Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  Indeed, the gridlock of Angie’s life delayed arrangements for a memorial service for her mother, which finally took place at Roxbury Park, the site of so many family memories, on September 1, 2007. Of course, family politics played a central part; if Jon Voight came, would James, Angie, and John Trudell, whom Marche described in her will as “one of the loves of [her] life,” boycott the event? In the end Angie was on her way to Venice for the film festival, where Brad’s movie, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, was a star attraction. Instead Jon Voight, John Trudell, and the other love of Marche’s life, Bill Day, arrived for what was jokingly billed as the “Time to Bury the Hatchet Memorial.” Marche’s sister, Debbie, even had a gold necklace with an axe on the end specially made for the event.

  Clearly Jon Voight hadn’t gotten with the program. He appeared carrying a small rosebush and proceeded, as ever, to take over the event. Small talk was at a premium, Voight curtly asking Bill Day if he was now married and had any children. As Day, who is married and has no children, recalls: “He looked at me like: ‘Well, don’t try to put any claims on mine, pal, ’cause I ain’t sharing. As far as I am concerned, when Marcheline died, you did too.’ ” After that inauspicious start, everyone, including friends like Lauren Taines, Belinha Beatty, and Jade Dixon, as well as Debbie and Marche’s brother, Raleigh, stood in a circle holding hands and fondly remembering Marcheline. Belinha Beatty made a point of saying that in spite of appearances to the contrary, Jon and Marche had worked out a loving resolution to their relationship and family life. In the end, Jon Voight, John Trudell, and Bill Day even posed for a photograph together taken by Raleigh’s son, Francis. (Sadly, six months later Raleigh, too, was gone, succumbing to cancer in February 2008.)

  There was one incongruous note: A couple of paparazzi were spotted hiding nearby. A few days later, a picture of Jon and the rest of the family appeared in a magazine. The suspicion was that Jon had alerted the media so that he could use the pictorial evidence to argue that if he was as bad as he was portrayed by his children, why was the rest of the family prepared to be with him? As one participant noted: “In the world of Voightville, the shit never ends.”

  SIXTEEN

  I have watched this family at war for decades. There comes a time to forgive and forget.

  —BILL DAY

  When Angie began filming Changeling in October 2007, she remembered her mother in her own way, carrying a picture of her in her costume handbag as she played the grievously wronged character of Christine Collins, a telephone switchboard supervisor whose son was abducted and killed. If Wanted was her escape from grief, then Changeling was a catharsis, a profoundly healing experience. She found herself drawn to Collins, as her quiet but resilient personality reminded her of “the kind of femininity that [her] mother had, that modern women don’t have so much.”

  Shortly after filming began, she discovered that she was pregnant, just before she was due to shoot harrowing scenes in a mental hospital ward. On several occasions filming was delayed because she felt sick or faint. In her heart she believes the highly charged nature of the story about a mother’s search for her abducted son actually contributed to the pregnancy. “I was so emotional about children that I think something in me kicked into gear,” she recalled. It was, though, a shock to learn that she was pregnant with twins. Brad and Angie’s much-talked-about “soccer team” was coming along sooner than ever expected.

  That November it was her second adopted child, Ethiopian-born Zahara, rather than any speculation about her condition, that was the focus of attention. It was “revealed” that Zahara was the daughter of a rape victim and not an orphan at all, the world’s media taking two years to notice Judge Dadnachew Tesfaye’s ruling in October 2005 that the adoption was legal even though Zahara’s birth mother was still alive. In fact, Mentwabe Dawit, who was unable to support her sick daughter, was thrilled that Zahara had the chance of a new life. “My baby was on the verge of death. She became malnourished and was even unable to cry,” Mentwabe told reporters. “I was desperate and decided to run away, rather than see my child dying.” Her distraught mother, Zahara’s grandmother, searched for her for a month and eventually put Zahara up for adoption in the belief that her own daughter had died or at the very least would not be found. In her hometown of Awassa in southern Ethiopia, Mentwabe kissed a picture of the actress for the cameras. “This is to show I have no ill feelings towards her,” she said. “I think my daughter is a very fortunate human being to be adopted by a world-famous lady. I wish them both all the success they deserve.” While the Ethiopian adoption agency said that the process was “legal and irrevocable,” it was now established that at least two of the three children Angelina had adopted had birth mothers who were still living, while her first adopted child, Maddox, was procured by an agency in Cambodia with a reputation for buying babies from impoverished families. The response from U.S. immigration officials was that there was no case or reason to believe Maddox was anything but a true orphan.

  Pregnant and impregnable, Angie sailed through this latest storm like some Hermès-clad galleon, impervious to rumor and criticism, glowing with beatific radiance. No longer the druggie goth, she had transformed herself into an earth mother, a modern-day goddess, voluptuous, bold but good, dispensing largesse wherever she went: In 2006 alone she gave more than $4 million to various charities, a sum matched by Brad. Even jibes from Jennifer Aniston barely scratched her image of untroubled serenity. The veil of deceit Brad and Angie had erected to keep their true relationship a secret was beginning to fall, each of them admitting, with startling if belated candor, just how far back their relationship went. Brad told Rolling Stone magazine that his favorite movie was Mr. & Mrs. Smith: “Because you know . . . six kids. Because I fell in love.”

