Brangelina (25 page)

Bertrand was no less concerned, Jolie admitted in her journal: “My mom looked at me like I was her little girl. She smiled at me through her teary eyes. She was worried. As she hugged me goodbye, she gave me a specific message from my brother, Jamie. ‘Tell Angie I love her, and to remember that if she is ever scared, sad, or angry, look up at the night sky, find the second star on the right, and follow it straight on till morning.’ That’s from
Peter Pan
, one of our favorite stories.” Whether her travels were causing tension in the marriage or whether she was trying to distance herself from the couple’s crazy antics of the year before, Jolie was rarely seen in public with Thornton any more except for high-profile events. Now, instead of talking to reporters about their sexual antics together, she began to talk about how she spent a lot of time with Thornton’s kids. “Billy Bob has two beautiful children,” she told one magazine. “They’re just turning seven and eight. They are still babies, and they live with their mother … She is wonderful about me getting to know them because they spend a lot of time with us and we want to spend more and more time with them.”

The media began to take the bait. The talk about her “stepchildren” begged the obvious question: Did she want some of her own? It was a question that started to be asked by just about every reporter. At first, she was noncommittal, but then started to hint at a future adoption. “We are a family already,” she told an inquiring journalist. “But when they are older, I think we will adopt quite a few children.”

In July 2001, after she had signed on to play Lara Croft for the second time, she was asked by
E! News Daily
correspondent Greg Agnew whether
Tomb Raider
was becoming a “franchise.” Her response was telling. “I have this year and a half, two years between them in case I do … get pregnant.” When Agnew asked if she was considering pregnancy, she responded, “No, I’ve never wanted to be pregnant. I’ve always wanted to adopt.” He pressed on, curious to know whether she would adopt in the United States or go abroad. She refused to go there. “We’ve talked about it a lot, and I’m sure you’ll know. Everybody will know,” she replied cryptically.

The question was much on her mind during this period. According to a friend of Thornton’s, Jolie had looked into the possibility of an American adoption but had been told her odds were slim, given her controversial past. “I think she talked to a lawyer at one point,” he revealed. “She wanted a newborn, not an older child, and she was told that she and Billy might have difficulty being accepted as prospective parents because of their issues.”

Indeed, when Jolie publicly contemplated adoption for the first time, it came just a year after she had spent seventy-two hours in a psychiatric institution. Thornton himself also had some mental-health issues in his past, and they had both admitted to previous substance-abuse problems. On top of that, Thornton had been accused by a previous wife of extreme physical and mental abuse. Not, perhaps, the ideal candidates for adoptive parents.

Still, I was curious if those issues would actually disqualify them from the adoption process, so I decided to put it to the test. Posing as a father who wanted to adopt a baby with my wife because of infertility problems, I approached a California-based organization called the Adoption Network Law Center, which specializes in “legal-adoption assistance.”

Talking to an agent named Robin Elcott, who specializes in newborn and domestic adoptions, I told her my name was Billy Bob Jackson and that my wife and I wanted to adopt, but we were afraid that some of our personal problems might disqualify us. I told her that I had recently been in a psychiatric ward for seventy-two hours, under observation for some mental-health issues, and that both my wife and myself had struggled with drugs and alcohol in the past but that we were now clean. Would that rule us out?

“It’s safe to say that your chances would be lower,” she explained. “You would have to pass a home study, which gets into a lot of details financially, physically, and emotionally.” However, she emphasized that we would not automatically be disqualified. “If you had ever been arrested, it would be another matter,” she explained. “But it’s on a case- by-case basis, and they would look at your current circumstances before making an evaluation.”

I asked whether I would have a better chance adopting abroad. “Not necessarily,” she said. “It depends on the country. In some foreign countries, mental illness is actually an official exclusion, so you would have a better chance adopting here than in those countries.” Even for a foreign adoption, she explained, a home study would be required.

