The Devil in Miss Angelina Jolie

Hollywood's next great bombshell is a tattooed love goddess who's played vixens, temptresses and a doomed, drug-addicted supermodel, and for some reason, people think she's dark

August 19, 1999

Angelina Jolie is in the front room of her apartment in New York, giving what has become the obligatory tour of her tattoos. “OK,” she says, standing up and showing her left arm. “That’s my dragon, upper left.” She presents the inside of her wrist: “That’s an H — there are two people in my life who have this letter who I’m very close to and who I sort of love and cherish. And this is the newest one. I got this with my mom, actually — she came with me. It’s a Tennessee Williams quote: ‘A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.’ “

She regards her left forearm and smiles her holy-madwoman smile. “This is my cross,” she continues, pulling down the waistband of her black pants to reveal her slender hip, “and this” — she indicates a Latin motto that curves across her stomach just above the bikini line, “means ‘What nourishes me also destroys me.’ And this” — she turns around, pulling up the hem of her black T-shirt to show a little blue rectangle on the small of her back — “is the only color I have. I’m going to turn it black, and it’s a window.” A window on to her spine? “No,” she says, “it’s because wherever I am, I always find myself looking out the window, wanting to be somewhere else.” She smiles again, her loony, beatific smile — religious ecstasy with just a dash of grimace.

It is suggested that the cage thing and the window thing are related to something she had mentioned when we first met, a few years back, about her interest in prisons in general and the Attica riots in particular. (Of all contemporary bombshells, Angelina is the one most likely to be carrying a clipping from theNew York Times about penitentiary conditions in her purse.)

“Maybe,” she says of this connection, sitting back down on one of her two big black leather couches. “My mom asked me if the prayer for the wild at heart was for me or if that was something that I thought had pained me throughout my life. But it’s for everybody I know. I don’t think I know one person who I think can be completely who they are every second of the day, who feels completely free. So it’s kind of a prayer for everybody to find their happiness, to break out. And Tennessee Williams also writes that a bird or an animal feels comfortable in a cage it grew up in — it represents security as well as confinement to be in that cage. So anything that makes us comfortable, those things are cages around us.”

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She lights a cigarette and looks around the room. She is as pale as a sleepless night in her black clothes on her black couch in the overcast light of a cool gray day filtering in past gray velvet curtains at the room’s actual window.

The last few months, Angelina has been working in Los Angeles, and though her living room is full of all the things a living room should be full of — furniture, a piano, a television, CDs and a CD player, a mannequin of the lower part of a woman’s torso wearing a white 1950s Playtex girdle — it has an unoccupied air. It also has a copy ofPenal Law and Criminal Procedure Law of the State of New York. “People do always think that because I have tattoos, I’m bad,” continues Angelina, “or that there’s something very dark about me, or that I think about death. And I’m probably the least morbid person. I’ve kind of discovered that if I think about death much more than some people have, it’s probably because I love life more than those people.”

Besides the tattoos, here’s another reason people might think there’s something dark about Angelina: There’s a little plaque by the sink in her bathroom that says,Some days it’s not worth chewing through the leather straps in the morning.

It usually seems like a waste of time, when writing about actors as compelling-looking as Angelina, to spend a lot of time describing their looks, surely the one thing with which anyone who has seen their movies is already familiar. And even if not, there are bound to be some pictures right there on a nearby page. But it must be said that although she doesn’t coast on her looks, as an actress or a person, Angelina is exceptionally beautiful, even among the professionally good-looking. It’s not just that she has the unlikely proportions — huge eyes, tiny nose, little elfin ears, long legs, no hips, high breasts — of a Japanese animé character. It’s that, physically, she has a little ripple of energy to her, like a pulse, even when she’s sitting still.

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