Brangelina (16 page)

Indeed, as the CBS crew discussed, footage and photos had emerged showing Angelina and her brother with their hands all over each other before and after the ceremony. Other journalists were quick to accept that their affection was merely the result of a bond between two children of a broken home, as Jolie had explained. “So what’s up with Angelina and her brother?” asked Sandy Banks of the
L.A. Times
. “Does that relationship seem a little strange? Maybe the questions simply reflect the image that the young actress has created: an eccentric iconoclast pushing the limits of convention on matters of sex and social mores. Or maybe it’s a sign of how disconnected we are from our own families, that so many of us could be made uncomfortable by the image of such strong familial love. As a woman with a brother I deeply love, I found myself moved by Jolie’s tribute to Haven … and bewildered by the prurient tone of inquisitors who implied there must be something weird about her affection.”

Dismissing the rumors, the
L.A. Times
interviewed a number of therapists who explained that it is not uncommon for siblings to be drawn closer by the trauma of divorce and for one to step into the breach and fill the role of an absent parent. “When divorce occurs, it’s a very intense experience,” Susan Maxwell, a West Los Angeles therapist, told the paper. “Everyone is suffering; there’s a lot of sadness and grief. Your little nuclear family that has given you security has been blown apart … You feel a sense of abandonment. A situation like that can make the sibling bond stronger. It’s the two of you against the world. It’s like surviving a war. Or an airline crash. When you share an experience like that, you can come through it feeling very close, very bonded.” Maxwell added that she too has an older brother with whom she weathered a family breakup. “And we’re very close. We talk all the time; we understand each other. It’s like we’re speaking the same language.”

Camille Paglia, the controversial author and social critic, had a different explanation for the Oscar kiss. “I think [Angelina] was messing with people’s heads,” she said. “I think she enjoys doing the unexpected.” Ian Drew, West Coast editor of
US Weekly
echoed Paglia’s assessment. “Only Angelina Jolie could turn that moment of Hollywood acceptance into the ultimate moment of Hollywood rebelliousness,” he said.

Indeed, many people believed that the shenanigans were part of Jolie’s carefully crafted image as a Hollywood wild child. After all, wrote one paper, Jolie’s life has been “an open book of bizarre behavior,” noting that she “sports numerous tattoos” and has “experimented with bisexuality and sadomasochism.”

The controversy and speculation probably would have died down very quickly were it not for a number of new details emerging about the siblings’ relationship. First, the
New York Observer
published details of the post-Oscars
Vanity Fair
party, where brother and sister partied together into the night. Frank DiGiacomo noted the “double takes” partygoers cast at Jolie and Haven, “whose cuddling appeared to surpass sibling affection. One partygoer told the
Observer
that even their father Jon Voight, who was at the party, seemed a little unnerved by their closeness.”

Then the media dug back two months, to the Golden Globes ceremony, where Jolie had dragged her brother up onto the stage after winning for
Girl, Interrupted
—she wanted him to “see the view from up here.” The
Fort Wayne News Sentinel
wrote, “First we see her at the Golden Globes and the Oscars, demonstrating a strange and unsettling fondness for her brother, who was her date at both events. At the Golden Globes, she led him to the stage with her when she accepted her award, their fingers intertwined, their glances not sibling-like at all, nor their kisses.” On top of that, backstage in the press room at the Golden Globes, another photo had been taken of Angelina leaning backwards into her brother’s chest and kissing him passionately on the lips, eyes closed, again in an embrace that seemed nothing like an innocent sisterly kiss.

Soon, news leaked that
Elle
magazine had done a recent photo shoot— weeks before the Oscars—where Jolie had showed up accompanied by her brother. The
New York Observer
reported that, during the shoot, the brother and sister had repeatedly kissed in front of the photographer and crew, posing in “their favorite scandalous pose without even being asked.” Photographer Gilles Bensimon told the paper that the two first exchanged a kiss on the lips, he discreetly refrained from snapping a shot. “We don’t try to use the picture in a tabloid way,” he said. “But the third time they were kissing, I take the picture.” Other photos from the shoot showed Haven standing with Jolie like her lover, with his hands on his sister’s hips with the top of her dress open to expose a good portion of her breasts.

