Brangelina (22 page)

The paparazzi were thrilled about the colorful visuals but most of them wondered what was going on. “Jolie never gave us that kind of shot before with her husband. She was always quite dignified, especially considering her wild rep. And then suddenly she’s practically having intercourse with Billy Bob for our benefit,” said a freelance British photographer who covers Hollywood for a London-based newspaper. “You had to wonder what the hell was going on with those two. I suppose it’s possible he brought out the exhibitionist in her.”

Even if the Hollywood establishment was skeptical about the constant public sex play, it made good copy, and no one dared to express their doubts in print. In Britain, however, the media were a little more candid and were not afraid to mock the couple’s persistent public canoodling. “The more nauseatingly and insistently two stars proclaim their togetherness, the closer they are to coming apart,” wrote London’s
Evening Standard
. “Witness Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, Jennifer Lopez and Puffy, or America’s Sweetheart, Julia Roberts, who has declared her eternal devotion to everything that moves, and several things that don’t. Meanwhile, celebrity couples that evidence staying power, like Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, tend not to conduct interviews with their legs coiled around each other’s heads.” The paper called Jolie and Thornton’s shenanigans “marriage as performance art.”

For good effect, the two occasionally threw in other bizarre tidbits to spice things up for reporters. First, Jolie revealed that Thornton often wore her panties to keep her close to him. He later confessed that some patrons caught him in her underwear while working out at the gym. Then the couple announced that they were wearing amulets containing each other’s blood around their necks. “We exchange each other’s blood all the time,” he confessed. “For my birthday she gave me a will with our grave plots next to each other. That’s pretty great, huh?” Jolie raised the stakes even higher: “And he signed a contract in blood with a notary public saying that we’d be together for eternity.” Then she added, “Some people think a big diamond is really pretty. My husband’s blood is the most beautiful thing in the world to me.”

At one point, Thornton even summoned a nurse to the Louisiana set of a film he was shooting,
Behind the Sun
, and asked her to draw two vials of his blood and mix it with an anti-clotting agent. He explained that he wanted to write Jolie a love letter using his own blood. “I’m not really one for jewelry, but I love his blood,” Jolie told reporters at another public event, fondling the glass globe pendant that contained her husband’s hemoglobin. “If I could drink his blood, if I could devour every part of him, I would. He’s my soul.”

Perhaps because they had originally eloped, depriving reporters a chance to hear about their impending honeymoon night, they decided to get married again, this time at the Beverly Hills home they purchased for $3.8 million from the Guns n’ Roses guitarist, Slash. “We want to get married in different countries, in different ways, different customs,” Jolie told the
L.A. Times
. “We love getting married,” Thornton chimed in.

Reporters were especially eager to know if Jon Voight approved of his daughter’s new mate, who he had co-starred with in the 1997 Oliver Stone film,
U-Turn
. “My dad likes him,” Jolie said. “I wasn’t sure how it would work out. I mean, they are fellow actors. But my dad loves me so much, and he’s never seen me so happy, so of course he likes him. They worked together, you know? I think it’s funny that they both did
U-Turn
and they were so damn weird in it. We joke about that. ‘Yeah, that’s my family in that movie, the two strangest people!’”

More than one skeptical member of the media wanted to know whether Thornton could make a marriage work, considering his four previous divorces. “In terms of relationships, this may be the first time in my life that I haven’t failed,” he responded. “Angelina is everything to me as a human being, as an artist and as a partner.”

But even early in the marriage there were whispers, true or false, that not all was as it appeared on the surface. As early as the summer of 2000, the
New York Daily News
reported that Jolie and Thornton were already talking divorce. At the same time, the paper cited a witness who saw Jolie emerging from the S & M club, Hellfire, which she and Jenny Shimizu had been known to frequent at the height of their affair.

Meanwhile, Jolie had been signed to appear in an action-film adaptation of a popular video game,
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
, playing the title role. According to one apocryphal account, it was Lara Croft who had come between Jolie and her first husband, Jonny Lee Miller. The story had it that he had become so addicted to
Tomb Raider
on his Sony Playstation that he never spent any quality time with his wife. “When they called me about [playing] Lara Croft, I said, ‘Oh God, not her,’” Jolie recalled. And even though video games likely had very little to do with the breakup of her first marriage, it can be argued that it was indeed Lara Croft who led to the end of her second.

