Angie - One Tough Mother - 2003

One Tough Mother - Interview



New mom Angelina Jolie lips off on Billy Bob, her father and feeling wild again

CHRIS HEATH Posted Aug 07, 2003

In every life, things change. When Angelina Jolie last appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, during the release of the first Lara Croft Tomb Raider movie in 2001, she lived in a Los Angeles house -- a dinosaur fountain prominent in its courtyard -- with her new husband, Billy Bob Thornton, and their pet rat Harry. They talked feverishly of how their wild, eternal love would outlast the forces against it and forever seemed on the verge of having sex with each other even as they spoke to you. Above the bed in which they slept and alongside which Harry would scuttle in his cage were the words, written in Jolie's blood, to the end of time. à Two years later -- another Tomb Raider movie, another Rolling Stone cover - Jolie is a single mother who lives with her adopted Cambodian son, Maddox, alternating among homes in the English countryside, New York and a place under construction in the Cambodian jungle. Jolie mentions as an aside that she has not had sex for a year. Besides caring for Maddox and acting, she is deeply involved in her role as an ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Things change.
The rat was the first to go. Harry was sneaked across the border to Canada, where Jolie was filming Life or Something Like It in 2001, and lived with her in her Vancouver hotel room. Until one day Harry couldn't take it anymore. "He went insane," Jolie says. "He just ate the curtains. Masses of the curtains. When anybody eats a curtain," she concedes, "that's a clear sign there's a problem. I took him to doctors, and they said he was suffering from stress. They said I wasn't paying enough attention to him." For Harry and Jolie, it was the end of their shared road. "I didn't have the patience to sort out a rat's therapy," she says, "so I asked them if they knew someone who needed a rat, and he was adopted."

One day I am sitting in the lobby of the London hotel where Jolie is staying, when she sweeps in with her grinning son in her arms (Maddox will turn two on August 5th). They have been playing in the park. "We kind of explore the world together," she tells me. Already, in Maddox's short life, they have ridden camels in the Namibian desert and elephants in Cambodia and have swum in the seas off Greece.

For most of her life, Jolie, 28, had assumed that she would never be a mother. "Because I never felt very stable," she says. In movies, whenever Jolie needed to cry, all she had to do was extend her hand and imagine a child taking hold of it. Then the tears would come. "I was always sure that I'd never know that feeling," she says. "I was never sure I was going to live very long when I was younger." Jolie did always know that if she were to have a child, it would be adopted. She says her mother remembers her first talking about it as a young girl. "It had a profound effect on me," Jolie says.