Now the world was listening to Angie. Days after the Golden Globe celebrations—George Wallace won the award for Best Miniseries or Television Film—she was center stage at the premiere of Gia, held at the Directors Guild in Hollywood. This time all her family was on parade, including her parents; her brother; her godmother, Jacqueline Bisset; and her husband. They heard HBO Pictures president John Matoian tell the celebrity audience: “If we hadn’t found Angelina Jolie, we wouldn’t be here tonight.” Afterward her father said of her performance: “I’d like to act with her and I’d love to direct her. She’s the real thing.” Just as when she watched her first movie, Cyborg 2, she went home feeling sick, but she nonetheless embarked on a round of interviews to promote the movie.
She was frequently asked about the lesbian love scenes, her own drug use, and her modeling career. Her responses ranged from her trademark unflinching honesty to confusing evasion. She told The Cable Guide that she “loved” the sex scenes with costar Elizabeth Mitchell. “She hadn’t done a love scene before and she hadn’t been with a woman before. I was looking forward to kissing her and touching her and watching her discover that and hopefully, enjoy it. I think she did. I become more romantic with women. I love women.”
She took a rather more equivocal approach when quizzed about her own use of drugs. “I hate heroin because I have been fascinated by it,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “I’m not immune but I won’t do it now, at all, because luckily I’ve found something that replaces that high, which is my work.” She emphasized to The New York Times: “Knowing what I know now, I would not do heroin now.” This was news to her dealer Frank Meyer, who confirms that he was supplying her with heroin throughout the filming of Gia and beyond.
Equally surprised was fashion photographer Sean McCall, who had picked her out as a future swimwear supermodel, when she told The New York Times and others that she had “failed miserably” in her attempts to be a model, recalling how she felt “terrible” when she was put into a swimsuit and measured all over, like a piece of meat. As Sean McCall recalls: “It’s baffling that she would say that. We never measured her or even considered it. She was certainly no failure; as a model she was on the brink of great success. She could have out–Kate Mossed Kate Moss if she had stuck with it.”
The dramatic license she took with her own life imbued her with the brio to take on an outsize character like Gia Carangi. Critics loved her outstanding performance, the doyenne of the film world, Pauline Kael, paying Jolie just about the biggest compliment she had to give: “This girl could play both the Brando and Maria Schneider roles in Last Tango in Paris! Where in the world did she come from?” Others were equally complimentary. The Daily News’s Will Cooper wrote: “Hers is the real art behind this artifice and her fire is what makes HBO’s Gia burn so brightly.” Variety described her performance as “a mesmerizing tour de force,” while Lee Winfrey of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Gia’s hometown paper, wrote: “If you like to see the birth of a star, watch Gia.”
It was not only Angie who received plaudits; her screen mother, Mercedes Ruehl, was also singled out for expressing the complex relationship with her daughter. “Even more than Jolie, Ruehl puts character into the role of the self-destructing Gia, helping us to understand where the daughter’s insecurities and fits of childish pique come from,” observed Newsday. “Ruehl also manages to convey guilt over Gia’s demise, even as she denies it.”
Friends and acquaintances who had lost touch with the young Angelina Jolie were equally impressed by her performance, mainly because it reminded them of the girl they once knew. School friend Windsor Lai watched her on TV and said, rather innocently: “Oh my God, that girl acts just like a girl I knew in eighth grade.” Only later did he realize he was responding to the girl he’d once sketched. For makeup artist Rita Montanez, the Angie she knew and Gia were interchangeable. “It was almost like she wasn’t acting. But her dark side is a disguise that hides something else, the relationship inside the family. Nothing much makes sense about her.”
Meanwhile, her mother was busy mapping out Angie’s future. With Jonny Lee Miller out of the picture, she went to see her regular psychic to ask about the chances of Angie’s marrying Mick Jagger. The psychic was blunt, telling her that she would marry an older man, but it was not going to be Mick Jagger. Marcheline was devastated—and determined to prove her wrong.
EIGHT
I feel like I am just a piece of luggage on an airport carousel waiting to be picked up. Please pick me, please pick me.