* * * *

When Jolie was in the fifth grade and attending El Rodeo Elementary School in Beverly Hills, the school faced a budgetary crisis and announced it was forced to lay off nine teachers. One of those on the chopping block was Angelina’s favorite phys ed. teacher, Coach Bill Smith. Jon Voight later described the campaign organized by his ten- year-old daughter to overturn the school board’s decision. “Angie’s friends and Angie got together and decided they would fight for him and they started this campaign ‘Save Our Smith,’” recalls Voight.

Smith himself also remembers Angelina’s role very well. “She’s picketing, she’s walking down the street with her sign,” he recalled. “They came up with the idea for a bake sale where they could sell cookies and cakes and stuff to raise money for my salary. They really were like a little army. They were very focused on doing something good for somebody.” The crusade worked. Of the nine teachers facing layoffs, only Smith kept his job.

“I think that was maybe the beginning of something for her so that she felt she could affect things, she could make a difference,” said Voight, who was himself actively involved in a number of political causes, including the rights of American Indians and Vietnam veterans.

Jolie arrived in Cambodia in the fall of 2000 to do the location shots for
Tomb Raider
. But what might otherwise have been a simple romp in a tropical paradise ended up exposing her to what she later called the “horrifying depths of human suffering.” When she returned to Hollywood, she would find it difficult to look at her life the same way again. She had, as she would soon declare, now “found purpose.”

As the sex life of Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie was splashed all over the papers throughout 2000, another high-profile celebrity couple was also making headlines, albeit in a decidedly more dignified manner. In July, just two months after Jolie eloped to Las Vegas with her new soul mate and pledged to be with him “forever,” Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston tied the knot in Malibu. The lavish ceremony overlooking the Pacific Ocean reportedly cost more than a million dollars to stage. “Great location, great script, terrific casting,” noted
People
magazine, declaring that the wedding had all the elements of a Hollywood production.

The two were first seen together in public on a dinner date over two years earlier, in March 1998. The event was brokered by their respective agents, which wasn’t all that unusual in Hollywood; most public dates in the town are designed by publicists to get their clients’ photos into the weeklies and generate mutually beneficial gossip. What was unusual was the that the two immediately hit it off. “He was just this sweet guy from Missouri,” Aniston later recalled.

Pitt then called Aniston the day before she was due to leave for London to shoot the Ross-Emily wedding episodes on
Friends
, in the first week in April. He left a message on the answering machine offering to help her pack and bring her coffee, but he didn’t hear back from her. “I was so nervous that I never called him back,” she told Oprah Winfrey. “I pretended I got the message too late. When I got back from England, we had a date.” After that first real date, when they hung out at Pitt’s bachelor digs in Los Feliz listening to music, Aniston claims she fell in love. “We both knew [right away] … it was weird,” she recalled. “The first time [he] kissed me, I stopped breathing. He literally took my breath away.”

They spent the next few months hanging out together, long before the media knew about their romance. They played poker, watched TV, and enjoyed each other’s company in what she would later describe as a “love nest.” “From the second date, we just huddled into this little house,” she recalled. “We wound up sitting on the couch and ordering in, having steak and mashed potatoes. That’s how it all began. It was one of those weird feelings where you just kind of know. You feel like you’re hanging out with your buddy. There was something very familiar about it. This was just very much meant to be.” Aniston also said that she first knew they were destined to be together because her dog, Norman, adored him.

It wasn’t until mid-June 1998 that the public got wind of their romance, when the two were seen kissing each other backstage at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in Washington, D.C. The next day, the
Washington Post
reported that the two were “all cuddly” together. And although their spokespeople insisted that they were just “good friends,” the
Post
said a more apt description would be “touchy-feely friends.”

