PEOPLE Magazine
January 15, 1996
Look Who Bagged Brad
By Karen S. Schneider
The Down-Home Heartthrob Who Has It All Wants Nothing More Than to
Hang Out with His Sweet Seven Costar Gwyneth Paltrow
Brad Pitt IS ON HIS KNEES. NO, HE'S not offering thanks for the abs
and orbs that have made him Hollywood's come-hitherest hunk. Nor has
our reigning ***iest Man Alive been bowled over by the accolades he is
receiving for his performance in 12 Monkeys, the new futuristic
thriller that casts him as a psychotic soothsayer and has already
earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Sup****ting Actor. At the
moment, he of Interview with the Vampire and Legends of the Fall fame
is simply putting in his time as John Doe, Citizen.
Pitt, you see, has taken his girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow's black Lab
out for a trot through the streets of Manhattan's Greenwich Village,
and, well, even to heartthrobs, things happen. "Gwyneth educated him
about New York City's cleanup laws," says Pitt's friend, director Tim
DiCillo. "So he got down with a plastic bag over his hand like any
other New York dog owner."
Ah, what even a young superstar won't do for love. In the year since
PEOPLE bestowed the ***iest Man title on a kicking and screaming Pitt=97
hey, after his breath-takingly bare-chested turn as Tristan Ludlow in
Legends, what choice did we have?=97much has changed in the life of the
32-year-old actor. He boasts a new buzz cut (to the chagrin of
millions of fans who had swooned over his long, bleach-blond locks), a
new tax bracket (his asking price is now a re****ted $8 million) and,
most im****tantly, a new romance=97with the 22-year-old actress he began
dating last winter while filming Seven, a huge hit this fall with Pitt
as a know-it-all cop tracking a serial killer, Paltrow as his devoted
wife and Morgan Freeman as his seasoned partner.
"They are very much in love," says Seven producer Arnold Kopelson of
Pitt and Paltrow, daughter of actress Blythe Danner (To Wong Foo) and
TV producer Bruce Paltrow (St. Elsewhere). "The chemistry between them
is very obvious." Confirms casting director and longtime Pitt friend
Marcia Schulman: "I met her, and when she was out of earshot, Brad
said, 'So, do you like her? Isn't she incredible?' " Seven director
Terry Gilliam says yes: "She's highly educated, encouraging him to
read more. They make a wonderful couple."
Their teamwork was delightfully evident a few weeks back, when Pitt
took Paltrow to Springfield, Mo., to spend Christmas with a his
family. Evidently the pantry in the large, gated home that belongs to
Pitt's parents=97Bill, a former trucking-company executive, and Jane, a
high school counselor=97was insufficiently stocked. At Smitty's
supermarket, where the young couple picked up $40 worth of groceries,
Pitt was instantly recognized despite his wool scarf and long dark coat
=97and after signing a few autographs stepped outside for a smoke. In
her high-top tennis shoes and a stocking cap, Paltrow, who remained
inside to pay the bill, passed virtually unnoticed. "That was Brad
Pitt," the checkout girl breathlessly declared.
"Who?" asked Paltrow with mock bewilderment=97and then a real laugh.
The actress, who previously dated Robert Sean Leonard (Dead Poet's
Society), would likely have been no more fazed a few days later when
Pitt lifted his dark sungl***** long enough to treat a female fan=97
unable to stop herself from staring in a local Venture discount store=97
to a quick blue-eyed wink. "Gwyneth is very confident," says Kopelson.
"A strong woman is not threatened by the attention Brad gets. It's a
reaffirmation of her selection."
Her boy Brad, though, does have a habit of falling hard for his
leading ladies. About a year after the 23-year-old University of
Missouri dropout rolled into Hollywood almost a decade ago, with
little more than $325 in his pocket and the silver Nissan he called
Runaround Sue, he landed a small part in the ABC sitcom Head of the
Class. He went on to date its star, Robin Givens, for six months in
1988. Next came a role in the 1989 slasher flick Cutting Class and a
brief romance with costar Jill Schoelen. In 1990 he met then-16-year-
old Juliette Lewis while they were filming the TV movie Too Young to
Die? They were still a couple when they costarred as coldblooded
killers in 1993's Kalifornia=97but had split by that February.
Lewis was followed by raven-haired model Jitka Pohlodek, 26, who spent
a lot of time with Pitt in his turn-of-the-century Hollywood Hills
mansion (previously owned by campy TV horror hostess Elvira) until
about a year ago. Her two pet bobcats fit in nicely with his
menagerie: three dogs=97Todd Potter, Saudi and Purty=97and an assortment
of chameleons and iguanas. Yet Pitt seemed sometimes to be thinking of
Lewis. "I still love the woman," he told Vanity Fair in November of
1994, while dating Pohlodek. "The problem is, we grow up with this
vision that love conquers all, and that's just not so, is it?"
Perhaps not, but love had to conquer quite a bit when it came to Pitt
and Paltrow, who grew up on different sides of the same career track.
Born in L.A. and raised in Manhattan, Paltrow came of age with her
younger siblings Jake and Laura in an artsy household where the dinner
conversation would likely have touched on her mother's stage role as
Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire or her father's dealings
with CBS as creator of the series The White Shadow. In the Pitt
household (brother Doug, now 29, and sister Julie, 27, are rearing
families of their own in Spring-field), the talk over supper=97quite
often, Pitt has said proudly, macaroni and cheese=97would sooner have
focused on the most recent sermon at the South Haven Baptist Church or
the latest make-out party with the gang from=97no kidding=97Kickapoo
High.
While Gwyneth was tackling arithmetic as an elementary student at the
tony Spence School, Pitt=97then a University of Missouri journalism
major and Sigma Chi fraternity boy=97was knocking back beers with his
buddies. When he got his first big break, in 1987=97a five-episode stint
on Dallas=97the 12-year-old Paltrow was a several-year veteran of summer
productions at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.
And yet, by the time they began work on the L.A. set of Seven last
December, the two were ready for each other=97her upper crust the
perfect complement to his humble pie. The electricity between them,
says Morgan Freeman, "was real." To an extent, Paltrow was able to
take Pitt's mind off his other worries: namely, the stud-muffin image
that has stuck to him since he seduced, then robbed, Geena Davis's
character in 1991's Thelma & Louise. "Beefcakes," he has noted, "are a
dime a dozen."
But shucking that image hasn't been easy. On the downtown L.A. set of
Seven, so many women wanted to peek at Pitt that the crew had to erect
barricades. Meanwhile, during the Philadelphia-based shoot for
Monkeys, radio stations conducted "Brad watches"=97complete with prizes
for anyone who managed to sneak into his hotel room and swipe
something, anything, belonging to the actor. (Apparently no one took
up the challenge.) Eager to deglamorize himself, Pitt told Monkeys
director Gilliam that he wanted to wear brown contact lenses to mask
his baby blues. The director agreed, though Gilliam says he doesn't
think Pitt fans will be fooled. "It's like he's caught in a body owned
by the public," says Gilliam. "He's been sold as the hot new bimbo.
But he knows there's more to him. He doesn't want to feel trapped by
people's expectations."
Once Gilliam accepted him for the part, Pitt made sure to deliver. "He
threw himself into the role," says producer Charles Roven. In order to
better play a manic-depressive, the actor spent two weeks in group-
therapy sessions in a Philadelphia hospital and checked into a
psychiatric ward for a day; only the ward director knew who Pitt was.
"He was fully in character," says Roven. "He is a perfectionist."
Through it all, Paltrow, who was preparing to shoot the forthcoming
films The Pallbearer and Emma, provided sup****t. Says Roven: "She
keeps him straight and aware of reality."
The couple got a crash course on just how unpleasant celebrity-style
reality can be last April. While they were vacationing in St. Bart's,
a photographer used a telephoto lens to capture Pitt and Paltrow
sunbathing=97privately, they believed=97in the ****. To their
mortification, the shots were published in European magazines and on
the Internet, available for downloading worldwide. Pitt has filed suit
in France against the photographer, the photo agency and two French
publications. "I wonder about the rights of privacy," he told Us
magazine. But otherwise Pitt wants to move past the embarrassing
shots. Said he: "I mean, it all ends up in the litter box anyway."
