Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (20 page)

Angie was still immersed in the feisty character of Georgie Lawshe Woods when, during the filming of
True Women,
she went for an audition that very nearly proved her undoing. It was for another period piece, a TV biopic about the controversial governor of Alabama George Wallace. She was reading for the part of Cornelia, his outrageous and sexy second wife, in front of veteran director John Frankenheimer, helmsman of
The Manchurian Candidate, The Train, Birdman of Alcatraz,
and many other films. Wearing bright red lipstick and a black dress, she nervously did her reading. Then Frankenheimer, in an attempt to calm her nerves and break the ice, casually mentioned, “So Jon’s your father. How’s he doing and what’s he up to these days?”

For Angie, not to mention the willful Georgie, this was a familiar and maddening refrain. As she later told
Back Stage
magazine: “My heart just sank and I thought: ‘He didn’t pay attention to anything I just did.’ ” She found herself suggesting that Frankenheimer call her father himself if he was so interested in his health, and stalked out of the audition.

Within minutes Geyer Kosinski was on the telephone, berating her for storming out and for “dressing like a geisha girl.” As far as Angie was concerned, the elderly director had been rude and hadn’t paid attention to what she was saying. “He didn’t even care about me as an individual,” she complained.

Kosinski convinced her to wipe the lipstick off, calm down, and return to the audition for a second try. It was a triumph, and she landed the part that would change her life. Very soon everyone would be talking about her, rather than about the men in her life.

SEVEN

I can’t fucking see. I can’t fucking dance and I can’t fucking sing. What the fuck am I doing here?

—A
NGELINA
J
OLIE ON THE SET OF THE
R
OLLING
S
TONES
VIDEO
“A
NYBODY
S
EEN
M
Y
B
ABY
?”

In the half-light and on a good day, curly-haired Franklin Meyer likes to think he bears a passing resemblance to Bob Dylan. But when the craggy-faced New Yorker has an ever-present cigarillo clamped between his yellowing teeth, think more Warren Oates from Sam Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch.
Frank has a lived-in face, though his blue eyes, which have seen more than their fair share of debauchery and decadence, still twinkle. Now sixty-four, he is old-school New York, fondly remembering the days when downtown Manhattan was bad, mad, and dangerous to know. A friend of Andy Warhol’s—“as much as anyone ever was a friend of his”—he learned filmmaking from that first master of the “reality” genre. As a young actor, Meyer appeared in one of Warhol’s Factory epics alongside drag queen Candy Darling. When he asked the great man for direction, Warhol replied: “Do whatever you feel like doing.”

So he did. For the next twenty-five years he worked as a cabinetmaker before discovering, somewhat late in life, that dealing drugs was easier on the hands and knees. He took over from an “inept” pothead at the legendary Hotel Chelsea, home to actors, artists, and musicians, including Mr. Dylan himself. Meyer offered what he proudly called a “full-service, one-stop shop” for everything from heroin to ecstasy, quaaludes to cocaine. His ninth-floor apartment was, he insists, never a “shooting gallery” but a modern-day salon where conversations ranged far and wide as the somewhat rich and relatively famous sniffed, snorted, and smoked.

Like the desk of the late TV talk-show host Johnny Carson, Meyer’s dealing desk was higher than the rest of the room so that he could look down on his seated clients. It also hid the shotgun as well as the 9mm and 32mm handguns that he loved to handle, admiring the mechanism of the weapons just as he loved to tinker with his collection of antique watches. He insists he never used the guns in anger. It was all part of the daily theater played out for his well-heeled or artsy clientele.

At some point during his new career as a dealer he took a line, so to speak, from Warhol’s playbook and decided to film the goings-on behind the locked door of apartment 921. He called his attempt at cinéma vérité
Hand Job Files,
after the time he and another cameraman, a well-known New York director, were filming a lesbian S&M dominatrix being whipped and the second cameraman got a touch carried away. Over the months and then years, he filmed forty-odd hours of footage ranging from the banal to the plain weird: designer Marc Jacobs, in coat and scarf, chasing a line, or a beautiful, half-naked girl freebasing. Others were filmed but not doing drugs, including a black rapper talking about his brother’s breaking into the home of his fiancée’s parents; a client’s girlfriend performing desultory oral sex; director Abel Ferrara growling around the apartment; and the irrepressible singer Chaka Khan being Chaka. While he has yet to find a suitable distributor, he proudly shows visitors, including the author, his uncut documentary.