—TIM HUTTON TO ANGELINA JOLIE
It was not so much a stairway to heaven as an elevator ride to ecstasy. He told her he was going to buy a pair of pants. She was heading for the hotel lobby. As they stood in the elevator, both felt a shock of attraction. Then Billy Bob Thornton, actor, director, and musician, climbed into a chauffeur-driven van and embarked on his shopping trip in downtown Toronto. The word “pants” conjuring up all kinds of thoughts in her head, Angie sat on a wall by their hotel and tried not to faint or swallow her cigarette. Irresistible object meeting improbable subject. “What was that?” she later recalled of that first encounter with her latest “screen husband” in early 1998. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Even for Billy Bob, four times married and with three children to his name, this was a new experience. “I felt like I had been hit by a bolt of lightning” is the way he later described first seeing Angie, who played Mary Bell, the sexy, boozy wife to Billy Bob’s air-traffic controller in Pushing Tin. Ever the artist, he later commemorated the moment his life changed by writing the song “Angelina.”
Of course, it wasn’t supposed to play out like that. In the Hollywood version of droit du seigneur, where the local nobleman enjoys the pick of fair maidens, Angie was the choice of the movie’s leading man, John Cusack. He had already taken her out for dinner in Beverly Hills, ostensibly to discuss her role as the cheating wife who falls for Cusack on-screen, but also to give her the Cusack squeeze. She came away from that dinner thinking about romance—but not in the way that Cusack imagined. He had also invited his good friend Al Pacino to dine with them. Throughout the evening, all Pacino did was talk about Angie’s mother. When she spoke with Marcheline the next day, Angie told her: “I could swear he was in love with you.” Only then did Marcheline give her wide-eyed daughter a glimpse into her own secret past.
When Angie and John Cusack later sat in the hotel bar in Toronto shooting the breeze, the star of High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Blank had the quiet confidence of a man who knew how his evening was going to end.
Cue the arrival of Billy Bob Thornton, old enough to be Angie’s father and a decade older than Cusack. She would later tell girlfriends that the crestfallen look on Cusack’s face when she left the bar with Billy was priceless. Angie’s evening was about to get a whole lot more amusing. She enjoyed telling the story of their first bedroom encounter, during which she discovered the truth of Hollywood rumors about Billy Bob’s prodigious talent. Before they consummated their passion, Billy, with faux embarrassment, apologized for what she was about to receive. “He told her that he was hung like a mosquito,” recalls her New York dealer, Frank Meyer, with scarcely disguised glee. “Then he pulled out this knee knocker. That certainly put a smile on her face.”
Understandably, she told a rather different version in public, assuring CNN’s Larry King, among others, that while she was “tempted” to bed Billy Bob when they first met, it was another two years before her love was consummated. “I was happy to be his friend and that was good enough,” she said. (It was a claim that would be repeated years later, about another man on another film.) Of course, at the time, she was quietly dating Timothy Hutton, while Billy Bob, according to the New York Daily News, became engaged to his live-in lover, Laura Dern—Angie’s onetime babysitter—who flew in from Vancouver, where she was filming The Baby Dance, to celebrate.
Angie didn’t just have competition for Billy Bob from Laura Dern, but also from another woman on the
set who found a lasting place in Billy Bob’s heart. Canadian air-traffic controller Sheila McCombe, who was training Cusack and Thornton for their roles, was Angie’s worst nightmare—beautiful, smart, funny, athletic, and aggressively ambitious: the living, breathing embodiment of “the other girl.” Certainly John Cusack and Billy Bob thought so, flirting outrageously with the blue-eyed blonde as she taught them the language and tricks of real-life air-traffic controllers. Director Mike Newell recalled: “John made for her like a hunter at the first set of the season.” He had a serious rival in Billy Bob, who invited her to dinner with her friends at local Toronto restaurants and called her constantly. Sheila found their attentions amusing—and flattering—recalling how Cusack and Thornton tried to outdo each other. “They wanted to impress me by being the best,” she recalls with some amusement. “I was very strict.”
