ASPECTS OF BRAD - by Leslie Bennett
After years of favoring edgy over commercial, Brad Pitt will star as Achilles,
Homer’s larger-than-life warrior hero, in this summer’s unrepentant
$170 million blockbuster, Troy. At the L.A. mansion Pitt redesigned for himself
and Jennifer Aniston, the 40-year-old actor talks with Leslie Bennetts about
his newfound confidence, his unconventional take on marriage, and the surprising
challenges of playing a demigod. Photographs by Nick Knight.
The role of Achilles—godlike hero of Homer’s Iliad and this month’s
$170 million Hollywood epic, Troy—seems made for Brad Pitt. It’s
also the kind of big-box-office lead he has spent a decade avoiding, in favor
of riskier parts. At the Beverly Hills mansion Pitt has renovated for himself
and Jennifer Aniston, LESLIE BENNETTS gets the 40-year-old actor talking about
the mythic Greek warrior’s all-too-familiar demons, as well as marriage,
kids, religion—and how he gets those breathtaking abs.
His gaze is fierce, his eyes blazing blue as an acetylene torch. His jawline
is so chiseled it could slice roast beef. His flowing blond locks glitter as
if throwing off sparks.
His bronzed muscles bulging with such inflated precision they might be on loan
from Popeye, Achilles points his sword toward the heavens.
“Immortality!” he roars to the soldiers who await his command.
“Take it—it’s yours!”
Not to mention his own. The fame of Achilles has lasted for more than three
millennia, his name enduring through the inexorable march of centuries and civilizations
as the prototype for the ultimate warrior, a godlike paragon of valor and manly
beauty. The incomparable fighter whose rage nearly doomed his fellow Greeks
during the Trojan War, Achilles was immortalized in the Iliad as the pivotal
character who finally accepted his fatal destiny and helped to defeat Troy.
Heroism? Beauty? The guy who saves the day, seduces the girl, turns the tide
of history, and has audiences swooning all over the world? In the kind of enormous
Hollywood epic that can transform a mere movie star into an icon for the ages?
Precisely the type of part Brad Pitt has spent the last dozen years rejecting.
Although such extravaganzas may gross hundreds of millions of dollars and earn
their stars more money than they can count, Pitt has consistently turned up
his perfect nose at opportunities to seize his share of the action.
So whey Troy opens on May 14, the $170 million saga will mark a major milestone
in his stubbornly iconoclastic career: Brad Pitt has stopped running from his
inner superhero and turned around to embrace his own destiny.
“I finally caved,” he says, those famous eyes twinkling.
It’s about time.
THE FACE THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND TABLOIDS IS PALE despite its golden tan;
after a couple of days at home with the flu, Pitt is still a bit wan around
the edges. But all he has to do is flash that killer smile and he’s irresistible—something
moviegoers everywhere have known ever since Pitt sauntered into stardom as the
cocky cowboy who showed Geena Davis what sex was all about in Thelma and Louise.
Although he spent only a few minutes on-screen in the 1991 movie, his electrifying
performance had women all over America exclaiming, “Who was that?”
as the lights came up. They haven’t stopped talking about him since.
Wearing ripped jeans and a green Polartec pullover on top of a white T-shirt;
Pitt is showing me around the shingle-roofed French Normandy-style home he shares
with Jennifer Aniston, his wife. Originally designed by Wallace Neff for the
actor Fredric March, the house is gracious and open, with walls of windows facing
out onto broad terraces and sweeping views of the Hollywood Hills. Although
the Pitts bought it because it was in move-in condition, they wound up gutting
the place.
“I just couldn’t keep my hands off it,” admits Pitt, an architect
manque’ who would often rather redesign a house than make a movie. After
two years of renovation, they finally moved in six months ago. “We’re
still like a couple of kids squatting in some Beverly Hills mansion,”
he says.
Pitt’s aesthetic-austere and somewhat unforgiving, all hard edges and
unyielding materials-could soon prove problematic, however. Aniston has been
making nervous comments about the difficulties of baby-proofing the rough-hewn
stone floors, the glass dining table, the gleaming metal and leather furniture.
But Pitt just shrugs and grins.
“I have a different theory: you gotta fall down; you gotta learn,”
he says. Besides, the drawbacks of what was supposed to be their dream house
offer an excuse to move again. “I see this as a good place to get started,
but I’m gonna build from the ground up-I have to,” he says. Restless
as ever; he’s already looking ahead to the next challenge.
