Brangelina

by Ian Halperin

  Aniston’s Friends castmates were equally enthusiastic about her marriage to Pitt, who was a constant visitor on the set and even guest- starred on an episode, playing a former schoolmate who hates Rachel. “Jennifer’s a lot more peaceful now, like a woman who’s in a good relationship,” Lisa Kudrow told a reporter. “There’s not a lot to say about them because there’s no problems. They’re both light-years ahead of themselves. You know how your grandparents have a certain perspective about life? They’ve got that now.”

  Although Aniston’s philanthropic efforts at the time can’t be compared to those of her future rival, she was heavily involved in social causes long before she met Pitt, including children’s charities and equality for gays and lesbians. Pitt too was starting to come into his own as an activist during the marriage, actively involving himself in the 2004 presidential election campaign on behalf of Democrat John Kerry.

  They usually kept their causes separate, but in 2004 the couple signed on to lend their celebrity to an international movement called One Voice, a grassroots campaign to bring Israelis and Palestinians together and work towards peace in the Middle East. Soon after they joined, Pitt and Aniston issued a joint statement about their commitment to the cause. “The past few years of conflict mean that yet another generation of Israelis and Palestinians will grow up in hatred. We cannot allow that to happen.” They told the media they believed most people in the region wanted a negotiated settlement with an end to violence and imagined that by appealing to “ordinary folk,” they could help bring the warring parties together.

  Personally and professionally, things were going very well for them as 2004 began. All that was missing was a baby.

  THE FEUD

  In his brilliant 2006 essay, “The Many Faces of Celebrity Philanthropy,” Joseph Epstein recalled an old joke about a young Hollywood star seeking to ornament his rising fame with a charitable cause. The star instructs his agent to find a charity for him to associate with. “Morty,” he says to the agent, “you gotta get me my own charity. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby have their charity golf tournaments. Doris Day works for protecting animals. Danny Thomas has St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Jerry Lewis has Muscular Dystrophy. It works for them, Morty, it’ll work for me. Get on it right away.” A week later the agent calls back. “You’ve found my charity?” the young star asks. “It wasn’t easy,” the agent replies, “just about everything was taken.” “What was left for me?” the star asks, with hope in his voice. After a brief silence and a clearing of the throat, finally the agent says, “Acne.”

  The point of the joke, explained Epstein, is to show the artificiality of celebrity giving, “the emptiness of it all, reducing it to the low status of little more than a good career move. Is this unfair? Of course it is. I, for one, am certainly not prepared to say that Doris Day doesn’t truly love stray dogs. Nor am I ready to quip, as the comedian Lenny Bruce did, that Jerry Lewis damn well ought to work for muscular dystrophy, since he caused it. (Bruce would here make a claw of his fist and go, ‘Gnang, gnang.’)”

  Indeed, as any celebrity publicist will tell you, Hollywood philanthropy—associating an actor with a humanitarian cause—is one of the most effective methods for repairing or transforming a tarnished image. So it was hardly a surprise when Time magazine sounded a mocking note at the news, in August 2001, that Angelina Jolie was appointed a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador. “Snicker if you will—it’s certainly understandable—but Angelina Jolie actually earned the title of goodwill ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees,” the magazine wrote, noting that a baby in Sierra Leone had recently screamed in terror at the sight of the actress, supposedly because of her white skin. “It certainly couldn’t have been that vial of husband Billy Bob Thornton’s blood on the chain around her neck,” Time wrote. But the mocking didn’t last long. People soon started to realize that Jolie was not just any fly-by-night celebrity pretending to care. She appeared to be genuine in taking up a cause that was near and dear to her heart.

  It all started when she flew to Cambodia at the end of 2000 to film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. While there, she was taken to see the plight of refugees on the Thailand-Cambodia border where she expressed shock at the conditions they faced. “Growing up in the States, I learned about American history, and that was the extent of it,” she told the Scotsman. “I focused on what was affecting us, not the rest of the world.”

  Jolie had long admired Audrey Hepburn, whose reputation as a screen legend was cemented towards the end of her distinguished career when she was appointed a UNICEF goodwill ambassador by the United Nations. Hepburn then traveled tirelessly, dedicating the last years of her life to helping impoverished children in the world’s poorest nations.

  The significant difference between Hepburn’s appointment and Jolie’s is that the UN had approached Hepburn to become a goodwill ambassador because of her long-stated commitment to children, whereas it was Jolie who approached the UN to offer her services. Jolie has asserted that she merely called them up asking for information and that they then asked her to come aboard. Others, including the UN itself, have claimed that Jolie herself offered to become an ambassador.

