I have watched this family at war for decades. There comes a time to forgive and forget.
—BILL DAY
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.”
Jennifer considered Angie’s comments about the fact that she “couldn’t wait to get to work every day” during the making of Mr. & Mrs. Smith to be very “uncool,” rubbing fresh salt in the wounds of Brad’s betrayal. “There was stuff printed that was definitely from a time when I was unaware that it was happening,” said Aniston. Her childhood friend, actress Andrea Bendewald, was blunt, telling Vanity Fair: “It was extremely hurtful to Jen that he was seen with another woman so quickly after they were separated.” Most painful were the rumors that Jennifer wanted a career more than a child, forcing Brad to find a mate who wanted a family. As an unnamed friend told the magazine: “So is there a part of Brad that’s diabolical? Did he think, I need to get out of this marriage, but I want to come out smelling like a rose, so I’m going to let Jen be cast as the ultrafeminist and I’m going to get cast as the poor husband who couldn’t get a baby and so had to move on?”
At one point all those evasions and denials could have come back to haunt Angie’s image, but it now seemed so last year. Angie had bigger and more important matters to attend to: launching a new United Nations campaign, Nine Million, to improve education for children around the world, meeting with the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, in November to discuss “global diplomacy,” and joining Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky on a visit to Baghdad in February 2008 to learn more about the plight of the two million youngsters under the age of twelve who were made homeless by the war. During the visit to the Green Zone, Angie met with the top U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki as well as senior Iraqi migration officials, calling for a coherent plan to allow refugees back to their homes. “There’s lots of goodwill and lots of discussion, but there seems to be just a lot of talk at the moment, and a lot of pieces that need to be put together. I’m trying to figure out what they are,” she said, penning another op-ed piece for The Washington Post on the issue.
Her condition did eventually catch up with her. On April 8, 2008, while on a panel discussing education in Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, she got some unsolicited feedback. “I felt kicking suddenly!” said Jolie, then thirty-two. She was still able to present a Vital Voices Global Partnership Award to her friend journalist Mariane Pearl. The kids might be kicking, but she wasn’t stopping. A month later she was back along the now-familiar corridors of power with her brother, lobbying movers and shakers on behalf of the charity Global Action for Children.
Of course, Angie wouldn’t be Angie if she wasn’t able to pass on what was going on between the sheets during her pregnancy. “It’s great for the sex life,” she said. “It just makes you a lot more creative. So you have fun, and as a woman you’re just so round and full.” Rather than welcome their twins in America, the couple decided on France, partly inspired by Marcheline’s dream of living there one day. Angie took lessons to try to master the language, while she and Brad rented and months later bought Château Miraval, an 880-acre property on the Riviera where showbiz neighbors included Johnny Depp and his partner, Vanessa Paradis. In May, after attending the film festival in Cannes, where they stayed with Microsoft billionaire Steve Allen and dined with Changeling director Clint Eastwood and Angie’s onetime courtier Mick Jagger, they decamped to the secluded villa, which came complete with marauding wild boar—and rather less tame paparazzi. There the impatient brood waited for the big day, an event described by the local newspaper, Nice Matin, as “the most important since man walked on the moon.”
It was normally a giant leap for Angie to remain in one place for a week, let alone be confined to a hospital for three, taking small steps around her suite of rooms. On July 12, 2008, after two frustrating weeks in the hospital, she gave birth by cesarean section at the Fondation Lenval hospital in Nice. Knox Léon arrived first, Vivienne Marcheline second, the babies weighing in at five pounds each. Brad, who helped Dr. Michel Sussmann during the thirty-minute operation, cut the umbilical cords. The doctor noted that the parents were calm, laughing and joking but deeply moved by the moment.
With the world’s media camped outside, Knox and Vivienne instantly became the most valuable properties on earth, worth far more than their weight in gold. In fact, their images were jointly sold to People and Hello! for $14 million—the most expensive celebrity pictures ever taken, the money going to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation. Angie did most of the negotiations herself, according to The New York Times, the deal contingent on the U.S. magazine, which enjoyed its highest sales in seven years, never saying a bad word about her or her family.
