Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (47 page)

Jennifer considered Angie’s comments about the fact that she “couldn’t wait to get to work every day” during the making of
Mr. & Mrs
.
Smith
to be very “uncool,” rubbing fresh salt in the wounds of Brad’s betrayal. “There
was stuff printed that was definitely from a time when I was unaware that it was happening,” said Aniston. Her childhood friend, actress Andrea Bendewald, was blunt, telling
Vanity Fair:
“It was extremely hurtful to Jen that he was seen with another woman so quickly after they were separated.” Most painful were the rumors that Jennifer wanted a career more than a child, forcing Brad to find a mate who wanted a family. As an unnamed friend told the magazine: “So is there a part of Brad that’s diabolical? Did he think, I need to get out of this marriage, but I want to come out smelling like a rose, so I’m going to let Jen be cast as the ultrafeminist and I’m going to get cast as the poor husband who couldn’t get a baby and so had to move on?”

At one point all those evasions and denials could have come back to haunt Angie’s image, but it now seemed so last year. Angie had bigger and more important matters to attend to: launching a new United Nations campaign, Nine Million, to improve education for children around the world, meeting with the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, in November to discuss “global diplomacy,” and joining Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky on a visit to Baghdad in February 2008 to learn more about the plight of the two million youngsters under the age of twelve who were made homeless by the war. During the visit to the Green Zone, Angie met with the top U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki as well as senior Iraqi migration officials, calling for a coherent plan to allow refugees back to their homes. “There’s lots of goodwill and lots of discussion, but there seems to be just a lot of talk at the moment, and a lot of pieces that need to be put together. I’m trying to figure out what they are,” she said, penning another op-ed piece for
The Washington Post
on the issue.

Her condition did eventually catch up with her. On April 8, 2008, while on a panel discussing education in Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, she got some unsolicited feedback. “I felt kicking suddenly!” said Jolie, then thirty-two. She was still able to present a Vital Voices Global Partnership Award to her friend journalist Mariane Pearl. The kids might be kicking, but she wasn’t stopping. A month later she was back along the now-familiar corridors of power with her brother, lobbying movers and shakers on behalf of the charity Global Action for Children.

Of course, Angie wouldn’t be Angie if she wasn’t able to pass on what was going on between the sheets during her pregnancy. “It’s
great
for the
sex life,” she said. “It just makes you a lot more creative. So you have fun, and as a woman you’re just so round and full.” Rather than welcome their twins in America, the couple decided on France, partly inspired by Marcheline’s dream of living there one day. Angie took lessons to try to master the language, while she and Brad rented and months later bought Château Miraval, an 880-acre property on the Riviera where showbiz neighbors included Johnny Depp and his partner, Vanessa Paradis. In May, after attending the film festival in Cannes, where they stayed with Microsoft billionaire Steve Allen and dined with
Changeling
director Clint Eastwood and Angie’s onetime courtier Mick Jagger, they decamped to the secluded villa, which came complete with marauding wild boar—and rather less tame paparazzi. There the impatient brood waited for the big day, an event described by the local newspaper,
Nice Matin,
as “the most important since man walked on the moon.”

It was normally a giant leap for Angie to remain in one place for a week, let alone be confined to a hospital for three, taking small steps around her suite of rooms. On July 12, 2008, after two frustrating weeks in the hospital, she gave birth by cesarean section at the Fondation Lenval hospital in Nice. Knox Léon arrived first, Vivienne Marcheline second, the babies weighing in at five pounds each. Brad, who helped Dr. Michel Sussmann during the thirty-minute operation, cut the umbilical cords. The doctor noted that the parents were calm, laughing and joking but deeply moved by the moment.

With the world’s media camped outside, Knox and Vivienne instantly became the most valuable properties on earth, worth far more than their weight in gold. In fact, their images were jointly sold to
People
and
Hello!
for $14 million—the most expensive celebrity pictures ever taken, the money going to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation. Angie did most of the negotiations herself, according to
The New York Times,
the deal contingent on the U.S. magazine
,
which enjoyed its highest sales in seven years, never saying a bad word about her or her family.

