Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (35 page)

Their secret plans led to a typically surreal Billy Bob moment with
Levity
director Ed Solomon, whose filming schedule called for Billy Bob to be on set until March 9. Billy Bob insisted he had to leave on March 1 for a vacation. Thinking that Billy Bob would shift his schedule, Solomon kept to his original plan, while Billy Bob refused to budge. Finally, Solomon, who had put up his house as collateral for the film, asked in desperation what was so important that Billy Bob couldn’t spend a few more days in Montreal. Billy Bob would say only that he was going to Namibia on a desperately needed vacation with his family, keeping quiet about the imminent arrival of Maddox.

Finally Billy Bob agreed to stay in Montreal for a few days longer—if, and only if, Solomon could convince singer and actor Pat Boone, whom Billy Bob had never met, to accompany him on the long flight. With a house on the line and his project dangling in the breeze, Solomon picked up the phone and called Boone’s people. Boone was having a root canal at the time, so Solomon left Boone’s assistant his Montreal phone number and started thinking of how to explain to his six-year-old that his college fund had been squandered on a film.

Then the phone rang. It was Pat Boone. Solomon told him the story: the money, the filming schedule, the March deadline, and Billy Bob’s wish to fly with the singer. Solomon recalls: “At the end of the conversation, Boone thought for a moment, then said: ‘You know, if it means something to Billy Bob, and if it will help you keep your movie together—sure, I’ll fly with him to Namibia.’ To say I was flabbergasted would be an understatement.”

During February, when Billy Bob wasn’t filming, he was rehearsing with his eight-piece band for a couple of sold-out local gigs. At this time there were enough A-listers filming in town, including Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, Drew Barrymore, Nicole Kidman, and Matt Damon, to make up a good-size crowd on their own. One night they were rehearsing when Bill Clinton showed up and played sax with Billy Bob’s band. Sound technician
Hugo Tardiff was impressed: “He was actually pretty good. Billy Bob was imitating Elvis for him.” The two concerts meant a lot to Billy Bob; it was the first time he was able to try out material from
Private Radio.
A noticeable absentee was his wife, the excuse being that she was too busy filming to attend. That hurt him; he believed it was important for his partner to show her support when he was performing. It was one of the complaints he had made against Laura Dern. Now Angie was following the same path, from utterly worshipping and adoring the ground he walked on to being absent. What was going on?

He put these thoughts at the back of his mind as he took the long flight to Namibia, though without Pat Boone, as Billy Bob’s schedule had changed anyway. He left Montreal on March 9, and a few hours later was holding his third son, Maddox, in his arms. Adoption facilitator Lauryn Galindo had flown halfway around the world to bring the eight-month-old baby to her most famous clients. It was a brisk handover at the airport and then she was gone, leaving Billy Bob and Angie with the first addition to their family. “A nurse came with Maddox and left ten minutes after handing him over,” Angie said. “I stared at this little guy. I didn’t know what to do. I called my mom. I remember saying: ‘Do kids have two or ten bottles a day? I’m at a loss.’ ”

Their joy was short-lived. Once again her father had, in her eyes, put his foot in it by prematurely announcing that he had become a grandfather. On March 11, in answer to questions at an Academy Awards lunch in Hollywood, he told reporters that he was “thrilled,” anxious to test his diaper-changing skills. Normally in a family, a new baby heals old wounds and resets the emotional clock. Not in Angie’s world. She was furious. “I left him a strong message about how on the most beautiful day of my life, my first day with my son, he had cast this huge cloud. That day became about dealing with this thing that Jon had done.” As Jon Voight had gotten the happy news from her mother, Angie told Marcheline never again to give her father details about her private life. Moreover, she vowed never to speak to him again.

Her response is interesting. There was no mention of “we,” as in “Billy Bob and I, the parents of Maddox”; it was all about her. Her apparent overreaction to Voight’s remarks, made in response to a question, also
demonstrates how edgy she was about keeping the adoption under the radar. Doubtless she feared that publicity might provoke further questioning—and delays—from U.S. immigration authorities, who were not as biddable as Hollywood producers.

