Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  As dramatic and emotionally draining as this encounter was, it gave only a partial portrait of the complex relationship between father and daughter. Like her father, Angie was and is a savior by nature, wanting to save everyone she can. Just as her father was trying to save her from herself, so did she want to save him from himself. A twenty-one-minute telephone conversation with him filmed by Franklin Meyer is revealing. At times she sounds like his mother, admonishing him for spending too much time punishing himself rather than enjoying his money and his life. “I want you to teach me things,” she told him, adding, “Making yourself happy makes us happy.” At the same time, as she began to appreciate the business she was in, she could see more clearly how he had squandered his talent. He took roles way beneath his ability and stature, while rejecting parts that might enhance his career. One example around this time was the Tom Cruise–produced movie Without Limits, about the famous 1970s Olympic runner Steve Prefontaine and his legendary coach, Bill Bowerman. Both Angie and James thought Jon was perfect for the part of Bowerman, but he turned it down. The role went to Donald Sutherland, who received accolades for his performance.

  She took a similarly maternal interest in her brother’s career. In spite of subsequent events, they had never been especially close. As a kid, James was the typical elder brother, telling his sister to “scram” on the rare occasions she wanted to play with him. They had different interests and outlooks on the world, typified by the fact that James loved being behind the camera, Angie in front. When he was at college he would not speak to or see his sister for months on end. He seemed destined for a career as a director, especially as he showed genuine talent, at USC winning the George Lucas prize. Friends recall that when he was making his student movies, which starred his sister, he affected the guise of a French New Wave director, wearing a beret and a striped shirt. During one film in which Angie appeared half naked, he announced portentously that it was a “closed set.”

  When James graduated, however, he was so painfully shy that he couldn’t bring himself to attend interviews, even when he was on a short list of one. It was a surprise when he suddenly switched gears, deciding, somewhat belatedly, to follow his sister into acting. Unlike Angie, he had never had an acting lesson or shown any interest in that branch of the business, yet his father dutifully introduced him to all the casting agents in town so that they would remember his face. Angie pitched in, too, helping him snag his first screen role, as a bartender in Hell’s Kitchen. She reported back to her father that she was thrilled to see how much her rather diffident brother had grown in confidence during the shoot.

  It was James who took her to the emergency room of the local hospital when she cut her hand. As she later recalled: “James was just great. I saw how he would be as a dad or a husband. He was so cool under pressure, held my other hand, and got me a lollipop and kept making jokes.” Whatever concerns Marche and Jon had about their daughter’s drug use might well have been soothed by the fact that her brother was on hand to keep an eye on her. But it was not quite as simple as that; Angie was very private about her drug use.

  Moreover, she was bouncing back and forth between New York and Los Angeles. The Hell’s Kitchen shoot in New York was organized around her commuting schedule to Los Angeles, where she played Cornelia in George Wallace. It was a meaty role, the ballsy character of Cornelia straight out of the Barbara Voight school of life. A crack shot, record-holding fisherwoman, onetime rodeo performer, and professional water-skier, she was a woman who loved adventure, driving the 100-mph pace car at the opening of the Indianapolis 500 and riding in a National Guard Phantom jet. “I wanted to be the first woman on the moon,” Cornelia Wallace once recalled. “I was never wild, but I was daresome. I’d try most anything one time.”

  During her research into Cornelia’s character, Angie discovered that she was also a classical pianist, saxophonist, and organist, and wrote and performed folk songs with the likes of the “king of country,” Roy Acuff. Angie made the mistake of mentioning Cornelia’s singing career to director John Frankenheimer, who suggested that Angie, who cheerfully declares that she cannot carry a tune in a bucket, strum the guitar and sing Acuff’s signature song, “The Wabash Cannonball,” at an election rally. Angie was being way too modest. Like her father, who sang on Broadway in The Sound of Music, Angie has a pleasing singing voice.

