Brangelina

by Ian Halperin

  According to a friend of Voight’s who has witnessed the vicious public feud play out, “Jon was very hurt by what the kids were saying about him. He knew that they knew it wasn’t true. But what did he expect after what he said about Angie on television? He crossed a line, it seems to me. In this case, he probably should have kept the dirty laundry hidden.”

  BRAD AND ANGELINA

  The only time I ever met Brad Pitt was on December 8, 2004. I was shooting a documentary in Hollywood and was trying to get some footage of George Clooney. With the help of my publicist, I had hatched a plan to crash the premiere of his film Ocean’s Twelve, scheduled for December 8 at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. I had acquired two forged passes, one for myself and one for my cameraman. They read “Red Carpet Access Only,” meaning we couldn’t watch the film itself but could be present when the film’s cast appeared and walked in.

  When the stars began to arrive in their limousines, we were in position, though publicists and handlers kept elbowing us and pushing us back to make room for their clients to make their entrances. When Clooney arrived with his mother and his girlfriend, he was immediately surrounded by TV cameras from various entertainment shows and local stations, all of whom get priority at these events, so I was never able to get close enough to talk to him.

  I stood there for a while, frustrated. Then I caught sight of one of the film’s other stars, Brad Pitt. He was standing a little ways away, keeping himself at a safe distance from the media and the crowds. All the cameramen, including my own, were being muscled away en masse, but, thanks to my forged pass, I was allowed to stay where I was. After a while, having watched most of the rest of the cast walk past on the carpet, I found myself about two feet away from where Pitt stood. He was waving to the crowd and refusing to talk to the media, who were cordoned off at a slight distance. Seizing my chance, I quickly introduced myself as a struggling actor who had just had a bit part in Martin Scorsese’s film, The Aviator, which was about to be released. Pitt commented that he’d love to work with Scorsese and seemed quite willing to continue chatting with me. Not having anything specific to question him on, I asked if he had any advice for an actor like me. His answer was immediate, and sounded almost rote: “Take classes, work your ass off, and if you haven’t made it by thirty-five, give up.” Then he gave me the once over. His expression changed to a sheepish smile. “Oh, I guess you’re already over thirty-five,” he said affably and shrugged. “What can I tell you?”

  In retrospect, I might have asked him a different question. As I was talking to him, in fact the entire time he was on the red carpet, fans kept screaming at him, “Where’s Jen?” But a few from the media were yelling another question: “Where’s Angelina?”

  When the stars finally headed in to watch the film, I asked a photographer from Splash what was up. “He’s been banging Jolie for months,” he answered. When I asked how he knew, he told me that he had been at the Cannes Film Festival the previous May, where Pitt’s affair was all people could talk about, even though Aniston had flown there at the last minute to be by her husband’s side. He said he had spoken to all kinds of people who had witnessed the two “all over each other.” When they started filming [Mr. & Mrs. Smith], the paparazzo elaborated, she was seen going into Pitt’s trailer for hours at a time and coming out with a “just-fucked look.” At one point, they were spotted holding hands in public; that was the story that fueled the first rumors. He said they had apparently “cooled off” at one point, but he didn’t know whether it was because the affair had ended or because the two had decided to keep their distance after rumors started to circulate.

  A month after this conversation, Pitt and Aniston formally announced their breakup, though it would be several months after that before Pitt made his relationship with Angelina Jolie official.

  * * * *

  Aniston met Jolie only once. It was on the Friends lot, just before Pitt was about to begin filming Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a tale of husband and wife assassins who are hired to kill each other. “Brad is so excited about working with you,” she told her husband’s new co-star. “I hope you guys have a really good time.” At that point, there was no indication whatsoever that there was trouble in paradise. Aniston and Pitt were constantly being asked about their relationship, and their answers always sounded very sincere, even if a bit sickly sweet. “Brad and I were driving, and we saw an old couple driving,” Aniston told one magazine. “The lady was at the wheel, and her hands were shaking. He touched her hand, and he seemed to say, ‘I’ve loved you for 7,000 years, and I still do.’ I hope that’s Brad and me one day.”