The fact is, Pitt and Paltrow have better things to focus on. Like
sinking the eight ball at Hogs and Heifers, a country-music bar in
Manhattan's meat-packing district where women sling their bras on the
resident buffalo head, the Charlie Daniels Band's "The Devil Went Down
to Georgia" blares loud and the Harleys are parked in a row outside.
"Brad knows every word on the jukebox," says owner Alan Dell. "He was
howlin' and hootin' when my wife, Michelle, was teaching Gwyneth to
two-step on the bartop."
Evenings often find the pair nuzzling privately: holding hands over
dinner at Villa Mosconi, an intimate Italian restaurant not far from
Paltrow's Greenwich Village apartment, or playfully embracing as they
wait on line to buy a late-night snack at the nearby Opera Deli. But
when daylight comes, the two turn to more serious tasks, like finding
a home for Pitt in Manhattan, where he just finished work on his next
film, Sleepers, a crime drama co-starring Robert De Niro and Dustin
Hoffman. So deep is his bond to the East Coast-based Paltrow that he
has all but abandoned the L.A. home he bought in 1994 and decorated
with copper walls and antique Arts and Crafts furniture. "I just saw
Brad," says casting director Schulman. "He told me, I'm homeless.' "
What the future will bring=97in real estate or in romance=97is anyone's
guess. Paltrow's 10-year plan: "Hopefully," she told Interview
magazine in September, "I'll be married, with three or four children."
Last month, Pitt gave USA Today a similar 10-year scenario: "Married
with bambinos and at home." For now, though, both are living for the
moment=97his contribution, it seems, to the Paltrow-Pitt pact: She
****ges him to pick up the clothes he is wont to leave strewn on the
floor; he eases what she has called her neurotic tendencies.
"[My] happiest day," Paltrow said recently, "was with Brad at a little
coffee shop. We woke up late and were having a lazy morning, and we
went around the corner and had these big bowls of latte and sat there
all sleepy."
Nodding in his Java=97or scooping up after his gal pal's pooch, for that
matter=97may not constitute the High Romance the public expects from
Pitt, but the picture of domestic bliss makes perfect sense to his
friends. "There's depth to him that people don't suspect," says his
True Romance costar Christian Slater. "As a guy he's pretty grounded;
he's funny, just all right." This year, call him the Luckiest Man Alive
=97and Paltrow the Luckiest Woman. Or maybe it's time to give the hype a
rest. "Everybody tries to inflate him," says Gilliam. "But he doesn't
need to be inflated. He's good, solid stuff, our Brad."
KAREN S. SCHNEIDER
NANCY JO SALES in New York City, TODD GOLD, CAROLYN RAMSAY, TOM
CUNNEFF and BETTY CORTINA in Los Angeles and BONNIE BELL in Chicago
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PEOPLE Magazine
January 13, 1997
To Have and to Hold
By Karen S. Schneider
Emma's Gwyneth Paltrow Has Beauty, Success=97and Now the ***iest Fianc=E9
Alive
THERE WAS REASON TO QUESTION THE BUZZ. AFTER ALL, OVER the past year
countless re****ts that Brad Pitt had proposed to Gwyneth Paltrow had
run up against the same official disclaimer: No way; not now. As
recently as early December, a Pitt spokeswoman had dismissed an
engagement rumor as "completely fabricated," and Paltrow herself had
told PEOPLE a while back, "When I know, I will call you." Why, then,
should the scuttlebutt that spread from watercooler to Web site to
prime-time TV just days before Christmas have been any different?
Paltrow's mother, actress Blythe Banner, apparently didn't believe
that it was. On Dec. 19, when Entertainment Tonight asked her, she was
adamant: "They're not engaged. I'm the mother. I know."
Maybe so, but bear in mind, the 24-year-old Paltrow is no longer
Mommy's Little Girl. Since starring in the critically acclaimed Emma
last summer. Paltrow has established herself as a long-legged, fresh-
faced, supremely elegant symbol of gen-X style. And to Pitt, Paltrow
is something more precious: "My angel," he called her at last year's
Golden Globe Awards. As everyone knows, it has been a good year for
angels, and within hours of Danner's denial, in Mendoza, Argentina,
where Pitt is filming the adventure Seven Years in Tibet, he asked his
for her hand in marriage. Paltrow wasted no time saying yes=97or in
contacting her parents back in New York's Westchester County. "They're
engaged!" her father, producer Bruce Paltrow, told PEOPLE'S Mitchell
Fink after hearing the news. Speaking on behalf of both families, he
added, "We are thrilled. We think it's perfect."
The next day, Pitt took a break from filming and flew with Paltrow on
a private jet to his hometown of Springfield, Mo., where they
celebrated the engagement with his family over Christmas. Next stop:
New York, to be with Paltrow's parents. While the two rejoiced,
however, the announcement sent some Pitt fans into a deep mope. "I
can't believe it's for real this time," wrote Internet surfer Martie
Lawrence. "[Gwyneth] is one lucky girl....Let's hope it's a long
engagement. He can always change his mind."
Fat chance. A serious chunk of femalekind may see Paltrow as the
Luckiest Woman Alive. But Pitt clearly feels he has done well too.
When he is tense, he has said, Paltrow calms his nerves. When he needs
inspiration, she is his muse. She adores his dogs (mutts Todd Potter
and Saudi and weimaraner Purty). She encourages him to read. And to
pick up his clothes. She thinks nothing of hopping in a car at 4 a.m.=97
as she did when she finished shooting her forthcoming thriller, Hush,
in Virginia last June=97and driving five hours to be by his side in New
York City. Or flying more than 5,000 miles to Argentina, where over
the past four months the couple have made several friends in the
picturesque city of Mendoza.
"They are like adolescents in love," says Dr. Horacio Cervo Zenie,
Pitt's physician on the set. Zenie has seen them "feeding each other,
kissing, doing things that people who are madly in love do. As soon as
Gwyneth would arrive on the set, Brad would rush off and give her a
big hug. You can't help but admire that." Adds Maria Teresa de
Barbeira, a Mendoza restaurant owner who cooked dozens of Italian-
style meals (including one of his favorites, paglia e fieno) for Pitt:
"It is like they are acting out a romantic scene in a movie. But it is
real life and they are not acting. They are just very much in love."
And have been, in fact, since falling for each other on the set of the
dark 1995 thriller Seven, in which he played a cocky cop on the trail
of a serial killer=97and she his ill-fated wife. At the time, Paltrow,
who was dating musician Donovan Leitch, was a relative unknown with
only a few minor roles to her credit; Pitt, meanwhile, was already a
major star. All abs and orbs, the aw-shucks midwestern stud had
captivated audiences as a bare-chested bad boy in 1991 's Thelma &
Louise and as a reckless charmer in 1992's A River Runs Through It and
1994's Legends of the Fall. As everyone knew, Pitt had a history of
taking up with his costars. He had a brief romance with Robin Givens
when they were on the ABC sitcom Head of the Class in 1988, and
another with Jill Schoelen, who starred with him in the 1989 slasher
flick Cutting Class. He had also spent three years with Juliette
Lewis, who was 16 when they met filming the TV movie Too Young to Die?
in 1990.
Needless to say, Paltrow had, as she later told Vogue magazine, "a few
preconceptions" about her Seven costar: "Of course, I thought he was
very handsome, from movies=97you know, the way people are. But I also
thought, 'Oh, he'll just be one of those young Movie Star Boys.' "
Indeed, Pitt seemed to have little in common with his future fianc=E9e.
The Movie Star Boy, born to former trucking-company executive Bill
Pitt and his wife, Jane, a high school counselor, had been reared on
macaroni-and-cheese, sermons at Springfield's South Haven Baptist
Church and the occasional makeout party with the gang from Kickapoo
High. Paltrow, by comparison, was the artsy Uptown Girl. Born in L.A.,
she and her brother Jake, now 21, a director, were raised in what she
has called an "immense" house in Santa Monica, complete with pool and
guest house. Come summertime, the Paltrow kids were carted off to
Williamstown, Mass., where Danner, whose credits include a Tony in
1971 for Butterflies Are Free and roles in The Great Santini (1979)
and Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986), performed in the annual theater
festival there. Young Gwynnie, as her family calls her, attended camp,
helped her mother rehearse and occasionally took a turn onstage. "I
believe the first play I was in [when I was about 7] was The Greeks,"
she told the Boston Globe. "I played a dead child."
