Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (21 page)

As colorful and accomplished as she was, Cornelia was forever captured in the public imagination the moment on May 15, 1972, when Governor Wallace was shot five times by would-be assassin Arthur Bremen during the presidential campaign and she threw herself on her husband’s body. She was pictured cradling her husband’s head, his blood soaking her yellow suit jacket, using her own body to shield him from further attack. As Angie tried to uncover the soul of Cornelia Wallace, she carefully studied the
Time
cover photograph of that moment, an image that spoke to her of not only Cornelia’s courage, but also her love and her loyalty. “She loved him and cared for him,” observed Angie. “She could have been shot herself.” Cornelia is much more matter-of-fact about the famous magazine cover: “Fortunately, I’d just been to the hairdresser. Women think of things like that.”

Wallace, played by Gary Sinise, was left paralyzed from the waist down, his injury giving added poignancy to the film’s opening scene, in which Cornelia and Governor Wallace enjoy a breakfast cuddle on top of their hotel bed before hitting the campaign trail. The three-hour TV biopic charted Wallace’s transformation from a racist governor and political
opportunist who stood in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in 1963, temporarily blocking the entrance of two black students and proclaiming “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” to a man who, after he was shot, deliberately brought a large number of African-Americans into his administration. In a dramatic and true scene, he arrived in his wheelchair at a black church in Montgomery where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, and begged the congregation for forgiveness for his past misdeeds. “I have learned what suffering means. I know I contributed to that pain [of the black community], and I can only ask for your forgiveness,” he told them.

The allegorical nature of Wallace’s transformation—his Faustian pact to win power and his downfall and subsequent contrition—was what drew Frankenheimer, a lifelong liberal and a friend of Bobby Kennedy’s, to the film in the first place. When the cameras stopped rolling, the veteran director of nearly fifty TV and feature films declared that it was his best movie ever. While neither the ailing subject nor Cornelia agreed with his judgment—“They depicted me incorrectly,” she complained—the critics were largely on the director’s side, and the TV movie went on to be nominated for nine Emmy Awards.

The experience of being involved in a historically provocative drama—such was Wallace’s continuing influence that Frankenheimer was not able to film in Alabama—had a powerful impact on Angie. “For the first time I saw the grand scale of what you can attempt and what you can achieve,” she remarked, sentiments that echoed those of her father thirty years before when he starred in the hugely controversial
Midnight Cowboy
.

She had enjoyed, too, a grand, if unrequited, passion during filming. Angie, like other actors, admits that she falls in love with her costars, and she fell hard for her screen husband, Gary Sinise. That she was still married, and that Sinise, twenty years her senior, was married with three young children, mattered not. She was besotted. For once her mother, who listened to her daily reports from the set, pleaded with her not to pursue him. The infatuation soon passed, Sinise oblivious to his potential romantic jeopardy.

As ever, her father was out of the loop. While his dream was to “share the screen with [his] kids,” Angie was ambivalent about working with her father, wondering if she would be able to take direction from him. Their edgy, rather wary relationship was symbolized by the fact that when they
recorded a joint interview in June 1997, shortly after filming for
George Wallace
wrapped, he was in a Toronto studio, while she was in New York completing
Hell’s Kitchen
.

When Voight mentioned Angie’s husband, Jonny Lee Miller, and their friends Jude Law and Ewan McGregor, the nascent competition that characterized all of Angie’s relationships bubbled to the surface. She complained that she expended a lot of energy just keeping her clothes on and steering clear of girlfriend roles, but felt that her husband had been “blessed with some great projects that don’t need to be fixed.” Not that her husband necessarily would have agreed. While she was working in the California sunshine on one of John Frankenheimer’s finest films, he was lying in a freezing muddy field in Scotland surrounded by disembodied corpses. In
Regeneration,
based on Pat Barker’s novel, he played a British officer rendered mute by the horrors he witnessed during the Somme offensive in World War I, where thousands of soldiers were slaughtered in a matter of minutes. Although the corpses were artificial, the bitter cold, the clinging mud, and the stagnant water were all too authentic. Miller could have been forgiven for thinking that the lady doth protest too much.

