While the Bertrand matriarchs have tended to rule the roost in their families, this is not the case with Brad and Angie. Theirs is a competitive relationship, a constant vying for supremacy. At the “boy racer” level they chased each other on their motorbikes, while Brad was so desperate to get his own private pilot’s licence—like his partner—that he took endless flying lessons from the Nice airport so that he could take her for a joyride. It bugged him that she had earned both British and American certifications while he struggled to certify to fly planes in America, where the rules are less rigorous.
The couple share, too, an innate restlessness—“My theory is be the shark, you’ve got to keep moving,” says Brad—their edgy energy funnels into their good works and creativity as well as their highly sexual relationship. As with her other lovers, Angie’s public displays of affection can be embarrassing in the company of friends. When they fought, which was often, he would go off on his motorbike to cool down while she called his parents, brother, sister, and everyone she knew to find out where he was.
At heart, though, they were a couple of guys, and while Brad was the more likely to have a beer and shoot the breeze, it was a matter of debate on any given day as to who was wearing the trousers. Even with such a combustible, volatile, passionate yet seemingly compatible relationship, the arrival of the twins changed their lives much more than they anticipated. Like she had during the adoption of Pax, Angie spoke often and publicly about reining in her workload and focusing on her family. “My kids are my priority so it’s possible from now I will make fewer movies. I may stop altogether,” she told Italian Vanity Fair. It was a similar refrain with the BBC and others. Her mantra was: “I don’t plan to keep acting very long. I will take a year off. I have a lot of children. I have a big responsibility to make sure that they’re growing right and that they have got us there for them.”
Yet just five weeks after giving birth, still struggling to properly breast-feed—though that didn’t stop Brad from taking black-and-white pictures of her doing so for his friends at W magazine—she was in talks to replace Tom Cruise in the spy thriller Edwin A. Salt. After Cruise dropped out, writers busily reworked the lead character to be female, Angie set to portray a CIA officer falsely accused of being a Russian agent. (The movie was renamed Salt.) Once more there was a gap between her words and her deeds, a dissonance that she herself had grown up with. As ever, once she had taken the new chicks under her wing, Angie was desperate to fly the coop and leave Brad literally holding the babies. Her pattern seems to be one of possession and abandonment, endlessly reworking a deep-seated psychological script based on her own childhood experiences. Apparently, her psychic emptiness, the void she often talked about, could not be filled for long—even by a new arrival. As one observer with an inside track on the couple said: “He got stuck with the nanny role. She told him she was going to be a mom and not do all those movies. Yet she did movie after movie. In his mind she broke that sacred contract, to have children and be a family together.” In fairness, though, as one of the highest-paid female stars in Hollywood, with a $15 million price tag, a relatively short time at the top, and a lot of hungry mouths to feed, who could blame her for cashing in?
There was more than cash at stake with the arrival of Knox and Vivienne. Quite simply, Angie struggled. In her mind’s eye she had, as a typical Gemini who craves symmetry and a twin, a vision of introducing an African brother or sister to match with Zahara. Viewing her burgeoning family like a latter-day Noah’s ark or even a cake, she called bringing another orphan into the family mix “layering in.” Every time she visited a refugee camp or an orphanage she was racked with enormous guilt that she couldn’t do more by rescuing another child from poverty. Those close to her believed that she was focused on adopting a child from the African state of Zimbabwe, currently suffering widespread starvation under the repressive regime of Robert Mugabe. An adoption agency in South Africa had been briefed on her requirements. Indeed, when the then Opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, was injured in a car crash that killed his wife, it was reported that one of the first messages of condolence came from Angie.
Her surprise pregnancy put an end to that dream—for the moment. It was one of the reasons, friends said, that she initially found it difficult to bond with Knox and Vivienne. Later she warmed to Knox because he was the more fragile and struggled with his breathing. Still, though, she aimed to adopt an African orphan to bond with Zahara, but Brad, knowing her propensity to adopt and then take off, was more circumspect. He felt it sensible to consolidate for at least a year before “layering in” another slice of baby cake.
