So began a glorious holiday, away from the spotlight, for Jolie, Pitt, and their four children in a sprawling château with a staff of 12 in the leafy glades of southwestern France. It was so idyllic that they decided to find an even bigger and more secluded property, not to rent but to buy.
Now, in June 2007, Brad Pitt sat in a twin-engine helicopter, his blue eyes scanning the verdant Provençal landscape. He and Jolie were “helicopter-hopping” with Jonathan Gray, the real estate broker recommended by the hotel. “There were six of us: two pilots, Brad and Angelina, their daughter Shiloh—who was one at the time—their American Realtor, and myself,” says Gray, who had arranged a top secret three-day tour of the region. They spent their days flying from one address to the next, searching for what Pitt would later describe as “a European base for our family…where our kids could run free and not be subjected to the celebrity of Hollywood.”
They touched down at more than a dozen properties, from cozy châteaux to vast estates, from the Riviera to Provence. Finally, on the morning of the third day, they flew over a magnificent 1,000-acre château and vineyard nestled in its own valley. Its name reflected its grandeur: Miraval, French for “miracle.”
Wine has been made at Miraval for centuries. The privileged domain of an Italian noble family for five generations, it was sold in 1972 to the French jazz musician Jacques Loussier. He produced red, white, and rosé wine on the estate and converted an ancient water tower into a recording studio, which attracted the likes of Sting, Sade, and Pink Floyd, who recorded their 1979 hit album The Wall there.
In 1992, Miraval was purchased by a US Naval Academy engineering graduate named Tom Bove and his family for approximately $5 million. Bove had made a fortune in water treatment before catching what he calls “the wine bug.” He ramped up the estate’s winemaking operation, turning out a small selection of vintages, including Pink Floyd rosé, which he launched in 2006.
Now Miraval was on the market. Bove, whose wife had died, was ready to move on. Suddenly, a helicopter descended and out stepped two of the world’s biggest superstars.
Pitt extended his hand for a shake. Jolie had Shiloh in her arms and “asked for a place to change the baby,” says Bove. Then Jolie, Pitt, and their brokers scouted the vast estate, a wonderland of olive and oak trees, lavender fields, a lake, vineyards on stone terraces, and ancient stone buildings, including a 35-room manor house.
Bove sensed that Jolie was allowing her husband to take the lead. “She let him talk,” says Bove. “From my side she was very gentle. You read all this stuff now, but they were a very nice couple, very sweet and obviously in love with each other.”
And obviously in love with Miraval. So much so that, as the morning stretched into afternoon, Bove invited everyone to stay for a meal. “Brad and I moved the tables around in the garden, and we had lunch,” says Bove. “Drank the wines of Miraval, which were very good. And then we toured the rest of the property.”
Before the party climbed back on board the helicopter, Pitt told Bove, “We’ll be back.” Bove didn’t doubt it. “It seemed like they wanted to buy it right then.”
Bove says Pitt then added, “This is the first place we visited where Angie is smiling.”
At the center of it all is Miraval. Conceived as a family retreat, it became a high-end commercial enterprise, producing honey, olive oil, a skin care line, and music from Miraval Studios. It all began with a signature wine, Miraval Côtes de Provence rosé, whose revenues reached $50 million in 2021.
“Even now impossible to write this without crying,” Jolie would say of Miraval in an email she sent Pitt in 2021, four years after she filed for divorce. “Above all, it is the place we brought the twins home to, and where we were married over a plaque in my mother’s memory. A place…where I thought I would grow old…. But it is also the place that marks the beginning of the end of our family.”
The story of Miraval parallels the story of Jolie and Pitt. As their legal battle stretches ever onward, their dueling lawsuits offer competing versions of a dark and disturbing saga. In Jolie’s telling, it’s a tale of alcohol abuse and financial control. For Pitt, it’s one of vengeance and retribution. Neither can deny its sheer dramatic force. There are echoes, even, of the movie that brought them together, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, in which they played a “married couple” per IMDB, “surprised to learn that they are both assassins hired by competing agencies to kill each other.”
Soon after Pitt and Jolie’s visit to Miraval, Bove heard from their brokers, then from lawyers and more lawyers. The overtures became even more urgent when Jolie learned she was pregnant with twins. “They wanted to be in ahead of the birth,” says Bove. Through their respective holding companies, the couple purchased the property on May 8, 2008, for 25 million euros.
Eight days before the deal was signed, Jolie’s business manager suggested adding a doomsday clause stipulating that, should the couple ever split, each would have the right to buy the other’s share of Miraval. Pitt rejected the idea, according to her cross-complaint, telling his business manager it “wasn’t necessary for two reasonable people.” However, as a by-product of their supposedly everlasting love, he would insist that he and Jolie later made a pact agreeing never to “sell their respective interests in Miraval without the other’s consent.” It was a promise Jolie would deny, claiming “no such agreement ever existed.”
Bove agreed to stay on and continue running Miraval’s wine operation. He retained 220 acres to operate on his own. “I think at that moment, Brad wasn’t really interested in making wine,” Bove says. “He liked the idea that he’d have a vineyard, but he really left the wine thing to me.”