Billy Bob clearly enjoyed her company. “We’d hang out with Sheila and she was just like this girl we knew,” he recalled. “Then she’d be on the set, like no nonsense, ‘No, this is what you do.’ ” When the film was finished, Billy Bob kept in contact, romancing her under the radar. Her friends would later say that the friendship deepened in time and he asked her to marry him—even though he was still engaged to Laura Dern. Sheila shoots down the marriage talk, the fighter pilot’s daughter stating: “He talks like that with everyone. He is a very talented man. We came close for a little bit.”
So who was this rather unlikely object of desire for the talented and beautiful? Born on August 4, 1955, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to a psychic mother and a basketball coach and history teacher father, Billy Bob had an upbringing that was genuinely hardscrabble, living in a shack without electricity or running water and often eating the game he caught in the woods. The only real choice he ever got was which switch his father would beat him with at night in his impotent rage at their financial plight.
As a teenager, Billy Bob formed his own rock band; later he would always consider himself a musician first, an actor second. He was the star pitcher on his school baseball team—he was good enough to win a tryout for the Kansas City Royals—but, like Angelina, he always thought himself an outsider, his extreme poverty setting him apart. “I was the bucktooth hillbilly who lived in the middle of nowhere,” he recalled. In 1973, when Billy Bob was eighteen, his father died of lung cancer. Despite his father’s past cruelties, Billy Bob was constantly at his bedside in his waning months, nursing him and reading to him. This quasi-religious experience taught him the transformative power of forgiveness, a quality that marked him as a man and informed his artistic journey. It would in time distinguish him from Angelina.
After his father’s death Billy got into drink and drugs, dropping out of college, where he studied psychology, after a couple of semesters. Eventually he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actor and a musician, playing drums and singing with the South African band Jack Hammer. With few acting parts for someone with his background or thick Southern accent, he took on a variety of menial jobs to scrape together a living. Perhaps the lowest point was when he was admitted to the hospital with myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart.
A chance conversation with the legendary Billy Wilder at a film industry Christmas party where he was working as a waiter transformed his life. When Wilder suggested that he focus on writing if he wanted to find a niche in Hollywood, Thornton teamed up with an old friend, novelist Tom Epperson, to write scripts. After an assortment of small roles in TV and films, he brought his most enduring creation, the mentally handicapped but astutely simple killer Karl Childers, to the screen in Sling Blade. He was a character who for years had haunted Billy Bob, who first wrote a stage play about the simple yet morally complex Childers.
With Sling Blade, the “hillbilly” outsider was suddenly very much an insider, winning an Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay for the 1996 tour de force. But the tics and twitches Billy grew up with remained, his genuine talent often overshadowed by ribald discussions of his many idiosyncrasies, including an obsessive-compulsive disorder that left him with a morbid fear of flying and a hatred of harpsichords, silverware, and antiques, particularly French furniture. Born into poverty, he was literally terrified of putting a silver spoon in his mouth.
His romantic life was as complex as his many quirks. Though married and divorced four times, he was living with a member of Hollywood royalty, Laura Dern, when director Mike Newell cast the actor with a flying phobia as the Zen-like air-traffic controller Russell Bell. The daughter of well-respected and Oscar-nominated actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, Laura Dern had first met Thornton during the filming of the celebrity-studded Ellen show in April 1997, when the star, Ellen DeGeneres, publicly outed herself as a lesbian.
At the time, Billy Bob was in the midst of an acrimonious divorce from his fourth wife, Pietra, who had angered him by claiming in court that he had physically abused her—an allegation he denied—and then, as a final insult, posed nude for Playboy, declaring that the spread was her version of an Oscar. For an old-fashioned Southern gentleman, polite but essentially chauvinistic, this was unacceptable behavior.
As was his wont, he quickly moved on, soon sharing the home Laura Dern was renting from comedian Dudley Moore. Even though it was a whirlwind romance, the omens seemed good, especially since Laura’s mother, who fancied herself a sage and a psychic, had earlier read the runes and forecast her daughter’s love match with this affable good old boy. Her prediction reinforced their feelings that they were indeed soul mates, destined to share the rest of their lives together.
