Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  As for the couple at the center of the storm, Angie stayed in the hotel compound, having picnics on the beach with Maddox or, for a time, posing nude for portrait artist Don Bachardy, who flew in from Santa Monica to paint the expectant celebrity. Ironically, it was Bachardy who had sketched her father during his rehearsals for Hamlet, the play that ended his marriage. Brad slipped the media cordon to ride a dune buggy or take off into the desert on his motorbike, and hired a plane to practice flying, spending hours on circuits and longer flights over the coast.

  During her eight-week confinement, the only journalist Angie agreed to meet was Ann Curry from NBC’s Today show. While they walked around a nearby shantytown, Angie spoke not about her bump or about Brad, but about her advocacy of the Global Campaign for Education, which promotes education as a basic human right, with an aim of giving 100 million children in poor countries the chance to go to school. She expressed similar sentiments in a teleconference on May 26 with British finance minister, later prime minister, Gordon Brown, their conversation watched by international political reporters.

  The next day, May 27, 2006, she and Brad climbed into a battered VW beach van with surfboards strapped to the roof while a convoy of 4 × 4’s with blacked-out windows left from their lodge. The reason soon became clear. In the former German colony, an operation organized with military precision swung into action. Once the waiting paparazzi had been lured away by the decoy convoy, Mickey Brett, dressed as a beach bum, drove the couple, hiding behind the van’s curtains, to the Cottage Medi-Clinic hospital in Swakopmund, where Angie’s Los Angeles–based obstetrician, Jason Rothbart, whom they had flown in specially, was waiting to perform a scheduled cesarean section, as the baby was in the breech position. Brad was present throughout, cutting the umbilical cord as baby Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, who weighed in at seven pounds, made a safe arrival. Angie’s mother had her wish: Shiloh was born a Gemini and took her first name from the bus sign Jon Voight had spotted all those years ago.

  While her brother was the first visitor to the hospital, Angie, who started breast-feeding within half an hour of Shiloh’s birth, managed to call her mother with the good news. Marcheline was at Cedars-Sinai hospital undergoing further cancer treatment and, like Angie, was on morphine to control her pain. “We both laughed about that,” Angie later recalled. Her mother was understandably thrilled. “My heart is overflowing with joy,” she told People. “Maddox, Zahara and Shiloh are deeply loved children. They have very kind and caring parents who love and support each other in every way.”

  Marche had to wait until they returned to America to see her first biological grandchild, but the Pitts flew to Namibia to coo over the latest addition to the family and to celebrate Angie’s thirty-first birthday on June 4. They had further cause for celebration: Brad’s latest release, Babel, which he starred in with Cate Blanchett, had just won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Alejandro González Iñárritu taking the Best Director award.

  Within days, Shiloh was set to work, earning more in her first month of life than many people do in a lifetime. Through her parents’ friendship with Jonathan Klein, CEO of Getty Images picture agency, a breathtaking global deal was organized for the first pictures of Shiloh en famille, which raised an estimated $11 million for the Jolie-Pitt Foundation. In just two of the contracts, People paid $4.1 million, while the British celebrity magazine Hello! shelled out $3.5 million. The paparazzi went home sunburned, out-of-pocket, without even the traditional “All I got was this lousy T-shirt” memento for two months’ worth of trouble.

  On June 14 the family left their adopted country by private jet with a tailwind of thanks from the nation’s president, Sam Nujoma. Alluding to the fact that for years Namibia was under UN mandate, he said: “You didn’t just birth a child but a new era for our new country. If we are the UN’s baby, then you, as one of its greatest supporters, are among its founding mothers.” It was official: Angie was now the good girl, the clean girl.

  Once back in America, Angie wasted no time before revealing her future ambitions, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper on June 20 that she and Brad planned to adopt their next child but weren’t yet sure of the country. “It’s gonna be the balance of what would be the best for Mad and Zee right now,” she told him in an interview screened for World Refugee Day. It was somewhat odd that the new mother of a breast-feeding baby didn’t mention Shiloh in this balancing act.

