While Jon admits that the rift between them was “very severe,” in the beginning they were civil to each other, a part of Marche hoping that he would return to his family and that she would awaken from what seemed like a bad dream. For a time Jon treated his estranged wife almost like a mother confessor, revealing intimate details of his relationship with Stacey. He was almost too honest about his new life, telling Marche about his drug use and bedroom antics. Krisann recalls: “She would say things like, ‘They go to the bathroom in front of each other!’ She was horrified. I told her that if she wanted to win Jon back, she was going to have to step up her sexual game. She was very straitlaced and conventional when it came to sex. At that time, Jon was a very sexy man. He walked into a room and he turned heads.
“I can tell you that Angie does not get her sexuality from her mother, that’s for damn sure. It comes from her father. Marche was graceful, sweet, and kind, but she became a bitter, scorned woman and she never let that anger out of her heart. She never moved on when she lost her role as Mrs. Jon Voight, and made sure she clung to that fame for as long as possible. Don’t get me wrong—I loved and adored Marche. But she never let go of her anger. Jon took away her fairy tale, and she felt bereft. I felt sorry for her.”
After he moved out, Jon rented an apartment on the fifth floor of the same building on Roxbury where he had lived with Marcheline. It was a white, unfurnished room that he planned to use as a business address to which his mail, film scripts, and other work-related materials could be delivered.
Shortly afterward, Marche had Angie’s white crib taken to Jon’s fifth-floor apartment. This was the “Ivory Tower” where Angie lived for more than a year, with a random assortment of babysitters looking after her twenty-four hours a day. Marche’s brother, Raleigh, would often recruit out-of-work actors or acquaintances to work in shifts at three dollars an hour.
Meanwhile, Angie’s older brother, Jamie, stayed with his mother on the second floor. For a long time Jamie and Angie remained apart, except for occasional outings together to Roxbury Park. Randy Alpert, a friend of Marche’s brother Raleigh, helped out for a time, making both Angie and James breakfast and taking them to the park. “I loved working for them,” he recalls. “Marche was so gorgeous and sweet and kind. Truly an angel.”
When I interviewed Krisann Morel for this book, she painted a rather different portrait of the household. Two years younger than Marche and a part-time model herself, at first she was confident, in control, chatting amiably about her days working at the Rainbow Bar and Grill on Sunset, remembering the night John Lennon was thrown out by overenthusiastic bouncers.
Nestled deep in her story lay a dark secret she had struggled to keep for more than half a lifetime. Now was time for confession. First, though, she wanted to set the scene. So she talked about Jon Voight; his blooming wife, Marche; the birth of Angie.
Her voice, so strong and firm, began to crack as, in her mind’s eye, she journeyed back in time to what she called the Ivory Tower, the white room with the white carpet, the white doors, the white drapes, the white walls, and the white crib. And the baby girl, helpless and alone.
Remembering those days, Krisann twisted her wedding ring, and her face contorted in an effort to suppress the welling emotion. “This has been my burden for thirty-three years. I saw what happened to Angelina Jolie, and it haunts me to this day. As much as I wanted to help, I couldn’t fix the hurt. I loved Marche, and I think she really loved her daughter, but the truth is the truth.
“Marche took her pain out on that child. She separated herself from that child because she looked a lot like Jon. She was fair like him and had his eyes.”
Not surprisingly, Angie was very different from her brother, who enjoyed a close relationship with his mother. She learned to talk late, never crawled but walked at ten months, did not play with dolls or stuffed animals, and was rather aloof. “She now says that she doesn’t like to be hugged. I can understand why,” says Krisann. “You could hold her, but I could feel her pain. I was not the mother holding her. Angie had happy moments, but for the first two years of her life she was not a happy child. I hate to say it, but it’s the truth. I can understand if Angie has abandonment issues, because she was abandoned as a child. Even she doesn’t know why.”
