Brangelina

by Ian Halperin

  According to Groen, “Jon doted on his kids. I don’t remember a lot of animosity between Jon and Mar. They stayed friends, and they had the kids in common. They handled the breakup fairly healthily, I think. Angie and James were very close to their mom, no question about it, but they always had fun with Jon, and he took a real interest in their lives. They spent a lot of time with him.”

  Indeed, one of Jolie’s kindergarten teachers related to Jolie’s biographer Rhona Mercer that Voight was very present. “Her father was always picking up her and her brother,” the teacher recalled. “He was always around. I don’t know if they had a good relationship; all I know is that he did the fatherly thing. He came to sports day. He came to the school. They lived in Palisades, where all the big stars like Al Pacino lived.”

  And even Jolie herself, before her estrangement from her father in 2003, seemed sympathetic to his side of the marriage breakup, explaining, “My father is a perfect example of an artist who couldn’t be married. He had the perfect family, but there’s something about that that’s very scary for him.”

  In an interview Voight gave to People magazine when Angelina was seven years old, he addressed his role as a divorced father. “The focus,” he explained, “is always the kids. Whatever Marche and I go through, we consider how it affects them. We’ve each made mistakes. The kids are aware of the deep disruption that went on early in their lives. The guilt, anger, and confusion made their way into their subconscious, and I don’t know what dues we’ll pay later on. But they will have learned how to deal with adversity.”

  Shortly after the couple finally divorced, in 1978, Marcheline took up with UCLA filmmaking student and later documentary filmmaker Bill Day, who was fond of young James and Angelina. This prompted occasional jealousy on the part of Voight. “The kids are crazy about this guy,” he acknowledged in an interview at the time. “There are male egos involved, and there is friction, the whole territorial thing. We don’t necessarily sync, but we each give ground. He’s crazy about Marche and really loves the kids.” For her part, Marcheline always defended Voight’s role as a father. “Nothing means more to Jon than the children,” she told People magazine in 1993.

  When Angelina was only six years old, Voight wrote and starred in a movie called Looking to Get Out, teaming up again with the brilliant director of Coming Home, Hal Ashby. They couldn’t recreate the magic of their first collaboration, however; most critics agreed the film was awful. But Voight did manage to arrange a small role for Angelina, her first big-screen appearance, as a cute little girl named Tosh, who appears in a long scene with her father. The acting wasn’t memorable, but it was clear even at that age that the camera loved her.

  The same year, Bertrand moved east to escape the brutal smog of Los Angeles, which had been wreaking havoc with her allergies. She settled with her children in a small community on the Hudson River north of New York City, Sneden’s Landing. The separation was hard on Voight, who was used to seeing James and Angie several days a week. He told one interviewer at the time that he missed his children terribly. Before long, he was commuting east each month to spend time with the kids, staying at his mother’s home in Scarsdale, about half an hour away.

  Since their estrangement in 2003, Jolie has given a number of interviews downplaying her father’s involvement in the lives of his children, often claiming “he wasn’t there.” But in 2001, she sounded very different: “I never remember a time when I needed my father and he wasn’t there. But he’s an artist, and it was the ’70s, a strange time for everybody. To this day, I think my parents really love each other. It’s a beautiful story. I saw them at Christmas; they came to our house.” Jolie even addressed the occasional press report that claimed that Voight had been estranged from his family: “The press likes to use the family angle, because then they get to include this whole other aspect of my life, but they’re always disappointed to hear I’m not trying to hide anything about some huge, sordid estrangement between us. The fact is, he’s very much a part of my life, but I’ve always been pretty independent of him, too.”

  By most earlier accounts, including her own, Jolie’s L.A. childhood was a happy one before she moved east. She loved to watch Disney movies with her brother and play with her pet lizard named Vladimir and her snake, called Harry Dean Stanton, after the actor. “I think a lot of people think I had a very different childhood than I had,” she said years later. “I probably had a more normal childhood than most people would think.”

  To Voight’s delight, when Angelina was twelve years old, Bertrand moved back to L.A. with her children. The details of Angelina’s life in New York are murky, but it was clear that something about her had changed by the time she returned to the West Coast. Angelina Jolie had discovered her dark side.

  BACK TO 90210

  By the time Angelina moved back to Los Angeles with her mother and brother in 1986, she was no longer the fun-loving little girl people remembered. This may have been due to her frequent forays into Manhattan, accompanying her mother on auditions. In the city, Angelina had been exposed to a seamier, edgier world, one that she had never experienced in California or in tranquil upstate New York. And she liked it. She began to change herself to fit in with the sort of people that were increasingly attracting her. By the time they arrived back in L.A., she was in full rebellion mode.

  “When we moved back from New York I had really gotten into leather,” she later recalled. “I think I loved Michael Jackson or something. I used to wear the leather jackets with the zippers or collars with studs on them, and I used to ask if I could go to school wearing them.” To complete her look, the eleven-year-old started dyeing her hair jet black.

