Bob Scott/Fotos International/ Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times/Contour/ Getty Images/ AP
Angelina Jolie would seem to be a biographer’s nightmare. What else could there possibly be to say about the actress who has, in the tabloid press, played man-eating Veronica to Jennifer Aniston’s jilted Betty for the better part of a decade? To make matters even more daunting for an author looking to tell all, Jolie, apparently, already has.
Over the years, she’s regaled reporters with tales of her drug use, love of knives, sexual exploits with men and women—and even the story of how, feeling suicidal, she hired a hit man who subsequently backed out, counselling her to wait a month or two and see if she still required his services.
But Andrew Morton, the former Fleet Street tabloid reporter, is not easily deterred. He’s a big game hunter: both Diana, Princess of Wales, and Monica Lewinsky chose him to pour their hearts out to, and he’s also penned unauthorized biographies of Tom Cruise and Madonna. There are skeletons in every celebrity closet, and finding them is “just a question of digging away,” he explained in a phone interview, adding, “Hollywood is a pretty small village, when it comes down to it, and one person leads to another.”
He did manage to unearth some new tidbits about the Oscar winner/humanitarian, though most predate her six-year relationship with Brad Pitt and therefore qualify, in the here-and-now world of celebrity gossip, as antique novelties rather than breaking news. To wit, when Jolie was 14, her boyfriend moved in—at the invitation of her mother, who graciously vacated the master bedroom so the couple would have a larger bed.
Later, when Jolie was in her early 20s, Mick Jagger had the hots for her but the budding actress was ambivalent, leaving the fiftysomething rocker to wail plaintively into her answering machine and call her mother—who idolized Jagger and promoted the relationship—to inquire as to her whereabouts.
Jolie was also lukewarm about Leonardo DiCaprio; they showered together one evening, but he did not, Morton reports, “float her boat.” She was more keen on Timothy Hutton (with whom she had an intense affair while she was married to actor Jonny Lee Miller) and Ethan Hawke (who, when she reportedly bedded him, was married to Uma Thurman).
Monogamy is not, evidently, Angelina Jolie’s thing. A month after her second marriage, to Billy Bob Thornton, Jolie enlisted him to pimp for her—though he was unsuccessful, according to Morton. “She was into chicks and it seems that was his job, to bring her the girls,” an unnamed source told him.
Reviewers have made much of Morton’s reliance on unnamed sources—rather disingenuously, since every journalist knows that only a sworn enemy with a hankering to be sued would be willing to have his or her name attached to a really juicy detail. And in Angelina, there are several. Jolie, who has remarked that she finds scars “beautiful,” apparently has deeply scarred inner thighs—she was a long-time cutter. Morton also reveals that she tattooed Thornton’s name below her bikini line, and helpfully provides the font: Helvetica. The inclusion of photos from that tattoo session, of a topless Jolie with strategically placed duct tape, lends credence to these specifics. But there’s little shock value to this kind of minutiae, as Jolie has never sold herself as anything but a hypersexual free spirit.
It’s no surprise that in Morton’s book she comes off as a distaff version of a swordsman, seducing other women’s men—Ralph Fiennes, among others—only to toss them aside after she’s had her fun.
Pages: 1 2
