Angie seemed to have swapped acting for earnestness—“wooden,” a word never before heard about Angelina Jolie, an apt description of her performance. It was a movie she truly believed in and had worked hard behind the scenes to get to the screen. “Jolie’s personal interest in humanitarian causes has been well documented,” noted critic George Thomas. “Here, she shows precisely why you should never mix your work with your personal crusades.”
Still, Angie’s love-in with the United Nations continued. In the week of the movie premiere, Secretary General Kofi Annan personally presented her with the first Citizen of the World award given by the UN Correspondents Association for her efforts “to bring public attention to the plight of refugees across the globe, so that the world community will take action to help them.” Only twenty-eight, she was justifiably proud of her achievement. “It means that I’ve done good work for an organization that I care a great deal about and that I didn’t let them down. If I die tomorrow I can leave my son something that says I did something good with my life.”
There is something endearingly naïve and innocent about her response, rather like that of a schoolgirl being given a gold star. The same quality of wide-eyed concern, a childlike wonder at man’s inhumanity to man, runs like a thread through her book Notes from My Travels, published in October 2003, describing her visits to refugee camps in Africa, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Ecuador. In the 256-page paperback she paints a vivid and at times moving portrait of the lives of the refugees, particularly the children. “I wanted to take each and every one home with me,” she wrote during a visit to a transit center in Africa. As well-meaning and eye-opening as her book was, it was still, as academic Jaimie Lee-Barron pointed out, rooted firmly in a traditional genre of travel writing in which the impoverished Third World is defined and described through the prism of the wealthy West, in this case a multimillionaire movie star.
With visits to refugees in Jordan and Egypt in December, Angie showed that she was not content to rest on her laurels, her goodwill missions invariably accompanied by large personal donations. During her visit to the SOS Children’s Village in Amman, Jordan, she “adopted” a house of three girls and four boys, paying for their food, clothing, and education.
While she was happy to embrace the family of the world, this did not extend to her own father, who was reduced to congratulating her on her book through the media. Always dapper and outwardly cheerful, Jon Voight seemed to be covered in a cloud of brooding loneliness. He was often seen out and about in Hollywood; a regular at the Beverly Glen Deli, shopping in the Century City mall, and browsing through Book Soup on Sunset, looking for books for his friend singer Diana Ross, but always he was alone. His only consolation came from the tabloid magazines he once scorned. Now he read them avidly, searching for snippets about his daughter and grandson. He would become so overwrought reading these stories that at Prida, his regular hair salon, they hid these tabloids when he was coming in. There was a central emptiness in his life, a cheerless existence painfully exposed in a televised conversation with William Shatner in which he admitted that when he came home there was no one to greet him, turn on the lights, and make him feel welcome.
For a man who loved the idea of family—“I’ve stayed in touch with almost everybody I have worked with,” he says—the estrangement from all those he loved and from the grandchild he had yet to meet was a constant torment. “There is a loneliness in my life,” he later admitted to writer Tanith Carey. At Christmastime there was little to cheer about. Without his children, he no longer felt that life was worth living or had much meaning for him. Such was his anguish that, even though he was a lapsed Catholic, he contacted a priest in a desperate cry for help. It was clear that he wanted a reconciliation of sorts with Marcheline and, in some way, to reconstitute the family he had lost. The priest in turn spoke to Marche about her ex-husband’s emotional state of mind. His ex-wife, then in remission from her cancer and in a loving relationship with John Trudell, was in no mood to offer Christmas cheer. The freeze was still on, forgiveness in short supply at the Bertrand inn.
