Brangelina (9 page)

Although TV is usually considered a step backward when pursuing a movie career, Marcheline Bertrand was intrigued by a script for a TNT Network television miniseries about the segregationist Alabama governor, George Wallace. Her interest was sparked because the movie was to be directed by the legendary and brilliant John Frankenheimer, who had made such iconic films as
The Birdman of Alcatraz
and
The Manchurian Candidate
. Jon Voight, too, was a huge fan of Frankenheimer’s work and immediately signaled his approval. Soon, Jolie was cast as Wallace’s second wife, Cornelia. She also accepted another better-than-average TV project, a CBS miniseries called
True Women
, which saw her playing a Texas pioneer alongside Annabeth Gish and Dana Delany.

By the time the
George Wallace
miniseries aired, in August, 1997, the failure of
Foxfire
had taken its toll on Jolie’s psyche. “There was a time when I was really going to give up acting—right after
Foxfire
,” she confides. “I was trying to find characters with a certain strength and things going on, but I was always disappointed.
Wallace
was the first thing I did where I felt their ideas were better than mine.”

Finally, Jolie’s talents were being showcased in worthy projects. Millions of viewers tuned in to watch her bring life to Cornelia Wallace, who stood by her husband after he was rendered paraplegic by an assassin’s bullet during the 1972 presidential campaign but was ruthlessly discarded just a few years later. Unlike in her other vehicles, here Jolie was now surrounded by talent, fine writing, and a brilliant director. It wasn’t as easy for her to stand out, especially beside the towering performance of Gary Sinise as the racist governor.

She nevertheless was noticed. The
New York Daily News
was the first newspaper to comment on her work in the miniseries: “Hardly recognizable as the punk computer geek in
Hackers
, Jolie (Jon Voight’s daughter) presents a performance that should have casting directors clamoring to hire her for bigger and even more challenging roles.” The
Boston Globe
called her performance “uneven,” but in general the reviews were glowing. Her performance as Cornelia Wallace earned her 1998 Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for best supporting actress, the latter chosen by the influential Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Interestingly, her father was also nominated for a Golden Globe that year for his role in John Grisham’s thriller,
The Rainmaker
.

She lost out on the Emmy, but at the Golden Globe ceremony, up against her own
George Wallace
co-star Mare Winningham, who played Wallace’s first wife, it was Jolie’s name that was called out when the envelope was opened. With tears in her eyes, she went up to claim her first major award:

Oh, God, I’d like to thank everybody involved with
George Wallace
. I was so privileged to be part of that film. Gary, you’re just brilliant and so brave and so amazing. And John Frankenheimer, I wish you were here. I know you are feared by many. At first I was terrified of you, but I just can’t say enough about you, and Clarence, and everybody involved, and TNT. Geyer Kosinski. Thank you. Emily, Hi. Thank you the Hollywood Foreign Press. And most of all, my family. Mom stop crying, stop screaming [laughter], it’s OK. Jamie, my brother, my best friend, I couldn’t do anything without you. I love you so much. Dad, where are you? [the camera showed Jon Voight in the audience] Hi. I love you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

With that, and to tremendous applause, she raised the trophy high in the air. It would not be her last.

Word gets around quickly in Hollywood. It is entirely possible that HBO producers knew about Jolie’s affair with Jenny Shimizu in 1997 when they targeted her to play the title role in their television movie
Gia
, the tragic story of Gia Carangi, the lesbian supermodel. Carangi had died of AIDS in 1986 at the age of twenty-six, less than seven years after landing her first magazine cover.

Jolie, of course, had herself been a model for a time, so the choice of her to play Gia seemed apt. But the parallels between Carangi and Jolie didn’t end with modeling and sexuality: both were heavily involved with drugs. Carangi’s life and career were destroyed by her heroin habit after she became infected with AIDS from sharing needles with other addicts. The timeline of Jolie’s addiction is murky, but the offer to play Gia came during her first marriage, to Jonny Lee Miller. She has credited him with helping her “see the light” about drugs, so it is likely that her own struggles with heroin were fresh in her mind at the time.

