When she returned to film the scenes with her father, Angie perceptively observed that their interaction was “a kind of goodbye in a strange way.” As she said: “It was a hello and goodbye.” Perhaps more accurately, it marked the ending of a period of her life. The movie has them professing sentiments about love and respect and lost time that appear to be both narrative-driven and reality-based. “I wanted to say a lot of those things to my dad,” admitted Angie. “And he wanted to say them to me. And I wanted to hear them.”
It seemed that father and daughter could connect through acting better than in real life, using words written by others but interpreted by them. Father and daughter did write a further scene, but it was never made. Angie finally got to hear what she had always wanted her dad to say. “I miss you and love you always and forever,” Lord Richard tells Lara. In the movie he dies when she is still a child, just as in real life he left when she was still in the cradle. “The time was stolen from us, and it’s not fair. I’ve missed you,” she tells her father in a sequence in which he reappears in a tropical tent when the hands of time have been shifted backward. For his part, Lord Richard apologizes for leaving Lara. It was a profound moment. What daughter, however proud and haughty, would not melt in the face of her father’s protestations of sorrow at the time stolen from them? “I am with you always, just as I’ve always been,” says Lord Richard to his daughter in a final sequence before she bids farewell to his spirit. On camera Lara was duly dewy-eyed; offscreen Angelina was in tears.
“Jon and I could not stop crying,” she later told TV reporter Ann Curry. “We’d have to stop takes. We’d walk on the other sides. We didn’t talk in between takes. We met in that tent and we’d walk away and meet in the tent until the scene was completely over. Then we kind of hugged each other.” On reflection Angie found it profoundly sad that the closest moment she ever had with her father was played out in public. It was also one of the rare times that she publicly acknowledged any positive influence he’d had on her life, telling the Los Angeles Times: “All my life my dad was always there for me, but I was very independent as well, and he’d always send me letters, books and information. And in the end we did the same thing with our lives—acting. So our scenes ended up becoming very personal.”
For his part Jon Voight was thrilled that at last his professional dream had come true. He described the shoot as a “joyous” time, father and daughter laughing and loving together. “It seemed like the beginning—there was a little hope coming through at that moment in time,” he later recalled.
He said hello, she said goodbye. “We seemed to understand each other and it was fun, but afterwards he returned quickly to old habits of being judgmental,” she told writer Andrew Duncan. During the shoot Voight was worried about her stunts—“She’s done things that I would never do and I wish she wouldn’t”—and encouraged her to take up his health regime of yoga and vitamin supplements.
As working with her father had been a completion of sorts, it was the other man in her life she needed most, Angie convincing her husband to overcome his fear of flying—and genuine antiques—to join her in London. With a great effort of will—“It was a sign of how much he loved her,” noted a friend of Thornton’s—he endured the eleven-hour flight to Britain. Just so that the world got the point, she told the Daily Mail, “I need him in my bed. I told him I was going to lose my mind if he didn’t get over here.”
Such was the automatic association among Angie, Billy Bob, and sex that when they paid $3.8 million for the home of his friend Slash, from Guns N’ Roses, it was immediately assumed that their huge basement had been converted into a sex dungeon. In fact, the onetime speakeasy was a music recording studio, perfect for Billy Bob to pursue his major artistic passion in life.
The real irony about their eleven-thousand-square-foot “love nest” was that their new neighbor was comedian Steve Martin, who Billy Bob had once feared would lure his fiancée Laura Dern away from him. Just three months on, Martin was no longer relevant to the script.
ELEVEN
Before, he was the sun, the moon, the stars and sky to Angie. Now he was no longer in her universe. Maddox was the new center of her life.
—INGRID EARLE, FRIEND OF BILLY BOB THORNTON’S
In late November 2000 the Lara Croft caravan left Pinewood Studios and moved to Cambodia for a two-week shoot during what is termed the “cool season,” when temperatures drop to the high nineties. It was a visit—and a view into a previously unknown world—that changed Angie forever. Like many of her life-altering moments, it was a fluke. Originally filming was due to take place on the Great Wall of China or a faux fifteen-foot stand-in in Scotland. Cost and politics ended that plan; it was cheaper to set the exotic scene in Angkor Wat, a complex of sacred ancient temples surrounded by dense jungle, located 220 kilometers (135 miles) northwest of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh.
One of the archaeological wonders of the world, the Temple of Angkor Wat is a massive ring of sculpted sandstone structures, the blurred carved faces depicting legends of the once great Khmer civilization. Given Angie’s love of symbol and ritual, the location must have been soul-stirring. It was a special privilege, too, Angie the first Hollywood star permitted on the grounds of this holy place since 1964, when Peter O’Toole filmed Lord Jim.
First, though, she and her film crew had to get there, trucking equipment from neighboring Thailand along a road only recently held by Khmer Rouge rebels and still pitted with potholes and land mines. Accompanied by the Royal Cambodian Army, the convoy of thirty trucks was forced to stop frequently so that soldiers could repair bridges and check for bombs.