  In fact, the couple had already decided on Vietnam as their next port of call, Dr. Aronson discreetly setting the wheels in motion for an adoption in a country where the tangle of red tape takes careful and time-consuming unraveling.

  Meanwhile, Brad, now reprising his role for Ocean’s Thirteen, was in full Mr. Mom mode, describing the joy of burping his new baby, the sore issue of diaper rash, and the best product to use for Zahara’s tangled hair. Already Shiloh, just two months old, had made history by becoming the first infant re-created in wax by Madame Tussauds.

  The happy family image was slightly marred by the ghost at the feast, Jon Voight. At a BAFTA tea party in Hollywood he wished Maddox a happy fifth birthday, then mistakenly sent good wishes to Shakira, the Latin American singer, rather than what he meant to say, Zahara, the granddaughter he had yet to meet. While there had been tentative attempts to heal the rift, notably when Brad was filming Jesse James in Canada, a truce was still far off. When Angie and Brad arrived at actor Scott Caan’s birthday party in August, she refused to leave their limousine when she realized that her father was already inside the house.

  The chances of bumping into her father, a familiar figure on the streets of Hollywood, were rather less when in September Angie and her family flew to Puna, India, where filming was soon to begin for A Mighty Heart. The obvious choice, Karachi, in Pakistan, where Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, was deemed too dangerous. It was a different working experience for Brad and Angie. They met as actors, and now Brad was a producer, Angie the leading lady, playing opposite Dan Futterman. For the newly minted mother, it was a stressful experience, both on and off the set. Director Michael Winterbottom’s edgy documentary style meant that he kept the cameras rolling continuously, even when the actors went off to use the bathroom. It gave a sense of the frenzied and ultimately gut-wrenching emotion felt by Mariane Pearl as she approached the conclusion that her husband had been grotesquely murdered.

  Not only was the shoot draining, but the attentions of the crowds and the paparazzi made every waking moment edgy and tense. At one point Angie’s assistant, Holly Goline, sent a harassed e-mail to writer Jonathan Van Meter: “We are barely surviving India.” As a brief respite, Brad took his partner for an overnight break at the nearby Taj Lake Palace hotel, one of the most romantic places on the planet. They drove to the lake in a vintage car, finally arriving by boat at the white marble palace that seems to hover above the water.

  They were back to the madness all too soon. The behavior of their bodyguards did little to help the frenzied mood. As they soon realized, this was not Namibia, where strong-arm tactics went unchallenged. Mickey Brett and three colleagues were arrested after an altercation at a school where filming was taking place, the bodyguards accused of hurling racial and religious insults and making death threats to parents trying to pick up their children. No further action was taken. Wearing his producer’s hat, and acutely aware of the $16 million Plan B Entertainment had sunk into the production, Brad called the incident “a horrible misunderstanding.” This was the worst kind of publicity for such a sensitive film. He and Angie, who donated $100,000 to the Daniel Pearl Foundation on what would have been the journalist’s forty-third birthday, October 10, were understandably disturbed. “I would never work with anyone [who] was derogatory to another man’s race,” said Angie, adding somewhat disingenuously, “I am of mixed race.”

  Once filming wound down, the couple made a Thanksgiving visit to former prison camps and detention centers in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in Vietnam. They roamed around on a moped, dined at wayside restaurants, w
andered the thronging streets, and, more important, visited an orphanage on the city’s outskirts where the latest member of their family, they hoped, was about to be discovered.

  Just six months old, little Shiloh was about to get a playmate.

  FIFTEEN

  Don’t let Jon in here.

  —MARCHELINE BERTRAND’S LAST WORDS

  When former schoolteacher Johanna Silver Gordon died of ovarian cancer at the age of fifty-two, her younger sister Sheryl was not only heartbroken but outraged. Like millions of women, Johanna was not aware of the symptoms of ovarian cancer until it was too late. Sheryl vowed to change all that. In late 2002 she proposed Johanna’s Law, to fund national outreach and education about the symptoms of gynecological cancer. After much lobbying, that legislation was signed into law by President George W. Bush on January 12, 2007. It was a personal triumph not only for Sheryl Silver but also for Marcheline Bertrand.

