Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  Long before she started searching for a special-needs child, Angie excitedly told a “stunned” Mick Jagger that she planned to adopt a Native American baby, whom she would name after him as a celebration of their relationship. How serious she was remains an open question. “She was just teasing him and messing with his head,” argues Lauren Taines. Angie did go along with Jagger when he invited her to the home of record producer Richard Perry to watch the Lennox Lewis–Evander Holyfield fight in November 1999, Angie amused and not a little jealous about the fact that whenever she left the room, actress Farrah Fawcett was “crawling all over” her date for the night.

  With Angie immersed in moviemaking, her mother did much of the administrative spadework in the search for baby “Mick Jagger,” although this was not her strong suit. Marche and Lauren attended a Native American awards ceremony in 1999 in the hope of making contacts with a suitable adoption agency. Thanks to the help of activist, musician, and poet John Trudell, whom Marche had met years earlier, she was introduced to comedian Charlie Hill, whose wife, Leonora, works with a Native American adoption agency. They arranged to meet at the Earth, Wind & Flour café in Santa Monica to talk through the mechanics of adoption, whereupon Marche realized that the process was complicated. If Angie wished to adopt a Native American child, she first would have to prove lineage linking the Bertrand or Voight family to an indigenous tribe. If she could not, she could only foster a child and even then would be obliged to raise the infant within Native traditions. As a devout Catholic, Marche eventually came to balk at these strictures and to gently discourage Angie from taking this route. For a time, however, Marche persevered, discovering, with John Trudell’s help, that the Bertrand family, who descended from the original French settlers in Quebec, Canada, had slender links to the Haudenosaunee Iroquois tribe. By then the moment had passed and Angie was looking elsewhere.

  As much as Angie might complain about her father in private, she was opinionated but not confrontational, playing the obedient daughter when they met socially. On these occasions she relied on her brother, James, to be her wingman, brother and sister giving each other support in dealing with their overbearing father. In spite of their differences, she had Christmas lunch with her father at his favorite Beverly Hills restaurant and even sent him a Christmas card of her wearing a cowboy hat. The black-and-white Polaroid picture was taken during the same session when she was tattooed with Billy Bob’s name.

  “Her bark was always worse than her bite,” recalls a friend. It was not only with her father that she slid around awkward issues. After the Hollywood premiere of The Talented Mr. Ripley in December, the film’s star Jude Law invited Angie and other friends, including model Kate Moss, to his hotel suite for drinks. Angie was furious that Kate Moss had been invited, knowing that she had recently had an affair with her ex-husband, Jonny Lee Miller, and had been engaged to Johnny Depp. Even though Angie had been “married but dating” during her time with Miller, Angie threatened to punch Kate if she dared to show her face in the hotel suite. The willowy model duly appeared in the company of Jude Law. Rather than confront her, Angie left the room.

  While Angie preferred her brother to be by her side when she tackled their father, their relationship was complex, at once mutually dependent yet detached. Angie and her brother were welded forever as guardians of the story of their lives, reinforcing each other’s memories. “They were always together; they hung out as a team,” recalled their father. “Angie cared so much for Jamie, and Jamie was always taking care of her.” While they had formed a profound and loving bond of support during their parents’ difficult divorce, gradually the differing trajectories of their careers shifted the balance of power between them. When they were children, James was the one expected to be a star, Angie the neglected also-ran, always fighting for oxygen inside the family. When Jamie won the George Lucas award for his filmmaking as a student and Angie struggled as an actor, it seemed that they were running true to type. For all their much-vaunted closeness, while James was studying at the University of Southern California and Angie worked on her career they hardly spoke for three years. Like his mother, James was not a self-starter, always waiting for someone else, usually his father, to give him a helping hand. By the time he finished college, Angie was way up the ladder, and their roles were reversed. The young boy who identified with Linus now had his tough-minded, ambitious sister as his security blanket—and paymaster.