Which is, in a nutshell, the simplest explanation for why the heartthrob who’s
perennially at the top of the world’s sexiest-man-alive lists has defied
myriad pressures to play the hero in any number of movies. “He likes to
be challenged as an actor,” says Cynthia Pett-Dante, his longtime manager.
“It’s very hard to hit blockbuster status without playing to the
lowest common denominator, and Brad has never chosen to do that,” observes
Doug Liman, who directed Pitt and Angelina Jolie in the upcoming Mr. And Mrs.
Smith.
“I wanted to go explore some of the other stuff before I got cornered,
Pitt explains. “My favorite actors and performances have more of a character
slant. I always felt like I could go back and do the leading-man thing. It was
something I could fall back on, but I didn’t see that as a way to longevity.
I saw it as a way to get in the door, but I don’t think it’s going
to keep you there. You see the consumptibility of the flavor the month—“
He pauses. “Is ‘consumptibility’ a word?” He pulls
out a dictionary and looks it up; when confronted with a gap in his education,
Pitt is always interested in filling it. We discuss variations of the word “consume,”
and then he continues, “There are films that we just consume, and there’s
a place for pure entertainment, but that’s not what interests me about
movies. I moved out here because of the films that showed me another culture,
another way of life-that made me understand something I didn’t understand,
that spoke of something in a way I could never speak it. For me it’s just
about following what’s interesting at the time.”
What interests Pitt are usually offbeat roles that subvert his pretty-boy looks
and all-American charm: the mental patient in Twelve Monkeys, the brutal fighter
who beats up other guys while recruiting terrorists in Fight Club. He’s
proud of his choices, even when they were box-office disappointments, as many
of his movies have been. “How about Kalifornia—I dare you to put
a better white-trash sociopath on the screen,” he says in a rare moment
of boastfulness.
“Some of his choices are not necessarily the most commercial choices,”
says Brad Grey, who is a partner in Plan B, the production company Pitt and
Aniston have formed. “Brad will always gravitate toward what he has not
done yet. It’s about creativity,”
“He’s gotten away with it because you can’t take your eyes
off him,” says Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of A Beautiful
Mind and producer of Mr. And Mrs. Smith. “The feeling Brad conveys on-screen
is that you’re sharing a secret. There’s this humor that is like
grace, that says, ‘I’m watching the world the way you are.’
The finest actors convey that on-screen.”
In the eyes of the public, neither strange roles nor disappointing grosses
seem to dim Pitt’s luster. “Brad Pitt is one of those people who
transcends box-office success and the failures of his movies; he’s box-office
impervious,” says Doug Liman. “We all love him—all of America.
We don’t all want to go see some of the movies he chooses to make, because
he makes bold choices, but he’s trying to push himself.”
Even when Pitt has signed on for what looked like a big-box-office movie, he’s
risked playing opposite leading men whose star power could overshadow his own:
George Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven, Robert Redford in Spy Game, Harrison
Ford in The Devil’s Own, Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire.
Big money hasn’t been a priority, either. “I don’t really
care. I’m not the best of businessmen, I guess,” Pitt says. “It’s
never been my first concern. To this day, I have yet to receive a full $20 million,
although I have been offered more than that. I took half of that to do Troy,
with profits on the other end. I like being the flighty artist guy unencumbered
by those things. At the same time, I’ve done Japanese commercials, so
let’s be honest. [Pitt has earned millions modeling Edwin Jeans and Tag
Heuer watches in Japan.] My choices have not been all about art for art’s
sake; I’ve certainly succumbed to some of the pressures of what others
may want. It’s a constant negotiation. But maybe I did run from it for
a while. I think that’s a fair assessment.”
Playing Achilles opposite such illustrious co-stars as Peter O’Toole,
Julie Christie, and Orlando Bloom would seem to have been a “no-brainer,”
as Pett-Dante puts it. But Pitt even had to be coerced into what others instantly
pegged as the role of a lifetime for him. “I almost didn’t do it,”
he admits. “It just seemed to obvious.”
On closer inspection, however, Achilles offered a rare opportunity. “It’s
not at all a straightforward leading-man role. He’s much more complex,
controversial, and interesting,” says Wolfgang Petersen, who directed
Troy as well as Das Boot, Air Force One, and The Perfect Storm. “Yes,
he looks beautiful; he looks like a god, but he’s a haunted person, driven,
pained—a very modern kind of man. He has a very dark soul. There are a
lot of demons inside him, and that suits Brad. Brad really nails it.”
