Brangelina

by Ian Halperin

  Echoing what many publicists have said about Jolie’s knack of changing the subject when she is under siege, America’s “paper of record” describes her modus operandi. “Shifting the focus is one of Ms. Jolie’s best maneuvers, magazine editors and publicity executives say. When she became romantically involved with Mr. Pitt, for instance, she faced a public relations crisis—being portrayed in the tabloid press as a predator who stole Mr. Pitt from his wife, Jennifer Aniston. This time, it was Ms. Jolie’s charity work that helped turn the story. Long interested in international humanitarian work, Ms. Jolie appeared in Pakistan, where she visited camps housing Afghan refugees, and even met with President Pervez Musharraf. Ms. Jolie and Mr. Pitt made a subsequent trip to Kashmir to bring attention to earthquake victims.”

  The New York Times asked a respected publicist and media expert whether he believed the couple’s humanitarian efforts were an attempt to shape their image. “Presto, they come out looking like serious people who have transformed a silly press obsession into a sincere attempt to help the needy,” said Michael Levine, CEO of one of America’s leading entertainment P.R. firms, LCO-Levine Communications, which has represented Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, and Cameron Diaz, among other powerful celebrities.

  But Neilson labeled this kind of criticism as “cynical nonsense” and retorted, “People don’t realize the complexity of what Angie is doing. A lot of her charity work is done quietly and not in front of the media.” Former US Weekly editor Bonnie Fuller agrees, but with a caveat. “She’s scary smart,” Fuller said. “But smart only takes you so far. She also has an amazing knack, perhaps more than any other star, for knowing how to shape a public image.”

  BRANGELINA

  It’s the summer of 2008, and I’m crouched in the dense forest outside Chateau Miraval, a lavish seventeenth-century vineyard estate in France’s Provence region. Angelina Jolie has holed up here after having given birth to her twins, Vivienne Marcheline and Knox Leon, a week ago.

  In the forest around me are some of the world’s leading paparazzi, all vying for the first photos of the new twins. The photos could fetch millions. I am accompanied by a French photographer, named Thierry, who has been scouting the grounds since long before Jolie gave birth. He points out which areas were public property and which were the grounds of the estate, though it is difficult to determine where the boundary was.

  “Be careful,” Thierry warns. “The security that Monsieur Pitt and Mademoiselle Jolie have hired are like a tiny army. They will not be afraid of busting that camera over your head.” A few days later, two photographers would, in fact, be accosted by the couple’s security detail. A vicious brawl would ensue, during which one of the photographers would bite a guard hard enough to draw blood.

  I cannot see any of the other paparazzi as I sit in the woods, peering at the magnificent grounds in the distance. As I sit waiting, I feel dirty, not because I am outside in the elements, but because there is something tawdry about lying in wait among what Jennifer Aniston calls the “ratsies” for the express purpose of invading someone’s privacy. It’s a reminder of what Pitt and Jolie, not to mention every other major celebrity, have to put up with on a daily basis.

  I convince myself that my mission is a little different from that of these professional stalkers, even if not by much. For three years, there has been a constant stream of rumors about the state of the couple’s relationship, with nearly daily reports that the couple is separating or that their relationship is little more than a facade. One thing strikes me, though: if one tries to track down these rumors, most of them turn out to be false. The stories are either contradictory, the timelines don’t match, or they’re logistically impossible. Yet the public laps up the reports without questioning them, so intent are they on believing the most salacious details about the so-called perfect couple.

  It was around this time that I came to the realization that virtually everything that has been written about the couple’s relationship is completely untrue. Worse still, it seems to have been almost entirely fabricated by the tabloids and by the less reputable entertainment weeklies preying on a gullible and gossip-hungry public.

  I was also beginning to get the impression that, as saintly as Angelina Jolie’s media image had become, a sizeable percentage of the population hates her. This seems to consist of an equal measure of women who still sympathize with Jennifer Aniston and consider Jolie a despicable home-wrecker and those who just can’t stand the Saint Angelina image and aren’t buying it for a minute. Many suspect that they are being manipulated by her—with good reason, as I have shown—but seem to revel in this hatred and accept at face value any news that casts her in a negative light. They hover over tabloids and gossip sheets, searching desperately for that critical piece of damning evidence that would finally “expose her hypocrisy.”

  Later in 2008, a New York City videographer who has worked with Michael Moore, among other documentary filmmakers, invited me to dinner to discuss an upcoming project. While we discussed things at his Chelsea apartment, I told him I was writing a book about Jolie and Pitt and mentioned how she was frequently compared to Princess Diana and Mother Teresa. At the mention of the late nun, he became quite animated and insisted that I watch a short documentary he had in his collection called Hell’s Angel, which was filmed by the iconoclastic British journalist, Christopher Hitchens. I thought I knew where this was headed.

