Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (23 page)

In the meantime, Miller called Angie and innocently told her that he was being considered for a part in a Jagged Films production. Angie listened but never breathed a word to her husband about why she suspected he was being courted. When confronted, Jagger confirmed her suspicions. Angie was furious at his underhanded behavior, screaming that she never wanted to see or speak to him again. As convoluted casting-couch maneuvers go, it was in a class of its own.

Jagger paid a high emotional price, falling into a deep depression as a result of Angie’s silence. He was now the recipient of the Bertrand freeze. “He was completely heartbroken by her,” notes Lauren Taines. The freeze lasted for months, Angie given further pause about any future dalliance when Jerry Hall gave birth to her fourth child with Mick, Gabriel, in December 1997. Angie’s heart thawed only after Stones drummer Charlie Watts called her and pleaded with her to call Jagger, as he was in utter despair. Reluctantly, she agreed to resume their relationship, and the love-struck rocker invited her to join him on tour in Brazil in April 1998.

The freeze in her relations with Jagger coincided with a further thaw between Angie and her husband. In October 1997, with rumors of a formal separation swirling, Angie stated the obvious—that she loved her husband but was no good at being married. “I wasn’t even a good friend because I was just absent and . . . I’d go for drives and disappear or go film something and be in hotels forever and not do anything, not have friends, not visit, not hang out. I couldn’t calm down and just live life.”

For a few brief weeks before Christmas and over New Year’s they tried to revive their marriage. They spent time in New York before Miller headed to
the Czech Republic to make
Plunkett & Macleane,
a period drama about two highwaymen, with his friend from
Trainspotting
Robert Carlyle, then reunited in Scotland for the wedding of Carlyle and makeup artist Anastasia Shirley at the remote but utterly luxurious Skibo Castle on December 28. The candlelit midnight union was an irresistibly romantic affair, what with the skirl of pipes, the swirl of kilts, and a seemingly endless supply of the finest malt. It was the final hurrah for Jonny and Angie, who decided to go their separate ways. Days later, Angie explained to writer Chris Hutchins: “Right now I’m not living as a married woman. Now we’re both busy growing up.”

Significantly, she chose her father, rather than her mother, brother, or husband, to accompany her to the Fifty-fifth Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hills Hilton in January 1998. Although she felt as if she were crashing a party where she didn’t belong—she even considered covering up her growing array of tattoos—this was very much her home turf. Angie had walked by the five-star hotel every day on her way to and from school.

When she won Best Supporting Actress for her role in
George Wallace,
that was a cue to party till dawn, her father wondering whether she really should be drinking tequila shots at five in the morning. She was joined in her late-night drinking by Leonardo DiCaprio, who had been nominated for Best Actor for his role in the unsinkable movie,
Titanic.
Their date was arranged by those unlikely Hollywood cupids, their agents, Geyer Kosinski and DiCaprio’s reps Rick and Julie Yorn. Even though they left the party together, the
Titanic
star did not float Angie’s boat; the actress told friends afterward that even though they shared a shower together in his hotel suite there was little sexual rapport. The most memorable event was Angie mislaying the pair of diamond earrings she had borrowed for the evening. Thankfully they were insured, Angie leaving her mother to fill in the insurance claim form.

When Angie finally got home and listened to her answering machine, among the many messages of congratulations there was one from her now-estranged husband and another from her lover, Timothy Hutton. Her response was jaded; she told friends that if she hadn’t won, neither would have bothered to call. Her mother’s answering machine was also working overtime. Photographer Robert Kim, who took her first head shots and advised Angie to take up modeling full-time, called Marche and said: “It’s a good job your daughter didn’t listen to us and never went to Paris!”

Now the world was listening to Angie. Days after the Golden Globe celebrations—
George Wallace
won the award for Best Miniseries or Television Film—she was center stage at the premiere of
Gia,
held at the Directors Guild in Hollywood. This time all her family was on parade, including her parents; her brother; her godmother, Jacqueline Bisset; and her husband. They heard HBO Pictures president John Matoian tell the celebrity audience: “If we hadn’t found Angelina Jolie, we wouldn’t be here tonight.” Afterward her father said of her performance: “I’d like to act with her and I’d love to direct her. She’s the real thing.” Just as when she watched her first movie,
Cyborg 2,
she went home feeling sick, but she nonetheless embarked on a round of interviews to promote the movie.

