Celebutards

by Andrea Peyser

  In 1995, while filming the movie Hackers, she met her first husband, Jonny Lee Miller. She said about him, “You’re young, you’re drunk, you’re in bed, you have knives; sh*t happens.” How romantic. She wore black leather pants to her wedding and a white shirt with Miller’s name written across the back in her blood. No surprise the marriage was doomed.

  After starring with Jenny Shimizu in Foxfire in 1996, the pair were said to have an openly lesbian relationship. Jolie told Elle magazine, “When I was twenty, I fell in love with somebody who happened to be a woman.” Asked by Barbara Walters if she was bisexual, she said, “Of course. If I fell in love with a woman tomorrow, would I feel that it’s okay to want to kiss and touch her? If I fell in love with her? Absolutely! Yes!” Only much later, ensconced with Brad Pitt, Jolie had second thoughts. “I’ve never hidden my bisexuality, but since I’ve been with Brad, there’s no longer a place for that or S&M in my life.” Shimizu didn’t buy it. Lesbianism is “like a drug and she was hooked,” she told the United Kingdom’s News of the World in 2007.

  Jolie hit the big time in 2000, accepting the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her convincing portrayal of mental patient Lisa Rowe in the 1999 film, Girl, Interrupted. In the audience, she was seen manically tongue-kissing and caressing her older brother, James Haven. Ew.

  “I’m so in love with my brother right now,” she said while thanking the academy. Even in Hollywood, this attracted attention. The pair, by the way, have denied having an incestuous relationship.

  * * *

  “I’m so in love with my brother right now,” she said while thanking the academy. Even in Hollywood, this attracted attention.

  * * *

  Jolie engaged in one more starter marriage, wedding actor and director Billy Bob Thornton in 2000. He was forty-four. She was twenty-four. The pair wore each other’s blood around their necks so they might remain close when filming in remote locations. Apparently, they were unaware that cellphones were a more sanitary option. I’ve seen them on TV, making out so fervently, it was enough to make one ill. They adopted Angie’s first child, a son named Maddox, in Cambodia, just months before divorcing in 2002.

  That year, Jolie’s sometimes estranged father, Jon Voight, went to the celebrities’ favorite counseling center, Access Hollywood, to declare that his daughter had “serious emotional problems.” Angie dropped the name “Voight” legally from her moniker. She said, “My father and I don’t speak…I don’t believe that somebody’s family becomes their blood. Because my son’s adopted, families are earned.”

  Her tattoos are the stuff of Hollywood legend and Middle-American ridicule. Space prohibits me from naming all her body illustrations, but they include: A lower case “h” inside her left wrist in honor of her brother, James Haven, and also for Timothy Hutton, whom she once dated. (After they broke up, she said it was only for James.) A quotation from Tennessee Williams on her left forearm. The global coordinates representing the birthplaces of her first four children on her left arm, covering an earlier “Bill Bob” tattoo. An Asian tiger on her back. The saying, “that which nourishes me also destroys me.” And an “M” on the palm of her hand for her late mother, Marcheline. She was so covered in tattoos, it was joked at the 2007 funeral of murdered “Realtor to the Stars” Linda Stein that the woman bullied Angie into concealing her ink while applying to snooty Manhattan co-op boards for apartments.

  During the filming of 2005’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Angie met Brad. Evidently, the couple’s on-screen chemistry was matched by the fireworks off-screen. But Jolie denied that she engaged in a sexual relationship with Pitt until he’d split from Jennifer Aniston, telling Britain’s Grazia magazine that sleeping with another woman’s husband is “one of the worst things you can do.”

  “He was married to his best friend who he loves and respects,” she said.

  She told an interviewer, “To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn’t be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife.”

  Conventional wisdom had it that Jennifer lost Brad partly because she did not want his children, which she denies. It did not help Brad’s image in the eyes of his “best friend” when pictures surfaced of Brad and Angie together in Africa with son Maddox while Brad was still married to Aniston. “The world was shocked and I was shocked,” she told Vanity Fair.