Neither her mother nor her father, a writer-director-producer best
known for the TV dramas St. Elsewhere and The White Shadow, encouraged
her to get into show business. They wanted their children to go to
college and to learn about history and art=97to be, in a word, cultured.
To that end, when Paltrow was 11, the family left the West Coast and
settled into a town house on Manhattan's Upper East Side. She enrolled
in Spence, an academically demanding private girls school, and
struggled to stay afloat. "You cannot believe the cl*****=97law and
physics in the seventh grade!" she told Vogue. "I was at sea."
Today, Paltrow, who won the VH1 Fa****on Award for best personal style
in October, may be the kind of "pure, natural beauty" who has helped
redefine modern elegance, says fa****on designer Calvin Klein, a
Paltrow favorite. But back at Spence, Paltrow, like adolescents
everywhere, struggled with her looks. "I had braces, and I was skinny
and little, and I had a bad haircut," she later complained to New York
magazine. By her high school years, she had blossomed into the 5'9"
stunner she is today. And while she was popular with classmates, some
couldn't help resenting her. One Spence student told New York she
remembered standing next to "Gwyn" in the locker room before a swim
practice, ****d: "She said, 'Isn't it interesting how different
people's bodies are?' Like, comparing mine to hers. And I just wanted
to hit her."
By the time Paltrow graduated from Spence in 1990, she had led a full
and varied high school existence. She had discussed Russian literature
with her friends over coffee and cigarettes ("It's mental posturing,"
she later told the Los Angeles Times), dabbled in theater (playing
Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in a school production of A Midsummer
Night's Dream), had her heart broken by a blond California surfer
("Oh, my God," Paltrow told Vogue, "the love I felt for that boy")
and, when the sun went down, par tied with her pals. While her parents
slept, she told The New York Times in 1994, she would sneak out,
leaving a note on her pillow: "Dear Mom and Dad. I didn't run away. I
haven't been kidnapped. I'm out at the clubs. You can punish me in the
morning."
Paltrow's grades weren't good enough to get her into the top schools
she applied to, such as Vassar. It was partly through the intervention
of family friend Michael Douglas that she was admitted to his alma
mater, the University of California at Santa Barbara. But Paltrow was
less interested in her art-history cl***** than in pursuing her
growing desire to act. Her first film audition landed the 18-year-old
a part in 1991's Shout with John Travolta. "I kept missing cl***** to
drive to L.A. to audition," she told The San Francisco Chronicle. "I
remember my father saying, 'You really have to do one thing or the
other because neither is going to be productive when you're doing both
half.' "
The summer after her freshman year, her mother arranged for Paltrow to
play the ingenue lead in Picnic at Williamstown. After watching the
show, her father went backstage and was "very effusive about my
performance," she told the Los Angeles Times. "He said, 'I don't think
you should go back to college.' "Though her parents gave her their
blessing, they offered her none of their money. They wanted, they told
her, to help her understand the financial challenges of an actor's
life. Paltrow got a job taking phone reservations at DC3, a trendy
restaurant at the Santa Monica Air****t, rented a small apartment
nearby and started hitting auditions. The family name helped at first.
She wouldn't have gotten her part as young Wendy in 1991's Hook, for
instance, had Steven Spielberg ("Uncle Steven" to Paltrow) not been a
longtime friend.
But connections only get you in the door, Paltrow has been quick to
note. Luckily, as Donna Gigliotti, Emma's executive producer, had
discovered when she happened to see Paltrow in Picnic in Williamstown,
the kid had more than a pedigree. "I remember I just sat there in the
audience and said, 'This is extraordinary. This girl is a major
talent,' " says Gigliotti. "And I was proved right." Indeed, though
the movies Paltrow appeared in=97including 1993's Flesh and Bone, 1995's
Jefferson in Paris and Moonlight and Valentino=97were largely forgotten,
Paltrow's performances won her respect. "Her talents are very
instinctive," says Jefferson in Paris and Emma costar Greta Scacchi.
"She's one who doesn't have to go browbeating and fussing too much" to
put in a good performance.
By the time she earned the lead in Emma, the adaptation of the Jane
Austen novel, Paltrow, with 12 feature films to her name, was no
longer a newcomer. During the seven-week shoot in England, Paltrow
impressed her colleagues with both her seriousness and her playful
antics. "She'd be speaking in her American accent, and then the
director would yell, 'Action,' and she would suddenly go into this
absolutely flawless English accent," says Gigliotti. "As soon as they
yelled, 'Cut!' she'd say, 'Oh, Donna, I hate this bra they're making
me wear.' " Her imitation of Woody Allen cracked up the crew, but
mimicry was not her only skill. There was nothing, Gigliotti notes,
that Paltrow could or would not do. She refused to let stand-ins
handle a horse-and-carriage or even sing for her. "And she's got Brad
Pitt for a boyfriend," gushes Gigliotti. "That's just icing on the
cake!"
Friends, families and even virtual strangers who've seen Paltrow and
Pitt recently say the engagement was only a matter of time. The owner
of a home Paltrow rented last spring during the filming of Hush
recalls that the actress grew anxious when Pitt was a few minutes late
for one visit: "She was pacing up and down. She kept looking out,
looking down the driveway. It was obvious that she was really crazy
about him." In Sarasota, Fla., where Paltrow spent a month last summer
shooting Great Expectations, a modern-day take on the Dickens tale due
out later this year, locals were smitten by the cooing couple. When
Pitt came to call, they drove around in her green, four-who drive
Toyota, window-shopped hand-in-o hand and picked up sandwiches at St.
Armands Deli. But mostly, says Sarasota location manager Jinx Harding,
"she just enjoyed being with Brad at the hotel."
During her regular visits to Pitt's set in Argentina this fall,
Paltrow proved indispensable. Fluent in Spanish (she spent a year as a
high school exchange student in Spain), she translated for her beau
during their visits to local towns. Reluctant to eat out because
Pitt's fans began to haunt his favorite Argentine restaurants, Paltrow
began preparing some of his meals at the walled mansion he rented
during the shoot. "Gwyneth loves to look after Brad," says a Seven
Years crew member. "She really enjoys cooking for him. They are a very
kind, loving and considerate couple=97always thinking of each other."
For Paltrow's 24th birthday last Sept. 27, Pitt arranged a surprise
party at the hotel Valle Andino in Uspallata, a small town in the
Andes three miles from the set. "He started blowing up balloons with
some friends, and we all helped him," says receptionist Silvia Jofr=E9.
"He decorated the whole room with flowers=97roses, orchids=97they were
everywhere. And he made a sign with sparkling letters that read,
'Happy Birthday, Gwyneth.' She is a lucky woman, and he a lucky man."
Certainly, finances are not likely to become a problem in the Paltrow-
Pitt household. Pitt earned a re****ted $10 million for his role as an
Irish gunrunner in The Devil's Own, scheduled for release in March.
And Paltrow's current price per film is in the seven figures. Still,
the actress says her career comes second to her personal life. "I love
what I do=97don't get me wrong," she told Us magazine last April. "I've
sort of achieved what I wanted to, and if I never worked again, it
would not bother me. It's fun and it's exciting, but it's not what
life is about."
What life is about for her, she has often said, is having children.
"Gwyneth especially is very excited to start a family," says Dr.
Zenie. "And Brad, because he is so sure about their love, is very
happy with that idea." Whatever they decide, says their new friend
from Argentina, they are already on the right course. "It is as if
they were made to meet and be together for the rest of their lives,"
says Zenie. "A destiny." All they need now is a wedding date.
KAREN S. SCHNEIDER
MITCHELL FINK in New York City, JOHN MAIER in Uspallata, ANNA DAVID,
KAREN BRAILSFORD and JEFFREY WELLS in Los Angeles, MARISA SALCINES in
Sarasota, MOIRA RAILEY and PETE NORMAN in London, ROCHELLE JONES
Virginia, KATE HALFPENNY in Sydney and KATE KLISE in Springfield
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PEOPLE Magazine
June 30, 1997
Love Lost
As a Couple, Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow Appeared to Have It All=97
Romance, Elegance and Stardom. So Where Did Their Love Go?
