Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  Unfortunately, these sorcerers could not find a female apprentice who would have the right chemistry with David Duchovny, who played a blacklisted doctor with a drug problem, and the devilish hoodlum, Academy Award winner Timothy Hutton. Angie Jolie was literally the last actor to come in for casting. Such was the frantic nature of their search that Wilson used a handheld camera to film Angie in his office as Duchovny watched from the side. “She came in and hardly looked at any of us,” recalls Wilson. “She read for a scene around a bonfire in the desert and she was electrifying. She had a great understanding of what she was doing.” Both he and David Duchovny knew this was the girl for them, but the producers had other ideas, continuing to insist on a blonde “name” to help carry the movie. After increasingly acrimonious discussions, the director and his leading man finally won out, and Angie found herself being fitted for costumes—clothes by designers like Dolce and Gabbana, Richard Tyler, and Mark Wong Nark—mere days before preproduction began. It was quite a transformation from her personal wardrobe of leather pants and tank tops. “Angelina had to look like an expensive sports car—sleek and streamlined,” said costume designer Mary Zophres.

  During filming, coproducer Melanie Greene said graciously of the female lead: “She has the wisdom of an old soul . . . the grace and style of an older woman. You want to peel away the layers when you meet her.”

  The casting of Angelina was such a coup for her ambitious young agent, Geyer Kosinski, that even though he had broken bones in a boating accident in late May, he rose Lazarus-like from his sickbed to call Variety, the Hollywood trade journal, and personally confirm their story that Angie was the female lead for Playing God. In doing so he ensured that he, not Marcheline, was linked with the up-and-coming young actress.

  At long last David Duchovny had got the girl. Or rather, he thought he had got the girl. His rival Timothy Hutton had other ideas. It greatly amused the director and other members of the cast and crew to see Hutton and Duchovny, two legendary Hollywood swordsmen, vying for the attention of a woman fifteen years younger than either of them. That Hutton was reportedly dating Uma Thurman, and Duchovny, who years later entered a rehab center to confront his sex addiction, was seeing actress Téa Leoni did not seem to matter as the duo dueled for the affections of the “newly married but still dating” Mrs. Miller.

  As for the director, he was thrilled with the offscreen shenanigans. “Angie was only twenty-one but as sexy as all hell. She enjoyed the company of all the guys,” recalls Andy Wilson. “During the preproduction and filming she was splitting up with Jonny, and for some reason it gave her great energy, which was fabulous for the movie. Then Tim and Angie started their affair on set. Tim was besotted with her, besotted. Actually, David was rather jealous.”

  There were many consolations for the dejected star. When filming began in August, virtually every day carloads and sometimes coachloads of young girls, all X-Files fans, would appear at the location, some even throwing their panties at Duchovny. As Hutton and Angie made merry, Duchovny, according to Andy Wilson, began an affair with a crew member.

  Although Hutton pursued and won the girl in real life, Duchovny, in Wilson’s view, enjoyed one of two of the “sexiest sex scenes never seen by a cinema audience.” Filmed by Anthony Richmond, whose bedroom scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is widely credited as the most erotic sex scene in cinema history, Duchovny made love to a naked Angie as music from Massive Attack played in the background.

  In the end, Disney and Touchstone, who were funding the movie, axed the scene, arguing that it was too erotic and romantic and detracted from the gangster plotline. By contrast, an equally sexy scene shot between Hutton and Angie in the back of his Jaguar as fellow gangster Gary Dourdan looked on was deemed by the producers to be too much of a celebration of the criminal classes. For the public, who will never see the uncut version, Wilson attests that the scenes were “fucking horny.”

  As for Angie’s husband, cuckolded after four months of marriage, Jonny Lee Miller spent his days mooning about the Hollywood home of Roger Taylor, from the rock band Queen, which the actor was renting for the duration of his now-estranged wife’s shoot. During what Andy Wilson described as Miller’s “cry fest,” he would pour his heart out to English actor Andy Tiernan, who played one of Hutton’s heavies and, like Miller, had cut his teeth on the TV crime drama Prime Suspect. Kept apart from his wife, Miller would ask Tiernan how Angie was coping on set, using his friend as a shoulder to cry on. As Andy Wilson saw it, Angie and Miller “were just too young to marry.” He recalled: “I had to treat all actors equally, so I tried not to get too involved in what was going on.”

