Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  In the peripatetic world of acting, Angie returned to Los Angeles after filming ended in April, while Miller bleached his hair and flew to Scotland to appear in Trainspotting, Danny Boyle’s movie based on Irvine Welsh’s tawdry tale of drugs and low life among a motley crew of Edinburgh youths.

  Around this time another man came into her life who would have a profound influence on her career. Her brother James’s graduation from USC took place during the filming of Foxfire, and she had wanted a clause in the contract to allow her leave to attend the ceremony. For some reason it was omitted. Angie was furious, and went to the graduation anyway—a fraught family event that saw the permanent estrangement of her mother and her mother’s sister, Debbie, over the trivial matter of the allocation of tickets. As a result of this contractual mix-up, Angie decided to move to a bigger agency, William Morris. As she was low on the agency totem pole—at the time, Billy Bob Thornton was riding high with Sling Blade, Quentin Tarantino had a hit with Pulp Fiction, and Sean Penn and Bruce Willis were hot—she was relegated to an agent’s assistant, Geyer Kosinski.

  Inside the William Morris offices, Kosinski, an exuberant if rather arrogant party animal, enthusiastically championed her cause, even when others questioned his judgment. She was seen as a wild card, a starlet who had done little of note—apart from attract the wrong sort of publicity. “He believed in her absolutely,” recalls a WMA colleague. “He told everyone that she was going to be a great movie star.” In time his home would become a shrine to Angie, every room dominated by pictures of his client. While she thought it was “creepy,” he soon had her in his thrall. Tough, thick-skinned, and driven, Kosinski was the classic hard-boiled agent who went everywhere with several cell phones—even on a date.

  Although Angie liked his focus, her mother was not so impressed. As Angie’s manager, Marcheline had effectively guided her career to date, keeping an eye on contracts and accounts while helping with scripts. Now all that changed, with Kosinski driving the editorial side of her career and Marcheline taking over the finances—for a reduced percentage of Angie’s fees. While this arrangement could charitably be described as creative tension, there was little affection between mother and agent over the coming months and years. At some point Marche was delighted when she discovered a $15,000 payment discrepancy, and thereafter she watched Angie’s accounts like a hawk. For his part, Kosinski frequently undermined Marche’s attempts to develop film and TV projects for herself and her children.

  Over time Angie and Geyer developed a dysfunctional father/daughter relationship. While Angie felt she had the final say over her career, Kosinski was the one who pulled the strings. Eventually their relationship evolved into the Hollywood equivalent of a royal court, Marche and Kosinski intriguing against each other. Ultimately, though, it was Kosinski who came to control Queen Angie. A family friend who watched this dance observed: “Angie is a typical Gemini and split the responsibilities. Marche didn’t trust Kosinski, and while Angie loved her mother, she pitted them against each other. It was checks and balances. There was no love lost there.”

  Nor was there any love lost between Jonny Lee Miller and Jenny Shimizu. As much as he might have considered himself Angie’s boyfriend, it was clear that her relationship with Jenny was no passing fancy. The two women continued to see each other in Hollywood, their ideal night spent cruising strip clubs with Angelina in hot pants and a matching skintight vest. “I even took her to dominatrix joints, and she loved them,” Jenny told writer Georgina Dickinson. “The naughtier the better. Then we’d go back to wherever we were staying, desperate to rip each other’s clothes off and act out the moves we had seen. They were amazing nights.”

  Even though she was younger and less sexually experienced than Jenny, it was Angie who was the dominant in their relationship, reflecting her long-held desire to “be one of the boys.” “If a strap-on was involved, she would wear it,” joked another friend from this sexually experimental period in her life. “She would be the one to tell you to suck her cock.”

  While her friend, speaking on condition of anonymity, was heterosexual and in a relationship, when Angie first met her she invited her and her boyfriend for a threesome. The girl declined, but nonetheless her friendship with Angie flourished, and she came to know Angie well over the next few years. Marche was thrilled about this friendship, observing that she was the first girlfriend Angie had ever had that she was not sleeping with. As this platonic girlfriend recalls: “I’d never met a true bisexual before Angie and wasn’t sure if they even really existed. To quote my little sister: ‘Bisexuals are just greedy.’ But I feel Angie is a true bisexual. She lusted after women, just as she did with men. It definitely was not an act. She is mega-sexual. When it comes to men, she is interested in those in the spotlight. When it comes to women, they are her true love. She is attracted to women she is friends with.”

