by Ian Halperin
In one interview, she revealed the origin of her first tattoo—the Japanese symbol for death on her shoulder. “When I got my first tattoo,” she explained, “I got ‘death,’ and Jonny got ‘courage.’ While he was doing Trainspotting, I was in Scotland and wanted to get another one, but I didn’t know what to get, so I just got ‘courage.’ I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just match his.’ But it was never really me.” She later eliminated both of these tattoos by covering them with new ones.
By the time Rolling Stone came to interview her for her first cover story, which appeared in the August 1999 issue, she was giving what the reporter described as the “obligatory tour” of her tattoos:
“OK,” she says, standing up and showing her left arm, “that’s my dragon, upper left.” She presents the inside of her wrist: “That’s an H. There are two people in my life who have this letter [author’s note: these are often alleged to be Timothy Hutton and her brother, James Haven] who I’m very close to and who I sort of love and cherish. And this is my newest one. I got this with my mom, actually. She came with me. It’s a Tennessee Williams quote: ‘A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.’” She regards her left forearm and smiles her holy madwoman smile.
“This is my cross,” she continues, pulling down the waistband of her black pants to reveal her slender hip, “and this,” she indicates a Latin motto that curves across her stomach just above the bikini line, “means ‘what nourishes me also destroys me.’ And this,” she turns around, pulling up the hem of her black T-shirt to show a little blue rectangle on the small of her back, “is the only color I have. I’m going to turn it black. It’s a window.” A window onto her spine? “No,” she says, “it’s because wherever I am I always find myself looking out the window wanting to be somewhere else.” She smiles again, her loony, beatific smile—religious ecstasy with just a dash of grimace.
Jolie appeared to have carved out a distinct public image for herself involving her knives, tattoos, and scars. The vulnerable, sensitive side that reporters had noted earlier seemed to have been replaced by a caricature of her own making. To what extent this was the deliberate crafting of a specific image is difficult to figure out. She has implied that it was a defense mechanism to help shield her from too much scrutiny: “I feel as if all that stuff has been like some sly move on my part so that people will focus on the tattoos and knives and that way [they] won’t really know anything about me. Yet everyone thinks they know personal stuff about me.”
Asked by one reporter what she would say in a personals ad to describe herself, she was no less forthcoming: “ ‘Leave me alone.’ Or it might say, ‘Looking for a very secret, very straight night of reckless abandon to do all the things I’ve never done before. Shock me and keep it private.’”
In fact, her knives and tattoos were far less important than her other passions, such as tango dancing and playing the drums. Nor did anybody know that her favorite film was Disney’s Dumbo, the whimsical film about a flying elephant. And her secret dream, she once admitted, was to own a motel in the middle of nowhere. “It all started when I was driving by this motel in Arkansas and thought it would be perfect to have,” she enthused. “I jumped out and asked if it was for sale, and they said it was. I didn’t end up buying it, but I loved that there were twenty-two little rooms. I thought I could just ride motorcycles, fix up the rooms, and grease the floors and stuff. I’m still looking for another motel. It’s my dream project. I love places that have funky neon signs and are really tacky. The one I liked was called Happy Hollow, and I wanted to just stay there so badly.”
An Esquire reporter, who spent some time with her in early 1998, was expecting a knife-wielding tough girl but was surprised to discover that “she’s also mushy and really close to her mom and has poetry books and lace nightgowns and wants to cook and learn French. She likes and owns a lot of lingerie, but she doesn’t always wear it. In a relationship, she wears ordinary underwear and saves the fancy stuff to cheer herself up. She fears being buried alive and becoming the kind of person who dresses her dog in clothes.”
Yet Jolie rarely allowed reporters to see this side of her. It didn’t fit the image she was crafting or the roles she was hoping to play, none of which went along with a soft-spoken normal Hollywood starlet. And, of course, she never tired of talking about what one reporter described as “the bisexual thing.” “I’ve been married to a man … ” she told one magazine. “But I love women; I’m attracted to women. To me, it wouldn’t matter if it was a man or a woman … I have been close to a woman and thought, ‘I could marry this person.’”
Still, she had no intention of playing a leading lady any time soon, so presumably she had no worries that her bisexuality would affect her box office returns. If anything, she seems to have viewed it as a professional asset. “I’ll probably go after a bunch of guy’s roles next,” she told one interviewer in late 1997. “They’re not really written for women, but there are some great roles; some great army movies. I want to play a sheriff, a cowboy, an army person. I’ll just keep trying for those strong roles.”
She would later get that chance, but for now she signed up to play a club girl yearning for love in a romantic comedy called Playing by Heart, which featured an ensemble of long-established stars: Sean Connery, Ellen Burstyn, Dennis Quaid, and Gena Rowlands. When the film was released, at the end of 1998, the public could see that the twenty-three-year-old Jolie could easily hold her own with such an intimidating array of stars. More than one reviewer claimed that Jolie had “upstaged them,” though the film itself was not well received. Her performance was enough to win her another award to add to her growing collection: “Best Breakthrough Performance by an Actress,” presented by the National Board of Review.
