Authors: Ian Halperin
Once again, Voight and Bertrand shared custody, with Angie and Jamie living at their father’s house two nights a week and every other weekend. As before, there is no evidence that the custody arrangements were causing any particular emotional problems. By most accounts, Voight and Bertrand were agreeable with each other, with Angelina later describing them as “each other’s best friend.” Angelina was attending El Rodeo Elementary School, reputedly one of the best public schools in the nation, and she did very well there. James credited their mother’s domestic routine. “There was very much that home feeling when we got back from school,” he recalls. “Angie and I would walk in, and we could smell things cooking and baking in the kitchen. My mom was methodical in making sure we did our homework perfectly, and she would do outlines to help us. When we were younger, she used flash cards, or she’d be in the middle of cooking and pick up a carrot and teach us about the vegetable or the fruit so that it was visual as well.”
For his part, Voight seemed thrilled that his daughter had caught the acting bug and did his best to encourage her new pursuit. “She’d come over to my house and we’d run through a play together, performing various parts,” he told the London
Independent
in 2001. “I saw that she had real talent. She loved acting. So I did my best to encourage her, to coach her, and to share my best advice with her. For a while, we were doing a new play together every Sunday.”
Unlike many actors of his caliber, Voight was selective in the films he chose and rarely acted just for the money. “I didn’t want to do the pretty-boy roles they were always offering me,” he explains. As a result, unlike many of his less acclaimed colleagues, he was not affluent. No beach house in Malibu. No swimming pool. In fact, Voight didn’t even own a house. He too, lived in an apartment.
Despite the claims of his son, James Haven, who has spent much of the past few years attempting to discredit his father, Voight was quite generous toward Bertrand and always paid his alimony. We know this because Angelina herself was publicly emphatic about her father’s integrity right up until their 2003 estrangement. “He always took good care of us and our mother,” Jolie declared to an interviewer in 2001. “He always met his obligations. He just didn’t have a lot of money.”
This period of Jolie’s life continued uneventfully for almost two years. But then, at the age of thirteen, Angelina suddenly quit the Strasberg Institute and slipped into what she would later describe as “a very bad time.”
This probably had been brewing for a long time. She describes turning ten years old as a time when her life “started not to be fun” anymore and when she developed a fascination with death. “My mother’s father died when I was nine,” she explains. “He was a wonderful, spirited man, but his funeral was horrible. Everyone was hysterical. I thought funerals should be a celebration of life rather than a room full of upset people. I’m not scared of death, which makes people think I’m dark; in fact, I’m positive.”
She could never point to a specific trauma as the turning point in her personality, although she describes a day when she was playing a game with a friend. She wanted to get into the fantasy world such games demand, but she could no longer find her way there. Perhaps that’s why she first decided to take up acting initially, to try to regain the comfort of the imaginary places of her childhood.
Now, though, having dropped out of acting, she talked about wanting to be a funeral director. She even started taking mail-order courses on embalming from the Funeral Services Institute. Before long, her preoccupation with death led Angelina to consider ending her own life, a state of mind that she has spoken about many times over the years. In one interview, she dismissed the idea that her thoughts of suicide were related to depression or sadness, however: “I always thought I was sane, but I didn’t know if I’d be comfortable living in this world. As a child I contemplated suicide a lot—not because I was unhappy, but because I didn’t feel useful. I had insomnia and was up all night, with a mind that wouldn’t stop.” And yet in a different interview, she says of her childhood, “I had a lot of sadness and distrust. I came very close to the end of my life a few times.”
In a 2001 article,
Rolling Stone
magazine writer Chris Heath described Jolie showing him a notebook she had kept when she was fourteen:
On the cover is some kind of sword. On the second page is a drawing of three daggers and the words DEATH: EXTINCTION OF LIFE. There are other drawings of weapons and a quote: ONLY THE STRONG SHALL SURVIVE. There are further definitions: PAIN: PHYSICAL OR MENTAL SUFFERING. AUTOPSY: EXAMINATION OF A CORPSE. She grabs the book back, seemingly embarrassed, but then relinquishes it. There is the word HELL and a picture of the devil, and there is a ripped- out page with only a middle strip of paper visible. The only word remaining is SUICIDE. “I can laugh at it now,” she says.
