That month another suitor joined the queue. In late May 1999 Angie began filming Gone in Sixty Seconds, the Jerry Bruckheimer remake of the 1974 cult classic by H. B. Halicki in which ninety-seven cars were wrecked in ninety-five minutes. Actor Nic Cage earned $20 million as the former car thief about to pull off the ultimate heist, Angie considerably less as his singer-songwriter lover. It was an amusing juxtaposition: Angie drove around Hollywood in a battered pickup truck and didn’t think she could sing, whereas Cage was a classic car nut, in 1997 paying a world-record price at auction for a Lamborghini. While her financial rewards were not as considerable as those of her costar, her standing in this fickle trade was high enough that she was offered top billing along with Cage.
In an industry as byzantine and hierarchical as a medieval court, this was a signal honor. Perversely, she turned it down, choosing to be named alongside the other actors, who included Robert Duvall and Giovanni Ribisi. She made it clear that she enjoyed being treated as one of the boys, preferring the testosterone-fueled atmosphere to the estrogen energy of Girl, Interrupted. “I wanted to be around a lot of men,” she explained. “I’ve been around women in a mental institution for way too long.”
Certainly men wanted to be around her.
During the filming of Gone in Sixty Seconds, Nic Cage was constantly calling her apartment. She was amused rather than seduced by the preposterous spending of Nic, a Beverly Hills High School alumnus who lived in a faux castle on the edge of Los Angeles. One day she took Cage, then married to actress Patricia Arquette, on a trip to a discount store, Pick’n Save on Hollywood and Vine, to remind him how the other half still lived. It didn’t have the desired effect; he subsequently ended up buying a handful of tropical islands with his movie earnings.
It was not only Nic Cage who was circling her; Tim Hutton, Billy Bob Thornton, Jonny Lee Miller, and a lovelorn Mick Jagger still had her cell phone number on speed dial. In time they would be joined by Australian actor Russell Crowe, whom she met during the promotion for The Bone Collector. She kept her stable of men in different compartments, never letting on that each was an interchangeable part of her posse.
Despite the pack of A-listers beating a path to her door, she wasn’t particularly interested in the usual Hollywood gossip about who was dating whom. There were just two exceptions to her rule of studied indifference: Johnny Depp, whom she had adored since Edward Scissorhands, and golden boy Brad Pitt. For some reason Pitt intrigued her, and she closely quizzed a friend who had worked with him, eager to know what he was like. As a youngster, he had a reputation, rightly or wrongly, as a “stoner,” observed actor Ric Young and others. He was a guy with a quirky sense of humor who only seemed to date A-list celebrities, which merely served to pique her interest. “She never took any notice of the Hollywood scene,” recalls her friend, “so her interest in Brad was truly unusual.”
Regardless of her interest, Angie had enough suitors to worry about without encouraging more. While her girlfriends were concerned that she would get hurt by one of these notorious players, Angie had the insouciant confidence of a woman above the fray, not caring or feeling enough to get her heart broken. The psychology seemed clear: As a youngster she had witnessed her mother’s torment at her father’s hand, and now she was making it one woman’s mission to tame a team of top-class heartbreakers. Tame and break them she did, teasing them, tempting them, and then tossing them aside. She was also following the lead of her mother, who, after the split from Jon Voight, had been courted by the likes of Al Pacino, Burt Reynolds, and Warren Beatty. Both she and Angie clearly forgot the advice of actor Jacqueline Bisset, Marche’s friend and Angie’s godmother. As Jacqueline was fond of saying when one of her girlfriends dated a thespian: “Good God! Not him. He’s an actor! Never go out with an actor.”
Instead Angie quietly dated a rock star, keeping Mick Jagger on a string like the others, always wanting more. During this romantic dance, Angie’s father was the unwitting wallflower, oblivious to what was really going on. One day he was shopping with Angie in Saks Fifth Avenue in New York when Charlie Watts spotted her and came over to say hi. After he had gone, Jon Voight whispered to Angie: “Dark side, dark side; these people are a bad influence.” It was all Angie could do not to laugh. “Dad, if anybody is a bad influence on the Rolling Stones, I am.”