As the family themselves had generated much of the negative media, it was a case of pot and kettle. There were, though, some moves toward an amnesty in the war of the Voights. Thanks to a friend’s detective work, Jon Voight had found the whereabouts of James’s new apartment in Sherman Oaks and had driven over to see him. Even though he had said hurtful things about his father in the media, James tends to be rather passive and nonconfrontational. This quality enabled him and his father to smooth over their public differences, the duo going to watch an L.A. Lakers basketball game in early June before James flew to be by his sister’s side for the last weeks of her pregnancy. The arrival of the twins, combined with Jon’s upcoming milestone—his seventieth birthday was in December—impelled friends and family to make an extra effort to warm the frozen relations between father and daughter. Director John Boorman made a personal plea to them to heal the breach. He was not the only one, the eventual result being a short telephone conversation around Jon’s birthday. Others, like Krisann Morel, who hadn’t seen Angie since she was a babe in arms, could only sit on the sidelines and watch with frustration. “Her view of her father is partly informed by the poison fed to her by her mother. It breaks my heart to see Jon denied access to his grandchildren.”
While Jon, increasingly aware of his own mortality, indicated his willingness to get on the next plane to France if there was a chance of seeing his six grandchildren, Brad’s parents were invited over to see the new arrivals—and to help out with the other kids. Help was indeed needed, the family having expanded by five children in just three years. During the long summer vacation, Jane Pitt was a familiar figure in the local stores, a handful of euros in one hand, her granddaughter Shiloh in the other, buying groceries for the château. Her parenting style, with set mealtimes and bedtimes and no nonsense, would have been a distinct contrast to the “no boundaries” approach promoted by Angie’s mother and the new mother herself: the Midwest meets Hollywood.
Angie based her child-rearing methods on what she could remember—or what she told herself—about her mother’s skills. Like Marcheline had when the children behaved themselves, she gave them sticker stars that they could later exchange for treats. Naturally, given the background of the parents, home life revolved around arts and crafts and dramatic play. So when the kids reportedly threw hair dye around the bathroom and stained the walls, Angie justified it as “creative expression,” but the owners reportedly complained later about the mess. As for Jane Pitt, presumably she spent much of the summer biting her tongue.
Angie did, however, portray herself as a traditional parent, too, telling Vanity Fair: “You end up hearing yourself saying all those clichéd parent things: ‘I don’t care who started it, but I’m here to finish it.’ I really can discipline the kids when I need to.”
Those who visited the château were not entirely convinced. According to tabloid reports, breakfast took place at all hours of the day, Maddox, at six, allowed to use the stove to make his own concoctions, including macaroni and cheese with apple, toast, and pizza. After he had finished shooting his siblings with arrows from his catapult or toy guns—his mother also gave in to his entreaties and took him shopping for knives—he surfed the Internet looking for “weapons” or slumped in front of the TV watching SpongeBob SquarePants while his dad, usually in another room, sat glued to The Ultimate Fighter. Bedtime, like breakfast, was whenever, Brad putting the kids into their own beds only after they were well asleep.
Otherwise they all slept together. The overall impression was one of structured chaos, a happy family squirming and struggling in a huge nine-foot-wide bed, especially on weekends, with Brad making airline reservations and reading scripts in between changing diapers. “We’re very hands-on parents, believe me,” Angie told writer Martyn Palmer.
Besides Angie’s brother, James, and Brad’s parents, they did have other hands to help: nannies from Vietnam, the Congo, and the U.S.; four nurses; a doctor on permanent call; two personal assistants; a cook; a maid; two cleaners; a plongeur, or busboy; four close-protection bodyguards; and six French former army guards patrolling the extensive grounds. The staff all stayed in a nearby hotel. However harassed Angie and Brad may have felt with six children, they still had a way to go to match Angie’s inspiration, dancer Josephine Baker, who raised twice as many orphans, also with the aid of a huge staff, at her home at Château des Milandes in the Dordogne.
There was one significant figure missing from this domestic caravan: the stocky figure of Mickey “Snowy” Brett, Angie’s loyal bodyguard for the last eight years. When she first met him for the filming of Lara Croft she arrived in London with just a duffel bag. Now she needed a coach to move her family and entourage. Brett’s departure showed how the wind was blowing inside the château of Brad and Angie. For all the chatter that Brad was just minding the kids while Angie got on with men’s work, the boy from Springfield was not quite the grinning pussycat he seemed.
