Brangelina (26 page)

“You have to hand it to her,” a Hollywood publicist said recently, laughing. “There sure are a lot of coincidences involved in that marriage. It started when she was accused of shagging her brother, and it ended when she was about to be accused of purchasing her baby. She came through both times smelling like roses, and the media played into her hands both times. It’s like in magic where the secret to the trick is misdirection. Angelina is a master magician. I wish I was half as good as her at my profession. She’s probably the most talented image consultant on the planet.”

The publicist, however, didn’t give all the credit to Jolie herself. “My hunch is that the real mastermind is Geyer,” she speculated. “That’s his department. He takes good care of her. She brags about how she doesn’t have a publicist, but she doesn’t need one. She has Geyer.” She was referring to Jolie’s long-time manager, Geyer Kosinski—one of the people she thanked on Oscar night—who has helped her navigate many different crises while acting as her gatekeeper, spokesperson, and damage-control artist.

Whoever was responsible for keeping the adoption scandal from tarnishing Jolie’s reputation was certainly skillful. Other than a single headline in the
New York Post
, “Did Angelina Buy Her Baby?” the story was virtually ignored in the United States, and most Americans are still unaware that she was caught up in a potentially devastating scandal.

Meanwhile, details appeared about her breakup with Thornton. It seemed as though Jolie would emerge from this, too, unscathed, while Thornton would be portrayed as an insensitive Hollywood boor, unsupportive of her attempts to save the world. At first, Jolie explained that the two had simply chosen different paths. “What went wrong, or not even wrong but what wasn’t meant to be was he was focusing on his music, and I was upstairs reading. I went through a change in my life and started paying more attention to the news and learning about other countries and becoming more politically active. I was saying, ‘OK, well, listen, you’re going to finish this song and I’m going to Washington and I’ll see you on Monday,’ and then I’d come back and we wouldn’t discuss what he wrote in the studio and we wouldn’t discuss what I learned in Washington, and then two weeks later it would be, ‘OK, I’m going to Sierra Leone and Tanzania …’”

Soon, however, her accusations became harsher, and she accused her ex of failing to support her humanitarian activities. “He’s never been to a refugee camp,” she told
US Weekly
in July 2002. “I asked him to come, but he chose not to. You learn what a person is about by their behavior. And sometimes what they do hurts you.”

Despite Thornton’s public claims that he planned to raise Maddox with Jolie, it was clear that this was a smokescreen when it emerged that she had put only her name on the adoption papers. It was a hint that the marriage had been over already for some time. When news of their separation emerged, the two had only been seen together in public four times in the previous five months, although Thornton had accompanied her to Cambodia to choose Maddox and then to Namibia where they took possession of the new baby. The last time she saw her husband, she revealed to
US Weekly
, was on June 3, the day before her twenty- seventh birthday. They had a huge fight. “It was ugly,” she said. Since then she hadn’t spoken to him. Jolie officially filed for divorce from Thornton on July 17, 2002.

* * * *

Less than a month after the end of that relationship, her world was turned upside down by another man she loved. In the beginning of August 2002, Jon Voight contacted the producers of
Access Hollywood
and asked if he could appear on the show to send a message to his daughter. The next night, he shocked America with what he had to say. Breaking down in tears, an emotional Voight declared, “I’ve been trying to reach my daughter and get her help, and I have failed. I’m sorry, really. I haven’t come forward and addressed the serious mental problems she has spoken about so candidly to the press over the years. But I’ve tried behind the scenes in every way. You can be sure that’s been my agenda. They’re very serious symptoms of real problems … real illness. I don’t want to look back and say I didn’t do everything I could.”

He then described an incident that he says happened while Jolie was wrapping up shooting
Girl, Interrupted.
“I went to New York, and I went on the same mission, you know, to be with her and try to get her and try to get her help. She said, ‘You can’t help me! You can’t help my pain!’ And I saw it, you know, and I said, ‘Angie, we can. We can get help for this.’”

