It's late afternoon in the kitchen at casa de Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie, and the man of the house has just returned from running errands. With a mischievous glint in his eye, he reaches into the brown paper bag he has brought home and hands his wife a rhinestone-studded dog collar. Jolie, who married Thornton in a Las Vegas wedding-chapel ceremony in May 2000, has just awakened but still looks impossibly sexy in a sheer black dress, her dark-brown hair lying messily on her suntanned shoulders. She takes the collar in her hands, inspects the fake gems, strokes the leather and then breaks into a wide, delicious grin.

"What do you think?" asks Thornton.

"I love it," she purrs. "Did you get two?"

Yes, he nods; the other one is in the bag.

Dog collars? Is this the latest bizarre gift ritual from Hollywood's sexiest or (depending on your point of view) wackiest couple? After all, for their wedding anniversary last May, she gave him side-by-side grave plots in Arkansas, and he gave her a proclamation, signed in his own blood, stating that they would be together for eternity. "Remember how good we said the sex was when we got married?" Thornton asks a visitor. "It's even better than you can imagine."

The dog collars, though, are for Muskrat and Poodle, the two white miniature poodles scampering at Jolie's bare feet. Born 12 weeks earlier, on the couple's wedding anniversary, the puppies have already had an impact on the their Spanish-style Beverly Hills mansion. A few days earlier, while Jolie was removing one of their paper "wee-wee pads" from the den, she knocked over a six-foot fiberglass Elvis statue, which the couple had standing next to the undecorated silver Christmas tree that remains on display year-round. They decided to leave poor Elvis lying there facedown with his right arm shattered in dozens of pieces. "We were going to move it, but it makes a statement," explains Thornton. "Even idols fall."

There is also the matter of feeding the dogs, who like to nibble pieces of orange soy-milk cheddar that the actors always keep around the house. "He got them hooked on this stuff," says Jolie, 26, gesturing to her husband, whose influence doesn't stop at their cheesy taste. One puppy, offers Thornton, "really rocks to Andy Williams singing 'Can't Get Used to Losing You,' " while the other is fond of Thunderclap Newman's classic tune "Something in the Air." "Both," he adds, "are really into music."

They aren't the only ones. "Music has always been my first love," says Thornton, 46, whose CDs, old vinyl albums and library of rock-star biographies cram the shelves in the den as well as all available drawer space. His collection just got one disc larger, too, with the release of his debut CD, Private Radio, a simmering backwoods brew of 12 songs that he has worked on for the past eight months, with country star Marty Stuart serving as producer. "He touched a place of his soul that takes real guts," says Stuart. "I wrote what I felt," says Thornton, who has made five videos for his album and plans to tour with his band, Mad Dogs and Hillbillies, at the beginning of 2002.

"I think the record would sell way more if I wasn't a movie star, but it stands on its own," he says, adding that the style "is not easily categorized as rock or country or anything else." Except as moody and emotional. "It bristles with the heat of a volcanic inner life," said Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis of the record. "It's explosive, erotic and ultimately redemptive."

It's also, according to Thornton, the most important project of his career. Certainly it's the most personal. The first single, the rock ballad "Angelina," chronicles his passionate relationship with his wife ("They all said we'd never make it/Two crazy panthers on the prowl/They said we'd only fake it for a while/We just looked at them and growled"), and another song, the soulful "Your Blue Shadow," is, he says, about that painful time after they first met on the set of 1999's Pushing Tin but couldn't be together because they hadn't extricated themselves from previous relationships (she was divorcing her first husband, British actor Jonny Lee Miller, and he was splitting from Jurassic Park star Laura Dern). "I cry when I hear that song," says Jolie. "It means so much to him. He's human. He wants people to like it. He's worked so hard."

Thornton may be strange at times, but he's always been a hard worker. The oldest of three boys of Billy Ray Thornton, a teacher and high-school basketball coach, and his wife, Virginia Thornton, a professional psychic, Thornton grew up as a drum-playing British-rock fan in Hot Springs, Arkansas. "My favorite person in the world was Ringo Starr," he says. "When I saw him on Ed Sullivan, I was like a teenage girl." After graduating from Malvern High School, he formed several bands, the last of which was Tres Hombres, a hard-edged ZZ Top tribute band that made several albums and toured with Humble Pie, Ted Nugent and Hank Williams Jr. "We did the whole route, but we never had our own thing," he says. "It wasn't going anywhere."

Neither was Thornton, who came to Los Angeles in 1981 hoping to make it as a writer and an actor but didn't break through until 1996's Sling Blade, the haunting story of a simple man released from prison after serving time for murdering his mother. His effort as writer, director and star earned him an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, a best actor nomination and an active career in movies, yet he never drifted far from music. "The whole time I wrote Sling Blade, I listened to Frank Zappa's 'Burnt Weenie Sandwich' over and over," says Thornton, who also spent downtime on the film jamming with his old Tres Hombres bandmates. "On weekends, they'd set up in this old barn and play their ZZ Top set," recalls production designer Clark Hunter.

"Everybody on the crew would pick up an instrument and play. There were some great parties."

There hasn't been much time to party since Thornton directed last year's All the Pretty Horses, which, he says, "turned into a nightmare" when he battled producers over the final cut. Thornton, who at the time was also shooting the comedy Bandits (due out October 12) with Bruce Willis in Portland, Oregon, suffered bleeding gums as a result of stress. He also ignored bronchitis while making The Man Who Wasn't There (due out November 2) with the Coen brothers in New Orleans. Finally, last September, Thornton checked into the hospital with a viral infection. "That experience [with Horses] showed me how trying to do stuff that you believe in, and do it the right way, can actually kill you," he says. "I asked myself, 'Is it worth dying for?' I have a wife, kids and family."

Those are fairly new priorities for a man who is on his fifth marriage and who has three children - a 22-year-old daughter, Amanda (with first wife Melissa Gatlin), and sons William, 8, and Harry, 7 (with fourth wife Pietra Cherniak). "He's a great father," says Jolie. "I love it when the boys are around. We have a lot of fun when they're here." Even between visits, the noise level remains high, thanks to nonstop chatter from Alice, Thornton's myna bird. "She's the real lunatic in this house," he says.

That's saying something, considering Thornton has been rumored to eat only orange food. "That's horses--t," he says. "I have a papaya every morning, but the rest of the day I eat stuff that's not orange." However, his weirdness factor is still higher than average. He has a phobia about antique furniture ("of old stuff, period"), a serious aversion to flying ("it's unnatural; it sucks") and a dread of crowds. "If I have to be around a lot of people, like at a premiere, I itch constantly," he says. "I start to pass out."

Lately, he has been thinking about a project that would allow him to get away from people: He wants to bring a piano down to the basement studio in his home, where he recorded his album, and learn how to play it. "If I could play, you know, seriously, I could just be with Angie and the kids, and I'd stay down here all the time."

TODD GOLD
(Us Weekly 345-346 - Sept. 24 -- Oct. 1, 2001)