Brangelina (6 page)

His first professional job when he got to L.A. was promoting a Mexican food chain called El Pollo Loco, which paid him a whopping $9.00 an hour to dance around in front of the restaurant on Sunset and Labrea dressed as a giant chicken. “That’s a lot of money when you’re used to making $3.50 for bus-boy jobs,” he said. He shrugged off the daily insults and jibes from rowdy customers: “I didn’t care. They weren’t yelling at me; they were yelling at the damn chicken.”

Dressing as a chicken was only slightly less demeaning than his next job, driving strippers to their appointments for a strip-o-gram company. “That was a good job. There were some interesting rides home,” he recalled, describing the nightly routine. “I’d drive them there in my car. We’d have a private room. They’d come out, and I’d introduce them and play the music. Most of them wanted Prince, whatever the ‘fuck me’ songs were, and they’d take their clothes off and throw them my way, and I’d catch them so guys wouldn’t steal them.”

After going to hundreds of auditions, he started to land some jobs as an extra, including standing in a doorway in
Less than Zero
and playing an airport cop in the Kevin Costner thriller
No Way Out.
And then, at twenty-four, he finally landed his first speaking parts, including an episode of the soap opera
Another World
and a four-episode stint on
Dallas.
He was on screen “probably for a total of four minutes,” he recalled of his
Dallas
role. “I was some reject boyfriend. An idiot.”

His on-air girlfriend in those episodes, Shalane McCall, soon became his first Hollywood romance, even though their fling only lasted six weeks. His manager, Phil Lobel, later claimed that this was the beginning of a long pattern. “He fell in love very easily,” Lobel told
People
magazine, recalling that he would often loan Pitt money to help finance some of the lavish gifts Pitt liked to bestow on his many girlfriends. “I’ve never seen Brad try and get a girl to go home with him. They come to him,” a friend told the magazine. “He’s actually kind of shy.”

Following his
Dallas
stint, Pitt spent four years kicking around Hollywood making guest appearances on various TV shows and taking bit parts in movies. He later described this work as “butt-awful.” Still, he was beginning to attract some attention. “Brad walking into a room was more exciting than most actors doing a scene,” said producer Patrick Hasburgh, who cast him in an episode of
21 Jump Street
in 1988. Two years later, Pitt landed his own series on Fox,
Glory Days
, a
90210
-style drama that was cancelled only six episodes into its run. “It was terrible,” he said of the short-lived series. “Man, I’d rather do nothin’.”

The role that finally put him on the map for good almost went to Alec Baldwin’s younger brother, William, who was Ridley Scott’s first choice to play the charismatic drifter, J. D., in his new road movie,
Thelma and Louise.
But when Baldwin opted to appear in Ron Howard’s
Backdraft
instead, Pitt got the call. His role was a small one, but critics later said he nearly stole the film. He plays a hitchhiker who steals Louise’s few thousand dollars in life savings after he charms Thelma into bed and gives her the first sexual satisfaction of her life. Pitt would later describe that career-making scene as the “$6,000 orgasm.” A crew member on the film later related to
People
magazine Pitt’s “skittishness” about filming the sex scene with Geena Davis, who played Thelma: “He was absolutely charming, very shy, and nervous. His biggest concern was that his mother wouldn’t approve.”

Today, Pitt speaks eloquently before congressional committees and international delegations with seemingly little effort, but in those days, it seemed that the only two words in his vocabulary were “cool” and “boring.” Asked by one publication what he thought about working with Ridley Scott, who also directed
Alien
, Pitt responded, “What do you think? It’s pretty cool. Ridley was really cool. I was really impressed … You know, we talked in big detail about the scenes, which is really cool. What is really cool is to be part of something where all the elements come together.”

As Jolie would be nine years later, after her role in
Girl, Interrupted
, Pitt was repeatedly compared to James Dean after
Thelma and Louise
. “That James Dean stuff is pretty boring,” he scoffed. “He bores me and what he has become bores me and young actors trying to be like him bore me. It goes way beyond this film. It’s a personal thing, I guess.” Like it or not, though, the James Dean comparisons signaled that he had already been anointed the next big thing.

