's mother tracked down Thornton. "I think he had been looking for me," Jolie says. The way she talks of it now, it was the final rite of passage out of the darkness. A few days and a Las Vegas wedding later, the life she'd wanted for so long had begun.
That first day, as they nuzzle into each other, I listen to the second verse of "Angelina."
They all said we'd never make it
Two crazy panthers on the prowl
They said we would only fake it for a while
But we just looked at them and growled
Thornton says that when they look at each other it's like two panthers. "We focus on each other in a way that's so intense that it's like that. We also stalk each other around the house. In the kitchen. It's a constant dance, really, for us."
Is one of you more the hunter or the hunted?
"I think we're pretty equal." He grins. "We both want to get caught, so how good as hunters are we really?"
That verse also addresses "people's cynicism about people like us," he says. "People either thought we were the worst two people to get married in the world, or the last two people, or possibly the only two people who could be right for each other," she says. They know the only true retort is a slow one. "And we just looked at them and growled," quotes Thornton. "That's the growl. We stay together and keep living."
"We just know," says Jolie.
"You know how people go to movies and watch the love story and it always ends up: `Oh, he's so handsome,"It's so wonderful,"It was sexy,' `Oh, I love that ending."It's so happy,' 11 says Thornton. "People go to the movies and watch that shit, and love the shit out of it: `Oh, God, I wish I had it.' But you know what? If someone puts it right in front of your face, most people don't accept it. So here's the deal. We're going to live like it is when people go watch that. Someone running through the rain, their fucking arm cut off... See, I would do that for her in real life."
Thornton has a fine point. Consider: two people trying to make their own good luck, the dice of a bad-luck universe loaded against them; two high-risk lives uniting to take a chance on high-risk happiness; two stilt walkers holding hands who watch the sky while everyone else watches for their wobbles; two more refusals to believe that a grand mad love can't triumph ... Aren't those the reasons most people go to the movies?
Jolie and Thornton are remarried the day after I leave town, in the kitchen where we assembled Harry's new cage. They renewed their vows in front of a woman from the Church of Enlightenment and in the ceremony she earnestly mentioned "four-footed Harry and winged Alice" and they just managed to keep straight faces. Instead of reexchanging their rings, they cut each other's fingers and sucked each other's blood. "It was very sweetly done," Jolie emphasizes. "It didn't get sexual or messy."
Away in Seattle, Jolie makes plans for their anniversary. She reserves a plot for their graves and orders a bench for it, which will sit in their garden during the living years. She calls me and chats breezily, though she does mention in passing that she has some vials of her own blood in her hotel room minibar. She had a doctor come to remove it from her, instead of dealing with it herself, and we both approve of this new maturity.
Jolie tells me that Harry the rat is being flown in the next day. "He's got a certificate," she says, with pride. "He's in perfect health." As long as she takes care. "I'm not allowed to give him pumpkin pie. They said it wasn't a good idea."
We speak again, after the anniversary. It went well. By chance, they'd both thought of the same thing. "I gave him my blood that I'd had taken out and put in vials," she says, "and he gave me his that he'd had taken out." Thornton had also painted TO THE END OF TIME in his blood, to join hers above their bed, written her a song of the same name, and had her name tattooed on his arm (she was already on his leg) "with," she describes, "the I going in his vein and four drops of blood coming out for me and his children and him." She gave him an album of the two of them as children, combined, as if they had grown up together: "just cute pictures of him with a dog, me with a dog." Jolie had also changed her will to read that she and Thornton would be buried together. She had the document notarized. When she gave the will to him he pulled out a piece of paper, signed in blood, promising that he would be married to her for eternity, and it was also notarized. "We laughed that we had both actually dealt with a notary," she says. The next morning they woke up and got tattooed together at the kitchen table; the same private, matching symbol on their right arms. Then they went out to the fruit market. Later they watched Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Curious, I ask what they do with the blood. "Well, I've opened his vial," she says. "Poured some on me. I've painted with it. There's something very primal and romantic about it. I've considered pouring it on my clothes but I think people might be a little upset about it. I'm trying not to upset people."
Jolie mentions that they now want a poodle. As for Harry, he has become keen on hotel service but has to go to the dentist this afternoon. The rat has been chewing curtains. Before Jolie goes I check a few final facts with her; at my request she clarifies her youthful interest in vampirism. "Like everybody, when I was a little girl. . ." she begins, and then she starts laughing. "Maybe not like everybody," she says.
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