Angie responded to her mother’s death in the only way she knew how—by keeping herself busy. Just three weeks after Marche’s passing, Angie was on the road again, spending two days in late February 2007 at the Oure-Cassoni refugee camp in eastern Chad, home to victims of the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region. “It’s always hard to see decent people, families, living in such difficult conditions,” said the UN Goodwill Ambassador, who had to cross the Sahara in a sandstorm in order to reach the 26,000-person camp. Several weeks after her visit, she and Brad Pitt, under the umbrella of the Jolie-Pitt Foundation, donated $1 million toward the humanitarian mission to assist more than four million people affected by the war in Darfur.
Just as satisfying for the girl striving to be “good” was an op-ed piece she penned for The Washington Post in late February, drawing on her experience to argue that there would be no permanent peace in Darfur until the perpetrators of the violence faced justice. For the first time she was referred to as a UN Goodwill Ambassador rather than an actor. At last she had broken free of the Hollywood ghetto, a fact underlined that month when she was nominated for membership in the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank on international discourse that included four former secretaries of state as well heavyweights like Richard Holbrooke, Tom Brokaw, and Alan Greenspan. Her membership was confirmed that June.
Still, it was her private life, rather than her public works, that excited the most attention. On March 2, days after Angie returned from Darfur, Vietnam’s top adoption official confirmed that the mother of three was about to add to her family. As Vietnam has a rigorous and complex adoption procedure, Brad and Angie had started the process the previous May, shortly after Shiloh’s birth, their application shepherded by the Adoptions From The Heart agency. Since Vietnamese law makes it difficult for unmarried couples to adopt, Angie applied solo, though with her partner’s full support, the couple agreeing that it would be good for their family to be ethnically balanced.
When they visited Ho Chi Minh City during Thanksgiving 2006, Brad and Angie had made a connection with a “shy but friendly” little boy, Pham Quang Sang, who celebrated his third birthday shortly after they distributed gifts to toddlers at Tam Binh orphanage. Abandoned at birth by his heroin addict mother, Pham Thu Dung, the youngster enjoyed a simple but familiar routine with 326 other orphans. All that was about to change.
So he wouldn’t be alarmed, Pham wasn’t told that he was about to meet his new mother—and brother and sister—until March 14, the day Angie arrived at the orphanage. Brad’s filming commitments did not allow him to be present, so Maddox and Zahara were their mother’s wingmen. The official handover in a room at the Department of Justice the following day didn’t go quite according to script, the “rather shy and dazed” three-year-old bursting into tears in the presence of the world’s most glamorous woman. While Maddox, now five, roamed around the nondescript room, the tearful Pham Quang Sang seemed bewildered.
Within a matter of minutes, he had entered a parallel universe. He had a new family, a new home, a new language, a new culture, and a new name, Angie calling him Pax Thien Jolie. The name Pax, Latin for “peace,” was first suggested by her mother, while Thien traditionally means “sky” in Vietnamese. Suddenly he was scooped from a life of order and certainty to the pandemonium of “Angie’s world,” his new mother, brother, bodyguard, and others taking almost an hour to reach their hotel amid the scrum of paparazzi and the curious. At one point, in a desperate effort to slow the convoy, paparazzi threw their crash helmets under the wheels of Angie’s car. The newly minted mother of four was acutely aware of the difficulties. “Photographs and press coverage will make him upset,” she told the Ho Chi Min Law newspaper. “I’m very worried about that.”
Aware, too, of the difficulties the youngster faced in adapting to a new country and a new language, Angie was committed to slowly building a bond of trust. During an interview with a Vietnamese journalist, she admitted that it would take her latest addition some time to realize that he now had a permanent family and that his life would not keep changing. To that end she stated emphatically that she had no plans to resume work. “I will stay at home to help Pax adjust to his new life. I have four children now, and caring for them is the most important thing for me at the moment. I am very happy to be their mother.”
