Brangelina (28 page)

Pitt would still not confirm whether he and Jolie were an item. He continued to say that she was a not factor in the breakup and denied that the two had slept together while he was married. Jolie told the same story. Interviewed in March 2005 for
Marie Claire
magazine, Jolie tried to squelch the persistent rumors that she and Pitt had been having an affair for months before the separation. “To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother is not something I could forgive,” she said. “I could not, could not, look at myself in the morning if I did that.”

By the time Aniston gave a tearful interview in the September 2005
Vanity Fair
, she was on the defensive. The issue broke all sales records for the magazine. In it, Aniston decried the stories that had been circulating as sexist and cruel. “A man divorcing would never be accused of choosing career over children,” she said. “That really pissed me off. I’ve never in my life said I didn’t want to have children. I did and I do and I will! The women that inspire me are the ones who have careers and children; why would I want to limit myself? I’ve always wanted to have children, and I would never give up that experience for a career. I want to have it all.”

Vanity Fair
writer Leslie Bennetts tracked down most of the couple’s mutual friends to determine what had really happened. Most of them told her that Pitt “virtually checked out” of his marriage as soon as he began working with Jolie. “He was gone,” a friend told Bennetts. They also dismissed the myth that Pitt had been obsessed with having children while Aniston kept putting it off. “When Brad and Jen were in the marriage, having a baby was not his priority—ever,” another friend told Bennetts. “It was an abstract desire for him, whereas for Jen it was much more immediate. So is there a part of Brad that’s diabolical? Did he think, ‘I need to get out of this marriage, but I want to come out smelling like a rose, so I’m going to let Jen be cast as the ultra-feminist and I’m going to get cast as the poor husband who couldn’t get a baby and so had to move on?’”

Yet there was something else that could have been a factor for both parties. Jennifer Aniston had been thought to have been pregnant twice recently, in 2003 and in the late spring of 2004. Rumor had it that both pregnancies had ended in miscarriages. Was Aniston unable to have children, or was her insistence on maintaining an ultra-thin, camera- friendly figure interfering with her efforts to have a baby? Such things put uncommon stresses on marriages. It is difficult to say, but perhaps Pitt was vulnerable at that point in time and simply unable to resist the force of nature known as Angelina Jolie.

Pitt does not in fact seem to have been complicit in what was proving to be a mean-spirited but effective campaign to shift public opinion against Aniston. Jolie, however, was. By now, she was an accomplished veteran at what one publicist called “misdirection”—deflecting a crisis by changing the subject—and she appears to have used those skills to good advantage once again. “It was Angelina who came up with the whole story about Jennifer not wanting to have kids,” a source connected to the publicity department at 20th Century Fox, which produced
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
, said in February 2009. “She was convinced that is the story that would resonate with all these women who saw her as a man- stealing bitch.”

According to a journalist who worked for the
Hollywood Reporter
, insider stories about Jolie, even the most innocuous, usually emanated from the office of Jolie’s manager, Geyer Kosinski, or from her brother, James Haven, who had become an aggressive defender of his sister’s interests in the press for quite some time. His days of distancing himself to avoid the incest rumors were long past. “That’s the way things are done in this town,” the journalist said. “There’s nothing particularly wrong with it. Unlike the tabloids, we need to know where the information is coming from before we’ll print it, how reliable it is. If we quote an “insider,” we know who that is and whether they are genuinely in the loop. Every celebrity has some trusted authorities they use to get their information to us or into the mainstream gossip columns like [the
New York Post
’s] Page Six.”

And it was working. As 2005 drew to a close, Jolie’s Q score began to climb again. Millions of women now believed that Pitt had left Aniston because she had chosen to put career over children.
Vanity Fair
called these stories as misogynistic as they were false and noted that mutual friends believed Pitt could have done more to refute the false rumors. “To some, this looks like sheer hypocrisy,” the magazine chided. Others took Pitt to task for continuing the charade that he hadn’t cheated on Aniston while he was married, although Aniston’s close friend and castmate Courteney Cox chose to give him the benefit of the doubt. “I don’t think he started an affair physically, but I think he was attracted to her,” she told the magazine.

