Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (50 page)

If the interview was a marker, it was placed just in time, Angie telling Germany’s
Das Neue
magazine in December that she did not consider fidelity “absolutely essential” in a relationship. “It’s worse to leave your partner and talk badly about him afterwards. Neither Brad nor I have ever claimed that living together means to be chained together. We make sure that we never restrict each other.”

Angie seemed to be sending out a signal, her semaphore interpreted by the media as indicating storms ahead. Those storms were not long in coming.
Hotel worker Anna Kowalski, who worked on Angie’s floor at the Waldorf-Astoria, accused the actress of cheating on Brad with one of her dialect coaches. She told
In Touch
magazine that after a late-night visit from the coach she found Angie’s hotel room littered with sex toys, a black rubber sheet, and empty vodka bottles. While the film’s chief dialect coach, Howard Samuelsohn, dismissed the claim as “bullshit,” Kowalski further claimed that Angie and Brad rarely interacted when they were in the suite together. “I didn’t see any kind of connection between Pitt and Jolie,” said the maid, who had been fired by the hotel.

While the tittle-tattle of a hotel worker was one thing, the front-page story in the
News of the World
on January 24, 2010, claiming that the couple had seen divorce lawyers and had signed a £205 ($320) million deal to split their assets and share custody of their six children was quite another. The story, which detailed the couple’s initial visit to the lawyer’s office in December and their subsequent agreement, which was signed in January, set off a furious spin cycle of speculation that sucked in even staid TV, radio, and print outlets. The whirr of further evidence included the information that Brad had paid $1.3 million for a bachelor pad—complete with cave—near his existing property in Los Feliz; that he had been absent from the Screen Actors Guild Awards when the rest of the cast of
Inglourious Basterds
was present; and that he was apparently overheard at a four-hour dinner at Alto restaurant in Manhattan telling Angie that she needed psychiatric help. (Given the distance between tables, this would have been difficult.)

One intriguing question that hung in the air was why they would need to see a divorce lawyer when they were unmarried. According to her circle, the reality was that they had gone to a lawyer in order to formalize arrangements for their children should anything happen to either of them. Since common-law marriages are not recognized in California, it made sense to have some paperwork relating to the children. Angie was notoriously slack in this regard. When she was married to Jonny Lee Miller, the couple had never bothered to sort out a prenuptial agreement. After Angie’s career took off, it was her mother who took the initiative to see a lawyer to draw up legal papers so that Angie was protected in the case of divorce. On February 8, 2010, Brad and Angie took legal action against Britain’s biggest-selling Sunday newspaper for making “false and intrusive allegations.”

While the physical and emotional demands of filming
Salt—
reshoots were still going on in January—had undoubtedly strained their partnership, and the looming prospect of working with Johnny Depp had given Angie pause about her past obsessions and future direction, the couple pulled together for a cause they both held dear, helping the homeless and injured following the devastating January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, a country they had just recently visited. Not only did they donate $1 million to Doctors Without Borders—on top of the $6.8 million they had given away during 2009—but Angie, in her capacity as Goodwill Ambassador, was soon on the ground seeing for herself the progress made by relief efforts.

During the two-day visit, when she visited SOS Villages for orphans and a Doctors Without Borders hospital, Angie spoke to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. The conversation reflected how far and how quickly she had come, Amanpour overtly recognizing her influence on the national and international stage. “You have a huge amount of power at your fingertips because of who you are. You have the ability to sway people.” Implicit was the fact she had broken free of Hollywood typecasting, a screen siren defined not by what she wore but by what she said. As activist John Trudell notes: “Her intelligence is the core of her substance. Looks and sexuality are the surface of who she is.” Today she is a role model for a different kind of woman: unconventional yet traditional, a homemaker but a marriage wrecker, nurturing but self-destructive. In fact, a classic Gemini. She is able to have it all without, seemingly, paying a price.

