Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (33 page)

Taking a chapter from Angie’s book of confessions, Billy Bob was generous with details about his private life that other, more prudent directors might keep to themselves. “I’ve screwed up so much, I’ve gotten into so much trouble over the years, and done weird stuff,” he said. “Well, I’m afraid of the water. I can’t watch movies before 1950 and eat at the same time. Don’t even ask. I can’t mention my children’s ages or I think I’ll put a curse on them. There’s my well-known fear of antique furniture.”

One of the stars of
All the Pretty Horses,
Matt Damon, shared the director’s famous fear of flying. After appearing on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
in Chicago, the terrified twosome sat together on the five-hour flight back to Los Angeles. As Damon explained, “In Billy Bob’s world, he is risking his life every time he gets on a plane. He’d much rather jump in front of a car because Billy Bob figures that way he might actually live.” So the fact that he was prepared to fly to London to see Angie and stay at upscale hotels with antiques and silver cutlery was a sign of his true commitment. “He broke through barriers for her, he really did,” observed a friend.

For her part she flew to New York to join him on the
Today
show to help him publicize his movie, the couple’s behavior on- and off-screen belying any suspicions that their union was just a publicity stunt to sell
Gone in Sixty Seconds
. “I was unfocused my entire life, and so was Angelina,” said Billy Bob. “Now we’re both very clear and very focused. It took finding each other to make us that clear. I’m married to the love of my life.” If that wasn’t commitment enough, after the interview he raced down the corridor and launched himself into the arms—and lips—of his laughing wife.

To underscore the point further, Angie and her beloved were full of talk about renewing their marriage vows. Finally “family” seemed like a safe, warm place for Angelina, who confessed that she had found “a home” at last. Billy Bob talked about buying a farm and raising llamas, describing Angie as “a pretty regular gal.” In turn, she liked to call herself “stepmom” to his sons, William and Harry. Of course the youngsters thought it was “cool” that Lara Croft was making them pancakes in their new house and reading them stories at bedtime. Even though her pancakes were, in Billy Bob’s term, “strong,” who cared?

Like her own mother, Angie did not cook, the quartet going for down-home cuisine in local West Hollywood eateries. “We eat a lot of ice cream and cereal, and when Billy sees me in an apron, he laughs,” said Angie. She
had not quite turned into a character in a Norman Rockwell painting: Her Christmas present to her husband was a framed message, “To the End of Time,” which she nailed up over their bed. Naturally it was written in her blood. Some men get socks.

Sadly, the big turkey that Christmas was Billy Bob’s labor of love,
All the Pretty Horses,
which opened to mixed reviews and indifferent audience numbers. Bitterly hurt by the rejection of a project he had truly believed in, Billy Bob retreated into his basement studio and took consolation in his music, shutting out the world. He vowed never to direct another movie, picking up the music he had started to lay down in Nashville as he worked to finish his debut album,
Private Radio.

As he narrowed his horizons, Angie was opening up hers, researching her role for
Beyond Border
s. The project had already run into casting problems, with Kevin Costner, originally slated to play the renegade doctor who was Angie’s love interest, being replaced by Ralph Fiennes. Although Costner’s people blamed artistic differences for his departure, the word was that Angie thought the forty-five-year-old star of
Dances with Wolves
was too old to be her movie paramour. The irony was that her own husband was the same age as Costner, and the actor’s then girlfriend was the same age as Angie.

Fiennes went to aid workers’ demonstrations on handling life-and-death refugee crises; Oliver Stone continued his travels around camps in southern Sudan and Kenya; and Angie called on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for information, reading pamphlets and books and scanning the Internet.

In many ways her character of Sarah Jordan was the perfect next step after Lara Croft. She was Lara with a social conscience, a real person out to do good, to help make the world a better place. Just as she had begun to morph into Lara during filming—director Simon West admitted “she was definitely thinking she was Lara Croft after a while”—Angie took her persona one stage further with Sarah; she was flesh and blood, not just a cartoon character.

