Brangelina (10 page)

It’s true that her family was tremendously supportive and, at the time, still very close knit. But that didn’t mean that Jolie’s father approved of her sudden outspokenness. Voight was a Hollywood survivor, privy to the town’s secrets and skeletons. It was only natural that he choked on his coffee when he read the interview his daughter gave to
TV Guide
while promoting
Gia
. Discussing the parallels between herself and the model, Jolie casually let slip that she had fallen “in love” with her co-star on the movie
Foxfire
. She was still a relative unknown, so the revelation wouldn’t have the kind of impact it would for a major star, but it certainly wasn’t the kind of admission that helps an actor reach the top. Voight was not amused.

“We’ve talked about it before, because I’m really outspoken, and I think he’s worried about me,” Jolie told
Esquire
magazine about her father’s uneasiness. “Because I’ve talked about, you know, everything. And just being really outspoken about my marriage and, you know, being with women, and they will take it and turn it into different things. So he’s wanting me to kind of be quiet. A lot of people have wanted me to kind of be quiet. A lot of people wanted me to be quiet during
Gia
, to not say if I’d ever done any drugs, or had ever slept with a woman, which to me was being totally hypocritical. If I had, and if I could identify with the story that much more, and really saw a beautiful thing in another woman—so I thought it was nice to share what I had experienced, because I thought it was great—I didn’t see why it was so bad. And especially because that’s the movie. And because it’s, I don’t know, it’s honest.”

Her honesty was refreshing. But was it the best policy in Hollywood? Only time would tell.

The culture of self-preservation in Hollywood dictates discretion, something gays in the town understand very well. There is perhaps no better way to illustrate the situation of homosexuals in Hollywood than to relate a conversation I had in 2007 while I was doing research for my book,
Hollywood Undercover
. At the time, I was focusing on closeted male actors and hadn’t given a lot of thought to Angelina Jolie’s bisexuality, even though by then she was the highest-profile actor to have ever come out of the celluloid closet. In hindsight this conversation has given me insight into many of the twists and turns in her Hollywood journey.

While posing undercover as a gay actor, I was invited to attend the weekly Hollywood Hills poker game of a group of gay Hollywood insiders who called themselves the “Queers of the Round Table.” I was replacing a well-known former sitcom star—the only actor of the group— who couldn’t be there that week because of a work commitment.

The first thing I told them is that I didn’t believe that the actor I was replacing, a reputed womanizer, was really gay. “Queer as a three-dollar bill,” came the reply from Lenny, the host, who worked as a location scout for TV and movies. “He’s an actor. What do you expect?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” I asked.

“All actors are gay,” came the response. “Actually, that’s not true, although a lot of people think they are. In reality, it’s probably closer to seventy-five percent.”

I found the statistic hard to believe.

“Well, let me ask you this,” said Karl, a set designer. “What percentage of male hairdressers do you think are gay? And figure skaters, ballet dancers, interior decorators, flight attendants?”

“Don’t forget librarians,” Lenny added.

I thought about it and conceded that most of the men in those professions are probably gay, likely even more than seventy-five percent. But acting isn’t the same thing, I told them.

“Honey, you are naive,” said Christopher, a script editor. “Acting is one of those trades where it just helps to be flamboyant, not to mention sensitive. Gay men are just drawn to it. Tell you what, go to any drama school in this country and talk to the boys. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single straight male. And what’s more, it’s obvious right away. Just about every student is a swishing queen.”

“Here’s a good rule of thumb,” said Karl. “Take the résumé of just about any movie star and look where they started out. If they took drama in college, the odds are they’re queer. If they started in theater or did a stint on Broadway, especially musical theater: bingo, they’re gay. And I’m not talking seventy-five percent, I’m talking ninety-five percent.”

“Like who?” I asked somewhat skeptically, trying to think of a single movie star who seemed less than heterosexual.

This simple question released what felt like a verbal stampede, as all three of them started tossing out famous names, one after another, some of them A-list superstars. I’m not exaggerating if I say they went on for at least fifteen minutes.

