Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (42 page)

Meanwhile, Angie stuck to her own script, filming a documentary in Niger before heading to Davos, Switzerland, in mid-January to speak about refugees and humanitarian issues at the World Economic Forum. She was with world leaders in the Alps when her mother’s first effort as a producer,
Trudell,
was screened at the Sundance Film Festival. The documentary, which had taken more than a decade to film and edit, received mixed reviews, seen as sincere but lacking dramatic focus.

In keeping with their “still friends” message, the Pitts threw open their home on February 12 for a birthday bash for Jennifer; guests included Gwen Stefani—now a great pal of Angie’s—Gavin Rossdale, and Cindy Crawford. Before the Oscars in March, Mr. and Mrs. Pitt spent time together at industry events, including a party hosted by CAA agent Bryan Lourd at which Gwyneth Paltrow proudly showed off pictures of her baby daughter, Apple, to her former fiancé and his estranged wife.

Babies were on Angie’s mind, too. On March 8 she told guests at a Washington Press Club luncheon that Africa was the focus for her next adoption. Once again it all came down to Maddox. “My son’s in love with Africa, so he’s been asking for an African brother or sister,” she explained, describing his pleasure at walking around a market during a recent visit to Ethiopia.

It seems Brad was ready to adopt, too, he and Angie looking through pictures sent by the Wide Horizons for Children adoption agency, which specializes in Ethiopia. Both settled on a little girl, born on January 8, the day after Brad and Jennifer separated. They were told that her mother had died of AIDS and it was unknown if the baby, legally named Tena Adam but called Yemsrach, meaning “good news,” by her mother, had also contracted the deadly virus. No matter; they wanted her anyway. As Angie later explained to writer Jonathan Van Meter: “We both had the same fear because she was sick at the time, and we both made the decision that no matter what, we were going to look after her.”

While they stealthily planned their own family, Brad and Angie went ahead with his make-believe family a few days later, spending the four-day Easter weekend at a late 1950s condo in Rancho Mirage, where they posed with five little blond “Bradlets” as a dreamy, dysfunctional 1960s family,
for pictures that would occupy sixty stunning pages of the June issue of
W
magazine. While the artistic intent could not be faulted, as an act of marital diplomacy it was a dagger to Jennifer’s heart. Several months later she accused her ex-husband of missing a “sensitivity chip.”

That weekend Jennifer had every right to feel sensitive. It was the date she filed for divorce. The night before she made it official, she visited her psychic, Faye, arriving in cargo pants, with no makeup and her hair pulled back. She looked like any other California girl and attracted little attention. The one jarring note was the distress etched on her freshly scrubbed face. When her lawyer called her the following day, March 25, Good Friday, to confirm that the divorce papers had been filed, she burst into tears and clung to her good friend Courteney Cox, spending the night at Courteney’s Malibu home rather than at the empty house Brad had built.

Brad continued to move on. A couple of weeks later, he flew to Ethiopia with
Good Morning America
’s Diane Sawyer to show her the work of Bono’s One charity and to talk about his own life for a TV special that would air in June, to coincide with the release of
Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
He explained that his nickname in Ethiopia was “Dabo,” meaning “bread,” as locals thought he was saying “bread” rather than “Brad” when he first introduced himself. While he talked movingly of the plight of youngsters in the country, the bread and butter of the interview concerned his private life. When Sawyer asked if he would ever adopt an African orphan, the actor was cagey. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m certainly open to it. I think it’s a beautiful idea. You know, especially meeting these kids firsthand. But at this point, I don’t know.”

As for Angie as home-wrecker, he kept to the party line, stating that she had had nothing to do with the end of his four-and-a-half-year marriage. Even as he spoke, a private plane was on the runway at Addis Ababa, waiting to fly him to Mombasa in Kenya, where he and Angie had secretly arranged a private rendezvous. It was Angie’s idea; several weeks earlier she had instructed her bodyguard Mickey Brett to find a villa hideaway where she and Brad could enjoy a break together. For some reason, he chose the Alfajiri beach resort on Diani Beach on the Kenyan coast, a popular location for European vacationers. With regular international flights from London and other destinations, it was easily reached by the paparazzi.

