Brangelina (21 page)

He told me he had been in a state mental facility for years in the early nineties before being let out. Now, he was coming here regularly for treatment. He wasn’t shy to talk about his experiences. “I received electroshock in the state hospital,” he said. I thought they had stopped that practice years ago. I had a vague notion that electroshock was akin to bleeding with leeches, but he disabused me of that. “They still use it even today. It’s safer than it used to be, but it still messes up your head. You have to consent to it. They tell you it’s going to help you, but they ask you to consent while you’re in no state of mind to make decisions. I suffered memory loss and more mental damage than I had before I was admitted.

“Here, it’s completely different. They don’t do things like that. They are genuinely concerned about the patients’ well-being. I wish I could have been in a place like this back then. That place totally screwed me up. They just pump you full of meds; that’s how they keep the patients under control. Here it’s all voluntary; you’re allowed to refuse meds.”

When we finally got to the emergency ward, a receptionist again asked me to fill out a form. I told her I didn’t feel up to it because I was feeling dizzy. She asked an attendant to look after me. Two minutes later, I was lying on a hospital gurney in a small narrow area just off the ward.

While lying there for about forty-five minutes, I was able to observe and hear what was going on. Everything seemed rather calm for a so- called nuthouse. It was a much different environment from what I had expected. At one point, I overheard a doctor talking to another staff member about a patient who was supposed to be released that day. To my surprise, the doctor was going on about how he feels strongly that the patient didn’t need medication and that he was ready to re-enter society.

Meanwhile, I was dying to get off the gurney and explore some more. Finally, an attendant came in and asked how I felt. I told him I was feeling much better. My “brother” hadn’t been permitted to accompany me into the area, but he managed to come in briefly and check on me as I was leaving, permitting him to get some footage. Again, I told the receptionist that I had no insurance coverage. Again, I was given a number to call and then I prepared to leave.

Everywhere I had gone in the hospital, I had tried to work Angelina Jolie into the conversation. Less than half the people I talked to knew she was once a patient there, although almost everybody knew that Britney Spears had been, and several people told me that some TV actor I had never heard of and whose name I forgot to write down had been in recently and attracted some attention.

Shortly before my third planned visit to the hospital, I finally had a breakthrough of sorts, thanks to one of my original contacts. He knew I was digging for information about Jolie’s stay and said he had found me somebody who was willing to talk, an employee who once worked in something called the “psychiatric intensive care unit.” I envisioned our meeting as a cloak-and-dagger operation, since not long before, an employee of the same hospital had been indicted for accessing and selling celebrities’ medical records to a national media outlet for $4,900. I wasn’t sure what I would do if somebody offered to sell me the records from Jolie’s stay, but $4,900 seemed like a bargain to me.

At the appointed time and place, the employee met me in a designated outdoor area near a building called the Ronald Reagan Medical Center in the same complex. When we met, I made some small talk about how I had once acted as a stuntman in a TV movie about Ronald Reagan. Unimpressed, she proceeded to tell me she had a story for me about Jolie, whom, to my disappointment, she had never met.

“I’m watching
Larry King
with a staffer who had been on the unit when Angelina Jolie was a patient here,” she said. “Suddenly King asks her about her time here. So we listen to her telling the whole story about her boyfriend, Billy Bob Thornton, and how she couldn’t live without him, how she thought she’d lost him and all that, and my friend turns to me and says, “That was a fictional story. She’s a very good actress. None of that was true.” Or something along those lines. I remember she used the word fictional. I think I asked her what part wasn’t true but that’s all she would say. That was years ago.” She agreed to give me the name of the woman, who now worked in another hospital, also in California. I tried to get in touch with her, but she never returned my calls.

My so-called undercover operation was decidedly less successful than Nellie Bly’s. I now had a better idea about the reasons for Jolie’s stay—that is to say, which were not the reasons. But I was not a lot closer to finding out what they were. Short of obtaining those medical files, we will probably never know for sure.

