SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

Jennifer Aniston’s divorce from Brad Pitt was the most relentlessly documented tabloid news story of 2005. Twelve months on, the one-time man’s best Friend is battered and bruised, but with four movies in the can and-if you believe the gossip-a new leading man in her life, she’s stronger and hotter than ever.

Story by Mark Healy



Last August, a Santa Barbara man allegedly took a cab to Malibu, stiffed the driver, sealed a nine-foot fence, slipped through the front door of Jennifer Aniston’s rented two-bedroom house, and announced that Ms. Aniston was expecting him. Though he was soon chased down by the beach by the housekeeper, arrested for burglary and ordered by a judge to come no closer than 100 yards of Aniston until 2008, the man’s real misfortune was his timing: for once she wasn’t home.
“I’m trying to hatch a plan where I don’t actually have to leave the house, and I think I’m figuring it out. I haven’t quite got it down,” she says, but then reconsiders. “Let me see… I got home last Thursday from Chicago, and I didn’t leave the house until Tuesday. So that’s six days, and I didn’t feel like I hadn’t left. I had friends over. I had meetings. I had walks on the beach. I got as much of my reading done as I could. I thought it was great.”
The house Aniston is not leaving is an unfussy beach bungalow, built of dark wood and filled with white furniture and artefacts that project a carefully cultivated calm, a soothing aesthetic born of Asia and priced and packaged in Santa Monica. A large stone bowl filled with koi and lotus blossoms sits at the front door in the gaze of a young Buddha. Incense is burning in the hallway. On the white walls of the foyer are panels depicting comical, curiously unsexy sexual positions as prescribed by the Kama Sutra . On another wall is a sepia-toned photo of an enormous elephant cuddling with a little Asian boy, taken by the photographer Gregory Colbert, whose pictures of big animals and small children her and her ex-husband collected.
She’s alone inside. Posted out front is a man who knows my name, and I suspect there’s another man sweeping the beach or patrolling the slender strip of land around the house. She’s been sitting on the back deck writing thank-you notes when I arrive. She greets me at the door, barefoot and with an easy smile you don’t expect of someone so hunted. She acts happy to see me-there’s a genuine sense in which she seems flattered that someone came all this way to see her, to hear what she has to say. Of course, maybe she’s acting.
When she lets me in, her mood changes as she discovers that the note she’s just written has fluttered off the back deck on the wind. “That blows,” Aniston says, holding her hair back with one hand and scanning the beach for signs of stationery. “That literally blows.” She stands on tiptoe, nine-tenths of her taut legs stretching out from fainted Levi’s cutoffs, an inch of fringe flipped up to good effect. She squints into the sun and bites her lip just like Rachel Green might, perhaps picturing the inevitable celebrity-weekly close-up of that same note in a grainy circle beside a photo of her writing on the deck, taken by one of the photographers that trawl the beach in front of her house, disguised as regular beachgoers, with their rented girlfriends and their coolers stuffed with telephoto lenses. I study her face for clues: to whom was the note written, and how much would it blow for it to end up in the hands o of the editor of one of the celebrity weeklies?
As always, her body is in fighting shape, an asset too valuable not to be tuned and tanned and mostly uncovered. These months at the beach have given her a soft Pacific glow, from the brown tops of her feet to the prominent sculpture of her collarbones. A layer of downy blond hair stands at static attention to her upper arms; goose bumps cover her gorgeous fat-free thighs. The famous hair is plentiful, an expensive tangle of highlights piled on her head and fastened somewhere I can’t see. Long strands of it fall around her face. Part of me hopes she didn’t shower for the occasion-so sure-footed and confident in her natural beauty that she couldn’t be bothered-but I suspect she has.
“Ah! Here it is!” she calls, spotting the off-white card that has blown through the French doors and into the sunny, modest-sized living room. She plucks it off the ultra-shaggy rug beneath us, slides it back into the envelope, and tucks it away. “Thank God,” she says, folding one leg beneath her and stretching the other toward her dog, Norman. She is alert and open-eager, almost. Her posture is excellent.
Aniston has created a haven here, a comfortable cove where the honking blather of the past year is kept at bay. The rumble of the Pacific is the dominant soundtrack, every surface except the glass coffee table is plush and forgiving, and the farthest any guest would have to reach for a smoke and a light is the eastern edge of the couch, where a squint crystal cylinder is filled with loose Merit cigarettes. The detritus of heartbreak therapy is everywhere: a Vatican-sized cache of candles, an Ani DiFranco CD sitting on the speaker, a lazy sleeping dog to nuzzle and scratch, even a copy of Shel Silverstein’s classic post breakup self-esteem booster, The Missing Piece Meets the Big O.
Aniston says that she has banished all the self-help from her bookshelves-says she’s reached the point where “you say, ‘Stop. Just stop looking at these other people’s words. Your instincts are pretty all right.’” At this point, she seems less willing to “honour her journey” than to mock it, as well as all the articles about her “progress,” with their “authoritative” diagnoses. “You know,” and here she adopts a mock life-coach voice, “the one where I’m surviving and I’m doing okay. Look, I’m not defined by this relationship. I wasn’t when I was in it, and I don’t want to be in the aftermath of it. And that’s really important to me. Let’s let everybody move on and live their lives, and hopefully everybody will be really happy.”
In the middle of the Malibu house is an open stairway that leads to the bedroom where Aniston sleeps. She describes herself as a “night processor”, a phrase she invented to describe the phenomenon whereby she goes to sleep with questions and problems and wakes up with something like answers and solutions. The issues may be mundane and material or may be something else entirely. “I wake up and I’m like, ‘I have to move the couch, you know? Or I gotta call my mother. Who knows? It could be, I don’t know…How am I going to get through the next few months with some dignity and grace?”
Last year Aniston did exactly that. When the world begged for spite and bile, she was tight-lipped in her ripped jeans, flip-flops and summer-camp hoodie, on a movie set or at Courtney Cox’s beach house, looking adorably brave. Her formula was straightforward: Keep your intentions clean and your mouth shut. And when you finally open it-after all, the movie studios that employ you require it-let your friends drop the withering quotes about your ex, leaving you to ride above the fray. Provide no commentary as he and his girlfriend span the globe, bringing glamour and greenbacks and goodwill wherever they go, carrying on in a casually flaunting manner that’s just a bit disrespectful of your five years together. So if it’s easier that you not leave the house for a while-don’t see the dissolution of the marriage depicted in fuchsia-and-yellow relief on every newsstand, don’t gaze up at the gargantuan billboard of the two of them looming over La Cienega Boulevard for five fucking months and counting, not hear the Kanye West song “Gone” that likens you to a jilted rapper…Well, let’s just hope you’ve got a comfortable place by the shore in which to hole up with friends and quietly shed the part of you that was Mrs. Brad Pitt.
She tries not to be bothered by the Brad and Angelina show. I ask her of she resents the way their relationship has unfolded so publicly. ”No,” she answers, “because I know what it is”-meaning, I think, a photo orgy orchestrated by the tabloids. “Yeah, there’s a little bit of the ‘C’mon, enough already. Just stop it.’” Ultimately, she’d rather transfer the blame to the people who publish the pictures, profit from her turmoil, and pick at the remains of her marriage as though it were carrion. “They serve the worst part of our culture,” she says. “We’ve never needed to join together, as people more than now, and still there’s this sick need to take our own down-we’re just dying to see other people get ripped apart or get some joy out of that.” Consider the New York Post gossip column, Page Six, which claimed that Aniston would reveal in last September’s Vanity Fair interview that Brad cheated . Despite her rep’s denial, the communist felt sure he’d have “the last laugh”. “As if there’s anything to laugh about in this whole situation at all,” Aniston says. “That was just a game to him, this sick fuck.”



