Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (27 page)

Marche put a brave face on her disappointment, telling friends she’d had the time of her life. She would later describe it as a “wild and magical” evening in which she partied until late. While Mick Jagger had fallen out of favor, he was in a perverse way responsible for saving her life. Days later she fell ill, at first thinking she had come down with pneumonia as a result of her brief flirtation with a rock-and-roll night out. After a series of tests over the next few weeks, her greatest fear was confirmed—she had cancer. The curse of the Bertrand family had struck again, this time taking the form of ovarian cancer. Thankfully it was discovered in the early stages, and under the care of the internationally recognized cancer surgeon Dr. Beth Karlan at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Hills, she went into remission. Marche felt that if she hadn’t fallen ill right after the Stones concert, her cancer would have been discovered too late. “I never imagined they would play an important part in saving my life,” she noted later.

During this very stressful period, Jon Voight was a constant visitor, spending hours at Cedars-Sinai as Marche recovered from the operation. Her younger sister, Debbie, had her bags packed, ready to visit and renew a relationship that had hit the rocks during James’s college graduation in 1995. As Debbie was about to begin the drive from home, Marcheline said that she wasn’t yet ready to meet her. She would never see her sister again.

As she gradually recovered, Marcheline asked her ex-husband if she could move in with him. As he only had a small two-bedroom rented apartment, he suggested that she move back into their first-ever apartment on Roxbury Drive. When he gave it the once-over, he could see that the landlord had neglected the one-bedroom apartment, so Voight spent around $30,000 on general maintenance, new carpets, furniture, and drapes. Ever the perfectionist, Marcheline complained that the curtains were half an inch too short. While his concern and generosity toward Marcheline earned Jon some brownie points with Angie, he had still racked up a large emotional debt. As a girlfriend who knew Angie well at this time remarked: “She didn’t really want him around. She wanted to punish him for the way she believed he had treated his wife and children.”

Angie articulated her own deep-seated fears about the family curse
artistically, writing her first script, called
Skin
, about a girl (a thinly disguised Angie) with a terminally ill mother and a family history of cancer who discovers that she has cancer in one breast but decides to have both breasts removed. “It was very deep, very hard-core,” said someone who read the script.

Ironically, while Marcheline had put Mick Jagger into the deep freeze, Angie was feeling much warmer toward him. Jagger, not known for his largesse, had sent Angie a pair of $5,000 diamond earrings that he bought for her in New York. In May 1999, before her mother’s cancer was diagnosed, she was thinking of joining him in Brazil during the
No Security
tour. Her friends, not privy to this two-year samba of enticement and rejection, were astonished and alarmed. That same month he had fathered a child by his mistress, Brazilian model and TV host Luciana Gimenez—and yet Angie was going to Rio de Janeiro to meet with the singer. “I told her that she was out of her fucking mind to have anything to do with him,” recalls a close friend. “She didn’t take a blind bit of notice. It was all part of her great adventure.”

That month another suitor joined the queue. In late May 1999 Angie began filming
Gone in Sixty Seconds,
the Jerry Bruckheimer remake of the 1974 cult classic by H. B. Halicki in which ninety-seven cars were wrecked in ninety-five minutes. Actor Nic Cage earned $20 million as the former car thief about to pull off the ultimate heist, Angie considerably less as his singer-songwriter lover. It was an amusing juxtaposition: Angie drove around Hollywood in a battered pickup truck and didn’t think she could sing, whereas Cage was a classic car nut, in 1997 paying a world-record price at auction for a Lamborghini. While her financial rewards were not as considerable as those of her costar, her standing in this fickle trade was high enough that she was offered top billing along with Cage.

In an industry as byzantine and hierarchical as a medieval court, this was a signal honor. Perversely, she turned it down, choosing to be named alongside the other actors, who included Robert Duvall and Giovanni Ribisi. She made it clear that she enjoyed being treated as one of the boys, preferring the testosterone-fueled atmosphere to the estrogen energy of
Girl, Interrupted.
“I wanted to be around a lot of men,” she explained. “I’ve been around women in a mental institution for way too long.”

Certainly men wanted to be around her.

