Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (16 page)

After the scene, Karen Sheperd, who had become a mother figure during filming, took her aside and asked if she was okay. “She said that she was glad that it was behind her. Here she was seventeen and naked in front of a camera, watched by a bunch of strange guys. I couldn’t understand why she did it, but I felt that this was a girl who knew what her goals were. She could see the big picture. She knew that she had the looks, the connections, and that if she stayed focused and absorbed it all, this film was going to be her stepping-stone.”

While she may have given that impression then, that was not the way Angie saw herself when she first viewed the completed movie. “When I saw it I threw up for three days” is her now-famous account of her movie debut. “My brother held me and I went back to school and didn’t want to work again.” Indeed, she says that it was a year before she summoned the courage to go for another audition.

Given the fact that she had left school, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the film’s director remembers the incident rather differently. She came over to his house in Hollywood for dinner and a viewing. Understandably apprehensive, she sat with Schroeder, and when the movie ended, she told him that she had to be by herself and drove off into the night. The next day she called him to apologize. “Sorry, I was blown away by the movie and had to leave,” she told him. She called again a couple of days later to tell him how much she liked the film. That night he took her to a bar in West Hollywood and bought Angie her first martini. “I love the movie and I love you; it’s all great,” she told her director. As he says, “A lot of actors won’t go to the movies they are in. When she came out with me she was fine.” She had once again moved past her own feelings.

Such was her enthusiasm that she immediately agreed to reprise her role of Cash for the sequel due to be filmed in 1993. She had already started prepping the script when the film’s new star, Zach Galligan, then riding high after
Gremlins,
insisted that a “name” actress be cast in Angie’s part. When the new producers chose Emmy Award–winning TV actor
Khrystyne Haje, director Michael Schroeder was so angry that he quit the movie and returned only when he was threatened with legal action. “When I told Angie that they had decided to go with someone else, she was so gracious,” he says, describing his time making
Cyborg 3
as the worst experience of his career.

It was almost as bad for Angie. She had pinned her hopes on having a breakthrough with this movie. As it turned out, she hardly worked for more than a year. During this hiatus, Marche did an “amazing” job with her daughter, encouraging her to work hard at modeling so that she would have a lot of material for her acting show reel.

Marche had other, more ethereal plans to help Angie snag a foothold on the acting ladder. They met with Marche’s regular psychic, who also helps the San Francisco police on unsolved cases, and she would take an object Angie was wearing and “see” her destiny through the vibrations she felt. Her mother also pinned her hopes on a subject that had fascinated her for years: astrology. Mother and daughter would read the runes, or rather the stars, seeking a pathway for Angie’s acting journey.

Marcheline even bought an astrology computer program to pick out the signposts in the stars that would guide Angie’s career. Unfortunately, she did not like the astrological map that the computer spat out: Angie’s chart specifically pinpointed a “controlling mother” who could make or break her career. Marche refused to let Angie see this chart, insisting that her friend Lauren Taines alter the actual computer program so that it was wiped from the memory. It was a telling incident.

In general, however, Marche and Lauren were so pleased with the program that they decided to set up their own company, Open Sky, to advise clients about their astrological charts. Unfortunately, the perfectionist in Marche ensured that the project was stillborn. She spent so long worrying about the punctuation and grammar for the company brochure that the venture never got off the ground—or, more appropriately, came to earth.

While Marche was poring over syntax, Angie enjoyed some consolation for losing
Cyborg 3
when she beat hundreds of other young hopefuls to become the face of
Young Miss
magazine. The resulting commercial, made in the summer of 1993 by
Se7en
and
Fight Club
director David Fincher, showed a sultry Angelina walking down a dark and dirty New York street as cars marked with words like “sex,” “drugs,” and “career” careened into
one another. As the face of
Young Miss,
she was the knowing go-to girl to guide other teenagers through these hazards. The voice-over said, “It’s her world, you just live in it,” a phrase that could serve as a metaphor for her life—at least outwardly.

