HARRY - who is sometimes known as Fat Harry, and who is actually female (though this fact is routinely and systematically ignored by Angelina Jolie because she really wishes Harry was male), and who is partial to pumpkin pie, and who is a rat - lives a few feet from Jolie and Thornton's bed. Harry, who was a gift from husband to wife, spends his days and nights in a cage on their bedroom floor. Sometimes he is invited out to play.

"Billy found me one day sitting in the bathtub in my pajamas, the rat on my lap, feeding it pumpkin pie," Jolie reminisces. "See, that's one of those things that only somebody that really loves me is going to think is cute." She notes that if Harry ever escaped, "he'd get his butt kicked - he's a spoiled little Beverly Hills rat."

Next to Harry's cage are two tents, which were recently used by Thornton's two visiting sons. "We had a camp-out on the weekend," Jolie explains. She clambers through the first tent to rummage for junk food in the second. They've left the tents up after the camp-out because. . . they like them. It's somewhere else to be. She fell asleep in one of them the other night. Under the bed, out of sight, is the knife Jolie keeps close at hand, just to feel safer as she sleeps. At the end of the bed, by the TV, are piles of the King of the Hill videos she and Thornton like to watch.

Above the bed, hung on the wall, are some words in a frame: TO THE END OF TIME. These five words were Jolie's Christmas present to her husband. "It's not just this life, or years from now," she explains. The depth of this sentiment is amplified by her choice of paint. The words are written in Angelina Jolie's blood.

Before her husband gets home to this strange happy world of their own creation, Jolie tells me their plan for this evening. First they'll order by phone from Why Cook, her favorite. Then they'll watch King of the Hill. "And then, possibly, if a preacher shows up, we'll come down in our pajamas and get married," she says, quite matter-of-factly. Jolie has just finished a morning of merchandising and marketing meetings about Tomb Raider, the new movie in which she portrays cyberheroine Lara Croft. Becoming an action-movie star has not been easy for her. "I was trying really hard not to cry," she says of the first time she saw potential product tie-ins. Some of her objections were specific. "It was 'Why has someone superimposed a gun right in between my legs?' or 'My breasts are big enough - why are they enhanced that much bigger?'" Others were a consequence of how close she feels to Lara Croft: "I don't like seeing her in that position. She's so much like me.' The marketing people joked to her that maybe she'd be fine if she avoided the stores. Jolie shakes her head. "I haven't adjusted my life that way," she says swears that she doesn't want the kind of fame that could stop her from hanging out with normal people in a normal way. "It could fuck with your head,' says. "It could be the thing that sends me ..." - she pauses - "... back into a mental institution. That's what I'm really saying." She grins, and I take this as a flamboyant metaphor. I will learn.

Billy Hob Thornton arrives home.

"I missed you," he says.

"I missed you too, honey." They kiss, and as they talk, discussing the day's details, she absent-mindedly traces her index finger up and down the zipper of his pants. She has a question for him.

"Weren't we supposed to get married tonight?" she asks.

Thornton turns to me and says, by way of explanation, "We're going to get married every now and then," and then adds, by way of further clarification, "We're already married - we're so married." (The first official ceremony that united Jolie, 26, to Thornton, 45, took place in Las Vegas on May 5th, 2000.)

However, Thornton tells his bride that this latest reaffirmation won't be happening tonight - they didn't get around to booking the preacher.

"You want to do it Thursday?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says.

THE LIVING ROOM, WHERE WE WILL DO MOST OF OUR TALKING, IS MOSTLY empty - apart from the leather sofas and the table by the fireplace, the bubble chair which hangs from the ceiling, the shrine to Elvis Presley by the doorway and the two framed drawings and poems about Jolie and Thornton's union written by her father, Jon Voight. On the table are some toys, including a pig on a skateboard, another gift from Thornton. "He thought I'd find it funny," she says. "Which I do." There is also, to one side of the room, a life-size horse. She wants to get five of them so that everyone can saddle up and watch TV together.

