Sex, Death and Angelina Jolie

Since the finely honed intellect, not to mention exuberant body, of Angelina Jolie has become an object of intense interest to many of my associates, I turned eagerly to Britain's News of the World for an update on the star of Tomb Raider. Last Sunday's edition of the Murdoch-owned tabloid is full of ripe detail about Angelina's self-confessed sexual tastes, plus admiring commentary from her husband, Billy Bob Thornton, and former costar Elizabeth Mitchell, who starred with her in a movie about lesbian supermodel Gia Carangi, and who sighed to the News of the World: "Angelina's got such beautiful lips and they're all her own. She's all real. She's a work of nature."

It depends how you define nature. Perhaps they were still part of the original bodywork when Angelina and Elizabeth embraced each other, but since then Angelina's breasts have clearly been into the body shop for an upgrade. Part of my painful duty as an investigative journalist has been to spend wearisome hours on Monday comparing various photographs of Angelina's breasts, as available for inspection on www.newsoftheworld.co.uk. As you can see, the set on the right has the tedious soup-plate symmetry of artificial enhancement, in contrast to the somewhat less ample, but erotically more pleasing tits of an earlier era.

It seems that Billy Bob hires a nurse to extract his blood so he can send droplets to Angelina when she is away filming. She wears it in an ampule around her neck. Chic, and reminiscent of the red threads the fast set of young aristocrats used to wear round their necks in late 18th-century France, in the Directoire period. The threads were an ironic homage to the guillotine on which many of their relatives had perished.

The News of the World tells me that this daughter of Jon Voight and French actress Marcheline Bertrand, born in Los Angeles, "spent much of her childhood living out of suitcases. At 14 she began to rebel and had a live-in boyfriend at her mother's house. She also began mutilating herself with knives."

In harmony with this teenage habit, she and Billy Bob keep a knife under their pillows to slash at each other during sex sessions. They spent last Christmas happily cutting their fingers and daubing messages in blood on the walls above their bed. "I was looking at her asleep," Mr. Thornton confided to the News of the World reporters, "and I had to restrain myself from literally squeezing her to death. Sex for us is almost too much. It's so intense that sometimes we can look at each other and think, 'We can't get into this right now or something's going to happen.'"

Over the breakfast table, the News of the World reports, he confessed to her that he had come close to doing her in the night before. "Angelina added: 'You know when you love someone so much you can almost kill them? I nearly was killed one night, and it was the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me!'"

Oh well, knives for some, ear plugs and eye blinders for others. Angelina and Billy Bob's stated preferences somehow made me think of Balzac's novella, La Duchesse de Langeais, where a beastly sensualist called Montriveau plots to turn the duchess into his love slave. Irked by her caprices, he has her abducted from a ball to his apartment, where he informs her that as a punishment she is to be branded on the forehead with a red-hot iron (shaped as a cross of Lorraine) that three masked pals of his are even now heating up in the next room. Greatly to Montriveau's mortification, the duchess is thrilled with the plan. "Ah! My Armand, mark, mark quickly your creature as a poor little possession... When you have thus marked a woman as your own, when you have an enslaved creature wearing your red cipher, oh, then you can never give her up, you will be forever mine... But the woman who loves always marks herself. Come gentlemen, come and mark, mark the Duchesse de Langeais. Come quickly, all of you, my forehead burns hotter than your red brand."

Montriveau's ardor wilts under this eager torrent of verbiage and he loses "faith" in his whole plan. I think there could be the germ of a script here for Angelina and Billy Bob, though maybe they're more interested in Geoffrey Woolf's great book Black Sun, about the love-unto-death affair of Harry Crosby and Josephine Bigelow in the months after the stock market went through the cellar in the fall of 1929.

In December, Crosby and Mrs. Bigelow took a five-day trip to Detroit. Woolf writes: "..they checked into the Book-Cadillac [Hotel] on December 3, registering as Mr. and Mrs. Harry Crane in a twelve-dollar-a-day room on the twentieth floor. Most of their meals they took in bed, where they also smoked opium, made love and battled."

On Dec. 7 the lovers returned to New York, where they agreed that Mrs. Bigelow should go back to Boston to her husband. But Josephine did not return to Boston, and on Dec. 9 she had delivered a 36-line poem to Crosby, who was staying with his wife Caresse at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. The last line of the poem is: "Death is our marriage."