  Psychologist Iris Martin sees more in Angie’s behavior than adolescent experimentation, tracing it back to her early months left alone in her crib, her life an unconscious search for a mother. “Most women have women friends and they are like your sisters. You don’t want to fuck them. If you are starved of intimacy, if you have been abandoned, you feel like nothing inside. If you have an attraction to a woman, it is going to end up sexual. The slightest reaction to intimacy is completely overblown, as it taps into her well of neediness.”

  Psychoanalyst Dr. Franziska De George also focuses on Angie’s scattered childhood, her disassociation from herself. “Bisexuality is part of being lost; it is a way of expressing yourself. If you don’t understand yourself and what you need, you are going to experiment.”

  There was, too, a darker motive behind Angie’s sexual experimentation and willing embrace of bisexuality—revenge. On one occasion she and Jenny Shimizu went to a photo booth near the beach at Santa Monica and made out for the camera, Angie licking and French-kissing her lover. When she next saw her father, she asked him if he wanted to see some pictures, pulling out the lewd set of her and Jenny. She knew full well that Stacey Pickren had left him for another woman, and teasing and humiliating him was her payback for the fact that he had left her mother. “I think a lot of her dabbling with other women was to take a stab at her father,” observes Lauren Taines.

  Whatever the motivation behind her on-and-off relationship with Jenny, she was reunited with Jonny Lee Miller that September to publicize Hackers. Their first experience of a mainstream release was not entirely enjoyable. The reviews were lukewarm to hostile and, in spite of all her efforts, in the round of media interviews, the chief interest in Angie was about her famous father. The focus was as much on why she no longer used her last name as on her role in the movie. “I don’t want to be hired because of my name,” was her patient refrain. “I’m not ashamed of my background. I’m very proud of my father and the work he’s done. But I don’t want anyone to be expecting me to be him.” Little did she know the unwitting part her father had played in her snagging her first decent role.

  There was no chance of anyone’s expecting her to be like Jon Voight for her next movie, Mojave Moon. Publicity for Hackers over, in October 1995 she headed out to the desert in Palmdale, California, where she was soon sensuously licking an ice-cold beer bottle in a roadside diner in a blatant attempt to lure middle-aged Danny Aiello into giving her a ride. The comedy thriller perfectly showcased her sexual presence; critic Rod Dreher described her as “so sinuously sexy she makes contemporaries Liv Tyler and Drew Barrymore look like church ladies.”

  Throughout the shoot, she was nursing a secret sadness: Her grandmother Barbara Voight was in the final stages of bone cancer, and on December 3, just days after filming wrapped, the eighty-five-year-old matriarch passed away in Palm Beach, Florida. During her illness, Barbara, an indomitable crackerjack of a woman whose personality reminded friends of Angelina’s, had displayed her customary cheery disregard for age and infirmity, her son Jon deliberately choosing film roles that would give him the chance to take her to parts of th
e world she had never seen. It was for this filial purpose that he took the part of agent Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible, which starred Tom Cruise. His mother had always wanted to see Prague, where the blockbuster was filmed. “She loved it,” Voight recalls, describing how he pushed his mother around the castle district in her wheelchair. “In the last year of her life we had that wonderful experience.” A fighter to the end and filled with a life force, his mother soon began asking: “Where are we going next?”

  As it happened, two big screen projects presented themselves. In Rosewood Voight was offered the role of a white storekeeper who saves black neighbors during a vicious race attack, and in Anaconda he was due to travel to the Amazon to be eaten by a giant snake. His mother had no hesitation. “I’ve never been to the Amazon,” she said. She passed away before she could make that trip, but not before her illness had encouraged her youngest son, Chip, to give up his addiction to gambling and go back to songwriting.