"We were upstairs the other day just laughing, because we realized: we're married and this is our home," Jolie says. "We're responsible. Like, we have a dishwasher. We do the simplest things, like he lights the fireplace in my office and I'm floored, I'm so proud." She beams. "We're functioning."

Later, Jolie will tell me about the first time she bought an apartment, also here in Los Angeles. She was nineteen. "I didn't really want to live," she says, "so anything that was an investment in time made me angry. . . but also I just felt sad." When the hopelessness is hurting you, it's the fixtures and fittings that finish you off. "I sat on the floor and cried, because I was trying to pick out carpet color and I thought that I wasn't going to live to put it in," she remembers. "I couldn't sleep. I always felt like I wanted to burn harder or go faster than erything around me, always. I lived very very much inside. Now I actually share my life with somebody who burns harder than I do and sleeps less than I do and needs to live fiercely and matches me. He calms me, because I never feel crazy around him, and I always felt crazy." Because he's crazier? "Because we're both crazy. Yeah. But because he's also a really good person, and he makes me feel like I'm a good person. . . . Sometimes if you're at all wild or at all provocative or bold with certain things or not stable in other ways or you have tattoos or knives or whatever it is, [people think] that you can't also be a really caring friend or a really good wife, or that maybe you don't like to be a girl sometimes and be cared for. Or be with dren. . . The great thing I've discovered is that you don't suddenly stabilize and settle down. You do it your own way." When Jolie was nineteen, and crying over the pointlessness of home decoration in an impermanent and unreliable world, she eventually did the smart thing and chose a carpet anyway. "Dark gray," she recalls. "I didn't get that happy." She smiles. "It was a very dark gray."

SHE WAS BORN ANGELINA JOLIE VOIGHT, THOUGH HER PARENTS ALWAYS called her Angie. The first thing she remembers is looking up into the sky her crib. She's always liked "fierce wind and air and sky. I've just been stsaing out a window all my life, thinking there was somewhere I could finally be grounded and happy. I belonged somewhere else. And I have stopped that since I met Billy."

Her father was an actor who won an Oscar for his 1978's Coming Home. Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, though much less successful, was also an actor. Her parents split up when she was just one year old. She lived with her mother and brother Jamie in Los Angeles, moved to upstate New York for a while, then back to L.A. when she was nine or ten. Neither of her parents has ever remarried. "They are really good friends," she says. "They're probably each other's closest friends. It's going to be weird for them to read that probably, but it's true."

There are home videos that document the young Angelina's love of plastic high heels, tassels and sparkles - "so I couldn't deny them," she says - but her girlie phase didn't last too long. When Michael Jackson entered his Thriller phase, so did she. "I bought lots of leather," she says. "Black and red leather. Dog collars. Things like that."

Jolie insists that there is no specific childhood trauma that punctured her happiness, but her happiness nonetheless receded. She recalls the day, at the age of ten, when "it started not to be fun." She was playing a game with a friend, and she wanted to get into the fantasy world such games demand, and she no longer could.

Maybe she grew up too fast. Jolie says that she first started "thinking about not wanting to be around" when she was about thirteen. "It was when the reality of life set in, the reality of surviving." She had a serious boyfriend for two years from the age of fourteen - they lived together in her mother's home for a while - and it was not a very healthy relationship. "Looking back, I think I was probably not good for him. He was somebody that I wanted to help me break out and I would get frustrated when he couldn't help me. Which was when the knives came in - he'd be asked to cut me or I'd cut him. When you need somebody to get aggressive with you and it's not in their nature. . ."

