Brangelina (20 page)

It was not, ostensibly, an opportune time to lose her publicist, but perhaps Jolie knew what she was doing. Publicly outing her affair with Billy Bob Thornton had succeeded in pushing talk of incest out of the media. The whispers were silenced, and her brother’s name was barely mentioned in conjunction with hers after mid-April 2000. James Haven, the person closest to Jolie for more than a year, the man she had recently described as her “best friend” and “strongest support” had apparently been banished.

* * * *

On June 1, 2000,
New York Post
columnist Liz Smith, known for her vast network of Hollywood friends and sources, reported a rumor that she had recently heard about Jolie and Thornton’s wedding: they were actually “just good friends.” The marriage was “basically Billy Bob’s way to keep an eye on Angelina because he feared she might fall over the edge somehow, and she agreed she needed looking after.”

Indeed she did. Although there appeared to be little basis for the rumor, a story had already been circulating that Jolie had indeed fallen “over the edge” before her marriage to Thornton. Something happened between May 1, the day Thornton told Laura Dern he wasn’t serious about Jolie, and May 5, the day Jolie and Thornton got married. The London
Daily Mail
was the first to break the news, citing sources from the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA in Los Angeles. The sources claimed that Jolie had checked herself in at the beginning of May. For seventy-two hours, she had been put on a psychiatric hold, the maximum somebody could be held under California law without being formally committed. Hospital insiders told the paper, “She said she was afraid she would hurt herself. She was very angry and thought she might kill herself if she wasn’t treated.” Jolie’s spokesperson confirmed to the British paper that she had checked into the UCLA psychiatric hospital, but not because of Billy Bob Thornton. Rather, Jolie was treated for “exhaustion.”

But a year later, Jolie broke her silence about the incident in an interview with
Rolling Stone
. She claimed that the psychiatric stay was indeed related to her relationship with Thornton. “What happened is we didn’t know if we were going to be able to be together,” she told the magazine. “I remember him driving somewhere and not knowing if he was OK … We had wanted to get married, and then for all these different reasons we thought we couldn’t. We both were just … are just, it’s a beautiful kind of love, but it’s also a little insane, and I for some reason thought something had happened to him, and I lost the ability to … I just went a little insane … All I can say is, it was not about other people. Neither one of us didn’t love the other. All I can say is, it’s just that life just explodes sometimes … Maybe part of me needed to shut down for a few days to process everything before; I don’t know.”

She claimed that just before the incident she had been with Thornton in Nashville. When she returned to Los Angeles and was picked up by her mother at the airport, she started weeping. “And I just couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “I don’t know what it was.” She started stuttering, and soon she was unable to speak. A doctor was called and she was taken to the hospital. “Basically I thought he was gone,” she said. “So they took it as I was going through the actual trauma of having lost, like a woman who lost her husband. I couldn’t really speak.”

The coincidence of being committed to a mental hospital only a month after she won an Oscar for portraying Lisa Rowe was not lost on Jolie, nor on her fellow patients. “Some of them were aware of me, some of them had seen
Girl, Interrupted
,” she said. “In some weird way it’s nice to know that everybody’s insane. I mean, to a lot of young girls, to all of us, there are these pictures in magazines of people that have their shit together where their lives are perfect. I think that somehow it was refreshing for these people that were struggling with the different things I’ve struggled with in my life to realize that it’s not about … Certain things don’t make it better; there isn’t some other side of life. People aren’t any different.”

When she was released from the hospital on May 4, Jolie told the magazine, her mother tracked down Thornton against her daughter’s wishes. “I think he had been looking for me,” Jolie said. Twenty-four hours later, the two were married. It was a romantic and touching account. But was it just a little bit too Hollywood?