  As colorful and accomplished as she was, Cornelia was forever captured in the public imagination the moment on May 15, 1972, when Governor Wallace was shot five times by would-be assassin Arthur Bremen during the presidential campaign and she threw herself on her husband’s body. She was pictured cradling her husband’s head, his blood soaking her yellow suit jacket, using her own body to shield him from further attack. As Angie tried to uncover the soul of Cornelia Wallace, she carefully studied the Time cover photograph of that moment, an image that spoke to her of not only Cornelia’s courage, but also her love and her loyalty. “She loved him and cared for him,” observed Angie. “She could have been shot herself.” Cornelia is much more matter-of-fact about the famous magazine cover: “Fortunately, I’d just been to the hairdresser. Women think of things like that.”

  Wallace, played by Gary Sinise, was left paralyzed from the waist down, his injury giving added poignancy to the film’s opening scene, in which Cornelia and Governor Wallace enjoy a breakfast cuddle on top of their hotel bed before hitting the campaign trail. The three-hour TV biopic charted Wallace’s transformation from a racist governor and political opportunist who stood in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in 1963, temporarily blocking the entrance of two black students and proclaiming “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” to a man who, after he was shot, deliberately brought a large number of African-Americans into his administration. In a dramatic and true scene, he arrived in his wheelchair at a black church in Montgomery where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, and begged the congregation for forgiveness for his past misdeeds. “I have learned what suffering means. I know I contributed to that pain [of the black community], and I can only ask for your forgiveness,” he told them.

  The allegorical nature of Wallace’s transformation—his Faustian pact to win power and his downfall and subsequent contrition—was what drew Frankenheimer, a lifelong liberal and a friend of Bobby Kennedy’s, to the film in the first place. When the cameras stopped rolling, the veteran director of nearly fifty TV and feature films declared that it was his best movie ever. While neither the ailing subject nor Cornelia agreed with his judgment—“They depicted me incorrectly,” she complained—the critics were largely on the director’s side, and the TV movie went on to be nominated for nine Emmy Awards.

  The experience of being involved in a historically provocative drama—such was Wallace’s continuing influence that Frankenheimer was not able to film in Alabama—had a powerful impact on Angie. “For the first time I saw the grand scale of what you can attempt and what you can achieve,” she remarked, sentiments that echoed those of her father thirty years before when he starred in the hugely controversial Midnight Cowboy.

  She had enjoyed, too, a grand, if unrequited, passion during filming. Angie, like other actors, admits that she falls in love with her costars, and she fell hard for her screen husband, Gary Sinise. That she was still married, and that Sinise, twenty years her senior, was married with three young children, mattered not. She was besotted. For once her mother, who listened to her daily reports from the set, pleaded with her not to pursue him. The infatuation soon passed, Sinise oblivious to his potential romantic jeopardy.

  As ever, her father was out of the loop. While his dream was to “share the screen with [his] kids,” Angie was ambivalent about working with her father, wondering if she would be able to take direction from him. Their edgy, rather wary relationship was symbolized by the fact that when they recorded a joint interview in June 1997, shortly after filming for George Wallace wrapped, he was in a Toronto studio, while she was in New York completing Hell
’s Kitchen.

  When Voight mentioned Angie’s husband, Jonny Lee Miller, and their friends Jude Law and Ewan McGregor, the nascent competition that characterized all of Angie’s relationships bubbled to the surface. She complained that she expended a lot of energy just keeping her clothes on and steering clear of girlfriend roles, but felt that her husband had been “blessed with some great projects that don’t need to be fixed.” Not that her husband necessarily would have agreed. While she was working in the California sunshine on one of John Frankenheimer’s finest films, he was lying in a freezing muddy field in Scotland surrounded by disembodied corpses. In Regeneration, based on Pat Barker’s novel, he played a British officer rendered mute by the horrors he witnessed during the Somme offensive in World War I, where thousands of soldiers were slaughtered in a matter of minutes. Although the corpses were artificial, the bitter cold, the clinging mud, and the stagnant water were all too authentic. Miller could have been forgiven for thinking that the lady doth protest too much.

