Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  The death of Rollie’s father, George, on September 18, 1962, and Lois’s mother, Jean, just five days later seems to have jolted the family out of their routine. Perhaps there was talk around the family dinner table of new pastures. Certainly when Rollie flew to Oakland, California, in 1964 for a bowling tournament, the wonders of life out West gained a new intensity. It was not long before the Bertrands were California dreamin’. They went on vacation to the Golden State—and liked what they saw.

  Of course, they were not the only ones. Thousands of young men who had enlisted during World War II and later the Korean War had enjoyed a taste of paradise out West at the military camps. So many had left the area that there were annual Harvey Day celebrations in various California towns. Several members of Jean’s family—the Kashas—had moved to Arizona. As the thermometer touched thirty below outside, inside the bars and drinking joints of Harvey and Riverdale the talk often turned to how different life could be in California, a fabled place of endless sunshine, the Beach Boys, beach blondes, and peaches ripening by the roadside. More than that, the Golden State was somewhere to make a fresh start, to reinvent your life, to live your dream.

  For the great majority it remained just that, a pipe dream. The death of Lois’s mother gave the Bertrands the opportunity to live that dream. In her will, Jean Gouwens left all her properties, bowling alleys, and other commercial ventures to her only daughter. As the family discussed, idly at first and then with greater focus, the possibility of selling up and moving west, the voice of fifteen-year-old Marcia Lynne was pivotal. In school she kept thoughts of modeling to herself, probably worried about being teased by her contemporaries. In family lore it was now accepted, much to her mother’s satisfaction, that Marcia Lynne wanted to pursue an acting and modeling career.

  After high school she said she wanted to attend the Theater Arts School (now the School of Theater, Film and Television) at UCLA on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. It was a seductive vision; Lois could imagine her own dream of showbiz success being fulfilled through her daughter.

  Opportunity came knocking when a consortium made a substantial offer for the family bowling business. While Rollie and Lois eventually planned to retire, it helped crystallize this momentous decision—and augment their finances—when Rollie secured a managerial job at the Century Plaza hotel in Los Angeles. So the Bertrands decided to move to Hollywood. As Lois’s cousin Chuck Kasha recalls: “They wanted to get out of the business. They had worked hard and wanted to live the American dream.”

  When Jon Voight dreamed, he dreamed big. When he was just three years old, he saw himself becoming a great painter. It helped that his parents, Elmer and Barbara, dreamed big, too. On the eve of America’s entrance into the First World War in 1917, the sports-crazy eight-year-old Elmer had gathered up all his youthful courage, marched into a golf club in Yonkers, just north of New York City, and asked for work as a caddie. He happened to be in the right place at the right time. Yonkers was the site of the first golf course in the United States—in 1888 Scottish immigrant John Reid had founded the Saint Andrews golf club—and in 1913, the local Jewish community had joined together to open their own course, which they named Sunningdale, after the historic course outside of London.

  Not only was Elmer, the son of a Slovakian miner, given work as a caddie, but members also took the personable youngster under their wing, teaching him correct English and the proper use of a knife and fork, as well as the mysteries of the great game itself. Elmer—universally known as “Whitey”—flourished, and but for a back injury would have been, according to Jon Voight, “one of the greats.” Instead he ended up as the club pro, a dapper, ebullient man, always ready with a funny story or a gag. The woman he married in 1936, Barbara Kamp, the daughter of a German immigrant, was also a keen golfer who knew how to enjoy life. At some point she founded the You’re a Nut Like Me society, dedicated to overcoming everyday stresses through humor and imagination. “She was the most fun-loving person I ever knew in my life,” recalled her longtime friend Susan Krak.

  With three boys born in five years—Barry in 1937, Jon on December 29, 1938, and finally James in 1942—Barbara had to run a strict household, ruling her boisterous brood with a touch of Prussian discipline. Every Sunday she took the three boys to the local Catholic church, but at times it was like herding cats. As Jon’s kid brother, James, recalls: “We were usually the last ones there. We would have to go and sit up by the altar.”