  Pitt proceeded to pose with Jolie in a photo shoot he helped devise for W magazine, in which the pair is done up like a 1963 couple and posed with a passel of children at the dinner table. Brad said he wanted to explore the “unidentifiable malaise” that can haunt a seemingly happy couple. “You don’t know what’s wrong, because the marriage is everything you signed up for.”

  Aniston retorted that the exercise proved, “there’s a sensitivity chip that’s missing,” in Brad.

  Brad and Angie set out to create a village. In 2005, an Ethiopian baby, Zahara, joined Maddox, whose initial father, Billy Bob, had dropped out of the picture.

  In May 2006, Jolie gave birth to Brad’s daughter, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, in Namibia, Africa, by a scheduled Caesarean section. And in March 2007, Jolie adopted a three-year-old Vietnamese boy, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt. Brad has lent his surname to all the children. Yet while the countries from which the Jolie-Pitts obtain their progeny willingly hand the kids to Angie, they refuse to grant adoptions to a man, not her husband, for fear of boosting child trafficking. And still, the family has had little trouble growing. This has led to considerable criticism of Angie and Brad. Isn’t there room in their lives to save American-born orphans?

  Angie slammed her sister in international adoption, Madonna, after the singer drew international outrage by taking home African non-orphan David Banda. “Personally, I prefer to stay on the right side of the law,” Angie sniffed. “I would never take a child away from a place where adoption is illegal.” But later, she backtracked, saying that she was “horrified” by the attacks on the singer.

  Jolie got a small taste of what can happen when you’re not careful to ensure that the child you save is really motherless, when the supposed Ethiopian birth mother of little Zahara emerged in the press, claiming the child was the product of rape. But the woman backed off of her claim to the baby. She said she was glad Zahara was being raised by such a fabulous couple.

  To thank Anderson Cooper of CNN for his reports about African refugees, Angelina sat for a two-hour interview in 2006 that the network hoped would capitalize on the birth of her daughter. Angelina hoped the chat would help her pet cause. To Cooper, she revealed that she donated one-third of her “stupid” income to help save the world, and intended to have even more children. She also demonstrated incredible naivety about the institutions she supports. Cooper prodded her with kid gloves about the United Nations Oil for Food scandal, in which UN officials and enemies of our country conspired to piggishly enrich themselves by looting a program created to exchange Iraqi oil for food and medicine. He never mentioned rape accusations against UN peacekeepers in Congo. He did gently mention the UN’s criminally slow response to the genocide in Rwanda.

  Jolie jumped to the defense of the United Nations.

  “I think we hear a lot of—we certainly hear a lot of the negative things and—about the UN. You know, you hear—you hear about the negative things that have gone on. You don’t hear on a daily basis the amount of people that are kept alive or protected by the UN. And if that list was plastered everywhere, I think people would be in shock and have a little more respect. I certainly think it needs to—it needs reform. I mean, it’s certainly not a perfect organization, by any means. It’s the closest thing that we have got, you know, to—to a real international institution that listens to all sides, represents all sides, and—and can make a certain—certain kinds of decisions….

  “I have gone to countries where I have wanted to be angry about something. And you realize there’s such a fine balance, be
cause you also have to be—they have to be allowed to work in these countries.”

  She was on fire, but she had no solutions. “And you just, God, feel—feel like, you know, how—how many times are we going to let these things go on this long? Or when are we going to finally be united internationally to be able to handle these things immediately and…” she said about the genocide in Darfur.

  Cooper asked no follow up questions.

  On December 5, 2007, Brad Pitt took a turn with Larry King, in which the broadcaster interviewed him in New Orleans, where he was building houses. As always, the conversation turned to family. But Larry, in his fashion, was not nearly as credulous as Anderson Cooper. The interview soon resembled comedy.

  KING: One other thing about your kids. How did you bang, bang?

