Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  While she was easygoing in rehearsals, on the day of the shoot, it was a different Angie who appeared on set, surrounded by bodyguards and a fluttering entourage. She had her game face on. The days of yelling and clearing her throat to get in character were long gone, Angie laid-back but ready for action, playfully hitting Ting in the face with her gun and saying: “Good morning. How are you? We are going to have fun today.”

  After twenty-five takes, Noyce was happy but Angie was perplexed that the crew was giving Rich Ting a hard time. She discovered that he was due to fly to Vietnam on a modeling assignment and his agent didn’t want his face messed up in the fight. Her own face lit up when talk turned to Vietnam, the actress speaking enthusiastically about the country and giving him a list of friends who would show him around. Ting was amazed that the leading lady would take this trouble. “In this industry courtesy is uncommon, but she is so gracious,” he says. “Unlike many others, she has not gone Hollywood; she has gone global.”

  During filming she stopped kicking the bad guys long enough to extend the hand of friendship to one of the good guys in her life. In January Bill Day received a call out of the blue from Angie, asking to meet up. It had been fourteen years since they had last met, but her schedule was such—her assistant, Holly Goline, breaks up her day into thirty-minute segments—that they didn’t come face-to-face until April. He arrived at the Long Island set to be met by a heavily made-up woman in a blonde wig.

  “You look just the same,” she said as they hugged in the middle of the warehouse set. “Wish I could say the same for you,” he joked, pointing at the wig and the costume. After she did a couple more takes of the scene, they went back to her trailer, where he met Shiloh and Zahara and they ate lunch, caught up on old times—and laid to rest some ghosts. He was keen to clear up the past, explaining that he met his wife, Caroline, long after he and Marcheline had split up. As he suspected, Marcheline had explained their breakup differently, telling the children that he had cheated on her. That wasn’t the case, as everyone in their circle knew at the time. In fact, Marcheline was so over Bill that she was dating a divorced father of four daughters shortly after they parted—something Bill had only learned recently. Angie made it clear that she bore him no ill will. She wanted to forgive and forget, eager to meet Caroline and to move on. Angie even arranged a birthday surprise for her brother a couple of weeks later in early May, Bill the special guest at a discreet lunch in a Manhattan hotel. Once again Bill explained the reasons behind the breakup with their mother. James was more skeptical, still believing the story their mother had told them fourteen years before. Like his sister, he had subscribed to the Bertrand freeze, sticking with his mother, right or wrong. During the three-hour lunch there was a dawning recognition that their mother’s version of events was not necessarily the truth, a grudging acknowledgment that her assessment of others, notably their father, had colored their perceptions since childhood. As James described his mother’s last days, he was even able to joke that at least her last words were only about his father and not about Bill as well. These encounters seemed to mark a turning point for Angie and James, a tacit admission that they had been party to an illusion and that they, unlike their mother, had the capacity to forgive.

  This friendly but important reunion was soon tarnished when Now, a British tabloid magazine, fabricated a story saying that Angie had had an affair with her mother’s boyfriend when she was sixteen, citing this author as the source. This was news to me, and of course totally untrue. For Bill it spoiled what had been a happy reunion, leaving him “seriously depressed.” The whole incident could be seen as a metaphor for Angie’s life, a life of illusion and delusion further distorted by a tabloid prism.

  In May Angie left this monstrous world of make-believe behind for grotesque real life, flying to Holland to spend time at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. There she attended the trial of Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, charged with war crimes, namely, using child soldiers in bloody tribal conflicts during 2002–2003. His was the first international trial focusing solely on child soldiers. In the courtroom Angie was given a long, unnerving, hard-eyed stare by the suspected mass murderer. Afterward she praised the child soldiers who were prepared to give voice to the horrors they had witnessed: “After watching the proceedings from the viewing booth, I stood up and found Thomas Lubanga Dyilo looking at me. I imagined how difficult it must be for all the brave young children who have come to testify against him.”

  A couple of days later, Angie found scrutiny of a very different sort much easier to bear when she and Brad strolled down the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival amid a flurry of flashbulbs for the premiere of Inglourious Basterds. It was the couple’s first appearance in public in three months. Angie, looking like a latter-day goddess in her slit-to-the-thigh Versace gown, with her partner dressed in a slick tux, put on a suitably amorous show to silence the Greek chorus of doom. It was a chance, a friend noted, to indulge in “cuddles and old-fashioned romance.”

  Not for long, though. The National Enquirer gave Angie an early birthday surprise with the headline that she and Brad had officially split. After she wiped away the birthday cake Brad smushed into her face when he arrived unexpectedly on the set of Salt on June 5, she reflected that there was some truth in the story. They were indeed splitting—but not intentionally: Brad was heading to Los Angeles in July to make Steven Soderbergh’s baseball drama, Moneyball, while Angie continued with Salt in New York. Then Brad was scheduled to spend months in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil to film The Lost City of Z, the story of the vain search for a legendary city by British surveyor Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett during the 1920s. Brad was growing his beard in preparation. Layer into that creative mix the fact that Geyer Kosinski had successfully concluded a deal with the author Patricia Cornwell for the movie rights to her bestselling series about medical examiner Kay Scarpetta and it was clear that the couple had a creatively overflowing plate. Even with the best intentions, their ideal scenario of one movie on, one movie off—which Angie and Billy Bob tried in their early days together—wasn’t working out as they would have liked. The last-minute cancellation of Moneyball by Columbia Pictures at a cost of $10 million gave them breathing space, the couple spending part of the summer in their Los Feliz home.