It was that knowing, self-possessed, somewhat enigmatic quality that attracted the attention of cameraman Mark Gordon, a recent graduate of the American Film Institute, who was producing a couple of surreal “haiku-style” short films for his portfolio. He hired Steven Shainberg, who would later direct
Secretary,
to write and direct them. When they were considering actors, Gordon’s stylist friend Brad Bowman raved about a beautiful new model he had seen at an agency. It was Angelina Jolie. They arranged to see her and hired her for one spot,
Angela and Viril.
Filmed in black and white in June 1993, the short film depicted Angie sitting on a bed in the lotus position, meditating, while Viril typed rhythmically the numbers one through one thousand on an old typewriter. Just eighteen, she was, according to Gordon, “extraordinarily beautiful and exotic.” As he observes: “She appeared shy but also had a reserved confidence with the shooting process.” Gordon and Shainberg liked Angie so much that they hired her for the second short,
Alice and Viril.
This time, Viril meets Alice at a convention for lawn products. She asks him to hold his head underwater for three minutes, so he plunges his head into a fish tank while Angie’s character lounges nonchalantly.

As surreal as this no-budget movie was, it paled in comparison to Angie’s real life. During his Broadway run in
The Seagull,
her father had met Laura Pels, a wealthy French-born theatrical producer who agreed to finance a filmmaking company, Jon Voight Productions. Pels invested $4 million, and the Paul family agreed to produce a slate of movies, including
Double Russian Roulette, Reverse Heaven,
and a trio of films based on Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. A few months later, in late 1993, Pels first became suspicious of the Paul family after receiving, as she later told the
New York Post,
an anonymous letter detailing lawsuits involving the family. While the sender of the letter has never come forward, the result was that Pels decided to sue Steven Paul as well as Stuart and Dorothy Paul and their companies for fraud and embezzlement.

That same year, Jon Voight’s manager, Steven Paul, moved into a palatial mansion in Coldwater Canyon. This rankled with Marcheline, who
was still waiting for her ex-husband to get his money back and buy her a house. Not only had he given Stacey Pickren the deed to the home they lived in when they parted, but now his manager was moving into an exclusive area, while Voight struggled to pay his bills.

What to do? Marche could buy a home only if Jon gave her the money she felt she was due—which couldn’t happen until the Paul family had repaid the loan. According to her, they had told Jon that they couldn’t afford to give him the money. So, she reasoned, what if she showed Jon financial paperwork to prove that they had ample cash to pay him back?

That was the logic behind a madcap scheme cooked up by Marche, Angie, and a couple of close friends to find the proof: They would take the trash from the street outside Steven Paul’s house, go through it in search of financial documents, and present them to Jon, who would see the light and demand his money. If that didn’t work, they would bundle up any incriminating papers and pass them on to the FBI.

The first part of the plan went off without a hitch. One night shortly after the Los Angeles earthquake in January 1994, Marche’s girlfriend and her friend’s boyfriend (brought in for “muscle”) quietly drove to Steven Paul’s home and filled the backseat of their Mustang convertible with large trash bags that were awaiting collection. Then they drove to Marche’s apartment and poured the trash on the kitchen table, and Angie and her mother, wearing rubber gloves, went to work sorting through the garbage. Angie and Marche uncovered a thick file of documents relating to expensive office furniture and other fittings, various film production companies, and other paperwork that suggested, certainly in Marche’s mind, that the Pauls had much to answer for. “Angie loved playing detective; she found the whole thing very amusing,” admits a coconspirator.

Part two of the operation—confronting Jon Voight and passing on the information to the FBI—never came off, however. Marcheline lost her nerve not only about approaching her ex-husband but also about compiling a dossier that the authorities would take seriously. There is no evidence of any actual wrongdoing on behalf of the Pauls, and Jon remains closely affiliated with them.

