A few weeks later, she was casually browsing through CDs at the now-defunct Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard when she had a bizarre spiritual experience. As she was looking at a Ben Harper CD, an angel appeared before her, hovering above the “A–M” aisle in the pop/rock section and telling Laura that the Californian musician was her true soul mate. “Call him, call him,” the angel implored, before fading away. Laura did as she was bid, or rather, in the way of Hollywood, she asked her publicist to call his publicist.
Neither Laura Dern nor the bossy angel seemed any more troubled by the awkward fact that Harper was married, with two toddlers, than Angie or Billy Bob had been about his engagement to Laura. Dern and Harper duly hooked up, officially in the fall of 2000 when he was separated, and within weeks she was pregnant, giving birth to Ellery on August 21, 2001. It was doubtless a wild rumor that when Harper’s wife, Joanna, discovered her husband’s tryst with Laura, she stormed backstage at one of his concerts and punched him in the nose.
For her part, Laura was transformed by the new man in her life. “Something that one might have thought would destroy her made her stronger,” said her friend singer Melissa Etheridge. “When she told me she was pregnant [with Ellery], she was very proud and very excited. She was saying, ‘This is the next new chapter in my life.’ ”
No sooner had Angelina opened a new chapter in her life than she promptly closed it. She arrived in London in early May, days after her marriage. The carefree road trip was soon a distant memory, a rather dazed Billy Bob back again in his Nashville recording studio while Angie was instantly cocooned by the studio, the Lara Croft producers keen to protect their $100 million investment. Much was riding on a girl who was struggling to come off heroin, and who had been a patient in a mental hospital just a few days earlier. Nerves were not helped by the fact that the script was not yet finished and wouldn’t be until June. Director Simon West, whose only previous writing experience had been for a Budweiser commercial, was frantically reshaping and rewriting three previous attempts by teams of scriptwriters. At least that left plenty of time for Angie to get in shape—and get in character.
Angie was met at Heathrow by the burly tattooed figure of Mickey Brett, the former bodyguard of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, hired to protect the studio as much as the actress. He was under instructions to report any misdemeanors, as were all members of the new court surrounding Angie. As part of her contract, she was under an eleven o’clock curfew, a production executive explaining: “She’s just not allowed to go out on a tear. She knows the score, but the curfew is just to protect everyone.” Often movie underwriters insist that leading actors take drug tests and have physical exams before they will insure the production. While it is not clear whether this rule was invoked for Lara Croft, Angie had to be healthy and in top shape because she was doing most of her own stunts. She had her own one-woman boot camp, which included a nutritionist; a dresser; two personal trainers, including Josh Saltzman, who got Sarah, Duchess of York, into shape; three stunt doubles; a judo and boxing instructor; a body double; a makeup designer; and a dialect coach to round out her vowels so that she spoke just like Lara Croft, a sexy yet wholesome upper-class English archaeologist who lived in a mansion but could get down and dirty with the best.
Brilliant, tough, witty, and voluptuous, Lara Croft embodied the qualities of the “other girl” whom Angie had long aspired to be. For her new film role, she had to be positive, bright, focused, and confident. Edgy and wicked, too—but in a wholesome way. Even Lara’s sexual appeal was strictly PG-13, focusing on her ample bosom and tight shorts. “She enjoys being a lady, but there’s a side to her that just wants to get free and wild and dirty and do something dangerous,” Angie said of her new persona. “There’s a part of me that wants to be like Lara Croft. There’s a part of me that is Lara Croft.”
For the Method actor in Angie, this was her rehab role, the best chance she would ever have of getting clean. She was forced to enjoy a veritable feast of cold turkey. Not only had she given up heroin, but cigarettes, sugar, and booze were off-limits, too. Vitamins, kickboxing, and yoga were her new diet, with side dishes of bungee ballet, weight training, deep-sea diving, dogsledding, and gymnastics.
Original Sin director Michael Cristofer, who understands her psyche better than most, shrewdly observed: “When she did Lara Croft, she needed to find and explore and live inside that part of her personality that was strong and healthy and physically in extraordinary shape. I think she had come out of a really bad time and she was getting herself together in a very good way through the shoot of that film.”