Once Angie had reached the temple unscathed, the real work began. She had to leap from twenty-foot walls, paddle a wooden canoe, and fight off the bad guys. At the end of a long day’s shooting, she couldn’t even bitch to her husband about her strained ankle, the bump on her head, and her pulled muscles. “The phone is a nightmare,” Angie admitted. “When I finally get through to Billy, and you try to say something romantic you both end up saying, ‘What? You said what? Oh forget it.’ Trying to be sexy on a cell phone in Angkor Wat just isn’t working.”
At least she could still talk about him, her love life the lure for the intrepid journalists who hacked through the jungle to visit the set. “I’m obsessed with Billy. I always want more. I can’t have enough of him,” Angie told one unnerved reporter, sitting on the steps of her trailer, naked beneath a sheet she had quickly wrapped around herself after taking a shower. So close and yet so far away. Cut off from her man, yet feeling for the first time in her life supremely fit and healthy, immersed in a holy place complete with chanting Buddhist monks, and with the ever-present frisson of danger in this lush land, Angie felt a spiritual kinship to an exotic place and people, impoverished but still smiling. For Angie, who usually found connecting and feeling so difficult, this experience—albeit surrounded as she was by film folk and sleeping in an air-conditioned trailer with hot and cold running water—touched something inside her. She experienced what she later described as “an epiphany.” Or, put another way, the mutable, impulsive Angie was about to shed yet another skin. “This has changed my life, being here in this country,” she said when the Cambodia chapter wrapped. “The world is a lot bigger than I thought it was. There is a lot I have to learn.” When she left, she was so touched by the people and the country that she cried for three days. She couldn’t explain why, but the tears just kept flowing. “I didn’t know what that country had gone through. I didn’t learn about it in history. And they were so warm and so beautiful and so pure and honest. And the country, I just loved the country.”
Back in London she continued her long-distance marriage, given every Friday off in order to share a few snatched hours with her husband in Los Angeles. “I spend twelve hours on a plane, fall into bed with Billy for ten hours, then it’s straight back to the airport,” Angie said. He had his own ferocious schedule, in December crisscrossing the States to bang the drum for
All the Pretty Horses, his $45 million adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s stark, neo-Western novel, which was due for release on Christmas Day.
Taking a chapter from Angie’s book of confessions, Billy Bob was generous with details about his private life that other, more prudent directors might keep to themselves. “I’ve screwed up so much, I’ve gotten into so much trouble over the years, and done weird stuff,” he said. “Well, I’m afraid of the water. I can’t watch movies before 1950 and eat at the same time. Don’t even ask. I can’t mention my children’s ages or I think I’ll put a curse on them. There’s my well-known fear of antique furniture.”
One of the stars of All the Pretty Horses, Matt Damon, shared the director’s famous fear of flying. After appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago, the terrified twosome sat together on the five-hour flight back to Los Angeles. As Damon explained, “In Billy Bob’s world, he is risking his life every time he gets on a plane. He’d much rather jump in front of a car because Billy Bob figures that way he might actually live.” So the fact that he was prepared to fly to London to see Angie and stay at upscale hotels with antiques and silver cutlery was a sign of his true commitment. “He broke through barriers for her, he really did,” observed a friend.
For her part she flew to New York to join him on the Today show to help him publicize his movie, the couple’s behavior on- and off-screen belying any suspicions that their union was just a publicity stunt to sell Gone in Sixty Seconds. “I was unfocused my entire life, and so was Angelina,” said Billy Bob. “Now we’re both very clear and very focused. It took finding each other to make us that clear. I’m married to the love of my life.” If that wasn’t commitment enough, after the interview he raced down the corridor and launched himself into the arms—and lips—of his laughing wife.
To underscore the point further, Angie and her beloved were full of talk about renewing their marriage vows. Finally “family” seemed like a safe, warm place for Angelina, who confessed that she had found “a home” at last. Billy Bob talked about buying a farm and raising llamas, describing Angie as “a pretty regular gal.” In turn, she liked to call herself “stepmom” to his sons, William and Harry. Of course the youngsters thought it was “cool” that Lara Croft was making them pancakes in their new house and reading them stories at bedtime. Even though her pancakes were, in Billy Bob’s term, “strong,” who cared?
Like her own mother, Angie did not cook, the quartet going for down-home cuisine in local West Hollywood eateries. “We eat a lot of ice cream and cereal, and when Billy sees me in an apron, he laughs,” said Angie. She had not quite turned into a character in a Norman Rockwell painting: Her Christmas present to her husband was a framed message, “To the End of Time,” which she nailed up over their bed. Naturally it was written in her blood. Some men get socks.
Sadly, the big turkey that Christmas was Billy Bob’s labor of love, All the Pretty Horses, which opened to mixed reviews and indifferent audience numbers. Bitterly hurt by the rejection of a project he had truly believed in, Billy Bob retreated into his basement studio and took consolation in his music, shutting out the world. He vowed never to direct another movie, picking up the music he had started to lay down in Nashville as he worked to finish his debut album, Private Radio.