Billy Bob was immediately welcomed into the bosom of the Dern family. Down-to-earth but with an offbeat sense of humor, he meshed well with Laura’s father, Bruce, who was known for his funny if far-fetched stories, his love of gambling, and his life as a bon vivant. “Billy and Laura were stone cold in love,” noted a close associate speaking on the condition of anonymity. “In the beginning it was Billy who made the running. Within a matter of weeks he convinced her that they should get married.” It was such a wild and passionate affair that they took compromising pictures of each other, which despite their fame they had developed locally and kept under lock and key for their future perusal. “Theirs was a possessive and intense love,” noted a friend from that time.
As was her pattern, Laura set about shaping herself to the new man in her life. When she was engaged to the lanky, urbane Jeff Goldblum, she neatly dovetailed into his lifestyle: driving a BMW, listening to jazz, collecting modern art, and eating and drinking only the finest foods and wines. After Billy breezed into her life, all that changed. When he planted a Confederate flag in the master bedroom, it was a cue for Laura to cast out her designer duds and her collection of French antiques and silverware, and buy herself a new wardrobe of checked shirts and cowboy boots. Out, too, went the BMW, and in came a Volvo station wagon to accommodate Billy Bob’s boys from his marriage to Pietra, William and Harry.
Laura threw out her Chet Baker and Charlie Parker in favor of what Billy called “shit-kicking music” by the likes of Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam (with whom he formed the film production company Cross River), and the bearded rock wizards ZZ Top. Indeed, when the band came to visit one day, their stretch limo was so long it couldn’t get in the drive of Laura and Billy Bob’s Coldwater Canyon home. There were other changes. Laura, whose eyesight had been affected after she was bitten by a poisonous insect as a child, was careful with her diet and ensured that Billy started to look after himself, seeing to it that he consumed organic vegetables, tofu, and lots of herbal drinks. For good measure she quietly removed all the hard liquor in the house. The results were plain to see in his public appearances. Under Laura’s care her boyfriend was looking healthier and fitter than he had in years.
He bought a $3.2 million home in Mandeville Canyon, near to luminaries such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg; and the couple’s remodeling plans, which included a nursery, were well under way by the time Billy arrived in Toronto. His life see
med settled—until that encounter in the elevator.
Fresh from filming the thriller A Simple Plan in Minnesota, he knew little about Angie before taking the gig as her screen husband. It was only when a friend pointed out that she was phenomenal in Gia that he watched the movie—and was suitably impressed. Even though their mutual agent, Geyer Kosinski, had once told Billy Bob that he and Angie would get along (as he also had told Angie and Leonardo DiCaprio), they had never met before. Angie later recalled that for some unknown reason she had deliberately avoided him at industry events in Hollywood.
Certainly if Laura had been concerned about a rival, it would not have been Angie but Billy Bob’s assistant, Odessa Whitmire, a pretty blonde from North Carolina who worshipped her boss. She would sit in her pajamas chatting with him late into the night when he stayed at the Sunset Marquis hotel, his rock-and-roll home away from home, where he worked on lyrics and songs for his debut album, Private Radio. But Laura, it seems, trusted her man. “If Laura was worried about Odessa, she never showed it,” notes an associate.
If anything, it was Angie’s agitated state of mind rather than her sexual allure that perturbed Laura. Like many others, she was aware of rumors circulating around Hollywood about Angie’s behavior on the set of Hell’s Kitchen in New York. During the filming of Pushing Tin, she and Billy Bob shared what director Mike Newell described as “a low-key friendship.” The English auteur was impressed by Angie’s focus and offbeat talent: “She is someone who would have fit in during Paris in the 1920s,” he recalled. “Very, very unordinary.” The only time Billy Bob’s and Angie’s behavior raised eyebrows was at the end of filming, in late April 1998, when they visited Daemon Rowanchilde’s tattoo boutique, Urban Primitive, in downtown Toronto. Billy Bob had a couple of names covered up on his hip and arm with a new energy wave design, while Angie also received energy waves just below her navel. It was an intimate moment, physically and emotionally. Angie has not only linked tattoos with positive events in her life but has also confessed that she finds the physical act of tattooing sexually arousing, saying in particular that the heavy rattle of the needle turns her on. “It gives her a sexual buzz,” notes a fellow aficionado. The effect is similar to that of cutting. When her skin was pierced she would enjoy an endorphin rush and feel spaced out, calm after the storm of emotions swirling inside her.
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 18