Despite the million-dollars-an episode she was paid for Friends and her marriage to the world’s most desirable man, Aniston has always felt surprisingly familiar-approachable, even-it’s the backbone of her appeal, the key to her stardom. As she sits here in the living room of this prime beachfront rental, where everything she needs and desires-meals, friends, haircuts- can be summoned instantly, she somehow still seems like the Jens we’ve known. But the “America’s sweetheart” rap gets tiresome, and limiting. Even Jennifer Aniston needs to play against type once in a while. Maybe that’s why she chose to do Derailed , even though she had doubts early on about her place in such an edgy, violent movie. “It’s Pavlovian,” she says. “It was just the typical ‘Oh, I don’t buy me in this part.’ It’s just fear. That happens with projects that are a little more challenging. It’s just a normal process.” Derailed shows us another side of her, the one that’s more dangerous than cute: tempting and just a little damaged, the picture of commuter melancholy in heels. Though we’ll have trouble watching Rachel Green endure physical traumas that would never happen at Central Perk-being held at gunpoint by Xzibit-we’ll enjoy watching her extramarital grapplings with Clive Owen, who seems to press himself against her in every dark alley of Chicago.
If you have to make out with someone in a movie, I offer hopefully…
“Let it be Clive Owen,” she finishes. “He’s just dashing. He’s debonair and dashing and dreamy. And,” she continues, holding up her index finger to pause for a moment, “if you’re going to also to be raped in a movie, it may as well be Vincent Cassel. I guess I was doing pretty good on both ends.”
She has completed four movies in the past 18 months. In addition to Derailed , she’s starred in a pseudo-sequel to The Graduate called Rumor Has It, released last month. It was the least surprising of her new roles, because it allowed her to do what she does better than anyone: brow-crunching befuddlement, zany confusion. In Friends with Money, out later this year, she plays a housecleaner whose friends-Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand, and Joan Cusack-all seem to have grown up and moved on without her. “I’m the stoner maid,” she explains, “and I just can’t seem to get my shit together. I steal from people whose houses I clean, and I smoke their pot. It’s definitely not a vanity piece.”
Having survived the Technicolor dissolution of her marriage, Aniston is not feeling terribly risk-averse about anything? “I think you have to be willing to fail,” she says. “That’s been a big lesson for me over the last year and a half, that our definition of failure is sort of limited. It means just one thing: It’s bad. You failed. You suck. As opposed to: You learned something, you got something out of it. You have to be willing to risk losing…love, risk losing relationships, risk losing friends by being truthful, you know what I mean?”
The Aniston project with the biggest buzz is The Break Up -if only because of those ubiquitous on-set photos of her cuddling with costar Vince Vaughn, and the reality-based ones that have emerged since (“Jen’s Lap Dance!” screamed the headline on the cover of the New York Post , accompanied by a photo of Aniston straddling and kissing Vaughn). In this film, likely to be released during the summer, the two share a home that both refuse to leave after their relationship goes south. Aniston, for one, thinks it’s going to be great. “But who knows? It could suck. I don’t think it will, but if it does, I don’t care. I had a blast.”
Apart from the obvious therapeutic benefits of hanging out with Vaughn in his hometown at the peak of baseball and beer-drinking season, something else happened in Chicago. She doesn’t remember where she was or who she was with, but at some point she looked up and emerged from the numbing haze that had engulfed her. “One day it’s like a switch went off and all of a sudden it was like, “Men! Everywhere” She smiles again, and I notice goose bumps covering her arms. “I’m starting to see the light, and it’s good.”