  The family moved to an apartment building in a middle-class section of Beverly Hills. Once they were settled, Bertrand immediately enrolled Angelina in the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute’s Young Actors Program. The legendary Strasberg had passed away four years earlier, but his influential method acting technique lived on. The Method, a refinement of the earlier Stanislavski technique, teaches actors to recall emotions or reactions from their own lives and use them to create lifelike performances.

  Among the actors who studied under Strasberg and who have credited the Method with their success are James Dean, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Paul Newman, and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe, who came to regard Strasberg and his wife as surrogate parents and to whom she left the bulk of her estate. Bertrand herself had studied there several years earlier, and for two years Angelina attended the institute regularly on weekends, but she wasn’t entirely convinced it was for her: “They’d ask me to go back five years in my life and relive something, and at age six there isn’t that much to work with.”

  Once again, Voight and Bertrand shared custody, with Angie and Jamie living at their father’s house two nights a week and every other weekend. As before, there is no evidence that the custody arrangements were causing any particular emotional problems. By most accounts, Voight and Bertrand were agreeable with each other, with Angelina later describing them as “each other’s best friend.” Angelina was attending El Rodeo Elementary School, reputedly one of the best public schools in the nation, and she did very well there. James credited their mother’s domestic routine. “There was very much that home feeling when we got back from school,” he recalls. “Angie and I would walk in, and we could smell things cooking and baking in the kitchen. My mom was methodical in making sure we did our homework perfectly, and she would do outlines to help us. When we were younger, she used flash cards, or she’d be in the middle of cooking and pick up a carrot and teach us about the vegetable or the fruit so that it was visual as well.”

  For his part, Voight seemed thrilled that his daughter had caught the acting bug and did his best to encourage her new pursuit. “She’d come over to my house and we’d run through a play together, performing various parts,” he told the London Independent in 2001. “I saw that she had real talent. She loved acting. So I did my best to encourage her, to coach her, and t
o share my best advice with her. For a while, we were doing a new play together every Sunday.”

  Unlike many actors of his caliber, Voight was selective in the films he chose and rarely acted just for the money. “I didn’t want to do the pretty-boy roles they were always offering me,” he explains. As a result, unlike many of his less acclaimed colleagues, he was not affluent. No beach house in Malibu. No swimming pool. In fact, Voight didn’t even own a house. He too, lived in an apartment.

  Despite the claims of his son, James Haven, who has spent much of the past few years attempting to discredit his father, Voight was quite generous toward Bertrand and always paid his alimony. We know this because Angelina herself was publicly emphatic about her father’s integrity right up until their 2003 estrangement. “He always took good care of us and our mother,” Jolie declared to an interviewer in 2001. “He always met his obligations. He just didn’t have a lot of money.”

  This period of Jolie’s life continued uneventfully for almost two years. But then, at the age of thirteen, Angelina suddenly quit the Strasberg Institute and slipped into what she would later describe as “a very bad time.”

  This probably had been brewing for a long time. She describes turning ten years old as a time when her life “started not to be fun” anymore and when she developed a fascination with death. “My mother’s father died when I was nine,” she explains. “He was a wonderful, spirited man, but his funeral was horrible. Everyone was hysterical. I thought funerals should be a celebration of life rather than a room full of upset people. I’m not scared of death, which makes people think I’m dark; in fact, I’m positive.”

  She could never point to a specific trauma as the turning point in her personality, although she describes a day when she was playing a game with a friend. She wanted to get into the fantasy world such games demand, but she could no longer find her way there. Perhaps that’s why she first decided to take up acting initially, to try to regain the comfort of the imaginary places of her childhood.

  Now, though, having dropped out of acting, she talked about wanting to be a funeral director. She even started taking mail-order courses on embalming from the Funeral Services Institute. Before long, her preoccupation with death led Angelina to consider ending her own life, a state of mind that she has spoken about many times over the years. In one interview, she dismissed the idea that her thoughts of suicide were related to depression or sadness, however: “I always thought I was sane, but I didn’t know if I’d be comfortable living in this world. As a child I contemplated suicide a lot—not because I was unhappy, but because I didn’t feel useful. I had insomnia and was up all night, with a mind that wouldn’t stop.” And yet in a different interview, she says of her childhood, “I had a lot of sadness and distrust. I came very close to the end of my life a few times.”

  In a 2001 article, Rolling Stone magazine writer Chris Heath described Jolie showing him a notebook she had kept when she was fourteen:

  On the cover is some kind of sword. On the second page is a drawing of three daggers and the words DEATH: EXTINCTION OF LIFE. There are other drawings of weapons and a quote: ONLY THE STRONG SHALL SURVIVE. There are further definitions: PAIN: PHYSICAL OR MENTAL SUFFERING. AUTOPSY: EXAMINATION OF A CORPSE. She grabs the book back, seemingly embarrassed, but then relinquishes it. There is the word HELL and a picture of the devil, and there is a ripped- out page with only a middle strip of paper visible. The only word remaining is SUICIDE. “I can laugh at it now,” she says.