On Dec. 9, Harry Crosby made the following entries into his notebooks: "One is not in love unless one desires to die with one's beloved. There is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved." These were Crosby's very last entries, because on Dec. 10, a few hours after shooting Josephine, Harry Crosby shot himself. Woolf sums it up thus: "He had meant to do it; it was no mistake; it was not a joke. If anything of Harry Crosby commands respect, perhaps even awe, it was the unswerving character of his intention."

Crosby always struck me as a horrible little twerp, but Angelina and Billy Bob could surely make something of all this.

Footnote: Returning to that red thread and the guillotine, the common view is that thousands of French aristos perished under the blade. Not true. Greer's statistical study The Incidence of the Terror, published in 1935, shows that 666 nobles got the chop in Paris and another 1543 in the rest of France. Compare that to the carnage after the Paris Commune of 1871, when some 20,000 Communards were executed.

The best defense of the French Revolution and its supposed excesses is surely that of Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee: "There were two 'Reigns of Terror' if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the 'horrors' of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror-that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."

And to think that Lewis Lapham dared put Tom Wolfe on the cover of Harper's next to the man who wrote those tremendous lines! Come to think about it, Angelina and Billy Bob could do a movie about Charlotte Corday's stabbing of Marat in his bath. The Jacobins were terrified of female radicals. Olympe de Gouges, author of Les Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne (1791), perished on the guillotine not long thereafter, as did Madam Roland. St-Just invoked the "male energy" of the Republic. In his very interesting 1993 book Body Work, Peter Brooks wrote, "In the...cult of Marat Charlotte Corday is present only in that gash in Marat's breast, a kind of displaced representation of her woman's sex as a wound on the martyred man. David's painting, Marat Assassiné, says it all: the ecstatic face of the martyr, the drops of blood on the immaculate sheet, the quill pen still grasped next to the kitchen knife fallen on the floor, the bathwater become a pool of blood-all these elements suggest the intrusion of ungoverned female sexuality on a life dedicated to the higher cause."

Flanders vs. Flanders

In the Sunday New York Times of June 24, we found "2001 In the Shadow of AIDS, a World of Other Problems" by Stephanie Flanders, who worked in Clinton-time as special assistant to Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

Flanders enlisted unnamed "experts" and "observers" to argue that it's a waste of resources to try to cure Africans of AIDS when the money would be better spent attacking malaria, TB or hookworm. One "expert" Flanders invoked by name was Dr. Lant Pritchett, a former economist at the World Bank who teaches development economics at Harvard. From his opening quote: "And it's not fair, if treatments exist, not to give [AIDS treatments] to all these people who are dying. But it's also not fair that more than a third of children in Africa are malnourished. It's not fair that maybe 140 babies in every 1,000 will die before the age of 1, and more than a third will never learn to read. All of it is unfair. Unfairness is not the test for action."

Yes, this is the same Pritchett who actually wrote the infamous memo Larry Summers put his signature to when he was president of the World Bank. Pritchett's memo argued it was okay to send toxic industries to the Third World because life expectancy rates dictated the workers would die before they contracted cancer.

The general thrust of Flanders' piece was that it's not worth throwing money at the AIDS-infected in Africa. The money will be stolen or wasted or misspent or would be better used for some other purpose.

It was ever thus when talking about the poor part of the world. Either/Or, though mostly Neither/Nor. We may help you with AIDS, or we may help you with TB, though maybe it would be best to let Nature take its course.

The United Nations General Assembly finally passed its first Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS and it wasn't just a set of mandates for spending big dollars on AIDS at the expense of every other health concern. Member states agreed that AIDS is more than just a medical issue; it's political, having to do with human rights, gender equality, sexual education and economics, and they called for work on each of those fronts.

One comment on Stephanie Flanders' piece came from her sister Laura, who used to produce that great radio show CounterSpin and who has been doing radio commentary for Working Assets' stations and website: "In an article June 24," Laura wrote, "this writer's own sister greeted summiteers with a piece...in which doomsayers warned that the spotlight on AIDS, 'which grabs people emotionally,' 'diverts energy and attention from broader development efforts.' Powerful media love to say that misguided 'do-gooders' are actually doers of wrong. You hear it about labor rights activists whose campaigns lead to the closing of factories; and feminists-their efforts have only doubled women's load. In fact, the struggle around AIDS has always been about how power and prejudice affect people's health, and by extension, a society's strength."

I love and esteem both Stephanie and Laura, not least because they are my nieces, but I'm with Laura on this one.