According to James, that dinner was the “best Thanksgiving” he had ever enjoyed. For once there was a real sense of family, nonjudgmental, giving, and loving. It was a special delight to see his sister so happy.
If fate had been different, rather than oohing and aahing over Holly’s wedding video, the Thanksgiving party could have been cooing over Angie’s second son. She had hoped to adopt again during a visit to Russia earlier in the month, but her plans had gone badly awry. Initially the aim was to adopt a little boy whom Angie had seen during a visit to Baby Home No. 13 in Moscow, an orphanage caring for developmentally challenged youngsters up to the age of four. She had, according to the Daily Mail, specifically asked for a “blonde, blue-eyed, Slavic looking boy”—observers noting the similarity in looks to her father and Brad Pitt. Apparently she fixed on a young Russian boy called Gleb.
Political considerations, however, were working against her plan. Her humanitarian visit came at a politically sensitive time. German chancellor Gerhard Schröder had recently adopted a three-year-old boy from St. Petersburg, but only after a personal intervention from Russia’s President Putin. The notion that Russia was not able to offer a decent future to its own children was political dynamite. Hence the obstacles to Angie’s plan, the head of the orphanage later stating that there was never any question of an adoption.
Clearly Angie had other ideas when she first arrived in Russia. As she later explained: “I was going to adopt this other child in Russia, but it didn’t work out, so I may adopt another in about six months. I don’t think Maddox is quite ready for a sibling yet.” He was apparently ready enough at the start of November when she initiated the process. Maddox often came in handy as a lightning rod to deflect unwelcome scrutiny, Angie suggesting that many of her decisions—about love, about adoption, about her career—depended on the say-so of the three-year-old.
Children were very much on Brad’s mind, too. In December, as part of the publicity for Ocean’s Twelve, he gave a famous interview to Diane Sawyer in which he spoke about his life in the next three years. “Kids. Family. I’m thinking family,” he said. Sawyer asked if he still was hoping for daughters, “little Jennifers” as he’d expressed it on previous occasions. “Yeah,” said Brad. “Jen and I, we’re working something out.” He then said girls might “crush” him and maybe all boys would be better. “Listen, I’ll take them all at this point.” Given the timing—the couple formally separated four weeks later—there is now the suspicion that he was papering the record to prepare for his separation from the nation’s sweetheart. His narrative was that he wanted children, while Jennifer was reluctant, the conversation with Diane Sawyer the opening salvo in what was later seen as a subtle public-relations operation.
It was not that Brad and Jennifer lacked the support of friends and family. Even as the breakup neared, many people close to them held out hope that the marriage would survive. For what was to be their last Christmas together, Pitt’s mother, Jane, who is a family counselor, and his sister, Julie, gave Aniston a ring monogrammed in the center with a “P.” Afterward the couple headed to Anguilla with their close friends Courteney Cox, her husband, David, and their baby, Coco. New Year’s Eve was spent at George’s, a restaurant in Cap Juluca, where they met up with Uma Thurman, another woman who could tell Jennifer a thing or two about Angelina Jolie.
Once again above the fray and away from it all, Angie spent Christmas and New Year’s with Maddox touring a children’s cancer center and a refugee camp in Beirut. By contrast, Brad and Jennifer were photographed on the beach arm in arm on January 6, Brad wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “trash.” The next day, January 7, they announced their separation. Angelina was nowhere to be seen, in a different country and a different time zone, doing good works. She had the perfect alibi. They wouldn’t find her fingerprints at the scene of this marital crime.
FOURTEEN
If I find anyone getting a picture of Jolie, I will fucking smash someone to pieces. I’m not joking. I’ll fucking put someone in the hospital.
—BODYGUARD MICKEY BRETT
During the fall of 2004, MTV launched a new reality show, Laguna Beach, about the lives of well-to-do, ambitious teenagers living in a seaside town that had for years been a magnet for artists, writers, and filmmakers. Nothing in the show’s plot could have matched what was really proposed for the resort.