The upshot was that Billy Bob and Angie hastily released a joint statement through Billy’s Hollywood publicist: “It has been four months since we first met him. As usual in international adoptions, many background and other checks on both parents and child must be completed. He has finally received his passport, which is Cambodian. He officially became our son on March 11.” The plan was for Angie to finish filming and then bring the boy home in May. “William and Harry are very excited to meet him.”

Although they were still waiting for the American embassy in Cambodia to complete Maddox’s visa, the signs were hopeful. Two days after their press announcement, the American ambassador to Cambodia, Kent Wiedemann, told the Associated Press that preliminary work had been done on the case and there was no reason to believe this was “a trafficked child.” He cautioned, though, that the process could take “a couple of months.” Hence the May schedule.

In the seaside resort of Swakopmund, Namibia, the new family retreated to their beach house, surrounded by bodyguards and security guards. Not that the local heavies had much of an idea who they were. When South African–based reporter Barbara Jones asked one sweltering guard who was inside the home he was watching, his offhand reply was unintentionally amusing. “There’s an old guy in the house with some film star,” he said nonchalantly. A few days later the “old guy,” dressed in a baseball cap, headed to the tiny airport, where he told Jones that he and Angie were “cool” about the prospect of bringing up baby Maddox even though both parents were busy. “We’re just going to do it. I’m going to turn down projects if Angie is working and she’s going to do the same and we’re going to try to be as good parents as we can.”

He was putting a brave face on a rapidly changing situation. Inside their beach house, the woman who only a few months earlier had delighted at the prospect of being squeezed to death during their torrid lovemaking now plonked the baby between them. It was a not-so-subtle shift in the relationship. “Before, he was the sun, the moon, the stars and sky to Angie. Now he was no longer in her universe. Maddox was the new center of her
life,” said Ingrid Earle, a friend of Billy Bob’s. The woman who had gone into a psychiatric ward in a frenzy of loss over the actor-musician was now addicted to baby Maddox. It was a fresh fascination, shifting through the emotional gears, first heroin, then her white knight, and now her complete devotion to the new little man in her life. Already a father of three children, Billy Bob was perhaps unfazed by the new arrival and the changing balance in their relationship, indulgent of Angie’s messianic zeal for being a mother. After all, he had seen it all before. As far as Billy Bob was concerned, he was still very much with the program.

He next expected to see his bride and their son in Los Angeles in May after she had finished filming
Beyond Borders
. First, though, he had a little matter of a European and North American tour, starting in Dublin on April 1, to promote his first album. During his time in the Emerald Isle, he told local media that he hoped to spend a couple of days researching his Celtic ancestry, but most of all he was looking forward to taking some of the summer off so that he and Angie could bond with Maddox before he began work on his next movie,
Bad Santa.
Privately, though, he was getting worried. He was now hearing news about Angie and Maddox on the radio—not from his wife herself.

His tour was a modest success, winding up on May 28 in Toronto, the home city of air-traffic controller Sheila McCombe. Meanwhile, Angie, who took time off from filming to visit the Osire refugee camp near Winhoek, Namibia, where she donated 270 tents and other equipment, flew with Maddox to Thailand to wrap up the
Beyond Borders
shoot. Maddox enjoyed his first camel ride while Angie took a helicopter ride to visit nine thousand refugees at a camp in Tham Hin, west of Bangkok, Thailand, donating $100,000 and a sarong for each of the women.

These days it wasn’t so much her films as her tireless charity work that was winning plaudits. UNHCR official Shannon Boyd praised her contribution to the global charity, saying: “She has become a key player in helping the office achieve its objectives of protecting refugees, assisting them, and winning public support for the respect of refugees’ human rights.”

Billy Bob had announced in April that Maddox had been granted a U.S. visa, Angie flying to Phnom Penh to complete the final formalities and arriving in Los Angeles with her boy in early June. She hadn’t seen Billy Bob since mid-March.

