Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  TWELVE

  For Angelina to adopt a child from another country is symbolic of how alien she feels. Metaphorically they are on the fifth floor. Worlds away.

  —DR. FRANZISKA DE GEORGE

  It was just a regular day in his Burbank office for Pat O’Brien, the dapper, moustachioed host of Access Hollywood. Then his phone rang. On the line was Jon Voight, asking if they could meet privately. He said “Sure,” and suggested they have a coffee at Nate n’ Al’s, a well-known casual meeting place for Hollywood movers and shakers. While O’Brien had met Voight a few times over the years, by no stretch of the imagination were they close. They were Hollywood friends, saying “Hi” to each other on the red carpet. “I had no idea what he wanted to talk about,” recalls O’Brien about the encounter in late July 2002, days after Angie had announced her official split with Billy Bob Thornton.

  O’Brien arrived at the deli shortly before Voight, and when the actor walked in, he got straight down to business. “I want to talk to you about my daughter,” he said. “I’m brokenhearted. That’s the reason why I’m here. I feel I can trust you as a journalist.”

  The TV host, who was a sports commentator before moving into TV entertainment, realized that Voight wanted to talk further. His antennae warned him to hold fire, to capture what Voight had to say on film. “Any chance you can do this on camera?” he asked. Voight nodded agreement. “That’s what I want. I want to tell you about my daughter.”

  O’Brien returned to the office intrigued by exactly what was on Voight’s mind. He remembered another time when he got a call out of the blue; it was from actor Michael J. Fox, who admitted on live TV that he had Parkinson’s disease and was bowing out of movies. O’Brien and his executive producer Rob Silverstein arranged to meet Voight in a suite at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills. While it was a two-camera shoot, which in television terms signifies that the interview is of some importance, O’Brien had no idea what he was getting into when he walked into the room. His questions were brief, O’Brien savvy enough to know when to stay quiet and let the star do the talking.

  When O’Brien asked him why he was coming forward, Voight was immediately in full flow, explaining that while the public might see a poised, smiling actor who had enjoyed numerous successes, inside he was a broken man. “I’ve been trying to reach my daughter and get her help. I have failed and I’m really sorry. I haven’t come forward and addressed these serious mental problems she has spoken about so candidly.” It “pained” him deeply to see these unspecified mental problems paraded over and over again. “They’re very serious symptoms of real, real problems, real, real illness.”

  He explained that her problems were in part drug-related and that over the years he had confronted her about her behavior, but with little success. As far as he was concerned, she had avoided facing up to these issues, more often than not shielded by her manager, Geyer Kosinski, whom he described as a “parasite.” “I begged him to help many times and always he turned her against me,” he said in a portion of the interview left on the cutting-room floor. (Geyer later sent him a letter threatening to sue him, but he never followed through.)

  Nor did Voight absolve himself of blame, acknowledging the pain and hurt his affair with Stacey Pickren, whom he did not name, had caused the family. His ex-wife also had to share the burden of guilt, Voight said, accusing Marche of programming the children against him in spite of all his “repentance,” combined with his efforts to be “an upstanding and strong example” for his kids.

  While he emphasized Angie’s drug taking as the main reason for her “real psychic pain,” he also acknowledged her psychological damage. “There is something she has to work out,” he said. “There is some trauma there.”

  Even though he had never held out much hope for his daughter’s second marriage, he did concede that Billy Bob Thornton had had a positive impact on her attempt to get clean of drugs. Now that Angie was considered to be a role model, he was bothered about her possible influence on young people, pleading with her fans to send her their love and prayers. At this point he put his hand over his face and broke down in tears. It was an electrifying moment.