He blamed the people around her for failing to get her the help she so desperately needed: “When the money train is running everybody wants to be on it and nobody wants to make adjustments, and I’m angry about that. And I’m especially angry at her manager who has been with her and seen everything. I begged him to help me many times, and always he has turned her against me.”

He was referring, of course, to Geyer Kosinski, who in July had ordered Jolie’s bodyguards to block Voight from stepping forward and giving his daughter a hug when they both attended a gala celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of Paramount studios. In an effort to discredit him, somebody later leaked a false story to the media that the bodyguards stopped Voight from physically manhandling his daughter, despite numerous witnesses saying he had done nothing improper.

Voight ended the shocking interview by saying his biggest heartache was not being able to see his newly adopted grandson, Maddox, and knowing that the interview would likely put at risk a future relationship with the boy. “Of course I want nothing,” he said, breaking into tears again. “I want nothing more than to hold my baby in my arms, and keep her from harm … At least she knows that somebody’s out there, trying to get help.”

The next day, Jolie issued a terse statement in response. “I don’t want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father,” she stated. “After all these years, I have determined that it is not healthy for me to be around my father, especially now that I am responsible for my own child.” Jolie’s mother immediately rallied to her daughter’s defense. “I’m shocked,” Bertrand said. “There’s nothing wrong with Angelina’s mental health. Mentally and physically, she is magnificently healthy.”

Many people, including those who knew the family well, were blindsided by the suddenly public family drama. A friend of Voight’s, who said he has helped the actor in his charity work, reported in 2007 that Voight has always refused to tell anyone what sparked the feud. “It didn’t seem to be a single incident that set it off, as if something suddenly happened that caused them to fight. I know Angie was peeved at her father for leaking the news of Maddox’s adoption to the press before she had a chance to announce it for herself, but that was just a squabble. They always bickered good-naturedly and occasionally she’d tell her dad off, but honest to God, they got along great. We [his friends] always speculated that he found something out about her that freaked him out, but we could never figure out what it was. It made him sad. He loved those kids so much, and then he lost both of them. Jamie took it badly. And he was so excited about meeting his grandson. He would talk about changing [Maddox’s] diapers and how he hoped he hadn’t forgotten his technique.”

The feud was all the more surprising to those who had been following Jolie’s career closely. They knew very well that, contrary to later media reports, Jolie and her father had never before been estranged. Her consistent public statements over the years amply demonstrated that she and her father were close. She repeatedly talked about how much she loved him, and time and again, she called him a great father in interviews. She had always made it clear she did not like being asked about being the daughter of Jon Voight because she didn’t want to be measured against her father, but she never shied away from expressing her appreciation for him.

They fought occasionally, and she seemed to resent his frequent lectures over her public behavior, even how she dressed, but that was normal father-daughter stuff. There had never been any extended period since childhood when the two weren’t in contact, except when their work took them to different places for lengthy blocks of time. The media seems to have gone along with the post-2002 mythology created by Jolie and her brother about their relationship with their father. It is common today to read descriptions of Jolie’s family life that claim he “abandoned” their mother when they divorced and that Jolie has been estranged from her father ever since. It is almost impossible to find references to the fact that Bertrand and Voight had joint custody and that the children were for years raised by their father as much as they were by their mother. It is even rarer to find mention that for years Voight traveled once a month across the continent, after their mother moved to New York, to spend time with his kids.

Today, Jolie likes to tell reporters that she and her father “were never close.” But a smattering of her own statements over the years belies this, notably what she told an interviewer in 2001: “I never remember a time when I needed my father and he wasn’t there.” And of course there was her Oscar acceptance speech, in front of a billion viewers in March 2000, when she said, “Dad, you’re a great actor, but you’re a better father.”