  Eventually Jonny did the decent thing—and went off with another woman. Or two other women, to be precise, if only on the screen. He flew to Montreal, where, thanks to the recommendation of Keith Carradine, he had been cast in Afterglow, a four-handed romantic comedy directed by Alan Rudolph. He played a buttoned-up young executive who does not want to have children with his sexy wife, Lara Flynn Boyle. When she has an affair with a local handyman, he enjoys a fling with the handyman’s wife, played by Julie Christie, in her heyday one of the world’s most desirable women. Doubtless the irony of the situation was not lost on Miller.

  While her husband might not have wanted to hear it, Mrs. Miller was coping remarkably well on set, coolly and calmly embracing an unusual filming process. With the director deeming the script “garbage,” Angie and her fellow actors would spend much of each day improvising their dialogue before the cameras rolled. It was a test of character and ability, and, according to Wilson, she “pitched in like a rock-and-roll star.”

  As Angie became more and more comfortable with improvisation, Wilson could sense that “an extraordinary actress” was emerging from the creative chrysalis. “When you film people, you don’t film technique or talent, you film the eyes,” he says. “What is going on in there will be captured by the camera. With Angie there was an enormous amount going on. She knew about needles and tattoos and heroin and she had an innate wild sexuality. That is what the camera captured. It filmed her courage and her chutzpah. As with all great actors, you never focus on technique, you film their spirit.”

  Taking a page from her mother’s book, she was the only member of the cast who bought the director a gift when filming ended. “It was perfectly chosen and very touching,” he says. Indeed, at the end of every film Angie was punctilious about buying presents for cast and crew. She was aware that the big-name actors who earned the most were invariably given the most handsome and lavish gifts, so she ensured that no one was left out.

  Work was now flowing for Angie, who flew from Los Angeles to central Texas to immerse herself in True Women, a sweeping historical saga spanning five decades, from the Texas Revolution through the Civil War. For once she kept her clothes on, which was just as well, as the TV movie, filmed on location in October and November, attracted the attention of a former and a future First Lady and a future president. The then governor of Texas, George W. Bush, and his wife, Laura, as well as Lady Bird Johnson, were among the spectators watching the reenactment of the stormy scenes surrounding the Reconstruction Convention of 1868. They looked on as Angie’s character, Georgie Lawshe Woods, a spoiled and self-centered Southern belle who goes through a humbling epiphany when she discovers that she is part Cherokee Indian, delivered a retort to the body of male politicians who rejected the idea of female suffrage.

  It was a powerful moment in a vivid, if overly earnest, historical drama that attempted to capture the hardships and triumphs of three women in one extended family whose lives were evoked by their descendant Janice Woods Windle in her best-selling 1994 novel. As director Karen Arthur, who corralled a largely female cast, observed: “Growing up in our country we never find out about the women, the normal women. These women are heroes to everybody whose lives touch theirs, but they were unsung.”

  To prepare for their roles, the three leads, Angelina, Annab
eth Gish, and Dana Delany, visited many of the real locations, met with their characters’ descendants, and communed with their spirits in Texas graveyards. During filming the author was on hand every day to answer questions about their characters. Dana Delany, who was the first of the trio to sign up for the movie, said of her character, frontierswoman Sarah Ashby McClure: “I thought of Sarah doing everything that John Wayne does, but she did it pregnant.” It was a test of a different kind for Angie, whose performance easily measured up against those of her more experienced costars. When the movie was screened the following May, Angie was praised for making her character the most interesting, if least noble, of the three.

  Angie was still immersed in the feisty character of Georgie Lawshe Woods when, during the filming of True Women, she went for an audition that very nearly proved her undoing. It was for another period piece, a TV biopic about the controversial governor of Alabama George Wallace. She was reading for the part of Cornelia, his outrageous and sexy second wife, in front of veteran director John Frankenheimer, helmsman of The Manchurian Candidate, The Train, Birdman of Alcatraz, and many other films. Wearing bright red lipstick and a black dress, she nervously did her reading. Then Frankenheimer, in an attempt to calm her nerves and break the ice, casually mentioned, “So Jon’s your father. How’s he doing and what’s he up to these days?”