I ask her about school, and she says that she hated sitting still and that she'd fill her notebooks with drawings. She ~ound some stuff the other day from when she was fourteen. She disappears into her office and returns with a notebook. On the cover is some kind of sword. On the second page is a drawing of three daggers and the words DEATH: EXTINCTION OF LIFE. There are other drawings of weapons and a quote: ONLY THE STRONG SHALL SURVIVE. There are further definitions: PAIN: PHYSICAL OR MENTAL SUFFERING. AUTOPSY: EXAMINATION OF A CORPSE. She grabs the book back, seemingly embarrassed, but then relinquishes it. There is the word HELL and a picture of the devil, and there is a rippedout page with only a middle strip of paper visible. The only word remaining is SUICIDE. "I can laugh at it now," she says.

Jolie explains the reason for the definitions. "I wanted to be a funeral director," she says. She goes back into her office and returns with incontrovertible evidence: her copy of the 1987 Funeral Service Institute Handbook. "It was one of those by-mail courses to learn how to be a funeral director," she says. I flick through the book, and find a multiplechoice test at the back, with Jolie's teenage answers filled in. Her tolerance has its limits. She swoops the book from my hands. "OK," she says, "that's enough of that."

THIS HOUSE, ON A QUIET STREET IN THE BEVERLY Hills flatlands, used to belong to former Guns n' Roses guitarist Slash. Its great attraction to Jolie and Thornton was his basement studio, known in the Slash years as the Snakepit, where Thornton could record his music. There is a brontosaurus' long neck rising out of the courtyard fountain. Water spouts from its head. They don't know whether to get rid of it. There's also a swimming pool in the yard, but they're not big swimmers and it makes them nervous, so they're thinking of filling that with plastic balls. Maybe they'll keep the tennis court. (Another rock illusion shattered: Slash had a tennis court.) "We literally are the Beverly Hillbillies," says Thornton.

There is an unused space out back, beneath their bedroom, where it was suggested they should landscape another small garden. Jolie thinks not. They've decided they want to put a mobile home there instead. When they want a rest from living at home, they'll move into the mobile home for a while. "Wouldn't that be great?" enthuses Jolie, and adds that they also want a tire swing. "We've got big plans," she says.

JOLIE'S VERY FIRST FILM APPEARANCE, WHEN she was five, was a brief one-day role in a movie called Loohin' to Get Out that her father was shooting in Las Vegas. She started studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute when she was thirteen. Too young, she says. "I didn't have the memories." She did a little modeling and appeared in some videos her first was "Rock & Roll Dreams Come Through" with Meatloaf. "He was a genie with pointy ears and I was a runaway." In those days her hair was long and she had no tattoos and she felt like she was doing what you're supposed to do - being an actor who can be molded. Even so, she'd always hear in auditions that she was "too dark." Then, when she was seventeen, she was cast as the lead in the straight-to- video sci-fi sequel Cyborg 2 She says she's not embarrassed by it now, but when first saw it she went home to her mother's apartment threw up while her brother tried to console her. She didn't audition again for another year.

Jolie and British actor Jonny Lee Miller met during her fourth movie, 1995's Hackers. - he was her first since the boyfriend she lived with at fourteen. They took trips together, got tattoos. But somehow it made her sad, suddenly caring about someone, and she told him that after the movie was finished he should just pretend that she was gone.

During Foxfire, the film she made the following year, Jolie grew close to one of her co-stars, Jenny !.izu. "I realized that I was looking at her in a way I had looked at men," she says. "And it was great, t was a discovery. It had never crossed my mind I was going to one day experiment with or kiss a woman, it was never something I was looking for. I happened to fall for a girl." She says that she and Miller stayed in touch, but were not committed. But they got back together and married.

Then Gia came along: the 1998 H BO movie that detailed the rise and fall of model Gia Carangi, her eventually debilitating heroin habit and her death from AIDS in the mid-1980s; the film that made people notice Jolie's talent for the first time.

There are two patterns that emerge when Jolie talks about the roles she has played, particularly the more memorable ones. First, she truly believes they have always matched where she has been in her life: "These characters learned something that I needed to learn and grew up in a way that I needed to grow." Second, she has often identified with these characters deeply - particularly the ones who have been dysfunctional by conventional standards - and the comedown and difficulty in disengaging after a film wraps have often messed badly with her head.