Certainly the way Angie was raised in the early months of her life raises red flags among clinical psychologists and psychoanalysts. The key to understanding this issue is the fact that babies are born without the capacity to differentiate or articulate their feelings and needs. They are in what is termed a “global undifferentiated state,” their emotions, if not met, lurching from anxiety to panic and finally disassociation. It is the attention and response of the mother or other consistent caregiver that allows infants to develop basic trust, the capacity to regulate their emotional state. In short, a mother turns distress into comfort.
Babies who do not get this kind of response often develop self-destructive coping mechanisms for the intolerable emotion they feel. This means that a child who has not had a relationship with a mother or an adequate substitute remains in a global undifferentiated state, living without the words, ideas, or capacity to relate to his or her own experience. In later life this angst can be manifested in alcoholism, drug abuse, cutting, and suicidal tendencies.
As contemporary psychoanalyst Dr. Franziska De George, who has practiced in Beverly Hills for nearly twenty years and never treated Angelina or her family, says: “The child whose mother abandons them at six months not only has severe trauma, but beyond that the child is lacking a relationship with itself. The basic emotional building blocks are missing. It is a house, or personality, built on shifting sands. While the rest of the house may be working beautifully, the emotional part is missing. In later life this is even more confusing.”
Marche’s own depression and trauma would have communicated themselves to her daughter, further exacerbating the infant’s feelings of alienation. Psychologist and author Iris Martin, who has specialized in working with chief executives and their families for the last twenty-five years but also never treated Angelina or her family, observes: “Angelina Jolie will have experienced profound abandonment, anxiety, and may have experienced depression. Early experience is based on two things: structure and trust. So her early attachment was fragmented, full of painful emotions. Her foundation of who she is is a mess.”
At some point Marche agreed that her children could start to play with each other rather than be looked after on separate floors of the apartment building by different sets of babysitters. It was an economic as much as an emotional argument that won the day, Marche agreeing to pay her babysitters five dollars an hour to watch both children rather than hire two babysitters at three dollars each. The children played well together, and eventually James kept some of his toys, such as an electric car, in Angie’s room on the fifth floor. As Iris Martin observes: “Jamie was probably a buffer for her. He comforted her. She was not getting human contact from anyone but the babysitters.”
At the same time, Jamie was always the favored child, the one who was the focus of attention, the one expected to succeed in life. He was the monarch of the family, as the beautifully hand-drawn and hand-painted fourth birthday card saying “King James” showed. For that same birthday, Krisann embroidered a number four on his denim dungarees, while Jon’s friend film director Charles Eastman came over to take pictures. Eastman later recalled that Angie was “kind of in the background that day. All eyes were on her brother.” Angie’s birthdays were much more low-key affairs.
Marche’s anger and depression manifested itself not only in her distracted behavior toward her daughter, but also in the frenzied way she lived her life. Outwardly all smiles, generous and loving, adored by everyone, Marche, still only twenty-six, was nursing a wound so deep that nothing could really mend her broken heart. She became obsessed with her acting career, spending most days as a student at the Lee Strasberg school while a team of babysitters looked after her children. When she w
as not focusing on her craft, she was shopping for clothes—there was an ocean liner chest filled with unworn antique French baby clothes for Angelina—or buying expensive antiques, mainly country French style, from high-end stores in Beverly Hills.
The apartment, once so spare, was soon bursting at the seams, to the point that she held a couple of garage sales to dispose of some of her goodies. Expensive crockery and objets d’art went for bargain-basement prices. Although consumed with guilt over his behavior, Jon was infuriated with his estranged wife when he discovered that total strangers were wandering around his apartment picking and choosing mainly new and unused goods that he had paid for. Marche’s stepmother, Elke, a frugal woman, was also perplexed and somewhat irritated by Marche’s penchant for buying everything, even the children’s underwear, from fancy stores like Saks Fifth Avenue. “She became a huge shopaholic,” recalls Krisann. “The idea that she didn’t have any money is nonsense.”