That August James Haven and his fiancée, Rachel Anderson, together with her father, Ken, a preacher at the Evangelical Lutheran church in Cypress, and her mother, Rose, spent the day at Laguna Beach. They weren’t there to soak up the sun and the surf but to size up whether it was a suitable venue for a wedding.
The original plan was for the couple to take their vows, barefoot on the sand, as the bloodred sun set over the ocean. Soon enough, James envisioned a different scenario, a plan that would set the world on fire. With his cockpit view of the developing relationship between his sister and Brad Pitt, he of all people knew how serious they were about each other. Once Brad was free, he could then formally commit to Angie. So at some point the idea was born of a double wedding on the beach. After all, Angie had frequently joked about marrying her brother; now she could stand beside him as they took their vows—to other people. Certainly marriage was on her mind, too, Angie admitting at the time that she was an “incurable romantic.” “I would love to have a wonderful marriage that will last a very long time,” she told Grazia magazine.
There were just a couple of catches. Not only was Brad still married, but, given their celebrity, this simple ceremony would also have attracted a bigger crowd than the Super Bowl. While Brad and Jennifer had managed to keep their Malibu nuptials secure, others were not so fortunate. When Sean Penn married Madonna on a California cliff top he was so incensed by the “chopperazi,” the helicopter-borne photographers, that he threatened them with a loaded pistol.
Doubtless James’s simple plan would have crumbled to sand once security and safety considerations were factored in, but it does offer a window into the cautious double life Brad and Angie were leading at that time. In public Brad protested loudly that the end of his marriage had nothing to do with Angie, while his screen wife was equally adamant, saying that she would never have an affair with a married man after seeing the suffering caused by her father’s adultery. “I have enough lovers; I don’t need Brad,” she argued.
The reality was that they were quietly planning a life together before Brad and Jennifer took that walk along the beach in Anguilla and announced their separation the following day. As for the Laguna Beach nuptials, they never got much farther than the back-of-a-napkin stage, but that had nothing to do with Brad and Angie. After dipping his toe in marital waters, James got cold feet and called off his engagement in July 2005, though he and Rachel remained friends for several years afterward.
As for Brad and Jen, they played the first weeks of their separation like an episode of Friends. Their joint statement left their fans wondering why they had split in the first place, the couple emphasizing that their decision was the result of much thoughtful consideration and had nothing to do with any third party, and that they remained “committed and caring friends with great love and admiration for one another.” Although they stayed in their marital home for a time, they warned family and friends not to hope for a reconciliation. As friendly as things seemed—Brad and Jen were each spotted still wearing their wedding rings in January—Brad wasted no time in moving on.
With the ink barely dry on their separation announcement, Brad called his friend photographer Steven Klein and suggested a series of faux family portraits of Angie, him, and some hired child models that would represent the seamy reality behind the smiling image of a happy family. A style shoot like in W magazine, the bible of the New York fashion crowd, would really “throw this back at them,” Brad argued—“them” being the paparazzi who dogged every move he and Angie made.
Meanwhile, Angie stuck to her own script, filming a documentary in Niger before heading t
o Davos, Switzerland, in mid-January to speak about refugees and humanitarian issues at the World Economic Forum. She was with world leaders in the Alps when her mother’s first effort as a producer, Trudell, was screened at the Sundance Film Festival. The documentary, which had taken more than a decade to film and edit, received mixed reviews, seen as sincere but lacking dramatic focus.
In keeping with their “still friends” message, the Pitts threw open their home on February 12 for a birthday bash for Jennifer; guests included Gwen Stefani—now a great pal of Angie’s—Gavin Rossdale, and Cindy Crawford. Before the Oscars in March, Mr. and Mrs. Pitt spent time together at industry events, including a party hosted by CAA agent Bryan Lourd at which Gwyneth Paltrow proudly showed off pictures of her baby daughter, Apple, to her former fiancé and his estranged wife.
