Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (37 page)

Not only was Jon publicly disowned by his ex-wife and daughter, but his son, James, also refused to have anything more to do with him, though they had always been closer than Jon and Angie. A committed Christian who for a time pondered becoming an evangelical preacher, even James could not forgive his father’s behavior. Jon Voight now felt the full blast of the legendary Bertrand family freeze, his children and his ex-wife casting him into the outer darkness.

The rest of the Voights suffered, too; Marche stopped talking to or writing to any member of his family. For years she had been great friends with Joan Taylor, the first wife of Jon’s younger brother, Chip Taylor. At a stroke she was out of her life. Joan continued to send family pictures as well as Christmas and birthday cards, but never heard a word from her friend again. It was as though she didn’t exist.

To formally seal the family schism, Angie instructed her lawyer to legally remove “Voight” from her name. “He’s not any more to me than a man who walks down the street,” she said, indicating the depth of her anger. “I’m an adoptive parent so blood ties aren’t what count.”

The irony was not lost on her mother or on those who had known Angie since she was a youngster. Just as James was more like his mother, passive, introspective, and placid, Angie was strikingly similar to her dad. She shared not only his genetic flaw, a slight curvature of the spine, but also his full lips and high cheekbones. Like her father, she was wild, chatty, sexy, feisty, and a born debater who loved to argue a point. While her mother preferred to donate to causes—Angie inherited her impulsive generosity—Jon Voight had long been an activist. “I think celebrity is a gift,” he once said. “You can do a lot of things with it and therefore you should be responsible. If I use it properly, I can help people”: sentiments that found an echo in his daughter’s work for refugees and other victims of society.

Of all the Voights, Angie inherited the straight-talking, loose-lipped nature of her crackerjack of a grandmother, Barbara Voight. One story straight out of the Barbara Voight playbook could have been about Angie. When her son took her to an Academy Awards ceremony, Barbara, then in her seventies, was complimented by James Bond himself, Sean Connery,
on her silver dress. “Five bucks, five bucks,” she said, pulling at the material. “Bought it from a secondhand store.” Her genetic code, a breezy disregard of fashion and convention, seemed to have been passed on virtually intact to her granddaughter.

Angie continued to bridle at any comparison to her father or his family. After the O’Brien broadcast, she told one interviewer: “We’re not similar people and we are not friends. In an argument we were always on opposite sides.” In denying her father’s existence, she was also denying herself. “Don’t tell Angie that; she will go mad,” Marche once warned her friend Lauren Taines, when they concluded that Angie was a true Voight.

While removing her father’s name took but the stroke of a pen—she officially became Angelina Jolie in September 2002 after petitioning a Santa Monica court—it was a rather more painful process to etch Billy Bob’s name out of her life, and her heart. She complained that it took five laser treatments to remove the tattoo of his name from her left shoulder; she then replaced his name with the global coordinates where Maddox was born. “The worst thing is the smell,” she said. Fortunately the now infamous tattoo of Billy Bob’s name beneath her bikini line had faded.

For his part, Billy Bob had the left forearm tattoo that once bore her name expunged. He observed later: “I had it covered up with an angel and it says ‘Peace.’ It’s like, basically, my way of saying, ‘No hard feelings.’ ” Then for good measure he buried the “vial of blood” in his backyard.

If only the tattoo left on his heart by his wild two-year ride with Angie could be removed so easily. To ease the pain and publicity, he cut the song “Angelina” from his band’s playlist. He had been sober and off drugs for years, but now he was again drinking and smoking. “At the time, he was very depressed because he thought that the world would think he had left her and Maddox,” recalled a close friend. “It just wasn’t true. The fact was that she had no further need for him. She had resolved something inside herself and moved on.”

For the last two years Thornton, at heart a homebody who lives for his music and art, had gotten himself into a freak show where he was exhibit A. While he had gone along with the overblown statements and sentiments—and contributed his fair share—he knew that the blood vials, the matching graves, and the endless sex talk were symptoms of her constant need for attention. “Shock value,” he would tell friends, rolling his eyes in mock
despair. “I went along for the ride.” He understood Angie’s motivation. During the early part of an actor’s career, people only want the juicy and sensational. “So you play it up,” he observed.