For years Brett and Angie had enjoyed a father/daughter relationship, the muscular East Ender, with a reputation for using threats in confrontations with photographers, regularly treated to her overblown generosity. Over the years she had given him lavish bonuses and, on one occasion, a Cartier watch. When Brad arrived on the scene, all that changed. For Christmas 2007 Brett got a pair of slippers. It was a not-so-subtle way of suggesting that Brett no longer occupied the position of prominence he had once enjoyed.
There were three of them in this relationship, and it was, to coin a phrase, “a bit crowded.” Brad was asserting his rights as top dog, the alpha male who would brook no rival. Someone had to go, and it wasn’t going to be him. According to Brett, the actor demeaned him by sending him to sex shops to buy face masks and other rubber paraphernalia for the kinky pair. Brett was outraged at this humiliating treatment—it was almost the first story he told casual acquaintances. Seeing the writing on the wall, Snowy melted from the scene, believing that Brad, brooding and moody, was not the man to make Angie as happy as she deserved to be.
As with Brett, so with Angie’s brother, Brad keeping a wary eye on his day-to-day involvement with his family. While he welcomed James’s help, Brad was not enthusiastic about swapping one intrusive male in the family mix for another and kept the boundaries clear. He apparently vetoed James’s desire to be in the delivery room when his sister gave birth. In his position as family patriarch—unsurprisingly, one of his favorite shows is MTV’s Run’s House, about the chaotic family life of rapper and hip-hop pioneer Joseph Simmons—he questioned Angie’s insistence that James adopt children of his own. As James had no permanent relationship or job, Brad didn’t think adoption was a realistic option for him, someone he described as an “overgrown kid.” To date, James has still to adopt.
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, Ted 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.
While she was easygoing in rehearsals, on the day of the shoot, it was a different Angie who appeared on set, surrounded by bodyguards and a fluttering entourage. She had her game face on. The days of yelling and clearing her throat to get in character were long gone, Angie laid-back but ready for action, playfully hitting Ting in the face with her gun and saying: “Good morning. How are you? We are going to have fun today.”
After twenty-five takes, Noyce was happy but Angie was perplexed that the crew was giving Rich Ting a hard time. She discovered that he was due to fly to Vietnam on a modeling assignment and his agent didn’t want his face messed up in the fight. Her own face lit up when talk turned to Vietnam, the actress speaking enthusiastically about the country and giving him a list of friends who would show him around. Ting was amazed that the leading lady would take this trouble. “In this industry courtesy is uncommon, but she is so gracious,” he says. “Unlike many others, she has not gone Hollywood; she has gone global.”
During filming she stopped kicking the bad guys long enough to extend the hand of friendship to one of the good guys in her life. In January Bill Day received a call out of the blue from Angie, asking to meet up. It had been fourteen years since they had last met, but her schedule was such—her assistant, Holly Goline, breaks up her day into thirty-minute segments—that they didn’t come face-to-face until April. He arrived at the Long Island set to be met by a heavily made-up woman in a blonde wig.
“You look just the same,” she said as they hugged in the middle of the warehouse set. “Wish I could say the same for you,” he joked, pointing at the wig and the costume. After she did a couple more takes of the scene, they went back to her trailer, where he met Shiloh and Zahara and they ate lunch, caught up on old times—and laid to rest some ghosts. He was keen to clear up the past, explaining that he met his wife, Caroline, long after he and Marcheline had split up. As he suspected, Marcheline had explained their breakup differently, telling the children that he had cheated on her. That wasn’t the case, as everyone in their circle knew at the time. In fact, Marcheline was so over Bill that she was dating a divorced father of four daughters shortly after they parted—something Bill had only learned recently. Angie made it clear that she bore him no ill will. She wanted to forgive and forget, eager to meet Caroline and to move on. Angie even arranged a birthday surprise for her brother a couple of weeks later in early May, Bill the special guest at a discreet lunch in a Manhattan hotel. Once again Bill explained the reasons behind the breakup with their mother. James was more skeptical, still believing the story their mother had told them fourteen years before. Like his sister, he had subscribed to the Bertrand freeze, sticking with his mother, right or wrong. During the three-hour lunch there was a dawning recognition that their mother’s version of events was not necessarily the truth, a grudging acknowledgment that her assessment of others, notably their father, had colored their perceptions since childhood. As James described his mother’s last days, he was even able to joke that at least her last words were only about his father and not about Bill as well. These encounters seemed to mark a turning point for Angie and James, a tacit admission that they had been party to an illusion and that they, unlike their mother, had the capacity to forgive.