From his office, Bove watched an armada of vehicles deliver the family’s possessions. “Vans and vans arriving with furniture, incredibly packaged by the finest movers,” all of it orchestrated by Pitt, says Bove. “He came more often because he wanted to get things started with the renovation.”
Along with the possessions came the staff: “nannies, from Vietnam, the Congo, and the U.S.,” according to one published source, along with two personal assistants (not always in residence); “a cook; a maid; two cleaners; a plongeur, or busboy; [and] four close-protection bodyguards.” Extensive renovations began immediately. “More Californian as opposed to Provençal,” says Bove. The ancient stone chapel became a parking area for the four-wheel all-terrain vehicles the family used to traverse the massive property.
And finally came the movie stars and their growing brood of children. They joined an invasion of celebrity home buyers in Provence that would come to include, just within a 100-mile radius of Miraval, Johnny Depp and his then wife Vanessa Paradis, George Lucas, George Clooney, John Malkovich, and many more.
For a time, leading the pack, were the most famous of them all—the couple known worldwide as Brangelina. (...)
They were “our last great Hollywood couple,” the New York Post eulogized after the breakup. “Their lineage was Bogart and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracy, Liz and Dick—golden megastars all, with outsize love stories.”
They began as mere mortals. The daughter of Midnight Cowboy star Jon Voight and actor Marcheline Bertrand, Jolie was a wild child who collected knives and aspired to be a funeral home director. At age five, she reportedly said she intended to become “an actress, a big actress.” She won raves for her performance in the 1998 HBO movie Gia, whose tagline—“Everybody Saw the Beauty, No One Saw the Pain”—seemed apt in light of her fraught relationship with her father. The following year, she broke big in Girl, Interrupted, riding a wave of acclaim to the Oscar podium, where, all of 24 years old, she accepted the award for best supporting actress.
By then, William Bradley Pitt was already a star. He’d arrived in Los Angeles from Springfield, Missouri, in a battered Datsun with $325 in his pocket. The astonishingly handsome son of a trucking company dad and a stay-at-home mom, he had dropped out of college two weeks short of graduating with a journalism degree. He told his folks that he was moving to LA not to act but to “go into graphic design, so they wouldn’t worry.”
Unlike Jolie, he had no movie-star dad, no contacts, nothing but a dream. He stood in the streets in a yellow El Pollo Loco chicken costume, waving a sign to beckon diners inside, and drove exotic dancers to their Strip-a-Gram appointments. Then Billy Baldwin dropped out of the 1991 feminist road picture Thelma & Louise to do the firefighting movie Backdraft. Tapped as a last-minute replacement, Pitt set his scenes ablaze as a hunky hitchhiker who hooks up with Geena Davis before taking off with her cash.
In May 2000, Jolie, then 24, married 44-year-old Billy Bob Thornton in Las Vegas. That July, Pitt married Friends star Jennifer Aniston in a $1 million wedding in Malibu.
By the time Jolie and Pitt met four years later on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Jolie and Thornton had divorced, though not before she adopted an orphaned baby boy from Cambodia, whom she named Maddox. Pitt and Aniston were still very much a couple—until he collided with Jolie.
They began as mere mortals. The daughter of Midnight Cowboy star Jon Voight and actor Marcheline Bertrand, Jolie was a wild child who collected knives and aspired to be a funeral home director. At age five, she reportedly said she intended to become “an actress, a big actress.” She won raves for her performance in the 1998 HBO movie Gia, whose tagline—“Everybody Saw the Beauty, No One Saw the Pain”—seemed apt in light of her fraught relationship with her father. The following year, she broke big in Girl, Interrupted, riding a wave of acclaim to the Oscar podium, where, all of 24 years old, she accepted the award for best supporting actress.
By then, William Bradley Pitt was already a star. He’d arrived in Los Angeles from Springfield, Missouri, in a battered Datsun with $325 in his pocket. The astonishingly handsome son of a trucking company dad and a stay-at-home mom, he had dropped out of college two weeks short of graduating with a journalism degree. He told his folks that he was moving to LA not to act but to “go into graphic design, so they wouldn’t worry.”
Unlike Jolie, he had no movie-star dad, no contacts, nothing but a dream. He stood in the streets in a yellow El Pollo Loco chicken costume, waving a sign to beckon diners inside, and drove exotic dancers to their Strip-a-Gram appointments. Then Billy Baldwin dropped out of the 1991 feminist road picture Thelma & Louise to do the firefighting movie Backdraft. Tapped as a last-minute replacement, Pitt set his scenes ablaze as a hunky hitchhiker who hooks up with Geena Davis before taking off with her cash.
In May 2000, Jolie, then 24, married 44-year-old Billy Bob Thornton in Las Vegas. That July, Pitt married Friends star Jennifer Aniston in a $1 million wedding in Malibu.
By the time Jolie and Pitt met four years later on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Jolie and Thornton had divorced, though not before she adopted an orphaned baby boy from Cambodia, whom she named Maddox. Pitt and Aniston were still very much a couple—until he collided with Jolie.
by Mark Seal, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Anthony Harvey. Chateau: Michel Gangne/AFP. Both Getty Images