Marche was naïve and rather careless about cash. Having always had money, she never felt the need to worry, especially as all the bills went straight to her husband’s accountant for payment. On one occasion, for example, she signed an entire checkbook, leaving the amounts blank. It was a clear security risk, especially given the constant ebb and flow of transient babysitters, actors, and others at the apartment.
As in most separations, money soon became an issue. While Jon was concerned about Marche’s outlays for babysitters, clothes, and furniture, Marche’s blood boiled if she sensed that he was spending money on his mistress. On at least one occasion she was driven to fury when she saw a credit-card statement containing details about clothes from a store she did not frequent. “Look. He’s out buying clothes for that tramp, his whore,” she proclaimed.
Yet far from walking out on his wife and children and never returning, Jon Voight spent as much time as he could with Jamie and Angie. He was a constant presence at the apartment building, even taking Marche house-hunting, though she found nothing that suited her. It was a time of anguish, passion, and soul-searching. He alluded to that period in a later interview: “ ‘Free love’—what a poison that was. Free love, the destruction of family life and loyalties and the responsibilities of parents, and I’ve gone through that.” In his defense he argues that in the morality of the times, what he did was not “so unusual or pernicious.”
As much as he now rejected his Catholic faith, he could never escape the nostrums and beliefs stamped on his soul since childhood. When he visited the children, the struggle between the primal, lusty lover and the caring father was transparent. “Here is Jon Voight having a roll in the hay like he’s never had before,” recalls Krisann. “He has that exuberance you have when you are enjoying wonderful sex. And then he plays the role of dad. And quite honestly, I never saw any father who loved and cared for his children as he did. When he was not working, he came over all the time, if only for an hour.” He regularly took the children to the park to play ball, and on several occasions Krisann was mistaken for his wife. As a change from Roxbury Park, Krisann would suggest that they all go “topless in Miranda,” her nickname for her convertible sports car, and she, Jon, James, and Angie would head off to Venice Beach. (It suited Krisann, as she loved watching the bodybuilders work out in the open-air gym.) During one parental visit James and Angie performed their first “show.” They were blacked up by Krisann and learned the words and gestures to the song “Mammy.” Then Angie, two, and James, four, peformed their routine for their somewhat bemused father. “James was into it, Angie a bit confused,” recalls Krisann.
While Jon got into debt—and therapy—in time Marche began to get her own love life back on track. She and several other recently separated or divorced women were members of an informal “First Wives’ Club” of Beverly Hills, meeting over lunch or dinner. She and fellow acting student Jade Dixon regularly went out on the town, joining another acting student, Barbi Benton, then the lover of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, at the Playboy mansion. “We double-dated and shared all the secrets best friends share,” recalls Jade.
As the estranged wife of aspiring Hollywood royalty—as well as a beauty in her own right—it was not long before Marche was being courted by any number of suitors. She enjoyed a flirtation early on with a then-unknown muscleman, Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was, like Marche, trying to break into Hollywood. When Marche told Jon about her encounter, he dismissed Schwarzenegger’s ambitions, saying that his accent was too thick for him ever to get a speaking part in a movie.
Then there was Burt Reynolds, Voight’s costar in Deliverance, whom she dated for a time and sent gifts to for his forty-first birthday in February 1977. He in turn sent oversize stuffed animals for James and Angie. Angie’s godfather, Maximilian Schell, was another admirer who visited Marche at home, on one occasion giving Angie an expensive porcelain doll, one of her first-ever presents. Of course, no self-respecting young actress at that time could avoid an encounter with the legendary lothario Warren Beatty, who has had, according to his biographer Peter Biskind, around 12,775 lovers. Marche considered Beatty to be worthy of his reputation. One Christmas she bought him an expensive gift and had it delivered to his penthouse apartment at the Beverly Wilshire hotel.