  “All of a sudden he just broke down,” recalls Pat O’Brien. “It was the dad in him coming out. This was his baby girl he was trying to save. He so wanted to reach out to her. She hadn’t returned his calls and he didn’t know where she was living. He broke down like a father who had not yet cried over the rejection by his daughter. I just sat there and stared at him. I didn’t really know what to do. At that point I was no longer a journalist but one father to another who felt sorry for the guy. I put my hand on his knee and patted him to say: ‘It’s okay to cry.’ The tears just came out.” As he tried to compose himself, the veteran actor spoke of his greatest pain, not being allowed to see his first grandchild, Maddox.

  When the cameras stopped rolling on the thirty-minute interview, the two men had lunch and swapped phone numbers. Voight went on his way, feeling that his mission had been accomplished. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  The first indication of trouble was when Angie’s lawyers, who were contacted before the Thursday-night broadcast on August 1, warned the TV show against even showing the material. “On no account can you run that interview,” Access Hollywood was told. Angie, who was staying in a London hotel with Maddox as she prepared to reprise her role as Lara Croft, issued a formal statement: “I don’t want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father. I will only say that, like every child, Jamie and I would have loved to have had a warm and loving relationship with our dad. After all these years, I have determined that it is not healthy for me to be around my father, especially now that I am responsible for my own child.”

  Having seen her father break down in front of his eyes, Pat O’Brien was surprised by Angie’s retort. “What shook me most about the whole episode was how cool her response was,” he says.

  If he had been in her hotel suite, he would have seen a very different reaction. She was incandescent with rage, shouting, cursing, and throwing cushions at her father’s image on the TV screen. Her greatest fear was that her father’s righteous intervention could lead to her son’s being taken away from her. “It’s horrible, it doesn’t make sense,” said the bewildered actress when first asked about the interview.

  Voight had grotesquely misjudged the impact his words would have, not just on Angie but on his family and friends. As director Rob Lieberman, a friend for more than twenty years, observed: “Jon is a complicated, intense guy who is very thoughtful. I’ve scratched my head about him a number of times. Going on TV to talk about his daughter was not the greatest choice. He was desperate and trying to save his daughter as he saw it from drugs and bad choices.”

  Angie was right, however; it didn’t make sense. He was once again treating her like a child—a daughter whose lifestyle had been a byword for independence: living with a boy at fourteen, moving into her own apartment at sixteen, making movies on her own at seventeen, buying her own place at nineteen, marrying for the first time at twenty and for the second time at twenty-four. In between she had become one of the world’s best-known actresses and a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador. In September, just a few weeks after the Access Hollywood broadcast, she became the first recipient of the Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program Humanitarian Award. She was trying to be the good girl of her imagination. “No matter what he said, I realized that I was a good person, a good friend and a good mother,” she said afterward.

  Actor Nathan Lee Graham, who had worked with Voight on Zoolander a couple of years before, got a brief taste of why Angie might feel so aggrieved after a lifetime of never quite making the mark—at least according to her dad. Graham found Voight constantly judgmental, never encouraging or consoling. “His intensity was unnerving. He looked down on you like he had the answers and you didn’t.”

  After some months of reflection, Angie told the TV show 20/20: “I think he truly believes he’s the
re to save me and my mother and my brother. And he’s somebody who has an opinion about all of us and what we should be doing and who we are. I’ve been crazy in my life and I’ve been wild in my life. I’ve never been a bad person. I’ve never intentionally hurt other people just to hurt them. And I’m trying to do a lot of good things with my life.”

  If his concerns had some credence and credibility at one time, even Jon Voight would agree that Angie had clawed her way out of the pit of suicidal despair. It seems the years of hide-and-seek, of endless rebuffs in person or on the phone, culminating in her public rejection of him at the Paramount anniversary celebrations, had taken a heavy toll, tipping the balance in his own mind. While both Angie and Jon had used the media for years to communicate with each other, his latest TV confessional proved an intercession too far.

  His timing could not have been worse. She was still upset, vulnerable, and emotional following the abrupt collapse of her second marriage, and her adoption of Maddox was under intense international scrutiny; she risked losing two of the most precious things in her life: her son and her position as a UN Goodwill Ambassador. During this time of turmoil Angie might have expected support from her father rather than public criticism.