  For his part, Pitt seemed committed to making that happen. “I never thought being married would make me feel this way,” he told one reporter. “It’s an amazing feeling. I look at Jen and think … she’s my wife … Marriage is great. It’s made me feel very good about taking this kind of journey together with a terrific woman who wants to share my life and share the journey with me.”

  According to friends and co-workers, the only time she and Pitt bickered was about architecture and design. Pitt was a fanatic about modern design, particularly the Arts and Crafts movement, while Aniston was a traditionalist, in keeping, perhaps, with her Greek heritage. It made for some fun disagreements, even occasional tension, while they were renovating the massive $14-million Beverly Hills mansion they had bought together and had been renovating for more than a year. But for the most part, friends always said they seemed the ideal couple.

  Pitt and Aniston had formed a production company together, Plan B Entertainment, and had just secured the rights to the memoir of Mariane Pearl, entitled A Mighty Heart, about how her husband Daniel, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, had been murdered by terrorists. Aniston was set to play Mariane in what was assumed to be the perfect vehicle to launch a serious acting career.

  In 2003, Pitt told an Australian newspaper that he and Aniston were starting to think of having children. “Jen and I are in the negotiation phase,” he said. “We’re still practicing. But everything’s going well, and I’m looking forward to the future.” Asked whether he preferred girls or boys, his answer was immediate: “There’s no question about it. I love girls. I want little versions of Jennifer. That’s my dream.”

  It was clearly Aniston’s dream as well. She had already designated a large light-filled space in the corner of the couple’s Beverly Hills mansion as a nursery for their expected baby. Aniston referred to the space as the “Room” and supervised its transformation from beginning to end during the extensive renovation process, which is reported to have cost approximately $300,000.

  One of the contractors who worked on the renovations confirmed that Aniston had very specific demands about what she called “the nursery”: “Brad was more hands-on with the renovations. He had all kinds of ideas and fancied himself an architect. But Lady Pitt supervised the nursery room, which had to be constructed specially to fit the space. It wasn’t just a room where you’d stick a crib and a mobile. It was quite elaborate, and she had very specific ideas about it.

  “They never decorated it as far as I saw, though,” explained the contractor. “We’re talking 2003, I think. Maybe they were waiting to know whether the baby would be a boy or a girl.”

  * * * *

  Many rumors have surfaced surrounding the relationship and breakup of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. One such rumor has it that, near the end of Friends, Aniston had suffered a miscarriage during the early stages of a pregnancy. Another says that, at one point in 2003, Aniston had quit smoking for an extended period because she was pregnant, though a version of the same rumor says that she had quit because she was “trying” to get pregnant. She had also been taking a daily folic-acid supplement at the time, which is commonly used to prevent birth defects when a woman is trying to conceive or is already pregnant.

  In June 2004, MSNBC reported that an inside source told them that Aniston was pregnant and that an announcement was expected later that month. It was a little over a
month after she had flown to meet Pitt at the Cannes film Festival. “This is something Brad and Jen both want,” a source told the network. More significantly, Aniston’s spokesman refused to deny the report, as would be expected if it weren’t true. Instead, he merely said, “I keep hearing that rumor.” But the announcement never came.

  Babies had been on Aniston’s mind since well before she married Pitt. “I love everything about them. Their backs, necks, smell, all their fits,” she told Cosmopolitan in 1997. “I want to be a young mom too.” In 2001, she told a magazine that she wanted three children. Brad wanted seven, she added, but that wasn’t in the cards. “Not unless he gets a mail-order bride,” she joked. “But I’ll give him the rest. I hope I’ll be a good mom. I love kids.”

