Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

Although the music videos were a stepping-stone, she had yet to land a speaking part in an actual movie. Though her film career seemed stalled, her modeling work continued apace. In April 1992, shortly before her seventeenth birthday, she faced the toughest choice of her fledgling career.

  A swimwear company wanted a fresh face to replace supermodel Cindy Crawford, whose celebrity meant that she was better known than the line. After spending hours looking through books of models, photographer Sean McCall was going cross-eyed searching for the right girl. It was only when Rita Montanez, who had now worked with Angie on several shoots, showed him Angie’s Elite card that he realized he had found her. “She was the obvious choice,” he recalls.

  While at five feet, seven inches she was short for a top model—though that never stopped Kate Moss—she had the exotic European look he was searching for. With her long limbs, perfect skin—her only blemishes a few scratches on her hand from the cat—and a certain elusive sexual poise, she seemed ideal. There seemed to be no obvious sign of cutting.

  As she changed into various swimsuits for the shoot in McCall’s cramped condo in Brentwood, she was upbeat and self-confident, a real natural. “For her age she was the most natural girl in front of a camera I had ever seen,” recalls McCall. “She was unself-conscious, whereas many teenage girls are like deer in headlights.” At one point she complained about the hot studio lights, and McCall told her that compared to movie lights, these were like candles. “I would go through that for a movie,” she said nonchalantly.

  Certainly she was a shoo-in to be the face of the brand. The swimwear executives loved what they saw and arranged for a full-scale shoot on location in the State Park at Malibu, the home of the TV show Baywatch. Shortly before she was due to take over from supermodel Cindy Crawford, however, Angie decided against going on the shoot, saying that she had decided to focus on acting. “If that doesn’t work, I will go back to modeling,” she explained. In the end, Californian blonde Caprice Bourret got the gig, going on to become best known as a lingerie model and a favorite of British men’s magazines.

  Angie’s decision was risky. If she had gone into modeling full-time, she would quickly have made a name for herself, whereas in the world of acting she was still a nobody. Within a matter of weeks, however, the gamble paid off. Angie had the chance to test McCall’s theory about studio lights when she auditioned for a big-budget sci-fi film initially titled Glass Shadow. Then the producers slashed the budget from $40 million to B-movie proportions and changed the title to Cyborg 2—making it the sequel to the 1989 original starring muscleman Jean-Claude Van Damme. In spite of the film’s vastly reduced scope, there were still three actresses—Legends of the Fall star Karina Lombard, martial-arts expert Cynthia Rothrock, and a model named Blueberry—vying for the role of Casella “Cash” Reese, an “almost human” cyborg designed to seduce and destroy. While Angie had a modest show reel (her modeling shoots augmented by five student shorts made by her brother while he attended USC film school), the moment she walked into the casting suite, she nailed the gig. “She sucked the air out of the room, she was so gorgeous,” recalls director Michael Schroeder. “She was special from the get-go, so talented she is a force of nature. She seemed to have the acting chops in her genes. I had a good feeling about this girl.”

  Not everyone on the set was so impressed. Her costar Elias Koteas had reservations about a girl just seventeen being cast as his love interest, given their age difference—he was thirty-two at the time. Since it was a tight twenty-nine-day shoot and she had to appear nude in a love scene, it was important that she was emanicipated and therefore exempt from child labor laws.

  While Michael Schroeder soothed the concerns of his leading man, others were equally doubtful about his choice of leading lady. Former world judo champion Karen Sheperd, who was playing an evil cyborg, was asked to give Angie some basic instruction in martial arts. When her mother dropped Angie off at a North Hollywood dojo—a garage turned into a karate studio—Karen, like the rest of the cast, was well aware that this was Jon Voight’s daughter. “She was skinny as a bird, arms like twigs, and she was so young and so brittle I had real doubts and thought, ‘Here we go, Hollywood nepotism.’ I was afraid I was going to hurt her.”

  Angie told her that she had “dabbled” in boxing, which Karen took as a way of saying she’d done nothing before. So she expected little from the two-hour session, teaching Angie how to punch without breaking her wrist as well as kicks, blocks, spins, and the basics of holding her body in a fighting stance. “She was lacking coordination and not that agile but really focused.” As well as learning her lines, she was instructed to spend the next few days doing her fighting homework—punching in front of a mirror.