Later, Jolie would talk candidly of her own substance abuse. “I have done just about every drug possible,” she revealed. “Cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, and, my favorite, heroin.” She even confided, on another occasion, that heroin “meant a lot” to her.

Perhaps the role hit a little too close to home for her, since she at first rejected the offer out of hand. After reading the script’s horrifying scenes of drug abuse and self-destructive behavior, written by
Bright Lights, Big City
author Jay McInerney, she decided she didn’t want to do the part. “It was such a heavy story,” she explained. “And it deals with so many issues. If done wrong, it could have been very bad and not said the right things; it could have been very exploitive. The script scared me—to confront all those things and do all those things, I didn’t know if I could pull it off. I didn’t know if I had the energy. I didn’t know if I wanted to face all those things and go to all those dark places … I didn’t think I could balance my life and my mind and my work. It happened that I became exposed at the same time that I was playing a role about somebody being exposed. I felt beaten down. I didn’t feel like a good person. I felt pretty bad.”

But the writer-director Michael Cristofer—author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play
The Shadow Box
—wouldn’t take no for an answer. There was only one actress he believed could pull off the role convincingly. After agreeing to meet with Cristofer, Jolie finally relented. “We went over the script for an afternoon, and he convinced me,” she said. “I think everybody involved with this film was coming from a place that was very deep inside them. She was so human to us. We all loved aspects of her, and we all identified with certain things. It became very personal.”

It wasn’t long, however, before she started having second thoughts. To prepare for the role, Jolie read everything she could get her hands on about the model’s tragic descent, including a diary Carangi kept while she was dying of AIDS. What Jolie read terrified her.

Gia Carangi is often called the first supermodel. Born in Philadelphia in 1960 to an Irish-Italian family, Gia’s father Joe ran a restaurant and a chain of sandwich bars. His wife Kathleen stayed home and looked after the kids. It was to all appearances an average middle-class family. Behind closed doors, however, the marriage was extremely volatile and often violent. In 1971, when Gia was only eleven years old, Kathleen walked out on her husband and kids.

Her fractured childhood undoubtedly took its toll. Searching for a place to belong, Gia fell in with a group of young people who called themselves the “Bowie Kids,” for their obsession with rock singer David Bowie and his over-the-top style. But it was not just the glam- rock image that appealed to Gia. Bowie became the first rock star to publicly acknowledge his bisexuality at roughly the same time that she was discovering her own sexual nature.

“Gia was the purest lesbian I ever met,” a friend of hers from that period told Carangi’s biographer, Stephen Fried. “It was the clearest thing about her. She was sending girls flowers when she was thirteen, and they’d fall for her whether they were gay or not.” Her sensuous androgynous style eventually captured the attention of a local photographer, Maurice Tannenbaum, who sent photographs of her to the New York agency, Wilhelmina Models. Despite her height of five feet seven inches, which was shorter than the requirement, Wilhelmina offered Gia a contract. At seventeen, Gia moved to New York, where her exotic look catapulted her almost overnight into the top echelons of modeling. By the age of nineteen, she had appeared on the covers of British and French
Vogue
, and U.S.
Vogue,
as well as twice on
Cosmopolitan
.

She was also a regular at Studio 54, where cocaine and hedonism reigned. In an interview with the ABC newsmagazine
20/20
, Gia admitted her rise had happened awfully fast. “I started working with well-known people in the industry, very quickly,” she said. “I didn’t build into a model. I just sort of became one.”

She was soon notorious for hitting on other models, whether or not they were gay, as well as makeup girls, and even celebrities like Liza Minelli. “She was like a cat constantly on the prowl for other female cats,” one of her conquests later recalled. “She was always that way,” said Jolie after reading her diaries. “When she was about thirteen, her mother found letters she had written to girls in school.” She was also known to hook up with men on occasion.