  At this point, probably the darkest period of her life, Jolie entered high school, and many chroniclers have attempted to link her well- documented psychological abyss to her particular school and its culture. This is doubtful, but it certainly was at Beverly Hills High School that Angie Voight took the first steps toward creating what has become the Angelina Jolie myth.

  In 1989, like today, Beverly Hills High was frequented by many of the offspring of the Hollywood elite. The school boasts more than a few notable, and some ignoble, alumni, including Nicolas Cage, Richard Dreyfuss, Nora Ephron, and Monica Lewinsky. But its reputation— solidified in popular culture as the supposed setting for the TV show Beverly Hills 90210—is misleading. The student body is quite diverse. Today, forty-two percent of the Beverly Hills High student population was born outside of the United States, and many students come from modest means. Although the mix certainly has changed since the late 1980s when Angelina first enrolled, she was by no means the only middle-class student there.

  Countless profiles over the years have claimed that Angelina was bullied by her classmates because, in a school full of rich kids, she didn’t have fancy clothes or an expensive car. “These rich brats were merciless with Angelina Jolie, taunting her for her extreme thinness, her second-hand outfits, her glasses and her braces,” declared one magazine profile.

  But according to those who knew her during those years, nothing could be further from the truth. A former classmate who now works in the television industry says, “Angelina was never picked on because she wasn’t a rich kid. Come on, her father was an Academy Award-winning actor. Everybody respected those kinds of things at Beverly, believe me. The fact is that our school was very typical of an American high school in those days. There were all the same cliques you would find anywhere else, sort of like The Breakfast Club. There were the jocks, the brains, the popular kids, the potheads, the misfits, and the outsiders, who deliberately went out of their way not to fit in. Angie was one of those. She didn’t dress in second-hand clothes because she couldn’t afford to shop on Rodeo Drive; she dressed like that because it was cool. That was the beginning of the whole grunge thing, and I’d say Angie was a combination of a Goth and a grunge girl. There were other kids like that as well; they had their own crowd just like all the others.”

  While the rich girls shopped at the Beverly Center, Angie hung out on the seedy Sunset Strip and shopped at the punk-rock stores on Melrose Boulevard. “I was always that punk in school,” Jolie told Vanity Fair in 2003. “I didn’t feel clean and, like, pretty … I always felt interesting or odd or dark or maybe, uh, you know, I could feel sexy … I’d be in my black boots and my ripped jeans and my old jacket, and I felt more comfortable like that. I wasn’t gonna pretend to be the smart, clean, centered girl. I could understand the darker things, the more moody things, the more emotional things.”

  While most of her fans have seen photos of Angelina looking geeky in braces and thick-rimmed glasses, those were taken when she was still in elementary school. By the time she was attending Beverly Hills High, the familiar features the world knows today were already evident, and she usually wore contact lenses. In her school yearbook photo, Jolie is clearly a striking teenager. According to one of her classmates, Michael Klesic, who also went on to pursue an acting career, “All the guys knew that she was a hot chick. I mean, when she walked down the hall, heads would turn.”

  Klesic remembers that Angelina stood out from the other “hot” girls. “She was the one you didn’t want to mess with,” he recalls. “She was the tough pretty girl. She was very direct when she spoke to you. She could always tell if anybody was speaking to her with an ulterior motive or anything like that. She really stuck out like a sore thumb in terms of Beverly Hills girls. She wasn’t one of them. She didn’t dress like them. She wasn’t interested in the same things that they were. She was her own human being and her own person, and she had her eyes on the stars. She wanted to get out of that school.”

  Angelina later described this period as her “awkward, mental- breakdown” adolescence. “I wore black fishnets and boots because I wanted to hide myself,” she recalled. “I wanted to feel everything. But at the same time, I was doing plays and taking ballroom classes at Arthur Murray. I’d wash off all the ink I had drawn on my arms, and take off my twenty-hole Doc Martens, and put on high heels and a dress and win tango competitions. My friends thought I was insane. But I thought it was fun.”

  Another classmate, Jean Robinson, recalled for Rhona Mercer
the actress’s now legendary obsession with cold metal. “She was deliberately different and didn’t want anything to do with the rich kids. She had a serious thing with knives. All kinds of knives—pen knives, kitchen knives. She would just whip one out and start playing with it.” Robinson remembers another side of Angelina that contributed to her unpopularity: “When she was fourteen at Beverly Hills High, she was stealing boys who were seventeen. Once they were panting after her, she would walk away. It was all about the chase.” But it was not only about boys. “The same happened with girls. Angie could seduce you into thinking she was your best friend and then not speak to you again,” said Robinson. “That kind of cruelty is common, but Angelina was devastatingly good at it.”

  One boy she didn’t walk away from was a sixteen-year-old punk rocker she started dating when she was only fourteen. Within a month, the boy had moved in with her, with her mother’s blessing. Evidently, Bertrand thought the best way to keep tabs on her wild daughter was to keep her and her boyfriend under the same roof.