by Ian Halperin
INTERVIEWER: Who was more theatrical as a kid?
HAVEN: That would be her.
JOLIE: Because you were always holding a camera.
HAVEN: I’d tell her to act for me. We did a version of a Subway commercial of her saying something like, “I’ll punch your face if you don’t buy a sandwich.”
INTERVIEWER: What impressions do you have of each other as children?
JOLIE: I remember him as a happy child and then getting to a certain age and becoming very sad. When I used to have to cry in a film, I’d think of Jamie at age six, so full of hope and happiness.
HAVEN: I’d say the same thing, a little girl who was so wonderful, and then things go wrong and cause pain.
INTERVIEWER: Once and for all, what was the deal with that Oscar kiss?
JOLIE: First, we’re the best of friends. And it wasn’t some odd open-mouthed kiss. It was disappointing that something so beautiful and pure could be turned into a circus.
HAVEN: It was an amazing moment. Yet it was totally misconstrued.
INTERVIEWER: Angelina, how are you as a prospective sister-in- law?
JOLIE: I’ve always been tough on anyone he’s dated. I’ve been the nightmare for any girl. But if I like her, I’m fantastic.
Like Jolie, Haven also attended Beverly Hills High. One of his classmates remembers him as “more normal” than his sister: “I didn’t know Angelina but Jamie was this quiet kid who was quite studious, like most of the other kids. His dad was famous, and people in that school were very conscious of those things. Most people’s parents were not actors, though a lot worked in the film business or in TV or that sort of thing. We saw his dad a few times. He was this friendly parent who always would say, ‘how ya doing?’ to the other kids when he attended something at the school, and there was this sense that he was a famous person and that sort of rubbed off on his son.”
In later years, after Jon Voight was estranged from his daughter, Haven repeatedly attacked him, calling him a bully, among other things. But accounts from the time suggest that the two were quite close. A friend of Marcheline Bertrand, who is still friendly with Voight to this day, remembers that James worshipped his father: “Forget the stuff you read today,” she said. “They were a close family. Jon and Mar continued to be friends, and, when they were all together, you wouldn’t know that there had even been a divorce. I think that’s the most accurate way to describe the situation. Jamie looked up to his father, and they were very close, much more so than Angie and Jon. She and Jon would argue a lot, in a good natured father-daughter sort of way, or she’d get pissed off at her dad if he made a comment about her clothes or something. But Jamie got along very well with him; they’d go to a lot of movies together, sometimes with Angie, sometimes without. Jamie was his first kid, and he was older, so Jon would do stuff with Jamie that Angie was too young for at first.
“Later on, when Jamie was making films, his father would give him advice. He lived with Jon for part of that time, but I don’t want to give the impression that Angie was left out. The three of them did a lot of stuff together. They even attended the 1986 Academy Awards, with his mother, and Jamie was so excited. Angie might have been a bit young to really appreciate the significance, but Jamie loved movies.”
Haven was indeed obsessed with movies but couldn’t figure out what side of the camera he wanted to be on. At the University of Southern California, he showed a flair for filmmaking and it looked like he might have a promising career as a director. But as Jolie’s career took off, his stalled. “I’m not sure what it was,” says his mother’s friend. “He didn’t seem very motivated,” she recalled. “He was very happy when his sister started to make it as an actress, but deep down there may have been a little jealousy as well. At one point, he seemed to believe his father was favoring Angie over him.
“His father was very helpful when he was in school. He paid for the film stock, the processing, everything that Jamie needed, and of course the tuition, none of which was cheap. But Jamie may have felt that Jon had pulled more strings to help his sister than himself. I never heard him say that, but I’ve read some of the things that he said about his father, and it’s a little puzzling to me. I was angry with Jon over some stuff as well, but I think he did right by the kids, or at least he tried to. Jon was proud of both his children and really wanted them to be happy, but maybe he did pour more attention into Angie once he saw where her career was heading.”
Countless media accounts have noted the eerie resemblance between Jolie and her brother, frequently describing them as look-alikes. “Its like snogging yourself from five years earlier,” said Paul Croughton, deputy editor of Arena magazine, about Jolie kissing someone who looks so much like herself. “I’m sure Sigmund Freud would have fun with it.” Freud would have had a field day if he had known that their similar looks were not just the result of genetics. Two separate sources, one of them a photographer of long acquaintance with Jolie, confirmed that when she was in her teens, she and her brother visited a cosmetic surgeon to get their noses thinned in “his and hers nose jobs.”
Still, none of this proved that they were more than very close siblings. As it turns out, their mutual fondness was quite recent. Although Jolie and her brother had been practically inseparable for almost a year, this was in marked contrast to any earlier period of their lives, when they only saw each other occasionally. Haven had never previously been a fixture in her professional career, but they had suddenly become inseparable around the time of the 1999 Golden Globes. Since then, Haven had accompanied Jolie to virtually every press interview, sometimes with their father along, but usually alone. “He was always there,” recalled one photographer. “I assumed that he was just part of her entourage. In those days, the press didn’t follow her around like they do now, hanging on her every move, so I don’t know how much time they spent together privately. But it’s like they were joined at the hip whenever she appeared at an event.”