As the family themselves had generated much of the negative media, it was a case of pot and kettle. There were, though, some moves toward an amnesty in the war of the Voights. Thanks to a friend’s detective work, Jon Voight had found the whereabouts of James’s new apartment in Sherman Oaks and had driven over to see him. Even though he had said hurtful
things about his father in the media, James tends to be rather passive and nonconfrontational. This quality enabled him and his father to smooth over their public differences, the duo going to watch an L.A. Lakers basketball game in early June before James flew to be by his sister’s side for the last weeks of her pregnancy. The arrival of the twins, combined with Jon’s upcoming milestone—his seventieth birthday was in December—impelled friends and family to make an extra effort to warm the frozen relations between father and daughter. Director John Boorman made a personal plea to them to heal the breach. He was not the only one, the eventual result being a short telephone conversation around Jon’s birthday. Others, like Krisann Morel, who hadn’t seen Angie since she was a babe in arms, could only sit on the sidelines and watch with frustration. “Her view of her father is partly informed by the poison fed to her by her mother. It breaks my heart to see Jon denied access to his grandchildren.”

While Jon, increasingly aware of his own mortality, indicated his willingness to get on the next plane to France if there was a chance of seeing his six grandchildren, Brad’s parents were invited over to see the new arrivals—and to help out with the other kids. Help was indeed needed, the family having expanded by five children in just three years. During the long summer vacation, Jane Pitt was a familiar figure in the local stores, a handful of euros in one hand, her granddaughter Shiloh in the other, buying groceries for the château. Her parenting style, with set mealtimes and bedtimes and no nonsense, would have been a distinct contrast to the “no boundaries” approach promoted by Angie’s mother and the new mother herself: the Midwest meets Hollywood.

Angie based her child-rearing methods on what she could remember—or what she told herself—about her mother’s skills. Like Marcheline had when the children behaved themselves, she gave them sticker stars that they could later exchange for treats. Naturally, given the background of the parents, home life revolved around arts and crafts and dramatic play. So when the kids reportedly threw hair dye around the bathroom and stained the walls, Angie justified it as “creative expression,” but the owners reportedly complained later about the mess. As for Jane Pitt, presumably she spent much of the summer biting her tongue.

Angie did, however, portray herself as a traditional parent, too, telling
Vanity Fair
: “You end up hearing yourself saying all those clichéd parent
things: ‘I don’t care who started it, but I’m here to finish it.’ I really can discipline the kids when I need to.”

Those who visited the château were not entirely convinced. According to tabloid reports, breakfast took place at all hours of the day, Maddox, at six, allowed to use the stove to make his own concoctions, including macaroni and cheese with apple, toast, and pizza. After he had finished shooting his siblings with arrows from his catapult or toy guns—his mother also gave in to his entreaties and took him shopping for knives—he surfed the Internet looking for “weapons” or slumped in front of the TV watching
SpongeBob SquarePants
while his dad, usually in another room, sat glued to
The Ultimate Fighter.
Bedtime, like breakfast, was whenever, Brad putting the kids into their own beds only after they were well asleep.

Otherwise they all slept together. The overall impression was one of structured chaos, a happy family squirming and struggling in a huge nine-foot-wide bed, especially on weekends, with Brad making airline reservations and reading scripts in between changing diapers. “We’re very hands-on parents, believe me,” Angie told writer Martyn Palmer.

Besides Angie’s brother, James, and Brad’s parents, they did have other hands to help: nannies from Vietnam, the Congo, and the U.S.; four nurses; a doctor on permanent call; two personal assistants; a cook; a maid; two cleaners; a
plongeur,
or busboy; four close-protection bodyguards; and six French former army guards patrolling the extensive grounds. The staff all stayed in a nearby hotel. However harassed Angie and Brad may have felt with six children, they still had a way to go to match Angie’s inspiration, dancer Josephine Baker, who raised twice as many orphans, also with the aid of a huge staff, at her home at Château des Milandes in the Dordogne.

There was one significant figure missing from this domestic caravan: the stocky figure of Mickey “Snowy” Brett, Angie’s loyal bodyguard for the last eight years. When she first met him for the filming of
Lara Croft
she arrived in London with just a duffel bag. Now she needed a coach to move her family and entourage. Brett’s departure showed how the wind was blowing inside the château of Brad and Angie. For all the chatter that Brad was just minding the kids while Angie got on with men’s work, the boy from Springfield was not quite the grinning pussycat he seemed.