If her failure to honor their “contract” was a brooding undercurrent, then Brad, too, was equally culpable. As she recuperated from giving birth, Brad was smoking pot and downing five bottles of rosé with Quentin Tarantino, who visited the château to try to convince Brad to appear in his World War II drama, Inglourious Basterds. At the start of the evening, Brad said he couldn’t possibly take on the role of Nazi hunter Aldo Raine. By the time the sun rose over the vineyards, the drunken couple had sworn eternal friendship and Pitt had signed on for Tarantino’s army.
When the family moved to Berlin for the start of the shoot in September, the frat-house atmosphere continued after the cameras stopped rolling, Brad joining the guys for beers and banter. Every week Tarantino hosted a film night. One time Brad took Maddox along to see the spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, starring a now-familiar face, Clint Eastwood.
The family and staff had only just settled into their huge rented villa in the Wannsee neighborhood of Berlin in October when they picked up again and flew to New York for the premiere of Changeling. Then they all returned to Germany before once again flying to New York, where Angie was promoting her latest movie. “It’s a rule of ours we keep the platoon together,” Brad explained.
With probably one of the largest individual carbon footprints in the world, Angie believed that the children actually enjoyed their globe-trotting lifestyle, bouncing from châteaux, to villas, to rented houses and sometimes their own homes in New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles. “Sure, I am still restless,” she said. “But do you know that my kids are the same way? We were in France these last few months and after a while they started asking when we could get back on a plane.”
Their apparent enthusiasm contrasts with Angie’s own childhood memories and complaints that she was constantly on the move and never had a permanent home. Yet she lived on the same street for most of her life, moving to Snedens Landing outside New York for just a few years before returning to California to finish her schooling in Beverly Hills. There are those in her circle who believe she is, however unconsciously, using her children as a shield; she is the one who cannot bear to stay anywhere for long, to dare to make anywhere “home.” Her apartment at the Ansonia in Manhattan never felt permanent, with nothing in the fridge and half-unpacked suitcases in the living room. Certainly Maddox, now nine, is at an age when he wants to play with other youngsters. Life in Angie’s traveling circus, albeit in private jets and luxury limousines, will at some point be seen by him and his siblings as a deprivation, stopping them from joining in with the crowd.
Angie, though, is not stopping anytime soon. Her peripatetic lifestyle is much more than films and promotion; she is now part of the furniture in the world of international relations and humanitarian aid. Recognized as one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people of 2008, she formed a substantive part of a major paradigm shift in Hollywood, where activist actors were becoming the rule rather than the exception. While Hollywood’s helping hand was nothing new—Audrey Hepburn was a tireless Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF—the confluence of so many celebrity voices on thorny issues like the killings in Darfur focused the public and ultimately the administration on taking a tougher stance with the Sudanese government. Angie, now dubbed the Mother Teresa of Hollywood, was a leading light in this process. She earned praise from JFK’s onetime speechwriter, T
ed Sorenson, who sat in an audience of policy wonks and power players, including General Wesley Clark, at the Council on Foreign Relations in October 2008, when she spoke about the need for peace with justice in places like Darfur. “Frankly I came a skeptic, but am leaving impressed,” he said. It seemed the days of “mist reading,” when journalists tried vainly to decipher what she was trying to say, were over.
SHE’S ACTUALLY SMART, said the headline in the Daily Beast blog, the patronizing tone drawing ire from Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who specializes in global conflicts. “Until we have an administration that cares about these issues, we have to accept moral leadership where we can find it—and that includes celebrities who care,” he wrote, singling out Bono, Ashley Judd, Ben Affleck, Mia Farrow, and of course Angie as examples of stars who shine a light on subjects politicians often shy away from. The role of the celebrity advocate is increasingly influential, their participation essential in bringing difficult issues into the mainstream of the American conversation. They are global politicians, without a party or a manifesto, and, unlike the Hollywood activists of Jon Voight’s youth, they have deep pockets and access to the corridors of power.