A few months earlier, Jolie had tried to buy a private island in the St. Lawrence River, near Montreal, complete with its own gothic castle, and claimed that her brother was “coming in” on the deal. And in November, only four months before the Oscars, she announced that she was forming a production company with Haven. The same month, he accompanied her to Australia on a press tour to promote The Bone Collector.
As the media continued to speculate and as the buzz lit up the Internet, the world appeared to let out a collective “Ick!” Jolie’s promising career seemed to be under threat at a time when it should have been soaring to new heights. “Her Q rating was in free fall,” said a publicist who followed the controversy, referring to the measure studios use to gauge the popularity of TV and film stars.
Haven appeared for the first time in public to defend their relationship, although Jolie’s publicists may have had second thoughts about that strategy after an interview he gave one reporter. “Maybe I haven’t found the right woman because my sister is too picky for me,” he said when asked if he had a girlfriend. “Any woman has to go through two filters, me and then my sister. I’m a perfectionist by nature. Then, because I’m so close to Angie, it’s like I’ve already got the perfect woman in my life, and it’s hard for anyone else to live up to that.”
To deflect this new controversy, Haven attempted irony when asked if he had any tattoos of his own, following the revelation that the H on her wrist signified her brother as well as former boyfriend Timothy Hutton. “No, but I’m thinking of getting one,” he replied. And what would it be? “Angelina’s name.” Haven was also asked whether, given his sister’s penchant to shock, they played up the incest rumors. He responded, smiling, “Oh, sure. If you guys all think that is going on, fine. Let’s go, you know? It’s like everyone wants to be with her, and I’m with her. Great.”
“It’s a really weird thing,” Haven told another inquisitor. “I laughed at first, then I got angry about it. Now that I have had time to think, I think it’s just that people are not used to this, so they
automatically think negatively. But everyone who has jumped to this very sick thought is going to have egg on their face. They are writing all these stories that will be there forever, and they will realize in time that it is just a very close relationship, and it has nothing to do with what they are implying.” When asked about Jolie’s statement that she was “in love” with her brother? “The word ‘love’ is such a special thing,” he responded. “Love and sex and whatever, they are different. I could say I’m in love with someone who is ninety years old and teaches acting and lives in Ohio.”
When US Weekly asked bluntly if he and his sister had ever slept together, Haven said, “That’s sick,” before adding that in fact the pair hadn’t slept together since he was seven and she was five. “I think we fell asleep in our mom’s bed while we were watching television,” he said.
Jolie, on the defensive, tried to use her notorious reputation for outspokenness to prove that the rumors couldn’t be true. “The thing is, if I were sleeping with my brother, I would tell people I was,” she insisted. “People know that about me.” The strategy wasn’t entirely effective, judging by the fact that the more the siblings denied it, the more reporters brought it up. The New York Observer even coined a new term to describe Jolie: “Incest chic.”
The repeated denials had clearly not impressed the hosts of the Early Show, who brought up the relationship once again after the story about the Elle photo shoot broke.
MCEWEN: She’s real smart, says exactly what she thinks. That’s why she said that whole thing with her brother … this was in Elle maybe … I don’t know where I saw it.
CHEN: You’re reading Elle?
MCEWEN: Well, I read what’s on …you know, if somebody’s on the cover I find interesting …
GUMBEL: They didn’t have Glamour.
MCEWEN: Yeah, right. I kind of like Glamour myself. But she said she’s very … people know she’s very honest, and she says exactly what she thinks. And was just hugging her brother. Give me a break.
CLAYSON: Hugging him? She gave him a big wet kiss.
MCEWEN: Well, I don’t know how wet that kiss was. She did kiss him.
CLAYSON: It was wet. Whoa. It was a … whoa.
MCEWEN: But you know what’s funny?
GUMBEL: It was a tonsil lock.
MCEWEN: Well, I don’t know about that. But she kissed her brother and all of America went, “Hmm.” They came right forward.
CLAYSON: Who kisses their sibling on the lips like that?
GUMBEL: Folks that … never mind. I shouldn’t do that.
CHEN: Yeah. But I know I’m right with you.
MCEWEN: Don’t say it.
CLAYSON: Don’t go there.
CHEN: And it’s more than just kissing.
CLAYSON: Whoa.
It was still too early to tell how the constant chatter about incest would affect Jolie’s career in the long term. Her current project, Dancing in the Dark, had just wrapped, and she had already signed to do the high-budget action flick, Lara Croft:Tomb Raider. Her immediate acting prospects weren’t in jeopardy, but the box-office returns of her next release could make or break her career.
Jolie’s management was nervous. The decision was quietly made to keep as much distance between Jolie and her brother as possible, a decision that the pair reluctantly went along with. They were never to be photographed together in public, but it is also clear that Haven was expected to distance himself from his sister completely, publicly as well as privately. Jolie would later claim that he had decided on that course of action himself.