  There are also a number of conflicting stories about how she first became interested in the plight of refugees. At first, she claimed it was her trip to Cambodia that opened her eyes to the issue. But in 2003, when she was promoting her newly released film Beyond Borders, she gave an interview to Newsweek in which she shared a different version. She stated that her initial interest began in 1998, when the film about international aid workers was first under development but was struggling to find financing:

  Five years ago, I read the script for Beyond Borders, and I was so moved by the content and curious about a world I knew nothing about. I felt a responsibility to start to educate myself as we all should, as we grow up. When I found out the film wasn’t going to go forward, I was really sad because I had wanted to take that journey and understand what that was about. Then it dawned on me that I could educate myself and travel to these parts of the world and see for myself what was happening. And so I read many different books on different organizations and different chapters of the UN. And I was shocked when I read about how twenty million people are displaced today. I couldn’t understand how that was possible. I called [the UN office in] Washington and, at the time, I had been following stories about Sierra Leone, so that was the first place we discussed me going, so I could observe and help.

  Whatever her original motivation, it was soon obvious that her new-found interest in humanitarian issues was sincere, especially when she put her money where her mouth was, donating $1 million of her own money and traveling to dangerous hotspots in Africa and Asia to educate herself on the issues.

  In the past, the UN had only designated non-controversial celebrities to the post of goodwill ambassador—people like Danny Kaye, Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, and Muhammad Ali. Now, they explained that the appointment of celebrities like Jolie and another recently appointed ambassador, former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, was meant to appeal to a new demographic: teenagers. “The UN is often seen as a boring bureaucracy by young people,” explained a spokesperson.

  At the ceremony where she was formally appointed an ambassador, Jolie broke into tears as she described her encounters with Afghan refugees in Pakistan during a recent trip. “It’s still very hard to talk about. It is the worst situation, I think, because there is no end in sight for the needs of these people,” she said emotionally. “But I was surprised to sit down with these women and their children and talk with them, and they were so kind and warm and funny and generous and hard-working and grateful for any little help they could get, and they are living in a situation [where] I don’t think anybody in this room could survive for more than a few days.”

  Whereas a year earlier Jolie talked ad nauseum to the media about her sex life with Thornton, she was now single-minded about a different topic. The constant talk about sex, blood, and underwear had been
remarkably effective in changing the subject from incest, but she had nearly become a caricature. She was no longer being offered the kind of serious roles that had won her three consecutive Golden Globes. Instead, she was being offered mediocre action movies from people wanting to capitalize on the new image she created for herself in her huge box- office success Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Her management was worried that she had lost her momentum, and numerous Hollywood insiders have reported that she was urged to transform her image or at least stop the embarrassing public antics with Thornton.

  While there seemed to be no question that she had an authentic concern for her cause, she now worked her new passion into almost every interview. Publicly, she started to reject the material values of Hollywood and talk about how she could channel her fame to help others rather than for personal profit. She discussed how her trips abroad had helped give her a new perspective about her fame. “You know, what’s funny is that I thought I would come back with a lot of anger or a lot of distance,” she said about her first international trips on behalf of the UN. “But instead, I felt bad for people who were focused on material things or fame. I just wished for them to not be so caught up in those things and hoped they would realize that all that stuff doesn’t matter, and this stuff does.”

  Returning from a UN trip to Africa in 2001, she told reporters that she had undergone a transformation. “I had gone from being in an African jungle to sitting on a first-class flight home,” she recalled. “Though I was covered in dirt, I felt real and at my most beautiful. And suddenly, I was surrounded by people who knew me as an actress. I think my appearance was upsetting to all of them, in their suits and makeup, looking at magazines. I felt sick because I started flipping through the articles about parties, film ratings, who has this, who’s the hottest that. I felt like I didn’t want to return to that world.”

  The media also began to notice that she and Thornton were spending less time together. When they did appear, the subject of their sex life never came up anymore, much to the disappointment of the gossip- columnists and paparazzi. In the past, they had always been able to count on the couple to give them something colorful.

  Thornton later lamented that when she first came back from filming Tomb Raider, Jolie was a different person from the wild child he had married. Jolie later described his increasingly wary attitude to what he assumed was a hobby. “He would say, ‘Why are you going to do these things? What do you think you’re going to accomplish?’” It wasn’t just her husband who was wondering what she was doing. “It seems crazy to some of my friends that I want to leave the warmth and safety of my home. But I had to believe I could accomplish something. They asked, ‘Why can’t you just help from here? Why do you have to see it?’ I didn’t know how to answer them.”

  Meanwhile, Thornton was devoting more and more time to his own hobby, the blues-and-roots rock band that he recorded with on weekends, frequently spending more time with his bandmates than with his wife. Both spouses stopped wearing the infamous amulets around their necks bearing drops of each other’s blood.

  Jolie’s parents, who both had strong social consciences, were more supportive of what she was doing. They were also deeply worried about her safety, especially before her first trip to Sierra Leone and Tanzania in February 2001. Just before she was scheduled to leave for Africa, Jon Voight called the American office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and tried to persuade them to cancel her trip. In the journal she kept of that trip, later published as a memoir entitled Notes from My Travels, Jolie recalled her reaction when she learned of his behind-the-scenes maneuvering. “I was angry with him,” she wrote, “but I told him that I know he loves me and that as my father he was trying to protect me from harm. We embraced and smiled at one another.”

