Angelina Jolie expose is damp squib

There was a lot of hype about Andrew Morton's unauthorised biography "Angelina." Initially it wasn't  published in the UK for fear of legal action. I bought it from our friends over the pond, Amazon.com. I wish I hadn't bothered.

The much leaked Big Story was Morton's assertion that Jolie's mother Marcheline locked the child upstairs for two years and barely saw her, leaving her in the care of a succession of babysitters. The baby apparently reminded her too much of Jon Voight, Marcheline's husband, who had gone off with another woman.

We only have one source to thank for this titbit, one of the alleged babysitters.

And according to Morton and a few quacks he lines up, this led to all of Angelina's problems: cutting, anorexia, promiscuity, vials of blood, etc etc.

Zzzzz.

The problem for me is the word "uauthorised." In the case of powerful living icons like Jolie, it means nobody very significant in her life is going to talk. So Morton has to skulk around in the undergrowth and find some people who vaguely knew her or her mother or her mother's cleaner.

And then I'm bothered by all the psycho babble too. It's too easy to blame parents for what happens to people. I don't hold with it. I firmly believe that most of Angelina Jolie's "cries for help" are just attention seeking. I'm  sure she just goes for maximim impact when she kisses her brother on the lips, for example, or makes claims about open marriages. I reckon she's fairly conservative and even prissy, in real life.

Morton  wants to claim that she isn't a good mother but he bottles out, and instead we get a lame statement that Angelina has a lot of babysitters and it's history repeating itself. Morton is very hard on Marcheline and almost deifies Jon Voight.

The book is sloppily written too. Getting her "acting chops" is referred to twice, whatever that is. And somehow, at the end of the book, I don't feel I know Angelina any better. She is an enigma, and remains thus. Morton even manages to make her a bit boring, which I'm sure wasn't his intention.