  For Angie, not to mention the willful Georgie, this was a familiar and maddening refrain. As she later told Back Stage magazine: “My heart just sank and I thought: ‘He didn’t pay attention to anything I just did.’ ” She found herself suggesting that Frankenheimer call her father himself if he was so interested in his health, and stalked out of the audition.

  Within minutes Geyer Kosinski was on the telephone, berating her for storming out and for “dressing like a geisha girl.” As far as Angie was concerned, the elderly director had been rude and hadn’t paid attention to what she was saying. “He didn’t even care about me as an individual,” she complained.

  Kosinski convinced her to wipe the lipstick off, calm down, and return to the audition for a second try. It was a triumph, and she landed the part that would change her life. Very soon everyone would be talking about her, rather than about the men in her life.

  SEVEN

  I can’t fucking see. I can’t fucking dance and I can’t fucking sing. What the fuck am I doing here?

  —ANGELINA JOLIE ON THE SET OF THE ROLLING STONES

  VIDEO “ANYBODY SEEN MY BABY?”

  In the half-light and on a good day, curly-haired Franklin Meyer likes to think he bears a passing resemblance to Bob Dylan. But when the craggy-faced New Yorker has an ever-present cigarillo clamped between his yellowing teeth, think more Warren Oates from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Frank has a lived-in face, though his blue eyes, which have seen more than their fair share of debauchery and decadence, still twinkle. Now sixty-four, he is old-school New York, fondly remembering the days when downtown Manhattan was bad, mad, and dangerous to know. A friend of Andy Warhol’s—“as much as anyone ever was a friend of his”—he learned filmmaking from that first master of the “reality” genre. As a young actor, Meyer appeared in one of Warhol’s Factory epics alongside drag queen Candy Darling. When he asked the great man for direction, Warhol replied: “Do whatever you feel like doing.”

  So he did. For the next twenty-five years he worked as a cabinetmaker before discovering, somewhat late in life, that dealing drugs was easier on the hands and knees. He took over from an “inept” pothead at the legendary Hotel Chelsea, home to actors, artists, and musicians, including Mr. Dylan himself. Meyer offered what he proudly called a “full-service, one-stop shop” for everything from heroin to ecstasy, quaaludes to cocaine. His ninth-floor apartment was, he insists, never a “shooting gallery” but a modern-day salon where conversations ranged far and wide as the somewhat rich and relatively famous sniffed, snorted, and smoked.

  Like the desk of the late TV talk-show host Johnny Carson, Meyer’s dealing desk was higher than the rest of the room so that he could look down on his seated clients. It also hid the shotgun as well as the 9mm and 32mm handguns that he loved to handle, admiring the mechanism of the weapons just as he loved to tinker with his collection of antique watches. He insists he never used the guns in anger. It was all part of the daily theater played out for his well-heeled or artsy clientele.

  At some point during his new career as a dealer he took a line, so to speak, from Warhol’s playbook and decided to film the goings-on behind the locked door of apartment 921. He called his attempt at cinéma vérité Hand Job Files, after the time he and another cameraman, a well-known New York director, were filming a lesbian S&M dominatrix being whipped and the second cameraman got a touch carried away. Over the months and then years, he filmed forty-odd hours of footage ranging from the banal to the plain weird: designer Marc Jacobs, in coat and scarf, chasing a line, or a beautiful, half-naked girl freebasing. Others were filmed but not doing drugs, including a black rapper talking about his brother’s breaking into the home of his fiancée’s parents; a client’s girlfriend performing desultory oral sex; director Abel Ferrara growling around the apartment; and the irrepressible singer Chaka Khan being Chaka. While he has yet to find a suitable distributor, he proudly shows visitors, including the author, his uncut documentary.

