by Ian Halperin
Whatever the timing, the three young actors dealt with the situation the best they could. Despite Jolie’s wild reputation, it is notable that Shimizu denied that the three had ever jumped into bed together. “We didn’t have a threesome,” she said. “I’m not really into that—it was a friendship the three of us had. But there wasn’t much conversation with Jonny; I think he was very threatened by me.” Indeed, Miller later confessed to being a “horribly jealous person.”
It was soon clear to everybody that the marriage was not destined to last, and few were surprised when the two separated after a year. Jolie blamed the breakup on the couple’s separate work schedules: “I’m not present enough, physically or emotionally, in relationships to get serious. It’s not fair to the other person that I’m so busy with my career and that I’m often distant even when I’m with someone. We were living side by side, but we had separate lives. I wanted more for him than I could give. He deserves more than I am prepared to give at this time in my life.”
“It’s just that I wasn’t being a wife,” she added. “I think we really needed to grow, and we always talked about getting remarried. Certainly, my career is first. I seem to meet a lot of men who say they are like that, but for some reason it just doesn’t turn out that way.”
Somewhat disingenuously, she also said the relationship broke down because she wanted to move to New York, while Miller wanted to return to Britain. He seemed to go along with this explanation when he told the Mail on Sunday newspaper, “I know this sounds mad, but I was missing little things like the nine o’clock news, red buses, country smells, the sound of our rock music, and Match of the Day.”
However, the most accurate explanation for the crumbling marriage was probably best summed up in something Jolie told a reporter about Miller: “He really had to put up with a lot.” It wasn’t her career that was getting in the way of her marriage, it was her girlfriend. Judging by their later public statements, it was obvious that Jolie’s relationship with Shimizu was paramount. “I would have married Jenny if I hadn’t married my [first] husband,” she later acknowledged.
Although Miller had occasionally gone along with Jolie’s fetishes and penchant for S & M, Shimizu implied that it was she who was better suited to meet those needs. “It’s not so much that we were dressed in leather capes and masks and there were chains,” she later recalled to the Sun about their unconventional sex life. “It was emotional. I would restrain her with my arms, but we didn’t get into buying stuff. We just used whatever props were available if we wanted to. She was a collector of knives and taught me about them.” Shimizu added, “She’s a very dominant personality. Once she displays love for you, she wants to know how much you care about her.”
Of this first, ill-fated marriage, Jolie later also implied that she and Miller had been realistic about their prospects. “The first time I got married, I was young,” she recalled. “I knew I wanted to be married and wanted to be his wife. And it was a great experience. But we knew it wouldn’t last forever.”
And, although they didn’t officially divorce until 1999, by late 1997, Miller was out of Jolie’s life. Jenny Shimizu, however, was not.
DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN
By the time Gia was released, in January 1998, Angelina Jolie should have been riding high. Her tour-de-force performance was almost universally acclaimed, she had a Golden Globe on her mantel, and she was being hailed as a rising star. But months earlier Jolie had tipped into an emotional abyss which she attributed to her sudden success.
“You think beauty and fame and money should make a person happy?” she challenged one reporter, who had asked her whether she was enjoying her new-found celebrity after George Wallace. “I don’t think so, if you don’t have love and you don’t have people to share it with. I think a lot of people have that feeling inside, that people don’t care about who we are inside or understand us.”
For a while she had seemed to enjoy her burgeoning success, especially when one of her favorite bands came to call shortly after she finished filming Gia. “I didn’t know what the Rolling Stones wanted,” recalled Jolie, who had also recently appeared in a video for a Meatloaf song. The Stones recruited her to play a sultry stripper to their song “Anybody Seen My Baby.” “Imagine my surprise when they wanted me to walk down the streets in basically my underwear. The great thing is that it was New York and no one cared. People in restaurants were like, ‘Oh, there goes the girl from Gia in her undies. Pass the salt.’”
The sexy video was definitely more memorable than her next movie appearance in 1997, in the awful film Playing God. She plays the girlfriend of a crime boss, Timothy Hutton, in a film that features David Duchovny in his first starring role after his success with the X-Files television series. The movie was a critical and box-office failure, though most critics blamed the mediocrity of her character on the script rather than on Jolie’s performance. The film might have been spicier: Jolie later revealed that the director had filmed two separate sex scenes, one with her and Duchovny and one with Hutton, but they were left on the cutting-room floor. “With David we were basking in sunlight, and with Tim we were fucking hard in the back of a car,” she revealed. “I think they felt like they couldn’t have one without the other so they cut them both.” About the only good thing for Jolie to come out of Playing God was a brief fling with Hutton.
Almost immediately after Playing God wrapped, she began shooting another inexplicably mediocre script called Hell’s Kitchen, playing a character named Gloria McNeary, a second-generation Hell’s Kitchen lowlife who has been waiting five years to get even with her former lover Johnny—a boxer who took the fall for a friend when a botched robbery cost Liz’s brother his life. The subsequent capers and convoluted plot are embarrassingly outlandish, but, fortunately for Jolie’s career, virtually nobody saw the film when it was released.
