Brangelina (23 page)

Unlike Angelina Jolie, who was too young to remember her parents splitting up, Jennifer Aniston has vivid memories of the time she returned from a friend’s birthday party when she was nine and her mother told her that her father would not be around for a while. John Aniston had fallen for his
Love of Life
co-star, Sherry Rooney, and had asked his wife for a divorce. Dow was devastated. Although she tried to keep it from her daughter, who didn’t see her father again for almost a year, it didn’t take long for Jennifer to figure out what was going on.

“It was awful,” she recalled. “I felt so totally responsible. It’s so clichéd, but I really felt it was because I wasn’t a good enough kid … She didn’t say he was gone forever … but I just remember sitting there, crying, not understanding that he was gone.” For his part, John Aniston acknowledged the effect his affair had on Jennifer. “I knew the divorce was hard on her,” he later said. “I’m sure I could have done a lot of things to make it easier, but it was very difficult.”

After John moved in with Rooney, Jennifer would visit him on weekends at their home in New Jersey, just across the Hudson River. But whereas most weekend dads fill their kids’ visits with fun activities, John had a different style. Jennifer later recalled being sent to her room when she was twelve for not being interesting enough. “My father told me I had nothing to say,” she remembered. “He made me leave the table.”

In fact, Jennifer had a lot to say. Her mother had enrolled her in an expensive Waldorf school—dedicated to the principles of the Austrian philosopher and educator Rudolf Steiner—which encouraged children’s artistic side and nurtured the imagination. John paid the annual $15,000 tuition, and Jennifer thrived in the creative environment.

When she was only nine, one of the young Aniston’s paintings was selected to be displayed in an exhibit at the prestigious New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Shortly after that, her mother took her to a Sunday matinee performance of
Children of a Lesser God
on Broadway, and Aniston decided on the spot that she wanted to be an actress. When she enrolled at the Waldorf school, at age eleven, in 1981, she joined the school’s drama club, where her first performance was in an eighth- grade Nativity play as an angel. In 1984, at fifteen, she applied for one of the few available spots at New York’s High School of Performing Arts, known as PA, the school that had inspired the Alan Parker movie
Fame
a few years earlier. Three thousand New York children were competing for only seventy spots. After a rigorous audition process, she was accepted.

But unlike Jon Voight, who was thrilled at his daughter’s career choice, John Aniston was dead-set against Jennifer following in his footsteps. “My father did not want me to be in this business,” she later recalled. “It’s so full of rejection.” John Aniston doesn’t dispute her recollection. “Well, I wasn’t terribly thrilled,” he said, well after his daughter had become famous. “I don’t think a father who knows anything about this business would be thrilled to have a daughter who is in it.”

After Jennifer graduated from PA in 1987, she took acting classes to hone her skills for what she still assumed would be a stage career, since the High School of Performing Arts usually prepares its students for a career on Broadway, not Hollywood. She also took night classes in psychology, thinking that she might want to be a psychologist if acting didn’t work out.

Going to auditions by day, she soon landed her first professional role in an off-off-Broadway play called “Dancing on Checkers’ Grave.” Between auditions, she worked as a bicycle messenger and a waitress to pay the rent at the West Village apartment she had moved into when she was eighteen. She soon landed her second professional role, in an off- Broadway production called
For Dear Life,
which lasted all of forty-six performances. It didn’t appear as if Broadway was her calling.

Finally, in 1989, she decided to abandon her stage ambitions and head to Hollywood, where her father had recently moved to take on a new role, as a Greek villain, in the popular soap opera
Days of Our Lives
. Although she never dressed in a chicken suit, her first years in the town were remarkably similar to Pitt’s. While waiting for an acting breakthrough and living with her father and his second wife, Aniston waitressed and took a variety of unrewarding jobs—telemarketer, messenger, and receptionist. Her first real Hollywood role was in a made- for-TV movie called
Camp Cucamonga,
starring John Ratzenberger of
Cheers
fame
.
She also was cast in the pilot of a sitcom called
Molloy
and won a part on
Ferris Bueller
, the television spin-off of the Matthew Broderick hit film comedy,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
At a party during this period, Aniston was introduced to an unknown young actor named Matthew Perry, who would later play Chandler on
Friends,
and the two hit it off as friends immediately.