  Maddox, Zahara, Pax and Shiloh—that is not Jane/Mary.

  PITT: No. We—I can’t—I can’t tell you anything more than it just felt right. And…Yes. It just kind of—we stumbled on it and after much deliberation and—when it felt right, it felt right. I can’t explain it.

  KING: Do you want more children?

  BRAD: Oh, yes. Yes. Yes…. We’re just getting started.

  KING: Four and you’re just getting started?

  PITT: We’ll see. We’ll, you know, we’ll probably crap out somewhere. I don’t know. But, yes, we’re not done.

  KING: Doesn’t it hit a point where there’s too many?

  Lest you think the Bradster misspoke, the comedy kept on coming a couple of weeks later, when he spoke to Charlie Rose.

  “I think we’ll crap out somewhere between seven and nine children,” he said. “Yeah, somewhere in there, we’ll crap out.”

  In 2008, it happened again. Jolie gave birth to Brad’s twins, Vivienne Marcheline and Knox Léon. Brangelina were paid $14 million by People magazine for the happy, grinning faces of the twins. New York magazine speculated that the pictures were Photoshopped after Parenting magazine reported that babies less than two to three months old “do not smile from exterior stimulation.” The couple planned to marry, finally, in New Orleans.

  Six kids down. One or two to go. The crap out point is drawing near.

  11

  Bowling for Cheeseburgers

  MICHAEL MOORE

  Thank God for the Canadians. They’re just like us—only better!

  —Michael Moore at the Democratic National Convention, July 27, 2004

  MICHAEL MOORE WILL NOT be ignored.

  The puffy pontificator and Oscar-winning filmmaker masquerades as a congenial, harmless nebbish. But at the core of his propaganda is a deep-seated disdain for all things American, and he will fudge facts or outright lie to get this message across. Madonna and the rest of the Hollywood crowd are so smitten with Moore, he might be considered the guru of the far left. But take everything he says with a grain of salt. Better yet, ignore it altogether. If you can.

  Michael Francis Moore was born April 23, 1954, in Flint, Michigan, the son of Veronica, a secretary, and Frank Moore, an auto assembly-line worker. He’s married to producer Kathleen Glynn, and lives in New York, where he claims to be a practicing Roman Catholic. Fun-fact: After winning a tournament as a youth, Moore was named a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. He would later address his dislike for guns in Bowling for Columbine.

  It comes as little surprise that Moore dropped out of the University of Michigan-Flint—a trend of the celebutard set. He was named the editor of Mother Jones magazine in California for a mere four months in 1986, before he was fired for refusing to print an article that criticized the Sandinistas’ human-rights record in Nicaragua. Mind you, this was not because he doubted the article’s premise. Rather, Moore feared that President Ronald Reagan might say, “See, even Mother Jones agrees with me.”

  The article’s author, Paul Berman, summed up Moore perfectly as a “very ideological guy and not a very well-educated guy.” The kind of warped reasoning that made Moore kill the article—damn the truth for politics!—would color the rest of his career, and even feed his first commercial success: He won $58,000 in a settlement over wrongful termination from the magazine. He used this money to help make the film Roger and Me. A monster was born.

  Released in 1989, Roger and Me is a documentary about the effects of closing General Motors auto plants in Flint, Michigan—with a heavy subtext of corporation-bashing. The movie was humorous and gripping. And completely misleading. It set the tone for everything to come.

  In the movie, Moore changed the chronological order of events for shock value. He shows a family being evicted from their home at the moment the chairman of General Motors, Roger Smith, gives a Christmas message. In reality, the two events did not coincide. He also shows President Ronald Reagan visiting Flint as the town collapses. In truth, the footage was shot years earlier, in 1979, when Reagan was merely a candidate for high office, not president.

  The film is based on the premise that Moore tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to interview chairman Smith, who manages to hide from him. Yet this is belied by unearthed footage that shows Moore questioning Smith during a 1987 General Motors shareholders meeting. That session is not in the film.