So it proved. During the four-day break, long-range shots of the couple
and Maddox playing on the beach made headlines around the world. It was reminiscent of similar pictures of Angie and Maddox playing alone in a park, taken within days of the split from Billy Bob Thornton, which presented a sympathetic image of Angie, the single mom focusing her attention on her son after the breakup. As
The New York Times
later revealed, those pictures were organized by Team Jolie, the photographer for
Us
magazine told when and where Angie and Maddox would be in the park.

The latest pictures had the hallmarks of a similar operation. Australian paparazzo Darren Lyons, owner of the London-based Big Pictures agency, happened to be in Mombasa when a suspiciously well-informed caller told him to be on the beach at a certain time and he would see something of interest. Right on cue, Angie, Brad, and Maddox appeared, Brad seeming like the perfect father figure, playing in the sand with Mad while keeping his hands off Angie. The visuals were consistent with their public utterances: “We’re just good friends.” When the pictures were published on April 29, the couple could fulminate about tabloid intrusion while presenting a platonic image, still able to keep everyone guessing about the exact nature of their relationship. Brad later complained to Diane Sawyer that he’d had no clue the pictures were being taken; otherwise he would have organized them himself and given the money—the pictures sold for more than $1 million—to charity. It seemed that Team Jolie and Team Pitt were not yet singing from the same public-relations hymnal.

Unfortunately, the “happy family” image went somewhat awry when security guards raced to their villa one evening thinking that a murder was taking place. One startled guest was quoted as saying: “The noise sounded like a wounded animal, like something being killed.” It was, so it was claimed, Brad and Angie engaged in robust nocturnal activity, though even by Angie’s high standards of exhibitionism this seems a tad extreme, especially with her bodyguard and Maddox nearby. Whatever the truth of the rather dubious story, it was soon part of the soap opera their lives were rapidly becoming. It was on this vacation that the nickname “Brangelina” was born—out of wedlock and proper syntax, but alive and kicking. How long the infant would last was anyone’s guess.

Brad seemed to be in it for the long haul, and the couple was resolute in their message: “Trust us, the truth is what we say it is. Actions don’t speak louder than words.” In May he stayed with Angie and Maddox at
her home in Buckinghamshire, where he joined her on outings to the local supermarket, took Maddox to school, and rode Angie’s new motorbike around the grounds. Her bodyguard even arranged for photographer Steve Butler to take some discreet pictures of Brad on the property.

It was a tricky public-relations operation, Brad and Angie leading an increasingly threadbare double life, rather like the characters in their blockbuster. With the premiere of
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
looming in June as a summer “tentpole” release that was supposed to be a huge box-office draw for the studios, nothing could get in the way of focusing the public on the movie rather than the unfolding soap opera. There was even an attempt to coerce journalists to sign a legal agreement preventing them from asking personal questions of the lead actors, but that strategy quickly collapsed.

Studio executives were right to be nervous. They saw what had happened that May, when Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch as he declared his love for Katie Holmes. It had left Steven Spielberg, director of Cruise’s latest movie,
War of the Worlds,
pleading: “Talk a little bit about
War of the Worlds
because we’re opening real soon.” While Angie and Brad may have wanted to shout their love from the sofa tops, they had to keep their feet on the ground. With “Team Jennifer” T-shirts outselling “Team Angie” twenty-five to one, it was imperative that Brad and Angie stick to the script, telling the world that they were just good friends, leaving room for doubt.

There was now no doubt in Jennifer’s mind, however, that she had been mistaken in believing her husband’s assurances that he had been intrigued by but had not dallied with Angie. The evidence of a happy family beach vacation, a possible adoption, domestic bliss in Buckinghamshire, and an endless sexy spread in
W
even prompted Madame Tussauds waxworks to place Angie and Brad next to each other. The circumspect, forgiving Ms. Aniston finally had to accept the inevitable. What hurt most was not just the beach vacation, but stories that Brad and Angie were thinking of adopting a child.

She was way too late. By now Brad was known as “Dad” by one little boy, Maddox uttering that important word when they were playing cars on a hotel floor. It meant a lot to Angie, a sign that she was doing the right thing, Maddox once again both oracle and guide. “He just out of the blue called him Dad,” she recalled. “It was amazing. We both heard it and
didn’t say anything and just looked at each other. And then we kind of let it go on, and then he just continued to do it and that was it. So that was probably the most defining moment, when he decided that we would all be a family.”

