Brangelina

by Ian Halperin

  “That one proves it,” Kim said. “That’s more lovey-dovey than the Oscars.”

  That’s when Adrian piped in with her theory.

  “Here’s what I’ve always thought about those two,” she said. “I believe they had a powerful quasi-incestuous attraction to each other and that there was sexual tension galore, but that they probably never acted on it, even if they wanted to.” And, although we’ll probably never know for sure, that’s roughly the same conclusion that I had come to.

  In the end, however, it was irrelevant whether Jolie and her brother had ever slept together. The public perception of their possible incest was doing incalculable damage to her career and something had to be done before it was too late.

  BILLY BOB

  The new gossip started with a blind item—a vague and unsupported reference to a celebrity—leaked to a New York newspaper at the height of the incest allegations: “Which Oscar-winning actress is earning a reputation as a home-wrecker?”

  It just so happened that Angelina Jolie was back in Mexico filming Dancing in the Dark with Antonio Banderas. It was only natural that readers assumed that the item referred to her and Banderas. His notoriously jealous wife, actress Melanie Griffith, was reportedly steaming when she read the item, assuming that Jolie had stolen her man.

  Not a soul knew that Jolie was actually three months into an affair with Billy Bob Thornton, who at the time was engaged to Laura Dern. The affair was apparently so secret that not even the usual insiders had a clue it was going on. Hence, the surprise when in the second week of April, the New York Daily News reported that Jolie was dating the Oscar-winning Sling Blade actor. The paper also reported that while bowling with Matt Damon, Matthew McConaughey, and Thornton at an L.A. bowling alley, she was spotted with a new “Billy Bob” tattoo on her left arm. “She said she’d just gotten it,” a friend of Jolie told the paper. “She said she’d always loved him.”

  The timing of the leak, of course, couldn’t have been more convenient. E! Online correspondent Ted Casablanca had just said of Jolie’s relationship with her brother, “That’s not Hollywood. That’s creepy!” And, more significantly, Saturday Night Live was beginning to make fun of Jolie’s allegedly incestuous relationship on a weekly basis, threatening to make her a laughingstock. In one SNL Weekend Update segment, “Angelina” and her brother engage in a slobbery make-out scene after denying incest, followed by an admission that they had sex and the appearance of a deformed child with a human arm sticking out of its head and something foul oozing from its mouth.

  But if the timing of the revelation of the affair was convenient and even suspicious, it was also effective. As the Daily News put it, the news that Jolie was involved with Billy Bob Thornton served to “quash the incest rumors.” She needed to change the subject and she had done so very quickly. Indeed, before long, it seemed that America had completely forgotten the Oscar-night kiss and could only talk about Jolie’s new love.

  At first glance, Billy Bob Thornton may have seemed a rather unusual man to fall in love with. Exactly twenty years Jolie’s senior, the forty-four-year-old Thornton was raised in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in a shack that had neither running water nor electricity. His mother was a professional psychic; his father, a teacher and basketball coach. After years of slogging it out in small roles, Thornton finally rose to attention as a regular cast member of the CBS sitcom Hearts Afire, starring John Ritter, from 1992 to 1995.

  As a struggling actor, Thornton had worked as a waiter and had once served the legendary filmmaker Billy Wilder, director of classics such as Double Indemnity and Some Like It Hot. After chatting for a few minutes, Thornton asked for advice, at which point Wilder suggested he try his hand at screenwriting. He heeded Wilder’s advice, and a few years later wrote the quirky independent feature Sling Blade, which he also starred in and directed. The film won him an Oscar for best adapted screenplay and made him a star, vaulting him to the top echelons of Hollywood.

  Thornton’s personal life was not as successful. Before he met Jolie, he had been married and divorced four times. His fourth marriage, to Playboy model Pietra Cherniak, ended in a messy divorce in 1997, and her allegations, despite being unproven, might have caused wife number five to think twice before tying the knot. In her divorce petition, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, Cherniak made a number of troubling accusations against Thornton:

  Respondent’s and my relationship has been characterized by his physical violence and his verbal, emotional, and mental abuse of me. The abuse, particularly physical abuse, has become more severe over the past twelve months. Respondent needs help. I am terrified that my filing this proceeding has jeopardized my life, and that Respondent will now follow through on his threats to kill me. I need protection, and I ask that this court grant the orders I have requested.

