Brangelina (5 page)

During one of their sessions, things went a little too far and sixteen- year-old Angelina ended up slashing her neck, cutting an
X
into her arm, and slicing her stomach. When the blood flowed longer than usual, she was rushed to a hospital by ambulance and given a life-saving transfusion. “I nearly cut my jugular vein,” she recalled years later.

Tiring of the constant drama and afraid for her daughter, Bertrand eventually decided to end the experiment and ordered the boyfriend to move out. Infuriated by her mother’s sudden penchant for authority and rules, Angelina decided she could no longer live under Bertrand’s roof and moved into a nearby apartment, financed by her father. She also broke up with the boyfriend. “He cried a lot,” she later recalled about the break-up. “And it was just a load of high drama that I could do without.”

There may have been another reason Jolie moved out of the house and broke up with her boyfriend, however. In May 2009, unsourced media reports claimed that, as a precocious sixteen-year-old, Jolie had been caught sleeping with her mother’s boyfriend. When her mother found out, so the story goes, she ended her affair with the man, but eventually forgave her precocious daughter.

The incident in question would have happened in 1991, which is indeed the year that Bertrand ended an eleven-year relationship with her live-in filmmaker boyfriend. It also coincides with the time that Angelina, still a minor, suddenly moved out of her mother’s house and broke up with her own boyfriend, who had been living with Jolie under her mother’s roof since she was fourteen.

Could her psychotherapy sessions, and subsequent diagnosis as an antisocial psychopath, be related to this affair? In California at the time, the age of consent laws considered sex with a minor under sixteen to be a felony or misdemeanor. Thus if she was sixteen or over at the time of the alleged affair, she would not have fallen into this category, and the sexual relationship would not have been considered a crime. Yet such an action could have easily been diagnosed by a therapist as antisocial behavior, to say the least.

Still, it is clear that Jolie was extremely close to her mother until Bertrand’s death in 2007. It is difficult to imagine that Bertrand would have so easily forgiven such an unconscionable act.

The end of the relationship, according to Angelina, also coincided with the end of her self-injuring. “By the time I was sixteen, I had gotten it out of my system,” she says, implying that her unstable adolescent behavior was just a phase. In fact, the worst was yet to come.

When Angelina was sixteen years old, she and her mother traipsed one day to the Beverly Center from their nearby apartment and took in the new movie,
Thelma and Louise
. Marcheline Bertrand enjoyed the film for its liberating theme of female independence, as the two main characters go on a wild road trip to escape their dreary lives. Angelina, on the other hand, was struck by the handsome young cowboy, J. D., a charismatic young con artist who gives Thelma a night she will never forget. Little did Angelina know that fifteen years later, her name and that cowboy’s would be merged to form one of the most powerful brands in Hollywood history.

It is hard to believe, comparing their early years, that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were destined to be together one day. Their backgrounds couldn’t be more different. Pitt was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, in December 1963. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved to Springfield, Missouri, a pleasant city in the southern part of that state, which is known as the “gateway to the Ozarks.” Living in Springfield at that time was somewhat like hiding in a Norman Rockwell painting. It was an oasis of traditional American values amid the turbulence that shook America in the 1960s. “I came from a very white-bread Christian community,” he has said.

His parents were conservative Southern Baptists; his mother was a high-school counselor, and his father managed a small trucking company. But that didn’t mean they were rednecks or in any way stereotypical Southerners. Frank Carver, who lived in Springfield until his retirement, knew the Pitt family well. “There was a lot of racism, a lot of backwards thinking in those days,” he recalled. “You’re talking about the South just before the civil-rights movement took hold—although some people will tell you it’s the Midwest—and there were a lot of ignorant attitudes. But you could say that Brad’s parents were a little more sophisticated than some. They were Baptists, but to them that meant having a traditional outlook, not some fire-and-brimstone way of looking at the world. They were probably Harry Truman Democrats. Truman was from Missouri and left his mark there. So they would have supported civil rights but probably disapproved of the radical stuff. They were God-fearing and church-going, but they weren’t exactly fundamentalists in today’s sense of the term. They were this tight knit, solid, middle-class American family.”