By Tom Gliatto
ONLY YESTERDAY, IT SEEMS, Gwyneth Paltrow WAS MADLY, PASSIONATELY,
head-over-her-Prada-heels in love with her fianc=E9, Brad Pitt. Honoring
their policy never to be apart for more than two weeks, the 24-year-
old actress, based in London while filming Sliding Doors, a whimsical
comedy-drama due this November, beamed with her betrothed at local
clubs, gazed into his blue eyes at a British Oscars party at the Savoy
Hotel and, on a romantic getaway in Paris, held his hand as they
strolled along the Seine. "She was incredibly close to Brad," says one
member of the crew. "She was talking about him all the time."
Only when Pitt, 33, had jetted back to his Los Angeles home or to
their shared Manhattan apartment did his willowy bride-to-be appear to
wilt a little. Off the set she drank coffee out of a mug emblazoned
with Pitt's likeness. She glanced often at her engagement ring, a band
with four diamonds=97one large and three tiny stones=97chosen by Pitt.
"She would say, 'I need my Brad to be with me today, I am really
missing him,'" says the crew member. By the film's wrap party at the
end of May, Paltrow=97who had turned down a plum role in the big-screen
version of The Avengers (opposite Ralph Fiennes) to be closer to her
fianc=E9=97was more than ready to head home. "She was very, very keen to
get back to Brad," says the crew member. "She was saying that she
couldn't wait."
Talk about a change of plans=97not to mention heart. On June 16, Pitt's
publicist Cindy Guagenti announced that Hollywood's golden couple had
called an abrupt end to their 2=BD-year romance: "They have been broken
up for a couple of weeks now," she told the New York Post. "It's not
because of any one specific event." A source close to both added,
"It's a real relation****p with real problems. This is not about any
third party. This is absolutely between the two of them." Even in a
town where love is as unpredictable as opening-day grosses, the
revelation came as a shock. What other celebrity couple in recent
years seemed so fresh, so guilelessly in love=97so like "a happy Romeo
and Juliet," as one friend put it last year? "Oh, it's too sad," says
L.A. hairdresser-to-the-stars Laurent, who cut Paltrow's hair just
before she left for London in February. "They were so much in love the
day they were here. He was holding her hand the whole time. They were
looking at her [engagement] ring."
Of course, in retrospect, there are always signs, however subtle.
Although the hush-hush wedding was rumored to be set for late summer
in East Hampton, N.Y., one person familiar with the couple's plans
says it never=97despite a trip by Paltrow to wedding-dress designer Vera
Wang in New York City=97even got to the planning stage.
And London celebrity photographer Nikos spotted the couple making a
fast, glum exit into a white Mercedes limousine from a London
nightspot several weeks ago. "Something went wrong," Nikos says.
Paltrow was later spotted in the car, being consoled by Pitt.
Pitt, who's filming a comedy-fantasy, Meet Joe Black, in New York
City, was seen carousing solo with a group of male friends at a party
at a photographer's studio on June 12=97four days before news of his
split became public. "Brad actually looked really happy, smiling and
enjoying himself," says one guest. "It was noticed by everyone Gwyneth
wasn't there."
With Pitt staying in their Manhattan place and Paltrow bunking with a
friend, an intimate of the couple's says they are still talking
regularly. But don't expect to see them at such favorite haunts as the
restaurant Villa Mosconi or the honky-tonk Hogs & Heifers. Paltrow,
for her part, has been keeping out of view. Though she accepted an
invitation to attend the June 17 New York City premiere of Julia
Roberts's new comedy, My Best Friend's Wedding, she didn't show.
According to a friend of Pitt's, the actress is "stunned and
devastated."
The reason, says Pitt's friend, is because the decision was, in fact,
more one-sided than Guagenti claims. "Brad called it off," the source
insists. "He changed his mind about a month ago. He got caught up in
the frenzy of getting married, but he really didn't want to. He hasn't
had a second to think about what's going on."
"He's commitment-shy," surmises another Pitt acquaintance. "He needs
to figure out what he wants."
An intimate of the actor's, however, says "he was full-speed-ahead
with the wedding. He did want to get married, and now he's upset." And
at least one person close to both performers dismisses the idea of
unilateral action by Pitt as "absolutely not true." It is a "true and
deeply felt love," adds this person, that is being tested by "a bumpy
time." Paltrow is herself "optimistic," this source adds, that the
split may not be final. Pitt's brother Doug, 30, who owns a computer-
service company in the actor's hometown of Springfield, Mo., would say
only, "Of course there's sadness. They're both great people."
Indeed, in the beginning, it seemed like destiny had brought the
enchanted pair together. The two fell in love on the set of the grisly
murder thriller Seven, where, by unpleasant irony, Paltrow played
Pitt's doomed wife. The actress, previously linked with actors Donovan
Leitch and Robert Sean Leonard, at first resisted her costar's killer
chemistry (he was PEOPLE'S ***iest Man Alive in 1995). "And then I
started getting a crush on him," she told the Los Angeles Times last
August. "I'm like, 'Are you sane? You can't get a crush on Brad Pitt.
Get hold of yourself.'" Pitt, on the other hand, was smitten from the
start. When he grabbed his Golden Globe trophy for his performance in
12 Monkeys in 1996, he thanked her as "my angel."
The couple seemed blissful whether in high society (they went to the
White House for a screening of Emma) or low (she danced for him on the
bar at Hogs & Heifers). They finally became engaged=97after months of
speculation=97when she visited him last December in Argentina, where he
was shooting a historical story, Seven Years in Tibet. Then at
Christmas he took her home to meet his father, Bill Pitt, who used to
own a trucking company, and his mother, Jane, a school counselor. (In
celebration of their anticipated union, the family dined at the local
Red Lobster.) Just two months ago, Pitt rhapsodized to Rolling Stone
as he envisioned their wedding day. "I can't wait, man," he said,
"...walk down the aisle, wear the ring, kiss the bride. Oh, it's going
to be great."
Whatever derailed the momentum toward that all-im****tant walk,
everyone interviewed by PEOPLE agreed on one point: There is virtually
no possibility that Pitt was putting his charms to work on another.
"Brad is not a womanizer," says one friend, "and he doesn't cheat. He
always has one girlfriend." At worst he has a tendency to fall in love=97
one at a time=97with his leading ladies. Among them: Jill Schoelen
(Cutting Class, a slasher pic), Robin Givens (he had a part on her
sitcom Head of the Class in 1988) and Juliette Lewis (Kalifornia).
Nonetheless, his relation****p with Paltrow seems far more serious.
"Brad wouldn't get engaged lightly," says Janice Johnson, his former
high-school drama coach. "Brad is a pretty down-home basic boy."
That presumably was okay by Paltrow, even if hers is a more genteel
sensibility than Pitt's, with his love for country music and beer. Her
pedigree is impressive. Paltrow, whose father is producer-director
Bruce Paltrow (St. Elsewhere), was raised with younger brother Jake
bicoastally, with homes in Santa Monica and on New York City's Upper
East Side. She spent summers doing regional theater with her mother,
actress Blythe Danner, and the school year attending Spence, an
exclusive girls academy in Manhattan.
More than anything, though, Paltrow is probably just a homebody who
wants a family=97and Pitt by her side. For all the well-do***ented
nights out in Manhattan with Pitt, Paltrow has usually emphasized the
snugly domestic in their relation****p. During a typical day, she told
E! online, "we hang out alone, read papers, have coffee, watch
Unsolved Mysteries or have friends over for dinner and laugh and play
Pictionary." And she has been quite vocal about having children, even
if that might mean putting her career on hold. "I love acting," she
told New York magazine. "But it's not the most im****tant thing to
me."
Ironically, as their personal life has come unglued, their
professional one has fallen in sync. In September the pair are
scheduled to make their first movie together since Seven. But it won't
be much of a reunion, either. They may have only one scene together in
Duets, an oddball film about participants in karaoke contests, to be
directed by Paltrow's father. Last week a nervous producer flew to New
York City to make sure the couple were still in the cast. For now,
yes, although as one agent puts it, "I can't imagine suddenly not
being engaged to someone and then going to make a movie with them."
But between now and the fall, romantics can only hope Pitt and Paltrow
will overcome their differences. "I hope they work things out," says a
Sliding Doors crew member. "Everyone likes a fairy-tale story."
