Angelina Jolie has reinvented herself as a modern day saint.
She has launched global humanitarian campaigns across the globe and raged against child rape in war zones, female genital mutilation and deforestation.
The earth mother is a matriarch of a Mia Farrow-style ‘rainbow family’ and medics have hailed her as a heroine for raising awareness of gene testing after she revealed she had a double mastectomy to avoid hereditary risk of cancer. She’s also a respected director and last year was made an honorary dame by the Queen for railing against sexual violence.
Jolie sealed her sainthood by going traditional and wearing all white last September when she got married to Brad Pitt.
But don’t let her piousness spoil the fun times, when Jolie used to enjoy drugs, booze, lesbianism, knife play and joyriding.
Pre-sainthood, the 40-year-old was a blood vial-wearing goth junkie who moved in with her first boyfriend when she was aged 14. She had a lesbian affair in her youth, once boasted about trying every drug on the planet, divorced Billy Bob Thornton, dabbled in S&M and threesomes and never used to cover up her tattoos.
Hollywood’s finest bad girl sat down with Loaded in 2000, two months after she turned 25 – to get naked in a hotel room and explain why she hates people who see sex as dirty and to chat about how Lara Croft’s tomb raiding breasts were too big.
Despite her best rebel act, Loaded hack John Perry still couldn’t resist seeing her as an angel… even back then.
A Jolie Nasty Cherub by John Perry, August 2000
The Angel pulls £2,500 in cash from a wall safe. She rifles through the bills with an elegant thumbnail. “It’s all there,” she smiles, thrusting it into my hands.
I stand there frozen, my jaw creaking like a broken fridge. My chest has tightened and I feel like I’m moving underwater. This Hollywood screen goddess has just handed me two-and-a-half grand. The Angel turns her head on one side and grins, “You wanna count it on the bed?”
Très Jolie
I first met Angelina Jolie in a hotel in London. The Hollywood wildchild owed an associate of mine – a Northern “businessman” – two-and-a-half grand. Well, five actually, but that’s another story. (A story that involves fast motors, money-laundering and a pink-haired punk rock singer called Texas Terri.)
It’d make a great movie, possibly featuring line-dancing and artistically justified sex scenes. I idly consider selling it to Jolie, then suddenly become distracted as she sprawls on the bed, counting £50 notes into little piles.
“One thousand and eight…one thousand and nine…” she whispers, her arse bobbing like an apple at Halloween. “Two thousand!” She rolls over and smiles at me. As she moves, her T-shirt slides up. “Are you keeping count?” she smiles.
In March, Jolie won an Oscar for her portrayal of a manipulative psychotic in Girl, Interrupted. She’d already won a Golden Globe for her smack-addicted lesbian in Gia, and is about to blast off the screen alongside Nic Cage in this summer’s car-chase blockbuster Gone In 60 Seconds.
Not only that, she has just taken the part of Lara Croft in the long-awaited Tomb Raider movie.
“With tits like that I don’t know how Lara Croft can jump about without causing an earthquake”
But it’s her hedonistic lifestyle that has seized headlines. The 25-year-old daughter of screen legend Jon ‘Midnight Cowboy’ Voight, Jolie scandalised Hollywood by talking freely about her bisexuality and drug experimentation (“ecstasy, coke, acid” in her own words), her short-lived marriage to Jonny Lee Miller, and her subsequent whirlwind splicing to screen psycho Billy Bob Thornton.
If Jolie came from Gateshead, she’d drink White Lightning, appear on Kilroy and push soft toys around Sainsbury’s. But she’s from Hollywood, a town built on excess. And in Hollywood, Angelina Jolie is as hot as the sun.
Back in the bedroom, and I’m still staring at her arse. Honed by her training for Lara Croft, it’s like a mirage, her tattoos growing like palm trees from beneath her unbuttoned jeans – an oasis. I could certainly do with a drink.
“How’s the training going?” I croak.
“I hate it,” she sighs, bouncing playfully on the bed. “I figure if I get enough tattoos…” – she pulls up her T-shirt to show a black dragon crawling under her skin – “…no-one will be able to see how small my muscles are.”
She adds, “Right now we’re working on the bra,” casually squeezing her tits together. “I mean, Lara Croft’s are pretty big and we’re trying to work out how she does this…” Jolie jumps into Lara’s two-handed shooting stance and I’m now convinced that I’m about to faint.
“With tits like that,” Jolie muses, “I don’t know how Lara Croft can jump about without causing a massive earthquake.”
Tatt’s entertainment
She pulls out a folder marked ‘Lara Croft’ and opens it on the bed. Inside are artists’ impressions of the tunnels, Lara’s house, the coastal village, all currently being built at Pinewood Studios.
“Here’s the gun. There’s the robot I have to fight. Here’s me in the show,” she grins like a tiger. Jolie may have lips like a bouncy castle, but I find myself falling hopelessly in love with her for completely different reasons.
She has invited me into her room, given me a fuck-load of cash and is happily flirting with me like we’ve met at Tesco’s cheese counter.
“You’re young, you’re crazy, you’re in bed and you’ve got knives… shit happens”
For a complete stranger to be so charmingly open would be exceptional; considering she’s currently Hollywood’s hottest talent, it’s a fucking miracle. I feel like weeping. But then, maybe that’s because she’s showing me a picture of herself in shorts… very snug shorts.
“Actually I won’t be wearing shorts,” she adds. “I tried them on and the reality is that you can’t kick high.”
She catches the glazed look in my eyes.
“Don’t worry, we’re not taping my breasts down or anything. They’re letting me get all dark and dirty. Lara’s going to be primal.”
I start coughing violently. It’s been quite a day. I was expecting an unmarked envelope. Instead, this lovely woman squeezed her tits and told me secrets.