  “My daughter is very sad. It’s a really tough time for her,” Marche told People magazine. Certainly Voight’s broadcast cast a shadow over Maddox’s first birthday party a couple of days later, on August 5. Not that Maddox seemed to care. “Maddox was very happy playing with his birthday cake. But he was only interested in eating his broccoli,” observed his proud grandmother.

  As Jon Voight knew, his ex-wife was suffering her own health issues, still recovering from further cancer surgery and treatment. Since 1999 she had been in remission from cervical cancer, but in 2002 routine tests revealed that the cancer had returned, and her condition was treated with more surgery and chemotherapy. Her annual mammogram also revealed a malignant tumor that was detected early enough to be removed. “Every sunrise I experience is truly a gift,” she wrote later.

  Marche felt sufficiently robust to issue her own defense of her daughter. “I’m shocked,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with Angelina’s mental health. Mentally and physically, she is magnificently healthy.” Certainly any problems, mental or otherwise, came as a surprise to Lara Croft producer Lawrence Gordon. “I have an excellent team around her,” he said. “If there was a problem I would know it.” Angie’s mother, who had been the conduit of information between estranged father and daughter, now refused to speak to Jon Voight ever again, a pledge she resolutely kept. There was another reason behind her decision. Her relationship with Bill Day had regularly been undermined by the proximity of Jon Voight. Now that her love affair with John Trudell was flourishing, she wanted to give it a chance to grow without Jon’s interference.

  Not only was Jon publicly disowned by his ex-wife and daughter, but his son, James, also refused to have anything more to do with him, though they had always been closer than Jon and Angie. A committed Christian who for a time pondered becoming an evangelical preacher, even James could not forgive his father’s behavior. Jon Voight now felt the full blast of the legendary Bertrand family freeze, his children and his ex-wife casting him into the outer darkness.

  The rest of the Voights suffered, too; Marche stopped talking to or writing to any member of his family. For years she had been great friends with Joan Taylor, the first wife of Jon’s younger brother, Chip Taylor. At a stroke she was out of her life. Joan continued to send family pictures as well as Christmas and birthday cards, but never heard a word from her friend again. It was as though she didn’t exist.

  To formally seal the family schism, Angie instructed her lawyer to legally remove “Voight” from her name. “He’s not any more to me than a man who walks down the street,” she said, indicating the depth of her anger. “I’m an adoptive parent so blood ties aren’t what count.”

  The irony was not lost on her mother or on those who had known Angie since she was a youngster. Just as James was more like his mother, passive, introspective, and placid, Angie was strikingly similar to her dad. She shared not only his genetic flaw, a slight curvature of the spine, but also his full lips and high cheekbones. Like her father, she was wild, chatty, sexy, feisty, and a born debater who loved to argue a point. While her mother preferred to donate to causes—Angie inherited her impulsive generosity—Jon Voight had long been an activist. “I think celebrity is a gift,” he once said. “You can do a lot of things with it and therefore you should be responsible. If I use it properly, I can help people”: sentiments that found an echo in his daughter’s work for refugees and other victims of society.

  Of all the Voights, Angie inherited the straight-talking, loose-lipped nature of her crackerjack of a grandmother, Barbara Voight. One story straight out of the Barbara Voight playbook could have been about Angie. When her son took her to an Academy Awards ceremony, Barbara, then in her seventies, was complimented by James Bond himself, Sean Connery, on her silver dress. “Five bucks, five bucks,” she said, pulling at the material. “Bought it from a secondhand store.” Her genetic code, a breezy disregard of fashion and convention, seemed to have been passed on virtually intact to her granddaughter.

  Angie continued to bridle at any comparison to her father or his family. After the O’Brien broadcast, she told one interviewer: “We’re not similar people and we are not friends. In an argument we were always on opposite sides.” In denying her father’s existence, she was also denying herself. “Don’t tell Angie that; she will go mad,” Marche once warned her friend Lauren Taines, when they concluded that Angie was a true Voight.