  Just as well. As Jon recalls, “As a kid I was always up to no good.” When he was not dreaming of becoming a great artist, he spent his days climbing the highest trees he could find.

  The real world of the imagination began at bedtime when Elmer arrived home. For a time he convinced his sons that he was an undercover FBI agent rather than a golf pro. As they sat on their bunk beds in their home off Lockwood Avenue, the curtain would go up on their father’s nightly theatrical performance, Elmer spinning endless tales that he would make up on the spot.

  “My father was a wonderful storyteller,” recalls Jon Voight. “Those were magical experiences. I still have vivid memories of those times. And I think those experiences had a lasting influence on me. He would tell us stories about the Mississippi River and the riverboats. I think that’s why I became an actor, to be like my dad. I was so thrilled to listen to him tell these tales.” His father’s imagination and his mother’s chutzpah opened up a world of possibilities for their sons. As James recalls, “My dad would wake me and my brothers up in the morning and say: ‘Boys, the world is your oyster.’ Mom and Dad were encouraging us to hop our own fences.” By the time he was six, Jon had already hopped one fence, having swapped thoughts of painting professionally for those of a career in the movies. Later, he dallied with the notion of becoming a professional comedian.

  Whatever the future held for Jon and his brothers, in the Voight household there was one overriding passion: golf. All three boys took up the sport, Jon and James excelling. Indeed, James’s later stage name, Chip Taylor, came about because for several Sundays in a row he had holed out from off the green. On one occasion Jon and Gene Borek, the assistant pro at Sunningdale, played in a national caddie tournament in Columbus, Ohio. It was not a successful venture. “When we got home on the train in Grand Central,” recalled Gene, who later enjoyed fleeting fame as the club pro who scored a sixty-five at Oakmont, “we had eleven cents between us. I had the penny.” While he never turned pro, Jon credits his father for instilling in him the balance and grace a good golfer needs—a point that Elmer never tired of making to his pupils. “The trouble with the average woman golfer is that she is too lazy; the trouble with the average male golfer is that he is too tense,” was his stern mantra.

  In addition to their love for golf, Elmer and Barbara were also keen movie- and theatergoers, Elmer finding inspiration for some of his bedtime yarns from films they saw at the local Roxy. Jon was not the only one who was inspired by his parents’ love of the arts: James vividly remembers “the chill factor”—the sense of joy in performance—he experienced as a youngster. In the late 1940s, when he was seven, his parents took him to see the musical My Wild Irish Rose, about the life of New York Irish tenor Chauncey Olcott. He had been so reluctant to go that his parents had brought him along only because they couldn’t find a babysitter. Looking back, he is glad they did. “I fought them the whole way,” he now recalls. “But I’m sitting in the theater, the music comes on, and my body was, like, on fire. At the end of the performance I didn’t want to talk to my parents. I just wanted to hold on to that wonderful feeling.” The chill factor was the inspiration that eventually took him into a highly successful career as a lyricist.

  As for Jon, he got the chill factor designing and painting sets for his school’s theater productions. Though he did also take to the stage—his mother, a part-time teacher, was his first director, when he was in sixth grade—at that time he had no thoughts of taking up the profession.

  Like his brothers, Jon attended the Arch
bishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York, and in between classes was an enthusiastic and talented stage designer. “We were in a real safe place to be creative, experiment,” he recalls. It was the school’s longtime drama teacher, the Reverend Bernard McMahon, now retired, who convinced a baby-faced Voight to move from stage design to playing the comedy lead of Count Pepi Le Loup in the school’s annual musical, Song of Norway, an operetta about the life of composer Edvard Grieg. In his senior class the next year, Voight took the part of the valet Lutz in The Student Prince. The 1956 yearbook raved: “Complete with German accent and whiskers, Jon surpassed his amazing triumph of last year with a masterful handling of the play’s main comic role.” His leading lady was Barbara Locke, a student at the all-girls Good Counsel Academy High School in White Plains. “Oh, he was talented and charismatic,” recalls Locke, who still gets the occasional surprise telephone call from her onetime leading man. “He was charming and always a nice-looking young man. The girls were crazy about him.”