Arrogant, proud, and full of fury, Achilles is almost super-human in his courage
and leadership on the battlefield, but all too mortal in his flaws—as
Homer makes clear from the first line of the Illiad: “Rage—Goddess,
sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed that cost the
Achaeans countless losses.”
And Pitt, who can glower and smolder with the best of them, found that Achilles
“really struck a chord with me,” he says. “He’s extremely
violent, but there’s a juxtaposition of violence and tenderness. He wasn’t
formed by any belief system; it was strictly trial and error, and yet he was
able to take those experiences and create himself from it. He’s conflicted
about going to war; he wrestles with that decision. He’s a hero, but that’s
not enough. There’s this hunger for something more, this need to transcend
everyday life—the need to grab more, to discover a mythic life and transcend
the limits of mortality. But he’s not such a nice guy. He desecrates the
body of Hector in a horrible, vengeful way.”
To get in character, he threw himself into the role with a grim intensity.
“I lived a complete and utter monastic life; I had to,” says Pitt,
who spent five months filming in Malta and Mexico. “This guy had so many
walls up; I had to live inside those walls, there were times when Jen would
look at me like I’m out of my mind, Malta is just a big rock island, and
I lived up in this 300-year-old stone house on a mountain. I didn’t run
the air conditioner or anything; I wanted to feel those 100-degree nights. People
always bring up what Laurence Olivier said to Dustin Hoffman—‘Dear
boy…why don’t you try acting? It’s so much easier.’
But it doesn’t work that way for me. We do give up our lives for a while,
doing a movie like this. It’s not necessarily fun. But I’m not a
big proponent of happiness. I think it’s highly overrated.”
He shoots me a sly smile. “I think misery is underrated. There’s
so much value in that. You can’t have one without the other.”
The smile vanishes. “I just want to be engaged,” he says.
Although the plot twists of the Illiad often hinge on revenge, it’s a
theme Pitt has long tried to avoid in his work. “I really despise a vengeance
film,” he says with uncharacteristic vehemence. “It’s too
easy; it’s too simple. I really stay away from those films.”
He justifies his participation in Troy by reaching an anti-war message into
the Illiad—an interpretation that might have surprised its author. “Achilles
goes for vengeance, and it shows the emptiness of vengeance,” Pitt maintains.
“It’s about one civilization trying to overthrow another civilization.
What he’s trying to say is, we can’t be drawing these boundaries—us
versus them. We’ve got to accept our common humanity. The hatred of men
is born; it dies. The things that separate us—they die. The thing that’s
everlasting is our humanity.”
After Achilles kills the Trojan prince, his father, King Priam—played
by Peter O’Toole—begs for the return of his son’s body. “As
walled up as Achilles is to any kind of emotion, Priam comes in and disarms
this hardened warrior with the weapons of peace, which are words,” Pitt
says. “There’s a line that brought me to my knees, that still gives
me gooseflesh. Achilles says to Priam, ‘If I do this for you, you’re
still my enemy in the morning.” Priam’s response is ‘You’re
still my enemy now, but even enemies can show respect.’”
Pitt sighs. “That scene was one of the high points of my mini-career.”
Even the august O’Toole approves of his younger co-star. “He came
through,” says O’Toole. “He was completely prepared for every
scene we did. Not once did he ever lose one thread of authority. He’s
maturing. He’s always had a frankness, a disarming sensitivity and vulnerability,
and that’s becoming stronger. He’s a good actor, and he’s
going to be a fine actor.”
By any reckoning, Pitt’s career is now moving into its mature phase.
He spent a year in training for Troy and currently has a body that could put
any Greek statue to shame; when his breathtaking musculature is revealed in
all its full-length (although not full-frontal) glory during Achilles’
love scene with the vestal virgin Briseis, His Buff-ness will once again set
female hearts to fluttering all over the world.
“This guy’s supposed to be the greatest warrior of all time; I
had to get my ass in shape,” Pitt says. “I changed my life completely.
I quit smoking—and let me tell you, I was a professional smoker, and I
still miss it. I know she was trying to kill me, but I really loved the bitch.
But I wanted to see how far I could go with my body, by the time the movie was
over, I’d been on this diet and workout plan for over a year. I wanted
physical dominance; I wanted to have that ability and endurance in my arsenal.
