As a free-spirited woman, she has constructed a gilded cage for herself, surrounded by the vulnerable, the needy, and the dispossessed, with an ever-expanding family and a partner who, in sickness and health, clearly shares this brave adventure with her. There is no easy escape and there are few opportunities to cut and run. Angie, this creature of air, has deliberately anchored herself in the reality of a partnership and family life. On her body is a quotation from Tennessee Williams that reads: “A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.” In truth, she should add: “Of their own making.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCE NOTES
When I first saw Angelina Jolie at a film premiere for the Peace One Day charity at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater in September 2005, the response to her reminded me how people behaved when the late Diana, Princess of Wales, walked into a room. Unlike the royal demographic, though, the women in this audience looked as if they had just stepped off the catwalk or come from making a keynote business speech, while the guys had that Brad Pitt vibe going on. Yet when Ms. Jolie walked into the theater in a long silver dress, all conversation, BlackBerry and other, came to a halt as sophisticated heads craned to get a better look. For some reason, she sat a couple of seats away from me, and I can confirm that the physiognomy and the rest of the bits did not disappoint.
The takeaway from the evening was twofold: How sad to think that the goals of a charity whose raison d’être is to encourage the human race to stop killing one another for one day a year seemed so far off; and what on earth was the quietly charismatic Angelina doing at such a function?
At the time, I was researching a book on Tom Cruise and was based in Beverly Hills. Most mornings I ran around Roxbury Park, one of the few spots of public green in an otherwise palm tree–lined concrete desert. Little did I realize that this modest oasis of grass and roses held a major clue to the secret that is the extraordinary life of Angelina Jolie. While I wrote my biography on the couch-jumping actor, Angie did what stars do: twinkle—but also give birth, adopt a child, and visit places like Peshawar, in the bandit country between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now a virtual no-go zone, even in those days Peshawar was hardly a place for hardened charity workers, let alone bona fide Hollywood movie stars.
I was intrigued to know more. At first viewing, Angelina Jolie seems to be a young woman who has lived in plain sight: an actress happy to talk about her love life, sexual preferences, drug use, tattoos, and why she kissed her brother on the lips in public. Secrets and Angelina Jolie don’t usually fit in the same sentence. Like other savvy Hollywood stars, she has shaped, often unintentionally, the landscape of her life to fit our expectations of how a celebrity behaves. It works.
Yet the true story of Angelina Jolie remains largely uncharted territory. Her statements are taken at face value, her stories uncorroborated. As a result, Kipling’s “six honest serving men,” What, Why, When, How, Where, and Who, have worked overtime on sorting the fact from the fiction of her extraordinary life. How did this woman who was a self-confessed drug user become a leading light in the United Nations? What lay behind this restless need to adopt children? And what with the cutting, the kissing, and the coke? Why Billy Bob? And when Brad Pitt?
It soon became clear that her life had been marred and scarred by the marital rift between her parents, a schism that had shaped her view of herself and informed her subsequent actions. Perhaps more than many others’, Angie’s story owes much to the character and nature of her parents, actor Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand, their lives defining who she is and, perhaps more important, how she sees herself.
Within a few weeks of starting my research, I discovered an extraordinary story about Angelina, a fresh and compelling narrative that perhaps only impinged on the edge of her consciousness and yet defined who she is and how she subsequently behaved. The facts I uncovered and the circumstances surrounding them meant that I knew more about Angelina’s life, what formed her, what drove her, than she did herself. It unlocked the door to understanding the dynamic yet enigmatic character of one of the world’s best-known and possibly best-loved actresses.
Angie’s story is essentially a synthesis of revelation and interpretation, uncovering new material about her life while trying to place her journey in the context of what she says, what she believes, and what she does. Words and actions rarely act in concert. Picking a path through the shifting sands of words, actions, belief, and fact has been the most ticklish aspect of this journey. I have enjoyed the company of many guides, some of whom have become good friends. While they have been generous with their memories and insights, the conclusions and interpretation, however ill-judged, are my responsibility alone.
