Brangelina

by Ian Halperin

  When she was released from the hospital on May 4, Jolie told the magazine, her mother tracked down Thornton against her daughter’s wishes. “I think he had been looking for me,” Jolie said. Twenty-four hours later, the two were married. It was a romantic and touching account. But was it just a little bit too Hollywood?

  * * * *

  Ever since I had started to follow Jolie’s biographical trail, there was one constant. Virtually everybody I talked to in L.A.—including ardent defenders of the actress, reporters, publicists, actors, and industry employees—was skeptical of her relationship with Billy Bob Thornton from start to finish. “It was just a little too coincidental that everything started leaking just as the brother rumors were running rampant and just when she needed a diversion,” said one reporter. “Nobody’s ever been able to find a single person—a friend, a relative, nobody—who saw any hint of this great love before the 2000 Oscar ceremony. Not a single hint before the controversy began, and then suddenly a week or two later they’re madly in love. Give me a break. Go out and find me anybody who believed that was real. Fantasyland.”

  After posing as an actor for more than a year and seeing the unbelievable lengths to which celebrities go to maintain their image or to hide a secret, I had no trouble believing the cynical implications of the people who insisted the Thornton relationship was a giant smokescreen. But there was one nagging question that kept me from buying the story. What was in it for Thornton? It is a question that I still cannot answer with satisfaction to this day.

  One thing was clear. Jolie had, without a doubt, been committed to a psychiatric hospital in the spring of 2000. I wanted to know why. One of my journalistic heroes was a woman named Nellie Bly who, in the late nineteenth century, was a reporter for the New York World. She feigned insanity to expose the conditions of the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on New York City’s Blackwell Island, now known as Roosevelt Island. Bly practiced mimicking mental illness and got herself diagnosed by a respected psychiatrist as “undoubtedly insane,” which allowed her to be committed to the asylum for more than a week, experiencing the brutal conditions firsthand. Her account of her stay in the asylum, which she turned into the book Ten Days in a Madhouse, caused a sensation and led to significant and lasting reforms to the American mental-health system.

  Inspired by Bly’s example, I was determined to gain some insight into Jolie’s experience by infiltrating the Resnick Neurospsychiatric Hospital, where she had been committed in May 2000. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find or what I could possibly discover nine years after the fact, but I did have a way in. A year earlier, while I was posing undercover as a paparazzo for a documentary, Britney Spears had suffered her much-publicized breakdown and had been committed to the same hospital by her father, very much against her will. Unfortunately, I was in New York that day, so I missed most of the drama. But upon my return, I cultivated a number of relatively low-level contacts at the hospital, including security personnel and orderlies, some of whom still worked there when I returned a little more than a year later. It was one of these hospital employees who facilitated my deception.

  “You have to be careful,” he told me when I informed him of my plan. “Most of the people who come through here have had a referral from another hospital. If you just show up, they won’t take you unless you have the right symptoms.” He explained to me that I would have to claim to be suicidal or in danger of hurting others in order to be admitted. Armed with this nugget of information and a little background about the hospital, I was now ready to venture in.

  When I arrived at the hospital the next morning, the place turned out be a whole confusing complex of buildings, but I finally located the right one. A security guard was stationed at the entrance and asked me where I was going. I told him that I was feeling suicidal, and he immediately directed me to the emergency ward, pointing down the hall. Instead of heading directly to emergency, I decided to look around and found a cafeteria where I decided to get a bite to eat. There were various food stations replete with all kinds of healthy foods—salads, juices, vegetarian selections. I opted for a chicken salad and mango juice. This was in marked contrast to Nellie Bly’s description of the food she was served at the asylum: “Gruel broth, spoiled beef, bread that was little more than dried dough, and dirty water that was undrinkable.”

  I sat and ate at an outdoor terrace that was populated mostly by doctors and employees. Next to me was a man about thirty-five years old named Reeve, who said he was following up as an outpatient. I asked him what he was in for. “If it wasn’t for this place I’d be dead,” he said, explaining that he had gone through a messy divorce that left him almost catatonic with depression. “I had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide except here.” He told me he was still depressed but that “it’s under control now.” I told him I’d heard of celebrities checking in here. Had he ever seen any?

  “I know Britney Spears was here last year,” he said. “My doctor told me all about it. It was a zoo. There were camera crews everywhere. She apparently turned the hospital upside down because everyone was trying to sneak in to get photos of her here. Supposedly, a photo of her in the unit would have fetched a million dollars. I heard they even stuck her in a padded room at one point.”

  After lunch, I met another patient in the men’s room, a guy named Mark. I told him I’d been depressed since Kurt Cobain died, and I’d never gotten over it. It was the one area of mental illness where I had some familiarity, having authored a book about the rocker’s death, with particular emphasis on the sixty-eight copycat suicides that took place in the aftermath. These were mostly depressed teenagers, and I was in my forties, but I played my best pitch. Lately I’d been thinking about finally ending it all, I told him. Was it worth checking in? Could they help me?

