Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (17 page)

For a girl who pondered suicide on numerous occasions, her next purchase suggested an underlying will to live. Her last two movies, together
with her modeling work and an appearance that year in a Meatloaf rock video, enabled this unconventional girl to behave in a very conventional way. Just nineteen, she had enough money to put a down payment on an apartment in West Hollywood. She had seen her mother have to rely on the intermittent largesse of her father, and that life was not for her. Even as she triumphantly asserted her independence, her father still acted as guarantor for the loan.

Once again, though, she felt a profound depression afterward, spiraling into a mood of anger, sadness, and hopelessness. As much as she embraced life, burning faster and running harder than her contemporaries, so did she reject life, as she rejected herself. It was almost as if she felt she didn’t really deserve a home of her own.

Once she got the keys to the apartment, she found herself sitting on the floor sobbing because she had to pick out a carpet color and didn’t think she would live long enough to see the carpet installed. Having a nice home of her own, it turned out, didn’t resolve her inner torment. And now she was truly lost: If a home didn’t provide the feeling of being finally “home,” what would?

But Angie is a survivor. As writer Chris Heath laconically observed, “Crying over the pointlessness of home decoration in an impermanent and unreliable world, she eventually did the smart thing and chose a carpet anyway.”

“Dark gray,” she recalls. “I didn’t get that happy. It was a very, very dark gray.”

SIX

She knew about needles and tattoos and heroin and she had an innate wild sexuality. That is what the camera captured. It filmed her courage and her chutzpah.

—
P
LAYING
G
OD
DIRECTOR
A
NDY
W
ILSON

After more than two years of focusing on her acting career, Angelina had no social life to speak of and no boyfriend since Anton had been sent packing. Her life was a relentless round of acting classes, occasional auditions, and rejection after rejection. The couple of small roles she had snagged in low-budget films after
Cyborg 2
were not going to make a Hollywood director or producer sit up and take notice. By the fall of 1994 she was depressed and frustrated; the name Angelina Jolie was just not opening any doors.

Seeing her despair, her mother, who was now her manager, broke the cardinal rule of Angie’s professional life, her refusal to piggyback on her father’s name. Without breathing a word to Angie, her mother called her agent, Hollywood veteran Richard Bauman of Bauman-Hiller, and told him that he could start to tell casting agents that Angie was indeed Jon Voight’s daughter. As the name Voight was rather better known than Jolie, very soon doors started creaking open. To this day Angie doesn’t know that it was her father’s name that helped her get her first big break.

In any event, she needed more than her father’s name to win her first mainstream role; dumb luck played a starring role, too. When fifteen-year-old actress Katherine Heigl, who had earned plaudits from French actor Gérard Depardieu for her role in his latest film,
My Father the Hero,
decided to drop out of a teen cyber-thriller,
Hackers,
Angie was invited to audition. Even though Angie impressed director Iain Softley, she was up against
formidable competition, including Hilary Swank, Heather Graham, and Liv Tyler, for the role of computer whiz kid Kate “Acid Burn” Libby.

Given Angie’s antipathy toward modern technology, it was rather ironic that the English director eventually chose her. Unlike her computer geek brother, she prided herself on using only a pencil. “I hate computers,” she would say during interviews to promote the film. She was not the only one. Her costar Jonny Lee Miller also had a love-hate relationship with the world of technology. “I’m not someone who needs to talk to someone in Russia at four
A.M
. on the Internet or store lots of information,” he later explained. It was but the first connection on the road to romance.

At first glance, Jonny Lee Miller neatly fitted the template of the rather fey young men who had drifted through her life. Good-looking, quietly charming yet diffident to the point of shyness, Miller, known as “Jonny Leave Me Alone” by his friend actor Robert Carlyle, seemed the antithesis of a strong, macho male. For Angie, an alpha female, he fitted the mold established by her friendship with the openly gay Chris Landon, her sobbing live-in lover, the “nerdy” Brian Evans, and of course her brother, the favored son endlessly waiting for his father to give his career a kick-start rather than relying on his own chops as his sister was doing.