Although Angie is one of the most picked-over celebrities of the modern age, for the most part I have relied on original research and interviews with contemporaries, or at the very least tried to place Angelina Jolie’s own words in a coherent framework. In Hollywood nothing is ever quite as it seems.
This is very much a family story, the history of the Voights and Bertrands, which forms the spine of Chapter 1, shaping Angelina’s destiny. In this endeavor I was helped by the insights and memories of Don, Shirley, and Chuck Peters, Esther Kasha, Karen Kaptor Jasnoch, Denise Horner-Halupka, Marianne Follis Angarola, Adrianne Neri, Marilyn Knickrehm, and the research of Riverdale historian Carl Durnavich, who placed the history of the Bertrand family in context.
To understand the trauma of Angelina’s childhood, the voice of Krisann Morel, who was effectively her nanny for two years, along with others who asked not to be named, was crucial. They provided the key that opens the door into Angie’s troubled soul. In this traumatic period, which occupies Chapters 2 and 3, I am grateful for the reminiscences, too, of actor Jeff Austin, publicist Deborah Kolar, director Robert Lieberman, family friends Randy Alpert and Susie Kantor Szarez, as well as director John Boorman, whose conversation and book Adventures of a Suburban Boy (Faber and Faber, 2003) provided much insight. Angie’s former school friends from El Rodeo and Beverly Hills High and other contemporaries were full of stories, though several, even at this remove, were nervous about being identified. My thanks therefore to Brian Evans, Bernard Hallet, Eddie Horowitz, Michael Hsu, and Windsor Lai.
I am eternally grateful to Bill Day, who was Marcheline Bertrand’s partner for eleven years, and Lauren Taines, who was a close friend of both Marcheline’s and Jon Voight’s for thirty-five years, for the ribbon of fact and anecdote that is a both a bracing antidote to the conventional view of Angie’s parents as well as an important window into her young life.
In describing Angelina’s early career, I was guided by the thoughts and recollections of photographers Robert Kim and Sean McCall, makeup artist Rita Montanez, instructor Kent Sterling of the Arthur Murray dance studio, cameraman Mark Gordon, director Michael Schroeder, and actors Karen Sheperd and Ric Young. The suicide of Julie Jones is based on the official autopsy report as well as background briefings from John Connolly and her friends. Jim Cairns, pathologist and former deputy chief coroner, Ontario, gave a specialist’s insight into the incident. As for the bizarre story of the theft of garbage left outside the home of Jon Voight’s manager, this is centered around off-the-record, and almost straight-faced, interviews with two of the conspirators. Angie’s work on Hackers and Foxfire was based on conversations with fellow actor Michelle Brookhurst, camera crew, agents, production staff, and others speaking on the condition of confidentiality. Andy Wilson, the director of Playing God, had a wryly cynical take on Hollywood, as befitting a man raised in a circus.
The period from the making of the movie Hell’s Kitchen in 1997 to Angie’s marriage to Billy Bob Thornton in 2000 was a haze of drugs, dramatic awards, and rock and rollers, most notably her relationship with Mick Jagger. I spent a fascinating day with her former dealer Franklin Meyer, looking over his extensive video and picture collection, inhaling only his memories of Angie and other well-heeled customers to his salon at the Chelsea Hotel. Inevitably, many of those involved wish
to remain in the background. Or have forgotten they were there in the first place. This was, though, a creative time for Angie, when she starred in Gia, Girl, Interrupted, George Wallace, and other works. My thanks to drummer Joey Covington, TV producer Jeremy Louwerse, tattooist Friday Jones, and other anonymous sources for helping to ink in this period. John H. Richardson’s February 2000 profile of Angelina Jolie in Esquire gives a sense of where her head was at, while the July 2001 Rolling Stone portrait of Angie and Billy Bob by Chris Heath can be read as performance art as much as an interview. Celebrity writer Jonathan Van Meter’s conversations with Angie are always revealing.