At this point, probably the darkest period of her life, Jolie entered high school, and many chroniclers have attempted to link her well- documented psychological abyss to her particular school and its culture. This is doubtful, but it certainly was at Beverly Hills High School that Angie Voight took the first steps toward creating what has become the Angelina Jolie myth.
In 1989, like today, Beverly Hills High was frequented by many of the offspring of the Hollywood elite. The school boasts more than a few notable, and some ignoble, alumni, including Nicolas Cage, Richard Dreyfuss, Nora Ephron, and Monica Lewinsky. But its reputation— solidified in popular culture as the supposed setting for the TV show
Beverly Hills 90210
—is misleading. The student body is quite diverse. Today, forty-two percent of the Beverly Hills High student population was born outside of the United States, and many students come from modest means. Although the mix certainly has changed since the late 1980s when Angelina first enrolled, she was by no means the only middle-class student there.
Countless profiles over the years have claimed that Angelina was bullied by her classmates because, in a school full of rich kids, she didn’t have fancy clothes or an expensive car. “These rich brats were merciless with Angelina Jolie, taunting her for her extreme thinness, her second-hand outfits, her glasses and her braces,” declared one magazine profile.
But according to those who knew her during those years, nothing could be further from the truth. A former classmate who now works in the television industry says, “Angelina was never picked on because she wasn’t a rich kid. Come on, her father was an Academy Award-winning actor. Everybody respected those kinds of things at Beverly, believe me. The fact is that our school was very typical of an American high school in those days. There were all the same cliques you would find anywhere else, sort of like
The Breakfast Club
. There were the jocks, the brains, the popular kids, the potheads, the misfits, and the outsiders, who deliberately went out of their way not to fit in. Angie was one of those. She didn’t dress in second-hand clothes because she couldn’t afford to shop on Rodeo Drive; she dressed like that because it was cool. That was the beginning of the whole grunge thing, and I’d say Angie was a combination of a Goth and a grunge girl. There were other kids like that as well; they had their own crowd just like all the others.”
While the rich girls shopped at the Beverly Center, Angie hung out on the seedy Sunset Strip and shopped at the punk-rock stores on Melrose Boulevard. “I was always that punk in school,” Jolie told
Vanity Fair
in 2003. “I didn’t feel clean and, like, pretty … I always felt interesting or odd or dark or maybe, uh, you know, I could feel sexy … I’d be in my black boots and my ripped jeans and my old jacket, and I felt more comfortable like that. I wasn’t gonna pretend to be the smart, clean, centered girl. I could understand the darker things, the more moody things, the more emotional things.”
While most of her fans have seen photos of Angelina looking geeky in braces and thick-rimmed glasses, those were taken when she was still in elementary school. By the time she was attending Beverly Hills High, the familiar features the world knows today were already evident, and she usually wore contact lenses. In her school yearbook photo, Jolie is clearly a striking teenager. According to one of her classmates, Michael Klesic, who also went on to pursue an acting career, “All the guys knew that she was a hot chick. I mean, when she walked down the hall, heads would turn.”
Klesic remembers that Angelina stood out from the other “hot” girls. “She was the one you didn’t want to mess with,” he recalls. “She was the tough pretty girl. She was very direct when she spoke to you. She could always tell if anybody was speaking to her with an ulterior motive or anything like that. She really stuck out like a sore thumb in terms of Beverly Hills girls. She wasn’t one of them. She didn’t dress like them. She wasn’t interested in the same things that they were. She was her own human being and her own person, and she had her eyes on the stars. She wanted to get out of that school.”
Angelina later described this period as her “awkward, mental- breakdown” adolescence. “I wore black fishnets and boots because I wanted to hide myself,” she recalled. “I wanted to feel everything. But at the same time, I was doing plays and taking ballroom classes at Arthur Murray. I’d wash off all the ink I had drawn on my arms, and take off my twenty-hole Doc Martens, and put on high heels and a dress and win tango competitions. My friends thought I was insane. But I thought it was fun.”