TOM GLIATTO
BRYAN ALEXANDER in London, SUE MILLER in New York City, ANNE-MARIE
OTEY and JEFFREY WELLS in Los Angeles and LUCHINA FISHER in Chicago
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PEOPLE Magazine
March 08, 1999
Brad and Friend
A Couple of Hard-Bodied Homebodies, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston
Delight in Their Not-So-Secret Love
By Anne-Marie O'Neill, Kyle Smith
Brad Pitt's people want to make one thing perfectly clear: Their client
=97that blond Adonis=97and TV's favorite Friend Jennifer Aniston are so
not engaged. "Ridiculous," says one representative. Some family
members profess to be in the dark ("I wouldn't have any idea," says
Pitt's brother Doug, 32), while a close friend of Aniston's family's
says, "Jennifer and Brad are very serious, but the rumors about them
getting married anytime soon are not even close." Still, a leading
L.A. wedding planner got a call months ago from one of the couple's
handlers and was told to be ready for an interview with the pair. (The
planner is still waiting by the phone.)
Of course, these are the same people who, until recently, denied that
Pitt, 35, and Aniston, 30, were even seeing each other. They must not
have noticed them cooing over dinners, puckering at parties and clubs
and hunkering down in hotels for romantic getaways. Or maybe they
weren't listening when Pitt said recently that "nothing is more
im****tant than love." Or when Aniston told Rolling Stone that
"marriage is wonderful."
Lacking any on-the-job experience herself, could that be wishful
thinking? Despite Pitt's and Aniston's aversion to premarital publicity
=97they go out of their way not to be photographed together=97something
distinctly premarital has been building since they began dating late
last spring. Their caution is understandable: Both stars are coming
off painful (and very public) breakups. Pitt and fianc=E9e Gwyneth
Paltrow parted in June 1997 after 2 12 years together, and Aniston
broke up with actor Tate Donovan last March after they also dated for
2=BD years. But the couple of the moment have lately seemed more willing
to let the truth trickle out.
Things came to a head in February when their romance set off fireworks=97
literally. Some nine months into their relation****p, as if to proclaim
their own personal Interdependence Day, Pitt and the woman he calls
"my girl" chartered a private jet with nine or so friends and threw
themselves an Acapulco weekend beach party to celebrate both
Valentine's Day weekend and (isn't it too perfect?) Aniston's Feb. 11,
30th birthday=97following another birthday blowout on Feb. 6 at L.A.'s
trendy Barfly restaurant. As Valentine's Day wound down that Sunday
night, fireworks set off for the occasion exploded over the Pacific
coast. Pitt and Aniston danced and snuggled until 5 a.m.
The setting was the spectacular 49-room Villa Alejandra residence,
borrowed from Mexico's prominent Alem=E1n family. Three cooks kept
buffet tables groaning with mountains of oysters, shrimp and tropical
fruit, washed down with beer, wine, champagne and pi=F1a coladas. The
secluded property, including three thatched-roof bungalows, is set
against a towering cliffside and opens onto a private beach scattered
with coconut shells and palm branches. During the day, Pitt and his
pals played touch football in the surf, while Aniston, her hair pulled
back and wearing cutoff blue jeans and a bikini top, chatted with the
other women. Neither Pitt nor Aniston left the property all weekend.
"Why bother? "Whatever they asked for they could get," says gardener
Enrique Martinez. "They were kissing everywhere."
If life back home is a little less exotic, it's no less romantic. The
pair hang out with pals like Friends costar Matt LeBlanc and his
fianc=E9e, Melissa McKnight, at Aniston's antiques-filled three-bedroom
Laurel Canyon house or at Pitt's multiterraced Craftsman home=97in
L.A.'s trendy Los Feliz section=97where the group Radiohead often blares
from the stereo. Brad does most of the cooking=97and the driving.
("Jennifer's a horrible driver," says a pal.) "We just hang out," Pitt
said of his L.A. gang. "We barbecue. We go on road trips."
Aniston's free time is limited by the shooting schedule of Friends,
and Pitt sometimes lurks around the Burbank set. At last fall's party
for the 100th episode, Pitt was at ease among the cast and crew and
could scarcely hide his pride. "They were holding hands and very
touchy-feely," re****ts a guest. "They are not shy about expressing
their feelings."
Except, of course, to the media. The couple have gone to extraordinary
lengths to frustrate photographers=97even emerging minutes apart from
the same limo in Manhattan on Nov. 2=97as if to say that what Oprah last
fall, Pitt coyly dodged questions about his sweetheart. When an
audience member asked how he met Jennifer, he said, "Uh, we met
through friends." His favorite TV show? "Friends." When Oprah asked if
he and Aniston watched it together, a blu****ng Pitt went for the three-
peat, mumbling, "Friends."
Aniston, who has at least two photos of her boyfriend on display in
her home, is similarly cir***spect. "I'm not withholding, just
preserving something that's mine," Aniston told Rolling Stone when
asked about their romance. "To talk about a relation****p trivializes
something that's nobody's business." Pressed to say something about
Brad, Aniston added, "I'll just tell you that this is the happiest
time of my life. I'm not saying why, it's for a lot of reasons: work,
love, family, just life=97all of it."
There are also a lot of reasons to stay cir***spect. After all, it
wasn't long ago that Pitt was proclaiming his eternal love for
Paltrow, 26 ("my angel"). And for her part, Aniston was gu****ng that
Donovan, 35, was "one perfect guy." Returning the compliment in August
1997, Donovan told PEOPLE, "I definitely want to get married; she
definitely wants to get married." Now that those words have the ring
of prematurity about them, Aniston apparently has vowed not to repeat
the mistake.
Pitt also learned that lesson the hard way. After his split with
Paltrow, the star "was in real pain," says Meet Joe Black costar
Anthony Hopkins. "He was very sad about his breakup." Pitt was also
angered by **** snaps of him and Paltrow that appeared that summer in
Play-girl and on the Internet. (Pitt sued, and Flay girl was ordered
to recall the issue.)
The latest intrusion came on Jan. 7, when a starstruck 19-year-old
woman was arrested in his L.A. compound (Pitt wasn't home) while
wearing his clothes. (The woman pleaded no contest to trespassing and
was sentenced to probation.) Someone who has spent time with Pitt sums
it up: "If you've broken up with your girlfriend, had a couple of
movie bombs and your ***** has been on the Web, how happy are you
going to be?"
It's a good thing he has a Friend to lean on. On the surface, at
least, Aniston seems a natural successor to Paltrow. Besides having
two of the most envied heads of hair in Hollywood, both actresses were
born into showbiz. (Paltrow's parents are director Bruce Paltrow and
actress Blythe Danner; Aniston's mom, Nancy, 62, was once an actress-
model, while dad John, 65, spent 12 years on Days of Our Lives.) Both
were also born in California but moved to New York as kids, where they
attended elite schools. (Spence for Paltrow; Aniston went to the
Rudolf Steiner School and Fiorello H. LaGuardia High=97the Fame-d
performing arts school.)
But unlike Paltrow, Aniston had a difficult childhood. When Jennifer
was 9 (half-brother John Melick, now an assistant director, is nine
years older), her father left her mother for another woman, his
current wife, Sherry. "Jennifer is the anti-Gwyneth," says a Friends
insider. "Gwyneth was into going out and being glamorous. Jennifer is
not. She's very nonglam."
Whether she's wedding-picture perfect for Pitt is something neither
star has discussed publicly. And neither has revealed who asked for
the first date, although their respective managers brokered it. By
last May, the lovebirds were nesting in Austin, Texas, while she was
filming the comedy Office Space, which opened to mixed reviews and
eighth place at the box office on Feb. 19. Though the couple seldom
ventured out of their hotel room=97sharing both bar and barbells,
sipping cocktails and working out at the hotel gym=97their moony grins
were hard to miss. Says one eyewitness: "They looked like kids in
love."
The following month, the pair got cozy at the Tibetan Freedom Concert
in Wa****ngton, D.C., and after-ward, when Pitt locked himself out of
his $430-a-night room at the Four Seasons Hotel, they "stood waiting
and cuddling in the hall," says a fellow guest. "They weren't
impatient. It was kind of a romantic moment."
They would just as soon stay home anyway=97especially Pitt, an
architecture buff, who has been painstakingly restoring his house.
