Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (25 page)

The shooting schedule on
Playing by Heart
was so tight—just forty-one days—that when her father offered to take her out for dinner to celebrate her twenty-third birthday, she said no because she had big scenes the next day. Instead he came to the set and read lines with her. As her usual practice was to actively discourage her father from visiting her on set, this change in attitude did not go unnoticed. “There was a moment when she said, ‘Dad, you can come to the set; they know who I am now,’ ” recalled Jon Voight, who publicly voiced his ambition to make a movie with his talented daughter “before the end of the millennium.”

Even though she felt the character of Joan bore little relation to the real Angie, she was thrilled when the “man who made her feel like a little girl,” Sean Connery, phoned her and Ryan Phillippe to congratulate them on the intriguing romantic dynamic they had conveyed on-screen.

While Angie was involved in her latest movie love affair, Billy Bob and his fiancée were strolling hand in hand down the red carpet at the premiere of
Armageddon,
a big-budget science fiction thriller, held at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Thornton’s gaunt appearance, which he ascribed to healthy living, and his public affection for his fiancée—she was “as tightly
attached as his sinister tattoos,” noted one commentator—were the talk of the evening. Afterward, they took off for Billy’s home state of Arkansas, where they played a madly-in-love married couple who couldn’t forgive or forget their respective romantic pasts. (Ironically, one iron rule in the Thornton household was never, ever to mention the name of Laura Dern’s ex-fiancé, Jeff Goldblum.) The movie,
Daddy and Them,
which Billy Bob also directed, was a real Hollywood family affair: Laura’s mother, Diane Ladd, and her friend Kelly Preston appeared in it, while Billy Bob’s agent, Geyer Kosinski, produced. “It’s about a family of white trash alcoholics,” Thornton observed. “I got all my misfit friends together and we made a movie.”

Angie was dealing with a rather more sinister misfit, desperate to snag a role in the grisly thriller
The Bone Collector,
about a serial killer. It meant working with one of her acting heroes, Denzel Washington, who plays a quadriplegic detective who teams up with a young but talented forensic detective, Amelia Donaghy, to track down the murderer. “I begged for the part of Amelia, I just wanted it so badly,” she later told writer Anne Bergman. “I loved who she was. She was very street.”

The real reasons behind her desire for the part may have been more complex. After two roles in which her character was led by her heart, she felt a need to return to a woman who was strong, cerebral, intuitive, and self-contained. She believed that this change of emotional pace completed her as a human being in some way, that portraying a kaleidoscope of screen characters would round out her own personality. This emotionally mechanistic approach, a kind of “painting by numbers” attempt to fill in the gaps in her character, implied that at the heart of Angie there was no “there” there. As a young actress she felt she was a blank canvas on which other characters played, and she got tattoos to literally mark the things about her life that were important to her, to show what she stood for. She saw herself as a cipher who only could evolve through her characters, who stained her soul long after filming finished. “I suspect she’s happiest when she’s not being Angelina Jolie” was the astute observation of director Phillip Noyce.

Even the daredevil in Angie had private doubts about this latest character; she was haunted by a script that at first reading, she admitted, had “scared her to death.” Not only did she have to confront a corpse covered in rats, but she also had to jump fully clothed into New York’s East River.
“I wasn’t sure I could play her, but that was perfect because she’s not sure she can do her job either,” she observed.

Angie admitted that during her research, she threw up when reviewing pictures of brutal crime scenes. That did not prevent her from decorating a wall of her New York apartment with black-and-white and color photographs of mutilated bodies, car-crash victims, and murder scenes to get in character, the montage ghoulishly reminiscent of Warhol’s early photographic work, particularly his Death and Disaster series.

If she was uncertain about her involvement in the project, so, too, were the suits at Universal Studios. In a now-familiar refrain, they made it clear that they wanted a star name to carry the big-budget movie. Even though she had won a Golden Globe for
George Wallace
and enjoyed the backing of director Phillip Noyce and veteran producer Martin Bregman, they won the duel with Universal only after taking a budget hit.