She was frequently asked about the lesbian love scenes, her own drug use, and her modeling career. Her responses ranged from her trademark unflinching honesty to confusing evasion. She told
The Cable Guide
that she “loved” the sex scenes with costar Elizabeth Mitchell. “She hadn’t done a love scene before and she hadn’t been with a woman before. I was looking forward to kissing her and touching her and watching her discover that and hopefully, enjoy it. I think she did. I become more romantic with women. I love women.”

She took a rather more equivocal approach when quizzed about her own use of drugs. “I hate heroin because I have been fascinated by it,” she told
Entertainment Weekly
. “I’m not immune but I won’t do it now, at all, because luckily I’ve found something that replaces that high, which is my work.” She emphasized to
The New York Times:
“Knowing what I know now, I would not do heroin now.” This was news to her dealer Frank Meyer, who confirms that he was supplying her with heroin throughout the filming of
Gia
and beyond.

Equally surprised was fashion photographer Sean McCall, who had picked her out as a future swimwear supermodel, when she told
The New York Times
and others that she had “failed miserably” in her attempts to be a model, recalling how she felt “terrible” when she was put into a swimsuit and measured all over, like a piece of meat. As Sean McCall recalls: “It’s baffling that she would say that. We never measured her or even considered it. She was certainly no failure; as a model she was on the brink of great success. She could have out–Kate Mossed Kate Moss if she had stuck with it.”

The dramatic license she took with her own life imbued her with the
brio to take on an outsize character like Gia Carangi. Critics loved her outstanding performance, the doyenne of the film world, Pauline Kael, paying Jolie just about the biggest compliment she had to give: “This girl could play both the Brando and Maria Schneider roles in
Last Tango in Paris
! Where in the world did she come from?” Others were equally complimentary. The
Daily News
’s Will Cooper wrote: “Hers is the real art behind this artifice and her fire is what makes HBO’s
Gia
burn so brightly.”
Variety
described her performance as “a mesmerizing tour de force,” while Lee Winfrey of
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
Gia’s hometown paper, wrote: “If you like to see the birth of a star, watch
Gia.
”

It was not only Angie who received plaudits; her screen mother, Mercedes Ruehl, was also singled out for expressing the complex relationship with her daughter. “Even more than Jolie, Ruehl puts character into the role of the self-destructing Gia, helping us to understand where the daughter’s insecurities and fits of childish pique come from,” observed
Newsday.
“Ruehl also manages to convey guilt over Gia’s demise, even as she denies it.”

Friends and acquaintances who had lost touch with the young Angelina Jolie were equally impressed by her performance, mainly because it reminded them of the girl they once knew. School friend Windsor Lai watched her on TV and said, rather innocently: “Oh my God, that girl acts just like a girl I knew in eighth grade.” Only later did he realize he was responding to the girl he’d once sketched. For makeup artist Rita Montanez, the Angie she knew and Gia were interchangeable. “It was almost like she wasn’t acting. But her dark side is a disguise that hides something else, the relationship inside the family. Nothing much makes sense about her.”

Meanwhile, her mother was busy mapping out Angie’s future. With Jonny Lee Miller out of the picture, she went to see her regular psychic to ask about the chances of Angie’s marrying Mick Jagger. The psychic was blunt, telling her that she would marry an older man, but it was not going to be Mick Jagger. Marcheline was devastated—and determined to prove her wrong.

EIGHT

I feel like I am just a piece of luggage on an airport carousel waiting to be picked up. Please pick me, please pick me.

—T
IM
H
UTTON TO
A
NGELINA
J
OLIE

It was not so much a stairway to heaven as an elevator ride to ecstasy. He told her he was going to buy a pair of pants. She was heading for the hotel lobby. As they stood in the elevator, both felt a shock of attraction. Then Billy Bob Thornton, actor, director, and musician, climbed into a chauffeur-driven van and embarked on his shopping trip in downtown Toronto. The word “pants” conjuring up all kinds of thoughts in her head, Angie sat on a wall by their hotel and tried not to faint or swallow her cigarette. Irresistible object meeting improbable subject. “What was that?” she later recalled of that first encounter with her latest “screen husband” in early 1998. “I didn’t know what to do.”

