She had every reason to be nervous. Around this time a well-known TV host was arriving at the Raffles L’Ermitage and met Angie as she was coming out of the elevator. She was on the phone and in a hurry. After a brief exchange of pleasantries she said: “I’m trying to find this guy I kinda know because I’m kinda horny right now.” And off she went into the night, looking for Billy Bob.
TEN
People like Angelina don’t have attractions, they have addictions.
—PSYCHOLOGIST IRIS MARTIN
Just about the only thing staying level was her Greyhound cocktail, a potent mix of grapefruit juice and vodka, as Angelina Jolie swayed and sashayed her way through the lobby of the Sunset Marquis hotel. She was a woman on a manhunt, and her quarry was Billy Bob Thornton. She quickly proved herself to be an equal opportunity seductress, however. Now firmly in the role of Bonny Castle, the ruthless, amoral femme fatale in her latest movie, Original Sin, she was breathing alcohol fumes but oozing sex and seduction. Certainly Billy Bob’s observation that actors’ roles often reflect what is going on in their real lives was never more apt. Spotting Billy’s spiritual healer and registered masseuse, Ingrid Earle, about to leave the hotel, Angelina asked if she knew where Billy was. Then Angie gave Ingrid the once-over and drawled that if she saw her giving Billy Bob a massage, she wouldn’t be able to keep her hands to herself. She was clearly implying an invitation to a ménage. Ingrid smiled and explained that the only happy ending in her work was spiritual. “When she was coming on to me she was very insistent,” she recalls.
Angie’s pursuit of Billy Bob became increasingly frenzied during the winter of 2000. During breaks in her own filming in Mexico, Angie flew to Los Angeles or to Reno to be with her lover, who was filming the comedy Waking Up in Reno, about the redneck world of giant truck rallies, with Charlize Theron and Natasha Richardson. More often, though, she hung around the Sunset Marquis hotel, knowing that Billy Bob was making music in the studio basement. Sometimes, when his cell phone was switched off or he was unavailable for some reason, Angie frantically called anyone and everyone: the hotel concierge and manager, his business associates, friends, and even staff at his new home in Mandeville Canyon. Though Angie was obsessively jealous of his sometime assistant, Odessa Whitmire, who now mainly worked for actor Ben Affleck, she called her frequently to locate Billy Bob. Angie was perhaps right to be wary of the blonde beauty from South Carolina, who was heard ending phone calls to her boss with the words “I love you.”
During this time Angie frequently stayed at the hotel—room 102 was her favorite—spending days in her suite. Such was her notoriety that on one occasion, even though she had requested privacy and housekeeping staff were ordered not to disturb her, the hotel management was worried enough to get in touch with her father after she had remained behind locked doors for several days straight without even contacting room service. When Voight arrived at the hotel, they unlocked the door to her ground-floor suite. Angie emerged disheveled and, according to one witness, “out of it,” but otherwise unharmed.
Once again her emotional tumult and obsession had its roots in her early childhood, the profound unknown wound the emotional jet rockets that propelled her journey. As psychologist Iris Martin observes: “Abandonment makes people go nuts. It means that the minute you become close to someone and you start to have an attachment to them, you constantly think they are going to leave you. So you harass them with phone calls, you show up in the middle of the night, you confront them at work and talk to your friends incessantly about them.”
At the same time, Angie deliberately courted disaster by hooking up with men like Jagger and Thornton, who could prove their devotion to her only by the act of betrayal, Jagger by cheating on Jerry Hall and Thornton by leaving Laura Dern. This was her version of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, the victors by definition losers. On some level, their behavior confirmed her preexisting contempt of men, “proving” them to be as unworthy of love and respect as her father.
Yet Billy Bob had one advantage over all her other suitors. As she confessed to her addict friend: “When I am with Billy, I don’t need drugs.” Swapping her desire for heroin for an infatuation for the actor-musician, Angie saw him as her white knight, her savior. Entirely understandable, says Iris Martin. “People like Angelina don’t have attractions, they have addictions.”