As he narrowed his horizons, Angie was opening up hers, researching her role for Beyond Borders. The project had already run into casting problems, with Kevin Costner, originally slated to play the renegade doctor who was Angie’s love interest, being replaced by Ralph Fiennes. Although Costner’s people blamed artistic differences for his departure, the word was that Angie thought the forty-five-year-old star of Dances with Wolves was too old to be her movie paramour. The irony was that her own husband was the same age as Costner, and the actor’s then girlfriend was the same age as Angie.
Fiennes went to aid workers’ demonstrations on handling life-and-death refugee crises; Oliver Stone continued his travels around camps in southern Sudan and Kenya; and Angie called on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for information, reading pamphlets and books and scanning the Internet.
In many ways her character of Sarah Jordan was the perfect next step after Lara Croft. She was Lara with a social conscience, a real person out to do good, to help make the world a better place. Just as she had begun to morph into Lara during filming—director Simon West admitted “she was definitely thinking she was Lara Croft after a while”—Angie took her persona one stage further with Sarah; she was flesh and blood, not just a cartoon character.
In late January, however, Oliver Stone, whom Angie had come to see as a surrogate father, bowed out, complaining of the meager budget, inadequate prep time, and the looming possibility of an actors’ strike. Angie was devastated. She loved her character and felt true kinship with the script and the story. She had already had discussions with the UNHCR about spending a couple of weeks visiting refugee camps to see for herself what life in them was really like. Now that plan seemed to be stuck in the sand.
For the first time in her life, however, the girl who had spent her career being told what to do by someone else slowly realized that she didn’t need Oliver Stone or anyone else directing her life. She could go anyway. “Suddenly it dawned on me that just because I’m an actor, I felt like I needed a film to do it,” she recalled. “I’m a person. Do it.” She contacted the UNHCR in New York and discussed the possibility of visiting Sierra Leone and Tanzania under their umbrella. She was forthright, telling UN officials: “You might think I’m crazy. I’m an actress. I don’t want to go with press. If you could give me access, allow me in on a trip so I could just witness and learn.” There were two conditions: She insisted on paying her own way and on being treated like everyone else.
While Oliver Stone might have tipped his hat at her chutzpah, Jon Voight was concerned. With Sierra Leone in the midst of a rumbling civil war, he thought that Angie was deliberately putting herself in harm’s way and contacted the UN to try to have the trip canceled. Officials pointed out that she was a grown woman and was visiting under escort. Typically, her mother was more passive, simply smiling through her tears. Before Angie left, Marche delivered a special message from James that alluded to her favorite childhood character, Peter Pan: “Tell Angie I love her and to remember that if she is ever scared, sad, or angry—look up at the night sky, find the second star on the right, and follow it straight on till morning.”
Billy Bob shared her father’s view, but he let her go ahead with her adventure. “He said he didn’t think I’d be safe. But he didn’t offer to come along, either. And so I left,” she recalled.
As Angie, armed with pens and a notepad, went off to a war zone, her husband headed to the basement with his friend Randy Scruggs and wrote a love song for his bride. “It’s basically the story of how we met,” recalled Billy, who, with his friend, wrote the song “Angelina” in just a few minutes. Angie was on a very different path, briefed by UN officials when she arrived in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in late February about the blind bureaucratic reality facing refugees and asylum seekers. With no chance of romance in their battered lives, the picture of struggle and sacrifice was etched on the faces of those she met.
Shocked and upset by the human tumult she encountered, Angie observed that she felt like a visitor in a zoo. A petting zoo, at that; when she visited a refugee center in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, a baby was unceremoniously placed in her arms. For Angie, who had never played with dolls and wasn’t the cuddling type, this was a remarkable event. “No words could express how I felt,” she wrote. At another transit camp children came running toward her. “Their tiny little hands grabbed on to mine. There was a child’s hand around every finger of mine. I wanted to take each and every one of them home with me.”
She was hungry to learn more, meeting the U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone, veteran diplomat John Melrose, and other aid workers at the ambassador’s residence on March 1, 2001. Before dinner she admitted to the seasoned Africa hand that
the experience had really opened her eyes. Her naïveté was striking, but little different from the response of other well-intentioned Westerners he had met during his long career. “She had been doing food distribution the day before she came to dinner,” he recalled. “She didn’t realize these kinds of things were going on. However, when you are first exposed it is a rather powerful experience, and it can also be a very depressing one. She grew up with a much more sheltered existence and had not been exposed to anything like that. She was touched by it.”
The impact was profound and immediate. A couple of weeks after that dinner, Melrose took a call from Angie’s assistant about a program they had been discussing to teach former soldiers, mostly teenage boys, how to read and write. As that program was fully funded, he steered her toward a scheme to help “war brides,” the girls taken by rebels and used as sex slaves, cooks, and human shields in battle. The idea was to house, counsel, and then teach these brutalized young women a skill or a trade so they could earn a living. Angie agreed to fund the whole program, donating just under $1 million on the condition that her gift be anonymous.
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 25
