Jolie and her mother, Marchelina Bertrand, from 1987. (Splash News)
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Of all the tattoos that grace Angelina Jolie’s A-list body — the geographical coordinates of her children’s birthplaces, a 12-inch long Bengal tiger tramp stamp, the inner thigh one she got “for Brad” — there’s one that she probably regrets the most.
On Oct. 6, 1999, Jolie recruited Friday Jones, a famous tattoo artist, to print the words “Billy Bob Thornton” in bold Helvetica font below her bikini line.
To say this was impulsive is an understatement. The two weren’t even officially an item at the time of the tattoo. Although only recently divorced from actor Jonny Lee Miller and dating actor Timothy Hutton, Jolie was having secret trysts with the bad boy star, who was then engaged to actress Laura Dern. “I thought it was a crackpot idea,” said Jones, who tried to dissuade the star from inking her body. “But you don’t say no to Angelina.”
While Jones worked, Jolie posed for a photo shoot, smoking a Marlboro cigarette and styling herself in a dog leash around her neck and two pieces of duct tape over her nipples. The next day Hutton, her boyfriend, asked her to marry him.
Her friend suggested she buy a “pair of crotchless panties and keep the lights down low.”
The tattoo story and the pictures that go with it are just one of the many torrid tales in a new biography “Angelina” by Andrew Morton. Morton, best known as the breathless chronicler of Princess Diana, Madonna and Monica Lewinsky, isn’t lacking for material. But then, Angelina has never been shy.
‘THE IVORY TOWER’
Morton attributes Jolie’s bizarre behavior to her strange formative years. For the first year and a half of her life, Jolie lived a sterile room with white curtains, white walls, no furniture, and no stimulation — only a white crib in the center of the room. Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, lived three stories below her, hardly visiting her, because it was too painful to see the baby who reminded her of her philandering ex-husband Jon Voight.
Instead of her mother, Jolie was cared for by a coterie of babysitters. Her room was nicknamed the “ivory tower” and the baby was seen as “some kind of infant Rapunzel,” Morton writes.
The babysitters begged Bertrand to paint the walls bright colors so she would get some kind of stimulation.
“This has been my burden for thirty-three years,” former babysitter Krisann Morel says. “I saw what happened to Angelina Jolie, and it haunts me to this day. As much as I wanted to help, I couldn’t fix the hurt. I loved Marche, and I think she really loved her daughter, but the truth is the truth.”
Morton claims that this early neglect caused Jolie to start talking later, never crawl, and that she didn’t play with stuffed animals or dolls, and disliked being hugged.
It was a time that would define her later erratic behavior, Morton says.
WILD CHILD
The book alleges that she began a series of high-risk behaviors early, losing her virginity at 14 after her boyfriend moved in at her “mother’s suggestion,” cutting herself so badly that she ended up in the hospital, and becoming so anorexic that she had to be padded for later roles.
But it wasn’t until her late teens and early 20s that she began to engage in serious drug use
Morton interviewed Jolie’s alleged drug dealer Franklin Mayer, whose headquarters was at the Hotel Chelsea, providing ecstasy, Quaaludes, heroin and cocaine to high-profile celebrities.
Taking a cue from his friend Andy Warhol, Mayer videotaped his deals and Jolie eagerly mugged for his video camera.
One day, Jolie dropped by and scored “sixty dollars worth of cocaine and heroin,” Mayer said. Jolie preferred to smoke heroin as opposed to shooting it, and Mayer said she never bought more than “a hundred dollars at a time.”
Even though Jolie bragged to the press that she had dropped her heroin habit by 1998, she continued for several more years.
In fact, during the shooting of “Girl, Interrupted” in 1999, Jolie would sit in her trailer and “quietly smoke heroin.”
She would also rent hotel rooms in Beverly Hills “smoking the dragon and surfing the Internet, shopping for a foreign special-needs baby on various adoption agencies.”
It wasn’t until she met Billy Bob, whose lovemaking prowess and “knee knocker” equipment left her on a drugged high, that she got completely clean.
“When I’m with Billy, I don’t need drugs,” she confessed to her addict friend.