  When shooting began on September 28, 1992, Angie quickly impressed her fellow actors with her dedication, her supple grace, and a willingness to work hard and take instruction. While the $2,500-a-week paycheck came in very handy, the experience mattered more to Angie. “She was an old soul,” recalls Karen Sheperd. “Not a flippant girl but mature beyond her years. I’ve worked with up-and-coming actors like Angie and they are punks. They throw tantrums and think that the whole world revolves around them. She wasn’t like that; she was self-controlled but open-minded to ideas on set no matter where they came from.”

  Angie had only one rule—her father’s name was not to be mentioned. Even though she used her middle name, Jolie, which her mother had presciently chosen when she was born, Voight’s shadow was ever present. Fellow actor Ric Young had just finished a charity telethon with Jon to raise funds for Chabad, while Michael Schroeder had worked with him on a film about the Chernobyl nuclear accident a couple of years before. Young takes an artistically matter-of-fact view of Angie’s inner turmoil concerning her father. “Every actor has a scar, some conflict,” he observes. “They are always at war with somebody. If you have a wonderful childhood, there is no conflict. But acting doesn’t work that way; a person has to go through a lot.”

  As much as Angie might have disapproved, Jon visited the set a couple of times, pleased that his daughter was in the hands of a “caring” director. At the time, he was rehearsing for his first stage role since playing the title role in Hamlet, the play that had cost him his marriage sixteen years before. In November 1992 he starred alongside Ethan Hawke in Chekhov’s The Seagull at New York’s Lyceum Theatre. It was a move that was to have bizarre consequences for his tenuous relationship with his daughter.

  Notwithstanding her famous father, Angie came to be seen by cast and crew as quiet but not aloof, serious about making a good job of her first movie role. She normally kept to her trailer, resting, smoking, or learning her scenes. One break from the exhausting routine came when legendary Hollywood star Jack Palance arrived on set for a couple of days to film his scenes. Other actors, including Angie, gathered in his trailer to listen to the actor, who is of Ukrainian descent, declaim Russian poetry. For the most part, though, Angie was focused on the work, knowing that this was her movie and her break, and she had to make the best of it. “She was really responsive to direction and could make changes without hesitation,” recalls Michael Schroeder. “Being brought up in the business, she understood instinctively how movies are made.”

  Her nude scene with Elias Koteas, which was filmed on a closed set toward the end of the shoot, did give her pause. Michael Schroeder made it as easy as possible. As the cameras rolled, he played a seductive aria from Erich Korngold’s 1920 opera, The Dead City. While her nude scene was tasteful and relatively tame, other cast members were concerned. “I felt sorry for her,” recalls Ric Young, appreciating that young actors can be “cursed by beauty,” like Marilyn Monroe was. “Everyone wants a piece of you, yet you have to be ruthless about keeping yourself to yourself. Angie has that inner toughness.”

  It was a toughness that might have been helped, or honed, by what psychoanalyst Franziska De George describes as Angie’s ability to dissociate, which was related to the impulse that caused her to cut herse
lf. If it was awkward to do a scene naked, she simply removed herself emotionally, switched gears, as cutting switched her pain from emotional to physical. Finally, her troubled background could serve an even better purpose than supplying a well of chaotic feelings to draw upon as an actress. It could give her the means to do what she had to, suffer what she had to, in order to succeed as an artist.

  After the scene, Karen Sheperd, who had become a mother figure during filming, took her aside and asked if she was okay. “She said that she was glad that it was behind her. Here she was seventeen and naked in front of a camera, watched by a bunch of strange guys. I couldn’t understand why she did it, but I felt that this was a girl who knew what her goals were. She could see the big picture. She knew that she had the looks, the connections, and that if she stayed focused and absorbed it all, this film was going to be her stepping-stone.”