Another classmate, Jean Robinson, recalled for Rhona Mercer the actress’s now legendary obsession with cold metal. “She was deliberately different and didn’t want anything to do with the rich kids. She had a serious thing with knives. All kinds of knives—pen knives, kitchen knives. She would just whip one out and start playing with it.” Robinson remembers another side of Angelina that contributed to her unpopularity: “When she was fourteen at Beverly Hills High, she was stealing boys who were seventeen. Once they were panting after her, she would walk away. It was all about the chase.” But it was not only about boys. “The same happened with girls. Angie could seduce you into thinking she was your best friend and then not speak to you again,” said Robinson. “That kind of cruelty is common, but Angelina was devastatingly good at it.”
One boy she didn’t walk away from was a sixteen-year-old punk rocker she started dating when she was only fourteen. Within a month, the boy had moved in with her, with her mother’s blessing. Evidently, Bertrand thought the best way to keep tabs on her wild daughter was to keep her and her boyfriend under the same roof.
Jolie claims to have been highly sexual from a young age, recalling, “I was very sexual in kindergarten. I was a member of a group called the Kissy Girls. I created a game where I would kiss the boys and give them cooties. Then we would make out and we would take our clothes off. I got in a lot of trouble!” Despite the early start, she claims that the punk-rock boyfriend was her first sexual conquest.
“I lost my virginity when I was fourteen,” she told the
Daily Mirror
. “He was my first boyfriend at the time. I wanted to be promiscuous and was starting to be sexual … I got lucky. We were in my bedroom, in my environment, where I was most comfortable, and I wasn’t in danger.”
She has frequently rationalized the unusual living arrangement. “He lived in our house with my mom and my brother, so it wasn’t like we were on our own,” she told the Melbourne, Australia,
Herald Sun
in 2005. “And I could always talk to mom if there were any problems. She was more connected and more aware of what was going on than most mothers. She knew I was at that age where I was going to be looking around. Either it was going to be in weird situations or it was going to be in my house, in my room.”
In her simple description of the relationship, it appears that Angelina possessed a remarkable maturity for one so young. Indeed, logic might prompt one to ask why more mothers don’t invite their daughters’ boyfriends to live under the same roof. But those who knew her during this period knew that her love life was not as simple or idyllic as she made it out to be. They could see the truth for themselves in the scars on her skin.
“Some people go shopping. I cut myself.”
In the late 1990s, when a newly famous Angelina Jolie started discussing her teenage penchant for self-mutilation, she made it seem like a harmless manifestation of adolescent angst. But those around her at that time were deeply worried.
People started noticing the scars around the time she took up with her live-in boyfriend. It seemed this was no coincidence. “I started having sex, and sex didn’t feel like enough; my emotions didn’t feel like enough,” she recalls. “My emotions kept wanting to break out. In a moment of wanting something honest, I grabbed a knife and cut my boyfriend. And he cut me. He was a really good person, a sweet guy—not threatening, not scary. We had this exchange of something, and we were covered in blood. My heart was racing; it was something dangerous. Life suddenly felt more honest than whatever this ‘sex’ was supposed to be. It felt so primitive and so honest, but then I had to deal with not telling my mother, hiding things, wearing gauze bandages to school.”
In another interview, she rationalizes her self-mutilation by comparing it to sexual deviance, which she insists was not part of her schtick. “There were moments when I just wanted physically to have something, whether it be a knife or a whip. You want to be drained of everything; you want somehow to have everything go quiet. Other people do sexual things or try to make themselves perfect—that’s another kind of sickness.”
In their landmark 1991 study, “Self-Injurious Behavior,” published in the
American Journal of Psychiatry
, Dr. Ronald M. Winchel and the late Dr. Michael E. Stanley of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons define
self-injury
as “the commission of deliberate harm to one’s own body. The injury is done to oneself, without the aid of another person, and the injury is severe enough for tissue damage (such as scarring) to result. Acts that are committed with conscious suicidal intent or are associated with sexual arousal are excluded.”