Karl finally put a stop to it. “You know, this might go faster if we just listed the heterosexual stars.” Then they started tossing out those names, and indeed the list was noticeably shorter. “Sylvester Stallone, Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, Hugh Grant, Colin Farrell.” At the next name offered by Christopher, though, Lenny broke in.

“No, you can definitely cross him off the list. I know for a fact that he’s fucking [a well-known Hollywood producer].”

I suspected they were abusing my naiveté—or perhaps their list was merely wishful thinking—so I finally interrupted the litany. “First of all, half the people you mentioned are married.” This prompted shrieks of laughter from my new friends.

“He’s a babe in the woods,” said Karl.

The three of them then decided to give me a tutorial on the way things work for a gay actor in Hollywood. “Like we said,” Christopher recapped, “drama schools are almost all populated by gays, at least the men. That much is easy to prove because at that point in an actor’s career there’s no reason for him to hide it. In fact, at that stage, it’s almost an advantage to be gay because a straight guy is in the minority. And, by the way, that’s why the sexuality of most stars is common knowledge. At some time they were openly hanging out in gay bars or cruising online, and their ‘secret’ is known by a large segment of the gay community wherever [they attended drama school]. By the time they head back into the closet after hitting it big in Hollywood, it’s too late.”

He then asked me to list the male Hollywood stars who were out of the closet. I could list them on one hand, with fingers to spare.

“Now, how is it possible that thousands of drama students— the overwhelming majority, in fact—and most Broadway actors are demonstrably gay, yet virtually every movie star is a raging heterosexual? The answer is, it’s not.”

Then they started with a history lesson. I expected they would begin with the obvious—Rock Hudson—but instead they cited the example of James Dean, the ultimate male Hollywood sex symbol of the 1950s, who I didn’t even know was gay. “Not only was he gay,” explained Lenny, but his sexuality, which he supposedly didn’t even bother to hide, was causing shit-fits at the studio. They’d had plenty of experience handling gay actors before, but here they had this incredibly bankable star, worth millions, and he was cavorting around town with every fag you could think of, including another one of their biggest stars, Montgomery Clift. They were terrified the news would get out and his box-office potential would go down the crapper. So they pretty well forced him to start dating starlets, while their publicity department went to work portraying Dean as a great cocksman.”

“The stakes were huge,” he continued, “and there was enormous pressure from the studio for Dean to get married. Their preference was Natalie Wood, who was perfectly willing to act as Dean’s beard [a companion of the opposite sex specifically chosen to distract from one’s true sexual orientation], but both Wood and Dean were apparently reluctant to go along with the nuptials.”

Here I interjected. Did they really think America was so homophobic that people would stop going to his movies just because they thought he was gay?

“Well at that time, yes, definitely. But that wasn’t the real point with Dean,” Lenny replied. “The fact is that part of his huge box-office appeal was that American girls were so in love with him that they would go to his pictures over and over again. Ironically, gay men did the same thing, but that’s just an interesting side fact.”

Lenny then named a superstar actor of today and drew a parallel to Dean. “Look at [one of the top box-office stars in the world]. At the beginning of his career, he had a lot of quirky roles and was never really seen as a leading man, so he didn’t really bother trying to hide his gayness very much. But all of a sudden he starred in [a hugely popular film], and almost overnight he became a sex-symbol superstar. The studio surveys showed that fourteen-and fifteen-year-old girls were going to the movie over and over again, some as many as twenty or thirty times. And why? Because they liked to fantasize that they were his leading lady and that he was seducing them. If they knew he was gay in real life that was all threatened. So, the next thing you know, he’s dating supermodels and going to strip joints, while his publicist makes sure the news is plastered in every newspaper in the world. Funny, though, you never heard of him having a girlfriend during the first ten years of his career.”

Christopher explained that it is not necessarily homophobia per se that keeps actors closeted today, but rather this phenomenon of both men and women attending movies to fantasize about bedding the star—in short, economics. “Look what happened to Anne Heche after she came out as Ellen Degeneres’s girlfriend. She had already been signed to star opposite Harrison Ford as his love interest in
Six Days, Seven Nights
. When the film came out, it completely tanked. Not because it was terrible, but because men could no longer go to her movies and picture themselves boffing her. And not long after that, look what happened. Heche broke up with Ellen and, surprise, she’s straight again.”

