Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (45 page)

As a result, there was general shock among those in her former circle when they heard that Marche had died. Indeed, the last word to filter out—via
Dances with Wolves
actor Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman, who was undergoing cancer treatment in the same hospital—had been that she was in remission. Bill Day, her former partner of eleven years, heard the news on his car radio while driving to Santa Monica, and was so stunned that he had to pull over to the side of the road. When he reached the seaside town, he climbed into an empty lifeguard station and gazed out at the ocean, reflecting on his life with Marcheline. “It was hard to believe she went through the slow agony of cancer death and didn’t bother to let me know. I knew we had a bad ending, but we had a life together. I would have thought she would have wanted to forgive the past so that she could leave this planet in peace. But knowing Marcheline as I did, I also understood why she didn’t. The freeze, the freeze, the freeze. God, I never hated it more than at that moment.”

As phone calls were made among close family and friends, it quickly became clear that a whole slew of them had also been consigned to the spiritual deep freezer. Jon Voight was reduced to leaving a message of condolence on his son’s answering machine, while Marcheline’s sister, Debbie, like many others, heard about her death on the local news.

The fact that she had frozen out virtually all those who cared for her went a long way toward explaining James Haven’s rather histrionic statement that he and his sister were now “orphans.” Indeed, there were no adult members of the Voight or Bertrand family who were close to Marche’s children. “She just became angry with everyone and shut them out of her life,” recalled Bill Day. “Marche took it all away with her unresolved and unfinished. What hit me hard was not so much that she died so tragically, but that she died such a tragic figure. What a sad end comes to those who can’t forgive, I thought.”

For Angie, grieving over the loss of “her best friend,” the only consolation
was that Marcheline was now out of the pain she had endured for so long. In the weeks following her mother’s death, Angie physically wasted away; as a onetime anorexic, not eating gave her control over her wayward emotions. Her brother spoke publicly about his fears for her well-being, saying that her profound sense of bereavement was affecting her health. Her work for the United Nations was also draining her physical resources. When the actress returned home from visits to refugee camps, she found it hard to eat out in expensive restaurants, knowing how little so many had to live on. Her brother, who accompanied her to several refugee camps, was also deeply affected. James, too, found it difficult to reconcile his life of plenty in a world of want, on one occasion abandoning his half-full supermarket cart during his weekly shopping trip and walking out of the store, repulsed by the groaning abundance that surrounded him.

Angie responded to her mother’s death in the only way she knew how—by keeping herself busy. Just three weeks after Marche’s passing, Angie was on the road again, spending two days in late February 2007 at the Oure-Cassoni refugee camp in eastern Chad, home to victims of the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region. “It’s always hard to see decent people, families, living in such difficult conditions,” said the UN Goodwill Ambassador, who had to cross the Sahara in a sandstorm in order to reach the 26,000-person camp. Several weeks after her visit, she and Brad Pitt, under the umbrella of the Jolie-Pitt Foundation, donated $1 million toward the humanitarian mission to assist more than four million people affected by the war in Darfur.

Just as satisfying for the girl striving to be “good” was an op-ed piece she penned for
The Washington Post
in late February, drawing on her experience to argue that there would be no permanent peace in Darfur until the perpetrators of the violence faced justice. For the first time she was referred to as a UN Goodwill Ambassador rather than an actor. At last she had broken free of the Hollywood ghetto, a fact underlined that month when she was nominated for membership in the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank on international discourse that included four former secretaries of state as well heavyweights like Richard Holbrooke, Tom Brokaw, and Alan Greenspan. Her membership was confirmed that June.

Still, it was her private life, rather than her public works, that excited
the most attention. On March 2, days after Angie returned from Darfur, Vietnam’s top adoption official confirmed that the mother of three was about to add to her family. As Vietnam has a rigorous and complex adoption procedure, Brad and Angie had started the process the previous May, shortly after Shiloh’s birth, their application shepherded by the Adoptions From The Heart agency. Since Vietnamese law makes it difficult for unmarried couples to adopt, Angie applied solo, though with her partner’s full support, the couple agreeing that it would be good for their family to be ethnically balanced.