  He was equally crazy about the stage and would pore over English theater critic Kenneth Tynan’s reviews of West End plays. The work of actor Laurence Olivier held a particular fascination. “I would read these sections over and over—much before I ever made a decision about being an actor—fascinated by Olivier’s ability to design these great roles so that they would come alive for modern audiences. It was intriguing how he set the performance for a beginning, a middle, and a climactic ending.”

  Yet even when Jon went off to college, he remained ambivalent about pursuing a career in acting. In 1957, after his freshman year at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., he changed his major from speech and drama to art while continuing to do stage design. Voight, who played college basketball, designed the cardinal that adorned the center of the basketball court, a section of flooring that is now on display in the school’s Pryzbyla University Center. Serious-minded, ascetic, and thoughtful, he entertained thoughts of becoming a priest, but that ambition soon evaporated. “I couldn’t have taken it,” he explains frankly. “I loved gals too much.” During his four years at the university, Voight, blond, blue-eyed, and touching six foot four inches, was sufficiently popular with both sexes to be elected president of the student body.

  After completing his degree in 1960, he seems to have had yet another change of heart and returned to New York to try his hand at acting rather than art. With the political baton about to be passed from Eisenhower to Kennedy, the theater scene in downtown Manhattan reflected the rapidly changing cultural climate. Young actors saw themselves as artists and idealists, agents of change. The idea of chasing fame and celebrity was treated with disdain by the new breed of downtown thespians, among them Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, and Jon Voight. Their hero was Marlon Brando, who, after performing in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire onstage in New York, boarded a plane to Hollywood to make a movie and declared that he would return to his first love, the theater, the instant filming was finished. These young tyros may have been idealistic, but they were also as competitive as any Wall Street trader. As Hoffman later recalled, “Actors are like women. Women check each other out in a way that men don’t. They look at the breasts, they look at the legs . . . because they are in competition with each other. Actors check each other out in a not dissimilar way.”

  Voight enrolled with the legendary acting coach Sanford Meisner, who taught Method acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Along with contemporaries who included James Caan and Robert Duvall, he absorbed Meisner’s dictum that “acting is the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”

  Voight’s off-Broadway debut in the long-forgotten O Oysters revue at the Village Gate nightclub on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village was less than impressive. According to one critic—Voight remembers he was from Vermont—he could “neither walk nor talk.” Nevertheless, he persevered. Voight and his roommate James Bateman, whom he had met at Catholic University, developed a comedy double act featuring two naïve hillbilly characters, Harold and Henry Gibson, the latter a derivative of playwright Henrik Ibsen’s name. Bateman took Henry Gibson as his stage name, later finding fame as the flower-holding poet in the TV show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.

  For his next effort, in 1961, Voight returned to the musical, a medium in which he had excelled in high school. He appeared as a temporary replacement for the Welsh actor Brian Davies in the role of Rolf Gruber, a Nazi who introduced the song “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” in the original Broadway production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein smash The Sound of Music.

  Although he was with the show for only a short time, he made an impression on Detroit-born actress Lauri Peters, who played Liesl, the eldest Von Trapp daughter. Just sixteen when Richard Rodgers cast her in 1959, by the time she met Voight, Lauri was already a stage veteran and had been nominated for a prestigious Tony Award for her performance. They started dating, Voight struggling to find work while his girlfriend was trying to fit film roles around her nightly Broadway appearances. The blonde actress with the girl-next-door looks starred with teen heartthrob Fabian, the star of American Bandstand, and Hollywood veteran James Stewart in the family comedy Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation. Although it was inevitable that she would be romantically linked with Fabian, it was Voight who won her heart.