  While she may have given that impression then, that was not the way Angie saw herself when she first viewed the completed movie. “When I saw it I threw up for three days” is her now-famous account of her movie debut. “My brother held me and I went back to school and didn’t want to work again.” Indeed, she says that it was a year before she summoned the courage to go for another audition.

  Given the fact that she had left school, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the film’s director remembers the incident rather differently. She came over to his house in Hollywood for dinner and a viewing. Understandably apprehensive, she sat with Schroeder, and when the movie ended, she told him that she had to be by herself and drove off into the night. The next day she called him to apologize. “Sorry, I was blown away by the movie and had to leave,” she told him. She called again a couple of days later to tell him how much she liked the film. That night he took her to a bar in West Hollywood and bought Angie her first martini. “I love the movie and I love you; it’s all great,” she told her director. As he says, “A lot of actors won’t go to the movies they are in. When she came out with me she was fine.” She had once again moved past her own feelings.

  Such was her enthusiasm that she immediately agreed to reprise her role of Cash for the sequel due to be filmed in 1993. She had already started prepping the script when the film’s new star, Zach Galligan, then riding high after Gremlins, insisted that a “name” actress be cast in Angie’s part. When the new producers chose Emmy Award–winning TV actor Khrystyne Haje, director Michael Schroeder was so angry that he quit the movie and returned only when he was threatened with legal action. “When I told Angie that they had decided to go with someone else, she was so gracious,” he says, describing his time making Cyborg 3 as the worst experience of his career.

  It was almost as bad for Angie. She had pinned her hopes on having a breakthrough with this movie. As it turned out, she hardly worked for more than a year. During this hiatus, Marche did an “amazing” job with her daughter, encouraging her to work hard at modeling so that she would have a lot of material for her acting show reel.

  Marche had other, more ethereal plans to help Angie snag a foothold on the acting ladder. They met with Marche’s regular psychic, who also helps the San Francisco police on unsolved cases, and she would take an object Angie was wearing and “see” her destiny through the vibrations she felt. Her mother also pinned her hopes on a subject that had fascinated her for years: astrology. Mother and daughter would read the runes, or rather the stars, seeking a pathway for Angie’s acting journey.

  Marcheline even bought an astrology computer program to pick out the signposts in the stars that would guide Angie’s career. Unfortunately, she did not like the astrological map that the computer spat out: Angie’s chart specifically pinpointed a “controlling mother” who could make or break her career. Marche refused to let Angie see this chart, insisting that her friend Lauren Taines alter the actual computer program so that it was wiped from the memory. It was a telling incident.

  In general, however, Marche and Lauren were so pleased with the program that they decided to set up their own company, Open Sky, to advise clients about their astrological charts. Unfortunately, the perfectionist in Marche ensured that the project was stillborn. She spent so long worrying about the punctuation and grammar for the company brochure that the venture never got off the ground—or, more appropriately, came to earth.

  While Marche was poring over syntax, Angie enjoyed some consolation for losing Cyborg 3 when she beat hundreds of other young hopefuls to become the face of Young Miss magazine. The resulting commercial, made in the summer of 1993 by Se7en and Fight Club director David Fincher, showed a sultry Angelina walking down a dark and dirty New York street as cars marked with words like “sex,” “drugs,” and “career” careened into one another. As the face of Young Miss, she was the knowing go-to girl to guide other teenagers through these hazards. The voice-over said, “It’s her world, you just live in it,” a phrase that could serve as a metaphor for her life—at least outwardly.

  It was that knowing, self-possessed, somewhat enigmatic quality that attracted the attention of cameraman Mark Gordon, a recent graduate of the American Film Institute, who was producing a couple of surreal “haiku-style” short films for his portfolio. He hired Steven Shainberg, who would later direct Secretary, to write and direct them. When they were considering actors, Gordon’s stylist friend Brad Bowman raved about a beautiful new model he had seen at an agency. It was Angelina Jolie. They arranged to see her and hired her for one spot, Angela and Viril. Filmed in black and white in June 1993, the short film depicted Angie sitting on a bed in the lotus position, meditating, while Viril typed rhythmically the numbers one through one thousand on an old typewriter. Just eighteen, she was, according to Gordon, “extraordinarily beautiful and exotic.” As he observes: “She appeared shy but also had a reserved confidence with the shooting process.” Gordon and Shainberg liked Angie so much that they hired her for the second short, Alice and Viril. This time, Viril meets Alice at a convention for lawn products. She asks him to hold his head underwater for three minutes, so he plunges his head into a fish tank while Angie’s character lounges nonchalantly.