In another odd twist, after the feud began, it was often James Haven who went on the offensive in interviews to discredit their father, despite having been even closer to Voight than his sister. In 2007, Haven told
Marie Claire
magazine that he had devoted himself to the cause of abused women after watching Voight inflict “years of mental abuse on his mother.” He also said Voight had failed to provide financially for Bertrand and the children. And yet Jolie herself had frequently given interviews over the years mentioning that Voight and her mother remained “best friends” even after they divorced. In 2001, just a year earlier, she had talked openly of how much fun she and her dad had when, at her request, he played Lara’s father, Lord Croft, in the first
Tomb Raider
film.

Family friends of both Voight and Bertrand had confirmed many times that everybody got along very well over the years and that they didn’t even seem like a broken family. In interviews, Bertrand frequently stated that Voight was an excellent father and a good friend to her. “Nothing means more to Jon than the children,” she told
People
magazine in 1993.

According to a friend of Voight’s who has witnessed the vicious public feud play out, “Jon was very hurt by what the kids were saying about him. He knew that they knew it wasn’t true. But what did he expect after what he said about Angie on television? He crossed a line, it seems to me. In this case, he probably should have kept the dirty laundry hidden.”

The only time I ever met Brad Pitt was on December 8, 2004. I was shooting a documentary in Hollywood and was trying to get some footage of George Clooney. With the help of my publicist, I had hatched a plan to crash the premiere of his film
Ocean’s Twelve
, scheduled for December 8 at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. I had acquired two forged passes, one for myself and one for my cameraman. They read “Red Carpet Access Only,” meaning we couldn’t watch the film itself but could be present when the film’s cast appeared and walked in.

When the stars began to arrive in their limousines, we were in position, though publicists and handlers kept elbowing us and pushing us back to make room for their clients to make their entrances. When Clooney arrived with his mother and his girlfriend, he was immediately surrounded by TV cameras from various entertainment shows and local stations, all of whom get priority at these events, so I was never able to get close enough to talk to him.

I stood there for a while, frustrated. Then I caught sight of one of the film’s other stars, Brad Pitt. He was standing a little ways away, keeping himself at a safe distance from the media and the crowds. All the cameramen, including my own, were being muscled away en masse, but, thanks to my forged pass, I was allowed to stay where I was. After a while, having watched most of the rest of the cast walk past on the carpet, I found myself about two feet away from where Pitt stood. He was waving to the crowd and refusing to talk to the media, who were cordoned off at a slight distance. Seizing my chance, I quickly introduced myself as a struggling actor who had just had a bit part in Martin Scorsese’s film,
The Aviator
, which was about to be released. Pitt commented that he’d love to work with Scorsese and seemed quite willing to continue chatting with me. Not having anything specific to question him on, I asked if he had any advice for an actor like me. His answer was immediate, and sounded almost rote: “Take classes, work your ass off, and if you haven’t made it by thirty-five, give up.” Then he gave me the once over. His expression changed to a sheepish smile. “Oh, I guess you’re already over thirty-five,” he said affably and shrugged. “What can I tell you?”

In retrospect, I might have asked him a different question. As I was talking to him, in fact the entire time he was on the red carpet, fans kept screaming at him, “Where’s Jen?” But a few from the media were yelling another question: “Where’s Angelina?”

When the stars finally headed in to watch the film, I asked a photographer from
Splash
what was up. “He’s been banging Jolie for months,” he answered. When I asked how he knew, he told me that he had been at the Cannes Film Festival the previous May, where Pitt’s affair was all people could talk about, even though Aniston had flown there at the last minute to be by her husband’s side. He said he had spoken to all kinds of people who had witnessed the two “all over each other.” When they started filming [
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
], the paparazzo elaborated, she was seen going into Pitt’s trailer for hours at a time and coming out with a “just-fucked look.” At one point, they were spotted holding hands in public; that was the story that fueled the first rumors. He said they had apparently “cooled off” at one point, but he didn’t know whether it was because the affair had ended or because the two had decided to keep their distance after rumors started to circulate.