Following Gia, Jolie announced that she had given up acting for good: "I felt like I'd given everything I had and I couldn't imagine what else was in me." She split up with Miller. She says she still loved him, but she was no good at being married. "I wasn't even a good friend because I was just absent and. . . I'd go for drives and disappear or go film something and be in hotels forever and not do anything, not have friends, not visit, not hang out. I couldn't calm down and just live life." She decided to go away from everything.

Shaving her head for Gia's final scenes made it easier there aren't many parts for bald young actresses, and it made her feel clean. Jolie moved to New York, enrolled in college and felt free for a while. Then she got lonely and depressed. Badly depressed. She was pulled out of the depression when she found herself at the Golden Globe awards, nominated for her role in the cable TV biopic Wallace, and won. "I felt like somebody who had crashed some party," she says, "and suddenly it became easier for me to work. And then Gia came out and people responded to it, and suddenly it seemed like people understood me. I thought my life was completely meaningless and that I would never be able to communicate anything and that there was nobody who understood. . . and then I realized I wasn't alone.

Somehow life changed." Jolie's career resumed. Soon she was filming the role that would win her an Oscar, Lisa, a mental patient in Girl, Interrupted. In the film Lisa is placed as the pathological and irretrievably damaged character. "That's some people's opinion," she says. To her, Lisa also was someone she deeply identified with. "She lived too big, was too honest, was too hungry, was too full of life." After they wrapped, Jolie again found the adjustment difficult.

"At the end of the film there's a certain sense of them saying to Lisa, 'Nobody wants you to live, nobody likes the way you are - you'd be better off if you were sedated and tied down and shut up.' " And Jolie took that personally. "If you feel that you're the kind of person she is, then it's really hard, because you're struggling with, 'Fuck, am I just damaging to people everywhere? Am I just too loud and too wild and do I just need to let everybody live their lives and shut up and calm down?' "

TWO WEEKS AGO, WHILE JOLIE WAS IN AFRICA, Randy Scruggs visited their basement studio. Though the album Thornton had been working on was notionally finished, Scruggs had the rudiments of a new song. "I don't know if you want to do a song about your wife," he said, and sung a chorus. They wrote the rest of the song, "Angelina," in a few minutes. Thornton plays it in the studio. "It's basically the story of how we met," he says. As the music starts playing, Jolie wraps her leg up around him. After the first two lines she pulls him close and they begin kissing.

I walked into an elevator And you walked into a wall You said you wanted to be with me But I never dreamed I'd have it all

Thornton kisses her foot. "I have a foot thing," she says. "We have a whole foot thing," he says.

They had heard about each other for a long time. Geyer Kosinski - her manager and formerly his agent - had told Thornton that they should meet, because they were similar. But they hadn't. Two years before they met they were in the same room and Jolie avoided him. Then they both signed up for the movie Pushing Tin. On the day she arrived in Toronto, they got into the same elevator. I invited them to reminisce.

"I said, 'I'm Billy Bob - how are you doing?' and then we came out of the elevator, and I just remember. . . you know wanting something to not go away? Wishing the elevator had gone to China. It's like a bolt of lightning." Something different happened that never happened before."

"Something went wron with me in the elevator," she says. "Chemical. I really walked into a wall. It was the elevator. I kind of knocked it as we were both gerting out. He got into a van and he asked me, 'I'm trying on some pants - you want to come?' And I nearly passed out. All I heard was him and taking off his pants. I just said no. And went around the corner and sat against a wall, breathing thinking, 'What. . . was . . . that. . .? What the fuck was that? Jesus, how am I going to work?' I was just confused. I became a complete idiot." She smiles. "I still have my moments."

One night, they went to dinner. They were both accompanied - Thornton by his assistant, Jolie by a business visitor from Hollywood - but they talked. "We were not able to be together at that time," says Jolie, who was still unpicking her first marriage Thornton was with actress Laura Dern.