Despite the stellar reviews, she remained humble and even a little embarrassed that she was being favorably compared to screen legends such as Connery and Burstyn. “I’ve saved the call sheet with my name against all these other actors because I was just so proud to be on the list,” she said of acting with the all-star cast. “I felt like I had crashed the greatest party in history.”
Jolie filled the rest of 1998 and early 1999 with two back-to-back pictures featuring two of Hollywood’s hottest male actors of the moment. First up was Pushing Tin, a comedy about air-traffic controllers, in which she plays the wife of Billy Bob Thornton. He had recently turned in an extraordinary Oscar-winning performance in Sling Blade, one of Jolie’s favorite films. Then she worked on The Bone Collector, playing a rookie police officer alongside Denzel Washington.
“I begged for the part of Amelia,” Jolie later admitted. “I just wanted it so badly. I loved who she was. She was very street, and there were a lot of questions about my accent, about how I’d dress. Denzel had to meet me. He had watched my films, and I was so nervous. I was filming Playing by Heart, and I had this pink hairdo that was all spiked up. So I tried to cover it with a scarf, [but] halfway through the dinner I accidentally pulled it off and didn’t realize it. They were all staring at my head, this pink thing. Here I was trying to be like a lady, a cop, and an adult. But he approved me, and I thought that said a lot.”
Asked how she chose her roles, her answer was revealing. “I do my own therapy quite a lot,” she said. “My choice of characters is my therapy, from one to the next. In Playing by Heart, there is a need for love, someone who is not very focused on purpose and work. Playing Amelia in Bone Collector was next; she’s a cop who is all about duty and responsibility. It was my own way of tapping every side,” she said.
On January 24, 1999, she attended the Golden Globe awards ceremony for the second year in a row as a nominated actress, this time for her role in Gia. In a red-carpet interview on the way in, she promised that if she won she would jump fully dressed into the pool of the Beverly Hilton, where the ceremony was being staged. When she was younger, she claimed she had jumped into the same pool while accompanying her father to an event and was kicked out by the hotel management.
Once again, w
hen the envelope was opened, her name was called. When she got to the microphone, Jolie couldn’t contain her tears on seeing her mother beaming at her from the audience. “Mom, I know you wanted to be an actress, but you gave it up to raise me. I love you.” Later that evening, Jolie made good on her promise, jumping into the pool at the hotel in her $3,000 Randolph Duke gown.
“What’s funny to me is that everyone wasn’t jumping into the pool,” she told Playboy. “It’s one of those events, and the people in the room are supposed to be free and wild, but everyone is so tame and careful.” The incident only contributed to her wild-girl image; it was portrayed by most media as a spontaneous, drunken lark instead of the planned celebration that it was.
Meanwhile, she was determined not to let the success go to her head. “I’m not going to get used to it too much,” she claimed shortly after the ceremony, when asked how a second Golden Globe award would affect her career. “I’m aware that it will help me get another job,” she said, “and that’s what every actor wants—another job.” There was one in particular that Jolie had in mind at that moment, and it was the job that would define her career.
STARDOM
From the moment Columbia Pictures announced they were filming Girl, Interrupted, virtually every young actress in Hollywood lined up for a role. Based on Susanna Kaysen’s best-selling memoir, the film looked like a golden opportunity to those who had been kicking around Hollywood for years, just waiting to be taken seriously. Rose McGowan, who had co-starred in Scream, summed up the film’s appeal after she read for a part. “It’s the only decent thing out there that doesn’t involve taking your clothes off,” she said. It was the ideal acting showcase, and Oscar visions danced in the head of every actress under twenty-five as she lined up for a chance to read.
It is doubtful that awards were in Winona Ryder’s first thoughts when she read the book, in 1993, and immediately tried to buy the film option for herself. “It catapulted me back to the first time I read Catcher in the Rye, and I discovered I was not the only person who knew what it was like to be lonely and alienated,” she explained. “Since I read the book when I was twenty-one and fell madly in love with it, I’ve wanted to do this.”
Angelina Jolie had much the same reaction. She wanted in. The book spoke to her in many ways; certain parts of Kaysen’s life hit really close to home: in 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist, Boston prep-school girl Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital, in nearby Belmont. Reality had become “too dense” for the eighteen- year-old. Kaysen spent most of the next two years living a nightmare on a ward for teenage girls at McLean, a psychiatric hospital famous for treating the mental frailties of the privileged. It was an experience that she captured in a gripping memoir more than two decades later.
Kaysen was raised in the upper academic echelons of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the daughter of famed economist Carl Kaysen, a professor at MIT and former advisor to President John F. Kennedy. When her stifling Cambridge upbringing became too much to bear, Kaysen made a half-hearted attempt to kill herself by swallowing fifty aspirin. The suicide attempt brought her to McLean, whose patients have included Sylvia Plath, Ray Charles, and James Taylor, all of whom spent time there after their own famous breakdowns.
Once at McLean, Kaysen was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and was quickly divested of any control over her own life. After a dental treatment under general anesthesia, she panicked when she awoke and nobody would tell her how long she had been unconscious; she believed she had “lost time.” On another occasion, in an episode known in psychiatry as depersonalization, she bit open the flesh on her hand because she was terrified that she had “lost her bones.”