While Angie was speaking on global issues, for once the spotlight was on her father. During the presidential election, Jon Voight, a guest at the 2008 Republican National Convention, launched a savage attack on Democratic candidate Barack Obama, the media, and what he described as the nation’s “lunatic fringe.” He then went on to provide the voice-over for a promotional video for Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. If he was trying to woo his children, he was hardly helping his cause. James, a pro-Obama activist who considered running for office himself in Nevada or California, was furious with his father for his outspoken attacks on the man who became the next president.
Angie, who privately dismissed Sarah Palin as setting back “the cause of women a century,” was much more circumspect in public about her political affiliations. She was aware that as a UN lobbyist she would have to curry favor with whichever party was in power if she wanted to be an effective voice on the Hill. It was one of the reasons why she was a registered Independent, although, in keeping with her strong Voight genes, she admitted that she and Clint Eastwood, a noted Republican, saw eye to eye on numerous issues. She even initiated a truce with her father, calling him around his birthday on December 29 and making occasional contact thereafter. It was an uneasy peace, most conversations confined to the children and what books they were reading.
Angie and Brad had campaigns of their own to wage after they were both nominated for Oscars, she for her understated but powerful performance in Changeling, and Brad, who had just turned forty-five, for his role as a man who ages in reverse in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In their game of one-upmanship, even though Brad had now been nominated for the second time, it was his partner who had won an Oscar for Girl, Interrupted. While she noted with an unconcerned shrug that her late mother had somehow misplaced her Oscar, she and Brad were quietly assiduous in schmoozing the red carpet during the awards season, glad-handing one and all at ceremonies in Hollywood, London, and elsewhere. The Oscars epitomized the Angie and Brad brand, a schizophrenic mixture of glamour and grit, the couple flying to the Thailand/Myanmar (formerly Burma) border shortly before the awards ceremony. There they met with Rohingya refugees, a minority community denied citizenship in their own country by the brutal military dictatorship. Their stories were heartbreaking; a month before, the Thai military had towed six boats carrying Rohingya refugees out to sea, and five of the craft had sunk, leaving hundreds drowned. In her capacity as UN Goodwill Ambassador, Angie asked the Thai authorities to accept Muslim migrants fleeing the tyranny of their next-door neighbors.
Within days of leaving this living hell, they were back to a different surreality, walking the red carpet for the Academy Awards, once again ignoring TV host Ryan Seacrest. Indeed, it was these wild swings in her life that inspired Angie to ask twenty-seven friends, including Jude Law, Hilary Swank, Colin Farrell, and Jonny Lee Miller, to film what they saw at the same time at different locations around the globe. Her ex-husband found himself, perhaps symbolically, allocated a minefield. The resulting documentary, A Place in Time, Angie’s directorial debut, captured something of these extremes, of radically different lives, cultures, and experiences.
On Oscar night in March 2009, Angie and Brad were front and center in their real-life soap opera. All eyes were on the celebrity couple as much for their dramatic potential as for their Oscar-nominated acting chops. They sat in the front row, just feet from the podium where Jack Black and Jennifer Aniston were presenting the animated feature award. Would she, could she, would they, could they . . . look at each other, that is? In the end Jen fluffed her first lines and smiled in the general direction of her nemesis and her former husband while Brad and Angie laughed at the rehearsed banter onstage. It was left to the professional mist readers in the tabloids to divine that Jen’s smile was “only for Brad.”
For all their efforts, the couple left empty-handed, Sean Penn winning the Oscar for his role in Milk and British actress Kate Winslet for hers in The Reader.
It was back to work: Angie filmed the action drama Salt, helmed by Phillip Noyce, who had worked with Angie on The Bone Collector, in Washington, New York State, and Manhattan; while just down the road, Brad reprised his starring role as Mr. Mom at the couple’s rented estate at Oyster Bay on Long Island. An early riser, he liked to make breakfast for the children before taking them to school. Just a normal stay-at-home dad, except locals noticed that moms bussing their kids to and from Maddox’s school seemed to be wearing higher heels and more makeup than usual. He took the attention in stride, Brad and the kids regulars at Dunkin’ Donuts, the local pizza parlor, and Borders bookstore, while he took the boys to Niagara Falls, bike riding, and to the local mall. Even so, this was Mr. Mom with a difference: Brad met with President Obama and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in March to discuss how to do more to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and later that month talked with Newark mayor Cory Booker about a potential partnership to build housing projects in New Jersey.
