Unfortunately, by the time she’d hit her teens, Angelina was taking her ‘wise guy’ act too far and went off the rails completely.
If Angelina didn’t get on with her fellow pupils at Beverly Hills High, the teachers were just as alien to her. Undoubtedly at a loss as how to deal with her, they enlisted the help of a psychotherapist. ‘They enrolled… everybody whose parents were divorced,’ says Jolie of this period. ‘One psychotherapist used to say that it was our “units” who were guilty of everything. It seemed to her that we, poor children, would never be able to adapt to life. I was assuring her that I had adapted in a nice way, but for some reason she wanted it to be the other way. After all, I thought out some fairy tale for her – oh how glad she was of it! Since then, I don’t believe in psychotherapy.’
Voight shares his daughter’s view on the effect divorce has on children, saying, ‘It’s easy to blame any problems children have on a divorce. But you have to ask yourself if they would arise anyway.’
While Angelina had her say about these sessions, so did the teachers, and in one of her references following these sessions she was described as ‘unrestrained’ and ‘inclined to antisocial psychopathy’. Typically, Jolie was undeterred by this label, admitting frankly, ‘Since childhood I was called a sociopath.’ (Ironically, she would go on to play one in Girl, Interrupted – and it would win her an Oscar.)
Whatever company she was keeping, it’s clear from her old school mate Jean Robinson that she wasn’t too popular with the other girls in her year. In fact, her reputation as a man-eater dates back to way before she was famous. ‘When she was fourteen at Beverly Hills High School, she was stealing boys who were seventeen,’ recalls Jean. ‘Once they were panting after her, she’d walk away. It was all about the chase.’ And according to Jean, it wasn’t just the boys Angelina preyed upon. ‘The same happened with girls. Angie could seduce you into thinking she was your best friend and then not speak to you again. That kind of cruelty is common, but Angelina was devastatingly good about it.’
Jean also had this to say of Angelina’s lack of wealth: ‘She lived in an apartment on the wrong side of Beverly Hills, not where the really rich people live. She was deliberately different and didn’t want anything to do with the rich kids. She had a serious thing with knives. All kinds of knives – penknives, kitchen knives. She would just whip one out and start playing with it.’
In terms of Angelina being an outcast, Jean explains that ‘Beverly Hills was so straight in the early Nineties, everybody was into fitting in and getting good grades. The dress was neat, very expensive preppy clothes. The place to hang out and shop was the Beverly Center, an enormous shopping mall in West Hollywood, or Rodeo Drive for girls with daddy’s credit card. Angie wanted no part of that. She hung on Sunset Strip at the punk-rock clubs and shopped at the punk stores on Melrose.’
Jolie herself admits, ‘I was that punk in school. I didn’t feel clean and, like, pretty. And I always felt interesting or odd or dark … I’d be in my black boots and my ripped jeans and my old jacket and I felt more comfortable like that. I wasn’t gonna pretend to be the smart, clean, centred girl. I could understand the darker things, the more moody things, the more emotional things.’
Of Jolie’s penchant for the goth look, Jean comments, ‘She was into leather, torn jeans, nasty boots with stiletto heels. Kids were scared of her, the teachers were as well. I don’t think there had ever been anybody quite like her at Beverly Hills High.’
While she was clearly looked down upon for daring to be different, this shock factor was likely to have pleased the rebellious Angelina more than acceptance ever would have.
In retrospect, her refusal to conform to Beverly Hills fashion etiquette is something that perhaps should have been admired rather than scorned, but it’s clear that her peers were scared of this girl who didn’t take social boundaries remotely seriously. Jean says of Jolie’s therapy sessions: ‘She went there, like, three times a week. She was like, “I’m off to therapy”, like it was maths or science. It didn’t change her a bit. I think the therapist needed therapy by the time they were done.’
Not all of Angelina’s contemporaries were so unforgiving. One, in particular, remembers a more insecure side of her personality. ‘I’m not saying she wasn’t wild. She was. But she also had a kind of vulnerability and a lot of pain. I think she was deeply hurt by the break-up of her parents and the fact her dad moved on with his life and, for the most part, left her behind. He would occasionally show up and take her out. They went to the Oscars one year. But she wanted a full-time dad, not an Oscars date. It hurt her and made her put on as tough a front as possible so as not to show the pain.’
Perhaps most revealing of all, the same source goes on to talk about Jolie’s deep-rooted ambition. ‘She was very smart and, in her own way, disciplined. She got into acting very quickly and successfully by fifteen or sixteen. She always said she wanted not to follow in her dad’s footsteps but to outdo him, which she did.’
Her uncle, Chip Taylor, could also see straight through his niece’s rebellious ways. ‘Angie was always the kind of kid that would like to think she was tough,’ he says. ‘I never looked at her as a tough kid because I’ve been around real punk kids and she was like a kid from Hollywood doing a little performance in her biker clothes.’
Conforming was clearly very low on Angelina’s list of priorities and it’s no surprise that her first serious boyfriend didn’t exactly fit into the high-school-jock mould. ‘She could do just about anything she wanted as a teenager,’ says Jean. ‘When she was 14, she fell for a punk rocker who was about 16. He was wild too.’
Rather than banning her daughter from seeing this guy, and potentially pushing her daughter away, Bertrand clearly thought the best way to deal with the situation was to keep an eye on it, and so she allowed Angelina to move him into the family home. Angelina said, ‘I lost my virginity when I was fourteen. We were in my bedroom, in my environment, where I was most comfortable and I wasn’t in danger. I was very young but kids are doing a lot of weird things these days and they’re getting very promiscuous. We lived together for two years with my mom, so I wasn’t sneaking around. Unlike other girls, I wasn’t partying and hanging out on the street.’
She may not have been sneaking around, but, according to school friend Jean, Angelina’s behaviour still left a lot to be desired. ‘It was a pretty strange living arrangement, but her mum made the best of it. Angelina dyed her hair purple and had piercings. She was a complete terror. She and her boyfriend went over to the rougher areas to punk clubs, staying out until all hours. That’s when she started losing interest in school completely.’
Angelina has since defended her decision to be so serious with someone so young, saying, ‘Are you ever emotionally developed enough to be involved in that kind of relationship? He lived in our house with my mom and my brother, so it wasn’t like we were on our own. And I could always talk to Mom if there were any problems. She was more connected and aware of what was going on than most mothers. She knew I was at that age where I was going to be looking around. Either it was going to be in weird situations or it was going to be in my house, in my