Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (28 page)

For the premiere of
The Bone Collector
in November 1999, Angie deliberately invited her lesbian girlfriend, Jenny Shimizu; her estranged husband but constant friend, Jonny Lee Miller; her brother, James Haven; and
another friend, a fellow heroin user. To spice things up even more, she and her guests all shared the same hotel suite for the night. If she thought she was going to be the ringmaster in some weird interaction, she was in for a shock. During the night Jenny made a pass at Angie’s addict friend, in part to make Angie jealous. The ploy worked, perhaps too well. It was more than Angie could handle, “freaking out” at the emotional menagerie—ex-husband, lover, fellow addict, and brother—that confronted her. “For once she went too far and it all ended in tears. Hers,” noted her friend.

During this emotional carousel ride, there was one man in her life who refused to leave her alone: her father, even though their public displays of fond togetherness on the red carpet or in the media were largely a charade. When the cameras were pointed elsewhere, father and daughter maintained a hostile, sometimes belligerent, distance. In interviews they talked about working together—perhaps, suggested Angie, in a remake of the 1985 comedy
Clue,
based on the board game. Her father seemed taken with the thought, saying in another newspaper interview that it would be “great to play these really dopey characters, partially because we’re both taken so seriously now.” Angie even talked about the possibility of driving across the country in the Cannonball Run with her father.

In keeping with this mutual adoration society, she told
Entertainment Weekly
in November 1999: “We’ve found a great relationship now,” while Jon Voight was hoping that the day would soon come when his daughter was more famous than he was. “Angie and I are great friends and that fact is one of the joys of my life,” he told the
Toronto Sun.
As ever, Angie capped the love fest when she declared to a Scottish newspaper: “I actually hate Jolie. I would rather have been Voight.”

The reality was very different. In the well-worn narrative of Angie’s life, which she unveiled to anyone who cared to listen, her father could do no right, her mother no wrong. Her story, learned at her mother’s knee, was that her louse of a father had abandoned his wife and children for another woman, never paid child support, and effectively left the family destitute. Tattooed on Angie’s heart was this story of betrayal, neglect, and selfishness. One lurid tale, which she repeated often, was that shortly after her parents’ separation, her mother had been waiting by an elevator, and when the doors opened she saw her husband’s mistress on her knees performing
oral sex. All the time Angie was growing up, she absorbed her mother’s tale of woe wholesale as Marche spent hours on the phone complaining about her ex-husband.

For most of her teenage years, Angie had deliberately kept her father out of the loop regarding her life. Now, thanks to the various media interviews she had given about her drug use, her cutting, and her suicidal tendencies, his eyes had been opened. Her father was particularly worried about her heroin use, seeing for himself the physical changes the drug wrought on her slim frame. He was not the only one to notice, both inside and outside the family. On one occasion James Haven found her unconscious on the floor of an apartment. His initial concern turned to alarm when he couldn’t wake her up. Eventually she revived, but it was a harsh insight into the unwholesome life she was leading.

Even casual observers could see she had problems. As
Time
magazine’s Jeffrey Ressner noted in November 1999 around the release of
Girl, Interrupted:
“The girl could use an interruption of protein. Her skin seems pasty, her face is gaunt and barely made up, and her famously full, pouty lips appear in need of Blistex.”

In arguably the most honest profile of her career,
Esquire
writer John H. Richardson described meeting her at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 1999 and, after two minutes of her undecipherable conversation, starting to look for track marks on her tattooed arms. “I feel very much like I’m dealing with a crazy person,” he wrote. “Half of what she says I can’t follow, it’s in some private language. Her sentences are like sheets of mist that start to evaporate the second they hit the open air.”

Many other celebrity profilers followed in Richardson’s uncertain footsteps, losing themselves in a meaningless swirl of mangled syntax, undecipherable thoughts, and unfinished sentences.

