Their semi-fictionalised, gossip-mag lives are so fascinating that the world doesn't care what Brad and Angelina are really like, writes FIONA McCANN
AT THE TIME of going to press, Brangelina (the artists formerly known as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) were still together. But watch this space. Or rather, the space they usually occupy in your celebrity gossip magazine or red top. Frankly, since the News of the Worldmade global headlines with its "revelation" three weeks ago that Hollywood's golden couple were splitting up (they're not, they're not, they're not – they are, however, suing the NOTWfor the allegation), there have been a dozen Brangelina stories to replace it.
Such as when they appeared together at the Super Bowl this week with their eldest son, eight-year-old Maddox, cheering and publicly embracing over the surprise win by the Saints who hail from New Orleans, where the couple have a home. Or when, after the game, they spent a night on a yacht belonging to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the same yacht that has long been the rumoured venue for the nuptials that have still to materialise. After which, they were in the news again when they announced that they were suing the News of the Worldover its allegations about the demise of their relationship and its reports of agreements reached on how they would divide their colossal assets and organise custody of their myriad children.
But wait. There’s more. To bring you up to speed on the Brangelina media mill as of this week, Jolie followed the Super Bowl and suing stories with a trip to the Dominican Republic, where she spoke with survivors of the Haitian earthquake in hospital there, and then a trip to Haiti itself, on behalf of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), in her capacity as UN goodwill ambassador.
In the past seven days she has also been reported as hating St Valentine's Day, in online news portal Oneindia, while Pitt and Jolie are "still in love," according to the Miami Herald, and the UK-based Metrosays Jolie didn't want kids until she met Pitt. She is now the mother of three adopted children, and has given birth to three more. The amount of newsprint these two have eaten this week alone would put George Lee to shame.
But it’s all in a week’s work for the celebrity phenomenon that is Brangelina, and the more stories, true and false, that emerge about Jolie and Pitt, the greater the appetite for them. These two have long been top fodder for celebrity magazines, with the latest Rupert Murdoch wrist-slapping further proof they have outstripped their closest neologistic rivals TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes) and put what was once known as Bennifer (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez) in the shade.
And while we all know more than we might ever have wished to about the Brangelina brood – Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh and the twins Knox and Vivienne – and can speculate about the couple’s impending nuptials/breakups/adoptions, the two have somehow managed to maintain a frenzied media interest in their red-carpet appearances and family outings, but without the kind of high-level intrusion into their private sphere that other high-profile celebrities complain about.
AFTER ALL, THISis Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Hollywood's reigning royalty and the two hottest tickets in Tinseltown. And when they got together, it was a modern-day equivalent of Adonis and Aphrodite, but much bigger news. Already two of Hollywood's most recognised sex symbols, the fact that they met on the racy film Mr and Mrs Smith, and that Pitt subsequently left his wife of five years, Friendsstar Jennifer Aniston, for an outspoken woman famed for bizarre behaviour (kissing her brother James Haven full on the lips at the 2000 Academy Awards, and wearing a vial of her ex-husband Billy Bob Thornton's blood around her neck during their three-year marriage, for example), was inevitably going to set tongues wagging. The thing is, they never stopped.
Individually, Pitt and Jolie were pretty bankable stars: together, they were a money-printing machine. The fact that their relationship began so soon after Pitt’s ended with Aniston also made for the perfect love triangle to keep celebrity watchers titillated for years. Such was the delight in the purported battle over Pitt’s heart that supporters began wearing Team Aniston and Team Jolie T-shirts to indicate where their loyalties lay.
Four years on, and the weekly magazines still report Aniston versus Jolie outbursts. No sooner did the News of the Worldstory break than Aniston was back in the newsprint loop as a potential shoulder for Pitt to cry on.
Looking for truth in this particular celebrity soap opera has become almost beside the point. As Oliver Burkeman pointed out in the Guardiannewspaper last year, such is the appetite for Brangelina stories that the real-life couple behind them can't keep up. "The frenetic state of today's celebrity news industry stems from one inescapable fact: the lives of real people – even people as volatile and wealthy as A-list movie stars – simply don't unfold fast enough to meet the appetite for information about them," says Burkeman.
Though the truth about Brangelina may forever elude us, it is clear their reign is nowhere near over, and both stars still command not only column inches, but serious figures for their film appearances. Both Jolie (34) and Pitt (47) can command more than $20 million a movie, and both featured on the Forbestop 10 list of Most Bankable Hollywood stars last year.
“They’re successful in their own fields, they look good, they both sell magazines, newspapers and movies, so it’s a win-win combination,” is celebrity publicist Max Clifford’s take on the reasons for brand Brangelina’s success.
The couple have also been canny about how they handle media intrusion into their lives, famously orchestrating a bidding war over the first pictures of their twins. The rights were finally sold to Peoplemagazine in the US and Hellomagazine internationally. The sale raised eyebrows, but the whole hoop-la raised $14 million (€10.3 million) for charitable causes, via the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.
In a BBC interview in November 2008, Jolie defended the couple’s decision to sell snaps of their newborns. “We’re either going to have people breaking into our property, which we’ve had, or breaking into the hospital, which we’ve had, getting in our children’s faces . . . Either we’re going to have these types of people make that kind of money off our children, or we’re going to say there’s something really wrong with that, so what can we do about it? . . . It’s a response to this other thing that we have to counter.”
It’s a strategy that appears to work, as they drip-feed the media with enough photo opportunities for the paparazzi to ensure they are not hounded for more. The couple appear to have kept some control over their public life, and though Pitt is allegedly particularly camera shy, Jolie is famous for handling her own publicity: she is said to organise her press and TV interviews, with a team of assistants.
As Clifford points out, these two know how to work the media to their best advantage. “The secret of success and longevity is knowing how to play the media game the way that suits you but that also works for them. There’s not that many people that are that clever at it, and [Jolie and Pitt] obviously are.”
The symbiotic relationship between Brangelina and the media is strengthened by the stars’ clever handling of their celebrity narrative and those who get to filter it to the masses. “They sell, so the media goes after them. And because it’s well handled and well controlled by them, they become bigger and bigger and sell even more,” says Clifford, who says Brangelina and the celebrity magazines that feature them with unprecedented regularity have a mutually beneficial relationship.
BOTH PITT ANDJolie have also used their celebrity to champion various causes: not only were they at the vanguard of a campaign to find new houses for hurricane victims in New Orleans, but they have also lent their voices – and faces – to fundraising efforts for Haiti, as well as a number of other causes in the developing world, and environmental campaigns.
But is it for real? With so much spin around the Brangelina fairytale, how do we know who’s spinning who, and where the brand ends and the real-life couple begins? “The reality of it is that, with many of the clients that I’ve represented in the last 40 years, the image out there is totally misrepresenting the reality,” Clifford says, though he admits Pitt and Jolie have at least succeeded in creating the impression that “with them, pretty much what you see is what you get”. According to Jolie, part of the reason the reality behind the glamorous fictions is so hard to access is because few people really want to know about it. “We are very rarely asked about how we balance our children or what our favourite bedtime stories are, things that to us are the world we live in,” she told the BBC. “But it’s how people choose to put us out there: they like to make things a little fantastic.”
CV
Who are they?Brangelina, or Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Hollywood's hottest brand and darlings of celebrity gossip magazines.
Why are they in the news?They're always in the news. This week, it's because they are suing the News of the World over its allegations that the two were splitting up. And because Jolie jetted to Haiti to lend her profile to relief efforts.
Most likely to say:"Another child? Don't mind if we do . . ."
Least likely to say:"We should totally have Jennifer over to babysit sometime."
