Angelina Jolie: Tres Jolie

https://lebeauleblog.com/2019/07/11/angelina-jolie-tres-jolie/

It seems like Angelina Jolie has always been a movie star. But she didn’t really break out until late in the 1990’s. Her Oscar win for Best Supporting Actress in Girl, Interrupted made her a household name, but her performances in Gia and Pushing Tin had already put her on the map by then.

It was a pre-Billy Bob, pre-Oscar, pre-A-list Jolie who slapped interviewer Michael Angeli not once but twice in this article from the March 1999 issue of Movieline magazine.

Angelina Jolie gazes out into the Royalton lounge, a shallow pit of polished concrete lit from the floor up in a fan of hostile glamour. She sees people putting up with stylishly misshapen chairs and the forced coziness of two-starlet elevators. Bellboys dressed like gravediggers in a Terrence McNally version of Hamlet.

Faces bobbing above a wake of Manhattan basic black. Weariness has her massaging her own hands, moving them the way kids do to make shadow doves on the wall. The six-day shoots for The Bone Collector (she plays a detective in search of a serial killer) have her shuttling from New York to Montreal on the Canuck red-eye, and if that isn’t enough, she’s starring in the picture with the talented but notoriously intense Denzel Washington (who plays a quadriplegic). She looks like a cross between one of the beleaguered air traffic controllers in her recently completed Pushing Tin and her dad in Midnight Cowboy when he realizes that Ratso Rizzo is dead. She looks sad.

Someone with as fully realized a presence as Angelina – with that figure, was she conceived in outer space, like the perfect ball bearing, or what? – should not be unhappy.

“Listen,” I offer, “you wanna do something really cool?”

“Sure,” she smiles, using the entirety of that mouth. It is an amazing mouth, but the minute you hear Angelina, you realize it’s the texture of her voice you get hooked on, bumpy and slippery, like tapioca and Rice Krispies.“Hey, you ask me some good questions, I’ll answer them.”

“What’re good questions? There are no good questions.”

“New questions.”

“Nah, there are no new questions. What? Did you love your director? What was your motivation? Is there a God? Do you like your eggs runny? What brought you to this role? That’s dreck–right? But–BUT! There’s one thing we can do that would probably reveal more about you than anything you could tell me.”

“You wanna go have sex?” She’s kidding. “I’m kidding, I’m kid-ding.” She’s kidding. “Well, what? What, what? Tell me what it is.”

“OK. I want you to slap me.”

Angelina is blinking. I think she understands the request, because her hands–big, pass-catching hands–slide over her thighs as if she’s looking for her pockets.

“It’s OK. I’m asking you to slap me. Can you do that?”

“Well … yeah,” she nods, containing herself. “Backhand?”

“No. No knuckles. Just a good old-fashioned slap. And don’t hold back. I want your lifeline tattooed on my cheek.”

“Are you gonna smack me back?”

This is a fine question, although asked without any terrible concern, more with the uncertainty of doing a jigsaw puzzle when the box lid with the whole picture on it is missing.

OK. She’s left-handed, so it’s gonna come from the north. I’m ready, got the chin teed up for her. Angelina lets her arm dangle loose. She composes herself for a brief second. And then WHACK!

She certainly seems to have found her motivation, because the contact lens in my right eye buckles and has to swim through the tears to its former home.

“Wow. That was good, Ms. Jolie–”

“Thank you! Call me Angelina.”

“Angelina. But I made a mistake. I had my eyes closed. I’m afraid you’re gonna have to do it again. I’m not into pain or anything, I just … need to see you. OK?”

“OK, no problem.”

“Well–do it. Hit me.”

“Yeah, but you can’t be expecting it … can’t be expecting it,” she repeats to herself, as if she’s lost her train of thought. But then WHACK! It was all a ploy to catch me off-guard. And this time she wound up, put some heat on her fastball and hit me so hard I’m smelling toast, like she shook loose memory traces lodged in my brain pan. And it was loud, a slap heard ’round the Royalton. Half the people in our vicinity avert their eyes out of the tacit social etiquette that makes everybody look as if they’re saying grace. The ones who stare probably recognize Angelina as that actress with the lips who starred in HBO’s Gia, the biopic of junkie supermodel Gia Carangi (she got Emmy-nominated for that). Or the actress who played Gary Sinise’s second wife on TNT’s George Wallace (she was Emmy-nominated for that, too, and she won a Golden Globe). Maybe one or two of them recognize her as the shared love interest of David Duchovny and Timothy Hutton in Playing God.