He later reflected to friends that the central difference between him and Angie was that he was an artist who had had to learn to cope with fame, whereas she was an actor who craved infamy. As his onetime girlfriend Sheila McCombe observed: “She fell in love with the idea of being with an artist and the reality was rather different. He is very smart and talented but the downside is that he’s a very heavy character.” It was somewhat like the difference between Madonna and her first husband, Sean Penn. She dreamed of ways to feed the media beast, while he threw rocks at it.

Billy Bob had no regrets, though. “Most people can’t talk me out of the house, but she did,” he said. Not that the incorrigible horndog could be kept on the porch for long. Within days of the July divorce announcement, he was pictured in West Hollywood with model Danielle Dotzenrod, at twenty-three less than half his age, though he was adamant that he never cheated on Angie during the marriage. Riddled with anxiety and low self-esteem, he later explained to writer Barbara Davies that the reason for the split was in his head—not below the belt. “It was all down to my inadequacy and fear. I was frightened of Angie because she was too good for me. She was too beautiful, too smart and had too much integrity. I felt small next to her and I just couldn’t live with it.”

It was not long before Billy Bob had resurrected his harem. Besides Dotzenrod, he was linked with country singer Deana Carter and his ex-wife Pietra, and in January he flew to Toronto to see Sheila McCombe. It was a woman who quietly flew below the radar, however, who truly captured his heart. In early July he had begun work on
Bad Santa
. During filming, his regular makeup artist, Carrie Angland, introduced him to her sister, Connie, who worked in the background as a seamstress on movie sets. She was as far removed from Angie’s life and lifestyle as one could get—which was probably half the attraction. At some point she moved in with him, and by late 2003 she was expecting his fourth child. As he explained in an
Esquire
interview with Amy Wallace in 2005: “Sex doesn’t have to be with a model to be good. As a matter of fact, sometimes with the model, the actress, the ‘sexiest person in the world,’ it may be literally like fucking the couch. Don’t count out the average-looking woman, or even
maybe the slightly unattractive woman, or the really unattractive woman. There may be this swarthy little five-foot-two stocky woman who just has sex all over her.”

In August 2002, as Billy Bob was being photographed hand in hand with model Danielle Dotzenrod, Angie was six thousand miles away in London, reprising her role as Lara Croft for a reported salary of $9 million. The fast-paced hokum involved the frantic hunt for a Pandora’s box that had the capacity to wipe out mankind. In her desperate search Angie jumped off Hong Kong’s tallest skyscraper, fought killer sharks, and rode everything from a horse to a motorbike. The woman who climbed trees as a little girl observed: “This film brought out the tomboy in me.”

Being newly single also brought out the animal in her. The panther was back on the prowl, explaining to
Marie Claire
magazine that one of the ten things she wanted to do before she died was tell her ex-husband Jonny Lee Miller that she still loved him. “But I think he knows,” she said, declaring later that she hoped the two “might find a way back to each other.”

She soon had the opportunity to tell him in person. According to the
Daily Mirror,
within days of checking into Claridge’s hotel, Angie was, in scenes reminiscent of her pursuit of Billy Bob, bombarding Miller’s production company, Natural Nylon, with endless phone calls, leaving her hotel name and room number. “Angelina has called up loads of times and sounded very distraught,” a well-informed source was quoted as saying.

When Angie arrived in London, Miller was due to marry his sweetheart from school, blonde TV actress Lisa Faulkner, who had previously dated
South Park
creator Trey Parker. The couple, who had become engaged the previous May, were in the midst of planning a “fairy-tale” wedding in November. Within three weeks of Angie’s arrival, the wedding was called off. Like Laura Dern, Lisa Faulkner never saw it coming. Faulkner was later photographed sobbing on a friend’s shoulder, breaking down in tears during a shopping trip in central London. Remaining tight-lipped about the reasons behind their breakup, Lisa later tried to be philosophical: “The wedding was a huge part of my life, but I’ve got over it and am moving on. It just didn’t work out. It has been tough, but I have no regrets about the split. Life brings up horrible things and you have to deal with them.”

It was not long before Angie and Jonny picked up where they had left off, the actor squiring her around town for the next few months—when
she was not visiting refugee camps or jumping off high-rise buildings in exotic locations. “I’m talking to Angelina on a regular basis,” he told a society gossip writer, adding with a sideswipe at Jon Voight, “She’s very well, and quite sane. She certainly bears no resemblance to the way she is depicted in the press.”

