Bennifer. Britney. Brangelina. The celebrity gossip of the 2000s is well documented, but what made us reach for copies of Us Weekly and People? On Just Like Us: The Tabloids That Changed America, Clare Malone delves into the celebrity obsession of the era — from magazine newsrooms to the paparazzi boom to the rise of reality television — to explore the stories behind the gossip and telling the tabloid sensation says about American culture. In Episode 3, we look back at the influence of the tabloids on the love triangle between Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
Us Weekly readers were young, relatively affluent women with average household incomes in excess of $72,000 in 2005 — that’s over $100,000 in today’s money. They were discerning media consumers. They wanted quality and good food.
In 2003, Janice Min took over from Bonnie Fuller as Editor-in-Chief of Us Weekly. At 33, she was her target: she had two degrees from Columbia University and had her first child while working for the magazine. Her former colleagues and numerous profiles describe her as a very chic New Yorker. Imagine the perfect Prada.
During her tenure, Us Weekly’s circulation grew by 350,000 copies per week, and she was reportedly making nearly $2 million a year. That would put her on par with the reported salaries of big Condé Nast editors like Graydon Carter and Anna Wintour.
That’s a lot of money. But remember: print was king in the mid-2000s. The money flowing in and out of magazines, especially the likes of Us, has been pretty wild by today’s standards. And that enabled the kind of coverage I’m about to describe to you, which in turn enabled the juiciest celebrity coverage ever.
Which led to a certain kind of sophisticated young woman wanting to shell out for her weekly celebrity gossip — because it was perfectly calibrated to feel both escapist and totally relevant to her life.
Let’s go back to the Brad-Jen-Angie love triangle. Sure, it was definitely cheating. But the whole thing had such a life – I mean, years of coverage revolved around these three – because it became a story about motherhood. Who deserves to be a mother? Who messes up their life by missing something.
Hollywood and the media may get a lot of criticism for being liberal suckers, but let me tell you, the values of the tabloids are pretty damn traditional. At least in terms of gender norms.
One of the more unexpected entrants to the celebrity mom canon was Angelina Jolie.
In 2002, Jolie adopted her son Maddox from Cambodia. It was quite a twist in the life story, especially since she’d opened up about blood bottles and her sex life the year before. Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton divorced fairly soon after she adopted Maddox. In 2003, she said she hadn’t had sex in a year — she was a full-time single mom in a new phase of life, though she was still an oversharer.
Hollywood and America were stumped by Jolie the mother, even more so when she ended up in the midst of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s split. It was as if our brains couldn’t handle the idea that someone could do something immoral but also have a desire to be a loving mother. The three-dimensionality was overwhelming. Tabloids deal best with a one-dimensional woman.
Jen was the good girl, the one who deserved to have Brad’s babies. Angelina Jolie settled down and got all that Jennifer Aniston, the good girl, deserved. It was, should we say, a bit of an anti-feminist nightmare on the maternity front, no matter how you felt about the whole cheating thing.
The whole motherhood discourse — which is incredibly powerful, especially for working women in their 20s and 30s, aka the Us Weekly readership — was so compelling. And also, I would say, not very good for women.
For one, it narrowed the scope of who “deserved” to be a mom — especially not an uncuddly woman like Angelina Jolie. Our fascination with their adoptions had a charged quality. Why did she adopt all the brown kids? As a cool statement? Misplaced adventurism masquerading as motherhood?
And of course, the eternal tie of Jolie’s fertility to Jennifer Aniston’s put Jennifer Aniston in an unwinnable position: She was doomed to make headlines for a decade about how she couldn’t get a man to have her kids.
Later, of course, Jen’s baby story would curdle a little, and she would be accused of not wanting children, so conveniently blaming the breakup on her head, not lovely old Brad.
And for years she faced chilling interviews trying to answer the question of motherhood. Here’s Diane Sawyer trying to force a connection between Aniston’s sexy 2005 thriller, Derailed, and the prospect of having babies:
The tabloid’s Aniston-Jolie mommy wars were, to be fair, also complicated by the fact that Jolie and Pitt played up their family image from the start. Despite being a controversial couple, they didn’t really hide from the press. Or I should say they ended up using the press strategically.
Probably to counteract this kind of reporting.
Here’s our girl Diane Sawyer again in conversation with Brad Pitt in 2005:
This interview took place during the odd period before Pitt and Jolie were officially known as a couple, but after they were very famously photographed with Maddox on a secluded beach in Kenya. These first exclusive images appeared in the May 9, 2005 issue of Us Weekly.
OK, so… these photos were almost certainly taken – a few people in the paparazzi world told me that. It’s basically impossible to confirm at this point – I haven’t been able to locate the photographer who took the actual photos – but Diani Beach in Kenya, where the photos were taken, is very remote and is in a private beach resort. It’s not the kind of place where professional paparazzi hang around hoping for a good celebrity to walk in. Someone almost certainly tipped the photographer.
These photos were taken in spring 2005. That summer — although they hadn’t yet confirmed they were dating — Jolie and Pitt did a photoshoot for W magazine that was basically a caricature of domestic bliss. She dressed up as a souped-up suburban housewife, he as a handsome guy with a bunch of kids in tow. It was… slightly tasteless.
Jennifer Aniston certainly thought so. That’s what she meant when she quoted Vanity Fair about Brad missing a sensitivity chip.
But it was just the beginning of a years-long tabloid obsession with the Jolie Pitt children.
Editor’s Note: The audio version of this episode incorrectly states that the Us Weekly photo spread confirming Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s relationship was released on April 19, 2005; The photos were published on May 9 of this year. The date is correctly displayed in this excerpt.
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