  Smart but shy, James loved basking in the glow of his sister’s stardom. In her own way she smothered him with kindness and concern, sometimes humiliating and belittling him along the way. For example, when they were at a party in the Hollywood Hills with numerous fellow actors, Angie loudly announced to the assembled throng: “My brother and I are going to get married.” Her statement so shocked other partygoers that one actor, who had been on the set with James while he waited for his father to get him a role in the movie Rosewood, was moved to shout: “Are you out of your fucking mind? Don’t say such ridiculous shit.” Those in her circle were well aware of the “weird” interaction between brother and sister, seeing how James hung around his sister and was resentful of anyone else who talked to her. Yet when he had girlfriends, she was equally disapproving: She did not like that his waitress girlfriend, Leanne, for example, and felt that he should pay court to her. Of course, it was different when Angie was in a relationship, notably during her marriage to Jonny Lee Miller. Then she rarely if ever saw or spoke with her brother.

  When she flew to Sydney, Australia, to promote The Bone Collector in November 1999, she took her brother and a few friends along for the ride. One night she went for dinner to actor Sam Neill’s home, spending the evening with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. When she returned to the hotel she said, tongue in cheek, “Do you know, if Tom Cruise and my brother came out as a couple, I think the public would embrace them.” While her off-the-wall comments baffled her small group of friends, they were consistent with her impulse to provoke.

  The first sign was at the Golden Globes ceremony in January 2000, where she won her third award in a row for her supporting role in Girl, Interrupted. As she clutched her statuette, her hair an odd shade of gray, she stood on the stage on the arm of her brother. “I had to bring my brother up here,” she said in her acceptance speech. “He just had to see the view from up here.” On the one hand, this could be seen as a kind, thoughtful gesture; in another light it was a professional humiliation, a tacit admission that big brother didn’t have the acting chops to earn his own award.

  In March she flew back from Mexico, where she was filming Original Sin (originally titled Dancing in the Dark) as part of her earlier agreement with Gia director Michael Cristofer, to attend the Academy Awards. When James Coburn announced that Angie had won the award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Girl, Interrupted, Angie, looking every inch the goth vampire of her youth with long black hair extensions and a Cruella De Vil black dress, was overwhelmed; she sincerely did not expect to win and had no victory speech prepared. She hugged her tearful brother, his own hair bleached blonde in what seemed to be a joint style statement, and kissed him on the mouth before making her way to the stage. “God, I’m so surprised no one’s ever fainted up here,” she told the audience at the Shrine Auditorium. “I’m in shock. And I’m so in love with my brother right now. He just held me and said he loved me. And I know he’s so happy for me. . . . Winona, you’re amazing. And Whoopi, everybody. My family for loving me. Geyer Kosinski, my mom, who’s the most brave, beautiful woman I’ve ever known. And my dad, you’re a great actor, but you’re a better father. And Jamie, I have nothing without you. You’re the most amazing man I’ve ever known, and I love you.” For once she broke her no-crying rule before leaving the stage.

  This was the expressive hors d’oeuvre before the sensational main course. After the ceremony the couple made their way hand in hand along the red carpet, James clutching his sister’s award and proudly posing with it, looking as triumphant as if it were his own. H
ollywood was left gasping for breath, as gossips pondered the possibility that Angie and her brother had an incestuous relationship. Original sin indeed, or as a New York tabloid put it, SMOOCHY JOLIE AND BRO TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT. In another assessment, writer Chrissy Iley was struck less by the sexuality than by Angie’s deeper cravings. “It’s all about attention, calculated effect and wild abandon coming from the soul of the needy and the already abandoned.” Unrepentant, they later enjoyed another swooning, openmouthed kiss at the Vanity Fair party.