  Even though she now had the time, Angie did not take the opportunity to watch her first-ever screen performance in Hal Ashby’s comedy Lookin’ to Get Out. She missed an emotional evening at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood on June 29, her father breaking down in tears as he spoke of a father’s search for his daughter. Voight was relating the untold story of the director’s cut of the film, which was first discovered by Ashby’s biographer Nick Dawson. The fact that Ashby had a daughter whom he had never been able to bring himself to meet added greater poignancy to the scene between the six-year-old girl played by Angie and her biological father, played by Jon Voight as a ne’er-do-well hustler. As Voight told the audience: “He walked to Leigh’s door many times. I truly believe he just couldn’t cross the threshold because he didn’t know if he’d be proper as a father because fatherhood was so questionable to him.”

  The audience of friends and colleagues shuffled uncomfortably in their seats as they recognized that the weeping Voight was really talking about his own pain and disconnection from his daughter. For example, he was not invited to the twins’ first birthday on July 12, though Brad’s parents flew in from Springfield for the occasion. Forgiveness stretched only so far.

  Within days Angie was off on her travels again, visiting Amman, Jordan, with Maddox in late July for the Twenty-ninth International Arab Children Health Congress, before making her third trip to Iraq, praising the efforts of the American troops while, once again, pinpointing the plight of the country’s homeless. Back in Los Angeles, she spent much time taking flying lessons, doing circuits or taking short flights to places like Las Vegas. Flying set her free; it was her escape from earthly cares. Once off the ground—astr
ologically she is an air sign—she was in her natural element, unfettered and unencumbered. There is no earth in her star sign.

  On the ground she was chained to her image; goddess, savior, and, ironically, earth mother. Whether she wanted to or not, she had to be or at least give the impression of being supermom, especially as Brad was now fully formed in the public imagination as Mr. Mom. She had always said she wanted the man in her life to be a great dad, the kind of father she wished she’d had. During the publicity for Inglourious Basterds, Brad waxed lyrical about the delights of fatherhood, how he enjoyed growing older and being a domestic god. “I’m a dad now; my partying ends at six P.M.,” he told the Daily Mail, while his costar Eli Roth revealed another dimension of the screen idol, describing how he used baby wipes to freshen up if he didn’t have time for a shower. Roth explained: “After a scene, Brad had to get next to me for a close-up shot, and he said: ‘Damn, you’re ripe.’ ” Roth replied: “I didn’t have time to shower.” Brad gave him a tip: “Baby wipes, man, baby wipes. I got six kids. All you’ve got to do is just take them, a couple quick wipes under the pits. I’m getting [peed] on all day. I don’t have time to take a shower.”

  The story captures the earthy good nature of a man who can still cause maternal hearts to flutter. While he talked volubly about his life as a father, there wasn’t much talk of “we,” as in Angie and him. With Brad now positioned as Mr. Mom, it appeared that the onus was on Angie to join him on Happy Family Airways rather than seem to fly solo. After all, she had what she always wanted—or told herself that she wanted. Be careful what you wish for.

  In the fall of 2009, whether consciously or not, she set herself a test, signing on for a romantic thriller, The Tourist, directed by Oscar winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. The plot revolves around an “extraordinary woman,” Elise, played by Angie, who deliberately crosses the path of an American tourist visiting Venice to mend a broken heart. The tourist, played by Johnny Depp, pursues their romance, which culminates with the couple making passionate love in the shower. While a Depp-Jolie pair-up had been dreamed about by producers and studios over the years—there was even talk of their playing Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights— it was also a long-cherished ambition of Angie’s to work with her teen idol. Once again Billy Bob Thornton’s dictum that actors choose the parts that reflect where they are in their lives seemed to have resonance.

  Those who have known Angie for years anticipated trouble. Johnny Depp, notes a family friend, is very much her type: wild, artistic, and intriguing. In her mind he falls somewhere between Billy Bob and Brad Pitt, creative but not weird, natural but not insane. Elusive, too, engaged at one time to Winona Ryder and to Kate Moss—which may help explain Angie’s antipathy toward both women—but now living with French singer and fashion muse Vanessa Paradis, with whom he has two children. People who know Angie well believe that in days gone by she would have made a play for Depp. For her to live out her fantasy on film rather than in real life might be the resolution of this emotional conundrum.

  “Angie is a free spirit; you cannot tame her,” says a friend. “If she could get something going with Depp, she would leave Brad. She has always had a crush on him, always admired his quirky roles and his looks.” Astrologically, though, there is little connection between Depp’s and Jolie’s charts; there is much more between Brad’s and Angie’s.

