Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (34 page)

“All I can say is that the final letter I got, that was the final break,” Angie said. “He handed it to me when I was on the way to Cambodia with the UN to go to a minefield for the first time. That’s the day he handed me this letter to tell me I was a bad person.”

Compared to negotiating the parental minefield, the United Nations proved an easier proposition. During the visit she met with UNHCR high
commissioner Ruud Lubbers, UN secretary general Kofi Annan, and her hero, author and activist Loung Ung, whose book
First They Killed My Father
describes the period between 1975 to 1979 and the suffering her family endured under the brutal Pol Pot regime. They bonded during impromptu pit stops when they went to the bathroom together by the side of the road.

More important, Angie was like a kid in a candy store when asked to detonate a land mine with dynamite. “I must say it was a great feeling to destroy something that would have otherwise hurt or possibly killed another person,” she noted in her journal. After the explosion, Loung told her how terrified she’d been the first time she was in America for Fourth of July fireworks. During the visit, Angie was formally asked by the United Nations to be a Goodwill Ambassador for refugees, although the announcement would not be made until a month later, on August 27, 2001, following a visit to Pakistan to see Afghan refugees. She was thrilled to accept, especially when she was informed that the UNHCR had a presence in 120 countries. “You have family wherever you go,” she was told, a sentiment she found especially appealing as this was a perfect kind of family—noble, ever smiling, distant, transitory, and all but anonymous. It showed, too, how far she had come. Just a year before she had been struggling to come off heroin; now she was officially representing the voiceless and dispossessed.

The UN was equally thrilled to have her, senior UN officer Ron Redmond observing: “We are 100 percent convinced of her commitment. There was no contact with agents and no entourage—she travels by herself and gets dirty in the field with our staff. She pays for her own flights and accommodation, and went against advice from her own family to travel to Sierra Leone. Once there, she even traveled in a convoy with refugees returning to homes they had earlier been forced to flee—and that’s a dangerous thing to do. She did it quietly and without fuss, not to win headlines for herself, but to play a positive role in issues that interest her. And we’re happy to have her on board to reach segments of the population who don’t know or care about the refugee issue.” There was more good news: Her pet project,
Beyond Borders,
was finally on again with a new director and was scheduled to begin shooting in Montreal in December.

Just a few days later, on September 11, the political and charity landscape changed for good with the attack on the Twin Towers. Angie’s donation of $1 million in response to the UNHCR’s appeal for $250 million to
meet the humanitarian catastrophe on the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan was met with death threats, hate mail, and bilious derision. She was now seen in some quarters to be funding “the enemy.”

While the media emphasized her work abroad, she and Billy Bob were quietly working on projects nearer to home. It was perhaps inevitable that the plight of the Native American struck a chord with the couple. He had roots deep in the Cherokee tribe, she a Bertrand family connection, albeit tenuous, with the Iroquois Indians. Not only had her father championed the plight of Native Americans, but on a more personal level, Marcheline’s relationship with Native American poet and activist John Trudell had gone past the point of friendship, the couple enjoying a strong spiritual and emotional connection that endured and strengthened in spite of her health issues.

In some ways Trudell had qualities that may have reminded Marche of her ex-husband when she first met him—not that he would like to be reminded of that. Back then Jon Voight saw acting as an arm of activism, the art carrying the message. At that time Trudell was seen, at least by the authorities, as one of the most notorious political subversives in America, with an FBI dossier running to seventeen thousand pages. He led the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island for twenty-one months in the 1960s, provoking condemnation but also a growing international awareness of government repression of tribal rights. In 1979, hours after he protested American government policy by burning a flag on the steps of FBI headquarters in Washington, Trudell’s pregnant wife, three children, and mother-in-law died in a suspicious fire in his home on a reservation in Nevada. While accusing fingers pointed at government agents, Trudell never really recovered, pouring his wounded despair and scouring sorrow into poetry and song.

In October 2001, Trudell released his album
Bone Days,
which was recorded over two weeks in a Los Angeles studio and cited Angelina as executive producer. Billy Bob was among the large choir of folks who were thanked for helping bring the mixture of bleak poetry and song to a wider audience. While his own album took far longer to produce—Billy Bob’s obsessive nature getting in the way of speed—he and Trudell were kindred spirits in the sense that music was simply another way to communicate a message. Billy Bob’s album
Private Radio,
released in September, was an attempt “to speak [his] mind a little bit.”