When she wasn’t working, which was most of the time, Aniston liked to lounge around the house watching TV and eating mayonnaise sandwiches. It soon showed on her figure, which, as those around her noticed, had gotten noticeably rounder. She once described herself as being the physical product of her heritage: “I am a Greek woman, and that figure is big tits and a big ass.” According to her, it was at that point that her agent took her aside one day and informed her that the reason she wasn’t getting more parts was because of her weight. She promptly went on a diet, cut out the mayonnaise sandwiches, and almost immediately lost thirty pounds. The figure may have been greatly exaggerated, but there’s no question that she suddenly appeared with the trademark body that would turn heads even after she turned forty.

“I was just as happy before I was thinner,” she says. But casting agents were quick to notice the change, and she was soon offered parts in projects like the horror movie called
Leprechaun
, then an ensemble comedy series called
The Edge
, on Fox for the 1992-1993 season, and in a sitcom called
Muddling Through
, which aired for one season.

When she heard from her friend Matthew Perry about a show he was auditioning for called
Six of One
, Aniston asked her agent to get her a reading. It was an ensemble sitcom with a cast of three men and three women. The parts of two of the women, Monica and Phoebe, had already been cast, but the last one, Rachel, was still open. Though nobody anticipated just how big the show would eventually become, a number of young actresses wanted the part desperately. Among those vying for the role were future stars Elizabeth Berkley, Denise Richards, and Tea Leoni. But when Aniston came in and read for the part, she immediately shot past her rivals; her poise and her natural flair for comedy so impressed the casting director that two hours after her audition, she received a call at home from the producer telling her the part was hers.

Before the pilot was shot a few months later, in the summer of 1994, the title of the show had been renamed
Friends Like Us
and then just
Friends
. The pilot episode was not well received by viewers, scoring a weak forty-one out of one hundred on the crucial “program test report,” and for a while there was doubt that NBC would pick it up.

On that first report, it was Monica alone who had attracted favorable reactions from viewers. It was assumed that Courteney Cox, already familiar from her role on
Family Ties
as Alex Keaton’s girlfriend, would be the star of the new series. “None of the supporting cast members reached even moderate levels with the target audience,” read the report.

Before the first season was over, however, Aniston had been designated the breakout star of the new hit series. She would prefer to think it had to do with her acting or personality, but it appears instead to have had something to do with her hairstyle. Mid-season her hairstyle had been changed to a bob that framed her face in a unique way that had never really been seen on screen before. “It looked terrible on me,” she later recalled. But the millions of American women who soon flocked to their salons requesting the “Rachel” seemed to disagree.

The success of
Friends
made a sort of America’s sweetheart out of Aniston, whose down-to-earth openness attracted millions of admirers. She had no steady boyfriend and, being something of a homebody, she managed to keep her private life out of the tabloids. Her only visible baggage, it seemed, was an estranged parent—one more thing that she and Angelina Jolie appear to have had in common.

In 1996, Aniston’s mother, Nancy Dow, had given an interview to a TV talk show, ostensibly about the pedagogy used at Waldorf schools. But when the show aired, there was no mention of Rudolf Steiner’s educational philosophy. Instead, Dow chatted about her famous daughter and her success on
Friends.
That evening, Aniston called her mother, furious about her “betrayal.” The two stopped speaking to each other. Then, to make matters worse, Dow came out in 1999 with a tawdry, self-serving “memoir” entitled
From Mother and Daughter to Friends
. The book was not particularly negative about her daughter, though it contained some embarrassing episodes from her childhood, but it disparaged Aniston’s friends—whom Dow referred to as the “hip crowd”—and their bad language and wild behavior. The book angered Aniston even further, and any hope of a reconciliation seemed to vanish.