However, if I were forced to make an educated guess about the most likely cause, based on my own investigation, I would point to the times she let her guard down during the interviews she did in the months following her wedding to Billy Bob Thornton. During this period, she publicly professed to be happier than she had ever been. In a July 2001 interview with
Rolling Stone
’s Chris Heath, for example, she appeared to confirm what insiders have repeatedly said about the period following the Oscar kiss, when incest-gate was raging out of control and everybody around Jolie was telling her she needed to distance herself from her brother to salvage her career: “ ‘It was a difficult time for my family,’ Jolie says. ‘I haven’t talked to Jamie for a few months. I think he … and I’m not sure … but somehow he made a decision to … to …’ She pauses and begins to cry, ‘not be around me so much, so we wouldn’t have to answer stupid questions.’”

Some of the elements about the official story just didn’t add up. If she was secretly dating Thornton for months and was madly in love, as she claimed, it is understandable that she may have kept the news from the world. But her own brother, who she’s always claimed was her rock, who she shared everything with since they were children, has acknowledged that he didn’t know about the affair or even the wedding until Jolie called him to tell him about it after the vows had been exchanged. “I asked her if she was happy,” he recalled, “and she said, ‘Yes, this is it.’”

Even more puzzling is Jolie’s claim that she went straight to Thornton’s hotel after the Oscar parties and talked with him in the garden. “He was in his pajamas, and he’d just put the kids to sleep,” she told
Rolling Stone
. But Liz Smith of the
New York Post
told me that she was at the same parties and that she saw Jolie still going strong at a post- Oscar event well after 2:00 a.m. that evening. Others present had similar recollections, and a number of media accounts said she partied into the early hours of the morning, clutching her Oscar all the while. Jolie had to be at the airport at 4:00 a.m. for an early morning flight to Mexico, where she was scheduled to resume filming
Dancing in the Dark
that day, so the timing in her oft-repeated account just doesn’t mesh with the chronology. Moreover, she also told
Rolling Stone
that “soon after that,” her brother helped her pack so she could go off and get married. Yet James Haven, of course, has always claimed that he had no idea about the wedding until after it took place.

It appears that the account of her months-long, secret, pre-Oscar relationship with Billy Bob Thornton—revealed only after incest rumors started to swirl—is filled with many unexplained holes. On the other hand, maybe Angelina Jolie had actually found her soul mate and true happiness, as she would profess repeatedly over the next year. It certainly looked that way, at least for awhile.

Before anybody had a chance to catch their breath, the new couple seemed to be everywhere, professing their undying love for each other. “They were like Romeo and Juliet with tattoos,” gushed one paper. Indeed, Americans couldn’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about the new Hollywood lovers.

“I’m so alive,” declared Jolie to NBC. “All my life I’ve been thinking, I’m really just half alive. I thought I was crazy. Half the time I thought I was crazy. Then I met him, and I thought, maybe I’m crazy. But he is also. I’m so proud to be his wife; it’s everything that I am. I’ve always been very, very much alone, and sort of felt like I was surviving that way and was self-contained and had my secret world in my head, and nobody ever really connected to me. I met him, and I loved life. I met him, and suddenly everything that I wondered about made sense, and everything that I wanted in life and hoped life could be … were the things that were possible.”

Declaring Thornton her “soul mate,” Jolie told another inquiring reporter, “He is the most amazing person I have ever met. He is really a free spirit, bold, really strong and passionate and wild and all those things. But he is also a very kind person, a really good friend … I never felt grounded before in my life … Suddenly, I’m more content, more alive, and my life has taken on meaning. He is my strength. Now, being centered and safe, I feel more alive than ever and really free.” Calling Thornton the “sexiest fucking creature who ever lived,” she declared, “I am madly in love with this man till the day I die.”

It seemed they just couldn’t stop talking about their sex life. After Thornton told an interviewer that he had to restrain himself from squeezing his new wife to death while she slept, adding the sex is almost “too much” for them, Jolie shared her reaction. “You know how you love someone so much you can almost kill them? I was nearly killed last night, and it was the nicest thing anyone ever did to me,” she said.