Carangi later blamed her drug abuse on the 1980 death of her agent, Wilhelmina Cooper, who had become like a mother to her. Carangi became increasingly known for her tempestuous photo shoots, where she had frequent tantrums and even occasionally passed out in front of the camera. It was clear that there was something terribly wrong. Her career disintegrated as track marks marred her arms and her reputation haunted her. She spent some time in rehab to kick her habit, only to be diagnosed with AIDS at a time when the disease was a death sentence.

Modeling agent Bill Weinberg remembers Carangi as “[a] real mess … [a] trashy little street kid … If she didn’t feel like doing a booking, she didn’t show up.” A close look at her
Vogue
cover shoot in November 1980 reveals a number of track marks on her arms, which were still visible even after airbrushing. She was a regular at the heroin dens of the Lower East Side, where her addiction escalated to the point of catastrophe.

With her career on the rocks and nobody wanting to hire her, Carangi entered rehab and stayed clean for months. In rehab, she confided in therapy that she had occasionally prostituted herself for drug money and had once been raped by a dealer. Just when it looked like she had turned a corner, her close friend, fashion photographer Chris von Wangenheim, died in a car accident, and she began using heavily again.

By 1982, her career was virtually over. Nobody would hire her. In her last cover shoot for
Cosmopolitan
, Francesco Scavullo had her hide her arms behind her back to hide the track marks. And then she was diagnosed with AIDS, the first female celebrity to be struck by the disease. By then, she had given up drugs, but it was too late. Still, in her final years she came to peace, which makes her tale all the more tragic. “Even the terrible pains that have burned and scarred my soul [were] worth it for having been allowed to walk where I’ve walked,” Carangi wrote shortly before she died in 1986.

At first, when Jolie began researching for the role, she couldn’t make up her mind about the character she was going to play. She recounts, “The first thing I saw of her was a
20/20
interview. I hated her because she was obviously really stoned and had this very affected speech and seemed very vacant. It was really hard to watch—just really sad. And then I saw footage of her talking and being herself—just this regular girl from Philly. And she’s really out there and funny and bold, and I fell in love with her. That completely split personality; that was a big clue to figuring out what was going on. There were lots of articles and a lot of people had different stories to tell me. And there was her journal, her words. I really read every little thing I could find to figure out who she was.

“I think that, deep down, she was a good person with a good heart and a great sense of humor—a person who wanted to be loved, wanted more excitement, wanted more out of life. She behaved in a crazy way sometimes and really shocked people, but I think she was really just trying to reach out and communicate and connect.

“Like every single one of us, she just needed desperately to be loved and understood and feel as if she had some purpose on this planet. She did lose herself, but when she found out she was dying of AIDS, she found herself again and she had time to write things down. That’s more remarkable and interesting to me than the fact that she was a supermodel.”

The movie was set to air in January 1998. It was evident from Jolie’s comments on the press tour that playing Gia had had a profound effect on her. “The first time I saw the [finished film], I cried. I felt that I too had died. Then I saw the poster for the film, and that bothered me. It’s my face and her name, but we’re one and the same. I was a bit broken up by all of it.”

She even hinted that she was looking at Carangi’s story as a cautionary tale, frequently discussing the similarities between Gia’s life and her own. “Playing her meant confronting a lot of things that I understand hurt me, so it was very difficult, but it was also this great kind of purging of all that was going on inside me,” she said.

For the first time, she also talked candidly about her own drug use. “I never was involved to the extent that she, of course, was, but I certainly know the trap of it and that world,” she told a group of critics. “I have this dangerous thing where I am brave, to the point where it is stupid. I will try something, and every drug could kill you. I have that fearlessness that could get me in a lot of trouble.”

“She found herself,” added Jolie. “She got back to her sense of humor, she forgave people, and she talked with the people she loved. She was seeing very clearly at the end of her life. There’s something so beautiful about that, that she went through it all and did find herself in her last moment.”

Jolie also frequently talked about the differences between the two. “I’m able to give all of myself, and I have an outlet for each side of me. Gia didn’t. I have a very loving family that would accept me even if I did nothing.”