Although her father was determined to confront Angie about her health, she ignored his phone calls, destroyed his letters, and stayed at the homes of her friends or checked into local hotels to elude him. It became a sad game of hide-and-seek, father bouncing around town looking for his errant daughter, Angie ensconced with a girlfriend getting high on heroin. His friends believed that in desperation, he hired a private eye to find out where she was and what she was doing. When he discovered where she was staying, he would buy stuffed animals and leave them in the lobby of the
hotel. After the bellman brought them to her, she would deliberately feed what she considered pathetic peace offerings to her friend’s eight-week-old pit bull, Bruno, who quickly chewed them to a pulp. It was symbolic. “You were never there for us growing up, so fuck you trying to have a relationship in our mid-twenties,” she said.

One evening Angie and her friend were smoking heroin in a suite at the Raffles L’Ermitage in Beverly Hills when there was a knock at the door. As they had recently ordered steak and red wine, they assumed it was room service. When Angie opened the door, it was her father, who was standing there in a camel coat. “Get out, get out, get out! I don’t want you here!” she screamed at him. He made a grab for her, but Angie pulled away. “Calm down, calm down,” he told her. He then asked Angie’s friend to leave so that he and Angie could have a confidential father/daughter conversation. She refused. “Don’t you have a father?” he asked plaintively. As her own father had abandoned the family when she was a youngster, she had no sympathy for Jon Voight. She stayed where she was.

Voight was at a loss as to what to do next. Running through his mind was how actor Martin Sheen had turned his son Charlie in to the authorities after he violated the terms of his probation by using drugs again. Martin Sheen, himself a recovering alcoholic, voiced a sentiment that had profound resonance with Angie’s father: “When a life is at stake and it’s your child, you become fearless in a lot of ways. You just become a fanatic.”

Finally Angie yelled: “Call security. Get him out of here.” Instead they reached a compromise, phoning her brother, James, to come over. Once James arrived, her father and Angie’s friend both left. “I knew she was safe, and I left,” he later told TV host Pat O’Brien, “but I shouldn’t have.”

Her father’s attempted interventions were mere distractions from the main pursuits in Angie’s life at the time—chasing the dragon and then surfing the Internet, shopping for a foreign special-needs baby on various adoption agency Web sites. It seems she wanted the most deprived child she could imagine, a desire that perhaps echoed her own unarticulated feelings of abandonment and damage. “She felt that she didn’t have a childhood and wanted to give a child the childhood she missed,” observed Franklin Meyer, who discussed her desire to adopt with her on numerous occasions. She was inspired in part by reading and talking about the African-American entertainer Josephine Baker, who adopted twelve multi-ethnic orphans,
whom she called her “rainbow tribe,” as a protest against racism in America in the 1950s and ’60s. Described by novelist Ernest Hemingway as “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw,” Baker was much more than a celebrated singer and dancer who mesmerized audiences in Paris with her near nude performances at the Folies Bergère. During World War II she worked for the French resistance, her bravery rewarded with the Croix de Guerre. Married four times, with numerous women lovers, including the artist Frida Kahlo, such was her standing that following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. she was asked by his widow to lead the civil rights movement. She declined, worried about the safety of her rainbow nation. Her enthralling, vibrant, and committed life would form a template for Angie’s own future direction.

Long before she started searching for a special-needs child, Angie excitedly told a “stunned” Mick Jagger that she planned to adopt a Native American baby, whom she would name after him as a celebration of their relationship. How serious she was remains an open question. “She was just teasing him and messing with his head,” argues Lauren Taines. Angie did go along with Jagger when he invited her to the home of record producer Richard Perry to watch the Lennox Lewis–Evander Holyfield fight in November 1999, Angie amused and not a little jealous about the fact that whenever she left the room, actress Farrah Fawcett was “crawling all over” her date for the night.

With Angie immersed in moviemaking, her mother did much of the administrative spadework in the search for baby “Mick Jagger,” although this was not her strong suit. Marche and Lauren attended a Native American awards ceremony in 1999 in the hope of making contacts with a suitable adoption agency. Thanks to the help of activist, musician, and poet John Trudell, whom Marche had met years earlier, she was introduced to comedian Charlie Hill, whose wife, Leonora, works with a Native American adoption agency. They arranged to meet at the Earth, Wind & Flour café in Santa Monica to talk through the mechanics of adoption, whereupon Marche realized that the process was complicated. If Angie wished to adopt a Native American child, she first would have to prove lineage linking the Bertrand or Voight family to an indigenous tribe. If she could not, she could only foster a child and even then would be obliged to raise the infant within Native traditions. As a devout Catholic, Marche eventually came to balk at
these strictures and to gently discourage Angie from taking this route. For a time, however, Marche persevered, discovering, with John Trudell’s help, that the Bertrand family, who descended from the original French settlers in Quebec, Canada, had slender links to the Haudenosaunee Iroquois tribe. By then the moment had passed and Angie was looking elsewhere.

