Running scared of Brangelina?
How Hollywood's biggest stars are keeping a sensational new book out of the news. Caitriona Palmer reports from Los Angeles
What Angelina wants . . . : Jolie with Brad Pitt on the red carpet
Saturday August 14 2010
She has already won an Oscar, two SAG awards, three Golden Globes and the arm of Hollywood's hottest leading man. But now actress and yummy-mummy Angelina Jolie has really hit the celebrity big time -- by becoming the subject matter of a gossipy unauthorised biography by Andrew Morton.
Joining the ranks of other Morton alumni -- Princess Diana, Tom Cruise, Madonna -- Angelina: An Unauthorised Biography, was released in America on August 3, immediately shooting to the top of the bestseller lists.
The only surprise is that it took Morton so long. Jolie's story to date has been a tour de force of whacky sensationalism that has been literally begging for the attentions of a celebrity biographer.
At just 35, the mother-of-six has been a Goth, a tattoo aficionado, a lesbian, and the wife of Billy Bob Thornton -- whose blood she wore about her neck in a vial. She has snogged her brother on the red carpet, spent time in a psychiatric hospital, dabbled in heroin and S&M, and raised the plight of refugees across the world in her role as a UN Goodwill ambassador.
Along the way she has been called a home-wrecking humanitarian, a serial adopter, and the closest thing that Hollywood has to Mother Teresa.
But despite the salacious claims in Morton's 350-page tome -- that the man-eating actress had a fling with a young Leonardo DiCaprio and a much-older Mick Jagger, and that she had a tattoo honouring her former husband emblazoned on her nether regions -- thus far Hollywood and the US media have steered clear of the book.
Speculation in Hollywood is rife that Jolie and her partner, Brad Pitt -- the golden couple known simply as 'Brangelina' -- are using their elusive star power to intimidate the networks to stay away from Morton's claims.
"I think that Hollywood and the public have basically ignored the book," Melissa Silverstein, author of the Women and Hollywood blog, told the Weekend Review. "The world has changed and nobody needs an unauthorised memoir to get information about celebrities any more."
Even the biggest entertainment shows on US television -- Extra, Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight -- which previously promoted Morton's biographies with huge fanfare, have conspicuously avoided coverage of the book, which also contains some previously unseen photos of Jolie -- one of her naked except for nipple tape and another where she is allegedly taking drugs.
"The fear that might have been imposed on these so-called entertainment news shows by the 'Brangelina' PR machine has got them running scared from the story," John Murphy, the publicity director of Morton's publishers told the Hollywood Reporter.
Morton, a former Daily Star reporter who penned the 1992 exposé of Diana, Princess of Wales, has become the king of the headline-grabbing grubby world of celebrity biography.
His biography of Diana was translated into 29 languages and made him a multi-millionaire in the process. Since his Diana biography he has earned on average of nearly $5m per book despite being constantly threatened with legal action by his subjects, including David and Victoria Beckham, Madonna and Tom Cruise.
Morton was inspired to write a book on Jolie because he saw in her the same magnetic qualities that made the Diana such an object of enduring public fascination.
"The response to (Jolie) reminded me of how people behaved when You-Know-Who walked into a room," said Morton. "Sophisticated heads bobbed to get a better look and all conversation stuttered to a halt as the crowd strained to see this modern day goddess. Both, too, have reached out to the world's dispossessed, using their influence to spotlight the forgotten and the voiceless."
But even Morton has admitted that the powerful American TV networks are giving his new book on Jolie the cold shoulder, and that the shadow of Hollywood's golden couple may lurk behind the paltry publicity.
"Brad and Angelina are the uncrowned king and queen of Hollywood," he told a TV network this month. "(TV networks are) ignoring it because they're being courteous."
Like his other celebrity biographies, Angelina: An Unauthorised Biography has approached Jolie's story with Morton's usual mix of tabloid gossip and thinly sourced facts.
Few of Jolie's alleged "friends" quoted in the book are named, except for the actresses' childhood nanny, Krisann Morel.
And unlike Diana, who allegedly fed Morton a non-stop diet of salacious court gossip about the "threesome" in her marriage, Jolie has remained steadfastly removed from this project, which sources claim "will annoy her massively".
Undeterred by the lack of real sources, Morton attempts to use pop psychology to explain Jolie's scandalous man-eating and drug abusing ways on her alleged abandonment by her mother at an early age.
Like any good Hollywood tragedy, Jolie's troubles began with her childhood, claims Morton, as the daughter of the beautiful aspiring actress, Marcheline Bertrand and the movie star, Jon Voight.
The couple lived a glamorous life in California until Voight -- who "attracted women like moths to a flame" -- began an affair with another woman when Jolie was just a few months old.
The fairytale destroyed, Jolie's mother became irrevocably bitter, and according to Morton, banished her daughter to an apartment three floors above her where a team of nannies raised her, Rapunzel-like, in isolation.
'Marche took her pain out on Angelina," Morel, Jolie's former nanny told Morton. "She separated herself from that child as she looked a lot like Jon."
Whether Morton's claims are true or not, he blames Voight's adultery on his wife as a shaky explanation for Jolie's alleged penchant for hooking up with already attached men.
In the book the author claims that Jolie had set her sights on Pitt even before she had ever met him.
"Pitt was one of the triumvirate of men -- the other two were (fellow actors) Johnny Depp and Willem Dafoe -- whom Angie had watched and wondered about from afar," Morton writes. (Despite her insistence that she began dating Brad Pitt after the break-up of his marriage to Jennifer Aniston, many Americans still perceive Jolie as the tattooed vixen who threw America's sweetheart under a bus.)
"It helps explain her cutting, eating disorders, drug-taking and suicidal tendencies in later life," said Morton.
But Jolie's childhood trauma may also have served as her salvation too. Showing early signs of the ingenuity and cunning that she has applied to protecting and cultivating her image, Morton recounts how Jolie once urinated into an empty bottle of a soda drink called Mountain Dew, popped it in the refrigerator and promptly gave it to her father's then mistress to drink.
Presumably this story is one the actor will be keen to keep out of the press. Since her hook-up with Pitt -- who is portrayed by Morton in the book as a "bit of a stoner" and "Mr Mom" -- Jolie has worked assiduously to cultivate her metamorphosis from crazy wild child to serious humanitarian.
It is this extraordinary ability to transform her image that keeps the public -- and gossipy biographers like Andrew Morton -- so entranced by Jolie, says Melissa Silverstein. And one that sets her apart from other A-list female actors.
"For Angelina, the thing that makes people so fascinated with her is how she transformed herself from her Billy Bob blood-drinking days into mommy of the year," said Silverstein.
"She seems to genuinely care about people from other cultures and she practises what she preaches."
"The bottom line is that she comes off as genuine and in a business where everyone looks and acts fake, her story, life, kids and relationship seems real."
Irish Independent