In late January, however, Oliver Stone, whom Angie had come to see as a surrogate father, bowed out, complaining of the meager budget, inadequate prep time, and the looming possibility of an actors’ strike. Angie was devastated. She loved her character and felt true kinship with the script and
the story. She had already had discussions with the UNHCR about spending a couple of weeks visiting refugee camps to see for herself what life in them was really like. Now that plan seemed to be stuck in the sand.

For the first time in her life, however, the girl who had spent her career being told what to do by someone else slowly realized that she didn’t need Oliver Stone or anyone else directing her life. She could go anyway. “Suddenly it dawned on me that just because I’m an actor, I felt like I needed a film to do it,” she recalled. “I’m a person. Do it.” She contacted the UNHCR in New York and discussed the possibility of visiting Sierra Leone and Tanzania under their umbrella. She was forthright, telling UN officials: “You might think I’m crazy. I’m an actress. I don’t want to go with press. If you could give me access, allow me in on a trip so I could just witness and learn.” There were two conditions: She insisted on paying her own way and on being treated like everyone else.

While Oliver Stone might have tipped his hat at her chutzpah, Jon Voight was concerned. With Sierra Leone in the midst of a rumbling civil war, he thought that Angie was deliberately putting herself in harm’s way and contacted the UN to try to have the trip canceled. Officials pointed out that she was a grown woman and was visiting under escort. Typically, her mother was more passive, simply smiling through her tears. Before Angie left, Marche delivered a special message from James that alluded to her favorite childhood character, Peter Pan: “Tell Angie I love her and to remember that if she is ever scared, sad, or angry—look up at the night sky, find the second star on the right, and follow it straight on till morning.”

Billy Bob shared her father’s view, but he let her go ahead with her adventure. “He said he didn’t think I’d be safe. But he didn’t offer to come along, either. And so I left,” she recalled.

As Angie, armed with pens and a notepad, went off to a war zone, her husband headed to the basement with his friend Randy Scruggs and wrote a love song for his bride. “It’s basically the story of how we met,” recalled Billy, who, with his friend, wrote the song “Angelina” in just a few minutes. Angie was on a very different path, briefed by UN officials when she arrived in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in late February about the blind bureaucratic reality facing refugees and asylum seekers. With no chance of romance in their battered lives, the picture of struggle and sacrifice was etched on the faces of those she met.

Shocked and upset by the human tumult she encountered, Angie observed that she felt like a visitor in a zoo. A petting zoo, at that; when she visited a refugee center in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, a baby was unceremoniously placed in her arms. For Angie, who had never played with dolls and wasn’t the cuddling type, this was a remarkable event. “No words could express how I felt,” she wrote. At another transit camp children came running toward her. “Their tiny little hands grabbed on to mine. There was a child’s hand around every finger of mine. I wanted to take each and every one of them home with me.”

She was hungry to learn more, meeting the U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone, veteran diplomat John Melrose, and other aid workers at the ambassador’s residence on March 1, 2001. Before dinner she admitted to the seasoned Africa hand that the experience had really opened her eyes. Her naïveté was striking, but little different from the response of other well-intentioned Westerners he had met during his long career. “She had been doing food distribution the day before she came to dinner,” he recalled. “She didn’t realize these kinds of things were going on. However, when you are first exposed it is a rather powerful experience, and it can also be a very depressing one. She grew up with a much more sheltered existence and had not been exposed to anything like that. She was touched by it.”

The impact was profound and immediate. A couple of weeks after that dinner, Melrose took a call from Angie’s assistant about a program they had been discussing to teach former soldiers, mostly teenage boys, how to read and write. As that program was fully funded, he steered her toward a scheme to help “war brides,” the girls taken by rebels and used as sex slaves, cooks, and human shields in battle. The idea was to house, counsel, and then teach these brutalized young women a skill or a trade so they could earn a living. Angie agreed to fund the whole program, donating just under $1 million on the condition that her gift be anonymous.

This spontaneous generosity was matched by her almost childlike response to the sights and sounds she had witnessed. She was like a character in a classic picaresque novel, the innocent at large. With hindsight, Angie would say that her first visit to refugee camps was monumental. “When I came back [to America] two weeks later, I was a very different person.”