Yet she is still paying a price in a currency that she barely understands, repeating a script from her childhood that she only briefly glimpses. There are signs, though, that she is venturing onto the path of forgiveness, inviting her father to join her family in Venice in February after flying to Dublin to watch his friend John Boorman receive a lifetime achievement award. It is possible that the long winter freeze is ending and a familial thaw has begun. Her mother would not have approved, just as she would not have countenanced Angie’s meeting with Bill Day. Perhaps Angie is starting to become her own woman. As Day observes: “I have watched this family at war for decades. There comes a time to forgive and forget.” Breaking free of the narrative of the past, understanding the truth of her journey, is Angie’s next big challenge.

As a free-spirited woman, she has constructed a gilded cage for herself,
surrounded by the vulnerable, the needy, and the dispossessed, with an ever-expanding family and a partner who, in sickness and health, clearly shares this brave adventure with her. There is no easy escape and there are few opportunities to cut and run. Angie, this creature of air, has deliberately anchored herself in the reality of a partnership and family life. On her body is a quotation from Tennessee Williams that reads: “A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.” In truth, she should add: “Of their own making.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCE NOTES

When I first saw Angelina Jolie at a film premiere for the Peace One Day charity at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater in September 2005, the response to her reminded me how people behaved when the late Diana, Princess of Wales, walked into a room. Unlike the royal demographic, though, the women in this audience looked as if they had just stepped off the catwalk or come from making a keynote business speech, while the guys had that Brad Pitt vibe going on. Yet when Ms. Jolie walked into the theater in a long silver dress, all conversation, BlackBerry and other, came to a halt as sophisticated heads craned to get a better look. For some reason, she sat a couple of seats away from me, and I can confirm that the physiognomy and the rest of the bits did not disappoint.

The takeaway from the evening was twofold: How sad to think that the goals of a charity whose raison d’être is to encourage the human race to stop killing one another for one day a year seemed so far off; and what on earth was the quietly charismatic Angelina doing at such a function?

At the time, I was researching a book on Tom Cruise and was based in Beverly Hills. Most mornings I ran around Roxbury Park, one of the few spots of public green in an otherwise palm tree–lined concrete desert. Little did I realize that this modest oasis of grass and roses held a major clue to the secret that is the extraordinary life of Angelina Jolie. While I wrote my biography on the couch-jumping actor, Angie did what stars do: twinkle—but also give birth, adopt a child, and visit places like Peshawar, in the
bandit country between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now a virtual no-go zone, even in those days Peshawar was hardly a place for hardened charity workers, let alone bona fide Hollywood movie stars.

I was intrigued to know more. At first viewing, Angelina Jolie seems to be a young woman who has lived in plain sight: an actress happy to talk about her love life, sexual preferences, drug use, tattoos, and why she kissed her brother on the lips in public. Secrets and Angelina Jolie don’t usually fit in the same sentence. Like other savvy Hollywood stars, she has shaped, often unintentionally, the landscape of her life to fit our expectations of how a celebrity behaves. It works.

Yet the true story of Angelina Jolie remains largely uncharted territory. Her statements are taken at face value, her stories uncorroborated. As a result, Kipling’s “six honest serving men,” What, Why, When, How, Where, and Who, have worked overtime on sorting the fact from the fiction of her extraordinary life. How did this woman who was a self-confessed drug user become a leading light in the United Nations? What lay behind this restless need to adopt children? And what with the cutting, the kissing, and the coke? Why Billy Bob? And when Brad Pitt?

It soon became clear that her life had been marred and scarred by the marital rift between her parents, a schism that had shaped her view of herself and informed her subsequent actions. Perhaps more than many others’, Angie’s story owes much to the character and nature of her parents, actor Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand, their lives defining who she is and, perhaps more important, how she sees herself.

Within a few weeks of starting my research, I discovered an extraordinary story about Angelina, a fresh and compelling narrative that perhaps only impinged on the edge of her consciousness and yet defined who she is and how she subsequently behaved. The facts I uncovered and the circumstances surrounding them meant that I knew more about Angelina’s life, what formed her, what drove her, than she did herself. It unlocked the door to understanding the dynamic yet enigmatic character of one of the world’s best-known and possibly best-loved actresses.

Angie’s story is essentially a synthesis of revelation and interpretation, uncovering new material about her life while trying to place her journey in the context of what she says, what she believes, and what she does. Words and actions rarely act in concert. Picking a path through the shifting sands
of words, actions, belief, and fact has been the most ticklish aspect of this journey. I have enjoyed the company of many guides, some of whom have become good friends. While they have been generous with their memories and insights, the conclusions and interpretation, however ill-judged, are my responsibility alone.