Angie’s time with Billy Bob Thornton, her involvement with the United Nations, and her eventual adoption of a Cambodian orphan, Maddox, in 2002, marked a turning point in her life. I would particularly like to thank Ingrid Earle for her insights and enthusiasm in helping to uncover sources, as well as Rachel Flanagan, Heather Hope Howard, Melissa Howard, Sheila McCombe, and Penny Thornton. Levity director Ed Solomon’s story about Billy Bob Thornton, Pat Boone, and the flight to Namibia captured the actor/musician’s enduring quirkiness.
With regard to Angie’s work with the United Nations, the Honorable Joseph Melrose, former United States ambassador to Sierra Leone, was very helpful in describing her first UN tour, while career aid worker Annick Gillard Bailetti described in detail life in refugee camps. Joanna Piucci, manager, Messengers of Peace & Special Projects Advocacy & Special Events, Department of Public Information at the United Nations in New York, and Patrick Hayford, director of the Office of the Special Advisor on Africa (OSAA), explained the role of a Goodwill Ambassador. Angie’s observations about her visits to refugee camps in her book Notes from My Travels (Pocket Books, 2003) provide the perspective of an innocent abroad to the problems of the planet, while the discourse by her sometime traveling companion Jeffrey Sachs, titled Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (Penguin Books, 2008), gives a more scholarly outlook.
On the vexed matter of adoption, I have consulted with a number of sources both specifically involved with Angie’s adoptions and with the general difficulty of Westerners adopting children from developing countries. Adoption facilitator Catherine Politte was most helpful, as was Kate Adie, whose book Nobody’s Child (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005) is highly informative. In relation to Operation Broken Hearts, the case against Seattle International Adoptions, which facilitated the adoption of Maddox, I would like to thank U.S. Assistant Attorney Jim Lord, who prosecuted, and Lorie Dankers, spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Seattle, which investigated the case. I consulted research papers by Kevin Browne and others on international adoptions and orphans in Europe and the so-called Madonna effect.
Fresh information and insights into the now-notorious interview Jon Voight gave about his daughter in 2002 were provided by TV presenter Pat O’Brien, though it is a pity his memories of Hunter S. Thompson and Timothy Leary didn’t make the cut. Another time. Pastor Ken Anderson helped place this public melodrama in human context, while actor Nathan Lee Graham and others who wished to remain in the background walked me through the fallout. The reissue of Hal Ashby’s Lookin’ to Get Out in June 2009 provided another setting to witness this estrangement. Nick Dawson’s biography Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel (The University Press of Kentucky, 2009) had eerie parallels with Angie’s own story.
Once Brad Pitt moseyed into town like some Wild West gunslinger, shutters were slammed shut, eyes averted, and Hollywood folk circled the wagons. It will, however, be clear that I have managed to ride shotgun and talk on a background basis with people who worked on Mr. & Mrs. Smith, who moved in the Malibu circle of Brad and Jennifer Aniston, and shuttled between Davos and Washington as part of the international humanitarian circuit. They know who they are and my thanks to them. Nancy Aniston’s self-serving autobiography, From Mother and Daughter to Friends (Prometheus Books, 1999), makes the perfect case for why children should be allowed to divorce their parents.
The extraordinary invasion of the African country of Namibia by Team Jolie for the birth of Shiloh was well described by the combatants, some of whom lived to fight another day. My thanks to Barbara Jones, Cornall De Villiers, Steve Butler, and Donna Collins. Marina Hyde’s book Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over the World and Why We Need an Exit Strategy (Harvill Secker, 2009) provided covering fire.