“Brad looks like his father, and he has the personality of his mother,” recalled Chris Schudy, one of Pitt’s early friends. “His mother is so down-to-earth, just a super woman. His dad is a great guy but more reserved.
A River Runs Through It
[the 1992 Oscar-winning film Pitt starred in] is almost a mirror image of Brad’s family.”

The family included two younger children, Doug and Julie, and all the siblings had a close bond growing up. “I always looked up to both of my brothers,” Julie later recalled. “I just thought they were the greatest things that ever happened. Doug and Brad really play off each other. We just had such a close family, and that gave us confidence. I think that’s what allowed Brad to try to be an actor. Sometimes I can’t believe that this guy from Springfield made it, but Brad has always succeeded in what he’s done, and he’s always had a way with people.” “The first time my mom met him, she called him a little Roman god,” echoed Schudy.

Pitt’s brother Doug, who still lives not far from where they grew up in Springfield, is quick to avoid placing Brad on that kind of pedestal. “He’s a regular Joe,” he said, noting that his brother always had an independent streak growing up. “If the rush was for everyone to go out and buy Harleys, Brad wouldn’t buy one.”

Pitt still refers to his parents as “the biggest guides in my life.” Like his future partner, he has always credited his mother—the first person to ever think he was talented—for his later success. “She just thought it from day one,” he said. His mother would drag the children to the South Haven Baptist Church every Sunday, where Brad often felt stifled by the piety. In retrospect, he appreciates the weekly routine. “It kept my mind on bigger things,” he later explained, recalling that he often felt like he wanted to let out a whoop or a fart in church and then “stand up and yell, ‘It was me! Right here!’ The preacher would pick someone to read the final prayer, and I would go into a sweat, afraid he would pick me. I would sit there and say, ‘Please, God, not me.’ That was my final prayer.”

For a time, he was even a choirboy, singing Baptist hymns every week. “You couldn’t keep from watching Brad because his face was so expressive,” said Connie Bilyeu, the piano accompanist at the church, who was later his high-school drama coach. “He would move his little mouth so big with all the words that he attracted everyone’s attention.”

But his first foray into show business may not have entirely met with the approval of his Christian mother. According to his Springfield friend Pam Senter, who has known Pitt since he was five, his first troupe was somewhat unconventional. “Brad and I went on church trips together, and he was always fun to be with—constantly entertaining,” she told his biographer, Brian Robb. “He and his friends sang at assembly. They called themselves the Brief Boys. It was ridiculous. They wore their underwear and sang Beach Boys songs with made-up lyrics. I think it was Brad’s idea—he showed off his body anytime he could. He never talked about wanting to be an actor, but now that I look back on it, he was an entertainer all along.”

Pitt attended Springfield’s Kickapoo High School in the mid-1970s. At the time, only four out of the 1,800 students were black. Since that time, the school—whose team slogan is “Fear the Poo!”—has become much more diverse and now includes a sizable number of Asian students as well.

Unlike Jolie, whose own high-school years marked a dark and unhappy period, Pitt appears to have thrived. “Brad was a super kid,” assistant principal Sandra Grey Wagner told
People
magazine in 1995. “He was into everything,” said Kate Chell, who attended Kickapoo at the same time as Pitt. “I guess Big Man On Campus usually refers to college, but if there was a high-school equivalent, that was Brad. He organized the dances, he did school plays, he sang, he did sports. People loved him. He wasn’t stuck up on himself; he just had this leadership aura where people were drawn to him. You could tell he was going to do something big, but I don’t think people thought he would be some big Hollywood star. The girls all had a big crush on him. I know I did. He had a steady girlfriend for a while, but I think he had a lot of girls. He liked blondes.”

Unlike Jolie, it was clear from an early age that Pitt was decidedly heterosexual. Indeed, Pitt once recalled his teenage reputation in an interview. “Loved girls, was always completely intrigued, taken over, would do anything for ’em,” he said. Chell, who remembers girls fighting over Pitt, called him the “cock of the walk.” Pitt admitted he got into occasional brawls: “I had the usual sort of fights over girls. From memory, I won one—probably because I took a cheap shot like grabbing the guy’s nuts, or something—and lost one. The only serious damage was to my ego.”