  In her affidavit, Cherniak maintains that Thornton told her he was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as a manic depressive, and that he was taking lithium on a daily basis. But a month or two after they got married, she said he told her he couldn’t take lithium anymore because it blocked his creativity and made him “feel like a piece of driftwood.” When she was seven months pregnant, she charged, he became extremely violent for the first time, throwing or pushing her onto a coffee table. Then, three months after their son Willie was born, Cherniak says Thornton punched her in the eye while she was holding the baby, then got on his knees and “begged for forgiveness.”

  In her documents, she describes how three weeks before she filed for divorce, Thornton began to choke her. With his hands around her neck, she says he looked her in the eyes and said, “I am going to kill you. I’m going to kill you, and then I’m going to go to prison, and the children will be orphans.”

  Thornton countered that it was his wife who was abusive, charging that she was trying to up the terms of their divorce settlement now that he was rich and famous, having recently won his Oscar for Sling Blade. The judge granted each party a restraining order against the other.

  Depending on who you talk to in Hollywood, Thornton is completely nuts or merely eccentric. Either way he is definitely odd. His eccentricities include some curious phobias, including his famous aversion to French antiques. “It’s just that I won’t use real silver,” he told the London Independent. “You know, like the big old, heavy-ass forks and knives; I can’t do that. It’s the same thing as the antique furniture. I just don’t like old stuff. I’m creeped out by it, and I have no explanation why … I don’t have a phobia about American antiques. It’s mostly French, you know, like the big old, gold-carved chairs with the velvet cushions. The Louis XIV type. That’s what creeps me out. I can spot the imitation antiques a mile off. They have a different vibe. Not as much dust.”

  Whether he’s nuts or not, he has admitted to some mental-health issues aside from manic depression, including a battle with obsessive- compulsive disorder. But even his detractors admit that he’s creative, funny, and highly intelligent—all traits that Jolie valued in a man.

  According to the official story, spread jointly by Jolie and Thornton after they went public in a whirlwind media blitz, they had heard of each other for a long time before getting together. Geyer Kosinski, one of the people Jolie thanked in her Oscar speech, was her long-time manager and used to be Thornton’s agent. He told Billy Bob that he should meet Jolie because they had a lot in common: a mutual affinity for tattoos, for example, and an untamed wild streak that frequently defied Hollywood conventions. Two years before they officially met, they were at an event together, but Jolie reportedly deliberately avoided him. Then they were signed to co-star in the film Pushing Tin, a comedy about air-traffic controllers, which was filmed in Toronto in the spring of 1998. On the day she arrived to begin filming, the two got into the same elevator, though they still had not been formally introduced. Thornton later recalled that meeting: “I said, ‘I’m Billy Bob. How are you doing?’ and then we came out of the elevator, and I just remember … you know wanting something to not go away? Wishing
the elevator had gone to China. It’s like a bolt of lightning. Something different happened that never happened before.”

  Jolie offered a similar recollection. “Something went wrong with me in the elevator,” she recalled. “Chemical. I really walked into a wall. It was the elevator. I kind of knocked it as we were both getting out. He got into a van, and he asked me, ‘I’m trying on some pants, you want to come?’ And I nearly passed out. All I heard was him and taking off his pants. I just said ‘no.’ And I went around the corner and sat against a wall, breathing, thinking, ‘What … was … that? What the fuck was that? Jesus, how am I going to work?’ I was just confused. I became a complete idiot.”

  The two claimed that one night in Toronto, after filming, they had dinner together, but not alone. Thornton was with his assistant, Jolie with a friend. But across the table, they talked and a connection was made. “We were not able to be together at that time,” Jolie said. “We never at that time said one day we’re going to be together. We couldn’t,” added Thornton about that initial spark. “But I know now that it was impossible not to be together.” “We would say strange things,” she said. “We would just randomly be talking about something in our lives, like the difficulty of living with people, and he’d say, ‘I could live with you.’ I thought … not that I wasn’t good enough for him, but that I didn’t know how centered in any way or together or solid or good for anybody I was. So I wouldn’t have assumed that that would be a great thing if we were together.”