  Bertrand was no less concerned, Jolie admitted in her journal: “My mom looked at me like I was her little girl. She smiled at me through her teary eyes. She was worried. As she hugged me goodbye, she gave me a specific message from my brother, Jamie. ‘Tell Angie I love her, and to remember that if she is ever scared, sad, or angry, look up at the night sky, find the second star on the right, and follow it straight on till morning.’ That’s from Peter Pan, one of our favorite stories.” Whether her travels were causing tension in the marriage or whether she was trying to distance herself from the couple’s crazy antics of the year before, Jolie was rarely seen in public with Thornton any more except for high-profile events. Now, instead of talking to reporters about their sexual antics together, she began to talk about how she spent a lot of time with Thornton’s kids. “Billy Bob has two beautiful children,” she told one magazine. “They’re just turning seven and eight. They are still babies, and they live with their mother … She is wonderful about me getting to know them because they spend a lot of time with us and we want to spend more and more time with them.”

  The media began to take the bait. The talk about her “stepchildren” begged the obvious question: Did she want some of her own? It was a question that started to be asked by just about every reporter. At first, she was noncommittal, but then started to hint at a future adoption. “We are a family already,” she told an inquiring journalist. “But when they are older, I think we will adopt quite a few children.”

  In July 2001, after she had signed on to play Lara Croft for the second time, she was asked by E! News Daily correspondent Greg Agnew whether Tomb Raider was becoming a “franchise.” Her response was telling. “I have this year and a half, two years between them in case I do … get pregnant.” When Agnew asked if she was considering pregnancy, she responded, “No, I’ve never wanted to be pregnant. I’ve always wanted to adopt.” He pressed on, curious to know whether she would adopt in the United States or go abroad. She refused to go there. “We’ve talked about it a lot, and I’m sure you’ll know. Everybody will know,” she replied cryptically.

  The question was much on her mind during this period. According to a friend of Thornton’s, Jolie had looked into the possibility of an American adoption but had been told her odds were slim, given her controversial past. “I think she talked to a lawyer at one point,” he revealed. “She wanted a newborn, not an older child, and she was told that she and Billy might have difficulty being accepted as prospective parents because of their issues.”

  Indeed, when Jolie publicly contemplated adoption for the first time, it came just a year after she had spent seventy-two hours in a psychiatric institution. Thornton himself also had some mental-health issues in his past, and they had both admitted to previous substance-abuse problems. On top of that, Thornton had been accused by a previous wife of extreme physical and mental abuse. Not, perhaps, the ideal candidates for adoptive parents.

  Still, I was curious if those issues would actually disqualify them from the adoption process, so I decided to put it to the test. Posing as a father who wanted to adopt a baby with my wife because of infertility problems, I approached a California-based organization called the Adoption Network Law Center, which specializes in “legal-adoption assistance.”

  Talking to an agent named Robin Elcott, who specializes in newborn and domestic adoptions, I told her my name was Billy Bob Jackson and that my wife and I wanted to adopt, but we were afraid that some of our personal problems might disqualify us. I told her that I had recently been in a psychiatric ward for seventy-two hours, under observation for some mental-health issues, and that both my wife and myself had struggled with drugs and alcohol in the past but that we were now clean. Would that rule us out?

  “It’s safe to say that your chances would be lower,” she explained. “You would have to pass a home study, which gets into a lot of details financially, physically, and emotionally.” However, she emphasized that we would not automatically be disqualified. “If you had ever been arrested, it would be another matter,” she explained. “But it’s on a case- by-case basis, and they would look at your current circumstances before making an evaluation.”

  I asked whether I would have a better chan
ce adopting abroad. “Not necessarily,” she said. “It depends on the country. In some foreign countries, mental illness is actually an official exclusion, so you would have a better chance adopting here than in those countries.” Even for a foreign adoption, she explained, a home study would be required.

  In August, Jolie appeared on CNN’s flagship talk show, Larry King Live, where she was asked about her plans. Again she hinted that she was thinking of adopting, but this time she referred to orphans, implying that she was thinking of a foreign country where, unlike the U.S., orphanages still exist:

  KING: Want a family?

  JOLIE: Yes.

  KING: Working on it? Would you like to get one soon? Have you thought about when you might want one?

  JOLIE: Well, I’ve always wanted to adopt. I’ve always felt it was …

  KING: You don’t want to give birth?

  JOLIE: It’s not that. It’s that I’ve just … I think some people have certain callings in life. Certain people are maybe meant to give birth and it’s wonderful. And some people … Ever since I can remember, after hearing about different kids that need homes or different orphans or different, you know, not a baby necessarily, but little kids … I’ve just always known that I would love [an adopted child] as much as I would love my own. So I’d be a great mother to adopt a child.