Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (41 page)

While Brad and Jennifer went through a marital ordeal by flashbulb at various European premieres of
Troy,
Angie was playing it cool. Almost too cool. Considering that this was the same girl whose frenzied search for an absent Billy Bob had ended in a mental hospital, it was interesting that she was always somewhere else when the media detectives were hot on the trail of Brad and Angie. While neither would ever admit it, it was almost as if Angie and Brad had worked out some kind of pact during those long, soulful tête-à-têtes on the set of
Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Jennifer had time on her hands now that
Friends
had ended, joining Brad in Rome during July for the
Ocean’s Twelve
shoot. The couple was seen canoodling in the city of love, sharing ice cream and sweet talk. There were rumors that they were buying a vacation home on Lake Como near their pal George Clooney and speculation that they might move to London.
Even though Brad and Jen were clearly together and publicly affectionate, Angie simply sailed through the speculation, traveling the globe on behalf of the UNHCR, to Spain in June for World Refugee Day and later to the border between Chad and Sudan, where 160,000 refugees had fled the fighting in Darfur. In July she accepted honorary Cambodian citizenship, celebrating this signal honor by flying to her son’s country to meet with tattooist Sompong Kanphai, who engraved a twelve-inch roaring tiger on her back.

Like her father, however, Angie was in danger of losing sight of what had propelled her to prominence in the first place and given her continued entrée into this club of world leaders—her acting ability. Even though she now liked to downplay her career, a salutary commentary in the influential
Empire
movie magazine may have given her—or her agent—pause. Critics were already preparing her box-office obituary, saying that since
Girl, Interrupted,
her movies had hardly set the world alight. “Among industry pundits dire warnings have been issued that if she doesn’t have a major hit pronto the sweet glow of her 2000 Oscar win could be snuffed out and her exalted position as one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood become a thing of the past.” As far as pundits were concerned, she had not lived up to the crushing weight of expectations, her movie releases running the gamut from disappointing to outright disaster. Much, then, rested on the box-office success of
Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

When filming restarted in August in Los Angeles and Italy, the studio was keen to emphasize the movie rather than the now-notorious real-life romantic subplot. Though paparazzi snapped pictures of Angie and Brad looking smitten, the publicity machinery tried to squelch the persistent rumors of an affair by saying they were simply acting in character. When filming moved to the Amalfi coast in Italy in October, the two were inseparable. Though they were in separate suites at the Hotel Santa Caterina, they ordered room service and dined together on Angie’s terrace in between playing with Maddox. In Ravello, Angie surprised onlookers with her “utterly flirtatious” behavior, never walking past Brad without touching him or giving him a sultry look. Not surprisingly, alone in the couple’s modernist mausoleum in Hollywood, Jen was said to be miserable, increasingly insecure and scattered.

Brad had little time—or possibly inclination—to soothe her. No sooner
was he back home than he was out the door again. He accepted an invitation from U2 front man Bono to visit Africa and see for himself the poverty and AIDS epidemic sweeping the continent. It was a very high-powered introduction, Brad flying to South Africa with Virgin boss Richard Branson and visiting former South African president Nelson Mandela before moving on to Ethiopia, where he met orphans and AIDS victims, seeing the problems faced by some of the poorest nations on earth. However high-minded his intentions may have been, the media concluded that he was interested in these issues only because of his involvement with Angie.

While Brad was playing soccer in a dirt field with Ethiopian youngsters, Angie was back arm in arm with the other two men in her life, Oliver Stone and Colin Farrell. When
Alexander
was released in November 2004, the improbable screen mother and son toured talk shows in America and Europe promoting the $155 million blockbuster, which for all their efforts was a box-office flop, earning only $34 million in America. On November 16 Angie attended the Hollywood premiere with her brother, but this time the speculation was about Jolie and Farrell, the endless “Were they having an affair?” rumors quite enough to keep the gossip mill churning. That night James Haven brought along his fiancée, Rachel Anderson, whom he had met at an independent film festival in San Francisco in December 2002. He had asked her to marry him several months before, sealing their love not with a ring but with a glass slipper, as in her favorite Disney movie,
Cinderella.
On the evening of the premiere, Rachel, who was seated next to Angie, looked radiant in a bright red satin evening gown. Afterward James told her: “You were sitting next to one of the most beautiful women in the world and people only had eyes for you.”

It was not surprising, then, that the talk at Thanksgiving dinner in Marche’s suite in the Raffles L’Ermitage hotel, where she had moved at Angie’s expense, was all about weddings, gowns, and bridesmaids. Not just the impending nuptials of James and Rachel but also of Angie’s loyal assistant, Holly Goline. After dinner they all settled down to watch a video of the marriage in May of Holly and her husband, Mark, at Jekyll Island, Georgia, where Angie was bridesmaid and Maddox, who spent most of Thanksgiving dinner hiding under the table, the ring bearer. During the evening John Trudell presented Angie with an animal hide engraved and branded with a variety of Indian signs and symbols as a gesture of thanks for
supporting and promoting his eponymous film,
Trudell,
due for release at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2005.

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.

—B
ODYGUARD
M
ICKEY
B
RETT

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.