  In May, Miller joined twenty other up-and-coming British thespians at the Cannes Film Festival to celebrate the “extraordinary renaissance” of the U.K. film industry. Miller was very much a part of that dynamism. He and a group of like-minded colleagues, including his pals Jude Law, Ewan McGregor, Sean Pertwee, and Sadie Frost, had taken control of their own destiny and formed a production company, Natural Nylon. That summer they were in serious talks to promote a raft of projects that included The Hellfire Club, about a group of eighteenth-century libertines, and Psychoville, a satirical thriller. It didn’t hurt their cause that Afterglow, starring Miller and Julie Christie, was released that month to rave reviews. “Serious and comic, frivolous and substantial, giddy and lyrical all at the same time,” wrote critic Emanuel Levy.

  Levy’s silky sentence could have served as a partial description of the brief and somewhat unusual marriage of Angie and Jonny. The word “ironic” would have been apt as well: For example, while Angie was seeing her dealer in New York, her husband was playing in a charity soccer match in Glasgow to raise money for a drug rehabilitation program.

  While the peripatetic life of an actor meant that they spent much of their union apart, on the infrequent occasions when they were together, few would have realized that they were thinking of formally separating. In a pattern she would follow for some years, Angie and her husband, at least in public, were passionate to the point of flagrant exhibitionism. When they went out with their friends to a restaurant in Los Angeles, they would make out in front of them and the other customers. “Quite frankly I found it tiresome going out with her when she spent all her time sucking her lover’s face off,” recalled one girlfriend. When they visited the homes of their friends, Angie would often ask to borrow the host’s bedroom for twenty minutes so that she and Jonny could have a “quickie.” “She was an exhibitionist; she liked the effect her sexuality had on people, how it discomfited them,” noted one of the witnesses to her sexy performances.

  With Timothy Hutton lurking quietly in the background, Jenny Shimizu was often the third wheel in Angie and Jonny’s relationship. As Angie once admitted: “I probably would have married Jenny if I hadn’t already married Jonny. I’m quite free with my sexuality.” That summer her girlfriend became part of TV history when, in May 1997, she was one of a host of celebrities, including Demi Moore, Billy Bob Thornton, and Oprah Winfrey, who appeared on an Ellen special in which the show’s star, Ellen DeGeneres, acknowledged that she was a lesbian. Although that appearance enhanced Jenny’s celebrity, others were not so fortunate. Angie’s former babysitter, actor Laura Dern, played Ellen’s love interest in the celebrity-packed show and found herself struggling to find work for a year or so afterward.

  During this period Jenny was staying with a girlfriend in the Hollywood Hills. One night Jenny invited Angie and her husband over for a kind of double date. As Jonny and Jenny’s girlfriend chatted inside, Angie and Jenny stripped and slid into the open-air swimming pool. “It seems like hours we caressed each other under the surface, again and again,” Jenny later breathlessly told a British tabloid. “It was one of our horniest nights ever. The fact that Jonny or my other lover [whom she later described as a “no-nonsense knockout”] could have caught us at any moment just made it more thrilling.”

  I’m alone; I’m dying; I’m gay; I’m not going to be able to see you for weeks,” Angie told her husband in July 1997 as she closed the curtains on her hotel windows in downtown Los Angeles and began to absorb the essence of tragic cover girl Gia Carangi, a notorious heroin addict who, in the mid-1980s, became the first celebrity model to die of AIDS, at the age of just twenty-six.

  With this dramatic sentence, Angie effectively closed the door on her year-old marriage. Jonny returned to his old life in London, but the couple perversely remained the best of friends. There was further collateral damage. Her carelessness with her pets continued. The couple had already dispatched Vlad the iguana to reptile heaven through the good offices of the local vet. Now it was the turn of their pet snake, Harry Dean Stanton. When they couldn’t find anyone to kill the mice that Harry needed, another visit to the vet ensued. As this was the second time Angie had sentenced a pet to death, the vet agreed to find Harry another home—as long as Angie promised never to get another animal. “I realized that being with me was not the best thing for a pet,” she wryly observed.