This friendly but important reunion was soon tarnished when Now, a British tabloid magazine, fabricated a story saying that Angie had had an affair with her mother’s boyfriend when she was sixteen, citing this author as the source. This was news to me, and of course totally untrue. For Bill it spoiled what had been a happy reunion, leaving him “seriously depressed.” The whole incident could be seen as a metaphor for Angie’s life, a life of illusion and delusion further distorted by a tabloid prism.
In May Angie left this monstrous world of make-believe behind for grotesque real life, flying to Holland to spend time at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. There she attended the trial of Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, charged with war crimes, namely, using child soldiers in bloody tribal conflicts during 2002–2003. His was the first international trial focusing solely on child soldiers. In the courtroom Angie was given a long, unnerving, hard-eyed stare by the suspected mass murderer. Afterward she praised the child soldiers who were prepared to give voice to the horrors they had witnessed: “After watching the proceedings from the viewing booth, I stood up and found Thomas Lubanga Dyilo looking at me. I imagined how difficult it must be for all the brave young children who have come to testify against him.”
A couple of days later, Angie found scrutiny of a very different sort much easier to bear when she and Brad strolled down the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival amid a flurry of flashbulbs for the premiere of Inglourious Basterds. It was the couple’s first appearance in public in three months. Angie, looking like a latter-day goddess in her slit-to-the-thigh Versace gown, with her partner dressed in a slick tux, put on a suitably amorous show to silence the Greek chorus of doom. It was a chance, a friend noted, to indulge in “cuddles and old-fashioned romance.”
Not for long, though. The National Enquirer gave Angie an early birthday surprise with the headline that she and Brad had officially split. After she wiped away the birthday cake Brad smushed into her face when he arrived unexpectedly on the set of Salt on June 5, she reflected that there was some truth in the story. They were indeed splitting—but not intentionally: Brad was heading to Los Angeles in July to make Steven Soderbergh’s baseball drama, Moneyball, while Angie continued with Salt in New York. Then Brad was scheduled to spend months in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil to film The Lost City of Z, the story of the vain search for a legendary city by British surveyor Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett during the 1920s. Brad was growing his beard in preparation. Layer into that creative mix the fact that Geyer Kosinski had successfully concluded a deal with the author Patricia Cornwell for the movie rights to her bestselling series about medical examiner Kay Scarpetta and it was clear that the couple had a creatively overflowing plate. Even with the best intentions, their ideal scenario of one movie on, one movie off—which Angie and Billy Bob tried in their early days together—wasn’t working out as they would have liked. The last-minute cancellation of Moneyball by Columbia Pictures at a cost of $10 million gave them breathing space, the couple spending part of the summer in their Los Feliz home.
Even though she now had the time, Angie did not take the opportunity to watch her first-ever screen performance in Hal Ashby’s comedy Lookin’ to Get Out. She missed an emotional evening at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood on June 29, her father breaking down in tears as he spoke of a father’s search for his daughter. Voight was relating the untold story of the director’s cut of the film, which was first discovered by Ashby’s biographer Nick Dawson. The fact that Ashby had a daughter whom he had never been able to bring himself to meet added greater poignancy to the scene between the six-year-old girl played by Angie and her biological father, played by Jon Voight as a ne’er-do-well hustler. As Voight told the audience: “He walked to Leigh’s door many times. I truly believe he just couldn’t cross the threshold because he didn’t know if he’d be proper as a father because fatherhood was so questionable to him.”
The audience of friends and colleagues shuffled uncomfortably in their seats as they recognized that the weeping Voight was really talking about his own pain and disconnection from his daughter. For example, he was not invited to the twins’ first birthday on July 12, though Brad’s parents flew in from Springfield for the occasion. Forgiveness stretched only so far.