  At the time, Thornton was dating actress Laura Dern. Consequently, after Pushing Tin wrapped in late 1998, Jolie and Thornton had no contact for months until they began talking by phone. Then, in April 2000, after persistent media reports confirmed that Jolie and Thornton were now a couple, the syndicated Rush and Molloy column asked Thornton’s publicist, Michelle Beaga, to check on the status of his romance with Dern. She confirmed that they had indeed “broken up” but claimed that she didn’t “know any more than that.”

  Dern had met Thornton in 1997 when they both appeared on the landmark episode of Ellen where star Ellen Degeneres comes out as a lesbian for the first time, confessing to the character played by Dern. Dern and Thornton later co-starred in the 2001 film, Daddy and Them, which was written and directed by Thornton. They had both talked openly of their engagement. Only a month before his affair with Jolie became public, Thornton had given an interview to the magazine Men’s Journal about Dern, saying, “I’m now happily involved with someone who’s my best friend. We have a dog and a yard, and I have my kids part of the time, and I feel that I’ve become a good father, and it’s something I’m proud of.”

  The couple split after Dern heard about the affair with Jolie, although apparently Thornton called Dern on May 1 to say he wasn’t serious about Jolie; he was “just doing his thing.” Four days later, however, he married Jolie. Dern told Talk magazine later that year, “I left home to work on a movie, and while I was away, my boyfriend got married, and I’ve never heard from him again. It’s like a sudden death.”

  Dern is the daughter of veteran character actor Bruce Dern and the versatile, three-time Oscar nominee Diane Ladd. Ladd was said to have been fond of Thornton, but just after his publicist confirmed that he and Dern had broken up, Ladd was quoted in mid-April as saying, “Billy Bob Thornton is a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I’m shocked. Billy Bob told me he wants my daughter to be his wife, and I know they’ve talked about having kids. I don’t know how to make sense out of it.”

  By the end of April, Thornton and Jolie had gone public with their relationship, and there were hundreds of articles reporting that wedding bells were imminent. On April 28, E! Entertainment News’s Hollywood correspondent Ted Casablanca reported that the two had eloped, but his information turned out to be incorrect. Nevertheless, a week later, on May 5, Thornton and Jolie drove to Las Vegas where they were indeed issued a marriage license at the Clark County courthouse. That same afternoon, they headed to the Little Church of the West Wedding Chapel, which hosts more than six thousand ceremonies a year, many conducted by an Elvis-impersonating minister who sings two songs by the King and performs the ceremony for the bargain price of $575.

  Thornton and Jolie stuck to the more traditional $189 beginning package, which included a bouquet of red and white roses. “They came in like anyone else,” recalled chapel owner Greg Smith. For their wedding music, the couple chose “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers. For the nuptials, the bride wore a blue sleeveless sweater and jeans, while the groom sported jeans and a baseball cap.

  “He identified himself as Bill Thornton when he made the reservation,” said Smith. “I didn’t know it was him until they got here.” The wedding entourage included none of Jolie’s friends or family, only Thornton’s pal, cinematographer Harve Cook, who served as his best man. Cook was the video assistant operator on All the Pretty Horses, a film Thornton had recently directed.

  Soon, the couples’ hyperbole reached a deafening roar. “I’m madly in love with this man,” Jolie told Talk magazine afterward, “and will be till the day I die.” “You know when you love someone so much you can almost kill them? I was nearly killed last night,” Jolie told US Weekly. Thornton rolled up his pant leg for a reporter to reveal a colorful mushroom on his right calf with the name “Angie” written inside.

  “It was all very over the top,” recalled a correspondent for the Hollywood Reporter who says that “everybody in town was rolling their eyes when this stuff started to come out. It all sounded so contrived, like they had one of their scriptwriters churn it out.”