Her father had no idea just how bad. One night Angie took her Jumpin’ Jack Flash to a bondage club in New York, a venue complete with dungeons and rooms where guests played doctor, among other, darker games. During their visit, most likely to the Vault, a now-defunct club with a celebrity clientele, she told friends that they were all whipped. “That was Angie; wild and great fun to be with,” said her friend. “She might have said that she had slept with only four men, but she is a total sexual deviant.” Certainly Angie knew her way around the sadomasochist scene, later telling Time magazine’s Jeffrey Ressner about the night she dragged an agent from the Creative Artists Agency on a tour of Manhattan’s bondage clubs. “S and M focuses you on survival,” she explained. “It’s a weird cleansing of self.”
The keen blade of a knife and the sharp bite of a skillfully wielded whip; it was all of a piece for a girl attempting to connect with herself, to dull the primal pain of abandonment. At the same time, the elaborate routines of sadomasochism appealed to her sense of ritual, her love of drama. As Dr. Franziska De George observes: “The ritual is a carefully orchestrated experience designed to invoke specific feelings, which can be stopped at any time. This is like being in complete control of your life. You design an experience, and during that time you know exactly what is coming and what to do. It’s like predicting the future and handling it perfectly.”
Angie was always raising the bar for violence, testing the limits of herself and others. One night, when she was having trouble with a movie executive who was a fellow guest at the Raffles L’Ermitage Hotel, where she and a friend were staying so that they could smoke heroin, she ratcheted up the level of aggression after the initial flirtation developed into him stalking her. During one exchange, the executive jammed his foot against the door to stop her from closing it. Instantly she whipped out a tiny penknife and stabbed at his foot. That ended the confrontation—her clear enjoyment of this violent dance giving the impression that it was part of a perverse game she both loved and knew how to play.
As far as her circle of intimates was concerned, Mick Jagger was a glamorous if aged sideshow to the main event, her “official” boyfriend, Tim Hutton. Even so, they were worried that Hutton, fifteen years older than Angie and a notorious heartbreaker, would leave her as so much romantic roadkill should she actually succumb and fall for him. They need not have troubled themselves. While Hutton was clearly besotted with her, Angie’s heart, or more accurately her desires, lay elsewhere.
She made it clear that it was the name “Billy Bob Thornton” that she wanted tattooed way below her bikini line. As Gone in Sixty Seconds wrapped in early September, she began jonesing about it to tattoo artist Friday Jones, who had tattooed Angie a couple of years before. Having seen the mess Angie had made of her body by her self-inflicted, prison-style tattoos, Friday was not keen, thinking Angie’s decision would come back to haunt her. “I thought it was a crackpot idea,” recalls Friday. She resisted Angie’s entreaties for weeks but was finally worn down with her insistence. “You just don’t say no to Angie.”
On October 6, 1999, they arranged to meet at the Hollywood Hills home of a mutual friend, a married amateur photographer who regularly joined Angie to indulge in their craving to smoke heroin. While Friday reluctantly got to work, her friend took a series of black-and-white and color Polaroid pictures of Angie. As the needle cut into her skin, she lay on a couch languidly smoking a Marlboro cigarette, naked except for two black crosses made from electrical tape covering her nipples. Sensual rather than sexy, the pictures convey a sense of moody eroticism, reminiscent of Marianne Faithfull, the quintessential rock chick (and onetime love of Mick Jagger), in her decadent
prime.
Initially Friday wanted to use a light, fluid script that would match the contours of Angie’s body and could easily be removed or disguised. Angie was insistent on choosing the typescript Helvetica, a rigid and upright font, which was a very obvious, literally unavoidable statement. “I used a Japanese technique involving light gray ink in case she ever wanted to grow her pubic hair over the tattoo to disguise his name,” recalls Friday, who was also struck by how deeply Angie had scarred her inner thighs. “In my experience, cutters are often girls with absent fathers. They take out the emotional pain on themselves; it gives them a sense of being.” Friday’s experience suggested that cutting could evolve into an addiction to tattoos, clearly the direction toward which Angie was moving.
Angie saw tattoos as celebrating and marking important events in her life. As she says: “Usually all my tattoos came at a good time. A tattoo is something permanent, when you’ve made a self-discovery or something you’ve come to a conclusion about.” So the fact that she chose to mark her most intimate sexual area with Billy Bob’s name speaks volumes about her feelings for him.