"We never at that time said one day we're going to be together - we couldn't," says Thornton. "But I know now that it was impossible not to be together." "We would say strange things," she says. "We would just randomly be talking about something in our lives, like the difficulty of living with people, and he'd say, 'I could live with you.' I thought... not that I wasn't good enough for him, but that I didn't know how centered in any way or together or solid or good for anybody I was. So I wouldn't have assumed that that would be a great thing if we were together." They weren't in contact for a few months after Pushing Tin, but then they began talking on the phone.

JOLIE AND THORNTON HAVE JUST GOTTEN OVER a kitchen crisis. A few days ago they bought a load of food to inaugurate the George Foreman grill they'd ordered from the TV. They cooked the steaks, but forgot about the fish and chicken, and only today were whiffily reminded that unattended food goes bad. I listen as they bicker about whether either of them really can cook eggs. They like to hang out in the kitchen. This is where they eat, picking at food or eating food they've ordered in, standing at the counter. There's a dining room next door, but they've never used it. (A myth exploded: The story has spread in recent years that Thornton eats nothing but orange food. This is not true. Though they have a bowl overflowng with papayas, one of his favorites, and though he is quite clearly a picky and particular eater, I see him eat some cold meat from the fridge, some raisins and some asparagus with salad.) She eats a lot of Cheerios. "Greates food in the world," she says.

THE WEEK BEFORE MY VISIT, Angelina Jolie was in Africa. She spent time in refugee camps in Sierra Leone and Tanzania. She got in touch with the UN's refugee program, because it was something she wanted to learn about. "I don't wabt to talk about it a lot," she says, wary of how she may sound. "Selfishly, I knew it would change my life to really understand." She visited amputee camps, war-wounded camps, camps for women who've been through trauma. "It's not like I did things that made much of a difference," she says. But something had changed. "I'd gone outside my own little world."

"I COLLECT VAMPIRE BOOKS," she says, gesturing towards the appropriate clusters on her office bookshelves. The vampire fascination came early - "when other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kind of wanted 10 be a vampire" - and her intcrpst in blood endures. She bought her husband and herself clear I pendants inside which you are supposed to place dried flowers. Inside theirs, they have each other's dried blood. "It's us being corny romantic," she explains, sincerely. She'd like to go further. "If there was a safe way to drink his blood, I'd love to," she says. "We've thought about it. You lay in bed and you just want to bite holes into each other. It's not about cutting yourself or some kind of weird thing - now it's just, 'I want to eat him.' " "People look at your life and they think, 'Well, yeah, you were married all these different times,' " says Thornton. (Aside from his relationship with Dern, he has been married four times.) "I've had a lot of shit go on, so it's easy for people to say, 'Oh, right, it's just another thing.' It's not another thing. This is different in every category. It says it in the song." "We love each other obsessively, madly," says Jolie. "All those things I worried about before, going crazy, it's all focused on each other and we're going to explode."

TOMB RAIDER was mostly filmed in London, where Jolie was required to work out and stop drinking and smoking. (She drew the line at giving up coffee.) Though flying is high on the things Thornton dislikes to do, he went to London to visit. (He had fun. Went to lots of record stores. He didn't eat much, however. All those old buildings. "I can't really eat around old stuff," he explains. Thornton will often joke about his OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. One evening, playing me a song from a CD, he will apologize and say that, as the song he wants to play is the second track, we'll have to hear the first track. He can't put on a second track, cold. He just can't.)

Jolie says the movie was good for her. "If Lara Croft's got a problem, she gets up and fixes it," she says. "If she's frustrated she breaks something. That's what life can be. I read something once: 'What matr"rs most is how well you walk through the fire.'

"There are a couple of pathways that don't go through the fire, you know.

"Yeah. Not for me."