Babies were on Angie’s mind, too. On March 8 she told guests at a Washington Press Club luncheon that Africa was the focus for her next adoption. Once again it all came down to Maddox. “My son’s in love with Africa, so he’s been asking for an African brother or sister,” she explained, describing his pleasure at walking around a market during a recent visit to Ethiopia.
It seems Brad was ready to adopt, too, he and Angie looking through pictures sent by the Wide Horizons for Children adoption agency, which specializes in Ethiopia. Both settled on a little girl, born on January 8, the day after Brad and Jennifer separated. They were told that her mother had died of AIDS and it was unknown if the baby, legally named Tena Adam but called Yemsrach, meaning “good news,” by her mother, had also contracted the deadly virus. No matter; they wanted her anyway. As Angie later explained to writer Jonathan Van Meter: “We both had the same fear because she was sick at the time, and we both made the decision that no matter what, we were going to look after her.”
While they stealthily planned their own family, Brad and Angie went ahead with his make-believe family a few days later, spending the four-day Easter weekend at a late 1950s condo in Rancho Mirage, where they posed with five little blond “Bradlets” as a dreamy, dysfunctional 1960s family, for pictures that would occupy sixty stunning pages of the June issue of W magazine. While the artistic intent could not be faulted, as an act of marital diplomacy it was a dagger to Jennifer’s heart. Several months later she accused her ex-husband of missing a “sensitivity chip.”
That weekend Jennifer had every right to feel sensitive. It was the date she filed for divorce. The night before she made it official, she visited her psychic, Faye, arriving in cargo pants, with no makeup and her hair pulled back. She looked like any other California girl and attracted little attention. The one jarring note was the distress etched on her freshly scrubbed face. When her lawyer called her the following day, March 25, Good Friday, to confirm that the divorce papers had been filed, she burst into tears and clung to her good friend Courteney Cox, spending the night at Courteney’s Malibu home rather than at the empty house Brad had built.
Brad continued to move on. A couple of weeks later, he flew to Ethiopia with Good Morning America’s Diane Sawyer to show her the work of Bono’s One charity and to talk about his own life for a TV special that would air in June, to coincide with the release of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. He explained that his nickname in Ethiopia was “Dabo,” meaning “bread,” as locals thought he was saying “bread” rather than “Brad” when he first introduced himself. While he talked movingly of the plight of youngsters in the country, the bread and butter of the interview concerned his private life. When Sawyer asked if he would ever adopt an African orphan, the actor was cagey. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m certainly open to it. I think it’s a beautiful idea. You know, especially meeting these kids firsthand. But at this point, I don’t know.”
As for Angie as home-wrecker, he kept to the party line, stating that she had had nothing to do with the end of his four-and-a-half-year marriage. Even as he spoke, a private plane was on the runway at Addis Ababa, waiting to fly him to Mombasa in Kenya, where he and Angie had secretly arranged a private rendezvous. It was Angie’s idea; several weeks earlier she had instructed her bodyguard Mickey Brett to find a villa hideaway where she and Brad could enjoy a break together. For some reason, he chose the Alfajiri beach resort on Diani Beach on the Kenyan coast, a popular location for European vacationers. With regular international flights from London and other destinations, it was easily reached by the paparazzi.
So it proved. During the four-day break, long-range shots of the couple and Maddox playing on the beach made headlines around the world. It was reminiscent of similar pictures of Angie and Maddox playing alone in a park, taken within days of the split from Billy Bob Thornton, which presented a sympathetic image of Angie, the single mom focusing her attention on her son after the breakup. As The New York Times later revealed, those pictures were organized by Team Jolie, the photographer for Us magazine told when and where Angie and Maddox would be in the park.
