the bold and the beautiful; Fresh from filming The Good Shepherd, Angelina Jolie opens up for the first time about falling for Brad, life as a mother of three, and why she doesn't need a shoulder to cry on.(Interview)

Byline: Jonathan Van Meter

It's official: "The middle of nowhere" is about halfway between L.A. and Las Vegas, just off Route 40, at a dusty old airstrip in the desert called the Barstow-Daggett Airport-airport being something of a misnomer, a word that conveys a sense of modernity that this place most certainly does not possess. There are two tiny runways and a few long wooden sheds where a handful of single-prop planes are parked out of the life-leaching sun. There are also a couple of humongous empty hangars, built in the 1930s, that were used by the military during World War II and look as if they haven't been painted since. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see a tumbleweed roll right on through or to find the bleached-out skeleton of a years-dead longhorn out behind the toilet. In fact, it is so Land That Time Forgot here that the only planes that come and go all day are the two that belong to the heroine of our story.

Angelina Jolie loves this place. Something about its broken-down beauty and military history speaks to her dual craving for authenticity and manliness. She calls it, simply, "Daggett." As in "Brad and I like to fly in to meet our motorcycles at Daggett. One time we took a three-hour bike ride in the desert to a place where we spent the night alone. And then we rode the bikes back to Daggett and flew back to L.A. to our kids before dinner the next evening." Impossibly romantic, you say? Sit tight. It gets better.

We have all gathered at this remote, intoxicating place-there is a Vogue/Annie Leibovitz crew of nearly 50-because it seemed like a fine setting for capturing the spirit of the post-pregnancy Jolie, the daredevil adventuress insta-mother-of-three who seems to have an unquenchable thirst for the uncharted and off-the-grid. This is a woman who thinks nothing of helicoptering onto the top of a mountain in post-earthquake Pakistan for Thanksgiving when she is three months pregnant. Or of moving to Namibia to give birth to her and Pitt's daughter, Shiloh, in a tiny hospital in a one-gynecologist town. "We aren't completely insane," she tells me. "We looked for places that were not rife with malaria and dengue fever, and Namibia is good for that because it's so dry." Indeed, just yesterday, she flew her own Cirrus SR22 single-engine plane to the photo shoot, the first half of which took place many miles from the airport, in the giant sand dunes near Death Valley, where you could see the red glow from some terrible fire burning in the distance and where the sun blazed and the wind blew and the sand pelted everyone for hours on end. The shoot went too late for Jolie to fly home in the dark, so she, like the rest of the crew, checked herself in to a Ramada, something she seemed to relish. "When Brad and I take road trips," she says, "we love a Taco Bell and a roadside motel."

Today the shoot is all about Angelina and her toys: motorcycles and airplanes. When I arrive, however, the mood is grim. Jolie is famously difficult to photograph; she does not like being styled, because, I think, it forces her to wrestle with the two sides of her public image: tattooed tough girl and insanely feminine sex bomb. Despite having approved of the clothes at a fitting a few days ago, now she is not in a Carolina Herrera or Bill Blass mood. Just after the fitting, back in a hotel room in Beverly Hills, I asked Jolie about her thorny relationship to the photo shoot. "It is always just an awkward thing for me," she said. "I'm not modeling. It's me. I'm a person. And yet I'm selling clothes while trying to promote a movie. It's very odd. And yet, in our world today, it's been a very successful formula. It works. We play dress up. But it's not really us. We've lost all sense of portraiture, and that's too bad."

But here and now, in the desert, she cannot help but fall under the spell of the master. Leibovitz has coaxed Jolie out of her trailer, where she had been quietly stalling, by letting her choose the tough girl/tomboy option . . . for now. She steps out into the sun with big hair. She is wearing a pair of skinny leather pants and a dark trench, like she is ready to shoot Mad Maxine, a remake with her in the Mel Gibson role (note to Hollywood: not the worst idea). After shifting around awkwardly for a moment, she ...