Instead she asked Lutheran pastor Ken Anderson, the father of James’s girlfriend, Rachel, to speak to her former husband. They met for dinner at a seafood restaurant in Hollywood, where Jon Voight poured his heart out, talking of his regrets about the past and his desire to have at least a sense of family. He felt his loneliness was literally killing him. They arranged to meet again in a restaurant in Santa Monica, this time Pastor Anderson’s wife, Rosie, joining them, her jokes about what she called his “snake documentary”—the film Anaconda—helping to lighten the mood. As much as Jon Voight had been the heavy-handed father, always trying to run the lives of his wife and children, he cut a sad and somewhat pathetic figure. For all the achievements in his career he had lost what he held most dear: the love and respect of his children.
A few months later Angie was using the revolving doors to enter the Dorchester hotel in London when she spotted her father standing alone in the lobby. She continued to revolve, spilled out into the street, and quickly crossed town, where she checked into Claridge’s. Her luggage came later. It was a metaphor of sorts, the UN ambassador spinning frantically around the globe, full of goodwill for the faceless and nameless but with none for her father.
THIRTEEN
Angie’s personality type . . . doesn’t present as crazy but as fabulous. She appears independent, rebellious, has got her shit together. That’s her image. That’s the persona she projected to hook him [Brad].
—A MEMBER OF BRAD PITT AND JENNIFER ANISTON’S CIRCLE
Of course she should have seen it coming. The moment Angelina Jolie unexpectedly arrived on the lot of Friends, Jennifer Aniston should have been on red alert. As Angie shook her hand, Jennifer could have been excused for wondering whether she was extending her long slim fingers in friendship or sizing up her next victim, like a hangman judging the length of rope needed for the drop. “Brad is so excited about working with you. I hope you guys have a really good time,” Aniston recalls telling her.
If the memories of Laura Dern’s tearstained face had faded, Aniston’s friend Courteney Cox, who played Monica on the show, would have been quick to remind Jennifer of what Angelina Jolie could do. After all, when Billy Bob Thornton ditched his fiancée for Angie, Cox was one of the posse who raided his mansion one night to pick up her possessions. Not surprisingly, the Hollywood coterie around Dern viewed Angie with suspicion. “They gave her a lot of shade, a lot,” recalls a onetime girlfriend of Angie’s.
Then there were the warnings from Faye, the Iranian psychic whose advice guided the decisions of such Hollywood celebrities as Tamara Mellon, Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn, and Jennifer. Jennifer would even consult her about whether to do a magazine interview. During their regular sessions, held in an anonymous Beverly Hills office building, Faye read the runes and felt the future. She didn’t like what she saw, telling Jennifer that Angie was a “dark angel.” In time Faye would no longer accept Brad Pitt as a client, the soothsayer smiling bleakly when acquaintances joked that she was the one woman in the world who had turned down Brad Pitt.
If those storm signals weren’t enough, Jennifer knew full well that Angie put the “M” in Method acting; the part took over the personality. Such absorption had won her an Oscar. So the clue was in the title: Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Director Doug Liman wanted chemistry between his leading man and lady, with sexual sparks flying on-screen. If they caused a fire off set, who cared? He had it in the can.
Of course, Jennifer didn’t see it that way. She could see that her husband was not that invested in the movie. He had previously pulled out of the troubled shoot when Nicole Kidman, who was originally scheduled to play the role, had other commitments, ironically to the movie The Stepford Wives, the dark tale of women who were slaves to their men. It meant that when the much-delayed shoot started in late November 2003, Brad would be in and out, filming intensely before going on to make Ocean’s Twelve with his friend George Clooney.
After all, filming was in Los Angeles, just down the road from their Malibu home. What could go wrong? Jennifer could visit him on set, and he could come home some nights, and, besides, he was being paid $20 million for less than six months’ work. For a time it did seem that the golden couple were indeed keeping romance alive. While Aniston was kept away from the set, “she’d send over little food things that she made for Brad’s dinner,” says a crew member. For his part, Pitt would occasionally request that his wife run an errand and then surprise her by arranging to have an old friend meet her.