“They took a big risk,” admitted Angie, whose most nerve-wracking moment in the casting process came when she had to get the once-over from Denzel Washington. Prudently, she covered her hair, which was spiked and dyed pink for
Playing by Heart,
with a head scarf, only to inadvertently pull it off halfway through dinner. She still got the gig, transferring the shyness and awe she felt toward Washington to her character when filming began in September 1998.

There were other anxieties. During filming she became so thin that she had to be padded beneath her clothing. There was concern among her family and friends that once again she was anorexic and that she was still taking drugs. Her mother spent time with her on set to monitor her. When the grueling four-month shoot was completed, Angie’s performance was more than competent—it was compelling. “The focus groups couldn’t stop raving about Angelina,” recalled Noyce. “Finally Washington couldn’t resist shouting out: ‘And what about Denzel? Don’t you think he was great?’ ”

Angie certainly thought so. Like Sean Connery, he was an alpha male, solid, dependable, and true. She could not say the same for the other big man in her life, her father. Fall 1998 marked a distinct plunge in the temperature of their stormy relationship. Indeed, the frost never really left.

In an interview on
The Howie Mandel Show,
Jon Voight spoke enthusiastically about his son and daughter and their differing acting ambitions, but his brief TV appearance set off a deadly round of family misunderstandings.
James’s girlfriend, Leanne, a waitress in a pool hall, thought Jon had said on TV that James should not attempt acting as there were enough actors in the family. This upset James, who complained to his mother. Although a friend urged her to wait until they had seen a transcript of the show, Marcheline called Angie, who was incensed with her father for publicly humiliating her brother. Ever the savior, she pledged to employ James herself, Marche willingly agreeing to take a cut in her manager’s percentage so that brother and sister could work together. Not that Angie’s agent, Geyer Kosinski, showed much enthusiasm about a two-for-one deal. “He realized where the talent lay,” noted a friend.

By the time Marcheline read the transcript from the Mandel show, which proved that Jon had spoken only well of his children, the die was cast. Marcheline simply shrugged and said: “Well, he’s done plenty of other nasty things to me.” By loosening their ties with their father, she drew her children closer into her orbit, just as her mother, Lois, had always encouraged her children to love her the most and treat their father with disdain. Unaware of what was actually said on the show, from now on both Angelina and her brother subscribed to the story that their father had failed to help James in his career. As angry as James and Angie were, and as often as they repeated the tale of woe to their circle of friends, neither of them raised the issue with their father. For all her bluster, Angie avoids direct confrontation. As a result, their father had no way of knowing why he was being treated so coolly.

Very soon he was threatened with being frozen out of the family forever. Once again it was the vexatious issue of Marcheline and her house. With Angie now living in New York, Marche’s thoughts turned to settling back East. She planned to live in the same exclusive neighborhood in Connecticut as Rolling Stone Keith Richards, buy two dogs (which she was going to name Bowie and Jagger), and one day befriend Richards while she was out walking them. One property she liked, which was riddled with damp and woodworm, was on the market for $900,000. The drip feed of complaints against her ex-husband—it was now twenty years since they formally separated—was relentless. Finally Angie, once again in full savior mode, took matters into her own hands and called her father. She told him bluntly that unless he bought her mother a house she would never speak to him again. That Angie had become embroiled in an ancient feud between
her parents shocked their friends, the feeling being that it was Marcheline’s fight, not her daughter’s. Nonetheless, her intervention broke the logjam. While he demurred at paying for a house in the $900,000 price range, he did write Marche a check for $500,000. Marche put it in the bank—and never bought a house on either coast.

During this time it was not so much her family’s fortune but her own career that was consuming Angie. She was bouncing back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, deluged by requests for interviews, photo shoots, and film promotions. In December 1998, for example, she won the Breakthrough Performance by an Actress award from the National Board of Review for her role in
Playing by Heart,
made her first appearance on the
Late Show with David Letterman
(where she haltingly discussed the end of her marriage to Jonny Lee Miller), appeared on the cover of the now-defunct glossy
Mirabella
with the tag
VENUS RISING—ANGELINA JOLIE IS THE NEXT SCREEN GODDESS
, and enjoyed the deliciously thrilling sensation of seeing her name up in lights, almost crashing her pickup truck when she drove by a giant poster of her and Denzel Washington in Hollywood. While the movie received mixed reviews, it made a big splash worldwide, taking in $151 million at the box office.