  As surreal as this no-budget movie was, it paled in comparison to Angie’s real life. During his Broadway run in The Seagull, her father had met Laura Pels, a wealthy French-born theatrical producer who agreed to finance a filmmaking company, Jon Voight Productions. Pels invested $4 million, and the Paul family agreed to produce a slate of movies, including Double Russian Roulette, Reverse Heaven, and a trio of films based on Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. A few months later, in late 1993, Pels first became suspicious of the Paul family after receiving, as she later told the New York Post, an anonymous letter detailing lawsuits involving the family. While the sender of the letter has never come forward, the result was that Pels decided to sue Steven Paul as well as Stuart and Dorothy Paul and their companies for fraud and embezzlement.

  That same year, Jon Voight’s manager, Steven Paul, moved into a palatial mansion in Coldwater Canyon. This rankled with Marcheline, who was still waiting for her ex-husband to get his money back and buy her a house. Not only had he given Stacey Pickren the deed to the home they lived in when they parted, but now his manager was moving into an exclusive area, while Voight struggled to pay his bills.

  What to do? Marche could buy a home only if Jon gave her the money she felt she was due—which couldn’t happen until the Paul family had repaid the loan. According to her, they had told Jon that they couldn’t afford to give him the money. So, she reasoned, what if she showed Jon financial paperwork to prove that they had ample cash to pay him back?

  That was the logic behind a madcap scheme cooked up by Marche, Angie, and a couple of close friends to find the proof: They would take the trash from the street outside Steven Paul’s house, go through it in search of financial documents, and present them to Jon, who would see the light and demand his money. If that didn’t work, they would bundle up any incriminating papers and pass them on to the FBI.

  The first part of the plan went of
f without a hitch. One night shortly after the Los Angeles earthquake in January 1994, Marche’s girlfriend and her friend’s boyfriend (brought in for “muscle”) quietly drove to Steven Paul’s home and filled the backseat of their Mustang convertible with large trash bags that were awaiting collection. Then they drove to Marche’s apartment and poured the trash on the kitchen table, and Angie and her mother, wearing rubber gloves, went to work sorting through the garbage. Angie and Marche uncovered a thick file of documents relating to expensive office furniture and other fittings, various film production companies, and other paperwork that suggested, certainly in Marche’s mind, that the Pauls had much to answer for. “Angie loved playing detective; she found the whole thing very amusing,” admits a coconspirator.

  Part two of the operation—confronting Jon Voight and passing on the information to the FBI—never came off, however. Marcheline lost her nerve not only about approaching her ex-husband but also about compiling a dossier that the authorities would take seriously. There is no evidence of any actual wrongdoing on behalf of the Pauls, and Jon remains closely affiliated with them.

  The saga had several more plot twists. In the summer of 1994 Voight filed a countersuit against Pels, accusing the sixty-three-year-old of treating him like a “sex object,” and claiming that Pels withdrew financing for his projects when he rebuffed her advances. She responded by describing his lawsuit as “inane,” a smoke screen to distract attention from her $4 million lawsuit against his manager and the rest of the Paul family. (After further legal maneuvers, he retracted his allegations in September 1994, apologizing for the pain he had caused Pels and her family, and Pels’s lawsuit against the Pauls was subsequently settled and dismissed.)

  In the meantime, Angie was not finished playing detective. At her mother’s urging, she visited her father’s home in Hollywood to snoop around for more financial paperwork linking her father to the Pauls. Marche was concerned that he had signed legal papers that would make him liable for any lawsuits or costs associated with the Pauls’ financial schemes. Angie was able to report back that he was not involved as a partner, nor was he financially liable. “It was a great relief for Marche,” recalls a friend with intimate knowledge of the matter. “A huge weight was lifted from her shoulders.”