Jennifer Anniston in Rolling Stone

Hollywood's Hottest Chick



Photo by Herb Ritts






She's hot now - and Mrs. Brad Pitt - but everyone's favorite friend was once a 'big old fat wuss' who pined for Simon Le Bon.

By Mark Binelli


Jennifer Aniston pulls into the Tower on Sunset in her silver Jag. She is running late. To make amends, she waves, comic-frantically, as she parks. That's the Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard. As in, ground zero for West Hollywood: next-door to Spago's, and just down the street from the Viper Room, the Whiskey and Larry Flynt's Hustler store. Aniston parks beneath a Neil Diamond billboard. (Later, she will confide that her earliest musical memories involve singing along to her mom's Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow records.) The poster facing the Neil Diamond billboard reads like a rebuke: SNOOP DOGG PRESENTS: BAD AZZ. Aniston is wearing a black ribbed tank top, gray shorts, sandals and brown-tinted sunglasses. She is tan and slender. Her jean jacket is tied around her waist.

Aniston is running late because it's her second day back at work on Friends after summer hiatus. It's the eighth and final season for the NBC sitcom that put Aniston on the star map. "We're shooting a wedding banquet, and banquet scenes are always a debacle," she says over her shoulder as we enter the store. (On the door: a splashy poster of Aniston's husband and Julia Roberts in The Mexican.)

Inside, Aniston pulls a crumpled piece of paper from her purse. "I have a list of shit I need to buy," she says. It is a hand-written list, scrawled erratically on the back of a fax page. For a famous person, Aniston seems wholly unconcerned by the fact that she is in public, in a relatively small store with narrow aisles, sans big floppy hat, false mustache or any other form of disguise.

"Brad said get this band Ours," Aniston says. "Do you know them? I guess they're one of those junior-Radiohead bands. I haven't heard them. I imagine there must be a lot of bands like that now, because everyone wants to be Radiohead." Shrug. "I'd like to be Radiohead. It's not a bad thing."

Aniston confesses that music plays a major role in her life with Brad Pitt: "We do have similar tastes - very eclectic in that we'll listen to pretty much anything. We also go through phases together, like that band Bran Van 3000, their first album. When we started dating, we were listening to a lot of Radiohead. They just sounded so good at that point in our relationship."

We walk down a Rock/Pop/Soul aisle. "All right, Aniston, focus," she says. We stop by the H's. "Which Hendrix did he want?" she mutters to herself. A big guy with tats and a rockabilly pompadour walks by. Aniston has shifted her sunglasses to her head. "I haven't been here in, like, ten years," she adds. "The last two times I came, people totally freaked out right next to me."

Aniston is not alluding to freakouts of the fan variety. A decade ago, she was not famous - so not famous, it would be two more years before she uttered the words, "I got Leprechaun - fuckin' A!" - after being cast in the mercifully forgotten 1993 horror film that marked her screen debut.

No, Aniston is referring to freakouts of the street-lunatic variety. "I attract that," she says. "Once in New York, I must have been in eleventh grade, and there was this homeless guy on the street who looked just like Santa. Beard. Huge guy. Big gut." Aniston puffs her cheeks and mimes a big gut with her hands. "So everyone's walking by him, finding him all cute and charming. Then I come by, and he slugs me across the face! And everyone else just kept walking. Because, you know, nobody wants to get hit by Santa."

A few moments later, a suspicious-looking guy beelines past three other customers and tries to sell Aniston a twenty-five-dollar Tower gift card. He'll let her have it for twenty. She grins faintly, not enough so the guy would even notice, and says, "No thanks, dude, I'm all set."

That would be an understatement. Never mind that Aniston, 32, and Pitt, 37, have just celebrated their first anniversary and reportedly are about to move into a $15 million Beverly Hills mansion. With Friends earning each Friend $750,000 an episode, Aniston is among the highest-paid actresses on the tube. She will also be attending the Emmys on September 16th, having been nominated for her role as Rachel. For Aniston, whose film work has been spotty (Remember Picture Perfect? No. That's the point), the TV nomination is a validation. Rachel began the show as a spoiled rich girl trying to cope with the working world, but by this late date, the Friends have all sort of morphed into a UniFriend, and so now Rachel's most distinguishing trait is also Aniston's: They're very funny. Aniston isn't always "on" in an annoying, actorly way. But she is a deft physical comedian, in that she uses her body to wrap, stamp and deliver jokes. On the show and in life, Aniston does this by flashing you a big-eye, or theatrically steeling her jaw or furrowing her brow. When she sits, she hunches forward, elbows on knees, letting you know she's about to tell a tale. Her tales often involve swooping hand gestures.

