Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  As she began to explore the “dark places” in Gia’s—and hence her own—psyche, the first thing she did was watch Gia’s infamous 20/20 interview, in which she affected an English accent and dreamily explained that she no longer took drugs. Initially Angie “hated” her new screen persona, but her feelings turned to warmth, even love, as she read Gia’s private journals and jottings and talked to those who knew her. One scene encapsulated her explosively vulnerable character: Gia stalking out of a modeling shoot dressed in full Japanese regalia and climbing on the back of a Harley motorbike, ridden by stuntman and actor Chuck Zito, to zoom off into Manhattan in search of drugs.

  Even though Zito appeared only briefly in the movie, he, like many others, was captivated by Angie. After filming finished, Zito, founder and onetime president of the New York chapter of Hells Angels, promised to take her for a ride on the back of his Harley. He was as good as his word, the besotted ex-con making a special trip to California to take the actress, twenty-odd years his junior, for a long, slow, comfortable ride on what is known as the “love ride.” In her naïveté she had thought she was going for a ride on the back of his Harley; he thought he was traveling three thousand miles for rather more. An acrimonious argument ensued, and Zito returned to New York.

  Angie’s impulsive acceptance of Zito’s invitation was very much in Gia’s mercurial character. However outrageous her behavior, everyone ended up liking her—even a photographer she pulled a knife on. Like Angie, Gia was the “other girl”; with her dark hair, volcanic temper, and stormy eyes, she was very different from the “clean” girls, the fresh-scrubbed, all-American blondes who were then the norm in the modeling industry.

  In the end Angie admitted that Gia was the kind of girl she would have liked to date and go to bed with. Describing Gia as a “perfect match” for her, Angie noted: “We represent the same role in life . . . outspoken, a bit tough, funny and out there, crazy, very opinionated and also soft and vulnerable.” At one point in the movie, Wilhelmina, reviewing Gia’s modeling pictures, says: “Tough, vulnerable, old, young, decadent, innocent, male, female.” She could have been speaking of Angie.

  Before the $8 million shoot finished in August 1997, Angie agreed to Cristofer’s request to appear in his next movie, Original Sin, based on Cornell Woolrich’s novel Waltz into Darkness. She also, reluctantly, indulged her mother. During filming she had turned down the chance to perform as a nightclub stripper in the latest Rolling Stones video, “Anybody Seen My Baby?” It was only endless pleading by Marcheline, who utterly idolized the band and knew all their lyrics by heart, that brought about an unwilling change of heart. “Please, darling; please do it for me,” Marche begged.

  When Angie arrived at the video shoot in Manhattan later in August, she was in a foul mood. As part of her stripper “look” she had been asked to wear colored contact lenses, but when she put them in everything was a blur. As the show had to go on, she stumbled into the fake concert hall, looking for the stage. “I can’t fucking see,” she announced to anyone in earshot. “I can’t fucking dance and I can’t fucking sing. What the fuck am I doing here?” Watching this vision in a gold corset and stockings swearing like a trucker were the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger, just five years younger than her father, was instantly smitten.

  As the cameras rolled, Angie danced onstage, all the while ogled by Jagger and the rest of the Stones. Tiring of the charade, Angie pulled off her blonde wig to reveal her bald head—shaved during the filming of Gia—and stalked out of the club into the Manhattan traffic, promptly followed by Mick Jagger. Afterward Angie observed that, for a girl with two left feet, she had been inspired by the spirit of Gia to strut her stuff onstage. “I just went for it,” she said. “I think Gia would have loved it.”

  Mick Jagger clearly did. He might not have found his baby in the video, but he knew that he wanted to find out more about the sexy woman standing half naked before him. Much more. It was the beginning of a two-year quest that was as decadent and depraved as any event in the Stones’ storied sexual lexicon—a magnificent if frustrating obsession as Jagger, at the time fifty-four and still married to Jerry Hall, then pregnant with the fourth of their children, pursued this erotic vision around the world.