  Lauri Peters was only nineteen going on twenty when she married Jon Voight in 1962. That year she starred alongside singer Cliff Richard in the classic British feel-good film Summer Holiday, released the following year, while her husband won his first TV role, a bit part in the long-running Gunsmoke. When the curtain finally came down on The Sound of Music in June 1963, Peters took on the role of Louisette in the play A Murderer Among Us, directed by Sam Wanamaker, which closed after its opening night in March 1964.

  After other small TV walk-ons in Naked City and The Defenders, Voight snagged his first film role as the eponymous Fearless Frank, a dim-witted hayseed with matinee idol good looks who heads to the big city and is murdered and resurrected as a kind of comic-book hero. He was more successful on the stage, getting his first big break in an acclaimed off-Broadway revival of the 1955 Arthur Miller drama A View From the Bridge in January 1965, working opposite Robert Duvall and getting to know Dustin Hoffman, who was the show’s assistant director and stage manager. Voight and Hoffman were both young, idealistic, and passionate about their craft, artistic purity held in far higher esteem than any siren call from Hollywood.

  Then it was Voight who was making waves—if not money. After his success off-Broadway, he was invited to San Diego, where he was the star in the 1966 National Shakespeare Festival at the Old Globe Theatre. Significantly, in the downtime between rehearsal and performance, he was gripped by James Leo Herlihy’s novel Midnight Cowboy, about the unlikely friendship between New York hustler Ratso Rizzo and a naïve Texas dishwasher who comes to the Big Apple to earn a living servicing sex-starved women. The oddball love story, published in 1965, rapidly attained cult status.

  He put the book aside and continued his steady progress in off-Broadway theater, in March 1967 winning a Theatre World Award for his performance opposite Greek actress Irene Papas in the Frank D. Gilroy play That Summer—That Fall. He was not the only Voight boy to be making a name for himself: His elder brother, Barry, was on his way to becoming a world-renowned volcanologist, while his kid brother, Chip, had penned the song “Wild Thing,” first performed by the Troggs, which became the summer anthem of 1966. As Jon Voight recalls: “I was one of the first people that he played it for, and I remember falling down on the floor laughing, and coming up saying, ‘It’s a hit! It’s a hit! People won’t be able to get it off their tongues!’ It’s a fun song.”

  His five-year marriage, however, was no laughing matter. An ambitious actor, tall, rangy, with soulful blue eyes and a ready smile, he attracted women like moths to a flame. “My God, the girls loved him. They would come backstage,” recalls Dustin Hoffman. “They wanted to marry him and to mother him. He was a matinee i
dol off-Broadway.”

  Unsurprisingly, Peters and Voight decided to part company, their youth, time spent apart, and the temptations of success all playing a part in their decision to divorce in 1967. As Voight later recalled of that period in his life, “If you come out of nowhere, then suddenly everyone wants a piece of you, you get an inflated view of yourself. I always wanted to do the right things, responsible pieces and charity work, but in terms of the personal attention I got from gals, well, success is the greatest aphrodisiac of all.”

  Still, that same year he found himself eclipsed by his friend and rival Dustin Hoffman, whose performance in The Graduate rocketed him to stardom. By contrast, while Voight was gaining a degree of critical respect on the boards, he had done little on the big screen. “Jon had been the rising star in the theater, but after The Graduate it was Dustin who was the star,” recalls photographer Michael Childers. “They were very competitive, but it wasn’t bitchy. Everyone was trying to do their best work.”

  When Voight heard that the legendary director John Schlesinger had agreed to film Midnight Cowboy, the novel he had read the previous summer, he was desperate for a part, especially when Dustin Hoffman snagged the plum role of Ratso Rizzo. At the time, he and Hoffman were working together on the U.S. premiere of Harold Pinter’s play The Dwarfs at David Wheeler’s Theatre Company of Boston. “The way I saw my industry in the sixties was that the movies weren’t about anything,” Voight now recalls. “We didn’t have the equivalent of a Kurosawa or a Bergman or a Fellini. Schlesinger was the answer for me.”