With the cat out of the bag, the tabloids and entertainment weeklies had a field day contemplating a romance between the two A-listers. When Aniston finally confirmed the pairing, her breathless enthusiasm was like that of a teenager who had fallen in puppy love with the high- school quarterback. “Brad’s the cutest guy on earth, and he’s so deep and spiritual,” she reportedly told one reporter. “I love being in his arms. I want to have his baby.” It wasn’t long before the media were speculating on a wedding date. After filming
Seven Years in Tibet
, the story of an Austrian mountain climber who becomes close to the Dalai Lama, Pitt had immersed himself in Tibetan Buddhism, and there were reports that he wanted to be married in a Buddhist wedding ceremony. “He’d like to go the whole Tibetan nine yards, having the wedding high on a mountain top, in traditional robes, with the Dalai Lama looking on,” a friend of his told the Auckland, New Zealand,
Sunday News
.

Pitt finally proposed to Aniston in November 1999, and the two began planning a lavish summer wedding. Four months later, the couple attended the
Vanity Fair
post-Oscar party, where Joan Rivers approached the bride-to-be and loudly demanded to see the ring. Pitt held out Aniston’s hand, prompting Rivers to announce, “It doesn’t get any better.” A few feet away, Jon Voight looked over to see what all the commotion was about. Next to him stood his daughter Angelina Jolie, clutching the Oscar she had won earlier in the evening.

* * * *

Like Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston was born into a show business family of two actors. And like her future rival, her childhood was shaped by divorce and a womanizing father. Aniston was born in Sherman Oaks, a suburb of Los Angeles, in February 1969. Her father, born Yannis Anastassakis in Crete in 1933, had had his name changed to John Aniston when the family moved to the U.S. when he was two. He began his acting career on Broadway in the late 1950s. By 1962, he had moved to Hollywood, where his ethnic good looks got him roles. When he appeared as “Greek number 2” in a 1964 episode of the World War II drama
Combat
, he befriended another young actor of similar descent, Telly Savalas, who was a guest star on the episode. The future
Kojak
star and Aniston became best friends, and Savalas was named the godfather of baby Jennifer when she was born five years later.

By then, John Aniston had met and fallen in love with a struggling actress named Nancy Dow, who was divorced with a three-year-old son. When they finally were married, Savalas acted as best man. Neither Aniston nor his wife were particularly successful as actors, however, with each only able to find work in small roles on sitcoms and crime dramas. By the time Jennifer came along in 1969, Dow’s career highlight was probably an appearance in 1966 on the
Beverly Hillbillies
, while Aniston continued to be typecast as Greek characters on shows such as
I Spy
and
Mission Impossible
.

Like Marcheline Bertrand with Jolie, Dow devoted herself to raising her daughter and supporting her husband’s career. After several professional setbacks, Aniston decided to change careers and become a doctor. Although he passed his pre-qualification exams, the forty-one- year-old couldn’t get into medical school in the U.S. because of his advanced age, so he looked abroad. He decided to sell the family’s small home in the San Fernando Valley and move to his homeland, Greece, where he was accepted into the University of Athens medical program.

After a year of study, however, his plans were thwarted when Turkey invaded Cyprus, forcing the closure of the island’s university and prompting an exodus of Greek students back to Athens, where they were given preferential treatment in admissions. Foreign residents were asked to withdraw for a year, and the Aniston family was forced to move back to the U.S. As luck would have it, almost as soon as Aniston started auditioning again, he was offered a part on the long-running daytime soap opera,
Love of Life
, which was shot in New York.

The family settled in Manhattan, where, for the first time in his career, Aniston had a steady income, and his daughter Jennifer became a real New Yorker. Whenever Telly Savalas flew to New York for location work, he would hang around at the Anistons’ Upper West Side apartment where he taught young Jennifer to play poker and eventually how to smoke cigars—both skills that endeared her to Brad Pitt years later. Despite her closeness to her godfather, though, Jennifer got to see enough during the family’s brief time living in Greece to make her vow never to marry a Greek man. “Women are still second-class citizens,” she later explained, “pregnant in the kitchen while the men sit around drinking ouzo and smoking cigarettes after dinner instead of helping with anything. And Greek men are well known for being philanderers.” Her father, it seemed, was no exception.