Within days Angie was off on her travels again, visiting Amman, Jordan, with Maddox in late July for the Twenty-ninth International Arab Children Health Congress, before making her third trip to Iraq, praising the efforts of the American troops while, once again, pinpointing the plight of the country’s homeless. Back in Los Angeles, she spent much time taking flying lessons, doing circuits or taking short flights to places like Las Vegas. Flying set her free; it was her escape from earthly cares. Once off the ground—astrologically she is an air sign—she was in her natural element, unfettered and unencumbered. There is no earth in her star sign.
On the ground she was chained to her image; goddess, savior, and, ironically, earth mother. Whether she wanted to or not, she had to be or at least give the impression of being supermom, especially as Brad was now fully formed in the public imagination as Mr. Mom. She had always said she wanted the man in her life to be a great dad, the kind of father she wished she’d had. During the publicity for Inglourious Basterds, Brad waxed lyrical about the delights of fatherhood, how he enjoyed growing older and being a domestic god. “I’m a dad now; my partying ends at six P.M.,” he told the Daily Mail, while his costar Eli Roth revealed another dimension of the screen idol, describing how he used baby wipes to freshen up if he didn’t have time for a shower. Roth explained: “After a scene, Brad had to get next to me for a close-up shot, and he said: ‘Damn, you’re ripe.’ ” Roth replied: “I didn’t have time to shower.” Brad gave him a tip: “Baby wipes, man, baby wipes. I got six kids. All you’ve got to do is just take them, a couple quick wipes under the pits. I’m getting [peed] on all day. I don’t have time to take a shower.”
The story captures the earthy good nature of a man who can still cause maternal hearts to flutter. While he talked volubly about his life as a father, there wasn’t much talk of “we,” as in Angie and him. With Brad now positioned as Mr. Mom, it appeared that the onus was on Angie to join him on Happy Family Airways rather than seem to fly solo. After all, she had what she always wanted—or told herself that she wanted. Be careful what you wish for.
In the fall of 2009, whether consciously or not, she set herself a test, signing on for a romantic thriller, The Tourist, directed by Oscar winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. The plot revolves around an “extraordinary woman,” Elise, played by Angie, who deliberately crosses the path of an American tourist visiting Venice to mend a broken heart. The tourist, played by Johnny Depp, pursues their romance, which culminates with the couple making passionate love in the shower. While a Depp-Jolie pair-up had been dreamed about by producers and studios over the years—there was even talk of their playing Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights— it was also a long-cherished ambition of Angie’s to work with her teen idol. Once again Billy Bob Thornton’s dictum that actors choose the parts that reflect where they are in their lives seemed to have resonance.
Those who have known Angie for years anticipated trouble. Johnny Depp, notes a family friend, is very much her type: wild, artistic, and intriguing. In her mind he falls somewhere between Billy Bob and Brad Pitt, creative but not weird, natural but not insane. Elusive, too, engaged at one time to Winona Ryder and to Kate Moss—which may help explain Angie’s antipathy toward both women—but now living with French singer and fashion muse Vanessa Paradis, with whom he has two children. People who know Angie well believe that in days gone by she would have made a play for Depp. For her to live out her fantasy on film rather than in real life might be the resolution of this emotional conundrum.
“Angie is a free spirit; you cannot tame her,” says a friend. “If she could get something going with Depp, she would leave Brad. She has always had a crush on him, always admired his quirky roles and his looks.” Astrologically, though, there is little connection between Depp’s and Jolie’s charts; there is much more between Brad’s and Angie’s.
Certainly an affair would be box-office poison for Angie, especially as she has been comprehensively outmaneuvered by Brad, who seems, at least in the public mind, to be the more stable, responsible, and hands-on parent. Brad cut off any likely romantic concerns at the pass, reportedly insisting, against Angie’s wishes, that he and the children join her for the three-month shoot in Venice and Paris. Before filming began in February 2010, Vanessa Paradis parked her tanks on Angie’s lawn, declaring in People that even after twelve years she was “still deeply in love”: “[Johnny] makes me happy. We are many things—we are together and, in a way, one person,” she said.
If the interview was a marker, it was placed just in time, Angie telling Germany’s Das Neue magazine in December that she did not consider fidelity “absolutely essential” in a relationship. “It’s worse to leave your partner and talk badly about him afterwards. Neither Brad nor I have ever claimed that living together means to be chained together. We make sure that we never restrict each other.”