When they visited Ho Chi Minh City during Thanksgiving 2006, Brad and Angie had made a connection with a “shy but friendly” little boy, Pham Quang Sang, who celebrated his third birthday shortly after they distributed gifts to toddlers at Tam Binh orphanage. Abandoned at birth by his heroin addict mother, Pham Thu Dung, the youngster enjoyed a simple but familiar routine with 326 other orphans. All that was about to change.

So he wouldn’t be alarmed, Pham wasn’t told that he was about to meet his new mother—and brother and sister—until March 14, the day Angie arrived at the orphanage. Brad’s filming commitments did not allow him to be present, so Maddox and Zahara were their mother’s wingmen. The official handover in a room at the Department of Justice the following day didn’t go quite according to script, the “rather shy and dazed” three-year-old bursting into tears in the presence of the world’s most glamorous woman. While Maddox, now five, roamed around the nondescript room, the tearful Pham Quang Sang seemed bewildered.

Within a matter of minutes, he had entered a parallel universe. He had a new family, a new home, a new language, a new culture, and a new name, Angie calling him Pax Thien Jolie. The name Pax, Latin for “peace,” was first suggested by her mother, while Thien traditionally means “sky” in Vietnamese. Suddenly he was scooped from a life of order and certainty to the pandemonium of “Angie’s world,” his new mother, brother, bodyguard, and others taking almost an hour to reach their hotel amid the scrum of paparazzi and the curious. At one point, in a desperate effort to slow the convoy, paparazzi threw their crash helmets under the wheels of Angie’s car. The newly minted mother of four was acutely aware of the difficulties. “Photographs and press coverage will make him upset,” she told the
Ho Chi Min Law
newspaper. “I’m very worried about that.”

Aware, too, of the difficulties the youngster faced in adapting to a new country and a new language, Angie was committed to slowly building a bond of trust. During an interview with a Vietnamese journalist, she admitted that it would take her latest addition some time to realize that he now had a permanent family and that his life would not keep changing. To that end she stated emphatically that she had no plans to resume work. “I will stay at home to help Pax adjust to his new life. I have four children now, and caring for them is the most important thing for me at the moment. I am very happy to be their mother.”

In spite of these assurances, the bewilderment on Pax’s face was matched by the general unease in the media and in the wider public over the practice of celebrities—and politicians—swooping into Third World countries and walking away with orphans. Angie herself had entered the debate earlier in the year, when she questioned the decision by Madonna and her then husband, Guy Ritchie, to adopt a baby boy from Malawi, a country with lax adoption laws. “Personally I prefer to stay on the right side of the law,” Jolie reportedly told the French magazine
Gala,
though she later made clear that she was “horrified” by the attacks on Madonna and Ritchie. Nor was Angie herself spared condemnation. Commentator Fiona Looney accused Angie of “choosing her babies like handbags.” Upbraiding Vietnamese officials for a “terrible disregard” for Pax’s emotional welfare, the
Daily Mail
columnist argued that just as it was cruel to change a dog’s name when it was several years old, it was even worse for a confused little boy. Arizona-based columnist Tracy Dingmann, herself an adopted child, observed: “To me it looks like Jolie is collecting cute little brown kids like she collects tattoos,” going on to quote Susan Caughman, editor of
Adoptive Families
magazine, who cautioned against adopting numerous children in a short period of time and out of birth order. To further add to the ethical debate about the adoption of Third World youngsters by rich Westerners, it was revealed that Pax’s distraught mother, Pham Thu Dung, had kicked heroin—like Pax’s adoptive mother—and was working in a shoe factory for fifty dollars a month. Though she was racked with guilt at giving away her son, she had no plans to reclaim him. She told her sister Pham Thu Trang: “I gave up my rights as a mother when I abandoned him. He is better off where he is. Now he has a life I could never give him.” Instead this sad and forlorn figure followed his progress as part of the
world’s most famous rainbow family via the Internet or picture magazines—rather like his maternal grandfather. Within days of his adoption, pictures of Pax appeared on the covers of
People
and
Hello!
magazines in a deal worth a reported $2 million.