  It was Jon who took on the responsibility of speaking for the family at her funeral. He wrote a lot of notes the day before—he is always careful to prepare his speeches—but after a restless night was struggling to find the right tone with which to speak about his beloved mother. In the morning, when he told Angie about the trouble he was having, he remembers that she spoke to him like a director to an actor. “You’ll do great, Dad. Just speak from your heart; you’ve got it all.” Her encouragement helped him capture his mother’s irrepressible spirit in his tribute. “There’s something about Angie that knows how to handle things,” he observes.

  For a girl intrigued by funerals, even Angie was taken aback by her grandmother’s bizarre final requests. At the open-casket visitation before the funeral, Marcheline was one of the first mourners to go forward and pay her final respects to her mother-in-law. When she returned to the pew, she was ashen-faced. “Angie, I want you to be really prepared when you go up there,” she told her. Angie asked what was wrong with her grandmother. Marche would not explain, saying, “You will have to see for yourself.” When Angie went to say goodbye, the matriarch of the Voight family was laid out according to her last wishes: dressed in a red bikini with a set of golf clubs by her side. She died as she lived—one of life’s great enjoyers who could raise a smile, or a rictus grin, even in the face of death.

  From being one of the congregation, Angie was once again just a face in the crowd when she watched her boyfriend enjoy his moment of triumph a few weeks later. She flew to Glasgow, Scotland, in February 1996 to join Jonny and the rest of the cast at the premiere of Trainspotting. Described as “Jonny Lee Miller’s girlfriend,” she was such an unknown at the after-party that she was not even mentioned in media reports of the list of attending celebrities.

  This was her boyfriend’s chance to bask in the limelight as critics heaped praise on a film that, despite the gruesome scenes of drug abuse and violence, was described as “a true original movie which everyone should see.” Danny Boyle’s film went on to win an Oscar nomination as well as British and European awards. The scene in which Jonny’s character, Sick Boy, meditated on the cultural significance of Sean Connery was singled out as matching any sequence dreamed up by cult hero Quentin Tarantino. This was Scotland’s answer to Pulp Fiction.

  Six weeks later, on March 28, 1996, Jonny and Angie were married in an intimate, almost apologetically small civil ceremony in Los Angeles. Only her mother and Jonny’s best friend, Jude Law, were witnesses. Absent were her brother and her father, who had previously met Jonny on the set of Hackers but was still filming Mission: Impossible. Also missing was Jonny’s family—parents Alan and Anne and his journalist sister, Joanna. They had called him in Los Angeles in some agitation when they had read about their future daughter-in-law’s very public discussion of her lesbian lover as well as her drug issues. They wanted to know what their son was getting himself into. Little did he know.

  “SICK BOY” WEDS FORMER ADDICT was the dismissive headline in the London Daily Mirror, Angie confessing: “I have done just about every drug possible, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD and, my favorite, heroin. Although I have been through a lot of dark days, Jonny has helped me see the light.”

  Though it wasn’t her first walk on the conservative side, it seemed an impetuously conventional decision to marry at all. After all, Angie was still seeing Jenny, still attracted to other women and exploring her sexuality. In marriage she was, once again, the sidekick and not the star. As a child, she had lived in the shadow of the favored son, James, who was always seen as the one most likely to succeed. At school and as she took her first steps on Hollywood’s greasy ladder, she had parried questions about her famous father, constantly measuring herself against his luminous and intriguing life’s work. Now she had hitched her wagon to a man whose career seemed about to take off. Trainspotting was his breakout movie, a chance for stardom that his colleagues, notably Ewan McGregor, seized with both hands.

  Enough about them, Angie’s fragile ego protested, what about me? It was only days after she had said “I do” that she was having second and third thoughts. As a family friend notes: “She was wild, impetuous, and adventurous. At that time in her life she didn’t see marriage as lasting forever; she saw it as an adventure.” In other ways, marriage was a sanctuary, a haven of independence from her mother. With no Bill Day on the scene, Marcheline’s total attention was on her daughter. They spoke every day on the phone, her mother learning all Angie’s secrets. It was as claustrophobic as it was affirming. Her husband, though he didn’t know it, was a buffer of sorts, a lightning rod and a useful way to get out of things Marcheline wanted but Angie didn’t. Soon, though, it was clear to Angie that what she wanted to get out of was the marriage.