* * * *

It is difficult to get a handle on James Haven because he has always lived in the shadow of his famous sister and father. Jolie has always maintained that it was her brother who was most likely to follow in Jon Voight’s footsteps.

In one of the few times they were ever interviewed together, a portrait emerged of the origins of their close sibling bond. “I’m so proud of him,” Jolie said. “Growing up, I couldn’t have cared less about movies. He had to drag me to them. Jamie always loved film. He should’ve been the one who was working first.” Asked how she compared to her brother, she claimed the two were “almost perfect opposites.” “He never swears,” she said. “I swear like a truck driver when I’m angry. When it comes to the moral high ground, he wins. When it comes to being crass and loud and tough, that’s me.”

I
NTERVIEWER
: Who was more theatrical as a kid?

H
AVEN
: That would be her.

J
OLIE
: Because you were always holding a camera.

H
AVEN
: I’d tell her to act for me. We did a version of a Subway commercial of her saying something like, “I’ll punch your face if you don’t buy a sandwich.”

I
NTERVIEWER
: What impressions do you have of each other as children?

J
OLIE
: I remember him as a happy child and then getting to a certain age and becoming very sad. When I used to have to cry in a film, I’d think of Jamie at age six, so full of hope and happiness.

H
AVEN
: I’d say the same thing, a little girl who was so wonderful, and then things go wrong and cause pain.

I
NTERVIEWER
: Once and for all, what was the deal with that Oscar kiss?

J
OLIE
: First, we’re the best of friends. And it wasn’t some odd open-mouthed kiss. It was disappointing that something so beautiful and pure could be turned into a circus.

H
AVEN
: It was an amazing moment. Yet it was totally misconstrued.

I
NTERVIEWER
: Angelina, how are you as a prospective sister-in- law?

J
OLIE
: I’ve always been tough on anyone he’s dated. I’ve been the nightmare for any girl. But if I like her, I’m fantastic.

Like Jolie, Haven also attended Beverly Hills High. One of his classmates remembers him as “more normal” than his sister: “I didn’t know Angelina but Jamie was this quiet kid who was quite studious, like most of the other kids. His dad was famous, and people in that school were very conscious of those things. Most people’s parents were not actors, though a lot worked in the film business or in TV or that sort of thing. We saw his dad a few times. He was this friendly parent who always would say, ‘how ya doing?’ to the other kids when he attended something at the school, and there was this sense that he was a famous person and that sort of rubbed off on his son.”

In later years, after Jon Voight was estranged from his daughter, Haven repeatedly attacked him, calling him a bully, among other things. But accounts from the time suggest that the two were quite close. A friend of Marcheline Bertrand, who is still friendly with Voight to this day, remembers that James worshipped his father: “Forget the stuff you read today,” she said. “They were a close family. Jon and Mar continued to be friends, and, when they were all together, you wouldn’t know that there had even been a divorce. I think that’s the most accurate way to describe the situation. Jamie looked up to his father, and they were very close, much more so than Angie and Jon. She and Jon would argue a lot, in a good natured father-daughter sort of way, or she’d get pissed off at her dad if he made a comment about her clothes or something. But Jamie got along very well with him; they’d go to a lot of movies together, sometimes with Angie, sometimes without. Jamie was his first kid, and he was older, so Jon would do stuff with Jamie that Angie was too young for at first.

“Later on, when Jamie was making films, his father would give him advice. He lived with Jon for part of that time, but I don’t want to give the impression that Angie was left out. The three of them did a lot of stuff together. They even attended the 1986 Academy Awards, with his mother, and Jamie was so excited. Angie might have been a bit young to really appreciate the significance, but Jamie loved movies.”

Haven was indeed obsessed with movies but couldn’t figure out what side of the camera he wanted to be on. At the University of Southern California, he showed a flair for filmmaking and it looked like he might have a promising career as a director. But as Jolie’s career took off, his stalled. “I’m not sure what it was,” says his mother’s friend. “He didn’t seem very motivated,” she recalled. “He was very happy when his sister started to make it as an actress, but deep down there may have been a little jealousy as well. At one point, he seemed to believe his father was favoring Angie over him.