"With other Hollywood people, either they're not there at all or
they'll talk through their business manager," says a designer who
worked with him. "With Brad, he's there in the room, asking questions,
being hands-on. He has an intuitive feeling about what he's looking
for."
Even if his career intuition seems to have failed him of late. After
the disappointing Seven Years in Tibet and The Devil's Own (both
1997), he played Death as a peanut butter-craving doofus in last
year's Joe Black=97earning $17 million for the role. Still, says L.A.
casting director Linda Phillips-Palo, "Brad's at the top. He's one of
the first people you'd go to if you were making a movie." Next up for
Pitt is July's Fight Club, in which he plays a waiter who runs an
underground slugging joint for yuppies and for which he tem****arily
had caps pried off his front teeth and replaced with snaggles. "My
girl likes them," he said of the result.
She also likes his family, by all accounts, and he hers. A couple of
weeks ago Aniston brought Pitt to a get-acquainted dinner with her
father, who calls Brad "very charming and down to earth," and his
wife, Sherry. Pitt had already brought Aniston home to Springfield,
Mo., to meet his relatives=97he is especially close to his grandmother
Clara Hillhouse, 88, whom he still calls Munner from the days when he
couldn't pronounce "grandmother." Aniston and the Pitt crew enjoyed a
holiday feast almost two years to the day after Paltrow made the same
pilgrimage. And it was at a hometown press conference that Pitt
allowed the tiniest peek into his feelings.
"Has Jennifer taken you off the market?" a re****ter asked him.
Pitt blushed. "We'll see," he replied.
Anne-Marie O'Neill and Kyle Smith
Re****ted by: Elizabeth Leonard, Irene Zutell, Steven Cojocaru, Lorenzo
Benet and Craig Tomashoff in Los Angeles; Julie Jordan in Acapuico;
Natasha Stoynoff, Sue Miller and Ward Morehouse III in New York City;
Kate Klise and Lisa Kay Greissinger in Springfield; Kate McKenna in
Wa****ngton, D.C.; and Peter McKillop in Tokyo
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PEOPLE Magazine
August 14, 2000
Isn't It Romantic?
Among Friends, Fireworks and 50,000 Flowers, Jennifer Aniston and Brad
Pitt Pledge a Lifetime of Love and Milk Shakes
By Anne-Marie O'Neill
Great location, great script, terrific casting. On July 29, hand in
hand on a Malibu bluff, Jennifer Aniston and William: Bradley Pitt
read marriage vows they had composed themselves. Some were
lighthearted: Pitt, for example, pledged to "split the difference on
the thermostat." Aniston, getting a little misty, promised to always
make his "favorite banana milk shake." When the time came to recite
more traditional vows in unison, the bride displayed comedic timing
befitting Rachel Green, the sweet scatterbrain she plays on Friends.
Pitt and the celebrant waited calmly for her to join in, but instead,
Aniston missed her cue. "Oh!" she exclaimed, after a beat. "I've never
done this before!"
Take Two, however, was a wrap=97and moving. "With this ring, I thee
wed," the duo declared together, "so that all the world may know my
love for you."
As if the world hadn't caught on already. Aniston, 31, and Pitt, 36,
came out as a couple two years ago=97furtively at first, then with the
paparazzi-be-damned assurance of two luminaries in love. The much
anticipated wedding, with some 200 guests, 50,000 flowers, four bands,
a gospel choir and fireworks, deftly mixed romance and exuberant
celebration. "Jennifer looked beautiful," her father, Days of Our
Lives actor John Aniston, 67, told PEOPLE after escorting his
daughter, who wore a glass-beaded, floor-length, silk-and-satin, low-
backed gown designed by Lawrence Steele, down the aisle. "It was a
spectacular wedding."
Others who no doubt felt the same way included Friends Courteney Cox
Arquette (with her husband, David), David Schwimmer (with his steady,
actress Mili Avital), Matthew Perry and Lisa Kudrow (castmate Matt
LeBlanc, stuck in Budapest filming All the Queen's Men, sent his
regrets); Edward Norton (who starred with Pitt in Fight Club) and his
girlfriend, actress Salma Hayek; and pals Cameron Diaz, Kathy Najimy
and comic David Spade. (One apparent no-show: Aniston's mother, Nancy,
whose comments about her daughter to a tabloid TV show four years ago
led to their estrangement; she re****tedly didn't make the invitation
list.) Despite the high-watt turnout, says one guest, the event had a
most un-Hollywood vibe. "It was an emotional service," says the guest.
"It was not like a business thing. It was friends and family and
celebration." During the ceremony, says L.A. County Sheriff's Dept.
Lt. Thorn Bradstock, who helped organize security, "they were all
laughing. Other times, people were clapping." Throughout, he adds,
"there was a big smile on Brad's face."
The telltale grin first appeared in early 1998, when Pitt met Aniston
on a dinner date brokered (only in Hollywood!) by their reps. For
months the pair avoided being photographed together, which wasn't
surprising: Pitt's 2=BD year relation****p and subsequent breakup with
Gwyneth Paltrow (who confidants say was upset by news of the Pitt-
Aniston nuptials) had played out publicly and painfully. "We just
wanted to keep it special. Keep it ours," Pitt later told Rolling
Stone. Eventually, more sure of themselves, they gave up that
strategy. By last fall Aniston was fla****ng a diamond-and-platinum
engagement ring from Italian jewelry designer Silvia Damiani (for whom
Pitt, who spent seven months conferring about the design, does Italian
television and magazine ads). To some friends, they already sounded
like an old married couple. "They finish each other's sentences=97
they're two peas in a pod," says director James Gray (Little Odessa),
who last dined with them in April, when Pitt was trying unsuccessfully
to quit smoking. "Jennifer was telling him to wear his patch," Gray
recalls. "She's trying to get him not to smoke, but she smokes. He
says, 'Don't smoke either, honey!' and she says, 'Well you quit
first!' They're perfect together."
And so it was that the perfect couple began orchestrating their
perfect wedding, which event planners estimate may have cost $1
million. (Not a problem for Pitt, who raked in $40 million last year,
nor for his bride, who'll take home $750,000 an episode for the next
season of Friends.) Milan-based dress designer Steele, formerly of
Prada, also created pale-green slip dresses for the bridesmaids and
cream silk frocks for the flower girls. Aniston teamed her gown
(knockoffs are already in the works) with a specially crafted pair of
four-inch ivory suede Manolo Blahnik heels and topped it off with a
circular veil draped from a pearl-and-Swarovski-crystal crown. She
wanted the look "to be ***y but pretty," says a source. "And
definitely designed to show off her toned arms."
As the day approached, an army of workers descended on the five-acre
Malibu property that the couple had rented for the occasion from Marcy
Carsey, producer of Roseanne and The Cosby Show. Tents were erected,
lanterns hung, linen laid on a canopied bridal walkway. Florists from
La Premiere of Beverly Hills set tables with roses, wisteria and
tulips and floated lotus flowers in a specially built slate fountain
("Brad," said one worker, "wanted the Zen garden look"). Candles made
from brown sugar, im****ted from Thailand, helped illuminate the
reception tent. "Jennifer wanted tons of candles," says an insider.
"We made it very romantic."
Meanwhile, the bride-to-be was busy with her own preparations: The
first order of business? Heading to Beverly Hills' Canale Salon, where
both Aniston and her fianc=E9 got matching "brother-and-sister" blond
highlights. The day of the wedding, tress-trimmer Chris McMillan
(creator of the mid-'90s Rachel shag that spawned countless copy-cuts)
styled Aniston's naturally wavy hair straight while the show's makeup
artist Robin Siegel applied a look that "was really soft and natural,"
says one observer. "You didn't look at her and see Rachel. You saw a
beautiful bride."
Guests, who had been contacted weeks earlier by phone and then mailed
invitations, began turning up at Malibu High School shortly before 5
p.m. to board shuttle vans for the five-mile ride to the site.
Security-conscious=97all the more so since a stalker was arrested in
Pitt's home in January last year=97the couple required staffers to sign
a do***ent making them liable for a penalty of up to $100,000 if they
talked about the wedding. With safety in mind, they arranged with the
FAA to have an inspector on-site in case the airspace above the
property became overcrowded with helicopters.