Billy Bob and Angie’s commitment extended far beyond the recording studio. That same year, together with Marcheline and John Trudell, they set up the All Tribes Foundation to support and promote the cultural and economic survival of Native American peoples. With John Trudell as advisor, they focused on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, site of the seventy-one-day standoff at Wounded Knee that led to the death of two FBI agents in 1973, where the Sioux Indian population had the lowest life expectancy anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Within a couple of years the All Tribes Foundation—effectively Angie and Billy Bob’s film money—had donated $800,000 in grants for programs to strengthen tribal ways of life and safeguard a future for Native American communities.

Although Angie was no longer looking for a Native American child, her most recent UN trip to Pakistan had reinforced her commitment to adopting. Rumors were swirling that she planned to adopt an Afghan child, especially when she and Billy Bob were spotted filling out documents at the Los Angeles office of Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Politically, however, the new Goodwill Ambassador had stepped into a minefield. For starters, the UNHCR opposed the adoption of orphaned children from Afghanistan, or any country in conflict. The reasons were pragmatic: It was common for families to be split up in the turmoil of war, only to be reunited afterward. Indeed, they were against foreign adoptions, period. “We try to find foster families within the country who are willing to take the children,” said a UN official. “We also think it’s better for the child to stay in the culture.”

Nevertheless, Angie had her mind and heart set on adopting a child from the country that had had such an impact on her during the filming of
Lara Croft:
Cambodia. Despite his fear of flying—especially after 9/11—Billy Bob flew with Angie to Phnom Penh in November 2001 to look at orphanages with an adoption facilitator. For Billy Bob the plane ride was an act of devotion; for Angie it was the final chapter in a dream she had harbored for years.

Their first step had been to contact Seattle International Adoptions, run by two sisters, Lauryn Galindo, a semiprofessional hula dancer from Hawaii, and Lynn Devin, a former social worker. Theirs was the largest adoption agency in Cambodia, running orphanages and building schools as well as funding literacy and justice programs. As
Cambodia Daily
writer
Richard Sine noted in a profile of Galindo: “It is easy to see how someone like Lauryn Galindo can gain the trust of hundreds of adoptive U.S. parents, including Angelina Jolie. She moves with a dancer’s grace, and she seems to radiate the compassion that draws so many parents to adopt in Cambodia in the first place. You can almost hear the U.S. parents breathe a sigh of relief: She’s one of us.”

Before Billy Bob and Angie boarded the flight to Cambodia, they would have undergone the agency’s standard vetting procedure. Devin screened parents for suitability; Galindo chose children depending on availability and the parents’ desires. Prospective parents paid on a sliding scale depending on income. A typical fee was $9,000—though Angie paid considerably more, unconfirmed reports speculating upwards of $100,000. The fees were split between donations to the orphanage and payments to government officials to facilitate processing; Galindo preferred to call this a system of “tipping” rather than bribery. While Angie has never spoken about the exact figure, Billy Bob later said that the couple set up their own foundation to build schools for deprived youngsters in the country.

Even by the odd standards of Billy Bob and Angie, Lauryn Galindo was a study in contrasts, her waist-length hair, gentle manner, and ethereal calm juxtaposed with her chauffeur-driven Mercedes with blacked-out windows that was always followed by a retinue of bodyguards in a Toyota Camry. With the country still recovering from a bloody civil war, Galindo’s precautions were sensible—if slightly unnerving. As their unlikely convoy journeyed 150 miles northwest of Phnom Penh to an orphanage in Battambang, prospective parents could have been excused for thinking they were taking part in a kidnapping rather than an adoption.

At the orphanage Billy Bob and Angie met with numerous infants, but it was the last baby they saw, three-month-old Rath Vibol, who won their hearts. They both felt an immediate connection. Unlike most Western couples, who want to take home a baby girl, Billy Bob and Angie fell for a boy.

“It’s the weirdest thing to go to an orphanage and know that you are going to be bringing a kid home with you,” said Angie. “He was the last child I met. He was asleep and wouldn’t wake up and at first I thought there was something wrong with him. They put him in my lap and I’d never held children, so I was scared that he wouldn’t be comfortable with
me, but he just stared at me for the longest time and then we relaxed and smiled at each other. He accepted me at the same time that I accepted him. He opened his eyes and it was like he chose me. I like to think we chose each other.”