While she had clearly moved up in the world—the faux biography of Lara Croft included the fact that she was a boarder at the Scottish alma mater of Princes Charles, Andrew, and Edward—her heart belonged to Billy Bob and his down-home Arkansas world. For a girl who immerses herself completely in her roles, even when the cameras have stopped rolling, this was a first for Angie, the actress living as both the poised, independent, and cultured Lara Croft and as Billy Bob’s outrageously sexy wife. The vivid contrasts at the heart of her Gemini character were now apparent, Angie the first to acknowledge this duality. “I like to collect knives but I also collect first-edition books.” As Princess Diana’s former astrologer, Penny Thornton, who has carefully studied Angie’s birth chart, noted: “She is a natural iconoclast, a dominant strong personality who is bold and ballsy and refuses to be manipulated by anyone.” Angie’s chart indicates that during her marriage to Billy Bob she came closest to her true nature, while playing two roles at once: Mrs. Good Old Girl and the self-contained adventuress Lara Croft.
In early June 2000, just after her twenty-fifth birthday, Angie was back in down and dirty mode as she and her husband—Angie in black leather trousers and a gray T-shirt, Billy in a loud print shirt and a baseball hat—groped, kissed, and pawed their way along the red carpet for the Hollywood premiere of Gone in Sixty Seconds. “Hey Angie, give us a little Billy Bob action,” yelled the photographers as the newlyweds smooched for the cameras. FORGET GLAMOUR—LET’S WATCH JOLIE AND THORNTON NECKING, headlined the Chicago Tribune.
The couple oozed sex, the tabloids enjoying a feeding frenzy as Billy Bob and Angie held court at the Sunset Marquis hotel and freely discussed every thrust of their rampant love lives. An indication of what a freak show they quickly became was that when Billy Bob ate papaya fruit for breakfast—his usual morning repast—it was said that he could only eat orange food because of his many and varied obsessions. Even though they had only spent a few days together as lovers and rather less as a married couple, they were as eager to dissect their sex lives as are juveniles who think they have discovered sex for the first time. They were so into the first flush of unbridled passion that each would have been hard pressed to say on which side of the bed the other preferred to sleep.
In a series of no-holds-barred interviews, they were so obviously into each other that Us Weekly declared, “Forget unconditional love. Thornton and Jolie have unbounded love, the kind of perpetually boiling body heat that inspired poets and pay-per-view programming.” With this wall-to-bedroom coverage, Gone in Sixty Seconds, which was poorly received by the critics, earned more than $230 million worldwide.
During one typically overblown poolside chat at the Sunset Marquis, Angelina opined, “You know when you love someone so much you can almost kill them? I was nearly killed last night and it was the nicest thing anyone ever did for me.” Billy Bob further explained: “I was looking at her sleep and I had to restrain myself from literally squeezing her to death.” Angie added that in their new house they were going to install a padded room so that they could “go crazy.”
During what was less an interview than a piece of performance art, Billy Bob marveled at the way Angie moved her wineglass—“That’s almost sex,” he mused—adding that they had known each other “since the dawn of time.” For her part she got off on the way he said “football,” stroking and nibbling him during one interview and pointing out t
hat if one day they spontaneously combusted it would be from an overload of sex. Angie admitted that her nickname for her husband was “lunch,” as in “lunch box,” relating to his prodigious manhood.
When it came to specifics about anything other than their sex life, they were evasive, Angie saying that they first became “amazing friends” during the filming of Pushing Tin: “I just wanted to be near him all the time. And I missed being around him when work was over.” Asked about her drug use, she waffled before Billy Bob interjected: “I like to say things that are true and say them hard. She does not take drugs.”
Just so that everyone had gotten the message that they were head over heels in love—“Sex for us is almost too much,” declared Billy Bob—they planned to weld their Oscars together (if Angie could find hers). As a final flourish, they gave each other necklaces with vials of their own blood. That they were later revealed to be lockets with a couple of drops of blood to remind each other of their passion and commitment was rather lost in the madness, as the stories about them became ever more lurid: Billy Bob was said to have hired a nurse to extract his blood so he could send it to Angie while she was filming in London, and they were rumored to keep a knife under the pillows to slash at each other with during wild sex sessions. Meanwhile, Angie confessed to Talk magazine that she had lived with a guy when she was just fourteen. Her “considerate” father had given the union his blessing, she said somewhat disingenuously. Little wonder that Jon Voight later described her behavior at this time as “exhibitionist.”