Angie seemed to be sending out a signal, her semaphore interpreted by the media as indicating storms ahead. Those storms were not long in coming. Hotel worker Anna Kowalski, who worked on Angie’s floor at the Waldorf-Astoria, accused the actress of cheating on Brad with one of her dialect coaches. She told In Touch magazine that after a late-night visit from the coach she found Angie’s hotel room littered with sex toys, a black rubber sheet, and empty vodka bottles. While the film’s chief dialect coach, Howard Samuelsohn, dismissed the claim as “bullshit,” Kowalski further claimed that Angie and Brad rarely interacted when they were in the suite together. “I didn’t see any kind of connection between Pitt and Jolie,” said the maid, who had been fired by the hotel.
While the tittle-tattle of a hotel worker was one thing, the front-page story in the News of the World on January 24, 2010, claiming that the couple had seen divorce lawyers and had signed a £205 ($320) million deal to split their assets and share custody of their six children was quite another. The story, which detailed the couple’s initial visit to the lawyer’s office in December and their subsequent agreement, which was signed in January, set off a furious spin cycle of speculation that sucked in even staid TV, radio, and print outlets. The whirr of further evidence included the information that Brad had paid $1.3 million for a bachelor pad—complete with cave—near his existing property in Los Feliz; that he had been absent from the Screen Actors Guild Awards when the rest of the cast of Inglourious Basterds was present; and that he was apparently overheard at a four-hour dinner at Alto restaurant in Manhattan telling Angie that she needed psychiatric help. (Given the distance between tables, this would have been difficult.)
One intriguing question that hung in the air was why they would need to see a divorce lawyer when they were unmarried. According to her circle, the reality was that they had gone to a lawyer in order to formalize arrangements for their children should anything happen to either of them. Since common-law marriages are not recognized in California, it made sense to have some paperwork relating to the children. Angie was notoriously slack in this regard. When she was married to Jonny Lee Miller, the couple had never bothered to sort out a prenuptial agreement. After Angie’s career took off, it was her mother who took the initiative to see a lawyer to draw up legal papers so that Angie was protected in the case of divorce. On February 8, 2010, Brad and Angie took legal action against Britain’s biggest-selling Sunday newspaper for making “false and intrusive allegations.”
While the physical and emotional demands of filming Salt—reshoots were still going on in January—had undoubtedly strained their partnership, and the looming prospect of working with Johnny Depp had given Angie pause about her past obsessions and future direction, the couple pulled together for a cause they both held dear, helping the homeless and injured following the devastating January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, a country they had just recently visited. Not only did they donate $1 million to Doctors Without Borders—on top of the $6.8 million they had given away during 2009—but Angie, in her capacity as Goodwill Ambassador, was soon on the ground seeing for herself the progress made by relief efforts.
During the two-day visit, when she visited SOS Villages for orphans and a Doctors Without Borders hospital, Angie spoke to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. The conversation reflected how far and how quickly she had come, Amanpour overtly recognizing her influence on the national and international stage. “You have a huge amount of power at your fingertips because of who you are. You have the ability to sway people.” Implicit was the fact she had broken free of Hollywood typecasting, a screen siren defined not by what she wore but by what she said. As activist John Trudell notes: “Her intelligence is the core of her substance. Looks and sexuality are the surface of who she is.” Today she is a role model for a different kind of woman: unconventional yet traditional, a homemaker but a marriage wrecker, nurturing but self-destructive. In fact, a classic Gemini. She is able to have it all without, seemingly, paying a price.
Yet she is still paying a price in a currency that she barely understands, repeating a script from her childhood that she only briefly glimpses. There are signs, though, that she is venturing onto the path of forgiveness, inviting her father to join her family in Venice in February after flying to Dublin to watch his friend John Boorman receive a lifetime achievement award. It is possible that the long winter freeze is ending and a familial thaw has begun. Her mother would not have approved, just as she would not have countenanced Angie’s meeting with Bill Day. Perhaps Angie is starting to become her own woman. As Day observes: “I have watched this family at war for decades. There comes a time to forgive and forget.” Breaking free of the narrative of the past, understanding the truth of her journey, is Angie’s next big challenge.
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.”