Brangelina
Authors: Ian Halperin
RANGELINA
T
HE
U
NTOLD
S
TORY OF
B
RAD
P
ITT
A
ND
A
NGELINA
J
OLIE
B
OOKS BY THE
S
AME
A
UTHOR
Céline Dion: Behind the Fairytale
Who Killed Kurt Cobain?
Shut up and Smile: Supermodels, The Dark Side
Fire and Rain: The James Taylor Story
Best CEOs: How the Wild, Wild Web Was Won
Bad and Beautiful:
Inside the Dazzling and Deadly World of Supermodels
Miss Supermodel America
Love & Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain
Hollywood Undercover:
Revealing the Sordid Secrets of Tinseltown
Guy Laliberté: The Fabulous Story
of the Creator of Cirque du Soleil
Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson
RANGELINA
T
HE
U
NTOLD
S
TORY OF
B
RAD
P
ITT
A
ND
A
NGELINA
J
OLIE
Published by Transit Publishing Inc.
© 2009 Transit Publishing Inc. and Ian Halperin
The reproduction or transmission of any part of this publication in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, or storage in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher, is an infringement of copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic production of the material, a licence must be obtained from the Canadian
Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright) before proceeding.
ISBN: 978-1-926745-43-5
Editor: Timothy Niedermann
Copyeditor: Shannon Partridge
Proofreaders: Nachammai Raman,
Tami Xanthakis and Aimée Verret
Cover design: François Turgeon
Text design and composition: Nassim Bahloul
Photos insert design: Pierre Pommey
Cover and back cover pictures:
Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images
Lester Cohen/WireImage
Francois Durand/Getty Images
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
P. Lapoirie/Maxppp/Zuma/Keystone Press
Transit Publishing Inc.
1996 Saint-Joseph Boulevard East
Montreal, QC
H2H 1E3
Tel: 1-514-273-0123
www.transitpublishing.com
Printed and Bound in U.S.A.
EDICATION
To my family, for always being there.
To my daughter Clover-Sky,
for bringing me each day all the joy and
happiness in the world.
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not have been possible but for the help and encouragement of many others. My heartfelt gratitude to:
Pierre Turgeon, the amazing head of Transit Publishing, for his continuous support and for structuring the shape of the book. Thank you for being there every step of the way.
Jarred Weisfeld, certainly the best agent in the world and also the most devoted friend. My daughter advised me to keep Jarred on for life—done deal! You are there at every moment.
Francois Turgeon, the whimsical genius whose creativity and insight has inspired me to keep going.
Timothy Niedermann, my undying gratitude for being a first-class editor. Here’s to you!
Max Wallace, for your insight, vision, and relentless hours of fact checking. Here’s to continued friendship, health, and success.
Sean O’Brien, my business partner at ianundercover.com. You have always been a rock. Here’s to much continued success for your design business.
The brave people who spoke on the record and those who spoke off the record because they are still affiliated with Brangelina.
The entire staff at Transit Publishing for your incredible support and friendship.
Thanks to (in completely random order):
Ruth Fishman, Alan Kaufman, Anthony Ziccardi, Ian Kleinert, Howard Stern, Judith Regan, Shloime Perel, Ron Deckelbaum, Alison Moyet, Randolph Freedman, Dylan Ratigan, Geraldo Rivera, Charles Small,
Paris Match
, the City of Oslo, Skavlan, Samantha Lockwood, Denise DuBarry, Michele Frenière, Robert Brouillette, Fran Weinstein, D. J. Petroro, Mancow Muller, Isabelle Dubé, Stuart Nulman, Larry and Belinda Seidlin, Dax, Renee Bosh, Andrew Rollings, Dr. Tony Stanton, Michael Cohen, Jeffrey Feldman, Jesse Jackson, Elliot MacDonald, Jon Reisler, Fleeze Fleming, Mitch Melnick, Christopher Heard, George Thwaites, Paula Froelich, Page Six, Noah Levy (
In Touch
), Lloyd Fishler, Karin Thomsen (1969-2009), Vanesa Curutchet, Peter Daley, Nate Colbert, Miles Wilkerson, Jimmy Davidson, JetBlue, Sofitel L.A., The L.A. Public Library, Norah Lawlor, Samantha Harris, Kia Zalewski, Annette Witheridge, Kevin Stinson, Jack Stinson, Amy Stinson, Meredith and Matt, Liz Jote, the gang in Austin (Christine, Angie, and Nuno), Morgan Nicholls, Jillian Harris, Esmond Choueke, Jim Nelson, Paul Santana, OTR, Dany Bouchard, Varda, Noir Chocolat, David Gavrilchuk, Elisa Gross, Irwin Gross, Bill Reed, Julius Grey, Nathalie McLennan, Al Barry, Pumpkin Jones, Kate and Keane, Kris Kostov, Michael Peshev, Denny Jacobsen, Nancy Grace, Terrance Hutton, Laura and Amanda, Petro Karloski, Sean Gottlieb, Rudy Bing, Alain Sommet, Brigit Laferrière, Daschl Wallace, Steven Sherman, Aldon James, The National Arts Club, Dawn Olsen, Mike Hess, Tommy Mays, Jacob Cohen, Al Reed, Stanley Hart, Laurent Medelgi, Gerry Gorman, Jennifer Robinson, Bob Shuman, Bryan White, Cynthia Jackson, Robert Lee, Ella Donaldson, Justin St. Marie, Peggy Allison, Clarissa Young, Bonnie Fuller, Michael Thomas, Terrance Dean, Ceasar DiSantos, Allison Lewis, Mr. Keating, Jerome Sabu, Yitzhak Klein, Bob White, Ted Ridder, Paul Carvalho, J. P. Pawliw Fry, Joe Franklin, Carl Horowitz, Leonard Wexler, Harvey Levin, Britt Taylor, Wendy Peterson, Jean Anne Rose, Lynn Grady, Matthew Benjamin, and Etienne Champagne. If I’ve forgotten anyone, mucho thanks!!!!