In fact, Angie found herself in a romantic dilemma much sooner than Friday could ever have anticipated. The next day Tim Hutton called Angie from London and asked her to marry him. It was not the first time he had asked, but this particular invitation caught her unaware. For once Angie was at a loss for words—or a suitable response. She called her photographer friend for urgent advice. “What should I do? What should I do?” Angie wailed.
Her friend’s reply was matter-of-fact. “Buy yourself a pair of crotchless panties and keep the lights down low.”
It seems that Hutton’s offer was mere bravado, the last hurrah of a lover who knew he was on the way out. “She settled the score for all the women who had been hurt by him,” notes a girlfriend. Within short order he was romancing children’s book illustrator Aurore Giscard d’Estaing, niece of the former president of France, whom he married three months later, on January 21, 2000. Stories circulating in October that Angie broke down in tears over the breakup in front of director Penny Marshall while reading for her upcoming movie Riding in Cars with Boys were well wide of the mark.
Tears were alien terrain for Angie; the girl who disliked being hugged or touched only ever cried for the camera. Ironically, a couple of weeks later the dry-eyed girl who was turned on by testing limits and pushing buttons finally met her match: herself. The woman who could never go too far finally went too far—and fell off the emotional edge.
For the premiere of The Bone Collector in November 1999, Angie deliberately invited her lesbian girlfriend, Jenny Shimizu; her estranged husband but constant friend, Jonny Lee Miller; her brother, James Haven; and another friend, a fellow heroin user. To spice things up even more, she and her guests all shared the same hotel suite for the night. If she thought she was going to be the ringmaster in some weird interaction, she was in for a shock. During the night Jenny made a pass at Angie’s addict friend, in part to make Angie jealous. The ploy worked, perhaps too well. It was more than Angie could handle, “freaking out” at the emotional menagerie—ex-husband, lover, fellow addict, and brother—that confronted her. “For once she went too far and it all ended in tears. Hers,” noted her friend.
During this emotional carousel ride, there was one man in her life who refused to leave her alone: her father, even though their public displays of fond togetherness on the red carpet or in the media were largely a charade. When the cameras were pointed elsewhere, father and daughter maintained a hostile, sometimes belligerent, distance. In interviews they talked about working together—perhaps, suggested Angie, in a remake of the 1985 comedy Clue, based on the board game. Her father seemed taken with the thought, saying in another newspaper interview that it would be “great to play these really dopey characters, partially because we’re both taken so seriously now.” Angie even talked about the possibility of driving across the country in the Cannonball Run with her father.
In keeping with this mutual adoration society, she told Entertainment Weekly in November 1999: “We’ve found a great relationship now,” while Jon Voight was hoping that the day would soon come when his daughter was more famous than he was. “Angie and I are great friends and that fact is one of the joys of my life,” he told the Toronto Sun. As ever, Angie capped the love fest when she declared to a Scottish newspaper: “I actually hate Jolie. I would rather have been Voight.”
The reality was very different. In the well-worn narrative of Angie’s life, which she unveiled to anyone who cared to listen, her father could do no right, her mother no wrong. Her story, learned at her mother’s knee, was that her louse of a father had abandoned his wife and children for another woman, never paid child support, and effectively left the family destitute. Tattooed on Angie’s heart was this story of betrayal, neglect, and selfishness. One lurid tale, which she repeated often, was that shortly after her parents’ separation, her mother had been waiting by an elevator, and when the doors opened she saw her husband’s mistress on her knees performing oral sex. All the time Angie was growing up, she absorbed her mother’s tale of woe wholesale as Marche spent hours on the phone complaining about her ex-husband.
For most of her teenage years, Angie had deliberately kept her father out of the loop regarding her life. Now, thanks to the various media interviews she had given about her drug use, her cutting, and her suicidal tendencies, his eyes had been opened. Her father was particularly worried about her heroin use, seeing for himself the physical changes the drug wrought on her slim frame. He was not the only one to notice, both inside and outside the family. On one occasion James Haven found her unconscious on the floor of an apartment. His initial concern turned to alarm when he couldn’t wake her up. Eventually she revived, but it was a harsh insight into the unwholesome life she was leading.