* * * *

Ever since I had started to follow Jolie’s biographical trail, there was one constant. Virtually everybody I talked to in L.A.—including ardent defenders of the actress, reporters, publicists, actors, and industry employees—was skeptical of her relationship with Billy Bob Thornton from start to finish. “It was just a little too coincidental that everything started leaking just as the brother rumors were running rampant and just when she needed a diversion,” said one reporter. “Nobody’s ever been able to find a single person—a friend, a relative, nobody—who saw any hint of this great love before the 2000 Oscar ceremony. Not a single hint before the controversy began, and then suddenly a week or two later they’re madly in love. Give me a break. Go out and find me anybody who believed that was real. Fantasyland.”

After posing as an actor for more than a year and seeing the unbelievable lengths to which celebrities go to maintain their image or to hide a secret, I had no trouble believing the cynical implications of the people who insisted the Thornton relationship was a giant smokescreen. But there was one nagging question that kept me from buying the story. What was in it for Thornton? It is a question that I still cannot answer with satisfaction to this day.

One thing was clear. Jolie had, without a doubt, been committed to a psychiatric hospital in the spring of 2000. I wanted to know why. One of my journalistic heroes was a woman named Nellie Bly who, in the late nineteenth century, was a reporter for the
New York World
. She feigned insanity to expose the conditions of the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on New York City’s Blackwell Island, now known as Roosevelt Island. Bly practiced mimicking mental illness and got herself diagnosed by a respected psychiatrist as “undoubtedly insane,” which allowed her to be committed to the asylum for more than a week, experiencing the brutal conditions firsthand. Her account of her stay in the asylum, which she turned into the book
Ten Days in a Madhouse
, caused a sensation and led to significant and lasting reforms to the American mental-health system.

Inspired by Bly’s example, I was determined to gain some insight into Jolie’s experience by infiltrating the Resnick Neurospsychiatric Hospital, where she had been committed in May 2000. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find or what I could possibly discover nine years after the fact, but I did have a way in. A year earlier, while I was posing undercover as a paparazzo for a documentary, Britney Spears had suffered her much-publicized breakdown and had been committed to the same hospital by her father, very much against her will. Unfortunately, I was in New York that day, so I missed most of the drama. But upon my return, I cultivated a number of relatively low-level contacts at the hospital, including security personnel and orderlies, some of whom still worked there when I returned a little more than a year later. It was one of these hospital employees who facilitated my deception.

“You have to be careful,” he told me when I informed him of my plan. “Most of the people who come through here have had a referral from another hospital. If you just show up, they won’t take you unless you have the right symptoms.” He explained to me that I would have to claim to be suicidal or in danger of hurting others in order to be admitted. Armed with this nugget of information and a little background about the hospital, I was now ready to venture in.

When I arrived at the hospital the next morning, the place turned out be a whole confusing complex of buildings, but I finally located the right one. A security guard was stationed at the entrance and asked me where I was going. I told him that I was feeling suicidal, and he immediately directed me to the emergency ward, pointing down the hall. Instead of heading directly to emergency, I decided to look around and found a cafeteria where I decided to get a bite to eat. There were various food stations replete with all kinds of healthy foods—salads, juices, vegetarian selections. I opted for a chicken salad and mango juice. This was in marked contrast to Nellie Bly’s description of the food she was served at the asylum: “Gruel broth, spoiled beef, bread that was little more than dried dough, and dirty water that was undrinkable.”

I sat and ate at an outdoor terrace that was populated mostly by doctors and employees. Next to me was a man about thirty-five years old named Reeve, who said he was following up as an outpatient. I asked him what he was in for. “If it wasn’t for this place I’d be dead,” he said, explaining that he had gone through a messy divorce that left him almost catatonic with depression. “I had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide except here.” He told me he was still depressed but that “it’s under control now.” I told him I’d heard of celebrities checking in here. Had he ever seen any?

“I know Britney Spears was here last year,” he said. “My doctor told me all about it. It was a zoo. There were camera crews everywhere. She apparently turned the hospital upside down because everyone was trying to sneak in to get photos of her here. Supposedly, a photo of her in the unit would have fetched a million dollars. I heard they even stuck her in a padded room at one point.”