In the midst of this emotional frenzy, Billy Bob was playing it very cool. After a while, though, his dismissive “she’s just a kid” stance no longer fooled anyone. “Come on, buddy,” remarked a girlfriend. “You know Angie is crazy about you. I’m not a lesbian, but I would sleep with her.” Given his own insecurities, Billy Bob liked to be surrounded by a harem of female admirers. Not only was he living with Laura Dern, but he enjoyed the company of Odessa Whitmire, was in contact with air-traffic controller Sheila McCombe, and regularly made romantic overtures to other women.
He was now about to make Angie his harem of one, asking her to have his name tattooed where everyone could see it. She did so a few days after her triumph at the Oscars in March, albeit, according to her tattooist Friday Jones, with some reluctance.
For all her pursuit of Billy Bob, those in her circle insist that it was he who issued the ultimatum for her to marry him. Otherwise, he would go back to Laura Dern—who didn’t yet realize that she had been ditched. It didn’t take long for the news to leak, however, the New York Daily News reporting on April 7 that Billy Bob and Angelina were now an item, as evidenced by the tattoo on her arm.
Laura Dern’s mother, Diane Ladd, responded with understandable shock. “Billy Bob Thornton is a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Billy Bob told me he wants my daughter to be his wife and I know they’ve talked about having kids. I don’t know how to make sense of it.” Meanwhile, Laura’s father, Bruce, was one of the stars of Billy Bob’s latest movie, All the Pretty Horses, although he was not invited to the Los Angeles bowling alley where Matt Damon, Penélope Cruz, and other costars of the film joined Angie and Billy Bob in a celebration tournament in April.
Diane Ladd would have been even more confused if she had known that Angie and Billy Bob had decided to take a long road trip that echoed the road trip of Daddy and Them, the movie in which he and Laura Dern played a white trash couple with a booze problem. In late April, after Angie finished filming Original Sin in Mexico, they rented a Chevy Tahoe—they found the name endlessly amusing—and spent a few days driving two thousand miles, first to Las Vegas, then to Flagstaff, Arizona, then to Billy Bob’s home in Little Rock, Arkansas, before ending up in Nashville, where Billy Bob planned to lay down tracks for his debut album, Private Radio. “We had a really great time, stopping in motels along the road,” she recalled, saying that the couple had enjoyed themselves so much they considered buying their own motel. During the weeklong road trip, Angie was in full trashy mode, feasting on junk food at roadside diners. “I’d insist on stopping at McDonald’s every half an hour to get a Happy Meal,” she was keen to point out, though both had, at some time, suffered from eating disorders. Their time together was as intense as it was illusory, a temporary escape from Hollywood and the real world.
As Angie was shortly going to be out of the country for six months, their romantic road trip effectively constituted not only their honeymoon but—though they didn’t know it at the time—also one of the longest periods they would ever spend together. There was one problem. They weren’t married. On April 24, while they were away, Angie’s lawyer petitioned the court to finalize her divorce from Jonny Lee Miller. This left the coast clear for them to wed. When Angie left Billy Bob in his Nashville studio, they were planning to spend a couple of nights together when he hosted the Country Music Awards in Los Angeles on May 3. Before that moment madness lay.
While he was recording his album, she intended to return to Los Angeles. By now media speculation about the couple was rife. On April 28 E! entertainment correspondent Ted Casablanca, citing sources in the Jolie camp, announced that they had eloped. Hold your pr
etty horses, responded Billy Bob’s folks. “They are not married and not engaged,” said his spokesman, as Billy Bob threw himself into his music, his first love and best distraction. He says that his OCD is such that when he is recording he cannot take a break or stop until a track is as perfect as he imagined it. He does not take calls for anything or from anyone—apparently including his increasingly frantic new lover.
After the wild intensity of their road trip, his silence was deafening. Nor were his spokesman’s public pronouncements reassuring. Endless fears assailed the actress: that he had cold feet, that he had gone back to Laura Dern, or even that he had died.
In her heightened state, struggling to stay off heroin and wrestling with her addiction to Billy Bob, Angie went to pieces. She was used to being in full control of a romantic script in which the voice on the other end of the phone pleaded with her to love him or at least to see him. Billy Bob’s inaccessibility unnerved her. Where was her white knight when she needed him most?