  Marcheline and her partner, John Trudell, had set up the charity Give Love Give Life to organize support in the music and film community for Johanna’s Law, arranging concerts and lobbying movers and shakers. With Trudell by her side, the days when Marcheline had been content merely to be a donor were over. Though Trudell did the heavy lifting, Angie’s mother was now a committed activist for a cause she truly believed in.

  At the time the law was signed, Marcheline was undergoing yet another course of chemotherapy at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Hills. While she was clearly ailing, she had shown remarkable resilience in bouncing back from this debilitating treatment over the years. When Marcheline’s doctor told Angie that she had at least another six-month reprieve, it was a consolation of sorts. Rather than hovering by her mother’s bedside waiting for the inevitable, Angie was able to get on with her life, though only up to a point—as TV host Ryan Seacrest found to his cost. When she and Brad walked the red carpet for the Golden Globes on January 15, 2007, Angie remained awkwardly silent when Seacrest lobbed her a typical question about her plans to increase her family. Brad eventually intervened, saying that they wanted to have a soccer team. Later, on his radio show, Seacrest complained about her behavior. “She clearly wanted nothing to do with me or my question or my answer or any of it.” He was not the only critic, The New York Times describing her as a “sourpuss” during the red carpet walk. Clearly her attention was elsewhere.

  It was not only her mother who was on her mind. Later that week Angie flew to Vietnam, ostensibly for a charity meeting to discuss helping subsistence farmers grow bamboo in the Mekong Delta, but also to advance the adoption proceedings for the new addition to their family, Pax Thien Jolie. She then joined Brad in New Orleans, where he was filming The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the intriguing story of a man who ages backward, looking younger as he grows older. The couple had made more than a filming commitment to the Big Easy. Not only had Brad and Angie bought a $3.5 million house, but the architect-minded actor also continued to work on an environmentally friendly housing project to rebuild neighborhoods ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.

  On Saturday, January 27, 2007, however, Angie had hardly had time to unpack her bags when she received the call that she had secretly been dreading. Her mother had taken an unexpected turn and was fading fast. Further chemotherapy was out of the question. Angie and Brad quickly took the four-hour flight from New Orleans to Los Angeles, but they were too late.

  As Angie said later, her mother passed away an hour after they landed. With John Trudell and her son, James, by her side in a private room at Cedars-Sinai, Marcheline finally succumbed to the ovarian cancer she had battled for seven and a half years. It was just two weeks after Johanna’s Law had been enacted.

  Even though Angie arrived at the hospital too late to say a final goodbye, she took some comfort in knowing that her mother felt that the family was all together before she passed away. Tabloid speculation, therefore, that Marcheline’s dying wish was for Angie and Brad (“an angel sent to look after you”) to marry was cruelly inappropriate. In fact, for the last few days she had been heavily sedated and drifting in and out of consciousness, though she did have the strength to tell James, who was watching a TV documentary on Nazi Germany, to change the channel in the Jewish hospital.

  Angie’s most powerful memory of arriving at the hospital was seeing Brad put his arms around her brother, James, when James broke down in tears. Over the next few hours, Brad gently questioned the siblings about their mom, lightening the somber mood by getting them to tell amusing stories about her. “He was extraordinary,” recalled Angie. “It was certainly one of the worst days of my life and then it was one of the most beautiful . . . realizing this is how family takes care of family. It was another gift she gave us.” Not quite. In one of her last sentences before she died, she whispered: “Don’t let Jon in here.” There was no forgiveness for her ex-husband even as she breathed her last.