  Angie made an effort to douse the flames of the tabloid firestorm. “I didn’t snog my brother,” she said. “I wanted an Oscar my whole life—my father had one. Me and my brother had a very difficult upbringing. We both survived a lot together and it meant a lot that he supported me my whole life. And in that moment, you reach to kiss somebody and you end up kissing their mouth. Who cares? It wasn’t like we had our mouths open, it wasn’t some romantic kiss.”

  Members of her circle, who had witnessed the intense interaction between brother and sister, were rather more cynical, seeing the symbolism in Angie’s stark black outfit. “It was the kiss of a vampire,” observed a friend from that time. “She drained the blood out of any career James had. It was the kiss of death for his dreams of being an actor.” Instead James was forever imprinted on the public imagination for this one titillating act. While neither brother nor sister would ever acknowledge it, a psychologist might well argue that her swooping kiss was an unconscious moment of revenge for the childhood years of living in her brother’s shadow. The fact that he avoided his sister for some months after the incident perhaps reflects his annoyance and confusion.

  In the immediate aftermath James was both irritated and coyly teasing with the media about what was really going on in his sister’s life. Gossipmongers were looking in all the obvious places, but had chosen the wrong target. Indeed, if they had gone to the Sunset Marquis hotel, where Angie went to celebrate her Oscar win, they would have seen her and the pajama-clad Billy Bob Thornton sitting outside amid the lush shrubbery talking and whatever until the early hours. Days after the ceremony, James Haven told writer Elizabeth Snead that Angie had a “special someone,” which would leave those implying an incestuous relationship looking ridiculous. Just to confuse matters, though, James averred that he was shortly going to get his first tattoo. Naturally, it would be his sister’s name.

  As a sly coda to this episode, Original Sin director Michael Cristofer filmed a scene, deliberately or not, in which Angie, a beautiful seductress, is watching a play from a box in the theater. Onstage, Faust, played by her brother, looks over to her and says: “Who was it sent her to her ruin, I or you?”

  When she transformed herself from vampire to vamp, returning to Mexico to resume filming the day after her Oscar win, Cristofer, probably Angie’s most sensitive director, tried to ensure that she did not fall into the same psychological slump that had followed her previous successes, notably her suicidal drift after finishing Gia. Cristofer and Angie’s costar Antonio Banderas assembled the cast and crew and, with the help of a mariachi band, serenaded her as she lay sleeping in her trailer. When she emerged bleary-eyed, the crowd of well-wishers each gave her a red rose to celebrate her victory. When all was said and done, Angie stood there with two hundred roses in her arms. “Everybody was emotional. It was kind of like I was their little girl,” she later told Premiere magazine. “I felt like the little girl was going to survive this business.”

  It was not just her psychological state but her medical condition that Cristofer was monitoring closely. During the making of the movie, Angie and her Hollywood addict friend made a serious attempt to wean themselves off heroin. It was a painful, painstaking, and very difficult journey, her friend taking two years to get clean. Her friend even moved from Los Angeles to keep away from temptation. Angie did not have that luxury. Not only was she working on Original Sin, but she was also on a short list of one to play the lead in a big-budget action movie, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, based on a favorite computer game of her ex-husband’s. “Jonny used to play Tomb Raider all the time, and I used to compete with this woman,” said Angie. “Taking on this part is a woman’s revenge, isn’t it?” The role appealed on a number of other levels, too; at last she would be playing the good girl, the clean girl, the posh girl. “When they called me I nearly fell over,” she recalled. “It’s like, ‘Oh God, it’s the woman we all compete with.’ ” Even better, Lara was the beloved daughter of a strong but doting father—a relationship that must have appealed to Angie. Equally important for the girl who took pleasure in kicking famous swordsmen to the curb, Lara Croft allowed her to beat men at their own games. She was destined to be Hollywood’s first-ever big-box-office, all-action heroine. Even better than the movie’s $7 million payday was the realization that she was now muscling in on territory traditionally patrolled by the likes of Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Her drugs versus her ambition; the struggle was prolonged and difficult.