In August, Jolie appeared on CNN’s flagship talk show,
Larry King Live,
where she was asked about her plans. Again she hinted that she was thinking of adopting, but this time she referred to orphans, implying that she was thinking of a foreign country where, unlike the U.S., orphanages still exist:

K
ING
: Want a family?

J
OLIE
: Yes.

K
ING
: Working on it? Would you like to get one soon? Have you thought about when you might want one?

J
OLIE
: Well, I’ve always wanted to adopt. I’ve always felt it was …

K
ING
: You don’t want to give birth?

J
OLIE
: It’s not that. It’s that I’ve just … I think some people have certain callings in life. Certain people are maybe meant to give birth and it’s wonderful. And some people … Ever since I can remember, after hearing about different kids that need homes or different orphans or different, you know, not a baby necessarily, but little kids … I’ve just always known that I would love [an adopted child] as much as I would love my own. So I’d be a great mother to adopt a child.

One of the countries that doesn’t automatically exclude adoptive parents because of mental-health issues is Cambodia, where Jolie had filmed
Tomb Raider
. She often said that during those weeks on-set, she had fallen in love with the people there. It was soon apparent that she had her sights set on adopting a Cambodian orphan. At first, Thornton sounded like he was on board with the idea, and he even accompanied his wife in September 2001 to fill out the forms required by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to start the process of foreign adoption.

The couple underwent and passed their home study and announced to friends that they would be travelling to Cambodia to visit an orphanage and choose their new baby. “Somebody told me that if you’re going to adopt an orphan, you should adopt from a country you love, because that’s the only history you’re going to share with them,” Jolie later explained of her decision to adopt from Cambodia.

But Cambodia also had another appeal, at least at that time: its relatively lax adoption criteria. According to the internationally respected Cambodian human-rights non-governmental organization, LICADHO, corruption and poverty had in recent years turned Cambodia into a “magnet for wealthy, childless foreigners,” with as many as a thousand adoptions rushed through annually, most of them to the United States.

When she visited Cambodia in November 2001, the UN announced that the purpose of her trip was to visit returned refugees on the Cambodia-Thailand border. But according to local photographer Chor Sokunhea, “We all knew why they were here: to adopt a baby at an orphanage she had been to when she made the movie.” She did indeed take a trip to an orphanage in Battambang, and by the end of their two- hour visit, Jolie knew she had found her son. He was the last child she saw, a three-month-old boy named Rath Vibol, who she said was from “a very poor village.” “I went into an orphanage and decided I’d not go for the cutest child but just go to the one that connected to me,” Jolie later recalled. “He was asleep, and he woke up and smiled. As soon as I saw him smile, I felt like this kid wasn’t uncomfortable with me. He seemed okay in my arms.”

Before the adoption could be completed and the parents could bring the boy—renamed Maddox Chivan by Jolie—back to the States, there was still a significant amount of red tape to cut through, not the least of which was getting the U.S. visa required to bring him home. That process suddenly got very complicated in December when the first reports came to light that illegal networks in Cambodia were buying infants from destitute mothers and selling them to orphanages. “The key is money,” explained Naly Pilorge, deputy director of LICADHO. “Americans are paying $10,000 to $20,000 [for a child] in a country where the average income is $250 a year … That comes to something like $7.5 million a year, all under a cloak of humanitarian assistance.”

The news prompted the U.S. government to ban the adoption of Cambodian orphans by Americans. An exception was made, however, for applications processed before December; those would be decided on a case-by-case basis. This meant that Jolie and Thornton were still eligible.

Less than three months later, Jon Voight, who had just been nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Howard Cosell in the biopic,
Ali
, attended a luncheon honoring Oscar nominees. After lunch, he let the news slip. “Angelina adopted a Cambodian baby. I’m a grandfather today,” he said. Indeed, the Cambodian authorities had suddenly approved the adoption, and baby Maddox was brought to an ecstatic Jolie, who was in Namibia filming
Beyond Borders.