Although Angie is one of the most picked-over celebrities of the modern age, for the most part I have relied on original research and interviews with contemporaries, or at the very least tried to place Angelina Jolie’s own words in a coherent framework. In Hollywood nothing is ever quite as it seems.

This is very much a family story, the history of the Voights and Bertrands, which forms the spine of Chapter 1, shaping Angelina’s destiny. In this endeavor I was helped by the insights and memories of Don, Shirley, and Chuck Peters, Esther Kasha, Karen Kaptor Jasnoch, Denise Horner-Halupka, Marianne Follis Angarola, Adrianne Neri, Marilyn Knickrehm, and the research of Riverdale historian Carl Durnavich, who placed the history of the Bertrand family in context.

To understand the trauma of Angelina’s childhood, the voice of Krisann Morel, who was effectively her nanny for two years, along with others who asked not to be named, was crucial. They provided the key that opens the door into Angie’s troubled soul. In this traumatic period, which occupies Chapters 2 and 3, I am grateful for the reminiscences, too, of actor Jeff Austin, publicist Deborah Kolar, director Robert Lieberman, family friends Randy Alpert and Susie Kantor Szarez, as well as director John Boorman, whose conversation and book
Adventures of a Suburban Boy
(Faber and Faber, 2003) provided much insight. Angie’s former school friends from El Rodeo and Beverly Hills High and other contemporaries were full of stories, though several, even at this remove, were nervous about being identified. My thanks therefore to Brian Evans, Bernard Hallet, Eddie Horowitz, Michael Hsu, and Windsor Lai.

I am eternally grateful to Bill Day, who was Marcheline Bertrand’s partner for eleven years, and Lauren Taines, who was a close friend of both Marcheline’s and Jon Voight’s for thirty-five years, for the ribbon of fact and anecdote that is a both a bracing antidote to the conventional view of Angie’s parents as well as an important window into her young life.

In describing Angelina’s early career, I was guided by the thoughts and
recollections of photographers Robert Kim and Sean McCall, makeup artist Rita Montanez, instructor Kent Sterling of the Arthur Murray dance studio, cameraman Mark Gordon, director Michael Schroeder, and actors Karen Sheperd and Ric Young. The suicide of Julie Jones is based on the official autopsy report as well as background briefings from John Connolly and her friends. Jim Cairns, pathologist and former deputy chief coroner, Ontario, gave a specialist’s insight into the incident. As for the bizarre story of the theft of garbage left outside the home of Jon Voight’s manager, this is centered around off-the-record, and almost straight-faced, interviews with two of the conspirators. Angie’s work on
Hackers
and
Foxfire
was based on conversations with fellow actor Michelle Brookhurst, camera crew, agents, production staff, and others speaking on the condition of confidentiality. Andy Wilson, the director of
Playing God,
had a wryly cynical take on Hollywood, as befitting a man raised in a circus.

The period from the making of the movie
Hell’s Kitchen
in 1997 to Angie’s marriage to Billy Bob Thornton in 2000 was a haze of drugs, dramatic awards, and rock and rollers, most notably her relationship with Mick Jagger. I spent a fascinating day with her former dealer Franklin Meyer, looking over his extensive video and picture collection, inhaling only his memories of Angie and other well-heeled customers to his salon at the Chelsea Hotel. Inevitably, many of those involved wish to remain in the background. Or have forgotten they were there in the first place. This was, though, a creative time for Angie, when she starred in
Gia, Girl, Interrupted, George Wallace,
and other works. My thanks to drummer Joey Covington, TV producer Jeremy Louwerse, tattooist Friday Jones, and other anonymous sources for helping to ink in this period. John H. Richardson’s February 2000 profile of Angelina Jolie in
Esquire
gives a sense of where her head was at, while the July 2001
Rolling Stone
portrait of Angie and Billy Bob by Chris Heath can be read as performance art as much as an interview. Celebrity writer Jonathan Van Meter’s conversations with Angie are always revealing.