What about Al Pacino, the man who had tried to dissuade her from marrying Jon Voight? They circled around each other for a while, Marche joining in with his weekend games of softball in a local park. “They had a mutual-admiration society,” recalls Lauren Taines. The moment, though, had passed; they were both too quiet and passive to rekindle a romance. In addition, Pacino felt guilty about the prospect of dating his friend’s wife. In her vivid imagination, Marcheline’s dalliance with Pacino assumed a greater significance than perhaps it warranted. She would later tell her daughter that she had deliberately chosen the names of her children—Angelina and James—as anagrams or copies of Pacino’s full name, Alfredo James Pacino.
It is difficult to know what to make of this story. Those who knew the Voights early in their relationship are adamant that Marche was absolutely devoted to Jon. In any case, Pacino’s name is only a partial anagram of her children’s names. Perhaps her assertion was a way of diminishing Jon’s impact on her life, an attempt to redress the emotional balance. As a friend notes: “She had all these major players after her, and if she had gone with any of those guys, the war between her and Jon would have been over, since she would no longer have needed to rely on him for money.”
A few months after the split, Marche decided that her career would be best served if she went to New York more often for auditions. She felt she had a better chance of finding work away from Jon’s Hollywood shadow. Certainly there was no indication, as her daughter has since maintained, that she gave up her career for the sake of her children. Marche and an artist friend, who was on the babysitting rota, now regularly flew to the Big Apple, where Marche tried out for various roles. During one visit she met businessman Allan Mezo—sniffily described by one friend as a pots and pans salesman—in a New York nightclub. She enjoyed a short romance with the New York–based trader, and while he was never going to inspire her acting career, he helped her rebuild her self-esteem and cope with the rejection she felt from her husband. The thirty-one-year-old was a comforting shoulder for her to lean on—and to cry on. As he later told the New York Post: “She told me that Jon had not treated her well, and I think there were other women involved. She found it so painful, and it made it hard for her to trust another man.” They met at the wrong time, Marche explaining as much in a letter she sent Mezo more than a decade later. “Perhaps I was just in too much emotional pain back then to appreciate you. The truth is, I never would have made it through that difficult time without you.”
From time to time her excursions to New York coincided with Jon’s work, leaving the children solely in the care of babysitters. Late at night on one of these occasions, Angie woke up screaming with a burning fever. Krisann, who was caring for her, bathed her in cool water to reduce her temperatur
e. Frantically she tried to find Jon or Marche, but neither answered her calls. The next day Krisann took the sick toddler to a doctor in Beverly Hills. He was furious and told Krisann in no uncertain terms that he had no legal right to examine or medicate Angie without parental permission. He diagnosed an ear infection and reluctantly agreed to prescribe antibiotics. “It was a really frightening situation,” recalled Krisann.
While Marche was looking for a break in New York, in the summer of 1976 Jon reprised the role of Hamlet at the Levin Theater at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The prize he really coveted, though, was a lead in a new Hal Ashby movie, Coming Home, about the unlikely romance between a serving soldier’s wife and a paralyzed war veteran. Actor and vociferous antiwar activist Jane Fonda—known as “Hanoi Jane” following her visit to North Vietnam—was the driving force behind the movie. The idea had come to her after an inspirational meeting with wheelchair-bound Ron Kovic, whose painful memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, described his own injuries suffered during the Vietnam War.
While Fonda was to play the role of Sally Hyde, the frustrated wife of a U.S. Army captain serving in Vietnam, the film’s producers were looking for a big-name actor like Sylvester Stallone, Al Pacino—now riding high on the success of Serpico and The Godfather—or Jack Nicholson to take on the part of the paraplegic, Luke Martin. Although Bruce Dern and Jon Voight were short-listed for the role of Sally’s husband, Voight told Ashby he would much sooner have the role of Luke. Ashby was impressed with his early commitment. Not only was Voight a known antiwar campaigner, but even before he snagged the part of Luke, he started talking to vets to get a sense of their lives and experiences. This cut no ice with the producers. Ironically, given his torrid domestic life, Voight was dismissed as having “no sex appeal.” Ashby stuck to his guns, and Voight took the lead role, with Bruce Dern cast as the hawkish husband. As a further sweetener, Stacey Pickren won the small part of Sophie.
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 5