Perhaps anticipating the furor that would accompany her third overseas adoption, Angie’s involvement in her latest movie,
Wanted,
was not formally announced until March 26—the naming of the director, Timur Bekmambetov, and the casting of the leading men, Morgan Freeman and James McAvoy, having been released in
Variety
the previous December. Indeed, during the film’s promotion, McAvoy said he felt rather “intimidated” when told that his love interest was to be Ms. Jolie, implying that he knew of her involvement from the get-go. She was committed to a three-month shoot, flying to Prague in May and then to Chicago, where she played an assassin training the son of a fellow assassin in the deadly arts. It was the kind of stylish action adventure hokum she enjoyed, but she needed to be fit and focused.

After a long day’s filming—which she saw as therapy after her mother’s death—there would not be much energy left for mothering. Once
Wanted
wrapped, she was scheduled to star in Clint Eastwood’s
Changeling,
the true story of a mother’s ultimately hopeless search for her son abducted by a serial killer. After that, she was slated to be a voice in the epic cartoon
Beowulf
before starring in a film version of Ayn Rand’s novel
Atlas Shrugged.

If Angie could have spoken to her new son rather than using gestures, how would she have explained the disparity between her public statements in Vietnam that she was going to put her career on the back burner to focus on family and the fact that, even as she made the pledge, she was already contracted to work on a movie that started filming almost before Pax became familiar with the layout of his new home? On the level of short-term public relations, it was a way to dodge the bullets fired by the Vietnamese and international media concerned about Pax’s welfare. Once on board the private jet that flew her and her family back to America, she knew she had lived to fight another day. Sweetened by the news that she and Brad had donated $100,000 to support the “Lost Boys” of the Sudan, the simultaneous announcement of her new movie passed largely without comment.

On another level, though, this was part of a pattern of behavior that gives an intriguing insight into Angie’s psyche. As a working mother, she
had no genuine need to dissemble. In her mind’s eye, however, the image of motherhood was represented by her idealized vision of Marcheline’s, giving up her career for the sake of the children. That was the narrative she—and others—believed, even though it was clearly untrue. Her mother continued to pursue an acting career and even moved to New York in the hope of attaining her dream. In her own way, Marcheline was a working mom. Yet this notion of the “domestic goddess” was the story Angie told herself and presented to the world not only about her own mother but about herself as a mother. As writer Susan Chenery observed: “There is something slightly preposterously pathological about all the things she is trying to be in her personal quest to be a ‘good woman.’ ”

On an even deeper level, she was reliving the profound imprinted experience of abandonment that lay just at the edge of her consciousness. Known as “repetition compulsion,” it is the state of mind represented colloquially by a phrase heard in families the world over: “If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for you.” That is to say, many hurt or abused children grow up to impose similar hurt and abuse on their own children. And so the pattern repeats.

While Angie could not articulate the abandonment she felt in that stark-white nursery, it informed her adult behavior in a variety of ways. As a survivor of abandonment herself, she identified with those who had gone through the same experience, associating more deeply with her orphaned children than with her biological child. “I think I feel so much more for Mad and Zee because they’re survivors, they came through so much,” she told
Elle
magazine. “Shiloh seemed so privileged from the moment she was born. I have less inclination to feel for her. . . . I met my other kids when they were six months old, they came with a personality. A newborn really is this . . . Yes, a blob!”

Yet her relationships with both adults and children could be characterized as “Come here, now go away.” A few examples should suffice: Within weeks of her marriage to Jonny Lee Miller, she began an affair with Tim Hutton; within days of marrying Billy Bob Thornton, she was on a plane to London to film
Lara Croft;
no sooner had she adopted Maddox than she ditched Billy Bob and left the boy with her mother and brother while she headed off to Ecuador; once Zahara was deemed out of danger in the New York hospital she began filming
The Good Shepherd;
and now with Pax she
was flying to Prague for long days of filming—albeit with Brad and the children in tow. All the while she repeated the mantra of the need for family, of giving up work, of focusing on the children. Yet she was as much a savior as a mother. Nowhere was the disconnect between words and actions more apparent than with Pax. As her former babysitter Krisann Morel observes: “When I see how the children are being brought up by nannies while she is off filming, I see that she is repeating her own childhood without knowing it. Why adopt if you are not going to parent them?”