During the filming of
Gone in Sixty Seconds,
Nic Cage was constantly calling her apartment. She was amused rather than seduced by the preposterous spending of Nic, a Beverly Hills High School alumnus who lived in a faux castle on the edge of Los Angeles. One day she took Cage, then married to actress Patricia Arquette, on a trip to a discount store, Pick’n Save on Hollywood and Vine, to remind him how the other half still lived. It didn’t have the desired effect; he subsequently ended up buying a handful of tropical islands with his movie earnings.

It was not only Nic Cage who was circling her; Tim Hutton, Billy Bob Thornton, Jonny Lee Miller, and a lovelorn Mick Jagger still had her cell phone number on speed dial. In time they would be joined by Australian actor Russell Crowe, whom she met during the promotion for
The Bone Collector.
She kept her stable of men in different compartments, never letting on that each was an interchangeable part of her posse.

Despite the pack of A-listers beating a path to her door, she wasn’t particularly interested in the usual Hollywood gossip about who was dating whom. There were just two exceptions to her rule of studied indifference: Johnny Depp, whom she had adored since
Edward Scissorhands,
and golden boy Brad Pitt. For some reason Pitt intrigued her, and she closely quizzed a friend who had worked with him, eager to know what he was like. As a youngster, he had a reputation, rightly or wrongly, as a “stoner,” observed actor Ric Young and others. He was a guy with a quirky sense of humor who only seemed to date A-list celebrities, which merely served to pique her interest. “She never took any notice of the Hollywood scene,” recalls her friend, “so her interest in Brad was truly unusual.”

Regardless of her interest, Angie had enough suitors to worry about without encouraging more. While her girlfriends were concerned that she would get hurt by one of these notorious players, Angie had the insouciant confidence of a woman above the fray, not caring or feeling enough to get her heart broken. The psychology seemed clear: As a youngster she had witnessed her mother’s torment at her father’s hand, and now she was making it one woman’s mission to tame a team of top-class heartbreakers. Tame and break them she did, teasing them, tempting them, and then tossing them aside. She was also following the lead of her mother, who, after the split from Jon Voight, had been courted by the likes of Al Pacino, Burt Reynolds, and Warren Beatty. Both she and Angie clearly forgot the advice
of actor Jacqueline Bisset, Marche’s friend and Angie’s godmother. As Jacqueline was fond of saying when one of her girlfriends dated a thespian: “Good God! Not him. He’s an
actor
! Never go out with an actor.”

Instead Angie quietly dated a rock star, keeping Mick Jagger on a string like the others, always wanting more. During this romantic dance, Angie’s father was the unwitting wallflower, oblivious to what was really going on. One day he was shopping with Angie in Saks Fifth Avenue in New York when Charlie Watts spotted her and came over to say hi. After he had gone, Jon Voight whispered to Angie: “Dark side, dark side; these people are a bad influence.” It was all Angie could do not to laugh. “Dad, if anybody is a bad influence on the Rolling Stones, I am.”

Her father had no idea just how bad. One night Angie took her Jumpin’ Jack Flash to a bondage club in New York, a venue complete with dungeons and rooms where guests played doctor, among other, darker games. During their visit, most likely to the Vault, a now-defunct club with a celebrity clientele, she told friends that they were all whipped. “That was Angie; wild and great fun to be with,” said her friend. “She might have said that she had slept with only four men, but she is a total sexual deviant.” Certainly Angie knew her way around the sadomasochist scene, later telling
Time
magazine’s Jeffrey Ressner about the night she dragged an agent from the Creative Artists Agency on a tour of Manhattan’s bondage clubs. “S and M focuses you on survival,” she explained. “It’s a weird cleansing of self.”

The keen blade of a knife and the sharp bite of a skillfully wielded whip; it was all of a piece for a girl attempting to connect with herself, to dull the primal pain of abandonment. At the same time, the elaborate routines of sadomasochism appealed to her sense of ritual, her love of drama. As Dr. Franziska De George observes: “The ritual is a carefully orchestrated experience designed to invoke specific feelings, which can be stopped at any time. This is like being in complete control of your life. You design an experience, and during that time you know exactly what is coming and what to do. It’s like predicting the future and handling it perfectly
.”