In the 24/7 tabloid hysteria that is the world of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, it is difficult to hear the quiet voices of reason, so my thanks to Mich Ahern, Alan Hamm, John Bell, Sharon Feinstein, Tim Miles, and others for calming the cacophony. My thanks to John Trudell for his observations about Angie’s luminous personality, while Bill Day’s insights into Marcheline Bertrand’s death and his subsequent meeting with her daughter and son, James, provide a telling bookend to the drama of her life. Rich Ting revealed what it was like to work with Angie as the tabloids yelled outside.
In understanding such a complex and sometimes troubled character, the professional insights of psychologist Iris Martin and contemporary psychoanalyst Dr. Franziska De George, as well as the observations of interventionist Candy Finnigan and Dr. David Kipper, have been invaluable in appreciating Angie’s personality. My thanks to them all, as well as to other professional care workers who chose to remain anonymous.
On this journey a detailed timeline has been the rope that has helped guide me through the fog of words and stay on the path to understanding. Time and again a clear chronology of Angie’s life has provided insight, and I would like to thank my researcher Bronwen Tawse for her dogged work, Peter Bahlawanian for technical services, as well as Gabriella Kantor for emerging with truffles from unlikely places. While Dr. Johnson, the pioneer of biography, might not have approved, Facebook proved an essential research tool. Who knew?
At St. Martin’s Press my editor, Hope Dellon, performed miracles with the manuscript, showing a deft and sensitive touch, publisher Sally Richardson bravely backed a hunch, and publicity director John Murphy was, as ever, full of brio and boundless enthusiasm. Thanks, too, to my agent, Steve Troha, for getting a green light for the project.
Give it up as well to the king and queen of bling, Bruce and Lori Halprin, for their generous hospitality at their Calabasas palace, to Aaron at the Sunset Marquis hotel for mixing the drinks, and the Dave Matthews Band for providing the sound track.
Finally, my undying appreciation to my partner, Tracy Nesdoly, for her indefatigable research, her smart and telling insights, and the bonniest of bon mots. Just don’t mention the timeline.
As they say in the movies, it’s been emotional.
—Andrew Morton
New York
April 12, 2010
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Academy Award(s)
Jolie’s
Access Hollywood
Ackerman, Dan
Acuff, Roy
Adams, Don
Adoptive Families
Adventures of a Suburban Boy
Affleck, Ben
Afterglow
Age
AIDS/HIV
Aiello, Danny
Alexander
Alice and Viril
The All-American Boy
Allen, Steve
Allen, Wade
All the Pretty Horses
All Tribes Foundation
Along Came Polly
Alpert, Randy
“Alta Marea (Don’t Dream It’s Over),”
Amanpour, Christiane
Amazonia
Anaconda
Anderson, Gillian
Anderson, Ken
Anderson, Rachel
Anderson, Rosie
Angarola, Marianne Follis
; Angela and Viril
“Angelina,”
Angelina, George
Angelina, Marie-Louise
“Angel of the Morning,”
Angland, Carrie
Angland, Connie
Aniston, Jennifer
background of
Pitt, Brad’s, relationship with
Aniston, John
Aniston, Nancy
Annan, Kofi
Annis, Francesca
Ann-Margret
Anton (boyfriend of Jolie)
“Anybody Seen My Baby?,”
Arab Children Health Congress
Arkin, Alan
Armageddon
Aronson, Jane
Arquette, Patricia
Arquette, Rosanna
Arthur, Karen
Ashby, Hal
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Astaire, Fred
Atias, Elan
Atlas Shrugged
Austen, Rosemary
Austin, Jeff
The Avengers
Avnet, Jon
Babel
The Baby Dance
Bachardy, Don
Back Stage
Bad Santa
BAFTA
Baker, Josephine
Banderas, Antonio
Barra, Allen
Barrie, J. M.
Barrymore, Drew
Bateman, James. See Gibson, Henry
Bauman, Richard
Beatty, Belinha
Beatty, Ned
Beatty, Warren
de Becker, Gavin
Bekmambetov, Timur
Bendewald, Andrea
Benét, Eric
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 39