Inside the gates, guests were greeted with classical music from a
string quartet and served iced tea and punch before taking their seats
on a lawn. At 6:30 p.m, a six-piece band backed up by a 40-member
gospel choir began singing Al Bowlly's 1930s classic "Love Is the
Greatest Thing." Then Aniston, carrying a loose bouquet of Dutch
Vendela roses, made her entrance preceded by petal-throwing and bubble-
blowing flower girls, a ring-bearer and two bridesmaids: actress
Andr=E9a Bendewald, 30, an old buddy from her days at New York City's
famous performing arts high school, and do***entary filmmaker Kristin
Hahn-Stringer, 31, one of the first friends Aniston made when she
moved to L.A.
Next to Pitt, who wore a four-button black tux by Paris designer Hedi
Slimane, stood his Prada-clad brother=97and best man=97Doug, 33, a
computer-company owner, who caused a moment of levity by dropping the
ring. Their father, Bill, 59, acted as the second groomsman. (Pitt's
mother, Jane, 59, watched from her seat close by with his sister
Julie, 31, a homemaker. Brad had paid for the entire clan to be flown
in for the event from his hometown, Springfield, Mo.)
When the 15-minute ceremony was complete, the party spilled onto the
lawn. As the newlyweds posed for photos, guests nibbled on shrimp,
gourmet pizza and caviar washed down with Dom P=E9rignon champagne. A
band, Gypsy Magic, played Latin jazz. It was a lovely moment. "[Brad
and Jennifer] were laughing and smiling, holding hands," says a
witness. "The sun went down over the ocean and there was a red sky."
At about 8 p.m. guests made their way into the reception tent, where
one side opened onto a view of the Pacific. A slide show of Aniston
and Pitt growing up over the years flashed on an outdoor screen.
Partyers dined on lobster, crab, peppercorn beef, risotto and pasta
and raised a glass to the newlyweds. (When the party began running low
on lobsters, champagne and ice, staff from the catering company Along
Came Mary scurried to a local store to re-supply.) During one toast,
former Saturday Night Live star Jon Lovitz playfully suggested, in not
so many words, that perhaps some editing was in order and heckled from
his seat that the speaker sounded like a "dying cat!"
When the speeches were done, Dakota Horvath, 12, a pint-size Sinatra-
style singer whom Pitt first heard at a Beverly Hills nightclub back
in 1994, took the stage. As he crooned "The Way You Look Tonight,"
Pitt and Aniston hit the dance floor and were soon joined by Norton
and Hayek. "Then everyone started coming up and dancing," says
Horvath. "When I got off the stage, Brad and Jennifer came over and
were hugging and kissing me."
Ten o'clock? Time for fireworks. Guests stepped outside as a 13-minute
display of pyrotechnic hearts and smiley faces, set to songs by
Radiohead, Garbage and Jeff Buckley, cascaded overhead. "They wanted
it big, grandiose," says James Souza, whose Rialto, Calif.-based
company orchestrated the display, "the greatest effects that we had."
That was spectacular=97but far from the finale. Still to come: the
bouquet toss (Aniston's first attempt ricocheted off a hanging lamp
back into her hands); the garter throw (Pitt extracted it from his
giggling bride's thigh with his teeth); and the cutting=97and consumption
=97of the six-tier, white-frosted wedding cake. "They were looking into
each other's eyes when they fed it to each other," re****ts Horvath,
"and they were laughing with cake in their mouths."
At one point, accompanied by actor Dermot Mulroney on mandolin, guest
Melissa Etheridge sang an acoustic version of Led Zeppelin's "Whole
Lotta Love." A Greek bouzouki band played traditional music, while
Pitt, Aniston, her dad and about 30 others circle-danced. Throughout
the night, guests clinked gl***** to demand that the newlyweds kiss.
Thoughtful hosts, they obliged. "Everybody danced with everybody,"
says one guest. "The feeling in there was of love and commitment."
So what does the script call for next? After a five-month summer
hiatus, Aniston was due to return to the Friends set on Aug. 8. Pitt,
whose next movie, The Mexican, is due next year, will begin filming
Ocean's Eleven in January. And no one would be surprised if the couple
became a family tout de suite. Aniston, who has been known to cry at
the sight of a friend's baby, once declared that she wanted three
children=97pronto. "I love everything about them. Their backs, necks,
smell, all their fits," she told Cosmopolitan in 1997. "I want to be a
young mom too." But that's the future; right now there's a moment, a
day, a memory to be savored. "I've known her a long time, and she and
I would talk about the day she gets married," says hairstylist Chris
McMillan. "There were big expectations, and this went way beyond that,
way beyond. It was a great and happy day."
Anne-Marie O'Neill
Lorenzo Benet, Michelle Caruso, Tom Cunneff, Michael Fleeman, Julie
Jordan and Elizabeth Leonard in Malibu, Pete Norman in London and
Heather O'Brian in Milan
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PEOPLE Magazine
November 13, 2000
Brad Pitt
Those Eyes, Those Abs, That Ring! Who Knew Settling Down Could Be This
Exciting? So Nice We Crowned Him Twice, This Poster Boy for Manhood in
the New Millennium Is Older, Wiser=97and Still Seducing with Manners and
Magnetism
By Karen S. Schneider
There are some things a guy just won't do=97even a nice midwestern guy
like Brad Pitt, who is so polite that he is loath to refuse anyone a
simple request. Especially anyone named Jennifer Aniston. On a visit
with his family in his hometown of Springfield, Mo., last Christmas,
Pitt, 36, and his father, Bill, 59, returned from running errands to
find the ladies=97Aniston, 31, Pitt's mom, Jane, 60, and his sister
Julie, 31=97hunkered down at his parents' home for holiday pedicures.
"He kept offering to get Jennifer something to drink and checking to
make sure she was okay," says Debra Bradley, a local beautician whom
Aniston hired for the private day of pampering. Still, there is a
limit. "She kept trying to talk Brad into getting his toenails
painted," says Bradley. "He wouldn't. He said he wanted to keep his
'manly feet.' "
Like he needs to worry. The fact is, in the five years since we first
ordained Brad Pitt the ***iest Man Alive=97and despite a string of
recent box office disappointments such as The Devil's Own and last
year's Fight Club, for which he tried to dim his beauty by shaving his
head and chipping a tooth=97the actor's appeal has only grown stronger.
Witness the rush of fans in August at the London premiere of Snatch, a
jewel-heist caper due to hit the States early next year. The crowd was
so overcome by Pitt's friendly handshakes that police threatened to
arrest him if he did not hurry along the red carpet and get into the
theater.
But it was a walk down another aisle that truly riveted admirers this
year. On July 29, surrounded by some 200 guests, 50,000 flowers, four
bands, a gospel choir and fireworks, the man who once wooed a high
school crush by writing "Hi" in a heart in the snow outside her
classroom window made the ultimate romantic move: He took himself off
the market. And according to friends and fans, in his role as Adoring
Husband, this ***iest Man Alive has never been hotter.
"Marrying Jennifer was the pinnacle for him," says Marcia Gay Harden,
who costarred with Pitt in 1998's Meet Joe Black. "***iness isn't just
about the single bachelor and good looks. There's something gorgeous
about his commitment."
No argument from the committed couple. Though careful to guard their
romance from the public, Pitt and Aniston were every bit the cuddly
newlyweds among friends such as David Spade and Melissa Etheridge at a
fund-raiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton in L.A. in August; ****vering
in her lavender pashmina shawl while waiting for a midnight alfresco
dinner, Aniston warmed herself in Pitt's bear hug. He was equally
adoring at the Oscars in March and in September at the Emmy Awards,
which the Oscar-" nominee (for 1995's 12 Monkeys) proudly attended on
the arm of his TV-star wife. And last year, while on a romantic
getaway at Acapulco's swank Villa Alejandra, the two were seen
"kissing everywhere," says local gardener Enrique Martinez.
The setting in England, where Pitt filmed Snatch last fall, was
considerably grittier. To play the role of a bare-knuckled Gypsy
boxer, he spent several afternoons punching bags in a dingy gym. And
as one crew member says, "He sometimes didn't shower for days." That
didn't bother Aniston, who flew in from L.A. between Friends tapings.