When Angie appeared on The Tonight Show, it was her mother who was on her mind. She brandished a piece of paper in front of Jay Leno that contained the incest jokes he had made following Angie’s notorious kiss with her brother at the Oscars. With a hooting, hollering audience on her side, she berated the comedian for his “stupid” wisecracks, saying that they had made Marcheline feel sick. Anyway, she continued, she and Billy Bob had better things to do than watch late-night TV. The audience got the hint, whooping their approval. Then she returned to her favorite subject, Billy Bob, describing him as “the sexiest creature that ever lived.”
“I love him and you know that,” she chided Leno. “We are perfect for each other.”
In the sexual froth and foment, it was easy to forget that Billy Bob was an artist of quirky genius and Angie one of the most accomplished screen actors of her generation. Besides the primal sexual pull, it was one of the main things that attracted her to him, or the idea of him, in the first place. She wanted to live like an artist. Only later did she come to realize that living like an artist was not the same as living with an artist. Angie was not hardwired to be an artist’s muse or helpmate.
In June, after four weeks of marriage, most of them spent apart from her husband, Angie was confident enough to tell USA Today that she felt “more content, safe, centered and alive.” She had more surprises in store. Having previously been interested only in adoption, she shocked her circle when she told an Australian newspaper that she wanted to make her husband a dad again. “I would love having children with Billy,” she said. “But I know that some people fall in love with their child so much that they don’t put as much focus on their husband or wife, so right now I am getting to know my husband and his children. But if we had a child, it would be amazing.”
When they were in Hollywood, the couple stayed at the Sunset Marquis, the Four Seasons, and the Peninsula, living a very ordinary life. They drove around Beverly Hills in her black pickup truck, going to the movies and eating out at regular diners. Nothing fancy for this pair. It wasn’t long, though, before people noticed Billy Bob making some very out-of-the-ordinary requests. As hot as their sex life seemed to be, it apparently wasn’t enough. Hotel staff complained that Billy Bob, whom they knew as a polite Southern gentleman, was acting totally out of character, hitting on girls in the hope, some observers believed, of encouraging a threesome with him and Angie. Aggressively sexual behavior was typical for Angie, as witnessed by numerous heterosexual women she had met. It was different for Billy Bob. He might have had a harem, but between the sheets, he was a conventional, one-woman guy. “She was into chicks and it seems that was his job, to bring her the girls,” recalled one of Billy Bob’s former lovers, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “While nothing came of it, it appeared she was trying to get a threesome going. He was hitting on girls for her pleasure. This was within a month of them marrying. People were horrified. It was the talk of the place.” Psychologist Iris Martin sees Angie’s behavior as “bizarre”: “Angelina cannot connect with anybody emotionally. Nobody in their right mind gets married and then starts having threesomes. It doesn’t make sense. It seems that he was not as exciting as she thought he was and so [she] lost interest.”
Once back in London, Angie did not exactly morph into the ladylike Lara Croft. During preparation she encouraged her boxing trainer and stunt double, Eunice Huthart, then the women’s world kickboxing champion, to get her first tattoo, and ignored her curfew in order to go see a group of Elvis impersonators at an off-the-beaten-track nightclub. For a girl who loved Madonna, Michael Jackson, and punk, Angie’s willing embrace of one of Billy Bob’s rock-and-roll icons had a touch of the Laura Dern school of romance about it. Just as Lara Croft would have turned up her finely bred nose at Angie’s night out at the Jazzmines club in unfashionable Bromley in darkest Kent, so her screen character would have been unable to stomach her eating habits.