Aniston mentions how musicians in the Eighties had something to be pissed off about, with Reagan in the White House. I ask her what she thinks of Bush. She vents about him in detail, eloquently, but off the record. She says she doesn't want to come off like another actor blathering about politics. On the record, she'll only say, "Bush is a fucking idiot," and flip him a double-bird, and that Jenna Bush - the Bush daughter whose underage drinking has proved embarrassing for the administration - had a summer internship at Brillstein-Grey, the management firm where she and Pitt are represented. "We'd pass her in the hall," Aniston says, "and Brad would say, 'Heyyyy, Jenna, wanna beer? I got one in the truck!'"

Aniston's comedic talents become all the more interesting when you consider she's also pulling double duty as a sex symbol. Quite a switch for someone who insists she was once an ugly duckling. As a chubby, not particularly popular kid growing up on New York's Upper West Side in the Seventies, she got through school hazings by developing a thick skin and a sense of humor. (She can laugh today about her "Carrie moment," where a group of girls rigged a bucket of paint to spill on her head and Easter dress as she entered a classroom.) "It's a bit of a cliche, you know," Aniston says with a sigh. "Comedians are always tortured souls trying to make people like them, and all that silly stuff." Still, spend time with Aniston - who famously shed thirty pounds (at the behest of her agent) before she was cast in Friends - and you notice most of her jokes and amusing anecdotes are self-deprecating. "I was a big old fat wuss who liked Aerosmith," Aniston confesses. "What are you gonna do?"

So, yes, even though Aniston has famously shed those thirty pounds and transformed herself into the Hot Chick, she continues to carry herself as the Class Clown, which is a pretty endearing combination. The homeless and the insane sense this fact, and they do not fear her. She is, in her funny and affable way, the opposite of untouchable.

Jennifer Aniston is record shopping because a) she lost her copy of Nevermind, but more important because b) we want her to talk about music. After all, she is now starring in Rock Star as the girlfriend-slash-manager of a Judas Priest-like metal god played by Mark Wahlberg. "I'm totally musically ignorant," Aniston notes. "I'm going to humiliate myself." Be that as it may, here is a selection of entirely random comments from Aniston on contemporary music, prompted by CDs she notices while shopping.

Brad, Interiors: "Great album. And not just because I'm that corny. 'The Day Brings' is one of the happiest songs you'll ever hear."

Blur, 13: "Oh, for our wedding march, we had this amazing full gospel choir play this song. [Points to song title on back of CD] Actually, could you not say the song? It's just such a private thing and so beautiful. I just want to keep it." (I don't think I'm revealing too much by saying, No, funny guy, it was not the "Woo-hoo" song.)

Duran Duran, Rio: "I slept out in front of their hotel when they were on Saturday Night Live. I was twelve. The day before, we'd waited on line in Times Square to meet them. I had a rose. They were signing their CD. Well, LP. Album. The line was around the block, but they cut it off before we got to the front, so I was standing there with a wilted rose. Simon Le Bon was my favorite. Actually, it was funny. Brad and I ran into him at a store in Santa Monica a couple of months ago. I'm looking at something and I see Brad going, 'Dude! You gotta come here!' I'm like, 'What?' and I walk over and Simon was literally standing right there. I was like, 'Oh, my God!' Then I went up to him and said, 'I waited outside a hotel for you!' I think he thought we were nuts. He was putting his receipt into his wallet and slowly backing away, going, 'Uh, great story. You should bust that one out on Leno.'"

Aniston leaves Tower with $184 worth of CDs, mostly by women (Eva Cassidy, Beth Hart, Lucinda Williams, Jill Scott). She also commented favorably upon CDs by Journey; Earth, Wind and Fire; Styx; Chris Cornell; Fleetwood Mac and her friend Melissa Etheridge. (OK, to be fair: As far as Styx goes, she only commented favorably upon their song "Jennifer.")

We walk to a bookstore coffee shop across the street, but it's closed, so we end up sitting on a low brick wall in front of a Ticketmaster office building. Aniston lights a Merit. The sun, behind her, dapples her hair, which is streaked and shoulder-length, and not even a third-cousin-twice-removed of the capital-H do that was such a part of her look early on, and that in retrospect, compared to this more casual cut, looked kind of evilly shellacked, like an alien parasite that could attach itself to unsuspecting heads. She glances around, excited to be on the street, people-watching, giving someone directions to the bus stop, complimenting a random guy's jeans, the cars whizzing across Sunset reflected in her sunglasses. Crouching on the edge of the wall, Aniston somehow manages to look both entirely relaxed and ready to pounce. We talk about the drugs/orgies/career-burnout thing as portrayed in Rock Star. When she asked Pitt how she might play the role, he offered two words of Zen advice: Be Sting. "You know, the way Sting's so sexy, so cool, and he's just there, he's just it, he doesn't have to try," Aniston says, stretching a lock of her hair and slowly wrapping it around her finger. "I remember thinking, 'Be Sting, huh? All right. Yeah. I'll try it.'"

 

Hey that's what I have found on the net, but she is still a babe right?