Central to the casting for his reality TV show was the sometimes blonde, sometimes dark-haired figure of Angelina Jolie. She first appeared at his door in February 1997, when she was filming
Hell’s Kitchen
in New York while also working with John Frankenheimer in Los Angeles on the biopic of George Wallace. Directed by Tony Cinciripini,
Hell’s Kitchen
was a down and dirty story of revenge, drugs, and sleazy sex; Angie played a vengeful girlfriend wanting blood atonement for the death of her brother. When she first arrived at Meyer’s apartment, she was accompanied by her screen lover, fellow actor Johnny Whitworth, who played Patty, a young punk who accidentally shot her brother and later had rough, drug-fueled sex with Angie’s addict mother, played by Rosanna Arquette.

Like her movie character, Angie was bleary-eyed, and her left hand was bandaged after an accident on set. Even though it was the first time Angie had met her new dealer, she was so careless of her image that she allowed
Meyer to take her picture for his collection. Then she scored sixty dollars’ worth of cocaine and heroin.

For the next three years “Frank from the Chelsea” was her dealer, supplying her from time to time with her drugs of choice, heroin and cocaine. The odd couple soon became friends, shopping, dining out, and even visiting his elderly father, Howard. Angie and Frank, whose mother, Sylvette Engel, was a talented artist, even talked of buying land and forming an artists’ colony in upstate New York. Angie wanted to learn to paint and sculpt. Her true passion, though, was for making masks and casts, on several occasions using plaster of paris to make molds of her own breasts. She was as intrigued by the beauty of women who had suffered partial or full mastectomies as she was by the use of hot candle wax and nipple clamps during lesbian S&M sessions. “It has to come from a real place,” she told the camera.

The star of
Hand Job Files
was as witty as she was uninhibited. During a filmed chat about childhood pets, she joked that Frank’s girlfriend, Danielle, should sue Warner Brothers, the makers of Bugs Bunny cartoons, after Danielle revealed that when she fed lettuce to her pet rabbit it died. (Actually, Bugs Bunny’s staple diet was carrots, but it got a laugh.) Angie confessed that when she was growing up she was equally unlucky with her own pets, recounting the countless small tragedies under her stewardship.

As happy as she was to chat endlessly on camera, her visits to Frank’s salon were not merely social. She was there to score. Frank, though, is reticent about Angie’s drug use, seeing her more as a friend than an addict. “She never bought or did a lot,” he recalls. “She was not a serious career drug addict. I never remember her spending much more than a hundred dollars at a time.” Still, he cautions: “Whether you smoke, shoot, or snort heroin, in the end you end up at the same place. It’s the same game no matter how you do it.”

Most of the time she preferred to smoke, finding comfort in the lonely ritual of “chasing the dragon.” This elusive pursuit of the ultimate high involved heating her heroin on a piece of aluminum foil and carefully ensuring that the liquid did not coalesce into an unmanageable mass before inhaling the smoke through a second, rolled-up piece of aluminum foil.

Her behavior caused sufficient alarm on set for the wife of a producer, who was also her driver, to call a close friend of her mother’s and outline
what was going on. Marcheline’s reaction was instructive. Passive as ever, she proposed doing nothing, arguing that Angelina was a twenty-one-year-old adult who was responsible for her own behavior. “But she’s your daughter,” said her friend, horrified at Marche’s willingness to accommodate her daughter’s self-destruction. In the end Marcheline agreed to go to New York and confront Angie. Over lunch she held her daughter’s hand and, in her wispy, ethereal way, tentatively asked, “Now, Angie, tell me the truth. Are you doing drugs?” Angie looked her in the eye and said, “No, Mommy, I am not,” and then proceeded to eat a whole hamburger and fries to show her mother that her appetite was healthy. The encounter was very Marcheline, who always wanted to be her daughter’s best friend rather than her mother.