  The film is a scathing indictment of the public deification of Mother Teresa, the Albanian nun who has become synonymous with virtue. Hitchens presents a well-documented investigation of her career and suggests that what we think we know about Mother Teresa does not reflect reality. He reveals that she cavorted with brutal dictators, traveled in luxury most of the year on private jets, and refused to account for the hundreds of millions of dollars she raised, purportedly to help the world’s neediest citizens. He convincingly demonstrates that the so-called missions that she built around the world were appallingly shoddy and that her motives were almost entirely self-serving. Hitchens maintains that Mother Teresa’s order spent very little of its significant income on its missions, preferring instead to use its funds for her political agenda, based upon her religious beliefs, which, among other things, included stopping abortion and birth control.

  When we have finished watching the film, I expect my friend to use the frequent Mother Teresa-Angelina Jolie comparison to illustrate that Jolie too is a charlatan who has deceived the public by building a myth based on her good works. Instead, he surprises me.

  “Did you see that? You can see for yourself that Mother Teresa was a phony who did more harm than good,” he begins. “You think Angelina Jolie is in the same league as that pious old bitch? Have you ever seen the good she does in Africa? Go to Youtube and look at the videos of her working with those kids. Do you know how many people are being helped by her missions, or whatever she calls them? Probably millions, and that’s real; that’s not some P.R. bullshit like we just watched. I don’t give a flying fuck why she does it, or if she thinks it helps her career. They should make her a saint instead of Mother Teresa. She does a hell of a lot more good.”

  * * * *

  My challenge now, as I saw it, was to separate fact from fiction. I wanted to discern what might actually be going on with the couple, especially the state of their relationship, without being taken in by the never-ending stream of false stories, innuendo and gossip. I didn’t want to fall into the same trap that others had fallen into.

  The couple themselves don’t make it easy to be sympathetic. After the New York Times reported the incident where Jolie alerted photographers to the exact time and place she could be seen playing with Maddox, I began paying attention to the amazing number of times Jolie or Pitt or both have been photographed taking their children to school or to McDonald’s or some other heartwarming family occasion. The impression created is of two parents who spend significant quality time with their children, despite what must be grueling work and travel schedules. Eve
n more surprising is that there is never a nanny in the photos.

  Raising six children, including two infants, shooting several movies a year, and constant travel to international hotspots: who’s looking after the kids? It didn’t take long to discover that Jolie and Pitt employ a “multicultural” team of nannies to care for their young brood. In fact, the children often spend more time with those nannies than they do with their parents, who spend weeks at a time shooting films and traveling on goodwill trips, sometimes with a child or two in tow but never with all of them.

  A hotel employee at the Dorchester Hotel in London, who sees many celebrities and their children, once overheard three-year-old Shiloh refer to one of her nannies as “Mommy.” She also observed the efforts of celebrities to broadcast an image of a happy family. “There’s sometimes as much of a production involved in avoiding the wrong shot as there is in making a movie,” she confided. “Stars will never allow the nanny to be photographed with their kids. It sends the wrong message to their public. In fact, it ruins a perfect opportunity to show their warm human side. Sometimes you’ll even have the nanny crouched down in the backseat of a car. It’s quite comical.”

  Still, I haven’t spoken to a single industry insider who suggests that either Pitt or Jolie are bad parents or that they are merely using their children as window dressing. “They love those kids,” a contract employee of Pitt’s company, Plan B Productions, said emphatically. “Anybody who tells you otherwise is an idiot or a liar. I can’t tell you whether they love each other, but I can tell you that they’d kill for the children.”

  * * * *

  In 2005, as the initial rumors started to swirl that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were having an affair, she threatened to leave Hollywood for the first time. Her goal, she suddenly announced, was to “quit movies, be a great mom to Maddox and join the PTA.” Her declaration conveniently served to emphasize that she was too devoted to her young son to even consider having an affair with a married man.

  The next time the words came out of her mouth, she had just been criticized for exposing her newly adopted Vietnamese son, Pax Thien, to a media scrum, which had set the boy into a crying frenzy. “I will stay at home to help Pax adjust to his new life,” she told a press conference in March 2007, shortly after cameras caught the boy crying. “I have four children, and caring for them is the most important thing for me at the moment. I’m very proud and happy to be their mother.” She also made three movies in the next year and traveled all over the world on humanitarian missions.

  In October 2008, shortly before signing on to make three more films, Jolie told Vanity Fair, “The kids are my priority, so it’s possible that from now on I will make fewer movies. I may even stop altogether.” And even more recently, she announced, “Brad and I are planning on doing one project a year so we can put all our time into the kids.” Yet, according to her IMDB (the Internet Movie Database) website page, she currently has four projects scheduled for release in 2011, all of which she will work on in 2010. Pitt has no fewer than six movies scheduled to be released in the next two years, with seventeen others currently “in development,” though it’s likely that several of those will never be made, and there is no timeline listed for the production of any of them.

  Jolie has now publicly talked about quitting movies to look after her children at least fourteen times, yet she is committed to film projects for years to come. Perhaps, as she admitted in a 2000 interview, she really is “addicted to work.” People involved in studio publicity say that this strategy of promising to quit to look after her children was designed by her manager, Geyer Kosinski, to preempt any criticism or questions about how she can continue to keep up such a hectic schedule and still spend time with her children.