After lunch, I met another patient in the men’s room, a guy named Mark. I told him I’d been depressed since Kurt Cobain died, and I’d never gotten over it. It was the one area of mental illness where I had some familiarity, having authored a book about the rocker’s death, with particular emphasis on the sixty-eight copycat suicides that took place in the aftermath. These were mostly depressed teenagers, and I was in my forties, but I played my best pitch. Lately I’d been thinking about finally ending it all, I told him. Was it worth checking in? Could they help me?

“Damn right. You’d be crazy not to. I shit you not,” he said emphatically. “This place ain’t like
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. Everybody thinks it’s going to be like that.” I asked him whether he’d ever seen
Girl, Interrupted
, but he’d never heard of it. It turned out, however, that he is a fan of Angelina Jolie, having seen
Wanted
. “She kicks ass,” he said. “They’ll get you straight here, but don’t, like, expect overnight results. It takes time,” he added.

He told me that he did the three-day emergency program a while ago and now is strictly an outpatient, though he never told me what brought him there in the first place. “The group therapy sessions are incredible. They help you bring out everything that has been hidden inside. It’s like a big self-disclosing session, but with other people. It’s hard to tell personal stuff at first, but you get used to it. You walk out feeling like you’re not nuts and that you’re not alone.”

I finally headed over to the emergency ward, where there were some desks with receptionists behind them. There was a bit of a line, so I sat in the waiting area. After a couple of minutes, a doctor came up to me, a resident I assumed, and asked me, “Are you OK?” I told him I was having some problems, that I wasn’t sure I could “handle things.” He told me I was in the right place and said I should fill out the forms when my turn came and they’d “take care” of me. When it was my turn, a woman who I didn’t think was a nurse handed me some papers to fill out. When I asked her about the request for a medical ID number, she asked me how I was going to pay. I told her I was Canadian, and I didn’t think I was covered by insurance. When I asked if I could pay in cash, she said that without insurance, it would be very expensive— “thousands of dollars”—if I was admitted. She gave me a number to call, saying that it would be much cheaper to visit as an outpatient. I finally left, vowing to call my travel-insurance company for information about my coverage. I discovered later that unless I was brought to the hospital in an ambulance under special circumstances, I was probably not covered.

I had been planning a possible documentary to accompany my book, and I realized that I would need footage of the hospital as well as scenes of me inside the ward gathering information. This was no easy task, given that I had seen signs all over the hospital forbidding cameras on the premises. There was also a State of California privacy law providing stiff penalties for anyone who published photos or video footage showing the face of a hospital patient. Nevertheless, I needed some visuals. That meant I would have to sneak in not only myself but a cameraman on my next visit. I had a friend who was an accomplished video operator and still-photographer. I had used him before on a number of similar projects. He is an actor who once had a significant role in a made-for- TV movie playing a famous comedian, but he was now struggling, and I knew he could use the work. Fortuitously, he had just recently begun development of a reality-show pilot where the participants were given mini video cameras—the size of a credit card—to record their experiences. He agreed to accompany me on my next visit after I assured him it was safe.

We headed back five days later. At first, he seemed to regard our undercover day at the hospital as an adventure. But it wasn’t long after I snuck us in that he began getting nervous. He was posing as my brother who had decided to bring me in because I was acting erratic, and he feared that I would harm myself. Once inside, he seemed to clue in that this was a place where people can be held against their will for weeks or months at a time.

Again, we were directed to the emergency room, but I was determined to sneak onto the inpatient floors to see what goes on there and to get some footage for my film. We were both nervous, especially since some of the security guards were armed. A little while later, we managed to get into a part of the hospital where, I imagine, I would be sent if I were admitted for a seventy-two-hour observation. Here the patients mostly seemed to be in their own zone, preferring peace and quiet. Each of the patients wore their own clothes, so it didn’t feel like a typical hospital ward. In one lounge, we sat next to an outpatient named Roy. His story was the most gripping I had encountered since I arrived.