  As brother and sister grieved, Brad took charge of the arrangements for the funeral and cremation. In a statement to People, brother and sister said, “There are no words to express what an amazing woman and mother she was. She was our best friend.” There were many other tributes. Angie’s godmother, actress Jacqueline Bisset, described Marcheline as “an enlightened spirit” who had “worked incredibly hard to raise both Jamie and Angelina and dedicated herself to their happiness.” Her acting coach Lee Strasberg emphasized how she had given up her career to care for her children, describing her as “an unusually good person in the best sense of the word.” There was a modest funeral service at the Holy Cross Mortuary in Los Angeles. Only John Trudell, Brad Pitt, and Marcheline’s children were present. Others paid tribute to her many nurturing and life-enhancing qualities on a Web site dedicated to her memory.

  As sweet, generous, and thoughtful as she was, the sad reality was that she died a rather lonely figure. Apart from John Trudell and her children, she had, for one reason or another, fallen out with many of her close friends and family in her waning years. It was a long litany that began when she was still in robust health. The first to go was her father, Rolland (although they later reconciled when he was suffering from terminal cancer), then her stepmother, Elke. Next out was her brother, Raleigh, followed by her sister, Debbie, along with Bill Day and close girlfriends like Jade Dixon and Belinha Beatty. Of course Jon Voight was cast out the day he gave his notorious TV interview in August 2002. Often the reasons were as trivial as a missed lunch date or a small unpaid debt. Even though they were ousted from Marche’s life, they still loved and cared for her, appreciating the complexity of her character beneath the “Saint Marcheline” image. They were perplexed by yet indulgent of her behavior, always ready to forgive and forget. However, in her last years, the “Bertrand freeze,” that stubborn inability or unwillingness to forgive, came more frequently to the fore.

  As a result, there was general shock among those in her former circle when they heard that Marche had died. Indeed, the last word to filter out—via Dances with Wolves actor Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman, who was undergoing cancer treatment in the same hospital—had been that she was in remission. Bill Day, her former partner of eleven years, heard the news on his car radio while driving to Santa Monica, and was so stunned that he had to pull over to the side of the road. When he reached the seaside town, he climbed into an empty lifeguard station and gazed out at the ocean, reflecting on his life with Marcheline. “It was hard to believe she went through the slow agony of cancer death and didn’t bother to let me know. I knew we had a bad ending, but we had a life together. I would have thought she would have wanted to forgive the past so that she could leave this planet in peace. But knowing Marcheline as I did, I also understood why she didn’t. The freeze, the freeze, the freeze. God, I never hated it more than at that moment.”

  As phone calls were made among close family and friends, it quickly became clear that a whole slew of them had also been consigned to the spiritual deep freezer. Jon Voight was reduced to leaving a message of condolence on his son’s answering machine, while M
archeline’s sister, Debbie, like many others, heard about her death on the local news.

  The fact that she had frozen out virtually all those who cared for her went a long way toward explaining James Haven’s rather histrionic statement that he and his sister were now “orphans.” Indeed, there were no adult members of the Voight or Bertrand family who were close to Marche’s children. “She just became angry with everyone and shut them out of her life,” recalled Bill Day. “Marche took it all away with her unresolved and unfinished. What hit me hard was not so much that she died so tragically, but that she died such a tragic figure. What a sad end comes to those who can’t forgive, I thought.”

  For Angie, grieving over the loss of “her best friend,” the only consolation was that Marcheline was now out of the pain she had endured for so long. In the weeks following her mother’s death, Angie physically wasted away; as a onetime anorexic, not eating gave her control over her wayward emotions. Her brother spoke publicly about his fears for her well-being, saying that her profound sense of bereavement was affecting her health. Her work for the United Nations was also draining her physical resources. When the actress returned home from visits to refugee camps, she found it hard to eat out in expensive restaurants, knowing how little so many had to live on. Her brother, who accompanied her to several refugee camps, was also deeply affected. James, too, found it difficult to reconcile his life of plenty in a world of want, on one occasion abandoning his half-full supermarket cart during his weekly shopping trip and walking out of the store, repulsed by the groaning abundance that surrounded him.