As much as Angie might complain about her father in private, she was opinionated but not confrontational, playing the obedient daughter when they met socially. On these occasions she relied on her brother, James, to be her wingman, brother and sister giving each other support in dealing with their overbearing father. In spite of their differences, she had Christmas lunch with her father at his favorite Beverly Hills restaurant and even sent him a Christmas card of her wearing a cowboy hat. The black-and-white Polaroid picture was taken during the same session when she was tattooed with Billy Bob’s name.

“Her bark was always worse than her bite,” recalls a friend. It was not only with her father that she slid around awkward issues. After the Hollywood premiere of
The Talented Mr. Ripley
in December, the film’s star Jude Law invited Angie and other friends, including model Kate Moss, to his hotel suite for drinks. Angie was furious that Kate Moss had been invited, knowing that she had recently had an affair with her ex-husband, Jonny Lee Miller, and had been engaged to Johnny Depp. Even though Angie had been “married but dating” during her time with Miller, Angie threatened to punch Kate if she dared to show her face in the hotel suite. The willowy model duly appeared in the company of Jude Law. Rather than confront her, Angie left the room.

While Angie preferred her brother to be by her side when she tackled their father, their relationship was complex, at once mutually dependent yet detached. Angie and her brother were welded forever as guardians of the story of their lives, reinforcing each other’s memories. “They were always together; they hung out as a team,” recalled their father. “Angie cared so much for Jamie, and Jamie was always taking care of her.” While they had formed a profound and loving bond of support during their parents’ difficult divorce, gradually the differing trajectories of their careers shifted the balance of power between them. When they were children, James was the one expected to be a star, Angie the neglected also-ran, always fighting for oxygen inside the family. When Jamie won the George Lucas award for his
filmmaking as a student and Angie struggled as an actor, it seemed that they were running true to type. For all their much-vaunted closeness, while James was studying at the University of Southern California and Angie worked on her career they hardly spoke for three years. Like his mother, James was not a self-starter, always waiting for someone else, usually his father, to give him a helping hand. By the time he finished college, Angie was way up the ladder, and their roles were reversed. The young boy who identified with Linus now had his tough-minded, ambitious sister as his security blanket—and paymaster.

Smart but shy, James loved basking in the glow of his sister’s stardom. In her own way she smothered him with kindness and concern, sometimes humiliating and belittling him along the way. For example, when they were at a party in the Hollywood Hills with numerous fellow actors, Angie loudly announced to the assembled throng: “My brother and I are going to get married.” Her statement so shocked other partygoers that one actor, who had been on the set with James while he waited for his father to get him a role in the movie
Rosewood,
was moved to shout: “Are you out of your fucking mind? Don’t say such ridiculous shit.” Those in her circle were well aware of the “weird” interaction between brother and sister, seeing how James hung around his sister and was resentful of anyone else who talked to her. Yet when he had girlfriends, she was equally disapproving: She did not like that his waitress girlfriend, Leanne, for example, and felt that he should pay court to her. Of course, it was different when Angie was in a relationship, notably during her marriage to Jonny Lee Miller. Then she rarely if ever saw or spoke with her brother.

When she flew to Sydney, Australia, to promote
The Bone Collector
in November 1999, she took her brother and a few friends along for the ride. One night she went for dinner to actor Sam Neill’s home, spending the evening with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. When she returned to the hotel she said, tongue in cheek, “Do you know, if Tom Cruise and my brother came out as a couple, I think the public would embrace them.” While her off-the-wall comments baffled her small group of friends, they were consistent with her impulse to provoke.