Aniston is convincing when she tells you the break-up isn’t the worst thing that could have happened to her. Part of her feels is a responsibility to handle it well. “There are so many women who are crippled by divorce,” she says, “crippled by it. I felt like there was a little part of it that I could put out there that was not about airing my dirty laundry but was just sort of saying that you can get through something like this and be as happy, if not happier, again.”
She’s looking forward to falling in love again. She feels fortunate that she’ll get at least one more chance to experience that pheromonal craze that comes when the love is new and strong and right. She’s standing on the back deck of her house now; the breeze is just cool enough to mitigate the abundant sunshine. She points out where the photographers stand in the surf and take aim as she sunbathes on the deck, and the canvas panels she’s having made to thwart them.
By the time you read this, Jennifer Aniston’s dalliances-be they with Vaughn or some other lucky guy- will surely have helped her forget all about that dreamy ex-husband of hers. Too bad it will all have to be so public. She can close her eyes and conjure the pictures, write the headlines-can already see the complications. “It’s just a bummer,” she says. “It’s such a hassle to think that you can’t easily and privately fall in love or be courted or anything. But I doubt I have a choice in the matter. It’s just something that comes with the dinner.”
Recently, Gwyneth Paltrow suggested that Aniston and her ex-husband were too willing to share their joy when the marriage was in good shape, and now they are paying the price. It seems a harsh thing to say about your ex and his former wife, but Aniston defends her. “You know, she’s right. She’s absolutely correct. I feel like there is a graveyard of celebrity couples who now have learned their lesson. You know, at the time you go, ‘Celebrate it-we’re in love, and let’s talk, and who cares?’ Part of that’s true. It kind of became a bizarre feeding frenzy for a period there. It just got a little out of control, that’s all. So you learn those lessons. It’s just about learning what to keep sacred.”
“What’s the best thing about not being married?” I ask her.
“Ahhh,” she says gamely. “What’s the best thing about not being married…”She slaps her thigh heartily and smiles too quickly. “Well…a lot of best things… There’s a lot of good things, hard to say… What are good things about not being married, ahh…” and the silence builds. I hear the waves crashing on the beach outside. I see her face tighten, her jaw clenching, and I see the ordinariness of the heartbreak that lingers and the inadvertent cruelty of the question. “Ah, I don’t know. I’m not good at these questions. Well, no, I’m trying to think, I can say, well, this is all mine,” she says as she looks hopefully around the room, “so there’s the good and the bad. And I guess you could say that I get to date again, which is… “she laughs “dreadful, but there is that fun of falling in love again, and people usually enjoy that part of a relationship.”
Aniston’s not hiding a thing. America’s sweetheart is a 36-year-old divorcée with a fresh perspective and a whole lot lessons learned. She’s a little sad, but don’t you dwell on it. She’ll get over it before you will.
It is here that, in the spirit of bright futures and the enduring promise of a new romance, I say something inane. “I guess now you can make out with strangers in bars,” I offer, and she laughs in my face.



H idia synentefxh,elafrws diaforopoihmenh,yparxei kai sto Amerikaniko GQ.

Tha prospathhsw na deixw tis (poly sexy) eikones ths Jennifer apo to periodiko kapoia stigmh argotera.