“His father was very helpful when he was in school. He paid for the film stock, the processing, everything that Jamie needed, and of course the tuition, none of which was cheap. But Jamie may have felt that Jon had pulled more strings to help his sister than himself. I never heard him say that, but I’ve read some of the things that he said about his father, and it’s a little puzzling to me. I was angry with Jon over some stuff as well, but I think he did right by the kids, or at least he tried to. Jon was proud of both his children and really wanted them to be happy, but maybe he did pour more attention into Angie once he saw where her career was heading.”

Countless media accounts have noted the eerie resemblance between Jolie and her brother, frequently describing them as look-alikes. “Its like snogging yourself from five years earlier,” said Paul Croughton, deputy editor of
Arena
magazine, about Jolie kissing someone who looks so much like herself. “I’m sure Sigmund Freud would have fun with it.” Freud would have had a field day if he had known that their similar looks were not just the result of genetics. Two separate sources, one of them a photographer of long acquaintance with Jolie, confirmed that when she was in her teens, she and her brother visited a cosmetic surgeon to get their noses thinned in “his and hers nose jobs.”

Still, none of this proved that they were more than very close siblings. As it turns out, their mutual fondness was quite recent. Although Jolie and her brother had been practically inseparable for almost a year, this was in marked contrast to any earlier period of their lives, when they only saw each other occasionally. Haven had never previously been a fixture in her professional career, but they had suddenly become inseparable around the time of the 1999 Golden Globes. Since then, Haven had accompanied Jolie to virtually every press interview, sometimes with their father along, but usually alone. “He was always there,” recalled one photographer. “I assumed that he was just part of her entourage. In those days, the press didn’t follow her around like they do now, hanging on her every move, so I don’t know how much time they spent together privately. But it’s like they were joined at the hip whenever she appeared at an event.”

A few months earlier, Jolie had tried to buy a private island in the St. Lawrence River, near Montreal, complete with its own gothic castle, and claimed that her brother was “coming in” on the deal. And in November, only four months before the Oscars, she announced that she was forming a production company with Haven. The same month, he accompanied her to Australia on a press tour to promote
The Bone Collector
.

As the media continued to speculate and as the buzz lit up the Internet, the world appeared to let out a collective “Ick!” Jolie’s promising career seemed to be under threat at a time when it should have been soaring to new heights. “Her Q rating was in free fall,” said a publicist who followed the controversy, referring to the measure studios use to gauge the popularity of TV and film stars.

Haven appeared for the first time in public to defend their relationship, although Jolie’s publicists may have had second thoughts about that strategy after an interview he gave one reporter. “Maybe I haven’t found the right woman because my sister is too picky for me,” he said when asked if he had a girlfriend. “Any woman has to go through two filters, me and then my sister. I’m a perfectionist by nature. Then, because I’m so close to Angie, it’s like I’ve already got the perfect woman in my life, and it’s hard for anyone else to live up to that.”

To deflect this new controversy, Haven attempted irony when asked if he had any tattoos of his own, following the revelation that the
H
on her wrist signified her brother as well as former boyfriend Timothy Hutton. “No, but I’m thinking of getting one,” he replied. And what would it be? “Angelina’s name.” Haven was also asked whether, given his sister’s penchant to shock, they played up the incest rumors. He responded, smiling, “Oh, sure. If you guys all think that is going on, fine. Let’s go, you know? It’s like everyone wants to be with her, and I’m with her. Great.”

“It’s a really weird thing,” Haven told another inquisitor. “I laughed at first, then I got angry about it. Now that I have had time to think, I think it’s just that people are not used to this, so they automatically think negatively. But everyone who has jumped to this very sick thought is going to have egg on their face. They are writing all these stories that will be there forever, and they will realize in time that it is just a very close relationship, and it has nothing to do with what they are implying.” When asked about Jolie’s statement that she was “in love” with her brother? “The word ‘love’ is such a special thing,” he responded. “Love and sex and whatever, they are different. I could say I’m in love with someone who is ninety years old and teaches acting and lives in Ohio.”