'I happen to be with someone who finds pregnancy very sexy, so that makes me feel very sexy."
A banal enough statement, yet this quote from the cover of the new Vanity Fair, purred by Angelina Jolie, has ricocheted through virtually every other entertainment magazine and tabloid, as if the actress had just revised the Avogadro constant.
In an infamous Saturday Night Live sketch, John Belushi played The Guest Who Wouldn't Leave, a mock-horror role in which he remained at a party well after its conclusion, loafing on the couch, asking for more drinks, picking up the phone and asking, "Mind if I make a long-distance call?" as they screamed in fear.
Jolie reminds me of this Belushi character, if only because of her inexplicable persistence and imperviousness to how tiresome and often maddening her constant presence can be.
Or maybe she is more like Elizabeth Taylor, a somewhat respected actress, more famous for her love life and various personal tragedies, her incomparable violet eyes and smouldering sexuality.
Taylor is so famous, in fact, that she is still often shot by ancient paparazzi, as she is being wheeled in and out of various medical facilities, in a white fright wig, clutching a small, shivering dog.
Or maybe Jolie is what Rich Cohen, the propulsive writer of the Vanity Fair story, calls "an emissary of secret order, a messenger from a lost kingdom ... a princess, an aristocrat."
Such dull mysteries are better solved by the terrifying members of Soulie.Jolie.com, a cult fan website that would be harder to hack than the Federal Bureau of Investigation database.
After reading the new Vanity Fair feature, her first since she pretended not to be sleeping with Brad Pitt several years ago, it is hard, beyond her obvious and mesmerizing beauty, to understand why she, Pitt and their children now completely dominate the entertainment media (and the new Forbes Celebrity 100 editorial package).
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