Others were appalled by a recent photo spread in
W
magazine featuring Pitt and Jolie as an early-1960s-style married couple. The pictures had been shot in March, the month Aniston filed for divorce. “He’s missing a sensitivity chip,” Aniston said, referring to Pitt’s continuous public flaunting of the relationship.

A former employee of Pitt’s put a different spin on it, however, defending Pitt’s continuing denials. “Of course he was sleeping with Angelina most of that time, but he didn’t hide it because he was a prick,” the man said. “He hid it because he was too nice a guy. He didn’t want to hurt Jen. He still loved her, and he didn’t know how to break it to her. In fact, for a while there he genuinely thought of ending the thing with Angelina and going back to Jen. I’m not sure what finally happened or why he decided to end it, but would you rather he did what Billy Bob did to the Dern chick? Was he a coward for not telling Jen sooner? Probably. But what would you do in that situation? It wasn’t easy for him. I doubt if he forgives himself to this day.”

Pitt had long suspected that the stories about Jen were being leaked by his new girlfriend, and he was, according to my sources, furious, ordering Jolie to desist from her whisper campaign. He was still visibly upset when
GQ
magazine asked him in its June 2005 issue about the rumor that Aniston didn’t want to have kids. “That was one version, and total bullshit, by the way,” he responded forcefully. In an ABC
Primetime Live
interview that same month, Diane Sawyer asked him the same question. This time he was even less equivocal, dismissing the reports as “ridiculous bullshit” and “completely fabricated.” By then, however, the damage had been done.

On January 8, 2005, the day after Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston publicly announced their breakup, a little girl named Yemasrech was born in a small Ethiopian city called Awassa. Six months later, with Pitt by her side, Angelina Jolie flew to Addis Ababa where the girl—now her new daughter—was handed over to her by adoption authorities.
People
magazine landed an exclusive interview with Jolie and broke the news with a cover story, announcing that the girl had been orphaned by AIDS. “Her name is Zahara Marley,” Jolie told the magazine. “Maddox and I are very happy to have a new addition to our family.”

A month before, in June 2005, Jolie had appeared on CNN describing the first time she saw the death of a child in a refugee camp. “I saw him dying,” she recalled. “And, you know, it was my first trip, my first moment, and being somebody from the States and with a bit of money, I thought, well, we’ll just airlift him and take him to the hospital. I can solve this in a second. And then you suddenly … it was that moment where you look around and realize that there are, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in the exact same situation and that a lot of these kids were going to die. And then I went home, and I thought, ‘I should have at least taken one.’”

She said it was Maddox who had ultimately helped her decide on the adoption. “My son is in love with Africa, so he has been asking for an African brother or sister,” she said. Earlier, Jolie had publicly declared that she wanted to create “a rainbow family.” “That’s children of different religions and cultures, from different countries,” she explained. “Actually, I’d love to have seven, a small football team.”

For a while it seemed that the first color to join Maddox in the Jolie family rainbow would be white, not brown. The London
Daily Mail
reported in December 2004 that she had been “scouring” Russian orphanages the previous month, looking for a child. “We were told she wanted a child of Slavic appearance,” said one of the directors of “Baby House 13,” an orphanage outside Moscow. “She wanted a blond baby with blue eyes.” Orphanage officials said Jolie had her heart set on a blonde, blue-eyed baby named Gleb. “Miss Jolie took him in her arms and kissed him,” the orphanage director said. “Then she asked her translator to tell the staff: ‘I’ve found my son.’”

But before the adoption could be made official, she also visited another Russian orphanage, “Baby House 22.” That center’s chief doctor, Natalia Kostyushina, told a similar story. “Like the heads of other baby orphanages, we knew that Jolie was interested in boys with a Slavic appearance only,” she told the paper. “As I understood it, on the first day of her visit she was trying to see as many kids as possible and on the second day was planning to make a decision. One of our kids was playing with his toys in the playpen when Angelina entered the room. She looked at him and he smiled, as if he recognized her. She then rushed to the playpen, took him out of it, clasped him to her bosom and started to whirl him around. They both laughed, and it looked like a happy mother with her beloved son. It was a very moving scene. After that, we had no doubt that she would take our boy as her son. But to our regret, it didn’t happen.”