By the time
Friends
had been on the air for three seasons and Aniston was a full-fledged superstar, she had been single for an extended period. Shortly after the show first aired, she had briefly dated the dreadlocked lead singer of the Counting Crows, Adam Duritz, but their fling was brief. In 1997, she was set up on a date with actor Tate Donovan, whose idea of a romantic evening at first appeared somewhat unusual. “He said we were going to dinner, and I got my hair done,” she later recalled. “I put on this major dress. Then he took me to a strip-mall food court. Later, Tate told me he did it to see if I was one of those stuck-up girls.”

Donovan couldn’t handle the fishbowl life that came from dating an A-lister who was followed everywhere by paparazzi. He broke it off a month later, but the two soon resumed the romance, and Aniston realized that he was in a different league from some of the men she had dated in Hollywood. “He’s a nice guy, a good guy,” she said about Donovan. “I reached that point where I’m not going to deal with the bastards anymore.”

They dated for more than two years, and she even arranged for him a guest role on
Friends
, playing Joshua, a passing love interest. By the time the shows were filmed, however, their relationship was somewhat shaky in real life, and Donovan later provided a revealing glimpse into Aniston’s lifestyle at that point in her career.

“We were fighting when I was on
Friends
,” he revealed in 2003. “We were already breaking up. Our split didn’t happen suddenly. It was in the cards for a while. She likes top-notch hotels and luxury; I like B & Bs and riding my bike. That’s the most shallow version of it, but it’s indicative of our personalities.” His explanation doesn’t ring true, however, and may be based more on bitterness about being dumped than reality. Those in the industry usually describe Aniston as down-to- earth and approachable, not a typical Hollywood diva stuck on material things.

There may have been another reason for Donovan’s post-breakup bitterness. The
Friends
episodes featuring Donovan aired in April 1998, the same month Aniston had returned from London and gone on her first real date with Brad Pitt.

* * * *

With his
Thelma and Louise
-driven escape from obscurity in 1991, Pitt had become a genuine movie star by the time he started dating Jennifer Aniston in 1998. In 1992, Robert Redford directed him as one of two fly-fishing brothers in
A River Runs Through It
. In that film, Pitt delivered what the
Los Angeles Times
called “a career-making performance,” high praise for the acting skills of someone who could have easily coasted by on his looks. “It’s like tennis,” Pitt said of working with Redford. “When you play with somebody better than you, your game gets better.”

Two years later, Pitt starred with Tom Cruise in the 1994 vampire epic,
Interview with the Vampire.
“I hated doing this movie,” he later told
USA Today
. “Hated it. Loved watching it. Completely hated doing it. My character is depressed from the beginning to the end.” He also hated working with Tom Cruise, who had attempted to recruit his co- star to his controversial church, but Pitt was having none of it. “He thought Cruise was a shallow asshole,” a former crew member said ten years later. “He made no secret of his disdain and he never socialized or hung out with Cruise when they weren’t filming.”

Vampire
producer David Geffen, not usually given to hyperbole, issued a prediction at the time: “Brad is one of the most attractive and talented men in the world. He’s going to be one of the biggest actors out there.” Indeed, that year saw Pitt earn his first Oscar nomination for playing an erratic mental patient in the sci-fi thriller,
12 Monkeys
.

That same year, he fell in love with twenty-two-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow, who played the role of his soon-to-be-decapitated wife in the grisly thriller
Se7en
. At first, she said she resisted his advances, assuming he was just another horny Hollywood Lothario. “And then I started getting a crush on him,” she told the
L.A. Times
. “I’m like, ‘Are you sane? You can’t get a crush on Brad Pitt. Get hold of yourself.’”

Pitt, however, seemed smitten from the start. When he won a Golden Globe award for his performance in
12 Monkeys
in 1996, he thanked Paltrow as “my angel.” After a long courtship, during which they were Hollywood’s darling glamour couple, Pitt proposed in December 1996, while filming
Seven Years in Tibet
in Argentina, and the two kicked off a long, public engagement. “Brad’s the good one and I got him,“ Gwyneth bragged. “I can’t wait, man,” he told
Rolling Stone
. “Walk down the aisle, wear the ring, kiss the bride. Oh, it’s going to be great.”