In the first flush of their renewed romance, the couple was seemingly unconcerned about expressing their feelings in public, making out in the crowded dining room of Claridge’s. A fellow diner at the hotel told the
Daily Mirror,
“They were all over each other. Angelina had draped herself over Jonny and they were giggling away. They seemed oblivious to the fact it was so busy. People were gawping at them.” It was not just dinner dates; he also took her to watch the England vs. France international rugby union match at Twickenham, where she joined in singing the English rugby anthem, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Such was their closeness that when she went on a land mines awareness course in Cheshire in northwest England as part of her work for UNHCR, she reportedly instructed her assistant to hold all cell phone calls except those from Miller.

It is not hard to understand why she was so keen to reconnect with Miller. In many ways they had never really been apart, Miller a friend and a shoulder to cry on even after their separation and subsequent divorce. Of all the men—and women—in her life, he probably seemed the most trustworthy. Unlike Mick Jagger and Billy Bob Thornton, who’d had to betray a partner to prove their devotion to Angie, Miller had never forfeited another to win her love. Until Lisa Faulkner. Perhaps, in a perverse way, his breakup with Faulkner was the final test, which, like all the other men in her life, he had failed. Abandoning his fiancée so abruptly in favor of Angie may have proved his dedication, but it also proved, in Angie’s eyes, that he was no longer worthy. On some level he was now no better than her cheating father, her template for all that was wrong with men.

The only male who had never let her down—baby Maddox—shared her bed most nights. She poured all her love and devotion into the youngster she called “Mad,” insisting on keeping him with her during the filming of the new Lara Croft movie. Over the course of the fourteen-week shoot, Angie and her son flew to Santorini in Greece, Hong Kong, Nairobi, Kenya, and north Wales, where an area of the Snowdonia mountain had been turned into a Chinese peasant village. It is not hard to imagine her distress
when in mid-September 2002 the toddler managed to scald himself while staying in her suite in the luxury Seiont Manor hotel in Wales. He was rushed ninety miles by ambulance to the Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool, his mother fitfully sleeping by his bed at night and returning to film during the day as he made his recovery. She was exhausted, literally wrung out by the trauma of what at first seemed like a life-threatening injury. After her father’s dire prognostications about her fitness to be a mother, this was the last thing she needed. The fact that she donated $80,000 to the hospital following his four-day stay was a sign of her relief. “Without a doubt, being a single mom is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she ruefully observed.

As if juggling motherhood and a demanding, high-pressure job wasn’t enough, she made it more difficult by trying to do everything herself. She found herself running on empty, on occasion falling asleep on the set. There was an emotional logic behind her behavior—child-care experts emphasize that parents who adopt foreign babies should spend as much time as possible with them, not only to help them bond but also to soothe any deep-seated fears of abandonment.

Meanwhile, she was already looking for a brother or sister for Maddox, admitting that she had completed the paperwork to adopt a baby from another religion and culture. As Dr. Franziska De George observes: “The motivation for Angelina to adopt a child from another country is symbolic of how alien she feels. Metaphorically they are on the fifth floor. Worlds away. She can identify with and responds to their feeling of alienation and abandonment, their helplessness and their pain. Cutting was a way of shifting herself out of her suffering, while adopting children shifts them out of their suffering. Adopting foreign children is her way of easing the suffering no one eased in her.”

Maddox was the center of her universe. “I just can’t bear to be away from him,” she told writer Anna Day. “If that makes me a dull person, then so be it. He is my life. I want to be a great parent. I’ve done pretty much everything in terms of movies but the biggest challenge is raising a child.” She added a tattoo in his honor, a Buddhist symbol and script branded onto her left shoulder blade. Thai artist Sompong Kanphai used the traditional long needles and hammer method, and Angie was obliged to kneel and fold her hands together in prayer during the long, painful process in a hotel room outside Bangkok. She saw it as a rite of passage for herself and a ritual
of protection for her young son. In her mind Maddox gave her life meaning, a sense of purpose, and a richness and responsibility she had never known before. The days when she immersed herself in a role, living her character, were now over. Instead she steeped herself in her new incarnation as a mother. “There was a time I lived through my characters,” she said. “I’ve now found that I prefer my life.”