Even for Billy Bob, four times married and with three children to his name, this was a new experience. “I felt like I had been hit by a bolt of lightning” is the way he later described first seeing Angie, who played Mary Bell, the sexy, boozy wife to Billy Bob’s air-traffic controller in
Pushing Tin
. Ever the artist, he later commemorated the moment his life changed by writing the song “Angelina.”

Of course, it wasn’t supposed to play out like that. In the Hollywood version of droit du seigneur, where the local nobleman enjoys the pick of fair maidens, Angie was the choice of the movie’s leading man, John Cusack. He had already taken her out for dinner in Beverly Hills, ostensibly to discuss her role as the cheating wife who falls for Cusack on-screen, but also to give her the Cusack squeeze. She came away from that dinner
thinking about romance—but not in the way that Cusack imagined. He had also invited his good friend Al Pacino to dine with them. Throughout the evening, all Pacino did was talk about Angie’s mother. When she spoke with Marcheline the next day, Angie told her: “I could swear he was in love with you.” Only then did Marcheline give her wide-eyed daughter a glimpse into her own secret past.

When Angie and John Cusack later sat in the hotel bar in Toronto shooting the breeze, the star of
High Fidelity
and
Grosse Pointe Blank
had the quiet confidence of a man who knew how his evening was going to end.

Cue the arrival of Billy Bob Thornton, old enough to be Angie’s father and a decade older than Cusack. She would later tell girlfriends that the crestfallen look on Cusack’s face when she left the bar with Billy was priceless. Angie’s evening was about to get a whole lot more amusing. She enjoyed telling the story of their first bedroom encounter, during which she discovered the truth of Hollywood rumors about Billy Bob’s prodigious talent. Before they consummated their passion, Billy, with faux embarrassment, apologized for what she was about to receive. “He told her that he was hung like a mosquito,” recalls her New York dealer, Frank Meyer, with scarcely disguised glee. “Then he pulled out this knee knocker. That certainly put a smile on her face.”

Understandably, she told a rather different version in public, assuring CNN’s Larry King, among others, that while she was “tempted” to bed Billy Bob when they first met, it was another two years before her love was consummated. “I was happy to be his friend and that was good enough,” she said. (It was a claim that would be repeated years later, about another man on another film.) Of course, at the time, she was quietly dating Timothy Hutton, while Billy Bob, according to the New York
Daily News,
became engaged to his live-in lover, Laura Dern—Angie’s onetime babysitter—who flew in from Vancouver, where she was filming
The Baby Dance,
to celebrate.

Angie didn’t just have competition for Billy Bob from Laura Dern, but also from another woman on the set who found a lasting place in Billy Bob’s heart. Canadian air-traffic controller Sheila McCombe, who was training Cusack and Thornton for their roles, was Angie’s worst nightmare—beautiful, smart, funny, athletic, and aggressively ambitious: the living, breathing embodiment of “the other girl.” Certainly John Cusack and Billy Bob thought so, flirting outrageously with the blue-eyed blonde as she taught them the
language and tricks of real-life air-traffic controllers. Director Mike Newell recalled: “John made for her like a hunter at the first set of the season.” He had a serious rival in Billy Bob, who invited her to dinner with her friends at local Toronto restaurants and called her constantly. Sheila found their attentions amusing—and flattering—recalling how Cusack and Thornton tried to outdo each other. “They wanted to impress me by being the best,” she recalls with some amusement. “I was very strict.”

Billy Bob clearly enjoyed her company. “We’d hang out with Sheila and she was just like this girl we knew,” he recalled. “Then she’d be on the set, like no nonsense, ‘No, this is what you do.’ ” When the film was finished, Billy Bob kept in contact, romancing her under the radar. Her friends would later say that the friendship deepened in time and he asked her to marry him—even though he was still engaged to Laura Dern. Sheila shoots down the marriage talk, the fighter pilot’s daughter stating: “He talks like that with everyone. He is a very talented man. We came close for a little bit.”