For years Brett and Angie had enjoyed a father/daughter relationship,
the muscular East Ender, with a reputation for using threats in confrontations with photographers, regularly treated to her overblown generosity. Over the years she had given him lavish bonuses and, on one occasion, a Cartier watch. When Brad arrived on the scene, all that changed. For Christmas 2007 Brett got a pair of slippers. It was a not-so-subtle way of suggesting that Brett no longer occupied the position of prominence he had once enjoyed.

There were three of them in this relationship, and it was, to coin a phrase, “a bit crowded.” Brad was asserting his rights as top dog, the alpha male who would brook no rival. Someone had to go, and it wasn’t going to be him. According to Brett, the actor demeaned him by sending him to sex shops to buy face masks and other rubber paraphernalia for the kinky pair. Brett was outraged at this humiliating treatment—it was almost the first story he told casual acquaintances. Seeing the writing on the wall, Snowy melted from the scene, believing that Brad, brooding and moody, was not the man to make Angie as happy as she deserved to be.

As with Brett, so with Angie’s brother, Brad keeping a wary eye on his day-to-day involvement with his family. While he welcomed James’s help, Brad was not enthusiastic about swapping one intrusive male in the family mix for another and kept the boundaries clear. He apparently vetoed James’s desire to be in the delivery room when his sister gave birth. In his position as family patriarch—unsurprisingly, one of his favorite shows is MTV’s
Run’s House,
about the chaotic family life of rapper and hip-hop pioneer Joseph Simmons—he questioned Angie’s insistence that James adopt children of his own. As James had no permanent relationship or job, Brad didn’t think adoption was a realistic option for him, someone he described as an “overgrown kid.” To date, James has still to adopt.

While the Bertrand matriarchs have tended to rule the roost in their families, this is not the case with Brad and Angie. Theirs is a competitive relationship, a constant vying for supremacy. At the “boy racer” level they chased each other on their motorbikes, while Brad was so desperate to get his own private pilot’s licence—like his partner—that he took endless flying lessons from the Nice airport so that he could take her for a joyride. It bugged him that she had earned both British and American certifications while he struggled to certify to fly planes in America, where the rules are less rigorous.

The couple share, too, an innate restlessness—“My theory is be the shark, you’ve got to keep moving,” says Brad—their edgy energy funnels into their good works and creativity as well as their highly sexual relationship. As with her other lovers, Angie’s public displays of affection can be embarrassing in the company of friends. When they fought, which was often, he would go off on his motorbike to cool down while she called his parents, brother, sister, and everyone she knew to find out where he was.

At heart, though, they were a couple of guys, and while Brad was the more likely to have a beer and shoot the breeze, it was a matter of debate on any given day as to who was wearing the trousers. Even with such a combustible, volatile, passionate yet seemingly compatible relationship, the arrival of the twins changed their lives much more than they anticipated. Like she had during the adoption of Pax, Angie spoke often and publicly about reining in her workload and focusing on her family. “My kids are my priority so it’s possible from now I will make fewer movies. I may stop altogether,” she told Italian
Vanity Fair
. It was a similar refrain with the BBC and others. Her mantra was: “I don’t plan to keep acting very long. I will take a year off. I have a lot of children. I have a big responsibility to make sure that they’re growing right and that they have got us there for them.”

Yet just five weeks after giving birth, still struggling to properly breast-feed—though that didn’t stop Brad from taking black-and-white pictures of her doing so for his friends at
W
magazine—she was in talks to replace Tom Cruise in the spy thriller
Edwin A. Salt
. After Cruise dropped out, writers busily reworked the lead character to be female, Angie set to portray a CIA officer falsely accused of being a Russian agent. (The movie was renamed
Salt
.) Once more there was a gap between her words and her deeds, a dissonance that she herself had grown up with. As ever, once she had taken the new chicks under her wing, Angie was desperate to fly the coop and leave Brad literally holding the babies. Her pattern seems to be one of possession and abandonment, endlessly reworking a deep-seated psychological script based on her own childhood experiences. Apparently, her psychic emptiness, the void she often talked about, could not be filled for long—even by a new arrival. As one observer with an inside track on the couple said: “He got stuck with the nanny role. She told him she was going to be a mom and not do all those movies. Yet she did movie after movie. In his mind she broke that sacred contract, to have children and be
a family together.” In fairness, though, as one of the highest-paid female stars in Hollywood, with a $15 million price tag, a relatively short time at the top, and a lot of hungry mouths to feed, who could blame her for cashing in?