This was not typical Angie hyperbole but a common response of couples on the brink of adopting. Hollywood-based adoption facilitator Catherine Politte, who has been helping couples for thirty years, has frequently witnessed this uncanny, almost instinctive, bond. She says: “When Angelina met Maddox, she fell in love. He didn’t seem as though he was from a different race or culture. Her heart was opened to this defenseless infant. I have seen it happen so many times.”

Like his wife, Billy Bob fell in love with the country as well as with the baby boy, feeling humbled as he watched the poor and disabled coping with their meager lot. One incident seeing land-mine victims at work stayed with him. “There were these three guys carrying lumber. The one in the middle was blind and the two on each end didn’t have arms. To watch them do that, smiling, open, friendly, without bitterness, really makes you rethink your complaints about your BMW seats needing reupholstering.”

Enchanted by the country and the people, but most of all by their prospective son, Billy Bob and Angie instructed Galindo to put the wheels in motion to adopt baby Rath. Angie’s long-held dream was now turning into reality: Angie and Billy Bob were becoming a family not just in word but in deed.

When they arrived back in Los Angeles in late November, they immediately began preparing for two different film projects, which they had arranged to be filmed in the same city, Montreal. It was a sign of their closeness—and their movie clout—that they could swing this. Angie was to start filming
Beyond Borders,
now with British actor Clive Owen playing her doctor lover, while Billy Bob planned to play a few local gigs to road-test his new album and then begin filming
Levity,
a somber movie about a killer’s search for redemption, in January. Originally the Ed Solomon–directed movie was not due to start filming until April, but when Billy Bob realized that Angie was going to be in the same city, he insisted the filming schedule be brought forward so that he could be with his wife. “We always had a deal that we would never be apart for more than two weeks, and we’ve made a new deal—from now on it’s one week,” he explained. To further
emphasize their love and fidelity, they agreed to exchange one homemade Christmas present each. Angie started knitting a scarf in their newly rented home in Montreal, but soon gave up. Instead she created a photo album of pictures from their respective childhoods, but spliced together to suggest that they had been united their whole lives. Only one picture was needed to complete the family album—that of baby Rath.

Then disaster struck. In December, just a few days after their return from the Far East, the American government suspended the issuing of visas for children adopted from Cambodia. The respected human rights and child welfare organization LICADHO had just released a damning report concerning the multimillion-dollar trade in Cambodian babies, including claims that children were sold by poor families and in some cases stolen. There were further allegations that unscrupulous middlemen sold these children to wealthy Westerners, mainly Americans, for a fat profit. At the center of this spreading scandal was Lauryn Galindo, currently fast-tracking a visa for baby Rath. LICADHO accused Galindo of luring young women to hand over their babies for temporary care in an orphanage, and then adopting them out without parental consent. The charity claimed to have extensive evidence against Galindo, including testimony by a woman who said she was offered $700 for three of her children.

While Angie acted in good faith, the newly minted UN ambassador risked accusations of going from tomb raider to womb raider. Like more than a hundred other American couples attempting to adopt Cambodian children, Angie and Billy Bob were placed in limbo, not knowing if their attempt to bring baby Rath back to America would be successful. It is not hard to appreciate Angie’s agitation and heartbreak as the baby she had fallen in love with was seemingly snatched from her grasp. U.S. immigration services now had the task of carefully examining the circumstances concerning all 114 of the adoptions that had been under way before the visa ban. This was going to take time. Angie and Billy Bob would have to be interviewed and go through a home visit, during which they would be assessed as to their suitability as parents. Meanwhile, Lauryn Galindo, endlessly protesting her innocence, was able to give the couple some good news. By the New Year it seemed that baby Rath, whom they renamed Maddox, would be given a Cambodian passport with Angie and Billy Bob listed as his adoptive parents. Galindo herself arranged to fly Maddox in early
March from Cambodia to Namibia, where Angie was scheduled to be filming
Beyond Borders.
On that date with destiny they would become parents. There was still a catch. Maddox could not be taken to his new home until his U.S. visa was issued. That was a burden the couple were more than happy to bear.