Her account of the next few hours is contradictory, incoherent, and inexplicable. “I ended up going crazy because I thought I had actually lost him,” she later told Larry King. In another version of the incident, however, she said that she had had a huge fight with a male friend—though not Billy Bob—and feared that this unnamed friend had been killed or injured as a result of their argument. Angie called her mother, who was alarmed by her daughter’s hysterical mood, especially since she was stuttering for the first time in her life.
Angie flew from Nashville to Los Angeles, where Marcheline met her at the airport and they saw a doctor. At Angie’s urging, they decided it would be best if she were admitted to the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the UCLA Medical Center for seventy-two hours so that she could be monitored. They knew about the place from drummer Joey Covington, who had spent time there following his suicide attempt. On reflection Angie now feels that she had some kind of nervous breakdown provoked by her grief over the possibility of losing Billy Bob. As Dr. Franziska De George observes: “With Billy Bob she must have felt the hope of finally being seen, of opening a door to look into herself and come out. Emotionally she is like a baby. When she couldn’t access him, she was left locked in torment again.” She considers Angie’s decision to place herself under medical supervision rather than resort to her “tried and tested disassociative mechanisms”—taking drugs, cutting herself, and toying with suicide—to be a “tremendous progression, truly admirable.”
In a surreal instance of life imitating art, Angie found herself in a ward with a group of troubled young girls, many of whom had seen her Oscar-winning performance in Girl, Interrupted. “In some weird way it’s nice to know that everybody’s insane,” she recalled.
Angie’s breakdown arose from her inability to “self-soothe” her fears in the way that most people are able to do. As Iris Martin observes: “We all self-soothe by going to the mother within, and she doesn’t have that infrastructure. It is one of the reasons why she is a brilliant actor. Ordinary people don’t lose themselves that easily in a person or a process.”
Eventually Marcheline located Billy Bob and, against Angie’s wishes, asked him to see her. In their first conversation on the phone, she was still barely able to speak and couldn’t stop crying. They were reunited shortly before the Country Music Awards, her trauma further bonding the couple.
On May 5, 2000, within twenty-four hours of his arrival in Los Angeles, they had tied the knot in Las Vegas. For $189 they reportedly bought the Beginning package at the famous Little Church of the West wedding chapel, where six thousand quickie ceremonies take place each year. Billy Bob wore jeans and a baseball hat, Angelina a blue sleeveless sweater and jeans, walking down the aisle to the traditional strains of “Here Comes the Bride” and carrying a rose and carnation bouquet. Watched by the best man and witness, Billy Bob’s cinematographer friend Harve Cook (curiously, her mother was not present), the bride promised to love and honor but not to obey her director boyfriend. The wedding ring that Billy Bob placed on Angie’s finger was almost an afterthought, purchased for $29 from a woman selling jewelry in a bar. Duly betrothed, they walked down the aisle as man and wife to the sound of the Righteous Brothers singing “Unchained Melody.” “The wedding was perfect for us,” said Billy Bob later. “It was cheesy and beautiful and profound and intense and lighthearted and humorous. It was everything.” For a wedding present he gave her a white rat called Fat Harry.
Soon the world knew what had been apparent to the cast and crew of Original Sin. As Antonio Banderas observed: “It was very obvious that this girl was in love. When somebody’s in love, you don’t hide it. I was very happy for her because actually I like Billy.” The need for acknowledgment, for everyone’s good wishes, was strong for the new bride, who was now stepmother to Billy Bob’s sons, William and Harry. “We were becoming a family. We wanted everybody’s blessings, [and] when I couldn’t be near him I started to go nuts,” she recalled. She said later that her “whole family” helped pack her bag the night before she went to Vegas. “They were so happy,” she told Us Weekly.