  Jennifer considered Angie’s comments about the fact that she “couldn’t wait to get to work every day” during the making of Mr. & Mrs. Smith to be very “uncool,” rubbing fresh salt in the wounds of Brad’s betrayal. “There was stuff printed that was definitely from a time when I was unaware that it was happening,” said Aniston. Her childhood friend, actress Andrea Bendewald, was blunt, telling Vanity Fair: “It was extremely hurtful to Jen that he was seen with another woman so quickly after they were separated.” Most painful were the rumors that Jennifer wanted a career more than a child, forcing Brad to find a mate who wanted a family. As an unnamed friend told the magazine: “So is there a part of Brad that’s diabolical? Did he think, I need to get out of this marriage, but I want to come out smelling like a rose, so I’m going to let Jen be cast as the ultrafeminist and I’m going to get cast as the poor husband who couldn’t get a baby and so had to move on?”

  At one point all those evasions and denials could have come back to haunt Angie’s image, but it now seemed so last year. Angie had bigger and more important matters to attend to: launching a new United Nations campaign, Nine Million, to improve education for children around the world, meeting with the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, in November to discuss “global diplomacy,” and joining Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky on a visit to Baghdad in February 2008 to learn more about the plight of the two million youngsters under the age of twelve who were made homeless by the war. During the visit to the Green Zone, Angie met with the top U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki as well as senior Iraqi migration officials, calling for a coherent plan to allow refugees back to their homes. “There’s lots of goodwill and lots of discussion, but there seems to be just a lot of talk at the moment, and a lot of pieces that need to be put together. I’m trying to figure out what they are,” she said, penning another op-ed piece for The Washington Post on the issue.

  Her condition did eventually catch up with her. On April 8, 2008, while on a panel discussing education in Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, she got some unsolicited feedback. “I felt kicking suddenly!” said Jolie, then thirty-two. She was still able
to present a Vital Voices Global Partnership Award to her friend journalist Mariane Pearl. The kids might be kicking, but she wasn’t stopping. A month later she was back along the now-familiar corridors of power with her brother, lobbying movers and shakers on behalf of the charity Global Action for Children.

  Of course, Angie wouldn’t be Angie if she wasn’t able to pass on what was going on between the sheets during her pregnancy. “It’s great for the sex life,” she said. “It just makes you a lot more creative. So you have fun, and as a woman you’re just so round and full.” Rather than welcome their twins in America, the couple decided on France, partly inspired by Marcheline’s dream of living there one day. Angie took lessons to try to master the language, while she and Brad rented and months later bought Château Miraval, an 880-acre property on the Riviera where showbiz neighbors included Johnny Depp and his partner, Vanessa Paradis. In May, after attending the film festival in Cannes, where they stayed with Microsoft billionaire Steve Allen and dined with Changeling director Clint Eastwood and Angie’s onetime courtier Mick Jagger, they decamped to the secluded villa, which came complete with marauding wild boar—and rather less tame paparazzi. There the impatient brood waited for the big day, an event described by the local newspaper, Nice Matin, as “the most important since man walked on the moon.”

  It was normally a giant leap for Angie to remain in one place for a week, let alone be confined to a hospital for three, taking small steps around her suite of rooms. On July 12, 2008, after two frustrating weeks in the hospital, she gave birth by cesarean section at the Fondation Lenval hospital in Nice. Knox Léon arrived first, Vivienne Marcheline second, the babies weighing in at five pounds each. Brad, who helped Dr. Michel Sussmann during the thirty-minute operation, cut the umbilical cords. The doctor noted that the parents were calm, laughing and joking but deeply moved by the moment.

  With the world’s media camped outside, Knox and Vivienne instantly became the most valuable properties on earth, worth far more than their weight in gold. In fact, their images were jointly sold to People and Hello! for $14 million—the most expensive celebrity pictures ever taken, the money going to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation. Angie did most of the negotiations herself, according to The New York Times, the deal contingent on the U.S. magazine, which enjoyed its highest sales in seven years, never saying a bad word about her or her family.

  As the family themselves had generated much of the negative media, it was a case of pot and kettle. There were, though, some moves toward an amnesty in the war of the Voights. Thanks to a friend’s detective work, Jon Voight had found the whereabouts of James’s new apartment in Sherman Oaks and had driven over to see him. Even though he had said hurtful things about his father in the media, James tends to be rather passive and nonconfrontational. This quality enabled him and his father to smooth over their public differences, the duo going to watch an L.A. Lakers basketball game in early June before James flew to be by his sister’s side for the last weeks of her pregnancy. The arrival of the twins, combined with Jon’s upcoming milestone—his seventieth birthday was in December—impelled friends and family to make an extra effort to warm the frozen relations between father and daughter. Director John Boorman made a personal plea to them to heal the breach. He was not the only one, the eventual result being a short telephone conversation around Jon’s birthday. Others, like Krisann Morel, who hadn’t seen Angie since she was a babe in arms, could only sit on the sidelines and watch with frustration. “Her view of her father is partly informed by the poison fed to her by her mother. It breaks my heart to see Jon denied access to his grandchildren.”