  While removing her father’s name took but the stroke of a pen—she officially became Angelina Jolie in September 2002 after petitioning a Santa Monica court—it was a rather more painful process to etch Billy Bob’s name out of her life, and her heart. She complained that it took five laser treatments to remove the tattoo of his name from her left shoulder; she then replaced his name with the global coordinates where Maddox was born. “The worst thing is the smell,” she said. Fortunately the now infamous tattoo of Billy Bob’s name beneath her bikini line had faded.

  For his part, Billy Bob had the left forearm tattoo that once bore her name expunged. He observed later: “I had it covered up with an angel and it says ‘Peace.’ It’s like, basically, my way of saying, ‘No hard feelings.’ ” Then for good measure he buried the “vial of blood” in his backyard.

  If only the tattoo left on his heart by his wild two-year ride with Angie could be removed so easily. To ease the pain and publicity, he cut the song “Angelina” from his band’s playlist. He had been sober and off drugs for years, but now he was again drinking and smoking. “At the time, he was very depressed because he thought that the world would think he had left her and Maddox,” recalled a close friend. “It just wasn’t true. The fact was that she had no further need for him. She had resolved something inside herself and moved on.”

  For the last two years Thornton, at heart a homebody who lives for his music and art, had gotten himself into a freak show where he was exhibit A. While he had gone along with the overblown statements and sentiments—and contributed his fair share—he knew that the blood vials, the matching graves, and the endless sex talk were symptoms of her constant need for attention. “Shock value,” he would tell friends, rolling his eyes in mock despair. “I went along for the ride.” He understood Angie’s motivation. During the early part of an actor’s career, people only want the juicy and sensational. “So you play it up,” he observed.

  He later reflected to friends that the central difference between him and Angie was that he was an artist who had had to learn to cope with fame, whereas she was an actor who craved infamy. As his onetime girlfriend Sheila McCombe observed: “She fell in love with the idea of being with an artist and the reality was rather different. He is very smart and talented but the downside is that he’s a very heavy character.” It was somewhat like the difference between
Madonna and her first husband, Sean Penn. She dreamed of ways to feed the media beast, while he threw rocks at it.

  Billy Bob had no regrets, though. “Most people can’t talk me out of the house, but she did,” he said. Not that the incorrigible horndog could be kept on the porch for long. Within days of the July divorce announcement, he was pictured in West Hollywood with model Danielle Dotzenrod, at twenty-three less than half his age, though he was adamant that he never cheated on Angie during the marriage. Riddled with anxiety and low self-esteem, he later explained to writer Barbara Davies that the reason for the split was in his head—not below the belt. “It was all down to my inadequacy and fear. I was frightened of Angie because she was too good for me. She was too beautiful, too smart and had too much integrity. I felt small next to her and I just couldn’t live with it.”

  It was not long before Billy Bob had resurrected his harem. Besides Dotzenrod, he was linked with country singer Deana Carter and his ex-wife Pietra, and in January he flew to Toronto to see Sheila McCombe. It was a woman who quietly flew below the radar, however, who truly captured his heart. In early July he had begun work on Bad Santa. During filming, his regular makeup artist, Carrie Angland, introduced him to her sister, Connie, who worked in the background as a seamstress on movie sets. She was as far removed from Angie’s life and lifestyle as one could get—which was probably half the attraction. At some point she moved in with him, and by late 2003 she was expecting his fourth child. As he explained in an Esquire interview with Amy Wallace in 2005: “Sex doesn’t have to be with a model to be good. As a matter of fact, sometimes with the model, the actress, the ‘sexiest person in the world,’ it may be literally like fucking the couch. Don’t count out the average-looking woman, or even maybe the slightly unattractive woman, or the really unattractive woman. There may be this swarthy little five-foot-two stocky woman who just has sex all over her.”