Yet, as she was soon to discover, Miller was much wilder than his meek and mild persona suggested. For once the intensely competitive Miss Jolie found herself uncomfortably lagging behind. Like Angie, Miller was from a theatrical family—his grandfather Bernard Lee played “M” in the first twelve James Bond films—and Miller had appeared onstage and on TV since he was nine. A member of the National Youth Music Theatre, during the summer vacations he and his best friend, actor Jude Law, regularly performed at the Edinburgh International Festival. Before joining the cast of
Hackers,
he had held his own playing opposite the redoubtable Helen Mirren, the hardboiled detective in the TV drama
Prime Suspect.

Initially, his pleasantly hypnotic English accent proved Angie’s undoing. “Englishmen appear to be so reserved, but underneath they’re expressive, perverse, and wild,” she says. She soon discovered that Miller, a serious runner, skydiver, and martial-arts fan, was as fascinated by tattoos as his new girlfriend. Two years older than Angie, he had a rat and a snake on his arm, courtesy of his “crazy” youth. Together they would explore the world of the needle much more intensely.

In the early days, though, the tomboy in her tried, and usually failed, to best her costar on Rollerblades, the couple bonding as they prepped for their roles as cool computer hackers. When they reported for work in September 1994, they spent several hours a days padded up and learning to Rollerblade in Battery Park in New York City and another four hours a day under the tutelage of a computer expert learning how to type and understand the intricacies of cyberspace. “Racing Jonny on Rollerblades was a big part of our relationship,” Angie recalls. “We had read a lot about computers and met computer hackers. With a lot of lines, I didn’t know what I was talking about.”

For his part, as much as Miller professed to be a Luddite, he spent hours playing computer games, one of his favorites the adventures of a buxom action heroine, Lara Croft. Angie, on the other hand, to the bemusement of other cast members, found a scene in which she had to rummage through garbage in an alleyway endlessly amusing. “I thought of you when I was doing it,” she told a fellow conspirator in the real-life garbage run on Steven Paul’s house.

Perhaps appropriately, given the juvenile nature of the movie, her love affair with Jonny evolved in the schoolyard, much of the filming taking place in November and December 1994 at Stuyvesant High School in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan. “I always fall in love while I’m working on a film. It’s such an intense thing,” she recalls. At the end of a passionate and at times exhilarating experience came the inevitable feeling of deflation and depression as the bonds forged in the intensity of the moment were casually cut. In spite of their closeness, when filming ended, Angie, once again sad and despondent, asked Miller to forget about her and move on. She returned to Los Angeles, but they nonetheless kept in touch, developing a long-distance relationship.

Angie had work to do. In many ways her role as the edgy but brilliant tomboy “Acid Burn” anticipated her next character, a charismatic drifter named Legs Sadovsky in
Foxfire,
based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel set in the 1950s. It’s the story of a group of high school girls who are inspired to confront a sexually abusive teacher when a mysterious female James Dean–like character appears out of nowhere to urge them to take on authority and explore their true natures, including their dawning sexuality. The opening shot establishes the mythic mood, the leather-clad Legs dramatically arriving at
the school gate in the middle of a thunderstorm. “I saw Legs as being androgynous but sexual in a very animal sort of way; free, fascinating, intriguing and touchy,” Angie told writer Gary Dretzka.

Before filming began in Portland, Oregon, in March 1995, she was reminded that for all the exploration of character, the search for essence, she was involved in a game for overgrown children. She remembers being in her father’s bedroom excitedly showing him the butterfly knife she was going to carry and the leather pants she was going to wear for the
Foxfire
shoot. He then showed her the hair extensions, bracelets, and rings he would be using in the Los Angeles–based crime drama
Heat.
“It was just like two kids playing dress up,” she recalls. For all her issues with her father, there remained a residual bedrock of understanding. “Now it’s great because we can talk on a level few people can talk to their parents on,” she told
Empire
magazine. “Not only can we talk about our work, but our work is about our emotion, our lives, the games we play, what goes through our heads.” The good news, too, was that he was back working, doing what he did best. As much as she railed against him, he was her dad and she cared about him. Watching a man she admired, albeit grudgingly, spiral out of control had been a painful experience.