Angie was making an even bigger splash, nominated for a second Golden Globe for her electrifying performance in
Gia.
The irony was not lost on her or Billy Bob that one of her rivals for the accolade was Laura Dern, the star of
The Baby Dance,
in which she played a white trash mother trying to sell one of her brood. Angie reserved her biggest splash for the awards ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hilton on January 24, 1999. As Laura Dern and her dapper black-suited fiancé applauded, Angie claimed her second Golden Globe and shortly afterward made good on her promise to jump fully clothed into the hotel pool.

She explained that it was a childhood dream, on hot summer days, yearning to dive into the pool. When she and her friends tried, they were thrown out by hotel security. This time no one was going to stop her—although she wasn’t quite as reckless as she first seemed, quickly changing out of her glittering Randolph Duke gown into a bodysuit before taking the plunge.

Joining her in the pool were the black-tied trio of her estranged husband, Jonny Lee Miller; her agent, Geyer Kosinski; and her brother, James
Haven. It was an interesting tableau, captured by TV producer Jeremy Louwerse and his camera crew. Clutching a bottle of Perrier-Jouët, Angie encouraged others to join the party. Prudently, no one did so, in spite of her pleading. During her midnight swim, the hierarchy of her relationships was clearly apparent—as was her need to snag the limelight. Her agent kept a discreet distance from the star of the show, Angie far more relaxed with her brother, climbing on his back for a piggyback ride around the pool while leaving a space between herself and her husband, with whom she was friendly but rather tentative.

At some point she swam over to Louwerse and encouraged him to dive in. When he demurred, she grabbed his arm and pulled him, his bottle of Morgan’s rum, Cohiba cigars, walkie-talkie, cell phone, and pager straight into the pool. “It was a very sexy thing to do,” he now recalls, though at the time he was more concerned about his equipment than with snagging a date with the Golden Globe winner. After conducting a rather bizarre interview in the pool with a sound man holding a boom mike over their heads, he let her swim away. It was a moment that stuck with him not just because of his encounter with a clearly flirtatious and friendly Ms. Jolie but also for what it said about her career trajectory.

“That incident symbolized her transformation from unknown wild child to superstar publicity machine. She knew what she was doing when she jumped into the pool. At the same time, she showed her innocence and playfulness, which we didn’t really see again in public. Even though she wasn’t an innocent, it was the end of the age of innocence for her. You can see the transition right there, the wide-eyed excitement matched by a kind of knowingness, a girl who instinctively knew she was headed for greatness.”

Louwerse made his own media splash, receiving a standing ovation when he arrived at the office of
Access Hollywood
the following morning. His unusual and exclusive interview was broadcast on heavy rotation nationwide. There was a price to be paid, however, for a midnight swim with a future screen goddess. When he arrived home at three in the morning, smelling of booze and soaking wet, his irate girlfriend asked what the hell he had been doing. His reply, “Swimming with Angelina Jolie,” was perhaps not the most judicious in the circumstances. With that she headed for bed, while he slept on the couch. The next day she moved out.

On the way out, too, was Jonny Lee Miller. The separation was made formal on February 3, ten days after the Golden Globes, the couple citing “irreconcilable differences” in papers filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. “Jonny and I are still crazy about each other, but we have the sense of needing to move on in different directions” was her somewhat disingenuous epitaph for the marriage.

For Angie it was a new beginning, which began with a dark journey into her tremulous soul. A few days earlier she had articulated a manifesto for the rest of her life: “I can never stand still. While I’m alive I’m going to move as quickly as possible and live as much as I can, and I won’t consider if that is good or bad for my career.”