I wanted to have the strength to do this and not be dogging after a take or
two. There was a tremendous amount of fighting with swords and spears, and everyone
was at the top of their game.”
Tall and limber, Pitt still looks boyish in his blue jeans and buzz cut. But
he turned 40 last December, and a cynic might wonder whether he finally stopped
avoiding heroic roles because the expiration date for their availability appeared
on the horizon, distant though that may be.
“It’s not that I was trying to avoid anything,” he protests.
“I only have something to offer if I’m interested in it. I am dead
to repetition. That’s just not what I do, not what I’m made of.
So when I have repeated, it’s been rather flat. I don’t get the
jones; I don’t get the discovery.”
When I ask who his own heroes have been, he invokes the names of architectural
icons. “I don’t know that I have any heroes,” he says. “But
I’ve certainly got a few men I respect very much, and one would be Frank
Gehry. He said to me, ‘If you know where it’s going, it’s
not worth doing.’ That’s become like a mantra for me. That’s
the life of the artist. The life of the artist is not about making sure it’s
successful. Gehry didn’t have a hit till he was 60, and neither did Louis
Kahn.”
We’ve been sitting in Pitt’s study, which provides a vivid contrast
to the rest of the house. Next to it is an all-black screening room that’s
dark as a cave, and beyond that is the largely empty living room, with its glossy
black wood floors and minimalist black leather furniture.
But Pitt’s hideaway is a Pop-art tribute to vibrant color, from its lime-green-and-orange
striped rug to the glowing chartreuse-and-red Lucite column towering over his
desk, which is flanked by orange-and-fuchsia striped chairs. The shelves and
the acid-yellow faux-fur ottoman are piled with the art and architecture books
he likes to pore over late at night. When he talks about what’s in them,
his passion is so much more animated that in conversations about acting that
I wonder whether he wishes he’d become an architect. “I may still,”
he says. “I just want to make things.”
He starts pulling out huge coffee-table books—Hans Hofmann, Nicolas de
Stael, Georgia O’Keeffe, Georg Baselitz, Leonardo da Vinci—to show
me paintings that move him. Largely self-taught, the Oklahoma-born Pitt, who
was raised in Missouri, deeply regrets the inadequacy of his cultural education.
“You got very little where I grew up,” he says. But he has dedicated
himself ever since to exploring what he missed. “That’s where I
find a joy,” he says. “I’ve got to do it all, got to see everything.”
That hunger was what drove him away from home at age 22, searching for things
he couldn’t name but knew were out there. Two weeks before graduating
from the University of Missouri, he hit the road instead, heading west in his
Datsun with $325 in his pocket, lured by the siren call of freedom. When I ask
what he was seeking, he gets a dreamy look in his eyes. “It was the world,”
he says softly. “It was the realization that I could go to it, that those
things I wished were around that weren’t around—I could go to it.”
In many ways, the words he chooses to describe Achilles reflect his own journey:
rejecting the belief systems that surrounded him, making his way through trial
and error, creating a new self out of the experiences he encountered, always
eager to grab more. While his is tactfully elliptical in discussing his upbringing,
it’s clear he found it too confining. Raised in Baptist and non-denominational
Christian churches, he sees organized religion, in particular, as narrow-minded
and repressive.
“I grew up in the dogma that told you what you can do and what you can’t
do,” he says. “I see that as very dangerous to the growth of an
individual. I am such a believer in live and let live. Don’t tell me how
to live; let me live my life, and I’ll let you live your life and respect
our differences. All our puritanical values drive me crazy. We end up policing
the world, trying to impose our values on other people. All that seems absolutely
ludicrous to me. I don’t want to attack anyone’s faith, but at a
certain point I find it stifling. My main problem with religions is that they’re
separatist. They draw lines: ‘Ours is the best!’ There’s a
harmful conceit that lies at the heart of all these religions: ‘My team’s
better than your team!’ It’s a high-school mentality. I couldn’t
relate to it even in high school.”
But he has a renewed respect for Greek mythology. “It seemed to really
value the ups and downs in the wheel of fortune,” he observes. “There
seemed to be a much greater understanding of human nature, instead of this crazy
concept that we all have to be good all the time.”
Fortune has been extremely kind to Brad Pitt, something he has understood since
he was very young, when he recognized that his extraordinary looks conferred
extraordinary advantages. “I remember being in early elementary school
and realizing that things are not fair,” he says. “I was well aware
that I could get away with more. It kept me up at night. I talked to my mom
about it. She told me that just meant I had a greater responsibility. I had
tremendous guilt over the lack of fairness, although at times I could be a little
Satan with it. Maybe it was those very times that would bring me to guilt.”