In May, Miller joined twenty other up-and-coming British thespians at the Cannes Film Festival to celebrate the “extraordinary renaissance” of the U.K. film industry. Miller was very much a part of that dynamism. He and a group of like-minded colleagues, including his pals Jude Law, Ewan McGregor, Sean Pertwee, and Sadie Frost, had taken control of their own destiny and formed a production company, Natural Nylon. That summer they were in serious talks to promote a raft of projects that included
The Hellfire Club,
about a group of eighteenth-century libertines, and
Psychoville,
a satirical thriller. It didn’t hurt their cause that
Afterglow,
starring Miller and Julie Christie, was released that month to rave reviews. “Serious and comic, frivolous and substantial, giddy and lyrical all at the same time,” wrote critic Emanuel Levy.

Levy’s silky sentence could have served as a partial description of the brief and somewhat unusual marriage of Angie and Jonny. The word “ironic” would have been apt as well: For example, while Angie was seeing her dealer in New York, her husband was playing in a charity soccer match in Glasgow to raise money for a drug rehabilitation program.

While the peripatetic life of an actor meant that they spent much of
their union apart, on the infrequent occasions when they were together, few would have realized that they were thinking of formally separating. In a pattern she would follow for some years, Angie and her husband, at least in public, were passionate to the point of flagrant exhibitionism. When they went out with their friends to a restaurant in Los Angeles, they would make out in front of them and the other customers. “Quite frankly I found it tiresome going out with her when she spent all her time sucking her lover’s face off,” recalled one girlfriend. When they visited the homes of their friends, Angie would often ask to borrow the host’s bedroom for twenty minutes so that she and Jonny could have a “quickie.” “She was an exhibitionist; she liked the effect her sexuality had on people, how it discomfited them,” noted one of the witnesses to her sexy performances.

With Timothy Hutton lurking quietly in the background, Jenny Shimizu was often the third wheel in Angie and Jonny’s relationship. As Angie once admitted: “I probably would have married Jenny if I hadn’t already married Jonny. I’m quite free with my sexuality.” That summer her girlfriend became part of TV history when, in May 1997, she was one of a host of celebrities, including Demi Moore, Billy Bob Thornton, and Oprah Winfrey, who appeared on an
Ellen
special in which the show’s star, Ellen DeGeneres, acknowledged that she was a lesbian. Although that appearance enhanced Jenny’s celebrity, others were not so fortunate. Angie’s former babysitter, actor Laura Dern, played Ellen’s love interest in the celebrity-packed show and found herself struggling to find work for a year or so afterward.

During this period Jenny was staying with a girlfriend in the Hollywood Hills. One night Jenny invited Angie and her husband over for a kind of double date. As Jonny and Jenny’s girlfriend chatted inside, Angie and Jenny stripped and slid into the open-air swimming pool. “It seems like hours we caressed each other under the surface, again and again,” Jenny later breathlessly told a British tabloid. “It was one of our horniest nights ever. The fact that Jonny or my other lover [whom she later described as a “no-nonsense knockout”] could have caught us at any moment just made it more thrilling.”

I’m alone; I’m dying; I’m gay; I’m not going to be able to see you for weeks,” Angie told her husband in July 1997 as she closed the curtains
on her hotel windows in downtown Los Angeles and began to absorb the essence of tragic cover girl Gia Carangi, a notorious heroin addict who, in the mid-1980s, became the first celebrity model to die of AIDS, at the age of just twenty-six.

With this dramatic sentence, Angie effectively closed the door on her year-old marriage. Jonny returned to his old life in London, but the couple perversely remained the best of friends. There was further collateral damage. Her carelessness with her pets continued. The couple had already dispatched Vlad the iguana to reptile heaven through the good offices of the local vet. Now it was the turn of their pet snake, Harry Dean Stanton. When they couldn’t find anyone to kill the mice that Harry needed, another visit to the vet ensued. As this was the second time Angie had sentenced a pet to death, the vet agreed to find Harry another home—as long as Angie promised never to get another animal. “I realized that being with me was not the best thing for a pet,” she wryly observed.