As ever, her father learned about her drug use some time later and from sources other than his ex-wife. He got on a plane and tracked Angie down. As he later told TV host Pat O’Brien, he could see what he called “real psychic pain” etched on her face, a torment she seemed to relieve with drugs. “You can’t help me! You can’t help my pain!” she screamed at her father, pleading with him to let her deal with her situation on her own and asking him to give her the night to recover. Reluctantly, he bowed to her will, leaving her to her own devices. It was a decision he later came to regret. However well-meaning, his one-man intervention had little chance of success without the full support of the rest of the family and the involvement of a qualified expert on drugs.

As dramatic and emotionally draining as this encounter was, it gave only a partial portrait of the complex relationship between father and daughter. Like her father, Angie was and is a savior by nature, wanting to save everyone she can. Just as her father was trying to save her from herself, so did she want to save him from himself. A twenty-one-minute telephone conversation with him filmed by Franklin Meyer is revealing. At times she sounds like his mother, admonishing him for spending too much time punishing himself rather than enjoying his money and his life. “I want you to teach me things,” she told him, adding, “Making yourself happy makes us happy.” At the same time, as she began to appreciate the business she was in, she could see more clearly how he had squandered his talent. He took roles way beneath his ability and stature, while rejecting parts that might enhance his career. One example around this time was the Tom Cruise–produced
movie
Without Limits,
about the famous 1970s Olympic runner Steve Prefontaine and his legendary coach, Bill Bowerman. Both Angie and James thought Jon was perfect for the part of Bowerman, but he turned it down. The role went to Donald Sutherland, who received accolades for his performance.

She took a similarly maternal interest in her brother’s career. In spite of subsequent events, they had never been especially close. As a kid, James was the typical elder brother, telling his sister to “scram” on the rare occasions she wanted to play with him. They had different interests and outlooks on the world, typified by the fact that James loved being behind the camera, Angie in front. When he was at college he would not speak to or see his sister for months on end. He seemed destined for a career as a director, especially as he showed genuine talent, at USC winning the George Lucas prize. Friends recall that when he was making his student movies, which starred his sister, he affected the guise of a French New Wave director, wearing a beret and a striped shirt. During one film in which Angie appeared half naked, he announced portentously that it was a “closed set.”

When James graduated, however, he was so painfully shy that he couldn’t bring himself to attend interviews, even when he was on a short list of one. It was a surprise when he suddenly switched gears, deciding, somewhat belatedly, to follow his sister into acting. Unlike Angie, he had never had an acting lesson or shown any interest in that branch of the business, yet his father dutifully introduced him to all the casting agents in town so that they would remember his face. Angie pitched in, too, helping him snag his first screen role, as a bartender in
Hell’s Kitchen
. She reported back to her father that she was thrilled to see how much her rather diffident brother had grown in confidence during the shoot.

It was James who took her to the emergency room of the local hospital when she cut her hand. As she later recalled: “James was just great. I saw how he would be as a dad or a husband. He was so cool under pressure, held my other hand, and got me a lollipop and kept making jokes.” Whatever concerns Marche and Jon had about their daughter’s drug use might well have been soothed by the fact that her brother was on hand to keep an eye on her. But it was not quite as simple as that; Angie was very private about her drug use.

Moreover, she was bouncing back and forth between New York and
Los Angeles. The
Hell’s Kitchen
shoot in New York was organized around her commuting schedule to Los Angeles, where she played Cornelia in
George Wallace
. It was a meaty role, the ballsy character of Cornelia straight out of the Barbara Voight school of life. A crack shot, record-holding fisherwoman, onetime rodeo performer, and professional water-skier, she was a woman who loved adventure, driving the 100-mph pace car at the opening of the Indianapolis 500 and riding in a National Guard Phantom jet. “I wanted to be the first woman on the moon,” Cornelia Wallace once recalled. “I was never wild, but I was daresome. I’d try most anything one time.”

During her research into Cornelia’s character, Angie discovered that she was also a classical pianist, saxophonist, and organist, and wrote and performed folk songs with the likes of the “king of country,” Roy Acuff. Angie made the mistake of mentioning Cornelia’s singing career to director John Frankenheimer, who suggested that Angie, who cheerfully declares that she cannot carry a tune in a bucket, strum the guitar and sing Acuff’s signature song, “The Wabash Cannonball,” at an election rally. Angie was being way too modest. Like her father, who sang on Broadway in
The Sound of Music,
Angie has a pleasing singing voice.