There is a “sixth sense” to their lovemaking, Thornton eagerly told another reporter. “The other day we were mentioning how I needed to get one of those heart monitors on me, because I’m convinced I’m going to have a heart attack mid-thrust.” Jolie responded, “He kissed me the other day, and I nearly fainted. I swear on my family’s lives.”

As if sensing the unspoken cynicism, they both took every opportunity to publicly guarantee that their love would last. “The fact of the matter is that I can’t prove to you that we’re going to stay together forever, but we are. If I see you again in five years’ time, you will be able to say, ‘How’s everything going? How’s your wife?’ and I will say, ‘Great.’ The difference is that, in the past, I was never in the right spot.”

When words alone didn’t placate the cynics, they stepped it up with almost constant mention of their fabulous sex lives, including the occasional live demonstration. At the 2000 MTV Music awards, for example, they were stopped by a reporter on the red carpet and asked, “Billy Bob and Angelina! What’s the most exciting thing you guys have ever done in a car?” Thornton, stopped, thought about it a moment, then replied in his down home Arkansas drawl, “We just fucked in the car.”

When the
New York Daily News
noted that many people were waiting for their relationship to crash and burn, Jolie responded, “We might. But it’ll be from sex.” “He’s an amazing lover, and he knows my body,” Jolie offered. On another occasion, she complained to reporters about suffering from rug burns as the result of having sex on their pool table. To a British newspaper, she revealed that Thornton was such a stud in bed she couldn’t walk after sex. “Before I know it, I’m in a corner across the room breathing heavily,” she said, “and I don’t know what happened, and I’m trying to get back on the bed, but I can’t walk.”

Asked whether her new-found love meant that she had sworn off women, she responded, “When I was twenty, I fell in love with somebody who happened to be a woman. I wanted to be close to her because I had feelings for her. The reality is, I love people. If Billy was a woman, then I’d be a lesbian. Simple. If I was a man, we’d be a gay couple.”

While Jolie had gained a reputation for her penchant for unusual sex in previous relationships, she never spoke in detail about the sexual specifics and was not known for public displays of affection. She had also frequently expressed her discomfort at being portrayed as a sexpot. In February 2000, only three months before she married Thornton, she told
Esquire
magazine that she had cried at a
Rolling Stone
cover shoot because they tried to force her to wear a lacy camisole, which she considered to be “verging on lingerie.” Her “glammed up expression” in the final cover photo, she explained, was not the result of makeup, but tears. “The cover … I was totally red-faced from crying. Because I felt like a whore.” She had often expressed similar consternation at the media’s attempts to play up her sexual persona, even if she brought some of it on herself by openly admitting to S & M, bisexuality, and past use of knives during sex play.

Yet now at virtually every public appearance and media interview, she worked in the topic of her sex life with Thornton in graphic detail. She made sure to give almost each reporter and photographer a visual demonstration. “They kiss, and as they talk, discussing the day’s details, she absent-mindedly traces her index finger up and down the zipper of his pants,” one profile described about an evening at home with Thornton and Jolie.

At public events, the two were often all over each other, making sexually suggestive gestures or implying that they couldn’t wait to have sex. At the Golden Globes one year, the
Los Angeles Daily News
reported that the “couple smooched their way down the red carpet.” After they groped each other for reporters at the premiere of
Gone in 60 Seconds
, author Robin Gorman Newman, who is known as the “Love Coach,” was quoted by one newspaper disapprovingly: “I would think the ones really having great sex are not the ones doing that.” Newman may have known what she was talking about. After they broke up, Thornton gave an interview in which he implied that his sex life with Jolie wasn’t everything he had made it out to be at the time. “Sex doesn’t have to be with a model to be good,” he said shortly after Jolie was named
Esquire
magazine’s sexiest person in the world. “Sometimes with the model, the actress or ‘the sexiest person in the world,’ it may literally be like fucking the couch.”

At the time, however, one couldn’t have helped thinking that the pair was trying too hard to be the poster couple for amazing sex. “It just seemed so contrived,” said one entertainment reporter who followed Jolie off and on for years. “It’s like when the cameras, especially TV, were on, they’d put on this whole semi-pornographic show, but when they got inside, they practically ignored each other. There were literally pools among journalists about how long they would last.”