In the middle of shooting, in the spring of 1997, Interview magazine commissioned Jon Voight to interview his own daughter. The result is a fascinating snapshot of Jolie’s perspective from that point in her still obscure life and career. After an emotional reflection on his daughter’s birth and her earliest acting roles, Voight asks Angelina about the early signs that she wanted to be an actor:
JOLIE: God, my earliest memories are of my brother, Jamie—your son—pointing the home video camera at me and saying, “C’mon, Ange, give us a show.” Neither you or mom ever said, “Be quiet! Stop talking!” I remember you looking me in the eye and asking, “What are you thinking? What are you feeling?” That’s what I do in my job now. I say, “OK, how do I feel about this?” And I immediately know, because that’s how I grew up.
VOIGHT: You have a very strong, specific presence onscreen. I think it’s a presence that will always make a difference, story-wise. Jolie: I have a certain energy, yeah, and it’s either needed or it’s definitely not needed. I know that I can stick out like a sore thumb, and there are some women I’m not ready to play. I’m curious what you’ll think of some of the things I’ve done recently.
VOIGHT: First of all, you have Playing God.
JOLIE: That was very rock ’n’ roll and fun and loud and say-what- you-want-to-say, dress wild and love wild. You know that fantasy. I really allowed myself to get into that world. Being the age I am, I sometimes feel like a punk kid walking onto certain sets, but I didn’t this time. I felt very much a woman. As a young woman, there are parts I’ll look at that may not be in the best projects, but I’m starting out in this business and trying to figure out how I can make it work. I’m having to do a lot just to keep my clothes on and not be cast in girlfriend roles. Some women will say, “I don’t want to be a man; I want the opportunities I can get as a woman.” Women have a certain sexuality, and I think their bodies are beautiful, and I’m not embarrassed to explore that in a film. But there are things you get offered that are vulgar and violent, just like there’s a side of me that’s vulgar and violent.
VOIGHT: Sometimes, to present the truth, you have to play a vulg
ar or violent character.
JOLIE: Yes, although in the films I’ve done recently, I’ve been learning a little more about the side of myself that enjoys being a light. I remember when I used to dress all in black, and you’d say, “Just be pretty, hold your head up, be proud. Be a pleasant person and don’t cover yourself so much with all your darkness, you need to be a little crazy.” Now, I have nothing against anything I’ve been in before, because I love all sides of me, but I have been experimenting more with that lovely woman side. In this age of feminism, I would hate for the whole gentlemen and ladies thing to be lost.
VOIGHT: What do you do when you’re not working?
JOLIE: I find it hard, so I usually find a way to put myself back to work. I’ll work with Tom [Bower, Jolie’s partner in her theater company], or on a play. I’ll read or write. And I think it’s important, in between projects, for me to sit down with who I’ve just become and allow her to continue to evolve and find a home inside me before I go and become somebody else. But I think I also need to learn to relax and not prepare too much, just enjoy life. I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.
VOIGHT: OK, Angelina, we haven’t heard even a portion of the wonderful Angelina Jolie stories we know, but we’ve suggested some of the energy that is uniquely you. I send you much love, my dear.
JOLIE: I love you too, Daddy.
* * * *
Gia was scheduled for release in January 1998, and her parents were both confident the role was going to catapult her into the upper echelons of the business. But Jolie wasn’t sure if that’s what she wanted.
“I don’t think I was ever more depressed in my life,” she would recall. “I was at a place in my life where I had everything I thought you should have to make you happy, and I felt emptier than ever. I thought after Gia that I had given everything I had to offer yet I didn’t find myself growing. I didn’t have the strength to deal with Hollywood. I was scared of being so public with my life and I didn’t want to go out like Gia. I just needed to get away and find myself.”
She had almost quit the business several times before. This time she finally made good on her threat, at least temporarily. Deciding that she might be happier on the other side of the camera, she decided to move east and enroll at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, majoring in filmmaking. But the move away from friends and family only appeared to make things worse.
“I didn’t have close friends anymore and the city just seemed cold and sad and strange, and the subway rides—everything that was kind of romantic about New York—just got very cold for me,” she recalled years later about this period. “I didn’t know if I wanted to live because I just didn’t know what I was living for.”
She described being in a New York hotel room where she was going to use either a knife or sleeping pills to kill herself; she couldn’t decide which was the best method. She even wrote a note for the housekeeper asking her to call the police, so that the poor employee wouldn’t have to come across her dead body. She then spent the day walking around the city. She was about to buy a kimono, in which she would commit her final act, when she suddenly realized how crazy the whole idea was. “I didn’t know if I could pull the final thing across my wrists,” she recalled. In addition, she calculated that she didn’t have enough sleeping pills to ensure she would die. She asked her mother to mail her some more, but then realized that Bertrand would inevitably feel responsible for her part in her daughter’s demise.
It was at this point that she came up with a bizarre scheme. The girl who had been diagnosed as “unrestrained, inclined toward antisocial psychopathy” only six years earlier decided she would hire a hit man to kill her so that her death would not appear self-inflicted. “With suicide comes the guilt of all the people around you thinking that they could have done something,” she explained. “With somebody being murdered, nobody takes on some kind of guilty responsibility.”