  Indeed, even publicists who earned their living generating this kind of coverage seemed to believe there was something amiss. In an unprecedented move, the venerable Hollywood public-relations firm of Baker Winokur Ryder (BWR), which represents A-list clients such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Chris Rock, and Michael J. Fox, quietly dropped Jolie from their stable. “Why on earth would anyone want to end a working relationship with the beautiful Oscar winner?” asked New York Magazine, which broke the story. Jolie’s former representative at BWR, Cari Ross, told the magazine, “It wasn’t working for me, so I told Jolie’s manager Geyer Kosinski that I needed to back out.” Kosinski’s company, Industry Entertainment, immediately put their own spin on the unusual move. “Angelina decided she just didn’t need a publicist,” said Industry’s Anne Woodward.

  It was not, ostensibly, an opportune time to lose her publicist, but perhaps Jolie knew what she was doing. Publicly outing her affair with Billy Bob Thornton had succeeded in pushing talk of incest out of the media. The whispers were silenced, and her brother’s name was barely mentioned in conjunction with hers after mid-April 2000. James Haven, the person closest to Jolie for more than a year, the man she had recently described as her “best friend” and “strongest support” had apparently been banished.

  * * * *

  On June 1, 2000, New York Post columnist Liz Smith, known for her vast network of Hollywood friends and sources, reported a rumor that she had recently heard about Jolie and Thornton’s wedding: they were actually “just good friends.” The marriage was “basically Billy Bob’s way to keep an eye on Angelina because he feared she might fall over the edge somehow, and she agreed she needed looking after.”

  Indeed she did. Although there appeared to be little basis for the rumor, a story had already been circulating that Jolie had indeed fallen “over the edge” before her marriage to Thornton. Something happened between May 1, the day Thornton told Laura Dern he wasn’t serious about Jolie, and May 5, the day Jolie and Thornton got married. The London Daily Mail was the first to break the news, citing sources from the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA in Los Angeles. The sources claimed that Jolie had checked herself in at the beginning of May. For seventy-two hours, she had been put on a psychiatric hold, the maximum somebody could be held under California law without being formally committed. Hospital insiders told the paper, “She said she was afraid she would hu
rt herself. She was very angry and thought she might kill herself if she wasn’t treated.” Jolie’s spokesperson confirmed to the British paper that she had checked into the UCLA psychiatric hospital, but not because of Billy Bob Thornton. Rather, Jolie was treated for “exhaustion.”

  But a year later, Jolie broke her silence about the incident in an interview with Rolling Stone. She claimed that the psychiatric stay was indeed related to her relationship with Thornton. “What happened is we didn’t know if we were going to be able to be together,” she told the magazine. “I remember him driving somewhere and not knowing if he was OK … We had wanted to get married, and then for all these different reasons we thought we couldn’t. We both were just … are just, it’s a beautiful kind of love, but it’s also a little insane, and I for some reason thought something had happened to him, and I lost the ability to … I just went a little insane … All I can say is, it was not about other people. Neither one of us didn’t love the other. All I can say is, it’s just that life just explodes sometimes … Maybe part of me needed to shut down for a few days to process everything before; I don’t know.”

  She claimed that just before the incident she had been with Thornton in Nashville. When she returned to Los Angeles and was picked up by her mother at the airport, she started weeping. “And I just couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “I don’t know what it was.” She started stuttering, and soon she was unable to speak. A doctor was called and she was taken to the hospital. “Basically I thought he was gone,” she said. “So they took it as I was going through the actual trauma of having lost, like a woman who lost her husband. I couldn’t really speak.”

  The coincidence of being committed to a mental hospital only a month after she won an Oscar for portraying Lisa Rowe was not lost on Jolie, nor on her fellow patients. “Some of them were aware of me, some of them had seen Girl, Interrupted,” she said. “In some weird way it’s nice to know that everybody’s insane. I mean, to a lot of young girls, to all of us, there are these pictures in magazines of people that have their shit together where their lives are perfect. I think that somehow it was refreshing for these people that were struggling with the different things I’ve struggled with in my life to realize that it’s not about … Certain things don’t make it better; there isn’t some other side of life. People aren’t any different.”