In spite of these assurances, the bewilderment on Pax’s face was matched by the general unease in the media and in the wider public over the practice of celebrities—and politicians—swooping into Third World countries and walking away with orphans. Angie herself had entered the debate earlier in the year, when she questioned the decision by Madonna and her then husband, Guy Ritchie, to adopt a baby boy from Malawi, a country with lax adoption laws. “Personally I prefer to stay on the right side of the law,” Jolie reportedly told the French magazine Gala, though she later made clear that she was “horrified” by the attacks on Madonna and Ritchie. Nor was Angie herself spared condemnation. Commentator Fiona Looney accused Angie of “choosing her babies like handbags.” Upbraiding Vietnamese officials for a “terrible disregard” for Pax’s emotional welfare, the Daily Mail columnist argued that just as it was cruel to change a dog’s name when it was several years old, it was even worse for a confused little boy. Arizona-based columnist Tracy Dingmann, herself an adopted child, observed: “To me it looks like Jolie is collecting cute little brown kids like she collects tattoos,” going on to quote Susan Caughman, editor of Adoptive Families magazine, who cautioned against adopting numerous children in a short period of time and out of birth order. To further add to the ethical debate about the adoption of Third World youngsters by rich Westerners, it was revealed that Pax’s distraught mother, Pham Thu Dung, had kicked heroin—like Pax’s adoptive mother—and was working in a shoe factory for fifty dollars a month. Though she was racked with guilt at giving away her son, she had no plans to reclaim him. She told her sister Pham Thu Trang: “I gave up my rights as a mother when I abandoned him. He is better off where he is. Now he has a life I could never give him.” Instead this sad and forlorn figure followed his progress as part of the world’s most famous rainbow family via the Internet or picture magazines—rather like his maternal grandfather. Within days of his adoption, pictures of Pax appeared on the covers of People and Hello! magazines in a deal worth a reported $2 million.
Perhaps anticipating the furor that would accompany her third overseas adoption, Angie’s involvement in her latest movie, Wanted, was not formally announced until March 26—the naming of the director, Timur Bekmambetov, and the casting of the leading men, Morgan Freeman and James McAvoy, having been released in Variety the previous December. Indeed, during the film’s promotion, McAvoy said he felt rather “intimidated” when told that his love interest was to be Ms. Jolie, implying that he knew of her involvement from the get-go. She was committed to a three-month shoot, flying to Prague in May and then to Chicago, where she played an assassin training the son of a fellow assassin in the deadly arts. It was the kind of stylish action adventure hokum she enjoyed, but she needed to be fit and focused.
After a long day’s filming—which she saw as therapy after her mother’s death—there would not be much energy left for mothering. Once Wanted wrapped, she was scheduled to star in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, the true story of a mother’s ultimately hopeless search for her son abducted by a serial killer. After that, she was slated to be a voice in the epic cartoon Beowulf before starring in a film version of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged.
If Angie could have spoken to her new son rather than using gestures, how would she have explained the disparity between her public statements in Vietnam that she was going to put her career on the back burner to focus on family and the fact that, even as she made the pledge, she was already contracted to work on a movie that started filming almost before Pax became familiar with the layout of his new home? On the level of short-term public relations, it was a way to dodge the bullets fired by the Vietnamese and international m
edia concerned about Pax’s welfare. Once on board the private jet that flew her and her family back to America, she knew she had lived to fight another day. Sweetened by the news that she and Brad had donated $100,000 to support the “Lost Boys” of the Sudan, the simultaneous announcement of her new movie passed largely without comment.
On another level, though, this was part of a pattern of behavior that gives an intriguing insight into Angie’s psyche. As a working mother, she had no genuine need to dissemble. In her mind’s eye, however, the image of motherhood was represented by her idealized vision of Marcheline’s, giving up her career for the sake of the children. That was the narrative she—and others—believed, even though it was clearly untrue. Her mother continued to pursue an acting career and even moved to New York in the hope of attaining her dream. In her own way, Marcheline was a working mom. Yet this notion of the “domestic goddess” was the story Angie told herself and presented to the world not only about her own mother but about herself as a mother. As writer Susan Chenery observed: “There is something slightly preposterously pathological about all the things she is trying to be in her personal quest to be a ‘good woman.’ ”
On an even deeper level, she was reliving the profound imprinted experience of abandonment that lay just at the edge of her consciousness. Known as “repetition compulsion,” it is the state of mind represented colloquially by a phrase heard in families the world over: “If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for you.” That is to say, many hurt or abused children grow up to impose similar hurt and abuse on their own children. And so the pattern repeats.