Lenny interrupted him. “Well, it’s not entirely true that homophobia has nothing to do with it. Look at all the black fags who don’t dare come out because the American black community is so homophobic.” He names a black comedian with a penchant for transvestites. “He’s not really a sex symbol; he’s a comedian. So technically he could come out, but if he does, he can say goodbye to his black fan base forever. Kaput!”

At this stage, I pointed out that the star was married. I could understand why he got married; he needed a beard. But what’s in it for the woman? I asked.

“Ah, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” answered Lenny. “We spend a lot of time debating that very point, and nobody can agree on the answer. In some cases, we know for sure that the women do it for career reasons. They are basically promised that if they marry a particular superstar actor, they are guaranteed that their own acting career will take off and they will be offered juicy roles because their new husband has so much clout with the studios. That much makes sense. What we don’t know is how many of these women are actually lesbians.”

Lenny explained that while the overwhelming majority of male actors are gay, the same is not true for females. Hollywood is not like the women’s golf or tennis tour, he joked. “If seven to ten percent of women in regular society are dykes,” he said, “then that’s probably the percentage in Hollywood as well. Now we all know for sure who some of the famous dykes are.” He named a multiple Academy Award winner who was living openly with her long-time girlfriend (they have since split up), though she has never officially acknowledged her sexuality.

“And then there’s Rosie O’Donnell—a perfect example. When she started out, she was as far from a leading lady as you can get. She made absolutely no attempt to hide her sexuality. When she was starring in
Grease
on Broadway, she began a long-time relationship with one of her female co-stars. Then she’s hired to front a popular day-time talk show, watched by a lot of conservative Midwest housewives who wouldn’t be very keen on watching a dyke host. Suddenly, she starts talking about the crushes she has on various male actors. She constantly refers to one in particular as her “boyfriend.” Then, when her lesbian friends call her on this, she tells them she’s obviously joking, especially because the star in question is widely rumored to be gay. So the whole thing is an elaborate inside joke. Then within days of the show coming to an end, Rosie finally announces that she is a lesbian.”

Then there were the countless women who date or marry gay actors. “The most famous Hollywood beard today,” said Lenny, “is [a well- known, Oscar-nominated actress], who has been reported to be dating a number of different A-list actors over the years. Everybody in Hollywood knows she’s a dyke. You can be sure that if you see an item in the gossip columns reporting that she’s dating some actor, then that actor is a fag.” He shot off the names of three famous actors, each of whom has been reported to be a notorious womanizer. Sure enough, all three of them had “dated” the actress in question within the previous few years.

“But what’s in it for her?” I asked.

“That’s easy,” said Lenny. “Just as the gay rumors get dispelled whenever these actors are reported to be dating a beautiful woman—or more often when they are photographed with her in public—she gets to look like a breeder whenever it’s reported that she is dating this or that handsome actor. Meanwhile, she has been dating [another well- known Hollywood actress] for years with the public none the wiser. So, it’s basically a win-win situation for a lesbian actress to date or marry a gay actor. But then there’s another subject we can never agree on—bisexuality.”

“There’s no such thing!” yelled Karl.

“Oh, shut up,” Lenny replied. He explained that nobody really knew how many of these gay actors were simply dating and marrying beards, and how many of them were actually bisexual. This debate, he said, had been raging since the beginning of Hollywood.

He cites the example of Cary Grant, one of Hollywood’s greatest sex symbols. Grant, he says, was reportedly in love with the movie star Randolph Scott. “Literally everybody in Hollywood knew it. They would sit there in the Brown Derby till all hours, staring longingly into each other’s eyes and holding hands. They even shared a beach house together. Yet Grant was married five times. His wives had to have known about him and Scott, not to mention his lovers over the years. One book claimed that he even had an affair with Marlon Brando, another rumored bisexual. So why would anybody marry him in the first place? Were they lured by the promise of the fabulous glamorous Hollywood lifestyle and the money, or by the potential impact on their own acting careers? After all, three of his wives were struggling actresses.”