Her brother, whom she called the minute she walked out of the chapel, wished her happiness and hoped that “this [was] it.” A few weeks later, he described himself as Billy Bob’s brother-in-law, “for now.” Her father, typically, was blindsided, surprised that she had tied the knot with a man he hadn’t met. When a writer for Empire magazine inquired if Billy Bob had asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage, “a long, uncomfortable pause” ensued. Angie was more upbeat, telling writer Elizabeth Snead: “My dad likes him. My dad loves me so much he’s never seen me so happy.” When he finally met his son-in-law, Jon Voight gave him and Angie wedding presents of rings, poems, and a self-penned drawing of the couple, and he later helped them move into their new home.
If Voight was surprised, their friends were perplexed by their impulsive behavior. One of Billy Bob’s friends, who heard the news on the radio, left him a message on his answering machine saying, “Dude, I told you to fuck her, not marry her!” Lauren Taines later discussed the union with Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, predicting, “Trust me, this girl is going to break Billy Bob’s heart.” Billy Bob himself later told friends that he had never been so impulsive in his life. (Or, he vowed, would be again.) But no one’s shock and misgivings could touch those of Billy Bob’s fiancée.
Laura Dern has a reputation in Hollywood for crying ugly. Her face contorts into a grimace, and racking sobs convulse her body. What she did on-screen was nothing compared to the way she howled in pain as she absorbed the fact that Billy Bob had left her for Angie.
She was filming the comedy Novocaine in Chicago when she heard the news from a tabloid reporter. “I went to work one morning and he ran off and married Angelina Jolie,” she told friends in disbelief. She had never for a moment seen it coming; their last conversations had been about starting a family together and her upcoming role in The Gift, the movie he had written with her firmly in mind. Their lives seemed just peachy, Billy Bob quoted in the May issue of Men’s Journal as saying, “I’m now happily involved with someone who’s my best friend.” A month later he was singing a different tune in Us Weekly: “I want her to be happy. But it was over. That’s all.” The sorest part was that she had been left for the girl she regularly babysat for on Saturday nights. Sitting in her trailer in Chicago, she told friends: “How can I do a comedy when my whole life has been destroyed?”
As the enormity of his betrayal began to sink in, so, too, did the practical reality. Their house was in his name, so she could not live there. Her old rented home in Coldwater Canyon, which she had intended to buy before she met Billy Bob, was now sold. She was effectively homeless. For some time, too, the star of the kinky thriller Blue Velvet had experienced the creepy nightmare of being stalked, forcing her to engage the services of celebrity security expert Gavin de Becker. The breakup with Billy Bob left her in a bind; she wasn’t a big moneymaking star and yet, because of the stalker, was not able to live in
a regular, unprotected house.
While in Chicago she met Oprah Winfrey and poured out her tale of woe. The talk-show host was outraged and encouraged her to sue Billy Bob, even putting Laura in touch with the legal team that had represented her during her long fight with the Texas beef industry over remarks she made on her show about mad cow disease. Laura followed Oprah’s advice and sued her former partner, eventually arriving at a confidential settlement that ensured that she could never mention him in interviews in return for a lump sum payment, estimated at around $800,000.
At the time, though, nothing could compensate her for the torment she was going through. It was a struggle trying to be funny on set. To make matters worse, she discovered that Billy Bob had ordered the security codes to be changed on the locks to their Mandeville Canyon home so that Laura could no longer gain access. While she had no wish to stay there—or, for that matter, to even see the place again—it contained all of her memorabilia, her prestigious movie awards, treasured photographs, and important business correspondence. The night before the locksmith was due to arrive, Laura Dern made urgent phone calls from Chicago to a handful of close friends, including Friends actress Courteney Cox and singer Sheryl Crow. In a late-night operation worthy of a Hollywood heist movie, they rolled up in their SUVs and proceeded to rifle through the house, taking everything Laura owned and cherished.
It was small consolation. When she returned to Beverly Hills in June, she was a changed woman. “She looked spent, like she had cried the life out of herself,” observed a friend. “She was still in love with Billy Bob and not ready to move on.” As she licked her wounds, she made sure that the tight-knit celebrity community knew that she was now homeless and living out of a suitcase, staying at the Four Seasons hotel, in Meg Ryan’s guesthouse, or with Sheryl Crow. “She played the victim card to the hilt,” recalled an associate.
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 23