IN THORNTON'S OFFICE, THERE IS A MYNA BIRD called Alice. Jolie had an accident with the bird - she mnistakenly fed it gravel rather than bird food - and she's worried that it hates her. Thornton says that AIice can almost say "Fuck you," except she can't get her beak around the f. On one of my house visits, when Thornton goes out, he leaves on a CD of Captain Beefheart poetry for Alice.

"SO WE'RE GOING TO GO AND BUY A RAT CAGE, are we?" asks Thornton of his wife. They have decided that Harry's cage is too small. "We could go to Petco," he suggests, "because they'll have a selection."

Jolie eats an apple. He puts his hand between her legs. They hug. We get in his car. Thornton drives, Jolie sits behind him. A CD of John Lennon hits is playing. They're getting sad. In two days, they will be apart. She is going to Seattle to film a romantic comedy with Ed Burns, Life or Something Like It.

He goes to Louisiana to film Monster's Ball in which Heath Ledger plays his son.

Jolie leans forward and kisses him. "Oh, one day," she says. "One day I'm going to eat his earlobe." We go into Petco, and they compare the different smallrodent cages. She points at one, the Small Animal Starter Kit, excited.

"Honey, it's got a hammock!" she exclaims. She wanders on, and looks at the dog diapers, the dog breath mints, the cat toothpaste and the bird buddies. "I feel like there's nothing here for rats," Jolie says indignantly. "Rats are normal... aren't they?"

They buy the cage. "He's going to be so happy," she says. Back home, Jolie and I sit on the kitchen floor and assemble Harry's new cage. "We've made one small vermin very happy," she declares. Jolie is proud that things seem to be working out with Harry. "I have a bad history with pets," she says. When she was fourteen she had an iguana called Vlad, but when she started getting acting jobs she had ro leave him with the vet. Then, a few years later, she and Jonny Lee Miller had a white albino snake called Harry Dean Stanton. They were both leaving for jobs, and they couldn't find anyone prepared to kill the mice to feed the snake. For a while she thought the only humane thing was to end Harry Dean's life. She tried but she couldn't do it, so she called the vet who had found Vlad a home and asked if he could give Harry Dean an injection. "He said, 'If you promise me you'll never get another pet, I will take Harry and find him a home.' " And you did promise? I "Yeah, but I assume he was kidding. I just tried to think that was for the best, and realized most of the time that being with me was not the best thing for a pet." She smiles. "This rat seems to be taking it fine."

THE JUKEBOX IS FILLED WITH THORTON'S MUSIC, and CDs are everywhere - he's been introducing her to all this stuff she doesn't know. She grew up loving the Clash. "They get you kind of riled up and agressive in a good way," she says.

On the far side of the room is Elvis Presley. "That would be a fiberglass Elvis with loafers on," she accurately points out.

I ask an innocent enough question: Do you spend evenings in here playing pool?

A mischievous smile. "We usually spend evenings not playing pool."

Meaning?

She says that she doesn't want their friends put off from playing pool when they visit.

So what you're saying to me, that you and your husband have been having sex on the pool table?

"Yes," she agrees, "we have. I've got this rug burn."

FOR A BRIEF PERIOD IN 2000 - JUST AFTER the lazy dismissive line on Jolic changed from "She's the crazy one (or the accusation that really hurt, the one pretending to be crazy) whith knives and tattoos," but just before it became the crazy one doing weird things with her crazy hillbilly husband" - what people said about Jolie was that she was having (or, as before, pretending to have) incestuous relationship with her brother Jamie. The evidence given was a) the long kiss she gave him, her Oscar date, when she won the Supporting prize for Girl, Interrupted, and b) her statemen the stage: "I'm so in love wirh my brother righ now.