  Overall, film critic Pauline Kael slammed the movie for exaggerating the impact of the plant’s closing on the community. It didn’t matter. At the time of release Roger and Me was the most successful documentary in American history. It’s since been surpassed at the box office by Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911.

  Out in 2002, Bowling for Columbine is another political screed using documentary techniques, this one about gun ownership in America. It was so preachy and over-the-top, the movie very nearly made me run out and buy an Uzi. And I favor gun control.

  The premise is that Canada, Moore’s utopia to the north, has a much lower rate of gun violence, despite similar levels of gun ownership as the United States—a completely disingenuous claim that Moore uses to condemn the violent American culture. But Moore knows very well that the ownership of handguns is far lower in Canada than in the States. Still, this fact does not stop him from making fun of hunters who, in the scheme of things, are not a major part of the problem.

  But the moment in the film that had me running for the gun cabinet came when Moore interviewed then National Rifle Association president Charlton Heston. As soon as the men sat down, Moore began hectoring the gun enthusiast about his support for firearms. Heston had no choice but to walk away from the chat, as the camera rolled. Even so, Moore theatrically placed a photograph of a six-year-old school shooting victim, Kayla Rolland, at Heston’s feet. Was he suggesting Heston was a murderer? Please! The arrogance.

  Bowling for Columbine won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. When he picked up his award, Moore couldn’t contain himself. He said, onstage, to boos and cheers: “We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where we have fictitious election results, that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons.”

  Oscar host Steve Martin couldn’t help himself either, cracking, “The Teamsters are helping Mr. Moore into the trunk of his limo.”

  I confess that, being weak of stomach, I did not sit through the entirety of Fahrenheit 911. I fundamentally object to films that commandeer the tragedy of September 11, 2001, in a cynical effort to advance a political agenda. And from what I’ve seen, Moore does this shamelessly, examining ties between the United States government and Saudi Arabia, particularly the family of Osama bin Laden. This point of view may be fodder for a very good film. Not a disjointed, sputtering, political rant by Michael Moore.

  * * *

  Oscar host Steve Martin couldn’t help himself either, cracking, “The Teamsters are helping Mr. Moore into the trunk of his limo.”

  * * *

  And yet, Fahrenheit 911 is the most successful documentary of all time. It didn’t get an Oscar, though. Moore did not enter it as Best Documentary, trying instead for a Best Pic
ture award. It did not even get nominated. Pity.

  I caught up with Michael Moore during the 2004 Democratic convention, where he hung out with like-minded celebutard Jimmy Carter, and was treated as a hero. While the convention was held in Boston, the nearby college town of Cambridge, Massachusetts had been taken over by hard-core leftists. People such as ex-presidential candidate, screaming Howard Dean, who laughed at his own crack, “You can’t call the president a fascist—we’re not trying to do that this week, anyway!” He was perfect company for Moore, who appeared goofy, jumpy and giggly.

  “Thank God for the Canadians,” he crowed to an audience. “They’re just like us, only better. They just wish we would read a little more.”

  I wanted to ask, “So when are you going, eh?”

  In the 2007 film Sicko, Moore blasts America’s certainly imperfect health care system, while lionizing those in Europe and even Cuba. I’ll tell you about a piece I saw on CNN, normally no stranger to far-left politics. In this one, though, Dr. Sanjay Gupta had both guns blazing as he interviewed Moore about the movie.

  “People will walk away with the perception that health care is free in England and Canada….” Gupta said as Moore interrupted.

  “It is free! It is free! It is free!” he insisted.

  But Gupta interjected with the obvious, “You pay for it through taxes.” And he rattled off the high tax rates in France, where “free” health care rips a sizable chunk from the family income.

  Moore sat there, speechless, shaking his head. He had no answer.

  “We’ve got Michael Moore speechless,” said Gupta. “That’s pretty hard to do.”