The saga had several more plot twists. In the summer of 1994 Voight filed a countersuit against Pels, accusing the sixty-three-year-old of treating him like a “sex object,” and claiming that Pels withdrew financing for
his projects when he rebuffed her advances. She responded by describing his lawsuit as “inane,” a smoke screen to distract attention from her $4 million lawsuit against his manager and the rest of the Paul family. (After further legal maneuvers, he retracted his allegations in September 1994, apologizing for the pain he had caused Pels and her family, and Pels’s lawsuit against the Pauls was subsequently settled and dismissed.)

In the meantime, Angie was not finished playing detective. At her mother’s urging, she visited her father’s home in Hollywood to snoop around for more financial paperwork linking her father to the Pauls. Marche was concerned that he had signed legal papers that would make him liable for any lawsuits or costs associated with the Pauls’ financial schemes. Angie was able to report back that he was not involved as a partner, nor was he financially liable. “It was a great relief for Marche,” recalls a friend with intimate knowledge of the matter. “A huge weight was lifted from her shoulders.”

Still, Angie continued to poke her nose into her father’s financial affairs. On one occasion she met a woman movie executive at her father’s home and, according to the story she told friends, advised her not to invest in any of her father’s schemes. The executive took Angie’s advice at face value and refused to invest.

While this made an amusing anecdote for Angie, the underlying story was rather tragic, exposing her utter lack of respect for her father. As entertaining as Angie may have found it to embarrass Jon Voight and interfere in his private financial dealings, she was ultimately a helpless pawn in the long-running war between her mother and father, usually siding, whether she wanted to or not, with her mother.

Ironically, during this family detective drama, she landed another film role, that of a witness to a murder who refuses to give evidence in court. She played a street junkie, Jodie Swearingen, in the conspiracy thriller
Without Evidence,
based on the true story of the unsolved murder of Michael Francke, the head of Corrections for the State of Oregon, who was thought to have uncovered a drug ring shortly before his death. The movie was filmed in Salem, Oregon, during May and June 1994, and Angie’s performance was described as “heartbreakingly touching” by
Variety
when the low-budget independent was released two years later.

A few weeks after that film wrapped, she enjoyed a complete change of
pace, appearing in
Love Is All There Is,
a romantic comedy loosely based on
Romeo and Juliet
that was filmed in the Bronx and at Greentree Country Club in New Rochelle, New York. She played a girl who falls in love with the son of a rival Italian catering family. Once again Angie found herself having sex on camera, except this time her star-crossed lover, played by Nathaniel Marston, was a month younger than Angie, and their love scene was played for laughs, Marston’s character’s parents walking in as they got hot and heavy beneath the sheets. When the comedy was finally released in May 1996 to generally lukewarm reviews—“woefully unfunny,” said the
Hollywood Reporter
—it was notable for the way Angie handled an Italian accent.

Life was decidedly unfunny for Angie, too. After the shoot she experienced the typical depression associated with the ending of a collegial venture such as making a movie. In Angie’s case, though, it was compounded by her feelings of worthlessness and alienation. She didn’t want to return to Hollywood, where she would be prey to her parents’ interminable skirmishing, so she stayed in a New York hotel room, contemplating life. Or rather, contemplating taking her life. “I didn’t know if I wanted to live because I just didn’t know what I was living for,” she later told
Rolling Stone
. She decided to take sleeping tablets and cut her wrists with one of her knives. She didn’t have enough pills, however, and she asked her mother, once again her passive if innocent enabler, to mail her more. Then she wrote a note for the hotel’s housekeeping staff asking them to call the police so that no one would have the distress of finding her body. She spent the rest of the day wandering the streets of New York, at one point looking at a kimono. Angie hesitated about buying it, realizing how absurd such a purchase would be given her immediate intent.

As she considered her decision, she appreciated that her mother would feel guilty for providing the sleeping pills. At some point, lying on the bed, she came to a conclusion of sorts: “You might as well live a lot, really hard, and not give a shit, because you can always walk through that door. So I started to live as if I could die any day.” The next day, she went back and bought the kimono.