The latest pictures had the hallmarks of a similar operation. Australian paparazzo Darren Lyons, owner of the London-based Big Pictures agency, happened to be in Mombasa when a suspiciously well-informed caller told him to be on the beach at a certain time and he would see something of interest. Right on cue, Angie, Brad, and Maddox appeared, Brad seeming like the perfect father figure, playing in the sand with Mad while keeping his hands off Angie. The visuals were consistent with their public utterances: “We’re just good friends.” When the pictures were published on April 29, the couple could fulminate about tabloid intrusion while presenting a platonic image, still able to keep everyone guessing about the exact nature of their relationship. Brad later complained to Diane Sawyer that he’d had no clue the pictures were being taken; otherwise he would have organized them himself and given the money—the pictures sold for more than $1 million—to charity. It seemed that Team Jolie and Team Pitt were not yet singing from the same public-relations hymnal.
Unfortunately, the “happy family” image went somewhat awry when security guards raced to their villa one evening thinking that a murder was taking place. One startled guest was quoted as saying: “The noise sounded like a wounded animal, like something being killed.” It was, so it was claimed, Brad and Angie engaged in robust nocturnal activity, though even by Angie’s high standards of exhibitionism this seems a tad extreme, especially with her bodyguard and Maddox nearby. Whatever the truth of the rather dubious story, it was soon part of the soap opera their lives were rapidly becoming. It was on this vacation that the nickname “Brangelina” was born—out of wedlock and proper syntax, but alive and kicking. How long the infant would last was anyone’s guess.
Brad seemed to be in it for the long haul, and the couple was resolute in their message: “Trust us, the truth is what we say it is. Actions don’t speak louder than words.” In May he stayed with Angie and Maddox at her home in Buckinghamshire, where he joined her on outings to the local supermarket, took Maddox to school, and rode Angie’s new motorbike around the grounds. Her bodyguard even arranged for photographer Steve Butler to take some discreet pictures of Brad on the property.
It was a tricky public-relations operation, Brad and Angie leading an increasingly threadbare double life, rather like the characters in their blockbuster. With the premiere of Mr. & Mrs. Smith looming in June as a summer “tentpole” release that was supposed to be a huge box-office draw for the studios, nothing could get in the way of focusing the public on the movie rather than the unfolding soap opera. There was even an attempt to coerce journalists to sign a legal agreement preventing them from asking personal questions of the lead actors, but that strategy quickly collapsed.
Studio executives were right to be nervous. They saw what had happened that May, when Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch as he declared his love for Katie Holmes. It had left Steven Spielberg, director of Cruise’s latest movie, War of the Worlds, pleading: “Talk a little bit about War of the Worlds because we’re opening real soon.” While Angie and Brad may have wanted to shout their love from the sofa tops, they had to kee
p their feet on the ground. With “Team Jennifer” T-shirts outselling “Team Angie” twenty-five to one, it was imperative that Brad and Angie stick to the script, telling the world that they were just good friends, leaving room for doubt.
There was now no doubt in Jennifer’s mind, however, that she had been mistaken in believing her husband’s assurances that he had been intrigued by but had not dallied with Angie. The evidence of a happy family beach vacation, a possible adoption, domestic bliss in Buckinghamshire, and an endless sexy spread in W even prompted Madame Tussauds waxworks to place Angie and Brad next to each other. The circumspect, forgiving Ms. Aniston finally had to accept the inevitable. What hurt most was not just the beach vacation, but stories that Brad and Angie were thinking of adopting a child.
She was way too late. By now Brad was known as “Dad” by one little boy, Maddox uttering that important word when they were playing cars on a hotel floor. It meant a lot to Angie, a sign that she was doing the right thing, Maddox once again both oracle and guide. “He just out of the blue called him Dad,” she recalled. “It was amazing. We both heard it and didn’t say anything and just looked at each other. And then we kind of let it go on, and then he just continued to do it and that was it. So that was probably the most defining moment, when he decided that we would all be a family.”
A growing family. After fulfilling their publicity obligations for Mr. & Mrs. Smith, they flew to Addis Ababa, where, on July 6, 2005, Angie signed the adoption papers for a little girl she named Zahara. Brad was by her side, but as Ethiopia does not allow adoptions by unmarried couples, let alone by unmarried “friends,” only Angie’s name was on the official papers.
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 32