  “Damn right. You’d be crazy not to. I shit you not,” he said emphatically. “This place ain’t like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Everybody thinks it’s going to be like that.” I asked him whether he’d ever seen Girl, Interrupted, but he’d never heard of it. It turned out, however, that he is a fan of Angelina Jolie, having seen Wanted. “She kicks ass,” he said. “They’ll get you straight here, but don’t, like, expect overnight results. It takes time,” he added.

  He told me that he did the three-day emergency program a while ago and now is strictly an outpatient, though he never told me what brought him there in the first place. “The group therapy sessions are incredible. They help you bring out everything that has been hidden inside. It’s like a big self-disclosing session, but with other people. It’s hard to tell personal stuff at first, but you get used to it. You walk out feeling like you’re not nuts and that you’re not alone.”

  I finally headed over to the emergency ward, where there were some desks with receptionists behind them. There was a bit of a line, so I sat in the waiting area. After a couple of minutes, a doctor came up to me, a resident I assumed, and asked me, “Are you OK?” I told him I was having some problems, that I wasn’t sure I could “handle things.” He told me I was in the right place and said I should fill out the forms when my turn came and they’d “take care” of me. When it was my turn, a woman who I didn’t think was a nurse handed me some papers to fill out. When I asked her about the request for a medical ID number, she asked me how I was going to pay. I told her I was Canadian, and I didn’t think I was covered by insurance. When I asked if I could pay in cash, she said that without insurance, it would be very expensive— “thousands of dollars”—if I was admitted. She gave me a number to call, saying that it would be much cheaper to visit as an outpatient. I finally left, vowing to call my travel-insurance company for information about my coverage. I discovered later that unless I was brought to the hospital in an ambulance under special circumstances, I was probably not covered.

  I had been planning a possible documentary to accompany my book, and I realized that I would need footage of the hospital as well as scenes of me inside the ward gathering information. This was no easy task, given that I
had seen signs all over the hospital forbidding cameras on the premises. There was also a State of California privacy law providing stiff penalties for anyone who published photos or video footage showing the face of a hospital patient. Nevertheless, I needed some visuals. That meant I would have to sneak in not only myself but a cameraman on my next visit. I had a friend who was an accomplished video operator and still-photographer. I had used him before on a number of similar projects. He is an actor who once had a significant role in a made-for- TV movie playing a famous comedian, but he was now struggling, and I knew he could use the work. Fortuitously, he had just recently begun development of a reality-show pilot where the participants were given mini video cameras—the size of a credit card—to record their experiences. He agreed to accompany me on my next visit after I assured him it was safe.

  We headed back five days later. At first, he seemed to regard our undercover day at the hospital as an adventure. But it wasn’t long after I snuck us in that he began getting nervous. He was posing as my brother who had decided to bring me in because I was acting erratic, and he feared that I would harm myself. Once inside, he seemed to clue in that this was a place where people can be held against their will for weeks or months at a time.

  Again, we were directed to the emergency room, but I was determined to sneak onto the inpatient floors to see what goes on there and to get some footage for my film. We were both nervous, especially since some of the security guards were armed. A little while later, we managed to get into a part of the hospital where, I imagine, I would be sent if I were admitted for a seventy-two-hour observation. Here the patients mostly seemed to be in their own zone, preferring peace and quiet. Each of the patients wore their own clothes, so it didn’t feel like a typical hospital ward. In one lounge, we sat next to an outpatient named Roy. His story was the most gripping I had encountered since I arrived.

  He told me he had been in a state mental facility for years in the early nineties before being let out. Now, he was coming here regularly for treatment. He wasn’t shy to talk about his experiences. “I received electroshock in the state hospital,” he said. I thought they had stopped that practice years ago. I had a vague notion that electroshock was akin to bleeding with leeches, but he disabused me of that. “They still use it even today. It’s safer than it used to be, but it still messes up your head. You have to consent to it. They tell you it’s going to help you, but they ask you to consent while you’re in no state of mind to make decisions. I suffered memory loss and more mental damage than I had before I was admitted.

  “Here, it’s completely different. They don’t do things like that. They are genuinely concerned about the patients’ well-being. I wish I could have been in a place like this back then. That place totally screwed me up. They just pump you full of meds; that’s how they keep the patients under control. Here it’s all voluntary; you’re allowed to refuse meds.”

  When we finally got to the emergency ward, a receptionist again asked me to fill out a form. I told her I didn’t feel up to it because I was feeling dizzy. She asked an attendant to look after me. Two minutes later, I was lying on a hospital gurney in a small narrow area just off the ward.

  While lying there for about forty-five minutes, I was able to observe and hear what was going on. Everything seemed rather calm for a so- called nuthouse. It was a much different environment from what I had expected. At one point, I overheard a doctor talking to another staff member about a patient who was supposed to be released that day. To my surprise, the doctor was going on about how he feels strongly that the patient didn’t need medication and that he was ready to re-enter society.

