Brad Pitt may be reconciled to seeing his newborn daughter's face on every newsstand in America thanks to People magazine, but, for heaven's sake, don't ask him whether he cheated on ex-wife Jennifer Aniston with current lover Angelina Jolie. According to two well-placed sources, Pitt's publicist, Cindy Guagenti, was recently telling celebrity wranglers they would have to promise not to ask about certain areas of his personal life if they wished to secure him for their magazine covers.

That raises the question of whether Esquire, which has booked the star for its October cover, agreed to any such restrictions. An Esquire spokesman declined to address the question directly, joking, "The only detail I can confirm is that he is not our mysterious "Sexiest Woman Alive.'" (He did confirm that it would be Pitt's first appearance on Esquire's cover.)

Guagenti, meanwhile, said it was "not true" she had been setting limits on interview questions. But asked whether that meant all topics were up for discussion, she hedged. "We chose that magazine for a specific reason, which I can't really talk about, because it just fit with what our line of thinking is," she said. Could it be that Esquire agreed to let Pitt get away with a first-person, "as told to" piece, ¨¤ la the June issue's cover story on Tom Hanks? Guagenti declined to elaborate.

While Pitt has a well-documented animosity toward the paparazzi press, Guagenti is not known as particularly aggressive, as Hollywood publicists go. That said, an experienced celebrity wrangler said it was distressingly common for publicists to demand ground rules, even in cases, such as Pitt's, where the topic being put off limits is the only one readers are likely to care about. "They always try to get away with as much as they can get away with," said the wrangler. "It's like, ¡®Media train your damn client so they don't have to pull this stuff.'"