  “Being addicted to heroin is not the same as being an addict where their compulsive behavior rules their life,” observes Candy Finnegan, a professional interventionist. Angie seems to have been in the former category, a functioning heroin user.

  The symptoms of heroin withdrawal are often compared to those of a bad case of flu, with watery eyes and nose, dilated pupils, muscle cramps, bone pain, and an aching body, together with diarrhea, vomiting, and loss of appetite. An addict suffers from acute cravings, especially at the three-day stage, and these are often accompanied by severe depression and suicidal behavior that can last for weeks. It is the psychological need that usually reels an addict back into using the drug again. Even taking heroin substitutes like methadone or OxyContin merely ameliorates the condition. Angie had some methadone in liquid form but, as her friend testifies, she really struggled to wean herself off heroin, some days staying clean and then sliding back. The only real solution for any addict, according to a Hollywood-based addiction specialist speaking on condition of anonymity, is to undergo medical treatment and to do “profound daily work” similar to the twelve-step program for alcoholics. There is no sign that Angie, not a joiner by nature, ever went down that path or needed to. “There is no such thing as ‘was a heroin addict’; it does not exist in nature,” argues the specialist. “A heroin addict has just three options: Continue, find a replacement, or undergo treatment and daily work.”

  Angie’s father later told Access Hollywood that he made another intervention, flying to the film set in Mexico when he heard whispers on the Hollywood grapevine that she was in bad shape. When he arrived, he discovered that she was in the hospital with high blood pressure and that doctors feared she might have an aneurysm, a rupture of the artery going to the brain or the heart. Once her medical condition was stabilized and she was well enough to continue filming, her father was happy to learn that a doctor trained in psychiatry would oversee her detox program during her stay in Mexico.

  It didn’t help her equanimity that Angie, who played a seductress, literally, to die for, was romantically linked to her leading man, Antonio Banderas. That his wife, Melanie Griffith, and child were on set, too, did little to stem the gossip. Angie told Larry King that she found the accusations “ridiculous, insulting, awful, and disgusting. . . . It’s probably one of the worst things I’ve ever felt accused of,” she said, knowing whose name was tattooed below her bikini line. While Banderas may not have featured on her horizon, she was being somewhat economical with the truth when she told writer John Millar in March 2000 that romance was not a part of her life. “I’m not dating anybody and haven’t been. I’m completely celibate and single. I don’t know what a date really is. I have a lot of buddies but I haven’t had anyone special since Jonny.” Try telling that to Messrs Jagger, Hutton, and Thornton.

  In the spring of 2000 Laura Dern and her fiancé finally moved into their remodeled home in Mandeville Canyon. Shortly after settling in, Laura invited some of her Hollywood friends, nota
bly Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox, and a heavily pregnant Kelly Preston—she gave birth to Ella Bleu on April 3, 2000—to her new home for a painting party. Each woman had a canvas set up in the kitchen with paints and brushes. The idea was that they would all express themselves. When a hill rat started crawling down the kitchen range hood, the mood of creative self-improvement gave way to screams of terror, with Kelly Preston grabbing a broom and trying to push the rat back up the chimney. When the party ended in disarray, Laura Dern saw the unwelcome visitor as a dire omen. Nonetheless, she was desperately in love with Billy Bob, the couple seen out and about at numerous low-key social events in Hollywood.

  At the end of March Laura was due to fly to Chicago to play a sexy siren who seduces a dentist played by Steve Martin in the comedy Novocaine. The problem was that Billy Bob, the inherently chauvinist Southern gentleman, didn’t want her to do the movie, fearing that Laura, who had a tendency to follow the traditional Hollywood pattern of falling for her leading men, would end up romancing the then single comedian. He was jealous, plain and simple, his fears spilling over into bouts of anger and unfair jibes that she was simply a gold digger after his money. Dern was in a bind. She wanted to make the movie, yet was worried about Billy Bob and his jealous moods. Eventually she flew to Chicago in a state of some anxiety.