What Jennifer didn’t know was that Brad was one of the triumvirate of men—the other two were Johnny Depp and Willem Dafoe—whom Angie had watched and wondered about from afar. Thanks to her dad, she had already been introduced to Willem Dafoe, but had yet to meet Johnny Depp. As for Brad, he was the one Hollywood star she had seemed particularly curious about, asking those who had worked with him, “What is he like?”
Now she had the chance to find out for herself. When she got the rather desperate phone call from director Doug Limon while she was in London promoting Lara Croft redux, it seemed like fate. So many had fallen—Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, and Catherine Zeta-Jones—but it was Angie who was chosen. As scriptwriter Simon Kinberg later reflected, with hindsight Angie was the perfect choice to play one half of a pair of married assassins who discover that their next assignment is to kill each other: “You put a gun in her hand and you don’t have to explain it. You believe that if she gets into a fistfight with Brad, she could handle herself.”
Their first scene together, shot in November 2003 after the movie had been on the back burner so long it was in danger of turning into mush, is now a piece of Hollywood history. It was when, as they both later admitted after much denial and prevarication, they began to fall in love with each other. When their characters sat down for marriage counseling in the opening scene, it was pretty much the first time the two actors had laid eyes on each other. No rehearsal, no second thoughts, just two people who were awkward and cold and snarly—alive in the way of unhappy couples, or those struggling to cope with a visceral chemical reaction. Doug Liman knew he was taking a risk but gambled that their discomfort could lead to the kind of Hollywood alchemy film directors dream of.
“It was going to be rolling the dice,” recalls Liman. “I decided I would take advantage of the awkwardness. They don’t really know each other. They’re not comfortable. Just sit them down, day one, first thing in the morning, and roll the camera. You can see right then and there, they had great chemistry.”
The frisson between them continued. Just as in the early days Jonny Lee Miller and Angie competed to see who could Rollerblade fastest for their roles in Hackers, Brad and Angie went through a similar bonding routine for Mr. & Mrs. Smith—except with guns and live ammo. “We would go to rifle ranges and actually compete with each other,” Angie later revealed. She preferred a pump-action shotgun, he a semiautomatic, the couple learning how to use their weapons as they made their way through obstacle courses, shooting at moving targets. “It made us trust each other quickly,” she told Vanity Fair.
Even though Pitt had long been a target of her curiosity, he was an odd choice for Angelina. There is nothing especially dark, brooding, or wildly artistic about him. Quite the opposite; he would rather have a Bud than a blood vial. Even at thirty-nine, he was still a Hollywood pretty boy, a two-time winner of People magazine’s “sexiest man alive” title, and half of a Hollywood golden couple. While Angie was undertaking missions for the UN, he had a reputation for swilling beer, going for motorbike rides, and smoking dope. He was, as several actors who have worked with him attest, “a bit of a stoner,” with a minor conviction for dropping his trousers and “mooning” a passerby in Santa Monica while under the influence.
In essence, Pitt was a corn-fed boy from the Midwest, the eldest of three children whose God-fearing parents, Jane and Bill, worked hard and prayed harder; they are still together after nearly fifty years of marriage. During his childhood in Springfield, Missouri, Brad grew up untroubled and unmarked: He was the class president, a sports hero, a drama king, and an all-around good guy, the most popular kid in school. If Angie was raised in Dysfunction Junction, Brad lived at the corner of Normal and Decent.
Like Angie, however, he suffered, as he admitted later, a “congenital sadness,” always looking out, wanting and needing more but not quite able to put his finger on what “more” was. “The state of the world, the state of yourself, I don’t know,” he once said. Even his good looks troubled him; he was painfully aware that he got by as much on his profile as his personality. It was a topic he broached at length with his mother. The focus of this teenage angst was his church, and he eventually rejected the tenets of his Baptist faith. “It was a relief in a way that I didn’t have to believe that anymore, but then I felt alone. It was this thing I was dependent on.” His arguments must have carried weight inside the family. Months later they followed suit, now worshipping in a nondenominational church.