Angie was always raising the bar for violence, testing the limits of herself and others. One night, when she was having trouble with a movie executive who was a fellow guest at the Raffles L’Ermitage Hotel, where she and a friend were staying so that they could smoke heroin, she ratcheted up the level of aggression after the initial flirtation developed into him
stalking her. During one exchange, the executive jammed his foot against the door to stop her from closing it. Instantly she whipped out a tiny penknife and stabbed at his foot. That ended the confrontation—her clear enjoyment of this violent dance giving the impression that it was part of a perverse game she both loved and knew how to play.

As far as her circle of intimates was concerned, Mick Jagger was a glamorous if aged sideshow to the main event, her “official” boyfriend, Tim Hutton. Even so, they were worried that Hutton, fifteen years older than Angie and a notorious heartbreaker, would leave her as so much romantic roadkill should she actually succumb and fall for him. They need not have troubled themselves. While Hutton was clearly besotted with her, Angie’s heart, or more accurately her desires, lay elsewhere.

She made it clear that it was the name “Billy Bob Thornton” that she wanted tattooed way below her bikini line. As
Gone in Sixty Seconds
wrapped in early September, she began jonesing about it to tattoo artist Friday Jones, who had tattooed Angie a couple of years before. Having seen the mess Angie had made of her body by her self-inflicted, prison-style tattoos, Friday was not keen, thinking Angie’s decision would come back to haunt her. “I thought it was a crackpot idea,” recalls Friday. She resisted Angie’s entreaties for weeks but was finally worn down with her insistence. “You just don’t say no to Angie.”

On October 6, 1999, they arranged to meet at the Hollywood Hills home of a mutual friend, a married amateur photographer who regularly joined Angie to indulge in their craving to smoke heroin. While Friday reluctantly got to work, her friend took a series of black-and-white and color Polaroid pictures of Angie. As the needle cut into her skin, she lay on a couch languidly smoking a Marlboro cigarette, naked except for two black crosses made from electrical tape covering her nipples. Sensual rather than sexy, the pictures convey a sense of moody eroticism, reminiscent of Marianne Faithfull, the quintessential rock chick (and onetime love of Mick Jagger), in her decadent prime.

Initially Friday wanted to use a light, fluid script that would match the contours of Angie’s body and could easily be removed or disguised. Angie was insistent on choosing the typescript Helvetica, a rigid and upright font, which was a very obvious, literally unavoidable statement. “I used a Japanese technique involving light gray ink in case she ever wanted to grow her
pubic hair over the tattoo to disguise his name,” recalls Friday, who was also struck by how deeply Angie had scarred her inner thighs. “In my experience, cutters are often girls with absent fathers. They take out the emotional pain on themselves; it gives them a sense of being.” Friday’s experience suggested that cutting could evolve into an addiction to tattoos, clearly the direction toward which Angie was moving.

Angie saw tattoos as celebrating and marking important events in her life. As she says: “Usually all my tattoos came at a good time. A tattoo is something permanent, when you’ve made a self-discovery or something you’ve come to a conclusion about.” So the fact that she chose to mark her most intimate sexual area with Billy Bob’s name speaks volumes about her feelings for him.

In fact, Angie found herself in a romantic dilemma much sooner than Friday could ever have anticipated. The next day Tim Hutton called Angie from London and asked her to marry him. It was not the first time he had asked, but this particular invitation caught her unaware. For once Angie was at a loss for words—or a suitable response. She called her photographer friend for urgent advice. “What should I do? What should I do?” Angie wailed.

Her friend’s reply was matter-of-fact. “Buy yourself a pair of crotchless panties and keep the lights down low.”

It seems that Hutton’s offer was mere bravado, the last hurrah of a lover who knew he was on the way out. “She settled the score for all the women who had been hurt by him,” notes a girlfriend. Within short order he was romancing children’s book illustrator Aurore Giscard d’Estaing, niece of the former president of France, whom he married three months later, on January 21, 2000. Stories circulating in October that Angie broke down in tears over the breakup in front of director Penny Marshall while reading for her upcoming movie
Riding in Cars with Boys
were well wide of the mark.

Tears were alien terrain for Angie; the girl who disliked being hugged or touched only ever cried for the camera. Ironically, a couple of weeks later the dry-eyed girl who was turned on by testing limits and pushing buttons finally met her match: herself. The woman who could never go too far finally went too far—and fell off the emotional edge.