They started off their reunion on June 3, the day before her birthday, with an almighty argument. From her side it was over allegations that he had been whooping it up on tour with other women. As far as he was concerned, he had no idea what the hell had gotten into her. The woman who had pledged to stay with Billy Bob until the end of time wasted no time packing a bag and moving out of their eleven-thousand-square-foot house. It is doubtful that William and Harry ever got to see their stepbrother. Billy Bob and Angie’s parting was like their first meeting, dramatic and overblown. Now he knew how Laura Dern felt.

From Angie’s perspective, this blowup had been brewing for months, the cracks in the façade first appearing when they moved out of their rented house in Montreal in March. “The marriage was already in trouble. It was obvious to both of us. I literally came back for one day, packed a bag and said: ‘Goodbye.’ It gave me a real sense of freedom,” she said. Later she suggested that his infidelity during his tour was the turning point: “He hasn’t been as honorable as he could be. I don’t disbelieve the rumors. I don’t think they are untrue.” Fellow band member Michael Shipp dismissed the allegations as “horseshit,” which, in any case, dated
after
the June 3 split. Angie was adamant: “I didn’t see anything with my own eyes, but I could believe they are true. Let’s just say that I’m not okay with certain kinds of behavior.”

Clearly there were deeper conflicts behind the abrupt split. Billy Bob was obsessed with his music, while she was focused on Maddox. Her lexicon was that the new priority in her life was Maddox, completely and utterly. “Suddenly I had a baby and that child was the center of my life. Anything that took away from that or hurt that was going to have to go,” she said. More than that, she felt he didn’t appreciate or respect her charity work, needling her by saying that refugees and poverty were as common as the rain. “He’s focused on his music and career,” Angie said. “I’m focused on my baby. Maddox is so important to me. It comes down to what’s important to you. Good for him. But I have other priorities.”

As for Billy Bob, these accusations were all news to him. For a guy who had overcome his phobias, supported her charity work, set up joint foundations, tailored his career to fit in with hers, and encouraged her need to adopt, this was a bolt out of the blue. “I don’t think either one of us knows why we split up. It was like, say you’re going to a nightclub one
night with your friends and you’re in line and the next thing you know there are guys with helicopters and there’s machine gun fire and you don’t know what happened. And that’s kind of what our breakup was like.”

For a doting, adoring mother, her subsequent behavior was curious to say the least. She celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday by ditching her husband and then dumping her beloved boy with her mother and her brother, James—in Maddox’s eyes two complete strangers—before catching a flight to Ecuador to spend a week visiting UN refugee camps. It seemed that once Angie had gotten the prize she had spent years planning for, her partner was superfluous, useful only insofar as his name on the adoption papers helped smooth the process. A single woman with a busy, full-time career and a well-known history of drug use might have had difficulty convincing even the most forgiving adoption agency that she would be able to give a baby from another country and culture the kind of constant support and care experts recommend. Having a husband helped.

For his part, Billy Bob embarked on the rest of his North American tour, the women he met a welcome distraction. So, too, were the long-necked bottles of Budweiser he now reached for with increasing regularity. As one “roadie” commented, “It wasn’t like Billy Bob was having affairs on the road, but he was doing his rock-and-roll thing, letting the girls get up real close. He was not shooing anyone off.” After reflecting on the split during her Ecuador trip, Angie told
USA Today:
“I’m angry. I’m sad. It’s a very difficult and sad time. Sometimes, you don’t see things coming, even though they are happening. It was a real deep connection, a deep marriage, so it’s not that simple to say this or that one thing caused the problems.”

Her status as a UN Goodwill Ambassador, however, made her a political target. In July, shortly after she appeared in a documentary alongside Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu and UN secretary general Kofi Annan to commemorate World Refugee Day in June, a report in the Australian
Age
newspaper quoted human rights and child welfare agencies in Phnom Penh saying that Maddox had been bought from his destitute mother for $100 and that his adoption was only fast-tracked after substantial bribes were paid to senior government officials. “I am sure that this child was not a real orphan and was not abandoned,” said Dr. Kek Galabru, head of LICADHO, whose report triggered the initial American visa ban. “A large number of them are not orphans. There are a lot of desperate
parents who are willing to sell their children and some do it for as little as $50.” These claims were never proven.