  On what was effectively their honeymoon—a European junket in May to promote Hackers—she realized that all the media questions concerned her father and her husband. No one seemed interested in her. It became so irritating that she said on Spanish TV that she was not even related to Jon Voight. “It was weird to immediately be married and then you kind of lose your identity,” she told The New York Times with a wide-eyed wonder that was as naïve as it was instructive. “You’re suddenly somebody’s wife and you are like: ‘Oh, I’m half a couple now. I’ve lost me.’ ”

  A morning TV show where the happy couple were showered with rice and given a toaster as a wedding present was a turning point. “I need to get myself back,” she thought. Whoever that was—she herself admitted that she spent so much time living the lives of her movie characters that she didn’t have “much of a personal life” of her own.

  What was intriguing was that in a matter of weeks, her private and very intimate civil ceremony was the most talked-about wedding of the year. She told journalists that she had had a large cross tattooed on her stomach the day before the wedding as a tribute to her beloved. It covered a little dragon with a blue tongue that she had had done in Amsterdam during a riotous trip that involved games on a water bed. “No longer appropriate,” she explained.

  She revealed, too, that their union hadn’t been a big white wedding but “a small black wedding.” As intimate as it was, she made sure the world knew all about it, telling the media that the groom wore black leather, while she wore black rubber trousers and a white shirt with his name written on the back in blood carefully extracted from her body with a clean surgical needle. “It’s your husband; you’re about to marry him. You can sacrifice a little to make it really special,” she explained, her own love of ritual overlaying the existing marriage rites. Not so much the blushing bride as the bloody bride, especially as the groom had a long name. Fourteen letters, to be precise. A lot of blood, but more ink spilled all over the celebrity magazines as the media became increasingly intrigued by this bizarre and highly photogenic actress. Sexy and dark; it was an explosive media combination.

  While Angie ruminated on what she had gotten herself into, it was Jonny’s mother, Anne, who inadvertently put a spoke in their romantic wheel. She worked in the production department at the B
BC in London and had been contacted by her friend Johanna Ray, a casting agent and the ex-wife of tough-guy actor Aldo Ray, about the latest movie she was casting, Playing God. The surreal tale of drugs, gangsters, and a good doctor gone bad was the breakout movie for X-Files star David Duchovny. The actor had such an influence over the $24 million production that he even chose the director, former circus impresario Andy Wilson, because he liked his work on the British cop series Cracker.

  Even before the filming of Playing God, scheduled for August 1996, began, the production was a mess. There were almighty arguments about the script, originally by Mark Haskell Smith but rewritten by Larry Gross, and deemed by Andy Wilson to be “unfilmable.” Not only was the script unfinished, but the editorial team was having hell’s own job finding a leading lady. After talking with Anne Miller, Johanna Ray watched Hackers and liked what she saw of Angelina Jolie. When she discussed her name with the Playing God producers, however, they were against even calling her in for an audition.

  They originally wanted the gangster’s moll, Claire, to be a big name and a blonde, penciling in Charlize Theron, Cameron Diaz, and Species star Natasha Henstridge for the part. By contrast, Andy Wilson, directing his first Hollywood feature, saw the bloody thriller as a “weird, slightly surreal” homage to maverick director Nicolas Roeg, who made the iconic movies Performance, Walkabout, and Don’t Look Now. He felt the lover of the ruthless crook played by Timothy Hutton should be dark-haired, with an enigmatic European quality. Dutch actress Famke Janssen, star of GoldenEye; Jennifer Tilly, from Bound; and actors from Twin Peaks all auditioned, but no one was deemed suitable. As Andy Wilson explained, “Casting is 90 percent of the filmmaking. It is being an alchemist, working out if the actors fit together. A director is like a sorcerer. Anyone can make a film. It’s all in the prep; that’s where you exhaust yourself.”