Pitt has always tended to be discreet about his sex life and has never revealed how old he was when he lost his virginity, although he did share with
Premiere
magazine the details of the first time he saw a naked woman. “Somewhere in early elementary school,” he says, “we found a house that was being built, and we found a stack of old
Playboys
at the site. Well, I was very impressed. I was just so overwhelmed.”

It wasn’t long after that when he got the birds-and-the-bees lecture. “Two little kids up the street kept using the word ‘fuck,’” he recalled, “and I asked my mom what it was, and that’s how we got into that whole sex talk. She told me, ‘We don’t use this word; this word is slang. But we do use the phrase “sexual intercourse,” and here it is.’ With the diagrams. I remember vividly, at that time, being horrified.”

By seventh grade, he says he was hosting make-out parties in his basement, fitted out in true seventies style with a number of comfortable beanbag chairs. “The girls usually overdid it with flavored lip gloss,” he said. “But we didn’t know it at the time. We thought it was fine. My mom always made a lot of noise before opening the door to the basement. She’d call down, ‘Brad? Can I come down and get something out of the freezer?’ Of course, you had to wonder why Mom needed a frozen steak at ten o’clock at night.”

Pam Senter also recalled girls falling all over the young Pitt. “There were plenty of them,” she remembered. “He had a real charm and a way with women. I made sure not to fall in love with Brad—I knew he’d break my heart. That’s just the way he is; he can’t help himself.”

His friends recalled that he loved going to films, especially the classics. But it was
Saturday Night Fever
that had the most lasting impact. “Not the dancing or the clothes,” he later explained, “but seeing these other cultures and these guys with their accents and the way they handled themselves and talked. It blew my mind, and it got me on this quest for travel and other cultures.”

As much fun as he was having in high school, Pitt was itching to get out and see the world. After he graduated from high school, he enrolled at the University of Missouri at Columbia, a three-hour drive from Springfield. “It was incredible just to get away from home,” he recalled, “living with a bunch of guys. That school kind of revolves around a keg. We had this idea of
Animal House,
and there was definitely that aspect. It was a highlight, without a doubt. Then, like everything, you grow out of it.”

At the University of Missouri, he was no less popular with the girls. “In our first year of college we put on a charity strip show,” Pitt’s friend Greg Pontius told Brian Robb. “Hundreds of girls paid to watch Brad— he was the hottest guy in the county. We didn’t strip completely naked, but the girls got their money’s worth.”

Majoring in journalism, Pitt began to acquire a wider world view and started questioning everything, especially his parents’ deep-seated religious beliefs. “I remember one of the most pivotal moments I’ve had was when I finally couldn’t buy the religion I grew up with. That was a big deal. It was a relief, in a way, that I didn’t have to believe that anymore, but then I felt alone. It was this thing I was dependent on,” recalled Pitt, who today describes himself as “twenty percent atheist and eighty percent agnostic.”

Despite his major, Pitt was determined to go into advertising or marketing until, in his senior year, he suddenly realized that he wasn’t cut out for a nine-to-five job for the rest of his life. In the spring of 1986, just two credits short of graduation, he decided to chuck it all and head to California. Lying to his family that he was going to attend art school, he had instead decided to try his luck as an actor. With $325 in his pocket, he drove his beat-up old Datsun, which he had nicknamed “Runaround Sue,” to L.A. without much of a plan or even much of an acting résumé.

“I always knew I’d leave Missouri,” he later said. “But it’s like that Tom Waits song: ‘I never saw the morning until I stayed up all night/I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long.’
I love
my hometown. I just wanted to see more. You’d come across a book or something on TV, and you’d see all these other worlds. It blew me away.”

“He hadn’t done a whole hell of a lot of acting,” recalled his old friend Chell. “I don’t think he ever had the lead in a school play even, but if you saw the way people reacted to him, you’d know why he would think he was going to make it. He was a pretty boy and he knew it. If he didn’t make it as an actor, he would have made money as a model, he was that good-looking. That goes a long way in this world.”