The damage had already been done, however. If Angelina Jolie’s career was to be salvaged from the public-relations fiasco of “incestgate,” it would take more than half measures. The public’s perception of her would have to be changed for good. It appears that Jolie was well on her way to making that happen.
BETWEEN BROTHER AND SISTER
It’s unlikely that the world will ever discover the truth about whether Angelina Jolie and her brother ever had a sexual relationship. But as a biographer trying to make sense of her life and career, I felt I had to at least try to explore the possibility instead of dismissing it out of hand. And, while a good number of people believed the two may have indeed taken their affection for each other way beyond healthy limits, very few of them, no matter how bizarre and unconventional Angelina Jolie certainly was, could bring themselves to believe that she and James Havens would violate this most ancient of taboos. It was unthinkable.
Brother-sister incest is much more common than people think, however. In a 1980 study, published in the academic journal, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 796 undergraduates at six New England colleges and universities were surveyed, with fifteen percent of the females and ten percent of the males reporting some type of sexual experience involving a sibling. It’s not known, however, how much of this contact was consensual.
Part of the difficulty in determining the facts about consensual sibling incest is that virtually all the research in the field concerns sexual abuse. That is, coercion by one sibling over another rather than a consensual relationship. Another difficulty is that most countries have strict laws against brother-sister incest in any form, though many allow sexual relationships between cousins. In 1997, a Wisconsin brother and sister, Allen and Patricia Muth, were charged with committing incest. They were separated as kids, but when they met as adults, they fell in love and had children together. They were both convicted, Allen sentenced to eight years in prison, Patricia five. Meanwhile, in Europe, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal no longer prosecute adults who are in incestuous relationships, while Romania is currently debating a law to decriminalize consensual incest.
The studies that have been done often focus on the psychological factors that motivate children to become involved in sibling incest. In a 1987 study conducted by the Boulder County Department of Social Services Sexual Abuse Team, twenty-five cases of sibling incest were studied over a three-year period to determine a set of common dynamics. According to the authors, the dynamics which were repeatedly observed throughout these cases were: (1) distant, inaccessible parents; (2) parental stimulation of sexual climate in the home; and (3) family secrets, especially with regard to extramarital affairs. It is not a stretch to say that the Voight-Bertrand household met most of these criteria.
Those who argue for the liberalization of incest laws usually say that consensual sibling relationships are not harming anybody. Dr. Paul Federoff, a forensic psychiatrist at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, has for years treated adults who have had consensual incestuous relations with siblings. The day after Jolie’s Oscar-night kiss with her brother, Federoff told the Globe and Mail that, in his view, incestuous feelings between siblings, particularly among children and young adults, is “a common probability.” More surprisingly, he said it’s not necessarily a bad thing. “Sexual exploration and contact between young siblings is not uncommon or harmful provided there is not a huge age discrepancy or coercion,” he says. He emphasizes, however, that he doesn’t encourage incest between adult siblings. York University sociologist Ann-Marie Ambert also doesn’t view consensual sibling incest as a moral problem. “Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with it,” she has said.
Medical historian Edward Shorter begs to differ. He argues that the prohibition against incest goes far beyond legalities and is in fact a “genetic commandment.” “The general social castigation of incest has never been relaxed in any time or place,” he argues. “It is an iron biological law, like the law against murder. The consequences of any indiscretion against it are engraved in our DNA.”
Many experts, however, now take issue with the biological prohibition, arguing that this is largely based on the probability of birth defects and that the existence of reliable contraception means that this is no longer necessarily a factor. In addition, a number of experts take pains to distinguish consensual sibling incest from supposedly consensual parent-child incest where an uneve
n power-and-authority dynamic calls into question just how consensual such a relationship can ever really be. Recently, actress Mackenzie Phillips revealed that she had a “consensual incestuous” relationship for years with her late father John Phillips, founder of the Mamas and the Papas, but the fact that both father and daughter were drug addicts at the time makes her claim that it was consensual very questionable.
But what about a brother and sister roughly the same age? I was eager to meet with some siblings involved in consensual sexual relationships to get their perspective and to see whether they could shed any insight on what might have been going on with Jolie and her brother. Was their Oscar-night kiss really the moment that sibling incest came out of the closet? as one newspaper asked the next day. However, locating siblings who would be willing to talk about their relationship was easier said than done, I discovered.
Not surprisingly, the Internet has helped incestuous siblings find and communicate with each other, with countless forums and chat rooms acting as informal support groups. In such forums, siblings discuss their common ground as well as trying to educate society about what many believe is a harmless, even healthy, lifestyle.
In one of these incest forums, a man calling himself “JimJim2” discussed what happens when “two adults who just happen to be related get it on”:
You can’t help who you fall in love with, it just happens. I fell in love with my sister, and I’m not ashamed … I only feel sorry for my mom and dad, I wish they could be happy for us. We love each other. It’s nothing like some old man who tries to fuck his three-year-old. That’s evil and disgusting … Of course we’re consenting, that’s the most important thing. We’re not fucking perverts. What we have is the most beautiful thing in the world.