For Angie there was no boundary between a role and real life. As she noted, she absorbed the character, becoming that person and living through the role. On set, she was Legs Sadovsky even when the cameras stopped rolling. She was not the only one. Fellow actress Hedy Burress was as granola offscreen as on, enjoying hiking and communing with nature; Sarah Rosenberg was the token grunge; while Calvin Klein model Jenny Shimizu was a contradictory presence: A crop-haired motorbike dyke, she gave off a butch vibe but was actually sweet, demure, and easily dominated. Both on-screen and off, Angie was an intimidating presence, her dark, brooding charisma terrifying and attracting.

Actress Michelle Brookhurst, who played the class bitch, Cindy, vividly describes having to shout, “Who the fuck are you?” in a potentially violent face-off with Angie’s Legs. The problem was that Michelle, then sixteen, was wary of Angie. It didn’t help her self-possession that, in Method acting style, Angie would yell and scream and continuously clear her throat in preparation for the scene.

“Even at nineteen, Angie was the most formidable person I have ever met,” recalls Michelle, now a stylist. “Everyone was slightly terrified of her, not because she was mean or unkind. She was not like that at all. It was like meeting a serial killer or a member of the Mafia. There was something dark there that scared me. She had that unsettling presence. Watching her was like watching a snake uncurling. She is inaccessible, like a force of nature, as if she was from a different planet.”

The screen “scent” left by Angie was sniffed out by film critic Robert Butler. He noted perceptively: “If
Foxfire
is remembered for anything it will be as one of the earliest screen appearances of Angelina Jolie, who has a face the camera loves and seems a likely candidate for fully fledged stardom.”

Certainly, Angie was by far the most experienced actor in the group of teenage girls sequestered in a luxury hotel in Portland’s Pioneer Square with an acting coach. Shimizu struggled with her role as a troubled drug addict and needed particular attention. For first-time director Annette Haywood-Carter, this was a baptism of fire. During filming virtually all members of the camera crew were fired, and the girls were endlessly indulged—filming halted for hours, for example, so that Hedy Burress could enjoy her “moment” alone on an empty bridge that served as a metaphor for personal growth. Editorially there was indecision about whether this was a liberating revenge fantasy or a rite-of-passage movie, as Maddy, a conventional young woman played by Burress, has her sexuality awakened by Angie’s Legs. Every night the girls were handed new pages of dialogue to learn, reflecting the indecision at the top. In the end, Haywood-Carter filmed two endings, one with Legs and Maddy kissing, the other with Maddy holding back.

While the kiss ended up on the cutting-room floor, another quasi-erotic sequence did make it to the big screen. In a long scene shot in an empty house, Legs tattoos the breast of each of her teenage disciples. “I loved doing it; it was sensual and fun,” she later told James Lipton. “It was a very lovely time between women.”

While there was sexual hesitancy on film, among the actors and crew there was no such inhibition, the eight-week shoot turning into one long and decadent sorority party. On one occasion all the girls went to a strip club, a bespectacled blonde lap dancing for Angie and her “wasted” crew. For the first few weeks Jenny’s girlfriend visited from New York, bringing
small presents. Angie bided her time. Although she was still developing her long-distance relationship with Jonny Lee Miller, she admitted that she fell in love with Shimizu the moment she saw her audition for the movie.

At first Angie thought the dark-haired model was a rival for her role of Legs, but she relaxed when she realized Shimizu was up for Goldie, the troubled addict. “I noticed her sweater and the way her pants fitted and I thought: ‘My God!’ I was getting incredibly strong sexual feelings,” she told the London
Sunday Mirror
. For the first two weeks the girls just lay on a hotel bed chatting. Eventually Jenny, then twenty-four, made the first move and undressed her costar. “She was very sexual and very comfortable and very domineering. I could tell she wasn’t a normal teenager,” Jenny later told Sky TV, acknowledging Angie’s precocious behavior. “I’ve never kissed anyone with a bigger mouth than Angelina Jolie. I always thought I had huge lips, but when I met her it was like two big water beds.” Much of their passion lay in resisting temptation before wildly embracing each other, Jenny describing this masochist element of their love affair as being acted out in their minds rather than in bed. “It’s not like we dressed in leather and hung each other up in chains or anything like that,” she said.