"She turned up looking, as always, like the most beautiful thing on
the planet," says another Snatch crew member. "The contrast between
her beauty and Brad, who was four feet deep in mud with his nose made
up to look broken and his fingernails torn, could not have been
greater. As soon as they saw each other their faces lit up. They
kissed each other really tenderly. It was obvious they were madly in
love."
If countless others are also in love with the 6-ft. Pitt, it's not
because he courts the attention. "He's not at all self-involved," says
his Fight Club costar Helena Bonham Carter, whose heard-but-not-seen
love scenes with Pitt involved mostly "jumping up and down on the bed
like we were 5-year-olds. He's just a kind and easy and chivalrous
gentleman. I know it sounds clich=E9, but what makes him really
attractive is internal=97his humor and caring and curiosity."
Pitt's curiosity doesn't stop with his career. Since college he has
nurtured a passion for Arts and Crafts design and architecture of the
early 1900s. On one occasion, after a long day's shoot, he labored
over a pad of tracing paper, sketching the floor plan of the 85-year-
old, 20-room Craftsman-style L.A. house he bought from campy movie
vampiress Elvira for $1.7 million in 1994 and which he and Aniston are
restoring. (Until the project is complete, the couple and their four
dogs are living in tem****ary digs in the area.) Pitt's enthusiasm has
evidently rubbed off on Aniston. For his 35th birthday, she arranged a
surprise weekend stay at a privately owned Northern California home
designed by the famous Arts and Crafts team of Greene & Greene. "Brad
seems thrilled with the way Jennifer actively shares this interest of
his," says architect Randell L. Makinson, who is helping the couple
restore their home. "She is very sup****tive."
What's not to sup****t? As folks in Springfield will tell you, she
couldn't have landed a nicer guy. At Horace Mann Elementary School,
"sweet little Brad" was remarkable not only for his "big old blue eyes
and dimples," says his third grade teacher, Jan Woodland, but also for
his polite reserve. "He didn't have to show off or be a smart aleck to
stand out," says Woodland, now retired. "He was shy and laid-back, the
kind of kid you wanted your little girls to like." They sure did. At
Kickapoo High School, where Pitt was the student body's public
relations officer, "he always had lots of dates," says former
classmate Mark Swadley, now the minister of music at Little Flock
Baptist Church in Shepherdsville, Ky. "He was a good leader, well
liked in the school cabinet, where he promoted all the dances and
spirit days." But in other areas Pitt remained less forceful. Although
he acted in plays both in school and at the South Haven Baptist
Church, where his family (including brother Doug, 34, a computer-
company owner) wor****pped, he never had a lead role. Says the family's
former pastor (and Mark's father), Rev. Paul Swadley: "He didn't steal
the spotlight."
Perhaps because he intended to earn it. In 1986, two credits shy of a
journalism degree from the University of Missouri in Columbia, the
Sigma Chi fraternity boy packed up his Nissan and headed for
Hollywood, where he enrolled at Roy London's acting studio. "He had
more pounds on him then, and he wasn't as good-looking," recalls Ivana
Chubbuck, then an associate instructor. "But there was definitely
something about him that was special." Indeed, during one of his first
scenes, she recalls, Pitt had to play a naive young man having a
picnic with a woman he had a crush on. "He was standing up offering
her some wine and twisting the stems in a very ***ual manner," says
Chubbuck, who now runs her own acting school in L.A. "It was all
subconscious. He was very unaware of what he had done, and when I told
him, he just blushed."
Not surprisingly, his female classmates were eager to work with him.
But, Chubbuck says, Pitt was "a loner in class" and had little
interest in extracurricular fun. "Brad is a hard, hard worker," she
says. "When his roommates would go off to parties, he'd be home
working on a scene. Women were never a priority with him. I used to
say, 'Isn't there someone you're interested in?' And he'd say, 'No,
there's no one.' He was so unaware of that part of who he was."
In 1987, in between making money delivering refrigerators, dressing in
a chicken costume outside an El Polio Loco restaurant and chauffeuring
strip-o-gram dancers, Pitt landed a few acting jobs: He made his debut
on Dallas, playing the boyfriend of Priscilla Presley's daughter, and
later appeared on 21 Jump Street, thirtysomething and, as actress
Tracey Gold will never forget, ABC's top-rated Growing Pains.
"I saw his picture in the casting office and I said, 'You have to hire
him,' " recalls Gold, now 31 and a mother of two. "It was just like,
Hell-o, Hell-o, my God! If you hire anybody else, I will not do that
episode." Gold, then 17, was doing more than throwing a star tantrum;
she was preparing for her first onscreen kiss. "I remember Brad was
very nervous about doing this in front of my mom," she says. "He said
to her at the run-through, 'Are you sure this is okay?' I was dying!
My mom, she still talks about it." While Gold never forgot Pitt's
touch, she was equally taken by his grace. "He was probably the only
guest star who ever sent us a card and a basket of goodies=97muffins and
cookies and things=97to thank us," she says. "He was a good guy."
But Pitt was not all work and no play. The same year he took Gold's
breath away, he happened upon an aspiring 18-year-old actress from
Little Rock named Jitka Pohlodek working behind the Alamo rental-car
counter at Los Angeles International air****t. "He tracked me down and
called me at home to ask me out," recalls Pohlodek, 31. After dinner
and a movie (Good Morning, Vietnam), she says, "he just took me home.
It was exactly the same the second time we went out. There was no kiss
until the third date. He was very proper and sweet." The romance
lasted less than a year. Pitt went on to date a succession of co-
stars, including Robin Givens, whom he met in 1988 on the sitcom Head
of the Class, and Juliette Lewis, with whom he starred in the 1990 TV
movie Too Young to Die? and in the 1993 film Kalifornia.
Pitt and Lewis shared a home for three years. When they broke up, he
rekindled his romance with Pohlodek. Within months the two were living
together. Although his performances in 199l's Thelma & Louise and in
1992's A River Runs Through It transformed Pitt from a struggling
actor to a rising star, "we didn't lead a typical Hollywood life,"
says Pohlodek. "We just hung out at home and watched TV and played
with the pets." Although the romance ended for good in 1994, Pohlodek
still considers Pitt a "good, good friend. I don't know if people
realize what a down-to-earth person Brad is. Does he pick up the check
on dates? Of course. Open doors for women? Of course. But he is also a
very ***y man, very romantic. I'm not going to go there except to say
that he was. Very."
Just how romantic, a 22-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow was about to find
out. The two met on the set of the grisly 1995 thriller Seven=97and fell
for each other hard. When he accepted the Golden Globe Award for best
sup****ting actor for 12 Monkeys, he called her "my angel, the love of
my life." He even designed her engagement ring=97but some six months
after proposing to "Gwynnie" in December of 1996, the two called it
off. Neither offered a public explanation. "This is just the real
world, and I'm growing up," he later told Premiere. "Life is tough and
it's crooked, but it's pretty fantastic."
But tough and crooked was then. Since meeting Aniston on a date
brokered by their reps early in 1998, fantastic clearly has the upper
hand. As Pitt told Rolling Stone last year, "She's complicated, she's
wise, she's fair and she has great empathy for others...and she's just
so cool." As far as friends can tell, there is only one real problem
for the couple who, as an associate put it, already "finish each
other's sentences." Between her $750,000-an-episode gig on the L.A.-
based Friends and his $20 million-per-picture movie career, they have
to speak too often only by cell phone. This past summer, after five
weeks of filming The Mexican (due out in early spring) with Julia
Roberts in remote Real de Catorce, producer Lawrence Bender says, "he
was like, 'I gotta get back and see my girl.' They're just lovebirds,"
he adds. "There's nothing else you can say." Well, almost nothing
else. Not long ago, Marcia Gay Harden saw her Meet Joe Black pal with
Aniston at an L.A. restaurant. "I'd had a baby and they had to see the
pictures," she says. As Aniston tells this month's British Elle of her
own maternal urges, "Brad has said to me, 'Listen, I'm ready now. But
I'll wait.'...If everything falls as it has done in the past, when the
time's right it will just present itself." Harden, for one, is looking
forward to that day. "I can't wait," she says, "to see one of their
little babies."
Karen S. Schneider
Julie Jordan and Pamela Warrick in Los Angeles, Kate Klise in
Springfield, Liz Corcoran, Caris Davis and York Membery in London
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