  Central to this unfolding romantic drama was Angie’s mother, who now lived vicariously through her daughter. Angie was everything her quiet, reserved, passive earth mother could never be: wild, adventurous, sexy, a rock-and-roll chick. Enter into this mix Mick Jagger. Marche had adored him from afar since she was a teenager. As unhealthy as it was, it was perhaps understandable why she encouraged Angie’s relationship with the rock-and-roll roué. For the next two years, unbeknownst to her daughter, she played cupid, encouraging Mick Jagger and advising him on how best to pursue his suit with Angie, eager for them to marry one day. She had controlled so much of Angie’s life—her clothes, her boyfriends, her career—that choosing a husband for her was the logical next step. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but from this time onward Marcheline frequently counseled that it would be for the best if Angie and her husband, Jonny Lee Miller, formally divorced.

  Certainly it was not long before Marcheline was planning her daughter’s wedding in France. She decided that Jon Voight was not going to be invited and that afterward she would live in an annex of her daughter’s home with Jagger. “Marche loved Mick for Angie,” recalls Lauren Taines. “She felt that he could teach her about fame and how to handle it. She wanted them to marry.”

  Marche was blind to any contradictions in pushing her daughter, then using heroin, into the arms of a married man of, to put it kindly, dubious repute, after complaining bitterly for years about her own philandering ex-husband. When Lauren posed this thorny question about her double standards, Marche was quiet for a long moment. “He’s my idol,” she said simply.

  Marche’s fantasy actually seemed within reach. Certainly Jagger’s phone messages indicated that he was willing to give up everything for the object of his desire. He courted Angie assiduously, reduced to a “sniveling wretch” in the face of her seductive disregard. For once it was a case of the biter bit, as the man whose romantic Rolodex included Brigitte Bardot, Carla Bruni, Anita Pallenberg, Carly Simon, and Bianca Jagger left Angie endless telephone messages, pleading, beseeching, begging her to speak to him and then meet him. “Angelina, why aren’t you calling me? Where are you? Please phone me,” Mick, one of the world’s great lotharios, implored.

  Unfortunately, he left the messages on the wrong phone. During the video shoot he had asked Angie for her number. Such was her indifference that she gave him her mother’s home number. When Marcheline first heard this voice on her answering machine, she was amazed that the man she worshipped was so infatuated with her daughter. She saved his messages and played them to friends. “It was literally astonishing,” recalls Lauren Taines. “Here was Mick Jagger virtually sobbing down the phone.”

  When Mick finally managed to speak to Angie, he invited her to join him for the weekend in Palm Beach, Florida, while the band took a break from the Bridges to Babylon tour. Though she spent time with him, she refused to have sex, claiming that she was having her period. “She was messing with his head,” recalls Lauren Taines.

  Jagger’s timing was all wrong. Not only was Angie coming out of the most emotionally draining movie of her fledgling career, but Mrs. Miller was juggling a ménage of her own. Angie recalled: “I was feeling emptier than ever. I was scared of going out like Gia.”

  She returned to New York to resume her studies at NYU—and to leach the ghost of Gia out of her psyche. It was her Greta Garbo moment. “I’ve chosen to be quite alone,” she told writer James Endrst. “I knew it was going to take me a while to say goodbye to Gia, to put myself back together. I kind of died and I’m still feeling a bit of that pain Gia did.” She even considered giving up acting, feeling that she had been eaten alive by Gia Carangi.

  “Her commitment to a role does saturate her being,” says Gia director Michael Cristofer, now
a close friend. “I think she knows when she takes on a role it’s going to permeate her self and how she lives and who she is.”

  Angie was plunged into one of her bleakest cycles of despair and gloom as she tried to say goodbye to the new love of her life. In perhaps the most melodramatic of her flirtations with suicide, she decided to hire a hit man to do the deed, paying him in a bizarre installment plan so that no one would notice the money going out of her bank accounts or feel guilty for causing her death. Angie says she was introduced to her killer by the friend of a friend. (While her gun-toting drug dealer Frank Meyer, who was in regular contact, would probably have been the go-to guy to arrange contact with the underworld, she never mentioned her scheme to him.)