  Meanwhile, I was dying to get off the gurney and explore some more. Finally, an attendant came in and asked how I felt. I told him I was feeling much better. My “brother” hadn’t been permitted to accompany me into the area, but he managed to come in briefly and check on me as I was leaving, permitting him to get some footage. Again, I told the receptionist that I had no insurance coverage. Again, I was given a number to call and then I prepared to leave.

  Everywhere I had gone in the hospital, I had tried to work Angelina Jolie into the conversation. Less than half the people I talked to knew she was once a patient there, although almost everybody knew that Britney Spears had been, and several people told me that some TV actor I had never heard of and whose name I forgot to write down had been in recently and attracted some attention.

  Shortly before my third planned visit to the hospital, I finally had a breakthrough of sorts, thanks to one of my original contacts. He knew I was digging for information about Jolie’s stay and said he had found me somebody who was willing to talk, an employee who once worked in something called the “psychiatric intensive care unit.” I envisioned our meeting as a cloak-and-dagger operation, since not long before, an employee of the same hospital had been indicted for accessing and selling celebrities’ medical records to a national media outlet for $4,900. I wasn’t sure what I would do if somebody offered to sell me the records from Jolie’s stay, but $4,900 seemed like a bargain to me.

  At the appointed time and place, the employee met me in a designated outdoor area near a building called the Ronald Reagan Medical Center in the same complex. When we met, I made some small talk about how I had once acted as a stuntman in a TV movie about Ronald Reagan. Unimpressed, she proceeded to tell me she had a story for me about Jolie, whom, to my disappointment, she had never met.

  “I’m watching Larry King with a staffer who had been on the unit when Angelina Jolie was a patient here,” she said. “Suddenly King asks her about her time here. So we listen to her telling the whole story about her boyfriend, Billy Bob Thornton, and how she couldn’t live without him, how she thought she’d lost him and all that, and my friend turns to me and says, “That was a fictional story. She’s a very good actress. None of that was true.” Or something along those lines. I remember she used the word fictional. I think I asked her what part wasn’t true but that’s all she would say. That was years ago.” She agreed to give me the name of the woman, who now worked in another hospital, also in California. I tried to get in touch with her, but she never returned my calls.

  My so-called undercover operation was decidedly less successful than Nellie Bly’s. I now had a better idea about the reasons for Jolie’s stay—that is to say, which were not the reasons. But I was not a lot closer to finding out what they were. Short of obtaining those medical files, we will probably never know for sure.

  However, if I were forced to make an educated guess about the most likely cause, based on my own investigation, I would point to the times she let her guard down during the interviews she did in the months following her wedding to Billy Bob Thornton. During this period, she publicly professed to be happier than she had ever been. In a July 2001 interview with Rolling Stone’s Chris Heath, for example, she appeared to confirm what insiders have repeatedly said about the period following the Oscar kiss, when incest-gate was raging out of control and everybody around Jolie was telling her she needed to distance herself from her brother to salvage her career: “ ‘It was a difficult time for my family,’ Jolie says. ‘I haven’t talked to Jamie for a few months. I think he … and I’m not sure … but somehow he made a decision to … to …’ She pauses and begins to cry, ‘not be around me so much, so we wouldn’t have to answer stupid questions.’”

  Some of the elements about the official story just didn’t add up. If she was secretly dating Thornton for months and was madly in love, as she claimed, it is understandable that she may have kept the news from the world. But her own brother, who she’s always claimed was her rock, who she shared everything with since they were children, has acknowledged that he didn’t know about the affair or even the wedding until Jolie called him to tell him about it after the vows had been exchanged. “I asked her if she was happy,” he recalled, “and she said, ‘Yes, this is it.’”

  Even more puzzling is Jolie’s claim that she went straight to Thornton’s hotel after the O
scar parties and talked with him in the garden. “He was in his pajamas, and he’d just put the kids to sleep,” she told Rolling Stone. But Liz Smith of the New York Post told me that she was at the same parties and that she saw Jolie still going strong at a post- Oscar event well after 2:00 a.m. that evening. Others present had similar recollections, and a number of media accounts said she partied into the early hours of the morning, clutching her Oscar all the while. Jolie had to be at the airport at 4:00 a.m. for an early morning flight to Mexico, where she was scheduled to resume filming Dancing in the Dark that day, so the timing in her oft-repeated account just doesn’t mesh with the chronology. Moreover, she also told Rolling Stone that “soon after that,” her brother helped her pack so she could go off and get married. Yet James Haven, of course, has always claimed that he had no idea about the wedding until after it took place.

  It appears that the account of her months-long, secret, pre-Oscar relationship with Billy Bob Thornton—revealed only after incest rumors started to swirl—is filled with many unexplained holes. On the other hand, maybe Angelina Jolie had actually found her soul mate and true happiness, as she would profess repeatedly over the next year. It certainly looked that way, at least for awhile.