Meanwhile, to the frustration of the new parents, the U.S. embassy in Cambodia still hadn’t issued Maddox’s visa to enter the U.S. “I’m certain Thornton and Jolie both know that … they must complete the proper procedures in accordance with U.S. law before bringing the child into the U.S.,” the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, Kent Wiedemann, said.

Finally, at the end of April 2002, the embassy’s special investigations unit approved the adoption, and Maddox was cleared to travel to his adoptive land. Then, after Jolie finally returned with baby Maddox to begin her new role as mother, she was suddenly engulfed by an adoption scandal that was now rocking Cambodia. In June, human rights agencies in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, charged that Maddox was not an orphan at all but that he had been “bought” from his destitute mother. Equally alarmingly, they charged that his adoption had been fast-tracked after “substantial bribes” had been paid to senior government officials. “I’m sure that this child was not a real orphan and was not abandoned,” Dr. Kek Galibru, head of LICADHO, told the London
Daily Mail.
There was an allegation that Maddox’s birth mother was paid approximately $100 to hand over her son, a small fortune for a poor Cambodian.

Maddox’s adoption had been facilitated by American businesswoman Lauryn Galindo, a Hawaiian-born former professional hula dancer who had been working as an adoption agent in Phnom Penh since the early 1990s. It was Galindo who had personally brought Maddox in March from the Cambodian orphanage to Walvis Bay, Namibia, where she delivered him to Jolie. Galindo later denied that she had paid money for children or been involved in any illegal practices. “When people ask me what I do, I don’t say adoptions, I say humanitarian work,” she told the
Cambodia Daily
newspaper. “I didn’t come here to steal children. I came here to do what I could to help.” Pressed further, she admitted that half of the $9,000 fee she charges American couples for processing an adoption was handed over to government officials. She denied that this is akin to bribery. “It’s OK to give tips,” she explained. “It’s fine because these guys can’t live on their salaries … I’m really happy to share the wealth.” Quizzed by reporters about the controversy, Jolie insisted that the adoption was legitimate and maintained that she and Thornton had hired private investigators to determine Maddox’s lineage. She has never released the results of that investigation, however, nor the documentation that she was given about Maddox’s origins.

Behind the scenes, Jolie immediately hired a team of lawyers to fight any attempt to return Maddox to Cambodia after the U.S. government hinted that she might have to do so. “I would never rob a mother of her child,” she insisted. “I can only imagine how dreadful that would feel. Maddox is my baby, he is by my side all the time, and I think I can give him so much. I can no more imagine living without him than not breathing.” Her efforts appear to have been successful, and no further action was taken.

Two years later, however, when the allegations had been long forgotten, Jolie’s adoption agent, Lauryn Galindo, quietly pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to fraud and money laundering in the falsification of documents to obtain visas for Cambodian children purported to be orphans. It is uncertain to this day whether Maddox was one of the orphans whose papers she had falsified, but Jolie was never formally implicated in her case.

The indictment leveled against Galindo, in fact, concerned only adoptions processed between 1997 and 1999, more than two years before she helped Jolie obtain Maddox. But it does provide a rather revealing insight into her modus operandi. In one 1998 case, according to the charges, Galindo faxed her sister the medical records of a child to be adopted with a handwritten note: “Father dead, mother very poor.” Four months later, she allegedly told the adoptive parents to give the birth mother $100 and to donate $3,500 to the orphanage that had been holding the child.

This may be significant, given that at the height of Maddox’s adoption process, Jolie announced that she was making a sizable donation to the orphanage. “Before I adopted Maddox, I decided to do something financially to help the whole orphanage,” she explained at the time. “I can’t bring every kid home, but I can make sure that life is better for a big group of them.” Now people wondered whether that contribution was demanded from her as a condition for taking Maddox.

What would a baby-buying scandal do to Jolie’s new image as a humanitarian and a mother? Just four days after the first American paper, the
Boston Globe
, broke the story of the adoption scandal and Galindo’s role in it, Jolie neatly changed the subject once again, suddenly announcing to the media that she and Thornton had split up.