While Angie could not articulate the abandonment she felt in that stark-white nursery, it informed her adult behavior in a variety of ways. As a survivor of abandonment herself, she identified with those who had gone through the same experience, associating more deeply with her orphaned children than with her biological child. “I think I feel so much more for Mad and Zee because they’re survivors, they came through so much,” she told Elle magazine. “Shiloh seemed so privileged from the moment she was born. I have less inclination to feel for her. . . . I met my other kids when they were six months old, they came with a personality. A newborn really is this . . . Yes, a blob!”
Yet her relationships with both adults and children could be characterized as “Come here, now go away.” A few examples should suffice: Within weeks of her marriage to Jonny Lee Miller, she began an affair with Tim Hutton; within days of marrying Billy Bob Thornton, she was on a plane to London to film Lara Croft; no sooner had she adopted Maddox than she ditched Billy Bob and left the boy with her mother and brother while she headed off to Ecuador; once Zahara was deemed out of danger in the New York hospital she began filming The Good Shepherd; and now with Pax she was flying to Prague for long days of filming—albeit with Brad and the children in tow. All the while she repeated the mantra of the need for family, of giving up work, of focusing on the children. Yet she was as much a savior as a mother. Nowhere was the disconnect between words and actions more apparent than with Pax. As her former babysitter Krisann Morel observes: “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?”
Angie was repeating her mother’s cycle in other ways. Just as Marcheline broke Elke Bertrand’s heart by stopping her from seeing her step-grandchildren, so the pattern was renewed with Angie and her father. The famous Bertrand freeze had certainly found a home with Angie.
If Pax would have been confused by the behavior of his new mother, he would have been equally alarmed by the family she came from. This was clearly a family at war. In the same week as the announcement of her extensive filming schedule, his uncle, James Haven, whom he had yet to meet, launched a ferocious public attack on the grandfather Pax was not allowed to meet.
In an interview with British journalist Sharon Feinstein, James described Jon Voight as a “manipulative,” abusive, and stingy father who left him with “horrible memories,” especially about the way he treated his mother. Not only was Voight never around during his childhood, but he deliberately kept Marcheline short of money. This was not a one-off rant. James later told Marie Claire magazine: “I don’t want to constantly berate my father but he put my mom through years of mental abuse and made me care especially for abandoned women and children. That is my religion—helping widows and orphans.”
By contrast, James explained that he and his sister had nothing but wonderful memories of their mother. “Angie and I would walk in and comment on how we could smell things cooking and baking in the kitchen,” he recalled. “She’d be in the middle of cooking and pick up a carrot and teach us about the vegetable or the fruit.”
It is hard to know what to make of this narrative. Certainly those who knew the family were horrified at James’s vituperation toward his father. So much of what he said was plain wrong. For starters, Marche never cooked. Ever. The nearest she ever got to cooking were the very rare occasions she made soup. The children did have a healthy, nutritious diet, but their meals came from high-end supermarkets, or their mother ordered takeout.
Then there was the nature of James’s relationship with his father. Jon Voight had always seen James as more of a “buddy” than Angie. They played basketball together, James lived with him for a couple of years as a teenager, his father paid for him to attend the private University of Southern California and bought him a brand-new Porsche sports car when he graduated with honors as a budding director. Thereafter he bought him a condo in the same building in West Hollywood as his sister—she paid for her own, though her father acted as guarantor—and when he decided, out of the blue, to become an actor, his father took him around to every casting agent in Hollywood. Not exactly the behavior of a stingy, absent father.
For a time his father kept his counsel, but he later told Life and Style magazine that he believed the “trauma” of their mother’s passing had deepened rather than healed the rift. “I find it very heartbreaking that my children want to paint a bad guy portrait of me. I feel it comes from the inability to let go of years of programmed anger from their mother, who understandably felt quite hurt when we divorced. In truth, I tried to give him [Haven] and their mother continuous love and support and large sums of money. God knows, for years I’ve tried to mend this relationship.”