  In fact, her assassin turned out to be a character straight out of the “tart with the heart of gold” playbook. The would-be killer apparently told her to think about her plan for a month and then, if nothing changed in her life, to come back to him. “It’s so weird and so complicated and . . . so like a fucking movie,” she told Rolling Stone magazine. Quite.

  Salvation of sorts came when she learned that she had been nominated for a Golden Globe Award for George Wallace. “Suddenly it seemed like people understood me. I thought my life was completely meaningless and that I would never be able to communicate anything and that there was nobody who understood . . . and then I realized I wasn’t alone,” Angie says of that time. “Somehow life changed.”

  Although her mother believed she was “overdramatizing,” her frequent thoughts of suicide were entirely consistent with her “undifferentiated feeling state,” her inability to connect with herself. As Dr. Franziska De George observes: “The ultimate dissociation is suicide. What better way to get rid of your feelings completely than by killing yourself? It’s not so much a wish to die as it is a wish not to endure feeling tortured anymore, to feel so desperately lost.”

  Angie finally gave vent to the furies within when she tried to learn to play the drums. In early September, during one of her frequent visits to Hollywood, she contacted one of the world’s best drummers, Joey Covington, formerly of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, and asked him to give her lessons. They ended up practicing at the Doheny Drive home of legendary composer Henry Mancini, of “Moon River” fame and a record seventy-two Grammy nominations, where his son Chris had a jamming studio. At first Angie was timid, then Covington said to her, “Okay, give me the names of the ten people you hate.” Among the names were those of her father and her agent, Geyer Kosinski. Covington wrote the names on gaffer tape and attached them to different drums. Then Angie really let rip, the physical effort cathartic and exhausting. During one session she pulled a switchblade from her back pocket, explaining that she was a cutter. “I have low self-confidence and suicidal tendencies,” she said with a directness that was as refreshing as it was unnerving. Several months later, Covington attempted suicide but was discovered by his partner. He subsequently discussed this episode with Angie, who wanted to know every nuance of the experience. It was clear that she had given considerable thought to the subject. Covington told her: “It was not fun, not fun at all. My advice is, don’t do it.”

  After the six sessions, which continued off and on during the fall of 1997, Chris Mancini photographed her holding the drumsticks high above her head in exhilaration. “I sincerely believe the drums helped save her life,” says Joey Covington. “They gave her a focus and a sense of achievement.”

  It is worth pointing out that for all the talk of suicide and self-harm, Angie was a thoughtful and nurturing young woman. During her drum sessions she befriended guitarist Bobby Ciarcia, who had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and she listened sympathetically as he talked about his constrained life. She even went—without any prompting from her parents—to a charity ball in aid of the illness.

  Back in New York, a $1,500 electronic drum kit, on which she could practice using headphones without disturbing the neighbors, had pride of place—along with her knife and sword collection—in her new apartment on the fourteenth floor of the fabled Ansonia building on the Upper West Side. Angie blended right in with the sophistication and decadence of the baroque edifice. Over the course of its colorful history, live seals had cavorted in the fountain in the entrance lobby; chickens, cows, and a live bear had been housed on the roof; and a swingers’ club, called Plato’s Retreat, had only recently been evicted from its basement enclave.

  There was an ulterior motive behind her drum lessons. She was quietly seeing Tim Hutton, who also had an apartment in New York, and wanted to join jam sessions with his garage band. “She quickly learned the basics of drumming so she could impress Tim and his friends,” observed a girlfriend. She was not quite so passionate about his other hobby: renovating and restoring derelict apartments in New York and then selling them for a handsome profit.

  Unlike Tim Hutton, who worked on only a film or two a year, Angie was constantly on the go, commuting between New York and Los Angeles. In between drumming lessons, she went parachuting over the California desert (presumably to match her husband in his daredevil antics) and bike riding. She simply didn’t have the time for her husband, Mick Jagger—or suicide.