Guilt notwithstanding, Pitt isn’t exactly a goody two-shoes. “He’s
a scoundrel,” says O’Toole with a wicked laugh. “He led me,
his elderly colleague, astray more than once.”
And what was the nature of their transgressions? “I can’t remember,”
claims O’Toole.
While Pitt has deliberately discarded some of his midwestern roots, others
are deeply embedded in his personality. Despite superstardom, he is resolutely
unpretentious. “He’s one of the most down-to-earth people; he’s
a very real man,” says Angelina Jolie, Pitt’s co-star in Mr. And
Mrs. Smith.
Pitt’s movies tend to perform better abroad than they do in America,
and the rabid attention generated by international fame is a constant challenge.
“One night in Malta everyone went out, and word got out that Brad was
there, and it was like ‘Elvis is on the loose!’” reports Eric
Bana, who plays Hector in Troy. “You wouldn’t want to be him and
Jen for all the tea in China. But he’s very, very cool about it. He’s
very aware of what people’s expectations are, and he knows how to handle
it.”
According to Pitt’s fellow cast members, he doesn’t even pull rank.
“He’s really generous to work with. I very much felt an equal,”
says Rose Byrne, who plays the vestal virgin who succumbs to Achilles’
charms in Troy.
“He’s a humble guy,” says Wolfgang Petersen. “He gives
everybody the feeling that he’s honored to work with them, and that creates
a wonderful atmosphere.”
Treating other people that way was drilled into Pitt early on. “Humility
is a big part of where I grew up,” Pitt says. “But I’m a dinosaur.
Rap culture is all about inflating yourself: “I’m the one! You’re
a piece of shit! That kind of pride, inflating yourself—it was considered
vulgar where I come from.”
His attitude extends to politics; Pitt is not one to hold forth publicly on
his views. “I don’t have all the answers,” he says. “I
wouldn’t be good in politics. I get too passionate about things and piss
people off sometimes. And sometimes I’m not too clear. I don’t get
points across well, verbally. I’m better off in other mediums.”
When he hit Hollywood, his laconic, aw-shucks-I’m-just-a-good-ol’-country-boy
persona may, at first, have been misleading. “In my time out here, I’ve
been underestimated a lot,” he observes. “Maybe it was because of
the DNA. Maybe it was because I smoked too much of that stuff that just turned
me into a doughnut. At some point, I realized it gave me the opportunity to
surprise, so I grew to embrace the underestimation—to just sit back and
say, ‘You’re setting yourself up!’” He flashes that
rakish I’ve-got-a-secret grin he used so effectively in Thelma & Louise,
just before he stole their money and sealed their doom.
Then fame exploded in his life like a bomb. “It was really overwhelming
to me when it went off,” he says. “There was this discombobulating
cacophony; I couldn’t find my bearings in it for a while. At 30, I was
so pliable, blown around by the bombardment of everything coming at me. I operated
mostly on instinct. Now I’m more bulletproof.”
But during those earlier years--which were also characterized by high-profile
relationships with Juliette Lewis, Robin Givens, and Gwyneth Paltrow, among
others--Pitt sometimes struggled with what he has referred to as a “congenital
sadness.” Since then it seems to have receded into the background. “I
know what to do with it now,” he says. “I keep it in check. It would
always be present, but it could be just a little nick over in the corner.”
He spreads his arms wide, as if his life were a big painting and the darkness
a mere shadow at one edge. “I think other things are more present, and
they overwhelm it now.”
His life with Aniston has clearly provided a solid center. “Her emphasis
is the home, friends, and family,” Pitt says. “We all kind of crowd
around her like moths to the flame. She’s like a magnet; she brings a
lot of people together that way. Jen’s the fireplace show provides the
warmth.” But they both bridle at their media image as America’s
sweethearts. “Neither of us wants to be the spokesman for happy marriage,
for coupledom,” says Pitt. “I’ll tell you what I despise:
this two-becomes-one thing where you lose your individuality. We don’t
cage each other with this pressure of happily ever after. You figure it out
as you go along. We feel it out, rather than setting policies and rules. Jen
and I always made a pact; that we’ll see where this thing is going. I’m
not sure it really is in our nature to be with someone for the rest of our lives,
just because you made this pact. You keep going as long as you keep growing.