To hear Jolie’s version today, her first attempts to make it as a teenage model failed miserably because she was too short, too thin, too fat, and too scarred. But again, the facts tell a different story.

In 1991, Sean McCall was an up-and-coming fashion photographer when he got an assignment to photograph a high-end swimsuit line for La Perla. He needed a new model for their latest high-profile national campaign. Ordinarily, the company opted for a supermodel or a recognizable face, but this time they wanted something different. “La Perla didn’t want the stardom of the gal to overshadow the line itself,” McCall remembers. “So they were looking for a brand-new face.”

McCall’s makeup artist had just worked with a teenage girl whose agency had sent her in to shoot her first theatrical head shots, compulsory for an aspiring actor looking to break into show business. “She told me that she had just seen this girl who was perfect for what I was doing,” he explains. “She knew I was looking for somebody a little enticing and different. She told me the girl happened to be the daughter of the actor Jon Voight, which didn’t impress me that much, but I decided to give her a look. I contacted her through her mother and arranged for her to come in and test.”

The next day, a sixteen-year-old Angelina Voight came to McCall’s condo in Santa Monica, and he knew instantly that he had found his face. “I immediately thought that she had one of the most unique looks that I ever saw,” he recalls. “I didn’t even have to test her. I wanted to do a full-blown editorial shoot.”

Many assume that Jolie’s distinctive look results from cosmetic procedures. Innumerable articles must have been written speculating whether she has had collagen injections to give her those trademark full, sensuous lips, for instance. Yet if one examines the photos that McCall took that day, it is instantly obvious that Jolie’s look has changed very little since the age of sixteen. If she is known today as the sexiest woman in the world, she didn’t earn the title through artificial means. “I’m a professional; I know when people have had work done, when they’ve altered their looks,” says McCall. “Believe me, the Angelina I saw then is the same Angelina the world knows today. I’ve heard that she had her nose thinned since then, but very little else has changed.”

What struck him most that day, he recalls, is how much they had in common. “She was very nice and obviously highly intelligent,” he says. “I think we struck up a conversation about fencing. I had just come from a fencing lesson, and when she heard that, she started talking about swords. She told me she collected knives and swords. I also had all kinds of them, some dating back to the Civil War. She asked me where she could get a sword rack. Then it turns out we knew somebody in common, Jean-Pierre Hallet.”

Hallet was a legendary figure who had devoted his life to saving the pygmy tribe in the Ituri region of Zaire from physical and cultural extinction. As an anthropologist, he had lived among the pygmies and even introduced a new plant for them to cultivate, helping to save them from starvation after deforestation wiped out most of their traditional food sources. He strongly believed the pygmies to be the most ancient people on earth, likely the ancestors of all humanity, and that they had originated many of the ethical and religious concepts that were later adopted by much of the rest of the world. By 1991, Hallet ran one of the world’s largest shops specializing in Central African artifacts, located on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. Angelina bought a Masai sword from him there, and they struck up a friendship. She was fascinated with his stories about the African people. “I’m fairly certain that her affinity with Africa, which is well known today, dates back from her association with Jean-Pierre Hallet. I also knew him well from buying swords from him,” says McCall.

In the end, the photographer never used Angelina for his La Perla shoot because her agent called up and said Angelina wanted to focus on her film career instead. “I was very disappointed,” he recalls. “I thought she would have been big. But as it turns out, the girl I chose instead, Caprice Bourret, went on to a huge modeling career and even became the first Wonderbra model … Maybe Angelina’s people were smart to pull her out. The world would have known her face but would have been deprived of her acting talent.”

This seems to have marked a turning point. Although the La Perla shoot would have been her first national campaign, Angelina had modeled successfully since the age of thirteen and had even traveled to London and France for numerous assignments when she was younger, represented by her mother’s best friend, the model agent Jade Dixon (now known as Jade Clark-Dixon). “Angie was an angel, as was her mother,” Dixon says. “She was my first client and she was very poised, very pretty even then. I eventually steered her to acting when I saw her giant talent. It was obvious from an early age.”