"It was a difficult time for my family," Jolie says. "I haven't talked to Jamie for a few months. I think he- and I'm not sure - but somehow he made a decision to . . . to . . ." - she pauses and begins to cry - "not be around me so much, so we wouldn't have to answer stupid questions." Jolie says rhat she sent her brother her Africa aries to save on a computer: He's the only one she trusts. "We even talked about it: Do people a really think that we're sleeping together? No - I it can't possibly be. The Oscars, it was completely shocking to me that it was taken that way. I was hugging him, I kissed him. . . . If it seemed too long. . . He loves movies, my brother. He knows who won every car. I was up for an Oscar. And he was so supportive. So when I said, 'I'm so in love with my brother right now what I was trying to say was, more than get fucking award I can't believe how much this person loves me. And somehow that was turned into god only knows what. Basically they were completely missing the real story, which is how great it is that two siblings support each other - if you're in a divorced family sometimes kids get a lot close hold onto each other." At the Oscars, of course, there was someone she was also thinking of, but she couldn't yet say, Coming off the stage she tried to find Thornton and left him a message. Then she left the parties and to the Sunset Marquis; she met Billy in the garden and sat with him on the ground outside. "He was in his pajamas and he'd just put the kids to sleep," she says. Soon after that her brother helped her pack so she could go off and get married.

THE SPARE BEDROOM IS LOCKED.

This is because it also houses the Los Angeles half of the Angelina Jolie knife collection, about twenty or thirty knives of many shapes and sizes. (the rest are still in New York.) "I think they're beautiful." she says. "I have knives from all different countries around the world. Different rituals. I like honor, and codes of honor. And so I have knives."

That's how it started, but when she was a teenager knives also took another role in her life. "When you can't feel anything from life," she begins, "you walk around and you don't feel the weather, you don't feel other people; even if I had somebody near me physically before it just didn't feel like anything, it didn't feel like enough, nothing ever really got inside me. So I went through a phase, yeah, where I'd cut myself because then that absolutely felt like something."

That's not that uncommon. "No, a lot of people have that. People do other things - let themselves get hurt, beaten up. A lot of people drug themselves. A lot of people have sex like that. I didn't do that. I really have had very few people in my life." Jolie talks more about the bad old days. "There were moments where I just wanted physically to have something. . . whether it be a knife or a whip, you want to be drained of everything that is making you. . . you want somehow to have everything go quiet. Other people do sexual things or try to make themselves perfect - that's another kind of sickness. Some people go shopping. I cut myself."

Jolie makes a big point of saying how furious it makes her when people imply that she still does any of this - it was years ago - or that she thinks it's cool.

"Yes, I understand what it's like when you want to see blood to feel you're alive," she says. "But I am not going to do that again. I have found other ways to feel. . . It's just different with Billy. Everything is very loving and very tender and I can be a girl. . . but it's also extremely explosive sex."

She laughs. Right.

"Which makes me... His mind and his body is everything that I've ever wanted, more than enough to satisfy me, I'm thrilled with life. But for me it's only him that that made sense with. It really didn't make sense before."

In the spare-bedroom display cabinets, she points out the knife her character brandished in Foxfire, and the big new one from Cambodia, and her throwing knives, which in certain moods she likes to throw across rooms into cardboard boxes. "It makes me feel better," she says. But she also says that she hasn't got them out for a long time.

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 I 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," sh" 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 aliI 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 20s; of secret tunnels. There's a door that they can't open, to an elevator that connects the first and the second floors. "We met in an elevator," says Jolie, "and we're extremely corny and we'd like to get in an elevator and have sex, and we have one and 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 Rob's name tattooed in her groin area. It would be a year betore 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 tollowing 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 tor 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 scventy-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 diffrent 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 for some reason thought something had happened to him and 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 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. Herr 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 noting, perscription 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 if 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 ot them had seen Girl, lnterrupted..." she says. "In some weird way it was nice to I 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 pertect. I think that somehow it was refreshinlg 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 malke it better, there isn't some other side ot 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" " 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. .. Ser, 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 holdillg hans 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 remaried 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 Enlightement 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 from 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 THY 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 going in his vein and four drops of blood coming out tor 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.