  While Jon, increasingly aware of his own mortality, indicated his willingness to get on the next plane to France if there was a chance of seeing his six grandchildren, Brad’s parents were invited over to see the new arrivals—and to help out with the other kids. Help was indeed needed, the family having expanded by five children in just three years. During the long summer vacation, Jane Pitt was a familiar figure in the local stores, a handful of euros in one hand, her granddaughter Shiloh in the other, buying groceries for the château. Her parenting style, with set mealtimes and bedtimes and no nonsense, would have been a distinct contrast to the “no boundaries” approach promoted by Angie’s mother and the new mother herself: the Midwest meets Hollywood.

  Angie based her child-rearing methods on what she could remember—or what she told herself—about her mother’s skills. Like Marcheline had when the children behaved themselves, she gave them sticker stars that they could later exchange for treats. Naturally, given the background of the parents, home life revolved around arts and crafts and dramatic play. So when the kids reportedly threw hair dye around the bathroom and stained the walls, Angie justified it as “creative expression,” but the owners reportedly complained later about the mess. As for Jane Pitt, presumably she spent much of the summer biting her tongue.

  Angie did, however, portray herself as a traditional parent, too, telling Vanity Fair: “You end up hearing yourself saying all those clichéd parent things: ‘I don’t care who started it, but I’m here to finish it.’ I really can discipline the kids when I need to.”

  Those who visited the château were not entirely convinced. According to tabloid reports, breakfast took place at all hours of the day, Maddox, at six, allowed to use the stove to make his own concoctions, including macaroni and cheese with apple, toast, and pizza. After he had finished shooting his siblings with arrows from his catapult or toy guns—his mother also gave in to his entreaties and took him shopping for knives—he surfed the Internet looking for “weapons” or slumped in front of the TV watching SpongeBob SquarePants while his dad, usually in another room, sat glued to The Ultimate Fighter. Bedtime, like breakfast, was whenever, Brad putting the kids into their own beds only after they were well asleep.

  Otherwise they all slept together. The overall impression was one of structured chaos, a happy family squirming and struggling in a huge nine-foot-wide bed, especially on weekends, with Brad making airline reservations and reading scripts in between changing diapers. “We’re very hands-on parents, believe me,” Angie told writer Martyn Palmer.

  Besides Angie’s brother, James, and Brad’s parents, they did have other hands to help: nannies from Vietnam, the Congo, and the U.S.; four nurses; a doctor on permanent call; two personal assistants; a cook; a maid; two cleaners; a plongeur, or busboy; four close-protection bodyguards; and six French former army guards patrolling the extensive grounds. The staff all stayed in a nearby hotel. However harassed Angie and Brad may have felt with six children, they still had a way to go to match Angie’s inspiration, dancer Josephine Baker, who raised twice as many orphans, also with the aid of a huge staff, at her home at Château des Milandes in the Dordogne.

  There was one significant figure missing from this domestic caravan: the stocky figure of Mickey “Snowy” Brett, Angie’s loyal bodyguard for the last eight years. When she first met him for the filming of Lara Croft she arrived in London with just a duffel bag. Now she needed a coach to move her family and entourage. Brett’s departure showed how the wind was blowing inside the château of Brad and Angie. For all the chatter that Brad was just minding the kids while Angie got on with men’s work, the boy from Springfield was not quite the grinning pussycat he seemed.

  For years Brett and Angie had enjoyed a father/daughter relationship, the muscular East Ender, with a reputation for using threats in confrontations with photographers, regularly treated to her overblown generosity. Over the years she had given him lavish bonuses and, on one occasion, a Cartier watch. When Brad arrived on the scene, all that changed. For Christmas 2007 Brett got a pair of slippers. It was a not-so-subtle way of suggesting that Brett no longer occupied the position of prominence he had once enjoyed.

  There were three of them in this relationship, and it was, to coin a phrase, “a bit crowded.” Brad was asserting his rights as top dog, the alpha male who would brook no rival. Someone had to go, and it wasn’t going to be him.
According to Brett, the actor demeaned him by sending him to sex shops to buy face masks and other rubber paraphernalia for the kinky pair. Brett was outraged at this humiliating treatment—it was almost the first story he told casual acquaintances. Seeing the writing on the wall, Snowy melted from the scene, believing that Brad, brooding and moody, was not the man to make Angie as happy as she deserved to be.

  As with Brett, so with Angie’s brother, Brad keeping a wary eye on his day-to-day involvement with his family. While he welcomed James’s help, Brad was not enthusiastic about swapping one intrusive male in the family mix for another and kept the boundaries clear. He apparently vetoed James’s desire to be in the delivery room when his sister gave birth. In his position as family patriarch—unsurprisingly, one of his favorite shows is MTV’s Run’s House, about the chaotic family life of rapper and hip-hop pioneer Joseph Simmons—he questioned Angie’s insistence that James adopt children of his own. As James had no permanent relationship or job, Brad didn’t think adoption was a realistic option for him, someone he described as an “overgrown kid.” To date, James has still to adopt.