  On a number of other occasions, she made it clear that she and Pitt would settle down and have kids as soon as Friends ended. That was always planned to happen at the end of its ninth season in 2003. When a reporter from Vogue asked her when she and Pitt planned to start a family, she asked with a laugh, “Do you all want to be there when we conceive? It will happen when Friends is over.” But in the middle of what was expected to be the final season, the producers suddenly announced that the cast had agreed to film one more. But there was a catch. The tenth season would only contain eighteen episodes instead of the usual twenty-four. At the time, word leaked that it was Aniston who had insisted on the shortened season. The media picked up on the report and assumed that she wanted to finish the series so she could embark on a film career.

  According to a former employee of Pitt’s, films were not, in fact, the reason Aniston was anxious to leave her Friends family. Aniston had always promised to stop after nine seasons so that they could start a family. But the other cast members were itching to do one more and pressured Aniston to go along. She reluctantly agreed, but only for eighteen episodes, a compromise she reached with Pitt, who hadn’t wanted her to do a tenth season at all.

  Part of the reason that the media speculated about Aniston’s desire for a film career was that she had already signed to do a number of future film projects even before Friends came to an end. This seemed to be a sign that establishing herself as a movie star was foremost in her mind and that she had no immediate plans to take a hiatus to start a family. But the media didn’t necessarily have it right.

  “That’s something that all female actors do,” a friend of Pitt’s says. “A film can be shot in a few weeks, depending on the complexity of the production. It’s not like a TV series, which commits you to months of filming at a time. And if you check her film contracts, they each had a clause that allowed her to withdraw in case of pregnancy before production began. The production companies are insured against that very possibility. The idea that Jenny had decided to put aside her baby plans in favor of a film career is a crock of crap. She wanted to have kids. You could tell. She’d say she couldn’t put it off much longer or it might be too late.”

  * * * *

  Just before Pitt began filming Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Aniston told an interviewer, “I had a period in my life when I was younger when I was jealous, but I don’t feel that now.” Friends was scheduled to wrap the last episode of its ten-year run in January 2004. Around that time, Aniston was interviewed on ABC’s Primetime Live by Diane Sawyer, who asked about having babies. She said she would “definitely love to have two” children now that Friends was coming to an end. “I’ve liked working right now,” she told Sawyer. “But I also feel that this’ll be probably the most important job I’ll ever do, having a baby. That deserves time like my career deserves time.”

  But on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, sparks began to fly between Pitt and his new co-star almost as soon as filming began in L.A. in November 2003, according to those present on the set. “They both went after each other,” a film employee told Mara Reinstein and Joey Bartolomeo, senior writers for US Weekly. “It wasn’t like she was just after him and seducing him. They wanted each other. It was pretty obvious.”

  After a shoot at an L.A. restaurant in February, the cast and crew of Mr. & Mrs. Smith partied on the rooftop at the city’s chic Standard Hotel. Shortly afterwards, reports emerged that hotel staff had witnessed Pitt and Jolie kissing long after filming had ended and the crew had gone home. Reinstein and Bartolomeo later confirmed those rumors. “It was just the two of them in a roped-off area on the rooftop, near the patch of grass,” an employee told the reporters. “They wanted time alone, and the staff made a booth space for them. I know for a fact they kissed.”

  Jolie’s representatives denied anything unprofessional had taken place, but the reports were already getting back to Aniston, who started to panic at the prospect of losing her husband. For the public, however, she adopted the pose of ignoring the rumors and assuming they had been fabricated. Aniston joined Pitt at Cannes in May. Shortly afterward, his representatives reportedly sent a message to Jolie to keep her distance for the time being.

  Meanwhile, Pitt was making his admiration for Jolie known. “I’ve never seen someone so misperceived in the press,” he had told reporters in April. “Jolie’s really a delightful human being, a dedicated mother and really quite normal. [She’s] dedicated to her work with the UN. There’s actually a real lightness to her.”

  Rumors were flying, as gossip columnists were drawn to the increasingly numerous accounts of Pitt’s alleged dalliance with Jolie. As with all Hollywood couples, stories of affairs, impending separation, and divorce had dogged Pitt and Aniston ever since they were married, but now there was an added bit of intrigue: the “other woman” was Angelina Jolie.

