Brangelina (12 page)

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Gia
was scheduled for release in January 1998, and her parents were both confident the role was going to catapult her into the upper echelons of the business. But Jolie wasn’t sure if that’s what she wanted.

“I don’t think I was ever more depressed in my life,” she would recall. “I was at a place in my life where I had everything I thought you should have to make you happy, and I felt emptier than ever. I thought after
Gia
that I had given everything I had to offer yet I didn’t find myself growing. I didn’t have the strength to deal with Hollywood. I was scared of being so public with my life and I didn’t want to go out like Gia. I just needed to get away and find myself.”

She had almost quit the business several times before. This time she finally made good on her threat, at least temporarily. Deciding that she might be happier on the other side of the camera, she decided to move east and enroll at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, majoring in filmmaking. But the move away from friends and family only appeared to make things worse.

“I didn’t have close friends anymore and the city just seemed cold and sad and strange, and the subway rides—everything that was kind of romantic about New York—just got very cold for me,” she recalled years later about this period. “I didn’t know if I wanted to live because I just didn’t know what I was living for.”

She described being in a New York hotel room where she was going to use either a knife or sleeping pills to kill herself; she couldn’t decide which was the best method. She even wrote a note for the housekeeper asking her to call the police, so that the poor employee wouldn’t have to come across her dead body. She then spent the day walking around the city. She was about to buy a kimono, in which she would commit her final act, when she suddenly realized how crazy the whole idea was. “I didn’t know if I could pull the final thing across my wrists,” she recalled. In addition, she calculated that she didn’t have enough sleeping pills to ensure she would die. She asked her mother to mail her some more, but then realized that Bertrand would inevitably feel responsible for her part in her daughter’s demise.

It was at this point that she came up with a bizarre scheme. The girl who had been diagnosed as “unrestrained, inclined toward antisocial psychopathy” only six years earlier decided she would hire a hit man to kill her so that her death would not appear self-inflicted. “With suicide comes the guilt of all the people around you thinking that they could have done something,” she explained. “With somebody being murdered, nobody takes on some kind of guilty responsibility.”

She even met with a man, “a friend of a friend,” who she had been told could arrange the hit. She calculated that it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to hire the assassin. She planned to put money aside bit by bit, so no one would be able to trace the murder back to her after her body was discovered. “It’s so weird and so complicated and so completely insane,” she later said about the plan. “And so like a fucking movie.” The potential killer, she recalled, “was a decent enough person, and he asked if I could think about it and call him again in two months. [But, in the meantime], [s]omething changed in my life, and I figured I’d stick it out.”

Among other things, Jenny Shimizu flew to New York, sensing that there was something wrong. The two had been having regular phone sex, and it was during one of these long-distance sessions that Shimizu sensed a cry for help. Her presence helped Jolie think straight.

Although this dark period had driven her to thoughts of suicide, a couple of years later Jolie was publicly describing it as an important chapter in her life. “That was a really bad time, because I didn’t think I had that much more to offer,” she told
Rolling Stone
in 1999. “I didn’t think I could balance my life and my mind and my work. I was also very scared of getting public after doing [
Gia
] and seeing how undernourished her private life was, how malnourished she was, though her exterior was very glamorous. So I’d be working and doing interviews, and then going home by myself and not knowing if I’d ever be in a relationship or be really good in my marriage or be a good mother one day or if I’d ever be … I don’t know, complete as a woman. It was a really sad time. But I think it was really good that I did that now, that I spent all those months on my own, having a very regular life, going to school at NYU, studying the different levels of how to get into this business, riding the subway back and forth and just being on my own.”

She had decided that instead of ending it all, she would “live life to the fullest.” While at one point in her life that would have included heavy drug use, she now insisted that was behind her. She had been awakened by Gia Carangi’s cautionary tale. “Gia has enough similarities to me that I figured this would either be a purge of all my demons, or it was gonna really mess with me,” she said. “Luckily I’ve found something that replaces a high, and that is my work.” The statement is telling: Angelina Jolie was still addicted, just to something that wasn’t a drug.

By the time she accepted her Golden Globe for
George Wallace
in January 1998, work was not hard to come by. Suddenly she was red hot. Scripts started to pour in and her unofficial manager and gatekeeper, Marcheline Bertrand, helped decide which ones to accept. Jolie probably would have been better off consulting her father, who had always been very selective about the scripts he chose for himself. Voight’s career was also suddenly hot, with his recent Golden Globe-nominated performance in the John Grisham thriller
The Rainmaker
thrusting him into the media spotlight.

Her name change aside, interviewers never seemed to let Jolie out from under her father’s shadow. But increasingly it was Voight who was asked about his daughter as he roamed the press circuit. “She’s something. She’s the real thing: an artist,” he told one reporter proudly when asked about Jolie’s rising career. “I look at her as a peer. Her work is full of detail, full of decisions, full of vision. I have heard her say in interviews that she didn’t know me when I was at my height. But she did know me then. It’s just that even then I was struggling,” he said. “The struggle is always with us.”

Another profile describes Voight’s entire face lighting up when asked about his daughter. “Young men come up to me now and say, ‘Oh, Mr. Voight, your work is wonderful.’ I’m thinking, ‘Baloney!’ It’s all a smoke screen. They just want to get to Angie.” Voight reveals that he and his daughter have a pact. “We are definitely going to do a film together before the end of this millennium,” he promised. “I would love to do a comedy with her,” he said elsewhere. “She has a wonderful sense of fun, and it would be great for the two of us to play these really dopey characters, partially because we’re both taken so seriously right now.”

Asked whether that was also a goal of hers, Jolie was a little more circumspect, although open to the possibility. “I would have never wanted to work with him if it seemed I was getting the job because of him,” she explained. “I had wanted to stay separate just to be able to prove to myself that I was worth something and able to do my job. As you grow up, your relationship with your parents changes. He’s gotten to know me through the roles I’ve done, and I’m probably stronger now, and more confident with my work.”

Even if she appeared to resent being asked about her famous father in every interview, it was clear that they were still close and that they respected each other’s craft. In one interview, she even described herself as a “daddy’s girl.” “I talk to him, and he talks to me,” she said. “We love each other. But, to be fair, I also love my mother. And, most of all, I’m my own person … Acting is really about life, so if we talk about careers, it isn’t just shop talk. When dad was doing [the 1999 TV movie
Noah’s Ark
], we often discussed how he approached the character, but it was really about our own attitudes toward religion. I was taught acting all the time; sometimes, my mom would say things like, ‘Look at me, and let me see what you are in your eyes.’ That’s real actor stuff.”

* * * *

Although her marriage to Jonny Lee Miller was over, reporters were fascinated by the most significant and lasting legacy of the marriage, her tattoos. In the years since, she has acquired at least a dozen, several of which she has had covered over by other tattoos or removed entirely. She has described her attraction to tattoos as “dark and romantic and tribal” and often gets them to commemorate personal events in her life, such as the births of her children and the death of her mother.

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.