A growing family. After fulfilling their publicity obligations for
Mr. & Mrs. Smith,
they flew to Addis Ababa, where, on July 6, 2005, Angie signed the adoption papers for a little girl she named Zahara. Brad was by her side, but as Ethiopia does not allow adoptions by unmarried couples, let alone by unmarried “friends,” only Angie’s name was on the official papers.

The next step was for the quartet, plus a nanny, to take a private jet to New York, where orphan expert Dr. Jane Aronson checked over Little Miss Jolie. While she was thankfully free of HIV, Zahara was in a fragile state, dehydrated, malnourished, and suffering from rickets. The following day she was admitted to the hospital with a potentially life-threatening case of salmonella poisoning, Angie keeping vigil by her bedside for a week as she slowly recovered. Zahara was not the only sick puppy. Brad, who had flown on to Los Angeles, was so ill that he checked himself into the hospital, suffering from viral meningitis.

On July 15, Zahara was given a clean bill of health and released from the hospital, spending another eight hours traveling to Malibu by private jet. Here she was reunited with her new “father,” and settled in to real life with her brother, Maddox, who had thus far seen her only in institutions, first an orphanage and then a hospital where she was on an IV drip. The family bonding experience did not last long. At the end of the month, Angie, who had earned her pilot’s license, flew Brad off in her own plane for a romantic weekend in Arizona. Zahara and Maddox, still feeling each other out, were left in the care of nannies. It was a significant weekend; under different circumstances he would have been celebrating his fifth wedding anniversary. Jennifer, meanwhile, spent that time with Brad’s mother, Jane, a signal perhaps that Jane was not entirely enamored of her son’s behavior.

After the couple returned to Malibu, Angie took Zahara back to New York for a further checkup with Dr. Aronson, who declared the child, now two pounds heavier than when she arrived in America, a “sugarplum”: “She has gone from the depression of abandonment [after the death of her birth mother],” the doctor said, “to being completely and unconditionally loved and attached.” Then the six-month-old returned to California to join
her new brother for his fourth birthday, before taking off again in early August for Long Island, where Angie was shooting Robert De Niro’s movie
The Good Shepherd,
a tale of betrayal and double-dealing during the early years of the CIA.

While young Zahara was certainly getting a taste of Angie’s peripatetic lifestyle, her mother’s movie choice was interesting. She played a woman who traps herself in a loveless marriage after stealing her man, a troubled spy hunter played by Matt Damon, from a deaf woman whom she considers inferior. There were arguably parallels with her behavior toward Jennifer Aniston, in keeping with the theory, articulated by Dustin Hoffman, Billy Bob Thornton, and others, that actors unconsciously choose their roles to reflect their personal journey. The overt appeal of the part was the chance to work with Robert De Niro. It was also, intriguingly, the first time she had acted with Timothy Hutton since their affair and near marriage.

While her role was significant, she was not the star of the film, giving her time to pack up the kids and join Brad in the backwoods of Alberta, Canada, where he was about to spend four months shooting
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
He was, of course, Jesse, not the coward. After a long prep period, principal photography was halted at the end of August 2005, as it was on
The Good Shepherd,
to allow actors to man the phones in a charity telethon to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and left thousands in Louisiana and Mississippi stranded and homeless. While Angie wrote to President Bush and influential congressmen and senators, Brad’s involvement took a practical turn as he harnessed his contacts in the world of architecture to design sustainable housing in the worst-hit—and poorest—areas of New Orleans. His Make It Right initiative was eventually responsible for 150 environmentally friendly houses.

The delayed political and economic response to the hurricane was the talk of the inaugural meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, a gathering of fine minds and original thinkers in New York in mid-September. Brad and Angie, still saying they were just friends, made a low-key appearance at the three-day forum, the couple somewhat self-conscious and deliberately keeping a distance from each other. As worldly as they were trying to become, neither Brad nor Angie was quite prepared for a crowd like this one. While there was a smattering of celebs, including Bono, Angie’s former
paramour Mick Jagger, and Barbra Streisand, it was a well-informed, high-minded group, focused on policy, not
People.
One former White House veteran recalls seeing Brad “standing in a corner by himself, clearly out of his depth.” In general conversation, where he was often unsure of the politicians and countries under discussion, he made the sensible move and kept quiet. Angie, too, who was interested in the discussion on poverty, was scrambling to keep up with these eggheads, even though she had much more experience. Given the couple’s record for rolling up their sleeves and pitching in, the verdict may have been a shade patronizing and professorial.