HEARTBREAKER
Her childhood intimacy issues followed her into adulthood, as she broke the hearts of the many celebrity men who dared fall for the dangerous woman.
She constantly had eyes for her co-stars (including an unrequited Gary Sinise, 20 years her senior and married with three children). Morton suggests she targeted attached men to prove that every man was as immoral as her father.
Nic Cage, Russell Crowe and John Cusack all fell into her orbit. Ethan Hawke had an affair with her while married to Uma Thurman, Morton says. Billy Bob, as is widely known, left his fiancée for her only to be dumped by her when she adopted her first son Maddox. And then Brad Pitt, well, you know the story.
But the person who fell the hardest was the famed lothario Mick Jagger. Jagger spotted her at a Rolling Stones show and asked for her to come backstage — she did but was seemingly unimpressed, giving him her mother’s phone number instead of her own.
But he would not be dismissed that easily. Jagger would leave desperate messages on her mother’s answering machine, sobbing, “Angelina why aren’t you calling me? Where are you? Please call me.”
When he invited her down to Palm Beach while the band took a break from its Bridges to Babylon tour, she refused to have sex with him, insisting that she “was having her period.”
“She was messing with his head,” recalls a friend.
In the midst of this Jagger game, Jolie bedded a young Leonardo DiCaprio. He wasn’t exactly king of the world.
“Even though they left the party together, the ‘Titanic’ star did not float Angie’s boat; the actress told friends afterward that even though they shared a shower together in his hotel suite, there was little sexual rapport,” Morton writes.
No matter, Jagger continued. After she snubbed him at one of his concerts, he sent her $5,000 diamond earrings. That piqued her interest.
She took him to a “a bondage club in New York, a venue complete with dungeons and rooms where guests played doctor, among other, darker games. During their visit, most likely to The Vault, a now-defunct club with celebrity clientele, she told friends that they were both whipped.”
And to show her affection for Jagger, Jolie even told him that she was going to adopt a Native American baby and name it after him.
MOTHER JOLIE
Morton writes that Jolie may have finally met her match in Brad Pitt, a man with the image of a sweet Midwestern boy but who has a serious dark side.
As opposed to what most tabloids have written about their affair, “those close to her insist that it was Brad who did the pursuing, not Angelina,” Morton said.
Six children later — three adopted, three biological — Morton says that the tabloids are still wrong about the relationship. While most people believe that Jolie is queen and that Pitt is Mr. Mom, Morton says they’re only half right.
Their relationship is “a competitive relationship, constantly vying for supremacy, constantly battling about who wears the pants,” Morton told The Post. “She and Brad are like sharks.”
Brad was not the “grinning pussycat he seemed,” Morton says. Instead, he keeps a close rein on who is in their shared lives. Jolie’s longtime bodyguard Mickey “Snowy” Brett, for instance, was pushed out by Pitt, who seemed almost jealous of their father-daughter relationship. “The actor demeaned [Brett] by sending him to sex shops to buy face masks and other rubber paraphernalia for the kinky pair,” Morton writes.
He also says that the rumors about their split are greatly exaggerated. “In 10 years, she’ll still be with Brad and her family will be fast approaching a football team.”
Just because they’re not breaking up doesn’t mean she’s the perfect mother, as she’d like to appear. Instead, she seems to be taking her parenting cues from her own dysfunctional childhood.
Jolie is almost always off shooting, Morton said, and has no qualms about leaving her children with the help as she prepared for her role in “Salt.”
There’s a house full of full-time help, including nannies from Vietnam, the Congo and US, a doctor on call, two personal assistants, a cook, two cleaners and a maid.
“When I see how the children are being brought up by nannies while she is off filming, I see that she is repeating her own childhood without knowing it. Why adopt if you are not going to parent them?” said former Angelina babysitter Morel.
Even though Jolie has announced that she plans on slowing her career down to be with her children, Morton is more than skeptical.
“She’s lived hard, and continues to live hard because it’s deeply imprinted in her psyche,” he said. “She’ll live fast and live for the moment until the day she dies.”
Angelina
An Unauthorized Biography
by Andrew Morton
St. Martin’s Press