Angie frequently ignored the advice of her nutritionist and ordered her driver to stop at a McDonald’s so she could get her fix of hamburger and fries. At the London premiere of Gone in Sixty Seconds, she turned up in leather trousers and a T-shirt, clutching a small bunch of flowers and wishing for all the world that she was somewhere else. No sooner had she made her way down the red carpet than she sneaked out of the auditorium in Leicester Square and went for a hamburger. “I was hungry and don’t like to see myself on the screen all the time,” she explained.
In the computer game, the voluptuous Lara Croft was a 36DD cup size, whereas at that time Angie was a mere 36C. The race was on to increase her ability to fill a bra. Teenage boys, who made up the bulk of the expected audience, notice these things. It ended as a compromise. Angie appeared on-screen as a 36D.
Even the Queen took second place to her cravings. In July Angie stalked out of the Cartier International Day polo match, held in the presence of Her Majesty and attended by British high society and international celebrities on the grounds of Windsor Great Park. She put down her glass of champagne, reportedly dismissed the likes of fellow actors Minnie Driver and Billy Zane as “pompous assholes,” and ordered her driver to find her the nearest McDonald’s. “I love Big Macs,” she later explained. Her early departure from one of the highlights of the social calendar excited much irritated comment, model and polo player Jodie Kidd saying tartly: “Well, that’s just typical. She’s American, after all.”
With principal photography beginning at the end of July, she had now to leave her trailer-park persona behind and start living to the manor born, in a baronial castle specially constructed on a soundstage at Pinewood Studios in north London. The start of filming also coincided with a personal celebration for the leading lady, who learned that she had finally been cast by director Oliver Stone in his latest movie, Beyond Borders, a high-minded romance set in refugee camps based on the work of Doctors Without Borders, an organization that won the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize. When she was first sent Caspian Tredwell-Owen’s script during the filming of Original Sin, she had cried as she read the story of a well-to-do American socialite, Sarah Jordan, who falls for a dedicated doctor striving to save lives in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. During their passionate affair she comes to see the world through the eyes of hard-pressed international relief workers.
In spite of her enthusiasm “to take the journey,” Oliver Stone had other actresses in mind. When his first choice, Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, became pregnant, he turned to single mom Meg Ryan. Then Ry
an dropped out, saying she didn’t want to be away from her eight-year-old son for so long. This left the role free for Angie.
As with all his actors, Stone encouraged Angie, whom he describes as a “natural-born actress,” to do her own research into her role. “He was one of the first people to tell me to start reading international papers and to educate myself,” she recalls. While she was in London, he was visiting UN-run refugee camps in northern Kenya and the turbulent southern Sudan in order to learn firsthand about the dire conditions. “I want to make it as real as it can be,” he said.
While preparing to dip her toe into the world of international relief, Angie first had to throw herself into the grueling twenty-week shoot for Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. She appeared in virtually every scene and performed her own stunts, which left her with torn ligaments and a battered, bleeding, and bruised body. “She was totally fearless. I had to decide how much jeopardy I wanted to put her in,” commented director Simon West. On one occasion she was swinging on a moving log fifty feet off a concrete floor and asked to take off her safety harness—a request West denied. “If she fell, she would be dead. I didn’t need that,” he said, displaying the classic auteur’s altruism.
One of the more telling—and quieter—moments in the action movie, which went on to shoot in Iceland, Cambodia, and Venice, was Jon Voight’s turn as Lara’s father, the late Lord Richard Croft. The interchange formed the emotional backstory to the movie, the whole adventure helping Lara find a sense of peace following the loss of her father. Angie personally approved the choice of her father to play the role, a far cry from her previous attitude toward being associated with him professionally. It was a sign of her confidence that she now overshadowed him as an actor, as well as a tentative personal reconciliation. The weeklong shoot with her father, scheduled for early October, had to be delayed when Angie flew to Los Angeles to be by Billy Bob’s bedside after he was admitted to the hospital suffering a viral infection. At first it was thought that he had a heart complaint, an illness that runs in the Thornton family, his brother Jimmy Don having died of a heart attack at the age of just thirty. Such was the concern that President Clinton, a former Arkansas governor, personally called Billy Bob’s mother, Virginia, to check on his condition. It helped that it was an election year; Billy Bob had recently appeared at a fund-raiser for Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore, then vice president.
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 24
