Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (46 page)

Angie was repeating her mother’s cycle in other ways. Just as Marcheline broke Elke Bertrand’s heart by stopping her from seeing her step-grandchildren, so the pattern was renewed with Angie and her father. The famous Bertrand freeze had certainly found a home with Angie.

If Pax would have been confused by the behavior of his new mother, he would have been equally alarmed by the family she came from. This was clearly a family at war. In the same week as the announcement of her extensive filming schedule, his uncle, James Haven, whom he had yet to meet, launched a ferocious public attack on the grandfather Pax was not allowed to meet.

In an interview with British journalist Sharon Feinstein, James described Jon Voight as a “manipulative,” abusive, and stingy father who left him with “horrible memories,” especially about the way he treated his mother. Not only was Voight never around during his childhood, but he deliberately kept Marcheline short of money. This was not a one-off rant. James later told
Marie Claire
magazine: “I don’t want to constantly berate my father but he put my mom through years of mental abuse and made me care especially for abandoned women and children. That is my religion—helping widows and orphans.”

By contrast, James explained that he and his sister had nothing but wonderful memories of their mother. “Angie and I would walk in and comment on how we could smell things cooking and baking in the kitchen,” he recalled. “She’d be in the middle of cooking and pick up a carrot and teach us about the vegetable or the fruit.”

It is hard to know what to make of this narrative. Certainly those who knew the family were horrified at James’s vituperation toward his father. So much of what he said was plain wrong. For starters, Marche never cooked. Ever. The nearest she ever got to cooking were the very rare occasions she
made soup. The children did have a healthy, nutritious diet, but their meals came from high-end supermarkets, or their mother ordered takeout.

Then there was the nature of James’s relationship with his father. Jon Voight had always seen James as more of a “buddy” than Angie. They played basketball together, James lived with him for a couple of years as a teenager, his father paid for him to attend the private University of Southern California and bought him a brand-new Porsche sports car when he graduated with honors as a budding director. Thereafter he bought him a condo in the same building in West Hollywood as his sister—she paid for her own, though her father acted as guarantor—and when he decided, out of the blue, to become an actor, his father took him around to every casting agent in Hollywood. Not exactly the behavior of a stingy, absent father.

For a time his father kept his counsel, but he later told
Life and Style
magazine that he believed the “trauma” of their mother’s passing had deepened rather than healed the rift. “I find it very heartbreaking that my children want to paint a bad guy portrait of me. I feel it comes from the inability to let go of years of programmed anger from their mother, who understandably felt quite hurt when we divorced. In truth, I tried to give him [Haven] and their mother continuous love and support and large sums of money. God knows, for years I’ve tried to mend this relationship.”

This family feud continued from beyond the grave. Marche’s will, released on April 10, 2007, indicated her unending bitterness toward her ex-husband. In a handwritten note in the margin, she claimed that her assets included $180,000 in “unpaid spousal support.” Even Marcheline’s friends were baffled by this statement. For all his faults, Voight had religiously paid the agreed monies in spousal and child support even when his own earnings took a dive. He even continued to pay alimony to his first wife, Lauri Peters. Unnoticed in Marcheline’s will was the $500,000 that had been accumulating interest ever since Jon Voight gave it to her for the house she never bought. The reason for Marche’s continued animosity was clear, certainly in the eyes of her onetime friend Krisann Morel. “Jon Voight took away her fancy dream life, and she never got over that anger. It was so debilitating to carry that hatred around with her.”

Nonetheless, Marcheline was still Angie’s mother, her safe harbor, mentor, manager, best friend, and consoler in chief, the woman she spoke with every day. Angie’s sense of loss was clear when she broke down during
an interview on the
Today
show in May to promote
A Mighty Heart.
“Damn it, you got me crying,” she told Ann Curry as she wiped away the tears, a spear of memory piercing her still-grieving heart. “I’m holding on to my family real tight at this moment—trying to be as good a woman as I can be.” As she talked proudly to the media about her latest baby, the first serious film under the Plan B umbrella, it was clear that her mother’s death was much on her mind. “This year I lost my mom. I’ve gone through a lot. I have four kids. I just finished breast-feeding. I do want people to understand that I am just trying to work through a very difficult year.”

The film’s producer, Brad Pitt, chipped in, too, revealing that Marcheline’s death had one positive effect—it stopped them from fighting. “There’s going to come a time when I’m not going to get to be with this person anymore,” he said. “So if we have a flare-up it evaporates now. I don’t want to waste time being angry at someone I love.”

Doling out nuggets about Planet Brangelina, Angie admitted that she couldn’t cook, said Pax was now the loudest, boldest member of the family, and stressed the importance of grandparents—Brad’s parents, that is—in her children’s lives.

Angie’s powerful performance as Mariane Pearl was a triumphant return to form; she played the role of a woman who had become a close friend with a rigor and a passion that surprised even jaded skeptics. As film critic James Christopher wrote in the London
Times:
“The film belongs to Jolie. She won an Oscar for 1999’s
Girl, Interrupted,
but this is by far her best performance, strong and true in every detail. Her total immersion in the role keeps the film from getting lost in the rush of details. Even after Daniel’s death and subsequent beheading, Mariane holds Daniel’s spirit close. Jolie sees to it that the humane and haunting
A Mighty Heart
honors that spirit.” Chicago-based critic Roger Ebert found her performance “physically and emotionally convincing,” saying, “She has a genuine screen presence. She holds the attention without asking for it.” While the film just about broke even financially—returning $19 million worldwide on a budget of $16 million—it earned Angie twelve award nominations, including for a Golden Globe and an Empire Award from the same magazine that was writing her career obituary the year before.

Her life was now a juggling act; she was selling
A Mighty Heart
in New York, Cannes, and elsewhere; shooting up the bad guys in
Wanted
in
Prague and Chicago; and prepping for her upcoming role as telephone switchboard supervisor Christine Collins in
Changeling,
directed by Clint Eastwood, a man whom she would come to see as another surrogate father. Then there was the little matter of raising her first biological child and three orphans, only two of whom could speak passable English. Little wonder Brad seemed more and more to assume the role of wife to her busy executive husband. One week that summer she went from filming
Wanted
in Chicago until four in the morning to flying to Syria and Iraq in her role as UN Goodwill Ambassador and dashing to the Hamptons in a helicopter for a fund-raiser for Brad’s New Orleans Make It Right project. As
The New Yorker
magazine described the superstar child wrangler: “His expression is sometimes that of a man who stepped out to hail a cab and got run over by a fleet of trucks.” Like most parents, he discovered that the experience made him more focused and better organized. “It’s the most fun I have ever had and also the biggest pain in the ass I have ever experienced,” he said of his growing “cuckoo’s nest.” “I love it and I can’t recommend it any more highly.”

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.

—B
ILL
D
AY

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.”