  Central to the casting for his reality TV show was the sometimes blonde, sometimes dark-haired figure of Angelina Jolie. She first appeared at his door in February 1997, when she was filming Hell’s Kitchen in New York while also working with John Frankenheimer in Los Angeles on the biopic of George Wallace. Directed by Tony Cinciripini, Hell’s Kitchen was a down and dirty story of revenge, drugs, and sleazy sex; Angie played a vengeful girlfriend wanting blood atonement for the death of her brother. When she first arrived at Meyer’s apartment, she was accompanied by her screen lover, fellow actor Johnny Whitworth, who played Patty, a young punk who accidentally shot her brother and later had rough, drug-fueled sex with Angie’s addict mother, played by Rosanna Arquette.

  Like her movie character, Angie was bleary-eyed, and her left hand was bandaged after an accident on set. Even though it was the first time Angie had met her new dealer, she was so careless of her image that she allowed Meyer to take her picture for his collection. Then she scored sixty dollars’ worth of cocaine and heroin.

  For the next three years “Frank from the Chelsea” was her dealer, supplying her from time to time with her drugs of choice, heroin and cocaine. The odd couple soon became friends, shopping, dining out, and even visiting his elderly father, Howard. Angie and Frank, whose mother, Sylvette Engel, was a talented artist, even talked of buying land and forming an artists’ colony in upstate New York. Angie wanted to learn to paint and sculpt. Her true passion, though, was for making masks and casts, on several occasions using plaster of paris to make molds of her own breasts. She was as intrigued by the beauty of women who had suffered partial or full mastectomies as she was by the use of hot candle wax and nipple clamps during lesbian S&M sessions. “It has to come from a real place,” she told the camera.

  The star of Hand Job Files was as witty as she was uninhibited. During a filmed chat about childhood pets, she joked that Frank’s girlfriend, Danielle, should sue Warner Brothers, the makers of Bugs Bunny cartoons, after Danielle revealed that when she fed lettuce to her pet rabbit it died. (Actually, Bugs Bunny’s staple diet was carrots, but it got a laugh.) Angie confessed that when she was growing up she was equally unlucky with her own pets, recounting the countless small tragedies under her stewardship.

  As happy as she was to chat endlessly on camera, her visits to Frank’s salon were not merely social. She was there to score. Frank, though, is reticent about Angie’s drug use, seeing her more as a friend than an addict. “She never bought or did a lot,” he recalls. “She was not a serious career drug addict. I never remember her spending much more than a hundred dollars at a time.” Still, he cautions: “Whether you smoke, shoot, or snort heroin, in the end you en
d up at the same place. It’s the same game no matter how you do it.”

  Most of the time she preferred to smoke, finding comfort in the lonely ritual of “chasing the dragon.” This elusive pursuit of the ultimate high involved heating her heroin on a piece of aluminum foil and carefully ensuring that the liquid did not coalesce into an unmanageable mass before inhaling the smoke through a second, rolled-up piece of aluminum foil.

  Her behavior caused sufficient alarm on set for the wife of a producer, who was also her driver, to call a close friend of her mother’s and outline what was going on. Marcheline’s reaction was instructive. Passive as ever, she proposed doing nothing, arguing that Angelina was a twenty-one-year-old adult who was responsible for her own behavior. “But she’s your daughter,” said her friend, horrified at Marche’s willingness to accommodate her daughter’s self-destruction. In the end Marcheline agreed to go to New York and confront Angie. Over lunch she held her daughter’s hand and, in her wispy, ethereal way, tentatively asked, “Now, Angie, tell me the truth. Are you doing drugs?” Angie looked her in the eye and said, “No, Mommy, I am not,” and then proceeded to eat a whole hamburger and fries to show her mother that her appetite was healthy. The encounter was very Marcheline, who always wanted to be her daughter’s best friend rather than her mother.

  As ever, her father learned about her drug use some time later and from sources other than his ex-wife. He got on a plane and tracked Angie down. As he later told TV host Pat O’Brien, he could see what he called “real psychic pain” etched on her face, a torment she seemed to relieve with drugs. “You can’t help me! You can’t help my pain!” she screamed at her father, pleading with him to let her deal with her situation on her own and asking him to give her the night to recover. Reluctantly, he bowed to her will, leaving her to her own devices. It was a decision he later came to regret. However well-meaning, his one-man intervention had little chance of success without the full support of the rest of the family and the involvement of a qualified expert on drugs.