As worthy as these causes were, the story that got the most attention concerned the night Angie arrived home unexpectedly at their Long Island mansion. When she walked through the door, she found a scene of devastation, the kids causing mayhem, the TV blaring away, and Brad upstairs, beer in hand, slumped on the bed. She gave him hell. “Will you please respect the fact that I am working right now?” she was reported as shouting. “All you have to do today is watch the kids. Will you please do it?”
Sadly, the story, as much as it consoled working mothers worldwide to hear that even the sexiest woman on the planet had trouble keeping her lazy, good-for-nothing partner in line, was dismissed as nonsense by Team Jolie-Pitt. Nevertheless, it seemed to have the ring of truth, and Brad’s behavior was probably one of the few things Angie and Brad’s ex-wife would ever agree on. His laid-back approach informed Jennifer’s thinking about having children. “She didn’t want to be stuck at home with a baby while he behaved like a forty-two-year-old adolescent, partying, smoking, and working out,” recalled a friend. Angie confessed that if Brad defied her, she was likely to fly off the handle. “Then I can get so angry that I tear his shirt,” she told Das Neue magazine.
While the cozy image of domestic disharmony added to the gaiety of nations, there were more troubling whispers. Angie, clearly painfully thin and very pale, was spending much of her time holed up in her suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, seemingly ignoring Brad and her children. She had done the same before when filming A Mighty Heart, leaving the kids with Brad and their platoon of nannies while staying in a hotel in Beverly Hills. At that time she explained that in order to perfect Mariane Pearl’s French accent and inhabit her new character, she needed time away from her madding crowd of kids. It was reminiscent of her mother’s desire for “me time,” leaving James and
Angie in the company of nannies while she read self-help books, reviewed her astrological chart, and wrote poetry.
This time Angie had a simple explanation for her absence from the rented family home. Her film work was so utterly demanding—the mother of six spent her days jumping through windows and off bridges, cars, and subway trains—that she didn’t want to arrive home exhausted and unable to give the children her full attention. “She doesn’t want to be irritable and short-tempered around the kids while she is totally focused on the part,” noted a close friend. After all, she had given Brad space when he was working with Tarantino in Berlin on his bloody war movie.
There were times Brad became the punching bag for her frustrations, Angie picking fault with the way he was handling the children as a way of venting her own tired anger. In their flashpoint arguments she would hurl insults at him and dare him to leave the family. For his part he found this rapid escalation of their fights to be frustrating and irritating. Whether she meant what she said or not, Brad made it clear that he was in it for the long haul. He wasn’t going anywhere soon.
Angie took out her frustrations on others, too—much to the delight of director Phillip Noyce. Inside the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, Angie was in the mood to kill. In between organizing playdates with stunt coordinator and martial-arts expert Wade Allen, who is the father of two sons, she was kicking the bad guys to death. Her director wanted Angie’s character, CIA agent Evelyn Salt, to show a cruel, vicious streak, and he wanted the fight sequences to be correspondingly “street and grungy.” This was something of a private joke between Angie and the stunt team. She had appeared in a mockumentary, Sledge: The Untold Story, about a fictitious stuntman whose claim to fame was introducing dance into screen fights. In a spoof interview about the stuntman, Angie deadpans: “We’re all going to have to dance. . . . I hate dance.” There was no dancing in her latest movie; in one sequence, which she rehearsed in the hotel suite, Angie performed what is known as a “stutter step” in front of a prone assailant. In the moments from looking at the guy to kicking him, Angie’s attitude suggested, “I’m going to hurt you because I want to and I can.” Fellow assailant, stuntman Rich Ting, lying prone on the floor, watched the move and thought: “This girl is vicious—and very sexy.” Then, in between rehearsals in April she would be on the phone to Brad, asking after the children before continuing her one-woman killing game. As they rehearsed she got so up close and personal with Ting, a Calvin Klein model, that he moved away. “What’s wrong? Do I smell?” she joked.
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 37