A pattern was emerging, the
Daily Mail
reported. When the paper spoke to the director of yet another orphanage, they heard a familiar story. “She showed interest in one of our children, too, but most were deemed not suitable for her,” revealed the director. “It was something of a circus the way it happened, as if we should all drop everything because this rich and famous American single mum needed another child. There are more than four million children in Russia, many of them abandoned by their parents, but there are rules in place to make it difficult for Westerners to adopt only ‘healthy’ babies. Instead they are encouraged to adopt those with serious sicknesses or disabled ones.”

In the end, Jolie left Russia without a child, later explaining she didn’t think Maddox was ready yet for a sibling. “I was going to adopt this other child in Russia, but it didn’t work out, so I may adopt another in about six months,” she said at the time. In fact, Jolie reportedly had learned that dealing with the Russian bureaucracy meant months of red tape before she could bring a baby home, and she had abandoned the plan. Was she hoping to adopt another baby at the time to distract from the imminent breakup of Pitt and Aniston?

When she finally adopted Zahara over half a year later, watchers were astonished at how quickly she was able to gain approval from the Ethiopian government, a process that usually takes between six months and a year. Zahara’s adoption was approved a week after Jolie filed her request, according to Hadosh Halefom, head of the country’s state-run adoption agency.

Dr. Tsegaye Berhe, medical director of the Addis Ababa orphanage, told a British newspaper that Pitt was with Jolie when she arrived to claim the baby and that they looked just like a married couple. “They were like any couple looking at their child for the first time. Angelina wiped a tear from her eye.” he recalled. “They were so happy. Then they turned to me and said, ‘This makes us a whole family.’”

Zahara had been described as an “AIDS orphan” in every media account of the child’s adoption. Jolie herself called Zahara an “AIDS orphan” on June 23 in an interview with Anderson Cooper of CNN. But in August 2005, new details emerged about the baby’s circumstances that brought to mind the controversy surrounding Maddox, who was not an orphan as was originally claimed.

Europe’s largest English-language newspaper, the
Sun
, discovered that the baby’s mother was not in fact dead, and that Zahara was not an AIDS orphan after all. Girma Degu Legesse, an employee of Wide Horizons for Children, the private agency that facilitated the adoption, admitted to the newspaper that he knew that Zahara’s real mom was only “missing,” not dead. Attempting to justify the deception, he claimed, “Some Ethiopians believe that disappearing and dead is the same.”

The
Sun
tracked down the real mother, Mentewab Dawit, who described the circumstances behind Zahara’s birth. She explained that she had been staying with her grandmother in a small village called Shone while she attended school. One night, when her grandmother was away on business, she was walking home in the dark after a day of work selling onions at a local market, when a man approached and attacked her.

“He pulled a dagger and put one hand on my mouth so that I could not scream. He then raped me and disappeared,” she later told Reuters. When she discovered she was pregnant, she claimed, she didn’t tell anybody at first. “I feared the consequences of being raped in a community where rape is considered a taboo, even if what happened, happened forcibly,” she said.

Her daughter was born on January 8, which in Ethiopia is the day after Christmas. She was named Yemasrech, which means “good news,” though she was later renamed Tena Adam, the name of a local herb. When Mentewab’s mother, Almaz, learned that she had given birth, she came and brought her daughter and the baby back to Awassa, a small city about three hours south of the capital. There, Mentewab worked as a laborer for a construction company, barely subsisting on the inadequate wages. “Sometimes all I had was a piece of bread all day,” she said, explaining that the uncle they had been staying with eventually asked them to move out. “My baby was crying all the time because she was hungry. I thought she was going to die, so I ran away,” she said.

The grandmother, Almaz, claimed that soon afterwards she took the baby to the local council and told them that her daughter had run away and left the baby with her. “She was really skinny. I was even thinking she could die,” Almaz claimed. “I said to them, ‘Please take the baby before she dies.’”