It was perhaps as well that she left behind everything that touched her life as she embarked on a potentially dangerous and challenging emotional journey. As an actor who “became” her characters, she realized early on that in Gia she was absorbing an uncomfortable second skin, a body double whom she feared she might one day become. Angie observed: “Gia has enough similarities to me that I figured this would either be a purge of all my demons or it was gonna really mess with me.”

It was a scary prospect, and understandably she was hesitant about taking on such a physically and emotionally demanding leading role. She had already enrolled in a part-time film studies course at NYU, and it was only Geyer Kosinski’s wheedling intervention that convinced her to consider the role in the first place. Part of the bargain was a walk-on role for her brother. When she met first-time director Michael Cristofer, who had already seen two hundred actresses audition, he, too, shared her doubts about her strength and willingness to embrace the demanding part. “Although she’s extremely striking, it was not easy to see how beautiful she was. Her presentation of herself was pretty rough. I think having to parade around and call herself beautiful was an issue for her,” he recalled.

While there had been some talk about casting supermodel Cindy Crawford, who was known as “Baby Gia” early in her career, it was Angie who clearly captured the essence of the doomed model, whose brief life was
a postmodern fairy tale—there was no happy ending. “Angelina is probably as adventurous a person as Gia in many ways, even if she didn’t act on all those impulses,” observed Cristofer, who added that she shared Gia’s “pervasive innocence and vulnerability.” A five-hour meeting between Cristofer and his potential leading lady cleared up any remaining doubts in her mind. He took her carefully through the script, explaining that while it described the drug-fueled modeling world, Gia’s aggressive lesbianism, and her fragile love affair with makeup artist Linda, played by Elizabeth Mitchell, the heart of the story was the desperate search by a tortured soul to find love after Gia’s mother, played by Oscar winner Mercedes Ruehl, abandoned her when she was only eleven.

Gia’s profound sense of rejection; her bond with her mentor and surrogate mother, model agency head Wilhelmina Cooper, played by Faye Dunaway; her love affair with Linda; and her mother’s tentative attempts at reconciliation formed the emotional spine in the brief life of a young woman who, less than two years after starting modeling, was on the covers of
Vogue
and
Cosmopolitan,
and featured in a major fashion campaign for Versace (his own funeral took place in Milan during filming in July 1997). All too soon came the fall, a downward spiral of pills, cocaine, and mainlining heroin. Shortly before her death, the model known as “Sister Morphine” was reduced to living on the streets and selling jeans to buy food.

In her earlier work, notably
Hackers
and
Foxfire,
Angie had demonstrated that she could play the feral punk chick with a switchblade and a wild attitude to match. With
Gia
she also had to show vulnerability, convincing audiences that behind the artificial swagger was an insecure little girl desperately looking for love. This was her challenge, as her fellow
Foxfire
actor Michelle Brookhurst observed: “In our film there was a level of fearlessness about her; she was emotionally untouchable. But where is the vulnerability in Angie as Gia? To make her sympathetic we have got to understand why we root for her.”

In exploring the mother-daughter relationship she was tackling new territory. Now that she was joined at the hip with her own mother, how far did the imprinting experience of abandonment when she was in the cradle, those first memories of looking out at the sky—an open window on her back was one of her first tattoos—inform her screen performance, even at the edge of her creative consciousness? Her screen mother, Mercedes Ruehl,
perceptively touched on Gia’s psychic scar, telling writer Alanna Nash: “Drugs are a manifestation of the problem, but the real problem is the wound. In the screenplay we have a mother with a narcissistic wound and a daughter who is narcissistically wounded herself, from a kind of heartbreaking neglect. They’re both having to get through the day with massive tricks of denial.”

The overriding theme of Gia’s life was an emptiness in her soul forged by fears of abandonment, subject matter that was closer to Angie’s own life than she perhaps realized. Ironically, she touched on her empathy for Gia’s experience of parental loss, understanding the model’s feelings by comparison with her own life. “If I didn’t have her, if she left [when I was] eleven,” Angie said to the
Toronto Sun
about Marcheline, “I would have been looking for that my whole life, that kind of love and comfort.” Family friends believe that though she never acknowledged it publicly, Angie did realize that she was, obliquely, confronting her own relationship with her mother.