When that dies, we do. But it constantly surprises me. Just when you think you’ve
gotten all you can out of it, you get knocked upside the head. It’s good
fun. We still have that friendship; we still have a good laugh, which can go
in and out depending on the dynamics and outside influences. It’s complicated,
but that’s what keeps it interesting. We’re good at getting shit
on the table. Then she tells other people and I get mad.” He lets loose
with a big belly laugh.
Their fans are now obsessing about when Brad and Jen will start a family, generating
media attention so intense that Aniston spoofed it in a paparazzi send-up on
Saturday Night Live last January. “It will happen when it happens,”
says Pitt, who is eager to have children. “I’ve got friends with
kids, and I’ve got nieces and nephews, and they just bring out a joy I’ve
gotten from few things. I am selfish, so I worry about having to give up my
time, but I gotta go see what it’s about. I think I’ve got a lot
of stuff to tell them, and the idea of being responsible and setting someone
loose in the world sounds really fulfilling.”
So how many kids does he want? “I’ll go till someone says stop.
I would love all girls. Guys—I know they’re going to be pissed off
at me. I know I’ll fuck ‘em up somehow.”
Even the thought of aging fails to shake Pitt’s equanimity. “Sooner
or later we have to face that thing of not being viable in the fame game,”
he says. “It all goes away. That’s the first little death, facing
up to not being in the ring anymore, having to watch from the sidelines. It
seems to me that you can still find those pleasures without still being in the
fame game; that’s an ego issue.”
Indeed, he claims to have enjoyed turning 40. “I felt privileged,”
he says. “It means no more excuses, which I like. I just feel like I’m
improved. I like the general label of new and improved, or old and improved,
as the case may be. I’ll trade that for the deterioration of the body,
or whatever else it brings. I know it’s impending.”
He grins. “I know there’s a midlife crisis on its way, I’m
sure there’s some more rude awakenings yet to come. But I like it like
that. I like the unknown. It’s just more vibrant that way. It’s
fucking interesting, isn’t it?”
Things certainly seem to be going well at the moment. After completing Troy,
Pitt filmed Mr. And Mrs. Smith, a dark comedy about husband-and-wife assassins
who are assigned to kill each other. “It’s not meant to be taken
literally; it’s one big metaphor for marriage,” Pitt explains. “Doug
Liman’s guiding sentence has been ‘Superhero shit is easy; it’s
marriage that’s hard.’”
Pitt then went directly into Ocean’s Twelve with George Clooney, Julia
Roberts, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. “I’ve never worked so hard in
my life,” he says. Making so many movies back-to-back is not his usual
style; before beginning Troy, he had spent two years not working, partly by
design and partly because of projects that fell through. “I do time off
really well,” he says. “I’m too good at it. But after the
two-year period, I’m itchy.”
The hiatus has rekindled his enthusiasm for acting. “I love it now. I’m
really excited,” he says. “I’ve got a new take on what I’m
doing here, so I want to go out and work. I know what I’m after, what
I have to offer. I’m more aware of what I can bring to a part, rather
than another actor. I guess what I understand now is that there’s room
for all of us. You want to earn it, but that’s a dangerous game, because
then you’re still trying to answer to somebody else. You have to earn
it for yourself. That’s why it’s great to be 40. I know what my
strong points are, but it took all this foraging in other territories to figure
this out.”
A week later, we spend a long afternoon chatting on the terrace, having tea
while looking out over the towering trees surrounding the house. As dusk begins
to fall, the evening grows chilly; Brad is wearing a bright-orange shearling
jacket that matches the orange wire table and chairs where we sit. In the gathering
darkness, the trees come alive with tiny white lights, making the secluded glen
behind the house look like a fairy wonderland.
The previous week, while we were talking about his 40th birthday and how he
feels these days, he’d said, “I’m happier than I’ve
ever been.” But his tone was mocking, as if making fun of the inevitable
tabloids headline. “Don’t write that,” he added, pointing
a finger at my notebook.
Now I’m preparing to leave, and Brad walks me to the front courtyard,
where my car is parked. Jen comes downstairs to say good-bye as well. He slings
his arm around her shoulder; she curls hers around his waist. Behind them, the
beautiful house glows in the twilight.
“I’m happier than I’ve eve been,” Pitt repeats. His
tone is still light and sardonic, but this time he doesn’t tell me not
to write it down.