She even met with a man, “a friend of a friend,” who she had been told could arrange the hit. She calculated that it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to hire the assassin. She planned to put money aside bit by bit, so no one would be able to trace the murder back to her after her body was discovered. “It’s so weird and so complicated and so completely insane,” she later said about the plan. “And so like a fucking movie.” The potential killer, she recalled, “was a decent enough person, and he asked if I could think about it and call him again in two months. [But, in the meantime], [s]omething changed in my life, and I figured I’d stick it out.”
Among other things, Jenny Shimizu flew to New York, sensing that there was something wrong. The two had been having regular phone sex, and it was during one of these long-distance sessions that Shimizu sensed a cry for help. Her presence helped Jolie think straight.
Although this dark period had driven her to thoughts of suicide, a couple of years later Jolie was publicly describing it as an important chapter in her life. “That was a really bad time, because I didn’t think I had that much more to offer,” she told Rolling Stone in 1999. “I didn’t think I could balance my life and my mind and my work. I was also very scared of getting public after doing [Gia] and seeing how undernourished her private life was, how malnourished she was, though her exterior was very glamorous. So I’d be working and doing interviews, and then going home by myself and not knowing if I’d ever be in a relationship or be really good in my marriage or be a good mother one day or if I’d ever be … I don’t know, complete as a woman. It was a really sad time. But I think it was really good that I did that now, that I spent all those months on my own, having a very regular life, going to school at NYU, studying the different levels of how to get into this business, riding the subway back and forth and just being on my own.”
She had decided that instead of ending it all, she would “live life to the fullest.” While at one point in her life that would have included heavy drug use, she now insisted that was behind her. She had been awakened by Gia Carangi’s cautionary tale. “Gia has enough similarities to me that I figured this would either be a purge of all my demons, or it was gonna really mess with me,” she said. “Luckily I’ve found something that replaces a high, and that is my work.” The statement is telling: Angelina Jolie was still addicted, just to something that wasn’t a drug.
By the time she accepted her Golden Globe for George Wallace in January 1998, work was not hard to come by. Suddenly she was red hot. Scripts started to pour in and her unofficial manager and gatekeeper, Marcheline Bertrand, helped decide which ones to accept. Jolie probably would have been better off consulting her father, who had always been very selective about the scripts he chose for himself. Voight’s career was also suddenly hot, with his recent Golden Globe-nominated performance in the John Grisham thriller The Rainmaker thrusting him into the media spotlight.
Her name change aside, interviewers never seemed to let Jolie out from under her father’s shadow. But increasingly it was Voight who was asked about his daughter as he roamed the press circuit. “She’s something. She’s the real thing: an artist,” he told one reporter proudly when asked about Jolie’s rising career. “I look at her as a peer. Her work is full of detail, full of decisions, full of vision. I have heard her say in interviews that she didn’t know me when I was at my height. But she did know me then. It’s just that even then I was struggling,” he said. “The struggle is always with us.”
Another profile describes Voight’s entire face lighting up when asked about his daughter. “Young men come up to me now and say, ‘Oh, Mr. Voight, your work is wonderful.’ I’m thinking, ‘Baloney!’ It’s all a smoke screen. They just want to get to Angie.” Voight reveals that he and his daughter have a pact. “We are definitely going to do a film together before the end of this millennium,” he promised. “I would love to do a comedy with he
r,” he said elsewhere. “She has a wonderful sense of fun, and it would be great for the two of us to play these really dopey characters, partially because we’re both taken so seriously right now.”
Asked whether that was also a goal of hers, Jolie was a little more circumspect, although open to the possibility. “I would have never wanted to work with him if it seemed I was getting the job because of him,” she explained. “I had wanted to stay separate just to be able to prove to myself that I was worth something and able to do my job. As you grow up, your relationship with your parents changes. He’s gotten to know me through the roles I’ve done, and I’m probably stronger now, and more confident with my work.”
Even if she appeared to resent being asked about her famous father in every interview, it was clear that they were still close and that they respected each other’s craft. In one interview, she even described herself as a “daddy’s girl.” “I talk to him, and he talks to me,” she said. “We love each other. But, to be fair, I also love my mother. And, most of all, I’m my own person … Acting is really about life, so if we talk about careers, it isn’t just shop talk. When dad was doing [the 1999 TV movie Noah’s Ark], we often discussed how he approached the character, but it was really about our own attitudes toward religion. I was taught acting all the time; sometimes, my mom would say things like, ‘Look at me, and let me see what you are in your eyes.’ That’s real actor stuff.”
* * * *
Although her marriage to Jonny Lee Miller was over, reporters were fascinated by the most significant and lasting legacy of the marriage, her tattoos. In the years since, she has acquired at least a dozen, several of which she has had covered over by other tattoos or removed entirely. She has described her attraction to tattoos as “dark and romantic and tribal” and often gets them to commemorate personal events in her life, such as the births of her children and the death of her mother.