Even casual observers could see she had problems. As Time magazine’s Jeffrey Ressner noted in November 1999 around the release of Girl, Interrupted: “The girl could use an interruption of protein. Her skin seems pasty, her face is gaunt and barely made up, and her famously full, pouty lips appear in need of Blistex.”
In arguably the most honest profile of her career, Esquire writer John H. Richardson described meeting her at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 1999 and, after two minutes of her undecipherable conversation, starting to look for track marks on her tattooed arms. “I feel very much like I’m dealing with a crazy person,” he wrote. “Half of what she says I can’t follow, it’s in some private language. Her sentences are like sheets of mist that start to evaporate the second they hit the open air.”
Many other celebrity profilers followed in Richardson’s uncertain footsteps, losing themselves in a meaningless swirl of mangled syntax, undecipherable thoughts, and unfinished sentences.
Although her father was determined to confront Angie about her health, she ignored his phone calls, destroyed his letters, and stayed at the homes of her friends or checked into local hotels to elude him. It became a sad game of hide-and-seek, father bouncing around town looking for his errant daughter, Angie ensconced with a girlfriend getting high on heroin. His friends believed that in desperation, he hired a private eye to find out where she was and what she was doing. When he discovered where she was staying, he would buy stuffed animals and leave them in the lobby of the hotel. After the bellman brought them to her, she would deliberately feed what she considered pathetic peace offerings to her friend’s eight-week-old pit bull, Bruno, who quickly chewed them to a pulp. It was symbolic. “You were never there for us growing up, so fuck you trying to have a relationship in our mid-twenties,” she said.
One evening Angie and her friend were smoking heroin in a suite at the Raffles L’Ermitage in Beverly Hills when there was a knock at the door. As they had recently ordered steak and red wine, they assumed it was room service. When Angie opened the door, it was her father, who was standing there in a camel coat. “Get out, get out, get out! I don’t want you here!” she s
creamed at him. He made a grab for her, but Angie pulled away. “Calm down, calm down,” he told her. He then asked Angie’s friend to leave so that he and Angie could have a confidential father/daughter conversation. She refused. “Don’t you have a father?” he asked plaintively. As her own father had abandoned the family when she was a youngster, she had no sympathy for Jon Voight. She stayed where she was.
Voight was at a loss as to what to do next. Running through his mind was how actor Martin Sheen had turned his son Charlie in to the authorities after he violated the terms of his probation by using drugs again. Martin Sheen, himself a recovering alcoholic, voiced a sentiment that had profound resonance with Angie’s father: “When a life is at stake and it’s your child, you become fearless in a lot of ways. You just become a fanatic.”
Finally Angie yelled: “Call security. Get him out of here.” Instead they reached a compromise, phoning her brother, James, to come over. Once James arrived, her father and Angie’s friend both left. “I knew she was safe, and I left,” he later told TV host Pat O’Brien, “but I shouldn’t have.”
Her father’s attempted interventions were mere distractions from the main pursuits in Angie’s life at the time—chasing the dragon and then surfing the Internet, shopping for a foreign special-needs baby on various adoption agency Web sites. It seems she wanted the most deprived child she could imagine, a desire that perhaps echoed her own unarticulated feelings of abandonment and damage. “She felt that she didn’t have a childhood and wanted to give a child the childhood she missed,” observed Franklin Meyer, who discussed her desire to adopt with her on numerous occasions. She was inspired in part by reading and talking about the African-American entertainer Josephine Baker, who adopted twelve multi-ethnic orphans, whom she called her “rainbow tribe,” as a protest against racism in America in the 1950s and ’60s. Described by novelist Ernest Hemingway as “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw,” Baker was much more than a celebrated singer and dancer who mesmerized audiences in Paris with her near nude performances at the Folies Bergère. During World War II she worked for the French resistance, her bravery rewarded with the Croix de Guerre. Married four times, with numerous women lovers, including the artist Frida Kahlo, such was her standing that following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. she was asked by his widow to lead the civil rights movement. She declined, worried about the safety of her rainbow nation. Her enthralling, vibrant, and committed life would form a template for Angie’s own future direction.
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 21