“Lunatics,” writes Kaysen, “are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can’t go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside.” She believes she was the family scapegoat, sent to an institution to spare her loved ones the inconvenience of having to live with her.
Nearly a quarter century after she was finally released, Kaysen documented her experiences at McLean. In the interim, she had rarely mentioned her hospitalization, “I didn’t know what to say,” she recalled. When she did bring it up, “it was a good way to irritate or frighten people.” But the memories of McLean kept surfacing, and finally she felt she had to record them.
In the years after her release she had discovered a significant talent for writing and had published two acclaimed novels, Far Afield and Asa, As I Knew Him. Her autobiographical account of her days at McLean was a surprise bestseller that was frequently compared to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. As poignantly as she captured her own experiences, she managed to capture the foibles of her fellow patients, including a number of memorable and fascinating characters who had been committed for a variety of reasons.
One of these characters is a manipulative sociopath named Lisa, who, unlike Susanna, probably needed to be in an institution. Lisa was the maverick of the all-female ward, fighting for justice and defying the system. She devised diversions from the strict routines and drew escape plans and rallied the other girls to question authority—in short, she was a female version of Jack Nicholson’s character Randle P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This is the role Angelina Jolie wanted, and she was determined to do whatever was necessary to land it. “Lisa was a very coveted role,” recalled producer Cathy Konrad. “We had the pick of all the young actresses out there.”
In contrast, Winona Ryder knew right from the beginning that she wanted to play the lead role of Susanna, the part she most identified with. She wanted it so badly, in fact, that she was willing to buy the rights to the book in order to land it. To her chagrin, she was beaten to it by Douglas Wick, who had produced The Craft.
Still, the dark, depressing story wasn’t seen as bankable by most studios, and Wick was having no luck getting the film financed. That’s when Ryder, in those days still a hot commodity and a bankable actress, made him a deal. She would come aboard as a producer and use her clout to get the story made. In exchange, she would be guaranteed the role of Susanna, which could be her ticket to the pantheon of serious actors that had so far eluded her.
But it wasn’t mere vanity that motivated Ryder to make Girl, Interrupted. When she was a rising young actress, she suffered what she later called an “extra-large breakdown” and checked herself briefly into the sleep-disorder unit of a psychiatric institution. She attributed the crisis to “the pressure of working and then going through adolescence onscreen.”
Because of the breakdown she had had to turn down the role of Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary in Godfather III, which was subsequently given to Sofia Coppola. It was not a decision she had taken lightly. “I thought I was losing my mind,” she later explained. “You know, when you are just so tired that you can’t sleep? … It was a really tough year. It would be for anybody, regardless of what they’re doing, whether it’s cramming for exams or their parents driving them crazy or breaking up with first loves. It’s the year where life is going crazy, and everything was going crazy in mine. It was amplified because it was in the papers. Every step I was taking was being written about.”
During her brief stint in the institution, she recorded her innermost feelings in a journal, much like Susanna Kaysen had done two decades earlier. “I didn’t get anything from that place,” Ryder said. “I was so tired and just wanted to sleep. They didn’t help me at all … I was nineteen, and I learned that no matter how rich you are and how much you pay some hospital or doctor, they can’t fix you. They can’t give you a certain answer. You have to figure it out for yourself. I finally realized I’m not supposed to understand everything. Life is just weird and messy, and I had to get through on my own and do my best. Choose to move on or stay miserable. I chose to move on.”
Like Kaysen, Ryder had never had a chance to come to terms with the episode. But after reading Girl, Interrupted, she realized she wasn
’t crazy for reeling under so much stress. “One of the things I thought for years is that I am not OK,” she said convincingly. “I thought people would think I was a brat if I complained about anything. If I said I was depressed, they’d attack me. Now I know I’m allowed to say, ‘Wow, I had a hard time.’ I am learning to be me.”
For a long time it looked like Girl, Interrupted would never be made. But once she finally got the green light from Columbia to turn Kaysen’s memoir into a film, Ryder personally approached her director of choice. James Mangold had just won the best director award for his first feature, Heavy, at the Sundance Film Festival and was making a big-budget crime drama called Cop Land, starring Sylvester Stallone, Robert DeNiro, and Harvey Keitel.
“[Ryder] came to see me in New York while I was making Cop Land in 1996,” Mangold recalled. “Girl, Interrupted had already gone through two writers, and I got the sense it had gone aground. It was a hard story to tell. I was so enthused by her enthusiasm that I agreed to do it, though I didn’t have a clue as to how I’d get the project right, because much of the story had been told from inside the author’s head. It took a while, but then, the ideas started coming.”
By the time auditions began in 1998, Ryder had been working closely on the project for almost two years. It had been a constant touch-and-go with the studio about whether production would ever begin. Eventually, they were ready to cast the film. The role of Susanna was already spoken for by Ryder. To her credit, she chose the lower-key role, likely because she so identified with the character. She must have known the other roles would overshadow it and possibly attract the attention of the Oscar nominating committee. Her decision left open the roles of the other inmates. Among the most coveted were the part of Daisy, a schizophrenic victim of incest, and, of course, Lisa.