This family feud continued from beyond the grave. Marche’s will, released on April 10, 2007, indicated her unending bitterness toward her ex-husband. In a handwritten note in the margin, she claimed that her assets included $180,000 in “unpaid spousal support.” Even Marcheline’s friends were baffled by this statement. For all his faults, Voight had religiously paid the agreed monies in spousal and child support even when his own earnings took a dive. He even continued to pay alimony to his first wife, Lauri Peters. Unnoticed in Marcheline’s will was the $500,000 that had been accumulating interest ever since Jon Voight gave it to her for the house she never bought. The reason for Marche’s continued animosity was clear, certainly in the eyes of her onetime friend Krisann Morel. “Jon Voight took away her fancy dream life, and she never got over that anger. It was so debilitating to carry that hatred around with her.”
Nonetheless, Marcheline was still Angie’s mother, her safe harbor, mentor, manager, best friend, and consoler in chief, the woman she spoke with every day. Angie’s sense of loss was clear when she broke down during an interview on the Today show in May to promote A Mighty Heart. “Damn it, you got me crying,” she told Ann Curry as she wiped away the tears, a spear of memory piercing her still-grieving heart. “I’m holding on to my family real tight at this moment—trying to be as good a woman as I can be.” As she talked proudly to the media about her latest baby, the first serious film under the Plan B umbrella, it was clear that her mother’s death was much on her mind. “This year I lost my mom. I’ve gone through a lot. I have four kids. I just finished breast-feeding. I do want people to understand that I
am just trying to work through a very difficult year.”
The film’s producer, Brad Pitt, chipped in, too, revealing that Marcheline’s death had one positive effect—it stopped them from fighting. “There’s going to come a time when I’m not going to get to be with this person anymore,” he said. “So if we have a flare-up it evaporates now. I don’t want to waste time being angry at someone I love.”
Doling out nuggets about Planet Brangelina, Angie admitted that she couldn’t cook, said Pax was now the loudest, boldest member of the family, and stressed the importance of grandparents—Brad’s parents, that is—in her children’s lives.
Angie’s powerful performance as Mariane Pearl was a triumphant return to form; she played the role of a woman who had become a close friend with a rigor and a passion that surprised even jaded skeptics. As film critic James Christopher wrote in the London Times: “The film belongs to Jolie. She won an Oscar for 1999’s Girl, Interrupted, but this is by far her best performance, strong and true in every detail. Her total immersion in the role keeps the film from getting lost in the rush of details. Even after Daniel’s death and subsequent beheading, Mariane holds Daniel’s spirit close. Jolie sees to it that the humane and haunting A Mighty Heart honors that spirit.” Chicago-based critic Roger Ebert found her performance “physically and emotionally convincing,” saying, “She has a genuine screen presence. She holds the attention without asking for it.” While the film just about broke even financially—returning $19 million worldwide on a budget of $16 million—it earned Angie twelve award nominations, including for a Golden Globe and an Empire Award from the same magazine that was writing her career obituary the year before.
Her life was now a juggling act; she was selling A Mighty Heart in New York, Cannes, and elsewhere; shooting up the bad guys in Wanted in Prague and Chicago; and prepping for her upcoming role as telephone switchboard supervisor Christine Collins in Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood, a man whom she would come to see as another surrogate father. Then there was the little matter of raising her first biological child and three orphans, only two of whom could speak passable English. Little wonder Brad seemed more and more to assume the role of wife to her busy executive husband. One week that summer she went from filming Wanted in Chicago until four in the morning to flying to Syria and Iraq in her role as UN Goodwill Ambassador and dashing to the Hamptons in a helicopter for a fund-raiser for Brad’s New Orleans Make It Right project. As The New Yorker magazine described the superstar child wrangler: “His expression is sometimes that of a man who stepped out to hail a cab and got run over by a fleet of trucks.” Like most parents, he discovered that the experience made him more focused and better organized. “It’s the most fun I have ever had and also the biggest pain in the ass I have ever experienced,” he said of his growing “cuckoo’s nest.” “I love it and I can’t recommend it any more highly.”
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 35