Thus encouraged, at sixteen, with her obsession with death, her need to cut herself, and her first sexual experiences all behind her, Angelina now set her sights on an acting career. Although Jolie now attributes her decision more to her mother’s influence rather than her father’s, Jon Voight in fact played a major part in encouraging her interest.

“Looking back, there was evidence at an early age that she would be an actor,” recalls Jon Voight. “She would take anything and make an event out of it. She was always very busy and creative and dramatic.” When she had play dates with her ten-year-old friends, her father went so far as to set up scenes for them. “I wanted to show the kids things about acting,” he explains. “I’d say, ‘I’m going to give you the lines; how are you going to say them?’”

For her part, Angelina explains that her earliest acting ambitions dated back to when she was a young child. “I remember Jamie pointing the home-video camera at me and saying ‘Come on, Angie, give us a show!’ Neither [Dad] nor Mom ever said, ‘Be quiet! Stop talking.’ I remember [Dad] looking me in the eye and asking, ‘What are you thinking? What are your feelings?’ I don’t know exactly what I wanted then, but I knew I could know. I loved some kind of expression. I wanted so much to try to explain things to somebody. I’m very good at trying to explore different emotions and listening to people and feeling things. That is an actor, I think. So that’s what I had to do.”

After Angelina emerged from her obsession with death, her father helped her build on the skills that she had picked up at the Strasberg Institute years before. He gave her weekly acting lessons at the home he rented in the San Fernando Valley where they read or acted out a different play every Sunday.

Voight later described being “moved to tears” when she read from the Arthur Miller play that had given him his first big break three decades earlier. “It was in stages, different stages. There was a point where we read
A View from the Bridge
, which I did as well as anything I’ve ever done in my life. There’s a scene where this Italian boy comes in and meets this young girl Catherine, and they fall in love. I’ve played with many Catherines. One Sunday Angie read it, and the first time she read Catherine, it was a performance. She was studying acting and sixteen, and it was, I’m telling you, as good as anybody had ever played the part. The accent, the emotion was there, and absolutely perfect. I was overwhelmed. It was very touching to me. That was the first time I knew.

“The next week, I had a friend of mine, Tom Bower, a wonderful actor, come over and we read it again. And same thing, a great performance. Tom’s going, ‘This is great!’ Tom was running the Met Theater in Los Angeles. So she went down with Tom and auditioned for Saturday workshops, which were monitored by Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, and Amy Madigan, who are [now] like godfather and godmothers to her. And one day, Tom came back from class and said, ‘Jon, she’s really special.’”

Bertrand encouraged her daughter to re-enroll at the Strasberg Institute to hone her talent. For her first production there, the comedy
Room Service
, she made an unusual choice of roles. “I thought, which character do I want to audition for?” Angelina explains. “The big, fat, forty-year-old German man, that’s the part for me.” She put her own take on the character, however, turning the part of an overbearing hotel manager into “Frau Wagner,” a German dominatrix.

Voight later recalled the surprise of seeing his daughter in the production. “I was a little shocked seeing her walk around as Frau Wagner. But the shock came from the realization that, ‘Oh my God, she’s just like me.’ She’ll take these crazy parts and be thrilled that she can make people chuckle or whatever.”

Meanwhile, her brother Jamie had enrolled at University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television (renamed the School of Cinematic Arts in 2006) and was living with his father at his house in the Valley. During this period, he made five short films, all starring his sister and all financed by his father, who at the time was still very close to his son. One of them even earned a George Lucas Award, whose winners were personally selected by the
Star Wars
director, one of the school’s most prominent alumni and generous benefactors.

Around this time, Angelina decided to drop the name Voight and started billing herself by her middle name, Jolie. As she later explained, “I love my father, but I’m not him.” Despite this, and despite Bertrand’s subsequent claim that at most auditions nobody knew her daughter’s bloodlines, many of her early casting directors have acknowledged that she was introduced to them as the daughter of Jon Voight, a fact that couldn’t help but open doors in Hollywood.