  It was perhaps as well that she left behind everything that touched her life as she embarked on a potentially dangerous and challenging emotional journey. As an actor who “became” her characters, she realized early on that in Gia she was absorbing an uncomfortable second skin, a body double whom she feared she might one day become. Angie observed: “Gia has enough similarities to me that I figured this would either be a purge of all my demons or it was gonna really mess with me.”

  It was a scary prospect, and understandably she was hesitant about taking on such a physically and emotionally demanding leading role. She had already enrolled in a part-time film studies course at NYU, and it was only Geyer Kosinski’s wheedling intervention that convinced her to consider the role in the first place. Part of the bargain was a walk-on role for her brother. When she met first-time director Michael Cristofer, who had already seen two hundred actresses audition, he, too, shared her doubts about her strength and willingness to embrace the demanding part. “Although she’s extremely striking, it was not easy to see how beautiful she was. Her presentation of herself was pretty rough. I think having to parade around and call herself beautiful was an issue for her,” he recalled.

  While there had been some talk about casting supermodel Cindy Crawford, who was known as “Baby Gia” early in her career, it was Angie who clearly captured the essence of the doomed model, whose brief life was a postmodern fairy tale—there was no happy ending. “Angelina is probably as adventurous a person as Gia in many ways, even if she didn’t act on all those impulses,” observed Cristofer, who added that she shared Gia’s “pervasive innocence and vulnerability.” A five-hour meeting between Cristofer and his potential leading lady cleared up any remaining doubts in her mind. He took her carefully through the script, explaining that while it described the drug-fueled modeling world, Gia’s aggressive lesbianism, and her fragile love affair with makeup artist Linda, played by Elizabeth Mitchell, the heart of the story was the desperate search by a tortured soul to find love after Gia’s mother, played by Oscar winner Mercedes Ruehl, abandoned her when she was only eleven.

  Gia’s profound sense of rejection; her bond with her mentor and surrogate mother, model agency head Wilhelmina Cooper, played by Faye Dunaway; her love affair with Linda; and her mother’s tentative attempts at reconciliation formed the emotional spine in the brief life of a young woman who, less than two years after starting modeling, was on the covers of Vogue and Cosmopolitan, and featured in a major fashion campaign for Versace (his own funeral took place in Milan during filming in July 1997). All too soon came the fall, a downward spiral of pills, cocaine, and mainlinin
g heroin. Shortly before her death, the model known as “Sister Morphine” was reduced to living on the streets and selling jeans to buy food.

  In her earlier work, notably Hackers and Foxfire, Angie had demonstrated that she could play the feral punk chick with a switchblade and a wild attitude to match. With Gia she also had to show vulnerability, convincing audiences that behind the artificial swagger was an insecure little girl desperately looking for love. This was her challenge, as her fellow Foxfire actor Michelle Brookhurst observed: “In our film there was a level of fearlessness about her; she was emotionally untouchable. But where is the vulnerability in Angie as Gia? To make her sympathetic we have got to understand why we root for her.”

  In exploring the mother-daughter relationship she was tackling new territory. Now that she was joined at the hip with her own mother, how far did the imprinting experience of abandonment when she was in the cradle, those first memories of looking out at the sky—an open window on her back was one of her first tattoos—inform her screen performance, even at the edge of her creative consciousness? Her screen mother, Mercedes Ruehl, perceptively touched on Gia’s psychic scar, telling writer Alanna Nash: “Drugs are a manifestation of the problem, but the real problem is the wound. In the screenplay we have a mother with a narcissistic wound and a daughter who is narcissistically wounded herself, from a kind of heartbreaking neglect. They’re both having to get through the day with massive tricks of denial.”

  The overriding theme of Gia’s life was an emptiness in her soul forged by fears of abandonment, subject matter that was closer to Angie’s own life than she perhaps realized. Ironically, she touched on her empathy for Gia’s experience of parental loss, understanding the model’s feelings by comparison with her own life. “If I didn’t have her, if she left [when I was] eleven,” Angie said to the Toronto Sun about Marcheline, “I would have been looking for that my whole life, that kind of love and comfort.” Family friends believe that though she never acknowledged it publicly, Angie did realize that she was, obliquely, confronting her own relationship with her mother.