That was not how it seemed at the time. When she returned, she immersed herself in Hollywood froth, agreeing to play a ditsy TV reporter in
a sudsy romantic comedy,
Life or Something Like It,
alongside Ed Burns. This was her replacement gig now that
Beyond Borders
no longer had a home. At the same time, she was in meetings to discuss Lara Croft merchandise, repeatedly sending back the prototype dolls with notes saying: “No. Boobs too big.” Welcome back to the real world.

Before she flew to Seattle and then Vancouver to film the romantic comedy, she and Billy Bob managed their second wedding. It took place in their kitchen in April, in the presence of a woman from the multifaith, multigod Church of the Enlightenment, witnessed by Harry, their pet rat, and Billy’s mynah bird, Alice. Instead of exchanging rings, they cut each other’s fingers and sucked each other’s blood. They were now officially blood brothers, even more so after Angie hired a doctor to extract her own blood, which she kept in vials in the minibar of her hotel during filming, awaiting the moment she might make a more meaningful wedding gift for her husband.

In May, for their first anniversary, Angie flew to Baton Rouge, where he was playing a prison guard and executioner in
Monster’s Ball
. They were in full Gothic mode. They swapped vials of blood—Angie painting herself with her husband’s blood—and she bought two grave plots so they could spend eternity side by side as well, along with a bench in the cemetery so they could sit together contemplating their future home. Not to be outdone, Billy Bob gave her a document signed and notarized in his blood saying that they would be married until the end of time. For good measure he created another message, once more vowing his undying love, which joined her bloody artwork above their bed. Finally, to seal the ritual of commitment, they added more tattoos to their crowded skin.

Beneath the frenzy of devotion, Angie was somewhat unsettled, knowing that her husband had a date with destiny—a graphic sex scene with Halle Berry, routinely described, along with Angie, as one of the world’s great beauties. To ensure that her relationship with Billy Bob stayed on course, if not till the end of time then at least till the end of shooting, Angie deputed her now permanent bodyguard, Mickey Brett, to be with Billy Bob during filming. Nor did it hurt that her brother, James, had snagged a small part. They were her eyes and ears on set. Once a womanizer, always a womanizer. If Billy Bob was a reformed man, that would be good to
know, too, especially as the scene would be shot just a couple of days before she headed back to Cambodia in mid-July on her second UN mission.

Angelina was not the only one concerned. Berry’s husband, musician Eric Benét, insisted on a private screening so he could come to terms with his wife’s having brutal, explicit sex with another man. He saw the version before a minute was cut from the final edit to avoid the dreaded NC-17 rating. “I had a screening just for him to let him deal with it,” said Berry, who was paid only a modest fee for the shoot. Angie, though, had her game face on, seemingly untroubled by the vivid sexuality. “Lara Croft belongs to the world, I belong to Billy Bob,” she said during publicity for her first big blockbuster, sentiments echoed by her husband. “She and I have a real strong relationship, and we’re the best friends in the world,” he observed.

For a time it seemed, too, that there was a genuine rapprochement between father and daughter. When Angie was filming the final scenes of
Life or Something Like It
in New York, her father and her husband stood in the wings watching her being shot, literally, in Times Square. When director Stephen Herek yelled “Cut,” she raced to the sidelines to give her dad a big hug and Billy Bob a lingering kiss. Then it all began to unravel.

Voight took her to the airport for her flight to Cambodia, giving her a letter as he said goodbye. Letters were typical of how he communicated with her and others, allowing him to get his point across without any redefinition or argument. What she thought was a note containing fond sentiments, building on their “new deal,” was instead, as she described it, a scathing indictment of her lifestyle. At a time in her life when Angie had finally heard what she wanted to hear from her dad, albeit in a movie—when she was feeling good about herself, mentally and physically, alive to bigger issues in the world than her own angst and pain, and in a marriage to a man who seemed to understand her—her father’s missive seemed cruel and somehow pointless.