  Jolie herself was very sensitive to the position she was in. Just three years before, she had stolen Billy Bob Thornton away from his fiancée of long standing, Laura Dern, and her career had suffered. Her careful efforts to recast her image since then were only now slowly starting to bear fruit. She couldn’t jeopardize that. If Dern had made a sympathetic victim, then Aniston would be even more so. An affair with her supposedly happily married husband would stain Jolie as a “home- wrecker” again, perhaps permanently jeopardizing her valued female fan base. She had to tread very carefully to protect her carefully built and brand new persona as a humanitarian and loving mother.

  The first hints of how Jolie planned to do that soon emerged. “Insiders claim Pitt’s desire to start a family and his wife’s reluctance to give up her career have caused “intolerable pressures,” wrote one newspaper. Many such stories began to appear as the year progressed, all citing “insiders” and all hinting that Aniston was selfishly denying her husband the family he so desperately craved.

  Mr. & Mrs. Smith took a hiatus from April through the end of July 2004 so that Pitt could film Ocean’s Twelve. After filming resumed in August, the crew flew to Italy to shoot the European scenes. While there, reports filtered out about how much fun Pitt was having playing with Maddox at the Hotel Santa Caterina in Amalfi. But Jolie remained consistent in denying the rumors, and in November gave an interview to Allure magazine. “I wouldn’t sleep with a married man,” she insisted. “I have enough lovers. I don’t need Brad.”

  Six weeks later, however, on January 7, 2005, Pitt and Aniston broke up. “We would like to announce that after seven years together, we have decided to formally separate,” their press release began. The decision was the result of “much thoughtful consideration,” and it was not caused by “any of the speculation reported by the tabloid media,” the couple insisted, assuring their public that they would remain “committed and caring friends with great love and admiration for one another.”

  As soon as the breakup was announced, public sympathy, especially women’s, sided almost exclusively with Aniston. The Hollywood boutique Kitson reported that by the following summer, its “Team Aniston” T-shirts were outselling “Team Jolie” T-shirts by a margin of twenty-five to one. Jolie’s Q score began to plunge; her negative evaluations, in particular, were much higher than they had been six months earlier. In Entertainment Tonight’s annual “Red, White,
and Blue” poll on July 4, asking Americans to name their favorite celebrities, Aniston came out on top by a wide margin. Jolie was selected number eight, while Pitt came in at the bottom of the rankings at number ten.

  Jolie’s camp had been prepared, however. A day after the announcement of the breakup, the New York Post ran the first of what would become a steady drumbeat of stories, all with the same theme and all without a single source, allegedly delivering the real story behind the breakup of Hollywood’s golden couple. “It’s about children,” a “pal” of the couple told the Post. “[Aniston] just doesn’t want kids right now, and he wants kids.” Each time the story was repeated, it was an “insider” who assured the reporter or a “friend” of the couple. “A pal said Aniston doesn’t want to take the time off to have a kid and she doesn’t want to endure the physical effects that giving birth will have on her sexy body,” said another report. “Three main reasons have emerged for the breakup: Aniston’s refusal to have a baby, Pitt’s relationship with Angelina Jolie, and Aniston’s obsession with her career,” wrote yet another.

  Pitt, for his part, had been photographed by paparazzi strolling hand in hand with Jolie on an African beach. At the same time, carefully leaked accounts began to emerge of Pitt’s stellar relationship with Jolie’s young son. “With the paparazzi snapping away, Pitt stepped into what looked suspiciously like a paternal role with Jolie’s adopted Cambodian son, Maddox,” Vanity Fair later noted.

  Pitt would still not confirm whether he and Jolie were an item. He continued to say that she was a not factor in the breakup and denied that the two had slept together while he was married. Jolie told the same story. Interviewed in March 2005 for Marie Claire magazine, Jolie tried to squelch the persistent rumors that she and Pitt had been having an affair for months before the separation. “To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother is not something I could forgive,” she said. “I could not, could not, look at myself in the morning if I did that.”