After studying journalism and advertising at the University of Missouri, he dropped out and headed for Hollywood, taking on a series of menial jobs, including dressing as a chicken, before landing a tiny role in Thelma and Louise, where he flashed his killer smile and showed his tight butt—and Geena Davis a good time. A million women around the world trembled at his beautifully masculine screen presence, and Brad Pitt became Brad Pitt. For his next major venture, A River Runs Through It, directed and narrated by Robert Redford, he effectively played himself: a handsome, adventurous, feckless, and doomed little brother in a family that loves him even if they don’t quite understand him. School pal Chris Shudy called him after watching the epic and told him: “You’re not even acting; it’s just your home unit minus Julie [his younger sister].” While his career choices have deliberately taken him down the ensemble rather than the leading man route, his choice of lovers has placed him firmly on the Hollywood A-list. Like Angie, he has often said he falls in love with his leading ladies, who have included Juliette Lewis, who starred with him in Kalifornia, and Gwyneth Paltrow, who played his doomed wife in the macabre thriller Se7en. He was, though, insecure enough to veto the choice of an actor in one of his movies because he had dated Lewis after Brad, but you’d never guess it from the easy manner and megawatt smile.
Everyone bought into Brad as Mr. Cool and Mr. Charming, the perfect catch. A Vogue magazine cover story described Gwyneth Paltrow as the “luckiest girl alive” not just because of her talent and breeding but because of her boyfriend. They seemed the ideal Hollywood couple, Paltrow turning down the lead role in The Avengers so she could spend time with her fiancé on the set of Seven Years in Tibet, then filming in Argentina.
Hollywood gold quickly turned to pewter, Pitt abruptly ending their six-month engagement. Paltrow was left devastated and confused. There was, behind the “Aw, shucks, ma’am” persona, a streak of cold-eyed cruelty, or should that be calculation, in the corn-fed boy. As a mutual friend, a writer, explained at the time: “I think Brad Pitt has done Gwyneth Paltrow a real favor. It may not feel that way to Gwyneth now because the wound is new and raw. It’s much easier to be broken up about something at twenty-three than it is to be broken up over a failed relationship at thirty-six with a bunch of kids in the picture.” It was a prescient comment.
Looking back, Gwyneth now acknowledges that they had an unhealthy relationship, her emotional neediness first attracting and then repelling Brad, who morphed from caregiver to “couldn’t care less.” Instead the luckiest girl alive was Jennifer Aniston, who met Brad in 1998 on a blind date set up by their agents while she was licking her wounds after the end of her two-year live-in relationship with actor Tate Donovan. After an eighteen-month courtship, Pitt and Aniston married in a million-dollar wedding, complete with two hundred guests, fifty thousand flowers, four bands, and a gospel choir, in Malibu on July 29, 2000. It was a piece of terrific casting, he the handsome movie star, she America’s favorite
Friend, the gorgeous and funny girl next door. During the ceremony, Jennifer vowed to make Brad’s favorite banana milk shake and Brad promised to find a balance on the thermostat. So far, so funny.
There was, though, one significant and deliberate omission from the jaunty celebrations: Jennifer’s mother, Nancy Aniston, a clear sign that Aniston, like Angie, owned real estate at Dysfunction Junction. Beneath the cute comic timing and the winning smile was an insecure, fragile young woman whose damage initially appealed to the dashing heroic protector in Brad. Abandonment underscored Jennifer’s early life; she was just nine when her seventeen-year-old half brother took off for California and then, more devastatingly, her father, actor John Aniston, packed his bags and walked out the door of their Upper West Side apartment in New York. As Jennifer tells it, she came home from a birthday party to find the empty hangers in his closet, and didn’t see Daddy for a year. Sensitive and anxious, Jen blamed herself for the split, believing she “wasn’t a good enough kid.” After a year’s absence, she occasionally saw her father again, but by then, she “found it incredibly difficult,” and her childhood memories “are mainly about just going from place to place, and taking care of adults.”
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 30