  Still the Rolling Stones singer persisted. Knowing that Angie was nominally married but dating, he cooked up a plan to snare her. Jagger’s film production company, Jagged Films, approached Jonny Lee Miller about a film they were casting, Enigma, about World War II code breakers. While Miller was an excellent actor, eminently suited for the period British drama, Jagger had an ulterior motive. He assumed that as Miller and Angie were still good friends even though they were leading separate lives, she would visit him on the set. That would give him the opportunity to spend more time with her. Or so he thought.

  In the meantime, Miller called Angie and innocently told her that he was being considered for a part in a Jagged Films production. Angie listened but never breathed a word to her husband about why she suspected he was being courted. When confronted, Jagger confirmed her suspicions. Angie was furious at his underhanded behavior, screaming that she never wanted to see or speak to him again. As convoluted casting-couch maneuvers go, it was in a class of its own.

  Jagger paid a high emotional price, falling into a deep depression as a result of Angie’s silence. He was now the recipient of the Bertrand freeze. “He was completely heartbroken by her,” notes Lauren Taines. The freeze lasted for months, Angie given further pause about any future dalliance when Jerry Hall gave birth to her fourth child with Mick, Gabriel, in December 1997. Angie’s heart thawed only after Stones drummer Charlie Watts called her and pleaded with her to call Jagger, as he was in utter despair. Reluctantly, she agreed to resume their relationship, and the love-struck rocker invited her to join him on tour in Brazil in April 1998.

  The freeze in her relations with Jagger coincided with a further thaw between Angie and her husband. In October 1997, with rumors of a formal separation swirling, Angie stated the obvious—that she loved her husband but was no good at being married. “I wasn’t even a good friend because I was just absent and . . . I’d go for drives and disappear or go film something and be in hotels forever and not do anything, not have friends, not visit, not hang out. I couldn’t calm down and just live life.”

  For a few brief weeks before Christmas and over New Year’s they tried to revive their marriage. They spent time in New York before Miller headed to the Czech Republic to make Plunkett & Macleane, a period drama about two highwaymen, with his friend from Trainspotting Robert Carlyle, then reunited in Scotland for the wedding of Carlyle and makeup artist Anastasia Shirley at the remote but utterly luxurious Skibo Castle on December 28. The candlelit midnight union was an irresistibly romantic affair, what with the skirl of pipes, the swirl of kilts, and a seemingly endless supply of the finest malt. It was the final hurrah for Jonny and Angie, who decided to go their separate ways. Days later, Angie explained to writer Chris Hutchins: “Right now I’m not living as a married woman. Now we’re both busy growing up
.”

  Significantly, she chose her father, rather than her mother, brother, or husband, to accompany her to the Fifty-fifth Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hills Hilton in January 1998. Although she felt as if she were crashing a party where she didn’t belong—she even considered covering up her growing array of tattoos—this was very much her home turf. Angie had walked by the five-star hotel every day on her way to and from school.

  When she won Best Supporting Actress for her role in George Wallace, that was a cue to party till dawn, her father wondering whether she really should be drinking tequila shots at five in the morning. She was joined in her late-night drinking by Leonardo DiCaprio, who had been nominated for Best Actor for his role in the unsinkable movie, Titanic. Their date was arranged by those unlikely Hollywood cupids, their agents, Geyer Kosinski and DiCaprio’s reps Rick and Julie Yorn. Even though they left the party together, the Titanic star did not float Angie’s boat; the actress told friends afterward that even though they shared a shower together in his hotel suite there was little sexual rapport. The most memorable event was Angie mislaying the pair of diamond earrings she had borrowed for the evening. Thankfully they were insured, Angie leaving her mother to fill in the insurance claim form.

  When Angie finally got home and listened to her answering machine, among the many messages of congratulations there was one from her now-estranged husband and another from her lover, Timothy Hutton. Her response was jaded; she told friends that if she hadn’t won, neither would have bothered to call. Her mother’s answering machine was also working overtime. Photographer Robert Kim, who took her first head shots and advised Angie to take up modeling full-time, called Marche and said: “It’s a good job your daughter didn’t listen to us and never went to Paris!”