“Say, I’m in London until Christmas. Maybe we could get together…”
She gives me her telephone number and I leave my heart on the Corby trouser press.
Back in black
The Angel comes at me, clutching an evil-looking knife. It must be two feet long. Christ, it’s only been a week. It usually takes me years to drive women to this.
“Oh my God! It’s you!” she shrieks. “What are you doing here?”
The second time I meet Angelina Jolie is in a restaurant in Greece. It’s a week after the transaction in London, and over her shoulder I can see the Acropolis laughing at me. What am I doing here?
The official explanation is I have come to see the first screening of Gone In 60 Seconds, but the real reason is that I want to be near her until the flesh falls from my bones and my mortal soul is carried into the sky by seagulls, raining on the hills like flat red tears. Something like that, anyway.
I look warily at the knife (it‘s a gift from a fan, incidentally) and ask if her dad is around. Jolie giggles. But she glances around first. Jon Voight, you see, wants me dead.
Back in London, as I was striding manfully towards his daughter’s suite, the screen legend had stopped me in my tracks.
“Where are you going?”
“To see your daughter,” I squeaked.
“What about?”
“Money.”
“I’m just silly. I’m even getting a fireman’s pole fitted in my house because I want to go straight from the bedroom to the kitchen. I’m a nutcase”
Any other time, he probably would have snapped my neck like a twig. As it was, Jolie appeared between us like the genie of the lamp.
“Hey, I got to worry when I see handsome young men going into my daughter’s room,” said Voight as the door closed on him.
“This happens all the time,” sighed Jolie. “He thinks I’m buying drugs.”
In Athens, she is excited. Perhaps it’s the Acropolis, perhaps she’s just happy to be away from Daddy, but her words tumble out in a torrent, like koi carp from a cracked fishtank. “Oh, don’t worry about Dad,” she says. “He’s like any father – he sees a guy going into my room, he thinks I’m getting into some kind of trouble.”
We both look at the knife. Jolie has certainly given daddy cause to worry in the past. She has scars on her neck, her arms, her belly (“You’re young, you’re crazy, you’re in bed and you’ve got knives… shit happens,” she says), and when she married Miller, she wrote his name on the back of the T-shirt she wore to the ceremony – in her own blood.
Now rumours abound, perhaps confirmed by Voight’s protective presence in London, that daddy is trying to get her new marriage to Thornton annulled on grounds of mental instability.
“No he’s not!” says Jolie, outraged. “That’s not at all true! Billy’s really close to my family, and dad knows I’ve never been happier.”
There’s no celebrity game-playing with Jolie and no bland soundbites or careful slalom around the darker spots of her life: if you ask her a question she assumes you want the answer.
“Yeah, I have this ‘bad girl’ image but I’m just more honest than people would like me to be. I’m certainly not a bad person. But of course, I can be really bad when I want to!” she laughs.
Bareback
When it comes to the scale of being bad, of course, one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. But near the top of most people’s ‘bad’ list is getting off with a member of your own family.
Jolie made headlines at this year’s Oscars when she ‘passionately kissed’ her brother James.
“Don’t you mean, ‘Slept with my brother James’?” she spits.
Well, incest was the implication.
Did it upset you? “No!” she says emphatically, “I wasn’t even angry – it was more like, ‘What sick fuckin’ people would come up with that?’ They think I’m crazy – they’re the fuckin’ crazy ones.”
Were you being deliberately provocative? “Why? Because I said that I loved him?”
No, the kissing. “Yeah? Well, people are out of their fucking minds.”
Perhaps, but the public perception is that you’re the one who’s mental.
“People think I’m so serious and fucked up, and that I wear black a lot ’cos I’m so dark and cool. But I wear black because I spill stuff on myself all the time. I’m just silly. I’m even getting a fireman’s pole fitted in my house because I want to go straight from the bedroom to the kitchen. I’m a nutcase,” she retorts to this line of interrogation.
“I just don’t see sex as this dirty, horrible thing – I see it as a connection with another human being”
I’ve blown it. By now, Jolie, like her father, wants me dead. I eye the knife and try to explain that she has a reputation for being uninhibited.
“When I say things like, ‘I find everybody attractive’, people jump to conclusions,” she says. “They go, ‘Oh that means she’s just fucking anyone’. I just don’t see sex as this dirty, horrible thing – I see it as a connection with another human being.
“So what I mean is that I think there’s something amazing about everyone, and if I spent enough time with someone, I could find them attractive… even an Englishman.”
I blush, and stutter something about Englishmen being far too reserved. She smiles, looking at me like Supergirl melting my ice with her eyes.
“Nooooo, not at all,” she purrs.
“Behind closed doors, you’re the insane ones.”
Loaded’s Quickie-And-Angie Session
In honour of Jolie wrapping filming on Gone In 60 Seconds when she spoke to Loaded, interviewer John Perry gave her a quick Q&A and discovered her obsession with auto-eroticism.
Loaded
Ever had it off in a car?
Angelina Jolie
Of course! I’m an American, for god’s sake! It’s part of our culture! Those big leather seats… ooh!
L Is it possible to have an erotic relationship even with a battered Capri?
A Oh yes! My car’s a pick-up truck, not too erotic. But when you’re at one with the steering wheel and the gearstick and you’re racing around kerbs, that’s very sexy. Or to be driven by someone, and they accelerate… that’s sexy too.
L If I gave you a coathanger, a spark plug and half a tennis ball, how long would it take you to break into a car?
A Depends on the car. Probably slightly more than 60 seconds, I guess. I could do it but I really love cars so I wouldn’t want to scratch the paintwork. I’m sure I could break a window or jam the door open but hey, it’s always better to stick it in slowly… open it up gently, jiggle those alarms and take your time. Know what I mean?
L Indeed we do.
Cover girl