Maybe it’s because I’d seen
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
too many times, but when I set out to infiltrate the psychiatric hospital where Angelina Jolie was once committed, I couldn’t help but be nervous.
In my career as an author and documentary filmmaker, I have specialized in undercover investigations. I have posed as a male model to expose the fashion industry, a gay actor to get the goods on Hollywood and Scientology, a hairdresser to meet Michael Jackson, a paparazzo to expose the behind-the-scenes reality of the movie industry, and I have assumed countless other guises. But those experiences merely required chutzpah; there was no real risk involved.
This time, I had recurring nightmares of being found out and ending up like Jack Nicholson’s character, Randle P. McMurphy—a lobotomized vegetable. Still, it seemed the only way I could hope to gain any insight into the central question that kept popping up as I tried to make sense of Angelina Jolie’s remarkable life and career: is she really crazy, as she once would have had us believe, or is it all an act?
Having followed her and Brad Pitt for a number of years, spoken to countless friends and colleagues, and watched her astonishing transformation almost before my eyes, I still couldn’t make up my mind. One person who had known her for more than fifteen years insisted to me that she was still “crazy as a loon.” Her father publicly echoed that assessment, referring to her “mental problems” on national television. Yet many others who knew her insisted that she had put all that behind her and that her metamorphosis into a philanthropic humanitarian who just happened to be a Hollywood idol—a virtual Saint Angelina—was both sincere and inspirational.
I knew all too well that in Hollywood nothing is as it appears. For almost a century, the town has perfected the art of illusion, both on and off the screen. Our perceptions about celebrities are often tightly controlled by a publicity machine that makes us believe only what it wants us to. Piercing that illusion to discover the truth about any star is difficult, even for a probing journalist. In the case of Jolie, it was proving next to impossible. In order to get a handle on what makes her tick, I decided to visit the place where she reached rock bottom a mere eight years earlier, when she self-destructed for reasons still unknown.
Posing as a suicidal psychiatric patient, I quietly slipped onto the ward where Jolie had spent the last seventy-two hours of what one friend aptly called the “cocoon” of her previous life before she emerged to become the glamorous movie star the world knows today, half of the iconic Hollywood supercouple known as “Brangelina.”
In order to make sense of those three days, however, and the incredible career trajectory that followed—not to mention her storied relationship to Brad Pitt—it is essential to first understand the life and events that led Angelina Jolie to the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA in the spring of 2000.
As any psychoanalyst or biographer worth their salt will tell you, the logical place to start in order to gain an understanding of the subject is at the beginning. But as both practitioners know all too well, this is easier said than done. The subject is often adept at laying strategically placed roadblocks to ensure that the truth remains inaccessible.
Just as the world knows two distinct versions of Angelina Jolie—the wild, disturbed bad girl and the doting mother and humanitarian—there are two different, deeply contradictory versions of her early life and childhood. Neither is completely true nor completely false, and each is equally important for distinguishing fact from myth. In both versions, however, Jolie’s father is central. And so, to understand her, it is essential to understand him.
When Jon Voight stunned moviegoers with his iconic role as the gay hustler Joe Buck in the 1969 classic
Midnight Cowboy
, the media proclaimed him an overnight movie star. In fact, he had already been slogging it out in bit parts for almost a decade by the time he slipped on the cowboy hat and played sidekick to Dustin Hoffman’s tubercular con artist, Ratso Rizzo.
Voight grew up in Yonkers, New York, the grandson of a Catholic Slovakian immigrant, George Voytka. To help support his family, Voight’s father, Elmer, went to work as a caddy at an all-Jewish golf club when he was only eight years old. The members of the club took the young Elmer under their wing, however, and taught him not just about golf, but also how to speak proper English, how to use a knife and fork, and other important skills that would help him assimilate into American society. By the time he was eighteen, Elmer’s golf skills were good enough for him to turn professional, and thereafter he earned a good living as a country-club golf pro, becoming something of a local celebrity. To cap his successful Americanization, he changed his name to Voight.