  Certainly an affair would be box-office poison for Angie, especially as she has been comprehensively outmaneuvered by Brad, who seems, at least in the public mind, to be the more stable, responsible, and hands-on parent. Brad cut off any likely romantic concerns at the pass, reportedly insisting, against Angie’s wishes, that he and the children join her for the three-month shoot in Venice and Paris. Before filming began in February 2010, Vanessa Paradis parked her tanks on Angie’s lawn, declaring in People that even after twelve years she was “still deeply in love”: “[Johnny] makes me happy. We are many things—we are together and, in a way, one person,” she said.

  If the interview was a marker, it was placed just in time, Angie telling Germany’s Das Neue magazine in December that she did not consider fidelity “absolutely essential” in a relationship. “It’s worse to leave your partner and talk badly about him afterwards. Neither Brad nor I have ever claimed that living together means to be chained together. We make sure that we never restrict each other.”

  Angie seemed to be sending out a signal, her semaphore interpreted by the media as indicating storms ahead. Those storms were not long in coming. Hotel worker Anna Kowalski, who worked on Angie’s floor at the Waldorf-Astoria, accused the actress of cheating on Brad with one of her dialect coaches. She told In Touch magazine that after a late-night visit from the coach she found Angie’s hotel room littered with sex toys, a black rubber sheet, and empty vodka bottles. While the film’s chief dialect coach, Howard Samuelsohn, dismissed the claim as “bullshit,” Kowalski further claimed that Angie and Brad rarely interacted when they were in the suite together. “I didn’t see any kind of connection between Pitt and Jolie,” said the maid, who had been fired by the hotel.

  While the tittle-tattle of a hotel worker was one thing, the front-page story in the News of the World on January 24, 2010, claiming that the couple had seen divorce lawyers and had signed a £205 ($320) million deal to split their assets and share custody of their six children was quite another. The story, which detailed the couple’s initial visit to the lawyer’s office in December and their subsequent agreement, which was signed in January, set off a furious spin cycle of speculation that sucked in even staid TV, radio, and print outlets. The whirr of further evidence included the information that Brad had paid $1.3 million for a bachelor pad—complete with cave—near his existing property in Los Feliz; that he had been absent from the Screen Actors Guild Awards when the rest of the cast of Inglourious Basterds was present; and that he was apparently overheard at a four-hour dinner at Alto restaurant in Manhattan telling Angie that she needed psychiatric help. (Given the distance between tables, this would have been difficult.)

  One intriguing question that hung in the air was why they would need to see a divorce lawyer when they were unmarried. According to her circle, the reality was that they had gone to a lawyer in order to formalize arrangements for their children should anything happen to either of them. Since common-law marriages are not recognized in California, it made sense to have some paperwork relating to the children. Angie was notoriously slack in this regard. When she was married to Jonny Lee Miller, the couple had never bothered to sort out a prenuptial agreement. After Angie’s career took off, it was her mother who took the initiative to see a lawyer to draw up legal papers so that Angie was protected in the case of divorce. On February 8, 2010, Brad and Angie took legal action against Britain’s biggest-selling Sunday newspaper for making “false and intrusive allegations.”

  While the physical and emotional demands of filming Salt—reshoots were still going on in January—had undoubtedly strained their partnership, and the looming prospect of working with Johnny Depp had given Angie pause about her past obsessions and future direction, the couple pulled together for a cause they both held dear, helping the homeless and injured following the devastating January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, a country they had just recently visited. Not only did they donate $1 million to Doctors Without Borders—on top of the $6.8 million they had given away during 2009—but Angie, in her capacity as Goodwill Ambassador, was soon on the ground seeing for herself the progress made by relief efforts.

  During the two-day visit, when she visited SOS Villages for orphans and a Doctors Without Borders hospital, Angie spoke to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. The conversation reflected how far and how quickly she had come, Amanpour overtly recognizing her influence on the national and international stage. “You have a huge amount of power at your fingertips because of who you are. You have the ability to sway people.” Implicit was the fact she had broken free of Hollywood typecasting, a screen siren defined not by what she w
ore but by what she said. As activist John Trudell notes: “Her intelligence is the core of her substance. Looks and sexuality are the surface of who she is.” Today she is a role model for a different kind of woman: unconventional yet traditional, a homemaker but a marriage wrecker, nurturing but self-destructive. In fact, a classic Gemini. She is able to have it all without, seemingly, paying a price.

  Yet she is still paying a price in a currency that she barely understands, repeating a script from her childhood that she only briefly glimpses. There are signs, though, that she is venturing onto the path of forgiveness, inviting her father to join her family in Venice in February after flying to Dublin to watch his friend John Boorman receive a lifetime achievement award. It is possible that the long winter freeze is ending and a familial thaw has begun. Her mother would not have approved, just as she would not have countenanced Angie’s meeting with Bill Day. Perhaps Angie is starting to become her own woman. As Day observes: “I have watched this family at war for decades. There comes a time to forgive and forget.” Breaking free of the narrative of the past, understanding the truth of her journey, is Angie’s next big challenge.