  However, in the spring of 2009, Jolie’s punishing schedule inadvertently raised another serious issue. In April, as Jolie was filming a new movie, Salt, about a rogue CIA agent, she was reported to have collapsed on the New York set. Sources told the Chicago Sun Times that Jolie suddenly complained that she couldn’t catch her breath, felt dizzy, and buckled while shooting a scene. After seeking medical attention, she was back to work.

  A little more than two weeks after Jolie was reported to have collapsed, I was able to hang out with three relatively high-level crew members for an extended period and quiz them about Jolie. Each of them had nothing but praise for her. One of them called her “very professional.” A second crew member told me she “likes to get it done.” I asked them if she was nice. “I wouldn’t call her nice,” one told me. “But she’s not high maintenance.” I asked whether it was true that she had collapsed on set. Only one of them was present at the time. “I wouldn’t call it a collapse,” he said. “There was an episode.”

  Photos had begun to emerge from the set weeks earlier showing Jolie looking unnaturally skinny. It was reported that she had been following a diet called “liquid detox” that was leaving her too weak to function. “She’s way too thin, even by Angie’s standards, and that’s really skinny to begin with,” the Sun Times quoted a source as saying—someone who was on the set when Jolie fainted. The next day, a Sony representative denied that there had been a collapse.

  I received a tip from somebody I used to work with on films who claimed that the real reason behind Jolie’s sudden weight loss was that she was taking “meth.” Crystal meth is the drug of choice for Hollywood actors who want to lose weight rapidly. A self-professed “drug dealer to the stars” in Hollywood once put it in context: “You know all these actresses and singers who look like skeletons? It’s meth. That’s the secret. It kills your appetite for days at a time and lets you lose twenty pounds fast. You always read in the tabloids about how this actress or that one is anorexic because they look so skinny; the real truth is that they are on crystal meth. The funny thing is that the publicists encourage the anorexia rumors because it’s not as damaging as the true story.”

  Was it possible that Jolie, who had once famously claimed to have done “every drug imaginable,” had resorted to meth as a weight-loss shortcut? It seems like a dangerous thing for a former addict to do, and Jolie has stated that her drug days are long behind her.

  * * * *

  Brad Pitt’s drug use is mild when compared to Jolie’s, but it is not inconsequential. According to a well-known Hollywood journalist, “[Pitt and Jennifer Aniston] spent much of their married life stoned But where as he was chilled out, she could get pretty paranoid. Having said that, she was probably right to be paranoid bearing in mind what happened on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith.”

  Canadian entertainment journalist Christopher Heard, who has interviewed Pitt at least six times, reports that the subject of pot often comes up. “The last time I was with him to interview him in Beverly Hills he was a real pot head,” Heard said. “In between every question about acting or his movie, he would ask me questions about the liberal pot laws in Canada and if we were actually going to decriminalize marijuana here. I thought he was just goofing around, but even after the interview ended, he asked me to keep him updated on how the pot laws were reforming here. He asked if Canada was going to become like Amsterdam. He seemed completely obsessed with pot.”

  * * * *

  Given both Pitt’s and Jolie’s history with relationships, it’s only natural to probe whether they’ve ever cheated on each other since their magical fairytale began. There was already some indication that Jolie may not have been entirely committed to monogamy since she took up with Pitt. Four years ago, after Jolie had already been with Brad Pitt for almost a year, her former lover, Jenny Shimizu—the woman whom Jolie said she would have married if she hadn’t married Jonny Lee Miller—gave an interview to the Sun claiming that she and Jolie had never ended their relationship.

  “She’s always had lovers that she relies on,” Shimizu told the newspaper. “If she can ring you and you can meet up, then she can take care of her sexual needs. Whenever she calls me up, I visit her. It’s not always the case that we always have sex. Sometimes
we go to her property in Cambodia and explore the jungle. It’s definitely more of a deeper friendship. She’s the person I’ll always care about and always help and always be there for.”

  Jolie had in fact built an elaborate complex in the middle of the Cambodian jungle several years before, having promised at the time of Maddox’s adoption that he would be brought up in both the United States and Cambodia. She has been known to escape there without Pitt, and it is the perfect getaway to escape the prying lenses of paparazzi. However, when Shimizu—who is currently a judge on the successful TV show Make Me a Supermodel—was asked by a reporter in 2009 whether she and Jolie were still involved, she responded, “No. This comes up every three years or so. Saying we’re in Cambodia having an affair sells magazines.”

  The most persistent story that crops up time and again involves Pitt and a beautiful Sudanese model, Amma, whom Pitt met at a benefit for Darfur at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. He was seen with her on at least one other occasion. Jolie has been alleged to accuse Pitt of cheating on her on more than one occasion, which is one of the reported sources of tension between the two.

  If Pitt has cheated, it is certainly not with his ex, contrary to what the gossip sheets would like the world to think. A story has surfaced repeatedly in the tabloids that has Pitt secretly meeting up with Aniston, if only “to talk.” I painstakingly traced each of these reports, including one that I initially fell for, which had the two meeting at a hotel during the 2008 Toronto Film Festival. I can say with a fair degree of certainty that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston have not been together in any capacity since the first week of January 2005. However, I have confirmed that Aniston is still friendly with Pitt’s parents, her former in-laws, and speaks to them regularly.