By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
October 12, 1999
You know how people are always saying that pretty boys would make nice-looking women?
Well, check out the current issue of Rolling Stone with Brad Pitt on the cover . . . in a dress. In fact, the prettiest of all male actors is featured in three more photos wearing dresses. And he doesn’t look good in them, either. On his decision to look so weird, Pitt says in the cover story, “I couldn’t just sit there and be pretty guy again.”
The interview is pretty much standard Pitt material: He talks about his relationship with Jennifer Aniston, the stalker who infiltrated his house and tried on his clothes, and his love for architecture. But the feature gets really interesting when writer Chris Heath asks him, “How do you feel when people make out that you’re really dumb?”
“It’s not who I am,” Pitt says. “I have someone who’s gone out of their way to trash my character and who’s very good at it, and that’s when I first started hearing it. I know why the person was doing it – out of defense, to save themselves, really. And maybe I’ve facilitated that. On the other hand, I don’t have the East Coast vocabulary in which all I say is packaging. The upper East Coast schooling. It’s very different from private schooling in Missouri, you know, but I work on it.”
Though he seems to be implying that Spence-educated, Oscar-winning ex-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow is the culprit, he never confirms the identity. But he takes the writer to task for asking him the insulting question.
“Basically, presenting the case immediately that `Brad Pitt’ is synonymous with `low intelligence’ or `dumb’ . . . was really (messed) up,” Pitt says.
“For you to say that that’s out there – listen, you may have heard it from a couple of people. People are always talking (trash). People have their opinions. But, you ask me, that statement there is just designed to make someone feel lousy and defend themselves.”
For the record, I don’t think Pitt is dumb. But he does look ugly in a frock.
Christina Aguilera is featured in an interview that reveals the teen’s diva-in-training status. Writer Anthony Bozza points out that the singer – who appeared on “Star Search” at the age of 8 – is used to having things taken care of for her and wasn’t shy about asking him to fetch McNugget sauce and sodas for her.
The September/October issue of Country Living’s Healthy Living includes an interesting feature called “The Chinese Way to Flawless Skin.” Letha Hadady writes, “Next time you start to bad-talk a blemish, thank it instead for sending you a signal about your body. Why? According to practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, your face is a map of your inner workings. So those pesky spots could be telling you that your liver’s overtaxed or your kidney’s on the blink. . . .
“The ancient Chinese doctors knew that beauty was more than skin-deep. The role of superficial dirt in determining the state of our epidermis is highly overrated. If grime and germs alone were to blame for our blemishes, we would not necessarily break out during periods of stress or rich eating; using a cleanser would be preventive enough. But that doesn’t work, in most cases, because skin problems should be tackled from the inside out.”
In the continuing trend of slapping actresses on the cover of women’s magazines, Cosmopolitan features Neve Campbell in its October issue. Of “Party of Five,” Campbell says that when her contract is up in April 2000, “I’ll have a life! . . . I don’t want to seem negative about the show, because it’s been fantastic for me, and I don’t think they deserve my slamming it. In the end, I just think that I’m tired.”
